"No. Sometimes they get COUD, but we don't medicate for that. We just bust them pretty good."
It took her a second. "Center of universe disorder?"
"You're good," he said, smiling. "You must do this all the time."
The waitress arrived. "This will shut me up." She stuck a spoon into the dessert, brought it to her mouth, savored. "Okay," she said, "Mike. You know, I never asked you what about Mike you wanted to talk about."
"But you still came down here?"
"I still cared about him, although I hadn't seen him in years. He was a good guy."
Hardy kept his opinion on that to himself. "That's what everybody says. But somebody killed him and I'm trying to find out why."
"Somebody? I understood they had a pretty solid suspect." An awareness gathered in her eyes. She killed a few seconds licking her spoon. "You're defending the killer?"
Hardy had gone through this so often that he was tempted to wave it off. But it was the first time that Catherine Bass would have heard it, and he had to give the objection its weight. "The alleged killer, yes. Andrew Bartlett. But I expect he'll be released maybe as soon as tomorrow. I'm all but certain he didn't do it. I want to find out who did."
"And you think I might know? I haven't laid eyes on Mike in years."
"I realize that." He paused, then came out with it. "Mrs. Bass, I know he was gay."
She closed her eyes for a second, drew a deep breath and let it out. "All right."
"I'm wondering if that might have played some role in his death."
"If what did? Being gay? How would it do that?"
"I don't know. If he had some secret life…?"
She poked the chocolate with her spoon. "Wasn't someone else killed with him? A girl? One of his students?"
"Yes."
"That doesn't really point to a sinister gay secret life to me."
"It doesn't to me, either. She might not have been part of the original plan, but as a witness she had to be eliminated."
"Do you really think that?"
"I really don't know. I'm hoping my client is innocent. Beyond that, I'm fishing. But it would be helpful to get the simple fact of Mike's gayness out in front of the judge."
"And how would that help?"
"It might punch some holes in the prosecution's motive theory."
"What about his father?"
Hardy's own expression had grown somber. "I know. I've been trying to figure that one out. Bring it out in chambers, seal the record, something. I see you've dealt with it, too."
Her mouth was a hard line. "God, those years. When I compare them to how I live now…"
"How long were you together?"
Her eyes came back to him. "Not so long in real time, I guess. Thirty months, something like that, beginning to end." Her mouth tried to signal a kind of apology for getting so personal. "It was an eternity, though, in psychic time. We really were best friends, even back when he was with Terri. I was the other woman, you know, in their marriage. Broke them up. It was really pretty funny, actually, if you had a taste for irony."
"Did you know?"
"About his being gay? Not at first. At the time… hell, you know… we were young and living the theater life, all of us. It was assumed that we all led active sexual lives and that some of us experimented with… various combinations. We didn't see it as a big deal. And Mike was pretty…" She laughed again with the brittle embarrassment Hardy had first heard on the phone with her. "Actually, he was pretty, period. Gorgeous. And promiscuous as all hell, trying to prove what he wasn't, you know? God! Was it exciting! Drama every day, especially when he, when we, were cheating on Terri. Sometimes she'd be out on stage doing a scene- I mean in plain sight, thirty feet from us. Jesus."
He gave her a minute to come back to him. "So how did you find out?"
Hanging her head, she drew her dessert near and picked at it. "After we got married, we had a couple of good months. But pretty soon the… the physical side… I guess what turned him on was the forbidden fruit aspect. When I stopped being that…" Her shoulders rose, then fell. "But as I said, we were friends. We liked to do the same things. So at first we pretended everything was the same, fooling ourselves, you know. I'm not sure if Mike really admitted to himself that he was strictly gay, even then. We were always together and busy and… shit, I may as well tell you… we never had sex in our bed. It was always someplace we might get caught. For me, that got a little old, but as long as we had our busy routine and found time to sneak away, I told myself that we were intimate enough. The lies we tell ourselves, huh? And then, as it turned out- nobody's fault- but the routine changed on us anyway."
"What happened?"
"Mike got called to jury duty."
31
Lucas Welding. Write it down." Hardy was in his car, speeding north, talking to Glitsky. It was 10:30 and he'd left Catherine Bass fifteen minutes before. His right hand was sore from taking notes, but he remembered everything he'd written. "In 1984, he strangled and murdered his wife, Ginny. Got tried and convicted in San Francisco in '86, sentenced to LWOP."
"But he's out now?"
"Looks like."
"How'd that happen?"
"I don't know. But Mrs. Bass, Mooney's ex-wife, is a lawyer herself now and remembered Boscacci distinctly as the prosecutor. She's followed his career ever since. I'll bet you a million dollars that your Elizabeth Cary was on the same jury."
"You said you're in your car. Where are you?"
"Just passing the airport."
"Meet you at the Hall," Glitsky said. "Twenty minutes."
Since the ground floor of the Hall of Justice was the location of SFPD's Southern Station, the building was open. Hardy and Glitsky opened the front door together and passed through the metal detectors and security cops in the lobby. Lanier was already waiting for them in the hallway outside Glitsky's office, and the three of them filed into the small conference room behind the reception area.
By earlier that afternoon, they'd finally managed to set up a total of six borrowed computers for the use of the two General Work officers and the twenty-two others that both Jackman had provided and Glitsky had recruited out of their respective clerical staffs. All overtime expenses paid.
It had taken a good part of the afternoon to get the computers up and connected, but when Glitsky had left work that night, all of them had been in use. Six volunteers at a time worked the list of four hundred recently released convicts, while six others- armed with case numbers from the computer searches- went downstairs and under the building to Records, where they searched for the physical files on the Boscacci "hits."
By the time of Glitsky's departure earlier that night, out of the first 154 they'd identified seven cases where Boscacci had been the actual trial prosecutor. At 8:00 P.M., the second "shift" of twelve was scheduled to come in and continue through the night and then the next morning, until they got something.
But now the room was empty.
"Where is everybody?" Glitsky asked.
"They're all downstairs," Lanier said. "They got the case number on Welding five minutes after you called. Finding the physical records isn't so easy. It may be a while. He wasn't in your original four hundred, you know."
"So he didn't get out in the last two months," Glitsky said.
"Where'd they keep him?" Hardy asked.
"Corcoran, according to the computer."
Hardy threw a glance at Glitsky, came back to Lanier. "And he's out now?"
"Pretty much got to be if he's killing people, don't you think?"