The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  She sat with Hal and Linda at the dining room table again. No sign of the maid this time. The house was almost eerily quiet to Wu after she’d finished acquainting the Norths with the most recent developments in the case. She needn’t have worried about finding exonerating evidence. The new discovery was, if anything, more damning than what they’d seen so far—the testimony of Andrew’s best friend, motives, more about the gun. Tension between the couple was thick but transparent, and to break it, Wu had asked if there was anything else about Andrew that she might need to know.

  “You already know about the joyride,” Linda said.

  “No,” Wu replied. “I mean before that. Did Andrew have any kind of history of misbehavior or violence? Anything like that?”

  “No,” Linda said. “Nothing serious.”

  Hal North cleared his throat. “Well . . .”

  “I said nothing serious,” Linda snapped. “I didn’t say nothing at all. Don’t give me that look, Hal. I’m not trying to hide anything.”

  “I’m not giving you a look. We just disagree about what was serious or not.”

  “Maybe it would be better,” Wu interjected, “if you just told me everything and let me decide whether it seems important now or not. I gather there were a few incidents.”

  “Years ago,” Linda said. “Literally, when Hal and I were first together.”

  “What happened?” Wu asked.

  Linda drew a labored sigh. “All right. The one, it was when I told him that Hal and I were getting married. I remember it was a Saturday afternoon, a nice sunny, warm day, and we had the windows open in the kitchen. Andrew was about ten, and still at the age where he liked to sit on my lap, you know?” She sighed again. “Anyway, Alicia—our daughter, Hal’s daughter, really—she was there, too, so we could all share the good news.” She stopped.

  “And what happened?” Wu prompted her.

  Linda’s lips were pressed tightly together as she fought for control. “He just . . . He just lost his temper.”

  “Did he hit you?”

  When it became obvious that Linda couldn’t or wouldn’t answer, Hal took over. “He hit her, me, Alicia. He went over to the sink and started throwing the dishes at us. I took a couple of stitches in the face stopping him.” He touched a still-visible scar along his jaw, let out a deep breath. “It wasn’t pretty.”

  “But that was seven years ago,” Linda said. “And it was my fault anyway. I think I must have just been a terrible mother.”

  “You are not.”

  “But I was, before you. You weren’t there.” Linda turned to Wu. “You should know all this. Andrew’s father walked out on us both when he was three, and I needed to work, so I became a waitress, then later a hostess.”

  “You know Beaulieu?” Hal interrupted with real pride, pointed at his wife. “Hostess at Beaulieu.”

  This was one of the city’s premier dinner destinations, and a magnet for the power elite. Wu wasn’t surprised that Linda Bartlett—beautiful, witty, and sophisticated—had wound up with a highly visible job there.

  But this was ancient history to Linda, and she waved off her husband’s intended flattery. “Anyway, I was young and selfish and liked to have a good time. I admit it, though I’m not proud of it. I had . . . opportunities come my way and I wanted to take advantage of them. Anyway, most of the opportunities came with men attached—it’s okay, Hal, she probably needs to know this. It’s not like a state secret anyway.” Linda sighed and continued. “In any event, the men I saw often weren’t so nice to Andrew. And I didn’t have the strength or understanding or simple will to do much about it. So he came to hate the idea of my boyfriends.” She reached out a hand to her husband. “Including Hal, I’m afraid. At first, at least.”

  “He still simmers,” Hal said. “Maybe not at me, specifically . . .”

  But Linda remained defensive. “It’s just that he’s got this mistrust. He has trouble believing in people in general. And that’s me, too, my fault. In the early years, I was so bitter and mad at being dumped, at the unfairness of the way my life had turned out, I just wanted to make up for lost time, and I took it whenever I got a chance. Andrew couldn’t count on me. So he’s always expecting to be betrayed or abandoned or let down.”

  “Still?” Wu asked.

  “To some degree,” Linda admitted.

  “Though Kevin has helped,” Hal added.

  “Kevin?”

  “Kevin Brolin,” Linda said. “He’s a psychologist who’s been seeing Andrew.”

  “For how long?”

  “All this time,” Hal said. “On and off. He’s an anger management specialist.”

  Fantastic, Wu thought. A jury would love to hear about all these anger issues. But she had to press on. Knowledge was power, and she needed all she could get. “Mrs. North, when you started to tell me about the day you and Hal announced your engagement, you made it sound like Andrew’s tantrum was the first of at least a couple of incidents.”

  Linda looked to Hal, who nodded and said, “Alicia’s party?” He went on. “This was maybe three years ago, Alicia’s twelfth or thirteenth birthday party. She invited five or six kids, and we made her include Andrew.”

  “They’re only a year apart,” Linda said.

  “Anyway,” Hal went on, “all the girls got into some PlayStation thing and evidently they all decided to gang up to beat Andrew.” He shrugged. “I came home to a smashed big-screen, pieces of remote all over the place. Alicia’s lip was cut, her eye . . .”

  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.”