Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The Read Online Free PDF

on paperwork. He’d had no objection to Hardy coming up to the detail to talk to inspectors Sarah Evans or Marcel Lanier — the Sal Russo investigating team — if they’d let him. If they didn’t want to talk, they wouldn’t be shy about letting him know. If they did, Hardy might get a hint about what Evans had found at the old fisherman’s apartment that had set off her warning bells: Sal might not have been a suicide.
    But both inspectors had been out in the field, so Hardy went down to the bathroom, then wandered back into Glitsky’s space and asked again about the kid Franco and got told it was politics.
    ‘Losing trials is politics?’
    ‘You really ought to go down there’ — meaning the DA’s offices — ‘it’s a whole new world.’ Glitsky put down his report. ‘You’re not going to leave me alone, are you? Let me get back to my work?’
    Hardy clucked. ‘I want to. I really do. I’m trying, even.’
    ‘I’m confident you can do it.’ The lieutenant picked up his report again. ‘Get the door on the way out, would you?’
     
    David Freeman was in his trademark brown rumpled suit and wrinkled rep tie. Sitting in the low leather couch in Hardy’s office, smoking a cigar, his tattered brogues crossed over the rattan-and-glass coffee table, Freeman, the wealthy, famous landlord of the building, could have been mistaken for a destitute client. The man was retirement age or better, and sported tufts of white hair from the tops of his earlobes and eyebrows. Bald on top, round in the middle, liver spots wherever skin showed, he was still a force in the courtrooms of the city.
    ‘The reason it’s politics,’ he was saying — Hardy had worried it all the way back to his office — ‘is Sharron Pratt, our esteemed DA.’
    Hardy knew the story of the election well enough. Pratt had beaten a reasonably popular incumbent named Alan Reston the preceding November. Although Reston was a Democrat, as nearly all elected officials in San Francisco had to be, and African-American to boot — potentially an even bigger plus — he was a career prosecutor. Many people in the city, including Hardy, found it ironic that what had done in Reston, running for the job of chief law-enforcement officer in the city, was his tough stance on crime. Sure, the DA was supposed to prosecute people who’d done bad things, but Reston seemed unable to make the leap of faith that this didn’t mean they were bad people. He thought they were bad people. He thought people who committed crimes ought to be punished, and punished hard.
    Pratt, on the other hand, while she agreed that many criminals, indeed, had done bad things — murder, rape, burning kittens for Santeria rites — she did not agree that this necessarily made them bad people. They were misunderstood, surely, but she believed that with counseling and guidance, many of them could again become productive members of society.
    Also, it hadn’t helped that Reston, a black man, had been a supporter of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. He opposed affirmative action, believing that trial lawyers, like brain surgeons, for example, ought to be hired and retained because of their ability to do their jobs getting convictions at trial and putting criminals in jail.
    When he’d come aboard, Reston looked around the office he ran and saw that there were a lot of women, some people of color, a lot of old white guys. The job was getting done. When there were new openings, he hired the best person from a diverse pool of applicants — black, white, male, female, Asian, Hispanic — he didn’t care. Pratt did care, though. And Pratt got elected. ‘So this relates to how Eric Franco pulled a murder?’ ‘Pratt unloads all the old white guys, she’s still stuck with the cases, so to prove her theory that anybody can do this work, she hires her quotas and willy-nilly assigns the cases, and her people lose and it doesn’t matter. Eventually they might win.’