As Andrew shuffled toward her now, handcuffed in his shapeless gray prisoner’s clothes, he seemed to her utterly defeated. Stopping in front of her table, he raised his head to look at his mother. His eyes opened in a silent plea, lips tightened down over a frankly quaking jaw. She was afraid that in another moment he might start to cry, and to forestall that, she stood, came around her table and helped him get seated.
“He doesn’t need to be handcuffed,” she said to the bailiff. “What’s your name?”
“Nelson.” The bailiff kept his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and replied in some surprise. He played no formal role in this proceeding, and it was decidedly unusual for an attorney to speak to him for any reason.
“Well, Officer Nelson, this young man doesn’t need to be handcuffed.”
It didn’t matter to Nelson one way or the other. “That’s up to the judge,” he said. He did take his hand off Andrew, however, and stepped aside a few paces. He stood leaning against the front of the jury box, facing Wu, sublimely indifferent, which was almost more chilling to her than outright antagonism would have been.
Wu reached over and patted Andrew’s arm. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”
He turned his face to her, then farther around, back to his mother again. “Mom,” he said, then couldn’t continue. Tears threatened to spill, but he blinked them back. Raw vulnerability took years off his age. The idea of this pathetic boy aiming a gun at a person and pulling a trigger not once but twice suddenly struck Wu for the first time as incongruous.
Her heart went out to him, while at the same time she was a bit relieved to see the depth of his despair. He would probably have to hit bottom and see that there was no hope in pleading not guilty. After they got to talk and she showed him the evidence, he’d realize the futility of pretending he hadn’t done it. When the truth must be clear to him if he dared to look at it objectively. Andrew wasn’t stupid—she glanced over at him one last time, confident that he would come to accept that he had to admit if he wanted to save himself.
Now in his early sixties, Judge W. Arvid Johnson had built a reputation as a reasonable and fair jurist with no particular ax to grind. Irreverently, secretly and universally called “Warvid” by the city’s legal community, Johnson took the bench today with little fanfare and no formal announcement by the bailiff or court recorder. Suddenly, it seemed, he had materialized up there, seated behind the slightly raised podium—white-haired and faintly jocular, he projected an amiable solidity.
After a business-like nod to both counsel, he said, “All right” to no one in particular, pulled his glasses down to the end of his patrician nose and asked the probation officer to call the first case. When he’d done this, the officer listed those present in the courtroom, including the gallery, for the record, and then Judge Johnson began. “Mr. Brandt, comments on detention?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Go ahead.”
Brandt stood up behind his table. His voice sounded clear and relaxed in the small room. “Your honor, as this is a murder case, the petitioner requests that the minor be detained.”
“He’s here under juvenile jurisdiction,” the judge said sharply. “The district attorney has decided not to file against him directly as an adult. I have to gather that that was done on purpose? Am I wrong?”
“No, your honor, not at all.” Brandt took the rebuke calmly, probably because he had a ready answer, and a good one. “We anticipate that Mr. Bartlett will admit this petition and receive the maximum commitment to the YA”—the Youth Authority. “He’ll still be confined here at YGC, of course, rather than downtown, for a brief period since he’s under eighteen, but we anticipate a quick disposition on two counts of first degree murder. So naturally the petitioner considers this a detention case.”
Planted in her seat, Wu was surprised when Brandt thanked the judge and sat down. He’d said what he’d come here to say, short and sweet.
Judge Johnson nodded and turned. “Ms. Wu?”
Wu tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry. She knew that Brandt liked to keep his opponents off-balance and that one way to do this was to mess with their timing. But he’d still surprised her, catching her in mid-thought with such a bare-bones statement. Detained. End of story.
“Ms. Wu,” Johnson repeated. “Would you care to make a reply?”
She got to her feet. “I’m sorry, your honor. I was just . . .” She stopped herself, willed her mind clear and started again. “Your honor, before we go any further, I’d like to request that the handcuffs be removed from my client’s wrists.”
“Request denied. I don’t believe this hearing will take enough time to make the exercise worthwhile. Detention has been requested by petitioner.” Johnson pulled his glasses down to the end of his nose and peered over them. “This is a double murder we’re talking about. We detain on murder cases.”
“Yes, your honor, I understand that,” Wu said, “but Mr. Bartlett can by no stretch be considered a danger to the community . . .”
Over at his table, Brandt cracked, “As long as we don’t give him back his gun.”
Johnson whirled on him. “That’s enough of that, Mr. Brandt.”
“I’m sorry, your honor,” Brandt said. “I was driven to it.”
Johnson frowned. “Be that as it may, see that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Yes, your honor.”
But, no doubt as he’d intended, Brandt’s interruption had blindsided Wu. Again, she’d lost her focus, and stood waiting for the judge to say something.
“Go on, Ms. Wu,” Johnson said.
She threw a fast look over at Brandt, who let his mouth twitch, a pastiche of a smile. Wu glanced at her client, then back to Johnson, and finally found the thread. “Your honor, the fact remains that Andrew is a minor, not an adult. A minor with no previous record.”
“Your honor, if I may.” Brandt, up again. “I spoke to Mr. Boscacci on this very point not an hour ago, and he informs me, as I’ve already indicated to the court, that he did not direct file as an adult based on the anticipation of a quick admission.”
“Your honor,” Wu said, “my client has no criminal history . . .”
“He does now,” Brandt said.
Johnson stared hard at the prosecutor, a warning. Coming back to Wu, he pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. “Ms. Wu, this hearing is concerned only with the continued detention of Mr. Bartlett, and I’m not hearing any argument from you on why I should overrule the petitioner’s suggestion.”
“Your honor.” Wu took a breath. “My client has been living a normal life for two months since these murders took place. He has known he’s a suspect for most of that time and has caused no civil disturbance of any kind, nor has he tried to flee.”
“True,” Johnson said, “but surely you are not arguing that knowing you’re a possible suspect and actually being an arrested suspect are the same thing, are you?”
“No, your honor, but his parents are here in the courtroom today, waiting to take him home. There is no reason they shouldn’t be able to do that. Surely there is no risk of flight. He has another two months in this school year, and he’s an excellent student. Surely he poses no worse danger to the community than he has for the past two months while he’s gone to school and lived at home.”
Johnson showed nothing. Wu supposed he’d heard the same argument a thousand times. He straightened at the bench, turned to the prosecutor. “Counselor.”
Brandt stood up slowly, turned to look past Wu squarely at Andrew Bartlett, then shook his head. Suddenly he pointed a finger at Andrew. His voice took on an edge. “That’s not somebody’s good little boy sitting over there. That’s a man who’s killed two people already this year, and the district attorney is not going to give him a chance to hurt anyone else.”
Andrew started to come to his feet. “But I didn’t,” he cried out.
“Yes, you did,” Brandt shot back. “You damn well did.”
&nbs
p; The judge cracked down his gavel. “Ms. Wu, no more of that from your client. Mr. Brandt, I’m warning you for the last time. No more outbursts, do you hear me? You address your remarks to the bench.”
“Yes, your honor. I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been sorry before, too. Don’t let it happen again.” Johnson made a notation in front of him and came back, fixing Wu with an impatient and angry glare, as if she’d been the one abusing the court’s protocol. “Minor is ordered detained,” Johnson said. “Bailiffs, take him back to the cabins.”
And with that, Johnson tapped his gavel, stood and made his exit out the back door to the courtroom.
So abrupt was the decision and Johnson’s disappearance that for a minute a dead calm settled over the courtroom. Wu’s hand went to her stomach, where she felt a deep and sudden hollowness. Behind her, she heard Linda saying, “That’s it? That can’t be it. They’re not letting him out?” Then, as Bailiff Nelson approached the table: “Wait a minute. Andrew!”
The boy whirled around in his seat to face his mother.
Wu held out a hand to the bailiff. “Please! Give us one minute, all right?”
In the gallery, Linda North had left her seat and was coming forward. She was nearly to the bullpen’s railing and then suddenly Andrew, too, was on his feet. Nelson, though, had reached him. He growled “Uh, uh” and put a restraining hand on his shoulder with enough force to topple the chair and send him sprawling. With his handcuffs on, Andrew couldn’t reach out to break his fall. His head hit the linoleum floor and for an instant he lay stunned.
“What are you doing?” Linda was now at the guardrail, and she screamed. “Leave him alone!”
“Linda!” Hal North, too, was out of his seat, coming up behind his wife.
The other bailiff, the young-looking one who’d been talking with the court reporter before the judge appeared, came from nowhere and insinuated himself in the space between Wu and Linda, blocking the mother’s access to her son. “Take it easy,” he said, holding up both his hands. “Easy. That’s enough! Enough!” Then he turned to Nelson. “You, too, Ray. I’ll take him.”
“I got him,” Nelson said with some heat.
“Go easy, then,” the second bailiff retorted.
“It’s okay, Mom! I’m okay.” Andrew, from the floor. “I got caught off-balance, that’s all. I’m fine.”
On either side of him, the bailiffs seemed to have worked out their turf differences, and now raised Andrew to his feet.
“Let him go,” Wu said. “You don’t have to manhandle him.”
The second bailiff turned and looked at her. Up close, she saw that the face, youthful and innocent from a distance, was heavily pockmarked and held a pair of gray, old, empty eyes. Wu thought that in spite of his relatively few years, the officer had already worked in the system long enough to become inured to the innate horror of it. He was a jailer, plain and simple. A zookeeper. And yet, he’d almost apologized to her, and still appeared more humane than his partner, for all that. “No one’s going to hurt your client,” he said.
But Wu checked him. “That’s already happened. I want that bump on his head looked at right away. I’ll be along to see him in a few minutes, and I want him to have seen somebody by then. Is that clear?” Wu included them both in her sights. “And while we’re at it, Officer,” she said to the second bailiff, “what’s your name?”
“Cottrell,” he said. “Ray Cottrell.”
She wrote it down on her legal pad, looked up again at both of them with a question. “You just called him . . .” She motioned to Nelson. “You just called him Ray.”
“That’s what his mother called him, too. What about it?”
Nothing, Wu realized, and said, “I’m holding you both responsible.” Her threat didn’t much instill the fear of God in either of them. The two men, unmoved, shared a glance. But then it was Nelson who touched Andrew’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go. Easy.”
Andrew threw his mother a last look of despair, then turned and started walking with the bailiffs, back toward the lockup.
5
Wu had been an attorney for five years. During that time, she’d mostly done litigation work for Freeman’s firm, mixed with a steady if unexceptional flow of criminal cases that she picked up in the usual way, the so-called conflicts cases. She was on the list for court appointments, and once a month she would appear in court while a succession of criminal cases were called and doled out mostly to the Public Defender’s Office. Every few cases, though, there would be more than one defendant—accomplices in robberies or drug deals.
In these cases, the Public Defender’s Office could not take on more than one of the defendants; it would be a conflict of interest. And so the court would appoint one of the on-hand lawyers sitting in the courtroom on conflicts day to represent the other defendants. In this way, Wu had represented a wide variety of clients and gotten what she had thought (until today) was a well-grounded schooling in the nuts and bolts and even some of the intricacies of criminal law.
But she’d never been assigned to a murder case. Never before had she confronted such a serious charge. In fact, until this weekend no criminal client had ever paid her directly—her fees in the conflicts cases were paid by the court. She was standing on new ground now, and finding that it shook perilously under her feet. She’d blown her first skirmish badly. Ill-prepared and overconfident, she’d foolishly failed to prepare her clients for the worst, in part because she didn’t believe that the worst was going to transpire. In her experience thus far, deals were always a possibility.
Now, out in the hallway with the Norths, Wu spoke up right away, a stab at damage control. “I’ve got those bailiffs’ names and badge numbers and I want to assure you both that I’m going to file a complaint before I leave this building.”
North spoke up. “I wouldn’t waste my time. Andrew admitted he was off-balance. The guy was just doing his job. My question is what the hell just happened? You told us you’d get him out.”
“I said I thought it was possible.”
“It never seemed to get close to possible in there. There wasn’t any real discussion at all.” North wore running shoes, jeans, a blue denim shirt, a corduroy sports coat, but the casual dress was nowhere reflected in his posture or attitude. The bulldog face was shut down, expressionless, the ice-blue eyes fathomless. “It doesn’t give me a whole hell of a lot of faith in all the rest, I’ll tell you that.”
“Hal.” Linda put a hand on her husband’s arm.
He kept his eyes on Wu. “So where does this leave us?”
“I’m going to talk to the DA,” Wu said. “Appeal the detention.”
“I would hope so,” North said. “I don’t care what it costs.”
“I don’t think the money’s the point, sir.”
“Well, if it isn’t, that would be a first. Maybe I’ll go have a word with the man myself.”
In an odd reversal, Wu looked to the wife for support, but Linda’s eyes never left the door to the courtroom. It was almost as though she still expected her son to walk out any minute. Wu came back to North. “That really wouldn’t be a good idea, sir. Look,” she said, “whatever the judge said in there, the truth is that minors get out on serious charges all the time.”
“Not this time,” he said.
“No. I know that.”
Linda spoke up. “So what do we do now?”
Before the fiasco in the courtroom, Wu had been hoping to get a chance to sit with Andrew and his parents in the relatively comfortable environment of their home. There, she would show all of them the evidence she’d already assembled from the discovery documents she’d received that so clearly—in her opinion—would damn Andrew if he went to trial as an adult. With Hal North in her corner, and Linda presumably already on board, it would be the three of them “against” the son, and Wu would be able to orchestrate the talk that would result in Andrew’s understanding that he needed to admit.
Now, with Hal in a slow-boi
ling fury at her failure to get the detention lifted, with Linda still woefully ignorant of the strategy Wu had already put in motion, and with Andrew back in his cell, Wu realized that she had to change her plan on the wing. If they all sat down together right now—in Andrew’s cell or anywhere else—the three-to-one odds in her favor would be closer to three-to-one against, with Hal quite possibly unwilling to argue with his characteristic force for the need to admit, and Linda and Andrew dead set against.
The dynamic had become completely skewed. Her best bet now—as the most committed to her position—was to take on Andrew one on one. Win him over as she’d won his stepfather the day before. Andrew didn’t need to hear Linda’s arguments why he should consider the feasibility of an adult trial on the really very unlikely chance that he would get acquitted. He didn’t need that kind of support. He needed to be frightened, and convinced.
Linda repeated her question. “So what do we do now?”
“Now,” Wu said, “I think it’s critical that I spend some time alone with Andrew. He needs to understand what he’s up against, that he’s here for the long haul. He’s got to see the evidence they’ve got. Mostly, he’s got to realize that he’s in the system, and that he needs his lawyer more than he needs his parents right now.”
“You don’t think we should see him?” Linda clearly didn’t like the decision. “I mean, while we’re already here? This is a good time for us.”
“You can visit him anytime, Mrs. North, anytime you want. But right now he’s going to be pretty upset with me, as I realize that both of you are. I need to try to make that right with Andrew, though, as soon as I can, so we can begin to cooperate and work together.” She looked from Hal to Linda. “Look, I don’t blame either of you for being frustrated, but in a sense the hearing in there didn’t change anything. Andrew still needs to be clear on what he needs to do.” She threw what she hoped was a meaningful glance at Hal. “That hasn’t changed. I really think both of you need to talk, so the next time you’re with him, you present a united front. So we’re all saying the same thing.”
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