The Second Chair Page 3

  “Well, we go to trial, yes.”

  “But you might be able to talk to this guy Boscacci before then?”

  “I’d call him at home today if you want me to.”

  “And that gives us a better deal?”

  She phrased it carefully. “Less of a potential downside, let’s say that.”

  “And that’s definite. I mean, we go juvie, he’s out at twenty-five?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s the best deal we can get, don’t you think?”

  “As a sure thing? Yes, sir, all else being equal, I do. But I don’t want to hurry you in any way. This is a huge decision and right now Andrew stands presumed innocent. If he admits, that changes.”

  North shook his head, dismissing that concern. His stepson, with whom communication was so difficult, who’d screwed up so many times before, had done it again. He was a constant burden and strain, and now he was putting his mother through more and more heartache. But North couldn’t yet admit out loud what he might believe, and so he simply said, “He might be innocent, okay, but tell me there’s a jury in the world that’s going to see it.” A sigh. “At least he’ll have a life afterwards, when he gets out.”

  Wu watched the second hand on the mantel clock move through ninety degrees, then spoke in a gentle tone. “So do you want me to see what I can do?”

  A last, long, agonizing moment. Then: “Yeah, I think you’ve got to.”

  Sitting back on the couch, she let herself sink into the deep cushions. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

  2

  Deputy Chief of Investigations Abe Glitsky was sitting in his old office in homicide on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. He was talking to the detail’s lieutenant, Marcel Lanier. When another old homicide chief, Frank Batiste, had finally been appointed chief of police the previous summer, he’d rewarded Glitsky, his longtime colleague, with the plum job of deputy chief. Though Glitsky’s civil service rank was lieutenant, for the year preceding his appointment he had labored unhappily in a sergeant’s position as head of payroll. Now, as deputy chief, and still a civil service lieutenant, Glitsky supervised captains and commanders and, of course, every one of the two hundred and forty police inspectors in the city.

  As deputy chief, Glitsky’s role was important but nebulous. The Investigations Bureau had taken a very public hit about six months before, when the Chronicle had run a weeklong feature exposing the fact that of all the nation’s largest cities, San Francisco came in dead last for its police record in arresting criminals and solving crimes of all types.

  The article had revealed that during the previous four years, over 80 percent of all crimes committed in the city had gone unsolved. Many criminal acts, even violent ones such as street muggings, were never investigated at all, and with others—residential burglaries and the like—the investigation would consist of one inspector making one phone call to the victim, asking if anyone would like to come down to the Hall of Justice and file a report on what was missing. Though the scathing report had not yet seen print at the time, Batiste had of course been aware of the dismal numbers, the lackluster performance, and generally low morale of the department as a whole, and he’d brought Glitsky on to galvanize the bureau, to kick ass and take names, and above all to see that more bad guys actually found themselves arrested.

  It was true that many inspectors had fallen into bad habits, but this was not always because they didn’t care about their jobs. In many cases, budget cuts to the PD had eliminated overtime pay for interviewing witnesses or writing up incidents. More systemically, a culture had arisen in the DA’s office—Sharron Pratt’s legacy—that placed a premium only on cases where the evidence was so overwhelming that a conviction could be guaranteed, and that encouraged assistant district attorneys to ask officers not to arrest suspects until they had the strongest possible case. If they had a guy cold on one count, for example, they should wait until they could get him for three or four, as that would make conviction more likely. This kept that particular scumbag out on the street, when in most other big cities he would already have been locked up.

  Glitsky’s first few months on the job had been characterized by his rather forceful presence working over the bureau, collaring inspectors in the Hall and even patrolmen in the precincts or out in the streets on surprise inspections. He’d put a friendly and unbreakable armlock on one of his troops and get right in his face. “I know you’ve got suspects and you’re waiting till they do something more. But I say let’s put ’em in jail. And I mean today!”

  Glitsky also set an example by showing up at work no later than seven-thirty and staying until at least six o’clock, and not putting in for overtime. He believed that the badge was a calling and a public responsibility more than it was a job. He made it clear to the people under him that they would have greater satisfaction in their work if they came to share that view. And ironically, after requests for overtime fell off slightly, Glitsky started getting more of it approved by Batiste. The Investigations Bureau was still far from perfect, but things seemed to be improving.

  A fortuitous sidelight that had opened up as a result of Glitsky’s flexible schedule was that he found himself free to stroll down the hallway from time to time, as he had this morning, and keep up on the workings of the homicide department. From his earliest days as a patrolman, Glitsky had viewed homicide as Action Central. This was where he wanted to be. These were the crimes that mattered the most. For twelve years he’d been an inspector with that detail, and for another eight the head of it. It wasn’t ever going to get out of his blood.

  When Batiste had offered him the post of deputy chief, he’d almost countered with the suggestion that he’d be happier back running homicide. Fortunately, before he said those fateful words, he’d recognized the faux pas they would constitute. Any response but an unqualified yes to Batiste’s thoughtful and generous offer would justifiably have made him appear to be ungrateful and would have driven a wedge between him and the new chief. If Glitsky had requested the job in homicide, not only would he never have gotten it, he’d never have left payroll. The Chief had picked him out from far down in the ranks and elevated him above many others to a truly exalted position. Glitsky even had his own driver!

  So reluctantly he’d accepted the new job, believing this meant that his time in homicide, the work he had always loved the best, was behind him forever. But now here he was, less than a year after his promotion, sitting with his feet up in his old office, discussing a particularly baffling murder case with Lieutenant Lanier. Who woulda thunk? But he’d take it.

  A middle-aged, happily married, slightly overweight white housewife named Elizabeth Cary had been shot at her front door about a week before. To date, inspectors had found no clues as to who had killed her, or why. “And you sweated the husband hard?” Glitsky asked. “Wasn’t his alibi soft?”

  “Robert. Yeah,” Lanier said. “He says he was driving home. He’s the one called nine one one. But Pat Belou—you know her? She’s new, but good. Anyway, she had him in there”—the interrogation room on the other side of the homicide detail—“six hours last Thursday, then we did him again four hours the next day, Russell in with her this time doing good cop/bad cop.” He shook his head. “Nothin’, Abe. If he did it, he’s good. Belou and Russell both say they couldn’t break him. Plus, no sign of another girlfriend on the side. The guy’s not exactly Casanova. Bald, fat, old.”

  “How old?”

  “Sixty. She was fifty.”

  Glitsky shrugged. “Bald fat old guys can get girlfriends, Marcel.”

  “Not as often as you think, Abe. And not Robert, I promise. They were redoing their wedding vows for their twenty-fifth anniversary next month.”

  “Doesn’t mean they couldn’t have had a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t agree on the guest list and he really wanted this old friend of his to come, but she hated him—the friend—so he ha
d to kill her.” Glitsky scratched his cheek. “All right, maybe not. So who else could it have been? One of the kids?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re all wrecked. I’ve talked to all three of them myself. Nobody’s that good an actor, especially the young one, Carlene. I think she’s eleven. Besides, they alibi each other—all watching some action video in the back of the house. Never even heard the shot. Must have thought it was part of the movie. Plus, finally,” he sighed, “no motive in the whole world. They loved her. I really think they did. You should have seen them. They’re all just completely fucked up around this. Excuse me the French.”

  Glitsky waved off the apology. He disliked profanity, but he’d heard all the words before and at the moment his mind was taken up with the case. “What about her friends?”

  “She’s got a regular book club and this group of other mothers from the neighborhood that meet every week or so, but we’ve talked to every one of them. All shocked. Stunned. Nobody had even a small problem with Elizabeth. Everybody came to her for everything and she never said no.”

  Lanier had reconfigured the office pretty much back to the way it had been when it had been Glitsky’s. One desk took up most of the center of the room and he sat behind it, with Glitsky across from him, his feet up, his fingers templed in front of his mouth.

  “I went to the funeral on Saturday, Abe,” he continued. “Huge crowd. Everybody loved this woman.”

  “Somebody didn’t.”

  Lanier conceded the point. “Well, whoever it was did it right. Took the gun with him, touched nothing. One shot, point-blank to the heart.”

  “You checking phone records?” Glitsky asked. “Maybe she had a boyfriend?”

  “We’re looking.”

  “Money?”

  Lanier spread his hands. “Not a problem. She was frugal. Robert makes enough that they’re okay. They went on vacation every year. Houseboat on Shasta.”

  Glitsky brought his feet to the floor. “So your absolutely typical average American housewife answers the door on a Tuesday evening and somebody shoots her for no reason?”

  “Right. That’s what we got.”

  “It’s unlikely.”

  “Agreed.” Lanier came forward. “Look, Abe, if you’re not so subtly hinting that you’d like to talk to some of the players here yourself, I would invite any and all input. Belou and Russell are stumped and have other cases with better chances of getting solved. So if you want to jump in on this, have at it.”

  Glitsky was standing. “If I get the time, I might like to have a word with the husband.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Lanier said.

  To avoid the gauntlet of Sixth Street south of Mission—perhaps the city’s most blighted stretch of asphalt and hopelessness—Dismas Hardy chose to drive the ten blocks or so from his Sutter Street office to the Hall of Justice. Only eighteen months before, his ex-partner David Freeman had been mugged and killed when he chose to walk home from the office one night rather than drive. Freeman’s attackers hadn’t come from the ranks of miscreants and drug-addled denizens of Sixth Street, true, but the old man’s death had brought home to Hardy in a visceral way the literal danger of the streets. You entered certain areas at your own risk, and the greater part of valor was avoiding them if at all possible.

  As he crossed Mission today in his flashy new, silver Honda S2000 convertible, on his way to what was sure to be a controversial meeting, his thoughts, as they did with an exhausting regularity, went back to the events surrounding Freeman’s death—events that had been the proximate cause of another, far more profound, change in Hardy and several of his closest friends.

  For the attack that killed David had been the penultimate escalation in a pattern of violence that had begun with the murder of a pawnshop owner named Sam Silverman, and continued through the deaths of two policemen, then to an attempt on Hardy’s own life. When he and his best friend, Glitsky, learned that a man named Wade Panos was behind this vendetta, they had of course taken their suspicions to the proper authorities—the DA, the police, the FBI. But Panos owned a private security force sanctioned by the city, and the lieutenant in charge of homicide turned out to be on Panos’s payroll as well. Hardy’s and Glitsky’s accusations fell on deaf ears, and before they could take it to the next level of legitimate authority, they had both received threats to the lives of their families.

  To protect themselves and their loved ones, out of time and frustrated by the law they’d both sworn to uphold, the two of them—along with Hardy’s brother-in-law Moses McGuire, his partner Gina Roake, and his client John Holiday—found themselves forced into a shoot-out with Panos’s men at a deserted pier near the abandoned waterfront. In a brief but furious gunfight, in pure self-defense, they had killed four of Panos’s men, including Lieutenant Barry Gerson, and had lost one of their own, John Holiday.

  The four survivors—Hardy, Glitsky, McGuire, and Roake—were physically untouched and made a clean escape. But there was much collateral damage.

  If Hardy had considered himself cynical about abusing the letter of the law in his practice before, now he was past entertaining any qualms at all. He still considered himself a “good guy,” whatever that meant, but he also recognized that a kind of a scab had grown over the wound his softer instincts had sustained. He’d been doubted, betrayed, lied to, threatened, and abandoned both by those in whom he’d put his trust and in the system he’d believed in intrinsically. Now he wasn’t about to squander any more emotional investment in a process that hadn’t worked for him when he’d needed it most. He did what he did and if sometimes it was ugly, well, sometimes life was ugly. Get over it. He didn’t care if everybody liked him anymore.

  Sometimes he didn’t like himself very much, either.

  As he turned into the All-Day Lot at the end of the alley across from the Hall of Justice, he found that his hands ached from gripping the wheel so firmly. His jaw throbbed from the constant pressure he’d been putting on it.

  His appointment was with the district attorney, Clarence Jackman. He was here to cut a deal for a client he despised, whom he wouldn’t have gone near a couple of years ago. In those days, he would simply have declined to take the case. In his earlier career, he’d turned down business many times when he didn’t personally like a prospective client. But more often than not lately he found himself inclined to choose to profit from his squeamishness, and would take the case at double or even triple his normal rate. It was all a game anyway, and if he didn’t profit from it when he could, he was a fool.

  So when an ex-cop named Harlan Fisk, now a city supervisor, came to Hardy the fixer to talk about Peter Chase, a big-time property manager/developer who’d been caught fondling his eleven-year-old nephew, Hardy forced himself to listen. Chase was one of Fisk’s big donors. Hardy heard the facts and said he’d see what he could do to keep the case from coming to trial, but it would cost Chase fifty thousand dollars. Up front.

  Now he had done his homework and perfected his pitch. He delivered it to Jackman in his third-floor office in the Hall of Justice. Also in the room were Supervisor Fisk, Chief of Police Batiste, and Celia Bonham, a representative from the mayor’s office.

  Winding it up, Hardy said, “Look, Clarence, I don’t like this any better than you do, but I’m just the messenger.”

  Jackman, a physically imposing African-American, was a powerful and charismatic figure. When Sharron Pratt, his predecessor as district attorney, had resigned in disgrace three years before, Mayor Washington had appointed Jackman to fill out the remainder of her term, and Jackman had hired a team of aggressive prosecutors who much preferred putting criminals in jail to understanding them and their problems. He was running for election in his own right next November, and was ahead in all the early polls.

  Now sitting behind his desk, his hands clasped in front of him, his voice mild, he said, “I’m of course happy to hear the mayor’s position on criminal cases. But there was a victim in this case, an innocent little boy, and this
office has his rights to protect. Are you telling me his abuser should go unpunished? You’ll pardon me for speaking frankly, Diz, but I’m a little surprised you’re taking this tack. This discussion is beneath you.”

  Hardy controlled a grimace, took a breath. “You should know he’s reached a financial settlement with his sister, the boy’s mother, Clarence. Will that make up to the boy for what he did to him? Will any amount of money address the human issue? No, it won’t. But it will pay for counseling for the victim, and then perhaps help with his schooling and even college. In return, the family has agreed to my proposal. To the mayor’s proposal, really.”

  “He can’t want us to drop the charges, Diz. Even if the victim’s family agrees, I’m inclined to pursue them. We’re a tolerant city, God knows, but not for this kind of stuff. Not on my watch.”

  Hardy turned to share a glance with Fisk, then came back around to the DA. “I’m not talking about dropping charges, Clarence. He remains charged. The case stays open.”

  Jackman frowned. “Then what do you want?”

  “I want the case to stay open. That’s all. My client gives you his word that nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever. He remains in counseling in perpetuity. He goes to meetings every week. His life changes. It has changed. He is always in treatment. And if he ever does cross the line again, Clarence, you’ve already got him charged. You just pull him in.”

  “If I may,” Ms. Bonham said, “I’m at this meeting because Mayor Washington wanted his feelings known. He has been acquainted both personally and professionally with Mr. Chase for many years, and while he in no way countenances his behavior in this case, he sees it as a one-time failing of an otherwise good man with a real sickness, a disease if you will, who may have let the stresses of his work get the better of him.”

  Jackman listened with interest to this extraordinary little speech, then nodded and looked at Chief Batiste. “Frank?” he asked. “What’s the police position here?”