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SubTitle: El Nino Arrives
Posted by: rs (bobsheridan@earthlink.net) on 5/08/1998@03:12hrs:
The San Francisco Hall of InJustice is your basic one-stop police-state supermarket, with police station near the entry and traffic clerk's office where you pay the fines that keep the city fathers well-paid dreaming up more ways to fine you so they can get a raise, which isn't a bad deal depending on whether you're on the receiving or the paying end.
There are several courtrooms past the police station, and the rear wing houses the chilly coroner's office for the folks who won't be appearing in court anymore.
As the floors go higher we have more municipal courts and the Adult Probation Department which is responsible for the half of the population that the other half is trying to control. We have a saying around the Hall of Injustice, "The guilty go to jail; the innocent get probation." Where that comes from I have no idea. The cops have a similar analysis about fights they break up. "The losers go to the hospital, the winners go to jail," they say, and the attorneys get to sort it out. In this way we all share in the life and death struggle of the jungle we call the streets; it reminds me of the the documentaries of the African wildlife, where the lions and tigers bring down the prey which all other birds and beasts then live off. But no one said life was pretty, or fair.
Another floor up are the superior courts. They call themselves superior because they get to hand out longer sentences. Here is the DAs office, where I served for five years as a trial lawyer, seven, if you count the two years in a neighboring DAs office, working my way up from the moving violations to the rape and murder cases, back when the place was called the Hall of Justice. Your viewpoint varies with your standpoint, some other wise person, or wise guy, also said. I like wise persons, and wiseguys. Someday I'm gonna be one.
The next floor up is the SFPD Bureau of Inspectors; this is the place from which Michael Douglas held forth with Karl Malden in a tv cop series called "The Streets of San Francisco," in the ‘Seventies.
Clint Eastwood, as Dirty "Make my day" Harry, also worked on the Fawth Floor between car chases where the four wheels of his Mustang left the ground going over the hills. We do that a lot around here. Very exciting for a kid from FawCawnahs.
Floor Five is the police brass, whose job is to sweep the Fawth Flaw's mistakes under the municipal rug, which is kind of hard as the floors are solid rock.
The newspaper reporter's office is a back staircase away so it's hard to keep secrets in dahallajustice for more than twelve minutes. If the reporters can't find out what's happening inside the beehive, they can always hit the bars across the street. One is called the Injustice and the other the Sidebar, after Judge Lance Ito's favorite form of recreation, but that's LA and that's another story).
Or the reporters can hit the coffee shop, cock an ear, and find out who did what to whom and maybe even why. It was at the Injustice, the bar, not the Hall, where two young deputy DAs fell in love after a few drinks and repaired to their third floor office where they really fell in love, on his desk amidst the files and the staplers. They were walked in on by a Puritan who reported them. This remained secret for twelve seconds, whereupon our fighting DA, one Hallinan by name, an ex-pug with a reputation for love-of-bottle fired the guy and kept the gal, which I guess has a sort of logic to it, except I can't explain what it is.
David Letterman happened to be in town that week so the affair, using the term lightly, received coast-to-coast coverage. San Francisco has a reputation for quirky politics and the rest of human behavior isn't too sound either. San Francisco is always good for a laugh, and Letterman had a good time with our moral standard bearers letting the flag drag, as it were.
Floors six and seven have bars on the windows, doors that make a loud "slam" when they clang shut and whose thick door-keys are about five inches long. They're of well-burnished brass, and carried on large steel rings by hefty sheriff's deputies wearing olive jumpsuits, black jumbboots, and rarely a smile. You can tell the deputies from the inmates by the orange jumpsuits the inmates wear. Orange and black for the control problems, and all red for the killers. The latter wear shiny steel chains at the waist, bracelets at the wrists, and ankle chains in case anyone should leave the door open by mistake.
I'd finished up a brief morning court appearance in Department 13 helping to keep the world a more honest place from a different perspective, since I've been in private practice for the last quarter century (It doesn't seem that long, really it doesn't, I assure you. Really.), when I decided it was close enough to ten a.m. to wander over to the Caffe Roma to absorb a cup of fresh-brewed Vienna Roast.
I've got my StatNisland friends, Dwyer and Marcovecchio, the former my ex-law partner, now back in the DAs office, and the latter a former public defender whose avocation is writing creative vignettes about the characters whose lives are entwined around and through the precincts of the Hall, primed to watch out for the white-haired guy who said he was going to come in looking for me.
If he had a voice like it came from Da Sout' Shaw, and he asked for any one of us, they were to say, "Hey buddy, you musta got offa da wrong bus." This was how we were going to recognize Tornado Charlie Joseph, also known as El Nino, who brought a month of rain in one week.
So I walk in, drop my raincoat, briefcase, and brown fedora (a rainproof affectation left over from my NewYawk days when men wore fifty dollar hats with brims and First Grade detectives wore hundred dollar fedoras with the brim snapped down in front.
No one else wears fedoras around here except for the Mayor and the Lieutenant of the Homicide Detail. They're both black, so I guess this means something good, like style is coming back. Black guys come up to me and say things like, "Great hat." White folks just eyeball it and keep walking; they could be thinking anything, but say nothing.
I wander over to the marble counter where Joyce, the pretty Filipina, has already drawn my cawfee. She gives me the morning smile which brightens my day then whispers there's a guy's been asking for you.
Over there, she says and I turn around and see this prematurely gray-haired guy sitting at a table by himself in front of a cup of coffee. He looks vaguely familiar and I remember seeing him on a web page along with this really cute young lady I take for his daughter but it's his wife, and their German shephard dogs.
This must be Tornado CharlieJ, so I walk over and say "Hey, you musta got offa da wrong bus," and he smiles and he asks if it's me and I ask if it's him and it turns out we're both right.
He's driven all the way up from Palo Alto just to see if there really is a Caffe Roma or whether I'd made it up, not that he didn't trust me. And here we were drinking their French Roast, which is good.
And so begins the tale, which I'll let CJ continue when he gets back, assuming the rain doesn't cancel the flight. Suffice it to say we had a very nice reunion, two Old StatNislanda's who'd never met on the Island, finding out one of my close friends is an old friend of his he went to PS 8 with a millenium ago, and trading the dirt on O.T.
Until later,
-RS