The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  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.

  7

  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 . . .”