The Second Chair Read online

  “I’m sorry, your honor,” Brandt said. “I was driven to it.”

  Johnson frowned. “Be that as it may, see that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Yes, your honor.”

  But, no doubt as he’d intended, Brandt’s interruption had blindsided Wu. Again, she’d lost her focus, and stood waiting for the judge to say something.

  “Go on, Ms. Wu,” Johnson said.

  She threw a fast look over at Brandt, who let his mouth twitch, a pastiche of a smile. Wu glanced at her client, then back to Johnson, and finally found the thread. “Your honor, the fact remains that Andrew is a minor, not an adult. A minor with no previous record.”

  “Your honor, if I may.” Brandt, up again. “I spoke to Mr. Boscacci on this very point not an hour ago, and he informs me, as I’ve already indicated to the court, that he did not direct file as an adult based on the anticipation of a quick admission.”

  “Your honor,” Wu said, “my client has no criminal history . . .”

  “He does now,” Brandt said.

  Johnson stared hard at the prosecutor, a warning. Coming back to Wu, he pushed his glasses back to the bridge of his nose. “Ms. Wu, this hearing is concerned only with the continued detention of Mr. Bartlett, and I’m not hearing any argument from you on why I should overrule the petitioner’s suggestion.”

  “Your honor.” Wu took a breath. “My client has been living a normal life for two months since these murders took place. He has known he’s a suspect for most of that time and has caused no civil disturbance of any kind, nor has he tried to flee.”

  “True,” Johnson said, “but surely you are not arguing that knowing you’re a possible suspect and actually being an arrested suspect are the same thing, are you?”

  “No, your honor, but his parents are here in the courtroom today, waiting to take him home. There is no reason they shouldn’t be able to do that. Surely there is no risk of flight. He has another two months in this school year, and he’s an excellent student. Surely he poses no worse danger to the community than he has for the past two months while he’s gone to school and lived at home.”

  Johnson showed nothing. Wu supposed he’d heard the same argument a thousand times. He straightened at the bench, turned to the prosecutor. “Counselor.”

  Brandt stood up slowly, turned to look past Wu squarely at Andrew Bartlett, then shook his head. Suddenly he pointed a finger at Andrew. His voice took on an edge. “That’s not somebody’s good little boy sitting over there. That’s a man who’s killed two people already this year, and the district attorney is not going to give him a chance to hurt anyone else.”

  Andrew started to come to his feet. “But I didn’t,” he cried out.

  “Yes, you did,” Brandt shot back. “You damn well did.”

  The judge cracked down his gavel. “Ms. Wu, no more of that from your client. Mr. Brandt, I’m warning you for the last time. No more outbursts, do you hear me? You address your remarks to the bench.”

  “Yes, your honor. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve been sorry before, too. Don’t let it happen again.” Johnson made a notation in front of him and came back, fixing Wu with an impatient and angry glare, as if she’d been the one abusing the court’s protocol. “Minor is ordered detained,” Johnson said. “Bailiffs, take him back to the cabins.”

  And with that, Johnson tapped his gavel, stood and made his exit out the back door to the courtroom.

  So abrupt was the decision and Johnson’s disappearance that for a minute a dead calm settled over the courtroom. Wu’s hand went to her stomach, where she felt a deep and sudden hollowness. Behind her, she heard Linda saying, “That’s it? That can’t be it. They’re not letting him out?” Then, as Bailiff Nelson approached the table: “Wait a minute. Andrew!”

  The boy whirled around in his seat to face his mother.

  Wu held out a hand to the bailiff. “Please! Give us one minute, all right?”

  In the gallery, Linda North had left her seat and was coming forward. She was nearly to the bullpen’s railing and then suddenly Andrew, too, was on his feet. Nelson, though, had reached him. He growled “Uh, uh” and put a restraining hand on his shoulder with enough force to topple the chair and send him sprawling. With his handcuffs on, Andrew couldn’t reach out to break his fall. His head hit the linoleum floor and for an instant he lay stunned.

  “What are you doing?” Linda was now at the guardrail, and she screamed. “Leave him alone!”

  “Linda!” Hal North, too, was out of his seat, coming up behind his wife.

  The other bailiff, the young-looking one who’d been talking with the court reporter before the judge appeared, came from nowhere and insinuated himself in the space between Wu and Linda, blocking the mother’s access to her son. “Take it easy,” he said, holding up both his hands. “Easy. That’s enough! Enough!” Then he turned to Nelson. “You, too, Ray. I’ll take him.”

  “I got him,” Nelson said with some heat.

  “Go easy, then,” the second bailiff retorted.

  “It’s okay, Mom! I’m okay.” Andrew, from the floor. “I got caught off-balance, that’s all. I’m fine.”

  On either side of him, the bailiffs seemed to have worked out their turf differences, and now raised Andrew to his feet.

  “Let him go,” Wu said. “You don’t have to manhandle him.”

  The second bailiff turned and looked at her. Up close, she saw that the face, youthful and innocent from a distance, was heavily pockmarked and held a pair of gray, old, empty eyes. Wu thought that in spite of his relatively few years, the officer had already worked in the system long enough to become inured to the innate horror of it. He was a jailer, plain and simple. A zookeeper. And yet, he’d almost apologized to her, and still appeared more humane than his partner, for all that. “No one’s going to hurt your client,” he said.

  But Wu checked him. “That’s already happened. I want that bump on his head looked at right away. I’ll be along to see him in a few minutes, and I want him to have seen somebody by then. Is that clear?” Wu included them both in her sights. “And while we’re at it, Officer,” she said to the second bailiff, “what’s your name?”

  “Cottrell,” he said. “Ray Cottrell.”

  She wrote it down on her legal pad, looked up again at both of them with a question. “You just called him . . .” She motioned to Nelson. “You just called him Ray.”

  “That’s what his mother called him, too. What about it?”

  Nothing, Wu realized, and said, “I’m holding you both responsible.” Her threat didn’t much instill the fear of God in either of them. The two men, unmoved, shared a glance. But then it was Nelson who touched Andrew’s shoulder and said, “Let’s go. Easy.”

  Andrew threw his mother a last look of despair, then turned and started walking with the bailiffs, back toward the lockup.

  5

  Wu had been an attorney for five years. During that time, she’d mostly done litigation work for Freeman’s firm, mixed with a steady if unexceptional flow of criminal cases that she picked up in the usual way, the so-called conflicts cases. She was on the list for court appointments, and once a month she would appear in court while a succession of criminal cases were called and doled out mostly to the Public Defender’s Office. Every few cases, though, there would be more than one defendant—accomplices in robberies or drug deals.

  In these cases, the Public Defender’s Office could not take on more than one of the defendants; it would be a conflict of interest. And so the court would appoint one of the on-hand lawyers sitting in the courtroom on conflicts day to represent the other defendants. In this way, Wu had represented a wide variety of clients and gotten what she had thought (until today) was a well-grounded schooling in the nuts and bolts and even some of the intricacies of criminal law.

  But she’d never been assigned to a murder case. Never before had she confronted such a serious charge. In fact, until this weekend no criminal client had ever paid her directl
y—her fees in the conflicts cases were paid by the court. She was standing on new ground now, and finding that it shook perilously under her feet. She’d blown her first skirmish badly. Ill-prepared and overconfident, she’d foolishly failed to prepare her clients for the worst, in part because she didn’t believe that the worst was going to transpire. In her experience thus far, deals were always a possibility.

  Now, out in the hallway with the Norths, Wu spoke up right away, a stab at damage control. “I’ve got those bailiffs’ names and badge numbers and I want to assure you both that I’m going to file a complaint before I leave this building.”

  North spoke up. “I wouldn’t waste my time. Andrew admitted he was off-balance. The guy was just doing his job. My question is what the hell just happened? You told us you’d get him out.”

  “I said I thought it was possible.”

  “It never seemed to get close to possible in there. There wasn’t any real discussion at all.” North wore running shoes, jeans, a blue denim shirt, a corduroy sports coat, but the casual dress was nowhere reflected in his posture or attitude. The bulldog face was shut down, expressionless, the ice-blue eyes fathomless. “It doesn’t give me a whole hell of a lot of faith in all the rest, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Hal.” Linda put a hand on her husband’s arm.

  He kept his eyes on Wu. “So where does this leave us?”

  “I’m going to talk to the DA,” Wu said. “Appeal the detention.”

  “I would hope so,” North said. “I don’t care what it costs.”

  “I don’t think the money’s the point, sir.”

  “Well, if it isn’t, that would be a first. Maybe I’ll go have a word with the man myself.”

  In an odd reversal, Wu looked to the wife for support, but Linda’s eyes never left the door to the courtroom. It was almost as though she still expected her son to walk out any minute. Wu came back to North. “That really wouldn’t be a good idea, sir. Look,” she said, “whatever the judge said in there, the truth is that minors get out on serious charges all the time.”

  “Not this time,” he said.

  “No. I know that.”

  Linda spoke up. “So what do we do now?”

  Before the fiasco in the courtroom, Wu had been hoping to get a chance to sit with Andrew and his parents in the relatively comfortable environment of their home. There, she would show all of them the evidence she’d already assembled from the discovery documents she’d received that so clearly—in her opinion—would damn Andrew if he went to trial as an adult. With Hal North in her corner, and Linda presumably already on board, it would be the three of them “against” the son, and Wu would be able to orchestrate the talk that would result in Andrew’s understanding that he needed to admit.

  Now, with Hal in a slow-boiling fury at her failure to get the detention lifted, with Linda still woefully ignorant of the strategy Wu had already put in motion, and with Andrew back in his cell, Wu realized that she had to change her plan on the wing. If they all sat down together right now—in Andrew’s cell or anywhere else—the three-to-one odds in her favor would be closer to three-to-one against, with Hal quite possibly unwilling to argue with his characteristic force for the need to admit, and Linda and Andrew dead set against.

  The dynamic had become completely skewed. Her best bet now—as the most committed to her position—was to take on Andrew one on one. Win him over as she’d won his stepfather the day before. Andrew didn’t need to hear Linda’s arguments why he should consider the feasibility of an adult trial on the really very unlikely chance that he would get acquitted. He didn’t need that kind of support. He needed to be frightened, and convinced.

  Linda repeated her question. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now,” Wu said, “I think it’s critical that I spend some time alone with Andrew. He needs to understand what he’s up against, that he’s here for the long haul. He’s got to see the evidence they’ve got. Mostly, he’s got to realize that he’s in the system, and that he needs his lawyer more than he needs his parents right now.”

  “You don’t think we should see him?” Linda clearly didn’t like the decision. “I mean, while we’re already here? This is a good time for us.”

  “You can visit him anytime, Mrs. North, anytime you want. But right now he’s going to be pretty upset with me, as I realize that both of you are. I need to try to make that right with Andrew, though, as soon as I can, so we can begin to cooperate and work together.” She looked from Hal to Linda. “Look, I don’t blame either of you for being frustrated, but in a sense the hearing in there didn’t change anything. Andrew still needs to be clear on what he needs to do.” She threw what she hoped was a meaningful glance at Hal. “That hasn’t changed. I really think both of you need to talk, so the next time you’re with him, you present a united front. So we’re all saying the same thing.”

  She waited, holding her breath. From Linda’s perspective, she knew that her words were probably close to indecipherable. But she hoped that Hal would understand her allusion and step in. And he did. “She’s right, hon,” he said. “You held his hand all weekend. He doesn’t need any more of that now. He needs some solid advice, legal advice. And Amy here is right. We need to talk, too, you and me.”

  “About what?”

  “This whole plea business.” At the mention of the topic again, Linda’s eyes went wide with surprise, perhaps with anger. But Hal cut off her reply. “I just said it needs to be discussed. It’s complicated.”

  “I don’t even like the sound of it,” Linda said.

  Wu stepped in. “That’s why I think it’s important that both of you talk. Meanwhile, this is when I need to go up and see Andrew.”

  Linda stood still for a moment, then nodded, turned and, without another word, walked off. Hal hung back another second. “Don’t fuck this one up, too,” he told her, then whirled and jogged after his wife.

  But before she went up to see Andrew, Wu knocked at the door to Johnson’s chambers and was told to enter. He was out of his robes now, standing at the side of the room, a golf club in his hand. “Ah, Ms. Wu. Just one second.” A black plastic contraption with a little blue flag in it popped a golf ball back across the rug, right to his feet, and he stopped it with his putter.

  What was it, Wu thought, with men and these games in their offices?

  She got right to her point. “Your honor, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but you’ll want to know what happened in the courtroom just after you left the bench.”

  When she finished her description of Andrew’s mistreatment, Johnson sighed with resignation. “My bailiffs. I call them my two rays of sunshine. It’s a very little bit of a joke.”

  He leaned to pick up his ball. Pocketing it, replacing his putter in the golf bag next to his desk, he turned back to her and was all business. “Ms. Wu,” he said, “I realize you must be a bit disappointed at my ruling in there, although I don’t know what else you could have possibly expected. But given what you just told me—that Mr. Bartlett himself admitted that he got off-balance and fell—what do you expect me to do? The bailiffs are there to keep order in the courtroom. Sometimes—right after a prosecution verdict, for example, or a ruling like today—that takes some physical restraint. You’d be surprised. I’ve seen kids turn on their lawyers, even rush the bench. It happens. The bailiffs have to be, if not primed for action, then at least in a perpetually aggressive state of mind. You said your client was getting up, turning to get in physical contact with his mother. That can’t be allowed to occur.”

  “Your honor, did you see Mrs. North? She was coming up to hug her son. She wasn’t going to slip him a weapon.”

  “Maybe not, but you sure can’t treat people differently depending on what they look like, can you? It sounded to me like Officer Nelson applied a little force and your client lost his balance. And Cottrell? If anything, it sounds like he took your side.”

  Wu shrugged. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. It wasn’t like what had ha
ppened bothered him. He just wanted to avoid the hassle getting any bigger.”

  “Right.” Johnson raised a finger. “That’s because Officer Cottrell knows how to keep things under control up here. You know why? ’Cause he’s been on the other side.” At Wu’s questioning look, Johnson nodded. “This isn’t a secret. He’s been featured in several articles. When he was a kid, he was at that same table as your client, next to a defense attorney very much like you. He’s spent time in the cottages, so he knows how it works up there.”

  “The bailiff’s done time?”

  He nodded. “Juvenile time. He slid from a bad foster care situation into the juvie system. But he’s the success story—why we do this complicated fandango around rehabbing kids as opposed to punishing them. Sometimes it works. Often enough to make the effort worthwhile.”

  Wu thought back to the courtroom, to the look she’d gotten at Cottrell’s eyes, with their strange flat affect. She’d attributed it to a boredom with the bureaucratic routines of his job. But Johnson’s remarks struck a deeper chord. The long-term denizens of the legal system had learned, out of a sense of self-preservation, to live below the radar.

  Johnson, reading her mind, said, “Most of these guys, they know how to get by here. You’d be surprised how many juvenile veterans of the system get out and then when they grow up want to work in it. It’s where they’re comfortable. They know how things work. So if somebody like Cottrell goes proactive around a situation like today in the courtroom, my bet is it’s because he wants to keep things on an even keel between Nelson and your client. Not because he’s some super-aggressive sociopath.”

  “I didn’t say that, your honor. I didn’t even imply it. But the one bailiff—the other one, Nelson—it wasn’t as innocent as all that. I thought you’d just want to know.”

  “I do want to know,” Johnson said. “Of course I want to know. And I’m grateful that you thought to come and tell me.”

  This time, Wu got to the attorney visiting room before Andrew and so had a moment to take in some of its admittedly unpleasant flavor. It reminded her of nothing so much as the dean’s office at her old high school—linoleum floor, pitted green metal table in the center of the room, cork bulletin boards on both sides, a gray filing cabinet, that one window by the old-fashioned one-piece desk that Andrew had used earlier, a faint smell of disinfectant and sweat.