The Second Chair (18 page)

“Life makes smart people cynical,” he said. “It’s a sad but true fact.”

“Not all of them.” Frannie let out a deep sigh. A shadow of distaste crossed her face.

“Cynical’s not so bad,” Hardy said. “It saves a lot of heartache down the line.”

“Right. I know. That’s what you think.” She closed her eyes for a second, drew a heavy breath, weariness bleeding out of her. “I guess I’m just worried about you.”

“Me?
Moi?
I?”

Tightening her lips, biting down against some strong emotion, she said, “Never mind,” and turned away from him.

“That was a little humor, Frannie. Just trying to lighten it up.”

Her chest rose and fell twice. Finally, she faced him. “That’s what I’m worried about. Everything being a joke.”

He tried to keep it light, josh her out of whatever it was. “That’s funny,” he said, “I wish more things were jokes.”

When suddenly, none of it was a joke at all anymore. She threw off the covers and was out of bed, nearly running across to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The lock clicked.

Hardy stood stock-still, his head down. After ten seconds, he went over and knocked. Whispered. “Fran? Are you all right?”

He thought he heard a sob.

“Whatever it is, I’m sorry.” He waited a moment. “No more joking if you come out. Promise.”

Finally. “In a minute.”

It was more like ten.

He was lying on the bed, hands behind his head. He barely dared look at her, afraid he might scare her off. The two of them hadn’t had a cross word since before the shoot-out nearly a year and half ago. He didn’t want anything to be wrong between them now. He said nothing while she got into her side of the bed, pulled the blankets up over her. “I didn’t mean to be so dramatic,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You can be dramatic anytime you want.”

He waited for another minute, perhaps two. A very long time.

Finally, she sighed. “I don’t mean to be critical of you,” she said. “It’s just that I am so worried about you.”

“You don’t need to be. I’m fine.”

“Maybe you are, but you’re not the same person you always said you wanted to be.” She shook her head. “I’m not saying this right.”

“Okay. Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

She wrestled with it for another minute or more. Finally, she sighed. “I just don’t know if there’s anything you care about anymore.”

“I care about you. And the kids.”

“No. I know you love us, but I mean with yourself, with your life. Are you happy with your life?”

A million glib answers, the usual grab bag, sprung to his mind. But that, of course, was what she was getting at. He sat up and half turned away from her. “Am I happy? What makes you think I’m not?”

“It’s not what
I
think.”

“But something, just now, made you ask.”

She reached over and touched his back. “It’s not just now. And maybe it’s the same something that’s making you not answer.”

He shifted to face her. “I honestly don’t know what that is, Frannie.” Then: “I don’t feel like I’m doing anything different.”

“You don’t?”

“No. Not consciously anyway.”

“No? What about this boy Amy just called you about? Andrew?”

“What about him?”

“You’re happy with him going to jail for eight years?”

Another shrug. “It beats the alternative, which is life in prison. It’s also the deal Amy made. It seemed like a good one.”

“If he’s guilty.”

Hardy shrugged. “Amy says he’s admitting, so he probably is. Either way, though, the deal gets him out not much later than if he went to trial and got acquitted anyway.”

“So eight years for an innocent person is okay with you?”

“Well, first, as I said, he’s probably not innocent. And second, he’s already in the system. So he’s looking at a year or two, minimum, before anything shakes out anyway.”

“Which leaves six years. In six years, your own little boy is twenty.”

Hardy ran a palm over his cheek. “So this is about Andrew Bartlett?”

Frannie shook her head. “It’s about . . .” She started over. “It just seems everything you do nowadays has to do with manipulating the rules somehow. It’s all just cynicism, and money, and cutting the deal.”

Hardy’s voice hardened perceptibly. “Maybe you don’t remember last year too well, Frannie. When you and I tried to play by the rules, and got Polaroids with gunsights drawn on over our kids. The experience hasn’t quite paled on me. So yeah, I guess I’ve gotten a little jaded on the whole play-by-the-rules concept. If I’m good at bending them and that makes life easy, I’m a sap if I don’t.”

“That’s what you tell yourself?”

He turned now, frankly glaring. “Yes, it is. And I do very well at it.”

Frannie glared back. “And that’s also why you drink all the time now? Because it helps you forget how you’re living?”

“What I’m doing is supporting this family, Frannie. The best way I know how.”

Frannie watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. “Look,” she said, “you cut a deal on this child molester guy the other morning, when you know there was a time you wouldn’t have gotten within a mile of him.”

“That was fifty thousand dollars’ worth of—”

“Stop. Then you go to lunch, have a few drinks, and make a deal for your firm to help elect the DA. Then you have some wine at your partners meeting and try to cut a deal to make poor Gina come back to work when you know that her heart’s gone out of it . . .”

“Let me ask you this, Frannie—tell me someone whose heart hasn’t gone out of it, especially after . . .” He let it hang.

Frannie waited until he met her eyes again. “I don’t mean to make you mad. I just don’t believe that the person cutting all these deals is who you really are.”

“Who I am.” His laugh rang dry and empty. “Who I am is a guy who’s lost faith in the process. But the bills keep on coming, the kids’ college is around the corner. What am I supposed to do? Just stop?”

“Maybe you could do something you care about.” She moved over toward him, put her arms around his shoulders. “Here,” she said, “lie down with me. Close your eyes. You don’t have to make any decisions right now, tonight. But a blind person can see how unhappy you are, how it’s all frantic and manic and going going going just to keep busy.”

“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

She kissed him. “You’re not going to die tomorrow.”

She felt him growing calmer next to her, his breathing more regular. He put his arm around her and she lay up against him. After another minute, he said, “I think maybe I am drinking a little too much.”

She noted the repetition of the disclaiming qualifiers—“I think,” “maybe,” “a little.” But it was nevertheless an admission of sorts and, she hoped, a start.

After another couple of minutes, his body seemed to settle next to her. Sleep trying to claim him. “I’m tired,” he said. Then, “I’m worried about Abe, too.” The words were a barely audible mumble.

Then he was asleep.

Back at her apartment, Wu changed out of her lawyer clothes and chose a black leather miniskirt, a diaphanous red shirt over a skin-colored bra, a heavy leather jacket against the cold wind. Fifteen minutes after she’d hung up with Dismas Hardy, she was among the packed bodies at Indigo’s, another bar at the triangle. At a dinner-plate-sized table, twirling her first cosmopolitan of the night with a well-manicured hand, she perched herself on a high stool and showed a lot of leg. The volume of the music—an endless bass and drum loop—made conversation impossible, but she didn’t mind.

She didn’t want to talk. She didn’t want to think about Jason Brandt, either. Or Andrew Bartlett.

Wu shrugged out of her jacket, put it across her lap, straightened her back and turned to survey the groups of men who were drinking and laughing all around her. She caught one of the guys—good-looking in a grungy way, long blond hair, couple of earrings—checking the assets she so artfully displayed.

He was very much interested.

She smiled, slipped off the stool, got her drink in one hand and her jacket in the other, and moved in to cut him out.

10

T
he wind blew itself out overnight, but it was still unseasonably cold. A high, clear sky, bright sun. A rare city frost bloomed on every patch of green—admittedly not many of them—that Wu passed as she drove up Market Street.

Her hands shook and her eyes burned, but she was still thankful about the timing of the hearing this morning. The ten o’clock call meant she didn’t have to go by the office and check in before driving to the YGC, and this had allowed her to grab an extra hour or two of sleep, badly needed after all the cocktails that had gone with last night’s adventure. She hadn’t made it back to her apartment until sometime after 3:00
A
.
M
. She hadn’t fallen asleep until nearly dawn, and was jarred awake by the alarm two hours later—disoriented, depleted, wrung out.

Still, by the time she entered the holding cell behind Arvid Johnson’s courtroom, the mixed jolt from the Dexedrine and the espresso had kicked in. Handcuffed, Andrew sat on a cement bench built against the wall. He seemed subdued and nervous, shrugging a greeting of sorts, then going back to studying the pattern in the floor between his feet.

Wu put on a brave face, sat up close next to him. He smelled of disinfectant and soap. “Are you holding up all right? Did you get some sleep? How do you feel now? Are you still comfortable with our decision?” To each question, she got a shrug, a nod.

She tried a few more conversational gambits, telling him that the judge was going to want to hear him admit the petition himelf. All he had to do was follow her lead and it would all be over before he knew it. He nodded some more, then at last shut her up with a curt “I know what I’ve got to do.”

She had to take that as an assurance. He was going to be okay.

Hal and Linda North were at their place in the first row, holding hands. Wu nodded to them, got a response from Hal, nothing from Linda but a blank stare. On the opposite side of the room, Jason Brandt directed his complete attention to the contents of some binders that were open in front of him. He avoided any eye contact with Wu. The two “rays of sunshine” had taken their respective positions again, Nelson by the back door to the holding cell, Cottrell in the otherwise-empty jury box. The court reporter and probation officer chatted amiably, and then suddenly the door to Arvid Johnson’s chambers opened and the judge, in his robes, was on the bench.

Again, there was little sense of ritual. The probation officer simply got a nod from the judge, stood and began. “Good morning. This is Petition JW02-4555, the matter of Andrew Bartlett, who is present in the courtroom. Also present are the minor’s natural mother, Linda Bartlett North, and his stepfather, Hal North. The minor’s attorney is Ms. Amy Wu. Mr. Jason Brandt is the district attorney.”

Judge Johnson thanked the officer and peered down over his glasses. “Ms. Wu, it’s my understanding that your minor client Mr. Bartlett and the district attorney have agreed to a mutually acceptable disposition in this matter. Is that correct?”

Wu put a hand under her client’s arm and the two of them rose. “Yes, your honor.”

Johnson had done this innumerable times, and although Wu was tuned to a high pitch of anxiety, for him it obviously held all the excitement and drama of a quilting bee. “Mr. Bartlett, I want to ask you if you understand the decision that’s been reached here on your behalf.”

Andrew’s voice was firm. “Yes, your honor, I talked about it with Ms. Wu last night.” He turned halfway around, gave a small nod to his parents, then came back to face the judge.

Johnson nodded. “And you understand, Mr. Bartlett, that by admitting this petition filed against you by the State of California that you in fact claim full responsibility for the murders of Michael Mooney and Laura Wright? And that immediately following this proceeding, you will begin serving a term at the California Youth Authority, and will remain in custody until your twenty-fifth birthday?”

Andrew hesitated for an instant and Wu, jumping in, spoke up for him. “Yes, your honor. Mr. Bartlett understands.”

But Johnson shook his head. “I’d like to hear it from him, Counselor. Mr. Bartlett?”

Andrew looked at Wu, then up to the judge. When he began the first time, he was almost inaudible, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I understand about the sentence. That’s what we decided I had to agree to.” Clearing his throat again, he went on. “But I’m not really comfortable . . .” He stopped, turned back to his parents again, came back around to Johnson. “But I can’t say that I killed anybody, because I didn’t.”

Wu had a sense of the world spinning before her. She reached out, put her hand on her client’s arm. “No, wait, Andrew!” Then, addressing the judge: “Your honor, if I may—”

But Johnson gaveled her to silence. He removed his glasses, squinted out over the podium. “No, Counselor, you may not, not for a minute anyway.” He pointed a finger at Andrew. “Mr. Bartlett, I want to hear you say it yourself one more time. You’re not admitting the petition?”

“Your honor.” Wu spoke up in a panic. She couldn’t let this happen. “I’d like to request a short recess.”

Over on her right, she heard Brandt close his binder with a sharp snap.

“Request denied,” Johnson said. “We just got here.” Back at Andrew. “Mr. Bartlett? Repeat your plea.”

This time Andrew’s voice was much more forceful. “I’m just saying that I didn’t kill anybody.”

Behind her, Wu could hear the Norths reacting with a muted enthusiasm. Needing to undo what Andrew had done, she turned to him, whispered urgently. “You can’t do this, Andrew. You’re looking at life in prison. Don’t you understand?”

The judge brought his gavel down again. “Ms. Wu, Mr. Brandt.” He motioned with his head. “Chambers.” And he was up in a swirl of black robes.

Johnson was waiting, facing them as they came through his door. No trace of anything avuncular softened his countenance as he reached around and closed the door behind them all. He came right to the point. “I don’t tolerate being trifled with in my courtroom, Ms. Wu. What is this supposed to be, some kind of publicity stunt? Or delaying tactic?”