have a couple of questions, that's all.'
'You're his lawyer?'
'That's right.'
'Then I got a question for you. How do you live with yourself?'
'John didn't kill anybody.'
'Hah! How'd Sam's stuff get in his house, then? Aliens?'
'Maybe something like that,' Hardy said. 'I hear you were at that last poker game.'
'Yep. What about it?'
Suddenly, Hardy found himself asking a question he hadn't even thought about. 'Have the police talked to you yet?'
And gratifyingly, it slowed Fischer down. 'What do you mean, talked to me?'
'You know. Taken a statement about the game, who was there, who won what?'
Fischer eyed him suspiciously. 'No. Nobody's talked to me. Not the cops, I mean.'
'So somebody has?'
'I didn't say that.' His look was pure defiance. 'Nobody talked to me.'
'Doesn't that seem strange to you? That you were at this game the night before Sam got killed, and nobody from the police wanted to question you?'
'I wasn't there when he got killed. They knew who they were looking for. They didn't need me.'
'So you believe that John went back and tried to get back the money he lost?'
'That's what they're saying. Yeah.'
'Did anybody else lose money that night? A lot of money?'
Fischer did an overdone impression of thinking about it. 'Nope,' he said with finality. Shaking his head, he repeated it. 'No.'
'You had to think that hard to remember?'
This riled the old man even further. 'No. I remember perfectly. Holiday was the big loser that night.'
'Nobody else?'
'Hey, Jesus, what do you want? I answered your question, all right? That's enough.' He backed into the doorway, put his hand on the door behind him.
'You seem a little nervous, Mr. Fischer. Are you nervous? You think maybe I'm going to hurt you. Did somebody else tell you they'd hurt you if you didn't change your story?'
Now the nerves were unmistakable. 'I never changed any story! They found all that stuff in John's place. There's no doubt he did it.'
Hardy stepped up closer, anger in his voice. 'So there's no point, then, in bringing up who else might have lost money that night, is there? They didn't kill Sam. They just don't want people asking questions that might be embarrassing, that might make the police think it looked like they had a reason, too. Isn't that it, Mr. Fischer? Isn't that it?'
For a lengthy moment, Fischer stared with wide-eyed fear at Hardy. Then, suddenly, he brought himself up straight. 'I don't have to talk to you,' he said, and ducked behind the door, slamming it in Hardy's face.
Hardy yelled at the door, his voice reverberating in the hallway, 'You'll have to talk to me at the trial!' Breathing hard, in a fury, he waited.
Eventually he turned and walked back downstairs, out into the bitter and windswept afternoon.
Hardy called Glitsky on his cell phone walking back to his office. Maybe Abe's meeting with Jackman had gone well. 'No,' Glitsky said. 'He wouldn't even listen to you?' 'Oh, he listened all right. But he didn't hear.' 'Abe, this is just plain weird. Clarence knows us.' 'Apparently not well enough. Apparently, you and I are conspiring to obstruct justice. I'm screwing with Gerson, going behind his back, undermining his inspectors so I can expose his incompetence and get my old job back. I'm also working with you on this Panos lawsuit so that if you win, I get to retire in style.'
'You want to run by me how that's going to work exactly? How are you making anything off of my lawsuit?'
'I'm sure there's some way.'
'When you find out, let me know, would you?' A pause. 'And Clarence believes this?'
'I can't say that for sure, not personally. But we're smeared enough that he can't be perceived to be involved.'
'Abe,' Hardy said, 'these people shot at me.'
'I mentioned that.'
'And what did he say to that? Hell, he saw me afterward. He knows I'm not making it up.'
'Not the issue. Not for Clarence.'
'But he knows us. We're the good guys.' Although, after his debate with Holiday on this issue, the statement nagged at him. 'Relatively,' he added.
'Not even that. Not today. Today the system's working as it should. As people are so fond of saying, evidence talks. And all the evidence says John Holiday's a stone killer and you're on his side. Which makes you one of the bad guys, no relativity about it. And, of course, because you and I are friends, so am I.'
'Except that the evidence is no good.'
'Yeah,' Glitsky said, 'there is that.'
23
Back in his office for the third separate time that day, Hardy was killing more time before the five o'clock meeting Norma had scheduled for him to address Freeman's staff in the Solarium. His shoes and jacket were off. He lay on his couch again, eyes covered, and realized that he had no other quasi-legitimate legal venue where he might be able to make his case. He hadn't swayed Jackman, had no chance with the homicide inspectors.
But he might be able to get to them through public pressure. He and Freeman had done this many times and he was a little surprised that he hadn't thought of it before now.
Jeff Elliott, his friend and the writer of the 'CityTalk' column for the Chronicle, had finished his column for the day. He told Hardy that if he could save him the handicapped space under his building-Elliot had multiple sclerosis- he would be happy to drop by for an hour of gay repartee, as long as there was a story involved. Hardy went down and stood in the spot until Elliot pulled into it. In a trice, the columnist had done his magic with his wheelchair. The two men rode the back elevator up to the third floor.
While Hardy had brought over some coffee and eased himself down in one of his client chairs, Elliot watched him move. 'So who beat you up?' he asked.
Hardy tried to smile. 'I thought I was hiding it pretty well.'
'You thought wrong. You're walking like the living dead.' He put his cup down. 'So what happened?'
'Leaving out the hangover, which is another story, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.' He gingerly rearranged his body in the wing chair, went on to outline the high points of the situation as it had developed. 'So now the whole world thinks that Abe and I are illegally conspiring to get Panos and take him.'
'And why are you doing this exactly?'
'So we can win this lawsuit that David and I had been working on.'
'Past tense?'
'It's starting to look like it. Although let's keep that off the record for now.' With some difficulty, he changed position in his chair. 'It was one of David's brilliant ideas that had some chance of success as long as he was around to pursue it, but I can't keep it going on my own. I can't even pay me, much less the associates we've been using. And that was before my witnesses started dying. In jail, no less.' He filled Elliot in on Aretha LaBonte. 'Although the official line is she killed herself.'
'But you think, somehow, it was Panos?'
'I don't know how, but yes.'
'He's got people on payroll in the jail?'
