The Hunt Club (8 page)

She had closed her eyes again and now opened them. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I do want to help you find who did this if I can.”

“Do you have any idea who it might have been? Did your husband have any enemies?”

“Don't you think we have to know who that woman is first? Why is she here? Whatever it is, that's what this has to be about. Doesn't it?”

Juhle wasn't sure that was true. He could envision several scenarios off the top of his head that explained the girl's presence. But Jeannette Palmer was right. The overwhelming likelihood was that it wasn't about the judge by himself. Jane Doe was part of it.

“But all right. George's enemies.” Her big shoulders heaved in a mirthless laugh. “This sounds awful for such a charming man, but it could have been anybody, really. You'd have to check his files. Every time he made a decision, he made an enemy, and he's been doing that for years and years. Then there's the CCPOA….”

Juhle shot another quick look over to Shiu. The CCPOA, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, was the prison guards' union, the most powerful and richest labor organization in the state. It was no secret that it wasn't doing much of a good job at policing itself. And suddenly Juhle, with a shock of recognition, put it together that the judge—who had been in the news looking into the possibility of putting the CCPOA into receivership, deposing its president, and freezing its assets—was George Palmer.

Jeannette Palmer didn't notice the silent exchange, and she was going on. “They're not nice people, and they were terrified that George was going to put them out of business.”

“Did they threaten him?” Shiu asked. He had taken out the small notepad he used.

“Not that I know of. Not overtly, anyway. George would have told me.”

Juhle waited for a moment, then asked if she knew what the judge had done on the previous night. She opened her eyes, brought him into focus. “He was home here when I left but said he was going out to dinner.”

“Did he say with who or where?”

“No. It was casual. He just said he had to see some people about a horse, which was our code for cases he wasn't supposed to talk about. Even to me. Maybe his secretary would know. I'm sorry. But it wasn't the dinner. We know he came back from that, don't we? With her.”

At the moment, Juhle didn't even know if he'd gone out at all, but he simply said, “Maybe not with her. Maybe she came later.”

The thought seemed to give her a moment's reprieve. Perhaps grateful for that, she nodded. “Maybe she did,” she said. “Maybe she came with the killer.”

This, Juhle thought, was a pretty thing to think. But not very likely.

She ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “oh, God.”

Juhle gave her a moment, then spoke her name, and she opened her eyes, but the faraway gaze she'd worn when they'd entered was back.

He tried again. “Mrs. Palmer?”

But she just looked at him and shook her head.

Snapping his fingers,
Amy Wu's boss Dismas Hardy had told Wyatt Hunt that he could set himself up as a private investigator just like that. But it hadn't been exactly just like that. First Hunt needed to convince the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs that his time in the army as a member of the CID should count as the required education in police science, criminal law, or justice, and then that his years of work in the CPS gave him at least the equivalent of six thousand hours of investigative experience. Then there was his evaluation by the federal Department of Justice and the criminal-history background check. To say nothing of the two-hour written exam on laws and regulations. And finally the additional requirements for a firearms permit. All that took the better part of two months.

Then four years ago tonight, he had hung up the shingle.

Now he sat against the wall at a large round table in the power corner at Sam's, the classic restaurant and watering hole at Bush Street and Belden Alley. Fresh from a successful day locating a Piedmont dentist's nineteen-year-old daughter who'd dropped out of the USF dorms and moved in with her boyfriend in the Mission District, Hunt was the first one here for the anniversary party. Sitting alone at the table, he took a first sip of his Bombay Sapphire gibson and sighed with contentment.

He knew that in a few minutes he was going to be all but holding court with a high-energy, even slightly famous group of some of the city's most successful legal professionals. He wore a suit and tie. He could spout some of his high school Latin, his college French, and everyone would know what he'd just said—more, they wanted to know what he would say. They would be drinking fine wine and their waiter Stephano would call them all by their first names.

It almost seemed impossible. From where he'd been to here.

Hunt had been a foster kid in a succession of homes until he was eight when the then-childless Richard and Ann Hunt had miraculously decided to adopt him (and then proceeded to have four natural children of their own in short order).

When he opened his agency, there was never a question as to what he'd call it. In a practical sense, as a business name, The Hunt Club sounded substantial, as though a bunch of like-minded professionals hung out together and did good work. There might be fifty employees in an organization called The Hunt Club.

In fact, at first it was just him.

Next had come Tamara Dade. She and her brother Mickey were two of the very few kids Hunt had met in the course of his emergency work at CPS with whom he'd kept up. Tamara had looked Hunt up when she was about fourteen to thank him for saving her life back when she'd been Tammy and down to her last spoonful of peanut butter.

Beginning with that unexpected phone call, they'd stayed in touch with one another in a haphazard way. A few years ago, Hunt had attended her graduation from San Francisco State. After that, Tamara did some clerical work while she looked for a “real” job, but nothing exciting presented itself. Then Hunt opened his agency and found that business was good and he needed at least both an assistant and a part-time field guy. Now Tamara came in to the office every day, serving as receptionist, office manager, bookkeeper, secretary, and since she was going back to school in criminology and starting to log her investigatory hours, occasional partner. Though she was an efficiency machine in the office, she was even better getting her hands dirty in the field—totally fearless and a crackerjack interrogator in whom people naturally confided.

They weren't long in the business before Hunt had occasion to call on Devin Juhle for some classified DMV information he couldn't get through normal channels. Hunt got acquainted with some of the homicide guys' snitches, who tended to know where witnesses went to hide out. After that, Juhle and his partner Shane Manning had started to refer to themselves as Hunt Clubbers. Then one night when Hunt was over at Juhle's house for dinner—a regular occurrence—his wife, Connie, refused to put food in front of him until he made her a member as well.

After that, the whole thing took on a kind of insider's cachet. One evening Amy Wu had stopped into Lou the Greek's with Wes Farrell, one of the partners in her firm, for a drink while Hunt, Juhle, and Manning, already a bit in their cups, were working on the club's bylaws, in this case, formally adopting Will Ferrell's
Saturday Night Live
bit, itself based on the original Fishbone lyric, as their official club cheer—“U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you Ul-ly, hey, hey, you Ul-ly.”

Naturally, Amy and Wes lobbied for admission. Hunt and the guys played hard to get. After all, what was the point of having a club unless there were standards? What could Amy and Wes bring to the party? Wes didn't hesitate. He unbuttoned his dress shirt and showed off the T-shirt he wore under it, on which were written the words,

EVERYTHING
'
S BETTER ON ANABOLIC STEROIDS
.

“I wear a new one of these every day,” Wes said. “I may have the world's most complete obnoxious T-shirt collection.”

Nodding in admiration—Farrell passed the attitude test and was going to make the cut—Hunt and the cops turned to Amy.

She wiped away the tear that now somehow glistened on her cheek. “I have never, ever been in a club in my life,” she whispered. “No one's ever let me join in. Oh, never mind, anyway.” Obviously hurt, she turned, took a few halting steps away. Hunt, feeling awful, rolled his eyes and got up to undo some of the psychic damage if he could—after all, she was his friend, to say nothing of a significant source of his income. He gently put his hand on her shoulder. “Amy, we didn't mean…”

And she whirled around, beaming at him. “Are you kidding me?” she said. “You don't think people would kill to get me in their clubs?” She pulled him down and kissed his cheek. “Great liars are always in demand, Wyatt. You never know when you're going to need one.”

Eventually, Amy hooked up with and was now engaged to Jason Brandt, another lawyer who worked mainly in the juvenile division but who made the club after he won a bet with Hunt that he could get the three of them into any Giants game any time they wanted without tickets or reservations. Or any other public concert, event, happening. Brandt didn't seem to understand why anybody ever paid or bought tickets to do anything. He told Hunt, who had come to believe it, that over the course of his senior-year summer—and granted, it had been before 9/11—he had toured the U.S. by commercial airliner, with stops in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, without buying one ticket.

Finally, Hunt hired another young stringer, Craig Chiurco, to help out with surveillance, and soon enough Chiurco and Tamara became an item. So now, since Shane Manning had been killed, there were eight of them—four, including Hunt, on the payroll—and another four irregulars who took the occasional break from their day jobs as lawyers and cops and even mothers to have a little fun on the edge of things, break up the routine.

This morning at the office, Hunt had given his employees each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. For the irregulars, the anniversary was a reasonably good excuse to have a dinner and a few laughs at Sam's.

Wes Farrell had grown
out his hair again, though not as extreme as a few years before when it had gotten below his shoulders. Still, in a ponytail, the hair was a statement, like tonight's T-shirt he'd just shown everyone under his dress shirt that read,
I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH
. He was explaining that he generally preferred nonverbal statements, such as his hair.

“So what's with the hair, anyway?” Wyatt Hunt asked him.

“You don't like it?” Farrell, hurt, put a hand to his heart. “I've been working on it for weeks.”

“I know. I love the hair. I do. It's just not exactly the standard lawyer look.”

“Tony Serra has it,” Amy Wu said, referring to the defense legend they'd once made a movie about. “Long hair, I mean.”

“Tony Serra's not your run-of-the-mill standard lawyer,” Hunt said.

Farrell took umbrage. “Nor, might I point out, am I.”

“No,” his girlfriend said, “that you're not.” Samantha Duncan—no relation to the restaurant Sam's—put a hand over his and leaned over to answer Hunt. “And as for the statement, he's not cutting his hair until something makes sense. I tell him that's not going to happen until we've got a new administration in Washington.” Sam was rather flamboyantly a Green Party person, which in San Francisco put her close to the mainstream, though not necessarily among this crowd of law enforcement types.

“Don't start, my love.” Farrell covered her hand with his. “It doesn't have to be on the national front. A sign of anything making sense anywhere could propel me to a barber. But I see little evidence of it.” Farrell looked around the table.

The dinner was going very well but hadn't exactly turned out to be the Hunt Club anniversary extravaganza that Hunt had originally billed it. Devin Juhle had pulled a huge case just this morning—a federal judge had been murdered—and he and Connie had had to blow it off. Hunt had reserved a table for nine, the empty chair for Shane Manning's memory and rather emphatically not for Juhle's new partner. When Amy had seen the crew from Trial TV—in for the current tabloid-fodder murder trial of Randy Donolan that was now in its sixth week at the Hall of Justice—which included her friend Andrea Parisi, she'd invited them to fill in the three open spots at the table. Now the party included Spencer Fairchild, the location producer; Parisi; and Richard Tombo, a black attorney, who along with Parisi worked as a talking-head expert on the trial.

“For example,” Farrell said, pointing at Tombo, “if you, Rich, or Andrea, or both of you, actually do go large with Trial TV, that would make some sense.”

“I'd make an appointment with your barber now, then,” Tombo said. “Andrea's a lock for national anchor.” He looked to his location man. “Isn't she, Spence?”

Fairchild tried not to wince. “As I believe I've mentioned, my friends, I just do local. This current Donolan circus ends in a couple of weeks, and I'm off to Colorado or Arkansas for the next hot trial. The big decisions are made in New York, not in the field.”

But Brandt, always up to talk legal cases, got Fairchild off the hook. “You think Donolan's going two more weeks? I'm thinking after what he did on the stand today…”

Andrea Parisi finished
applying her lipstick and looked at herself in the mirror in the women's room. She'd been trying not to think about yesterday and felt that she'd needed a couple of glasses of wine at lunch to keep her spirits up for the daily wrap-up broadcast. She and her producer and her male counterpart had had a little champagne in the limo on the way over here. In the past ninety minutes since they'd arrived, she'd had a vodka martini (“Belvedere, a little dirty, up”) at the bar before they'd all sat down, then a glass of pinot grigio with her half-shell littlenecks, some Jordan cab (two glasses? three?) with the sweetbreads. She weighed 122 pounds and knew that she was probably legally drunk, although she felt fine.

She checked to make sure that the bathroom door was locked. Then, closing her eyes, she lifted her right foot slightly off the ground, touched the tip of her nose, and counted to five. Opening her eyes, she put her foot back down, and forced a bright smile at her reflection. “She sells seashells by the seashore,” she whispered. She repeated it three times perfectly.

She would have bet that she'd be rock steady, and she was, but it never hurt to do a little inventory. Now she had verified for herself that she would easily be able to handle having some Amaretto or maybe, depending on her dinner partners, some Grand Marnier or a snifter of cognac with dessert. Then at least some of them would go around the corner to the cigar bar and have another round or two with their smokes, and she intended to be among them if that was the way the night went.

She took a last look, and something in her gaze held her for another moment. Oh, she supposed she was glamorous enough, to be sure. Her dark hair, a little below her shoulders, gleamed with red highlights—natural, thank you, since she was only thirty-one years old. A bridge of pale freckles rose off each smooth cheek and crossed a nose Modigliani might have painted. Perhaps in a technical sense her chin was too small, her lips too full, but for television, they were if anything a plus. Still, the mirror caught the trace of doubt, of what might be a flash of insecurity. At the corners of the startling green eyes, she saw a tiny web of worry lines form and then dissipate like an apparition. Leaning forward, she tried to see what was in those eyes that stared back at her. But there was no ready answer, and she couldn't stay in here any longer, not if she didn't want to call attention to herself as less than one of the guys, and she wouldn't do that. She would never let herself do that.

She pulled back, ran her tongue over her lips, over the bright red lipstick, and smiled at herself. A small sigh escaped, but she was unaware of it. “It's all good,” she said aloud to her image. “Be cool. Don't push it.” Now drawing a deeper breath, she steeled her shoulders, reached for the doorknob, and walked back out into the main dining room.