The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  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.”