The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  “You were listening.” Wu didn’t seem very happy about it.

  “Damn straight. I’m a good listener. So now you’re saying we need character?”

  “Maybe it’s a bit of a risk. Certainly it’s a different situation. But the bottom line is we need to defeat all the criteria. Every one of them, or Andrew goes up.”

  North sighed heavily, cast his gaze out to the view. “I’ll talk to Linda. Maybe between us we can come up with something. You got those things, the criteria, written down?”

  “Yes. Right here.”

  “Okay. Leave them with me, and if we can come up with something concrete you don’t already know, we’ll get back to you. How’s that?”

  Wu arrived before her client did in the cold and tiny room—the scratched table, the ancient chairs, the antiseptic old-school smell. Suddenly, she noticed the bars of sunlight high on the opposite wall, and she realized that she’d been awake only for a little over three hours total today, and the daylight was already nearly gone.

  And wouldn’t her father have been proud of her for that? For wasting the day? Or the past weeks? She rested her head in her hands as a fresh wave of nausea and revulsion rolled and broke over her. An unconscious moan escaped.

  “Are you all right?”

  She hadn’t heard the key, hadn’t been aware that the door had opened. Now Bailiff Cottrell—the young one with the old eyes—stood in the entrance, holding a restraining hand up for Andrew, waiting for a sign that the interview was still on. It wasn’t immediately forthcoming, so he asked, “Are we good here, ma’am?” Eventually she nodded, and the bailiff lowered his hand, let her client come in, closed the door.

  Andrew warily kept his eyes on her as he pulled his chair over, sat on the front inch of the seat. “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

  Wu’s mouth was dry, her face clammy. She closed her eyes for an instant, ran her hand over her forehead. “No. I’m not mad at you, Andrew.”

  “I thought you would be because I didn’t do what you wanted me to.” He had his hands clasped together between his knees. “But I couldn’t say I did it.”

  “I know,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry about it now. It’s done. The thing we have to do now is prevail at this hearing, get you mandated in the juvenile system so you stay here.”

  “But I thought that was already over with.” Confusion played itself all over his features. “I mean, that’s what everybody is so mad about, right?”

  “Not really. They’re mad that now they have to go through the hassle of trying to move you back up to adult court.”

  “So you’re saying your deal, even though I didn’t agree to it, got me another chance anyway?”

  “Yeah.”

  Suddenly, the look of confusion cleared. Her client tentatively smiled. “Well, then, if your job is my defense, how could it have been wrong? Maybe the guy you made the deal with wasn’t as careful as he needed to be, either. You ever think of that? Maybe it wasn’t all your fault?”

  Wu wouldn’t think ill of the dead, especially not today. But Andrew’s rationale released some small bit of the tension she felt. “Well,” she said, “at least some of it was my fault. But that’s very nice of you to say, and I could use a little nice.” For the first time with Andrew, she felt something like a connection.

  But there was still the business, the five criteria for amenability to the juvenile system. After she had painstakingly gone through the list for him, she sat back with her arms crossed over her chest. “We need to talk about each of these individually, Andrew,” she said. “If the court finds you not amenable on any one of them, you go up.”

  “Any one?”

  “That’s the rule. And I’m afraid we’ve got less than a week to prepare.”

  “But these criteria.” Andrew scratched at the tabletop. “Most of them don’t apply to me at all. I don’t even know what they mean by criminal sophistication, or if I can be rehabilitated. Rehabilitated from what?”

  “Your violent criminal past.”

  He looked a question at her. “I don’t have one.”

  “I know. But I don’t think sophistication is the problem. Neither is rehab.”

  “But gravity is.”

  Everyone seemed to understand that one immediately. “Yes.”

  He gestured around the small room. “If it helps me get out of here . . . but I was saying, even on gravity, if I didn’t do it . . .” He raised his eyes, hopeful.

  But she didn’t want to raise those hopes. She came forward and reached across the table, a hand over his forearm. “This hearing isn’t about whether you did it, Andrew. I need you to understand that. It’s only about whether you go up as an adult or not. They’re going to pretty much assume the gravity criteria.”

  “And they only need the one?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “So I’m going to lose?”

  “We may lose, yes. For now. But we’ll get a real chance in adult court.”

  “We ought to just go straight there, then. If this hearing is just a formality.”

  “No,” she said. “We’ve got to try. Anything that keeps you down here even for on extra minute is what we want to do.” In his eyes, she saw real worry—perhaps he was starting to realize where his refusal to admit had left him. Left them both. “So we’ve got to talk about some real issues, Andrew. My partner, Mr. Hardy? He’s got a few ideas about gravity. We’re not just going to give that to them. But the other criteria, we don’t want any surprises with those either.”

  “I don’t know what they’d be.”

  “No. I don’t either, but that’s why they call them surprises.”

  He started with some marginal enthusiasm as they discussed possible witnesses for the various criteria—the psychologist he’d seen for anger management, his school counselor, one of the probation officers up here. But before they’d gone too far, the enormity of what he was facing seemed to drag him down.

  His focus wavered, then abandoned him entirely, and Wu—not at peak performance levels herself—found it difficult to humor him. From her perspective, his primary emotion was sorrow for himself. He stopped every few sentences, stared straight ahead or down at the table. He fought back tears a couple of times.

  “Why should we bother doing this?” he’d say. “We’re never going to win.”

  Or: “I’m such a loser. This isn’t going to make any difference.”

  Or: “It’d be better for everybody if I just killed myself, wouldn’t it?”

  That last one stopped Wu. “Why would you want to do that, Andrew? What good would that do?”

  “It’d end all this stupidity. If they’re going to put me away anyway.”

  Wu scratched at the table, summoning her patience. “That’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

  “It won’t work, though, will it?”

  “Not if we don’t try.”

  But even to her, the words sounded condescending, the kind of adult pablum he’d been forced to eat a hundred times. “Or even if we do,” he said.

  She tried to keep him on track, but it was a long, uphill slog until they finally summoned him for dinner. After he left, she felt she had no reserve of strength and remained sitting, elbows on the table, on her papers and notes. She rested her head on her palms, the heels of them pressing into her eyes.

  She heard a knock. “Excuse me? Ms. Wu?” Bailiff Cottrell, come to close up the room, stared down at her from the doorway. She must have nearly let herself doze off. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “Fine. I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look well. Can I get you something? Some water?”

  Moving slowly, she leaned back in her chair. “How about a head transplant? And maybe a new body to go with it.”

  “You couldn’t get a better face,” he said, “and you definitely don’t need a new body.”

  At the moment, she felt about as attractive as a garbage truck, and she almost laughed at the compliment. But he was, she thought, just
trying to be nice. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting while I just sat here. It’s been a long day.” She started gathering the papers and folders she’d spread out over the table.

  “Ms. Wu, let me help you,” he said.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got it. And you can call me Amy.”

  “Ray, if you didn’t remember,” he said, then stood waiting at the door while she finished up, throwing everything into her heavy lawyer’s briefcase, snapping it closed. When she stood, then leaned over to pick the briefcase up, he said, “That thing must weigh a ton. At least let me take that.”

  Exhausted, her head still pounding from her hangover, she finally nodded. “That would be nice.”

  He stepped into the room, picked up the briefcase, gave her some support with a hand under her elbow. “You’re sure you’re okay to walk?”

  In fact, she had some question about that, but she took a step and then another and in a minute they were outside in the hall and then at the main entrance to the cabins. Cottrell accompanied her outside to the razor-wire gate and opened it for her. They stopped there and he put down her briefcase. Turning to say good-bye, she looked up at him. Their eyes met for an instant, and she thought she caught a glimpse of that earlier wariness she had noticed in the courtroom. Again, his eyes seemed old and somehow empty, but—it was as though he had a switch he could throw—suddenly a bit of life came into them. “Your client seems pretty down,” he said.

  She blew out heavily. “I don’t blame him,” she said. “He’s screwing himself.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I dealt him an eight-year top and he turned it down. Now he’s looking at LWOP.”

  “They’re moving him to adult?”

  “Not yet, but it’s probable. I’m trying to get him to help me, but he doesn’t seem to know the word ‘cooperate.’ ”

  “Maybe he’s just scared.”

  “I’m sure he is. And he should be. Oh, God!” She brought a hand up to her head, squeezed at her temples. With her other hand, she grabbed the side of the gate for support. Cottrell stepped up, grabbed both of her shoulders. “You look like you’re going to faint. Maybe you want to sit down.”

  She nodded and leaned into him. He put his arm around her and walked her back toward the cabins.

  From the lobby of the admin building, down the hill Jason Brandt saw the bailiff carrying her briefcase, walking with her to the gate, where they stopped and spent a minute talking. He didn’t want her to see him, at least not until she was alone, and so he remained where he was, pretty much out of sight.

  Wu hadn’t left his thoughts since the night they’d spent together, and now Brandt was unable to take his eyes off her. He had wanted to get to know her since the first time he’d seen her, back right after his law school days. But one or the other of them had always had other relationships going or big cases and she’d more or less slipped from his consciousness until she showed up in his courtroom last week, when finally—he’d thought—there had been no impediment.

  Then he really believed that running into her at the Balboa had been a sign. There had been real chemistry between them that night, something uncommon and, he believed, maybe even a little magical. As a general rule, he didn’t do one-night stands. The encounter, like it or not, had seemed as though it meant something. Maybe something important.

  Then, this morning, thinking for a moment that because she had been near Boscacci when he’d been shot that she, too, might have been physically hurt, made him realize that he’d been way too harsh with her the other morning. Okay, she’d made a mistake by not telling him right away that Bartlett’s case wasn’t really settled, but maybe it had been innocent after all, something he’d never really given her a chance to assert. Maybe they’d just started talking at the Balboa and in all the personal stuff they’d shared, including the sex, the professional business between them had receded into the background. It certainly had for him.

  So he didn’t want this antagonism between them to go on any longer. He wanted to apologize for his overreaction, at least see what she had to say to that. And just now, when he’d first seen her coming out of the cabins, he thought he’d take the opportunity to talk to her. One way or another, he thought that the Bartlett matter was going to be over in a few weeks at the most, at least as far as Wu and he were concerned. If Bartlett went to adult court, they wouldn’t be adversaries in the same courtroom anymore. Maybe they could pick up where they’d left off. If he could get her to talk to him.

  Although if she had gone off on him as ballistic as he had with her, he wasn’t sure if he would talk to her.

  But then suddenly, as Brandt was watching them, he saw the bailiff put his hands on her shoulders. Then she leaned into him, her face against his chest, and he put his arm around her, keeping it there until they had both disappeared back into the cabins.

  His stomach went hollow. He turned to take the long way out the front door of the admin building, where there was less chance that they would inadvertently run into each other.

  Cottrell stayed with Wu until she told him she felt better, and then he told her to take care of herself and went inside, back to work. Still, Wu didn’t move for a few minutes. She sat on the bench just outside the entrance door to the cabins, trying to summon enough strength to get up and walk to her car. When the cellphone in her briefcase rang, she considered not answering, but then realized that it might be, in fact probably was, the Norths. After all that had transpired so far, she felt that however exhausted she might be, at least she owed them accessibility. She got it on the third ring.

  It wasn’t the Norths. It was her boss. “Amy? So you’re up and about. Where are you?”

  “Up at the YGC. I just talked to Andrew.”

  “Good for you. How’s he doing?”

  “He’s depressed. We talked about starting a club. Not really. That was a joke.”

  “Well, this isn’t. Did you get the message I left at your house about talking to Glitsky?” It came back to her in a flash. “Oh, shit.”

  “Right,” Hardy said. “He’s still at his office and he called me at home just now, which I really try to discourage. He was wondering how he could get in contact with you, like immediately. Since I had more or less promised him that you’d see him today, he wondered what was going on. You want his direct number?”

  “I guess I’d better.”

  “Good guess.”

  By now it was nearly 7:00 P.M. There was no one at any of the desks in Glitsky’s reception area at the Hall of Justice, so Wu walked back through the conference room and down the small hallway to the deputy chief’s door, which stood ajar.

  Some natural light from outside made it through the drawn blinds, but with the electric lights off, the room seemed dim. Glitsky sat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. He was canted slightly forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his head down. He might have been napping. Wu was surprised that he didn’t seem to have heard her approach, and she stood a moment in the doorway, waiting for him to turn and acknowledge her. When that didn’t happen, she tapped lightly on the door.

  He didn’t exactly jump, but he’d clearly been somewhere else. Now, back in the present, he stood and came toward Wu, checking his watch as he did so. “You made good time from the YGC,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  “No traffic for a change,” she said. “I’m sorry about the mixup around this interview, sir, me not coming down here. It’s all my fault, not Mr. Hardy’s. He called my home and told me you wanted to see me, but I have a client who’s in big trouble and I went to see him first. I didn’t realize that this was so urgent, even though Mr. Hardy said it was.”

  Glitsky seemed to find a little humor in her explanation. “Next time I talk to him, I’ll tell him you tried to cover for him. But I know the truth. He forgot to tell you, didn’t he?”

  “No, really. He—”

  But Glitsky held up a hand and stopped her. “Kidding, just kidding.” He didn�
�t seem to take much joy in it, though. Awkwardly, he shrugged, half turned. “Well, you’re here now,” he said, pointing. “Why don’t you take that chair and we’ll get going.”

  Wu sat while he got his tape recorder out of his desk, tested it, set it down and recited the standard introduction, identifying himself, his badge, the case and event number, his subject, where they were. Three or four years before, in her first year out of law school and before Treya and Abe had gotten married, Wu had played a small role helping Hardy and Treya learn the identity of the person who’d killed Glitsky’s grown daughter. They hadn’t all exactly socialized—last night at Boscacci’s death scene was the first time Glitsky had seen her since—but there was a definite sense of familiarity and even goodwill still between them. Nevertheless, Glitsky was a procedure freak, and this was a formal interview pursuant to the death of an important person. He wasn’t going to phone it in.

  “Ms. Wu,” he began, “where and when was the last time you saw Allan Boscacci alive?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, here at the Hall of Justice. In his office.”

  Pre-supplied with Hardy’s version of events and Jason Brandt’s information conveyed through Treya, he walked her through the history and intricacies of the Bartlett matter. Then: “Mr. Brandt mentioned that there might be some bad blood between you and Allan because of this blown deal.”

  “Not really bad blood. I don’t know why he said that. It wasn’t personal.”

  “But the meeting was rancorous?”

  “A little, yes.”

  “Were voices raised?”

  “His. Yes, sir. I had been wrong and didn’t do much except sit and take it.”

  “Did he threaten you?”

  “Physically? No. Professionally, he made it clear we wouldn’t be doing many more plea deals together.”

  “And how did you feel about that?”

  “It wasn’t much of a surprise, after what had happened. I just let him vent, and couldn’t really blame him.”

  “You had no reaction?”