The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  Hardy shook his head. “You ever meet a kid that didn’t, Clarence? Age fourteen to forever. He might. He gets the right counselors at YGC, somebody catches a spark with him, he comes out in a few years and he’s a stand-up human being. But the real question, the legal question, is the provocative act.”

  Jackman ran a finger under his shirt collar. Now, his deep voice an almost inaudible rumble, he chuckled. “If you break into somebody’s home, you forfeit quite a few of your inalienable rights.”

  “Granted. But Mr. Parensich”—the robbery victim who’d actually shot Damon and Jamahl—“was never really in danger. The boys didn’t even have guns. They didn’t even know he was home.”

  “That’s what they say, so it’s just more bad luck for them. And let’s remember, there were five of them.” He held up his hand. “Cinco. This is a substantial amount of gang throw-weight, and you know it. Even if this guy was only fourteen. I believe Mr. Parensich felt legitimately threatened.”

  “I don’t doubt it, but these kids didn’t act up that much. They were already fleeing when Parensich fired at them. Self-defense or not, they’re the ones that took the shots. Let’s call it square.”

  “If you’re suggesting it, let me just say that no way am I going to charge Parensich,” Jackman said. “Somebody’s got to stand up for the victims in these situations.”

  Hardy actually broke a grin. “That’s a lovely campaign moment, Clarence, but you can’t say that running away is inherently likely to cause a violent response, and that’s what the boys were doing, hightailing it.” Hardy paused, considered, concluded. “Parensich’s response was legal, but unnecessary, so the murder can’t go under provocative act. That’s all there is to it.”

  Jackman had been listening carefully, rolling a pencil under a finger on his desk. “So how do I get the message out to these people, Diz? You break into some guy’s house, you don’t understand somebody’s likely to get hurt? The tragedy here isn’t your boy and his mother, but Damon, who was also fourteen and who won’t be getting any older. If these dumb fuck kids, pardon me, wouldn’t have decided to knock over Parensich, Damon’s still walking around. It’s such a goddamn waste.”

  “I hear you, Clarence. I really do. But you’re punishing Jamahl in any event. He’s going to YA on the robbery. That’s appropriate. But you won’t win hearts or minds by a reach of a charge like this. You’ll just seem unfair and vindictive. Jamahl’s only fourteen, Clarence. As you say, he’s still walking around, so he’s still got a chance. Slim, but real. You don’t want to take that away from him on this. And,” Hardy was getting to the bottom line, “you and I both know there’s no way you’ll get any jury in this town to convict him, so why waste the time? You’re just pissed off.”

  “I am pissed off.”

  “That’s fine. But take it out on somebody’s who’s earned it. This one just ain’t right, and you know it.” Hardy found himself surprised that he’d used these words. He hadn’t thought that way in quite some time.

  Jackman rolled the pencil some more. By all indications, he was making his decision on Jamahl, but when he finally spoke, it wasn’t about that. “I hear through the grapevine that you’re working with your associate on Bartlett. That the hearing is this morning, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “That’s right. It should start in about an hour.”

  “I’m taking your presence on the team to mean that some kind of reason is going to prevail up there.”

  “Well, we’re playing the cards we got dealt, Clarence, if that’s what you mean. Amy should never have tried to make the deal with Allan, that goes without question. But not because she didn’t deliver.”

  “No, then why not?”

  “Because I’m more than halfway to convinced he’s not guilty.”

  The quiet voice took on an ominous tone. “You think there was a rush to judgment out of this office? Do you think we weren’t fair? That we don’t have a case? Your own associate was going to plead him guilty less than a week ago. What’s changed? Do you have new evidence?”

  “No, sir. Not really. Maybe a new approach. That’s all.”

  “Well.” Jackman, frowning now, picked up the pencil and tapped the table with its eraser. “I’ll let you know my decision on Jamahl, then. When I make it.” He looked at his watch. “You don’t want to be late for court.”

  It was a dismissal.

  When the meeting ended, Hardy came out into the reception room by Treya Glitsky’s desk. “So how’d it go?” she asked.

  “The reviews aren’t all in yet.” But Hardy’s face indicated that when they came, they wouldn’t be all good, and Treya knew better than to push. His pager had vibrated three times while he’d been speaking with Jackman, and all the calls had come from his office, and now he asked, “Could I borrow your phone for one minute? Local.”

  “One? One,” she said. Then, after she’d made sure the door to Jackman’s office was closed, she added, “Abe called. He asks if you get a chance, stop up.”

  Hardy was punching numbers, nodded abstractedly. “He called me? How’d he know I was here?”

  “He didn’t. He didn’t call you. He called me since I’m his devoted wife and I work here. I told him you were in with his nibs. He’s going to want to talk about . . .”

  “Excuse me, one sec.” Hardy was holding a finger up, stopping her. He spoke into the phone. “Phyllis, Diz. You don’t have to call me three times. You leave the number once, I’ll call back, promise.” He listened. “Who? Okay. Yes, I know her. I got it. All right, then. I’ll be going straight out there. Right. Right. That means I won’t stop at the office first. After that I’m up at YGC with Amy. Right, okay. That’s it. Thanks.” Hanging up, he turned to Treya. “I love that woman,” he said. “She makes the rest of humanity look so good by comparison. Was Abe important?”

  “Always,” she said, then lowered her voice. “But I think he just wants to pick your brain on this silencer thing with Allan and the others.”

  “The others.” Hardy leaned over her desk. “You know I think he’s a brilliant and fascinating guy, but this is just spinning his wheels until he gets something real.”

  “That’s what I told him,” she said. “He just wants to be back in homicide, and this gives him an excuse. He sent out a couple of inspectors this morning to ask relatives of the Twin Peaks people—if there are any—if either of them had ever served on a murder jury. They weren’t too enthusiastic, the inspectors.”

  “Wait’ll he sends them downstairs to Records to look up all of Allan’s cases over the past twenty years. That’ll really juice ’em up.”

  At this moment, Anna Salarco was, by any of Hardy’s standards, more important than Glitsky. So, for that matter, was the hearing, which would start now before he arrived. But he couldn’t ignore the summons from Anna, who had called his office. Wu and he had discussed strategy late yesterday afternoon, and he had no reason to believe she couldn’t handle it well herself. But he did ask Treya to call Abe back and send his regrets.

  Twenty-five minutes later he was back in the Salarcos’ bright yellow kitchen. Carla was in her playpen watching Barney on television. Clearly nervous, her head darting this way and that, her hands pushing her hair around, Anna offered him a seat at the kitchen table. He took out his tape recorder, held it up and got a nod from her, and put it on the table between them. She sat where she could keep an eye both on her baby and on the front door. Reading the signs, Hardy asked her if her husband knew that she’d called him.

  “No, but I had to. I think about it all the night. The boy. Andrew. The one Juan pick out of the lineup.” She threw a look at the door, took a breath, came back to him. “I was there, too. At the lineup. With Juan. But afterward, they only talk to him.”

  “Because he’d seen Andrew and he’d told them that he could identify him?”

  “Sí. But they did not . . .” She snapped her fingers, cast her eyes about the room, searching for the right word. “No sais.” Then: “They did not m
ake it different, the times Juan saw him, like you did.”

  “Differentiate,” Hardy said.

  “Sí. Differentiate. Between when he went down first and when he came back later, after. Or the other one.”

  “The one you saw? Outside in front?”

  “Sí. I don’t know what . . . how . . . if Juan saw something that time.” She’d gripped her hands, intertwining her fingers in her lap, and now she turned them over on themselves. “But I went over it last night a hundred times, what I remembered, and it was as you say, as Juan said when he . . . described how we went to the window. Me in front of him.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Hardy said. “I’m listening. It’s all right.”

  She gave him a darting, empty smile, turned her head toward the door again.

  “You were at the window . . .”

  “Sí. I look out, and I am angry, too, at waking up the baby. I am slapping, you know, at the window. This is why the boy turn around. He look up at me and then he’s gone, running.”

  “And that man, that time, was it Andrew?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I don’t say Juan is not telling the truth. Maybe he saw different. Maybe I . . . It was too far and I don’t see everything just perfect.”

  “All right. Maybe all that. Listen, Anna. No one’s going to accuse Juan of anything because of what you tell me now. It could have been an honest mistake. He’d already seen Andrew twice that night, so who else could it have been? Right? And when was the lineup? A month later? Six weeks?”

  “Sí. Something like that much. But they bring out the boys, and Juan and I are both there, you know, watching from back in the dark. They keep us apart and we’re not supposed to talk, you know. They give us a card and we make an ‘X’ if we know somebody. But I see nobody I know, and later I find out Juan said it was number two. He knows. I tell him I don’t think this is who I saw from the window.”

  “It was not Andrew?”

  Shaking her head from side to side, she said, “No. Not if he was in that lineup.” Then, with the confession out, she stopped all the frenetic movement. Her shoulders settled almost imperceptibly. “Juan, he takes my arm and asks me do I know what am I saying. He tells me that there is no doubt. This is who he saw.”

  “He did,” Hardy said. “That’s who he did see. Just not that one time.”

  “Sí. But he is . . . angry at me. Very angry. Do I think he does not know who he saw? Don’t I know the police will help us with la migra if we help them?”

  “They can’t,” Hardy said. “They won’t.”

  “I think that, too. But Juan still hopes, you know. If we go to the trial and he says it was Andrew . . .” She trailed off. “Anyway, I don’t fight him anymore.” Her head was down, but she raised her eyes to him. “Not until yesterday. When I understand.”

  29

  By the time Hardy arrived at the YGC at 10:15 and got himself admitted to the courtroom and then the defense table in the bullpen, all under the disapproving eyes of Judge Johnson, they appeared to have cleared all the motions, including the continuance request, and now were apparently in the middle of what Hardy supposed was their first witness.

  But before they could get back to that, Johnson took off his glasses and spoke up. “For the record, the court notes the arrival of . . . ?”

  Hardy stood. “I’m sorry I’m late, your honor. Dismas Hardy, second chair for the minor.”

  Johnson’s lips went tight, his eyes narrowed. “All right, Mr. Hardy. Would you care to approach the bench, please? Ms. Wu? You, too.”

  This was unusual, but when the judge called you up, you went.

  “Yes, your honor?”

  Johnson held his glasses in one hand, and it was shaking. His eyes were cold pools of glacier water. He spoke with a crisp clarity, brooking no misunderstanding. “I gathered from your various motions and witness list yesterday that you intended to make this hearing more of a protracted proceeding than I had intended to countenance in this particular case. Now I see a second lawyer at Mr. Bartlett’s table. I don’t often see two attorneys for one juvenile defendant in the seven-oh-seven. I wanted to give you both fair warning that I’m not going to tolerate any delaying tactics or tag-team mumbo jumbo from either of you. I’ll hear from one lawyer per witness—either one of you, but only one. If your witnesses don’t speak to particular criteria, I will dismiss them. If you waste this court’s time, I will cut you off. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, your honor.” Hardy was stunned at not only the force of the warning, but also the severity of the dressing-down. Wu had really ruffled feathers up here, maybe more so even than she had with Boscacci, and Hardy would be well advised to keep it in mind. Still, he wasn’t about to roll over. “But as you’ve no doubt noticed from our motions, your honor, this case has grown in complexity. The—”

  Johnson pointed a finger. “That’s exactly my point, Mr. Hardy. Don’t get me started. This hearing is not about the complexity of this criminal case. It’s about whether Mr. Bartlett should be tried as a minor or not. That’s all it’s about. I’ve read your motions about calling witnesses for the gravity criterion and it doesn’t take a genius to see what you have in mind on that score, but your witnesses had better be about facts and evidence. I won’t tolerate any alternative theory nonsense—you can bring all that up in adult court if some judge will let you.” He caught himself. “Assuming, of course, that this case goes to adult court.”

  He leaned down over the bench, shot a look at Hardy, over to Wu. He lowered his voice, which in no way diminished its intensity. “I believe we all know that we shouldn’t even be here this morning, and wouldn’t be, Mr. Hardy, if your firm had played straight with the DA. But now that we are here, I won’t let you make a mockery of this proceeding. That’s all.”

  Summarily dismissed, Hardy returned to the defense table while Wu prepared to continue with her witness. Seated next to Andrew, for several minutes Hardy found that he couldn’t get his mind to focus. Johnson’s warnings rang in his ears; Anna Salarco’s tape burned in his pocket.

  Next to him Andrew sat not in one of the courtroom chairs, but propped and shackled to a wheelchair, his wrists cuffed and resting in his lap. A thick, cotton-wrapped white brace of some kind encircled his neck, bringing visions of Frannie back to him—it was neck brace week on the hacienda. Andrew sat straight up, a ramrod, eyes closed, occasionally emitting tiny moans that Hardy did not believe were faked. Behind them both, in the front row, Hardy felt the hostile eyes of the Norths—they’d watched him enter the courtroom, followed him up the aisle and to their son’s table, with ill-disguised displeasure.

  Gradually, he forced himself to put the distractions aside. He reminded himself that this hearing was merely Act I of what looked more and more like it would become a three-act play—with the preliminary hearing in adult court next and then the trial to follow. On the stand next to the judge was an ex-cop private investigator friend of Wes Farrell’s named Jane Huron, whom they were paying $350 and who was to have read Andrew’s “Perfect Killer” story and picked it apart for criminal veracity. On the surface, Hardy thought, this was a simple and fairly straightforward task, especially since they’d supplied her with many of the objections Andrew himself had voiced for them.

  She’d obviously been on the stand for a good while, and now Wu was apparently in the process of wrapping it all up. “So, Ms. Huron, based on your training and experience, eleven years as a police officer and seven as a private investigator, how would you characterize the criminal sophistication of the author of this story?”

  Huron looked the part: short-cropped, dark hair, a dark blue pants suit. She was a hefty, solid woman with a no-nonsense face. Answering, she turned directly to the judge, as Hardy and Wu had suggested. They’d also told her not to mince her words. “Not at all sophisticated, in terms of the real world,” she said.

  “What specifically do you mean by that?”

  “He showed no knowledge of how a real police investigati
on would treat such a crime.”

  “Could you give us one example, please?”

  “Yes. His alibi was extremely naive.”

  “In what way?”

  “Well, primarily because it wouldn’t in any way have eliminated him from suspicion. The times of the deaths would have been consistent with his presence at the scene when they occurred, regardless of what he did afterward. It would have just been stupid. And then going back to the scene, and pretending to discover the bodies. Not even the most remotely sophisticated criminal would consider doing something like that.”

  “Anything else?”

  Again, Huron looked up at the judge, as though for approval, and he nodded down at her. “Almost everything else, I would say. The author demonstrated little understanding of forensics, ballistics testing, gunshot residue, hair and fiber samples, any of the normal details that crime scene investigators routinely analyze as a matter of course. The kind of precautions outlined in the story—the surgical gloves and fingerprint worries and so on—are what you’d expect to get from watching television and movies. Not from any real-life crime experience.”

  This was all Hardy and Wu could have hoped for, and Huron had pulled it off perfectly. Wu inclined her head, thanked her, and said she had no further questions.

  “Mr. Brandt?” Johnson intoned from the bench.

  And Brandt was immediately on his feet, approaching the witness with a light in his eye and a spring in his step. Hardy thought this wasn’t a good sign, but didn’t see where he could go. He was about to find out, and it wasn’t a long journey. “Ms. Huron, you’ve worked in law enforcement for nearly twenty years, isn’t that true?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “And you’ve had a great deal of experience with firearms and forensics, have you not?”