I was thinking about all this as I finished dressing and made a pot of coffee. There was something of Grant in Hugh Paris as if Hugh had been a version of Grant more comfortable with himself and more distant from that insular world of old money and unchanging attitudes. I let the comparison lie. There was work to be done.
The weather was beautiful, almost cruelly so, I thought as I walked across the parking lot to the courthouse. The deep and broad blue sky and the dazzling morning sun which should have looked down upon an innocent landscape instead shone above cramped suburban cities and cramped suburban lives. The sunlight brushed the back of my neck as if it were fingers wanting me only to stop for a moment and do nothing but breathe and be grateful that I was alive. Another time, I thought as I pushed open the glass door to the courthouse.
I walked up the stairs to the clerk’s office on the second floor. Telephones screeched and voices rose in frustration at the service counter. This was the place where court records relating to criminal cases were kept. By the time I got a sullen clerk’s attention, I had forgotten the weather and gratitude was the farthest thing from my mind. Having already located the case number on a master index, I ordered the court docket on Hugh’s case to see what had happened to it. Fifteen minutes later, the docket was regurgitated from the bowels of the bureaucracy by the same clerk, who warned me three times not to remove the file from the room.
I went over to the reading counter and flipped through the pages of the docket. The criminal charges filed against Hugh the day after his arrest were possession of PCP, being under the influence of PCP and resisting arrest — all misdemeanors. His arraignment had been set for a week after his release from jail. On that day, he appeared through his attorney, Stephan Abrams, and the D.A. moved to dismiss all charges against him. The court granted the motion and that was the end of the case. I made a mental note of the D.A.’s name: Sonny Patterson, an old courtroom adversary. I had the docket copied and went down the hall to the office of the District Attorney.
Sonny Patterson rattled the docket sheet and dropped it on his desk. He took a drag from his cigarette, scattering ashes on his pale green shirt and bright orange tie. Hick was written all over his puffy potato face, but it was an act, like his carefully mismatched clothes. He got juries to like him by letting them think that they were smarter than he. But Sonny had a mind for detail and one that made connections. A good mind. Evasive when circumstances required evasion. He was being evasive now.
“Come on Henry, I handle twenty cases a day in the arraignment court. You’re talking a thousand cases ago.”
“It’s not every day that you dismiss a three-count complaint involving drugs and resisting arrest.”
“Misdemeanors,” he replied disdainfully.
“Being under the influence carries a mandatory thirty day jail sentence.”
“So?” he said, shrugging. “With good time/work time figured in you’re out in twenty.”
“That’s still twenty days longer in county than I’d care to spend.”
“I know your position on determinate sentencing, counsel,” he said stiffly.
I held up my palms. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t come here to debate the point. I just want to know why you dumped the case.”
“What was the defendant’s name again?” he drawled in a vaguely Southern accent. Another affectation. The furthest south Sonny had ever been was Castroville.
“Hugh Paris,” I replied.
“Isn’t he the guy they pulled out of the creek about a week back?”
“The same.”
“You know him pretty well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The papers say it was an accident.”
“So do the cops.”
“I know,” he said, “I had Torres up here to tell me about it. He mentioned — in passing — that you identified the body.” He leaned forward on his desk. “Do you know anything about this man’s death that the police don’t know?”
Police, I thought. Did he mean the cops? Any moment now he’ll be calling them peace officers. Aloud I said, carefully, “I don’t know anything about Hugh’s death the cops don’t know. I just added up the information differently.”
“So did I,” he said, picking up the phone and pushing a button. He reeled off a string of numbers into the receiver. A couple of minutes later there was a knock on the door and his secretary entered with a thick file. Hugh’s name was written across the outside of the manila folder. She put the file on the desk and Sonny flipped through the arrest report to the three sheets of yellow paper on which the complaint appeared. He turned the last sheet over to some writing. This was the alibi, so-called because every time a D.A. dismissed a case he was required to set out his reasons on the back of the complaint in the event someone — like a cop or irate citizen — took exception to the dismissal down the road.
“Insufficiency of the evidence,” Sonny said, lifting his face from the sheet.
“That’s meaningless. What was the problem?”
“The alleged PCP cigarette was analyzed by the crime lab and came back as creatively rolled oregano, dipped in ether to give it the right smell. Mr. Paris’s pusher misled him. Street justice, I guess.”
“And the other charges?”
“We won’t pursue the under the influence charge unless the defendant was examined by a doctor at the time of his arrest. The cops didn’t do that.”
“What about the resisting arrest count?”
“That was plain, old-fashioned contempt of cop. A little chickenshit charge. Not worth the paper it was written on.” He glanced at the complaint with an expression almost of distaste. I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. The D.A.’s know better than anyone what cops can be like — touchy, hostile, self-righteous.
“Have you ever heard of that lawyer, Abrams, before?”
“Nope. He’s not a local. He’s got himself a fancy address up in the city. You want it?”
I nodded.
He scrawled an address on a sheet of legal paper and pushed it across the desk.
“Thanks,” I said, rising to go. “You don’t think Hugh’s death was an accident, either, do you?”
“If I did,” he said, suddenly grim, “I wouldn’t have given you the time of day.”
“Then why are you?”
“The cops botched this one,” he said. “I know it, but I can’t prove it. I’ve already beefed Torres but even if they reopen the investigation now, the trail’s cold. You seem to know something about this case. Better you than no one. Good luck and remember,” he said, as I opened the door, “you’re an officer of the court.”
“Meaning?”
“If you find out who did it, let me know the bastard’s name. He won’t get away with it.”
But so often criminals do, I nearly said, but I kept the thought to myself.
At the end of the day I drove to San Francisco on highway 280, the serpentine road that wound through the foothills behind the posh peninsula suburbs and within view of the hidden houses of the rich. The twisted eucalyptus trees stood high and elegantly on those hills and the air was moist with the fragrance of their leaves. Deer grazed those hills and now and then a jeep went flying along the dirt roads with no apparent destination. A line of horses appeared on the horizon and then disappeared behind a clump of oak.
I was passing through some of the wealthiest communities in the country, and the only sign of money was its absence. The developer’s hand was stayed from these hills and woods to perpetuate a view of California as it had existed a hundred years earlier. Even the Southern Pacific commuter train, whose whistle I heard in the distance, was a subsidized prop, reminding listeners of the pristine age before Henry Ford gave wheels to the masses. A hundred years earlier, Grover Linden raised monuments to his wealth, but his heirs bought privacy, the ultimate luxury. Judge Paris lived somewhere in those hills, as safe as money could make him. Like God, he moved a finger and the sparrow fell. To him, a little death. But not to me. I floored the accelerator as if physical speed could make time move faster. I would bring this death home to him, whatever it took.