The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  Treya had gotten good at meals that took fifteen minutes to prepare, and she waited until she heard his tread on the steps up to their duplex before she threw the halibut on to broil in the oven. When she turned it the one time, she would smear it with jalapeño jelly, which would melt, forming a fantastic glaze. The asparagus sat in a shallow covered pan with a quarter inch of boiling water. She’d finish that with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a pinch of sea salt. A small, still warm, dense loaf of homemade bread-machine bread—roasted-garlic with Asiago cheese—would round out the meal, after which they’d split a plate of frozen grapes for dessert.

  Glitsky had fed Rachel in her high chair and for the past few minutes had been doing magic tricks, making a quarter disappear. Now Treya put the adult plates down. “Arranged yet,” he said. She’d garnished with a few sprigs of fresh rosemary. A crystal vase sat between the place mats on the small wooden table, and in it bloomed one perfect daffodil.

  Glitsky put a finger on his daughter’s nose, turned to his food and picked up his fork. “Do I thank you enough for doing all this?”

  Treya kissed the top of his head. “Every day.” She touched her baby’s cheek. “You gave me her, didn’t you?” She came around the table and took her seat. “Now shush and eat your fish. It’s brain food.”

  “I’d better, then. I’m going to need it.” He chewed, swallowed. “This Boscacci thing.”

  “At least it’s not LeShawn Brodie. I checked, and you’d dropped right off the news tonight, just like it never happened.”

  “Fresh kill,” Glitsky said. “Anyhow, you’ll be glad to hear Amy Wu’s almost certainly out of it.”

  “She was never really in, though, was she?”

  “No, not really, although she could have timed her last meeting with Allan a little better. The real story, though, is that because of her, I got to give Diz a little grief.”

  Treya smiled. “Always a plus.”

  “And even more so because I swung by his office to give him his earful of righteous cop, and while I was there, I found a way to repay him for his little caper with my peanut drawer.”

  “I thought you weren’t sure who that was.”

  “I wasn’t, then I realized it had to be Diz. No one else is that immature.”

  “I can think of one other person,” she said.

  The corners of Glitsky’s mouth rose a fraction of an inch. “Thank you,” he said. “Plus, anybody at the Hall, it’s too risky if I catch them. They’re flayed, then fired. Diz, I get him red-handed and he says, ‘Ha ha, you got me, so what?’ It was him.”

  “Okay. So what’d you do to him?”

  “First, you have to promise not to tell under penalty of death.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Diz or Frannie. You’ll be tempted.”

  “I’ll resist, I promise. What?”

  A spark of mischief flashed in his eyes. “I stole his darts. You want to hear the best part?”

  “That wasn’t it? What could be better?”

  “Next time I’m there, I’m going to put them back. Then steal them again. My hope is that eventually he’ll go insane.”

  “And that would be so that you two could play together as equals?” Treya put her fork down and looked across the table, her own eyes alight. She turned to Rachel. “Do you know how lucky you are that you can’t understand any of this?” she asked.

  An hour later, the baby was in bed and the two of them sat in their living room with their after dinner tea. “But that poor man . . .” Treya was talking about Boscacci. “Do you have anything at all?”

  “Well, if you count that we’re fairly certain it wasn’t Amy, we’ve got that.”

  “Well, yes. But we knew that this morning before you even talked to her.”

  “True. But now we know with more certainty,” he said. “And not because she works with Diz. Because she couldn’t have done it.”

  “So who could have?”

  Glitsky pulled at the scar at his lower lip. “My best guess now is someone he fired in the last three years. Maybe one of them took it personally.”

  “So how many people did he let go? Allan?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Treya whistled softly. “That’s a lot.”

  Glitsky sat back into the couch. He reached down near his belt and probed, perhaps unconsciously, at his side. “Well, fortunately,” he went on, “I’ve got a lot of resources for a change. I’ve got two inspectors from General Work for the canvassing and alibi checking, then Belou and Russell from homicide, and they’ll basically be full time to find and interview the folks Allan fired. Then Marcel asked to be part of it, too, back on the street if he had to. And, of course, my own magnificent self.”

  “What are you going to be doing?”

  Glitsky drew a sharp breath. “Well, mostly, given the lack of any forensic evidence, I’m going to be developing theories. But I’m not complaining. At least it’s a homicide. Something I know how to do.”

  Treya put her cup down, reached over, put her hand on Glitsky’s shoulder. “Is your side hurting you again? Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  “No.”

  “No to what?”

  “Both.”

  “You won’t see a doctor?”

  Glitsky grunted. “I’ve seen enough doctors. You start in with doctors, it never ends. They looked when this started and couldn’t find anything. I’m not about to let them cut on me again just to look.”

  “But it’s still hurting you, whatever it is.”

  “I know what it is.” He softened his tone. “I’m uptight. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, and till it does or I decide it’s not going to, I’ve got to tough it out.”

  “So what’s going to make you decide that? Do you have any idea?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe doing something I’m good at.”

  “What does that mean? You’re doing a great job as deputy chief. Everybody says so.”

  “Nobody was saying so yesterday with LeShawn.”

  Treya waved that off. “Those were just the media vultures, Abe. You know that. You can’t take them seriously. I’m talking about people like Clarence, and Frank Batiste. The mayor. Kathy West. I hear nothing but good things and where I work, that’s saying something.”

  A shrug. “I make my numbers. I show up on time. My brass shines. But inside I’m not like these people.”

  “What people?”

  “Frank, Clarence, the mayor—all the people who have these meetings.” He pushed at his side again. “They’re politicians. Plus I’ve got this little secret and can’t help thinking that someday somebody’s going to find me out.”

  Treya spoke with some care. “Maybe you want to talk to somebody?”

  “What do you mean, a shrink?” He barked out a black laugh. “So then word goes out that the man is cracking up? And everybody starts to check out my office furniture? Half the folks would think I really am crazy and the other half would figure it’s a scam to get disability. I’d kiss my credibility good-bye forever.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a psychiatrist. Maybe a psychologist. Or a career counselor.”

  “And what’s this person going to do, talk me out of the pain?” He took her hand. “Besides, I talk to you.”

  Treya wasn’t going to be conned. “And I can’t help. I haven’t helped. I’m just saying maybe someone else could get somewhere.”

  “Not if I couldn’t tell them about it. And I can’t. You know I can’t.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. But there is such a thing as doctor/ patient privilege, you know. That’s a real thing. They couldn’t tell.”

  “Right, in theory. But in real life, they tell all the time. A rumor gets started, and you know cops, they ask questions. And then where are we?”

  “At least you’re not in pain.”

  “Wonderful. Except that now I’m ruined, even in jail. How does that sound? There’s no statute on murder.”


  “It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense. You keep saying it was murder, and it wasn’t.”

  “All right, but it killed a cop. And I was a party to covering it up. Whatever happens, if that comes out, even if I never go to jail, it’s the end of my career.” He exhaled with some force. “I’ve got to live with it, that’s all. It’s not that bad.”

  But as he said it, he tightened his lips, the scar through them going white with the pressure. Treya, her own face tight with concern, laid a palm on his thigh and he covered it with his own hand, squeezing hard. When the spasm had passed, he released his grip. “Not that bad,” he repeated.

  He came into the bedroom and Treya put down her book. “Who was that?”

  “Marcel.”

  She checked the bedside clock. 10:42. “This time of night?”

  “I told him he could call anytime.”

  She smiled at him. “Of course you did.” She patted the bed next to her. “Here, sit down. What did Marcel find?”

  “Well, again, it’s more what they didn’t find. Nobody heard anything.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Marcel sent out our team to knock on every door within two blocks of the All-Day Lot. Have another go at them, catch the people who weren’t home earlier. They got forty-four hits, which is the jackpot. Nobody heard a shot, not even the shoe repair folks still at work just around the corner, like fifty feet away.”

  “Maybe they just didn’t want to say.”

  “Maybe. Some percentage wouldn’t give away their trash to save humanity. But you’ve got to hope that with forty-four people, maybe a couple are good citizens. But these folks were there, admitted they were there, talked to our people. Nobody heard anything.”

  Treya sat up. “Is that so unusual?”

  Glitsky shrugged. “You know what a nine-millimeter sounds like? Close up, a cherry bomb. A block away, you hear it and you stop a second and go, ‘What was that?’ ”

  “And nobody heard anything? Maybe he was inside a car and rolled the window down?”

  “Maybe that,” Glitsky said. “Or maybe he had a suppressor.”

  “A what?”

  “A silencer. Suppressor.”

  “And what does that mean? Other than the shot doesn’t make much noise?”

  “It means he’s probably a pro. In which case he’s probably in another state by now. But if he was a pro, that also means somebody hired him. It’s another place to look, that’s all.”

  Hardy owned a one-quarter interest in one of San Francisco’s oldest bars, the Little Shamrock, at the corner of Ninth and Lincoln, just across the street from Golden Gate Park. The majority partner was Frannie’s brother, Moses McGuire, another emotional casualty of the shoot-out. By jogging just slightly from the direct route to his home from Juan Salarco’s, Hardy could pass right by the place, check up on his brother-in-law, maybe have a short nightcap.

  It had gotten late. After saying good night to Salarco, Hardy had gone out to his car and, with the interview still fresh in his mind, listened to the tape of it twice through again. With the sometimes lengthy time-outs he took for making notes, both as the witness talked and as ideas occurred after each listening, he worked for most of an hour that felt to him like five minutes.

  The Shamrock’s bar ran along one wall halfway back to where the room widened out slightly. At the front door, it was wall-to-wall people, five or six deep. His first glance told Hardy he had no chance to claim a stool anywhere near the bar itself, and even if he was successful at that, the crowd would keep Moses too busy to talk. Nights like this, Hardy would sometimes take off his jacket, grab a bar towel and help out behind the rail. He’d been a bartender once, and a good one.

  But tonight he wasn’t in the mood. It was too crowded, too loud, too hot. The jukebox was cranked up with some old Marshall Tucker music. Maybe he ought to go home.

  He was just turning to leave when Wes Farrell and his live-in girlfriend, Sam Duncan, pushed their way in. Sam was a petite, feisty, pretty dark-haired woman, forty-ish, who ran one of the city’s rape crisis counseling centers not far away on Haight Street.

  “You’re not leaving?” Farrell said. “Not when we’re just getting here.”

  “It had crossed my mind. It’s going to take an hour to get a drink.”

  “We’ve got that knocked,” Sam said. “We know the owner. Come on.”

  Sam took Hardy’s hand and led the way, jostling them through the crowd. Once they’d cleared the bottleneck up front, there was adequate room to stand and even move as long as nobody wanted to polka. Hardy noticed that Farrell was his out-of-the-office casual self, wearing one of his trademark T-shirts, which read “Be More or Less Specific.” At Hardy’s shoulder, Sam was saying that since he was buying, she’d have a Chivas rocks and Wes would have a pint of Bass Ale. Hardy could have whatever he wanted.

  “Thanks,” he told her. He ducked under the bar, gave McGuire a half-salute and called down that he was getting his own drinks, Moses shouldn’t worry about him.

  When Hardy got back with the drinks, Farrell nudged Sam and said, “Tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Hardy said.

  Sam sampled her Scotch, nodded appreciatively. “I don’t know how it came up,” she began.

  “At dinner,” Farrell said. “I started telling you about this situation with Amy.”

  “That’s it.” She came back to Hardy. “Well, the point is he mentioned this boy Andrew Bartlett and I said I knew a little about it. I’d been following it in the papers. I was interested because back when I was young and foolish, I used to hang out sometimes with Linda.” At Hardy’s uncomprehending glance, she added, “His mother.”

  “What do you mean, hang out?”

  A shrug. “Just that. Go to bars, meet guys. This was before I met my true love here, of course. But if you wanted to pretty much guarantee you’d get lucky of a given night, you wanted to hang with Linda if you could. She could materialize men out of a vacuum. You’re thinking ‘so what?’ Aren’t you?”

  In fact, that’s what Hardy was thinking. Sam could make almost any story listenable. But the wild child Linda Bartlett was now the married Linda North, and other than the fact that San Francisco continued to be a small and self-referential little world, there wasn’t anything particularly fascinating about the fact that she’d hung out and picked up men with Sam Duncan when both of them had been younger. But Hardy said, “Go on.”

  “Well, since it’s the law and by definition must be endlessly enthralling, I say to my darling here, ‘I’m not surprised the little kid didn’t turn out right. His dad ran off and his mother didn’t give him the time of day.’ ”

  “So Andrew was around when you and Linda were hanging out?”

  “He was around in the sense that he was alive. He must have been three or so about this time. But Linda would dump him with anyone at the drop of a hat. I even kept him with me for a couple of weekends when she went away with somebody. He was the cutest little guy, if you like three-year-olds, which, you know, are not generally my favorite. But even given that, this was a woman who shouldn’t ever have become a mother. The boy was nothing but inconvenient to her. She was going to have her fun and all he did was get in the way.”

  Sam drank more of her Scotch. “Actually, that’s one of the reasons I stopped hanging out with her. It just became obvious, the kind of person she was. I like to think I’m as shallow as anybody—it’s why Wes loves me, after all—but she just wasn’t going to be involved with her own son, and that was that. After a while it got so I couldn’t stand to see it.”

  Farrell jumped in. “The reason this might be important to you, Diz—”

  “Hey!” Sam hit him on the arm. “It’s my story, all right? I understood your point at dinner. I’m getting to it.”

  “I’m listening,” Hardy said.

  “Thank you. The point,” she shot a glare at Farrell, “being that the boy really has had a difficult life, especially in his early years. So in s
pite of the pampered rich boy he might seem to be, he was essentially an abandoned kid, raised, if you want to call it that, by an emotionally removed if not outright abusive mother.”

  “She abused him, you think?”

  “I don’t know if she actively abused him, like beat him or anything like that, but I guarantee you he’s deeply scarred. And, finally, the point is . . .”

  “Ahh,” Farrell said, “the point.”

  “. . . is that in many jurisdictions, but especially in San Francisco, the wise defense attorney, such as my esteemed roommate here, will take every opportunity to present his criminal client as the victim of something, childhood abuse being perhaps the all-time favorite.”

  “It is a good one,” Hardy said.

  “And Andrew is legitimately in that club.”

  “If you can get it into the record,” Farrell said. “It may not get him off, but it sure as hell couldn’t hurt in sentencing.”

  “No,” Hardy said. “I don’t imagine it could.”

  17

  We’ve got a problem.”

  At his desk, Hardy motioned Wu in. She’d taken some care dressing and making up this morning. She often did, so this wasn’t unusual in itself. But the two-piece pin-striped dark blue business suit she wore was such a far cry from the way she’d looked in his daughter’s bathrobe, nursing the mother of all hangovers, that Hardy blinked at the transformation. He’d been listening again to the tape he’d made at Juan Salarco’s—something about it bothering him—and now he removed his headphones, gave Wu his attention. “Hit me,” he said.

  “He’s a writer.”

  “Who is? Andrew?”

  She nodded. “On his computer. They delivered more discovery here yesterday while I was out. This disk,” she held it up, “is not good. You want to see?”

  “It would make my day.” He took the disk from her and slipped it into his computer.

  “ ‘Perfect Killer Dot One,’ ” she said.

  “Love the name.”

  Hardy’s fingers moved over the keyboard. Wu came around behind him as the document appeared on the screen. Quiet and intent, together they read Andrew’s short story about a young man filled with jealous rage who kills his girlfriend and his English teacher. For over ten minutes, the only sound in the room was the tick of the computer’s cursor as Hardy scrolled through the document.