The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  But if it was to be, it was already done. “So where are we now?” Hardy asked.

  “I’ve served the Salarcos,” she said, meaning with subpoenas to appear in court. They’d be there tomorrow. “How are you doing with the wives?”

  “Still hoping.”

  Silence. Wu asked, “You’ll be in court tomorrow, though, right?”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “Because we’re opening with your show.”

  “I’ll be there,” Hardy said. “Don’t worry.”

  The cellphone rang an hour later. He’d had another cup of coffee, his first apple pie à la mode in probably ten years. Forgotten tastes, childhood memories. Delicious beyond imagining.

  “Mr. Hardy?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Catherine Bass. I’m sorry I’m a little late getting back to you. We’ve got three kids under fifth grade and we just finished supper. But Everett Washburn said this was about Mike Mooney.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Hardy thought her brittle laugh sounded nervous, or embarrassed. “Don’t tell me he left me all his money.”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “I’m kidding, of course. Mike wouldn’t have had any money.” Then: “I was so sad when I heard about that. It’s just so unbelievably sad.”

  Hardy gave her a second, then said, “I realize that this is an imposition, but would you mind if we talked in person? I won’t take much of your time. I know about small children. I promise I won’t keep you.” Hardy’s intention all along had been to get some face time with either of the wives. He didn’t just want to verify the fact of Mooney’s sexual orientation—after Steven Randell, he didn’t have any real doubts about that. What he wanted was some sense of where it might have played in his married life, in the hope that some of the habits might have continued. Did he have secret liaisons? Long-term but hidden relationships? Was he consumed with smoldering anger or paralyzed by fear of exposure? Were there enemies? Lovers? Blackmailers?

  Too much for a phone call with someone he’d never met.

  She came back after talking to her husband. “Where are you?” she asked.

  Catherine Bass, like his own wife, was a petite redhead. She didn’t have Frannie’s world-class cheekbones; her skin was a bit more freckled and her hair cropped short, but with her striking green eyes and dimples as she smiled, she was very attractive nonetheless. Hardy had the impression that she was still dressed from a day of work at some professional job—she wore low black heels, a gray knee-length skirt, a black turtleneck sweater. She exuded a confident warmth as Hardy stood and they shook hands.

  He thanked her for coming to meet him. She waved that off as they both sat and the waitress came to the table—by now Hardy was a resident. Catherine ordered herself a dessert called a chocolate heart attack. “I’ve got CDD,” she said by way of explanation, breaking that dimpled smile again.

  “No, let me guess.” Hardy was immediately taken with her. After a second, he said, “Chocolate something something.”

  “You’re not from around here, are you? Or it would be obvious. Chocolate Deficit Disorder. It’s pretty serious.”

  “Why would I have known that if I lived around here?”

  “Because here in the lovely south Peninsula, you have kids and you hear ‘D’ attached to anything, you know it means disorder. You may not realize it, but right now we’re sitting in the Ritalin capital of the world. Every second or third child here has ADD. Or maybe ADHD. At least something.”

  “Why is that? I mean, why’s it so big down here?”

  She leaned in toward him and lowered her voice. “This is heresy,” she said. “I could be shot if anyone heard me, but it’s because they test for it.”

  “Who does?”

  “Any parents with a difficult kid. Your children are failing or acting up in school, take them to a shrink, have them tested for ADD. And see if you can guess—you’re a shrink looking for a condition where, if it’s present, you’ve got a lifelong patient and endless billings.”

  “They tend to find it?”

  “Surprising, is it not? Kind of like asking a car mechanic if you really need the brake job.” She shook her head. “Because it’s not that kids crave attention from their both too busy and can’t be bothered parents, it’s that they’re born with a disorder. Not the parents’ fault, not the kid’s, either, which is the way we like things down here. Don’t get me started.”

  Hardy was grinning at her. “I thought you already had.”

  “It’s my job,” she said. “Forgive me.”

  “Nothing to forgive.”

  “I know I get tedious. I’m trying to stop.” The dimples. “Chocolate will help.”

  Hardy wanted to keep her talking until she was comfortable, and it didn’t seem like that was going to be much of a chore. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a city attorney, believe it or not. I do code enforcement on foster homes and shrinks, mostly, but my real mission is this over-prescribing of Ritalin. It really is an epidemic down here. Maybe it’s everywhere parents can afford to get their kids tested, I don’t know. Maybe kids have fundamentally changed since I was growing up and everybody needs to be medicated. But if you want my opinion, and it looks like you’re going to get it anyway, it’s that most of the time—not always, I admit—kids have this attention deficit because they don’t get attention from their parents. Is it that complicated? Oh God.” She brought her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry. Especially if your kids have it, and they probably do, don’t they?”

  “No. Sometimes they get COUD, but we don’t medicate for that. We just bust them pretty good.”

  It took her a second. “Center of universe disorder?”

  “You’re good,” he said, smiling. “You must do this all the time.”

  The waitress arrived. “This will shut me up.” She stuck a spoon into the dessert, brought it to her mouth, savored. “Okay,” she said, “Mike. You know, I never asked you what about Mike you wanted to talk about.”

  “But you still came down here?”

  “I still cared about him, although I hadn’t seen him in years. He was a good guy.”

  Hardy kept his opinion on that to himself. “That’s what everybody says. But somebody killed him and I’m trying to find out why.”

  “Somebody? I understood they had a pretty solid suspect.” An awareness gathered in her eyes. She killed a few seconds licking her spoon. “You’re defending the killer?”

  Hardy had gone through this so often that he was tempted to wave it off. But it was the first time that Catherine Bass would have heard it, and he had to give the objection its weight. “The alleged killer, yes. Andrew Bartlett. But I expect he’ll be released maybe as soon as tomorrow. I’m all but certain he didn’t do it. I want to find out who did.”

  “And you think I might know? I haven’t laid eyes on Mike in years.”

  “I realize that.” He paused, then came out with it. “Mrs. Bass, I know he was gay.”

  She closed her eyes for a second, drew a deep breath and let it out. “All right.”

  “I’m wondering if that might have played some role in his death.”

  “If what did? Being gay? How would it do that?”

  “I don’t know. If he had some secret life. . . ?”

  She poked the chocolate with her spoon. “Wasn’t someone else killed with him? A girl? One of his students?”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t really point to a sinister gay secret life to me.”

  “It doesn’t to me, either. She might not have been part of the original plan, but as a witness she had to be eliminated.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  “I really don’t know. I’m hoping my client is innocent. Beyond that, I’m fishing. But it would be helpful to get the simple fact of Mike’s gayness out in front of the judge.”

  “And how would that help?”

  “It might punch some holes in the prose
cution’s motive theory.”

  “What about his father?”

  Hardy’s own expression had grown somber. “I know. I’ve been trying to figure that one out. Bring it out in chambers, seal the record, something. I see you’ve dealt with it, too.”

  Her mouth was a hard line. “God, those years. When I compare them to how I live now . . .”

  “How long were you together?”

  Her eyes came back to him. “Not so long in real time, I guess. Thirty months, something like that, beginning to end.” Her mouth tried to signal a kind of apology for getting so personal. “It was an eternity, though, in psychic time. We really were best friends, even back when he was with Terri. I was the other woman, you know, in their marriage. Broke them up. It was really pretty funny, actually, if you had a taste for irony.”

  “Did you know?”

  “About his being gay? Not at first. At the time . . . hell, you know . . . we were young and living the theater life, all of us. It was assumed that we all led active sexual lives and that some of us experimented with . . . various combinations. We didn’t see it as a big deal. And Mike was pretty . . .” She laughed again with the brittle embarrassment Hardy had first heard on the phone with her. “Actually, he was pretty, period. Gorgeous. And promiscuous as all hell, trying to prove what he wasn’t, you know? God! Was it exciting! Drama every day, especially when he, when we, were cheating on Terri. Sometimes she’d be out on stage doing a scene—I mean in plain sight, thirty feet from us. Jesus.”

  He gave her a minute to come back to him. “So how did you find out?”

  Hanging her head, she drew her dessert near and picked at it. “After we got married, we had a couple of good months. But pretty soon the . . . the physical side . . . I guess what turned him on was the forbidden fruit aspect. When I stopped being that . . .” Her shoulders rose, then fell. “But as I said, we were friends. We liked to do the same things. So at first we pretended everything was the same, fooling ourselves, you know. I’m not sure if Mike really admitted to himself that he was strictly gay, even then. We were always together and busy and . . . shit, I may as well tell you . . . we never had sex in our bed. It was always someplace we might get caught. For me, that got a little old, but as long as we had our busy routine and found time to sneak away, I told myself that we were intimate enough. The lies we tell ourselves, huh? And then, as it turned out—nobody’s fault—but the routine changed on us anyway.”

  “What happened?”

  “Mike got called to jury duty.”

  31

  Lucas Welding. Write it down.” Hardy was in his car, speeding north, talking to Glitsky. It was 10:30 and he’d left Catherine Bass fifteen minutes before. His right hand was sore from taking notes, but he remembered everything he’d written. “In 1984, he strangled and murdered his wife, Ginny. Got tried and convicted in San Francisco in ’86, sentenced to LWOP.”

  “But he’s out now?”

  “Looks like.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “I don’t know. But Mrs. Bass, Mooney’s ex-wife, is a lawyer herself now and remembered Boscacci distinctly as the prosecutor. She’s followed his career ever since. I’ll bet you a million dollars that your Elizabeth Cary was on the same jury.”

  “You said you’re in your car. Where are you?”

  “Just passing the airport.”

  “Meet you at the Hall,” Glitsky said. “Twenty minutes.”

  Since the ground floor of the Hall of Justice was the location of SFPD’s Southern Station, the building was open. Hardy and Glitsky opened the front door together and passed through the metal detectors and security cops in the lobby. Lanier was already waiting for them in the hallway outside Glitsky’s office, and the three of them filed into the small conference room behind the reception area.

  By earlier that afternoon, they’d finally managed to set up a total of six borrowed computers for the use of the two General Work officers and the twenty-two others that both Jackman had provided and Glitsky had recruited out of their respective clerical staffs. All overtime expenses paid.

  It had taken a good part of the afternoon to get the computers up and connected, but when Glitsky had left work that night, all of them had been in use. Six volunteers at a time worked the list of four hundred recently released convicts, while six others—armed with case numbers from the computer searches—went downstairs and under the building to Records, where they searched for the physical files on the Boscacci “hits.”

  By the time of Glitsky’s departure earlier that night, out of the first 154 they’d identified seven cases where Boscacci had been the actual trial prosecutor. At 8:00 P.M., the second “shift” of twelve was scheduled to come in and continue through the night and then the next morning, until they got something.

  But now the room was empty.

  “Where is everybody?” Glitsky asked.

  “They’re all downstairs,” Lanier said. “They got the case number on Welding five minutes after you called. Finding the physical records isn’t so easy. It may be a while. He wasn’t in your original four hundred, you know.”

  “So he didn’t get out in the last two months,” Glitsky said.

  “Where’d they keep him?” Hardy asked.

  “Corcoran, according to the computer.”

  Hardy threw a glance at Glitsky, came back to Lanier. “And he’s out now?”

  “Pretty much got to be if he’s killing people, don’t you think?”

  Glitsky took Hardy’s silent cue. “We call, tie it up. If it turns out this guy is the Executioner, we want to know everything about him. The warden gets a wake-up.”

  Hardy and Lanier followed him around the corner to his office, where he flipped through his Rolodex and picked up the telephone. After a short wait, he identified himself by name and rank and said he needed a record on one of the prison’s inmates immediately. It was urgent.

  Glitsky listened for a while, then said, “Yes, I realize that. But if he’s the only one with that access at this time of night, then I need to talk to him.” Another pause while the scar in Glitsky’s lips went white. Then: “Could I get your name and rank, please? Thank you, Sergeant Gray. Listen, I could have the mayor of San Francisco call again in five minutes, and possibly even the governor after that, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble. I’ll take full responsibility.”

  Glitsky spelled his name, left his badge and telephone number, hung up. “I guess the warden likes his beauty rest,” he said.

  They heard the elevator and the scuffle of feet, and in a minute the small army of twelve volunteers had gathered again in the computer room. They’d brought up two large gray rolling trolleys, each about four by six feet wide and three feet high, and on them were piled what looked to be about twenty cardboard boxes. The lead guy, who was in uniform, saluted Glitsky. “This is the case, sir, or as much of it as we could find. Lucas Welding. Eighty-six. There’s no room and worse light down there, so we thought we’d bring it up. What are we looking for?”

  “The jurors,” Glitsky said. “Also, just to be thorough, let’s make sure Allan Boscacci tried the case.”

  Everyone, including Hardy, took a box and started going through the paper—endless, endless reams of paper, the complete record of a California murder trial. The boxes contained everything from the initial police reports to the autopsy and forensics information, to witness interviews, as well as all discovery, prosecution notes, expert witness testimony and background, the transcript of the trial itself. After fifteen minutes, one of the workers said, “I’ve got Boscacci. Here’s the what-do-you-call-it, the front page.”

  “The caption page,” Hardy said, although nobody looked up or seemed to care.

  Glitsky jumped, though, and was looking at it. “Okay. So far so good.” He flipped through a few of the following pages in that document, then closed it and handed the whole thing back. “Let’s keep going,” he said.

  A long twenty-five minutes after that, Lanier’s easy delive
ry broke the silence. “Here we go.” He was sitting across the table from Glitsky, and slid the document across, while everyone else—some from out in the reception area—stopped what they were doing to look.

  Glitsky read for a moment, then put a hand to his scar and pulled at it. “He’s the one,” he said in a hoarse and strangled tone. Then, clearing his throat, he read aloud. “Philip Wong, Michael Mooney, Edith Montrose, Morris Tollman.”

  “What about Elizabeth Cary?” Hardy asked.

  Glitsky looked down, nodded. “Elizabeth Reed. That was her maiden name.”

  “Jesus Christ,” someone whispered.

  “I doubt it,” Lanier said. “He wouldn’t have come back for a murder trial.” To a titter of nervous laughter.

  But Glitsky was already punching numbers into the phone on the desk, a muscle working in his jaw. While he was waiting, another phone rang in his office. “Diz. That’s the warden. Get it,” he ordered. “Tell him I’ll be right there.” Hardy jumped.

  “Marcel.” Glitsky handed Lanier the conference room phone he’d been using. “That’s Batiste. When he picks up, tell him what we’ve got and that I’ll be right back. Now or sooner we’re going to need eight teams at least, at least, to protect the people who are left.” He was moving back to his office. “And when you’re done, put out an all points on Welding ASAP.”

  In his own office, Glitsky strode in and grabbed the phone from Hardy. “Warden Fischer,” he said. “This is Glitsky. Thanks for getting back to me. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these Executioner killings we’ve been having . . . Okay, great. In the last hour or so, we’ve developed a tentative ID on the suspect and believe he was staying at your place until recently. We’re going to need all the information you have on him immediately—last known address, next of kin, the works. He went up in ’86, LWOP. I know. I wondered about that, too. Welding. W-E-L-D-I-N-G. Lucas. Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

  Hardy watched Glitsky’s face, already hard, turn to stone. The eyes narrowed, the lips went tight, the jaw muscle by his ear quivered. His hand went to his side and he pushed in as though trying to reposition his intestines. Then, for a long frozen moment, he ceased to move entirely. Finally, he asked, “You’re sure?” Then, “Yes, of course, I see. Thank you.”