Pratt was aware of the drama of the moment. The silence in the room was perfect – even the waiters were still, hanging on her conclusion.
'I want there to be no mistake. It is the intention of the District Attorney to seek the death penalty in this case. This is the word I'm putting out to the criminal element in this city, the line that today I draw in the sand – street violence, all violent crime, stops here. The law will be enforced. For as long as I remain District Attorney, here is the policy of my office: if you are unfortunate or dispossessed, mercy will still have its place…' her hands gripped either side of the podium as she looked out over the multitude, 'but if you break the law, justice will trump mercy every-' she brought down her fist, 'single-' again, the fist, 'time.'
After a short stunned silence, a man at one of the front tables began to applaud and it was as though a dam had broken. The ensuing ovation brought the entire dining room to its feet.
8
Sick of conjuring with imponderables, Hardy called a fifteen-minute recess for himself. He stood up, stretched, and walked to the window. Late afternoon, a listless gray day downtown. He and Frannie had their traditional Wednesday date night scheduled to begin in a couple of hours, and Hardy was tempted to call it a day and go wait for his wife at the Shamrock, discuss some philosophical conundrums with his brother-in-law Moses who would be working behind the bar. He could have an early cocktail on the theory that it was always five o'clock somewhere.
He wasn't getting anything done here, that was for sure.
His reaction to Monday's problems with Glitsky and the jail had settled uneasily enough, but after his visit with Cole Burgess yesterday, the whole business lay curdling in his stomach. Something was very wrong, but he really didn't want to get involved any further. He was too close to it, one way or the other. Also, he didn't want to risk a serious rupture in his friendship with Abe over a lowlife such as Cole Burgess – to say nothing of the logistical problems he'd doubtlessly have with his friends Jeff and Dorothy, and her difficult mother.
When the dust cleared, he was all but certain that Cole would cut some kind of deal and get low double digits in the state prison. Every homicide was a manslaughter to Pratt's trial-shy prosecutors. Even the public defender called the city's system a 'plea bargain mill'. Best case, Cole might even get out of San Quentin with his habit broken. In any event, it wasn't Hardy's problem.
What was his problem right now, though, was Dash Logan. The damned guy was proving harder to contact than the Pope, and Hardy's client Rich McNeil was understandably losing some patience.
In the mid-eighties, McNeil had just turned fifty and decided to invest his pension plan money in San Francisco real estate. He could have done better with Microsoft, but back then the stock market made him nervous. In any event, he wasn't complaining. The sixteen-unit apartment building on Russian Hill had cost a hefty $1.5 million when he purchased it for a quarter million down; its most recent appraisal pegged its value at six million plus. Rich was now sixty-four years old, primed to sell the thing and retire.
So here he was, this nice guy and good citizen who'd worked and saved the way good Americans were supposed to, and instead of some carefree years of leisure, he was suddenly looking at some very serious trouble.
A year and a half ago, he'd finally succeeded in evicting Manny Gait, who'd been a tenant in the building for nearly ten years. The tenant from hell, as it turned out.
The first sign of trouble was when he painted his entire unit, including the windows, black. When McNeil had demurred, politely requesting Gait at least to leave the outer windows clear, Gait had not so politely declined. It was his fuckin' place, he said, McNeil could go piss up a rope.
To say that San Francisco's rent control laws favor tenants over landlords is to say that Custer favored Southern belles over the Ogalala Sioux. So when Hardy's client explored the possibility of evicting Mr Gait over the paint job, he found that this would be legally impossible. Gait had his five rooms, he paid his four-hundred dollars every month, and as far as the law was concerned, that apartment was his, and at that price, until he gave it up on his own.
Which he wasn't inclined to do.
Over the years, Gait's one unit became a constant source of dissatisfaction to the other tenants as well, and a regular feature of McNeil's life became dealing with complaints about loud noises, awful odors, unsavory people.
Gait's apartment was just inside the front door to the building on the ground floor, and he decided it was a safer place to keep his Harley than in the garage. Though he ostensibly, and sporadically, worked as a bouncer, he once boasted to McNeil that he really got his money for gas, rent and beer (his only necessities) selling or brokering crack and dope deals to other bikers.
The man himself was a giant – a vulgar, terrifying Neanderthal with an enormous gut, a voluminous, unkempt beard, and a shaved head. He dressed perennially in black – T-shirts and leathers, boots and chains. If he bathed at all – but no, he couldn't have and smelled the way he did. The only problem McNeil had with turnover in his building were the units adjacent to Gait's – over the years, the average tenancy in these units – despite the great location, the cooperative landlord, the reasonable rents – was ten months.
Finally, one happy day eighteen months ago, Gait had suddenly disappeared. McNeil didn't receive his rent check by the tenth of the month, which was the statutory grace period. He immediately served written notice and filed to evict. Under normal conditions, in San Francisco McNeil would have had to wait six months or more before any action would be taken on the filing, but the unprecedented support of every other tenant in the building – all of whom personally showed up for the hearing – convinced the judge that this was an extraordinary situation, and he ruled in McNeil's favor.
When he opened the door to the apartment, even McNeil -who'd expected the worst – wasn't prepared for the damage. The place was totaled. Eventually, it took a crew of four men forty-six days to restore the apartment to habitability. The removal of debris alone was a week-long process. After that, it had to be cleaned, deodorized, cleaned again. McNeil had had to install new hardwood floors and drywall, new lights and fixtures, all new kitchen appliances. Finally, after the new paint was dry, when the work was all done at a cost to McNeil of thirty-one thousand dollars and change, he put it on the market for two thousand four hundred dollars per month, and had eleven qualified renters the first day.
Then Gait returned.
He hassled McNeil for a few months, came to his house a few times, once with some biker friends, scared everybody, made a big stink, eventually went away. And Rich had thought the nightmare was over at last.
But three weeks ago, after all this time, Gait had resurfaced, and in a guise beyond McNeil's worst imaginings. According to the complaints, both civil and criminal, filed in the courts, Gait came home to shock and dismay that he had been put out of his castle.
Contrary to his landlord's sworn statements, he had not abandoned the property. As Mr McNeil well knew, he'd had to leave with his Harley on an emergency road trip to Kentucky to care for his dying mother. Before he left town, he had paid McNeil twelve hundred dollars in cash for three months' rent in case he had to be gone that long. Upset, worried about his mother's health, in a hurry to be back at her side, he had not concerned himself about a receipt for the transaction – he was a man of his word, and assumed McNeil was as well. They'd had a relationship for years. It never occurred to him that either one of them would cheat the other.