14
TO THE CASUAL observer, Lou the Greek’s restaurant—directly across the street from the Hall of Justice—might appear to have health and hygiene issues. People in the know suspected that the A it received every year from the city’s Health Department was the result of either a health inspector with severely poor vision or an influential clientele who didn’t want the place to change or get hassled. Nevertheless, if you lingered on the stairway that led down to the door—say, waiting in line—you’d detect an odor that spoke to the presence of some of San Francisco’s treasured homeless population, who used the stairway as a windbreak, bedroom, and sometimes toilet.
Lou got in every morning about four hours after closing at two A.M. and before the place opened at six. He rousted the sleepers, hosed everything down, Cloroxed, squeegeed, then opened up for the early-morning drinking crowd.
In spite of all that, but mostly due to proximity to the courts, the place was always jammed at lunchtime. Cops, lawyers, clients, reporters, jurors, witnesses, all of them needed lunch, and Lou’s was convenient, cheap, fast, and surprisingly and consistently good. This was all the more unexpected considering that it served only one course every day, the famous Special, which was nearly always an original combination of the ethnic foodstuffs of Lou and his wife, the cook, Chui—Greek and Chinese. So you’d get a lot of lamb and pork dishes, squid and octopus and shrimp, meatballs, noodles, rice, grape leaves, and bao dumplings, seasoned heavily with lemon juice, Mae Ploy, or soy sauce. Often weird but always edible, if not downright tasty.
Its other great advantage was that its popularity tended to produce a noise level comparable to a jet engine’s. This made it convenient not only for privileged communications, say between lawyers and their clients, but for other conversations that might otherwise have to take place behind closed doors.
Today, at the front of the line that extended up the stairs and out to the sidewalk, Glitsky stood with Treya and her boss, Wes Farrell. Abe had stopped by the Hall to see if he could talk to one of the DA’s investigators or assistant district attorneys who’d looked into some of the irregularities at the jail, and if somehow he could bring the name Hal Chase subtly into the conversation. Basically, nobody knew nothin’.
Abe was talking to Farrell about it. “It just seems odd that none of these allegations ever got any legs. Jeff Elliot’s got files on every incident—every death in custody, OD, or inmate treated for blunt force trauma—that’s happened at the jail for the past few years, and none of them has gone anywhere.”
“This surprises you?” Farrell asked.
“Slightly. Especially when you look at what happens if somebody starts talking abuse or excessive force with regular cops. The whole world jumps all over them. Particularly, if memory serves, your office jumps all over them.”
“True. And you know why that is?”
“You guys hate cops?”
Farrell turned to Glitsky’s wife. “Try to keep him away from stand-up.” To Abe, he went on, “As you know, that was the wrong answer. We love cops. We have a full and free and respectful working relationship with the Police Department. I am the DA himself, and I have personal friends in the PD. The truth is, our good citizens demand that cops be held to a higher standard than normal people. SFPD operates in the community. They interact with criminals, sure, but also with regular people, many of whom have cell phones with those cool video functions. They operate in an open environment and, when they show up, often don’t know what is going on. So they’ve got a much better opportunity to screw something up and a much better chance that a credible person will be there to see when they do it.
“The sheriff, on the other hand, totally controls the jail, and the inmates are pretty much at his mercy. The only people who are not, by definition, criminals in the jail work for the sheriff, which hardly fosters a transparent environment. So the chances of solving a crime involved in the jail approach zero, and if a guard brutalizes an inmate, nobody’s ever going to know. But if we get a righteous case, we try it. I promise you.”
“You haven’t gotten one? Not even one?”
“Sometimes we get one. But the ones we do get tend to fall into the misdemeanor category, the Sheriff’s Department policing itself and making sure that its members adhere to the law and protocol in all cases. The occasional small-fry investigation yields a misdemeanor conviction that allows for plausible deniability on larger matters. Their story is that they investigate every allegation of wrongdoing, and when they find something actionable, then by God they act on it.”
“None of the larger cases make it upstairs?”
“Very few, if any. And what do you think that could be about?” Farrell asked as they finally got to the door. “I bet, being an ex–police officer of unrivaled sagacity and experience, you can figure this out.”
“You never have witnesses.”
Farrell beamed, spread his arms, and again turned to Treya. “And there it is,” he said. “But now let me ask you one.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do you care? Are you not done with the daily exertions of your brain about criminal matters?”
“I thought I was. But Diz asked me to look into something for him, and Wyatt Hunt is out of town, so I said yes.”
Farrell once was Hardy’s law partner, and the news obviously took him by surprise. “You, a cop—”
“Ex-cop.”
“Still. You’re working for Diz the defense attorney?”
“Part-time.”
“It’s a work in progress,” Treya put in. “He’s only just started.”
Farrell asked, “You don’t feel like you’re working for the wrong side? Don’t you find that a little weird?”
“Did you find it weird prosecuting people after thirty years as a defense attorney?”
“Actually, yes. I don’t know if I’d recommend it for normal people.”
“In my case, I’m an investigator, and I’m investigating, that’s all. It’s not like I’m on one side or another.”
Farrell chuckled. “No? Just wait. It will be. So what’s the case? Something to do with the jail?”
“Only in the sense that Hardy’s client is a guard there. I was down with Jeff Elliot at the Chronicle this morning, nosing around about my guy, and next thing you know, Jeff’s going off about all the troubles at the jail.”
“Connecting them to your client?”
“No. No apparent connection at all.”
“Do you think there is?”
Glitsky shook his head. “No reason to. My guy’s wife has gone missing, and I’m trying to find out where she went. Unless she’s hiding in the jail, the jail’s got nothing to do with it.”