9

 

A small jungle of dieffenbachia, rubber trees and other more exotic plants thrived in the corners and against the back wall of the firm's conference room. Opening to a sheltered outdoor atrium, complete with grass and fountain, the entire outer wall and part of the roof jutted from the line of the building, creating a greenhouse effect, and giving the room its nickname of the Solarium.

Now, at a few minutes after six, Gina Roake, the building's owner, in a conservative gray business suit, sat with a cup of coffee at the head of the large table that commanded the room. Roake was closing in on fifty years old, but few people would have guessed it. She'd always had good skin and a youthful face. A recent diet and exercise program had accented her chin and cheekbones and slimmed the rest of her down significantly, though she remained a bit zaftig. To her left, Dismas Hardy, emulating his old mentor Freeman, sipped some Baystone Shiraz from an oversized wineglass. Across from him, Wes Farrell was trying to tell what had supposedly just been voted the funniest joke in the world. But he was having some trouble getting to it.

"Who votes on that kind of thing?" Hardy asked. "It's got to be bogus. Nobody asked me, for example. Gina, anybody ask you?"

"No."

"See? And we're both famous for our senses of humor."
Farrell wasn't to be denied. "It's a very prestigious group of joke researchers based in Sweden or someplace. They wouldn't ask people like you and Gina."

"So it's a European joke," Hardy said, "which strikes me as pretty arrogantly Eurocentric. Okay, so now it's like, in some Swede's opinion, the funniest joke in the world. Those wacky Swedes, with the highest suicide rate in the world and all."

"Can I tell the joke?" Farrell asked. "And then you decide."

"All right," Hardy said. "But telling us up front that this is the funniest joke in the world, it's guaranteed to be forty percent less funny."

Farrell persisted. "You'll still get sixty percent of it. It'll be worth it, I promise."

"I can't wait," Roake said.

But Hardy wasn't through yet. "Did you laugh out loud when you heard it, Wes?"

"No, but I never laugh out loud at jokes."

"You laughed at Dirty Harold."

Farrell broke a grin. "True. I did."

"So based on your own response, this new funniest joke in the world isn't as funny as the Dirty Harold joke."

"Fucking lawyers," Farrell said. "Everything's an argument."

"What's the Dirty Harold joke?" Roake asked.

Hardy turned to her. "This little kid with a filthy mouth, so the teacher won't ever call on him. Then one day they're going through the alphabet, finding words that start with a given letter and then they use the word in a sentence. They finally get to 'e'— Harold's hand has been up the whole time on every letter— but she figures there aren't any filthy words that start with 'e,' so she calls on him . . ."

"Elf!" Roake exclaimed, smiling. "I know an elf with a big prick."

"That's it." Hardy drank some wine.

Farrell seized his chance. "So Holmes and Watson go camping and set up their tent and they go to sleep. Two hours later, Holmes goes, 'Watson, what do you see?' and Watson goes, 'I see millions and millions of stars. And Holmes says, 'And what do you deduce from that?' Watson says, 'I imagine each star has planets around it just like our own, with a chance of life on each one.' And Holmes goes, 'Watson, you fool, someone's stolen our tent.' "

"So." Roake maintained a poker face. "Having heard the joke, maybe now we can begin. I've got a handball game in forty-five minutes."

They were gathered for their monthly partners overview— business, after all— and Hardy spent the next twenty minutes going over the firm's numbers. The associates were all well utilized— the firm was cranking along, racking up substantial fees almost as though it were on automatic pilot. Hardy's concerns about Wu's deal with Boscacci might have been a legitimate topic for discussion on another day, but so far nothing had actually gone wrong, and he elected to keep his qualms under his hat.

Under "other business," Hardy mentioned the firm's upcoming involvement in support of the Jackman campaign, which he considered an opportunity as good as any to broach the one sensitive topic they needed to discuss. Might the Jackman candidacy entice Roake back to work, Hardy wondered. To something approaching regular hours?

Roake straightened up in her chair. Her eyes flicked between the two men. "I resent the hell out of that question, Diz. What I do with my time is my business."

Hardy's gaze didn't flinch. He kept any sign of edge out of his voice. "I'm not arguing with that, Gina. You've earned whatever time you feel you need. But as a business matter for the firm, you're drawing a decent salary for yourself and your own private secretary and you've got a big corner office that's essentially sitting unused."

Roake clipped off her words. "How about if I just quit and start charging the kind of rent for this building that another firm would have to pay? I could give up my decent salary and I'd still be making more money than I am now. How about that?"

Hardy shook his head. "That's not what I want. I don't think it's what you want. I wasn't speaking critically. If you don't want to do any more billing, you've got my complete support. Wes's, too. But when we started up together, we had a business plan that included the three of us bringing in business and billing our own time. And that's not happening. Even with our otherwise good utilization, we're struggling to make those original numbers."

Hardy came forward, his hands clasped on the table in front of him. His voice was still soft, almost caressing. "I'm just trying to get a sense of your plans, Gina, so I can know what we're dealing with. As it stands now, you're an expense item and not a profit center, and we didn't plan for that. The firm has to come up with the difference, which is not insignificant. I owe it to us all to tell you about it. Times are good now, but if they get tight, we could find ourselves in a heap of trouble."

Roake scratched at the yellow legal pad on the table in front of her, staring down at her scribblings. "All right," she said, without looking up. "I'd like to think about this for a few days, if you don't mind."

"Not at all," Hardy said, "and Gina? There's no wrong answer here. The firm needs to know, that's all. We've talked about some capital improvements on the horizon. We've got to know if they're feasible, that kind of thing."

"I hear you," Roake said. "Really, I do." Then, with a crisp smile, she pushed back from the table, gathered her notes and told them both good night.

After the door to the Solarium had closed behind her, Hardy let out a long breath and met his partner's baleful eye over the table.

"Okay, then." Farrell drew a palm over his brow. "All in all, I'd say that went pretty well. You want to pour me some of that wine?"

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

Hardy put his briefcase down by his reading chair, then walked down the long hallway in his house. Before he'd remodeled it, the old Victorian had been in the railroad car style, with all the downstairs rooms opening to the right off the hall. Now a large, recently renovated kitchen opened up in the back, and behind that was a family room and then the bedrooms for the two kids. They didn't keep the television on much as a general rule, so he was somewhat surprised to hear the low drone. He poked his head into the family room. "What's on?"

Frannie looked over from where she sat on the couch. "Abe."

He walked over and joined them. "What's that loopy guy done now?"

On the tube, Glitsky frowned into a battery of microphones. "No, that's not true," he was saying. "I consulted with the Chief and Lieutenant Lanier, but the decision was mine. At the time it seemed the best one. No one could have predicted that Mr. Brodie would escape. And in fact, the capture itself took place without incident."

The picture flicked back to the pretty anchorwoman, who wore the same cheerful face whether she was reporting on terrorism or bake sales. "But in spite of Deputy Chief Glitsky's comments, the fact remains that Leshawn Brodie, still considered armed and extremely dangerous, and a suspect in several local murders, remains at large after he allegedly stole one of the officers' weapon and engaged in a dramatic shoot-out with arresting authorities this morning in Nevada. Critics are calling ill-advised at best Glitsky's decision not to arrest Brodie while he sat on a bus in the Greyhound terminal in downtown San Francisco early this morning. And considering the suspect's escape and record of violence, it's hard to disagree with them."

"Hard, but not impossible," Hardy said. When the male anchor appeared and it was clear that the news had moved on to its next sound bite, he grabbed the remote and turned off the set. You notice she never mentioned who the critics were. Did I miss that? 'Yet, it's hard to disagree with them,' " he intoned in the anchor's voice. "What kind of reporting is that?"

"Bad," Vincent said. "They weren't even listening to what Uncle Abe said."

"How long was he on?" Hardy asked.

"Long enough." Vincent's voice was breaking with adolescence. He cleared his throat and went on. "What did they want him to do? Shoot up the whole bus to get the one guy?"

"You got the gist of it, I think." Frannie put a hand on Hardy's knee. "Maybe you ought to call him, though. He's taking a lot of heat. How was your day?"

"Evidently better than Abe's, though it had its moments." He glanced at his watch. "You think he's home?" But he was already punching numbers on the telephone. "This is your best and possibly only true friend," Hardy said, "and if you get this . . ."

"What?"

"Monitoring your calls, I see."

"You would, too. It's been ringing off the hook."

"TV'll do that. Instant fame."

"Great, but I don't want to be famous."

"There's your problem. You're the only person in America who doesn't. The media doesn't know what to do with you. Maybe you ought to get a new makeup guy. Wipe away those frown lines. Did you know you had a scar through your lips? I'm sure they could airbrush that out, too."

There was a pause. Then Glitsky asked, "Are you calling for any real reason?"

"Not exactly. You were on the news just now. I thought you'd enjoy the sound of a friendly voice. Also, for the record, Vin's on your side."

At his side, Hardy's wife said, "Frannie, too."

"I heard that," Glitsky said. "Tell them both thanks."

Frannie squeezed Hardy's leg. "Ask him . . . No, wait, let me." She grabbed the phone. "Abe, what are you and Treya doing tonight? I've got a big pot of spaghetti sauce going. Why don't all of you come over here? Get away from these people who don't love you like we do."

*     *     *     *     *

 

Wu had planned all along to get back to Andrew, get the plea locked up, before tomorrow. She wasn't about to enter Arvid Johnson's courtroom in the morning with any sort of question still hanging about her client's disposition. But before she went in to see Andrew again, she found that she still needed some time to gather herself.

She sat at a table in the street window of what had probably once been a nice little boutique espresso shop half a block from the YGC. But the place had been servicing the juvenile hall clientele for so long that it had given up hope and lost whatever charm it may have once possessed. Now the bulletin board by the door bristled with lawyers' business cards, photos of missing kids, ads for bail bondmen and private investigators. Stacks of assorted newspapers lay piled on a table by the sugar and cream. A pit bull, chained, slept on the floor in the back of the shop. Behind the counter, a young woman with a peg in her tongue and a ring in each eyebrow was wiping down the back counter, putting things away.

Outside, long shadows stretched up the hill, but the faces of buildings across the street glowed in the last blast of blinding evening sunlight. The wind had picked up and was all but howling, flinging any trash that weighed less than a pound along the nearly deserted street.

Wu's day— from waking up hungover and alone, to her meeting with the Norths, then Andrew, then the fight with Jason Brandt— seemed to have lasted about a week so far, and the hardest few moments were no doubt still ahead of her.

Well, maybe not the hardest. For a combination of guilt, anger and shame, she knew that it would be tough to top the half hour or so after Brandt had stormed away from her. What made it even worse was that she found she couldn't even blame him. For it was true. Even when she'd first begun flirting with him the night before, she had known that her deal with Andrew wasn't consummated. If she wanted to have any claim to calling herself an ethical attorney, she would have disclosed her conflict about Andrew to Brandt first thing. You simply did not have sex with your courtroom opposite number.

Sipping her coffee, she was still sick with herself, appalled at what she'd done and at the situation in which she and Brandt now found themselves, a situation that she had orchestrated.

She had risked both of their jobs— still risked them, if the truth came out— to satisfy some undefined and pathetic need to connect. It was beneath her, she knew, or at least beneath the person she had been until her father's death had kicked the foundation out from under her, turned her into the kind of unstable, needy, manipulative, dangerous woman she'd always hated and resolved never to become. And the scariest thing was that the lapse with Brandt had completely broadsided her— she'd never even considered discussing Andrew's case with him. There had been that spark, the attraction, and lubricated by drink, she'd just gone for it.

Never mind that he was a colleague, a good guy, a no-bullshit attorney she felt she could really come to like and admire someday. Maybe more than that. Of course, now all of that possible future was out of the question. And that, too— the waste of it, the sheer stupidity— made her sick.

And now— she looked at her watch—right now, she had to face her young client and wrest a final agonizing decision from him, one that shouldn't have been his to make in the first place. She should have left the original disposition to fall where it would— with Andrew filed as an adult. Then there would have been an adult trial and he'd all but certainly have been convicted of some degree of murder, but it all would have been according to the system. Now, because of her arrogance, stupidity, blindness, she had placed the entire burden of choice on an unhappy, miserable kid. She wondered if it was a burden he would have the strength to bear. Earlier, when he'd broken down, she'd even viewed that as a positive thing— he'd be persuaded to do what she wanted. But what if he simply couldn't deal with it?

She shook her head, finished the last of her coffee and left the mug on the table.

As was the case with Jason Brandt, this was yet another example of where she'd acted— committed herself, really— before she'd considered the implications of what she was setting in motion. She could only pray that Andrew was in fact guilty, as she'd assumed and believed all along. As she'd convinced his parents. That would make Andrew's admission, though still difficult, acceptable, even preferable, as a strategy.

As she turned up the walkway to the cabins, she stopped and looked up at the razor-wire fence. After she got Andrew's admission sewed up tonight, she vowed she would change and never put a client in such a position again. But first she had to get his admission. First that. Then begin work on fixing herself.

But she couldn't lose sight of her objective in the short term. Too much was already riding on Andrew's admission. She couldn't let the accumulation of this day's terrible events weaken her resolve or blind her to her first duty.

"Don't wimp out now," she said aloud to herself, and started up to the cabins.

*     *     *     *     *

 

"Who was that?"

Frannie took off her reading glasses and put down her P.D. James. She was in bed, propped against her reading pillow. She had let her red hair down and now it hung to her shoulders and shone in the room's light.

Hardy turned from his desk by the room's door. "Amy."

Frannie checked the clock by the bed. "At eleven-fifteen?"

"She didn't want me to worry and lose any of those precious minutes of sleep that are so important to men of a certain age."

"What were you going to be worried about? That now you're not, I presume."

He spent a minute filling her in on his concern that Wu might find herself having to renege with Boscacci. "But she just got back home from what must have been a marathon session with Andrew down at YGC. She wanted me to know that she had nailed down the plea."

"Well, there's a relief. I would have tossed all night." Frannie went to pick up her book, stopped. "It took her twenty minutes to tell you that?"

"To do it justice."

"And how old is this boy?"

"Seventeen."

Frannie made a sad face. "Seventeen."

A nod. "And, unfortunately, a killer. A double killer, actually. Eventually, apparently, he gave that up to Amy."

"Confessed, you mean?"

"Well, agreed to admit the petition, which is pleading guilty. And since that's the deal Amy cut with Boscacci, I'm glad he finally got religion around it."

"So what was the deal with Boscacci?"

Hardy filled in the particulars for his wife, concluding with the comment that Amy had been smart to keep Andrew's parents away while she put the pressure on the kid.

"Why is that?" Frannie asked.

"Because he'd been telling Mom and Dad he didn't do it."

"But he did?"

"Yep, if he's pleading, which he is."

"So then tell me again why he wouldn't agree to plead guilty if his parents were there."

Hardy stopped and turned by the closet. "Because, my love, he continues to scam them. The dad's paying the bills. First he can be a good boy and assure them to their face that he's innocent, then he can save his own skin by telling Amy the truth. And— the real beauty of it all— he can then go back to his parents and tell them that Amy talked him into the whole thing. She coerced him. It wasn't his fault. He didn't really kill anybody. He's a good boy."

A long moment passed, his wife staring into the empty space in front of her. "You are so cynical."

"Life makes smart people cynical," he said. "It's a sad but true fact."

"Not all of them." Frannie let out a deep sigh. A shadow of distaste crossed her face.

"Cynical's not so bad," Hardy said. "It saves a lot of heartache down the line."

"Right. I know. That's what you think." She closed her eyes for a second, drew a heavy breath, weariness bleeding out of her. "I guess I'm just worried about you."

"Me? Moi? I?"

Tightening her lips, biting down against some strong emotion, she said, "Never mind," and turned away from him.

"That was a little humor, Frannie. Just trying to lighten it up."

Her chest rose and fell twice. Finally, she faced him. "That's what I'm worried about. Everything being a joke."

He tried to keep it light, josh her out of whatever it was. "That's funny," he said, "I wish more things were jokes."

When suddenly, none of it was a joke at all anymore. She threw off the covers and was out of bed, nearly running across to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The lock clicked.

Hardy stood stock-still, his head down. After ten seconds, he went over and knocked. Whispered. "Fran? Are you all right?"

He thought he heard a sob.

"Whatever it is, I'm sorry." He waited a moment. "No more joking if you come out. Promise."

Finally. "In a minute."

It was more like ten.

He was lying on the bed, hands behind his head. He barely dared look at her, afraid he might scare her off. The two of them hadn't had a cross word since before the shoot-out nearly a year and half ago. He didn't want anything to be wrong between them now. He said nothing while she got into her side of the bed, pulled the blankets up over her. "I didn't mean to be so dramatic," she said. "I'm sorry."

"You can be dramatic anytime you want."

He waited for another minute, perhaps two. A very long time.

Finally, she sighed. "I don't mean to be critical of you," she said. "It's just that I am so worried about you."

"You don't need to be. I'm fine."

"Maybe you are, but you're not the same person you always said you wanted to be." She shook her head. "I'm not saying this right."

"Okay. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere."

She wrestled with it for another minute or more. Finally, she sighed. "I just don't know if there's anything you care about anymore."

"I care about you. And the kids."

"No. I know you love us, but I mean with yourself, with your life. Are you happy with your life?"

A million glib answers, the usual grab bag, sprung to his mind. But that, of course, was what she was getting at. He sat up and half turned away from her. "Am I happy? What makes you think I'm not?"

"It's not what I  think."

"But something, just now, made you ask."

She reached over and touched his back. "It's not just now. And maybe it's the same something that's making you not answer."

He shifted to face her. "I honestly don't know what that is, Frannie." Then: "I don't feel like I'm doing anything different."

"You don't?"

"No. Not consciously anyway."

"No? What about this boy Amy just called you about? Andrew?"

"What about him?"

"You're happy with him going to jail for eight years?"

Another shrug. "It beats the alternative, which is life in prison. It's also the deal Amy made. It seemed like a good one."

"If he's guilty."

Hardy shrugged. "Amy says he's admitting, so he probably is. Either way, though, the deal gets him out not much later than if he went to trial and got acquitted anyway."

"So eight years for an innocent person is okay with you?"

"Well, first, as I said, he's probably not innocent. And second, he's already in the system. So he's looking at a year or two, minimum, before anything shakes out anyway."

"Which leaves six years. In six years, your own little boy is twenty."

Hardy ran a palm over his cheek. "So this is about Andrew Bartlett?"

Frannie shook her head. "It's about . . ." She started over. "It just seems everything you do nowadays has to do with manipulating the rules somehow. It's all just cynicism, and money, and cutting the deal."

Hardy's voice hardened perceptibly. "Maybe you don't remember last year too well, Frannie. When you and I tried to play by the rules, and got Polaroids with gunsights drawn on over our kids. The experience hasn't quite paled on me. So yeah, I guess I've gotten a little jaded on the whole play-by-the-rules concept. If I'm good at bending them and that makes life easy, I'm a sap if I don't."

"That's what you tell yourself?"

He turned now, frankly glaring. "Yes, it is. And I do very well at it."

Frannie glared back. "And that's also why you drink all the time now? Because it helps you forget how you're living?"

"What I'm doing is supporting this family, Frannie. The best way I know how."

Frannie watched a muscle twitch in his jaw. "Look," she said, "you cut a deal on this child molester guy the other morning, when you know there was a time you wouldn't have gotten within a mile of him."

"That was fifty thousand dollars' worth of—"

"Stop. Then you go to lunch, have a few drinks, and make a deal for your firm to help elect the DA. Then you have some wine at your partners meeting and try to cut a deal to make poor Gina come back to work when you know that her heart's gone out of it . . ."

"Let me ask you this, Frannie— tell me someone whose heart hasn't gone out of it, especially after . . ." He let it hang.

Frannie waited until he met her eyes again. "I don't mean to make you mad. I just don't believe that the person cutting all these deals is who you really are."

"Who I am." His laugh rang dry and empty. "Who I am is a guy who's lost faith in the process. But the bills keep on coming, the kids' college is around the corner. What am I supposed to do? Just stop?"

"Maybe you could do something you care about." She moved over toward him, put her arms around his shoulders. "Here," she said, "lie down with me. Close your eyes. You don't have to make any decisions right now, tonight. But a blind person can see how unhappy you are, how it's all frantic and manic and going going going just to keep busy."

"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

She kissed him. "You're not going to die tomorrow."

She felt him growing calmer next to her, his breathing more regular. He put his arm around her and she lay up against him. After another minute, he said, "I think maybe I am drinking a little too much."

She noted the repetition of the disclaiming qualifiers—"I think," "maybe," "a little." But it was nevertheless an admission of sorts and, she hoped, a start.

After another couple of minutes, his body seemed to settle next to her. Sleep trying to claim him. "I'm tired," he said. Then, "I'm worried about Abe, too." The words were a barely audible mumble.

Then he was asleep.

*     *     *     *     *

 

Back at her apartment, Wu changed out of her lawyer clothes and chose a black leather miniskirt, a diaphanous red shirt over a skin-colored bra, a heavy leather jacket against the cold wind. Fifteen minutes after she'd hung up with Dismas Hardy, she was among the packed bodies at Indigo's, another bar at the triangle. At a dinner-plate-sized table, twirling her first cosmopolitan of the night with a well-manicured hand, she perched herself on a high stool and showed a lot of leg. The volume of the music— an endless bass and drum loop— made conversation impossible, but she didn't mind.

She didn't want to talk. She didn't want to think about Jason Brandt, either. Or Andrew Bartlett.

Wu shrugged out of her jacket, put it across her lap, straightened her back and turned to survey the groups of men who were drinking and laughing all around her. She caught one of the guys— good-looking in a grungy way, long blond hair, couple of earrings— checking the assets she so artfully displayed.

He was very much interested.

She smiled, slipped off the stool, got her drink in one hand and her jacket in the other, and moved in to cut him out.