The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  When they got to the end, Hardy found his heart pounding. He had also broken a sweat. He pushed his chair back from the computer, stood and went over to open one of his windows, get some air. After a minute, he turned to Wu. “I’d better go meet the client.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Wu asked. They were driving out to the YGC in Hardy’s car, the top down. “Do I come across as some kind of monster?”

  “Not at all.” Hardy didn’t know exactly what to say. He looked over at her. The light changed and he pulled out. “Why do you ask? Did somebody say that?”

  “More or less. That I didn’t feel anything. That there wasn’t anybody real inside of me.”

  “Who said that? Somebody in the firm?”

  “No. A colleague.”

  “Well, whoever it was can ask me. The other night, talking about your dad, that was real enough.”

  “But I was drunk then, with my guard down.”

  “I’ve done research on that exact topic. It still counts.”

  “I don’t know.” She turned in her seat. “But I’m thinking if that’s all people can see in me, then maybe that’s all my dad saw, too.”

  Hardy kept it low-key. “Or maybe it wasn’t you at all. Maybe your dad just wasn’t able to show what he felt.”

  “No, he really didn’t approve of me. Or like me very much.”

  “Or maybe the idea of showing you terrified him, so he was extra-tough so you wouldn’t ever find out and take advantage and hurt him.” Trying to lighten it up, he added, “And if that’s the case, you better watch out. It’s genetic, that kind of thing.” Hardy flashed a quick look at her.

  Abruptly, Wu had turned straight ahead in her seat, her eyes on the road.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Her lips tight, her jaw set, she nodded. But said nothing.

  Throughout all of his schooling at the best institutions in San Francisco, Andrew had been inculcated into the sensitive, educated modern child’s nutritional paradigm of healthy eating. Sutro had both a juice and a salad bar, and that’s where, for a mere $4.45, he bought his lunch every day. Over the years, like most of his classmates who’d been forced to witness the brutal slaughtering of some food animal on videotape in school, he had come to believe that humans shouldn’t eat meat. A few days of real hunger after his arrest, though, had conquered his qualms. Besides that, the YGC vegetarian alternative meal was total slop.

  Wu didn’t think it was the food, though, that accounted for his pallor and lethargy today. He’d shaved, showered, and combed his hair, but in the jail outfit—blue denims, gray sweatshirt—he showed no sign that yesterday afternoon’s depression had lifted at all. If anything, it seemed worse.

  He greeted Hardy with a bored and sullen silence. He only shook, no grip, after a pause long enough for Hardy nearly to withdraw his own offered hand. Wu started to explain that Hardy was here because he had more experience with murder cases and . . .

  “You said that yesterday. So we’re going to adult trial?”

  “Maybe not,” Wu said. “We’re hoping that this hearing . . .”

  But he cut her off again. “No you’re not. Yesterday you said that was hopeless. They get one of the criteria, it’s over, right?”

  Andrew had stuffed himself into the old school desk. Wu sat at the table. Hardy was standing in the corner, leaning against one of the walls, arms crossed. He spoke matter-of-factly. “You can always go back and admit the petition. I’ll bet you I could talk Johnson into accepting that if you wanted to change your mind. You want to do that?”

  Andrew kept his eyes on the table in front of him. “That’s eight years automatic.”

  “That’s right,” Hardy said.

  He looked up. “I didn’t do this.”

  “Well, then,” Hardy said, “you don’t want to do those eight years, do you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Which, like it or not,” Hardy said, “leaves us with an adult trial, unless we can win this hearing next Tuesday.”

  He pointed to Wu. “She says we can’t do that.”

  “We’ve got some problems,” Hardy admitted, “but we’ve also got some strategies. To make them work, though, we’re going to need your help. If you think it’s even worth it to try.”

  Andrew shrugged.

  Hardy came forward, his voice hardening up, pressing him a little. “You do? You don’t? I’m not reading your signals very clearly. You want to try using some words?”

  It was clear that Andrew hadn’t had too many people talk to him so harshly. “All right,” he said finally. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Let’s start by you telling me about the gun,” Hardy said.

  “What about it?”

  “I’m curious why you brought it to your rehearsal that night.”

  Andrew didn’t have to think about it. “It was just in my backpack. I’d been carrying it around for a few weeks.”

  “But you took it out that night. At Mr. Mooney’s. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did that happen?”

  He shrugged. “It was a prop, that’s all. We were doing Virginia Woolf, you know. That was the play. And Mike—Mooney—he thought it might add to the tension if we had a gun on stage. It’s not really in the script, but he just wanted to see how it would feel.”

  “So he asked you to bring a gun to rehearsal?”

  “No. I had it with me anyway, so I brought it up. It was my idea. I thought it might be cool.”

  Hardy thought this would be a good time to shake things up. He forced an amused little chuckle, walked up to the table, looked down at Wu. “The boy’s good, Amy,” he said. “This is some brilliant delivery. I can see where he got the lead in the play.”

  “What are you talking about?” Andrew asked.

  Hardy kept his tone easy. “I’m talking about acting, Andrew. What else?”

  “I’m not acting. This is what happened.” A pause. “Really.”

  Hardy nodded, chuckled again, talked to Amy. “Damn,” Hardy said. “Impressive. I mean it. I’d be pretty well swayed if I were on a jury.”

  “Me, too,” Wu said. “We put him on the stand, he flies.”

  Hardy looked down at him. “It’s always a big decision whether or not to put a defendant on the stand himself. But we get a world-class performer like yourself, it’s a real bonus.”

  “Why are you saying this? I’m not performing. I’m telling you the truth.”

  Again, Hardy spoke directly to Wu. “And the award goes to . . .”

  “I’m telling the truth, goddamn it! What are you saying?”

  Hardy didn’t rise to the challenge. Retreating to his neutral corner, he leaned against the wall again, crossed his arms. “You tell him, Amy.”

  She took the cue. “Andrew,” she said. “Andrew, look at me.”

  He dragged his pained expression back down to the table.

  “Why Mr. Hardy is skeptical is that in ‘Perfect Killer,’ you tell that same story as the—”

  Andrew jumped as if he’d been stung. “How do you know about that? I never . . .” He shot a look to the corner, where Hardy was the picture of nonchalance. Nothing there. He came back to Wu. “I never even printed that out.”

  “No,” Wu said. “I don’t suppose you would have. But it was still on the disk.”

  Hardy spoke up. “It’s pretty standard procedure now, Andrew. The police get a search warrant and dump your computer files, read your e-mail. That’s the one thing I’d criticize about your story. The writing was good. It reminded me a little of Holden Caulfield, but you hadn’t done your research on the latest tech stuff. Didn’t you know they’d served a warrant at your house? Didn’t it occur to you that they’d look for everything they could find?”

  Andrew slumped at his desk. His arms hung straight down, his head bowed. They let him live with his new reality for a minute or more, a very long time under those circumstances. Finally, he sighed and raised his
head. “Look,” he said, “I’m not acting. I’m telling you guys the truth. What I made up was that story. I had my guy, my character—”

  “Trevor,” Wu said.

  “Right, Trevor. I had Trevor—”

  Hardy cut in. “Andrew,” he said. “That’s the most incriminating document I’ve ever read and I’ve been in this game a long time. No judge in the world is going to let you off if he gets a look at that, which he will. How many other stories like that are in your computer?”

  “None just like that.”

  “Thank God,” Wu said. “What in the world were you thinking, Andrew?”

  Unbowed, he snapped back. “I was thinking about writing a story. You know, fiction?”

  “We know all about fiction,” Hardy said. He hadn’t moved from his spot in the corner by the door. “But this just . . . Well, it isn’t fiction. I flat don’t believe it.”

  “You can believe what you want. Haven’t you ever read Crime and Punishment? Or John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure?”

  “I’ve read them both,” Wu said. “What about them?”

  “Well, I had just read Debt to Pleasure earlier in the year, when I was starting to have some problems with Laura.” His eyes went back and forth between his attorneys. “When we first started rehearsing with Mike, she . . . well, like Julie in the story, she was just all impressed with him, that she’d gotten the part, all that. It got to me. We actually broke up about it.”

  “That wasn’t in the story,” Hardy said. “The breakup.”

  “No,” Andrew said. “That’s because I made up the story. Have I already mentioned that? I thought I had.”

  Hardy’s mouth grinned, but his eyes didn’t. “I don’t know who convinced you that sarcasm was a powerful debating tool, Andrew. But whoever it was didn’t do you a service. I understand that you made up your story. It’s not that tough a concept to grasp. But you have to admit that there’s a lot of it that seems pretty closely based on your own experience. Now, do you want to tell us about that, or not?”

  Andrew tried stewing for a moment. He turned to Wu, who might show some sympathy, for support, but she stonewalled him. At last, he spoke. “When I wrote it, I was jealous of Mike with Laura. I was going for a weird-guy feel like Lanchester did.”

  “You got that,” Wu said. She turned to Hardy. “The Debt to Pleasure again.”

  Hardy deadpanned. “I’ve got to read it.”

  “In the end,” Andrew said, “that’s why I didn’t send out the story anyplace. It was too derivative. I mean, a really really bright guy who’s basically insane. It’s been done a million times now. Plus, I don’t think the ending worked really well. I wanted Trevor to find a really unique way to commit these murders, but in the end, I fell back on the gun.”

  Hardy had to fight a disorienting sense of surrealism. Here’s a client up for murder and what he wants to discuss are plot points in a story that might hang him. “Have you published before?” he asked.

  “No. But I’ve sent out a bunch. I did get a nice note back from McSweeney’s on one of them, not a straight rejection.”

  “I’m happy for you.” Hardy finally moved up to the table, pulled around a chair and sat in it. “Listen, Andrew, whether or not you made this up, we’ve got to work on some kind of spin for this story. You’ve got to see that it casts you in the worst possible light.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Andrew said.

  “No, it’s peachy,” Hardy said. “But I’m not talking about its literary quality. I’m talking about the events and motive around these two murders that have actually taken place and that you’re charged with committing and that you pretty much exactly mirrored in the story you wrote two months earlier. Two murders—your teacher and your girlfriend. Your dad’s gun. Even down to your alibi.”

  “Don’t forget my favorite moment,” Amy said. She’d printed the thing out at the office, and now had found the page, and read aloud. “Talking about the gun now. Here’s your narrator. But what if I get rid of it after? Then, even if they can recover the slugs, they won’t be able to compare the ballistics marks. I double-check and make sure the gun isn’t made in Israel, where they shoot their guns before they sell them. Then the ballistic readouts are computerized and matched with the weapon’s buyer, so even if the gun itself is unavailable, they can identify its owner.”

  “That’s true,” Andrew objected. “That’s what they do. I found it in my research.”

  “Good for you,” Hardy said. “But not the point. Here, Amy, let me.”

  She handed the pages across to him. He flipped to the end. “How about this part, Andrew? How do you think a jury would feel about you if the prosecutor got this admitted, which he will, and reads it out loud? I come back and find the bodies. I call nine one one. They’re going to think there’s no way I’d come back and do that if I’d done the shooting.

  “Will the cops suspect me? Yeah. But I’ve gotten rid of the gun and the gloves. The night I do it, I pack a change of clothes just like the ones I was wearing in a plastic bag in my trunk. Shoes, too. I adios the whole package before I come back and discover the carnage.

  “The cops look, but I’m clean. And Mike and Laura are gone.”

  “No! That’s wrong.” Andrew came halfway out of his chair. “I didn’t write Mike and Laura. I wrote Julie and Miles. The characters.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you did. I guess it seemed like you meant Mike and Laura, so that’s what I read. Honest mistake.” Hardy turned the pages facedown, looked across the room at his client. “Listen, Andrew. Not only is this pretty much exactly what happened, it shows premeditation and planning. It’s also sophisticated stuff. You may remember that as another one of the criteria we’re supposed to avoid—criminal sophistication.”

  Andrew slumped back into his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. Given the magnitude of disaster he was looking at, his expression was almost serene. “Look,” he said. “You start with my character in the story, remember, not me. You put him in a situation that you know something about. That’s what they tell you, to write what you know.”

  “That’s what you say in the story, too. So all right, you picked jealousy.”

  “I hadn’t ever felt anything like it before. It was just . . . overpowering. Laura would get to going on about Mike, and after a while I just couldn’t listen to it anymore. I suppose I started acting like a jerk . . .”

  Wu jumped on it. “How?”

  “Every way I could, really. Coming on to other girls around her. Cutting her down in front of other people. Dissing Mike . . .”

  “But nothing physical?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Nothing?” Hardy repeated. This was the kind of fact about which you wanted no ambiguity. “You never hit her? Nobody ever saw you hit her?”

  “I never hit her,” he said. “I would never hit her. I loved her.”

  “Okay.” Hardy thrummed his fingers on the table. “Let’s go back to the story. Do you have any idea how we deal with it, or get around it?”

  Andrew sighed. “It’s fiction. I don’t know what else I can say. The character isn’t me. Julie isn’t Laura, Miles isn’t Mike. There’s tons of stuff in the story that didn’t really happen.”

  “Name me something important,” Hardy said. “Something that will make any difference to a judge or jury.”

  “Well, the main thing, in the story, Trevor had had a lot of sex with other girls. That wasn’t me.”

  “You’re a virgin?” Hardy asked. “That didn’t read like a virgin wrote it.”

  “I was then,” Andrew said, a hint of pride in the admission. “I imagined what a guy like Trevor would have felt and done.”

  “All right.” Hardy wasn’t giving him much. “But it’s a stretch to call that the main thing, Andrew. Maybe you could tell us something about the crime that’s different in the story from real life.”

  The boy looked to Wu for help, but she, too, was waiting for what he’d say. “Okay,”
he said finally. “Okay. In the story, I have Trevor almost decide not to use his father’s gun, right? He understands that if he does that, the cops have got to see that he’s tied to the crime. So if I understood that clearly enough to write about it four or five months ago, would it make sense that I’d just go ahead and use Hal’s gun?”

  Hardy shrugged. “Maybe you figured out some way you could make it work?”

  “But I didn’t. It wouldn’t have worked. So I wouldn’t have done it. Not in real life.”

  Wu came forward. “But Hal’s gun was there, Andrew.”

  “But that was—I mean, look, I got the idea from writing the story—we have the gun there on stage . . .”

  Hardy butted in. “We’ve already done this. Let’s go to something a little more personal. Your best friend—Lanny is it?—Lanny has testified that you thought Mooney and Laura were intimate. That’s why you brought the gun to school in the first place, and . . .”

  “That’s another one!” Andrew’s expression was alight with triumph. “My character Trevor never would have showed the gun to anybody at school. I wouldn’t have shown it to Lanny if I’d been planning to use it. I mean, think about it, would that make any sense? Would a guy smart enough to write the Trevor character be dumb enough to show the gun around?”

  “Smart guys do dumb things all the time,” Hardy said. “The question is did you believe that Laura and Mooney were having sex?”

  Deflated, Andrew sat back. “I thought maybe. That’s why I wrote the story. But then we got back together . . .”

  “You and Laura?” Hardy asked. Between the fiction and the reality, he almost felt he needed a scorecard. “I guess I missed the breakup. What was the timing on that?”

  “Before Christmas. A couple of weeks after we got on the play.”

  “And why did you break up again?”

  “She broke up with me. Over me being so jealous.”