She in turn found out, not only from him, that the judge had been married to Jeannette for nearly forty years. He lived in a big house in Pacific Heights on Clay Street. He had three grown children. He worked at the federal courthouse and worked on appeals to the Ninth Circuit. "Fun stuff," he told her. He also was an avid fly fisherman and something of a wine nut, as she'd already guessed from what he usually ordered to drink after his gin on the rocks for lunch.
After a while, they began to see each other outside of MoMo's, at quiet places down the coast where the judge would not be recognized. One day, he had come in much later than usual, close to one thirty, timing it so he was getting up to leave at around three, as she was finishing her shift. They walked together down the Embarcadero for a hundred yards or so, making easy conversation as they usually did at the restaurant. He asked her if she'd like to go over and walk by the water, where it was more private. He told her he had a present for her, which he so hoped she'd accept.
It was a solitaire one-carat diamond necklace on a platinum-and-gold braided chain.
6
Although he was now considered an official hero, Inspector Devin Juhle was coming off a very bad time. Six months ago, he and his partner Shane Manning were on their way to talk to a witness in one of their investigations at two in the afternoon, when they'd picked up an emergency call from dispatch-a report that somebody was shooting up a homeless encampment under the Cesar Chavez Street freeway overpass. As it happened, they were six blocks away and were the first cops on the scene.
Manning was driving, and no sooner than he had pulled their unmarked city-issue Plymouth into the no-man's-land beneath the overpass, a man stepped out from behind a concrete pillar about sixty feet away and leveled a shotgun at the car.
"Down! Down!" Juhle had screamed as Manning was jamming into park, slamming on the brakes. One hand was unsnapping his holster and the other already on the door's handle, and Juhle ducked and hurled his body against the door, swinging it open and getting below the dash just as he heard the blast of the scattergun and the simultaneous explosion of the windshield above him, which covered him with pebbles of safety glass. Another shotgun blast, and then Juhle was out of the car on the asphalt, rolling, trying to get behind a tire for shelter.
"Shane!" he yelled for his partner. "Shane!"
Nothing.
Peering under the car's chassis-he remembered all of it as one picture, though the images were in different directions, so it couldn't have been-he saw two bodies down on the ground by a cardboard structure and behind them a half dozen or so people crouched in the lee of one of the concrete buttresses that supported the overpass, penned in so they couldn't escape. At the same time, the man with the gun had retreated behind the pillar again. To the extent that Juhle was thinking at all and not just reacting, he thought the killer was reloading. But it was his only chance to get an angle and save himself and maybe these other people as well.
He bolted for the low stump of a tree that sat in the middle of the asphalt. It shouldn't have been there-Caltrans should have uprooted the thing before they poured, but they hadn't. Now there it was and he'd reach it if he could. Running low, then diving and rolling, he got to it in two or three seconds, enough time for the shooter, who had come out in the open again to fire his next round, which pocked into the stump in front of him and sprayed him with wood chips and pulp.
Juhle, on his stomach and with the side of his face and body pressed flat to the ground, knew that the stump didn't give him six inches of clearance and that the man was advancing now, sensing his advantage. He was still probably sixty or seventy feet away-and coming on fast. Once he got to forty feet or so, the shooter's height would give him the angle he needed. The next shotgun blast and Juhle would be history.
There wasn't any time for thought. Juhle rolled a full rotation, extended his gun gripped in both hands out in front of him, drew a bead, and squeezed off two shots. The man stumbled, crumbled, dropped like a bag of cement, and did not move.
Juhle called out for his partner again and again got no reply. Still in a daze, his adrenaline surging, he eventually got to his feet, his gun never leaving the downed man. In half steps, he warily crab-walked sideways toward him, with his gun extended across his body in a two-handed stance. When he got to his target, he saw that he had made the luckiest shot of his life. One bullet had hit the man between the eyes.
Which should have been the end of it. After all, Juhle had six witnesses to everything. Manning was dead, killed by the first blast. The car was a shot-up mess. It was clearly self-defense at the very least and heroism by any standard.
But not necessarily.
Not in San Francisco, where every police shooting is suspect. One of the homeless in the encampment, a highly intoxicated diagnosed schizophrenic, insisted that police had run up to the deceased and executed him for no reason. The fact that he claimed there had been five such officers and that he maintained that the man had not had a shotgun-in spite of Manning's death by shotgun blast-didn't even slow down the right-minded public nuisances of the antipolice crowd.
Beyond that, Juhle's shot was so perfect that it led Byron Diehl, one of the city's supervisors, to opine that perhaps the killing had, in fact, been an overreaction by an overzealous and enraged cop. Perhaps it had, in point of fact, been an execution. Nobody could hit a moving man with a pistol between the eyes at fifty or sixty feet. That just wasn't a possible shot. The man with the gun might have already surrendered, laid his gun down, and Juhle-out of control because of the murder of his partner-had walked up and shot him point-blank.
The other witnesses? Please. Most of them wanted the shooter dead, anyway. Plus, they were naturally afraid of the police. If Juhle told them they'd better back up his story or else, they'd say anything he wanted. They were simply unreliable and their testimonies worthless. Except for the schizophrenic, of course, who was struggling with his substance abuse issues. The idiocy was so palpable that it may have been fun to watch but not to be part of.
So Juhle spent the next three months on administrative leave, under the shadow of a murder charge. He testified four times before different city and police commissions, not including a formal session defending his actions and confronting Diehl in the chamber of the board of supervisors. He was asked to demonstrate his prowess with a handgun on various police ranges in San Francisco, Alameda, and San Mateo counties, where they had pop-up targets that demanded speed as well as accuracy.
Finally, a couple of months ago, he'd been cleared of any wrongdoing. Returning to his place in homicide, though-Manning was of course gone forever-he found himself newly partnered with an obviously political hire, Gumqui Shiu, whose ten-year career didn't seem to have included much real police work. He'd been an instructor at the Academy, worked in the photo lab, and been assigned to various other details, where his progress had been rapid but unmarked by any real accomplishment. He clearly had juice somewhere, but nobody seemed to know where it came from.
This morning, Juhle was at his desk. Insult to injury, he still had his right arm in the sling from arthroscopic rotator cuff surgery-three little holes. His doctor had told him it was an in-and-out-in-the-same-day procedure, little more than an office visit. He'd be pitching Little League practice again in no time.