The Second Chair

by John Lescroart

  “He’s alive,” Hardy said. “Which is good enough for now.”

  Wagner swiveled in his chair, looked out the window behind him at the play yard, still packed with students. “This has been a terrible tragedy for the school,” he said. “To think that he was coming here every day for weeks after . . .” He sighed. “Our counselors are a little overwhelmed, you know. Students realizing they’d been walking around, or even taking classes, with a murderer.”

  “An alleged murderer,” Hardy said.

  “Alleged or otherwise.” Wagner spun back around, gave him the man-to-man. “Mr. Hardy, please. Do you really think it’s possible Andrew is not guilty?”

  “Yes. Possible. Although proving I’m right may be a different story.”

  “I must say it’s refreshing to hear someone say they don’t think he’s guilty. Pretty much all I heard after the arrest was that it was open-and-shut.”

  “I’d heard the same thing myself. I keep hearing it, in fact.”

  Wagner moved some papers around on his desk. “You know, it would be so wonderful for the school if that weren’t the case. It’s bad enough that the two victims were members of the community. But if somehow Andrew were found innocent, it might go a long way toward starting the healing.”

  “Well, you know, sir, that’s the reason I came by here today. I’ve got a hearing for Andrew scheduled to begin tomorrow and I wondered if I might ask you a favor. I understand his sister goes here, too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I know it’s unusual, but I’ve got some questions for her, and for the two other people that were in the play with Andrew, that really might be of some use. I know I could wait and see all of them at home with their parents”—and maybe their lawyers, he thought—“tonight, but I’m in a time crunch of major proportions. Would it be possible to borrow a room here in the office and pull those three people out of class for a few minutes?” When he saw that Wagner had a problem with the idea, he added, “Mr. North assured me that I would have your complete cooperation in the defense of his son.”

  Wagner considered a moment. “I’m sure we can do that.” A bell rang and he looked up at his wall clock. “Fifth period,” he said. “Together or separately?”

  “Separately would be better,” Hardy said.

  But it wasn’t to be that simple. Wagner’s desire to see Andrew cleared because it would benefit Sutro might have blinded him to the fact that he should not under any circumstances be allowing his students to talk to an attorney without parental permission. But obviously he couldn’t let Hardy be alone in a room with one of his students, either.

  Hardy was obliged to let him sit in. He couldn’t help but think that this changed the dynamic dramatically—he had been planning a gloves-off discussion with each of the kids, but he had no choice. If the meetings were going to happen at all, they’d be in Wagner’s office with the principal in attendance.

  Alicia breezed in first. Hardy had heard next to nothing about her, either from Wu or from Andrew. His only preconception was that she was probably the model for the sister in Andrew’s short story, locked in her room listening to death music and smoking dope. His first look at her—very pretty with beautiful long dark hair, clear skin and eyes, designer clothes—was a bit of a shock and brought him up short. Andrew’s story, he reminded himself, was fiction. If the judge wound up having trouble with that concept, Hardy thought he could bring in Alicia as a witness and win the point without any further debate.

  She took a few confident steps into the office, threw at glance at Hardy—a stranger to her—and spoke to Wagner. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Alicia, this is Mr. Hardy. He’s one of the lawyers representing Andrew. He’d like to talk to you for a few minutes if you don’t mind.”

  Her face grew serious, and she nodded first at Wagner, then at Hardy. “Sure. Okay. Why would I mind? Although Andrew and I aren’t exactly what I’d call close.”

  “Why not?” Hardy asked.

  “Well, I don’t know. He’s just . . . We don’t have that much in common, I suppose.”

  “So you don’t know much about what’s happening with him?”

  “Just of course the basics. What Dad and Linda have told me. I thought it must be some misunderstanding or something that Dad would have to work out.”

  Hardy found that an interesting turn of phrase. He asked her, “Would you be surprised to hear that Andrew tried to kill himself this morning?”

  She stared. All the vivacity drained out of her face. She looked to Wagner. “Is that true? Is he dead?”

  “No, but Mr. Hardy was at the hospital this morning.”

  “He tried to hang himself,” Hardy said. “He didn’t succeed.”

  The news derailed her for a beat. Without asking permission, she went to a chair and sat. “I guess I could see him doing that,” she said. “He’s just always so intense and so unhappy. And then when Laura . . . was killed, it got so much worse.” She turned and faced Hardy full on. “But I don’t think he killed her. You don’t think he did, do you?”

  Hardy shook his head no. “There might be some facts about that night that don’t work if Andrew did it.”

  “See? I didn’t think he did either.”

  Hardy hadn’t quite said that, but he’d take it. He stood up, hands in his pockets, and began to pace the room. “But the problem I’ve got is that I don’t know what else was going on in Andrew’s life, something that might have had some connection to Mr. Mooney or Laura and given someone else, perhaps, a reason to have killed them.”

  “Surely not another student here,” Wagner said.

  “I’m not implying that. There’s no evidence implicating anyone else here at Sutro.” Hardy came back to Alicia. “But you’re his sister. You may have heard Andrew say something that didn’t seem to mean anything at the time, but now when you think back on it, it might have been important.”

  He thought that given the different crowd Alicia hung out with, the odds were against her providing some alternative theory of the crime, but at least she might start thinking about her brother’s situation differently. In Hardy’s experience, schools—like companies and coffee groups and men’s clubs—always had secrets. If Andrew hadn’t killed Mooney and Laura, then the person who had done it might have had some connection to Sutro. At least, from Alicia or one of the other students, he might get some rumors, something to wave in front of a judge or jury, as opposed to what he had now.

  Which was nothing.

  Nick and Honey are the character names of the young couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? who become foils for the vitriolic outpourings of George and Martha as their relationship implodes. Mooney cast Andrew and Laura as the leads, with the secondary couple’s parts going to Steve Randell as Nick and Jeri Croft as Honey.

  If Alicia North was the norm for the “popular” look at Sutro, Jeri was something else again. She’d dyed her hair a dark henna, rimmed her eyes with black kohl shadow. Waif-thin, the pajama bottoms she wore hung low enough on her hips to reveal a hint of pubic hair on her belly under the black T-shirt. In addition to the silver rings adorning both of her ears, she’d pierced her nose, eyebrows and tongue. When she got to the office, she greeted Wagner and then Hardy with an ill-disguised wariness. She tugged her pajamas up an inch or two. “So why again am I here?”

  Wagner went through the explanation for a second time. The girl scanned Hardy up and down, clearly pegged him as another meddling adult in the Wagner mold. Suit and tie. A dork who started out by saying, “I’m trying to get at the truth of what happened that night.”

  She rolled her eyes, an actress all right. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If you’re Andrew’s lawyer and you’re any good, you’re trying to get him off, whether it’s the truth or not. So give me a break, all right? And that night? I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there.”

  “Okay,” Hardy said. “Thanks for coming down, then.” Dismissing her. Two could play at that g
ame.

  She threw a confused glance first to Hardy, then at Wagner. “That’s it?”

  Hardy, stonewalling, shrugged. “You obviously don’t want to talk about it. I want to help Andrew and I’m sure there are other students here at Sutro who feel the same way I do. So why waste each other’s time. Sorry to have interrupted your class.”

  She shifted her weight, hip cocked. “Who said I didn’t want to help Andrew?”

  Hardy, giving her nothing, looked up from scribbling on his legal pad as though surprised she was still there. “I got that impression. It’s not a problem. Thanks again.” He went back to his notes, spoke to Wagner. “Let’s try Steve Randell.”

  “Wait a minute! Steve doesn’t know anything either.”

  Patiently, Hardy said, “Well, if that’s true, I’m sure he’ll let us know.”

  “What could he tell you? He wasn’t there either.”

  “I don’t know, Jeri. What do you know, say, about Laura?”

  “You mean she and Mooney?”

  “We can start with that, sure.”

  “Well, the main thing, they didn’t have anything going. Sexually.”

  “But Andrew thought they did?”

  “Maybe. I mean, yeah, sure, the first couple weeks of rehearsal, Laura got a crush on him. So did I, you want to know the truth. He was just so there, you know?”

  “This is Mr. Mooney now?” Hardy ventured an encouraging smile. “Just keeping the players straight. Mr. Mooney was so there, you said. You want to talk about that?”

  A sigh. “Have you met Laura’s parents?”

  “No. They wouldn’t see me.”

  “There you go. They wouldn’t see her much either. I’m going to sit down.” She folded herself down onto the floor. “The thing about Mike—Mr. Mooney—is there was no . . . like barrier, you know. I mean, at school he was a teacher and all, but when you got acting, you were with him. Just completely equal. He’d get inside your space and you’d just want to stay there. It was just total acceptance.”

  “Of what, though, exactly, if you can say?”

  She paused, thinking. “Of who you are, of what you were doing.”

  “And Laura? How did she react to that?”

  “What do you think? Like a desert to water. She bloomed, man. Everybody did.”

  “And this is when Andrew became so jealous?”

  Jeri didn’t answer right away. “Okay,” she finally said, “let’s get this part straight. At first, yeah, Andrew kind of freaked. But you’ve got to remember that this was like in November or something, four months before the shootings happened. Four months. You know how long that is? That’s half the school year.”

  “All right. But you said Andrew freaked? What do you mean by that?”

  “First, though, you had to know Laura.”

  “Were you and she friends?”

  “Like, best.” On the floor with her legs crossed, Jeri bent over at the waist, stretching, came back up. The movement seemed unconscious, but it bought her some time to get her emotions in check. “You know she was seriously depressed?”

  “No. I hadn’t heard that.”

  “That’s the key, though. She’d been in therapy forever. She tried to kill herself two years ago. Did you know that?”

  Hardy and Wagner exchanged glances, and Wagner gave a small nod, acknowledging it.

  “Do you know why?” Hardy asked.

  “A million reasons. The world, you know? But mostly the home scene sucked.”

  “What sucked about it?”

  “Basically, clueless parents. They’re heavily into the social thing here in town, you know? The Wrights? Wright-Way Components? Anyway, she had this whole wing of her house that was all hers? So she comes home from school, goes to her room and gets loaded, listens to all, like, you know, metal and death music.”

  “Like who?”

  Jeri shook her head. “You wouldn’t know them. They’re not playing for guys like you. Let’s just say the music’s dark. So anyway, she’s popping valiums and ludes and anything else she can get her hands on, but nobody notices. I mean, her parents see her every day, right? And Laura’s fine, she’s pulling A’s and B’s. And Mom and Dad are all, ‘Whatever, as long as you don’t bother me, ’cause I’ve got a party.’ You know? Same as Andrew.”

  “You mean with the drugs, too?”

  “No. Andrew’s uptight about drugs, but the home thing. Gone parents. That’s how they connected.”

  Hardy found himself working the fictional angle again—the sister in “Perfect Killer” hadn’t been based on Andrew’s sister, Alicia, but on his girlfriend Laura. He made it up.

  Next, wondering if the Wrights had discovered their daughter’s pregnancy and, because of the rumors about Mooney’s promiscuity, attributed it to him. And what they might have been tempted to do about that. He scratched a note, came back to Jeri. “So how does all this relate to Mr. Mooney?” he asked.

  She scrunched her face puzzling it out. Hesitantly, the words started to come. “I guess, I think Laura needed somebody to notice she was alive. Maybe Andrew needed the same thing. That was kind of the baseline, you see?”

  Hardy didn’t exactly, but wanted to keep her talking, so he nodded.

  “Okay, so you’ve got two needy kids—Andrew and Laura—hanging on to each other, right? Then, all the sudden really, one of them wakes up. Now she doesn’t just need anymore. Suddenly, she’s . . . I don’t know if happy is the word, maybe . . . validated. Mike—Mr. Mooney—makes her feel that way, all on her own, without Andrew. If you ask me, that’s what Andrew freaked about. Laura just had this new confidence and went flying away. Not with Mike, by herself. But Mike had made it happen, and Andrew didn’t know how to handle it.”

  “So how’d they get back together?” Hardy asked.

  “That’s what’s funny. The same thing, I think, happened to Andrew. Mike really thought Andrew was a great actor. I mean, he gave him the lead. And I think Andrew finally just got it. He’d been stupid and he apologized. So next time he and Laura got together, it was . . . I don’t know . . . it seemed like it was on a different plane, if that makes any sense.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think Andrew was jealous of Mr. Mooney anymore, at least not by the time the shootings happened?”

  “No way. He just wasn’t. I knew them as well as I know anybody. They were tight.”

  “But she didn’t tell him she was pregnant? Did you know that she was?”

  Jeri glanced down to the floor. “Yeah. But she was getting an abortion. She didn’t want to screw things up with Andrew again by getting him involved in all that. It would be better if he just never knew. That’s why she was staying later with Mike those nights, getting all that worked out. He was going to help with the arrangements. She sure couldn’t go to her parents.”

  “All right. But what if Andrew found out about the baby and wanted to keep it? Might they have fought about that?”

  “I doubt it. And so then because he wants the baby to live, he kills it? I don’t think so. And while we’re at it, Andrew didn’t shoot Laura, either. Or Mike. There’s no way. That’s just not who he is.”

  Hardy leaned forward. “Then do you have any idea at all who might have?”

  “This is going to sound weird, I know,” she said, her dark eyes shining now, “but I don’t think it could have been anybody who knew either of them.” A tear track, black with kohl, coursed her cheek. “They were too great,” she said.

  24

  First thing that Monday morning, Glitsky had put out the word with Marcel Lanier that he would like to see the field notes from the weekend work of his task force investigators on the Boscacci investigation. Because of the Twin Peaks killings on Friday night, Lanier himself, as head of homicide, had been otherwise employed and had not been able to participate, but Pat Belou, Lincoln Russell and the General Work inspectors had covered all of the gun shows in the Bay Area that weekend except the one in Fremont. Maybe because these San Francisco c
ops didn’t have reliable snitches in some of the outlying counties, nobody came back with anything remotely resembling Glitsky’s phone book from Mr. Ewing’s truck.

  Frustrated by the lack of data, Glitsky still believed he was on to the only possible lead, albeit a remote one, to Boscacci’s murder. So before he ran out to his 8:00 A.M. chiefs’ meeting, he called the ATF liaison for San Francisco, got a recorded message and left one of his own. He gave a Xerox copy of Ewing’s phone book to the guys from General Work and told them to get names and addresses for everyone in the book from the phone company’s reverse listings. He wanted them by the time the ATF got back to him so that he’d have something to trade—the names and addresses of known suppressor buyers—in exchange for the ATF’s cooperation in supplying still other, much larger lists of similar buyers. He had the personnel and the budget, for once, and he was looking for the nexus, if any, of suppressor buyers and people who might have had dealings with Allan Boscacci.

  After chiefs’, he met with the mayor’s representative, Celia Bonham, at City Hall, to discuss some jurisdictional issues between the SFPD and the officers and administrators of Homeland Security. After that, Paganucci drove him halfway home, out to Fillmore, to talk to the new executive director of the African-American Art & Culture Complex about some mutual impact issues, such as the use of the city’s finest as private security for the complex at the city’s expense. Back at the Hall of Justice, he fielded questions from reporters on all three of the major events currently transpiring in his domain—the handling of the LeShawn Brodie matter, Allan Boscacci’s murder (which some reporter had now called an assassination) and the double homicides of the Executioner on Friday night. Since he had nothing good or even mildly productive to say about any of these, it was a dispiriting news conference. Glitsky couldn’t seem to get much of a spin going about the fact that between the chiefs, the homicide detail and his own special event number task force, he had nothing to show, and very little to say, about crime in the city within the past six days.