The Second Chair (42 page)

This last fact, considering that he’d come very close to actually believing in Andrew’s innocence, was the most galling. If someone else had killed Mooney and Laura Wright, he had no idea who it might have been, or what reason they might have had. Perhaps the most frustrating element was that Hardy now believed that Juan Salarco—or, more precisely, Anna Salarco—had actually seen the murderer as he fled from the scene and turned to look back at the house.

But because of the promises of the police for some kind of intercession on his behalf with the INS—promises Hardy knew to be empty—Salarco couldn’t admit that he’d made a mistake on the identification. Maybe he didn’t even accept that fact himself. Maybe all Anglos looked pretty much the same to him, especially young ones wearing cowled sweatshirts.

He was just finishing up a telephone discussion with Kevin Brolin, the psychologist who’d treated Andrew for his anger problems when he’d been younger, and whom Hardy wanted to testify the next day on the second criterion, Andrew’s rehabilitation potential. Brolin had been called by the Norths before they’d even flown home after the suicide attempt, and Hardy had talked to him earlier that evening at the hospital right after his little contretemps with Hal and Linda. Brolin seemed knowledgeable and sympathetic and, more importantly, convinced that Andrew had resolved the problems with his temper—in Brolin’s opinion, he was not a candidate for physical violence. He’d learned to channel that negative energy into creative outlets, such as writing and acting. Brolin even understood that he’d stopped eating meat out of compassion for the suffering of food animals.

Hardy didn’t tell him about Andrew’s jailhouse conversion on the vegetarian issue. Nor was he particularly convinced by Brolin’s professional opinion about Andrew’s current commitment to a nonviolent life. In Hardy’s own experience, he’d known people who had directed their “negative energy” toward creative outlets, and who were still capable of heinous acts of violence. The two were not mutually exclusive. But if as a psychologist and expert witness—at a thousand dollars per court day—Brolin thought they were, and was willing to say so, that was all right with Hardy. It might not convince the judge, but Brolin would certainly make a damn strong argument that would be hard to refute, especially if Jason Brandt had not thought to present a rebuttal witness to testify to the opposite.

Hardy was still on the kitchen phone when the front doorbell rang. He checked the wall clock. It was 9:40. “Anybody want to get that?” he called out.

“In a second!” Vincent called from his room.

Rebecca gave her constant refrain. “I’m doing homework!”

The doorbell rang again. Hardy said, “Excuse me a minute, Doctor, would you?” Covering the mouthpiece. “Now!” he called out, “as in right now!”

“Beck!” Vincent yelled.

“I’m doing homework, I said.” Her final answer. She wasn’t budging.

“So am I! It’s not fair!” Hardy heard a slam from Vincent’s room—a book being thrown down in a fit of pique?—then a chair perhaps knocked over. Anger anger everywhere. His son went running by down the hallway. Hardy came back to the phone. “You work with children all day?” he asked. “How do you do it?”

“I’m a very, very old forty-five,” Brolin said.

From the front door. “Dad! Somebody for you.”

Covering the phone again. “Tell him I’ll be a minute.”

Hardy heard Vincent’s steps coming back up through the house, then passing through the kitchen. His put-upon fourteen-year-old son didn’t so much as favor him with a glance.

Hardy cut it off as quickly as he could with Brolin, told him he’d see him at the YGC the next morning and walked up through the dining room to the front of the house. No one waited in the living room and the front door was still closed. Was it possible, he wondered, that Vincent had left the caller to cool his heels outside and closed the door on him? Surely between him and Frannie, he thought, they’d covered, at least once, some of the basic etiquette involved in answering the goddamned front door?

But evidently not.

A shadow moved behind the glass and Hardy opened the door.

The young man looked familiar. Recently familiar, but Hardy couldn’t quite place him. “Mr. Hardy,” he said. Then, reading Hardy’s uncertainty: “Steven Randell, from Sutro?”

“Sure, sure. Sorry. Didn’t my son invite you in?”

“He said you’d just be a minute.”

Hardy sighed, backed up a step, opened the door all the way, summoned him inside and closed the door behind him. “You want to come in? Can I get you anything? Something hot to drink, maybe?”

“No, that’s okay, thanks.”

He went to the window seat. Neatly groomed and as tall as Hardy, with brown hair and a good complexion, closely shaved, he hailed from the opposite fashion camp as his costar Jeri. He wore tan cargo pants and a black leather coat over a blue work shirt. During the session they’d had earlier in the day at Sutro, he hadn’t volunteered much, his position being that he hadn’t known either Andrew or Laura very well. But if Andrew had killed Mr. Mooney, Steve hoped that he’d be punished for it. Hardy had given him his by now pro forma song and dance about Andrew’s innocence, but had gotten the impression that it had rolled off. But, obviously now, if he was here, something had stuck.

“You mind if I ask you how you knew where I live?” Hardy asked.

Randell shrugged at the no-brainer. “I had your phone number. I just got directions to here on the web.”

“You can do that?”

Another shrug. Had Hardy climbed the evolutionary ladder all the way up to Cro-Magnon? “Sure,” he said. “You can find anything on the web.”

Hardy wanted to ask him how he’d found this particular and unnerving bit of information, and if there was a way he could remove it from the public domain, but he guessed it would be impossible now. Besides, the young man hadn’t come here to talk about cyberspace.

“So what can I do for you, Steven?” he said.

He sat straight up, rather stiffly, his hands folded in his lap. The window seat was really more of a bench with cushions. There was nothing to lean back against, no real way to get comfortable. And now that they were down to the nub, Randell seemed suddenly reticent, even confused. “Um . . .” Wrestling with it.

Hardy helped him out. “Did something we talked about earlier come back to you?”

“Something like that.”

Hardy waited through another lengthy silence. In the street out front, a couple of cars passed, and from up on Geary came the wail of a siren. City noises. Finally: “Steven.”

“Yeah. I know.” He let out a heavy sigh, took an audible breath. “But before I tell you anything, I need you to promise me that it stays between us.”

Hardy narrowed his eyes, cocked his head. “Do you know who killed Mooney and Laura?”

“No. But I know something. I just don’t know what it might mean, if anything. I almost told you at the end of our talk today. And maybe I should have, but then Wagner would have known, too, and he might have felt like he had to go to my parents. Anyway, then tonight I couldn’t get it out of my mind, that I should have told you. I’m not even sure it matters, but there are things about it that definitely matter a lot to other people. And to me. Personal things. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I don’t mean to be dense, Steven. But you have my word that whatever it is, I’ll keep it between us. How’s that?”

Another sigh. “It just seemed like you really might believe that Andrew didn’t do any of this.”

Hardy finessed that admission, which was still just slightly too strong. “I believe that somebody else might have come to Mooney’s while Andrew was on his walk. If that’s true, I’m trying to find out who, or why, or both.”

“Okay. What if I told you . . . and this is the thing I was talking about, the secret. What if I told you that Mr. Mooney was gay?”

The perverse obviousness of it brought a lightness to Hardy’s head. He’d been standing by the fireplace, and now he crossed the room and sat down on the ottoman by his reading chair. “Then I’d say he did a good job of keeping it hidden.”

“Yes, he did. That was on purpose. Do you know his father?”

“I’ve met him. Yes.”

“Well, Mike loved him more . . . more than almost anything, I think. He couldn’t let him find out, his dad. It would have broken his heart. He couldn’t have dealt with it.”

“The dad, the Christian minister, couldn’t have dealt with it?”

“The Southern Baptist minister. Right.”

“How is that possible? I mean, this is San Francisco in the two thousands. Mooney’s dad must have seen hundreds of people come out.”

“Yeah, but not his own son. Not Michael. And he isn’t a San Francisco minister, putting together an AIDS quilt. He’s a nice enough man, I guess, but his church is down on the Peninsula, and his brand of preaching is, uh, more conservative. The sons and daughters of Gomorrah being turned into salt, and rightfully so. I’ve heard him.” Steve pitched his voice differently. “ ‘Homosexuality is always sin, and always a choice. It’s not a matter of genetics, as some would have us believe, but a degenerate lifestyle for those unfortunate people who can muster neither the strength nor the grace to reject it.’ Straight out of the fifties, huh? And that’s Michael’s dad. Still.”

But Michael’s dad or no, Hardy immediately saw the incalculable strategic value of this information for Andrew. If he could bring it out at the hearing—or the trial if it got to that point—then all he and Wu would have to do would be to keep their defendant from testifying, which was always the defense’s option. Meanwhile, the jury would naturally assume, especially in San Francisco, that Andrew and everyone else at Sutro knew that Mooney was gay. This would, in turn, eliminate the prosecution’s primary motive of jealousy.

It would also not only open up an alternative theory of the crime—the “soddit,” or “some other dude did it” defense—but also allow Hardy and Wu to question the original police investigation that had resulted in Andrew’s arrest. They certainly should have interviewed people from this aspect of Mooney’s life; a failure to even identify Mooney as gay must surely argue for a shoddily handled case from the outset. If Hardy could then get Salarco’s no gunshot testimony and even a hint of a hedge on the eyewitness identification, his client stood at least a chance of a hung jury, then maybe a plea on a lesser charge. This was very, very big news.

If it were in fact true.

If he could get it in front of a judge or a jury.

And, most importantly, if it wasn’t merely hearsay. “Steven,” Hardy said, “I’ve got to ask you this question, and I think I already know the answer, but in the eyes of the law there’s a big difference between someone
hearing about
a fact and someone
experiencing
that fact with their own senses. Did you and Mr. Mooney have a relationship?”

Steven needed to take a while with his answer and Hardy was content to let him. “Yes,” he finally said.

With that one word, Hardy’s entire view of Mike Mooney underwent a complete transformation. If he was in fact having sex with one of his students—male or female, Hardy didn’t care—then he was not the caring and sensitive soul most people took him for. He was a predator. “Would you be willing to testify to that in court?” he asked.

But Hardy couldn’t let his reaction slow him down. This was critical information, and though the bare fact of it filled him with outrage toward Mooney, he had no choice but to find a way to use it.

Hardy couldn’t imagine why, but the question actually seemed to both surprise and frighten him. He thought another moment, then shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I mean, not unless it’s your very last chance to save Andrew by itself, and I don’t see how it could get to be that. That’s why I asked you to promise before I told you.”

“Okay, but I’ve still got the same question. Why not?”

Randell met his gaze with a steady one of his own. “Are you bullshitting me?”

“No. What would I be bullshitting you about?”

“Why I won’t testify.” He choked off a bitter laugh. “Because I’m not out, Mr. Hardy, I’m not out.”

“Okay.”

“And I’m not going to be out while I’m still at Sutro. There’s no way.”

Hardy was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “Would it be that bad? I always thought if you were gay, this was the town to be in.”

“Maybe for older guys, but don’t be a gay teenager. You’ll get slaughtered. You want to hear a story?”

“Sure.”

“I had this friend, Tony Hollis, you can look him up. He came out last year and got beaten up by cruisers in Noe Valley four times in six months, whenever any prowling group of teenage straights got bored. Then I guess Tony got bored with that and took a bottle of pills.” He took a minute collecting himself. “So, no, I’m not saying anything in public. And you promised you wouldn’t, either. If you do, I’ll deny it. And that goes for Mooney, too.”

“What do you mean, it goes for Mooney, too?”

“You promised you wouldn’t tell about him.”

“Yes, but that was . . .” Hardy paused. “I’m not sure I understand why that is so important now, after he’s dead.”

“For the same reason it was while he was alive. He didn’t want his father to know. It was, like, the most important thing to him. He lived this whole secret life to keep the truth from his old man. If he didn’t want to cause him that pain, how am I supposed to let it happen? I can’t do it. When you were talking to me today, you said if I knew anything, I should come forward and do the right thing. Well, I’ve come forward, but letting you tell his father about Mike wouldn’t be right at all.”

“So then maybe you can tell me how am I supposed to use this information? If I can’t let it come out.”

“I don’t know. That’s not my problem.” He stood up, a good kid awkward with playing the heavy, and now suddenly anxious to get away from what he’d already done. “Look, I’m sorry, I really am, but I just thought it was important that I tell you, so you’d know what you were really dealing with.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Steven. I really do appreciate that, but . . .”

The young man cut him off. “But what you do with it is up to you.”