The Second Chair Read online

  “I serve at the mayor’s pleasure, Clarence, as you know. If the mayor’s okay with holding off on a trial . . .” He let the sentence hang.

  Jackman brought his eyes back to Hardy. “This is a nonstarter, Diz, and you know it. What’s really going on here?”

  This was getting to the meat of it. “As you know, Clarence, Mr. Chase manages several city properties in the blocks surrounding city hall. Beyond those, he also holds the contract for the police department’s motor pool. He leases all the city cars. What he’s proposing is a yearlong moratorium on rents for all these properties, starting this month.”

  In a long legal career, Jackman had fielded a host of bizarre settlement offers, but this one rocked him. He blew out a lungful of air, pushed his chair back, got up quickly and walked over to his windows. He was close to losing his temper, something that he had not allowed himself for years.

  “So Mr. Chase wants to buy his way out of child molestation charges? Why send you, Diz? Why not a plain envelope stuffed with hundreds delivered by some hoodlum in a dark bar?” He actually spoke more softly. “I won’t be bribed, Diz, and I’m disgusted that you think I could be.” He looked from eye to eye at the assembled legation. “I think you all had better leave.”

  Hardy stood up, put out a restraining hand to the others, crossed over to where Jackman stood. “Look, Clarence, I said at the outset that I knew this stinks. The guy hired me because he figures I can pull a personal string here, and I have the right to be as insulted as you do.

  “But I think you’ve got to do this. Listen. Washington says the city will make about three mil on this deal. If you won’t do it, he’ll just cut the difference out of your budget. You’re being extorted, Clarence, plain and simple, squeezed by a child molester and a venal political hack.”

  Behind him, he heard Ms. Bonham make a kind of gurgling noise. He was talking loud enough for her to hear, and this was getting rather more raw than she’d expected.

  “But the bottom line,” Hardy concluded, “is I think they’ve got you.”

  Hardy knew that three million dollars was about 10 percent of the DA’s already lean budget. The office had already made deep cuts, and three million more would be a catastrophe. Jackman would have to lay off 15 percent of his staff. And because most of his nonlabor expenses were fixed, salaries were all he had to work with.

  “Clarence,” Hardy concluded, lowering his own voice now, “believe it or not, I’m here as your friend because nobody else would have told you what was really going on. I think you have to do this.”

  Hardy walked back to the couches. Jackman returned to his desk and sat back down in the heavy, expectant silence. After a moment, he looked up and nodded. “If he so much as spits on the sidewalk, I’ll have him hauled in and fast-track him to Superior Court. Is that clear to each and every one of you?”

  “Yes, sir,” they intoned as with one voice.

  “All right. You make sure the paperwork is tight and have it back here by this evening for my signature. Ms. Bonham, while I’m talking about signatures, I wouldn’t mind his honor’s position in writing. At his and your convenience, of course. Other than that,” he pointed toward his door, “I’ve got a couple of appointments scheduled. I appreciate you all coming to talk to me about this problem.”

  Bonham, Fisk and Batiste were through the door when Clarence called out for Hardy to stay behind a minute. After the door closed, he sat looking down at his desk. When he spoke, the words came out with a scalpel-like precision. “I accept you came here as a friend, Diz. But, as a friend, never come here with a deal like this again. Not ever. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  With more than just a bad taste in his mouth, Hardy went into the bathroom in the hallway outside Jackman’s office. There he leaned over one of the sinks for a few seconds, his head hanging as though from a thread. Then he turned on the cold water and threw several handfulls into his face. Drying off with a paper towel from the roll, he suddenly stopped and stood studying his face in the mirror for a long moment. The conversation with Jackman had netted him and his firm fifty thousand dollars, and though he told himself that it was a decent deal all around, his body was telling him something else. His head was light, his heart pounded. A wave of nausea made him hang his head again. When the dizziness passed, he ran his palms over his face, trying to recognize the person he was staring at. Would Clarence ever forgive him, he asked himself. Would he forgive himself? Could he continue to live like this?

  I have no choice, he told himself. Don’t confuse a job with a vocation. This is a job. You do it. You get paid for it. That’s what it’s about. It’s not about you. It’s not personal. Don’t lose that focus. If it gets personal, you lose.

  When he got his breathing and the rest of his body under some degree of control, he rode the elevator up one floor. Looking in at the suites of administrative offices that opened onto the lobby, he noticed with some surprise that the reception area was empty. He stood inside the double doors for a moment, making sure no one was guarding the entrance, then reached behind the waist-high wooden door by the reception desk and pressed the button that admitted visitors to the inner sanctum. In a few steps, silently, he’d passed through the outer office, then the conference room. Neither of the deputy chiefs was in their adjacent offices.

  The room to his left was Glitsky’s office. Far from the norm at the Hall, his office was expansive, nearly as large as Hardy’s own, and almost as well furnished. Windows along the Bryant Street wall provided lots of natural light.

  The bookshelves behind his desk testified to Glitsky’s love of books. A knowledge junkie, he stocked hundreds of paperback novels, a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an abridged, although still enormous, Oxford English Dictionary. There was a shelf of history, another of forensics, criminology, the Compendium of Drug Therapy and other medical references. One whole section was devoted to Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring books, Glitsky’s ongoing passion now for the past few years, and the other highly esoteric reference books that accompanied these novels—Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, Harbors and High Seas, A Sea of Words, a biography of Thomas Cochrane, who’d been O’Brian’s inspiration for Jack Aubrey.

  On these shelves, too, were a number of personal artifacts—a football signed by all of his college teammates at San Jose State; pictures of him and his sons on most if not all of the Pop Warner teams he’d coached; his old patrolman’s hat; a menorah (Glitsky was half Jewish and half African-American); lots of police-themed bric-a-brac from citations he’d been awarded, classes and conferences he’d attended, decorations and medals he’d acquired. The walls were covered with even more citations, including Police Officer of the Year in 1987, plaques, diplomas, the (premature) obituary that Jeff Elliot had written about him after he’d been shot. There were also two family photos—one about twelve years old featuring his then-young boys and his wife Flo before she’d died; the other taken only last December with Treya and their baby Rachel, Treya’s twenty-year-old daughter, Raney, and his three now-grown young men—Isaac, Jacob and Orel.

  In Glitsky’s new position, he spent a good portion of every day going to meetings, holding press conferences to manage the spin on police issues, representing the Chief at various functions. Hardy assumed he’d been at such a meeting this morning, and saw no reason not to take advantage of his friend’s absence to inject a little lightness into his afternoon. He walked behind the desk and opened the top left drawer, which as he knew was filled with peanuts in the shell.

  Quickly, looking up lest one of the gatekeepers bust him, he pulled the drawer all the way out and set it on the desk. He then took out the right-hand drawer—pens, Post-it pads, business cards, paper clips—and inserted it into the left-hand slot. When the peanuts were in on the wrong side, he checked his handiwork and saw that lo, it was good.

  Glitsky the control freak would go into fits.

  Hardy made it out of the administrative offices without running into a human being.
When he got back on the elevator going down, his good humor had mostly returned, and he was whistling to himself.

  3

  Hardy pulled his convertible into the garage of the Freeman Building, underneath the law offices of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake. When Freeman had died, he had left the building that bore his name to his fiancee, Gina Roake, and the firm’s business to Hardy, and they’d formed a new firm, keeping Freeman’s name in it, immediately and almost without discussion. The arrangement had somehow seemed foreordained. Now, with the top down, Hardy parked in the primo spot next to the elevator that was reserved for the managing partner. For a moment, he sat listening to the terrific interplay of guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, violin and vocals of Nickel Creek’s “Sweet Afton,” a song from the CD his daughter Rebecca had recommended.

  It did his heart good to know that this old poem by Robert Burns had somehow attained a kind of limited hipness again. It was a mostly acoustic country group, after all, melodic and musical, so it didn’t exactly rule the airwaves, but his daughter and her teenage friends loved it for a’ that. Here alone was reason to have hope and faith in the next generation, he thought. It wasn’t all rap and crap.

  He set the brake, took off his sunglasses, and pushed the button that got the roof back up in under six seconds, a little more than the time it took the car to hit sixty on the open road. In another minute, he exited the elevator into the main lobby on the second floor and was gratified to hear the steady thrum of activity. It was nearly ten a.m. and most of the fourteen associates had already been here since at least eight o’clock, on their way to billing at least eight hours of their time, as they did every day at $150 an hour.

  From where he stood, Hardy could see three associates meeting with some clients in the Solarium, the firm’s large, glass-enclosed conference room. Directly in front of him at the receptionist’s workstation, Phyllis seemed to be answering five calls at once. The hallway to his right bustled with mail delivery and some other associates talking with their secretaries or paralegals. The Xerox machines were humming in the background.

  Hardy crossed the space in front of him and poked his head into the office of Norma Towne, his office manager, a humorless woman of uncertain vintage who had conceived an affection of sorts for him, in spite of his tendency to crack wise. She pulled her eyes from her computer long enough to give him a little wave, to ask if he needed anything.

  “An oil well would be nice,” he said, “if you’ve got a spare. Everything okay here?”

  It was, and he proceeded to his own office. In the past year, he’d moved down to the main floor from the one above, bequeathing his old office to his new partner, Wes Farrell. As managing partner, Hardy felt he ought to have more of a presence in the day-to-day workings of the firm, and he’d ensconced himself in a room directly next to David Freeman’s old office.

  A year ago, Hardy’s current work space had enclosed a four-desk paralegal station, the stationery room and the semi-warehouse where the firm had kept the old, physical files. Now, with a couple of interior walls removed and twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of interior decorating, it was a large, airy and imposing executive suite. He had his own wall of law books, several somber original oils suitably framed, a sink and large wet bar, and two seating areas with Persian throw rugs, like the one in front of his custom cherry desk. He did bring the dartboard down from upstairs, but now it hid behind a pair of cherry cabinet doors—the only hint of its presence was the thirty-inch slat of dark teak set into the oak hardwood floor exactly seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the face of the dartboard. Similar cabinet doors also hid his entertainment center, audio system and huge television set.

  Hardy pushed the button on his espresso machine and crossed to his desk just in time to respond to his buzzer. Phyllis announced that his ten o’clock, Mrs. Oliva, had arrived. He crossed to the door, paused to take a breath and get his smile in place, then walked out to meet his client.

  The area over by the bar and the law books was the more formal of the two seating arrangements—the other had a loveseat and upholstered wing chairs—and Mrs. Oliva and Hardy sat kitty-corner to each other on stiff-backed Empire chairs. She had taken a cup of espresso, too, though it rested untouched on the low table in front of her. Not yet thirty years old, she was carefully made up and as well dressed as Wal-Mart could make her. She was explaining why she supported the charges the DA had filed against Hardy’s client, her ex-husband James, a San Francisco policeman.

  “I completely understand,” Hardy said when she’d finished.

  “I don’t know if you can. I realize it sounds ridiculous. I mean, a box of baby wipes.” She smiled almost apologetically at the absurdity of the words. But the reality was too serious to allow that. She’d called police alleging that James had gotten angry during a scheduled visitation with their one-year-old, Amanda. From a distance of less than five feet he had thrown a full box of baby wipes at his estranged wife. The force and surprise of the thing had knocked Mrs. Oliva down, broken her nose, blackened both eyes. Hardy thought he could still detect halos of bluish bruise under her foundation.

  “The issue isn’t what may or may not have been in the box. The issue is that he threw it in anger at you.”

  As though curious, she cocked her head to one side. “You’re not trying to defend it?”

  “Call me old-fashioned,” Hardy said, breaking a small grin, “but I’m opposed to guys hitting girls. Throwing things at them, too, if you want to get technical.” His voice went dead sober. “I’m acting on behalf of your husband, Mrs. Oliva, but not trying to defend what he did. I’ve suggested he get himself into an anger management program and he’s done that, but what he did to you, he and I both agree, is completely inexcusable. He wants you to know that that’s how he feels.”

  Mrs. Oliva digested this unexpected viewpoint for a short moment. She seemed to remember the demitasse on the table and reached down, picked it up, took a sip. “So, if that’s the case, why are we having this meeting?” she asked. “Why are you defending him?”

  “Well, as I’ve indicated, I’m really not there yet. Defending him, I mean, in the legal sense. At this point, he’s retained me and I’m representing him. If this case eventually comes to trial, I’ll probably advise him to seek other counsel.”

  She carefully put her coffee cup back down and faced Hardy, her lips now tight. “What do you mean, if this case goes to trial? The DA’s charged it and they’re planning to go forward.”

  “I know that. Of course.” Hardy sat back, crossed one leg over the other. “But I wanted to talk to you in person and ask you if in your heart you really wanted Jim to go to jail over this. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about what happens to cops when they go to jail.”

  Her mouth worked, but she didn’t speak.

  Hardy pressed her moment of hesitancy. “I’m not suggesting that Jim not be punished, or that if he does go to jail he wouldn’t deserve whatever happened to him there. What I am saying is that I’d like you to consider what that type of punishment for him would do to you.” He uncrossed his legs and came forward. “If Jim gets convicted, Mrs. Oliva, he loses his job, which in the here and now means no income for you and no child support. I understand he’s been good about those payments up until now.”

  She nodded. Her face showed that this was something she hadn’t considered. The possibility of losing that precious income clearly struck a nerve.

  Hardy continued. “He’s not trying to duck his responsibility to you, Mrs. Oliva, or even his punishment, which he knows he deserves.” He lowered his voice to near inaudibility. “I doubt if he would want anyone to know about this, but I sat across from him in this very seat two days ago and watched him break down in remorse for what he’d done to you. He’d never harmed you physically before this one incident, had he?”

  “No.” Suddenly one of Mrs. Oliva’s eyes overflowed. She made no effort to wipe the tear away.

  Hardy handed her a Kleenex from the box o
n the table beside him, his voice a caressing whisper. “He lost his temper, Mrs. Oliva. He never meant to hurt you, and certainly not so badly. He says he thinks you know that. Is that true?”

  “No. I mean yes. I don’t think he meant to do it. But it was so . . . so violent. And in front of Amanda.”

  “I know. Amanda. She’s his main concern, too. What’s going to happen to her if Jim’s in jail and you’ve got to be working to support the both of you? What’s that going to do to her, living in a succession of daycare places, as opposed to her having her own mother . . .” He stopped.

  Her tears flowed over her cheeks and she dabbed at them with the Kleenex. She sat straight-backed, under rigid control.

  “Mrs. Oliva,” Hardy said, “Jim is more sorry for this than he can express. He plans to write you a formal apology. Beyond that, he doesn’t want the baby you had together to be brought up by strangers. He understands that you’re not comfortable seeing him for a time, or having him around Amanda. But these anger management classes can work wonders. I’ve seen it happen many times. In the meanwhile, at my suggestion, Jim has agreed to double his monthly child support payments to you, which will be a burden on him, but one that he accepts, would gladly accept if you’d agree to it and ask the DA to to drop these criminal charges.”

  Hardy knew that it was up to the DA to press or drop the charges. Jackman felt continual pressure from women’s groups to go to the max on every case such as this one. Nevertheless, with the victim on board, Hardy thought he had a good shot at getting his client into some kind of program that would result in the charges being dismissed. Jackman might not like these diversion programs, where nothing substantive ever really happened, but he was stuck with them. And sometimes, as in this case, they served a purpose.

  “You know your husband,” Hardy continued. “Basically, he’s a good man. He’ll honor his debts, especially to Amanda. You know he will. But he needs to keep his job. He needs to go back to work, for all of your sakes.”