Not.
Like he ever wanted to do that again, anyway. Little League was pretty much the reason he'd thrown out the damn arm in the first place, letting his macho devils con him into a little mano a mano with Doug Malinoff-perfect baseball name-the manager of Devin's son Eric's team, the Hornets. Doug was a good guy, really, if maybe slightly more competitive than your typical major-leaguer during the playoffs, talking Assistant Coach Devin into playing a game of "burnout" for the enjoyment of the kids. Give them a taste of what it's like to really want to win.
Burnout's a simple game for simple adults and preadolescent boys: You throw a baseball as hard as you can starting from, say, sixty feet. You use regular gloves, no extra-padded catcher's mitts allowed, and you move a step closer after each round. First one to give up loses. Devin was no slouch as an athlete, having played baseball through college. He still had a pretty good gun of an arm. Nevertheless, he gave up, conceding defeat, after seven rounds, his opponent nearly knocking him down on his last throw from thirty-five feet. Malinoff had played shortstop in minor-league ball, made it to double-A. He could throw a baseball through a plywood fence.
Juhle caught the sixth toss not in the webbing but in the palm of the mitt. He never mentioned to a living soul and never would that on top of ruining his shoulder through his own stupidity on that cold and misty March day, he also allowed Malinoff's major-league fastball to break two bones in his catching hand.
Since then, Juhle had been having confidence issues. He found it hard to convince himself that he was among the most brilliant homicide inspectors on the planet when at the same time he considered himself a certified idiot for going at it with Malinoff.
It was Tuesday morning, May 31, nine fifteen. June, just a day away, is synonymous with fog in San Francisco, and today Juhle couldn't see the elevated freeway sixty yards to his left out the window. Awaiting the arrival of his partner, he was at his desk in the crowded, cramped, and yet wide-open room without interior walls that was the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. He was sipping his third cup of coffee this morning, his right arm and still untreated opposite hand-damned if he was going to let anybody know-both throbbing in spite of six hundred milligrams of Motrin every four hours for the past ten days. He turned to the second page of the transcription of a witness's testimony in one of his cases that he was checking against the tape and suddenly took off his headphones, stood up, made his way past the shoulder-high, battered green-and-gray metal files that served as room dividers, and stopped at the door of his lieutenant, Marcel Lanier, who looked up from his own paperwork.
"What's up, Dev?"
"We gotta do something about the quality of people they hire, Marcel."
Lanier, only fifty-some and yet still a hundred years with the department, scratched around his mouth. "That's a song I've been singing for years. What kind of people this time?"
For an answer, Juhle handed him the printout he'd been reading. "You'll see it," he said.
Five seconds into his reading, Lanier barked out a one-note toneless laugh, then read aloud. "'And what is your relationship with Ms. Dorset?'"
Juhle nodded. "That's it. You don't see a relationship like that every day."
"He was her power mower?"
"Must have been, since it's right there in black and white."
"Her power mower?"
"Yeah, except maybe instead of power mower, what he actually said was that he was her 'paramour.'" Juhle leaned against the doorpost. "And this is, like, mistake ten on one page, Marcel, not counting the big chunks that she has marked 'unintelligible' on the transcript, but that I can hear perfectly on the tape. Do they give an IQ test before we start paying these people? Of course, I've got to correct the transcript, anyway, but now it's going to take me two days instead of an hour. It'd be quicker to write the whole goddamn thing out in longhand."
Shiu floated up behind Juhle into the space left in the doorway. "What's going to take two days?"
Lanier ignored both the arrival and the question. His phone rang and he picked it up. "Homicide, Lanier." Frowning, suddenly all serious, he pulled over his yellow pad and started jotting. "Okay, got it. We're moving." Looking up at his two inspectors, he said into the phone, "Juhle and Shiu." When he hung up, there was no sign that he'd ever laughed or thought anything in the world had been funny ever. "Either of you already signed out on a car?"
The inspectors shared a glance. "No, sir. Paperwork day," Juhle said.
"Not anymore it isn't. Grab a ride in a black and white downstairs," he said, "and have 'em light it up out to Clay at"-he shot a quick look at his notes-"Lyon. Don't pass go, guys. I'll get word to the techs. I want a presence there yesterday. Somebody just killed a federal judge."
Jeannette Palmer had made the call to 911 at precisely a quarter to nine, her voice high-pitched and panicked, saying that her husband was dead, that somebody had shot him. Since Pacific Heights is a high-income neighborhood, emergency response tends to be prompt. In this case, a patrol car had been cruising within a couple of blocks down in Cow Hollow and was at the scene within two minutes. An ambulance arrived one minute later.
Jeannette was standing in the door-dressed, wringing her hands, crying-to meet the cops and guide them to the judge's office, a large room in the left-hand front of the house, with bay windows and thousands of books. This was where Jeannette had found her husband and a young woman she'd never seen before, both of them on the floor behind his desk, and where the responding officers then directed the med techs in the ambulance, who took one quick look and then left the bodies undisturbed. Both had been cold to the touch.
Juhle and Shiu, as ordered, got to the scene in fifteen minutes in a patrol car with lights and sirens clearing the traffic for them. Even so, a news van from Channel 4 had obviously picked up the dispatch and was already parked in the street out front, a harbinger of what was sure to be the full-scale media circus to follow. A knot of people-neighbors, probably-stood over by the van, chatting away with backstory. The good news was that there were already three other patrol cars at the premises, the officers out of the cars in uniform, securing the scene, denying access.
Juhle wasn't a native San Franciscan, but he'd moved up from the Peninsula for college at San Francisco State and had stayed. He had always loved Clay Street, especially this stretch of it. The gas lamp-style antique streetlights. The elegant gingerbread houses were set back a civilized distance from the sidewalk, usually with a low wall or discreet fence marking the property boundary. And then the landscaping, each house as though it were watching over its own small private park-no bigger than an average front lawn in suburbia-making a totally different statement about taste, urban life, civility.
Judge Palmer's place was in the mold. The house was a three-story Victorian, immaculately kept up. A low, tan stucco wall with a wrought-iron fence ran along the sidewalk. Then behind the wall, a circular driveway swept up to the steps of the porch. In the semicircular garden carved out by the brick drive, a three-tiered stone fountain splashed down into a small lily pond surrounded by flowering shrubs, seemingly every one of which somehow contrived to be in bloom.
The two inspectors had gotten to the scene so quickly that the sergeant from the nearest station, who was supposed to superintend at these types of scenes, hadn't made it yet, but Officer Sanchez, a field-training officer, met them at the front door and told them they could find Mrs. Palmer, apparently in shock, with his rookie partner in the living room, off to their right. The office, with the bodies, was to the left. "Nobody's touched anything in there," he said, "and the wife says she didn't either, except the phone on the desk to call nine one one."