The Second Chair

Brandt's work space was a reconverted closet that held his desk and chair, a bookshelf and nothing else. The door could only be closed because somebody had sawed several inches off the corner of the desk. One window, high up and tiny, provided neither light nor view. A bare lightbulb hung from a cord four feet above his desk.

Brandt was behind the desk, crammed amid his books and filing cabinets. The place was literally overflowing with binders, case files, periodicals. For a moment while Wu stood in the doorway, he didn't look up. When he finally did, in the first two seconds his face contorted through several iterations of arrangement- he was glad to see her; he wasn't sure why she was here; some kind of hope that they might get together again?

If it was that, Wu moved to quash it immediately. "Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. I was just up visiting my client and wanted to ask you if you thought I could get a little more time to plead him out."

Brandt's face instantly grew stern. "Why?"

Wu had decided upon a plausible explanation. "I'm having a slight problem with the parents. I doubt Boscacci would mind."

"He would. I talked to him just before the hearing yesterday and he was the soul of inflexibility."

"Really? That's fu

"Provided Andrew admits."

"Right. Which he will."

"Shouldn't that be 'has'?"

"Tomorrow. That's 'will.' Beyond that, I'm talking only a few days' grace."

"Grace?"

"Courtesy. Whatever word you want."

Brandt leveled his gaze at her. "The word I want is 'now,' Amy. Anything beyond now- meaning tomorrow at the hearing, first thing, he admits- anything else makes me nervous as hell."

"Why?"

"You're kidding, right?" He stood up abruptly, coming out from behind his desk. "Excuse me," he said, squeezing past her, looking both ways down the hallway.

"What are you doing?"

His voice was quiet yet urgent. "I'm making sure nobody's out here to hear us, that's what." He turned and faced her. "You ask me why I'm nervous if we get delayed? Do you remember anything about last night?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

He lowered his voice still further. "It means that when I walked into the Balboa last night and saw you sitting at the bar, you were a woman I had wanted to get to know for a long time. The case we were both handling was settled, so we wouldn't be squaring off in court anymore. We could do whatever we wanted. Now you're telling me it might not be settled? And you knew this last night? And still you let us go ahead?"

"It wasn't just me, if you remember, Jason."

"No, it wasn't. But you're the one who knew we might not be finished in court. If what happened with you and me gets out at all, and/or if this thing with Bartlett gets delayed, it's my ass. Don't you realize that? It's my job. And you knew it all along?"

The strength of Brandt's reaction caught Wu off guard. "No, but if I did, could you blame me, after how you treated me in court…"

He stared at her in shock. "I don't believe this. You're telling me you set me up on purpose? What's next? You blackmail me for your silence about us?"

"Come on, Jason. You're overreacting. It wasn't like that."

Brandt said aloud to himself, "I've got to call Boscacci. I'm out of this right now." Then he looked at her with a new flash of insight. "But if I do that, then you win, too, don't you? You get your delay. You knew this going in, didn't you? You've just been playing me."

"No, that's not true. I…"

But he wasn't going to be listening to any more excuses. In a fury, he put a finger to her face. "Don't you dare try and sell me on what's true or not, not after last night. You may have gotten me, okay, you win one. But that's the last time, I swear to God. The last fucking time."

He stepped back into his office and closed the door in her face.

8

Glitsky had meetings all morning.

The first was the bureau lieutenants' meeting, held in Department 19, a courtroom on the second floor of the Hall of Justice that happened to be dark for the day. Since there were thirty-two lieutenants within the Investigations Bureau and each was expected to present a short report on highlights in their respective bureaus since last week's meeting, this one tended to run long.

Glitsky sat up at the judge's bench, and after his initial remarks reiterating his stand in favor of quantifiable progress in police duties- arrests made, citations issued, investigations instigated, victim assistance and follow-up, and so on- for almost two full hours he listened and took notes on everything from the auto detail and home burglaries to homicide and hate crimes, from arson and the general work detail to bomb investigations and the gang task force, from narcotics and vice to sexual assault, domestic violence and psychiatric liaison.

All of this was numbing and tedious and, Glitsky suspected, not really necessary in the long run. He thought that within a few more months, he'd be able to let these meetings slide, once he had clearly delivered the message to his bureau chiefs that investigators needed to make arrests, take bad people off the street. That was the basic job. Patrolmen in uniform made the vast majority of arrests. Inspectors followed up to put the finishing touches on these cases. But the real inspectors' job was to solve cases. To assemble evidence and make arrests based on investigating crimes when no arrest at the scene was possible.

The new policy was showing signs of bearing some fruit, but nine of his bureaus had not made one arrest in the past week. There was still work to be done. Nevertheless, there had been a total of eighty-four arrests in that same period, up from seventy-eight the week before. This, he supposed, could be construed as progress, but mostly the cynical part of him believed it would turn out to be simply the manipulation of numbers, or cleaning out old, solved cases that they hadn't gotten around to filing yet. Speeding up the pipeline a little to rig the stats.

After the meeting, he stayed behind a moment with Lanier of homicide, passing along the Post-its with the names of Elizabeth Cary's brothers. Lanier might particularly want to have one of his inspectors on the case, Pat Belou or Lincoln Russell, check out Ted Reed, the crazy brother who lived down at Lake Elsinore. If he'd been in San Francisco last week, it might turn out to be something.

By ten-fifteen, he was up in Chief Batiste's office for a meeting of the Benefits Board, where he listened for another hour to the city's director of human resources talk in excruciating detail about the latest proposed improvements to the police department's pension and retirement plans, and its health and life insurance benefits. Like, what should be the deductible on sex-change operations? Like, should alcoholism automatically be presumed to be a job-related illness, entitling the officer to a full disability retirement for on-the-job injury?

At eleven-thirty, he was driven to the mayor's office. Smiling was a form of torture for Glitsky, but for most of another hour, that's all he did, while photographers took his picture with other local VIPs and the members of a Russian delegation here to explore business opportunities in the City by the Bay. As far as he could tell, there was no other reason for him to be present except that the mayor apparently believed that the Russians tended to be impressed by the presence of high-ranking, beribboned officers in uniform.

His driver, Sergeant Tony Paganucci, nagged him about getting some lunch. Wasn't he supposed to try and meet up with his wife and Clarence Jackman and some other folks at Lou the Greek's? But Glitsky had run out of time. He absolutely had to be back at the Hall of Justice for a one o'clock press conference, and that was in twenty-five minutes.