The Second Chair (27 page)

She considered taking thirty extra seconds and putting on a bra—she didn’t want to send any kind of sexual signal—but if it was going to be two minutes, she might as well hear it and then get back in bed. Besides, she wore no makeup, her hair was still damp, her eyes must be ravaged. She was a train wreck.

She opened the door.

In a gray business suit, white shirt, rep tie, Brandt stood awkwardly. Hands in his pockets. He cleared his throat. “Can I come in?”

Stepping back without a word, she let him pass, closed the door behind them.

He crossed over to her all-purpose table, pulled a chair around and sat in it, looking around, getting his bearings, really seeing the room for the first time. The other night they hadn’t paused for the grand tour before dragging each other into bed. Afterward she didn’t think he’d even turned on the lights, just pulled his clothes on and let himself out.

Arms crossed, waiting, she leaned against the counter by the sink.

“I was down in the street for a while and saw your shadow moving up here, then the lights went out. I thought if I was going to get you, it had to be now.”

“Okay, you got me.” Then his phrase caught her. “You were down in the street for a while? Doing what?”

“Just standing there.” He shrugged again. “Deciding whether to come up and try to talk to you.”

Something in his tone stopped what would have been another harsh reply. She cocked her head. “All right. Talk.”

“First,” he began, “I wanted to apologize.”

“Okay.”

“But beyond that, I guess I’m having trouble figuring you out.” He took a breath, pushed on. “I don’t understand what’s happening exactly, first the other night with us, then the next morning at my office—”

She cut him off. “Then you accuse me of murder. Talk about not understanding what’s happening.”

“Amy, I swear to God. I never accused you of anything like murder. I didn’t accuse you of anything at all.”

“That’s funny. I just got back from the Hall of Justice, where Abe Glitsky said you told him there was bad blood between me and Allan. He seemed to think I was some kind of a suspect.”

“That couldn’t have been me.”

“You’re saying you didn’t talk to him?”

“No. I talked to him. But just telling him about what’s happened with Bartlett—”

“And me and Allan.”

“Okay. But never even implying . . . I mean, come on. If Glitsky came to that on his own . . . If you want, I’ll call him tomorrow. I never meant anything like that. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” He looked up at her. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

Her tone softened. She was too exhausted for another round. “All right, apology accepted, okay? Now if you don’t mind, I’m exhausted and your two minutes are up.”

But he didn’t move. “I didn’t just want to apologize.” He scratched at the table, took a quick breath. “I wanted to ask you about you and me.”

“You and me?” She pulled a chair around and sat on it. “First you accuse me of screwing you for advantage in a case, then you go to Glitsky and somehow give him the idea I might have killed Allan. I don’t see any ‘you and me’ in this picture.” She paused, let out a breath. “Look, I don’t expect anything from you, Jason. That night was that night. I’m not telling anybody about it, so our jobs are both safe. So now you can go. In fact, you really should go now.”

“That’s not it,” he said.

“No? Then tell me what it is.” Sighing again, she shook her head. “Look, if it makes you feel any better, I thought it was a game to you, too.”

“No. Okay, maybe it started that way at first.” He walked over to one of the windows, turned back to her. “For a minute, I thought we had something going. I mean personally.” He tapped his chest. “In here.” He waited, eyes on her. “I guess not.”

She didn’t contradict him. Did he really think she was going to fall for this line now? If he would have said something that night, maybe. Because he was right. There had been a real moment between them. They’d both realized it. Beyond the physical stuff, something that had felt to her like a deeper connection. Then in the morning, he’d been gone.

Fool me once, okay. But twice? She didn’t think so.

A tense silence gathered, until she finally broke it. “I think you’d better get out of here right now. I mean it.”

15

H
ardy didn’t want to go out after dinner at home, but with the 707 hearing looming, he felt he had no choice. Since Frannie had suggested he put his heart into his work again, she couldn’t very well object. They both knew the strains that Hardy’s work ethic had placed on their marriage in the past, and both saw the irony in her position. If Hardy was going to care, he was going to put in the hours. That was who he was. That was the trade-off. So when he told her he had to go out and have a talk with Mike Mooney’s neighbor, she kissed him with a tolerant humor. “Husbands,” she said. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em.”

He had conceived of a strategic idea that he thought stood a long shot, but still possible, chance to play at the 707 hearing if all the stars lined up just right. He’d already told Wu that she could confidently call any witnesses she wanted. Jackman’s insouciant attitude notwithstanding, Judge Johnson would be concerned about the risk of having the case reversed on appeal. He wouldn’t hurt the defense any more than he already had done. And it would be greatly to Wu’s advantage if she knew how some of the witnesses were going to testify at trial.

But it had occurred to Hardy that he might be able to take it a step further, and convince Johnson that justice demanded he allow witnesses to the crime itself. This would be decidedly unusual, since in this type of hearing, the prosecution only had to make a prima facie case that the crime had been committed, and there wasn’t any doubt that
somebody
had killed Mooney and Laura. But Clarence Jackman had never practiced as a criminal lawyer in his pre-DA career, and even after three years in office, he was sometimes embarrassingly inexperienced in the nuts and bolts of how things really worked. And Hardy’s hope was that Brandt, young and relatively green himself, by pushing the supercharged rush to the 707 after Boscacci’s murder, had goaded Jackman to a tactical blunder.

Judge Johnson would be nervous that the defense had only been given five days to prepare for the hearing. No doubt feeling angry and abused himself, he would be inclined to grant the DA’s wish to get Andrew moved downtown—he’d want to slap Wu as badly as either Brandt or Jackman did—but Hardy and Wu would file motions by Monday making sure the judge knew that the defense considered this unseemly hurry an appealable issue. After that, if Johnson let the hearing proceed as planned, he’d be extra sensitive to the threat of appeal, and might let the defense get away with calling witnesses related to the case in chief as a function of the fifth amenability criterion—the gravity of the offense.

If Hardy and Wu could make that happen, then Andrew would get himself not just an administrative hearing, but a de facto juvenile trial. If he lost at the 707, then worst case Hardy and Wu would get two chances to hear the prosecution’s case. And to beat it. And even if Andrew then lost again in adult court, Hardy might still be able to appeal, saying that they’d been forced to go to the 707 before they could adequately prepare.

Hardy knew this wasn’t just a long shot, it was a full-court bomb at the buzzer. But occasionally, he knew, they went in.

So as he turned into Beaumont Avenue, in the first block off Geary Boulevard, he felt some small grounds for enthusiasm. Twenty feet of free, legal curb space yawned open on his right, and he pulled over and parked. He’d driven out with the top down on his convertible—there was no fog and the last days’ winds had finally abated—and now he sat, headlights off, letting a sense of the crime scene seep into him. He forced himself to wait, to observe, to listen. There was no hurry. If his coming out here was going to do any good at all, he had to slow down and take time.

It was a short block. Eleven relatively small two-story housing units squatted between the major thoroughfare of Geary and the next street south, which was Anza. The address he sought was the fourth building down from Anza, and, at least from the outside, by far the smallest residence on the block. Set back a little from the street, it was also the only building with a lawn in front and a driveway with a separate garage on the side. Lights shone from the upstairs windows while the bottom unit—Mooney’s old place—was dark.

Finally, he put up the hood on his car, grabbed his legal pad from the seat next to him, got out of the car and went to lean against one of the streetlights on his side of the street. With six of these, all miraculously functioning, the area was surprisingly well lit. This wasn’t the most unusual thing in the world, Hardy thought, but it almost never happened on his own block, which was in a similar suburban, high-density neighborhood.

He made a note to check and see if Public Works had come out to install new lights since Mooney’s murder. Sometimes a station captain or one of the beat cops, called to a crime scene in one of these nice neighborhoods, would take the opportunity to check the city’s housekeeping and let somebody know. If the street had been significantly darker two months ago, it might make a difference to eyewitness testimony.

Standing there on the curb, Hardy became aware of a subtle rhythm. He timed it out of curiosity—he didn’t think it was really worth writing down. About every forty seconds, the street noise from Geary, less than two hundred feet away, increased dramatically as eastbound traffic, released from its last red light, sped past on the way to the next one. The sound wasn’t anywhere near deafening, but once Hardy became aware of it, he waited through a few cycles, trying to determine how loud it could get.

Loud enough to cover gunshots? He didn’t think so. Certainly not for the closer neighbors. And it would be quieter as it got later.

The gunshots were a question and he jotted it down.

Andrew’s walk was critical to his story and Hardy wanted to see if it made sense, so he checked the time and started moving south a few blocks to Turk, where he then turned east along the periphery of Lone Mountain College. This time of night, the road was quiet enough and might be conducive to memorizing lines. Certainly, this was a better route for that purpose than anything along Geary would have been. There was also quite a bit of street parking—it was where Andrew said he had parked on the night of the murders.

Rather than go all the way to another busy street, Masonic, Andrew said he had turned south again, crossed the campus of the University of San Francisco by the baseball diamond, then come out through a little cul-de-sac. Andrew hadn’t known the name of this street when he’d traced his route for the detectives, but Hardy was glad to see that it fit his description—a paved walkway allowed foot access to the campus at the end of the street.

When he turned back west at Fulton, Hardy found the uphill going a little slower. There was also a significant increase in traffic—it might have been more difficult for Andrew to concentrate or memorize his lines on this part of the walk, but maybe not. There simply was no way to tell.

He passed St. Ignatius Church at the top of the hill, continued down a couple of blocks to Stanyan, then turned right and made it back to his car. He checked his watch. He hadn’t been particularly pushing himself, and he’d made the circuit in eighteen minutes—rather far from the half hour it had supposedly taken Andrew. Although Andrew might have stopped once, twice, several times, to set a line or perhaps just to think, he’d never specifically mentioned stopping. Hardy didn’t feel comfortable with the twelve-minute difference. He made another note.

Crossing the street, he stood under the streetlight and looked up at the Salarcos’ unit. From reading the police reports, Hardy knew that the involvement of this critical witness had been reluctant at first. Salarco was a mow-blow-and-go gardener with an INS problem—no green card. Ironically, the Salarcos were only involved in the case because Andrew himself had told the detectives about them. Sergeant Taylor had asked him if he had any idea who might have called nine one one before he had—that person had had a thick Mexican accent.

Andrew had volunteered that he bet it was the people upstairs—they had definitely been home that night. Their baby had been crying incessantly, and it had been distracting to the max. Andrew had told Sergeant Taylor that it was one of the reasons he couldn’t just go into one of Mooney’s back bedrooms to work on memorizing his lines. He’d had to get out where it was quiet enough to concentrate.

So Taylor had asked Salarco if he’d seen or heard anything, or had called nine one one. At first the neighbor had said no. He and his wife had a sick baby. That’s all they were concerned with. But Taylor had a hunch and asked about Salarco’s immigration status, then explained that he was not with the INS, that Salarco’s testimony might be crucial to a murder investigation and might in fact mitigate in his favor with
la migra.
Hardy knew this was probably a cynical lie on Taylor’s part, but it did accomplish its goal—Salarco talked.

At the sidewalk in front of the house, Hardy took a deep breath, hoping he could make the man talk again.

The door to the Salarcos’ upstairs unit was around the driveway side in the back. A small flatbed truck took up most of the space between this building and its neighbor. There was no light over the door, and Hardy heard nothing when he pushed the doorbell, but after few seconds, he heard footfalls within, coming downstairs. Then,
“Sí? Qué es?”

“Señora Salarco?”

“Sí. Policia?”

“No. Habla inglés?”
Hardy dug for some words that he hoped were close enough.
“Soy abogado de Señor Bartlett.”

“Momento.”

The footsteps retreated. Hardy had time to turn around and examine the truck and the building. Wooden fence posts lined both sides of the empty flatbed. He saw no tools. The windows in the cab were up. The house was old, ramshackle, very small—less than half the size of the other buildings on the block. Hardy had wondered how an illegal handyman could afford the rent to even a doghouse in this neighborhood, and the answer was that it wasn’t much bigger than a doghouse, and from the outside at least, not much nicer.