The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  She waited, holding her breath. From Linda’s perspective, she knew that her words were probably close to indecipherable. But she hoped that Hal would understand her allusion and step in. And he did. “She’s right, hon,” he said. “You held his hand all weekend. He doesn’t need any more of that now. He needs some solid advice, legal advice. And Amy here is right. We need to talk, too, you and me.”

  “About what?”

  “This whole plea business.” At the mention of the topic again, Linda’s eyes went wide with surprise, perhaps with anger. But Hal cut off her reply. “I just said it needs to be discussed. It’s complicated.”

  “I don’t even like the sound of it,” Linda said.

  Wu stepped in. “That’s why I think it’s important that both of you talk. Meanwhile, this is when I need to go up and see Andrew.”

  Linda stood still for a moment, then nodded, turned and, without another word, walked off. Hal hung back another second. “Don’t fuck this one up, too,” he told her, then whirled and jogged after his wife.

  But before she went up to see Andrew, Wu knocked at the door to Johnson’s chambers and was told to enter. He was out of his robes now, standing at the side of the room, a golf club in his hand. “Ah, Ms. Wu. Just one second.” A black plastic contraption with a little blue flag in it popped a golf ball back across the rug, right to his feet, and he stopped it with his putter.

  What was it, Wu thought, with men and these games in their offices?

  She got right to her point. “Your honor, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you’ll want to know what happened in the courtroom just after you left the bench.”

  When she finished her description of Andrew’s mistreatment, Johnson sighed with resignation. “My bailiffs. I call them my two rays of sunshine. It’s a very little bit of a joke.”

  He leaned to pick up his ball. Pocketing it, replacing his putter in the golf bag next to his desk, he turned back to her and was all business. “Ms. Wu,” he said, “I realize you must be a bit disappointed at my ruling in there, although I don’t know what else you could have possibly expected. But given what you just told me—that Mr. Bartlett himself admitted that he got off-balance and fell—what do you expect me to do? The bailiffs are there to keep order in the courtroom. Sometimes—right after a prosecution verdict, for example, or a ruling like today—that takes some physical restraint. You’d be surprised. I’ve seen kids turn on their lawyers, even rush the bench. It happens. The bailiffs have to be, if not primed for action, then at least in a perpetually aggressive state of mind. You said your client was getting up, turning to get in physical contact with his mother. That can’t be allowed to occur.”

  “Your honor, did you see Mrs. North? She was coming up to hug her son. She wasn’t going to slip him a weapon.”

  “Maybe not, but you sure can’t treat people differently depending on what they look like, can you? It sounded to me like Officer Nelson applied a little force and your client lost his balance. And Cottrell? If anything, it sounds like he took your side.”

  Wu shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. It wasn’t like what had happened bothered him. He just wanted to avoid the hassle getting any bigger.”

  “Right.” Johnson raised a finger. “That’s because Officer Cottrell knows how to keep things under control up here. You know why? ’Cause he’s been on the other side.” At Wu’s questioning look, Johnson nodded. “This isn’t a secret. He’s been featured in several articles. When he was a kid, he was at that same table as your client, next to a defense attorney very much like you. He’s spent time in the cottages, so he knows how it works up there.”

  “The bailiff’s done time?”

  He nodded. “Juvenile time. He slid from a bad foster care situation into the juvie system. But he’s the success story—why we do this complicated fandango around rehabbing kids as opposed to punishing them. Sometimes it works. Often enough to make the effort worthwhile.”

  Wu thought back to the courtroom, to the look she’d gotten at Cottrell’s eyes, with their strange flat affect. She’d attributed it to a boredom with the bureaucratic routines of his job. But Johnson’s remarks struck a deeper chord. The long-term denizens of the legal system had learned, out of a sense of self-preservation, to live below the radar.

  Johnson, reading her mind, said, “Most of these guys, they know how to get by here. You’d be surprised how many juvenile veterans of the system get out and then when they grow up want to work in it. It’s where they’re comfortable. They know how things work. So if somebody like Cottrell goes proactive around a situation like today in the courtroom, my bet is it’s because he wants to keep things on an even keel between Nelson and your client. Not because he’s some super-aggressive sociopath.”

  “I didn’t say that, your honor. I didn’t even imply it. But the one bailiff—the other one, Nelson—it wasn’t as innocent as all that. I thought you’d just want to know.”

  “I do want to know,” Johnson said. “Of course I want to know. And I’m grateful that you thought to come and tell me.”

  This time, Wu got to the attorney visiting room before Andrew and so had a moment to take in some of its admittedly unpleasant flavor. It reminded her of nothing so much as the dean’s office at her old high school—linoleum floor, pitted green metal table in the center of the room, cork bulletin boards on both sides, a gray filing cabinet, that one window by the old-fashioned one-piece desk that Andrew had used earlier, a faint smell of disinfectant and sweat.

  Andrew came to the door, escorted by a bailiff Wu didn’t recognize. He wasn’t handcuffed, though, and after he’d taken a step inside the small room, he stopped, his head turning quickly from side to side. “Where’s my mom?” he asked.

  “Not here.” Wu kept the explanation unadorned.

  He let out some sort of disaffected grunt, shook his head, shrugged, and slouched over to his desk, throwing an arm over the back of it. Wu was aware that the bailiff had closed the door, leaving them alone. She looked back down to Andrew, who was busy barely acknowledging her. He tossed the brown hair that hung over his forehead, swiped at it with his hand. When he’d been in the courtroom, he’d appeared to be truly vulnerable and harmless. Here Wu saw him in a different, perhaps a truer, light. He was an angry young adult—tall, well-proportioned, muscular. Traces of acne and a few days’ worth of stubble added to the picture.

  Wu asked about his head, if it hurt where he’d cracked it against the floor. He told her it was fine. Staring down at his fingers, he scratched at the desk, the noise like a mouse scampering in drywall. She continued to stare down and across at him until eventually he looked up, brushed back his forelock again, crossed his arms over his chest.

  They held each other’s gaze.

  “So?” he said.

  Wu wasn’t about to put herself through the same discussion she’d just had with his parents. Neither was she inclined to start out on the defensive, so she took a deep breath and came right back at him. “So here’s the thing, Andrew. With what just happened down there, you might be starting to get the picture that you’re in a world of hurt. This isn’t some situation where you pay the fine and do community service like last time and it’s all over. This is murder. This is as serious as it gets.”

  Andrew started to open his mouth, “But I didn’t—”

  She cut him off. “Do it? Not the point right now. I heard you say it in court. Then I heard it again from your mother just now. Maybe we’ll get to it sometime, what you did or didn’t do. For the moment, though, we need to talk about the evidence they’ve got. You know what discovery is?”

  “Yeah. It’s when somebody finds something for the first time, like Columbus and America, that kind of thing.”

  The little shithead was being wise with her. She flared, her voice harsh. “Yeah, that’s right. Good guess.” She stood up, grabbed her briefcase, went to the locked door and knocked on it. “Guard!”

  Andrew tipped his desk over getting out of it. “What are
you doing?”

  She ignored him, knocked again. “Guard!”

  “Wait a minute!”

  This time the bailiff Cottrell came to the door, his face in the barred window. Wu said, “Open up,” and the sound of the key turning filled the room.

  “Where are you going? Wait a minute.”

  She whirled on him. “I don’t have a minute. Not for games. You don’t want to help me, fine, I’ll do it alone.”

  The guard stood waiting behind her, the door now ajar.

  “No, wait, please . . .”

  Wu motioned to the guard. The door closed. She turned around. “Get wise with me again, good-bye,” she said. She pulled a chair to the center table, hoisted her briefcase, sat down, stared at her client for a long moment. Eventually, he righted his own desk, squeezed into the seat, waited.

  An uneasy truce.

  “First,” she said, “let’s talk about what you’ve admitted and see where we are after that. You were in fact at Mr. Mooney’s the night it happened, practicing for a play. Then, sometime around nine o’clock, you left to walk around the neighborhood and memorize some lines you were having trouble with. You were gone for about a half hour.”

  “I was.”

  “Okay. Then when you got back, you saw what had happened and called nine one one.”

  “Right.”

  Wu came forward, elbows on the table between them. “But you didn’t wait for the police to come? Even though the dispatcher asked you to stay at the scene?”

  “I was right down the street.” He shifted where he sat, defensively, and Wu felt some gratification. At least Andrew knew that he’d done something wrong, that was certain. “I couldn’t handle waiting inside with both of them there.” His voice rose, more defensiveness. “What was I supposed to do? They were just . . . It didn’t matter. They weren’t going to move. Nothing changed in there.”

  Wu sat back with an exaggerated calm, crossed her own arms, leveled her eyes at him. “Okay, then. I think it’s time to talk about discovery. Leaving Columbus out of it.”

  Wu had her documents out on the table and she was popping Andrew pretty hard with some of the facts they contained. “So you say here in this interview that you and Laura were getting along great?”

  “Right.”

  Wu flipped to another page she’d marked. “Then how come, do you think, Laura’s mother says you were close to breaking up?”

  “I don’t know.” He squirmed. “Okay, maybe we were having some troubles, but nothing big.”

  “Having some troubles isn’t really the same as getting along great, though, is it?” She pressed him. “So you lied about it. Why didn’t you want the police to know?”

  “That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Then he added, “But I didn’t know they’d talked to Laura’s mom.”

  “That’s not why you lied, Andrew,” she said. “It’s why you thought you could get away with the lie.” She paused, then continued almost gently. “They talk to everybody, Andrew. Don’t you understand that yet? Everybody. Family, friends, friends of friends, neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers, students, teachers—you name it. And everybody’s got a story. When it doesn’t agree with yours, guess who looks bad?”

  But Andrew was shaking his head. “Still, no way they can prove I did this,” he said. “I haven’t told that many lies. Maybe some small ones.”

  “You mean like your car? You call that a small one?”

  He threw a glance at the ceiling, then leaned onto the back legs of his chair. Lifting then dropping his shoulders, he stared into emptiness.

  Wu found her place in the documents, read silently, then raised her eyes to his. “When the police arrived, Andrew, you told them you’d walked to the rehearsal that night. You remember that? You don’t call that a lie?”

  “I couldn’t have them go look at the car right then. I went down to it after I called them.”

  “You mean after your nine one one call?”

  “Yeah. To get away from the scene. I already told you I couldn’t stand being in the room with them.”

  Wu clasped her hands in front of her. “So instead of waiting just outside Mooney’s door for the police to arrive, you walked—what, a block or two?—back to your car.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And why, again, did you do that?”

  He moved his hair out of his eyes. “I already told you, I . . .”

  Bam! She slapped down hard on the table between them. “Cut the shit, Andrew! Right now!” She raised a finger and pointed it at him. “You went to the car to get rid of the gun and you lied to the cops because you didn’t want them to look where you’d hidden it. Isn’t that it?”

  He stared at her, openmouthed. Wu had truly frightened him now. For the truth was that she hadn’t read anywhere in discovery that Andrew had ever mentioned the gun that night. She had read nearly all of the eyewitness testimony and had come to the conclusion that he’d just gotten rid of it. And now his terrified visage verified that she’d guessed right.

  Andrew’s hand again went to his forehead. “How do you know about that?”

  “The same way the police do, Andrew. They know there was a gun left in the room after the shooting, and—”

  “But how could they know it?”

  “The upstairs neighbor told them.”

  “Who’s he? How did he know about any gun?”

  “His name’s Juan Salarco. Another witness the cops managed to talk to. Also, you might like to know, he’s the man who picked you out of the lineup.”

  “I don’t even know the guy.”

  She pulled some copied and stapled pages from one of her folders, held them up for him to see. “You want to read his statement to the police, or should I just give you the highlights?” But it wasn’t really a question and she didn’t wait for an answer. “He and his wife happened to hear the shots and right after they both saw you leave—”

  “They saw me leave? Right after the shots?”

  She nodded. “Both of ’em.”

  “Then they’re lying. They’ve got to be lying.”

  She had him running now, badly scared, and this served her purpose. Time to hit him again, make him begin to see how really bad it was. “Lying or not, the fact remains that Mr. Salarco did call nine one one from the phone at Mooney’s place”—she looked down at the pages—“exactly six minutes and forty seconds before you called from the same phone. And he later told Sergeant Taylor that while he was there making the emergency call, he saw a gun on the coffee table, which wasn’t there when the first police unit arrived.”

  Now she leaned forward, her eyes boring into his. “Do the math, Andrew. Only one person could have taken and hidden the gun, and that’s you. You took it to your car to get rid of it later, and that’s why you had to lie. And that’s not a small lie. It’s a whopper.”

  Ray Nelson escorted Andrew back to his cell, while Cottrell led Wu down the corridor in the other direction. At the door to the cabins, he held the door open for her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “That turn out all right?”

  She stopped in mild surprise.

  “You weren’t in there too long before you wanted out,” he said. “Sometimes that’s a bad sign.”

  “We just had to establish a few ground rules,” she said. “After that it went fine.”

  He was walking next to her on the short path that led down to the razor-wire gate. “He doesn’t want to admit, does he?”

  They’d come to the gate and she stopped and turned to face him. The walkway wasn’t very wide. She looked up into his face. “I can’t really discuss that, you know. I’m sorry.”

  “Sure. I understand.” He unlocked the gate, pulled it open for her. “That’s the hardest part, realizing you’re really in. You’re not getting out and going home with Mom and Dad.”

  “Yes, well . . .”

  He held up a hand, perhaps an apology, if one was needed, that he’d made her uncomfortable. “Just ma
king conversation,” he said. “Have a nice day, Ms. . . . ?”

  Wu realized that she didn’t need to be such a hard-ass. She extended a hand, offered a smile. “I’m sorry, my mind’s still back in there. Amy Wu.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too. Well, I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other.”

  “I’ll watch out for your boy.”

  She briefly met his eyes. “I’d appreciate that,” she said. “He might need it. Thank you.”

  6

  Am I interrupting?” Wu asked.

  Hardy looked up from the billing and utilization numbers report, one of several similar management tools that Norma gave him every week for his review and comments—good enough numbers, but numbers nevertheless. He jumped at the opportunity to leave them, closing the folder, motioning with his hand. “I was hoping you’d make it back today.”

  “Actually, I’ve been back awhile, hunkered down in my office.” Wu motioned behind her. “I waited until Attila abandoned her post out there.”

  “Probably a good idea.” He pushed his chair back from his desk, stood up and stretched, moved toward the bar counter. “You want some coffee, a beer, water, a rare old Bordeaux?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Just as well,” Hardy said. “I don’t have any rare old Bordeaux. David did, though. About this time of day, I’d often come down and he’d be halfway through a bottle of something outrageous.”

  “You miss him a lot, don’t you?”

  Hardy opened the refrigerator, then straightened up. He turned to her and nodded. “Yeah, I do.” Then, shrugging with some awkwardness, he reached down and grabbed a bottled water, turned back again. “So how’d it go?”

  Wu lowered herself onto the couch. “Not perfectly, I’m afraid. The judge—Johnson—detained him.”