The Second Chair

So reluctantly he'd accepted the new job, believing this meant that his time in homicide, the work he had always loved the best, was behind him forever. But now here he was, less than a year after his promotion, sitting with his feet up in his old office, discussing a particularly baffling murder case with Lieutenant Lanier. Who woulda thunk? But he'd take it.

A middle-aged, happily married, slightly overweight white housewife named Elizabeth Cary had been shot at her front door about a week before. To date, inspectors had found no clues as to who had killed her, or why. "And you sweated the husband hard?" Glitsky asked. "Wasn't his alibi soft?"

"Robert. Yeah," Lanier said. "He says he was driving home. He's the one called nine one one. But Pat Belou- you know her? She's new, but good. Anyway, she had him in there"- the interrogation room on the other side of the homicide detail-"six hours last Thursday, then we did him again four hours the next day, Russell in with her this time doing good cop/bad cop." He shook his head. "Nothin', Abe. If he did it, he's good. Belou and Russell both say they couldn't break him. Plus, no sign of another girlfriend on the side. The guy's not exactly Casanova. Bald, fat, old."

"How old?"

"Sixty. She was fifty."

Glitsky shrugged. "Bald fat old guys can get girlfriends, Marcel."

"Not as often as you think, Abe. And not Robert, I promise. They were redoing their wedding vows for their twenty-fifth a

"Doesn't mean they couldn't have had a fight."

"About what?"

"I don't know. Maybe they couldn't agree on the guest list and he really wanted this old friend of his to come, but she hated him- the friend- so he had to kill her." Glitsky scratched his cheek. "All right, maybe not. So who else could it have been? One of the kids?"

"I don't think so. They're all wrecked. I've talked to all three of them myself. Nobody's that good an actor, especially the young one, Carlene. I think she's eleven. Besides, they alibi each other- all watching some action video in the back of the house. Never even heard the shot. Must have thought it was part of the movie. Plus, finally," he sighed, "no motive in the whole world. They loved her. I really think they did. You should have seen them. They're all just completely fucked up around this. Excuse me the French."

Glitsky waved off the apology. He disliked profanity, but he'd heard all the words before and at the moment his mind was taken up with the case. "What about her friends?"

"She's got a regular book club and this group of other mothers from the neighborhood that meet every week or so, but we've talked to every one of them. All shocked. Stu

Lanier had reconfigured the office pretty much back to the way it had been when it had been Glitsky's. One desk took up most of the center of the room and he sat behind it, with Glitsky across from him, his feet up, his fingers templed in front of his mouth.

"I went to the funeral on Saturday, Abe," he continued. "Huge crowd. Everybody loved this woman."

"Somebody didn't."

Lanier conceded the point. "Well, whoever it was did it right. Took the gun with him, touched nothing. One shot, point-blank to the heart."

"You checking phone records?" Glitsky asked. "Maybe she had a boyfriend?"

"We're looking."

"Money?"

Lanier spread his hands. "Not a problem. She was frugal. Robert makes enough that they're okay. They went on vacation every year. Houseboat on Shasta."

Glitsky brought his feet to the floor. "So your absolutely typical average American housewife answers the door on a Tuesday evening and somebody shoots her for no reason?"

"Right. That's what we got."

"It's unlikely."

"Agreed." Lanier came forward. "Look, Abe, if you're not so subtly hinting that you'd like to talk to some of the players here yourself, I would invite any and all input. Belou and Russell are stumped and have other cases with better chances of getting solved. So if you want to jump in on this, have at it."

Glitsky was standing. "If I get the time, I might like to have a word with the husband."

"Knock yourself out," Lanier said.

To avoid the gauntlet of Sixth Street south of Mission- perhaps the city's most blighted stretch of asphalt and hopelessness- Dismas Hardy chose to drive the ten blocks or so from his Sutter Street office to the Hall of Justice. Only eighteen months before, his ex-partner David Freeman had been mugged and killed when he chose to walk home from the office one night rather than drive. Freeman's attackers hadn't come from the ranks of miscreants and drug-addled denizens of Sixth Street, true, but the old man's death had brought home to Hardy in a visceral way the literal danger of the streets. You entered certain areas at your own risk, and the greater part of valor was avoiding them if at all possible.

As he crossed Mission today in his flashy new, silver Honda S2000 convertible, on his way to what was sure to be a controversial meeting, his thoughts, as they did with an exhausting regularity, went back to the events surrounding Freeman's death- events that had been the proximate cause of another, far more profound, change in Hardy and several of his closest friends.

For the attack that killed David had been the penultimate escalation in a pattern of violence that had begun with the murder of a pawnshop owner named Sam Silverman, and continued through the deaths of two policemen, then to an attempt on Hardy's own life. When he and his best friend, Glitsky, learned that a man named Wade Panos was behind this vendetta, they had of course taken their suspicions to the proper authorities- the DA, the police, the FBI. But Panos owned a private security force sanctioned by the city, and the lieutenant in charge of homicide turned out to be on Panos's payroll as well. Hardy's and Glitsky's accusations fell on deaf ears, and before they could take it to the next level of legitimate authority, they had both received threats to the lives of their families.

To protect themselves and their loved ones, out of time and frustrated by the law they'd both sworn to uphold, the two of them- along with Hardy's brother-in-law Moses McGuire, his partner Gina Roake, and his client John Holiday- found themselves forced into a shoot-out with Panos's men at a deserted pier near the abandoned waterfront. In a brief but furious gunfight, in pure self-defense, they had killed four of Panos's men, including Lieutenant Barry Gerson, and had lost one of their own, John Holiday.

The four survivors- Hardy, Glitsky, McGuire, and Roake- were physically untouched and made a clean escape. But there was much collateral damage.

If Hardy had considered himself cynical about abusing the letter of the law in his practice before, now he was past entertaining any qualms at all. He still considered himself a "good guy," whatever that meant, but he also recognized that a kind of a scab had grown over the wound his softer instincts had sustained. He'd been doubted, betrayed, lied to, threatened, and abandoned both by those in whom he'd put his trust and in the system he'd believed in intrinsically. Now he wasn't about to squander any more emotional investment in a process that hadn't worked for him when he'd needed it most. He did what he did and if sometimes it was ugly, well, sometimes life was ugly. Get over it. He didn't care if everybody liked him anymore.

Sometimes he didn't like himself very much, either.

As he turned into the All-Day Lot at the end of the alley across from the Hall of Justice, he found that his hands ached from gripping the wheel so firmly. His jaw throbbed from the constant pressure he'd been putting on it.

His appointment was with the district attorney, Clarence Jackman. He was here to cut a deal for a client he despised, whom he wouldn't have gone near a couple of years ago. In those days, he would simply have declined to take the case. In his earlier career, he'd turned down business many times when he didn't personally like a prospective client. But more often than not lately he found himself inclined to choose to profit from his squeamishness, and would take the case at double or even triple his normal rate. It was all a game anyway, and if he didn't profit from it when he could, he was a fool.