The Second Chair (38 page)

She rolled her eyes, an actress all right. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If you’re Andrew’s lawyer and you’re any good, you’re trying to get him off, whether it’s the truth or not. So give me a break, all right? And that night? I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t there.”

“Okay,” Hardy said. “Thanks for coming down, then.” Dismissing her. Two could play at that game.

She threw a confused glance first to Hardy, then at Wagner. “That’s it?”

Hardy, stonewalling, shrugged. “You obviously don’t want to talk about it. I want to help Andrew and I’m sure there are other students here at Sutro who feel the same way I do. So why waste each other’s time. Sorry to have interrupted your class.”

She shifted her weight, hip cocked. “Who said I didn’t want to help Andrew?”

Hardy, giving her nothing, looked up from scribbling on his legal pad as though surprised she was still there. “I got that impression. It’s not a problem. Thanks again.” He went back to his notes, spoke to Wagner. “Let’s try Steve Randell.”

“Wait a minute! Steve doesn’t know anything either.”

Patiently, Hardy said, “Well, if that’s true, I’m sure he’ll let us know.”

“What could he tell you? He wasn’t there either.”

“I don’t know, Jeri. What do you know, say, about Laura?”

“You mean she and Mooney?”

“We can start with that, sure.”

“Well, the main thing, they didn’t have anything going. Sexually.”

“But Andrew thought they did?”

“Maybe. I mean, yeah, sure, the first couple weeks of rehearsal, Laura got a crush on him. So did I, you want to know the truth. He was just so there, you know?”

“This is Mr. Mooney now?” Hardy ventured an encouraging smile. “Just keeping the players straight. Mr. Mooney was so there, you said. You want to talk about that?”

A sigh. “Have you met Laura’s parents?”

“No. They wouldn’t see me.”

“There you go. They wouldn’t see her much either. I’m going to sit down.” She folded herself down onto the floor. “The thing about Mike—Mr. Mooney—is there was no . . . like barrier, you know. I mean, at school he was a teacher and all, but when you got acting, you were with him. Just completely equal. He’d get inside your space and you’d just want to stay there. It was just total acceptance.”

“Of what, though, exactly, if you can say?”

She paused, thinking. “Of who you are, of what you were doing.”

“And Laura? How did she react to that?”

“What do you think? Like a desert to water. She bloomed, man. Everybody did.”

“And this is when Andrew became so jealous?”

Jeri didn’t answer right away. “Okay,” she finally said, “let’s get this part straight. At first, yeah, Andrew kind of freaked. But you’ve got to remember that this was like in November or something, four months before the shootings happened. Four months. You know how long that is? That’s half the school year.”

“All right. But you said Andrew freaked? What do you mean by that?”

“First, though, you had to know Laura.”

“Were you and she friends?”

“Like, best.” On the floor with her legs crossed, Jeri bent over at the waist, stretching, came back up. The movement seemed unconscious, but it bought her some time to get her emotions in check. “You know she was seriously depressed?”

“No. I hadn’t heard that.”

“That’s the key, though. She’d been in therapy forever. She tried to kill herself two years ago. Did you know that?”

Hardy and Wagner exchanged glances, and Wagner gave a small nod, acknowledging it.

“Do you know why?” Hardy asked.

“A million reasons. The world, you know? But mostly the home scene sucked.”

“What sucked about it?”

“Basically, clueless parents. They’re heavily into the social thing here in town, you know? The Wrights? Wright-Way Components? Anyway, she had this whole wing of her house that was all hers? So she comes home from school, goes to her room and gets loaded, listens to all, like, you know, metal and death music.”

“Like who?”

Jeri shook her head. “You wouldn’t know them. They’re not playing for guys like you. Let’s just say the music’s dark. So anyway, she’s popping valiums and ludes and anything else she can get her hands on, but nobody notices. I mean, her parents see her every day, right? And Laura’s fine, she’s pulling A’s and B’s. And Mom and Dad are all, ‘Whatever, as long as you don’t bother me, ’cause I’ve got a party.’ You know? Same as Andrew.”

“You mean with the drugs, too?”

“No. Andrew’s uptight about drugs, but the home thing. Gone parents. That’s how they connected.”

Hardy found himself working the fictional angle again—the sister in “Perfect Killer” hadn’t been based on Andrew’s sister, Alicia, but on his girlfriend Laura.
He made it up.

Next, wondering if the Wrights had discovered their daughter’s pregnancy and, because of the rumors about Mooney’s promiscuity, attributed it to him. And what they might have been tempted to do about that. He scratched a note, came back to Jeri. “So how does all this relate to Mr. Mooney?” he asked.

She scrunched her face puzzling it out. Hesitantly, the words started to come. “I guess, I think Laura needed somebody to notice she was alive. Maybe Andrew needed the same thing. That was kind of the baseline, you see?”

Hardy didn’t exactly, but wanted to keep her talking, so he nodded.

“Okay, so you’ve got two needy kids—Andrew and Laura—hanging on to each other, right? Then, all the sudden really, one of them wakes up. Now she doesn’t just need anymore. Suddenly, she’s . . . I don’t know if happy is the word, maybe . . .
validated.
Mike—Mr. Mooney—makes her feel that way, all on her own, without Andrew. If you ask me, that’s what Andrew freaked about. Laura just had this new confidence and went flying away. Not with Mike, by herself. But Mike had made it happen, and Andrew didn’t know how to handle it.”

“So how’d they get back together?” Hardy asked.

“That’s what’s funny. The same thing, I think, happened to Andrew. Mike really thought Andrew was a great actor. I mean, he gave him the lead. And I think Andrew finally just got it. He’d been stupid and he apologized. So next time he and Laura got together, it was . . . I don’t know . . . it seemed like it was on a different plane, if that makes any sense.”

“So you’re saying you don’t think Andrew was jealous of Mr. Mooney anymore, at least not by the time the shootings happened?”

“No way. He just wasn’t. I knew them as well as I know anybody. They were tight.”

“But she didn’t tell him she was pregnant? Did you know that she was?”

Jeri glanced down to the floor. “Yeah. But she was getting an abortion. She didn’t want to screw things up with Andrew again by getting him involved in all that. It would be better if he just never knew. That’s why she was staying later with Mike those nights, getting all that worked out. He was going to help with the arrangements. She sure couldn’t go to her parents.”

“All right. But what if Andrew found out about the baby and wanted to keep it? Might they have fought about that?”

“I doubt it. And so then because he wants the baby to live, he kills it? I don’t think so. And while we’re at it, Andrew didn’t shoot Laura, either. Or Mike. There’s no way. That’s just not who he is.”

Hardy leaned forward. “Then do you have any idea at all who might have?”

“This is going to sound weird, I know,” she said, her dark eyes shining now, “but I don’t think it could have been anybody who knew either of them.” A tear track, black with kohl, coursed her cheek. “They were too great,” she said.

24

F
irst thing that Monday morning, Glitsky had put out the word with Marcel Lanier that he would like to see the field notes from the weekend work of his task force investigators on the Boscacci investigation. Because of the Twin Peaks killings on Friday night, Lanier himself, as head of homicide, had been otherwise employed and had not been able to participate, but Pat Belou, Lincoln Russell and the General Work inspectors had covered all of the gun shows in the Bay Area that weekend except the one in Fremont. Maybe because these San Francisco cops didn’t have reliable snitches in some of the outlying counties, nobody came back with anything remotely resembling Glitsky’s phone book from Mr. Ewing’s truck.

Frustrated by the lack of data, Glitsky still believed he was on to the only possible lead, albeit a remote one, to Boscacci’s murder. So before he ran out to his 8:00
A
.
M
. chiefs’ meeting, he called the ATF liaison for San Francisco, got a recorded message and left one of his own. He gave a Xerox copy of Ewing’s phone book to the guys from General Work and told them to get names and addresses for everyone in the book from the phone company’s reverse listings. He wanted them by the time the ATF got back to him so that he’d have something to trade—the names and addresses of known suppressor buyers—in exchange for the ATF’s cooperation in supplying still other, much larger lists of similar buyers. He had the personnel and the budget, for once, and he was looking for the nexus, if any, of suppressor buyers and people who might have had dealings with Allan Boscacci.

After chiefs’, he met with the mayor’s representative, Celia Bonham, at City Hall, to discuss some jurisdictional issues between the SFPD and the officers and administrators of Homeland Security. After that, Paganucci drove him halfway home, out to Fillmore, to talk to the new executive director of the African-American Art & Culture Complex about some mutual impact issues, such as the use of the city’s finest as private security for the complex at the city’s expense. Back at the Hall of Justice, he fielded questions from reporters on all three of the major events currently transpiring in his domain—the handling of the LeShawn Brodie matter, Allan Boscacci’s murder (which some reporter had now called an assassination) and the double homicides of the Executioner on Friday night. Since he had nothing good or even mildly productive to say about any of these, it was a dispiriting news conference. Glitsky couldn’t seem to get much of a spin going about the fact that between the chiefs, the homicide detail and his own special event number task force, he had nothing to show, and very little to say, about crime in the city within the past six days.

He finally checked into his office. The General Work guys had done a good job while he’d been going to meetings, and they’d compiled a neatly typed name and address list from the Ewing phone numbers, which now lay under a stapler on his desk. For lunch, he washed two rice cakes down with a Diet Coke. When his receptionist buzzed to tell him that two ATF agents were here, he felt reasonably prepared.

But that didn’t last long.

The two of them—Aitkin and Drew—struck Glitksy as having come straight not from their offices but from the street, perhaps a bust. Both still wore their black field jackets with the oversized initials “ATF” across the back; both were packing in obvious, bulging shoulder holsters. Drew made the introductions for both of them, and they sat without any fanfare in the chairs in front of Glitsky’s desk.

Glitsky had planned to open the discussion by expressing his appreciation that they’d come down on such short notice and so on, but Drew barely gave him the chance before he interrupted. “We just wondered, sir,” he began in a terse tone, “if you’re familiar with the joint task force we’ve had working with local officers in each county and through which we’re all supposed to coordinate our activities?”

“Sure,” Glitsky said. “I called Sergeant Trona last Friday and he told me he could get me hooked up with one of your agents by early next week, which is now. I’m heading up an event number force on this Allan Boscacci homicide. I didn’t have that kind of time.” He reached for his list. “But I think you’ll be pleased with my results.”

Aitkin, who so far hadn’t said a word, came forward and took the sheet of paper. Drew glanced over at it without much show of interest. “And these are what?” he asked.

“Names and addresses of people who’ve bought suppressors illegally from a man named James Martin Ewing out of the Cow Palace. Or at least that’s where he was working out of last Friday.”

“How did you get to him?” Drew asked. “Ewing?”

“I had a snitch. It was easier than I thought it should be.”

Finally Aitkin spoke, turning to Drew. “Imagine that.”

“I beg your pardon.” Glitsky didn’t much appreciate the tone. “Do you gentlemen have some kind of a problem?”

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid we do.” Drew sat back, linked his hands over his belt.

Aitkin had carried in with him a flat leather briefcase and now he opened it on his lap and withdrew a photograph, which he handed over to his partner. Drew, in turn, handed it to Glitsky. “I’d like to ask you, sir, if this looks familiar to you.”

The picture was of him. The photo was taken last Friday, no doubt from the camera Ewing had concealed somewhere inside his van. “Ewing is your snitch,” he said.

Drew nodded. “Didn’t you wonder why it was so easy getting connected with him? You got a guy looking at twenty years if he gets caught at this stuff and you drop one name to a more or less random dealer at a gun show and you’re talking to him in fifteen minutes? Any warning bells go off for you?”

“I thought I was having a lucky day.”

The two agents’ heads turned, briefly, to each other. Drew came back at Glitsky. “So what are you looking for?”

“Background. I need to know if any of these guys are connected to Boscacci.” He pointed to his list. “It’s long odds, but we’re not working with much.”

The problems of any local police department were of no concern to the ATF. “We’ve busted two-thirds of Ewing’s people already,” Drew said. “The others we’re watching to see who they hang with, how they hook up. You know the drill, which is why we’re asking you not to pursue . . . this any further.”

Glitsky passed the photo back to Drew. His stomach was doing a mariachi dance and he put a hand over it. “I’d still be interested in getting some background on anyone who has bought suppressors, see if we can get a match.”

Drew and Aitkin exchanged a glance and nodded. “We can provide that,” Drew said. “Probably be a couple of days.”