Hardy 10 - Second Chair, The

by John Lescroart

  "This guy, Welding, the dad." Brandt, wanting to contribute, couldn't stop himself and spoke to Glitsky. "If he won an appeal, he must have had a lawyer. The lawyer would know the son, wouldn't he? Where he lives?"

  "He might," Glitsky said. "But he won't talk to us. We're the cops, remember, the bad guys."

  "But if the son's the Executioner?"

  Glitsky didn't answer because someone else told him to pick up the phone. This time he listened without writing or saying much, and by the time he put the phone down, the room had hushed. His head hung, chin to chest. He slowly fisted the table in a black fury.

  Everyone waited until he raised his head. "The last local juror," he said. "Wendy Takahashi, maiden name Shui. The one that just moved last month." Which was why they hadn't been able to locate her sooner.

  "She's already dead?" someone asked.

  "Before we got there," Glitsky said. "Maybe just before. Belou's been standing outside her place since about two, protecting a dead woman." Glitsky's eyes, opaque with fatigue and anger, were glazed over.

  Brandt wandered out to the reception room, stopped next to a uniformed officer. "What did he mean, the last local juror?"

  The man, studying a computer printout, answered like a zombie. "There were six locals. Mooney, Reed— that's Cary— Montrose, Wong, Tollman, and now Shui/Takahashi. She was the last one."

  The mention of Mooney as the first Executioner victim did not escape Brandt's notice. "What about the other six?" he asked.

  "Four moved away, two died. We're trying to find the four. We figure the other two— the dead ones— are out of immediate danger."

  * * * * *

  Wu got back to the Sutter Street office and, after accepting congratulations from the small group gathered in Hardy's office, excused herself to go and call Brandt back at the YGC. He wasn't in and she left a message that she wanted to see him, with her work and home phone numbers. Maybe, she said, they could even have dinner later tonight. Start over and take things more slowly. In the flush of confidence she was feeling after Johnson's decision on Andrew, she allowed herself to believe that sometimes the right thing could happen in this world.

  But Brandt wasn't at his office. She'd have to wait a bit longer.

  Her in basket was filled to overflowing with work— mail that she'd neglected, returned materials from word processing and her secretary. On the top was the most recent draft of the notice rule memo she was writing for Farrell— billable work— and she lifted it up from the pile, kicked back from her desk, put her feet up and began to read it over.

  Ten minutes later she was back in her working hunch, red pen in hand, scratching out and rewriting, when somebody knocked at her door. "Come in."

  "You're working," Hardy said.

  "That's what you pay me for. What's up?"

  "I'm going down to the Hall, see if I can find Glitsky and get a word with him. Maybe get a commitment on some action with the Mooney scene."

  "You want me to come with you?"

  "Actually, I was going to suggest that you give yourself a break. As managing partner, I wanted you to know that I've declared today a clear win for the good guys. And they're not so common you want to ignore them, ever. David Freeman, lesson six. So it's your sacred duty to take the evening off and savor the victory."

  "David Freeman never took time off."

  "Not true. Every time he won, he burned the city down."

  Wu glanced down at the draft on her desk, let out a sigh. "I don't consider this over yet, sir. Not till next Wednesday. If then."

  "It's over," Hardy said. "Jackman hears that the Salarcos never heard a shot, my guess is that even without scuffed slugs from Mooney's, he'll never go forward. Andrew's home tonight, Wu. You've got to call that a win."

  "All right, but it wasn't a win for me."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "You're the one who found everything that made the difference. I just made problems we shouldn't have had at the outset. Then made them worse as we went along."

  Hardy stood a minute in the doorway, then took a step in and closed the door behind him. "Look, Wu" he said, "this was your first major case. So you weren't perfect. Nobody is. The point is, do you think you learned anything?"

  Gradually, she softened. Nodded her head in acknowledgment.

  "Okay, then. Your client's free, your team just took the flag, your boss is telling you to take the rest of the day off, and you're splitting hairs about how we didn't really win and it wasn't really you and how it could have been better? Don't do that. It could always be better, but you ought to recognize when it's good enough, don't you think?"

  She sighed again, glanced at her in box, finally looked up and gave him a chagrined smile. "All right."

  "You can go back to punishing yourself tomorrow. I won't stop you. But tonight, give yourself a break and get out of here."

  * * * * *

  Hardy was right, she thought. You had to take these moments when you could.

  It was a bit after five, suddenly warm and still now after all the spring wind, with an almost buttery softness to the air and the light. She parked just off Chestnut and decided to stroll along the avenue, letting her senses dictate where she'd stop, what she'd buy for a private celebration dinner at home. She'd open all the windows to let in some of the outside, then sit alone at her table with her view of the bridge and some great bread and selections of the awesome take-out Marina food and fresh flowers. After, she'd curl up in her chair and read or put on some music or both, and Jason would call or he wouldn't, but either way there would be tomorrow and if it was meant to be, it would be.

  It took her most of an hour, dawdling along, stopping in at half a dozen shops, chatting with the merchants and even some of the other customers. She bought daffodils and some fresh Asiago cheese bread, marinated artichoke hearts, a spinach salad, some pot-stickers, an early pear.

  The staircase up to her apartment was suffused with still-bright sunlight as she walked up. When she got to the fourth-floor landing outside her door, she stopped and took another moment to look down over the neighborhood, then the view beyond— the dark green cypresses in the Presidio, a hundred pleasure boats on the bay.

  What a gorgeous place!

  Suddenly, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, she realized that she felt blessed and even lucky.

  She put down the bag of food and flowers. Taking her keys from her purse, she inserted the house key into the door, picked up her groceries again and walked inside. Closing the door behind her, she threw the deadbolt and set the chain lock.

  Behind her, a male voice said, "Turn around slowly and move away from the door."

  * * * * *

  The after-work crowd at the Balboa Cafe wasn't quite as thick as the after-dinner mob, but Jason Brandt still felt fortunate to get a seat at the bar. He laid a twenty-dollar bill down and ordered a beer.

  "A beer?" Cecil held up a bottle of Jack Daniel's. "I see you walk in the door, my hand automatically goes to the JD. Double, rocks."

  "Not today," Brandt said. "Beer."

  "What kind of beer?"

  "Wet and cold. I'm looking for Amy Wu. She been in?"

  "Not yet." He started pulling a Sierra Nevada from the tap on the bar. "Come to think of it, I haven't seen her in a while. Since she went out of here with you, if I remember. You think she's all right?"

  "Yeah. I was with her in court today. She's fine."

  "She is fine. You seeing her?"

  "No. We've been in trial together. Opposite sides. It's against the rules."

  "Shame," Cecil said.

  "Yeah." Brandt brought the beer to his lips, drank off an inch.

  Cecil moved down the bar, served some customers, changed the channel on the television set. When he came back, Brandt was staring into his beer, turning it around and around on the bar in front of him. "You all right?" Cecil asked.

  "Yeah, great."

  "You don't look great. You look unhappy."

  "I
t's Wu," Brandt said. "I think I'm kind of in love with her."

  "You say that like it just occurred to you."

  "It did."

  "Are you still in trial?"

  "I don't think so. Not after today."

  "Well, if you're in love, bro, you better make a move or somebody else will snag that babe first for sure. I wouldn't be sitting my poor ass on a stool waiting for her to come in here. I'd go find her where she is, stake my claim."

  His glass halfway to his mouth, Brandt stopped and lowered it back down to the bar. Then he was up off the stool and moving.

  "Hey, your change!"

  "Keep it."

  * * * * *

  He was sitting in her reading chair, having moved out from behind the changing screen where he'd been waiting when she came in. He held a gun on her— a gun with a long and very heavy-looking tube attached to the barrel. She sat at her table, hands in her lap. The grocery bag remained on the floor by the door she'd locked. "How did you know where I live? How'd you get in here?"

  His laugh was guttural, humorless. "I've gotten real good at finding people. And getting in is the same as it was when I was a kid. The point is that I'm here."

  "What do you want?"

  "I want to finish my work."

  "And what's that? Your work?"

  "I believe you legal types would call it redress of grievances."

  "Then it can't have anything to do with me. I haven't done anything to you."

  "No, that's true. Not to me personally. In your case, maybe it's more that I want to keep you from doing more harm."

  "Than what? I haven't done anybody any harm."

  "Amy, Amy, Amy, please. I hope you don't really feel that. What about Andrew Bartlett?"

  "What about him? He got out of detention today. Did you know that? How is that harming him?"

  "Are you forgetting his attempted suicide already? Did it really make that little of an impression on you? You don't call that harm?"

  "But I didn't—"

  He slapped his free hand down on the arm of the chair, bared his teeth in a snarl. "The fuck you didn't! Don't you think he did that because you made him believe he'd never get out? But no, you don't think that way, do you? Nothing's really your fault, is it?"

  "No. That's not true. Some things are completely my fault. Please don't point that thing. I'm sorry," she said. "Whatever it is, I didn't mean . . ."

  "You don't understand what I'm saying. I don't care what you mean, what you meant. You play the same game they all played with my father, don't you see that? You're just like Allan Boscacci was twenty years ago— arrogant, self-righteous, pigheaded and wrong." He lifted the gun again. "Don't you move!"

  "I wasn't. I was just . . ."

  He kept his arm extended, the gun with its silencer pointed directly at her chest. "I don't care. I say something, you don't deny it. If I say 'Don't move,' you don't move."

  "I'm sorry. I won't anymore. I promise. But I'm nervous. I've got to pee."

  "So pee."

  She started to stand, but he barked again, came halfway out of the chair with the gun trained on her. "Sit down!"

  "But you just said . . ."

  "I said you can pee. I didn't say anything about going anywhere."

  She stared across at him, squeezed her legs together. "What do I have to do with Allan Boscacci?" Anything to keep him talking, to buy time, even a few precious seconds more.

  "You're just like him."

  "You said that. But how?"

  "You really ask how? As if you don't know. All right, I'll tell you how." He sat back in the chair, rested the gun on his knee. "I saw you that first day with Bartlett, so sure he was guilty, ready to send him away for half his life, no concern at all for the truth, for what might be right. Just like Boscacci did with my father. Sent him up for life when he didn't do it."

  "Your father?"

  "That's right. My father."

  "Didn't do what?"

  "Rape and kill my mother, that's what."

  She clutched her hands together against her stomach. "I'm sorry, but I really don't know what you're talking about."

  "I'm talking about my father, goddamn it! My father!" Again he'd come forward, lifted the gun. He held it on her for five seconds, ten. Again he collapsed back. "My father," he said, his voice now going to dead calm.

  "What about him? I don't know about your father."

  "Lucas Welding. His name was Lucas Welding."

  "All right," she said. "Please. Tell me about him."

  * * * * *

  Jason Brandt got to the landing and thought he heard voices upstairs. He stopped and listened, almost turned around and went back down, but then decided since he'd come this far, he'd just say he was in the neighborhood and thought he'd stop by and see if she wanted to go out for a drink, or maybe meet him later at the Balboa. Surely, that was harmless enough. Or if whoever was with her turned out to be just a friend or a neighbor, she'd invite him in, they'd finish their conversation, then she'd tell the friend good-bye. After that, the two of them could let the night take them where it would.

  When he got to the door, he paused a moment and listened. Yes, two voices, one male and one female. When he knocked— three quick raps— the voices stopped abruptly within. He waited through a lengthening silence, perplexity growing on this face. Then all at once the truth of what he must have been hearing dawned on him.

  He blinked a few times, nodded, bit at his lower lip. He wasn't aware of it, but his shoulders fell.

  What a fool he was.

  He turned back toward the steps.

  Then heard her voice through the door behind him. "Who is it?"

  For a second, he considered not answering, getting to the stairs and out of sight before he brought any more embarrassment to himself. But she had asked him to believe her, believe in the kind of person she was. At least, he thought, he owed her that. To give her a chance to be straight with him. "Amy. It's me, Jason."

  "Jason." He thought he heard a kind of relief in her voice, but it disappeared with her next words. "This isn't a good time. I'm sorry."

  "Are you all right?"

  "Fine. I'm fine. But really, it's not a good time."

  "Okay, but if I could just—"

  "Jason, go away! Leave me the fuck alone, all right! Get out of here! Now! Or you're in trouble! I mean it!"

  * * * * *

  "Good," he said. "That was all right. Nobody stays around after that."

  "No. He's a jerk," she said, turning around. "Well, you know that. But please, could I go to the bathroom?"

  * * * * *

  Brandt stood below, in the gathering dusk, looking up at her window. Her outburst against him had punched him in the gut. Even now, frozen in his spot, leaning against the wall of a building across the street, he held his hand there.

  He couldn't seem to make himself move. He stared up at the window, saw no shadows, no sign of movement.

  Maybe they were lying together in her bed?

  That thought came like another kick to his stomach, but suddenly, all at once, he couldn't accept it. That wasn't what was happening up there. And his certainty wasn't a matter of rational thought. It was on another level, a bone-deep conviction. She was up there with somebody, yes, but even if she was being romantic with another man, there was no way she would have gone off on him that way. Beyond the connection he felt that they'd established, that wasn't who she was. She wouldn't have treated him like that, not now.

  It made no sense.

  And then, suddenly, her words came back at him. "You're in trouble." That private, powerful, ambiguous code word between them, and now Amy had screamed it at him through her locked door. "You're in trouble." A little out of place, even in that context. Off-key.

  A warning? Or a cry for help?

  Christ, he thought. What an idiot. She's just dumping me. Let it go.

  But he was already crossing the street, going back up.

  * * * * *

  "Boscacci w
as so sure," he said. "All the jurors were so sure. They polled them one by one afterward, you know. Every one of them."

  He'd followed her into the bathroom, stood in the doorway while she'd gone, walked her back to her chair and now was finishing his story.

  "I'm so sorry," she said. "I didn't know that."

  "Yeah? Well, here's something else you don't know. You don't know what it's like having your home taken away from you when you're seven years old. You don't know what it's like when your mom's murdered and they blame your father for it and then try him and take him away and put you in foster care. Do you know what that's like?"

  "No, I don't," Wu said. "I'm so sorry." And she was, but mostly she was afraid that she was going to die, and thought maybe she could get him to spare her. "It must have been terrible for you."

  "Terrible doesn't begin to cover it. And taking away my own name, talking me into taking my mom's maiden name. I didn't want to have people knowing I'm the son of that murderer, did I? Wouldn't I be happier with a different name? Don't you understand— they took away my life!"

  "I'm sure they didn't mean to do that. I mean, Boscacci and the jury . . ."

  "I hope they all rot in hell." He suddenly jerked and was back to the present. "Thirteen of them, every one of them so certain, and every one of them so completely dead wrong." He found something to laugh at. "And now more than half of them just completely dead."

  She felt a wave of chill break over her. "What do you mean?"

  "What do I mean? I mean I killed them. You haven't figured that out yet? All of them still living around here, anyway, in beautiful San Francisco and vicinity."

  When it came to her, the blood ran from her face. "You're the Executioner."

  "Good," he said. "Why do you think I got onto you in the first place?"