NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

Chapter One

At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy was beginning to fear that he would also be spending the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in municipal court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San Francisco.

He was waiting—interminably since nine a.m.—for his client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty eighth birthday.

Now again the clerk called out someone not his client—this time a young man who looked as though he’d been drinking since he’d turned twenty-one and possibly two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk—certainly he looked wasted.

The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong.

Judge Li’s longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny See, read the charge against the young man as he stood, swaying, eyes opening and closing, at the center podium. The judge addressed him. “Mr. Reynolds, you’ve been in custody now for two full days, trying to get sober, and your attorney tells me you’ve gotten there. Is that true?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Donna Wong declared quickly.

Judge Li nodded patiently, but spoke in a firm tone. “I’d like to hear it from Mr. Reynolds himself, Counsellor. Sir?”

Reynolds looked up, swayed for a beat, let out a long breath, shook his head.

“Mr. Reynolds.” Judge Li raised his voice. “Look at me, please. Do you know where you are?”

Donna Wong prodded him with her elbow. Reynolds looked down at her, up to the judge and his clerk, across to Huang sitting at the prosecution table. His expression took on a look of stunned surprise as he became aware of his surroundings, of the Asian faces everywhere he turned. “I don’t know.” A pause. “China?”

But the courtroom humor, such as it was, mingled uneasily with tragedy and the sometimes cruel impersonality of the law. Twenty-five very long minutes after the drunken Mr. Reynolds had been removed from the courtroom, another case had been called, another defendant—not Hardy’s—brought in. He was beginning to think that his own client wouldn’t get his hearing and that another entire day would have been wasted. This was not all that unusual an occurrence. Everyone bitched about it, but no one seemed to be able to make things better.

The new defendant was Joshua Bonder, and from the Penal Code section read out by the clerk, Hardy knew the charge was dealing amphetamines. But before things got started, Judge Li wanted to make sure that the three material witnesses in the case were in the building and ready to testify.

Hardy was half nodding off, half aware of the jockeying between Judge Li and the attorneys, when suddenly the back door by the judge’s bench opened. At the sound of rattling chains—shades of the Middle Ages—Hardy looked up as a couple of armed bailiffs escorted three children into the courtroom.

The two boys and a girl seemed to range in age from about ten to fourteen. All of them rail-thin, poorly dressed, obviously terrified. But what sent an almost electric buzz through the courtroom was the fact that they were all shackled together in handcuffs and leg chains.

Joshua Bonder, whose own handcuffs had been removed for the hearing screamed out, “You sons of bitches!” and nearly knocked over the defense table, jumping up, trying to get to the kids. “What have you done to my children?”

Hardy had seen many murderers walk into the courtroom on their own, without any hardware. He thought he’d seen most of everything here, but this shocked him to his roots. And he wasn’t alone. Both of the courtroom bailiffs had leapt to restrain Mr. Bonder, and now held him by the defense table. But Judge Li himself was up behind the bench, his normal calm demeanor thrown to the winds at this outrage.

“What the hell is this?” he boomed at the guards. “Uncuff those children at once!” His eyes raked the room, stopping at the prosecution table. “Mr. Vela”—the assistant DA who’d drawn Joshua Bonder—”what is the meaning of this?”

Vela, too, was on his feet, stammering. “Your Honor, you yourself issued the body attachments for these children as witnesses. We were afraid they would flee. They wouldn’t testify against their father—he’s their only guardian. So we have been holding them in Youth Guidance.”

“For how long?”

Vela clearly wished the floor would open up and swallow him. “Two weeks, Your Honor. You must remember. . . .”

Li listened, then went back to shouting. “I remember the case, but I didn’t order them shackled, for God’s sake!”

Vela the bureaucrat had an answer for that, too. “That’s the mandated procedure, Your Honor. When we transfer inmates from Juvenile Hall and we think there’s a flight risk, we shackle them.”

Judge Li was almost stammering in his rage. “But look at these people, Mr. Vela. They’re children, not even teenage—”

The father’s attorney, a woman named Gina Roake, decided to put in her two cents’ worth. “Your Honor, am I to understand that these children have been at the YGC for two weeks?”

Vela mumbled something about how Ms. Roake shouldn’t get on her high horse. It was standard procedure. But Roake was by now truly exercised, her voice hoarse with disgust. “You locked up these innocent children in the company of serious juvenile offenders? Is that what you’re telling me, Mr. Vela?”

“They are not innocent—”

“No? What was their crime? Reluctance to testify against their father? That’s all? And for this they’re shackled?”

Vela tried again. “The judge ordered—”

But Li wasn’t having any part of that. Exploding, he pointed his whole hand at the prosecutor, now booming at the top of his voice. “I ordered the least restrictive setting that would ensure the children’s return to court. Least restrictive, Mr. Vela. You know what that means?”

The smallest of the three kids had started crying, and the girl had moved over, putting her arm around him. As the bailiff moved in to separate them, Gina Roake cried out, “Don’t you dare touch them. Your Honor?” A plea.

Which Li accepted. “Let them alone.”

A moment of relative quite ensued. Into it, Gina Roake inserted a heartfelt reproach. “Your Honor, this is the inevitable outcome when children are drawn into the criminal justice system. There has to be a better way. This is a travesty.”

At long last, it was Hardy’s turn.

His client, a thirty-two-year-old recent Dallas transplant named Jason Trent, made his living laying carpet and was now in custody charged with three counts of mayhem and inflicting grievous bodily injury pursuant to a fight in the 3Com Stadium parking lot after a 49er game.

Trent’s story, and Hardy believed it, was that a trio of local boys had taken exception to his Dallas Cowboys attire and, after the Niners had been soundly thrashed, thought they would work out some of their frustrations by ganging up on the lone cowboy. This, in common with most of the other Niner decisions on the field during the game, turned out to be a bad idea for the home team.

Jason Trent had black belts in both karate and aikido and had also been a Golden Gloves champion in his teens back in Fort Worth. After being sprayed with beer and pushed from two directions at once, and all the while warning his assailants about his various defense skills, Jason had finally lost his temper. In a very short fight, he put all three boys on the ground. Then—his real mistake—he’d gone around with a few more rage-driven punches, in the process breaking two arms, one collarbone, and one nose.

“You should have stopped when they were down,” Hardy had told him.

To which Jason has shrugged. “They started it.”

Even so, the story probably would have ended there had not one of the three “victims” been the son of Richard Raintree, a San Francisco supervisor and political ally of District Attorney Sharron Pratt. Raintree contended that Jason Trent had overreacted to what amounted only to good-natured hazing and was himself drunk on beer. Sharron Pratt agreed—she’d ordered Jason arrested and charged. Now Hardy addressed Judge Li. “Your Honor,” he said, “this is my client’s first alleged offense. He has no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. He holds a steady job. He’s married and has three young children. He shouldn’t even be here in the courtroom. His alleged victims started this fight and he was forced to defend himself.”

Li allowed a crack in his stern visage, glancing over at the bandaged and splinted victims at the prosecution table. “And did a good job of it, didn’t he?”

Hardy kept at it. “The point, Your Honor, is that Mr. Trent was pushed to this extreme by three punks who were ganging up on him. For all he knew, they were planning to kill him.”

This woke up the prosecutor, Frank Fischer, who objected to the use of the word “punk.” “And further, Your Honor, the victims were on the ground at the time of the attack. They posed no threat to Mr. Trent at that time.”

“They are the reason anything happened at all, Your Honor.” The odds were that he was whistling in the wind, but Hardy felt he had to go ahead. This was San Francisco in the 90s. The ultimate responsibility for any action only rarely got all the way back to a prime mover—there were always too many victims in the path who could claim stress or that their rights had somehow been violated.

The law said that Jason Trent had gone beyond simple self-defense. Trent himself admitted that he’d been driven to loss of control. He wouldn’t pretend he didn’t do it. He’d hurt these slimeballs on purpose because they’d hurt and threatened him first. So whose fault was that? he wanted to know.

So, law or no law, Hardy felt that for his client’s sake he had to make the point. “Mr. Trent didn’t do anything wrong here, Your Honor. The law recognizes self-defense as a perfect defense. These young men scared and outnumbered him. He felt he had no option but to immobilize them until he could get away.”

“Even after they were down on the ground?” Li asked.

Hardy nodded. “He wanted to make sure they wouldn’t get up until he could remove himself from any further danger. He didn’t use anything like deadly force, which he very well could have, Your Honor. He used appropriate force to stop a vicious and unprovoked attack.”

Hardy noted the vibration at his belt, his silent beeper going off. He glanced down at it—a message from his office. Well, he was almost done here. Finally. The judge had heard his little speech and now would set bail and assign a trial date and then . . .

But Li, no doubt still simmering in his earlier fury with the DA’s cavalier style, suddenly had a different idea. After he listened to Hardy’s argument, he allowed a short silence to reign in his courtroom. Then he looked over at the prosecutor. “Mr. Fischer,” he said, “do the People concede that Messrs. Raintree et al. assaulted the defendant here, Mr. Trent, without provocation of any kind, other than his choice of clothing.”

Fischer was a nondescript functionary in his mid-thirties. By his reaction, this might have been the very first time that a judge had surprised him, or even spoken to him in the course of a proceeding. Now he stood up slowly, looked down at his notebook, and brought his eyes back up to the judge. “Your Honor, there was an exchange of words and insults. We have witnesses who—”

Li interrupted. “Who hit who first?”

Fischer scratched at the table before him. “Regardless of whatever instigated the fight that resulted in . . .”

Li’s face remained placid but his voice hardened. “Excuse me, Mr. Fischer, I asked you a simple question. Would you like me to repeat it?”

“No, Your Honor. That isn’t necessary.”

“Then would you do me the kindness to answer it?” Li repeated it anyway. “Did Mr. Raintree and the others start this fight?”

Fischer looked over at Hardy. Finally, he had to give it up. “Yes, Your Honor.”

Hardy thought he saw a momentary glint in the judge’s eye, and was suddenly certain he knew what the judge was going to do next. He wasn’t supposed to do it, but Li obviously had had enough and didn’t care. A couple more seconds of thought, then he tapped his gavel and stunned the courtroom with the words “Case dismissed.”

Chapter Two

Hardy had no time to savor the triumph. He thought he’d just quickly call his office, pick up his message, and then go have a celebratory birthday/freedom lunch with Jason Trent. Enjoy a rare midday martini. Maybe two.

But the phone message ended all thought of that. It was the call all parents fear. His receptionist, Phyllis, told him that Theresa Wilson from Merryvale needed him to get in touch with her as soon as possible. Merryvale was where his children—Rebecca and Vincent—went to school, and Theresa Wilson was the principal there. It was one-thirty, a Thursday afternoon in the middle of October.

“Are the kids all right?” He blurted it out. Hardy had lost a son, Michael, twenty-five years before and that wound still hadn’t completely healed—it never would. Now any threat to his children blanked his mind, brought his stomach to his throat.

“They’re fine.”

He closed his eyes and let out a breath of relief.

“But no one’s come to pick them up.”

“Frannie hasn’t called?” No, of course she hadn’t. That’s why Mrs. Wilson was on the phone with him. He flicked a glance down at his watch. “How late is she?”

He knew it sounded lame. He wasn’t in charge of taking care of the kids—that was Frannie’s job—so he wasn’t certain what time school got out. Somewhere in the back of his mind he recalled that they had one early dismissal day every week. It must be Thursday.

“About an hour.”

An hour without even a call? Frannie liked to say that if a punctual person was a lonely one, then she was one of the loneliest people on earth. “Have you heard from Erin? I mean Mrs. Cochran? She’s on the call list.” This was Rebecca’s grandmother, who often spelled Frannie with the kids.

“That was my first call, Mr. Hardy, to Erin. But I just got an answering machine. I thought I’d wait a few more minutes before calling you at work—maybe somebody got caught in traffic.” She hesitated. “Your son’s pretty upset. He wants to talk to you.”

Hardy heard his third-grader, Vincent, trying to be brave, but his voice was cracking, frayed. He responded with a hearty confidence. “It’s okay, bud, I’ll be down to pick you up in no time. Tell Rebecca it’s all right, too. Everything’s fine.”

“But where’s Mom?”

“I don’t know, Vin, but don’t worry. I’m sure it’s just a communication mix-up. That or she’s running late from something.” He was selling himself as well as his son. Maybe Frannie had arranged for another parent to pick up the kids and that person had forgotten. “She’ll probably show up before I get there.”

Although he didn’t really believe that. Frannie would have told the children if someone else other than Erin was going to pick them up. They had strict rules about not going home with anybody other than Mom, Dad or Grandma unless the arrangements had been approved in advance. “You be a big guy,” he said. “Everything’s okay, I promise.”

Hardy made a quick call back to his reception desk and questioned Phyllis—was she sure Frannie hadn’t left a message earlier? But Phyllis was an efficiency machine. If his wife had called, she told him icily, she would have told Hardy. As she always did.

He checked his watch again. It had been less that five minutes since he’d talked to Mrs. Wilson. Undoubtedly there was a simple explanation. Even in this day of ubiquitous communication, there were places that didn’t have phones, or access to them. Frannie might be at one of them, stuck, trying to reach him.

He got the answering machine when he tried at his home. Where could she be? If she was not picking up the children, something was wrong.

Perhaps she’d been in an accident? Hardy’s fertile brain played with the possibilities of what might have happened, might be happening, to his wife. He didn’t like any of them.

A few minutes later he was in his car, negotiating the downtown traffic. He tried to remember something about Frannie’s day, her plans. For the life of him, he couldn’t retrieve anything, if in fact she’d told him.

Truth was, lately she probably wouldn’t have mentioned anything about her daily schedule and even if she had, it might not have registered with him. More and more, the two of them were leading separate lives. Both of them knew it and admitted that it was a problem, but it was the toll of day-to-dayness and neither of them seemed able to break the cycle. Hardy knew about as much of his wife’s routines as he did of his children’s schoolday, which was precious little.

Though it was cold comfort, he told himself that it was just the way things had evolved. The family dynamic had changed, gotten more traditional. He was overwhelmed with the simple mechanics of making a living. Frannie volunteered for everthing, never said no, was always there to support the other moms, her circle of friends. And all of it—Frannie’s very existence it seemed—revolved around their children. As he supposed it should—that was the job she’d wanted. He made the money and helped with discipline. That was the deal.

Finally, beyond Van Ness the traffic started to move along out toward the Avenues. With luck now he’d be to Merryvale in ten minutes.

By the time he got home with the children and searched the house for some kind of note, he was really worried. His wife didn’t simply disappear with no explanation.

He sent the kids to the backyard and got on the phone. His first call was to Erin Cochran, but he got another answering machine. Next—a flash of insight—he called Moses McGuire, Frannie’s brother, bartending at the Little Shamrock.

“She probably left you. I would have long ago.”

“She wouldn’t have left the kids, Mose.”

“Well, that’s probably true, you’re right.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

Moses took a minute. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Diz. She’ll turn up.”

“Well, that’s heartening. Thanks for the input.”

He hung up. Big help from the brother front. While he sat at the kitchen table contemplating his next call, the phone rang and he snatched at it.

“Are you really worried?”

“Some.”

“You really don’t know where she is?”

“No. I’m kidding you. Actually, she’s right here next to me. We just thought it would be fun to call you and say she was gone, see how you react.”

Moses got serious. “When did you last talk to her?”

“This morning.”

“You guys fight or anything?”

“No.”

The line hummed with silence. Then, “I’d try Erin.”

“I already did. She isn’t home.”

“Maybe they went somewhere together and got hung up.”

“Maybe,” Hardy agreed. He didn’t want to alarm her brother any more that he already had. Moses had raised Frannie. He often said that of the ten things he cared most about, Frannie was the first eight. “Either Erin or one of her other friends.”

“But she didn’t call you?”

This, of course, was the nub of it, but Hardy played it down. “Phyllis might have lost the message. Happens all the time,” he lied.

“I’ll call Susan,” Moses said, referring to his wife. “Maybe she’s heard something.”

“Okay.” Hardy looked at his watch. 2:50. “I’m sure she’ll be home anytime. I’ll call.”

Forty-five minutes later, the phone had rung twice more, but neither one was Frannie.

First had been Susan, checking to make sure that Moses had not misinterpreted what Hardy was saying. Was Frannie really missing? Hardy didn’t want to say that, not yet. She just wasn’t home yet. He’d call Susan back when he heard from her.

The second call was Erin Cochan, home from a long weekend that she and her husband, Ed, had spent in the Napa vineyards. No, she hadn’t talked to Frannie in a week. Mrs. Wilson’s call on her machine had told her that Frannie hadn’t gone to pick up the children, then she’d gotten Hardy’s message. What was going on? Was Frannie back yet?

She tried to hide it, but the worry was unmistakable in her voice. It was now nearly two hours since Frannie should have picked the kids up at school and Hardy still hadn’t even heard from her? Did he need help at home? Erin could be right over.

Hardy admitted that maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea.

He’d put off making the next call for as long as he could, but now—nearly four-thirty, with two red-eyed children at the table listlessly pushing around some graham crackers and milk—he punched in a number he knew by heart.

“Glitsky. Homicide.”

Lieutenant Abe Glitsky, the chief of San Francisco’s homicide department, was his best friend. Being in the criminal justice system, Glitsky could circumvent a lot of bureaucracy.

“Abe, it’s Diz.”

This was so different from their usual obscene or ironic greeting that it raised Glitsky’s red flag. “What’s the matter?”

Hardy told Abe to hold a minute, then stood up with the portable phone, and told Rebecca and Vincent he was talking to Uncle Abe—adult stuff—he was just going into the living room for a little privacy. He’d be right back. They should keep eating their snacks.

“Frannie’s running about three hours late,” he whispered from the front of the house. He cast his eyes up and down the street out front. No Frannie.

“Three hours?”

“I thought you might check around.”

Hardy’s casual tone didn’t camouflage much for Glitsky. He knew what his friend meant by check around—accidents, hospital admissions, or the worst, recently dead Jane Does.

“Three hours?” Glitsky repeated.

Hardy looked at his watch, hating to say it. “Maybe a little more.”

Glitsky got the message. “I’m on it,” he said. Hardy hung up just as Vincent let out a cry in the kitchen.

The Cochrans—Big Ed and Erin—were the parents of Frannie’s first husband, Ed, who was the biological father of Rebecca. Their son had been gone a long time now, but Ed and Erin still doted on their granddaughter and her brother, Vincent. They loved Frannie and her husband. Hardy and his wife, with no living parents between them, considered them part of the family.

Now, after getting the word about Frannie’s absence, they had come to Hardy’s house. Erin was shepherding the kids through their homework at the kitchen table, trying to keep their minds engaged. Hardy and Ed were making small talk, casting glances at the telephone, waiting.

Hardy was on the phone before the ring ended. It was Abe Glitsky with his professional voice on.

“She back yet?”

Hardy told him no, endured the short pause. “Okay, well. The good news is nobody’s dead, not anywhere. I checked Alameda, Marin, Santa Clara”—the counties surrounding San Francisco—”and it’s a slow day on the prairie. Barely a fender-bender. No reports of anything serious. Nothing in the city at all.”

Hardy let out a long sigh. “So what now?”

“I don’t know. We hang. She’ll—” He stopped. Glitsky, who’d lost his own wife to cancer a few years before, wasn’t one for stoking false hopes. “She driving the Subaru?”

“I’d guess so. If she’s driving.”

“Give me the license and I’ll put it out over the dispatch, broaden the net.”

“All right.” Hardy hated the sound of that—broaden the net. It was getting official now. Objective. Harder to deny, even to himself.

Where was his wife?

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