The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  Again, there was little sense of ritual. The probation officer simply got a nod from the judge, stood and began. “Good morning. This is Petition JW02-4555, the matter of Andrew Bartlett, who is present in the courtroom. Also present are the minor’s natural mother, Linda Bartlett North, and his stepfather, Hal North. The minor’s attorney is Ms. Amy Wu. Mr. Jason Brandt is the district attorney.”

  Judge Johnson thanked the officer and peered down over his glasses. “Ms. Wu, it’s my understanding that your minor client Mr. Bartlett and the district attorney have agreed to a mutually acceptable disposition in this matter. Is that correct?”

  Wu put a hand under her client’s arm and the two of them rose. “Yes, your honor.”

  Johnson had done this innumerable times, and although Wu was tuned to a high pitch of anxiety, for him it obviously held all the excitement and drama of a quilting bee. “Mr. Bartlett, I want to ask you if you understand the decision that’s been reached here on your behalf.”

  Andrew’s voice was firm. “Yes, your honor, I talked about it with Ms. Wu last night.” He turned halfway around, gave a small nod to his parents, then came back to face the judge.

  Johnson nodded. “And you understand, Mr. Bartlett, that by admitting this petition filed against you by the State of California that you in fact claim full responsibility for the murders of Michael Mooney and Laura Wright? And that immediately following this proceeding, you will begin serving a term at the California Youth Authority, and will remain in custody until your twenty-fifth birthday?”

  Andrew hesitated for an instant and Wu, jumping in, spoke up for him. “Yes, your honor. Mr. Bartlett understands.”

  But Johnson shook his head. “I’d like to hear it from him, Counselor. Mr. Bartlett?”

  Andrew looked at Wu, then up to the judge. When he began the first time, he was almost inaudible, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I understand about the sentence. That’s what we decided I had to agree to.” Clearing his throat again, he went on. “But I’m not really comfortable . . .” He stopped, turned back to his parents again, came back around to Johnson. “But I can’t say that I killed anybody, because I didn’t.”

  Wu had a sense of the world spinning before her. She reached out, put her hand on her client’s arm. “No, wait, Andrew!” Then, addressing the judge: “Your honor, if I may—”

  But Johnson gaveled her to silence. He removed his glasses, squinted out over the podium. “No, Counselor, you may not, not for a minute anyway.” He pointed a finger at Andrew. “Mr. Bartlett, I want to hear you say it yourself one more time. You’re not admitting the petition?”

  “Your honor.” Wu spoke up in a panic. She couldn’t let this happen. “I’d like to request a short recess.”

  Over on her right, she heard Brandt close his binder with a sharp snap.

  “Request denied,” Johnson said. “We just got here.” Back at Andrew. “Mr. Bartlett? Repeat your plea.”

  This time Andrew’s voice was much more forceful. “I’m just saying that I didn’t kill anybody.”

  Behind her, Wu could hear the Norths reacting with a muted enthusiasm. Needing to undo what Andrew had done, she turned to him, whispered urgently. “You can’t do this, Andrew. You’re looking at life in prison. Don’t you understand?”

  The judge brought his gavel down again. “Ms. Wu, Mr. Brandt.” He motioned with his head. “Chambers.” And he was up in a swirl of black robes.

  Johnson was waiting, facing them as they came through his door. No trace of anything avuncular softened his countenance as he reached around and closed the door behind them all. He came right to the point. “I don’t tolerate being trifled with in my courtroom, Ms. Wu. What is this supposed to be, some kind of publicity stunt? Or delaying tactic?”

  She tried to swallow, get a breath. “No, your honor.”

  “No to which?”

  “Neither, your honor. I’m as surprised as you are.”

  Johnson looked to Brandt—who wisely stood at respectful attention—then came back to Wu. “This is unacceptable. What do you expect me to do now?”

  “I’ll go talk to him.”

  “And what good will that do?”

  “I’ll get him . . . He’s just afraid. He was on board with this last night. He just couldn’t go through with it, that’s all.”

  The judge crossed his arms. “Stop wasting my time. As far as I’m concerned, he’s denied the petition. This is really unacceptable, Counselor,” he added. “Wholly unacceptable.” Then, making no effort to hide his anger and disgust, he continued. “All right, let’s get the show back on the road, go back in there and get this done as fast as we can.”

  Brandt spoke. “Your honor, if I may?”

  Johnson turned his glare on him. “What?”

  “I just wanted to say that Ms. Wu isn’t as naive as she’s pretending to be. She knew the conditions when she cut her deal. Andrew admits or he goes up as an adult.”

  “I think we all knew that,” Johnson said. “So now we’re going to have him tried as an adult. Ms. Wu should agree to that.” His stare at her brooked no denial.

  Brandt nodded, satisfied. “Then we want him certified today, your honor, unless the plan all along was to get him to juvenile court by misrepresenting his intention to admit.”

  Wu, holding her temper in check, talked to the judge. “Your honor, I promise you, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I had no such plan. I didn’t want Andrew to have to run the risk of an adult trial. An admission, to me, seemed like the right thing.”

  Johnson’s face remained grave, his color high. “I’m just wondering if it’s possible that you are actually this ill-prepared, Ms. Wu. Agreeing to plead out a case before securing the client’s agreement?” But he didn’t wait for her to answer. “It doesn’t matter. The point is that Mr. Bartlett, as you undoubtedly must be aware, is already in the juvenile system, you see. Now he can’t be tried as an adult without a seven-oh-seven hearing first. Do you expect me to believe you didn’t know that?”

  Suddenly the enormity of her miscalculation came into much clearer focus. Wu had been acting as though she needed Andrew’s admission to secure his place in the juvenile system. But this was not, strictly speaking, the case. What she needed his admission for was merely so that the sentencing could proceed. In fact, Boscacci’s initial filing had assured that, legally, Andrew was already in the juvenile system, and hence protected from LWOP as long as he stayed there. “I didn’t think. . . , ” she stammered.

  “All right,” Johnson snapped at her. “You didn’t think. So can I now assume that you will agree to waive the seven-oh-seven hearing and have Mr. Bartlett recertified an adult today, as Mr. Brandt here has requested?”

  “I . . . I can’t do that, your honor.”

  “No,” Brandt exploded. “No, of course you can’t.” He obviously, justifiably, thought she’d planned to have her client deny the petition all along. This would not only delay Andrew’s eventual trial as an adult, but place another administrative hurdle—the 707 hearing—in the middle of his path. He appealed to Johnson. “I don’t believe for a moment, your honor, that this wasn’t her plan all along.”

  “That’s not true. That’s just not true, your honor.”

  Brandt ignored her. “Your honor, the only way to read this is she set it up so that she could stall down here for months. But I’m certain that the district attorney is going to want to get this matter back into adult court, so I’d like to ask that the seven-oh-seven be calendared at the earliest possible time.”

  Johnson gave a last withering look at Wu, then nodded. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Counselor. Let’s go out and put it on the record.”

  11

  Look at the bright side,” Wes Farrell was saying. “She’s convinced the clients that she did it on purpose. She planned it all along. Now the kid catches a break in the seven-oh-seven, maybe he never has to go to trial as an adult, and everybody wins.”

  “Except the DA never tr
usts anybody from the firm again.”

  “Picky, picky.” Farrell, on the couch across the room, shrugged. “They probably didn’t trust us all that much anyway. Remember, we’re defense attorneys, a bare evolutionary step above pond scum.”

  “That much, you think?” Hardy could joke, but he wasn’t amused.

  “Maybe not, if you want to get technical. The thing is, though, we’re going to help get Jackman elected again, so we’re his pals, or will be again soon. It’ll all blow over in a few months, and they’ll be trusting us as much as they ever did, which—don’t kid yourself—is not close to the world record anyway. Meanwhile, Amy’s got the Norths thinking she’s a latter-day Clara Darrow, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.”

  “Swell.” Hardy pushed his chair back from his desk. His elbows rested on the arms of the chair, fingers templed at his lips. “So she spins it to deceive the people who are paying her?”

  “Paying us, you mean. Just keep repeating the paying part and you’ll feel better.”

  “I won’t feel better. I don’t want to get paid to lie to my clients.”

  “Well, fortunately, they’re not your clients, they’re Amy’s.”

  Hardy straightened himself up in his chair. “Precisely the opposite point you made about one sentence ago, you notice. When the Norths were paying, they were our clients; when they’re being lied to, they’re Amy’s.”

  “You’ve stumbled upon my specialty, honed in years of debate. Answers tailored to justify any course of action.” Farrell broke a smile. “It’s a modest enough talent, but it’s seen me through some dark days. And what do you mean, you don’t want to get paid to lie? I thought that’s what we got paid for.”

  But Hardy held up a hand. “Wes. Enough. Okay?”

  The smile faded. “Okay. So what’s she going to do? Amy?”

  “First thing, I had her go down to Boscacci and apologize in person. Tell him the truth, which is that the kid decided on his own not to admit.”

  Farrell sat back and crossed a leg. “And why do you think he did that?”

  Hardy gave it a minute. “He’s young. Eight years sounds like the rest of his life. But for now, I guess he’d rather take bad odds at pulling life than no odds at eight years.” He sighed. “He’s going to find out.”

  Inspector Sergeant Pat Belou stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice. She had ridden up from the lobby with her partner Lincoln Russell, a well-dressed mid-thirties black inspector. Also in the small enclosed elevator had been about ten other citizens, at least one of whom badly needed a shower, some new clothes, a toothbrush, maybe industrial disinfectant and certainly deodorant. Lots of deodorant.

  “That was the longest elevator ride I’ve ever taken,” Belou said when the door closed behind her. “We ought to arrest that guy as a health hazard.”

  “Not till he kills somebody,” Russell said. “We’re homicide. He’s got to kill somebody first. Those are the rules.”

  “Well, he almost killed me. That ought to count. Anybody goes with him all the way to the top, their life’s in danger.”

  “Maybe we catch him on the way down,” Russell said.

  Belou blew out through her mouth, waving the air in front of her nose. She was a thirty-year-old, tall and rangy woman with an outdoorsy look, a bit of a heavy jaw, some old, faded acne scars on her face. But her large mouth smiled easily, she laughed as though she meant it, and her shoulder-length hair, a shade lighter than dirty blond and with a perennially windblown look, set off lovely blue eyes.

  The inspectors turned into the hallway, and Belou stopped suddenly, hit her partner on the arm. “Glitsky,” she said. “Good a time as any.”

  Russell said he’d see her in the homicide detail, and she turned around and came back to the double doors by the elevator lobby that led to the admin offices. She was just asking the receptionist at the outside desk if she could have a word with the deputy chief when the man himself appeared from somewhere in the back. He wore a deep frown and was accompanied by a sergeant in uniform, Paganucci by his name tag.

  She spoke right up. “Sir? Sergeant Belou. Homicide.”

  Glitsky, obvious frazzled, came to a full stop. “I’m running to a meeting,” he told her. “If you’d like to leave a message with Melissa here, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Yes, sir. But this is short. Ted Reed.”

  “Ted Reed?”

  “Elizabeth Cary’s brother. Lake Elsinore.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s been in custody on an arson charge down in Escondido for most of the last month. The public defender down there told me he must have decided he liked the food in jail, didn’t want to waste his money on bail. His trial’s in a couple of months. Bottom line is he didn’t kill his sister.”

  Glitsky nodded. Something else was distracting him, but he said, “Okay. Thanks. Good job.”

  Then, to Melissa: “I’m at the Young Community Developers ribbon cutting out on Van Ness. I won’t talk to any reporters before the next scheduled press conference. Tony.” He turned to the sergeant who accompanied him. “How fast can we get there? We’re late already.”

  “Lights and sirens, five, six minutes.”

  “If they call,” Glitsky told Melissa, “tell them we’re on the way.”

  Then they were gone, jogging through the elevator lobby, hitting the stairs at a run.

  Behind the reception desk, Melissa looked up at Belou, shook her head in commiseration. “Man don’t belong doing this. Gonna make hisself sick.” The phone rang and she picked it up, said without ceremony that the deputy chief wasn’t available, hung up. She smiled at Belou, pointed at the telephone. “One of the reporters he didn’t want to talk to. They eatin’ him up.”

  “What about?”

  “This LeShawn Brodie thing. You following that?”

  “The Greyhound guy?”

  “That’s him, sugar.”

  “What about him?”

  “So you ain’t heard? He was headin’ back this way, but they pulled him over up in Colfax. Now he’s got hisself twenty hostages in some diner up there, already killed two of ’em.” She pointed to the phone. “Them reporters. They wantin’ his hide.”

  Hardy asked Phyllis to hold his calls. He locked his door, took off his shoes, loosened his tie and lay down on one of his couches. He’d had a good breakfast with the family and wasn’t remotely hungry, and he decided he would start to break the bottle-of-wine-with-lunch habit by skipping lunch entirely. Eliminate the temptation.

  He fell asleep instantly, and awoke nearly three hours later. Alone in his office, he threw water on his face, brewed a cup of espresso and drank it down as soon as it didn’t scald.

  Replaying Frannie’s monologue from last night in his mind, he realized that all of his friends involved in the gunfight had been wrestling with their long-term reactions and demons ever since. He shouldn’t have been surprised that he had his own issues, and that he’d been ignoring them as best he could. But from today on, he resolved that things were going to change. It was just a matter of will, and that had always been one of his strengths.

  But today, after he’d finished his coffee, he got up to pour himself another cup and noticed the bottle of Rémy Martin in his bar. Without agonizing about it too much, he poured a shot into his cup and added coffee. He’d never entertained the thought that he intended to quit drinking altogether, and after all he’d not had any wine for lunch. He deserved that shot as a reward for his earlier abstinence, and one shot wasn’t going to affect him adversely in any event. It would just take a little of the edge off.

  Raising the cup to his mouth, though, he hesitated.

  Maybe Frannie’s point last night was that his normal response to conflict or inner turmoil lately had been to round off the edges. He was literally dulled, and in that state, nothing was really that serious. You could take the easiest course, ride it out, have a few drinks, and usually things tended to work out
acceptably. You couldn’t spend your whole life worrying about the what ifs, the small stuff. And that was counterproductive, too. At least as debilitating as drinking.

  In fact, seen in that light, drinking had enabled him to function better. He came to work every day, drummed up mega-business with whoever could pay his fees, used his natural talent for schmoozing. He was good with people, that was all. And with a bit of a load on, even more charming.

  Like Wu. Charming.

  The thought stopped him cold.

  Like Wu. Screwing up. Hiding behind that old glib shit. Ultimately failing those who might be counting on you.

  Leaving the cup untouched on the counter, he instead walked over to his dart area, opened the cabinets and pulled the three tungsten customs from the board. It wasn’t so long ago that he used to throw his darts to clear his mind as a relaxation technique, and now he got to the line in the floor, turned and threw. Threw again. Again. One round.

  Before he moved forward to pull the round from the board, he went over to the counter, picked up the coffee cup and poured it down the sink.

  It was nearly four o’clock by the time he knocked on Gina Roake’s door.

  She had the corner office, an altogether different work space than Hardy’s. There were a few stuffed chairs and a sofa, an old wooden coffee table, a computer table and chair, but no formal desk to speak of. Instead of hardwood floors, Gina went with wall-to-wall carpet, a shade darker than champagne. Cheaply framed posters of old movies—Giant, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane—decorated the one big wall. The other, by the door, mostly held her law books, although there was one shelf of David Freeman memorabilia—an empty bottle of La Grande Dame champagne (from the day he’d proposed to her); a picture of the two of them outside on the deck at the Alta Mira in Sausalito, the bay shimmering in the background; a hand-blown blue and red glass perfume bottle; some erotic if not frankly obscene porcelains from Chinatown; a clean ashtray with an unlit cigar and a book of matches from the Crown Room at the Fairmont. Then there were the windows, six of them to Hardy’s two. In the afternoon, now, the light suffused the room with a golden glow.