The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  “LeShawn. He’s escaped.”

  When Clarence Jackman had first been elevated to the office of district attorney, he came from managing a private law firm and was relatively inexperienced in city politics. In fact, this was one of the reasons the mayor tapped him for the job—Jackman was a proven, results-oriented administrator, and this as opposed to an agenda-driven zealot was what the office required. In his early months, the DA had bridged the gap in his hands-on knowledge by convening an informal kitchen cabinet every Tuesday to get and keep him current on issues he might not otherwise have considered, the political implications of which he might not otherwise have been aware.

  Now, gearing up for his first general election later in the year, Jackman had called together many of the original group again to feel out their respective interests in participating in his campaign. He had pretty much decided he would be announcing at the end of the week, and wanted to take the pulse of his core supporters on that timing as well.

  The group assembled at the large, round table at the back of Lou the Greek’s, a bar/restaurant across the street from the Hall of Justice, were all well acquainted. Dismas Hardy sat between Jeff Elliot, the wheelchair-mobile reporter for the Chronicle, and Allan Boscacci, relatively new to the group but apparently here to stay. Abe Glitsky’s wife Treya, who had been with Jackman in his old firm and now worked as his personal secretary, sat on the other side of Boscacci to the DA’s left. Glitsky would have been welcome, but obviously his work had kept him. Some of the old players were missing—David Freeman had passed away and Gina Roake had simply lost interest—and they’d been replaced by a couple of city supervisors, the young, ambitious, cheerily overweight Harlan Fisk and his aunt, a birdlike spinster named Kathy West.

  But now the business part of the meeting, such as it was, had come to an end. No surprise—Jackman had assurances of undying support from everyone. Hardy was going to host his fund-raising kickoff party—they thought that for the best buzz and food they’d have it at Moose’s—in about six weeks. Fisk and West would begin calling in favors, wheeling and dealing as necessary, to try to get at least a majority coalition of support from the usually divided Board of Supervisors. Boscacci, a political animal himself, was going to hire and oversee the eventual campaign manager, and funnel much of the day-to-day administration of the campaign across the desk of the abundantly capable Treya. As a supposedly objective and nonpartisan columnist, Elliot could only promise that he’d be inclined to continue and possibly even increase his sympathetic coverage of doings in the DA’s office so long as Jackman maintained the same policies and programs that had been working so well during his first term; Elliot would also do his damnedest to use his considerable popularity and influence to get the Chronicle to support Jackman come November, something the paper would probably do on its own, although it never hurt to have an inside advocate or two.

  So everybody was on the same team, and a convivial spirit reigned at the table as people finished their coffee. Hardy had exchanged some easy pleasantries with the chief assistant DA when he’d sat down, but they hadn’t talked to each other much since. Truth to tell, Hardy found Boscacci’s perennially florid countenance somewhat forbidding—the collar at his neck, always buttoned to the top and festooned with a bow tie, seemed a half size too small; this in turn seemed to stretch the closely shaved skin on his face, to make his dark eyes bulge slightly, so that it always appeared that he might be on the verge of a stroke. Fifty-two years old, he wore his thick, black hair slicked with some kind of hair lotion and pulled straight back off his prominent forehead. But Hardy knew he could be an affable enough guy when he was on your side. He took the opportunity, as though he’d just remembered it, to thank Boscacci for the courtesy he’d shown Amy Wu yesterday in the Andrew Bartlett matter.

  Boscacci waved off the comment. “Ah, that was nothing. She’s an easy person to want to do something nice for.” Then, leaning in a bit and lowering his voice, he added, “Besides, she didn’t know it, but she couldn’t have timed it better for us.”

  “Us?”

  He included the group at the table. “Clarence. All of us. We chalk up the two convictions before the end of the week, when Clarence announces he can say he’s had fifty murder convictions so far this term, not even four years.”

  “You’re kidding me. Is that the number?”

  “With your associate’s two, it is. And fifty sounds so much bigger than forty-eight, you know what I mean?”

  “I don’t know, forty-eight sounds pretty good to me.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. Forty-eight is a fine number. But we figure fifty is easier for the man in the street to get his arms around. Pratt’s administration, she didn’t even charge fifty murders.”

  “I remember it well,” Hardy said. “I doubt if she charged fifteen.”

  Boscacci lowered his voice. “Twelve, if you want to get precise. Which is one of the reasons we’ve got such great numbers. Between you and me, we’re recycling some leftovers.” He grinned in triumph. “So, anyway, your Ms. Wu comes to me with a reasonable and some might even say charitable request, we find a way to make it win-win. She says it’s not even out of the question the kid’s stepfather—you know Hal North? North Cinemas?—will be so grateful for saving the kid thirty plus of hard time, he might want to express his gratitude to Clarence in a more tangible way.”

  “She mentioned the same thing to me, but I wouldn’t be expecting that check soon.”

  Suddenly the forbidding aspect of Boscacci’s personality appeared. His face darkened perceptibly. Hardy was half-tempted to reach over and undo his bow tie, let him get a breath, but he spoke clearly enough, without any difficulty. “Why? Is there some problem? North should be slobbering in gratitude.”

  Thinking fast, and realizing that he’d inadvertently almost tipped Boscacci to his own concerns about Wu’s disposition of the case, Hardy said, “No. I don’t see any problem, Allan. It’s just that eight years is eight years that his stepson is gone. It’s not likely that North’s going to see the deal in quite the same way as you do.”

  “Well,” Boscacci said, “somebody ought to go and explain it to him. Given the case against his boy—and it’s a deuce, remember that—it may be the best deal we’ve ever agreed to from a suspect’s point of view. Time we get around to serious fund-raising for Clarence, I’d hope he’d come to understand that. I’d bet your Ms. Wu could even have a little chat with him come fall if she was so inclined, draw the picture a little more clearly.” He paused. “Anybody could do it, she could. She put her mind to it, I believe that woman could charm the skin off a snake. You’re lucky to have her, but you already know that, don’t you?”

  Hardy nodded, affable as he could force himself to be. “It’s why we pay her the big bucks, Allan. All that charm and a legal whiz on top of it. If I didn’t believe the cosmic truth that we were always on the side of the angels, I’d say it was close to unfair.”

  9

  A small jungle of dieffenbachia, rubber trees and other more exotic plants thrived in the corners and against the back wall of the firm’s conference room. Opening to a sheltered outdoor atrium, complete with grass and fountain, the entire outer wall and part of the roof jutted from the line of the building, creating a greenhouse effect, and giving the room its nickname of the Solarium.

  Now, at a few minutes after six, Gina Roake, the building’s owner, in a conservative gray business suit, sat with a cup of coffee at the head of the large table that commanded the room. Roake was closing in on fifty years old, but few people would have guessed it. She’d always had good skin and a youthful face. A recent diet and exercise program had accented her chin and cheekbones and slimmed the rest of her down significantly, though she remained a bit zaftig. To her left, Dismas Hardy, emulating his old mentor Freeman, sipped some Baystone Shiraz from an oversized wineglass. Across from him, Wes Farrell was trying to tell what had supposedly just been voted the funniest joke in the world. But he was having some trouble getting
to it.

  “Who votes on that kind of thing?” Hardy asked. “It’s got to be bogus. Nobody asked me, for example. Gina, anybody ask you?”

  “No.”

  “See? And we’re both famous for our senses of humor.”

  Farrell wasn’t to be denied. “It’s a very prestigious group of joke researchers based in Sweden or someplace. They wouldn’t ask people like you and Gina.”

  “So it’s a European joke,” Hardy said, “which strikes me as pretty arrogantly Eurocentric. Okay, so now it’s like, in some Swede’s opinion, the funniest joke in the world. Those wacky Swedes, with the highest suicide rate in the world and all.”

  “Can I tell the joke?” Farrell asked. “And then you decide.”

  “All right,” Hardy said. “But telling us up front that this is the funniest joke in the world, it’s guaranteed to be forty percent less funny.”

  Farrell persisted. “You’ll still get sixty percent of it. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

  “I can’t wait,” Roake said.

  But Hardy wasn’t through yet. “Did you laugh out loud when you heard it, Wes?”

  “No, but I never laugh out loud at jokes.”

  “You laughed at Dirty Harold.”

  Farrell broke a grin. “True. I did.”

  “So based on your own response, this new funniest joke in the world isn’t as funny as the Dirty Harold joke.”

  “Fucking lawyers,” Farrell said. “Everything’s an argument.”

  “What’s the Dirty Harold joke?” Roake asked.

  Hardy turned to her. “This little kid with a filthy mouth, so the teacher won’t ever call on him. Then one day they’re going through the alphabet, finding words that start with a given letter and then they use the word in a sentence. They finally get to ‘e’—Harold’s hand has been up the whole time on every letter—but she figures there aren’t any filthy words that start with ‘e,’ so she calls on him . . .”

  “Elf!” Roake exclaimed, smiling. “I know an elf with a big prick.”

  “That’s it.” Hardy drank some wine.

  Farrell seized his chance. “So Holmes and Watson go camping and set up their tent and they go to sleep. Two hours later, Holmes goes, ‘Watson, what do you see?’ and Watson goes, ‘I see millions and millions of stars. And Holmes says, ‘And what do you deduce from that?’ Watson says, ‘I imagine each star has planets around it just like our own, with a chance of life on each one.’ And Holmes goes, ‘Watson, you fool, someone’s stolen our tent.’ ”

  “So.” Roake maintained a poker face. “Having heard the joke, maybe now we can begin. I’ve got a handball game in forty-five minutes.”

  They were gathered for their monthly partners overview—business, after all—and Hardy spent the next twenty minutes going over the firm’s numbers. The associates were all well utilized—the firm was cranking along, racking up substantial fees almost as though it were on automatic pilot. Hardy’s concerns about Wu’s deal with Boscacci might have been a legitimate topic for discussion on another day, but so far nothing had actually gone wrong, and he elected to keep his qualms under his hat.

  Under “other business,” Hardy mentioned the firm’s upcoming involvement in support of the Jackman campaign, which he considered an opportunity as good as any to broach the one sensitive topic they needed to discuss. Might the Jackman candidacy entice Roake back to work, Hardy wondered. To something approaching regular hours?

  Roake straightened up in her chair. Her eyes flicked between the two men. “I resent the hell out of that question, Diz. What I do with my time is my business.”

  Hardy’s gaze didn’t flinch. He kept any sign of edge out of his voice. “I’m not arguing with that, Gina. You’ve earned whatever time you feel you need. But as a business matter for the firm, you’re drawing a decent salary for yourself and your own private secretary and you’ve got a big corner office that’s essentially sitting unused.”

  Roake clipped off her words. “How about if I just quit and start charging the kind of rent for this building that another firm would have to pay? I could give up my decent salary and I’d still be making more money than I am now. How about that?”

  Hardy shook his head. “That’s not what I want. I don’t think it’s what you want. I wasn’t speaking critically. If you don’t want to do any more billing, you’ve got my complete support. Wes’s, too. But when we started up together, we had a business plan that included the three of us bringing in business and billing our own time. And that’s not happening. Even with our otherwise good utilization, we’re struggling to make those original numbers.”

  Hardy came forward, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. His voice was still soft, almost caressing. “I’m just trying to get a sense of your plans, Gina, so I can know what we’re dealing with. As it stands now, you’re an expense item and not a profit center, and we didn’t plan for that. The firm has to come up with the difference, which is not insignificant. I owe it to us all to tell you about it. Times are good now, but if they get tight, we could find ourselves in a heap of trouble.”

  Roake scratched at the yellow legal pad on the table in front of her, staring down at her scribblings. “All right,” she said, without looking up. “I’d like to think about this for a few days, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” Hardy said, “and Gina? There’s no wrong answer here. The firm needs to know, that’s all. We’ve talked about some capital improvements on the horizon. We’ve got to know if they’re feasible, that kind of thing.”

  “I hear you,” Roake said. “Really, I do.” Then, with a crisp smile, she pushed back from the table, gathered her notes and told them both good night.

  After the door to the Solarium had closed behind her, Hardy let out a long breath and met his partner’s baleful eye over the table.

  “Okay, then.” Farrell drew a palm over his brow. “All in all, I’d say that went pretty well. You want to pour me some of that wine?”

  Hardy put his briefcase down by his reading chair, then walked down the long hallway in his house. Before he’d remodeled it, the old Victorian had been in the railroad car style, with all the downstairs rooms opening to the right off the hall. Now a large, recently renovated kitchen opened up in the back, and behind that was a family room and then the bedrooms for the two kids. They didn’t keep the television on much as a general rule, so he was somewhat surprised to hear the low drone. He poked his head into the family room. “What’s on?”

  Frannie looked over from where she sat on the couch. “Abe.”

  He walked over and joined them. “What’s that loopy guy done now?”

  On the tube, Glitsky frowned into a battery of microphones. “No, that’s not true,” he was saying. “I consulted with the Chief and Lieutenant Lanier, but the decision was mine. At the time it seemed the best one. No one could have predicted that Mr. Brodie would escape. And in fact, the capture itself took place without incident.”

  The picture flicked back to the pretty anchorwoman, who wore the same cheerful face whether she was reporting on terrorism or bake sales. “But in spite of Deputy Chief Glitsky’s comments, the fact remains that Leshawn Brodie, still considered armed and extremely dangerous, and a suspect in several local murders, remains at large after he allegedly stole one of the officers’ weapon and engaged in a dramatic shoot-out with arresting authorities this morning in Nevada. Critics are calling ill-advised at best Glitsky’s decision not to arrest Brodie while he sat on a bus in the Greyhound terminal in downtown San Francisco early this morning. And considering the suspect’s escape and record of violence, it’s hard to disagree with them.”

  “Hard, but not impossible,” Hardy said. When the male anchor appeared and it was clear that the news had moved on to its next sound bite, he grabbed the remote and turned off the set. “You notice she never mentioned who the critics were. Did I miss that? ‘Yet, it’s hard to disagree with them,’ ” he intoned in the anchor’s voice. “What kind of reporting is
that?”

  “Bad,” Vincent said. “They weren’t even listening to what Uncle Abe said.”

  “How long was he on?” Hardy asked.

  “Long enough.” Vincent’s voice was breaking with adolescence. He cleared his throat and went on. “What did they want him to do? Shoot up the whole bus to get the one guy?”

  “You got the gist of it, I think.” Frannie put a hand on Hardy’s knee. “Maybe you ought to call him, though. He’s taking a lot of heat. How was your day?”

  “Evidently better than Abe’s, though it had its moments.” He glanced at his watch. “You think he’s home?” But he was already punching numbers on the telephone. “This is your best and possibly only true friend,” Hardy said, “and if you get this . . .”

  “What?”

  “Monitoring your calls, I see.”

  “You would, too. It’s been ringing off the hook.”

  “TV’ll do that. Instant fame.”

  “Great, but I don’t want to be famous.”

  “There’s your problem. You’re the only person in America who doesn’t. The media doesn’t know what to do with you. Maybe you ought to get a new makeup guy. Wipe away those frown lines. Did you know you had a scar through your lips? I’m sure they could airbrush that out, too.”

  There was a pause. Then Glitsky asked, “Are you calling for any real reason?”

  “Not exactly. You were on the news just now. I thought you’d enjoy the sound of a friendly voice. Also, for the record, Vin’s on your side.”

  At his side, Hardy’s wife said, “Frannie, too.”

  “I heard that,” Glitsky said. “Tell them both thanks.”

  Frannie squeezed Hardy’s leg. “Ask him . . . No, wait, let me.” She grabbed the phone. “Abe, what are you and Treya doing tonight? I’ve got a big pot of spaghetti sauce going. Why don’t all of you come over here? Get away from these people who don’t love you like we do.”

  Wu had planned all along to get back to Andrew, get the plea locked up, before tomorrow. She wasn’t about to enter Arvid Johnson’s courtroom in the morning with any sort of question still hanging about her client’s disposition. But before she went in to see Andrew again, she found that she still needed some time to gather herself.