Amazon Rating 4.5/5 (read reviews)

Goodreads Rating 4.2/5  (read reviews)

Amazon Readers say:

I enjoy Mr. Sheldon’s books about Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez. As a criminal defense lawyer, living in San Francisco, the Hall of Justice (or “850”) is a familiar milieu. I require a little more sleep than Mike Daley, and I usually let my investigators do the talking with witnesses. But my hat is off to Mr. Siegel, who writes some brilliant cross-examinations, as well as excellent direct examinations by the various DA’s who populate these books. This is more poignant when you consider that Mr. Siegel is a civil attorney, and probably doesn’t get to court as much as we criminal practitioners. 

In this book, Mike Daley represents a young cop who killed a black man after a traffic stop because of a broken tail light. Usually, the defense is attacking cops rather than soliciting them to be witnesses for their case. The real star of this book is Pete, Mike’s younger brother who is a former cop, and Mike’s investigator. He is the one who truly never sleeps and tirelessly works to find a witness who might have seen what happens. Investigators are the ones who allow defense attorneys to shine in court, and don’t get enough credit. Mr. Siegel certainly knows the value of a good investigation.

Rosie and Mike have been divorced longer than they were married, and continue to have a complicated relationship. There are lots of strong women in this book, and I’ve enjoyed sharing the lives of Mike, Pete, Rosie, and the venerable homicide detective Roosevelt Johnson. These books are well written; correct on legal procedure; and have engaging and fast moving plots. If you haven’t read any of these books, start at the beginning and work your way up.

1
“I HOPE IT ISN’T SOMEBODY WE KNOW”

The Honorable Elizabeth McDaniel tapped her microphone, and her overflowing courtroom went silent. She looked my way and flashed a wry grin. “Haven’t seen you in a few months, Mr. Daley.”

I stepped to the lectern and returned her smile. “I’m not spending much time in court, Your Honor.”

“Neither am I.”

Now in her mid-sixties, Betsy McDaniel was a fair-minded jurist and a gracious soul who had gone on senior status to spend more time with her grandchildren. While she adored them, the former prosecutor had grown bored playing with Legos and going to Pilates classes, so she came back to pinch-hit for her former colleagues from time to time.

She arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t expect to see the head of the Felony Division of the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office in Misdemeanor Court.”

“One of our deputies is under the weather.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Just a cold.”

At nine a.m. on Wednesday, February ninth, her courtroom was packed with small-time criminals and smaller-time lawyers waiting for a moment of small-time justice. A half-step above Traffic Court, Misdemeanor Court was our system’s great equalizer. On good days, the windowless courtroom on the second floor of the Hall of Justice smelled a bit nicer than the men’s locker room at the Embarcadero Y. On bad days, the plumbing backed up and the aroma of sewage wafted through the courts. A few years ago, the monolithic fifties-era building at Seventh and Bryant was declared unsafe from earthquakes, and it was being evacuated room-by-room at a snail’s pace. If the economy stayed strong and the political winds blew in the right direction, there was a chance that the old warhorse would be replaced before I retired.

Every seat in the gallery and the jury box was taken. People were standing halfway down the center aisle and along the back wall. Many couldn’t afford a Muni ticket, let alone a lawyer or a childcare provider. As a result, the courtroom and the corridor were filled with relatives, significant others, and friends. Children weren’t allowed in court, so they had to entertain themselves in the hall. I felt bad for the parents who would have to write a note to their kid’s teacher explaining that they were absent from school to attend Mommy or Daddy’s court date. I felt worse for the kids.

Judge McDaniel put on her reading glasses and glanced at her computer. The process in Misdemeanor Court was similar to the long-closed cafeteria in the basement that was now a storage area. You took a number and waited your turn. She nodded at the baby A.D.A. standing at attention at the prosecution table. He was wearing a brand-new going-to-court suit that looked as if he’d bought it off the rack at the Men’s Wearhouse earlier that morning. The judge spoke to him in a cheerful tone. “Good morning, Mr. George.”

He tugged at the collar of his starched white shirt that was a little snug around the neck. “Good morning, Your Honor.”

Ted George was a handsome lad and fifth-generation Californian who had graduated at the top of his class at Stanford Law School. His ancestors had planted the apricot orchards that once dotted Silicon Valley. His father had made a fortune in venture capital. He was a conscientious young man who had the potential to grow up into a competent prosecutor. It brought back memories of the day almost a quarter of a century earlier when I had made my first appearance in this very courtroom in front of a grizzled judge who took his morning coffee with a splash of bourbon. He retired a few years later and lived comfortably in the Pacific Heights mansion that he had inherited from his parents until his liver finally gave out.

“What brings you here today, Mr. George?” Judge McDaniel asked.

“The People versus Luther Robinson.”

“Oh, dear.” The judge pushed out a sigh and turned to me. “Is he here, Mr. Daley?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

I motioned to my client, who joined me at the lectern. Luther Robinson was a wiry man of indeterminate middle age. When he had a few bucks in his pocket, he lived in an SRO in the Tenderloin. When he didn’t, he slept in an alley on Sixth Street. A gentle soul with sad eyes and gray stubble, the native of the Fillmore had returned from the war in Kuwait with a severe case of PTSD which he treated by self-medicating with malt liquor. He was wearing a navy sport jacket and a pair of khaki pants that he had selected from the donated clothes closet at the P.D.’s Office. Luther had been one of my first regulars when I was a rookie P.D. working in Misdemeanor Court, and I had a soft spot for him. He was blessed with an engaging manner and a gift for persuading strangers to part with their hard-earned cash for his low-rent scams. He’d never hurt anybody. He ripped people off when he was hungry.

Judge McDaniel’s tone was more maternal than judicial. “How are you, Luther?”

“Fine, Your Honor.” His voice was soft. “And you?”

“Fine, thank you.” She took off her reading glasses. “I saw you here last week, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“You were selling baby wipes and telling people that they were contraceptives, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And the week before, you were selling Tic Tacs and saying that they were Viagra tablets, weren’t you?”

He lowered his eyes. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“In each case, I let you go on your own recognizance after you promised not to do any more scams, right?”

“Right.”

The judge rested her chin in her palm. “Did you break your promise again, Luther?”

“Sort of.”

She turned to the prosecutor. “Why are we here, Mr. George?”

“Mr. Robinson was selling wooden tongue depressors on the street in the Tenderloin.”

I interjected, “Allegedly selling.”

“No, he was really selling. One of his customers was an undercover police officer.”

I shot a glance at Luther, who nodded.

The judge looked up. “Where did he get the tongue depressors, Mr. Daley?”

“The Tenderloin Free Clinic. Luther took them during an appointment last week.”

“Technically, that might be shoplifting, but it seems pretty innocuous.” She looked at her computer. “It says here that Mr. Robinson is charged with misdemeanor fraud.”

George answered her. “He is.”

“Strikes me as a bit severe.”

“Mr. Robinson was charging twenty dollars each.”

“Why would anybody in their right mind pay so much for an item worth a few pennies?”

“Mr. Robinson represented to his customers that they were home STD tests.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. He instructed them to place the wooden stick under their tongue for thirty seconds. If it didn’t turn blue, they were clean.”

This elicited a few snickers in the gallery.

Judge McDaniel templed her fingers in front of her mouth to hide a smile. “How many did he sell?”

“At least a dozen. Seems they’re in great demand in the Tenderloin.”

“Is this true, Luther?”

He nodded.

The judge’s voice filled with disappointment. “Oh, Luther. Were you trying to get yourself arrested again?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Do you need dental work?”

“No.”

“Were you hungry?”

“A little.”

She turned to me. “Mr. Daley, would you please see that Luther gets something to eat?”

“Already did.”

“Thank you. Is he prepared to enter a plea?”

“In a moment. First, I wanted to let you know that Luther is very sorry.”

“That’s a good start.” The grandmother voice disappeared as she spoke directly to Luther. “Do you understand that sexually transmitted diseases are serious business? And if they are not diagnosed properly, someone could become very sick or die? And that they can be retransmitted to somebody else?”

Luther swallowed. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Your Honor,” I said, “Luther sold only a handful of these items and nobody was injured. I would also remind you that he has never been convicted of any crime other than petty misdemeanors. He’s never hurt anybody.”

George did his best to muster a forceful tone. “We can’t just let this go. Mr. Robinson committed a blatant fraud that could have resulted in serious medical repercussions.”

Technically, that’s true, but let’s not get carried away. “Your Honor, Luther made a mistake for which he is willing to take responsibility.”

“What did you have in mind, Mr. Daley?”

I was hoping you would ask. “First, Luther will refund the money.”

“So far, so good.”

“Second, he will agree never to engage in the sale of any medical products of any type.” Especially the phony kind.

“I like the sound of that.”

“Third, he will volunteer at the Tenderloin Free Clinic one afternoon a week for the next four weeks.” And he won’t pilfer any more tongue depressors.

“Even better.” The judge spoke to Luther. “Is this agreeable to you?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“That’s good enough for you, isn’t it, Mr. George?”

The young A.D.A. exhaled heavily. “I guess.”

“Then we’re agreed.” She picked up her gavel—which she rarely used for its intended purpose—and pointed it at my client. “I want to make something clear to you, Luther. I am going to suspend these charges and grant diversion, but not dismiss them. Subject to the conditions that Mr. Daley just outlined, I am going to release you on your own recognizance—again. If I see you back in this courtroom in the next five years, I’m going to reinstate the charges and make sure that you spend time in jail. If I’m not here, I will instruct my colleagues do the same thing. Understood?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Good.” Her eyes shifted to me. “Nice to see you, Mr. Daley. Please give my best to our Public Defender.”

“I will.”

“Next case.”

✽✽✽

The Public Defender of the City and County of San Francisco flashed the radiant smile that I still found irresistible twenty-five years after we’d met in the old P.D.’s Office and two decades after we’d gotten divorced. “How’s Betsy?” she asked.

“Fine. I told her that you’d see her at the gym on Monday.”

“Great.” Rosita Carmela Fernandez adjusted the sleeve of her Calvin Klein blouse. Sixteen months earlier, the Mission District native had upgraded her wardrobe when she won a hotly contested election to become San Francisco’s first Latina Public Defender. “Were you able to resolve Luther’s case?”

“I got him off with a warning and a promise not to sell ersatz STD tests ever again.”

“Making the world a little safer for victims of scammers.”

“Indeed. If Luther’s case appeared in a Grisham novel, nobody would have believed it.”

“Out here in the real world, things are always stranger than anything you make up. Thanks for pinch hitting for Rolanda.”

“My pleasure.” Rolanda Fernandez was Rosie’s niece and one of our best deputies. “It was fun to be in Misdemeanor Court. It brought back good memories.”

“You miss it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

“Thought so.” I flashed back to the days when Rosie was a rising star who had just been promoted to the Felony Division, and I was a newbie Deputy P.D. who had gone to law school after three frustrating years as a priest. In those days, she wore jeans and denim shirts to work. Her two going-to-court suits were in plastic bags hanging from a nail pounded into her door. Her straight black hair used to flow down to her waist. Nowadays, it was shorter and styled into a softer look. She had been San Francisco’s Public Defender for a little over a year, but it seemed longer. She wore the trappings of political influence naturally.

Her smile broadened. “You’re a helluva lawyer, Mike.”

“That’s why you made me the head of the Felony Division.”

“You still work for me.”

“You never let me forget.”

“It’s important to observe chain-of-command protocols.”

“You’re just a higher-ranking bureaucrat.”

“I prefer to call it public service.”

One of the reasons that Rosie and I had remained on reasonably good terms at the office and, for that matter, in bed, was the fact that I always let her have the last word. If I had learned this lesson twenty years ago, we might still be married.

I glanced around at her immaculate office on the second floor of a bunker-like building a couple of blocks south of the Hall of Justice. The P.D.’s Office had moved here in the nineties. While our new digs were no longer under the same roof as the criminal courts and the jail, it had the advantages of adequate ventilation and, more important, functional bathrooms.

The wall next to her door was lined with law books (mostly for show). The area behind her desk was filled with citations and photos of herself with San Francisco’s political and social power brokers. Rosie insisted—legitimately, I suppose—that the fancy office was required for her occasional TV appearances. While she was the most grounded human being I’d ever met, I worried that she was beginning to enjoy the accouterments of her job a little too much.

I pointed at the framed photo of our nineteen-year-old daughter, Grace, who was a sophomore at USC. “Heard anything lately?”

“She might have an internship at Pixar this summer.”

“That’s great. How’s the new boyfriend?”

“Already an ex-boyfriend.”

“That didn’t take long.”

“She’s very particular.”

Just like her mother. “Is Tommy okay?”

“Fine.”

Our twelve-year-old son was a pleasant, but unplanned surprise long after Rosie and I had split up. He was more dedicated to video games than schoolwork, but he was a good kid. “I’ll be at his basketball game on Saturday.”

“I’ll let him know.”

Rosie and I lived a couple of blocks from each other fifteen minutes across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. I spent three nights a week at her house. Old habits.

I glanced at the flat-screen TV on her wall. It was tuned to the local news, the sound turned down. “What’s going on?”

“There was an officer-involved shooting in the Fillmore.”

“Not good. Do you know which cop?”

“They haven’t released a name.”

My dad was a San Francisco police officer for thirty-five years. He had died almost twenty years earlier. He always referred to SFPD as the “family business.” My younger brother, Pete, had worked in the family business until he and his partner cracked some heads breaking up a gang fight in the Mission. He lost his job as part of the settlement of the inevitable lawsuit. Nowadays, he worked as a private investigator. We still knew a lot of cops.

Rosie glanced at her watch. “I need to get onto a conference call.”

Her doorway filled with the imposing presence of our secretary, legal assistant, process server, bodyguard, and one-time client, Terrence “The Terminator” Love, a former small-time prizefighter who was one of my most reliable customers during my first stint at the P.D.’s Office. The light reflected off the bald head of the gentle giant who clocked in at six-six and three hundred and fifty pounds. “Pete’s on the phone. He tried your cell, but you didn’t answer.”

I glanced at my iPhone and saw that the battery had run out. “Is he okay?”

“Yes, but he needs to talk to you right away. It sounded important.”

Terrence was perceptive for a guy who had taken more punches than he had given. “I’ll take it in my office.”

✽✽✽

I sat down at my metal desk and picked up the phone. “You okay, Pete?”

“Fine, Mick.” His rasp was more pronounced than usual.

“Everybody okay at home?”

“Yeah. Got a minute?”

“For my kid brother, always.”

“I need to see you right away. We gotta deal with a problem.”

Uh-oh. “What kind?”

“You seen the news?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “There was an officer-involved shooting in the Fillmore.”

“I heard. I hope it isn’t somebody we know.”

“It is.”

2
“THERE COULD BE RIOTS”

“Who’s the cop?” I asked.

Pete’s voice was tense. “Johnny B.”

Oh, crap. “Is he okay?”

“Yeah.”

“But?”

“He shot an eighteen-year-old kid during a traffic stop. The kid died.”

Not good. “Stuff happens.”

“This is bad, Mick.”

“Yes, it is.”

Giovanni “Johnny” Bacigalupi IV was a rookie cop and fourth-generation SFPD. The youngest of seven siblings, all of his brothers were police officers. His father, Giovanni “Gio” III, was an assistant chief and my high school classmate at St. Ignatius. His grandpa, Giovanni II, used to be the commander at Taraval Station. He was one of my father’s best friends.

“Where’s Johnny?” I asked.

“Northern Station.”

“Has Gio talked to him?”

“Not yet.”

“He’s the assistant chief.”

“Doesn’t matter. You remember the chaos during ‘Fajitagate.’ They aren’t going to let Johnny talk to anybody—especially his father—until they get his statement.”

True. In 2002, three off-duty police officers had too much to drink and got into a fight outside a bar on Union Street after they demanded a bag of fajitas from two young men who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The cops were exonerated of assault and battery charges, but two were held liable in a civil case. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the father of one of the cops was an assistant chief. He and other members of the brass were absolved of obstruction of justice. When the smoke cleared, the three cops lost their jobs, and the big guns looked terrible. SFPD adopted a policy that the chief or an assistant must recuse himself from the investigation if his kid is accused of wrongdoing.

I kept my tone even. “He has to go through the process, Pete.”

“This is going to get messy.”

Yes, it is. “Who else was there?”

“Three other cops. It gets worse. The victim may have been unarmed.”

In which case, this could be a full-blown disaster. “Have they ID’d the victim?”

“SFPD hasn’t released a name.”

“Did Gio call you?”

“No, Luca did. He couldn’t reach you.”

Lucantonio “Luca” Bacigalupi was Gio’s older brother and Johnny’s uncle. He was a “juice” lawyer downtown who used his family’s connections on behalf of developers to ram building projects through the City’s Byzantine permitting process. He was the only member of the immediate family who wasn’t SFPD.

“Why didn’t Gio call me?” I asked.

“He’s at Northern Station trying to see Johnny.”

“What does Luca expect me to do?”

“Line up a lawyer.”

“He knows everybody in town.”

“He does real estate deals. He wants a criminal defense attorney.”

“The POA has people on-call.”

“He wants somebody he knows.”

“Johnny won’t qualify for a public defender. The family has plenty of money.”

“Luca wants somebody he trusts.”

So would I. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We don’t know that Johnny did anything wrong.”

“In that case, we can call off the fire drill. For now, we have four cops involved in an officer-involved shooting. Gio wants a lawyer for Johnny in case this gets out of hand.”

“Is there video?”

“Probably. The world has changed since I was a cop. SFPD still doesn’t have dash cams, but every cop wears a body cam. Something might have been caught on a security camera. And there’s always a chance that somebody taped it on their iPhone.”

“Johnny’s lawyer needs to see the videos before somebody puts them up on YouTube.”

“Agreed. Pop never had to deal with this.”

“He would have quit.”

“So would I. Local TV is all over it. CNN and Fox News will pick it up any minute. Twitter is going wild.” My streetwise younger brother’s tone transformed into a whisper. “There could be riots, Mick.”

“Where did you leave it with Luca?”

“I told him that you and I would come over to his office as soon as we could.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

✽✽✽

I was walking down the corridor at the P.D.’s Office when I heard Rosie’s voice from behind me. “Going somewhere?”

“I need to see Luca Bacigalupi.”

“Does this have anything to do with Johnny B.?”

“Yeah. How did you find out?”

“I’m the Public Defender of the City and County of San Francisco.”

“How did you really find out?”

“Twitter.”

Thought so. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“Johnny won’t qualify for a P.D., Mike.”

“I know.”

“Why are you going?”

“He’s my godson.”

End of Chapter 2. Buy SERVE AND PROTECT on Amazon.