The Second Chair (36 page)

When the story ended, with Glitsky ducking into his car and making a clean getaway, he waited a minute for Hardy to say something. When he didn’t, Glitsky did. “I said, is that cool or what?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? That’s your complete response to one of the great moments in my career?”

“Right,” Hardy said. Then, with a small show of interest: “Sorry, Abe. I missed the end of it. What were you saying?”

As soon as he hung up, Hardy grabbed his telephone book and looked up Juan Salarco’s number, which was listed. The phone rang four times, then he heard a message in Spanish.

“Juan,”
he said at the beep.
“Soy Dismas Hardy, abogado de Andrew Bartlett. Importante, por favor.”
And he left his number in both English and Spanish.

He’d stopped listening to Glitsky about halfway through the saga, when it occurred to him that maybe his friend had inadvertently supplied him with what had been nagging him about Salarco’s testimony all along. It was a small enough point, perhaps, but it could prove important.

He’d already listened to the Salarco tape several times all the way through, but to be sure now he got his briefcase, put it on the dining table and took out his notes and the tape. With some chagrin, he realized he’d even written a comment about street noise, and whether the gunshot could have been heard over it. But he’d never followed up. Now he put in the tape and started running the interview through another time. This time, knowing what he was listening for, it was even less ambiguous.

Salarco’s voice.
“ . . . and turn on the TV, real quiet, but then there is this . . . this scream, the girl, and then a . . . a bump. You could feel it up here, like something dropped. The house shook. Then right after, a crash, the sound of a crash, glass breaking. And a few seconds later, suddenly
boom
again, the house shakes another time, somebody slamming the front door under us.”

Stoked up now, Hardy ran it back, played it yet again.

A bump.
“You could feel it up here, like something dropped.”

A crash.
“ . . . the sound of a crash, glass breaking.”

Boom again.
“ . . . somebody slamming the front door under us.”

A bump, a crash, a boom. But no gunshot.

Paper-thin walls, where even the sounds of Andrew’s and Laura’s rehearsals could wake the baby upstairs, and yet Salarco did not hear, or did not comment upon, the explosive percussion of two 9mm automatic rounds fired probably within eight feet of him? Could it have been possible not to hear them?

The telephone rang, and Hardy leapt to it, perhaps Salarco getting back to him already, pulling a break on this case at last.

“Dad.” Something wrong with the voice. Something wrong altogether.

“Vin. What’s the matter?”

“Um, it’s not bad. I mean, everybody’s alive . . .”

“Jesus Christ, Vin, what?”

“It’s Mom. She didn’t want you to worry, but . . .

“Vin. What about her? What’s happened?”

“She had an accident. Somebody hit her.”

“In the car?”

“No, on the slope. Skiing.”

“Is she okay? Where is she now? Can I talk to her?”

“She says she’ll be okay, you know? You’re not supposed to worry. But you can’t talk to her. They had her on a backboard to the ambulance and now they’ve got her in the emergency room and the Beck’s waiting outside in case . . . Anyway, she said I ought to call you.”

“Where are you?”

“The hospital in Truckee. By the emergency room.”

“I’m on my way up. I’m on my cellphone the whole way.”

“Okay. And, Dad?”

“Yeah, bud?”

“Hurry, huh?”

Frannie was going to be okay. As Vinnie had said, nobody was going to die. But okay was a relative thing.

They let him take her home on Sunday, but as soon as she got there, Hardy was to make sure she got in bed and stayed there until her local doctor told her she could get up. She’d definitely sustained a concussion. It was very much out of character for Frannie, who didn’t like to acknowledge physical pain, but she didn’t argue with him at all. She’d be wearing a neck brace and sporting an arm sling for at least six weeks. After that they’d do some more tests and have a clearer picture of what, if any, further damage had been done to her spine and/or neck. She’d also cracked two ribs on her left side and sustained a Ping-Pong-ball fracture of the left shoulder socket in the course of dislocating it.

By the time he had fed her some soup and settled her into bed, it was full dusk, but the Beck still hadn’t made it home. She’d been driving his hot little sports car, following close, but they’d lost sight of her in the traffic just outside Sacramento, and now they’d been home for almost an hour and still no sign of her.

For dinner, Hardy and Vincent cooked up two cans of corned beef hash—the black pan again, but without any romance—and quartered a head of iceberg lettuce with a mayo and ketchup thousand island poured over it. They amused themselves, and kept the unspoken fear about the Beck at bay by inventing tortures for the person who’d run into Frannie on the slopes, who of course didn’t even slow down and had never been caught.

Finally, they heard the front door. Hardy put down his fork and prepared himself not to speak harshly. He’d almost been unable to swallow for the second half of his meal, as the minutes had passed. His beautiful, smart, clever seventeen-year-old was never late, and if anything had happened to her, too . . .

She stood at the end of the dining room. “I’m so sorry, Dad. I got a flat tire in Sacramento, and you had both cellphones with you, and I wasn’t anywhere near a gas station. And then I couldn’t figure out where they put the spare . . .”

“It’s under the rug in the trunk,” Vincent said.

“Thanks, dear brother, I know that now. And I even know how to change a flat tire. But, Dad, look, I pulled over and some guy stopped and . . . I mean, an older guy, and he helped me, but then he asked for my number, and I got . . . Anyway, I didn’t think . . . I thought if he followed me . . .”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Hardy held up a hand. “Did he follow you?”

“No. I don’t think so. But I was afraid when I was parking . . .”

He stopped her again. “Are you okay now? Is the car okay? Good. Are you hungry? Sit down, I’ll make you something.” He stood up, put his arms around her, kissed the side of her face, the top of her hair. He kept his arms around her, tight around her back. “I love you. Everything’s all right. Your mother’s upstairs sleeping. Thanks for driving my car down. I’m sorry about the flat tire. They happen.”

They separated and she looked up at him. Getting her bravery together. “But, Dad,” she said, suddenly breaking a smile, “what a great car!”

Finally, finally, the kids both relatively calmed and catching up on their weekend’s homework, he got to the Sunday paper. While they’d been gone, things had developed rapidly in the double homicides, and by this morning, “Executioner Stalks City Streets” was the banner headline. Ballistics had confirmed that both victims in the Friday night shootings had in fact been shot by the same weapon. Because of the nature of the attacks—the execution-style, point-blank shot to the heart—Marcel Lanier of homicide had told some reporters that he was afraid that what we had here was some type of executioner, and judging by the headline, the idiotic name looked like it was going to stick.

Hardy never even looked at his answering machine until the kids were asleep. He hadn’t had a drop to drink since at least Thursday night, and was somewhat surprised to see that he hadn’t missed it a bit. Still, now he thought he could use a beer. He opened a Sierra Nevada and, turning off the overhead, finally noticed the blinking light on the far end of the kitchen counter.

Salarco, getting back to him.

It was 11:15 on a Sunday night. The gardener undoubtedly got up at or near daybreak. Hardy wouldn’t be doing himself or Salarco any favors by calling back this late.

For a minute, he cursed himself for all he’d absolutely had to do this weekend that he’d left unaccomplished. His client’s hearing was now only two days away, and he’d made no progress of any kind. It had been through no fault of his own, true, but he knew that other lawyers might have found a way to proceed on the case even through two such difficult days. They might have called in partners or associates, hired private investigators, even pled hardship to the judge. He might have thought to do something, but all he’d been able to think of was the suffering of his wife, the worries of his children, the needs of his family.

“So sue me,” he said aloud. Put down his unfinished beer. Went up to get some rest.

22

H
ardy got the phone before it finished its first ring. Next to him, Frannie moaned but did not wake up. It seemed to be sometime in the middle of the night, pitch out the window.

“Hello.” His sleep-edged voice cracked. He cleared his throat and said it again. “Hello.”

The voice was urgent, yet controlled, the words hastily strung together. “Sorry to wake you up, sir. It’s Amy. I just got a call from the YGC. Andrew’s tried to kill himself.”

“Give me a second.” He was up, moving to the bathroom, where he closed the door behind him and turned on the light, blinking in the glare. “What do you mean, tried? Is he alive? What happened?”

“All I know is they called me about ten minutes ago. They said he tried to hang himself in his cell, but the guard heard something and got to him in time to cut him down. Or maybe the shirt he used ripped, it wasn’t clear. It doesn’t matter.”

“So where is he now?”

“They were bringing him to SFGH.” San Francisco General Hospital. “I’m on my way down now.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

Dressed now in the same clothes he’d been wearing yesterday, and Saturday before that, down in the kitchen, he stopped to write a note to Rebecca and Vincent, telling them where he was going. They’d been getting themselves ready for school, making their own breakfasts, their bag lunches, for some time now. Beyond that, Hardy didn’t know the Monday morning routine, but he was confident they could work it out themselves. He reminded them to check on their mother upstairs, make sure she got some food and liquid and her pain medication. He’d be back home, hopefully, by mid-morning if he could. Again, he’d be on his cellphone. Call with any questions or problems.

He grabbed his briefcase, glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. 4:30.

Outside, he paused in thin fog at the sidewalk just outside his gate, realizing that he didn’t know where Rebecca had parked his car last night. Well, fortunately they had two of them. Now if he could only remember where he’d parked the 4Runner. After a minute’s reflection, it came to him and he turned up toward Clement. Half-jogging now, he covered the two blocks down to Thirty-second, then turned right—the car was about midway down the block, under a burned-out streetlight.

The front seat was dew-drenched and cold. Inside the car, in fact, it seemed exceptionally cold, but the reason for it didn’t really register until he turned to look over his shoulder as he put it in reverse so he could pull out. The backseat window on the passenger side wasn’t there anymore. Neither, he suddenly realized, were the skis they’d left the night before.

Now in a flash, his actions last night came back to him. Double parked in the street right out front of his house, he and Vincent had helped get Frannie inside. Then he’d gone on the daily search for a parking place, finding this spot a couple of blocks away—not too bad, considering. In his rush to get back to his wife, he’d locked up, of course, but hadn’t unpacked this car, thinking to return soon with his son. But then the Beck hadn’t shown up, and . . .

Knowing what he’d find, he got back out of the car and walked around to where the broken glass covered the sidewalk, crunching under his feet. He opened the door and peered over the backseat into the storage area in the back and verified that they’d not only taken the skis, but the poles and boots and luggage bag they used for the rest of their stuff—gloves, goggles, extra clothes, everything. The deck was bare, cleaned out.

Sick at the world, he got back in behind the wheel, started the engine, put on his lights and pulled out into the still-dark street.

Wu wore a dark blue jogging suit and tennis shoes, a black and orange Giants warm-up jacket, no makeup. Her hair was back in a ponytail. Hardy thought she could have passed for about Andrew’s age. “ . . . because it’s my fault, that’s why,” she was saying.

“How could it be your fault?” Hardy had had enough of hospitals over the weekend with Frannie to never want to see one again, and yet here he was now, outside the emergency room at SFGH, aptly nicknamed the San Francisco Gun & Rifle Club by the law community. He and Wu sat on red molded-plastic chairs and he was drinking vending machine coffee from a paper cup.

“I spent almost all day yesterday with him, going over the criteria, ways we might be able to beat them. It wasn’t too heartening. By the time I left, he was pretty down.”

“Did you tell him about our plan to call witnesses on the crime itself?”

She nodded. “Sure, but by that time we’re on number five. He figured we couldn’t win on any of the first four, either, not after his short story got out. So he was going up, that was his opinion. We couldn’t do anything to stop that.” She hung her head wearily, came back up to Hardy. “I keep thinking if only I wouldn’t have gone in to talk to him, it wouldn’t have come to this. But what was I supposed to do? Who else except Andrew could have . . . ?”

A young Asian woman in bloodstained blue scrubs and a stethoscope was approaching them. Wu stopped talking and they both stood up.

“The officer who brought him in told me you were with the hanging victim,” she said. “He’s going to have trouble talking for a while, and he’ll be in some discomfort, but fortunately whatever he used—evidently his shirt—couldn’t hold him and the fall didn’t break his neck. He’s going to live. The officers want to take him back to the YGC, but I told him we’re going to hold him here for observation for at least a day.”