Only four minutes remained in sixteen-year-old Laura Wright's life as she came out of the bathroom of the small apartment on Beaumont Street in San Francisco. Her eyes glistened with the residue of recent tears. But in the bathroom she'd splashed water over her face and washed away the smeared mascara and makeup, and now her skin glowed. A damp tendril of blond hair hung over a broad, unlined forehead.
She walked through the tiny living room and over to where Mr. Mooney, her drama coach, leaned over the kitchen table, making some notes in his neat hand in the margins of the script they were rehearsing. At her approach, he straightened up. In the brighter light of the kitchen, Laura's eyes picked up some of the turquoise in her blouse.
Mooney wore a kind face, projected an easy manner. Ten years before he'd been leading man material and now, though still trim and good-looking in a conventional way, his hair had thinned and gone slightly gray, a hint of jowl marred his jawline. He smiled down at her.
"Better?" he asked.
She nodded, still too emotional to trust herself with her voice.
The two stood facing each other for a moment, and then Laura reached out her hands and stepped into him. After a minute, her shoulders began to shake and Mooney, holding her, moved his hands over her back, the smooth fabric of the silk. "It's all right," he said. "It's going to be all right."
"I know. I know it will be." Her face was buried into the hollow of his neck.
"It is now," Mooney said.
She nodded again. "I know. Just… just thank you." She stepped back, a little away, and looked up at him. "I didn't mean to get this way."
"The way you are is fine. I'm just glad you found the courage to tell somebody. Holding that inside can be so hard."
"I figured I could trust you."
"You figured right."
"I know, but… what was that?"
Mooney crossed to the window, looked out to the street. "Nobody. Nothing."
Laura sighed, a deep exhalation. "I didn't think Andrew could be back already. I don't know if I'm ready to face him. He'll be upset if he finds out I told you first. I mean, it's his baby, too. Maybe I can just say I started crying right after he left and you asked what was wrong…"
"Which is exactly what happened."
She nodded. "I know. But Andrew's been a little funny about you and me."
"You and me? What about you and me?"
"Our relationship. Yours and mine. We actually broke up about it once."
Mooney had to suppress a laugh. "About what, exactly?"
"He thought I had a crush on you. I did, in fact."
"You had a crush on me?"
"When we started the play, yeah, rehearsing here. A little. He was just so jealous, and then I got so mad when he accused me."
"Of what?"
"You know. Having a thing with you."
Now Mooney did allow a small chuckle. "Well, by now I hope he knows that didn't happen. And besides, this is about you. It's your body. You get to decide what to do." A pause. "And you know, it might not be the worst idea in the world to talk to your parents."
"No way," she said, shaking her head. "They'd kill me. They wouldn't want to be bothered. Trust me, this I know." Her eyes began to well up again.
Mooney stepped near to her and brushed a tear where it had fallen onto her cheek. "It's okay," he said. "In a few months this will all be behind you. It's just getting through the tough part."
"I so hope you're right. I feel like such a fool for letting this happen. I mean, it was just the one time."
"It only takes once." Mooney spoke gently. "You might want to keep that in mind, though, in the future."
"Don't worry," she said. "It's locked in." But again her composure slipped. Tears still threatening, she stood looking helplessly up at him. "Do you think I could get one more hug?"
"As a special request, one short one." He put his arms around her.
She pressed herself against him, squeezed hard, then all but jumped back out of his embrace as a knock came on the door. "Oh God," she said. "There's my great timing again. That's got to be Andrew. What if he saw us?"
Mooney held her at arm's length. "Laura," he said, "Andrew's a great guy. You don't have to worry about him, and even if he saw us, he knows you love him. Really. You just take care of yourself and do what you have to do and everything will be fine. I promise."
Mooney didn't know it, but his last words were a lie. Another knock sounded, and he moved to get the door.
Hello."
"Amy Wu, please."
"This is Amy."
"You sleeping? I wake you up?"
"No. Just lying down for a minute."
"So Friday afternoon, you're not at work?"
"No. Right. I'm not feeling too well. Who is this anyway?"
"Hal North. You remember me."
"Of course, Mr. North. How are you? How'd you get my home number?"
"You gave it to us last time, remember?"
"Right. That's right. I gave it to you. So how can I help you?"
"Andrew's in trouble again."
"I'm sorry to hear that. What kind of trouble?"
"Big trouble. The police just came and arrested him for murder. You still there?"
"Yeah. Did you say murder? Andrew?"
"Yeah, I know. But right. Two of 'em, actually."
"I'm sorry. Two of what?"
"What did I just say? You paying attention? Murders. His teacher and his girlfriend."
"Where is he now?"
"They took him to jail. I mean, to the Youth Guidance Center. He's still not eighteen, or it would have been the jail."
"Is that where you're calling from, the YGC?"
"No. Me and Linda, we got a benefit tonight, so we're still home for another two hours at least. We could probably be late to the thing and make it three if you…"
"I could be over in, say, a half hour."
"Good. We'll be looking for you."
Wu checked herself in the bathroom mirror. No amount of makeup was going to camouflage the swollen bags under her eyes. Half-Chinese and half-black, Wu had a complexion that was dark enough as it was, and when exhaustion got the better of her, the hollows around her eyes deepened. Now, between the crying jags, the lack of sleep and the hangover, Wu thought she looked positively haggard, at least a decade older than her thirty years. Why guys would hit on her looking like this, she didn't know, but there didn't seem to be a shortage of them, not since she'd started going out almost every night to find whatever the hell she was seeking in the four months since her father died.
Still, prepping herself to visit Hal North, she did her best to make herself presentable. It wouldn't do to look unprofessional. This was a legal matter, and she knew the potential client had made millions from his chain of multiplex movie theaters. At least he had been worth millions a couple of years ago, when Hal North's corporate attorney- a classmate from law school- had recommended Wu for criminal work and she'd represented his stepson Andrew for a minor joyride beef. She'd gotten him off with a fine and some community service. The fees at her hourly rate had come to a little under two thousand dollars, but when the judge came down with his wrist-slap judgment, North wrote her a check for ten grand. She wasn't sure if she should be flattered or insulted that he assumed he should tip his lawyer.
From now on, North had said in his forceful manner, she was his lawyer, that was all there was to it. Andrew, who'd been sullen and distant throughout the entire proceeding, even broke a rare smile and concurred. She'd told them both that though she was flattered that they liked her work, all in all it would be better if the family wouldn't need a criminal lawyer ever again. They both conceded that she probably had a point.
She lay down on the bed for two minutes, timed, with ice wrapped in a dish towel over her eyes. When she got up, she dried her face and started applying eyeshadow, mascara, lipstick. Her hand was steady enough, which was a nice surprise. This morning, brushing her teeth after she'd gotten home from whatever-his-name's place a little after dawn, she'd dropped the toothbrush twice before she'd given up, called work for the fouth time in four months- very bad- to say she was sick, and crashed.
For a moment she considered calling North back and making another appointment for tomorrow. After all, the Norths had a benefit tonight- it came back to her now, they always had something going on- and they'd be in a rush. And she really did feel horrible. She wouldn't be as sharp as she liked. But hell, that was getting to be the norm, wasn't it? No sleep, no focus.
She hated herself for it, but she couldn't seem to stop feeling that it didn't matter anyway. Of course it mattered, she told herself. As her old boss David Freeman never tired of saying, the law was a sacred and beautiful thing. And Wu hadn't dreamt of a career in it for five years, then studied it for three, and now have worked in it for five only to lose her faith and become cynical about it. That wasn't who she was, not at her core. But it was who she acted like- and felt like- all too often lately.
The truth was- her bad angels kept telling her- that you didn't really have to be as much on your game as she'd always taken as gospel, since law school. She'd proven that clearly enough in the past four months, when she'd essentially sleepwalked through no fewer than ten court appearances. No one- not even her see-all boss Dismas Hardy- had alluded to any problems with her work. She could mail it in, which was lucky, since that's what she had been doing.
The clients were always guilty anyway. It wasn't as though you were trying to get them off, cleanly acquitted. No, what you did was you squeezed a little here, flirted with a DA there, got a tiny bit of a better deal, and everybody was generally happy. That was the business she was in. It was a business, and she'd come to understand how it worked.
Mr. North had said that his son had been charged with murder, and if this were true, it would be her first. But her experience led her to believe that it probably wouldn't turn out to be a righteous murder, charged as such. If it wasn't simply confusion with another person, at worst an accident, it was probably some kind of manslaughter. And of course the Norths would want to get an attorney on board. If Wu went over now, at least she would get a feel for the case, some of the salient details. It would give her the weekend to get her hands on some discovery, if it was available yet.
And if she could keep herself straight and productive for two whole days in a row.
The Norths' home was a beauty near the Embassy Row section of Clay Street in Pacific Heights. Old trees shaded the sidewalks on both sides, and most of the residences hid behind some barrier- a hedge or fence or stucco wall.
At a few minutes past four o'clock, Wu got out of her car to push the button on the green-tinged brass plate built into the faux-adobe post that held the swinging grille gate to the driveway. When she identified herself, she heard a soft click, then a whirr, and the gate swung open.
For all of the security, there was very little actual room between the gate and the house. Wu got inside, then turned left before she came to the garage. The driveway was quite narrow as it passed in front of the house, but widened into a larger circle near the entryway, and this was where she parked, the area deep in shadow. Getting out of her car, she could see blue sky above her through the trees and hear a steady shush of April breeze, but here in this small leafy enclosure, it was still. Briefcase in hand, she drew a breath, closed her eyes for an instant to gather herself, then went around her car, up the steps to the semi-enclosed brick porch, and rang the bell.
Hal North was in his early fifties, a short, wiry man who tended to dress, as he talked, loudly. Today he answered the door in a canary yellow, open-necked shirt that revealed a robust growth of chest hair into which was nestled a thick gold chain; white slacks; penny loafers with no socks. He hadn't aged one week since Wu had seen him last. He wore his thick black hair short and basically uncombed- the tousled look. His face was not-unattractive, slab-sided with a strong nose and piercing blue eyes that sized Wu up afresh as he crushed her hand. "Thanks for coming," he said. "You don't look too sick." He backed away a step. "You remember Linda."
"Sure." Wu stepped over the threshhold and extended her hand. "Nice to see you again, Mrs. North."
Linda North was at least three inches taller than Hal and in another age would have been called a bombshell. Blond, buxom, thin and long-legged, she had always struck Wu as one of those freak-of-nature women over whom age and experience seem to pass without leaving a scar, a line, a trace. Though Wu knew that she was somewhere close to either side of forty- she'd delivered Andrew when she was just a year out of high school- in her jeans and tennis shoes and men's T-shirt, with her hair back in a ponytail, she looked about seventeen herself.
"Ellie's got some coffee going." Hal was already moving, shooing the women before him down the short hallway from the foyer into the dining room. "Ellie!" He pushed open the door to the adjoining kitchen. "In here, okay?" He turned around, motioning to the women. "Sit, sit. She'll be right in." He pulled a chair next to his wife and sat in it, threw a last look at the kitchen door where Ellie would presumably soon appear, then came back to Wu. "Really," he said, "we appreciate you coming out."
"We just can't believe this is happening," Linda said. "It's just a total shock. I mean, out of nowhere."
"You didn't expect something like this?"
"Never," Linda said.
"Complete blindside." Hal was shaking his head, his lips tight. "They kept saying Andrew wasn't a suspect."
"They always say that. You know why? So you might not think you need to have a lawyer with him." She paused. "So I'm assuming you let him talk to the police?"
"Of course," Linda said. "We thought it would help to be as cooperative as we could."
The couple exchanged a glance.
"Why don't we start by you telling me what has happened," Wu said, "starting from the beginning, the crime." She turned to Hal. "You said he's accused of killing his teacher and his girlfriend?"
Linda answered for her husband. "Mike Mooney and Laura Wright. They were in the school play and…"
"What school?"
"Sutro."
Wu wasn't surprised to hear this. Among the city's private schools, Sutro was a common choice among people with real money. "Okay, they were in the school play…"
"Yes," Linda said. "Andrew and Laura were the leads, and they'd been rehearsing nights at Mr. Mooney's house rather than the school. Then, the night it happened, somebody just came and shot them down. Luckily, Andrew had gone out for a walk to memorize his lines and wasn't there when it happened or he might've been shot, too."
Luckily or too conveniently, Wu thought. But she moved along. "And Andrew got arrested when?"
"They came by about twelve-thirty, one o'clock. School is out for spring break. And they just took him."
"I was at work," Hal said, "or I would have tried to slow them down, at least."
"Then it's probably better you weren't here." Wu was sitting beyond Linda at the table and could see them both at once. "When did the crimes happen?"
"February." Linda said. "Mid-February."
Wu's face showed her confusion.
"What's the problem?" Hal asked her.
"I guess I don't understand how two months have gone by and all that time, with the police coming by, neither of you thought Andrew was a suspect?"
"He said he didn't do it," Linda said, as though that answered the question. "I know he didn't. He couldn't have."
Ellie came through the door and the conversation stopped while she set out the coffee service. As soon as the door to the kitchen closed back behind her, Wu began again. "Mrs. North, you just said that Andrew couldn't have done these killings. Why not? Do you mean he physically couldn't have done them because, for example, he wasn't there? Does he have an alibi? I mean, beyond the walk he took."
"But he did go for that walk," Linda said. "There's no doubt about that. Besides," she added, "Andrew's just not that kind of person."
Wu's experience was that anyone- if sufficiently motivated- could be driven to kill. And Hal, she'd noticed, had stopped talking, was looking down into his coffee cup. "Mr. North," she said, "why'd they decide just now, after two months, and after they'd talked to Andrew several times? Did something new come up? Do you have any ideas?"
He raised his eyes to her, made a face. "Well, the gun," he whispered.
"That's nothing!" Linda's eyes flared and her voice snapped. "That's not even been definitely connected to Andrew."
Hal, muzzled, shut up and shrugged at Wu, who then spoke gently to Linda. "I don't believe I've heard anything yet about a gun."
She was prepared to answer. "This was early on, in the first week or so. The police asked Hal if we owned any guns, and Hal told them he had an old registered weapon…"
"Nine-millimeter Glock semi-auto," Hal said.
Again, Linda snapped. "Whatever. And when Hal went to find it, he couldn't." She turned to her husband. "But you know you're always misplacing things. It didn't mean Andrew took it."
Wu touched Linda's arm. "But the police think he did?"
Linda looked at Hal, who answered for her. "They found a casing in his car."
"So what?" Wu asked "Without the gun, you can't have a ballistics test."
"It was just a random piece of junk under the seat," Linda said. "It might have been there forever. It was nothing."
Wu tried to look sympathetic. "So the police didn't specifically refer to that when they came today?"
"No. They just said he was under arrest. They had enough evidence, they said. Something about a lineup," she added.
"He stood in a lineup? You let him do that? Who was trying to identify him?"
Hal North bristled. "I don't know. Some witness. Someone identifying Andrew, obviously."
"And wrongly," Linda said.
"Although," Wu phrased it gently, "as you say, he was there at Mooney's place. So someone might have seen him. Yes?"
"Yes, but…" Linda slapped at the table.
Hal reached out and put a hand over hers. "Look," he said to Wu, "we're not sure why any of this is happening. We don't think Andrew did this."
Linda slapped the table again. "We know he didn't do this."
"Okay, okay, that's what I meant," Hal said. He turned to Wu. "But they must have built a pretty impressive case against him if they got all the way to arresting him, wouldn't you think?"
Wu more than thought it. They had a case, and- since Andrew was the son of a wealthy and prominent man- it was probably a strong one. A gun in the house, a casing in Andrew's car, a positive lineup identification. What she had here, she was beginning to believe, was a young man who'd made an awful mistake.
"What are you thinking?" Hal asked her abruptly.
"Nothing," Wu said. "It's too soon. I don't know anything yet."
"You know he's innocent," Linda said. "We know that."
"Of course," Wu said. "Other than that, though."
By Sunday afternoon, when she met with Hal North again, Wu knew that they had a substantial problem. She also thought she had a solution.
This time it was just she and Hal in the large, bright, and high-ceilinged living room. Hal sat in the middle of a loveseat while Wu perched on a couch.
Linda had gone to visit Andrew and would be gone for at least two hours.
Wu had been lucky to get a couple of folders of discovery on Andrew's case from the DA's office before close of business on Friday. She had spent all day Saturday going over what the police had assembled. It looked very, very bad.
"What's so bad?" North asked.
Wu sat all the way forward on the couch, hunched over in tension. Her folders rested unopened on the coffee table in front of her. "Where do you want to start? It could be almost anywhere. They've got a good case."
"It looks like he did it?"
"Do you know anything beyond what we talked about on Friday?"
North shrugged. "I figured the gun was a problem, but I didn't know how they'd tied that to him. They didn't find it, did they?"
"No. Still no weapon, but there's plenty in here"- she tapped the folders-"to prove to me that he had the gun with him that night. You want me to go over it piece by piece?"
North waved impatiently. "I don't need it. If you're convinced, it'll be good enough for a jury." He slammed a palm against the side of his seat. "I knew he took it, goddamn it. I knew he was lying to me." Smoldering, North sat forward with his shoulders hunched, his elbows resting on his knees, head down. Finally, he looked up at Wu. "What about the lineup?"
"The man upstairs saw him leave just after the shots. Positive ID."
North slumped again, shook his head from side to side wearily, came back up to face her. "So he did it." Not a question.
"Well, maybe he wasn't taking that walk to rehearse his lines, let's say that."
"Jesus. This is going to kill Linda."
"She really believes him?"
"We're talking faith here, not reason. I thought that alibi story was like the ultimate in lame myself, but once Andrew came up with it, he had to stick to it. I just wish he would have invented something else, almost anything else." North shook himself all over, then straightened his back and threw Wu a determined, pugnacious look. "Okay, Counselor, what do we do now?"
Wu was ready for the question, and suddenly glad that Linda wasn't here. Hal would play much more into her plan that she'd reluctantly come to believe was the boy's best hope- albeit a defeatist and cynical one because it was based on the absolute fact of Andrew's guilt.
As a good lawyer with a difficult case before her- hell, as a good person- she knew she should have been consumed with getting Andrew off. That was in many ways the definition of what her job was all about. Give her client the best defense the law allowed. And myriad defenses- insanity, psychiatric, diminished capacity, some form of self-defense or manslaughter- were always available, a veritable smorgasbord of reasons that homicide could be if not forgiven entirely, then mitigated. But all of those defenses and strategies involved huge expense for her client's family, a year or more of her life's commitment, and tremendous risk to her client should she fail, or even not completely succeed.
On the other hand, assuming that Andrew was guilty in actual fact (and every other client she'd ever defended had been), Wu knew that she could get him a deal that would give him a life after he turned twenty-five years old, eight years from now. And this when the best result she could reasonably expect under the other various defense scenarios was ten years- and probably many, many more.
And so, though it was a terrible choice, she had convinced herself that, all things considered, it was the best possible strategy in these circumstances. "I think our primary goal," she said, "ought to be to keep Andrew in the juvenile system, not let them try him as an adult."
"Why would they do that? He's not eighteen. It's eighteen, right?"
"Right. At eighteen, it's automatic, he's an adult. But that doesn't mean the DA can't charge younger people. It's a discretionary call."
"Depending on what?"
"The criminal history of the person charged, the seriousness of the crime, some other intangibles." She took a breath, held it a moment, let it out. "I have to tell you, I've already talked to the chief assistant DA- his name's Allan Boscacci- and as of this moment, they're planning to file Andrew as an adult."
"Why? That makes no sense. This is his first real offense. He's a little hard to talk to sometimes, okay, but it's not like he's some kind of hardened criminal or anything."
"Yeah, but two killings, point-blank. Pretty serious. They're even talking special circumstances. Multiple murders, in fact, again, it's automatic."
"Special circumstances? You're not talking the death penalty?"
"No, you can't get that no matter what if you're under eighteen at the time of the offense."
North quickly cast his eyes around the room. "Okay, so what happens when he's an adult? Different, I mean."
Wu knew she had to deliver it straight and fast. If she was going to get North to agree with her strategy, she had to make it look as bad as she could for Andrew as quickly as possible. "A couple of major issues. First, most importantly, if he's an adult, life without parole is in play. If he's a juvenile, it's not. The worst he can get as a juvenile is up to age twenty-five in a juvie facility."
But North, not too surprisingly, was struck by the worst-case scenario. "Jesus Christ! Life without parole. You've got to be shitting me."
"No, sir. If he's convicted."
"Okay, then, he doesn't get convicted. Last time you got him off clean. It's not even on his record."
"Last time, sir, with all respect, he borrowed a car for half an hour. That's a long way from murder."
"Yeah, but I'm paying you to get him off. You can't do that, I'll find me somebody else who can."
Wu expected this- denial, anger, threats. She held her ground. "You might find somebody who'll say they can." She fixed him with a firm gaze. "They'd be blowing smoke up your ass."
"You're saying you can't do it?"
"No, sir, I'm not saying that. If that's your decision, I'll sure try. I might succeed, like I did before. Get him a reduced sentence, maybe even an acquittal. But nobody- and I mean nobody- can predict how a trial's going to come out. Anybody who says different is a liar. And the risks in this case, given just the evidence we've seen so far, are enormous." She reined herself in, took a deep breath. "What I can do, maybe, is avoid the adult disposition. If Andrew goes as a juvenile, the worst case is he's in custody at the youth farm- which is way better than state prison, believe me- until he turns twenty-five. Then he's free, with his whole life still in front of him."
"Okay, so how do you do that? Avoid the adult disposition?"
"Well, that's both our problem and our solution. To have any chance of convincing the DA at all, we'd have to tell him Andrew would admit the crime."
North snorted. "That I'd like to see. That's not happening."
Wu shrugged and waited, content to let the concept work on him. North did his quick scan of the room again, sat back in his loveseat, frowned. Finally, he met her eyes, shook his head. "No fucking way," he said.
"Okay."
"Shit."
"Yes, sir."
"I'll never get Linda to go for that. She'll never believe he did it."
"All right. But what do you believe?"
"I don't know what I believe. The kid and I never bonded really well, you know what I mean. I don't know him. He's all right, I guess. I love his mother, I'd kill for her, but the kid's a mystery. But whether he could kill somebody…" He shrugged, helpless. "I don't know. I guess I think it's possible. I'd bet he's lying about the walk he took. I know he took my gun, and he's lying about that, too. And why'd he take it if he wasn't going to use it?"
"That's a good question." Wu kept her responses low-key, not wanting to push. North, she was sure, would come to his conclusions on his own. As she had. At least that Andrew's situation looked bad enough to make the risks of an adult trial not worth taking. Still, in a matter-of-fact tone, she said, "They don't usually arrest innocent people, sir. No matter what you see in the movies." Then she added, "I'm not saying Andrew is guilty, but last time, if you remember, he started out saying he never took the car. Never drove in it at all. Didn't know what the cops were talking about. He swore to it."
"Just like now." North was slumped back in his chair, his palm up against the side of his head. "This is going to kill Linda," he said again.
"Well, if he really isn't guilty…" Wu let the words hang.
North shook his head. "Even if he isn't, how's a jury going to like the eyewitness and the gun and the motive? Jealousy, right?"
Wu had read the testimony of one of Andrew's friends, alluding to the jealousy motive- he evidently thought the teacher and his girlfriend were at least on the verge of starting- if not engaged in- an affair. But it was the first time North had mentioned anything about it, and the independent, unsolicited confirmation was a bit chilling.
Still, Wu restrained herself from trying to convince. She believed that forceful men like Hal North stuck far more tenaciously with decisions that they reached on their own. So she changed tack. "Here's the thing, Mr. North. He's up at the YGC now, they haven't filed against him as an adult yet, so practically speaking he's being treated as a juvenile. They have to hold what's called a detention hearing right away- I've already checked and it's tomorrow- to decide if they're going let Andrew go back home under your supervision."
"No reason they shouldn't do that."
Except for the fact that he's killed two people, she thought. But she only let out a breath and said, "In any case, as long as he's considered a juvenile, administratively they've got to have this detention hearing. That might give you some time, not much admittedly, to walk through some of these other issues with Linda, and even with Andrew."
He shook his head. "No, she'll talk to him, but maybe I can make her see what's happening."
Wu drew another breath and came out with it. She was going to need her client's approval before she took her next gamble, and this was the moment. "In light of everything we've been talking about here, Mr. North, I'd very much like to try to keep him in the juvenile system and avoid an adult trial if there's any way at all to do it, but that means he admits guilt right now. Immediately. Not maybe. I tell the DA he will admit and clear the case, in return they let him stay in juvenile court."
He sat stone still for a long beat, then nodded once.
Ambiguous enough, but Wu took it as an acceptance. "Do you think you can get your wife to go along with that? I want you to understand clearly that if Andrew admits, there won't be a trial, either in juvie or adult court. He'll just be sentenced. But the worst sentence he could get is the youth farm until he turns twenty-five."
"Eight years," he said. His shoulders slumped around him. "Eight years. Jesus Christ."
"That's the maximum. The actual sentence may be less. With the crowding at the youth work farms and time off for good behavior, he might not be as old when he gets out as when he'd finish college."
North may have been starting to see it, but the pill wasn't getting any less bitter. He rubbed his hand against the slab of his cheek. "Still, we're talking years."
Wu nodded soberly. "Yes, sir. But compared to the rest of his life. Even if I could plead him to a lesser charge as an adult- say second degree murder or manslaughter- he'll do at least double that time." She came forward. "And it would be in an adult prison, which is like it appears in the movies. But if we can get him declared a juvenile, which is not certain…"
"It seems to me we've got to do that. At least try for it."
"I can do it, but I'll have to move quickly." She consciously repeated herself. "You might want to talk to Linda first."
He gave it another few seconds of thought, then nodded again, spoke as if to himself. "Andrew's stubborn, but he'll come around when he sees the alternative. If he goes adult and gets convicted, Linda couldn't handle it. She really couldn't." Tortured, he looked across at her. "So what do we do?"
"I'm afraid that's got to be your decision."
He blew out heavily in frustration. "And when is this filing decision, adult or juvie?"
"Soon. It might have already happened, except that Andrew got arrested on a Friday afternoon and Boscacci is off on the weekend. But by sometime tomorrow morning, probably."
"Tomorrow morning?" His eyes seemed to be looking into hers for some reprieve, but the situation as they both sat there seemed to keep getting worse. "And once a decision comes down, then what? I mean, is it appealable or something?"
"You mean, once he's declared an adult? No. Then he's an adult."
"God damn." He shook his head, side to side, side to side. "This isn't possible." At last, he seemed to gather himself. "So if they decide he's an adult tomorrow, we're screwed?"
"Well, we go to trial, yes."
"But you might be able to talk to this guy Boscacci before then?"
"I'd call him at home today if you want me to."
"And that gives us a better deal?"
She phrased it carefully. "Less of a potential downside, let's say that."
"And that's definite. I mean, we go juvie, he's out at twenty-five?"
"Yes, sir."
"That's the best deal we can get, don't you think?"
"As a sure thing? Yes, sir, all else being equal, I do. But I don't want to hurry you in any way. This is a huge decision and right now Andrew stands presumed innocent. If he admits, that changes."
North shook his head, dismissing that concern. His stepson, with whom communication was so difficult, who'd screwed up so many times before, had done it again. He was a constant burden and strain, and now he was putting his mother through more and more heartache. But North couldn't yet admit out loud what he might believe, and so he simply said, "He might be innocent, okay, but tell me there's a jury in the world that's going to see it." A sigh. "At least he'll have a life afterwards, when he gets out."
Wu watched the second hand on the mantel clock move through ninety degrees, then spoke in a gentle tone. "So do you want me to see what I can do?"
A last, long, agonizing moment. Then: "Yeah, I think you've got to."
Sitting back on the couch, she let herself sink into the deep cushions. "Okay," she said. "Okay."
Deputy Chief of Investigations Abe Glitsky was sitting in his old office in homicide on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. He was talking to the detail's lieutenant, Marcel Lanier. When another old homicide chief, Frank Batiste, had finally been appointed chief of police the previous summer, he'd rewarded Glitsky, his longtime colleague, with the plum job of deputy chief. Though Glitsky's civil service rank was lieutenant, for the year preceding his appointment he had labored unhappily in a sergeant's position as head of payroll. Now, as deputy chief, and still a civil service lieutenant, Glitsky supervised captains and commanders and, of course, every one of the two hundred and forty police inspectors in the city.
As deputy chief, Glitsky's role was important but nebulous. The Investigations Bureau had taken a very public hit about six months before, when the Chronicle had run a weeklong feature exposing the fact that of all the nation's largest cities, San Francisco came in dead last for its police record in arresting criminals and solving crimes of all types.
The article had revealed that during the previous four years, over 80 percent of all crimes committed in the city had gone unsolved. Many criminal acts, even violent ones such as street muggings, were never investigated at all, and with others- residential burglaries and the like- the investigation would consist of one inspector making one phone call to the victim, asking if anyone would like to come down to the Hall of Justice and file a report on what was missing. Though the scathing report had not yet seen print at the time, Batiste had of course been aware of the dismal numbers, the lackluster performance, and generally low morale of the department as a whole, and he'd brought Glitsky on to galvanize the bureau, to kick ass and take names, and above all to see that more bad guys actually found themselves arrested.
It was true that many inspectors had fallen into bad habits, but this was not always because they didn't care about their jobs. In many cases, budget cuts to the PD had eliminated overtime pay for interviewing witnesses or writing up incidents. More systemically, a culture had arisen in the DA's office- Sharron Pratt's legacy- that placed a premium only on cases where the evidence was so overwhelming that a conviction could be guaranteed, and that encouraged assistant district attorneys to ask officers not to arrest suspects until they had the strongest possible case. If they had a guy cold on one count, for example, they should wait until they could get him for three or four, as that would make conviction more likely. This kept that particular scumbag out on the street, when in most other big cities he would already have been locked up.
Glitsky's first few months on the job had been characterized by his rather forceful presence working over the bureau, collaring inspectors in the Hall and even patrolmen in the precincts or out in the streets on surprise inspections. He'd put a friendly and unbreakable armlock on one of his troops and get right in his face. "I know you've got suspects and you're waiting till they do something more. But I say let's put 'em in jail. And I mean today!"
Glitsky also set an example by showing up at work no later than seven-thirty and staying until at least six o'clock, and not putting in for overtime. He believed that the badge was a calling and a public responsibility more than it was a job. He made it clear to the people under him that they would have greater satisfaction in their work if they came to share that view. And ironically, after requests for overtime fell off slightly, Glitsky started getting more of it approved by Batiste. The Investigations Bureau was still far from perfect, but things seemed to be improving.
A fortuitous sidelight that had opened up as a result of Glitsky's flexible schedule was that he found himself free to stroll down the hallway from time to time, as he had this morning, and keep up on the workings of the homicide department. From his earliest days as a patrolman, Glitsky had viewed homicide as Action Central. This was where he wanted to be. These were the crimes that mattered the most. For twelve years he'd been an inspector with that detail, and for another eight the head of it. It wasn't ever going to get out of his blood.
When Batiste had offered him the post of deputy chief, he'd almost countered with the suggestion that he'd be happier back running homicide. Fortunately, before he said those fateful words, he'd recognized the faux pas they would constitute. Any response but an unqualified yes to Batiste's thoughtful and generous offer would justifiably have made him appear to be ungrateful and would have driven a wedge between him and the new chief. If Glitsky had requested the job in homicide, not only would he never have gotten it, he'd never have left payroll. The Chief had picked him out from far down in the ranks and elevated him above many others to a truly exalted position. Glitsky even had his own driver!
So reluctantly he'd accepted the new job, believing this meant that his time in homicide, the work he had always loved the best, was behind him forever. But now here he was, less than a year after his promotion, sitting with his feet up in his old office, discussing a particularly baffling murder case with Lieutenant Lanier. Who woulda thunk? But he'd take it.
A middle-aged, happily married, slightly overweight white housewife named Elizabeth Cary had been shot at her front door about a week before. To date, inspectors had found no clues as to who had killed her, or why. "And you sweated the husband hard?" Glitsky asked. "Wasn't his alibi soft?"
"Robert. Yeah," Lanier said. "He says he was driving home. He's the one called nine one one. But Pat Belou- you know her? She's new, but good. Anyway, she had him in there"- the interrogation room on the other side of the homicide detail-"six hours last Thursday, then we did him again four hours the next day, Russell in with her this time doing good cop/bad cop." He shook his head. "Nothin', Abe. If he did it, he's good. Belou and Russell both say they couldn't break him. Plus, no sign of another girlfriend on the side. The guy's not exactly Casanova. Bald, fat, old."
"How old?"
"Sixty. She was fifty."
Glitsky shrugged. "Bald fat old guys can get girlfriends, Marcel."
"Not as often as you think, Abe. And not Robert, I promise. They were redoing their wedding vows for their twenty-fifth anniversary next month."
"Doesn't mean they couldn't have had a fight."
"About what?"
"I don't know. Maybe they couldn't agree on the guest list and he really wanted this old friend of his to come, but she hated him- the friend- so he had to kill her." Glitsky scratched his cheek. "All right, maybe not. So who else could it have been? One of the kids?"
"I don't think so. They're all wrecked. I've talked to all three of them myself. Nobody's that good an actor, especially the young one, Carlene. I think she's eleven. Besides, they alibi each other- all watching some action video in the back of the house. Never even heard the shot. Must have thought it was part of the movie. Plus, finally," he sighed, "no motive in the whole world. They loved her. I really think they did. You should have seen them. They're all just completely fucked up around this. Excuse me the French."
Glitsky waved off the apology. He disliked profanity, but he'd heard all the words before and at the moment his mind was taken up with the case. "What about her friends?"
"She's got a regular book club and this group of other mothers from the neighborhood that meet every week or so, but we've talked to every one of them. All shocked. Stunned. Nobody had even a small problem with Elizabeth. Everybody came to her for everything and she never said no."
Lanier had reconfigured the office pretty much back to the way it had been when it had been Glitsky's. One desk took up most of the center of the room and he sat behind it, with Glitsky across from him, his feet up, his fingers templed in front of his mouth.
"I went to the funeral on Saturday, Abe," he continued. "Huge crowd. Everybody loved this woman."
"Somebody didn't."
Lanier conceded the point. "Well, whoever it was did it right. Took the gun with him, touched nothing. One shot, point-blank to the heart."
"You checking phone records?" Glitsky asked. "Maybe she had a boyfriend?"
"We're looking."
"Money?"
Lanier spread his hands. "Not a problem. She was frugal. Robert makes enough that they're okay. They went on vacation every year. Houseboat on Shasta."
Glitsky brought his feet to the floor. "So your absolutely typical average American housewife answers the door on a Tuesday evening and somebody shoots her for no reason?"
"Right. That's what we got."
"It's unlikely."
"Agreed." Lanier came forward. "Look, Abe, if you're not so subtly hinting that you'd like to talk to some of the players here yourself, I would invite any and all input. Belou and Russell are stumped and have other cases with better chances of getting solved. So if you want to jump in on this, have at it."
Glitsky was standing. "If I get the time, I might like to have a word with the husband."
"Knock yourself out," Lanier said.
To avoid the gauntlet of Sixth Street south of Mission- perhaps the city's most blighted stretch of asphalt and hopelessness- Dismas Hardy chose to drive the ten blocks or so from his Sutter Street office to the Hall of Justice. Only eighteen months before, his ex-partner David Freeman had been mugged and killed when he chose to walk home from the office one night rather than drive. Freeman's attackers hadn't come from the ranks of miscreants and drug-addled denizens of Sixth Street, true, but the old man's death had brought home to Hardy in a visceral way the literal danger of the streets. You entered certain areas at your own risk, and the greater part of valor was avoiding them if at all possible.
As he crossed Mission today in his flashy new, silver Honda S2000 convertible, on his way to what was sure to be a controversial meeting, his thoughts, as they did with an exhausting regularity, went back to the events surrounding Freeman's death- events that had been the proximate cause of another, far more profound, change in Hardy and several of his closest friends.
For the attack that killed David had been the penultimate escalation in a pattern of violence that had begun with the murder of a pawnshop owner named Sam Silverman, and continued through the deaths of two policemen, then to an attempt on Hardy's own life. When he and his best friend, Glitsky, learned that a man named Wade Panos was behind this vendetta, they had of course taken their suspicions to the proper authorities- the DA, the police, the FBI. But Panos owned a private security force sanctioned by the city, and the lieutenant in charge of homicide turned out to be on Panos's payroll as well. Hardy's and Glitsky's accusations fell on deaf ears, and before they could take it to the next level of legitimate authority, they had both received threats to the lives of their families.
To protect themselves and their loved ones, out of time and frustrated by the law they'd both sworn to uphold, the two of them- along with Hardy's brother-in-law Moses McGuire, his partner Gina Roake, and his client John Holiday- found themselves forced into a shoot-out with Panos's men at a deserted pier near the abandoned waterfront. In a brief but furious gunfight, in pure self-defense, they had killed four of Panos's men, including Lieutenant Barry Gerson, and had lost one of their own, John Holiday.
The four survivors- Hardy, Glitsky, McGuire, and Roake- were physically untouched and made a clean escape. But there was much collateral damage.
If Hardy had considered himself cynical about abusing the letter of the law in his practice before, now he was past entertaining any qualms at all. He still considered himself a "good guy," whatever that meant, but he also recognized that a kind of a scab had grown over the wound his softer instincts had sustained. He'd been doubted, betrayed, lied to, threatened, and abandoned both by those in whom he'd put his trust and in the system he'd believed in intrinsically. Now he wasn't about to squander any more emotional investment in a process that hadn't worked for him when he'd needed it most. He did what he did and if sometimes it was ugly, well, sometimes life was ugly. Get over it. He didn't care if everybody liked him anymore.
Sometimes he didn't like himself very much, either.
As he turned into the All-Day Lot at the end of the alley across from the Hall of Justice, he found that his hands ached from gripping the wheel so firmly. His jaw throbbed from the constant pressure he'd been putting on it.
His appointment was with the district attorney, Clarence Jackman. He was here to cut a deal for a client he despised, whom he wouldn't have gone near a couple of years ago. In those days, he would simply have declined to take the case. In his earlier career, he'd turned down business many times when he didn't personally like a prospective client. But more often than not lately he found himself inclined to choose to profit from his squeamishness, and would take the case at double or even triple his normal rate. It was all a game anyway, and if he didn't profit from it when he could, he was a fool.
So when an ex-cop named Harlan Fisk, now a city supervisor, came to Hardy the fixer to talk about Peter Chase, a big-time property manager/developer who'd been caught fondling his eleven-year-old nephew, Hardy forced himself to listen. Chase was one of Fisk's big donors. Hardy heard the facts and said he'd see what he could do to keep the case from coming to trial, but it would cost Chase fifty thousand dollars. Up front.
Now he had done his homework and perfected his pitch. He delivered it to Jackman in his third-floor office in the Hall of Justice. Also in the room were Supervisor Fisk, Chief of Police Batiste, and Celia Bonham, a representative from the mayor's office.
Winding it up, Hardy said, "Look, Clarence, I don't like this any better than you do, but I'm just the messenger."
Jackman, a physically imposing African-American, was a powerful and charismatic figure. When Sharron Pratt, his predecessor as district attorney, had resigned in disgrace three years before, Mayor Washington had appointed Jackman to fill out the remainder of her term, and Jackman had hired a team of aggressive prosecutors who much preferred putting criminals in jail to understanding them and their problems. He was running for election in his own right next November, and was ahead in all the early polls.
Now sitting behind his desk, his hands clasped in front of him, his voice mild, he said, "I'm of course happy to hear the mayor's position on criminal cases. But there was a victim in this case, an innocent little boy, and this office has his rights to protect. Are you telling me his abuser should go unpunished? You'll pardon me for speaking frankly, Diz, but I'm a little surprised you're taking this tack. This discussion is beneath you."
Hardy controlled a grimace, took a breath. "You should know he's reached a financial settlement with his sister, the boy's mother, Clarence. Will that make up to the boy for what he did to him? Will any amount of money address the human issue? No, it won't. But it will pay for counseling for the victim, and then perhaps help with his schooling and even college. In return, the family has agreed to my proposal. To the mayor's proposal, really."
"He can't want us to drop the charges, Diz. Even if the victim's family agrees, I'm inclined to pursue them. We're a tolerant city, God knows, but not for this kind of stuff. Not on my watch."
Hardy turned to share a glance with Fisk, then came back around to the DA. "I'm not talking about dropping charges, Clarence. He remains charged. The case stays open."
Jackman frowned. "Then what do you want?"
"I want the case to stay open. That's all. My client gives you his word that nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever. He remains in counseling in perpetuity. He goes to meetings every week. His life changes. It has changed. He is always in treatment. And if he ever does cross the line again, Clarence, you've already got him charged. You just pull him in."
"If I may," Ms. Bonham said, "I'm at this meeting because Mayor Washington wanted his feelings known. He has been acquainted both personally and professionally with Mr. Chase for many years, and while he in no way countenances his behavior in this case, he sees it as a one-time failing of an otherwise good man with a real sickness, a disease if you will, who may have let the stresses of his work get the better of him."
Jackman listened with interest to this extraordinary little speech, then nodded and looked at Chief Batiste. "Frank?" he asked. "What's the police position here?"
"I serve at the mayor's pleasure, Clarence, as you know. If the mayor's okay with holding off on a trial…" He let the sentence hang.
Jackman brought his eyes back to Hardy. "This is a nonstarter, Diz, and you know it. What's really going on here?"
This was getting to the meat of it. "As you know, Clarence, Mr. Chase manages several city properties in the blocks surrounding city hall. Beyond those, he also holds the contract for the police department's motor pool. He leases all the city cars. What he's proposing is a yearlong moratorium on rents for all these properties, starting this month."
In a long legal career, Jackman had fielded a host of bizarre settlement offers, but this one rocked him. He blew out a lungful of air, pushed his chair back, got up quickly and walked over to his windows. He was close to losing his temper, something that he had not allowed himself for years.
"So Mr. Chase wants to buy his way out of child molestation charges? Why send you, Diz? Why not a plain envelope stuffed with hundreds delivered by some hoodlum in a dark bar?" He actually spoke more softly. "I won't be bribed, Diz, and I'm disgusted that you think I could be." He looked from eye to eye at the assembled legation. "I think you all had better leave."
Hardy stood up, put out a restraining hand to the others, crossed over to where Jackman stood. "Look, Clarence, I said at the outset that I knew this stinks. The guy hired me because he figures I can pull a personal string here, and I have the right to be as insulted as you do.
"But I think you've got to do this. Listen. Washington says the city will make about three mil on this deal. If you won't do it, he'll just cut the difference out of your budget. You're being extorted, Clarence, plain and simple, squeezed by a child molester and a venal political hack."
Behind him, he heard Ms. Bonham make a kind of gurgling noise. He was talking loud enough for her to hear, and this was getting rather more raw than she'd expected.
"But the bottom line," Hardy concluded, "is I think they've got you."
Hardy knew that three million dollars was about 10 percent of the DA's already lean budget. The office had already made deep cuts, and three million more would be a catastrophe. Jackman would have to lay off 15 percent of his staff. And because most of his nonlabor expenses were fixed, salaries were all he had to work with.
"Clarence," Hardy concluded, lowering his own voice now, "believe it or not, I'm here as your friend because nobody else would have told you what was really going on. I think you have to do this."
Hardy walked back to the couches. Jackman returned to his desk and sat back down in the heavy, expectant silence. After a moment, he looked up and nodded. "If he so much as spits on the sidewalk, I'll have him hauled in and fast-track him to Superior Court. Is that clear to each and every one of you?"
"Yes, sir," they intoned as with one voice.
"All right. You make sure the paperwork is tight and have it back here by this evening for my signature. Ms. Bonham, while I'm talking about signatures, I wouldn't mind his honor's position in writing. At his and your convenience, of course. Other than that," he pointed toward his door, "I've got a couple of appointments scheduled. I appreciate you all coming to talk to me about this problem."
Bonham, Fisk and Batiste were through the door when Clarence called out for Hardy to stay behind a minute. After the door closed, he sat looking down at his desk. When he spoke, the words came out with a scalpel-like precision. "I accept you came here as a friend, Diz. But, as a friend, never come here with a deal like this again. Not ever. Understood?"
"Understood."
With more than just a bad taste in his mouth, Hardy went into the bathroom in the hallway outside Jackman's office. There he leaned over one of the sinks for a few seconds, his head hanging as though from a thread. Then he turned on the cold water and threw several handfulls into his face. Drying off with a paper towel from the roll, he suddenly stopped and stood studying his face in the mirror for a long moment. The conversation with Jackman had netted him and his firm fifty thousand dollars, and though he told himself that it was a decent deal all around, his body was telling him something else. His head was light, his heart pounded. A wave of nausea made him hang his head again. When the dizziness passed, he ran his palms over his face, trying to recognize the person he was staring at. Would Clarence ever forgive him, he asked himself. Would he forgive himself? Could he continue to live like this?
I have no choice, he told himself. Don't confuse a job with a vocation. This is a job. You do it. You get paid for it. That's what it's about. It's not about you. It's not personal. Don't lose that focus. If it gets personal, you lose.
When he got his breathing and the rest of his body under some degree of control, he rode the elevator up one floor. Looking in at the suites of administrative offices that opened onto the lobby, he noticed with some surprise that the reception area was empty. He stood inside the double doors for a moment, making sure no one was guarding the entrance, then reached behind the waist-high wooden door by the reception desk and pressed the button that admitted visitors to the inner sanctum. In a few steps, silently, he'd passed through the outer office, then the conference room. Neither of the deputy chiefs was in their adjacent offices.
The room to his left was Glitsky's office. Far from the norm at the Hall, his office was expansive, nearly as large as Hardy's own, and almost as well furnished. Windows along the Bryant Street wall provided lots of natural light.
The bookshelves behind his desk testified to Glitsky's love of books. A knowledge junkie, he stocked hundreds of paperback novels, a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an abridged, although still enormous, Oxford English Dictionary. There was a shelf of history, another of forensics, criminology, the Compendium of Drug Therapy and other medical references. One whole section was devoted to Patrick O'Brian's seafaring books, Glitsky's ongoing passion now for the past few years, and the other highly esoteric reference books that accompanied these novels-Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, Harbors and High Seas, A Sea of Words, a biography of Thomas Cochrane, who'd been O'Brian's inspiration for Jack Aubrey.
On these shelves, too, were a number of personal artifacts- a football signed by all of his college teammates at San Jose State; pictures of him and his sons on most if not all of the Pop Warner teams he'd coached; his old patrolman's hat; a menorah (Glitsky was half Jewish and half African-American); lots of police-themed bric-a-brac from citations he'd been awarded, classes and conferences he'd attended, decorations and medals he'd acquired. The walls were covered with even more citations, including Police Officer of the Year in 1987, plaques, diplomas, the (premature) obituary that Jeff Elliot had written about him after he'd been shot. There were also two family photos- one about twelve years old featuring his then-young boys and his wife Flo before she'd died; the other taken only last December with Treya and their baby Rachel, Treya's twenty-year-old daughter, Raney, and his three now-grown young men- Isaac, Jacob and Orel.
In Glitsky's new position, he spent a good portion of every day going to meetings, holding press conferences to manage the spin on police issues, representing the Chief at various functions. Hardy assumed he'd been at such a meeting this morning, and saw no reason not to take advantage of his friend's absence to inject a little lightness into his afternoon. He walked behind the desk and opened the top left drawer, which as he knew was filled with peanuts in the shell.
Quickly, looking up lest one of the gatekeepers bust him, he pulled the drawer all the way out and set it on the desk. He then took out the right-hand drawer- pens, Post-it pads, business cards, paper clips- and inserted it into the left-hand slot. When the peanuts were in on the wrong side, he checked his handiwork and saw that lo, it was good.
Glitsky the control freak would go into fits.
Hardy made it out of the administrative offices without running into a human being. When he got back on the elevator going down, his good humor had mostly returned, and he was whistling to himself.
Hardy pulled his convertible into the garage of the Freeman Building, underneath the law offices of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake. When Freeman had died, he had left the building that bore his name to his fiancee, Gina Roake, and the firm's business to Hardy, and they'd formed a new firm, keeping Freeman's name in it, immediately and almost without discussion. The arrangement had somehow seemed foreordained. Now, with the top down, Hardy parked in the primo spot next to the elevator that was reserved for the managing partner. For a moment, he sat listening to the terrific interplay of guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, violin and vocals of Nickel Creek's "Sweet Afton," a song from the CD his daughter Rebecca had recommended.
It did his heart good to know that this old poem by Robert Burns had somehow attained a kind of limited hipness again. It was a mostly acoustic country group, after all, melodic and musical, so it didn't exactly rule the airwaves, but his daughter and her teenage friends loved it for a' that. Here alone was reason to have hope and faith in the next generation, he thought. It wasn't all rap and crap.
He set the brake, took off his sunglasses, and pushed the button that got the roof back up in under six seconds, a little more than the time it took the car to hit sixty on the open road. In another minute, he exited the elevator into the main lobby on the second floor and was gratified to hear the steady thrum of activity. It was nearly ten a.m. and most of the fourteen associates had already been here since at least eight o'clock, on their way to billing at least eight hours of their time, as they did every day at $150 an hour.
From where he stood, Hardy could see three associates meeting with some clients in the Solarium, the firm's large, glass-enclosed conference room. Directly in front of him at the receptionist's workstation, Phyllis seemed to be answering five calls at once. The hallway to his right bustled with mail delivery and some other associates talking with their secretaries or paralegals. The Xerox machines were humming in the background.
Hardy crossed the space in front of him and poked his head into the office of Norma Towne, his office manager, a humorless woman of uncertain vintage who had conceived an affection of sorts for him, in spite of his tendency to crack wise. She pulled her eyes from her computer long enough to give him a little wave, to ask if he needed anything.
"An oil well would be nice," he said, "if you've got a spare. Everything okay here?"
It was, and he proceeded to his own office. In the past year, he'd moved down to the main floor from the one above, bequeathing his old office to his new partner, Wes Farrell. As managing partner, Hardy felt he ought to have more of a presence in the day-to-day workings of the firm, and he'd ensconced himself in a room directly next to David Freeman's old office.
A year ago, Hardy's current work space had enclosed a four-desk paralegal station, the stationery room and the semi-warehouse where the firm had kept the old, physical files. Now, with a couple of interior walls removed and twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of interior decorating, it was a large, airy and imposing executive suite. He had his own wall of law books, several somber original oils suitably framed, a sink and large wet bar, and two seating areas with Persian throw rugs, like the one in front of his custom cherry desk. He did bring the dartboard down from upstairs, but now it hid behind a pair of cherry cabinet doors- the only hint of its presence was the thirty-inch slat of dark teak set into the oak hardwood floor exactly seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the face of the dartboard. Similar cabinet doors also hid his entertainment center, audio system and huge television set.
Hardy pushed the button on his espresso machine and crossed to his desk just in time to respond to his buzzer. Phyllis announced that his ten o'clock, Mrs. Oliva, had arrived. He crossed to the door, paused to take a breath and get his smile in place, then walked out to meet his client.
The area over by the bar and the law books was the more formal of the two seating arrangements- the other had a loveseat and upholstered wing chairs- and Mrs. Oliva and Hardy sat kitty-corner to each other on stiff-backed Empire chairs. She had taken a cup of espresso, too, though it rested untouched on the low table in front of her. Not yet thirty years old, she was carefully made up and as well dressed as Wal-Mart could make her. She was explaining why she supported the charges the DA had filed against Hardy's client, her ex-husband James, a San Francisco policeman.
"I completely understand," Hardy said when she'd finished.
"I don't know if you can. I realize it sounds ridiculous. I mean, a box of baby wipes." She smiled almost apologetically at the absurdity of the words. But the reality was too serious to allow that. She'd called police alleging that James had gotten angry during a scheduled visitation with their one-year-old, Amanda. From a distance of less than five feet he had thrown a full box of baby wipes at his estranged wife. The force and surprise of the thing had knocked Mrs. Oliva down, broken her nose, blackened both eyes. Hardy thought he could still detect halos of bluish bruise under her foundation.
"The issue isn't what may or may not have been in the box. The issue is that he threw it in anger at you."
As though curious, she cocked her head to one side. "You're not trying to defend it?"
"Call me old-fashioned," Hardy said, breaking a small grin, "but I'm opposed to guys hitting girls. Throwing things at them, too, if you want to get technical." His voice went dead sober. "I'm acting on behalf of your husband, Mrs. Oliva, but not trying to defend what he did. I've suggested he get himself into an anger management program and he's done that, but what he did to you, he and I both agree, is completely inexcusable. He wants you to know that that's how he feels."
Mrs. Oliva digested this unexpected viewpoint for a short moment. She seemed to remember the demitasse on the table and reached down, picked it up, took a sip. "So, if that's the case, why are we having this meeting?" she asked. "Why are you defending him?"
"Well, as I've indicated, I'm really not there yet. Defending him, I mean, in the legal sense. At this point, he's retained me and I'm representing him. If this case eventually comes to trial, I'll probably advise him to seek other counsel."
She carefully put her coffee cup back down and faced Hardy, her lips now tight. "What do you mean, if this case goes to trial? The DA's charged it and they're planning to go forward."
"I know that. Of course." Hardy sat back, crossed one leg over the other. "But I wanted to talk to you in person and ask you if in your heart you really wanted Jim to go to jail over this. I'm sure you've heard stories about what happens to cops when they go to jail."
Her mouth worked, but she didn't speak.
Hardy pressed her moment of hesitancy. "I'm not suggesting that Jim not be punished, or that if he does go to jail he wouldn't deserve whatever happened to him there. What I am saying is that I'd like you to consider what that type of punishment for him would do to you." He uncrossed his legs and came forward. "If Jim gets convicted, Mrs. Oliva, he loses his job, which in the here and now means no income for you and no child support. I understand he's been good about those payments up until now."
She nodded. Her face showed that this was something she hadn't considered. The possibility of losing that precious income clearly struck a nerve.
Hardy continued. "He's not trying to duck his responsibility to you, Mrs. Oliva, or even his punishment, which he knows he deserves." He lowered his voice to near inaudibility. "I doubt if he would want anyone to know about this, but I sat across from him in this very seat two days ago and watched him break down in remorse for what he'd done to you. He'd never harmed you physically before this one incident, had he?"
"No." Suddenly one of Mrs. Oliva's eyes overflowed. She made no effort to wipe the tear away.
Hardy handed her a Kleenex from the box on the table beside him, his voice a caressing whisper. "He lost his temper, Mrs. Oliva. He never meant to hurt you, and certainly not so badly. He says he thinks you know that. Is that true?"
"No. I mean yes. I don't think he meant to do it. But it was so… so violent. And in front of Amanda."
"I know. Amanda. She's his main concern, too. What's going to happen to her if Jim's in jail and you've got to be working to support the both of you? What's that going to do to her, living in a succession of daycare places, as opposed to her having her own mother…" He stopped.
Her tears flowed over her cheeks and she dabbed at them with the Kleenex. She sat straight-backed, under rigid control.
"Mrs. Oliva," Hardy said, "Jim is more sorry for this than he can express. He plans to write you a formal apology. Beyond that, he doesn't want the baby you had together to be brought up by strangers. He understands that you're not comfortable seeing him for a time, or having him around Amanda. But these anger management classes can work wonders. I've seen it happen many times. In the meanwhile, at my suggestion, Jim has agreed to double his monthly child support payments to you, which will be a burden on him, but one that he accepts, would gladly accept if you'd agree to it and ask the DA to to drop these criminal charges."
Hardy knew that it was up to the DA to press or drop the charges. Jackman felt continual pressure from women's groups to go to the max on every case such as this one. Nevertheless, with the victim on board, Hardy thought he had a good shot at getting his client into some kind of program that would result in the charges being dismissed. Jackman might not like these diversion programs, where nothing substantive ever really happened, but he was stuck with them. And sometimes, as in this case, they served a purpose.
"You know your husband," Hardy continued. "Basically, he's a good man. He'll honor his debts, especially to Amanda. You know he will. But he needs to keep his job. He needs to go back to work, for all of your sakes."
Every day, under his dress shirt and tie Wes Farrell wore a T-shirt with a message. He was buttoning up now, having just shown Hardy today's: "Dyslexics of the world, untie!" Now Farrell, religious in his avoidance of good posture, had gotten himself comfortable sideways and slumped in the loveseat, his legs up over the armrest. He said, "For this twenty minutes you made five thousand dollars?"
Hardy had his cabinet open and was throwing darts in an abstracted manner. Now he turned to face his partner. "It was grueling work. But it wasn't any twenty minutes. More like fifteen."
"Fifteen minutes. And what's this, the fifth one this month?"
"The fifth what?"
"Whatever you call it. Facilitation?"
"I love that word." Hardy threw a dart. "But I don't keep track of the numbers. It's bad luck, counting your money at the table." He threw another dart. "More than a couple anyway."
"And this one, she's calling the DA today?"
"That's the deal."
"And her husband doubles the child support and also pays you five grand?"
Hardy felt enough guilt about it himself. He didn't need to get an extra dose from his partner. "Don't look at me like that. He's still better off. It's way cheaper than if he went to trial. I didn't do anything unethical. Everybody wins here."
"If you believe that, I believe you," Farrell said. "I'm just trying to figure out how I can get some of that action."
"Well, I'm not really sure I do believe it, to tell you the truth. But it seems to be what I'm doing lately. Nobody really wants to go to trial anyway. It's too expensive and time-consuming."
"You're kidding. When did that start?" Farrell stood and walked over to the dart board, from which he extracted Hardy's last round, all twenties. "Although if memory serves, those pesky trials are the traditional way we establish guilt or innocence."
Hardy chortled- short, dry, mirthless. "Uh huh. And I've got this bridge… I'd think that you, Wes, of all people, might harbor a little skepticism about that issue." A few years before, in a highly-publicized murder trial, Farrell had made his reputation as a defense attorney by getting an acquittal for his best friend who, as it turned out, and unbeknownst to his lawyer, had been guilty as hell. "I should also think," Hardy went on, "that instead of this show of unseemly envy, you would pause to admire the finesse with which your friend and partner has mastered the fine art of fattening the firm's account, and hence your own, without having to resort to the tedium of hourly billing."
Farrell threw a dart. "I'm constantly in a state of high awe."
Hardy nodded. "There you go."
Someone knocked and his door opened. Amy Wu stood for a moment in the doorway, all but gaping. "Partners with darts," she said.
"Now you know why Phyllis guards the door," Hardy said.
"I waited until she took a break."
Farrell threw. "Bull's-eye."
Both Hardy and Wu turned. The dart was nowhere near the center of the board. "Made you look," Farrell said.
"You guys are weird, you know that?" Wu looked at Hardy. "I don't know if you're still interested in these things, sir, but I've got a question about a case. You know, the law?"
"I've heard of it," Hardy said. "Can Wes stay and listen?"
Wu cast a baleful eye at Farrell. "If he can spare the time."
"Can't," Farrell said. "Duty calls. Well, whispers." He threw his last dart and headed for the door.
Hardy closed up his dart closet and went around behind his desk. He stole a glance at Wu as he passed her. She projected at least the illusion of efficient competence, but he wasn't fooled. Wu's performance had slipped since her father's death. She'd also missed a lot of work, really an unconscionable amount for someone in her position. But he believed she'd make it up by the end of the year. She was having a hard time, and understandably.
All in all, Hardy felt that it was much preferable, and far easier, to pretend that all was well when that's what it looked like. And Wu certainly still looked the part of hotshot young associate- she wore her hair short and cropped around her ears; her always-crisp business attire couldn't be faulted. Besides, with an IQ of around one fifty, Wu could be firing on only half of her cylinders and still blow away a great deal of the competition. Or so Hardy chose to believe.
Certainly he didn't want to inquire too pointedly about her personal life. That was neither his job nor his inclination. But he was her boss, and at the very least he should be awake to nuances that might affect her performance.
The real problem, he knew, was that he was having some nuances himself. He'd be damned if he was going to think about those much, either, but Wu had missed another day of work on Friday- if she kept her absences at anything like this rate much longer, she would have some difficulty making the firm's annual hourly billing minimum. He really felt he had to say something. He sat back in his chair, hands folded in his lap. "You've got a law question," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"Well, before we get to that, can I ask you a bit of a personal one?"
Her face closed up. "Of course."
"How are you holding up?"
"Fine," she answered automatically.
"I noticed you were out on Friday."
"I saw a client in the afternoon. The case I wanted to ask you about, in fact."
"Ah." He scratched at his desk. "I just thought that if you wanted some time off, you could ask and get it, you know. Even an extended leave if you felt you needed it. Sometimes that's a better idea than taking a day at a time, piecemeal."
"I'm fine. Really."
"Okay. I'm not meaning to pry. Just making the offer. The firm places a high value on you and your work, and if you feel like you'd be more productive after a bit of a break, we'd be happy to give you one, that's all."
"I don't think I need that. I'm just working through some stuff, sir." She tried a game smile. "Getting used to the new world order."
"Okay, but if it gets tough and you change your mind, you can come in here. Anytime."
"Thank you." Wu half turned her head to the door behind her. "But maybe you could mention that to Phyllis first, just in case."
A ghost of a smile played around Hardy's mouth. "You said you got by her this time?"
"Yes. But I cheated and watched from my office until she left her post and went to the bathroom."
Hardy nodded, his smile genuine now. "You know," he said, "when David was still with us, sometimes I used to do that, too. I'd be hiding on the stairs just out of sight and wait for Phyllis to get up off her phones, then I'd zip across the lobby and get inside David's lair before she could stop me. She hated it. It was great. But I must say," he went on, "since then I've gotten some appreciation of why he kept her around, in spite of that slightly witchlike quality. The gatekeeping does serve a purpose. Me, I'm trying to emulate how David did things. Keep an open door."
"But he didn't keep an open door."
"Exactly. Except when he did." Hardy came forward and linked his hands in front of him on the desk. "He always said that if it was important enough to make me figure out how to get around Phyllis, it was important enough for him."
It was a challenge and a question, and Wu nodded. "Seventeen-year-old kid up for double murder. How's that?"
"If that's the case you wanted to ask me about, I'd say it's good enough." Hardy sat back, his own face tightening down. "Tell me about it."
Wu settled into her leather chair and gave him the short version.
When she finished, Hardy didn't move for a while; then he brought himself up to his desk, ready for business. "You say the teacher was with this girl? How old was he?"
"Forty."
"Forty," Hardy said. "And Laura?"
"Sixteen."
"What a lovely world. And they picked up your client- Andrew?- when?"
"Last Friday."
Hardy nodded. "So nobody's rushing to judgment. Homicide must have worked the case pretty well."
"Looks like." Wu hesitated. "Also, and you might find this interesting, Andrew Bartlett's stepfather is Hal North."
"Is he now?" Hardy, no stranger to the power players in the city, nodded with approval. "So where are you now?"
"Well, I've talked to Boscacci. They've got a witness who picked Andrew out of a lineup. No question, first try. Beyond that, Andrew's on the record with half a dozen lies, plus he stole his father's gun- a nine-millimeter automatic, which in this case is bad luck. Oh, and they found a casing in the car. Andrew's car."
"Okay, and the boy's story?"
"He didn't do it. He didn't even realize he was being considered a suspect until the police came and put the cuffs on him. He liked Mooney. He loved Laura."
When she mentioned the alibi, Hardy asked immediately, without inflection, "Anybody see him while he was taking this walk?"
"No sign of it."
"What does he say?"
Wu shifted in her chair. "Well, I haven't talked to him yet, gotten his story."
Hardy cocked his head. "You haven't talked to him yet? It's been, what, four days?"
"I've been going over the discovery, sir, talking with the parents, and negotiating with Allan Boscacci. I've met Andrew before. I defended him for a joyride a couple of years ago, and didn't see any immediate need to go and introduce myself again."
"Okay," Hardy said. "Sorry to jump." But the fact remained that, in his opinion, Wu had slipped again. One of the fundamentals was that you went and talked to the client.
But Wu seemed oblivious. "Anyway, the point is that Boscacci wouldn't have arrested Andrew if his alibi held up. And it doesn't. The eyewitness."
"All right. But if they just hired you on Friday, who'd Andrew have with him all the times when he talked to the homicide guys since February?"
"Nobody. No lawyer anyway. His parents saw it the way he did, and really didn't believe he was a suspect. They just let him talk and talk and talk."
Hardy shook his head. "How deep a hole did he dig?"
"He's pretty well hit China."
"Well, then, it looks like you've got your first bona fide murder case. Congratulations, I think. If you've come to me for my imprimatur, you've got it"- as managing partner, Hardy approved all of the firm's new business-"although I'm not sure you'll wind up thanking me for it. Murder trials can kill you."
"I've heard," she said, "but I'm not planning to take him to trial."
"No? How's that going to happen?"
"I think you'll be happy," Amy said. "My idea is to keep him in the juvie system."
"How old is he, did you say?"
"Seventeen."
Hardy sat back. "Last I heard, seventeen-year-olds got filed adult around here. Mr. Jackman's been a little rigid on the topic." Jackman had very publicly adopted a very tough stance on juvenile crime. A seventeen-year-old who'd killed two people did not elicit much sympathy from the new prosecutors in the DA's office. "You're telling me Boscacci has already filed him juvie?"
"Yes, sir." She paused. "After I told him Andrew would admit."
But Hardy's expression grew perplexed. "He's going to admit? How do you know he's going to do that? You said you hadn't talked to him yet."
"I talked to his stepfather."
"Okay, all well and good, but the one who pays the bills isn't necessarily the client." Hardy scratched behind his ear, interrupted Wu as she started to reply. "No, wait," he said. "And what if in fact he didn't actually do it?"
Wu came forward with some enthusiasm, obviously feeling that this question put her on firmer ground. "He did, though," she said. "Look, we know homicide took two months building the case. They played it slow and steady. He did it, sir, and specials as an adult puts him in prison for the rest of his life. He'll admit to avoid that."
"But you just told me he says he's innocent."
Wu shook her head. "They don't arrest innocent people anymore."
"It's happened to clients of mine."
"Yes, sir. All two of them, I believe, right?"
"Actually, three."
"Well, the exceptions that prove the rule. Three is more than an entire century's allotment right there."
Hardy wasn't really amused, but he broke a small smile. "I hate to mention it, but they were last century's cases. Now we're working on the new one."
"When Andrew sees the evidence against him, he's going to get religion. You watch. I promise. Really, sir. This is a sweet deal for everybody."
"I can't believe Boscacci's going along."
"To avoid the trial? Why not? He gets two convictions out of this, so he wins. Wouldn't you take the deal?"
Hardy thought if he were Boscacci he might, but depending on the evidence, he might not. Though there was always an incentive among administrators to clear docket time, a high-profile murder case often sought its own level and provided potentially positive intangibles, such as name recognition for the politically ambitious. And even if Wu's strategy worked, it wouldn't be without its drawbacks.
Wu sat back, cocked her head, spoke in a measured tone. "What I'm doing here, sir, is making sure that Andrew gets out of custody in eight years instead of never."
Hardy, unsatisfied, glanced at his watch. "All right," he said. Getting up out of his chair, he pulled some papers on his desk together. "I'm hoping you're right in every respect. Meanwhile, I've got another client coming in, so may I be so crass as to inquire about your retainer? This is still criminal law…"
"And you get your money up front."
"Words to live by. How much?"
"Well," she said. "The plea won't take too long to get processed. I figured it was worth about five grand."
At the figure, Hardy stopped his paper gathering, looked up with another question on his face, worry in his eye. Even if everything went exactly according to Wu's plan and she was uncommonly lucky- and Hardy thought neither of these was a lock- then she would certainly spend at least forty hours, and maybe as many as sixty, in the next week or so preparing Andrew, convincing him that it was in his favor to say that he was guilty of murder so that he could avoid being tried as an adult.
Hardy had been doing a lot of math in his head lately, and immediately sensed that five thousand dollars wasn't close to Wu's standard rate of $150 an hour. He punched at the adding machine in front of him. It was worse than he'd thought. "You're only planning on putting in thirty-three hours on this?"
"I figured that was about what it was worth." She fidgeted with her hands opening her purse.
Hardy shook his head. "So you were going to put in the extra time without billing it, which would not only be cheating you, but the client and the firm, and…"
She pulled the check from her purse, interrupted his rebuke. "So I told Mr. North I'd take twenty down. Thousand, that is."
She put the check face up on the desk.
Hardy looked down at it, up at her. Nodded. "Okay, Wu," he said, "you're starting to get it."
Into the phone, Hardy said, "I would have bet your office was a veritable fortress of solitude."
"I would have, too, but I guess not," Glitsky said. "I even thought of dusting for prints, except everybody who works in the Hall was here for the open house when I took office."
"You don't have any idea who it was?"
"I can't imagine anybody who'd take the chance. I mean, I'm the deputy chief. They get caught, they're toast. Who'd risk it?"
Hardy was standing behind the desk in his office. The shades were down, cutting some of the afternoon glare, but his eyes were twinkling, his color high. He'd had a martini and most of a bottle of Pinot Grigio at lunch at Sam's, with a plate of sand dabs. He'd reeled in another client from the bottomless pool of troubled police persons. And now for an unexpected bonus, he was getting to console Glitsky on the terrible breach of security in his office, somebody moving his drawers around. The way it was going, Hardy thought there was some small chance he could talk Abe into paying him to put an private investigator on it.
But then Glitsky said, "Well, it was probably some stupid prank anyway."
The opening was just too wide, and Hardy couldn't resist stepping into it. "I don't know, Abe. There are some bona fide crazies in your building. At least I might send a sample of the peanuts to the lab and throw the rest out."
"You think?"
"Better safe than dead."
"How could I get dead around this?"
"I don't know. Was there any powder in the bottom of the drawer?"
Glitsky snorted. "Yeah, but they're salted in the shell peanuts, so the trained inspector in me thinks the white powder is probably salt. And if it was anthrax, it's too late already."
"Did you taste it?"
"No. Just a minute. Yep. Salt."
Hardy clucked. "Your tongue goes numb in five minutes, do me a favor and call nine one one. And I'd still send some of the goobers to the lab. You never know."
"I'll consider it."
"You don't sound sincere. You remember the song 'Found a Peanut'? The guy in that song died if you recall. I'm serious."
"That's what worries me, that you're serious." Glitsky sighed. "Can we leave the peanuts, please? I didn't call about the peanuts anyway."
"All right. It's your funeral. So what do you want?"
"I wondered what time you might be going home. I've got a five o'clock meeting with Batiste that just came up and Treya's got to be home at the regular time because Rita's… never mind. The point is if you're staying a little late, maybe I could bum a ride with you."
"Your driver ought to take you to and from work."
"My driver works the day shift. I come in too early and go home too late. I think I've mentioned this to you before."
"I probably didn't pay attention. So what time?"
Glitsky said six-thirty or so and Hardy told him it was his lucky day. He had his own meeting after close of business with Amy Wu about this double homicide she was handling.
"That would be Andrew Bartlett," Glitsky said. It wasn't a question.
"Doesn't it get boring when you already know everything?" Hardy asked. "But I bet you haven't heard that Boscacci's filed him juvie."
"Sure he did. And next year I'm quarterback for the Forty-Niners."
"I'll expect great tickets. But it's true. Boscacci, I mean."
Silence. Then. "How did that happen?"
"Wu is having him cop a guilty plea in exchange for juvenile sentencing."
"And Jackman agreed? Jackman who likes to say if you're old enough to kill somebody, you're an adult? That Jackman?"
"The very same. And I've heard him say the same thing. But Wu says it's a done deal."
"I'd make sure before I go real large telling anybody. Like the newspapers."
"Well, that's what Wu and I are going to be talking about, so I'll let you know."
The name Youth Guidance Center, or YGC, had an avuncular ring to it, as though the juvenile detention facility were some kind of a counseling haven for wayward children, a rest stop filled with soft stuffed chairs and couches, pastel colors, New Age music in the background. And in reality, in simpler times when the place was new, it had pretty much been like that. Kids who stole hubcaps, or smoked a joint, or played hooky from school, would wind up at the YGC and receive counseling, maybe a day or so of lockup to impress upon them the serious consequences of breaking the law.
Nowadays these relatively petty crimes never hit the radar of the police department. Juvenile felonies were commonly every bit as serious as crimes committed by adults, so in today's San Francisco, the YGC's primary function was, mostly, to lock up seriously dangerous criminals who happened to be under the age of eighteen. True, the center had a suicide-prevention watch. It also held a few dozen abandoned or abused children while they awaited suitable outplacement to foster homes. But in the main, "the cottages," as the jail facility was called, housed murderers, rapists and a varied assortment of vandals, robbers, muggers and burglars. Most of the inmates were awaiting or in the middle of their respective trials or hearings, which occurred in courtrooms on the premises, just adjacent in the administrative wing.
Wu hated being late. This morning between Boscacci and Hardy, she had also talked to Hal North, told him about her success with Boscacci, and scheduled what she thought might be a relatively lengthy appointment with the North family before the detention hearing- they had a lot they had to go over. She particularly wanted to hear more about the results of Hal's discussions on the admission issue with his wife and stepson, about which he'd been disconcertedly vague, telling her that he and Linda hadn't had as much time as he would have liked to talk because of an event they had to attend at the yacht club. Wu shouldn't worry, though, he told her. He'd have it all worked out with Andrew and Linda by the time they got to court.
This was Wu's first formal court appearance at the YGC, and she had gotten lost on the way up, then caught in traffic. After the uphill half-jog from down the street where she'd managed to find a parking place, through the admin building and up the steep walk to the cottages, she fought to catch her breath for a minute just outside the gate in the razor-wire-topped Cyclone fence. A bailiff appeared in response to her ring and escorted her without a word into the building proper- a one-story structure that reminded her of a cross between a military barracks and an inner-city high school. Drab and institutional and depressing as hell, she thought.
The bailiff led her to a pocked wooden door in the hallway and opened it. Sitting in an old-fashioned school desk in the opposite corner of the tiny room, next to the one outside window, Andrew Bartlett lifted a hand about an inch in a halfhearted greeting.
"Here she is." Hal stood to Wu's right, leaning back against the wall, arms crossed and clearly unhappy. "At last."
"Hal." Linda shot a frustrated look at her husband, then turned and smiled at Wu. "It's all right. You're here."
"I'm sorry. Terrrible traffic. I even gave myself an extra half hour," she lied, then showed some more teeth, took a breath, turned to her client. "It's good to see you again, Andrew. How are you holding up?"
The boy dropped his head, lifted it, shrugged. " 'kay."
Confident and prepared, Wu smiled at him. "Good," she said. "Don't worry. We'll get you out of here today."
Linda piped in. "You think we can do that?"
"Oh, I think so."
"Really?" Hal asked.
"Probably," she said. "The hearing today is about whether they keep Andrew here until he's sentenced, and I don't see why they'll need to do that."
"So what happens?" he asked. "What about bail?"
Wu shook her head. "No. I thought I'd explained that. Juveniles don't get bail. The judge either lets Andrew go home with you and Linda, or he orders him kept here- detained."
"Just like that?" Linda shot a hopeful glance at her son. "One way or the other."
"Yes. And in this case, look what we've got. Both parents here showing support and concern. A minor with no previous record who poses no risk of flight- you'll both watch out for him, right?" She turned to Hal. "Then there's your standing in the community, sir. Beyond that, if the judge wanted more assurance, I'm assuming you'd be willing to pay for whatever private security, even a twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, that the court could want to be sure Andrew stayed out of trouble."
"He wouldn't need that," Hal said.
"No, I don't think so either. So I think…"
But Andrew finally spoke up, interrupting her. "What do you mean, 'sentencing'? Don't you mean 'trial'?"
Wu's startled glance went from her client to his stepfather, back over to Linda. "That's one of the other issues we're going to have to discuss. I thought you might already have…"
Hal cut her off. "I was waiting for you to get here…"
"To what?" Andrew asked.
"Just talk about the case."
"What about it?"
"The evidence, your plea, like that."
"What do you mean, his plea?" Linda, her voice suddenly very sharp, backed up a step so she could face both Hal and Wu together. "His plea is not guilty. It has to be not guilty, right?"
Wu drew a quick breath. "Well, as I said, there are a few legal issues…"
Three sharp raps sounded on the door to the room and it immediately opened to the bailiff. "Time," he said. "Let's go. Can't keep the judge waiting." Then, perhaps sensing the tension in the room, he asked, "Everything all right in here?"
"Fine," Wu said. She turned to Linda and Andrew. "We'll have all the time in the world to talk about everything after the hearing. It'll all make sense, you'll see."
Linda looked to Hal for support. "I hope so."
But the bailiff had his job to do. "Sorry, but you've all got to move out," he said. "Hearing's in ten minutes." He looked at Andrew. "You're going to want to hit the can first. And quick."
"Can't he walk down with us?" Linda asked.
"No, ma'am. He's in custody. Rules."
Out on the pavement, walking down to the admin building, Wu broke the uncomfortable silence that had been holding since the three of them left the visitors' room. "The main thing," she said, "is that we're all in agreement as to what's best for Andrew."
"Hon," Hal stopped and put a hand on her arm, "we went over all of this yesterday."
"I know, but I thought it was more hypothetical, all this about Andrew admitting something. But in there you both sounded like Andrew is going to confess and then go to prison. How can he do that?"
Wu forced herself to look into Linda's eyes, to feign a confidence she didn't feel. "The fact is, we have to face that as an option. If we plead him out as a juvenile, then there's no life without parole hanging over his head."
"But he's not guilty," Linda repeated. She turned to Hal. "We talked about this every time the inspectors came by with some new thing, didn't we? And then this terrible lineup mistake…" The voice wore down. "He just didn't do this, Hal. Don't tell me you don't believe that."
Wu was fairly certain that she knew what Hal believed, and stepped in to save him. "I don't think we have to discuss the actual fact of whether he's innocent or guilty right now, Mrs. North. The issue is that he saves the court the considerable time and expense of a trial if he admits. In return, the DA agrees he's a juvenile and he avoids the LWOP."
"LWOP?" Linda asked. "What's LWOP?"
"Life without parole. That's what he would get as an adult."
North let out a snort. "But it's moot for now, anyway. He's not charged as an adult today, right?"
Linda turned to Wu. "He's not?"
"No, ma'am. That's why we're here, having this detention hearing. So we have a chance to let Andrew go home for a few days."
"We can get it all straightened out there," Hal said, "at home. We'll have plenty of time there."
Still unsure, Linda blew out in evident frustration. She looked back up to the cottages, wrapped in their razor-wire dressing, and her shoulders sank. "Okay," she said with great weariness. "Let's at least first get him out of here."
"That's the plan." Wu offered her a brave smile. "Really."
Wu sat at the defense table awaiting the judge's entrance. In juvenile court proceedings, the district attorney was said to represent not the people, but the petitioner, and the person accused of a crime was not the defendant, but the minor. This nicety functioned to preserve the legal fiction that youthful felons were not lost causes. The district attorney's role was not to prosecute miscreants, but rather to ask, or petition, the state to recommend a treatment for the minor that stood a chance to result in the child's complete rehabilitation back into society. Even if that treatment was six or eight years locked up at the California Youth Authority, or CYA, it technically wasn't the same thing as prison, although its inmates might be hard-pressed to elucidate the precise difference.
To Wu's left, at the petitioner's table, sat her opposite number, Jason Brandt. Not yet thirty, Brandt already had four years as a prosecutor under his belt, all of it here at the YGC. Brandt had a full head of neatly combed dark brown hair and wore a well-cut dark gray suit with a white shirt and muted blue tie. Affable, quick-witted, charming even, he smiled a lot and made it a point to get along well with everyone, including the defense attorneys against whom he was pitted. Wu, herself, had long harbored a bit of a secret crush on him. They'd shared drinks more than once- although his reputation was that as soon as the gavel came down, he was nobody to play with.
Suddenly Brandt lifted his head like an animal catching a scent. He caught Wu in the middle of her surreptitious glance at him and, nodding genially, went back to his papers. Wu made it a point to continue looking about the room, which was smaller than most of the courtrooms downtown at the Hall of Justice, but had the advantage of natural light pouring in from large windows set high in one wall.
Beyond Brandt, a very young-looking uniformed bailiff sat talking to a middle-aged woman whom Wu presumed was the court recorder. There were no jurors- juvenile trials did not have juries- and yet a nice jury box held twelve perennially empty chairs. There was no one in the gallery on the prosecution side- for the protection of the minors involved, the public was not admitted into the courtroom.
Wu turned around farther in her chair and gave a confident nod to Andrew's parents, the sole occupants of Wu's side of the gallery. Hal and Linda sat hip to hip, next to each other on the bench behind the bar rail. They held hands and seemed to be leaning into each other. Wu's eyes went briefly to Hal, and he inclined his head an inch, then raised a finger and pointed to one side of the room, where the door had started to open. Wu turned at the sound and watched as the bailiff from the cottages ushered Andrew ahead of him into the bullpen.
As Andrew shuffled toward her now, handcuffed in his shapeless gray prisoner's clothes, he seemed to her utterly defeated. Stopping in front of her table, he raised his head to look at his mother. His eyes opened in a silent plea, lips tightened down over a frankly quaking jaw. She was afraid that in another moment he might start to cry, and to forestall that, she stood, came around her table and helped him get seated.
"He doesn't need to be handcuffed," she said to the bailiff. "What's your name?"
"Nelson." The bailiff kept his hand on Andrew's shoulder and replied in some surprise. He played no formal role in this proceeding, and it was decidedly unusual for an attorney to speak to him for any reason.
"Well, Officer Nelson, this young man doesn't need to be handcuffed."
It didn't matter to Nelson one way or the other. "That's up to the judge," he said. He did take his hand off Andrew, however, and stepped aside a few paces. He stood leaning against the front of the jury box, facing Wu, sublimely indifferent, which was almost more chilling to her than outright antagonism would have been.
Wu reached over and patted Andrew's arm. "It's all right," she said. "It'll be fine."
He turned his face to her, then farther around, back to his mother again. "Mom," he said, then couldn't continue. Tears threatened to spill, but he blinked them back. Raw vulnerability took years off his age. The idea of this pathetic boy aiming a gun at a person and pulling a trigger not once but twice suddenly struck Wu for the first time as incongruous.
Her heart went out to him, while at the same time she was a bit relieved to see the depth of his despair. He would probably have to hit bottom and see that there was no hope in pleading not guilty. After they got to talk and she showed him the evidence, he'd realize the futility of pretending he hadn't done it. When the truth must be clear to him if he dared to look at it objectively. Andrew wasn't stupid- she glanced over at him one last time, confident that he would come to accept that he had to admit if he wanted to save himself.
Now in his early sixties, Judge W. Arvid Johnson had built a reputation as a reasonable and fair jurist with no particular ax to grind. Irreverently, secretly and universally called "Warvid" by the city's legal community, Johnson took the bench today with little fanfare and no formal announcement by the bailiff or court recorder. Suddenly, it seemed, he had materialized up there, seated behind the slightly raised podium- white-haired and faintly jocular, he projected an amiable solidity.
After a business-like nod to both counsel, he said, "All right" to no one in particular, pulled his glasses down to the end of his patrician nose and asked the probation officer to call the first case. When he'd done this, the officer listed those present in the courtroom, including the gallery, for the record, and then Judge Johnson began. "Mr. Brandt, comments on detention?"
"Yes, your honor."
"Go ahead."
Brandt stood up behind his table. His voice sounded clear and relaxed in the small room. "Your honor, as this is a murder case, the petitioner requests that the minor be detained."
"He's here under juvenile jurisdiction," the judge said sharply. "The district attorney has decided not to file against him directly as an adult. I have to gather that that was done on purpose? Am I wrong?"
"No, your honor, not at all." Brandt took the rebuke calmly, probably because he had a ready answer, and a good one. "We anticipate that Mr. Bartlett will admit this petition and receive the maximum commitment to the YA"- the Youth Authority. "He'll still be confined here at YGC, of course, rather than downtown, for a brief period since he's under eighteen, but we anticipate a quick disposition on two counts of first degree murder. So naturally the petitioner considers this a detention case."
Planted in her seat, Wu was surprised when Brandt thanked the judge and sat down. He'd said what he'd come here to say, short and sweet.
Judge Johnson nodded and turned. "Ms. Wu?"
Wu tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry. She knew that Brandt liked to keep his opponents off-balance and that one way to do this was to mess with their timing. But he'd still surprised her, catching her in mid-thought with such a bare-bones statement. Detained. End of story.
"Ms. Wu," Johnson repeated. "Would you care to make a reply?"
She got to her feet. "I'm sorry, your honor. I was just…" She stopped herself, willed her mind clear and started again. "Your honor, before we go any further, I'd like to request that the handcuffs be removed from my client's wrists."
"Request denied. I don't believe this hearing will take enough time to make the exercise worthwhile. Detention has been requested by petitioner." Johnson pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and peered over them. "This is a double murder we're talking about. We detain on murder cases."
"Yes, your honor, I understand that," Wu said, "but Mr. Bartlett can by no stretch be considered a danger to the community…"
Over at his table, Brandt cracked, "As long as we don't give him back his gun."
Johnson whirled on him. "That's enough of that, Mr. Brandt."
"I'm sorry, your honor," Brandt said. "I was driven to it."
Johnson frowned. "Be that as it may, see that it doesn't happen again."
"Yes, your honor."
But, no doubt as he'd intended, Brandt's interruption had blindsided Wu. Again, she'd lost her focus, and stood waiting for the judge to say something.
"Go on, Ms. Wu," Johnson said.
She threw a fast look over at Brandt, who let his mouth twitch, a pastiche of a smile. Wu glanced at her client, then back to Johnson, and finally found the thread. "Your honor, the fact remains that Andrew is a minor, not an adult. A minor with no previous record."
"Your honor, if I may." Brandt, up again. "I spoke to Mr. Boscacci on this very point not an hour ago, and he informs me, as I've already indicated to the court, that he did not direct file as an adult based on the anticipation of a quick admission."
"Your honor," Wu said, "my client has no criminal history…"
"He does now," Brandt said.
Johnson stared hard at the prosecutor, a warning. Coming back to Wu, he pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. "Ms. Wu, this hearing is concerned only with the continued detention of Mr. Bartlett, and I'm not hearing any argument from you on why I should overrule the petitioner's suggestion."
"Your honor." Wu took a breath. "My client has been living a normal life for two months since these murders took place. He has known he's a suspect for most of that time and has caused no civil disturbance of any kind, nor has he tried to flee."
"True," Johnson said, "but surely you are not arguing that knowing you're a possible suspect and actually being an arrested suspect are the same thing, are you?"
"No, your honor, but his parents are here in the courtroom today, waiting to take him home. There is no reason they shouldn't be able to do that. Surely there is no risk of flight. He has another two months in this school year, and he's an excellent student. Surely he poses no worse danger to the community than he has for the past two months while he's gone to school and lived at home."
Johnson showed nothing. Wu supposed he'd heard the same argument a thousand times. He straightened at the bench, turned to the prosecutor. "Counselor."
Brandt stood up slowly, turned to look past Wu squarely at Andrew Bartlett, then shook his head. Suddenly he pointed a finger at Andrew. His voice took on an edge. "That's not somebody's good little boy sitting over there. That's a man who's killed two people already this year, and the district attorney is not going to give him a chance to hurt anyone else."
Andrew started to come to his feet. "But I didn't," he cried out.
"Yes, you did," Brandt shot back. "You damn well did."
The judge cracked down his gavel. "Ms. Wu, no more of that from your client. Mr. Brandt, I'm warning you for the last time. No more outbursts, do you hear me? You address your remarks to the bench."
"Yes, your honor. I'm sorry."
"You've been sorry before, too. Don't let it happen again." Johnson made a notation in front of him and came back, fixing Wu with an impatient and angry glare, as if she'd been the one abusing the court's protocol. "Minor is ordered detained," Johnson said. "Bailiffs, take him back to the cabins."
And with that, Johnson tapped his gavel, stood and made his exit out the back door to the courtroom.
So abrupt was the decision and Johnson's disappearance that for a minute a dead calm settled over the courtroom. Wu's hand went to her stomach, where she felt a deep and sudden hollowness. Behind her, she heard Linda saying, "That's it? That can't be it. They're not letting him out?" Then, as Bailiff Nelson approached the table: "Wait a minute. Andrew!"
The boy whirled around in his seat to face his mother.
Wu held out a hand to the bailiff. "Please! Give us one minute, all right?"
In the gallery, Linda North had left her seat and was coming forward. She was nearly to the bullpen's railing and then suddenly Andrew, too, was on his feet. Nelson, though, had reached him. He growled "Uh, uh" and put a restraining hand on his shoulder with enough force to topple the chair and send him sprawling. With his handcuffs on, Andrew couldn't reach out to break his fall. His head hit the linoleum floor and for an instant he lay stunned.
"What are you doing?" Linda was now at the guardrail, and she screamed. "Leave him alone!"
"Linda!" Hal North, too, was out of his seat, coming up behind his wife.
The other bailiff, the young-looking one who'd been talking with the court reporter before the judge appeared, came from nowhere and insinuated himself in the space between Wu and Linda, blocking the mother's access to her son. "Take it easy," he said, holding up both his hands. "Easy. That's enough! Enough!" Then he turned to Nelson. "You, too, Ray. I'll take him."
"I got him," Nelson said with some heat.
"Go easy, then," the second bailiff retorted.
"It's okay, Mom! I'm okay." Andrew, from the floor. "I got caught off-balance, that's all. I'm fine."
On either side of him, the bailiffs seemed to have worked out their turf differences, and now raised Andrew to his feet.
"Let him go," Wu said. "You don't have to manhandle him."
The second bailiff turned and looked at her. Up close, she saw that the face, youthful and innocent from a distance, was heavily pockmarked and held a pair of gray, old, empty eyes. Wu thought that in spite of his relatively few years, the officer had already worked in the system long enough to become inured to the innate horror of it. He was a jailer, plain and simple. A zookeeper. And yet, he'd almost apologized to her, and still appeared more humane than his partner, for all that. "No one's going to hurt your client," he said.
But Wu checked him. "That's already happened. I want that bump on his head looked at right away. I'll be along to see him in a few minutes, and I want him to have seen somebody by then. Is that clear?" Wu included them both in her sights. "And while we're at it, Officer," she said to the second bailiff, "what's your name?"
"Cottrell," he said. "Ray Cottrell."
She wrote it down on her legal pad, looked up again at both of them with a question. "You just called him…" She motioned to Nelson. "You just called him Ray."
"That's what his mother called him, too. What about it?"
Nothing, Wu realized, and said, "I'm holding you both responsible." Her threat didn't much instill the fear of God in either of them. The two men, unmoved, shared a glance. But then it was Nelson who touched Andrew's shoulder and said, "Let's go. Easy."
Andrew threw his mother a last look of despair, then turned and started walking with the bailiffs, back toward the lockup.
Wu had been an attorney for five years. During that time, she'd mostly done litigation work for Freeman's firm, mixed with a steady if unexceptional flow of criminal cases that she picked up in the usual way, the so-called conflicts cases. She was on the list for court appointments, and once a month she would appear in court while a succession of criminal cases were called and doled out mostly to the Public Defender's Office. Every few cases, though, there would be more than one defendant- accomplices in robberies or drug deals.
In these cases, the Public Defender's Office could not take on more than one of the defendants; it would be a conflict of interest. And so the court would appoint one of the on-hand lawyers sitting in the courtroom on conflicts day to represent the other defendants. In this way, Wu had represented a wide variety of clients and gotten what she had thought (until today) was a well-grounded schooling in the nuts and bolts and even some of the intricacies of criminal law.
But she'd never been assigned to a murder case. Never before had she confronted such a serious charge. In fact, until this weekend no criminal client had ever paid her directly- her fees in the conflicts cases were paid by the court. She was standing on new ground now, and finding that it shook perilously under her feet. She'd blown her first skirmish badly. Ill-prepared and overconfident, she'd foolishly failed to prepare her clients for the worst, in part because she didn't believe that the worst was going to transpire. In her experience thus far, deals were always a possibility.
Now, out in the hallway with the Norths, Wu spoke up right away, a stab at damage control. "I've got those bailiffs' names and badge numbers and I want to assure you both that I'm going to file a complaint before I leave this building."
North spoke up. "I wouldn't waste my time. Andrew admitted he was off-balance. The guy was just doing his job. My question is what the hell just happened? You told us you'd get him out."
"I said I thought it was possible."
"It never seemed to get close to possible in there. There wasn't any real discussion at all." North wore running shoes, jeans, a blue denim shirt, a corduroy sports coat, but the casual dress was nowhere reflected in his posture or attitude. The bulldog face was shut down, expressionless, the ice-blue eyes fathomless. "It doesn't give me a whole hell of a lot of faith in all the rest, I'll tell you that."
"Hal." Linda put a hand on her husband's arm.
He kept his eyes on Wu. "So where does this leave us?"
"I'm going to talk to the DA," Wu said. "Appeal the detention."
"I would hope so," North said. "I don't care what it costs."
"I don't think the money's the point, sir."
"Well, if it isn't, that would be a first. Maybe I'll go have a word with the man myself."
In an odd reversal, Wu looked to the wife for support, but Linda's eyes never left the door to the courtroom. It was almost as though she still expected her son to walk out any minute. Wu came back to North. "That really wouldn't be a good idea, sir. Look," she said, "whatever the judge said in there, the truth is that minors get out on serious charges all the time."
"Not this time," he said.
"No. I know that."
Linda spoke up. "So what do we do now?"
Before the fiasco in the courtroom, Wu had been hoping to get a chance to sit with Andrew and his parents in the relatively comfortable environment of their home. There, she would show all of them the evidence she'd already assembled from the discovery documents she'd received that so clearly- in her opinion- would damn Andrew if he went to trial as an adult. With Hal North in her corner, and Linda presumably already on board, it would be the three of them "against" the son, and Wu would be able to orchestrate the talk that would result in Andrew's understanding that he needed to admit.
Now, with Hal in a slow-boiling fury at her failure to get the detention lifted, with Linda still woefully ignorant of the strategy Wu had already put in motion, and with Andrew back in his cell, Wu realized that she had to change her plan on the wing. If they all sat down together right now- in Andrew's cell or anywhere else- the three-to-one odds in her favor would be closer to three-to-one against, with Hal quite possibly unwilling to argue with his characteristic force for the need to admit, and Linda and Andrew dead set against.
The dynamic had become completely skewed. Her best bet now- as the most committed to her position- was to take on Andrew one on one. Win him over as she'd won his stepfather the day before. Andrew didn't need to hear Linda's arguments why he should consider the feasibility of an adult trial on the really very unlikely chance that he would get acquitted. He didn't need that kind of support. He needed to be frightened, and convinced.
Linda repeated her question. "So what do we do now?"
"Now," Wu said, "I think it's critical that I spend some time alone with Andrew. He needs to understand what he's up against, that he's here for the long haul. He's got to see the evidence they've got. Mostly, he's got to realize that he's in the system, and that he needs his lawyer more than he needs his parents right now."
"You don't think we should see him?" Linda clearly didn't like the decision. "I mean, while we're already here? This is a good time for us."
"You can visit him anytime, Mrs. North, anytime you want. But right now he's going to be pretty upset with me, as I realize that both of you are. I need to try to make that right with Andrew, though, as soon as I can, so we can begin to cooperate and work together." She looked from Hal to Linda. "Look, I don't blame either of you for being frustrated, but in a sense the hearing in there didn't change anything. Andrew still needs to be clear on what he needs to do." She threw what she hoped was a meaningful glance at Hal. "That hasn't changed. I really think both of you need to talk, so the next time you're with him, you present a united front. So we're all saying the same thing."
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 making 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."
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."
"No surprise there. It was murder. They always detain."
"I know, but I thought maybe with his age and no previous record, plus Hal North's money if they asked him to pay for a private security guard for Andrew… Anyway, it doesn't matter- I never even got the chance to argue that." She paused again. "Jason Brandt- the prosecutor?- he came out swinging and got all histrionic. I guess it worked."
"How'd the clients take it? They fire you?"
She broke a bare smile. "Not yet, but every call I got this afternoon when I got back here, I thought I'd throw up."
"Thanks for sharing." But he grinned, softening it. "So what's the status now?"
"Well," she said, "if there's any silver lining, it's a loud wake-up call for Andrew. The continued detention blew him away. He thought North would somehow take care of it like he always has. But when Andrew realized that wasn't happening, it gave me the chance to acquaint him with a few hard truths."
"Like?"
"Like the evidence." Suddenly animated, Wu came forward on the couch. "It might have been the first time he actually realized why they arrested him. So I went through what little discovery I'd seen, which was a good start, since it placed him at the murder scene with the weapon, for example."
"He didn't already know that?"
She shook her head. "He thought he'd gotten rid of the gun without having mentioned it to anybody. Which in fact he did. But- bad luck- a witness saw it first. I surprised him with what he must have done, and sure enough, he admitted it. And this is to say nothing of five or six other evasions and outright lies, or the ID."
"He didn't know he'd been ID'd?"
"Not the specifics. Though by the time I left him I believe he was getting a clue."
Hardy sat back in his chair. "And how, again, is this a silver lining?"
"Well, it is," she said. "It really is."
"I want to believe you, but traditionally it's not good news for the client when the DA's got you nailed."
"It is this time."
"And why is that?"
"Because Andrew finally sees that they can put him away for life."
"And that's good news? Maybe it's semantics," Hardy said. "The meaning of 'good.' "
"It is good. It means Andrew's on his way to admitting."
"I would hope so, given the fact that you've already made a deal to that effect with Mr. Boscacci, haven't you? I didn't imagine that whole thing, did I? Boscacci filing juvie? All of that?" Hardy chewed on the inside of his cheek, added ruminatively, "Although I still can't imagine why Boscacci went for it."
Wu curled a leg under herself on the couch. "Because it's all about numbers. The public understands convictions. Jackman's gearing up for reelection. If Andrew admits, Jackman gets not one, but two murder convictions on the books, instead of a long messy trial with a sympathetic teenage defendant and a wealthy stepfather with ties to the media. You would have done the same thing."
"Maybe, but that's me. And I'm notoriously softhearted."
"Right. Anyway, I reminded Allan how hard it is to get convictions, San Francisco juries, blah, blah, blah. I told him it was possible North might even be monetarily grateful at some time in the future for saving his son the extra fifty years in the slammer, perhaps a slight exaggeration on my part."
"I hope slight," Hardy said.
Wu shrugged that away. "I don't think Allan bought it anyway. But he did buy the fact that this was a young man's crime of passion. By the time Andrew's twenty-five, he'll be a different person, rehabilitated by the juvenile system instead of hardened by the hard time. And so on."
"In other words, you snowed him."
"Maybe I did pile it on a little. But this is such a classically good move. It's actually got some moral underpinnings."
"Alway a plus." Hardy drank from his bottled water. He put the bottle down on his desk, took a deep breath, let it out. A longer silence settled in the space. The plantation shutters over the office windows weren't drawn, and outside the shafts of early evening sun suddenly seemed glaringly bright in contrast to the muted office lighting. Finally Hardy spoke. "I bet you can guess what's going through my mind."
Her face tight with tension, Wu nodded, but answered confidently enough. "I'll be seeing Andrew first thing again tomorrow morning and tie it up tight. Believe me, he definitely got it by the time I left today. He sees it."
"He'll admit?"
"I'm sure he will."
"You're sure he will. But Allan Boscacci thinks he already has? Is that right?"
"No. Not that he already has. Just that he will."
"But Boscacci's acted on that. And he'll expect you to do what you promised in return?"
"And I will. Andrew will. He'll see there's no other real option. He already sees it, I'm sure."
"You're sure." Hardy cast his eyes at his ceiling, brought them down and ran a hand over his cheek. Now he looked over at his young associate. He knew that she was still suffering over the loss of her father, laboring under who knew what other pressures. The last thing Hardy wanted to do was kill her initiative or micromanage her cases to death, but for a moment he was tempted to have her call Boscacci right there from his office. Clear the air with the DA's office, at least. Let the chief assistant know that the deal might not be as solid as he'd been led to believe. Later, privately, Hardy could even plead Wu's pain and suffering to Boscacci, and this might somehow mitigate the consequences if things went wrong, which according to Murphy's Law they must, since they could.
On the other hand, he didn't want to send a no-confidence message to one of his bright young lights. He himself had carved his own niche in San Francisco's legal world by being somewhat of a loose cannon, taking risks beyond those which, he knew, any responsible boss would have approved. He strongly believed in the advice of Admiral Nelson, "Always go right at 'em." Ask permission later. That's what victorious sea captains- and winners in general- always did.
Didn't they?
Hardy gave his associate a last, ambiguous look that mingled worry and hope, and she responded with a quick bob of her head. "Don't worry, sir. It'll happen."
"I tell you what, Wu," he said. "I'm sure hoping you're right."
Hardy parked on Bryant Street across from the Hall of Justice. Traffic was light and curb space, so precious during the workday, was everywhere. Behind him, the sun was going down with a gaudy splash. The usual sunset gale had started up off the Bay and it whistled by the windows of his car, throwing pages of newspapers, candy wrappers, random grit and other debris through the long shadows in front of him.
He checked his watch. Glitsky was ten minutes late.
Hardy had paged him, their signal, before he'd left his office. He wasn't thrilled at having to wait. It gave him too much time to think about what Wu had done. He pushed the knob in his dash, turned up the latest Fleetwood Mac, who'd somehow managed to lift themselves off the oldies heap and get back in the game again.
Wu's situation? It would play the way it played.
"Sorry I'm late." Glitsky opened the door and slid into the seat beside him.
Lost in the music, Hardy hadn't seen him leave the Hall or approach the car. Now he found himself mildly surprised by the sight of his friend in full uniform. In the nearly dozen years during which Glitsky had been the lieutenant in charge of the homicide detail, he hadn't often worn his blues, preferring instead the more informal look of khaki slacks, usually a shirt and tie, and almost invariably a flight jacket, faux fur collar and all.
Now Glitsky was the picture of proper police protocol. He wore the uniform, his shield and decorations, gunbelt and gun. He held his hat in his lap at the moment, and the rest of him and his gear seemed to take up more space than he had when he dressed more like a civilian. Hardy thought it interesting that even the face looked more at home and, ironically, less threatening, with the uniform under it. Law officers were supposed to look authoritative and tough, and Glitsky, with his hatchet nose, cropped graying hair and the distinctive scar that ran through both lips, looked like a working cop, not like a scary citizen.
Now the working cop, fixing his seat belt, shot a look across the seat, saw Hardy's eyes on him and said, "What?"
Hardy turned the key in the ignition, put the car in gear, started rolling. "Just admiring the fancy figure you cut in your uniform. I can't seem to get used to it. You catch the peanut thief?"
"He wasn't a thief. He just changed the drawers."
"Somebody goofing with you."
"Maybe," Glitsky said, "knowing I'm such a big fan of practical jokes."
"You are? And to think that all this while I understood you favored the death penalty for practical jokes."
"I do." Glitsky squirmed in his seat, getting himself arranged. "These seats are too small for normal people, you know that?"
"Wouldn't one have to have a nodding acquaintance with normal to make that statement? And if so, how could you?"
Glitsky sat, not exactly squirming, but shifting in his seat. After a bit, he seemed to be probing with his right hand into the left side of his torso. He took in a big breath and released it, looking ahead, quiet, frowning.
"You okay, Abe?"
Glitsky sucked in a breath again, settled into his seat. In another minute, he sighed heavily. "My guts," he said.
They drove another block or two in silence. "Me, I keep waking up." Hardy spoke without any preamble. "It's not like I don't go to sleep. After I drink myself into oblivion, I do, but then a couple of times every week I have these dreams, always different but always with the same theme, like somebody's closing in on me and I've got to shoot them, but there's no bullets in the gun, or the knife disintegrates in my hand, or the cage they're in, the bars melt, and then they rush me and I wake up."
"I don't dream at all," Glitsky said. "But my guts hurt."
Another block and they hit a light. "You ever think about seeing somebody? Maybe talk about it?"
"Nobody can talk about it." His tone made it clear: this was Glitsky's last word on the subject.
The subject, of course, was the shoot-out.
Since then, each of the four survivors were suffering, dealing in their own respective ways with the psychic toll of what they'd had to do. Gina Roake, who'd been engaged to Freeman when he died, spent most of her time exercising in martial arts or shooting at the range. Her earlier and lifelong passion for defense work had all but dissipated and she came into work only sporadically. She had completed a few hundred pages of a legal thriller that, she said, was going to expose the rottenness of the whole system.
Hardy's brother-in-law, Moses McGuire, previously a heavy but controlled social drinker, had descended into a deep fog of alcohol. He wasn't yet drinking in the mornings, but Hardy hadn't seen him close to sober in eight months. He'd gained thirty pounds. He hadn't shaved or trimmed his beard and his hair hung down to his shoulders. He and Susan were having problems in their marriage.
Hardy knew all about his own dreams, his problems with motivation, his feelings about the system he worked in, the cynical machinations he orchestrated nearly daily, the bibulous lunches, then dinners, then late nights. He figured his problems, too, would pass. In some ways the shaken foundations of his life seemed all of a piece with the world in general, the terrorism and war and madness that were now part of the daily fabric and that, for him at least, hadn't existed since he'd been in Vietnam, and that since those long ago days, he'd naively allowed himself to believe would never exist again.
And now Abe and his guts. "Nobody can talk about it," Glitsky repeated.
"I heard you the first time," Hardy said. Then. "You worried somebody's going to find out someday?"
"You're not?"
"It crosses my mind from time to time."
"It's eating me up from inside." As though to prove it, Glitsky pushed again at his side. "Especially since my promotion."
They drove. Hardy said, "What does Treya say?"
"Nothing." Then: "I don't talk about it. Nothing's wrong. She doesn't need to worry about it. I'll get over it." Glitsky stared out the side window while pushing his right hand into his guts, just above his gunbelt. "I don't understand this," he said. "When Bruce Willis shoots somebody, they roll the credits and everybody's fine."
Hardy dropped Glitsky a few blocks beyond his own house, at the corner of Lake and Twenty-first. The deputy chief walked, counting ten houses up to the address. He stopped and noted the location of the garage to the side and a little behind the two-story, stand-alone stucco house. Then he continued on the sidewalk and turned up the polished riverstone path that bisected a neat lawn. Up three steps to an unlit brick and stucco porch, he stood on the landing and waited for a moment, listening. Through the glass at eye level in the door, he saw lights in the back of the house, some shadows dancing on the walls.
He turned back and checked the street. Like Glitsky's own block, it dead-ended at the southern edge of the Presidio. From what he had heard and read about the murder of Elizabeth Cary, it had been just about at this time of day, a week ago tomorrow. Still not exactly full night. Witnesses certainly could have seen something. Especially if they ran to a window, as someone must have after hearing the enormous boom of a.9mm handgun. But no one had reported seeing anyone.
Glitsky pushed at the doorbell. The sound echoed in the house and a dog barked.
A dog? Glitsky hadn't realized there was a dog, and didn't know if it meant anything. Still, he wished he'd read it someplace, in one of the reports. For a moment, apprehension swept over him, the feeling that he wasn't prepared enough for this interview, that he shouldn't be here. His role in the gunfight last year had forfeited his right to be here, to be a cop at all.
It was just like he felt every day, at his regular job- deputy chief of investigations. He didn't deserve to be where he was.
But then a figure was visible through the glass down the hallway. Glitsky put aside his own angst and stood straight, arranging his face to show sympathy. If the man he was about to interview was not a cold-blooded wife killer, then he was himself a victim who'd recently lost his life companion to violence.
The door opened. "Yes?"
Cary came as advertised- he looked at least sixty, was thirty or more pounds overweight and sported a thinning tonsure around a shiny dome of a head. He wore rimless bifocals, a white shirt and solid dark tie, loosened at the neck. Glitsky knew that the man had worked as the head accountant of a medium-sized engineering firm located in Embarcadero Two for the past seventeen years. From the look of him, he didn't get out of the office much.
"Mr. Cary? I'm Deputy Chief Glitsky. I wonder if you could spare me a few minutes of your time?"
"Of course," he said with a weary resignation. Then added, "Sorry," for no apparent reason. He reached over, flicked a switch, and suddenly there was light in the living room and over the porch. "Come on in."
Glitsky stepped over into the house, followed Cary a few steps over to a couch, where they sat. The dog was a light brown, medium-sized mutt with a lot of Lab in him, and he gave Glitsky's legs the once-over. "If you're not okay with dogs, Ranger can go."
"Dogs are fine." Glitsky gave him a little scratch behind his ears. Satisfied after a second or two, Ranger went over next to Cary and sat against the couch. His master began to pet him absently. Glitsky suddenly became aware of the smell of pizza just as Cary said, "We were having some dinner, but I wasn't hungry anyway. Do you need to see the kids, too? They're back in the kitchen."
"Maybe after a while. We'll see." Glitsky cleared his throat. "First, I wanted to say how sorry I am about your loss. You have my deepest sympathy."
Cary managed to nod.
"Secondly, I know that we, the police, haven't made much progress yet, but I wanted to assure you that we have no intention of letting up on the investigation. He is out there and we still have every hope of finding him."
"You're assuming it was a man, then?"
"No. I didn't mean to give that impression. Is there some reason you think it might have been a woman?"
Cary lifted his head and shook it. "No. I was just reacting to what you said. I have no idea in the world who it could have been." He sighed, scratched at Ranger's head. "I'm so tired of saying that, but it's true. You had to know Elizabeth. She had no enemies. Really. I mean, nobody's perfect, but she was a cheerful, sweet…" He stopped, blinked a couple of times, finally completed the thought: "A cheerful, sweet woman."
"We keep hearing that from all reports, sir. And Inspector Belou tells me that the two of you were getting along as well. No conflicts." He didn't phrase it as a question.
Cary shrugged, then sighed. There wasn't a trace of defensiveness about him. "We were a team," he said. "That's how we always talked about one another. I don't know what else I can say. We may have had an argument in the past year or so, but if we did, I don't even remember what it was about. We were a team," he repeated. "We just lived a normal life."
Glitsky's original conception of this interview had been that he would start out slow and gradually grill the husband hard on his movements on the night of the murder, and maybe find a hole in the story he'd given to Inspectors Belou and Russell. But now, in the small room, seeing the man in such obvious, all-inclusive pain, he found himself unable to get warm to the idea that Cary was a killer. "I know the inspectors have gone over this with you, sir, but in the past few days, I wonder if something else might have occurred to you- some disagreement your wife might have had with, I don't know, a neighbor, one of your relatives, somebody from your children's school. Maybe even something from a long time ago that you didn't remember in the first days of shock and grief? That you originally didn't see as having any possible connection."
Cary looked down at his dog, stopped petting him and sat back on the couch. He took off his glasses, rubbed them on his pants leg, put them back on. "No," he said, and shook his head.
"What?"
"Nothing, I'm sure." But he went on. "This really isn't possible, I don't think, but Elizabeth does have… I mean she did… I mean he's still alive."
"Who's that?"
"One of her brothers. She's got three of them, but one of them, Ted, is crazy. He lives down south at Lake Elsinore. He didn't make the funeral."
"And he's, what? Institutionalized?"
"No. He's not clinically crazy, I don't think. Just not completely right, you know what I mean?"
"Why don't you tell me." Glitsky had a small notepad out. "Ted. Last name?"
"Reed. R-E-E-D."
"Okay. And how is he crazy?"
"I shouldn't say crazy. That's just how we always refer to him. He was born premature and always had lots of learning problems. His IQ's probably about eighty-five. He's sad more than anything, really. I haven't seen him in, I don't know, five years or more. But Elizabeth tried to stay in touch on his birthday and Christmas, like that. That's the way she was, she wasn't going to abandon her brother." He sighed. "Anyway, I know she talked to him at Christmas because she made the kids say hi to their Uncle Ted."
"He yelled at us, too."
Glitsky looked up in surprise. Ranger ran over to the tall, gangly boy of about fourteen, hands in his pockets, who had appeared in the hallway. Cary stood up. "Scott…" He turned. "Inspector, this is my oldest, Scott. He's sorry that he was eavesdropping. Scott, Inspector… I'm sorry."
"Glitsky." On his feet, shaking the boy's hand.
A good solid grip. The boy even made eye contact. "Nice to meet you, sir."
Cary raised his voice. "You other kids back there, too?"
In a second, the two younger sisters were in the room. Both of them had been crying. Cary introduced them, too, Patricia and Carlene, then apologized to Glitsky again.
He waved it off and looked at the son. "So you were saying, Scott, that your Uncle Ted yelled at you on this phone call?"
"Yes, sir. I finally had to hang up on him."
"What was he yelling about?"
Scott glanced at his father, got a nod and went ahead. "All the presents I got."
"What about them?"
"Well, he asked what I'd got for Christmas and I started to tell him and go down the list, like, you know, and suddenly he's all 'Your mother's got that kind of money?' Really yelling at me. Like if Mom's got all that money, she could send some to him instead of spoiling us…" He turned to his father. "You think it might have been him, Dad?"
"No, I don't know. I can't imagine…" Cary to Glitsky now: "That's just the way he is. He thinks because we have a little money, we… He just doesn't understand. But he's really harmless, I think. Just a little crazy."
"He's a jerk," the son said. "A total jerk."
Cary's face relaxed into something like a smile for the first time. "I can't really argue with that. Even Elizabeth thought he was a pain in the ass. And she liked everybody."
"And he didn't come to the funeral?" Glitsky asked.
"Thank God," Scott said.
"No," Cary answered. "Nobody could reach him."
"So he might not have been down at Lake Elsinore?"
"I don't know. I don't know if the other brothers have reached him yet."
"I bet he did it, the son of a bitch."
"Scott! That's enough. All right." The rebuke's tone wasn't harsh, but it was firm, and effective. The boy still fumed, but in silence. Cary turned to Glitsky. "I've got an address and a phone number down there I can give you, but I'd be very surprised."
Glitsky shrugged. "You never know. It's worth following up."
"I'll go get it."
As Cary went out to the hallway, Glitsky faced the children. "Do any of you guys have any ideas of who might have wanted to hurt your mother?"
The two young girls started crying again, quietly. Ranger started whimpering around them and Scott, repeating over again that he bet it was Uncle Ted, went over to join in the comforting. Glitsky's own emotions began to roil, and incredibly moved, he had to look away for a moment.
Then Cary was back with Ted's numbers on a yellow Post-it. He absently handed it to Glitsky as he gathered his children around him, telling them to go back into the kitchen and finish dinner, then do the dishes and get going on their homework. He'd be in to help in a minute.
When they'd gone, Glitsky said, "You've done well with them. They're good kids."
"All Elizabeth," he said. "I'm only here for decoration." He sighed. "I notice the girls were crying again. Did something happen?"
"I asked if they had any idea of anyone who might have wanted to hurt their mother."
Cary's shoulders sagged. "That's just it. No one could have wanted to hurt her." He seemed to be searching for a way to express it more compellingly. "I mean, she couldn't abide anything even remotely violent, so what reason could anyone have to do this to her? She refused to be in the same room with me when I watched Law & Order because she said it reminded her too much of a murder trial she had to sit on a long time ago before I even knew her. That's how she was. So how could someone hurt a person like her? It makes no sense…"
But suddenly, Cary's explanation had sparked a question. "What was this murder trial?" Glitsky asked.
"The one Elizabeth was on? I don't really know anything about it. She didn't like to talk about it. As I said, it was before we were even together. At least twenty-five years ago. They found the man guilty and he went to jail."
"You remember his name?"
"No. I don't know if I ever knew it." Cary pushed at the bridge of his eyeglasses. "She really wouldn't talk about it at all. It bothered her that she'd been a part of putting this guy away forever. She just felt tremendous guilt about the whole thing."
"Why? Didn't she think they reached the right verdict?"
"No. It wasn't that. Mostly it was she didn't feel like she should have been sitting in judgment of another person. Even if he was guilty. She wished she'd never done it." Cary put his hand to his head and closed his eyes. After a moment, he opened them again.
"Was it here in San Francisco?" Glitsky asked.
A shrug. "I don't even know that, for sure. I think it must have been right after she got out of school, college. She went to Santa Clara. She may have still been living down there. Maybe one of her brothers would know." He pointed to the Post-it. "Anyway, I've included them in with Ted's number there. But again," he said, "I can't imagine…" His voice petered out. "It doesn't really matter anyway. It won't bring her back, will it?"
Even though it was a Monday night, by a little after nine-thirty the crowd was four deep at the bar of the Balboa Cafe, at the corner of Greenwich and Divisadero. Although the intersection had four corners and not three, it went by the nickname of "the triangle"- after the Bermuda Triangle- where singles went to disappear for the weekend. By ten o'clock every night of the week, the three major bars and the streets in front of them were clogged mostly with young professionals, but also (what gave the place its uniquely privileged character) with the sons and daughters of the older generation of San Francisco's elite society.
These people weren't out slumming- they owned the bars and restaurants, and this was where they played with their friends. But the influence and surface glitter drew a fast, smart, ambitious crowd- local politicians, music celebrities, movie stars in town for a shoot or a party. And, of course, all the others- lawyers on the make, lovelies of both sexes, suppliers of different kinds of fuel.
And because so much juice flowed to this one spot, a regular contingent of hangers-on was also always on hand, literally out in the street, adding to the color. Two well-connected, extremely personable and relatively hip San Francisco cops- Dan Bascom and Jerry Santangelo- had the best and most lucrative permanent assignment in the city. Eight to two, they kept their squad car parked across from the entrance to the Balboa, a presence that only rarely required any muscle. The two of them, along with Tommy Amici, the Balboa's chief valet, hauled in Cuban cigars, tickets to every artistic, cultural or sports event in the tricounty area, business cards and introductions, as though they ran clearinghouses. The Bay Guardian had done a story on Amici a few months before where he claimed he made eight thousand dollars a month to park cars. Bascom and Santangelo, also featured prominently in the piece, refused to comment about their income or the other undocumented perks.
Three and a half months ago, Amy Wu had come here for the first time. Since then she'd become one of the regulars.
Tonight she had somehow claimed a stool before the nighttime mob had begun to appear in strength. Now, two cosmopolitans down, she sat sideways to the bar near the front door with her back held straight. A lot of her crossed legs showed beneath her black leather miniskirt.
The noise wasn't jet-engine level, but between the canned music, the buzz of the hundred or so customers in a space that could comfortably hold eighty, and the televisions, nobody here was sharing intimate secrets. Wu was half watching the Giants game and half stringing along two guys, Wayne somebody and his friend. The two of them couldn't seem to decide which one was going to make a move. Wayne wore a wedding ring and Wu ached to tell him, if he did come on to her, that he might want to think about the ring next time.
But for the moment, that was premature.
So far he'd only bought her a drink, wedged himself up next to her stool, told her she was too pretty to be a lawyer, only the thousandth time she'd heard that one, whatever it was supposed to mean.
So he was moving toward it, but not there yet.
The crowd suddenly cheered and Wu looked up at the TV. One of the Giants was in a home-run trot.
Wu drank off half of her drink, put it back down. Wayne had a fist raised as though he'd hit the home run himself, and under his arm a space opened in the press of bodies and she caught a glimpse of Jason Brandt as he pushed his way through the swinging door.
And he saw her, flashed a genuine enough smile, started moving in her direction. In a minute, really before she could do anything even if she'd known what it was she wanted to do, he'd come up beside Wayne, pointed to Wu and said to him, "Excuse me, that's my girlfriend," and was standing at the bar, calling over the bedlam to his good friend Cecil to give him a double JD rocks. Then he turned to her, still smiling. "Hey."
"Hey yourself." Then, to Wayne: "He's not my boyfriend."
Before Wayne could respond, Brandt turned and looked him up and down. "Are you married, dude?" he asked, and clucked disapprovingly, then came back to Wu. "That is bad form. If he's looking to hook up, the least he could do is lose the ring."
"I wasn't trying to hook up," Wayne said. "I just bought the lady a drink. I'm not looking for any trouble."
Brandt's own drink, delivered in seconds, was in his hand, and he raised it to clink Wayne's beer glass. "Then we, my friend, are on the same page. Can I buy you another beer?" He turned and yelled out over the noise, "Cecil?" But Wayne had already put the remainder of his beer on the counter and was gone.
Brandt turned back to Wu and cracked a grin. "Predators. Scumbag's got a wife at home with the kids and he's hitting on babes in bars. There ought to be a patrol out for those guys, publish their names and pictures in the papers. Wanna bet he's going across the street, checking out the action at Indigo's?" Suddenly he seemed to notice that Wu wasn't smiling. "What?"
"That's what I want to ask you. What are you doing, Jason? Chasing off somebody I'm talking to? What's that bullshit?"
He cocked his head. "You kidding? You think that guy, like, wants to be your friend?"
Wu's eyes flashed. "Whatever he wants to be, whatever I want him to be, it's none of your business. How about that?"
He drew his mouth into a pout, picked up his drink and had some. "You're mad about today, aren't you? This afternoon?"
"No."
He looked surprised. "You're not. I would be."
She shrugged. "It was always a detention case. I knew that going in."
"Okay. So what are you mad about? You are a little pissed off."
"Yeah, I am pissed off."
"You mean me chasing off that married dweeb?"
"His name is Wayne."
"Oh, excuse me, Wayne. Maybe you didn't hear me, but I just offered to buy him a beer. That's not chasing him off."
"You chased him off. You ever think about what if I liked him?"
"It never crosssed my mind. Did you like him?"
"I didn't not like him. He seemed nice enough."
"Very strong. If he meant that much to you, I really am sorry I ruined your night."
"You didn't ruin my night and that's not the point anyway. The point is it's my life and it's got nothing to do with you."
Brandt put a hand to his chest. "And I would be the last to deny it. But all the books say you don't want to get involved with a married guy."
"Jesus, Jason, he bought me a drink, that's all. That's not exactly involved."
"It's not exactly uninterested either. Did he let his hand, however casually, fall and rest upon any part of your body?"
"My shoulder. One second, leaning over to pay Cecil. That was all."
"I'm sure. But you notice I managed to pay Cecil already without touching anybody. Did he tell you you looked good?"
"Yes, he did." Finally, beginning to be worn down, she broke a small smile. "He said I was too pretty to be a lawyer."
"I love that. Like what, they have an ugly contest to get into law school?"
"I know," she said. "But guys say it all the time. Like it's a compliment. Wow, imagine that, a woman with enough brains to be an attorney and yet not a total scag."
"Not even half a scag, in your case. Not trying to kiss up or anything."
"No. Calling me half a scag is not kissing up."
"Okay, you're way less than even half a scag. You planning to have another drink?"
"You buying?"
"One. If you promise not to touch me."
"You're safe," she said.
For eighteen hundred dollars a month, Wu rented a twenty-by-thirty-foot studio apartment on the top floor of a large building on Fillmore Street, north of Lombard. The unit was essentially one large, high-ceilinged room, with a small but functional open kitchen, a tiny toilet and shower-only bathroom in the back corner, a decent clothes closet. The futon she slept on converted into a sofa during the day. She also had an old upholstered reading chair next to an end table where she kept her magazines. The only really nice pieces of furniture, aside from a relatively new, high-tech television set, were a Japanese changing screen and a cherry dining table that her father had bought her when she passed the bar. More often than not this doubled as her work desk.
The best thing about the apartment, and the reason for the ridiculous rent, was the windows- two oversized ones along the Fillmore wall, and another couple over the sink and counter in the kitchen area. From their vantage four stories up, all of these afforded really nice views of Marina Park, with the Golden Gate Bridge off to the left, Marin County just a swan dive and a long swim away.
The built-in bookshelves on the opposite wall were filled to bursting with her CDs and law books and a wide selection of hardbacks, mostly nonfiction- history, biography, political science- but one shelf of novels. A bright multicolored eight-by-ten rug covered most of the hardwood. She kept the place neatly organized and very clean.
Now, wrapped in a heavy turkish nightgown, she sat at her table with her briefcase open and her third cup of morning coffee in front of her. The sun, just up, came in over the sink windows and sprayed the wall to her left. She'd been awake for forty-five minutes, had taken the hottest shower she could stand and gulped down four aspirins. She'd eaten a banana, half a canteloupe, and then three eggs scrambled up with soy and leftover rice. Two cups- not demitasses, but her old cracked mug- of espresso. The throbbing in her head was getting to the manageable state, she thought, but still she hesitated before opening the folder she'd just taken from her briefcase. She had picked it up- newly transcribed interviews, more discovery- from Boscacci.
Last night she'd never gotten to them. Instead, like almost every other night for the past few months, she had gone out to find a party. For a moment there, in the dead of the night with Jason Brandt, it had almost seemed as though it would turn out to be more than that. But by the time the alarm went off, he had gone.
Just as well, she had told herself after the initial stab of realization that he'd left. Probably just as well.
Now that she'd committed her client to admitting the petition against him, she had a long moment of terror imagining that she'd find something among this latest evidence indicating that Andrew had not in fact murdered his teacher and his girlfriend. She didn't believe it was likely, but Dismas Hardy's reaction had brought home to her the seriousness of the situation. She'd leveraged not just herself and her client, but the reputation of the firm.
If she didn't deliver, it would be bad.
Finally, she reached into her briefcase for the folder, pulled it out and set it in front of her, then opened it.
She sat with Hal and Linda at the dining room table again. No sign of the maid this time. The house was almost eerily quiet to Wu after she'd finished acquainting the Norths with the most recent developments in the case. She needn't have worried about finding exonerating evidence. The new discovery was, if anything, more damning than what they'd seen so far- the testimony of Andrew's best friend, motives, more about the gun. Tension between the couple was thick but transparent, and to break it, Wu had asked if there was anything else about Andrew that she might need to know.
"You already know about the joyride," Linda said.
"No," Wu replied. "I mean before that. Did Andrew have any kind of history of misbehavior or violence? Anything like that?"
"No," Linda said. "Nothing serious."
Hal North cleared his throat. "Well…"
"I said nothing serious," Linda snapped. "I didn't say nothing at all. Don't give me that look, Hal. I'm not trying to hide anything."
"I'm not giving you a look. We just disagree about what was serious or not."
"Maybe it would be better," Wu interjected, "if you just told me everything and let me decide whether it seems important now or not. I gather there were a few incidents."
"Years ago," Linda said. "Literally, when Hal and I were first together."
"What happened?" Wu asked.
Linda drew a labored sigh. "All right. The one, it was when I told him that Hal and I were getting married. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon, a nice sunny, warm day, and we had the windows open in the kitchen. Andrew was about ten, and still at the age where he liked to sit on my lap, you know?" She sighed again. "Anyway, Alicia- our daughter, Hal's daughter, really- she was there, too, so we could all share the good news." She stopped.
"And what happened?" Wu prompted her.
Linda's lips were pressed tightly together as she fought for control. "He just… He just lost his temper."
"Did he hit you?"
When it became obvious that Linda couldn't or wouldn't answer, Hal took over. "He hit her, me, Alicia. He went over to the sink and started throwing the dishes at us. I took a couple of stitches in the face stopping him." He touched a still-visible scar along his jaw, let out a deep breath. "It wasn't pretty."
"But that was seven years ago," Linda said. "And it was my fault anyway. I think I must have just been a terrible mother."
"You are not."
"But I was, before you. You weren't there." Linda turned to Wu. "You should know all this. Andrew's father walked out on us both when he was three, and I needed to work, so I became a waitress, then later a hostess."
"You know Beaulieu?" Hal interrupted with real pride, pointed at his wife. "Hostess at Beaulieu."
This was one of the city's premier dinner destinations, and a magnet for the power elite. Wu wasn't surprised that Linda Bartlett- beautiful, witty, and sophisticated- had wound up with a highly visible job there.
But this was ancient history to Linda, and she waved off her husband's intended flattery. "Anyway, I was young and selfish and liked to have a good time. I admit it, though I'm not proud of it. I had… opportunities come my way and I wanted to take advantage of them. Anyway, most of the opportunities came with men attached- it's okay, Hal, she probably needs to know this. It's not like a state secret anyway." Linda sighed and continued. "In any event, the men I saw often weren't so nice to Andrew. And I didn't have the strength or understanding or simple will to do much about it. So he came to hate the idea of my boyfriends." She reached out a hand to her husband. "Including Hal, I'm afraid. At first, at least."
"He still simmers," Hal said. "Maybe not at me, specifically…"
But Linda remained defensive. "It's just that he's got this mistrust. He has trouble believing in people in general. And that's me, too, my fault. In the early years, I was so bitter and mad at being dumped, at the unfairness of the way my life had turned out, I just wanted to make up for lost time, and I took it whenever I got a chance. Andrew couldn't count on me. So he's always expecting to be betrayed or abandoned or let down."
"Still?" Wu asked.
"To some degree," Linda admitted.
"Though Kevin has helped," Hal added.
"Kevin?"
"Kevin Brolin," Linda said. "He's a psychologist who's been seeing Andrew."
"For how long?"
"All this time," Hal said. "On and off. He's an anger management specialist."
Fantastic, Wu thought. A jury would love to hear about all these anger issues. But she had to press on. Knowledge was power, and she needed all she could get. "Mrs. North, when you started to tell me about the day you and Hal announced your engagement, you made it sound like Andrew's tantrum was the first of at least a couple of incidents."
Linda looked to Hal, who nodded and said, "Alicia's party?" He went on. "This was maybe three years ago, Alicia's twelfth or thirteenth birthday party. She invited five or six kids, and we made her include Andrew."
"They're only a year apart," Linda said.
"Anyway," Hal went on, "all the girls got into some PlayStation thing and evidently they all decided to gang up to beat Andrew." He shrugged. "I came home to a smashed big-screen, pieces of remote all over the place. Alicia's lip was cut, her eye…"
Linda came to her son's defense. "He's really passionate about video games. That's normal enough nowadays. But he also reads, and writes beautifully. He's getting solid B-pluses at Sutro, and you already know he'd gotten the lead in the play."
Hal's whole body seemed to slump. His voice was deep, depressed. Obviously he and Linda's respective spin on Andrew's character traits was a festering wound, and now here in front of the boy's attorney, its binding was unraveling. He looked directly at Wu. "He never laughs. The boy's just not happy in his skin. He hates all team sports. He's changed his haircut and color ten times in two years. He wears torn T-shirts with butt-crack shorts and combat boots." The slab of Hal's face was a monolith of sadness.
Persistent, nearly pleading to Wu, Linda started again. "He can play any musical instrument with strings on it."
"But won't ever perform for anyone, or take lessons."
Wu had to call a stop to it. "I think I get the picture," she said. She sat perfectly still with her hands linked on the table in front of her. The Norths were avoiding eye contact with each other, although Hal caught Wu's gaze for a brief instant and rolled his eyes. Finally, choosing her words with great care, Wu started to speak. "This issue we've got to deal with here is the likelihood of what a jury in an adult trial is going to do when confronted with the facts of this case. The negative character issues we can avoid as long as we don't bring up anything positive."
"What?" Linda asked. "What does that mean?"
"It's just a rule," Wu said. "Character can't be used by the prosecution except if we bring it up first. After that it's open season. Do you think we want to go there, Mrs. North?"
It took her a minute, but she finally shook her head. "I don't think that would be a good idea."
It was the first time that Linda had acknowledged the basic problem: that regardless of the facts, the situation looked bad for her son. Wu played to that card. "No, I don't think so, either. And that leads me to the really crucial question." A quick glance at Hal, who nodded encouragement. "From what we've seen of the discovery so far- and this means the whole gun question, the pattern of lies to the police, the eyewitness testimony, and so on- do you really think, Mrs. North, we should advise Andrew to run the risk of an adult trial, or try to talk him out of it if he decides to admit?"
Hal reached over and put his hand over his wife's. "It comes down to how it looks, hon. What a jury will probably do with the evidence they see."
Linda sat with it for a long time. Finally, she looked first to Hal, then to Wu. "You don't think it's possible that he actually did do this, do you?"
Wu finessed her answer. "I think that eight years is a far, far better sentence than anything he'd be likely to get in an adult trial. There are no other suspects, Mrs. North. Andrew was the only person that we know was there when the murders happened, and he had a gun and a motive."
Another silence.
"Maybe we should let Andrew decide," Hal's voice was a whisper.
This, of course, had been Wu's goal all along. When Andrew got acquainted with the next round of discovery, which she intended to show him today, Wu believed that he would be a fool to deny the hopelessness of his position, and she did not think him a fool. He would opt to admit. With his mother opposed to that idea, though, urging him to fight for his innocence every step of the way, he was much less likely to come to this obviously correct decision. But if Linda could be convinced not to object, Wu would have a clear field, and convincing her client would be that much easier.
"I'm going up to see him right after I leave here," Wu said.
"Maybe I should go up with you," Linda said. "I don't want to him feel like we think he's guilty. That we're abandoning him."
But Linda's company was the last thing Wu wanted when she made her pitch to Andrew. "It might be better just to leave it to me, Mrs. North. This is really something your son is going to have to come to rationally, and if you're there, it's going to be emotional. If it's just me, his lawyer, explaining that it's not about guilt, it's legal strategy that will give him many more years of freedom, he's at least going to look at it clearly. Then, if he's in fact truly innocent and just won't admit no matter what, we'll go to trial. But if he doesn't think it's worth the risk…"
Linda hung her head, finally looked back up. "Then that means he probably did it after all, doesn't it?"
Well, yes, Wu thought. That's certainly what the evidence indicates, doesn't it? But she only said, "If he admits, he admits. That's all. It's about strategy, not factual guilt or innocence."
Hal leaned in, his hand still over his wife's on the table. "It's got to be his decision," he repeated. "He's the only one who knows for sure."
Another lengthy silence. Linda said, "But…" and stopped, turned to her husband, shook her head again. Finally, she nodded.
Q: Three two one. This is Homicide Inspector Sergeant Glen Taylor, badge fourteen ten. Case number 003-114279. It is three-thirty in the afternoon, Tuesday, March 4th. I am at the residence of Mark and June Ropke, 2619 Irving Street. With me are the Ropkes and their son, Lanny, caucasian juvenile aged seventeen. Lanny, would you describe your relationship with Andrew Bartlett.
A: He was, is I mean, my best friend.
Q: And how do you know him?
A: He's in my class at school. We're juniors at Sutro.
Q: Did you also know a Mike Mooney and a Laura Wright?
A: Yeah. Mr. Mooney was my English teacher, and Laura was Andrew's girlfriend.
Q: Okay. Did Andrew talk to you about them?
A: Yeah. He was a little jealous.
Q: Andrew was? Of Mooney?
A: Yeah.
Q: You want to tell me about it.
A: All right. Him and Laura, Andrew and Laura, I mean, had been going out for about a year, something like that, a long time anyway. Then they got in a fight just before Christmas break and broke up.
Q: Do you know what the fight was about?
A: I think it was sex.
Q: Did Andrew tell you that?
A: Kind of, yeah. I guess he was coming on pretty strong and she told him she wasn't ready for that yet, so he got all pissed off- sorry, mad, I mean- and said she was just being a tease, leading him on, what was she making out with him for if they weren't getting to that? Anyway, it was a big fight and they broke up, but then a couple of weeks later, maybe a month before she got killed, they got back together.
Q: Did Andrew tell you why?
A: He didn't have to. It was obvious. But he did tell me he couldn't stand not being with her, sex or no sex. He was really in love with her.
Q: So what happened with Mr. Mooney? How'd he get into this?
A: He was directing the play, and Andrew and Laura were both in it. They're… I mean she was, both of them were into drama. So they started going over to his place together at night to do their lines and rehearse, you know. Mooney's. Anyway, one night Laura told Andrew that she wasn't driving back with him. She was going to stay on awhile and do some more rehearsing and Mr. Mooney would take her home.
Q: And what was Andrew's reaction to that?
A: At first, you know, not much. But after it happened again a couple of times, pretty bad. Really bad, I guess.
Q: In what way?
Q: (female voice) It's okay, Lanny. There's no hurry.
Q: (male voice) Just tell him what you've told us. It's all right.
A: He brought a gun to school.
Q: Did you see it?
A: Oh yeah, he showed it to me. It was in his backpack. It was a real gun, and loaded.
Q: Did he tell you what he was planning to do with it?
A: Yeah, but he wasn't sure exactly.
Q: What do you mean?
A: Well, he was carrying it around for a week, maybe two, I think just seeing how it felt, you know. He talked about killing himself mostly at first.
Q: But that changed?
A: It just… I don't know. He told me he was going to find out for sure if something was going on with Mooney and Laura. This was while they were broken up. And meanwhile, he sees her and Mooney goofing at school, all these little jokes they had with each other. So basically, it was this jealousy thing. It was eating him up, the thought of her maybe having sex with him, after only teasing with him for so long. I mean, Mooney's a grown-up and Andrew didn't believe they'd only be making out. So he decided he had to find out for sure.
Q: And how would he do that?
A: He was going to hang around after he told them he was leaving, maybe make up some excuse, and come back and catch them at it.
Q: And then what what was he going to do?
A: Well, he said he hoped he'd find out Laura wasn't lying, but if he caught them at something, he hoped he could handle it. He said maybe it would be a good idea if he didn't have the gun with him. If he didn't, maybe he wouldn't kill them on the spot. He hoped he wouldn't do that.
Q: He said he hoped he wouldn't kill them?
A: That's what he said.
Although it was clear and sunny outside, it wasn't warm by any stretch. The small visiting room at the YGC felt to Wu like a refrigerator. She was gauging her client's reaction to his friend's testimony, and it seemed to have hit him pretty hard. Andrew was sitting back, slumped in one of the hard wooden chairs at the table this time, one elbow on the chair's arm and his hand over his mouth. Now he wearily dropped the hand, shook his head.
"This is bad."
She nodded. "Correct."
"He told me the cops had come and he'd talked to them, but he never mentioned anything about the gun. You think Lanny would have been smart enough… Nobody had to know about the gun. It's makes it look…"
Wu knew what it made it look like. She asked, "You want to talk about the gun?"
"What about it?"
"Well, the gun's kind of an issue. You bring it to school and show it around…"
"Not around. Just to Lanny."
"Okay, just to Lanny, although he's enough. He'll testify that you said you were thinking about killing Laura and Mooney, and maybe yourself. The gun is what you presumably would have used to do that. So what were you thinking when you took it? It was Hal's gun, is that right?"
His expression grew sharp. "I never said that."
"No, I know you didn't. But another one of the interviews in here"- she patted the folder that held Lanny's transcript-"is a discussion with your stepfather about when Sergeant Taylor asked him if he owned a gun and he said yes, then went to get it and couldn't find it. Didn't Hal ever ask you if you'd taken it?"
"Yeah, he did."
"And what did you tell him?"
Andrew gave her the bad eye.
"Okay, then," she said, "let me tell you. You denied it, maybe even pitched a little fit of indignation that he'd accuse you of anything like that. Am I close?" She leaned in toward him over the table. "Let me ask you this, Andrew. Why didn't you just put it back from where you'd taken it? If you'd done that, and if you in fact hadn't committed these murders, don't you realize that you wouldn't be here right now?"
His eyes weren't quite to panic, but they flicked to the wall behind her, then to the corners of the room before they got back to her. "Why is that?"
She noticed that he didn't bother with the pro forma denial of the crime this time. She let herself begin to believe that her strategy was working- he was getting used to admitting the basic fact of his guilt. "Because if we had the gun, we could test ballistics with the slugs they recovered from the scene and prove that it wasn't the murder weapon." She gave him a minute to digest this critical information, then pressed on. "You told me you got rid of the gun."
"I did."
"Do you think you could find it again?"
"No. I dropped it off the bridge."
"That would be the Golden Gate?"
"Yeah."
Wu checked a laugh. Perfect, she thought. "I don't understand, and I don't think a jury will understand, why you did that if you didn't kill anybody with it."
"I freaked out, is all. I told you. When I got back to Mike's- Mooney's- and saw it there, I figured the cops would be able to trace it back to Hal and I'd be screwed."
"And why is that?"
"I mean, if it was the murder weapon." His miserable look seemed to plead for her to understand. "I had to get rid of it."
"But it wasn't the murder weapon, was it?"
"I don't know. I mean, it might have been."
Wu straightened up in her chair and faced him head-on. "Let me get this straight. Your theory of the crime, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that while you were out taking a stroll and memorizing your lines, somebody- you don't know who or why- knocked at Mooney's door, saw your father's gun conveniently sitting out on a coffee table, grabbed it and shot anybody who happened to be standing around. That's it?"
"I don't think that."
"Good. That would be a dumb thing to think. But otherwise, why get rid of the gun?"
"I told you!" Andrew again cast his eyes around the walls. Wu could almost feel his panic, searching for escape, any escape. Finally, he exploded, slamming the table between them with the flat of his palm, coming to his feet, turning around, trapped. "I already told you that!" he screamed. Don't you get it? Aren't you listening to me? I was freaked out. I knew it was a mistake the minute I let it go."
Suddenly, his voice broke into an uncontrolled and wrenching sob. He was crying, pleading with her. "I mean, there's Mike and Laura shot dead on the floor. They're dead. My mind goes blank and I can't think of anything except to call emergency." He gulped now for a breath, tears streaking his face. "After that… I don't know what I did, except finally I turn around and there's my gun on the coffee table. I can't leave it there, can I? I didn't think it out, what I was doing. I just did it. Didn't you get that at all?"
Andrew stood across the table from her, hands limp at his side, staring at her. His breath still came in jagged gasps.
It was all she could do to keep from coming around the table and hugging him.
A knock at the door interrupted and Wu crossed to it. The unpleasant bailiff from the detention hearing, Nelson, had heard a noise and was wondering if everything was all right. She noticed he had a grip on his mace, and she held up her hand, palm out. "We're fine."
When the door had closed and she turned around, Andrew was back in his chair, leaning over, his face down by his knees, his fingers laced over the back of his head. She went to his side of the table, boosted herself onto it, folded her own hands in her lap, and waited.
He was still taking deep, labored breaths, but gradually they slowed, and eventually he looked up. Seeing her so close, nearly hovering over him, he pushed the chair back six inches, then hung his head again, perhaps in shame. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry." He brought his hands to his face, said "Oh God," and broke again, a sob that seemed to sound the death knell to all the hopes of his childhood.
Someone else witnessing the breakdown, hearing the same words, might have reached a different conclusion, but to Wu it ratified all of her preconceptions- she'd been expecting something like this, Andrew's show of remorse for what he'd done. To her, the apologetic words sounded exactly like an admission of his guilt.
She pushed herself off the table and went up beside him, put a hand on his opposite shoulder and pulled the close one against her hip. "It's all right," she whispered. "It's okay."
Through the wired windows, steep shafts of sunlight mottled the floor, struck the backs of both of them. The tableau held for nearly a minute, an eternity in that setting. Andrew's breath became more regular. Wu herself was nearly afraid to breathe, hyper-aware of the possible implications of the scene. This proximity was unprofessional. Prompted at first by a genuine sympathy, she remained out of an awkward desire to appear natural. Some small despicable part of her was also aware that even such a slight physical gesture, a hand on his shoulder, her hip against him, might work to her advantage in the next phase of their negotiation.
Finally, he raised his head. "So what am I going to do?"
She moved away, a gentle extrication. Leaning back now against the table, she didn't answer right away. "I don't mean to put you through any more agony, Andrew. God knows you've got enough to deal with as it is. But I needed to make you see, and see very clearly, some of the really powerful and convincing evidence that they've got against you."
"But it's still…"
"Please. Let me go on." She paused. "Count the ways," she said. "They've got an eyewitness, someone who saw you at Mr. Mooney's that night both before and after. They've got motive and lots of it. Your gun was there. You were there, walk or no walk. They've got the testimony of your best friend, showing premeditation. They've got the gun that you threw away, when if you'd saved it, it could have proved you innocent. All this, and then there's all the rest of their discovery we haven't even seen yet. Laura's mother's testimony, Mr. Mooney's colleagues and associates, forensics and medical reports. Your lies to the police…" She stared fixedly at him.
"What if a jury doesn't believe all that?" he asked.
"They don't have to believe all of it." She kept her tone soft. "But let me ask you one, Andrew. What part of it isn't true?"
He bit at his lip, ran his hand back through his hair.
Wu drove home another point. "And even if a jury drew a slightly different conclusion from all this evidence, say they came back with some lesser offense, say second degree murder or even some kind of manslaughter, you're still, best case, looking at a minimum of ten and maybe up to thirty years."
"But none, if I got off."
"No," she agreed. "Not then. But think about what we've just been over in the past two days. That's just a part of what the prosecution is going to present. Think of how you'd feel if you were on your own jury and heard what they were going to hear."
"So you're saying it doesn't matter whether I actually did it or not."
"Of course it does. It's critical to who you are, to the person you'll be when you get out. I'm just asking you to consider your alternatives with great, great care. We've got a hearing tomorrow, and I have set it up so you can be done with all this and out of custody with your whole life ahead of you in no more than eight years. I know that seems like forever right now, but you'll still be a very young man, believe me, with everything to live for."
"But… eight years…"
She nodded. "No one's pretending this is an easy call. I understand that. Talk to your mom and to Hal, if you want, get their opinions."
"My mom and Hal," he said with withering dismissal. "My mom and Hal. What are they going to tell me? And whatever it is, why should I listen? They live their own lives, if you haven't noticed. They're not interested in mine."
"That's not true, Andrew. Your mother's been in here to visit you every day so far, hasn't she? She loves you. She wants what's best for you. I've just come from seeing them."
"Yeah? And what did she say?"
"She said this was your decision."
Andrew snorted. "See? She'd love it if somebody else took care of me for eight years. It'd leave her and Hal freer to party."
Wu sat back, shook her head. "I don't think that's true," she said, "but it's really neither here nor there. What's important is that you've seen how hard it is to control the way evidence comes out, what it looks like. Your friend Lanny, your own… mistakes in talking to the police."
"So you really don't think you can win?"
Wu empathized with his despair, but it would be a disservice to sugarcoat his predicament. "I will try with everything in me, Andrew. You're free to get another lawyer if you want, but I promise you that I will live and breathe this case for as long as it takes if you decide to go as an adult. But I want you to have a clear understanding of what we're looking at. It will be a long haul, with no guarantees."
"How long?"
She drove in yet another nail. "It might go as long as two years before we can get to trial, maybe eighteen months if we're extremely lucky. And all that time you're in custody anyway. There's no bail, so you're right here until you're eighteen and after that probably at the county lockup downtown."
"Two years?" He swallowed, his eyes pleading. "Two more years?"
"I'd try to speed it up, of course, but that's about the average wait."
"Even if I didn't do it? Even if they found me innocent?"
"I'm afraid so. Either way. I'm sorry."
Bailiff Nelson again picked up Andrew at the door to the visitor's room. If Judge Johnson had reprimanded him over his conduct in the courtroom after the detention hearing, or even discussed it, Nelson gave no sign of it. Wu watched the two of them trundle off to wherever Andrew's cell was located back in the confines of the building. She thought that having a goon like Nelson monitor- hell, shadow- your every move must be one of the most debilitating things about confinement here.
In the women's room down in the main admin building, she fixed her makeup, then found she had to gather her emotions for several minutes. Andrew's disaffection with his parents had bothered her more than she could allow herself to show- it so closely mirrored her now forever unresolved ambivalence about her own father. How much had he really cared about her? Now she would never know. Maybe, she thought, Andrew's approach was healthier- just go on the accumulated evidence of absenteeism and benign neglect and admit that there is no profound connection. If you really believe that there is no parental love at all, you don't spend any time searching for it, either in your parents or in surrogate and successive sexual partners. You don't keep trying to please them, to live off the crumbs of praise or approval that you can then falsely interpret as a proof of their affection for you, their esteem.
Her next stop, Jason Brandt's office, added to the volatility of the emotional mix. She knew that she had to have a talk with the prosecutor and didn't want to acknowledge their physical intimacy of the night before in any way. And though she might have preferred to believe for a moment last night that they actually had potential to connect as people, Brandt had put the lie to that by getting up and leaving soon after the sex. Proof positive, she knew- she'd done the same thing herself- that all it had been was physical. Two consenting adults, thank you very much. In fact, rather than signal any kind of openness to see each other again, she thought this might be a good opportunity to score a few professional points, a payback for the grief she'd taken from him in the courtroom yesterday.
Brandt's work space was a reconverted closet that held his desk and chair, a bookshelf and nothing else. The door could only be closed because somebody had sawed several inches off the corner of the desk. One window, high up and tiny, provided neither light nor view. A bare lightbulb hung from a cord four feet above his desk.
Brandt was behind the desk, crammed amid his books and filing cabinets. The place was literally overflowing with binders, case files, periodicals. For a moment while Wu stood in the doorway, he didn't look up. When he finally did, in the first two seconds his face contorted through several iterations of arrangement- he was glad to see her; he wasn't sure why she was here; some kind of hope that they might get together again?
If it was that, Wu moved to quash it immediately. "Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. I was just up visiting my client and wanted to ask you if you thought I could get a little more time to plead him out."
Brandt's face instantly grew stern. "Why?"
Wu had decided upon a plausible explanation. "I'm having a slight problem with the parents. I doubt Boscacci would mind."
"He would. I talked to him just before the hearing yesterday and he was the soul of inflexibility."
"Really? That's funny, because when I talked with him, he didn't seem awfully concerned about timing."
"Provided Andrew admits."
"Right. Which he will."
"Shouldn't that be 'has'?"
"Tomorrow. That's 'will.' Beyond that, I'm talking only a few days' grace."
"Grace?"
"Courtesy. Whatever word you want."
Brandt leveled his gaze at her. "The word I want is 'now,' Amy. Anything beyond now- meaning tomorrow at the hearing, first thing, he admits- anything else makes me nervous as hell."
"Why?"
"You're kidding, right?" He stood up abruptly, coming out from behind his desk. "Excuse me," he said, squeezing past her, looking both ways down the hallway.
"What are you doing?"
His voice was quiet yet urgent. "I'm making sure nobody's out here to hear us, that's what." He turned and faced her. "You ask me why I'm nervous if we get delayed? Do you remember anything about last night?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He lowered his voice still further. "It means that when I walked into the Balboa last night and saw you sitting at the bar, you were a woman I had wanted to get to know for a long time. The case we were both handling was settled, so we wouldn't be squaring off in court anymore. We could do whatever we wanted. Now you're telling me it might not be settled? And you knew this last night? And still you let us go ahead?"
"It wasn't just me, if you remember, Jason."
"No, it wasn't. But you're the one who knew we might not be finished in court. If what happened with you and me gets out at all, and/or if this thing with Bartlett gets delayed, it's my ass. Don't you realize that? It's my job. And you knew it all along?"
The strength of Brandt's reaction caught Wu off guard. "No, but if I did, could you blame me, after how you treated me in court…"
He stared at her in shock. "I don't believe this. You're telling me you set me up on purpose? What's next? You blackmail me for your silence about us?"
"Come on, Jason. You're overreacting. It wasn't like that."
Brandt said aloud to himself, "I've got to call Boscacci. I'm out of this right now." Then he looked at her with a new flash of insight. "But if I do that, then you win, too, don't you? You get your delay. You knew this going in, didn't you? You've just been playing me."
"No, that's not true. I…"
But he wasn't going to be listening to any more excuses. In a fury, he put a finger to her face. "Don't you dare try and sell me on what's true or not, not after last night. You may have gotten me, okay, you win one. But that's the last time, I swear to God. The last fucking time."
He stepped back into his office and closed the door in her face.
Glitsky had meetings all morning.
The first was the bureau lieutenants' meeting, held in Department 19, a courtroom on the second floor of the Hall of Justice that happened to be dark for the day. Since there were thirty-two lieutenants within the Investigations Bureau and each was expected to present a short report on highlights in their respective bureaus since last week's meeting, this one tended to run long.
Glitsky sat up at the judge's bench, and after his initial remarks reiterating his stand in favor of quantifiable progress in police duties- arrests made, citations issued, investigations instigated, victim assistance and follow-up, and so on- for almost two full hours he listened and took notes on everything from the auto detail and home burglaries to homicide and hate crimes, from arson and the general work detail to bomb investigations and the gang task force, from narcotics and vice to sexual assault, domestic violence and psychiatric liaison.
All of this was numbing and tedious and, Glitsky suspected, not really necessary in the long run. He thought that within a few more months, he'd be able to let these meetings slide, once he had clearly delivered the message to his bureau chiefs that investigators needed to make arrests, take bad people off the street. That was the basic job. Patrolmen in uniform made the vast majority of arrests. Inspectors followed up to put the finishing touches on these cases. But the real inspectors' job was to solve cases. To assemble evidence and make arrests based on investigating crimes when no arrest at the scene was possible.
The new policy was showing signs of bearing some fruit, but nine of his bureaus had not made one arrest in the past week. There was still work to be done. Nevertheless, there had been a total of eighty-four arrests in that same period, up from seventy-eight the week before. This, he supposed, could be construed as progress, but mostly the cynical part of him believed it would turn out to be simply the manipulation of numbers, or cleaning out old, solved cases that they hadn't gotten around to filing yet. Speeding up the pipeline a little to rig the stats.
After the meeting, he stayed behind a moment with Lanier of homicide, passing along the Post-its with the names of Elizabeth Cary's brothers. Lanier might particularly want to have one of his inspectors on the case, Pat Belou or Lincoln Russell, check out Ted Reed, the crazy brother who lived down at Lake Elsinore. If he'd been in San Francisco last week, it might turn out to be something.
By ten-fifteen, he was up in Chief Batiste's office for a meeting of the Benefits Board, where he listened for another hour to the city's director of human resources talk in excruciating detail about the latest proposed improvements to the police department's pension and retirement plans, and its health and life insurance benefits. Like, what should be the deductible on sex-change operations? Like, should alcoholism automatically be presumed to be a job-related illness, entitling the officer to a full disability retirement for on-the-job injury?
At eleven-thirty, he was driven to the mayor's office. Smiling was a form of torture for Glitsky, but for most of another hour, that's all he did, while photographers took his picture with other local VIPs and the members of a Russian delegation here to explore business opportunities in the City by the Bay. As far as he could tell, there was no other reason for him to be present except that the mayor apparently believed that the Russians tended to be impressed by the presence of high-ranking, beribboned officers in uniform.
His driver, Sergeant Tony Paganucci, nagged him about getting some lunch. Wasn't he supposed to try and meet up with his wife and Clarence Jackman and some other folks at Lou the Greek's? But Glitsky had run out of time. He absolutely had to be back at the Hall of Justice for a one o'clock press conference, and that was in twenty-five minutes.
Paganucci dropped him behind the Coroner's Office. Glitsky came into the Hall through the back door. Taking the stairs two at a time for his only exercise of the day, rather than the elevators where someone would want to talk to him about something, he breezed through the outer office unmolested.
In the office adjacent to his own, the deputy chief of administration, Bryce Jake Longoria, a white-haired, soft-spoken patrician, was in uniform sitting at his desk, working at his computer. Glitsky stopped in the doorway until Longoria looked up, smiled, gestured at his monitor. "Just trying to get some real work done, squeeze it in during lunchtime."
"I hear you. I'd try the same strategy if I had enough time to boot up my computer, which I don't." Glitsky took a step into the room. "But I do have a quick question for you if you can spare a minute."
"One. Shoot."
"Say you know the name of somebody who served on a jury fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. Do you know if there's any database you could access to identify the case?"
Longoria pondered a moment. "You don't know the date, or the name of the defendant?"
"No. Just that it was a murder trial, and they found the guy guilty."
A dry chuckle. "Well, if it was during the Pratt administration, you could just go and manually look up every one. There couldn't have been more than three or four, maybe less."
"Unfortunately, I think it was way back before her. Maybe late seven-ties, early eighties."
Longoria clucked. "The Golden Years." He took another moment, then shook his head. "They may still have the physical records downstairs"- the cavernous basement of the Hall, larger than a Costco, that held many millions of documents, shelf after shelf after shelf, floor to twelve-foot ceiling, from cases stretching back to the city's earlier days-"but first you'd have to find them by going through every one individually."
"That's the other thing," Glitsky said, "it might not have been here. In San Francisco."
"Well, tell you what, I'd find that out first. If you had the case number, the defendant, maybe even the judge…"
Glitsky pursed his lips. "I know, but I don't."
"Well, then I'd say if it was a local case, it might be doable, but it'll take you most of a couple of years if you do it yourself. It would have to be pretty important, and if it was, I'd assign a good-sized team to it. Still, it wouldn't be quick."
"I don't know why it would be important. At the moment, it's just a question."
But Longoria had been a cop all of his life. He knew that any given question could turn into something critical, so he gave it some more time and passed on another thought. "Here's a real long shot, but maybe if your juror was foreman, he might have gotten his name in the paper. You could check. Other than that…" He shrugged. "Sorry."
"Not a big deal," Glitsky said. "Thanks." Closing the door to his own office, Glitsky went behind his desk and sat down. He had eleven messages on his answering machine, six on his Palm Pilot.
His press conference began in fifteen minutes. Its purpose was for him to explain why the police decision to allow a suspect in a gang-related multiple murder to leave the state had been the proper one. When they'd made the decision, Glitsky had had no doubt. LeShawn Brodie, considered armed and dangerous, had already taken his seat on the Greyhound bus to Salt Lake when they'd received the tip on his whereabouts. Rather than storm the crowded bus and possibly provoke a hostage crisis, Batiste, Glitsky and Lanier had decided to alert Nevada and Utah authorities to follow the bus in unmarked cars and have officers pick the suspect up after he got off, either in Salt Lake or en route. As it happened, LeShawn got out to stretch his legs and play a few slots in Elko, and authorities picked him up without incident. But it was now an extradition case, and Glitsky would be explaining all about it to the press.
Having put on dozens of these shows by now, he could imagine the questions already, and none of them improved his humor. Did Glitsky mean to say that the police knowingly allowed a dangerous criminal to ride for several hours with unsuspecting citizens? Did they have any assurance at all that LeShawn wouldn't take hostages as soon as he'd come aboard? Couldn't they have simply used a team of plainclothes cops and arrested him here, avoiding all the extradition hassles? Why did they let him get on the bus in the first place? Why couldn't they have used tear gas? Or a sniper with tranquilizer darts? Or beamed him directly to a jail cell?
Glitsky opened his middle drawer and popped three antacids. Pressing at the side of his stomach, he checked his watch again. He still had twelve minutes. He hadn't eaten a bite since his bagel at six-fifteen. He opened his peanut drawer, restored to its original position, and pulled out a small handful of shells, placed them on his desk.
The phone rang and, thoughtlessly, he picked it up. His secretary told him to hold for the Chief, and in two seconds Frank Batiste's tightly controlled voice was on the line. "Abe, I need you up here right away. The shit's going to hit the fan."
"What's up?"
"LeShawn. He's escaped."
When Clarence Jackman had first been elevated to the office of district attorney, he came from managing a private law firm and was relatively inexperienced in city politics. In fact, this was one of the reasons the mayor tapped him for the job- Jackman was a proven, results-oriented administrator, and this as opposed to an agenda-driven zealot was what the office required. In his early months, the DA had bridged the gap in his hands-on knowledge by convening an informal kitchen cabinet every Tuesday to get and keep him current on issues he might not otherwise have considered, the political implications of which he might not otherwise have been aware.
Now, gearing up for his first general election later in the year, Jackman had called together many of the original group again to feel out their respective interests in participating in his campaign. He had pretty much decided he would be announcing at the end of the week, and wanted to take the pulse of his core supporters on that timing as well.
The group assembled at the large, round table at the back of Lou the Greek's, a bar/restaurant across the street from the Hall of Justice, were all well acquainted. Dismas Hardy sat between Jeff Elliot, the wheelchair-mobile reporter for the Chronicle, and Allan Boscacci, relatively new to the group but apparently here to stay. Abe Glitsky's wife Treya, who had been with Jackman in his old firm and now worked as his personal secretary, sat on the other side of Boscacci to the DA's left. Glitsky would have been welcome, but obviously his work had kept him. Some of the old players were missing- David Freeman had passed away and Gina Roake had simply lost interest- and they'd been replaced by a couple of city supervisors, the young, ambitious, cheerily overweight Harlan Fisk and his aunt, a birdlike spinster named Kathy West.
But now the business part of the meeting, such as it was, had come to an end. No surprise- Jackman had assurances of undying support from everyone. Hardy was going to host his fund-raising kickoff party- they thought that for the best buzz and food they'd have it at Moose's- in about six weeks. Fisk and West would begin calling in favors, wheeling and dealing as necessary, to try to get at least a majority coalition of support from the usually divided Board of Supervisors. Boscacci, a political animal himself, was going to hire and oversee the eventual campaign manager, and funnel much of the day-to-day administration of the campaign across the desk of the abundantly capable Treya. As a supposedly objective and nonpartisan columnist, Elliot could only promise that he'd be inclined to continue and possibly even increase his sympathetic coverage of doings in the DA's office so long as Jackman maintained the same policies and programs that had been working so well during his first term; Elliot would also do his damnedest to use his considerable popularity and influence to get the Chronicle to support Jackman come November, something the paper would probably do on its own, although it never hurt to have an inside advocate or two.
So everybody was on the same team, and a convivial spirit reigned at the table as people finished their coffee. Hardy had exchanged some easy pleasantries with the chief assistant DA when he'd sat down, but they hadn't talked to each other much since. Truth to tell, Hardy found Boscacci's perennially florid countenance somewhat forbidding- the collar at his neck, always buttoned to the top and festooned with a bow tie, seemed a half size too small; this in turn seemed to stretch the closely shaved skin on his face, to make his dark eyes bulge slightly, so that it always appeared that he might be on the verge of a stroke. Fifty-two years old, he wore his thick, black hair slicked with some kind of hair lotion and pulled straight back off his prominent forehead. But Hardy knew he could be an affable enough guy when he was on your side. He took the opportunity, as though he'd just remembered it, to thank Boscacci for the courtesy he'd shown Amy Wu yesterday in the Andrew Bartlett matter.
Boscacci waved off the comment. "Ah, that was nothing. She's an easy person to want to do something nice for." Then, leaning in a bit and lowering his voice, he added, "Besides, she didn't know it, but she couldn't have timed it better for us."
"Us?"
He included the group at the table. "Clarence. All of us. We chalk up the two convictions before the end of the week, when Clarence announces he can say he's had fifty murder convictions so far this term, not even four years."
"You're kidding me. Is that the number?"
"With your associate's two, it is. And fifty sounds so much bigger than forty-eight, you know what I mean?"
"I don't know, forty-eight sounds pretty good to me."
"Don't get me wrong. Forty-eight is a fine number. But we figure fifty is easier for the man in the street to get his arms around. Pratt's administration, she didn't even charge fifty murders."
"I remember it well," Hardy said. "I doubt if she charged fifteen."
Boscacci lowered his voice. "Twelve, if you want to get precise. Which is one of the reasons we've got such great numbers. Between you and me, we're recycling some leftovers." He grinned in triumph. "So, anyway, your Ms. Wu comes to me with a reasonable and some might even say charitable request, we find a way to make it win-win. She says it's not even out of the question the kid's stepfather- you know Hal North? North Cinemas?- will be so grateful for saving the kid thirty plus of hard time, he might want to express his gratitude to Clarence in a more tangible way."
"She mentioned the same thing to me, but I wouldn't be expecting that check soon."
Suddenly the forbidding aspect of Boscacci's personality appeared. His face darkened perceptibly. Hardy was half-tempted to reach over and undo his bow tie, let him get a breath, but he spoke clearly enough, without any difficulty. "Why? Is there some problem? North should be slobbering in gratitude."
Thinking fast, and realizing that he'd inadvertently almost tipped Boscacci to his own concerns about Wu's disposition of the case, Hardy said, "No. I don't see any problem, Allan. It's just that eight years is eight years that his stepson is gone. It's not likely that North's going to see the deal in quite the same way as you do."
"Well," Boscacci said, "somebody ought to go and explain it to him. Given the case against his boy-and it's a deuce, remember that- it may be the best deal we've ever agreed to from a suspect's point of view. Time we get around to serious fund-raising for Clarence, I'd hope he'd come to understand that. I'd bet your Ms. Wu could even have a little chat with him come fall if she was so inclined, draw the picture a little more clearly." He paused. "Anybody could do it, she could. She put her mind to it, I believe that woman could charm the skin off a snake. You're lucky to have her, but you already know that, don't you?"
Hardy nodded, affable as he could force himself to be. "It's why we pay her the big bucks, Allan. All that charm and a legal whiz on top of it. If I didn't believe the cosmic truth that we were always on the side of the angels, I'd say it was close to unfair."
A small jungle of dieffenbachia, rubber trees and other more exotic plants thrived in the corners and against the back wall of the firm's conference room. Opening to a sheltered outdoor atrium, complete with grass and fountain, the entire outer wall and part of the roof jutted from the line of the building, creating a greenhouse effect, and giving the room its nickname of the Solarium.
Now, at a few minutes after six, Gina Roake, the building's owner, in a conservative gray business suit, sat with a cup of coffee at the head of the large table that commanded the room. Roake was closing in on fifty years old, but few people would have guessed it. She'd always had good skin and a youthful face. A recent diet and exercise program had accented her chin and cheekbones and slimmed the rest of her down significantly, though she remained a bit zaftig. To her left, Dismas Hardy, emulating his old mentor Freeman, sipped some Baystone Shiraz from an oversized wineglass. Across from him, Wes Farrell was trying to tell what had supposedly just been voted the funniest joke in the world. But he was having some trouble getting to it.
"Who votes on that kind of thing?" Hardy asked. "It's got to be bogus. Nobody asked me, for example. Gina, anybody ask you?"
"No."
"See? And we're both famous for our senses of humor."
Farrell wasn't to be denied. "It's a very prestigious group of joke researchers based in Sweden or someplace. They wouldn't ask people like you and Gina."
"So it's a European joke," Hardy said, "which strikes me as pretty arrogantly Eurocentric. Okay, so now it's like, in some Swede's opinion, the funniest joke in the world. Those wacky Swedes, with the highest suicide rate in the world and all."
"Can I tell the joke?" Farrell asked. "And then you decide."
"All right," Hardy said. "But telling us up front that this is the funniest joke in the world, it's guaranteed to be forty percent less funny."
Farrell persisted. "You'll still get sixty percent of it. It'll be worth it, I promise."
"I can't wait," Roake said.
But Hardy wasn't through yet. "Did you laugh out loud when you heard it, Wes?"
"No, but I never laugh out loud at jokes."
"You laughed at Dirty Harold."
Farrell broke a grin. "True. I did."
"So based on your own response, this new funniest joke in the world isn't as funny as the Dirty Harold joke."
"Fucking lawyers," Farrell said. "Everything's an argument."
"What's the Dirty Harold joke?" Roake asked.
Hardy turned to her. "This little kid with a filthy mouth, so the teacher won't ever call on him. Then one day they're going through the alphabet, finding words that start with a given letter and then they use the word in a sentence. They finally get to 'e'- Harold's hand has been up the whole time on every letter- but she figures there aren't any filthy words that start with 'e,' so she calls on him…"
"Elf!" Roake exclaimed, smiling. "I know an elf with a big prick."
"That's it." Hardy drank some wine.
Farrell seized his chance. "So Holmes and Watson go camping and set up their tent and they go to sleep. Two hours later, Holmes goes, 'Watson, what do you see?' and Watson goes, 'I see millions and millions of stars. And Holmes says, 'And what do you deduce from that?' Watson says, 'I imagine each star has planets around it just like our own, with a chance of life on each one.' And Holmes goes, 'Watson, you fool, someone's stolen our tent.' "
"So." Roake maintained a poker face. "Having heard the joke, maybe now we can begin. I've got a handball game in forty-five minutes."
They were gathered for their monthly partners overview- business, after all- and Hardy spent the next twenty minutes going over the firm's numbers. The associates were all well utilized- the firm was cranking along, racking up substantial fees almost as though it were on automatic pilot. Hardy's concerns about Wu's deal with Boscacci might have been a legitimate topic for discussion on another day, but so far nothing had actually gone wrong, and he elected to keep his qualms under his hat.
Under "other business," Hardy mentioned the firm's upcoming involvement in support of the Jackman campaign, which he considered an opportunity as good as any to broach the one sensitive topic they needed to discuss. Might the Jackman candidacy entice Roake back to work, Hardy wondered. To something approaching regular hours?
Roake straightened up in her chair. Her eyes flicked between the two men. "I resent the hell out of that question, Diz. What I do with my time is my business."
Hardy's gaze didn't flinch. He kept any sign of edge out of his voice. "I'm not arguing with that, Gina. You've earned whatever time you feel you need. But as a business matter for the firm, you're drawing a decent salary for yourself and your own private secretary and you've got a big corner office that's essentially sitting unused."
Roake clipped off her words. "How about if I just quit and start charging the kind of rent for this building that another firm would have to pay? I could give up my decent salary and I'd still be making more money than I am now. How about that?"
Hardy shook his head. "That's not what I want. I don't think it's what you want. I wasn't speaking critically. If you don't want to do any more billing, you've got my complete support. Wes's, too. But when we started up together, we had a business plan that included the three of us bringing in business and billing our own time. And that's not happening. Even with our otherwise good utilization, we're struggling to make those original numbers."
Hardy came forward, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. His voice was still soft, almost caressing. "I'm just trying to get a sense of your plans, Gina, so I can know what we're dealing with. As it stands now, you're an expense item and not a profit center, and we didn't plan for that. The firm has to come up with the difference, which is not insignificant. I owe it to us all to tell you about it. Times are good now, but if they get tight, we could find ourselves in a heap of trouble."
Roake scratched at the yellow legal pad on the table in front of her, staring down at her scribblings. "All right," she said, without looking up. "I'd like to think about this for a few days, if you don't mind."
"Not at all," Hardy said, "and Gina? There's no wrong answer here. The firm needs to know, that's all. We've talked about some capital improvements on the horizon. We've got to know if they're feasible, that kind of thing."
"I hear you," Roake said. "Really, I do." Then, with a crisp smile, she pushed back from the table, gathered her notes and told them both good night.
After the door to the Solarium had closed behind her, Hardy let out a long breath and met his partner's baleful eye over the table.
"Okay, then." Farrell drew a palm over his brow. "All in all, I'd say that went pretty well. You want to pour me some of that wine?"
Hardy put his briefcase down by his reading chair, then walked down the long hallway in his house. Before he'd remodeled it, the old Victorian had been in the railroad car style, with all the downstairs rooms opening to the right off the hall. Now a large, recently renovated kitchen opened up in the back, and behind that was a family room and then the bedrooms for the two kids. They didn't keep the television on much as a general rule, so he was somewhat surprised to hear the low drone. He poked his head into the family room. "What's on?"
Frannie looked over from where she sat on the couch. "Abe."
He walked over and joined them. "What's that loopy guy done now?"
On the tube, Glitsky frowned into a battery of microphones. "No, that's not true," he was saying. "I consulted with the Chief and Lieutenant Lanier, but the decision was mine. At the time it seemed the best one. No one could have predicted that Mr. Brodie would escape. And in fact, the capture itself took place without incident."
The picture flicked back to the pretty anchorwoman, who wore the same cheerful face whether she was reporting on terrorism or bake sales. "But in spite of Deputy Chief Glitsky's comments, the fact remains that Leshawn Brodie, still considered armed and extremely dangerous, and a suspect in several local murders, remains at large after he allegedly stole one of the officers' weapon and engaged in a dramatic shoot-out with arresting authorities this morning in Nevada. Critics are calling ill-advised at best Glitsky's decision not to arrest Brodie while he sat on a bus in the Greyhound terminal in downtown San Francisco early this morning. And considering the suspect's escape and record of violence, it's hard to disagree with them."
"Hard, but not impossible," Hardy said. When the male anchor appeared and it was clear that the news had moved on to its next sound bite, he grabbed the remote and turned off the set. "You notice she never mentioned who the critics were. Did I miss that? 'Yet, it's hard to disagree with them,' " he intoned in the anchor's voice. "What kind of reporting is that?"
"Bad," Vincent said. "They weren't even listening to what Uncle Abe said."
"How long was he on?" Hardy asked.
"Long enough." Vincent's voice was breaking with adolescence. He cleared his throat and went on. "What did they want him to do? Shoot up the whole bus to get the one guy?"
"You got the gist of it, I think." Frannie put a hand on Hardy's knee. "Maybe you ought to call him, though. He's taking a lot of heat. How was your day?"
"Evidently better than Abe's, though it had its moments." He glanced at his watch. "You think he's home?" But he was already punching numbers on the telephone. "This is your best and possibly only true friend," Hardy said, "and if you get this…"
"What?"
"Monitoring your calls, I see."
"You would, too. It's been ringing off the hook."
"TV'll do that. Instant fame."
"Great, but I don't want to be famous."
"There's your problem. You're the only person in America who doesn't. The media doesn't know what to do with you. Maybe you ought to get a new makeup guy. Wipe away those frown lines. Did you know you had a scar through your lips? I'm sure they could airbrush that out, too."
There was a pause. Then Glitsky asked, "Are you calling for any real reason?"
"Not exactly. You were on the news just now. I thought you'd enjoy the sound of a friendly voice. Also, for the record, Vin's on your side."
At his side, Hardy's wife said, "Frannie, too."
"I heard that," Glitsky said. "Tell them both thanks."
Frannie squeezed Hardy's leg. "Ask him… No, wait, let me." She grabbed the phone. "Abe, what are you and Treya doing tonight? I've got a big pot of spaghetti sauce going. Why don't all of you come over here? Get away from these people who don't love you like we do."
Wu had planned all along to get back to Andrew, get the plea locked up, before tomorrow. She wasn't about to enter Arvid Johnson's courtroom in the morning with any sort of question still hanging about her client's disposition. But before she went in to see Andrew again, she found that she still needed some time to gather herself.
She sat at a table in the street window of what had probably once been a nice little boutique espresso shop half a block from the YGC. But the place had been servicing the juvenile hall clientele for so long that it had given up hope and lost whatever charm it may have once possessed. Now the bulletin board by the door bristled with lawyers' business cards, photos of missing kids, ads for bail bondmen and private investigators. Stacks of assorted newspapers lay piled on a table by the sugar and cream. A pit bull, chained, slept on the floor in the back of the shop. Behind the counter, a young woman with a peg in her tongue and a ring in each eyebrow was wiping down the back counter, putting things away.
Outside, long shadows stretched up the hill, but the faces of buildings across the street glowed in the last blast of blinding evening sunlight. The wind had picked up and was all but howling, flinging any trash that weighed less than a pound along the nearly deserted street.
Wu's day- from waking up hungover and alone, to her meeting with the Norths, then Andrew, then the fight with Jason Brandt- seemed to have lasted about a week so far, and the hardest few moments were no doubt still ahead of her.
Well, maybe not the hardest. For a combination of guilt, anger and shame, she knew that it would be tough to top the half hour or so after Brandt had stormed away from her. What made it even worse was that she found she couldn't even blame him. For it was true. Even when she'd first begun flirting with him the night before, she had known that her deal with Andrew wasn't consummated. If she wanted to have any claim to calling herself an ethical attorney, she would have disclosed her conflict about Andrew to Brandt first thing. You simply did not have sex with your courtroom opposite number.
Sipping her coffee, she was still sick with herself, appalled at what she'd done and at the situation in which she and Brandt now found themselves, a situation that she had orchestrated.
She had risked both of their jobs- still risked them, if the truth came out- to satisfy some undefined and pathetic need to connect. It was beneath her, she knew, or at least beneath the person she had been until her father's death had kicked the foundation out from under her, turned her into the kind of unstable, needy, manipulative, dangerous woman she'd always hated and resolved never to become. And the scariest thing was that the lapse with Brandt had completely broadsided her- she'd never even considered discussing Andrew's case with him. There had been that spark, the attraction, and lubricated by drink, she'd just gone for it.
Never mind that he was a colleague, a good guy, a no-bullshit attorney she felt she could really come to like and admire someday. Maybe more than that. Of course, now all of that possible future was out of the question. And that, too- the waste of it, the sheer stupidity- made her sick.
And now- she looked at her watch-right now, she had to face her young client and wrest a final agonizing decision from him, one that shouldn't have been his to make in the first place. She should have left the original disposition to fall where it would- with Andrew filed as an adult. Then there would have been an adult trial and he'd all but certainly have been convicted of some degree of murder, but it all would have been according to the system. Now, because of her arrogance, stupidity, blindness, she had placed the entire burden of choice on an unhappy, miserable kid. She wondered if it was a burden he would have the strength to bear. Earlier, when he'd broken down, she'd even viewed that as a positive thing- he'd be persuaded to do what she wanted. But what if he simply couldn't deal with it?
She shook her head, finished the last of her coffee and left the mug on the table.
As was the case with Jason Brandt, this was yet another example of where she'd acted- committed herself, really- before she'd considered the implications of what she was setting in motion. She could only pray that Andrew was in fact guilty, as she'd assumed and believed all along. As she'd convinced his parents. That would make Andrew's admission, though still difficult, acceptable, even preferable, as a strategy.
As she turned up the walkway to the cabins, she stopped and looked up at the razor-wire fence. After she got Andrew's admission sewed up tonight, she vowed she would change and never put a client in such a position again. But first she had to get his admission. First that. Then begin work on fixing herself.
But she couldn't lose sight of her objective in the short term. Too much was already riding on Andrew's admission. She couldn't let the accumulation of this day's terrible events weaken her resolve or blind her to her first duty.
"Don't wimp out now," she said aloud to herself, and started up to the cabins.
"Who was that?"
Frannie took off her reading glasses and put down her P.D. James. She was in bed, propped against her reading pillow. She had let her red hair down and now it hung to her shoulders and shone in the room's light.
Hardy turned from his desk by the room's door. "Amy."
Frannie checked the clock by the bed. "At eleven-fifteen?"
"She didn't want me to worry and lose any of those precious minutes of sleep that are so important to men of a certain age."
"What were you going to be worried about? That now you're not, I presume."
He spent a minute filling her in on his concern that Wu might find herself having to renege with Boscacci. "But she just got back home from what must have been a marathon session with Andrew down at YGC. She wanted me to know that she had nailed down the plea."
"Well, there's a relief. I would have tossed all night." Frannie went to pick up her book, stopped. "It took her twenty minutes to tell you that?"
"To do it justice."
"And how old is this boy?"
"Seventeen."
Frannie made a sad face. "Seventeen."
A nod. "And, unfortunately, a killer. A double killer, actually. Eventually, apparently, he gave that up to Amy."
"Confessed, you mean?"
"Well, agreed to admit the petition, which is pleading guilty. And since that's the deal Amy cut with Boscacci, I'm glad he finally got religion around it."
"So what was the deal with Boscacci?"
Hardy filled in the particulars for his wife, concluding with the comment that Amy had been smart to keep Andrew's parents away while she put the pressure on the kid.
"Why is that?" Frannie asked.
"Because he'd been telling Mom and Dad he didn't do it."
"But he did?"
"Yep, if he's pleading, which he is."
"So then tell me again why he wouldn't agree to plead guilty if his parents were there."
Hardy stopped and turned by the closet. "Because, my love, he continues to scam them. The dad's paying the bills. First he can be a good boy and assure them to their face that he's innocent, then he can save his own skin by telling Amy the truth. And- the real beauty of it all- he can then go back to his parents and tell them that Amy talked him into the whole thing. She coerced him. It wasn't his fault. He didn't really kill anybody. He's a good boy."
A long moment passed, his wife staring into the empty space in front of her. "You are so cynical."
"Life makes smart people cynical," he said. "It's a sad but true fact."
"Not all of them." Frannie let out a deep sigh. A shadow of distaste crossed her face.
"Cynical's not so bad," Hardy said. "It saves a lot of heartache down the line."
"Right. I know. That's what you think." She closed her eyes for a second, drew a heavy breath, weariness bleeding out of her. "I guess I'm just worried about you."
"Me? Moi? I?"
Tightening her lips, biting down against some strong emotion, she said, "Never mind," and turned away from him.
"That was a little humor, Frannie. Just trying to lighten it up."
Her chest rose and fell twice. Finally, she faced him. "That's what I'm worried about. Everything being a joke."
He tried to keep it light, josh her out of whatever it was. "That's funny," he said, "I wish more things were jokes."
When suddenly, none of it was a joke at all anymore. She threw off the covers and was out of bed, nearly running across to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The lock clicked.
Hardy stood stock-still, his head down. After ten seconds, he went over and knocked. Whispered. "Fran? Are you all right?"
He thought he heard a sob.
"Whatever it is, I'm sorry." He waited a moment. "No more joking if you come out. Promise."
Finally. "In a minute."
It was more like ten.
He was lying on the bed, hands behind his head. He barely dared look at her, afraid he might scare her off. The two of them hadn't had a cross word since before the shoot-out nearly a year and half ago. He didn't want anything to be wrong between them now. He said nothing while she got into her side of the bed, pulled the blankets up over her. "I didn't mean to be so dramatic," she said. "I'm sorry."
"You can be dramatic anytime you want."
He waited for another minute, perhaps two. A very long time.
Finally, she sighed. "I don't mean to be critical of you," she said. "It's just that I am so worried about you."
"You don't need to be. I'm fine."
"Maybe you are, but you're not the same person you always said you wanted to be." She shook her head. "I'm not saying this right."
"Okay. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."
She wrestled with it for another minute or more. Finally, she sighed. "I just don't know if there's anything you care about anymore."
"I care about you. And the kids."
"No. I know you love us, but I mean with yourself, with your life. Are you happy with your life?"
A million glib answers, the usual grab bag, sprung to his mind. But that, of course, was what she was getting at. He sat up and half turned away from her. "Am I happy? What makes you think I'm not?"
"It's not what I think."
"But something, just now, made you ask."
She reached over and touched his back. "It's not just now. And maybe it's the same something that's making you not answer."
He shifted to face her. "I honestly don't know what that is, Frannie." Then: "I don't feel like I'm doing anything different."
"You don't?"
"No. Not consciously anyway."
"No? What about this boy Amy just called you about? Andrew?"
"What about him?"
"You're happy with him going to jail for eight years?"
Another shrug. "It beats the alternative, which is life in prison. It's also the deal Amy made. It seemed like a good one."
"If he's guilty."
Hardy shrugged. "Amy says he's admitting, so he probably is. Either way, though, the deal gets him out not much later than if he went to trial and got acquitted anyway."
"So eight years for an innocent person is okay with you?"
"Well, first, as I said, he's probably not innocent. And second, he's already in the system. So he's looking at a year or two, minimum, before anything shakes out anyway."
"Which leaves six years. In six years, your own little boy is twenty."
Hardy ran a palm over his cheek. "So this is about Andrew Bartlett?"
Frannie shook her head. "It's about…" She started over. "It just seems everything you do nowadays has to do with manipulating the rules somehow. It's all just cynicism, and money, and cutting the deal."
Hardy's voice hardened perceptibly. "Maybe you don't remember last year too well, Frannie. When you and I tried to play by the rules, and got Polaroids with gunsights drawn on over our kids. The experience hasn't quite paled on me. So yeah, I guess I've gotten a little jaded on the whole play-by-the-rules concept. If I'm good at bending them and that makes life easy, I'm a sap if I don't."
"That's what you tell yourself?"
He turned now, frankly glaring. "Yes, it is. And I do very well at it."
Frannie glared back. "And that's also why you drink all the time now? Because it helps you forget how you're living?"
"What I'm doing is supporting this family, Frannie. The best way I know how."
Frannie watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. "Look," she said, "you cut a deal on this child molester guy the other morning, when you know there was a time you wouldn't have gotten within a mile of him."
"That was fifty thousand dollars' worth of-"
"Stop. Then you go to lunch, have a few drinks, and make a deal for your firm to help elect the DA. Then you have some wine at your partners meeting and try to cut a deal to make poor Gina come back to work when you know that her heart's gone out of it…"
"Let me ask you this, Frannie- tell me someone whose heart hasn't gone out of it, especially after…" He let it hang.
Frannie waited until he met her eyes again. "I don't mean to make you mad. I just don't believe that the person cutting all these deals is who you really are."
"Who I am." His laugh rang dry and empty. "Who I am is a guy who's lost faith in the process. But the bills keep on coming, the kids' college is around the corner. What am I supposed to do? Just stop?"
"Maybe you could do something you care about." She moved over toward him, put her arms around his shoulders. "Here," she said, "lie down with me. Close your eyes. You don't have to make any decisions right now, tonight. But a blind person can see how unhappy you are, how it's all frantic and manic and going going going just to keep busy."
"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."
She kissed him. "You're not going to die tomorrow."
She felt him growing calmer next to her, his breathing more regular. He put his arm around her and she lay up against him. After another minute, he said, "I think maybe I am drinking a little too much."
She noted the repetition of the disclaiming qualifiers-"I think," "maybe," "a little." But it was nevertheless an admission of sorts and, she hoped, a start.
After another couple of minutes, his body seemed to settle next to her. Sleep trying to claim him. "I'm tired," he said. Then, "I'm worried about Abe, too." The words were a barely audible mumble.
Then he was asleep.
Back at her apartment, Wu changed out of her lawyer clothes and chose a black leather miniskirt, a diaphanous red shirt over a skin-colored bra, a heavy leather jacket against the cold wind. Fifteen minutes after she'd hung up with Dismas Hardy, she was among the packed bodies at Indigo's, another bar at the triangle. At a dinner-plate-sized table, twirling her first cosmopolitan of the night with a well-manicured hand, she perched herself on a high stool and showed a lot of leg. The volume of the music- an endless bass and drum loop- made conversation impossible, but she didn't mind.
She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to think about Jason Brandt, either. Or Andrew Bartlett.
Wu shrugged out of her jacket, put it across her lap, straightened her back and turned to survey the groups of men who were drinking and laughing all around her. She caught one of the guys- good-looking in a grungy way, long blond hair, couple of earrings- checking the assets she so artfully displayed.
He was very much interested.
She smiled, slipped off the stool, got her drink in one hand and her jacket in the other, and moved in to cut him out.
The wind blew itself out overnight, but it was still unseasonably cold. A high, clear sky, bright sun. A rare city frost bloomed on every patch of green- admittedly not many of them- that Wu passed as she drove up Market Street.
Her hands shook and her eyes burned, but she was still thankful about the timing of the hearing this morning. The ten o'clock call meant she didn't have to go by the office and check in before driving to the YGC, and this had allowed her to grab an extra hour or two of sleep, badly needed after all the cocktails that had gone with last night's adventure. She hadn't made it back to her apartment until sometime after 3:00 A.M. She hadn't fallen asleep until nearly dawn, and was jarred awake by the alarm two hours later- disoriented, depleted, wrung out.
Still, by the time she entered the holding cell behind Arvid Johnson's courtroom, the mixed jolt from the Dexedrine and the espresso had kicked in. Handcuffed, Andrew sat on a cement bench built against the wall. He seemed subdued and nervous, shrugging a greeting of sorts, then going back to studying the pattern in the floor between his feet.
Wu put on a brave face, sat up close next to him. He smelled of disinfectant and soap. "Are you holding up all right? Did you get some sleep? How do you feel now? Are you still comfortable with our decision?" To each question, she got a shrug, a nod.
She tried a few more conversational gambits, telling him that the judge was going to want to hear him admit the petition himelf. All he had to do was follow her lead and it would all be over before he knew it. He nodded some more, then at last shut her up with a curt "I know what I've got to do."
She had to take that as an assurance. He was going to be okay.
Hal and Linda North were at their place in the first row, holding hands. Wu nodded to them, got a response from Hal, nothing from Linda but a blank stare. On the opposite side of the room, Jason Brandt directed his complete attention to the contents of some binders that were open in front of him. He avoided any eye contact with Wu. The two "rays of sunshine" had taken their respective positions again, Nelson by the back door to the holding cell, Cottrell in the otherwise-empty jury box. The court reporter and probation officer chatted amiably, and then suddenly the door to Arvid Johnson's chambers opened and the judge, in his robes, was on the bench.
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."
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 trusts 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.
He stopped just inside, carefully closed the door behind him. "You busy?"
She was at the computer, work showing on the screen. "I decided you were at least a little bit right. If I'm going to have my name on the door, I should pull some of the weight."
He drew around one of the folding chairs, flipped it open and sat on it. "That's funny, I decided I was at least mostly wrong. The firm's making a fortune. I was a horse's ass. Am." He gestured vaguely around the room. "If you don't want to work, you've earned the right not to." He waited a moment. "So how are you?"
She turned to face him. Thought a moment. "I'm all right. I think if I exercised any more, I'd self-destruct. Which is maybe what I was trying to do. I'm damn sure already the strongest woman my age I know, if any man has the guts to want to find out." But the smile faded. "But it wasn't physical strength, though, after all, was it? It was bullets."
"It was bullets," Hardy agreed.
A silence ensued. In only a few seconds, Gina's face tracked through several variations on the themes of grief, revenge and regret. Last year she'd killed a man, and the experience had scarred her. "So what brings you down to this neck of the woods? If it was just your apology- unnecessary, but nice."
"It wasn't just that. It's Amy."
He gave Gina a brief recap of the events leading up to this morning's fiasco in juvenile court, and by the time he finished, Gina had turned and was facing him, her face set with worry. "She made the deal before she had the client's consent?"
"Right." Then he added, "It's possible she thought he had given it."
"How's that? Did she have him sign a statement?"
"I don't think so, no. She called me last night and said it was locked up. Solid."
"But didn't get his John Hancock? And then he went sideways?"
"Last minute, in the courtroom." Hardy shrugged. "It happens."
"Not as often as you might think if you do it right. So. What do you want me to do?"
A pause. "For Amy? Nothing. For me, I could use some guidance. I'm the managing partner, and I've managed this whole thing wrong up until now. I knew her client hadn't signed off. I kept convincing myself that I should trust her judgment that he'd come around. That was irresponsible enough, but it was more than that, really."
Roake cocked her head. "What, though, exactly?"
Hardy took a minute deciding what he should say. "You may remember, Amy's father died a few months ago. Since then she's been… distracted. And her work's been suffering, today's problem being the best of several good examples." Again, he paused. "I can't help but feel that a lot of where this has gotten to is my fault. I should have stepped in at the git-go, and three or four other stops along the way. But the point is, she's been playing fast and loose with this boy's life and it probably feels relatively okay to her because she's playing fast and loose with her own."
Roake leaned back into her chair, let out a heavy breath. "People are going to do what they're going to do, Diz. Do you think she's competent? Legally?"
"I don't know. She's got a good mind. But the only bright spot right now, if you want to call it that, is that she's somehow conned the parents, who are paying the bills, that this has been her plan all along, to pretend to go along with the deal to get Andrew declared a juvenile."
"Which, I take it, isn't true?"
"Right."
"So she's still lying to her clients?"
Hardy tried a weak grin. " 'Spinning' is the preferred term of art, I believe. But it's going to unravel fast enough, you watch. Boscacci's going to demand a seven-oh-seven before she knows what hit her. And if she loses there, which is a good bet because not only does she have the burden of proof, but the judge already hates her, then her boy's looking at adult murder with specials." Hardy found a chair and sat. "I'm thinking I have to step in, take her off it. That would mitigate the personal issues with Boscacci and the judge anyway. Although the paying customers currently think Amy is a genius. If I yank her, they quit. Maybe she quits, too. Did I mention the fees here? It's going to go adult murder, and that's six figures, high profile. We don't want to lose it."
Roake crossed her arms over her chest, whirled halfway around in her chair, and stared out toward one of the windows. Finally: "If memory serves, the seven-oh-seven's not about evidence, is it? It's only a question of whether the child can be rehabilitated in the juvenile system or should be punished in the adult. Isn't that about right?"
Hardy nodded.
"Okay, then. And how is Andrew's record otherwise?"
"Nothing to speak of. One joyride, community service and a fine. Expunged."
"Well, then." Roake considered a moment. "In that case, she might have a shot. The court can't say that the boy's already a hardened criminal and needs to spend the rest of his life locked away. She might pull it off."
"Maybe." Hardy had his doubts. He knew perhaps better than Roake that the last of the five criteria in determining whether a defendant was legally a juvenile or an adult was the gravity of the offense, and there was nothing more serious than murder. On that alone, Hardy thought, the 707 hearing was doomed to failure.
He ran a hand down his cheek. "I don't want to step on her, Gina, or God knows, fire her. But her focus has been off on this since the beginning, and now, especially after she reneged on Boscacci, he's going to want to take her down." He sat back, crossed his arms in a pensive mode, looked from window to window around the room. Suddenly, he came back to Roake, his eyes bright with an idea. "How about if I tell her I'd like to sit second chair?"
Roake gave it some thought. "She might resent that, too. She might even quit. And your hours on top of hers? Would the clients go for that?"
"I don't care about my hours," Hardy said. "I wouldn't charge for them. Long term, getting Amy straight and on track is worth more to the firm than I'd bill, don't you think?"
Roake smiled, spoke gently. "You don't have to ask me, but that doesn't sound like the managing partner I know and love. He's been pretty tough on billing lately, even with some of our partners."
"Touché," Hardy said, smiling.
But Roake was back to business. "She still might quit, though. Take it as a vote of no-confidence."
"Except that she knows she's screwed up. I think it might be more likely, especially with the other pressures she's feeling, that she'll be grateful she's not fired."
Roake, warming to the idea, was nodding. "Okay. You could certainly say you've got every right as managing partner to demand a closer accountability. You can't let another mistake happen on your watch. What's she going to say? No?"
"She could. She might."
But Roake shook her head. "Sure, but I don't think so. I think she'll thank you for offering. So, assuming she'd be okay with it, how would you handle it logistically?"
Hardy came forward, suddenly pumped up at the prospect. "The way I see it, I get up to speed on the evidence while she's arguing the rehab criteria at the seven-oh-seven. That way, even if we lose at the hearing, we're stronger for the adult trial. Plus, between you and me, if her personal problems become too much for her, I'm already on board. The clients now know me. It's good insurance." He dropped his head for a moment, stunned at how right this decision felt.
Frannie's message the night before had struck a reverberant chord. He needed something to reconnect himself with who he was- an officer of the court, a justice freak, a guardian of the law. What he needed for his own good was a pure case, where you defended your client because the presumption was innocence. If the prosecution couldn't prove otherwise, couldn't prevail against a spirited defense, the client walked.
This was neither cynical nor manipulative- it was the essence of the system. And though Hardy had lost some faith, a great deal of faith, in the mechanics, in the way it sometimes played out in the real world, suddenly it was crystal clear that this imperfect system, if he still believed in anything, was what he believed in. More, it was an opportunity for his own redemption that he couldn't let pass.
He hadn't taken a murder case in over three years. They were too time-consuming, too physically grueling, too emotionally demanding. They played hell with his home life.
There was better money to be made quicker and more fun to be had cutting deals. You could skim along the top of things and not worry too much- hell, not worry at all. You laughed until your face hurt, and you'd be damned if you'd ever have to internalize any of your clients' problems. You just fixed their messes.
And yet at some level, Hardy never lost his awareness that the fun was about as ephemeral and nourishing as cotton candy, and often left a worse aftertaste. And the money often felt dirty.
He might not have wanted to face it squarely, but once he did, it wasn't any mystery to him why he'd been drinking too much. He could see where it would all lead if he continued. The picture wasn't pretty. No, more. It was so ugly that, thank God, it had made Frannie cry.
Maybe it was time to engage again, to let himself care.
He lifted his head, broke a weary half grin. "So. Second chair? You think?"
Roake nodded. "It's got your name on it."
Amy Wu hadn't been able to face the idea of going back into the Sutter Street office and facing Dismas Hardy and her other colleagues again, not after the brutal dressing-down she'd taken at the hands of Allan Boscacci, who'd first kept her waiting for almost two hours, then informed her that he had already filed a motion for a 707 hearing on the Bartlett matter, to have the boy declared an adult.
He hoped she realized what she'd done, and wanted her to be under no illusion- she wasn't getting away with it. Oh, and by the way, if she ever wanted to communicate with him about any case ever again, she should do it in writing, signed by her, no "dictated, not read" bullshit. And he didn't mean e-mail. And she would find this to be the policy for every assistant district attorney in his office.
Badly shaken, fighting tears, she'd crossed Bryant, then descended into the dark and ripe-smelling stairway under the bail bondsman's office that led down to Lou the Greek's. She'd taken her stool at the bar and ordered straight vodka.
No cosmopolitans today. No frou-frou little cocktails. She wasn't here to party. She was drinking.
By five-thirty, Lou's was jammed and Amy's immediate troubles had mostly been drowned. The bar was Mecca for the lawyers and cops who worked out of the Hall of Justice, and Amy's situation with Andrew Bartlett was as nothing compared with the shit storm that had developed over Deputy Chief Glitsky's handling of the LeShawn Brodie matter.
During the late morning and early afternoon, Brodie had taken the lives of seven of his hostages, one every twenty minutes while the local cops and the highway patrol argued over who had jurisdiction to provide a helicopter that would take him to the Sacramento airport. There, Brodie evidently had been convinced that authorities would also supply him with a plane to take him to Cuba. In fact, a police sniper shot him in the forehead when he'd gotten one step outside of the diner's entrance, while the helicopter waited, its rotors twirling, in the parking lot.
Both of the televisions over the bar at Lou's had been carrying nothing else for the past several hours, while the pros and cons of the original police strategy had fueled an endless and passionate debate among the clientele.
By the time it had gotten dark, Amy had had six vodka martinis and was ready to go home and get some sleep. But an aggressively clever young defense attorney named Barry had outlasted the other hopefuls around her, and now he had his arm around her as they negotiated the doors and came out into the suddenly full-dark night.
At the top of the stairs, Barry turned to her and she found herself being kissed. Then they were walking together down the alley that ran alongside Lou's. She had herself tucked inside the jacket of his suit against the chill. She'd already told him she didn't think she should drive, but he said he was sober enough and could drive them both.
He was parked where she had parked. Where every visitor to the Hall parked. In the All-Day just up at the end of the alley.
The lot was one block wide, bounded by three-story buildings on both sides, closing the place in. Every spot, alley to alley, was filled during business hours every day. Now the place held only three cars- Amy's by the near building, and then Barry's car and another one parked in adjacent spaces on the far side. One light, burning from high on a pole by the deserted pay station, cast its pool over the area, leaving the borders in deep shadow.
When they got to his car, Barry opened the door for her and she lowered herself, taking care lest she collapse into the seat. As they backed out, the car's headlights raked the building in front of them, then washed over the car in the adjacent parking space.
Following the beam through heavy-lidded eyes, Amy sat up abruptly. "Wait a minute. Stop!"
"What?" Barry slammed on the brakes.
Before the car had fully stopped, Amy opened the door. She was halfway out, staggering. She fell once, cut her knees, then got up and moved forward again.
"What are you doing?" Barry, still in the car, called from behind her.
She turned and pointed. "Get your lights next to that car, over by the wall." She kept moving over toward a dark amorphous mound on the pavement up against the building. As the headlights hit it, its shape became obvious.
Barry came running up next to her. "Jesus Christ!"
The body was dressed in a business suit under a trenchcoat. It lay skewed on its side, the face visible now in the headlights. A dark pool had formed under the head, but Amy wasn't able to pay any attention to other details. She stood transfixed, unable to tear her eyes from the awful, vacant stare of the victim.
The dead man was Allan Boscacci.