The Second Chair (32 page)

He turned around for a minute and happened to see something familiar in the woman standing on the corner down there. Squinting in the bright sun, he moved to the closest spot on the court for a better look. It was her, all right.

Uptight lawyers. He should have known.

“I don’t
see
people with whom I have a professional relationship.”

But still, he watched her. Even at this distance, she was a lot easier to look at than anything else he was likely to see today. All dressed up today, but yesterday with the jeans and sweater, he’d seen what she packed under that business suit.

Man.

The basketball slammed into the fence a foot in front of him, rattling the chain link, maybe one of the players noticing he didn’t have his eye on them, taking the opportunity to shake him up a little. He shot a glance at the court, everybody getting a kick out of making him jump.

He ignored them, looked back down for another glimpse of Wu. Still there.

Then suddenly, he saw Jason Brandt’s car—no mistaking it, that yup-pie piece of shit—pull up from around the corner, come to a stop in front of her. Cottrell watching as she steps back, talks into the passenger-ride window. The door opens, she gets in.

She doesn’t
see
people with whom she has a professional relationship, does she?

Cunt, he thought.

For the first several blocks, neither of them spoke. Finally, Brandt said, “So where’s your car?”

“Back at the office. I drove up this morning with Mr. Hardy, but he had a meeting. I told him I’d get a cab.”

“We don’t see too many cabs up here.”

“I noticed.”

They went another block in silence.

Brandt finally broke it. “So what did your boss want?”

“To meet Andrew. He’s coming on second chair.”

Brandt threw a look across the seat. “You okay with that?”

“We didn’t vote on it.” She forced a small laugh. “I haven’t exactly impressed him at every turn, you must admit.”

He didn’t comment.

After a minute, she said, “Anyway, I’ve been distracted.”

Again, he looked over. She was looking straight ahead, her big briefcase lying flat on her lap, her hand clasped and resting on it. “You might as well know that my dad died a few months ago. I guess I haven’t been myself.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You should have told me when . . .” The words stopped.

“Yeah. Well, it’s not the kind of thing you talk about when you’re getting picked up. Especially if you think it’s why you’re letting yourself get picked up.”

He let that thought hang in the air between them for a minute. “You could have told me,” he repeated.

“Maybe,” she said. “But I didn’t want to find out.”

“Find out what?”

“If you’d want to deal with baggage.”

“Yeah, I try to avoid that at all costs.”

“Me, too.”

“As you said, we’re the same.” After a moment, he reached out his hand across the seat. “Friends?” he said. “Tentatively.”

She gave it a second, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I guess so.”

They shook on it.

19

D
uring the previous administration, the preferred firing method for the DA’s office had been a pink slip on your chair while you were out at lunch, or even making a quick court appearance. Just so long as there was no direct confrontation or discussion. You’ve had your job for sixteen years and you’ve got three kids, two just starting college, and you go down to department 22 for fifteen minutes and come back and surprise! You’re an “at will” employee and now you’re fired. Thanks for the memories. The terminated tended to take this so badly that for a period of time the DA actually had an armed investigator posted outside the office in case somebody wanted to lodge a violent, personal protest.

Boscacci’s more straightforward management style in this regard was making it easier for Glitsky and Lanier. He had held exit interviews for every assistant district attorney he laid off under Jackman, and he’d filed the records of those interviews, as well as other personal data, alphabetically in his secretary’s credenza. This narrowed the list of truly disgruntled ex–assistant district attorneys down from seventeen to three, and Glitsky had assigned those three to the homicide inspectors Belou and Russell.

The other fourteen would be interviewed and otherwise checked out by the General Work officers, although hopes were not high that these interrogations would lead to a break in the case. The last of the Boscacci layoffs had been nearly a year ago. In a back booth under the windows at Lou the Greek’s, Glitsky was telling Marcel Lanier that he didn’t consider it likely that at this remove in time, someone would suddenly get mad enough to kill Allan for it. “ . . . but I think we’ve got to look there anyway. Eliminate the obvious, then move down the list.”

Lanier chewed at today’s special—pot-stickers cooked up in some kind of yogurt sauce with garlic and paprika over rice. “I’m not sure that these guys are even the most obvious anymore,” Lanier said. “Although yesterday they seemed like a good place to start. If nobody heard the shot, it probably was silenced. And if it was silenced, it was a pro.”

Glitsky sipped iced tea. “The lab says the Boscacci bullet has scuff marks that could be from a silencer. Not certain, but possible. And if it was a pro, I agree, we lose. But since that’s out of our control . . .”

For years, Lanier had been a homicide inspector under Glitsky’s supervision, and now they fell into an old and familiar routine. “It wasn’t a robbery,” Lanier said. “So it’s someone he knew. So it’s about motive.”

“Right. And we eliminate the family?”

“Yeah.”

“I agree. And no caseload to speak of. Just one murder, and that one kind of self-enclosed. He mostly assigned cases. That’s the job.”

“True. But he might’ve been riding herd on some actives. He was also pulling guys to trial who’d been waiting around in the system for a while. He was ramrod for that program.”

Lanier had a small notebook out and jotted. “That’s real,” he said.

Glitsky nodded. “Maybe we want to look at who’s coming up the pipeline. Somebody with mob connections—Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, regular Mafia. I’m not up on the latest. Do any one of them use suppressors more than the others?”

“Any of them would. Simple business.”

“All right. Speaking of business, what about the union stuff?”

Lanier forked some special, nodded. “I don’t see someone with the union getting so bent out of shape about the negotiations that he takes Allan out. He’s just watching Clarence’s back. He probably leaned toward giving the union a lot they wanted anyway.”

“Agreed. Not worth pursuing without some kind of tip.”

“Okay, who’s that leave? With motive, I mean.”

“Our professional? He’s getting paid. That’s motive.” Glitsky shook his head. “But we’re counting him out as hopeless. Somebody else.”

“The rest of the known universe?”

Tempted to smile and ruin his reputation, Glitsky sipped tea. He looked up as Lou himself stopped by the table. “Abe, you don’t like the special?”

Glitsky had taken one bite and realized he wasn’t that hungry. “It’s great, Lou, but I didn’t realize it had yogurt in it. I’m allergic.”

“Hey. Whyn’t you say so? I’ll have Chui whip you up something else. She’s got a whole tray of pot-stickers still hot back there on the steam table. She could throw some soy over ’em, vinegar, hot flakes. You’d swear you were in Chinatown.”

“Thanks, Lou, but me and Marcel are out the door in a minute. We’ve got a meeting. In fact, we were getting the check just now.”

“All right. I’ll run and ring it up.” He pointed to the untouched dish. “But I don’t like this. It happens again, you’ve got to let me know right away. And I’ll tell Chui. She uses yogurt all the time, gives her stuff that Greek taste everybody loves, but she’d cook up something special for you, Abe. I mean it.”

He went off to get the bill and Glitsky said, “The awful thing is, I think she would. So where were we? The known universe? How do you feel about checking out everybody he’s put away? As a prosecutor, I mean.”

“In like what, twenty-five years? When’s the last time you’ve heard anybody did that?”

“Not recently. But it’s a few less than the whole universe. And we’ve got the General Work people to look. They start with anybody’s who’s gotten out of the joint recently.”

“You mean somebody that Boscacci sent away?”

“Right.”

Lanier shook his head. “It’s not what they usually do, Abe.”

“I realize that.” Glitsky thought a second. “Okay, we put that on hold for a few days and instead check the gun shows.”

“For what?”

“For somebody selling silencers.” Glitsky cut off Lanier’s reply. “You never know. We might get lucky. At least we’re doing something. Maybe I’ll go do one of the shows myself.”

“You think somebody’s going to talk to you at one of those places?”

“Well, it’s either that or we start slogging through twenty-five years of old records and find every case Allan ever won. And they’ll talk to me at the gun shows. I won’t wear my uniform.”

“Yeah,” Lanier replied, “that’ll fool ’em.”

Glitsky’s Friday afternoon had originally been scheduled to be taken up with addressing the Pakistan Association of San Francisco at the Bay Area Band Shell Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park. When he got back to his office from lunch, he debated with himself for the better part of five minutes before placing a call to Frank Batiste.

He told the Chief that there had been a possible development in the Boscacci matter and he personally wanted to look into it. Perhaps, he suggested, one of the department’s senior press officers could stand in for him at the Pakistani gig and deliver some poignant remarks, which were certainly to be better received than his own in any event. On his way out the door to his office, Deputy Chief of Administration Bryce Jake Longoria called out and stopped him. Although he ran around as much as any deputy chief, Longoria was again behind his desk, again at his computer.

“I’m out the door, Bryce. What can I do for you?”

“Don’t let me slow you down. I was just wondering if you’d had any luck with your jury question.”

“My jury question?”

“The last time we talked? Somebody who’d been on a jury somewhere a hundred years ago?”

Glitsky closed his eyes, trying to bring it back. He shook his head, about to give up when the name came. “Elizabeth Cary,” he said.

“Maybe. I don’t know if you ever told me.”

“That was it. Shot at her doorstep last week.”

“Still nothing, though?”

“Not with her. Last time we talked, I recall, was about five minutes before LeShawn Brodie broke, and since then Boscacci. Those two washed Mrs. Cary clean out of my brainpan and she hasn’t had much opportunity to come back. But why? You got an idea?”

“No.” Longoria shook his head, lifted and dropped his shoulders. “It just seemed vaguely like real police work, so it got my attention.”

A chuckle tickled at Glitsky’s throat. “You, too, huh?”

Longoria waved a hand at his surroundings. “The desk,” he said. “You know.”

“I hear you.”

“So where are you off to?”

Glitsky took a step into the room. “Between us, Bryce, I’m cutting school. Checking out a gun show.”

“What for?”

“See if I can pick up a line on somebody selling suppressors illegally. Nobody heard the shot that killed Boscacci.”

Longoria held up a finger and turned to his computer, tapped a few keys. “Look at this first,” he said. “I may save you a trip.”

Glitsky, not particularly wanting to save himself a trip, crossed to the desk and leaned over it. “What am I looking at?”

“I just ran a search for ‘gun suppressor.’ You know how many hits I got?” He scrolled down to the bottom of the screen. “Five thousand eight hundred twenty-eight. And you’re going to a gun show?”

“Got to be quicker than checking all of those.”

“Plus, you’re not stuck in the office.”

“There is that.” Glitsky was stuck on the screen. “When did suppressors get legal?”

“Oh, they’re not,” Longoria replied with a breezy air. “All these listings, they clearly state that sale of suppressors is only permitted for government agencies and police departments.”

“Police departments? We don’t use ’em.”

“Yeah, we do. TAC has a couple. The tactical unit. You don’t know that?”

“I haven’t done much business with TAC.”

“Yeah, well, they’re on the roof of a building with hostages downstairs, they want to zap bad guys they meet on the way down without waking up the whole block. That’s legal, at least under federal law. But these websites. Check ’em out.”

Longoria scrolled through several screens. “Here. These journals on how to make your very own sweet little suppressor from common items in your home shop. ‘For information purposes only,’ of course, or ‘academic study.’ I’m sure no one has ever bought one of these books and actually made a silencer.”

“No,” Glitsky said. “That would be wrong.” But he’d already decided that he was going to do some old-fashioned footwork, outmoded though it was. He told Longoria good-bye, then at the door turned around. “You think of anything I can do about Elizabeth Cary, I’d love to hear.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

On any given weekend, gun shows are common in Northern California. Glitsky had checked the internet, then made a couple of calls, and discovered that this weekend would feature Gun & Doll shows in several communities—Santa Rosa, San Jose, Fremont, Sacramento and the San Francisco Cow Palace, which was actually in Brisbane, in San Mateo County. The more he thought about the idea—given that they weren’t going to waste time looking for a professional hit person—the more he liked it. The suppressor angle might actually give him a lead. And at least, as he’d told Longoria, he was away from his desk and the endless meetings on one of the first truly lovely days of the year.

In his hiking boots, Dockers and a camouflage blouse, he was far more comfortable than he would have been in uniform. Beyond that, he didn’t think he much resembled a cop—the camo actually worked to his advantage that way. On his way down to the Cow Palace, he finalized arrangements for his event number detail to hit their snitches and cover all the shows over the weekend, then report back to him on Monday. If everybody struck out, Glitsky might have them begin culling the internet suppliers for their mailing lists and customers. Even if he could get the not-automatic cooperation of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, it would be an enormous and tedious job, pretty much comparable to assembling the list of Boscacci’s convictions over the past twenty-odd years. Still, it was early afternoon and he was on the road. An added bonus was that he still had the services of his driver. Paganucci pulled the black Taurus up to the Cow Palace parking lot and Glitsky gave him two hours off.