Great rivers may begin with a tiny trickle, but the creation of an avalanche does not occur in the same way, where one snowflake adheres to another and the growing mass slowly coalesces until it simply begins to fall over itself. No, an avalanche just happens - all at once the side of a mountain gives way, coming loose with explosive force, unstoppable and indiscriminate, rearranging the landscape of everything in the path of its inanimate will.
By two A.M. on Thursday morning, less than eight hours after Graham Russo’s release from jail, the momentum of the avalanche had pushed every other issue in San Francisco off the political map. By that hour the early-morning edition of the San Francisco Chronicle was coming off the press with the banner headline: ‘Mercy Killing Debate Rips City, State Offices.’ The long story merely scratched at the surface of the many fronts on which the battle had erupted simultaneously.
The mayor supported the district attorney. San Francisco had always been in the forefront of social awareness. Sharron Pratt had done the right thing. People shouldn’t be forced to live in unrelenting pain. Where was the quality in a life like that? If a person chose to take his or her own life to end their suffering, they had the right to do so, and the people who helped them were not murderers. They were heroes.
Dan Rigby, the city’s chief of police, was outraged. This was the latest and most serious example of the DA’s utter disdain for the police who kept the city safe. His officers had acted correctly in arresting a homicide suspect. There was no evidence that the death of Sal Russo had been anything but a murder in the course of a robbery.
But even if it had been an assisted suicide, ‘The DA is elected to enforce the laws, not make them. I shudder to wonder what other kinds of homicides Ms Pratt is going to decide are not crimes.’
Dean Powell, the state attorney general, was studying the case, refusing to disclose, or foreclose, any of his options. Art Drysdale, formerly of the DA’s office (and fired by Pratt) and now with the state attorney general, would only comment that ‘as a matter of law it’s unambiguous that we have jurisdictional responsibility. We’re not going to let murders go unpunished in San Francisco.’
The Board of Supervisors called an emergency session for late in the evening, and declared by a 9 to 2 majority that San Francisco should be a ‘right-to-die’ haven – the country needed a humanitarian city that would become a mecca for the terminally ill and hopelessly suffering.
The Catholics and the Protestants wasted no time squaring off. Archbishop James Flaherty reiterated the stand of the Catholic Church on any form of euthanasia. God took His children when it was His time. Jesus himself had suffered horribly, Flaherty said, and that he had allowed himself to do so was meant clearly to serve as an example to all of humanity: suffering was part of life. It had a purpose. It ennobled and strengthened the spirit, especially when offered up to the glory of God.
The archbishop ended his remarks with a not-so-subtle dig at the mayor’s stand on ‘quality of life.’ ‘Life is a sacred thing unto itself,’ he said. ‘A quality life is a life lived in the service of God, not in the pursuit of comfort.’
At first light, from the altar of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, with the huge AIDS mosaic on the floor, and AIDS blankets hung from the rafters, the Right Reverend Cecil Dunsmuir fired his own broadside back at Flaherty to his own bank of cameras.
‘Anyone who could extol the virtue of suffering ought to spend more time with our AIDS community. Here he will find great caring, great love, great sacrifice, and great nobility in the face of death. But the end of pain is a blessing from God, and administering to that end is the true meaning of Christianity.’
Police had to be called to a meeting of a previously planned anti-abortion protest group at an Elks Hall in Potrero Heights when differences on the morality of mercy killing erupted into a melee among the activists.
Barbara Brandt was an attractive woman in her late thirties who made her living as a Sacramento lobbyist. As the state’s chairperson of the Hemlock Society, the national right-to-die organization, Brandt saw Graham Russo’s picture on the front page of The Sacramento Bee - young and movie-star handsome – and, after reading the story, realized that here was this year’s poster boy for major fund-raising.
She looked up Graham’s number in the telephone book and was a bit surprised when he picked up on the second ring.
‘I’m really not interested in talking about it,’ he told her after a couple of minutes. ‘I’m a lawyer, you know. If I break the law, they’ll yank my bar card. I’ve already had enough problems with my career.’
‘But you did the right thing,’ Brandt persisted.
‘You don’t know what I did.’
‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I know just what you did. I’m on your side.’
But it wasn’t any use. He wasn’t budging. After he hung up, she considered it for several minutes. She’d heard enough to know the truth. Graham’s law career would be over before it had begun if he admitted he’d helped kill his dad.
But he’d done the right thing; he’d already committed his civil disobedience. All he needed now, Brandt thought, was the courage to admit what he’d done. And she thought she could help him find a way to do just that.
The public television station made a controversial decision to change their early Thursday-morning programming. Entitled Just Let Me Die, the show later won television’s Humanitas Award and an Emmy for Best Local Documentary. It was a grueling and poignant half hour of hastily assembled and edited file videotape of suffering hospital and nursing-home patients – AI sufferers, cancer victims, other terminally patients of both sexes, all ages, creeds, and colors – and all conscious enough to voice their desire to die.
‘This is Hank Travers with Bay Area Action News. I’m standing outside the offices of the California state attorney general’s office in San Francisco, and with me is Assistant Attorney General Gil Soma. Mr Soma, can you tell us whether the state has decided to bring charges against Mr Russo?’
Soma was a talking head. ‘We need to carefully review all the evidence, of course. But the law, and my office, believes that the deliberate killing of another human being is usually a crime.’
There was an avid glint in his eyes that belied the apparent objectivity. Clearly, Soma wanted the head of Graham Russo.
And just as obviously, Hank Travers recognized this. ‘Is it true that you and Mr Russo used to work together?’
The camera angle widened. Soma was the picture of the fighting young attorney. The cameras were out on the street and a freshening breeze was playing with his tie, messing with his hair. He ignored these distractions, giving all his attention to Hank. ‘It’s a matter of record that we were both clerks for Federal Judge Harold Draper. Beyond that I can’t comment.’
The camera moved in for a close-up. Hank’s voice came over Gil Soma’s intense glare. ‘But you know a different Graham Russo, don’t you? The man behind the outward appearance? And you believe he would have killed his father for fifty thousand dollars?’
‘No comment.’
Travers tried a last time. ‘But in your opinion he’s the kind of person who could have done it?’
Soma kept it straight. ‘We’re looking at the evidence. That’s all I can tell you.’ But he continued nodding into the camera, and the message came across loud and clear: Soma despised Graham Russo. He was going to take him down if he could.
Glitsky had Evans and Lanier in a borrowed office in the vice detail down the hallway from homicide. It was important that the office have a door that could be closed, and Glitsky’s cubicle did not provide that particular amenity. The situation regarding the continuing investigation into Sal Russo’s death was unusual and volatile.
He was taking them through the game plan. When he had finished his first pass, Evans raised a hand and the lieutenant, atypically, took on an amused expression. ‘We’re not in school here, Sarah, you can just speak up.’
She folded her arms back across her chest. ‘I’ve got just one question: what are we supposed to do that we didn’t do last time when they let him go?’
Glitsky nodded; it was a good question. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. Same stuff, just more of it.’
Marcel Lanier had been around long enough that he got the gist of it the first time. He was sitting in a comfortable chair next to his partner and he looked over at her. ‘Everybody has their guards down, Sarah. Witnesses think there won’t be any charges, so what they saw or heard might not be so threatening. People might open up. The investigation is still open. That’s really what Abe’s saying.’
‘That’s it.’ Glitsky was all agreement.
‘But Russo is still our suspect?’ Especially after last night this was not welcome news.
‘Best and only. He did it.’ Lanier was ready to hit the streets. Glitsky had delivered the message. Time to go to work. But Sarah was still in her chair, arms still crossed over her chest.
‘Is something wrong, Sarah?’ Glitsky asked her.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, something.’ They waited. ‘I don’t think he did it,’ she said at last. ‘I think we were wrong.’
Lanier began sputtering something, but Glitsky stopped him with a gesture. He set a haunch on the corner of the desk. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I’m just not sure.’
‘What’s changed since yesterday?’ Glitsky asked. ‘
‘A couple of things.’ She hesitated, then came out with it. ‘I talked to him.’
‘When?’
She told them about the meeting at the softball diamond, leaving out her personal reaction. ‘He came up to me.’ Not precisely true but, she thought, close enough. She was positive he’d been about to approach her when she saw him staring at her. ‘I don’t think he would have done that if he’d killed his father.’
‘Sure he would have.’ This was Lanier’s territory. He’d interacted with a hundred murderers in his career and had not a doubt that he had the psychology down. Whatever it might be, he’d already seen it twice. ‘That’s exactly the kind of shit these assholes try to run on us. We let him out of jail, so he’s untouchable. He wants to know what we know. He’s sucking up to you, Sarah, trying to get under your skin.’
She didn’t believe it. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
Glitsky: ‘What was it like?’
‘There’s wasn’t any sucking up. He barely mentioned it.’
Lanier leaned in toward her. ‘I bet it did sneak its clever little way into the conversation, though, didn’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘He just said he didn’t do it. An afterthought.’
Lanier had seen that too. ‘Ahh, the subtle approach. He barely brings it up after he’s been arrested and spent the day in jail?’ The psychology of that failed Marcel’s litmus test, and he wanted his partner to know it. ‘If you’d just spent your first day in jail and met the person who’d put you there, don’t you think it might be kind of the main thing on your mind? Wouldn’t you want to talk about it just a tiny bit?’
‘Marcel, I think she gets the point.’ Glitsky came back to Sarah. ‘You said there were a couple of things. What was the other one?’
Her eyes fixed on each of the men in turn. ‘I thought about this all night, reread over the file. We don’t really have anything that puts him there.’
Glitsky nodded. This, too, was a valid point. ‘That’s why Drysdale wants the investigation to proceed. He says he needs more to get a conviction.’
‘You mean we shouldn’t have arrested him last time?’
‘Now, wait a minute!’ Lanier wasn’t about to accept that analysis. ‘The guy had already hired a lawyer-’
‘Not in itself a crime,’ Glitsky pointed out.
‘Sure, sure, but still…’ Lanier knew what cops knew, and that was that innocent people – if there were any – didn’t tend to bring their lawyers into the picture until they were charged, until they finally understood that they were in trouble. He continued. ‘Basically, we got an unemployed, selfish kid with a million-dollar lifestyle who needed the money and saw an easy way to take it.’
‘So it’s all the money?’
‘Absolutely. He had the safe combination at his place. That puts him at his old man’s.’
‘Then why didn’t he just pick up the safe deposit key while we were searching his place, put it in his pocket? We wouldn’t ever have found it.’
Lanier shrugged. ‘I give up. Maybe he thought we’d catch him if he tried. Maybe he didn’t believe we’d be so thorough. I’m not saying the guy’s a professional hit man. Maybe he was just nervous.’
‘If it was all about the money, he would have done something to hide it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘It would have been so easy. He couldn’t not have done it.’
The old bromide – that killers needed to tell somebody about what they’d done – wasn’t all false. ‘He wanted us to find it. Call it a type of confession.’
‘He wouldn’t feel the need to confess if it was an act of mercy, if he felt he’d done the right thing.’
Lanier shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. This wasn’t any assisted suicide either. This was murder. That bump under the ear-’
‘Which Strout said could have happened hours before.’
‘No no no. Our boy Graham cold-cocked him from behind with the whiskey bottle, gave him a veinful of morphine, cleaned out the safe, and tiptoed home through the tulips.’
‘So if Sal was cold-cocked, lying still on the ground, and Graham gives shots every day of his life, why was there trauma around the injection site? Why wasn’t it a clean little poke?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he was scared. He was hurrying. Maybe there was an earthquake. The needle was broke. Maybe he missed the vein. My doctor does every time.’
But Glitsky had listened to enough arguing. ‘All right, all right. This doesn’t matter. I think you had plenty to arrest Russo yesterday. If you keep looking, maybe you’ll find more. You’re authorized to keep looking, that’s all. Make it tight. If the AG wants to move on him, we’ll bring in Graham again. If the evidence points to somebody else, we’ll go after them. Sarah, you got anybody else you’re thinking about?’
She said she didn’t, ‘But Sal still might have killed himself, right? The autopsy didn’t rule that out.’
Glitsky nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He pushed himself off the desk. The meeting was over. ‘And that is precisely the reason that God in Her infinite wisdom invented the jury system.’ He spread his hands, as though blessing them. ‘Which, fortunately, never fails.’
‘Well, at least we had a nice summer, didn’t we?’
Lanier had his jacket buttoned all the way up, his head down in his collar. Next to him Evans, her hands tucked into her own jacket, squinted into the face of the wind and the dust it was kicking up. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asked. They were both walking fast. ‘It just can’t be this cold.’
After their meeting with Glitsky, they’d driven the half mile from the Hall up Seventh Street and pulled into Stevenson Alley, a narrow and grimy, if schizophrenic, line of asphalt and garbage a half block south of the always exotic bus station.
The north side of Stevenson was lined with the backs and delivery doors of the ancient medium-rise buildings of retail businesses that were struggling to survive on Market Street. Of the few structures whose fronts faced the alley, the most prominent was the Lions (no apostrophe) Arms apartment building, where Sal Russo had lived and died in corner room 304. Stenciled in fading black paint onto the side of the building were the words Daily, Weekly Rates.
For most of the past decade the south side of Stevenson had fit in with the run-down ambience of the neighborhood – an open sore of a construction site while the Old Post Office Building was being renovated. Recently, though, that work had been completed.
The Postal Service now had its own new home out at Rincon Annex, and the building’s other tenant – the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals – had taken it over. The federal courthouse now loomed fresh and imposing, a massive and elegant structure between Stevenson Alley and Mission Street.
Lanier and Evans didn’t notice any of it. As they stepped around the homeless man camped, sleeping now, in one of the back doorways, all they saw on the south side of the alley, the courthouse side, was a solid gray wall, already sprayed with graffiti, topped with coils of razor wire. It wouldn’t have mattered to the two inspectors if the Taj Mahal had been across the way; the Lions Arms didn’t pick up any reflected majesty from its surroundings. It was a flophouse, pure and simple.
The uniforms had canvassed the Lions Arms when Sal’s body had been found, but after dark were prime hours for a certain class of people who made their living on the street – lots of tenants hadn’t been home.
So Sarah and Lanier were back, planning to knock on more doors. Normally, inspectors don’t like to work alone in this kind of environment, but it was midday and they could get more done if they split up. Both were aware that they probably should have gotten back to this sooner, but in the crush of other priorities it had had to wait.
To accommodate a relatively spacious lobby and mailbox area – the building dated from a more gracious era – there were only four units on the first floor, and Sarah began knocking on them. The upper three stories had eight units each.
Lanier mounted the stairs that began in the back of the lobby and took the second floor. He was going to start at 204, directly below Sal’s apartment, at the front of the building. He wasn’t even there when Sarah appeared on his landing. ‘Nobody home on the first floor. I’ll start on three.’
The name in the slot next to the door said Blue, and Blue was coal-black. She was vaguely familiar by sight to Lanier – he had probably seen her around the Hall after she’d been busted for prostitution, for there was no question about her profession.
After Lanier identified himself through the door, there was the sound of some movement inside. She must have been expecting a customer, Lanier thought. Probably was putting away some novelty items, maybe a bong. The door eventually opened. She’d opened the window, but the room still smelled strongly of marijuana and, somewhat less so, of musk. Blue was tucking a red teddy-bear top into a pair of skintight black denims.
She stood in the open doorway, not asking him in. He showed her his badge. And then she surprised him. ‘This be about Sal, upstairs?’ Lanier said it was and she nodded. ‘I thought you be by sooner. I almost call you ’cept I don’t call cops. Sal was okay.‘
‘You knew him?’
She shook her head. ‘Not real good. We talk a few times in the lobby, sometimes out the alley there. He brung me up some fresh salmon sometimes. I love salmon.’ Her eyes got wistful. ‘It was so sad, him dying. You find who killed him?’
Out of habit and caution Lanier did not answer questions put to him by witnesses. Instead, he talked to her for a moment, realized he might have something, and pulled out the tape recorder he almost hadn’t bothered to bring along.
After intoning the standard introduction for the transcriber, he came back at her. ‘Did you see or hear anything on last Friday, May ninth, that made you believe Sal Russo had been killed?’
‘I didn’t know killed at the time, but somebody be up in Sal’s place with him. I hear the door open, then’ – she indicated over her head – ‘the ceiling creaks, somebody else there.’
‘And where were you?’
‘Here, in my apartment. And then some other noises.’
‘What kind of noises were they?’
‘Like he fell down. Like some scraping furniture.’ She looked up. ‘This place, you know, the walls pretty thin, not ’zactly soundproof.‘
But Lanier was going to keep her at it. ‘So you heard this noise, some furniture scraping on the floor?’
That wasn’t precisely right. ‘Wasn’t like anything pushing, more like something fell, hit against it or something, and it scraped. Then he kind of moaned and yelled, “No,” bunch of times.’
‘No?’
‘Yeah, like he was in pain or something. But pleading, like? The saddest sound.’
‘Did you hear anybody else, any other voices?’
‘Yeah, two voices. Sal and somebody else.’
‘Male, female?’
‘Male. Having some argument, it sounded like.’
‘This was before Sal moaned? Before the furniture scraped?’
Blue closed her eyes, her face a study. ‘Before.’ But there was an uncertainty.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It was just before.’
‘And then, after the moan, what? Anything else?’
She took a moment, closing her eyes again, making sure. ‘No, just that. Then the door opened and closed again a few minutes later, and then it be quiet.’
‘So what did you do?’
The question seemed to spook her. She looked down, then at a place somewhere over Lanier’s shoulder. ‘I did go up, but later. No one answered.’
Lanier almost got sarcastic with her – dead people generally didn’t answer doors too well. But he kept his tone neutral. ‘Yeah, Blue, but you heard this noise that sounded like Sal might be in trouble while you were right here underneath him. You said you guys were friends-’
‘I didn’t say we were friends. Not exactly friends. I knew him a little. He seem like a good guy, that’s all.’
‘Okay, so why didn’t you go up and see him while you still might have been able to help?’
Again, that look over his shoulder. ‘Blue?’
‘I couldn’t.’ She paused and sighed. ‘Somebody was here, sleeping afterward, you know. I couldn’t get up.’
Dismas Hardy remained unaware of developing events for the whole day, until nearly nine o’clock Thursday evening. He had awakened at six and met Michelle at David’s Deli for a breakfast meeting an hour later. They were going down to Palo Alto – forty-some miles south – to meet with Dyson Brunei, Tryptech’s CEO, to introduce Michelle and discuss some of the substantive issues related to the lawsuit.
Hardy hadn’t taken the time to even glance at a newspaper. From his perspective the Graham Russo case was still smoldering, but the immediate fire had been put out. Hardy was going to have his hands full anyway, bringing Michelle up to speed on this litigation, continuing with his daily work. He figured that Graham was going to be in his life sometime in the future, but for now it was important to will Graham onto a back burner, impending murder charge or not.
It was easier said than done. Over lunch the conversation between Michelle, Brunei, and Hardy had come around to the surveillance equipment in use at the Port of Oakland. Perhaps, Michelle suggested, there was some video record of malfeasance, some smoking gun locked in the video camera at one of the security checkpoints. There was no record anyone had looked into that possibility.
Graham’s bank! Hardy had thought. Video records at the bank could prove, perhaps, that Graham hadn’t gone there with his father’s money after Friday. That would mean that, whatever else might have happened, he didn’t kill Sal so that he could get at the safe. It would get any murder charge out of the range of special circumstances.
Once the idea about videotapes at the bank came to him, the rest of the day was an agony of detail and protocol. Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that even during this apparent hiatus, his inability to get out of Tryptech’s office might be costing Graham Russo years of his freedom. Hardy’d let himself be lulled by the media attention around the idea that the death of Sal Russo had been an assisted suicide. That was, after all, the express reason that Sharron Pratt had declined to file charges.
But – the realization came to him in a bolt – if the attorney general was going to play hardball politics and bring a charge against Graham Russo, it wasn’t likely to be for less than first-degree murder.
Still, Hardy couldn’t very well leave his bread-and-butter corporate client and his brand-new associate together and tell them to just catch up on things. He had to sell Brunei on Michelle’s skills and competence, simultaneously giving her a chance to show off what she had – miraculously – mastered in such a short time.
As if that weren’t enough, he also felt they needed to conduct some real business, going over deposition testimony he’d taken in the past couple of weeks, squeezing hard data from the elusive Brunei. The three of them and some of Tryptech’s staff remained at it until after seven.
Then Hardy decided to stop by his own office downtown and check his messages. From the pile of slips and first four phone calls on his answering machine, all from reporters, it was immediately obvious that the Russo case had gone ballistic.
Making his delay more crucial.
He tried calling Graham at home – by now it was nine-thirty – and no one answered, not even the machine. Hardy reasoned that if his own tangential connection to the case had produced today’s volume of mail and phone calls, then Graham must have been absolutely inundated by the flood. No doubt he was lying low.
He didn’t get home until eleven-thirty, and Frannie was by then asleep. His dinner was on the dining-room table, cold.
This morning, out in the Avenues, where Hardy lived, it was more than mere fog. It was wet as rain, although for some reason the droplets didn’t fall, just hung in the air. The temperature was in the low forties and a bitter wind whipped his coat as he approached his car.
Things at home were not good.
He thought he remembered telling Frannie yesterday that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He had never planned to be home for dinner last night. If he had told her, though, she didn’t remember it, and in all honesty he wasn’t completely certain that he had.
Though he ached with every bone in his body to be out of the house – he needed a court order and then he needed to get to Graham’s bank – he also knew he had better wait and talk to Frannie when she got back from taking the kids to school.
Which he had done.
Now, driving downtown through the soup, he wasn’t sure if he was happy or not that his wife wasn’t a nag. If she’d only yelled at him, he could have responded in kind or worked himself up a froth of righteous indignation that she didn’t appreciate all the hours he was putting in so that he could support the family, and all by himself, he need hardly remind her.
It was a grueling responsibility – the daily grind. But it was his job, and he was sorry if once in a very great while he had to miss a goddamn dinner. Some wives actually understood this.
That’s what he would have said if she’d come back in on the warpath.
But if she had lost her temper at any time last night, she’d found it by the time she talked to him this morning. She wasn’t mad, and this threw him, as she knew it would, back on himself.
Was this the way it was always going to be? She simply wanted to know, so she’d be able to deal with it. So she could be a better mom to the kids. (She didn’t say, ‘in the absence of a father figure,’ but he heard it.)
So he tried a few clichés – ‘Life is complicated.’ ‘We have different roles we’re trying to juggle.’ ‘This is just a busy time’ – but he’d ended up by apologizing. He’d try to communicate better in the future. She was right: something had to change.
Well, he thought, something already had. He’d brought on Michelle to help with Tryptech. He’d more or less committed to Graham Russo’s defense. This case intrigued him as corporate litigation never would. There was no passion for him in business law and it took all of his time, wasting him for anything else – like his family. It made him feel old.
He might – no, he would - wind up working the same kind of hours for Graham Russo, but it would be in the service of something he believed in. Maybe, at forty-five, he was finally getting down to the core of who he was.
The car behind him honked and he moved forward, then pulled over to the side of Geary Street, letting the traffic flow past him.
This was the way he always reacted when he began caring too much: he went on autopilot and ran from it. There was too much to lose. It wasn’t safe.
It was what he’d done after his son had died during his first marriage, when he was twenty-seven. Something in him decided he wouldn’t survive looking over into the chasm. He closed up and went to sleep.
He and Jane had gotten divorced, he’d quit the law entirely, and for nearly ten years he’d tended bar at the Shamrock. Drinking a lot, but rarely getting drunk. Functioning quite well, thank you, but keeping any feeling on a short tether. Sleepwalking.
Then, suddenly, Frannie. Realizing that the essence of him had nearly dried up and would surely blow away if he didn’t risk part of it, he’d started over. Fatherhood, again. Criminal law, again. Caring too much again.
What if he lost all this now, or even any part of it?
No, he couldn’t let that happen. He was at his limit of risk tolerance. It was too dangerous; it was a matter of his survival, he had to pull back.
And that’s what he’d done: gotten back to sleepwalking. Functioning, keeping too busy. He was on the run, avoiding the only kind of work he found fulfilling, maintaining a low level of interaction with his family.
It stunned him – he’d become afraid. Of change, of failure in his job, of caring too much at home.
It had to stop, he thought. He had to wake himself up. What was the point of protecting the essentials in your life – your talents, your family, your friends – if you never took the time to enjoy them? If you were already dead?
Superior Court Judge Leo Chomorro, a brush-cut, swarthy block of well-tailored muscle, was in his chambers, playing chess with his computer. He had blocked out six days for a murder trial in his courtroom, and this morning one of Pratt’s young wunderkind had forgotten to subpoena the witness he had planned to call at the start of the day. So Chomorro had a morning off, not that this had put him in an especially good humor. On the other hand, one of Hardy’s trials had been in Chomorro’s courtroom, and there was no evidence that anything put him in a good humor. Nevertheless, he was the only available judge this morning, and Hardy needed him.
He kept it short: he’d like the judge to sign a court order to look at the surveillance videotapes from Graham Russo’s bank. He explained why he needed it.
‘Why don’t you use a subpoena?’ the judge asked him.
‘I can’t. There’s no case pending.’
‘So what jurisdiction do I have to issue this order? Who am I to tell the bank what to do? I can’t issue an order any more than you can issue a subpoena.’
‘Your Honor.’ Hardy laid on the respect. ‘The bank doesn’t care about the tape. All they need is paper to cover themselves. If you sign this, no one will ever object. If you don’t, important evidence in this case could be lost because the police don’t want to preserve it.’
Chomorro snorted. ‘They shouldn’t care either way.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Should is the operative word there, Judge.’
‘You think this one’s going to get hot, don’t you?’
Another nod. ‘It’s smoldering already. That’s why I need the order now. I don’t know how long they save the tapes. If it’s a week, maybe I’m already too late. I need last Friday’s.’
Chomorro reviewed the order that Hardy had printed out from the word processor in his office.
‘To: CUSTODIAN OF RECORDS, Wells Fargo Bank, Haight Street Branch.
‘GOOD CAUSE APPEARING THEREFORE, you are hereby ORDERED, upon receipt of reasonable payment therefore, to surrender to Dismas Hardy, counsel of record for Graham Russo, copies of surveillance videotape film for the dates May 9-13, inclusive.’
Below the date was a line for the judge to sign, and this he did, looking up when he was finished, handing over the paper. ‘I haven’t seen you around here in a while, Mr Hardy. You been on vacation?’
Hardy kept it light. ‘Just waiting for the right case.’
Chomorro nodded. ‘Looks like you found it.’
Graham had his telephone and answering machines unplugged, but in New York on Thursday afternoon a senior editor at Time - Michael Cerrone – convinced his boss that the Russo story in San Francisco was a potential cover. On Friday at one-twenty, shivering in the wind and fog – even up on Edgewood – Cerrone knocked on Graham’s door and introduced himself. He had his photographer with him.
‘Time magazine?’ Graham said. ‘You’re kidding me.’
Cerrone had seen this response before in people whom fame had sledgehammered. He proffered his credentials.
‘This is so unreal,’ Graham said. ‘Here I just come home from getting laid off and now you want to take my picture for Time magazine?’
Cerrone wasn’t much older than Graham, though he looked even younger, with dark hair to his shoulders and an open, inviting smile. In jeans, hiking boots, and a bright blue parka, he was the farthest thing imaginable from a threatening big-city media type. He showed his teeth, grinning. ‘Hey, I know it’s not Rolling Stone, but I’ll buy you a beer.’ Then, more seriously, ‘Who laid you off? How come?’
Graham explained it. His employers had no complaints about his work, but due to all the publicity, they’d gotten several phone calls. Potential customers didn’t seem all that thrilled with the idea that their sick patients would be riding in an ambulance with a paramedic who might help them end their suffering. After all this blew over, the ambulance company might reconsider bringing Graham back on, but until then…
‘That sucks,’ Cerrone said sympathetically. ‘Don’t you want to tell your side of it? You’ll never get a better chance.’
Graham Russo thought about it for a couple of seconds, then told Cerrone he might as well come on in out of the cold, bring his photographer in with him.
The manager of the Wells Fargo branch – a cooperative woman named Peggy Reygosa – was inclined to comply promptly with Hardy’s court order. She wasn’t about to let go of the originals, however, but arranged with the bank’s custodian to make copies for Hardy. Yes, of course she’d tell him to be extremely careful not to erase the originals until he’d checked over the copies.
In her corner cubicle Ms Reygosa assured Hardy that the front entrance to the bank, where the video camera was mounted, was the only way into and out of the building, even for employees. She called in her custodian and asked him to get to work copying the tapes right away. ‘But if you wanted to see when Mr Russo last accessed his box, you should also check the sign-in form. Nobody gets inside their box without signing in.’
‘Even if they have their own key?’
She shook her head. ‘No. It takes two keys – yours and ours – and your signature. The inspectors who were in on Tuesday, they’ve already made a copy of the sign-in sheet. Would you like to see it?’
Bleary eyed, feeling stupid and finessed – he really was out of practice – Hardy told the manager that it would be nice. She got up and returned a couple of minutes later.
It wasn’t much of a formal document, just an oversized page with the bank’s logo on the top, vertical lines intersecting the signature and date lines below, so that each signatory had an individual box. A bank officer had a stamp, which was initialed in the first box, then there was the date, then the signature, and finally the time.
Ms Reygosa came around to peruse the sheet over Hardy’s shoulder. On the line above Graham’s every box had been filled in. Hardy couldn’t make out the name – Ben something – but he’d accessed his box on 5/8, which was Thursday, at 4:40 P.M. A bank officer with the initials A.L. – ‘That’s Alison Li’ – had signed Ben in.
On Graham’s line, Li had initialed her stamp again, but beside that there was only a signature, no time or date. ‘How did this happen?’ Hardy asked. ‘What does this mean?’
It was evidently the first time that Ms Reygosa had studied the document. She straightened up, surprising Hardy by laying a hand on his shoulder, and told him she’d be right back.
While she was gone, he went back to the list. Below Graham, order had once again been restored. On 5/10 – Saturday, he realized – at nine-fifteen, a Pam Barr had signed in. In all there were eight lines below Graham’s through Tuesday night. But there were no names at all for Friday.
He put his hands to his eyes and rubbed them, wondering why nothing was easy. When he looked up again, Ms Reygosa was back with a diminutive, terrified young Asian woman. ‘Alison’ – the peppy friendliness had disappeared – ‘this is Mr Hardy, and I’d like you to explain to him how Mr Russo signed in for his safe deposit box without either a time or a date.’
Hardy smiled, trying to put her at ease, but it didn’t seem to work. She stared at the sheet for what seemed an eternity. ‘I remember this. I reminded him about the date and time.’
Hardy kept his voice neutral. ‘But you didn’t see him write them in?’
‘Obviously, no. As you can see, he didn’t.’ She threw a glance at Ms Reygosa, stammered to Hardy, ‘We stamp, you know, after we check the signature, then go into the room with the customer, with our key.’
‘And the customer writes the date and time?’
‘Sometimes. Sometimes I do it.’
‘But neither of you did on this occasion?’
She indicated the sheet. ‘As you see,’ she repeated. ‘Mr Russo, he was in a hurry. He signed and I remember I even said not to forget to put the time, and he smiled like he does, said he’d get it on the way out. He’d remember. But he didn’t, and I must have gotten busy, so I guess neither did I. It seemed like he was anxious to get inside, like he was nervous. He had a briefcase with him.’
I’d be nervous, too, Hardy thought, if I were carrying around fifty thousand dollars in cash. But Hardy had no desire to keep cross-examining the woman. He didn’t want to antagonize her, since if Graham did go to trial, which he considered all but certain, he would be questioning her then. ‘Do you remember what day this was, Ms Li, Thursday or Friday? You said it was near the end of the day. Do you remember the time?’
She was biting her lip, thinking hard. Finally, it seemed to come to her. ‘It was the afternoon. Thursday or Friday, though, I can’t be sure.’
Hardy pointed down at the sign-in document again. ‘Do you remember if it was right after this man, Ben somebody, came in? You signed him in, too, at twenty minutes to five.’
She pondered for another long moment. In his desperation Hardy gave her a hint. ‘No one else signed in on Friday. Mr Russo would have been the only one that day. Does that seem right?’
The poor woman was on the verge of tears. Another glance at her boss, Ms Reygosa, didn’t help. Alison was trying to give Hardy the information he wanted, give him the right answer, but she didn’t know exactly what it was.
Hardy pressed further. ‘You said you thought it was the afternoon, Alison. Did it feel like it was after three o’clock? Mr Russo went to work at three on Friday.’
Suddenly her face cleared, and she let out the deep breath she’d been all but holding for five minutes. ‘Oh, yes, then, it must have been Thursday afternoon. Thursday, I’m sure of it. Near the end of the day.’ She pointed down at the sheet. ‘Maybe we should write it in now that we know?’
Since the inspectors had already copied the original of this document, Hardy – gently – allowed as how that might not be an inspired idea. They should just leave it as it was.
Hardy’s errand at the bank had, he thought, been supremely worth it.
As it turned out, the Haight Street branch did erase their tapes on a ten-day cycle. Hardy got his copies and spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching television in his living room, the front door of the bank as people came and went. After getting his bearings he got so he could fast-forward until someone appeared in the doorway, stop the tape, determine it wasn’t Graham, and move on. In this way he got through viewing three days of the most boring video he’d ever watched in a little over five hours.
Perhaps it wasn’t conclusive, but at least once he’d seen his copies, he had a good argument that Graham Russo hadn’t entered this bank from the time of his father’s death on Friday until he was arrested on Wednesday morning. If a jury believed this, then it would indicate that Graham did not kill his father to get the money. He already had the money and the baseball cards before his father was dead.
During the same viewing period, Hardy’d had no trouble identifying Evans and Lanier when they’d come in to check the safe deposit box.
Glitsky, Assistant AG Art Drysdale, and San Francisco coroner John Strout sat around the latter’s desk in his office behind the morgue. All around them Strout’s collection of murder weapons under glass, from medieval torture devices to guns and knives, lent a humorous, macabre air to their surroundings, but the three men weren’t joking now. Between them they had assembled the foundations for hundreds of murder cases, and yet their respective roles were not necessarily complementary.
Glitsky and Drysdale – the cop and the prosecutor – viewed themselves as true allies. They found and interpreted evidence with the mutual goal of proving that a particular person had committed a crime. They did different work, but it was toward the same end.
Strout, on the other hand, jealously guarded his independence and his objectivity. He was a scientist. If his discoveries helped Glitsky and Drysdale – and they often did – then so be it. But he had no ax to grind. He did not consider himself a lawman, an officer of the court, anything like that. His job was to rule on cause of death. Speculation did not enter into it, nor did politics. If he didn’t know, he said he didn’t know, and vice versa.
At this moment, behind his desk, Strout’s normally unflappable Southern style was being put to the test. Drysdale had decided he wanted to be sure he had Strout’s support in calling the homicide of Sal Russo a murder, and he’d enlisted Glitsky to come down as moral support.
‘Now, Art, that’s just simply not going to happen. I am not about to change an opinion without different evidence, and to be honest with you, I’m just a bit offended that you thought I might.’
But Drysdale had his game face on. Dean Powell – the attorney general – had told him what he wanted in the best of all worlds, and if it were gettable, Drysdale was going to get it. Strout’s feelings would heal. ‘You’ve already called it a homicide, John-’
Strout was holding a hand up. ‘Well, that’s just plum inaccurate, Art. I did not say it was a homicide. I called it a suicide equivocal/homicide, which is not the same thing. It means I can’t say for sure that Russo didn’t kill himself.’
‘Mr Powell thinks that’s splitting hairs.’
Strout removed his wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Well, Mr Powell can hire himself another pathologist and get himself another opinion, but he’s already got mine, and it’s stayin’ the way it is.‘
Glitsky thought he would try to calm the waters. ‘You know Art doesn’t mean to insult you, John. He’s asking if there’s anywhere this can bend, that’s all. Okay, it could have been suicide – we accept that-’
‘Well, thank you all to hell, Lieutenant.’
Glitsky ignored him. ‘But isn’t there anything that militates against it? Makes it a little more likely somebody killed him?’
‘The bump, for example.’ Drysdale had studied the autopsy report carefully. He had years of experience, and to him it read like a murder. Someone had whacked Sal to knock him out, then administered the fatal dose of morphine. It was open and shut.
Unfortunately, other scenarios were possible. Maybe not as probable, but medically feasible. It made him short tempered.
Strout kept his glasses off, but sat back in his chair, elbows on its arms. ‘The bump was caused, as I mentioned, by a blow to the head, which is not inconsistent with the deceased banging it on the table as he fell down.’
Drysdale didn’t buy that at all. ‘That would have meant he fell backwards, John. How could he fall backwards unless somebody pushed him? There was no hair on the table. He didn’t hit the table. He got hit by the whiskey bottle.’
Strout made a gesture at Glitsky, who reluctantly spoke up. ‘The bump didn’t even bleed, Art. It’s not inconsistent that it didn’t take any hair-’
Betrayed by his ally, Drysdale bit out the words. ‘Not inconsistent, not inconsistent! You fellas got a tape loop going down here?’
Strout impatiently explained some more. ‘There was sufficient edema – which, as both of you know, is swelling – to allow for the flow of blood for a half hour or more.’ He turned his palms up. ‘He was alive, Art. The blow to the head didn’t kill him. I can’t even say for sure it knocked him out. If it did, it wasn’t for more than a few seconds.’
‘Long enough to give him the shot.’
Strout shrugged. ‘I can’t say. Maybe.’
Drysdale’s face had gone red, and he sat back in his chair, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled at his tie. In his own office he let off tension by juggling baseballs, but there wasn’t anything to juggle here except hand grenades, and he wasn’t going to go grabbing at them. For all he knew, they were live.
There was a short silence, broken by the screech of rubber and colliding metal on the freeway outside Strout’s window. All the men got up to gawk. The coroner raised the blinds. They couldn’t see the freeway through the fog, and it was less than fifty yards away.
They all stayed standing by the window. Nothing had been said, but the anger, somehow, had dissipated.
‘Y’all just plain aren’t gonna prove it couldn’t have been suicide,’ Strout began. ‘I’ve heard you say it a hundred times, Abe. You can’t prove a negative. It might be y’all want to concentrate on why it could have been a homicide.’
‘I’m listening,’ Drysdale said.
Strout ticked off reasons on his fingers. ‘One, he’d never used the site before, the inside of his wrist. Two, his blood alcohol was point one oh – pretty drunk – hittin’ the vein on the first try was dang good shootin‘. Three, the needle wasn’t in him. It was sitting on the table there. Isn’t that right, Abe?’
Glitsky nodded in agreement and Drysdale asked what the last fact meant.
‘It means Sal Russo shot himself up and remained conscious long enough to withdraw the needle. Except you got eight or more milligrams of morphine goin’ IV, on top of a point one oh alcohol, most people, time they got the plunger all the way down, they’re at least in shock. The needle might fall out when consciousness went, but it don’t get itself put neatly back on the table. The cap doesn’t get itself put back on the syringe, that’s for damn sure.‘
Drysdale chewed on it for a moment. ‘If I’m on a jury, those three taken together, that’s beyond reasonable doubt.’
‘I don’t know,’ Strout replied, true to form. ‘It might be, but it don’t have to be, which is what I said all along.’
The photographer had left to develop his film. Fearing they’d be interrupted if they stayed on Edgewood, Graham and Michael Cerrone had spent the afternoon and evening at Modena, an upscale Italian deli on Clement Street, sharing two bottles of ten-year-old Gold Label Ruffino Chianti. Now they were no longer strangers. In seven hours Cerrone felt he’d captured the soul of his subject on tape.
Cerrone had come out to California with high expectations – a cover, after all, was not a daily occurrence, even for a senior editor. But the interview had exceeded his hopes by far, both in scope and in human drama.
The story had everything: Russo’s background as a bonus athlete cut down in his prime by injury, a brilliant law student, a clerkship with a federal judge. Then chucking it all to give his dream one last try, only to fail again; and only, in turn, to have that noble effort ostracize him from the legal community. And now there was the fallout from the murder charge that had been summarily dropped: even his part-time employer wouldn’t keep Graham on.
But Cerrone thought the personal side was even more compelling. Although it was nowhere on the public record, he learned that privately Gil Soma wanted Graham’s head on a platter. The state prosecutor had been Graham’s office mate at the federal courthouse. Graham had told him that in Soma’s eyes he was far worse than a mere murderer – he was a traitor, to be hunted and brought down.
On the other side was the picture of a talented and sensitive hero, reconciling, after years, with his father, who then became terminally ill. Graham had confided to Cerrone that over the past two difficult years, his father had been the only person who’d accepted him, who loved him. The only person keeping Graham from being utterly alone.
Of course he’d taken care of him. Though he didn’t admit to knowing the source of the morphine, he had often given him his shots.
Cerrone fell short of getting the coup, the confession, but what he had was almost better – it played into his ‘hook’ perfectly. The issue of the week was going to be assisted suicide – the agony of the decisions confronting everyone stepping through this emotional minefield. Cerrone would write his story so that the conclusion was obvious.
Graham had done the right thing. His father wanted to end his life, but he needed support, someone to hold his hand; at the last moment he was afraid of being alone. He would choose his own time, but Graham, his dutiful, perhaps prodigal, son, would help him if need be.
This, Cerrone was sure, was what had happened. And the beauty and pathos of it was that there was no way that Graham could own up to what he’d done, not if he ever wanted to work again.
After her morning meeting with Glitsky, Sarah’s turmoil increased by the hour. By sunset, when she parked down the street from Graham’s place, she was a wreck. Twice during the day Marcel had wanted to come up here to Edgewood, find Graham, push a few of his buttons, see what popped up. Sarah told him they ought to wait, get more on him, bide their time. In reality she wanted to keep Marcel out of it, to go see Graham again by herself. This was dangerous on many levels, she knew, and unprofessional on all of them, but she was going to do it anyway.
For the first time in her career she wasn’t sure she was after the right person. Suddenly, after last night’s really meaningless discussion at the ballpark, she’d lost her cop’s simple take on Graham Russo. He’d become mostly a human being, not mostly a suspect.
And worse, he was a human being she could be attracted to, was already attracted to. It was wise to acknowledge that, keep it in front of her.
She knew it was a bad situation, untenable really. She ought to take herself off the case. Her objectivity was shot.
But what if that apparent objectivity led her and Marcel to the wrong conclusion? They might, for the second time, arrest the wrong man – a black mark on each of their careers, a possible false-arrest lawsuit, to say nothing of the grief to Graham. This is what she wanted to avoid, why she wanted to see Graham without her partner hovering.
She’d talk to Graham and get it clear to her own satisfaction, lay this ambivalence to rest. He was either a murder suspect or not. She had to know for herself. Then she could do her job.
That was all it was. She was just making sure, taking that extra step, being a good cop. That’s what she told herself.
But there was one other problem: she found she couldn’t shake a kind of simmering anger at Graham for having put her in this position. Was he manipulating her, or trying to? Who was this guy? He shouldn’t have come up to her at the ballpark. They were enemies, on opposite sides. What was that all about? Arrogance, as Marcel contended? Or was Graham simply, as he’d appeared, a sweet guy who held nothing against the woman who’d arrested him, had wanted no more than to tell her that he knew she was only doing her job? No hard feelings.
She just didn’t know. It was personal somehow, and it shouldn’t have ever gotten to there. It made her mad.
She was going to find out who he was.
Graham and another man stood talking out in the street in front of his place. It was full dusk and the fog had thinned up here on the hill, though the wind still gusted fitfully, shaking fistfuls of blossoms, snowlike, from the trees around them.
Sarah walked up, dressed for business in a blue suit as she’d been all day. ‘Hello, Graham.’
He turned to look at her. She thought she saw something welcoming in his face, though it disappeared instantly.
She kept moving toward him. ‘Your father called you twice on Friday morning. What did you two talk about?’
It tore at her heart to see something go out of Graham’s shoulders, but he recovered quickly, bringing his companion into it. ‘This is my favorite cop, Sergeant Evans. Sarah, Mike Cerrone. He’s a reporter.’
The reporter put out his hand, and she took it. ‘You’re not with the Chronicle.’ Sarah knew the locals, and this guy wasn’t one of them.
‘Time,’ he answered.
‘My, how the word do get around.’
In truth, she’d been expecting something like this. The shop talk at the Hall was about how big this had gotten in a hurry. And now Time.
‘You boys been drinking?’ she asked. To Cerrone: ‘I could call you a cab. Here in the Wild West it’s considered bad form to drink and drive.’
Graham had his grin back. ‘What did I tell you? She is some pistol. Don’t let her sweet looks fool you.’
‘I don’t think they were going to,’ Cerrone said. He never took his eyes from her. In fact, Graham had mentioned her, but only in passing. Now it seemed to Cerrone – an instinct – that there was something more here, or might be. More story. An attractive female investigator coming up alone to interview him at night? ‘How ’bout coffee instead? Go inside, kill an hour, get sober.‘
‘Coffee just makes you wide-awake drunk.’
‘I don’t think I’m drunk.’
‘Nobody thinks they’re drunk. That’s kind of the problem.’
‘Hey!’ Graham said, getting their attention. ‘What’s with you guys? I think I’m drunk, how about that? I’ll make coffee.’
Evans looked at him levelly. ‘If you invite me in without a warrant…’
But Graham had already turned, heading for his door. ‘What a hardass,’ he said. ‘I’m going in, I’m freezing. You can come or don’t, I don’t care.’
Cerrone, in a mock gallant gesture, indicated Evans should precede him. She did.
Nobody was in a hurry to get down to business. Graham had put on the coffee, then some music – Celine Dion’s French Album. Cerrone hated it. Didn’t Graham have any Alanis Morissette? Evans was somehow relieved that Graham didn’t. She didn’t want to think he had that much affinity for rage. In the end he put on Chris Isaak’s Baja Sessions, came back to the table. Sarah finally asked him again about his father’s phone calls on the morning of his death.
Graham sighed wearily. ‘Okay, we talked twice on Friday.’
‘What did you talk about?’
Graham drank some of his coffee, then seemed to remember something. ‘Are you recording this? Not that it matters. With Mike here I’ve been recording all day. How many tapes we go through today, Mike?’
‘Five.’
Sarah processed that, then got out her own recorder. ‘The electronic age, you gotta love it.’ Her face dimpled prettily. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’ She gave her introduction, and asked again.
‘We talked about his pain mostly.’ He paused and stared out at the blackness. ‘Actually’ – his voice took on a husky edge – ‘Sal and me, we had the same discussion twice. The first one kind of went away. Maybe the second one, too, I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘It was one of his bad days.’
Sarah found that she had to blink. This response – ‘It was one of his bad days’ – was Graham’s first real reference to the day-to-day fact of Sal’s condition. In her concentration on the son she’d nearly forgotten the father.
With difficulty she found the thread and picked it up again. ‘Your father called you seventeen times in the past month, Graham.’
He nodded. ‘Something like that, I guess.’
‘So what did he want you to do?’
The huskiness remained in his voice. He’d obviously been drinking. His defenses were down. She was sure this was honest and raw emotion, an open wound. ‘I don’t know what he wanted that day. It wasn’t one thing – it varied. He was dying, you understand? He’d wake up and not know where he was. He was scared. He needed his hand held. He just wanted to talk to somebody. Take your pick, Sergeant. He counted on me.’
At the opposite end of the table Cerrone was an irritant. God only knew what impression this interrogation was making on him. But Sarah had a tipsy and emotional Graham talking voluntarily. The opportunity had to be taken if she was to get what she needed.
Cerrone stared at her disapprovingly, but she ignored him. ‘All right, he counted on you. And what did you do, that day, after the second call?’
Graham sipped at his coffee. He put the cup down and brought his hand to his face, rubbing at his jawline as though it had gone numb. When he spoke, his voice was flat. ‘It wasn’t just a bad day. It had been a terrible couple of weeks, just terrible. Everything was going downhill – the pain, the forgetting, all the sudden, way worse than it had been. I don’t know what happened, if the tumor affected the Alzheimer’s somehow. I don’t know what it was. But something had changed. Something was going to have to be done.’
‘Did you know what?’
Graham shook his head. ‘When we first got back together, we’d talked a little about having to put him in a home someday. Back then he’d gotten lost a few times, but the disease wasn’t very advanced. He was functioning pretty well. I think he went to see somebody, some doctor, to get diagnosed, but chickened out before they could run all the tests. He didn’t want to know for sure, didn’t want to face that he had it. But he knew.’
‘And what did he think about being in a home?’
‘There was no way. He wasn’t going to end his life as a vegetable. He made me promise I’d kill him first.’
‘And did you do that? Promise that?’
Cerrone leaned forward. ‘Graham?’
The trance was broken. Momentarily. ‘What?’
‘I’m sure the sergeant meant to inform you that you don’t have to answer any of this. That you can have your lawyer here.’
The alcohol was a definite if subtle presence. Graham reached over and patted the reporter on the arm. ‘Hey, it’s cool, Mike. It’s cool. Sarah’s not here to bust me’ – he turned to her – ‘are you?’
Their eyes met, held. Finally Sarah broke it off. ‘I’m just trying to get to the truth, Graham. I’m trying to find out what happened. You just told me you promised your dad you would kill him…?’
‘If.’ Graham held up a finger. ‘There was a big if.’
‘And what was that?’
‘If the Alzheimer’s snuck up on him, and suddenly his brain wasn’t there. That was when I was going to do it.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. I hadn’t figured that yet. Or even if I was really going to. We hadn’t got there. He was still functioning. But then he started getting the headaches and we found out about the tumor…’
‘How did you find out about that?’
Graham’s eyes went to Cerrone for a moment, then to Sarah. ‘This is starting to sound like an interrogation, you know that?’
Sarah tried to bluff it. ‘We’re just talking, Graham.’
He motioned to the tape recorder. ‘With that thing running? You’re telling me you won’t use anything on there?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t tell you that.’
‘So this is an official visit after all?’
Again, the eyes. ‘What else would it be?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A guy can hope.’ He paused for a longish moment. ‘Sure, Sal went to a doctor, I guess.’
‘Do you know who?’
Another pause, longer this time. Graham sighed heavily and lowered his head, shaking it like a tired dog. ‘You want to go off the record?’
She considered, then shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. I’m investigating your father’s death, Graham. If you know something about it, you can tell me. Do you know the doctor your father consulted or not?’
Graham’s eyes moved to the tape recorder. ‘On the record I don’t know. He went alone. I didn’t live with him, you know. He had a life.’
‘Did he tell you how he paid for this doctor? Didn’t you talk about money?’
Graham shrugged. ‘He told me about the cancer, that they couldn’t operate, it was going to kill him. Then the whole question of putting him in a home kind of became moot. He wasn’t going to get old as some shell in a wheelchair. He wasn’t going to get old at all.’
The simple truth of this fact struck them all dumb. The CD even chose this moment to pause between cuts. Finally, Graham shrugged. ‘Anyway, as I said, the last couple of weeks it got worse.’
But Sarah, now, wasn’t quite ready to move on. Something else was eating at her. ‘The last time we talked on the record,’ she said, ‘you didn’t know what was causing your father all this pain. Now you did know. Do I have that right?’
‘Yeah. I knew. It was the cancer, the tumor.’
‘But you didn’t tell me then?’
Bad though it sounded, the rationale was obvious enough to Graham. ‘I also told you we didn’t see much of each other.’ He broke a grin. ‘Come on, Sarah, I was trying to be consistent and you caught me anyway.’
‘And you still say you don’t know where the morphine came from?’
‘That’s right.’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Hey, can we stop this already? I’m going to open some more wine. You want a little wine? A glass of beer? Mike?’
Sarah declined, and Mike said he had to go. He had a plane at an obscene hour the next morning. The three of them walked to the door, and Graham opened it, shook Mike’s hand, told him good luck. Sarah hung back as Mike crossed the street and started walking downhill toward his car.
Sarah stood crammed next to Graham in the doorway. It seemed to her that every cell in her body was attuned to his proximity. Yet it also felt as though he was daring her not to move. He put an arm on the doorsill just over her shoulder, then put some weight on the arm – all but leaning on her. ‘Are you really leaving?’ he asked her.
She told herself that he wasn’t completely sober. His inhibitions were lowered and, okay, he found her attractive. For the moment he’d forgotten that she was a cop. That was all it was. And she would be damned if she was going to duck away. Raising her head, she was looking up into his eyes.
Bad idea. Whether or not it betrayed her true feelings, she’d better blink. Otherwise, their superficially professional relationship was about to develop an overt new element. And if she thought she had troubles up to now…
She swung under his arm, outside onto the driveway. ‘All right, Graham,’ she said, ‘if you’ll just answer three quick questions, I promise I won’t bother you anymore.’ She broke a conciliatory smile. ‘Tonight.’
‘Then afterward you’ll have a glass of wine with me?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’m on duty.’
‘So go off duty,’ he said. ‘Ask your three questions, then declare your workday over.’ His eyes never left her face.
This time she met his gaze. ‘First, I want to be clear. You did, in fact, give your father morphine shots from time to time?’
He nodded. ‘I said that.’
Actually, he hadn’t said that, Sarah knew, but he’d been speaking so freely and he’d had enough to drink that she wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember exactly what he had admitted. But he was telling the truth now. ‘How often?’
‘Is that the second question?’
She thought about it, and decided it could be. ‘Yeah.’
‘Couple of times a week, if I was there. He didn’t like to shoot himself up. Okay, what’s the third question?’
‘After the two calls on Friday morning, when your dad called you in great pain, why didn’t you go over there to help him?’
This last hurdle didn’t slow Graham at all. He brought his arm down off the door, took a step toward her. ‘Well, tell you the truth, that’s what I did.’ Spreading his hands, he grinned sheepishly. ‘And guess what?’ he asked. ‘The old fart had gone out. He wasn’t even there.’
Shaken with the import of what she’d heard – not only had Graham been at Sal’s on Friday, he had often administered morphine to his father – she was nearly back to her car when she stopped herself up short and swore.
Her tape recorder was still on Graham’s table!
She’d gotten up with the two guys to make sure Michael Cerrone of Time was good and gone before she attempted to ask her half-drunk suspect her last three questions. Then she’d ducked outside to escape the awful chemistry, asked her questions, and all but run away.
What a fool she was.
It had been less than five minutes, but the window slits high on the side wall had already gone dark. Knocking on the door, she heard no sound from within. Maybe he’d gone to sleep already, passed out. Or, more likely, she thought, he’d had it with reporters and the police. Whoever it was, he didn’t want any. She knocked again, softly. ‘Graham,’ she whispered, ‘it’s me. Sarah.’
Sergeant! she reminded herself. She was here not as Sarah, but as Sergeant Evans.
After a minute she heard movement. The light over her head came on. When the door opened, Graham seemed somehow diminished. His expression, she felt, made every attempt to welcome her, but she couldn’t miss the labor behind it. His eyes were exhausted, suddenly heavy lidded. ‘I thought you were having another glass of wine,’ she said.
All of Graham’s glibness was gone. It was as though he’d fallen into a deep sleep and been rudely awakened. ‘I think I’m about done for today. You gone off duty?’ But the question wasn’t inviting.
She pointed ambiguously behind him. ‘I left my recorder on your table.’
He nodded and hit the light switch next to the door, stepping back to let her pass. The recorder was where she had left it, still spinning. She flicked it off and walked back to the door, where Graham had remained, waiting for her.
Outside again, she hesitated one last moment, looking up at him. ‘Well, thanks for opening for me.’
‘Sure, anytime,’ he said. The door closed on her before she could turn away, and she wasn’t three steps down the street when the overhead light went out.
For herself, she had her answer. This man had loved his father. There were still outstanding questions about the wrapped bills, the baseball cards. Graham had all but admitted he knew more and would tell her if she would go off the record, but she couldn’t do that. Whatever else might be true, he hadn’t killed Sal for his money.
Coming up here alone had served a purpose: she now believed that Graham had revealed who he really was, to her, to Sarah. But Sergeant Evans, homicide inspector, realized with a pang of anguish that the cost had been dear. She’d helped him dig himself further into an ever-deepening hole.
Hardy was in his backyard, a long and relatively narrow strip of grass bordered by Frannie’s rose gardens. On either side apartment buildings rose to four stories. But directly behind to the east there was a clear view all the way to downtown. Also, beginning in about mid-April, when the sun contrived to shine, the path of it cut between the apartments, making a warm and cozy enclosure.
Now, tending to the barbecue, scraping the grill down, waiting for the coals to turn, Hardy was nearly recharged for the new week. Glitsky and his young son were coming over for dinner. So was Frannie’s brother, Moses McGuire, and his wife, Susan, and their baby, Jason.
It was late afternoon on Sunday and both the weather and the mood around the house had warmed a little from the deep-freeze late in the week. And here in the backyard the house shielded most of the breeze off the ocean.
The other center of chill – Frannie – came down the back stairs with a large covered Tupperware container. Hardy watched her as she put it on the picnic table that was up against the house. She stood still a moment, then set her shoulders and deliberately walked the half-dozen steps over to her husband, leaning into him and putting one arm around his waist.
‘Whatever you decide is all right, you know. It doesn’t matter to me as long as we’re in it together.’
He brought her in to him. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t seem like that,’ he said. ‘I thought you were pretty clear about no more murder cases.’
‘That’s what you told me you wanted, remember, so I got used to the idea, but I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a dog catcher if that’s what you want to be, if that’s what makes you happy.’ She moved away a step so she could look at him. ‘You’re the one with all the angst, Dismas. I know what I’m doing.’
‘It burns you out,’ he said. ‘The kids all the time.’ ‘No, it doesn’t. Well, a little. But so what? That’s not your problem. It’s what I’m doing. If my husband were happier, life would be perfect. If you were happier with the kids…’ Hardy let out a breath. ‘I love the kids, Fran, but-’
‘There’s always a but, Dismas. There shouldn’t be a but. It’s not the kids. It’s not me or your job. It’s your attitude.’ She walked up and placed a quick kiss on his lips. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Be happy. Sing the song. Check it out.’
Abe Glitsky sat straddling the picnic bench at the table by the house. He sat forward, elbows on his knees, his hands around a glass of iced tea. Hardy was lifting the lid from the kettle cooker, checking the chicken.
‘You’re not supposed to keep lifting the lid. It won’t cook right. There’s nothing worse than uncooked chicken.’
Hardy threw him a withering look, took a pull at his beer. ‘Global warming is way worse,’ he said. ‘Acid rain. Hemorrhoid commercials. I can think of a hundred things.’ He leveled the tongs at the grill. ‘You don’t lift the lid, how do you turn the chicken?’
‘Once,’ Glitsky said. ‘You lift it once, turn the chicken, put the lid back on, come back in a half hour, it’s done. That’s why they invented this kind of barbecue, as a matter of fact. Brilliant scientists working around the clock to save you from the necessity of having to watch your chicken every minute.’
‘That’s my personality,’ Hardy said. ‘I need to watch things, stay in control. And a good thing I do too.’
Glitsky stood up and walked over. ‘You could turn them now, for example. They look about done on the bottom. Then you could sit down and enjoy your beer without interruption.’
Hardy took a minute, poking and jabbing, then started turning the pieces. ‘I’m not doing this because you said so. Independently, they look done to me too.’
‘Half done,’ Glitsky corrected.
Hardy took his beer back over to the bench, and sat down.
‘Okay, now I’m enjoying my beer without interruption. By the way, what do you hear about Graham Russo?’
‘By the way, huh?’
A nod. ‘At your very own suggestion I sit myself down to take a moment of leisure, and what should pop into my brain unaided but the thought of my client.’
Glitsky took a seat at the other end of the bench, straddling it again. ‘And here I allowed myself to hope that your wife had invited me over again because she enjoyed my company so much last time.’
‘Maybe that too,’ Hardy said, ‘mysterious as that may be to the rest of us. But while you’re here…’
‘While I’m here, seriously, I’m not talking about it.’ Hardy had heard this kind of denial before in a dozen different guises, and usually it went away of its own accord. He wouldn’t have to push. His friend would get around to telling him, off the record, or he wouldn’t.
Hardy brought his bottle to his mouth, started to get up to check the chicken again, caught himself, and sat back down. ‘So, how about them Giants?’
But the lieutenant was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think I can tell you anything this time, Diz. There is some serious juice around this one.’
‘Powell?’
Glitsky shrugged. Hardy didn’t even have to ask. He knew Powell had decided to prosecute the case. The question was when.
But he wasn’t going to get that by asking directly. ‘Did you know about the wife?’ Hardy asked. ‘Or did you read about it in the paper?’
In this morning’s paper a reporter had discovered from reading recent police incident reports that Leland and Helen Taylor had summoned the authorities to the Seacliff palace known as the Manor three times in the past six weeks.
The first two times, it seems, Sal Russo had come by and knocked on the door. When Helen had opened it, he’d simply walked in, making himself at home – Helen’s home was his home, wasn’t it? wasn’t she his wife? – helping himself to whiskey, becoming verbally abusive, refusing to leave.
The third time, Sal had let himself in through an open servants’ entrance in the back, helped himself again to a couple of drinks, gone upstairs to where Helen was napping, and lain down next to and begun fondling her, demanding his conjugal rights.
In each case police had taken Sal to a local mental-health facility and booked him as a ‘danger to himself and others.’ The third time he was held for two hours and released. The first two times he hadn’t stayed that long.
Glitsky nodded. ‘Yeah, we heard about that on Saturday.’
‘And you were looking into it as a possible motive for Sal’s murder? Get another suspect in the loop?’
‘Nice try. No comment.’
Sal Russo waited patiently on one of the plastic yellow chairs in the sunlight that streamed through the lobby door of the social welfare detention center. He had Graham coming down in a couple of minutes to take him back home. He’d surprised this social worker here – Don. Not only did the old man know who he was, he knew his son’s telephone number.
‘Hey, Sal,’ Don called to him.
He opened his eyes. ‘What?’
‘You want to tell me why you keep breaking into your old house?’ Don thought he could trick Sal into giving an answer that would incriminate himself, so they could maybe send him to jail. But Sal knew his game. Don wasn’t fooling him.
‘Sometimes I miss my wife. That a crime?’
‘Except she s not your wife anymore.’
‘We said till death do us part. I remember that clear enough, sonny. I’m trying to get her back.’
‘Still, maybe it upsets her family now, don’t you think? You do it again, they might try to lock you up.’
‘Helen wouldn’t lock me up. Don’t you worry about it. What I got on her, she wouldn’t dare! He closed his eyes and faced the sun for another minute, a peaceful look settling over his features. ’She wasn’t always Little Miss Proper, you know. We had ourselves some times. I reminded her today. Got her upset, I think. She doesn’t want anybody to know.‘
Sal suddenly brought his hand up and squeezed at his temples.
‘You all right?’ Don asked.
‘Damn headache. I’m fine. We used to smoke a little dope, you know. A few lines of cocaine once or twice. You think her Leland wants to hear about that? I don’t think so. You think Leland knows she got arrested for shoplifting that time? You think that might bother him? Her Leland’s a little too uptight to handle that news, isn’t he?’
Don chuckled. ‘And your wife had me thinking she didn’t file a complaint because she didn’t want to cause troubles for a harmless old man. You were blackmailing her, weren’t you? You’re not harmless at all, are you?’
Sal smiled. ‘Not even a little,’ he said.
Hardy got a better idea of the way the wind was blowing during dinner. It was still light outside, and the five adults were eating in the dining room while the kids ate their drumsticks in front of the video.
Susan Weiss was McGuire’s wife. A cellist with the symphony, although she’d been on strike for a while now, she had an artistic temperament and spoke her mind freely. She knew all about the troubles with Glitsky’s wife, Flo – that she had died a couple of years before after a prolonged battle with cancer. She couldn’t understand how a man – ‘even a cop’ – who’d been through that experience could be opposed to ending the suffering of someone else who was in the same place.
‘I’m not.’ Glitsky put the evil eye on Hardy, as though his friend had somehow prompted Susan, then did his best to answer her, his voice under tight control. ‘Even if I’m a cop, I’m not opposed to the idea of assisted suicide. But I think it ought to be more private, much more private than – than what we are seeing sometimes.’
‘What do you mean, private?’
‘I mean between the involved parties and no one else. Private.’
‘How about doctor-assisted suicide? Kevorkian, all these guys. I hear half the doctors in the city do it all the time.’
‘And this means?’
‘Well, if you’re going after Sal Russo’s kid, shouldn’t you also be going after these doctors? Isn’t it the same thing?’
Glitsky appeared to be having trouble swallowing. He was the only adult at the table drinking water and now he took his glass and drank from it. ‘No, it’s not.’
‘How’s it different?’
Cornered, Glitsky let out a quick breath. ‘It’s different because somebody killed Sal Russo. Murdered him, and not out of mercy…’
‘I don’t think so,’ Hardy said.
Seated between his wife and his sister, Moses McGuire had been relatively quiet throughout the meal. An Irish brawler, a doctor of philosophy turned bartender, Moses usually tended to be a presence. But he’d sat without comment on this discussion up to now, drinking steadily from his glass of Scotch.
McGuire knew that Glitsky and Hardy were friends. Moses also considered himself Hardy’s best friend. This did not mean that Glitsky and McGuire were especially close. Now McGuire laid a proprietary hand on his wife’s arm. ‘Didn’t the dead guy, Sal, didn’t he have cancer?’
Glitsky nodded again. ‘Yeah.’
‘Inoperable, from what I hear? Right?’
Susan popped in. ‘So how can you write off the idea that somebody helped him kill himself, that that’s what he wanted?’
‘We don’t just write it off, Susan.’ Glitsky was still striving for the patient tone. ‘We collect evidence, see what it looks like, go from there.’
But McGuire was now warming to the argument, or from the Scotch, one of the two. ‘You’re going to have to go a hell of a long way from there to get around the fact that the guy was dying in a couple of weeks, anyway. Why in the world would somebody want to kill him?’
Frannie joined in, answering for the lieutenant. ‘Abe’s going to say it was money. Graham had a lot of his dad’s money – fifty thousand dollars.’
‘So what?’ Susan said. ‘That means he killed him?’
‘No,’ Abe replied, ‘it means he might have. That’s all we’re looking at.’
Hardy spoke up. ‘The reason he had the money was in case his dad had to go into a home.’
Though he knew Graham’s story about the children of Joan Singleterry, he wasn’t at all certain that he believed it. In any case, he didn’t want to muddy the waters, and he’d come up with his own theory over the past day or two. He thought it had a more credible ring. ‘His dad had it in a safe under his bed and Graham didn’t think that was the most brilliant idea…’
Glitsky turned to Hardy. ‘He tell you that?’
‘He didn’t have to.’
‘I wonder why didn’t he tell us?’
‘Abe.’ Frannie put down her fork. ‘We don’t mean to pick on you, but this just doesn’t make sense. Susan’s right. This kind of thing is happening every day. Why are you going after this boy?’
Glitsky clipped it out. ‘Because he lied about everything we asked him. Lying makes us law-enforcement types suspicious.’
‘But it was all of a piece, Abe.’ Hardy, the voice of reason. ‘Graham’s already blackballed for legal work in town, he was afraid he’d lose his bar card if it came out he helped kill his dad, even with the best of intentions.’
Frannie picked it up. ‘So he made up the story that he and his dad didn’t see each other. He didn’t think you guys would look so hard.’
‘So it sounds like he didn’t lie a lot.’ Susan joined the chorus. ‘He just told one lie and then had to make up a bunch of other stuff to support that one.’
A ghost of a smile flickering around his mouth, Glitsky sat back and crossed his arms. ‘Just bad luck we happened to catch him at the big one, huh?’ He came forward and picked up his fork. ‘Maybe it’s just me, but does anybody else think it’s funny that he still had the money after his father was dead, then kind of forgot to tell his family about it?’
‘Maybe he was going to,’ Susan said. ‘Maybe he just didn’t have time yet, you arrested him so fast.’
‘Maybe. More bad luck.’ Glitsky’s voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘Graham Russo,’ he said, ‘the original bad-luck kid.’
Playing up front in mixed doubles, and standing too close to the net, Mario Giotti didn’t even see the vicious forehand his opponent launched at his head.
One second he was on his toes, poised for a volley, following the flight of the ball his wife had just returned, and the next moment he was on the ground, flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him, conscious only of pain.
Sunday evening, and they were playing indoors at the Mountain View Racquet Club, located on the crest of the escarpment in Pacific Heights, where Divisadero Street began its cascade down from Broadway to Lombard – eight hundred vertical feet in six blocks.
The judge was aware of people gathered over him, then his head on his wife’s thigh. Someone brought over a white towel, then another one – wet and cool. He had an impression of blood, blotches of red on white in his vision, the brassy taste in the back of his throat.
Pat was taking control, as she always did. After satisfying herself that it was true, she assured one and all that Giotti was fine. She came down close and whispered into his ear. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him, ‘you’re okay.’ She wiped the wet towel over his face again, gently.
Then they were up, he and Pat, walking together. The judge held the stained, wet towel to his face, aware of the stares of the other patrons. Their opponents, another couple a decade younger than they were, tagged along – extras, without any role – a few steps behind them. Giotti felt the sturdiness of his wife’s shoulders, the weight they could bear. ‘Just lean on me,’ she said. He noticed some streaks of red on her short tennis skirt.
By the time they got to the juice bar, his breath was returning. He felt sure that his nose was broken, but the pressure he’d applied with the towel seemed to have stanched the flow of blood. The other couple – Joe and Dana – insisted on buying something, and Pat ordered large bottles of water for them both. They went off together, stricken and solemn.
Giotti watched after them. ‘What’s he think, we’re in the goddamn French Open? This is supposed to be a friendly little workout, and we get Agassi and Evert. What is this shit?’
‘Shh.’ Pat put a hand on his knee, leaning in toward him, whispering. ‘Somebody might hear, Mario.’
‘Let ’em,‘ he snapped back at her, but his eyes, following hers, surveyed the nearby tables. No one was within earshot. He turned back to her. ’This public court nonsense. They should have installed one at the courthouse. You know your opponents. They know you. You can be civilized.‘
The judge worked and had his chambers in the newly redone U.S. courthouse, the building that had gone unnoticed by Lanier and Evans two days before. The recent renovation, over eight years and at a cost of nearly $100 million, had restored the building to its original opulence, and that was saying something. Nicknamed the Federal Palace, it was widely considered, after the Library of Congress, to be the most beautiful government building in the United States.
The Palace had originally been built by Italian artisans. Completed just in time for San Francisco’s Great Earthquake of 1906, it had miraculously survived that catastrophe because the postal clerks who worked in the new building at the time had refused to leave, choosing instead to fight the fires that threatened it.
Now the elegant interior of the place – marble walls and frescoed ceilings – had a modern infrastructure. It was newly wired for computer terminals in nearly every room. Over the objections of many of the judges, including Giotti, who felt that the courts should be open and accessible to the people without hindrance, security was tight. Video cameras hovered at each entrance, with a bank of television screens overseen by uniformed deputies at a central command post by the front doors. Downstairs, a private, indoor parking area for the judges led to an equally private workout room and gym for the staff.
But no tennis courts, for which Giotti had lobbied strenuously. According to the experts there hadn’t been room.
This was an opportunity for the judge to remember it, and he continued raving at his wife, although quietly, to be sure. ‘We should join a private club.’
‘No, we can’t do that, Mario. We’ve discussed it. Let’s leave that now.’
‘No. I don’t agree.’
Her eyes narrowed in resolve and her fingers tightened on his leg, just above his knee, a warning. Pat was a powerhouse, physically strong and mentally tough. The monitor of the judge’s behavior outside of the court, the guardian of his precious reputation. He rarely disagreed with her judgment in these areas, but today he did. ‘People can be discreet,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to make friends, have private dinners. But the class of people-’
‘Don’t use that word, please.’
A frustrated expression. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘And I also know we can’t refer to it. Ever.’
So Giotti went back to his original complaint. ‘A hundred million dollars and they couldn’t figure out a way to put a court in the basement. I solve more difficult problems three times a week. Fucking bureaucrats.’
Pat was by now reassured that her husband couldn’t be heard, but his profanity when angry still was a source of frustration. Her fingers tightened around Giotti’s leg again. It made her crazy – he didn’t seem to realize who he was sometimes. Or, more truthfully, he seemed to want to forget that a federal judge was not an ordinary citizen. All of them breathed rarefied air and were accountable on a different level.
And her husband particularly – a centrist Democrat – had to be ever vigilant. There were rumors that he was in line for the Supreme Court at the next vacancy. Surely, he’d earned it: the lifetime of sagacious decisions, published majority opinions, brilliant dissents, the millions of travel miles as he flew the circuit, the sacrifice of abandoning all their old friends, all of the city’s rich social life, on the altar of judicial purity.
But that last wasn’t unique to the Giottis. To avoid any appearance of conflict of interest, and because of the awesome responsibility of the issues they must daily decide, most, if not all, federal judges wound up cutting off their preappointment relationships – both business and personal. That was part and parcel of the life of the federal judge, and those who didn’t know it at their appointment soon found out, sometimes to their great dismay and disappointment.
Even despair.
They couldn’t have friendships in the usual meaning of the word. It wasn’t so much that people couldn’t be trusted. No, it was more that if he served long enough – and the job was a lifetime appointment – sooner or later a federal judge would be called upon to make a decision that would impact nearly everyone he had ever known.
A casual friendship, an innocent prejudice, a personal comment, an inappropriate liaison, too great an attachment even to a son or a daughter, or a wife – any of these could sully the sacred objectivity of the law.
Pat Giotti knew that this was why all the federal judges were such a family. And in that artificial and ethereal family, where there were few real friendships and little outside influence, reputation was all.
Of course, she knew, Mario’s profanity wasn’t going to lose him his job, but it might lower the judge in the eyes of even one citizen, and Pat Giotti, bred to the culture of the Ninth Circuit, would not abide that. She, too, had made great sacrifices to further her husband’s career – her own friendships, her fun, the intimacy of their four children, her youth. Sometimes, she thought in her dark moments, her very life.
But these thoughts passed. They couldn’t be allowed. It had all been worth it. Mario Giotti was a federal judge now. He was someday, with luck, going to the Supreme Court, perhaps as its chief justice, the culmination of their every dream, the goal for which they had never ceased laboring. Together.
The couple had come back and the man was blathering on. ‘I’m just so sorry,’ Joe was saying. ‘I get too competitive. I shouldn’t have-’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Pat interrupted. ‘Spirit of the game. You don’t play if you don’t want to win, isn’t that right, Mario?’
The judge pulled the towel down from the bridge of his nose. His eyes were mild, the smile benign. ‘It’s one of the absolute truths, Joe.’ He took a long sip of the bottled water. Then, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Could’ve happened to anybody.’
Helen Taylor reclined in the oversized marble bathtub, soaking in scented oils. The disastrous meeting with Graham on Friday night had exhausted the family. After her children had gone, she and Leland went out to a late supper at the Ritz-Carlton and afterward, keeping the unpleasantness at bay, they’d danced at the Top of the Mark. The rest of the weekend had been given over to society events. They’d had no private time to talk. Until now. Leland knocked at the bathroom door and she told him to come in, which he did, taking a seat in the brocaded wing chair that graced the wall opposite the bath. Crossing one leg over the other, he leaned back, enjoying the sight of his wife in the water. He was wearing the pants to one of his Savile Row suits, a white shirt and dark blue tie, black shoes, black socks with garters.
Inhaling through his nose, he seemed to have suddenly encountered an off scent. His voice had a reedy tone, highly pitched and phlegmy. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to pay for Graham’s defense, aren’t we?’
Helen took a moment before answering. ‘I keep hoping they’re not going to arrest him again.’
‘No.’ Leland was certain. ‘It’s a matter of time, but they will. I wouldn’t squander my hope there.’
His wife sighed and moved. The water lapped gently once or twice. ‘Then I suppose we must. Pay his attorneys, I mean. I know he can’t.’
The phantom scent wasn’t getting any better. Leland held his chin high, turning his head from one side to the other, as if trying to place it. ‘We’ll have to keep it from George.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps it should be a loan this time. A real loan.’
‘Through the bank? If it’s through the bank, it would be impossible to keep from George.’
Her husband was shaking his head no. ‘I was thinking of a personal loan. We could-’
But another thought had crowded in, and Helen interrupted. ‘You don’t really think he’ll go to jail, do you?’
‘I don’t know, Helen. If he did kill his father for the money-’
‘Graham couldn’t have done that, Leland. It’s impossible. That’s not who he is. He might have helped him die, but it wasn’t for money.’
Her husband raised his eyebrows, a parlor trick of impressive eloquence. He lived in a world entirely circumscribed by money, and believed that to a substantial degree everything was connected to it. But there was no need to make this point to his wife, and he moved along. ‘I’m thinking, though – back to the loan now – that if he doesn’t get convicted, we might be able to get some reasonable behavior out of the boy, at least until the debt was retired.’
‘But if he does? Get convicted, I mean.’
‘I suppose then he’ll have rather a more difficult time paying us back.’ Leland seemed to savor the thought. ‘But that isn’t really the issue. When we paid for his law school – a mistake, as it turns out-’
‘Maybe it won’t turn out to be eventually.’
But there was no sign he heard her. ‘Law school, if you recall, supposedly wasn’t the money either.’ He held a palm up to forestall any interruption. ‘I’m only saying that if it had been a loan instead of a gift with no strings, if he’d felt the monthly burden of paying off a debt, he might have thought twice about quitting his job.’
‘No, he wouldn’t have. He thought he’d be stepping up, playing in the major leagues, making multiples of his clerk’s salary at the court. That was the whole problem. He probably wouldn’t take a loan anyway, knowing he couldn’t guarantee paying it back.’
‘So what’s this attorney of his working for?’
Helen shifted again, sitting up. Slipping the net from her hair, she shook it out and it fell gleaming – dyed, but gleaming – to her shoulders. Her breasts were buoyant at the water’s surface. ‘I don’t know. Advertising, maybe. I imagine there’ll be a lot of publicity.’
‘Of course. There always is.’ From Leland’s expression the bad smell was back. ‘Well, there’ll be time to decide. This assisted-suicide angle looks promising. Perhaps a jury will clear him on that score.’
‘But that would still ruin him,’ his mother said. ‘He couldn’t ever work in the law again, and I do think that eventually he intended to do just that.’
‘Don’t entertain these false hopes, Helen. He’s out of the law – that’s already come to pass.’ He uncrossed his legs and came forward in the chair, a great deal more urgency in his body language. He cleared his throat, his voice taking on a deeper pitch. ‘Now, I must tell you, I am worried about George.’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. Her younger son’s reaction to Graham had been wildly disproportionate as well as out of character. If George had any trademark, it was generally his lack of emotion, not his susceptibility to it. ‘That really wasn’t like him.’
‘I wondered if he’d talked to you.’
Her pretty face held a thoughtful frown. ‘About what?’
‘That Friday. Anything that might have happened that Friday.’
She shook her head. ‘No. Not to me.’
‘Because, you know, he wasn’t at the bank.’
Her eyes narrowed; apparently this was news to her. She slid back down, slightly, into the comforting water. ‘When wasn’t he at the bank?’
Leland stroked his upper lip. ‘I don’t have it precisely fixed, but it seems between about eleven and two.’
‘Did you ask him?’
‘I did. But you know George. He said he must have been at a client’s, he couldn’t remember exactly. If it was important, he’d double-check. But he hasn’t gotten back to me. I wondered if he’d mentioned anything to you.’
‘No. Nothing, Leland. Honestly, nothing.’ She let out a sigh, watching as her husband resumed his old posture, his back rigid against the wing chair, one leg crossed over the other. ‘You don’t think he went to see his father?’
‘I’m afraid I think it’s quite possible. I don’t like to think it, but it’s almost as though I see it happening.’
Helen shook her head. ‘We shouldn’t have had him come over when Sal was here. That last time.’
But Leland brushed that off. ‘Well, what we should or shouldn’t have done is beside the point now. He did come. And in this one area, protecting you from Sal-’
‘I know. I think it was just he never got over the hurt. He continued to believe that anyone who could inflict such pain couldn’t be harmless.’
‘Maybe, at base, Sal wasn’t harmless after all.’
‘No.’ She was certain. ‘He was.’ She reached a hand out over the marble, and her husband took it. ‘He wasn’t like you, Leland. He really was a simple person. He wouldn’t ever have hurt me. He was sick and confused, that’s all.’
The tableau froze for a long moment. At last the banker’s eyes came back into focus. ‘I just wonder if George realized that. That we’d taken steps. Maybe if we had in fact filed charges-’
But Helen was firm. ‘There was no need, Leland. We did inform the social agencies. They would be getting around to him. This wasn’t a continual stalking, just an episode-’
‘Several actually.’
‘Three. Only three. But the point is that there wasn’t really any urgency. And these things always take time. There was no further danger – in fact, there hadn’t been any danger all along. Sal would just flip into the past. I know George realized that.’
‘I hope so,’ Leland said. ‘But I’m not at all so sure.’
On Monday morning, early, Hardy was in his office with Michelle, one of them on either end of the couch, folders and copies of briefs on the low table in front of them. ‘You know where we get the term straight from the horse’s mouth?’ Michelle looked up from some paper she’d been reading as though Hardy had broken into Sanskrit. ‘It relates, it relates.’
Small talk wasn’t Michelle’s long suit, but she had already learned that this was how her new boss liked to break up his work, so she sat back and listened.
‘No, this is important. We’re talking one of the major philosophical questions that plagued the early Middle Ages – right up there with “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” ’
‘What was?’
‘How many teeth a horse had.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
Hardy was having a difficult time believing that Michelle – with the possible exception of David Freeman the most highly developed brain in the office – was ignorant of this fact. But then, he’d seen enough intellectual myopia that it didn’t shock him anymore. Here in the Age of Specialization if you held a double major in law and accounting, you weren’t expected to master any context. Any history. That was irrelevant junk for the most part.
But Hardy thought it wouldn’t kill her to know an oddball fact or two that wasn’t strictly related to the case at hand. ‘I’m not kidding. They argued about it all the time.’
‘Who would argue about that?’
‘Philosophers and theologians, most of whom, I think, would have been lawyers in today’s world.’
‘So why didn’t they just count them?’ She made a face at him, wondering if he was teasing her. ‘Are you making this up?’
‘No, I swear I’m not. It’s true. Okay, Michelle, you got the right answer, but you’re ahead of my story. Listen. These guys would sit around the old monastery, convinced that there was a Platonic ideal number of teeth in the perfect horse. They evidently debated this thorny problem for decades.’
‘These were not rocket scientists,’ Michelle said.
Hardy wondered if she realized they were talking about a time before there were rockets, or scientists, for that matter. ‘No, but these were intelligent men.’
‘No women?’
‘I doubt it. I’d be surprised. This was a guy thing.’
‘No wonder,’ Michelle said.
‘Well, anyway,’ Hardy continued, ‘one day a monk who was far ahead of his time decided on the revolutionary approach of going out, finding a horse, and counting the teeth in its mouth.’
‘And that settled it.’
‘Well, not exactly. I gather it took maybe a hundred years or so before everybody agreed that this was an acceptable way to get an answer to a question like this. Anyway,’ he pressed on in the face of Michelle’s sublime tolerance, ‘that’s where we get the expression.’
‘Great,’ she said dryly. ‘That’s fascinating. Really.’
The judge in the Tryptech case had just taken on the modern role of the monk who’d counted all those teeth. First thing this morning, Michelle had called Hardy at home with the news that they had been served with a cross-complaint. The Port of Oakland had evidently decided to press the charge that Tryptech had overloaded their container. Further, a judge had decided that Tryptech had the burden of proof as to how many computers were actally in the container. An affidavit from some shipping guy wasn’t going to do it.
Tryptech – through Hardy – had been making the argument that the container hadn’t been overloaded. He had presented the bill of lading, which, in theory, ‘proved’ the actual number of computers inside the container. Additionally, the computers were insured and therefore it would obviously be counterproductive for the company to claim fewer than had actually been there, since they were being paid for every one that had been lost.
Of course, Hardy knew it wouldn’t take a genius to realize that the monetary difference between say, two hundred extra computers at a thousand dollars each, and the millions the company stood to lose if the Port of Oakland won the lawsuit, was fabulously insignificant. Now the thing would have to be lifted from the bottom of the Bay, so that the computers within could be counted.
But pulling up the container would cost a bundle, and their client had told them he didn’t have a bundle on hand in cash just now.
The name of the game was delay, and Hardy had been successful in putting off this problem for nearly five months.
However, now that the judge had decided, it was going to happen.
The dredging fee of one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars might not be unreasonable in light of the potential size of the damage award, but Brunei was saying it was blood from a turnip.
Hardy didn’t know how he could delay any longer. Tryptech would have to figure out some way to come up with the money.
‘Actually’ – Michelle was more comfortable now that they were back to business – ‘I see a way that we can use this to our advantage. We should be able to string this along for a while.’
‘Okay, hit me,’ Hardy said.
‘Take it out to bid. We’ll of course comply with the ruling, but unless the Port wants to take on some – no, all - of the expense, I think we can argue that it’s only fair that we solicit bids from competing dredging firms, get the best possible price. Who could argue with that?’
Hardy had to admire her. Say what he would about the values of his own classical training, he had to admit that in the here and now Michelle was a godsend. Competing bids would buy them another few months at least, and anything could happen in a couple of months.
Maybe, Hardy fantasized, he could convince Brunei to hire a team of scuba divers to locate the container in deep secrecy by night and put in some extra units, the presence of which Brunei continued to assert.
‘How would you like to handle the details?’ he asked her. She had already gathered the paperwork and put it atop the stack of briefs they still had to discuss.
‘That’s what I’m here for.’
Before the ‘horse’s mouth’ issue had intervened, the morning routine at home had been anything but. Today’s drama was the mystery of how every toothbrush in the house had disappeared.
Upon some pretty hefty cross-examination, Rebecca and Vincent had confessed that maybe they remembered that yesterday Orel Glitsky might have thought of another use for them and they’d played some game in the backyard, or mostly in the backyard, they thought. There were fences and forts involved.
And Jason, their little nephew – ‘and he’s still a baby, Dad,’ Rebecca reminded him – had played with the toothbrushes too. But both of his kids were sure, they were positive, that if somehow they had taken all the toothbrushes, which wasn’t very likely, but if they had, then they had put them back right afterward.
After finishing up the morning’s strategy-and-review session with Michelle, he’d walked three blocks in the breezy forenoon and picked up half a dozen fresh bao - sticky buns filled with hoisin and plum and barbecued sauces and stuffed with various roasted meats – pork, chicken, duck. All by itself, he thought, the ready availability of hot-out-of-the-oven bao was reason enough to live in San Francisco.
He was in the greenhouse Solarium, alone, the bao a still-fragrant and comforting memory, the morning Chronicle open on the table in front of him. He hadn’t forgotten anything about his talk last night with Abe Glitsky. (Maybe Glitsky had stolen the toothbrushes! Aha! That was it. Even if it wasn’t, he could accuse him of it and have some fun.)
It had become pretty clear in the talk at the table that Glitsky thought Sal had been killed and, more, that Graham had murdered him. And if that was the case, then Glitsky knew more than Hardy did.
He scanned the paper, but there was nothing particularly new and exciting there. The weekend hadn’t provided any startling revelations. Even DA Pratt and AG Powell had maintained what one article called a ‘wary silence.’ Thirty-one doctors took out a full-page advertisement announcing that they had helped patients kill themselves, but this, Hardy knew, wasn’t going to have any direct impact on the Graham Russo case.
So what did Glitsky know?
Pulling the ten-button conference-room phone over to him, he started to call the homicide detail, but hung up. If the lieutenant hadn’t talked to him sixteen hours ago, he wasn’t going to start now. Nothing had changed on that front.
Suddenly, that old horse’s mouth yawed open before him again. ‘Idiot,’ he said to himself, shaking his head.
A miracle, Graham was home and picked up his telephone. But the first words out of his mouth – that he’d spent more time chatting with Sarah Evans – cut short Hardy’s happiness that he’d reached his client. ‘You’re making this up, aren’t you, Graham?’ he said. ‘Please tell me you’re making this up.’
‘No. I’m not. It was really good.’
‘It was really good,’ Hardy repeated. ‘That’s nice. I’m happy for you.’
‘It wasn’t like what you’re thinking,’ Graham protested.
Hardy could picture him, sitting framed in his splendid back window, looking out over the city, having a cup of his terrific Kona coffee, perhaps savoring a fresh croissant, bought with who knows what money. Maybe, Hardy thought, living up there in fairy-tale land colored one’s view of the rest of the world.
In any case, Graham was in serious need of a reality check. ‘What wasn’t it like? You tell me. How it could be different from what I’m thinking? Even in the best of all worlds, what other interpretation could there possibly be?’
‘If Sarah was going to arrest me, Diz, she would have done it already. She just wanted to know.’
‘We’re talking Sergeant Evans of the homicide detail, is that right? Suddenly, she’s Sarah now? Are you guys going out together, staying in, what? It would help if I knew.’
‘Nothing, Diz. Nothing like that.’
‘She just wanted to know the truth?’
‘Right.’
‘And the Time guy, what about him?’
‘He was a good guy.’
Hardy could envision the shrug, the nonchalance. He knew he was getting geared up here, and he didn’t think it would hurt his client any to realize it. ‘Graham, it’s this reporter’s job to be a good guy and get you to like him so you’ll open up and tell him the story he needs to write. It’s not personal.’
‘No.’ Graham was convinced. ‘This was different. Really. It was great to get to lay some of it out finally.’
Hardy had both of his elbows on the table, the receiver cradled against one ear, his head held up with the other one. There wasn’t any sense in going further with this. It was time to shift to damage control, if that was going to be possible. He forced some modulation into his voice. ‘So what did you tell your friend Sarah this time? I hope parts of it were close to the last version.’
He heard an amused chuckle. ‘It’s just the obvious stuff. Nothing to worry about.’
‘Obvious?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t, really. Why don’t you humor me?’
‘Well, the truth about my dad and me. I mean, of course I helped him out. Once it was clear that we’d kind of patched things up, the rest of it just followed.’
‘What “rest,” though? That’s what I’m trying to get at.’
A pause. ‘That I’d given him morphine a bunch of times. But not that day,’ he added.
‘You told Sergeant Evans that?’
‘Yeah.’ Another hesitation, longer. ‘And that I’d gone by there, on Friday. By Sal’s. But he hadn’t been home.’
At almost precisely the same moment State Attorney General Dean Powell was reaching his own decision. He’d quietly come down from Sacramento early in the morning and spent the morning with Drysdale and Gil Soma. Now they were finishing their lunch at a back table in Jack’s – one of the city’s finest and oldest restaurants. An elderly waiter in a tuxedo was pouring coffee all round. The white linen had been cleared of crumbs.
Powell originally hailed from San Francisco. Before his election he’d been a senior attorney in the DA’s office. His habit of combing his long white hair with his fingers had been the subject of dozens of caricatures, and he was doing this as he spoke to Soma. ‘I think we’re close to settled on the basics, but I must confess, Gil, I’ve got a reservation or two about your involvement. You ever put on a murder trial before?’
Powell, of course, knew the answer to this. He was impressed with Soma’s credentials and, more, his passion, but if the young man couldn’t stand up to the pressure of his boss’s informal interrogation now, he’d melt in the crucible of a special-circumstances-case courtroom. Better to find out sooner.
Soma brought a napkin to his lips, but didn’t waste any time with the motion. He wasn’t stalling. ‘No, sir, but I can win this case.’
‘As a murder one?’
‘It is a murder one. This morning’s police reports lock that up. This wasn’t any assisted suicide.’
Powell nodded. ‘I buy that, Gil. It’s critical, though, that we have the right man.’ He leaned over the table, combed his hair back again, then pointed a finger at Soma. ‘You hate this Graham Russo, don’t you? It’s personal, isn’t it?’
Soma glanced over at his mentor, Art Drysdale, who was stirring his coffee. No help there. ‘I don’t like him, sir, that’s true.’
‘And you’re sure you’re not seeing what you want to see here? You’ve thought about this a lot?’
Now Soma did reach for his coffee. Powell thought this a well-rehearsed move. The question appeared to call for thought and even if Soma had considered every possible ramification of it, he would take a formulaic pause. Placing the cup carefully into the center of its saucer, Soma brought in Drysdale for a beat, then proceeded. ‘The original case – the DA’s here in the city – had several holes. The money alone wasn’t really enough, and we knew that, which was why we waited. Since then we’ve discovered that there was a fight, that Graham Russo was there – he’s admitted it…’
Drysdale finally spoke up. ‘That’s a little squirrely.’
But Soma didn’t think so. ‘It’s evidently not on the tape, but Glitsky guarantees we’ve got Evans’s testimony. She’ll swear to it.’
‘Then we’re back to “he said, but she said.” ’
Powell interrupted. ‘Art, play devil’s advocate a little later. I want to hear what we’ve got altogether.’ He gestured back to Soma.
‘Okay, we’ve got the fight. We put Graham there. We’ve got the morphine, plus syringes from a box traced to his ambulance company. We got a fistful of his lies on the record. We’ve got his financial position, which is horrible, and which leads us back to the money. We’ve got means, opportunity, and motive. It’s classic, sir. He did it and we can prove it.’
On Soma’s left Drysdale cleared his throat. He wanted in.
‘Art?’ Powell asked.
‘I agree with everything Gil’s said here, but if we’re talking specials…’
‘We are.’ Powell was solid with this decision.
‘Okay, then the options we’ve got are LWOP’ – this was life in prison without the possibility of parole – ‘or death. Gil, you’re telling me you’re comfortable asking the state to put your old office mate to death?’
This, finally, stopped the posturing. Some of Soma’s spark went away. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, taking in both of his superiors. ‘To be honest, I don’t think so. I don’t think we should ask for death.’
Powell nodded. This was the right answer. Soma was passionate, but not blinded by hatred, a critical distinction.
‘I wouldn’t either,’ Drysdale said, ‘but we might wave it around early on, see if something shakes loose.’
Soma shrugged. ‘I can do that.’
‘And no other suspects? Real? Imagined? Implied?’ Powell wasn’t getting into this without having it locked up. He hadn’t gotten where he was by going high profile and losing. Drysdale passed the question over to Soma with a look. ‘We’re still checking some of his fisherman contacts. He poached for a living, but the volumes are tiny. A hundred, two hundred bucks. I don’t see anyone killing him for it.’
‘The family,’ Drysdale prompted.
‘Oh, yeah. Sal – the victim – he broke into the family house three times in the past few months. Nobody seemed to get too upset, though. They didn’t file criminal charges. Just wanted to help him get some assistance.’
Okay, Powell was thinking. The loopholes are closing up. ‘And it was definitely not a suicide? I don’t want to have that come back and bite us.’
Drydale took this one. ‘I don’t think they’ll even make the argument, but Strout’s got some pretty good stuff for us. Nobody thinks Sal killed himself. That didn’t happen.’
A silence descended for a moment. Powell raised his eyes, ‘Dismas Hardy’s doing the defense?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Soma knew the story as well as he knew his name. Three years before, in the last major case Powell had prosecuted before moving to the state capital, Dismas Hardy had pulled a rabbit from a hat and beaten him after a jury had both convicted his suspect and sentenced her to death. It was no secret that the AG longed for payback.
‘All right,’ Powell said at last. ‘Let’s go get him.’
Drysdale tapped the table with a fingertip, getting their attention one last time. ‘I suggest, with all respect, Dean, it might be wiser to wait another couple of days. Graham’s not going anywhere. Make it fat.’
This was jargon from Powell’s earliest days with the DA – FAT was the acronym they’d all used back then for making a watertight case. Frog’s-ass tight – FAT.
Powell gave it another second’s thought, then nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘That’s probably smart. But let’s tie this sucker down by Thursday, Friday at the latest.’
He was looking directly at Soma, and the young attorney simply nodded. ‘Done,’ he said.
He’d been the head of homicide now for nearly two years, and Glitsky felt he was growing into the job, taking bold steps to improve conditions and performance. This morning, for example, after he’d trotted down to vice again with Lanier and Evans so they could enjoy the privacy of an office with a door, he’d come back to homicide and pulled a tape measure from one of the drawers in his desk.
After carefully measuring the size of the hole in his wall where the door should have been – in fact, used to be until it was removed one day for painting and never returned – he called a local hardware store and found that doors were not some kind of embargoed item. The salesperson to whom he’d spoken had seemed somewhat amused that Glitksy didn’t realize that doors were available on a regular basis almost anywhere.
Upon reflection the lieutenant realized that he should have known this from his own life, but he also knew that when you worked in a bureaucracy, simple tasks had a way of becoming herculean, difficult tasks impossible. He’d filled out four requisition forms from building maintenance requesting a new door, and in two years hadn’t yet gotten even one answer.
Eventually, he’d come to accept that a new door wasn’t ever going to appear. And then, suddenly, the bolt of inspiration had struck him this morning: he could just order his own door! Take up a collection among his inspectors. The salesperson assured him he could have the door installed by Friday – painted, fitted, hung.
Miraculous!
Now it was midafternoon and Lanier and Evans were back. It was Glitsky’s second meeting with them today. The first one, down behind the closed door in vice, had been to bring the lieutenant up to date with a recap of their weekend’s activities. At this confab he’d learned of the apparent fight in Sal’s apartment. He was also pleased with Evans’s discoveries about Graham Russo – the morphine, the visit to Sal’s on the day of the murder. He wasn’t so thrilled about her technical blunder with the tape recorder, but what could he do?
That first meeting had been to prepare Glitsky for his nine o’clock with Drysdale, who’d be passing along all of his information to Dean Powell. Evidently that meeting had gone fairly well, because after lunch Drysdale had called again.
Powell had been disposed to proceed immediately with the arrest of Graham Russo, Drysdale said, but he had convinced the attorney general that a few more days might be productive, might lock the case up FAT. He gave Glitsky some marching orders.
And now – the second meeting – the lieutenant planned to pass these along to the troops. Gil Soma had been sent along – Drysdale probably trying to make the new kid feel part of a team.
They were all crammed in Glitsky’s office, the lieutenant at his desk, Soma in the doorway. Evans stood at ease behind one of the chairs facing his desk. Lanier was more relaxed, propped on the corner of the desk, cracking and eating peanuts, dropping the shells in the wastebasket. Mostly.
But first Glitsky was killing a couple of minutes, loosening up the audience, crowing in his low-key way about his proactive move regarding the door.
He had just finished outlining his bureaucracy theory and it rang a bell with Lanier. ‘Reminds me of one time back when I walked a beat, they were having this trade show. At the Holiday Inn, I think. One of those hotels. Anyway, guys in one of the booths were just freaking out. Couldn’t get all these logos and lights and stuff to go on. So they called us cops over, right? I take a look and there’s this plug on the ground and I ask ’em, “This the plug?” and they say, “Yeah, but the union rep came by and told us not to touch it.” So I give ‘em the look, plug the sucker in, the place lights up like a Christmas tree. I give ’em my badge number, tell them if anybody asks, they didn’t touch it, have a nice day.‘
‘That’s perfect,’ Glitsky said. ‘Exactly what I mean. You think the door might really be in here by Friday? I don’t know what this office will feel like, it’s been so long…’
Against the back wall Evans coughed politely. ‘Are we going back down to vice?’ she asked.
Glitsky caught her drift. ‘Okay, you’re right, it’s probably not as fascinating to you all as it is to me.’ He straightened up in his chair. ‘No, I think we’ll stay here.’ He included the young attorney. This okay with you, Gil? There’s nothing to hide about this.‘
The two inspectors glanced at each other. ‘About what?’ Lanier asked.
‘About what, Gil?’ Glitsky repeated.
Soma was pumped up from his personal meeting with the attorney general. His tailored dark suit seemed to hang like a tent on a thin frame. Glitsky had sat down because he didn’t want to tower over Soma.
But what the young man lacked in physique, he made up for in intensity. Nodding at the lieutenant, he began. ‘The AG likes everything you’ve both done up to now. We’ve got plenty of evidence to convict. But for the next few days he thinks a change of emphasis might be productive.’
‘To what?’ Lanier asked.
‘To everybody but Graham Russo.’
A moment of silence. Lanier cracked a peanut. ‘But Graham did it.’
Soma nodded. ‘I know that. But Dean Powell wants to turn over a few more rocks, that’s all. You’ve both undoubtedly noticed this one’s a political bomb. We want to head off any accusation that we’re going after Graham for politics. Show that there’s no rush to judgment.’ He altered his tone, lightening it. ‘He just wants to make sure.’
Glitsky leaned back and his chair creaked. Lanier swung his leg and his heel kept knocking into Glitsky’s desk – bump, bump, bump. Deep and hollow sounding. ‘These interviews,’ Soma went on. ‘Do you tape all of them?’
Lanier threw a glance at Glitsky, who was silent, sitting back, arms crossed, listening. ‘Maybe we should have gone to vice,’ Lanier said.
Evans moved forward. The young attorney had moved more into the room and had lowered his voice. She didn’t want to miss anything. ‘Why would we need to go to vice?’ she asked.
But her partner was a veteran cop. He knew what was coming and didn’t wait for Soma before he butted in. ‘You don’t want us to create any paper. Is that what you’re saying?’
The young attorney nodded. ‘That would probably be more convenient.’
‘What are you guys talking about?’
With a nod Soma tossed it back to Lanier. ‘Discovery.’
‘Okay,’ Evans said, ‘I give up. What about discovery?’
‘The prosecution’s got to give everything to the defense, right? Everything they get. So if we go finding alternative suspects and reasonable evidence, guess what? The defense gets to bring them all up in front of the jury, so they can make up their mind.’
‘Essentially,’ Soma added, ‘Mr Powell doesn’t want us to help the defense by providing them with other suspects a jury might get confused about. So you talk to these people-’
‘What people, though?’
A shrug. ‘The rest of the family, where Sal got his fish, who got him the morphine if it wasn’t Graham, like that.’
Lanier: ‘But we don’t run tape, we don’t take notes.’
Soma: ‘Right. Basically, you tell us what you find, but you don’t create discovery.’
‘And as an extra special treat,’ Lanier added to Sarah, ‘you didn’t hear it here.’
Sarah all but glared at the inscrutable Glitsky, hoping that he’d speak up. He didn’t.
‘But-’
Soma stopped her. ‘Except, of course, if someone really starts to look like a suspect.’ He added hastily, ‘But if you think you’ve got something, talk to us before you write it up.’
Silence.
‘We wouldn’t want to create false impressions…’ He trailed off lamely.
In the small room Sarah again became aware of the bump of her partner’s heel. He cracked another peanut. She moved around and sat in the chair in front of her lieutenant’s desk. This type of discussion was all new to her, and it wasn’t settling well. Soma and Lanier must have realized it, as a glance passed between them, and Lanier took the ball.
‘I think Mr Soma’s just talking about the preliminary interviews, Sarah. We get anything that sets off a charge, we come back and do the soup-to-nuts version. Is that it?’
‘But you won’t,’ Soma said, ‘because Graham did it, right?’
‘Right.’ Lanier was with the program, ready to be rolling again. ‘You just want to avoid making a case for the defense. We got it.’
Sarah wanted to make it crystal clear. ‘But we are, in fact, looking for another suspect. Isn’t that true?’
‘Absolutely,’ Soma said. ‘If somebody jumps up at you, we put Graham on hold and go after the new guy. But there isn’t going to be any new guy. Look, Sergeant, you and your partner here found Graham out of a universe of potentials, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So he’s the man. This is just some CYA for the AG. We’re beating the bushes, backfilling, making sure we haven’t missed a bet. Any righteous evidence, I promise you, we cough it up.’ Sarah obviously still didn’t like it, and Soma moved to cut her off. ‘We’re not subverting anything here. We’re not asking you to.’
Finally Glitsky’s chair squeaked again. He came forward, the scar white through his lips, a pulse visible at his temple. All eyes went to him. ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear any of this,’ he whispered. He turned his wrathful gaze to Soma. ‘I don’t know how you boys do things in other jurisdictions, but this department writes up everything. That’s our job. We find what there is to find, all of it.’
Soma had blanched. ‘I didn’t mean-’
His voice still low and taut, Glitsky sounded meaner than he looked, and Evans thought that was a physical impossibility. ‘I know what you meant. I heard you all the way out. And I’m telling the sergeants here that they are going to do it by the book. Every time. Everybody we talk to. That covers our ass. It covers your ass. Everybody stays clean.’
He shook his head, calming down by degrees, still at Soma. ‘Listen. What do you think happens if some defense attorney notices we haven’t interviewed anybody except the suspect? You think this might raise an eyebrow somewhere? What if they find we talked to somebody and “forgot” to tell them? Think that’s a problem? I do. I’ve seen it happen. No. Our position is that if there’s anybody else to look for, we’re looking for them. We don’t find ’em, there’s no other leads, that’s why the case is strong.‘ He met the eyes of all three of them, one at time, slowly. ’Just so we’re clear. Everybody on the same bus here?‘
Nods all around.
In under a minute they’d all filed out. He decided then and there: he would pay out of his own pocket if he had to for a door to close behind them.
After his inspectors had gone, Glitsky was drinking a cup of tea, filling out a requisition form for the door. That, he decided, would be his first offensive sally. Stamping URGENT in red ink on the slip, he put his tea down and was taking the slip outside to post in the building mail when he ran into Dismas Hardy in the hallway, coming down in his direction.
‘All right,’ Hardy said, anger all over him. ‘What did you do with them?’
‘What?’
‘My toothbrushes, that’s what. Every single toothbrush in my whole house.’
‘What did I do with your toothbrushes?’
‘Right. They were there yesterday when you came over. This morning they were gone. Ruined my placid morning, upset my domestic tranquillity, which is explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution. The preamble. Right up in the front there, after “We, the People.” ’
Glitsky stood still for a moment. Then he nodded, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went to post his requisition slip.
When he came back into his office, his friend had settled himself down at his desk, feet up, eating peanuts.
‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘If I took away the peanuts, would anyone ever again come into my office?’
Hardy gave the room a once-over. ‘I doubt it. As a popular destination it’s a little flat, don’t you think? How come nobody’s ever here anymore? You notice that? Look out there – the place is a ghost town.’
Glitsky glanced back over his shoulder. ‘An hour ago we had to call in crowd control. I don’t know. Everybody’s out working. They come in here to write reports. Why are you here?’
The feet came down. ‘Because through secret sources I have discovered what you already knew yesterday when you wouldn’t talk to me about Graham Russo.’
‘Which was?’
‘He was at his father’s place. He shot him up with morphine all the time.’
‘Did I know that yesterday? I don’t think I knew that, if I do, until this morning.’
‘You knew something, though. More than you had last week. You were convinced you had a murder.’
Glitsky moved into the room. ‘No comment.’
‘Has it gone to the grand jury yet? Tell me that.’
‘No comment.’ Then, ‘Sal had a fight.’
Hardy gave them a minute, then shook his head. ‘Not with Graham.’
‘If you say so, and you probably will at the trial.’
Glitsky had just told him what he wanted to know: there was going to be a trial. There was no point in arguing the merits. With the combination of Graham’s presence at Sal’s and the fight, added to the lies and the money, there was a case the attorney general could prosecute, even if the district attorney would not. The lieutenant had one more remark, however. ‘Whoever did it, Diz, this was a murder. You mind if I sit in my chair?’
Hardy got up and they did a little dance moving around each other. Glitsky looked up at him. ‘Why don’t I think you came all the way down here just to have some peanuts?’
‘I needed to know if you had a smoking gun before I did anything else.’
Glitsky considered this. ‘No comment.’ He flashed his terrible smile. ‘What else brought you down to our little garden spot?’
‘No comment.’ Hardy smiled back. ‘Gosh, we’ve turned into some great conversationalists here in our middle years, haven’t we?’ He hesitated, about to say something else, then thought better of it. He checked his watch. ‘Lord, how time flies. Thanks for the peanuts. Later.’
Hardy had tried to make the appointment with Sharron Pratt’s chief assistant, Claude Clark, soon after he’d hung up with Graham. His client might choose to deny it, but Hardy knew that after his admissions to Sergeant Evans, big trouble was brewing. He had a wild idea that might head it off at the pass.
Clark already had a reputation as a trim and officious bully. In his late thirties, he sported a sandy buzz haircut, a clipped mustache with goatee, and an openly fey style that he would exaggerate around people whom he suspected of homophobia.
He had the power now; he controlled access to the district attorney and was very effective at conveying the feeling that if you wanted to see her, then you could very politely kiss his ass. Pratt liked to pretend that she was sensitive to people, that she cared about their personal feelings, and keeping Clark near by to do her hatchet work was, she believed, good politics.
The chief assistant dismissed Hardy’s request to meet with Pratt as ridiculous. The district attorney did not take meetings with defense attorneys on little or no notice. She might be able to set aside some time for him in several weeks if he put his request in writing.
Thinking, It’s bad luck to diss the Diz, Hardy put on the press. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell her I’d like five minutes. It’s about the Sal Russo case. It hasn’t gone away. I’ve got some information that might help her.’
‘Why don’t you just brief me and I’ll pass it along to her?’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ Hardy had said. ‘I’ll just call my good buddy Jeff Elliot over at the Chronicle. You know Jeff? Hell of a reporter, writes the “CityTalk” column. Gets his teeth in and never lets go. Sharron can read about it in the morning. Take care now.’
In ten minutes he got the call. Pratt could set aside a few minutes if Hardy could be at the Hall at four o’clock, sharp.
The DA set the rules of engagement. She reigned from her chair, protected and isolated from supplicants behind an expansive slab of polished hardwood. Claude Clark hovered by the windows. Hardy hadn’t been in this room since he’d been fired five years before by the late Christopher Locke. He had been ushered to his spot front and center.
‘Mr Hardy’ – she nodded – ‘nice to meet you, though of course I know you by reputation.’ Hardy doubted whether this was true, but made the appropriate face. ‘I understand you’ve got some information for me.’
He nodded, getting right to it. ‘Yes, ma’am. Graham Russo talked to the police over the weekend. He admitted that he’d been to his father’s and that he’d injected him with morphine.’
She sat forward. ‘He admitted he killed him?’
‘No. I’m sorry. He admitted that he’d earlier injected him with morphine. The point is, he’s contradicted his original story again. Also, apparently there was a struggle.’
‘The chair?’ she asked. Then shook her head. ‘We’ve already seen that. That’s no proof of a struggle.’
‘They have a witness.’ He saw her eyes narrow. She was following him closely. ‘In any event, I’m convinced that they now have a case. The AG is going to make an arrest.’
She nodded. ‘I had assumed they would. Powell wants to make some bones. He won’t win. Assisted suicide shouldn’t be charged as homicide, and every jury that gets picked in this city is going to agree with me. But what does this have to do with you? Or me?’
‘I want you to arrest him again.’
Her eyes went down to slits, then opened as an admiring smile formed. ‘Let me see if I get your meaning here.’
She understood it perfectly. She would simply pull the rug out from under the attorney general. If she charged Graham in Sal’s death, then cut a deal with his attorney, then under double jeopardy, Graham could never be brought to trial again for the same crime.
She locked him in her gaze again. ‘You’re afraid Powell’s going to charge murder one with specials here, aren’t you?’
Hardy nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not indicted the son yet?’
Thinking of Glitsky, Hardy felt a tug of guilt. They’d played the ‘no comment’ game, but Hardy knew that if they hadn’t been friends off the court, Glitsky wouldn’t even have spoken to him. In fact, Glitsky had as much as confided that the case hadn’t yet been to the grand jury, and now he was telling that to Pratt. It bothered him to do this to Abe; he should have thought about where it might go before he’d come in here, but he’d been psyched on his strategic brilliance, and now was the time. He had to go ahead. ‘No indictment. That’s what I hear.’
‘So what’s your offer?’
‘You charge him tomorrow morning, early. If the grand jury indicts first, we’re dead. I bring Graham down and the next day we plead manslaughter. The deal is probation. No time. Community service negotiable.’
‘And your client’s on board with this?’
He didn’t really see how Graham could disagree. He’d called him back after their early talk to propose it to him but again, maddeningly, there’d been no answer, not even a machine. But Hardy would get to Graham before the morning if he had to camp on his front step. He nodded. ‘He will be.’
This response, though, brought Pratt up short. ‘You don’t have your client’s approval for this?’
‘I wanted to get your take on it first. If you weren’t interested, what was the point?’
Pratt obviously thought this was bass-ackwards – as indeed it was. But the idea itself played beautifully into her hands. As a vehicle for votes she could ride it for miles. Still, ‘I won’t move forward on this until I’ve heard from you.’
‘I understand that.’
She nodded once. ‘Claude, give Mr Hardy one of my cards with my home number. Mr Hardy, I’ll expect to hear from you.’
Since the business day was nearly over, Hardy drove directly from the Hall of Justice. Graham was home and cracked a bottle of beer for each of them, suggesting that they walk up and have their talk outside at the top of the Interior Park Belt, which marked the end of Edgewood.
They were sitting on a low brick wall, looking down the canyon at the lush eucalyptus-scented greenery. The microclimate was putting on a show for them; there wasn’t even a light breeze, and the temperature was pushing eighty. Hardy had left his coat in his car, had removed his tie. Graham was barefoot, in khaki shorts and a mesh jersey.
‘I never asked. You play ball this weekend?’ Hardy thought he’d ease into the real reason for his visit. Get some dialogue happening before he dropped the bomb.
‘Luckily.’ Graham pulled at his beer. ‘I told you I got fired from the ambulance company, didn’t I?’
Though Hardy wasn’t happy to hear this, it wasn’t any surprise.
Things were going to get a lot worse for Graham, and anything that helped him realize it was to the good. ‘You make some money?’
A sidelong look. ‘Is this a subtle intro to the fees discussion?’
Hardy smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll send you a bill eventually. No, I just wondered how you were getting along.’
‘Sorry, I’m a jerk lately. Yeah, we played a tournament down in Hayward yesterday. Five games, went all the way.’ He made some dismissive gesture. ‘I pulled down two grand.’
‘In one day?’
‘Five games. The second game we got a bonus of a thousand bucks on the mercy rule. That’s how it works.’
‘Two grand a day?’
‘Best case, if we win. If we’d have lost the first game, I would have made fifty dollars, so we’re motivated to win. The mercy rule helps.’
‘What’s the mercy rule?’
Graham looked at Hardy as though he’d just stopped by from Mars. ‘If a team’s ahead by ten runs, that’s the game, they call off the slaughter. It’s called the mercy rule. The way the sponsors bet, they get double, sometimes more, if the game’s mercy-ruled. The players get a bonus.’
‘That happen a lot?’
‘Team full of ringers like us? Yeah, I’d say.’
‘So the guy who sponsors your team – what’s his name?’
‘Ising. Craig Ising.’
‘So Craig Ising paid your team ten grand in one day?’
Shrugging, Graham gave it a minute. ‘I guess so, something like that.’
Hardy whistled. ‘What did he win? Betting.’
‘More than that,’ Graham said. ‘These guys, they don’t get out of bed for ten grand.’ But this subject, clearly, was making him uncomfortable. He bought his bottle up, took a drink. ‘So? Something tells me you didn’t come up here to talk softball. You get some more news?’
‘Well, actually, I did.’ There really wasn’t going to be any way to sugarcoat it, so Hardy didn’t try.
Graham listened patiently, shaking his head. ‘They’re not going to arrest me again,’ he said easily when Hardy had finished. ‘Sarah’s not going to arrest me. She likes me. I like her. She’s cool.’
‘She’s a cop,’ Hardy said. ‘She’s using the fact that you think she’s cool – that maybe there’s a buzz between you two, you talk to her – she’s using that to take you down.’
‘That would really surprise me,’ he said. ‘When she came by here Saturday night, that wasn’t business.’
‘So what was it, a date?’
Graham laughed at that. ‘Almost. Not quite, but we might have got there.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘Why is it, Graham, that you’re the only person in the city who doesn’t think you’re going to get arrested? You ever ask yourself that?’
Graham shrugged, sipped his beer. ‘They already took their shot with me, Diz. What’s in it for them doing it again?’
‘It’s not the same people. How about that?’ He stood up and walked a few steps away. He was thinking that after all he should have come here with the appearance of panic. Maybe that would have gotten his client’s attention, made him realize the seriousness of his situation. But he hadn’t wanted to scare him off. He’d wanted to keep him talking, not to reject the plea-bargain plan out of hand, out of defensiveness.
Well, there was nothing for it now. Hardy had to make his case. He turned back. ‘Look, Graham, here’s the situation. You’re going to be arrested again in a couple of days, certainly by the end of the week. You’re going to get charged with first-degree murder, maybe even special-circumstances murder. This is going to happen. Even if it’s not your Sergeant Evans, and I think it is, somebody is going to get this done. It’s too big an issue. It’s not going to go away.’
He didn’t win him over, but at least the confident smile vanished. ‘All right. Let’s say that happens. Let’s just say. Then we’re just where we were last week anyway, right? We duke it out.’
‘That’s one approach. But I’ve got a better one.’
He came back to the low fence, handed his untouched bottle of beer to Graham, and laid it all out – his deal with Pratt, the whole strategy. When he’d finished, he waited, watching his client’s face.
It wore a dead sober expression now, conjuring with the possibilities. He blew out heavily, shook his head at something, craned his neck. ‘But I’d have to say I did it,’ he said at last.
‘But you wouldn’t serve any time. Nobody could come back and get you for it. It would be over. The deal’s already cut, Graham. Pratt’s bought it.’
‘It’s a good attorney move, I’ll give you that.’
Hardy tried a light touch. ‘Afterward, you could even call up Sergeant Evans again, ask her out.’
‘But’ – maddeningly, seemingly unable to leave it alone, Graham played his refrain – ‘I’d have to say I did it.’
There was no evading this. ‘Yeah, you would.’
‘But what if I didn’t?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Hardy said, surprised by how much he sounded like a defense lawyer. It didn’t matter if he committed the crime? What was he saying? But he pushed at it. ‘It’s just a legal issue.’
‘And I’d be off? That would be the end of it?’
Hardy had him on the verge – he could feel it. Now was the moment. He had to close the deal. ‘You might get a couple or three years probation, but, Graham, listen to me. You’re just starting out in the business world. There’s a lot more to do than be a lawyer. I am a lawyer and I know. It’s ninety-nine percent drudge and the rest is kissing your client’s-’
This brought a smile. ‘Like now, with me? You’re kissing my ass? Somehow it doesn’t feel like you’re kissing my ass.’
‘This is an exception. What I’m saying is you could do anything. You don’t need your bar card. You don’t need to be a lawyer any more than you needed to be a baseball player. They’re just jobs.’
Finally, a heartfelt note. ‘But I’m good, Diz. I made law review. I got the clerk job with Draper. Nobody gets that job except the best.’
Hardy was shaking his head. ‘So you’ve got a good brain. Use it on something else. And if you don’t, you’re looking at prison, Graham. We’re not talking your second or third choice in your career goals, we’re talking years out of your life. Prison. Hard time.’
For nearly a full minute that seemed like an hour, Hardy waited. Birds chirped in the foliage around them, but otherwise the stillness was complete. At last Graham shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I know you put a lot of thought into this, but I didn’t kill my dad. I can’t say that I did.’
Hardy, his stomach tight, wished Graham could simply leave it that he hadn’t killed Sal, instead of always adding that he couldn’t say he had. He gave it a last try. ‘We don’t have to call it killing him, Graham. We can say-’
‘No! Listen to me! I am not going to say I killed him.’
Hardy listened to the birds chirp for another moment, then gradually stood up. ‘I’ve got to tell Pratt your answer by the morning,’ he said.
‘You’ve got my answer. My father killed himself. He left the DNR tag for the medics. He did it. That’s what happened.’
A large percentage of Marcel Lanier’s working life outside of the office was spent in and around the city’s various slums and housing projects. Poverty being the wet nurse to so many crimes, this was the usual beat and homicide cops soon grew accustomed to it. Occasionally, though, the work took him on a different tour.
So while Sarah Evans was working phones at the Hall of Justice, punching the numbers that Sal Russo had written on his scraps of paper, playing connect-the-dots with the names, Lanier thought he’d grab this opportunity to take a different, more direct, approach. In spite of Glitsky’s explicit instructions Lanier forgot his tape recorder.
He knew that Danny Tosca held down the end of the bar most nights at Gino & Carlo’s. The place had been in its North Beach location forever. This was where the authentic old Italian heart of the city beat most strongly, and Danny Tosca was in some sense its unofficial pacemaker. Now in his early fifties, cue-ball bald, casually dressed in a dark sport coat, burgundy shirt, tasseled loafers, Tosca was – ostensibly – in real estate. And in fact, many of the businesses in the neighborhood made their rent checks out to his company, which brokered for the actual property owners.
Danny Tosca had never been indicted or arrested. As far as Lanier knew, he’d never even had a parking ticket, although if he had gotten one, it would have been taken care of before the ink on it had dried.
He occupied a unique niche in the sense that he did not appear to believe in physical force. He would be the first to admit that he had a knack for persuasion and negotiation, for locating the pressure point, and wasn’t averse to accepting commissions from grateful clients. He simply took a proprietary interest in his community and, like Lanier, viewed himself as one of the many checks and balances in the city by which order was maintained.
He was enjoying his inevitable demitasse of espresso when Lanier pulled up a stool and said hello.
Tosca gave every appearance of being glad to see the inspector, nodding at the bartender to set him up with whatever he’d like. Marcel had a Frangelica in a pony glass on the bar in front of him before his seat had gotten warm. The two men chatted about the beautiful night, the warm spell, the Giants, who were on television above the bar, losing to the Dodgers.
Finally, Marcel deemed the moment propitious. ‘That was a shame about Sal Russo,’ he said. ‘I guess he’d been sick a long time, though.’
Tosca sipped his espresso, waved at a couple who’d just come through the door, came back to Lanier. ‘Maybe it was better. The son, what he did.’
‘You think it was, Dan?’
A shrug. ‘That’s what the papers say.’
Lanier nodded, taking his time. ‘You see Sal recently?’
‘You know, here and there.’
‘And how’d he seem? In a lot of pain?’
‘He don’t show it, you know. Doesn’t mean it isn’t there.’
‘And what if it wasn’t about his pain? How about if it was something else?’
Lanier could see that Tosca didn’t expect this. The question slowed him. He fiddled with a sugar cube, turning it around and around on the bar. Lanier leaned in closer. ‘Somebody killed him, Dan. We don’t know why. If it wasn’t the kid, we’d like to know it before we arrest him again.’
‘You’re saying it was business?’
‘I’m saying I don’t know. Maybe somebody does. I’m wondering if there wasn’t something else in the fish.’ Meaning drugs. If the illegal fish sales – condoned as they were – were a cover, if Sal had in fact been a mule for some major dealers, there might be a motive.‘
But Tosca was shaking his head. ‘That didn’t happen,’ he said flatly. ‘He sold fish. Good fish too.’
‘A lot of it?’
Tosca eyed him carefully. ‘One day a week.’
‘Not exactly what I asked.’
The twirling had moved from the sugar cube to the cup itself. ‘I don’t think he cleared two hundred a week. What he needed to survive. There wasn’t any loan to welsh on. This was cash business – he paid when he picked up.’
‘Okay, but the suppliers? Some of them turn volume, am I right?’
Tosca thought a beat. ‘You’re asking was Sal blackmailing somebody, getting some payoff? If they didn’t pay, maybe he’d fink to Fish and Game? Why would he do that? More money? What would he need more money for?’
Lanier shrugged. ‘Suddenly he needed morphine?’
Although not particularly convincing to Tosca, this was at least an answer. He chewed his cheek for a minute, popped a sugar cube into his mouth, and chewed some more. ‘Okay, there’s one guy,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can find out.’
‘If you give me his name,’ Lanier said, ‘I can go see him tonight.’ At Tosca’s glare, he explained. ‘We’re on deadline here, Danny. Sooner would be better.’
The glare abated. Tosca patted Lanier’s hand on the bar. ‘I hear you, Marcel. I’ll see what I can find out.’
Sarah was almost beginning to think Sal Russo had sat in his room for hours, making up names and telephone numbers. Certainly, not one number she reached in the first hour admitted to knowing him, or had any idea what her call could be about. She reasoned that there must be a password she didn’t know, or everybody knew that Sal Russo was the subject of a murder investigation. Either way, the well was dry.
Until she got to the name Finer. Disheartened and ready to call it a day, she listened to five rings and was about to hang up when a weary voice answered. ‘Who’s this? What time is it?’
‘Mr Finer?’
A deep sigh. Exhaustion. ‘Doctor Finer. And I’m not on call. This isn’t right. I haven’t slept in two days. How’d you get this number?’
‘From Sal Russo.’
‘I don’t know any Sal Russo.’
‘Dr Finer, wait a minute. This is Sergeant Evans with San Francisco homicide. Sal Russo’s been murdered.’
She wondered if he’d hung up anyway. There was nothing but air in her ear. Then another sigh.
‘Homicide? Who’s been murdered?’
She gave him an abbreviated version and at the end of it, he seemed to have broken a bit through the fatigue. ‘Did I treat this man? I’m sorry, but I’m interning at County. It’s not like I have patients the way you’re thinking. What did he have?’
‘Cancer. A brain tumor,’ she said, ‘and Alzheimer’s.’
‘And you got my number at his house?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, then, I might have seen him. But I’ll tell you, it wasn’t recently. I’ve been in the ER for the past six months and if he wasn’t bleeding, I didn’t treat him.’
‘He wasn’t bleeding. But it might have been before that. I don’t know when it was. I’ve got your name and phone number on an old crumpled piece of paper and that’s all I know.’
She heard, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’ Then, ‘What was your name again?’
‘Evans.’
‘All right, Evans, hold on. It might be a minute. Russo?’
‘Sal Russo,’ she said.
It was more like five minutes, but Sarah was content to wait. At least she had someone trying to find something related to Sal Russo. It was better than punching phone numbers and getting nothing.
Finally, he was back. ‘If he had this number, I must have seen him here.’ This didn’t mean anything to Sarah, but he was going on. ‘Salvatore Russo? He’d be near sixty now, right?’
‘That was him.’
‘All right.’ Finer was obviously reading his notes. ‘He came into the public clinic on his own and was referred to me. I was doing primary care. Said he’d gotten lost twice in the last couple of months, just suddenly couldn’t figure out where he was. He was worried he might have AD.’
‘AD?’
‘Alzheimer’s. So anyway, let’s see, hold on.’ She waited and heard paper flipping. ‘Yeah, I scheduled him for blood chemistry and a thyroid panel, but he didn’t show. Then he had another episode – this was four months later – and we tried it again, the blood tests.’
‘Is that how you diagnose Alzheimer’s? Blood tests?’
‘No. First you eliminate other possible causes of dementia – third-stage syphilis, for example. There isn’t any diagnostic genetic test for AD. We’re talking a whole battery of this and that until they get to imaging, and even then the diagnosis, especially at the early stage, is uncertain.’
‘But you did diagnose Sal?’
He made sure, answering slowly. ‘No. He stopped coming. We never got to the MRI. He didn’t want to know for sure, maybe he got scared.’
‘Of knowing?’
‘Some of that, I’m sure. I don’t know, maybe I made some mistakes. I’ve got a note here – he wanted to know what would happen if we got to a diagnosis.’
‘What would happen?’
‘Well, I’m mandated to report to the DMV, for example. If somebody’s got advance dementia, you don’t want-’
‘No, I see that.’
‘Also, this was him, not me, but I’ve got it here where he said he didn’t want to get to be a burden on anybody. He’d kill himself before that happened.’
‘He said that?’.
‘Yeah. But then… you know, this is hard to deal with. He didn’t want to get any closer to it, especially if he thought it would be his duty or something to kill himself if he had it. He’d rather not know about it for sure.’
‘That makes sense,’ Evans said. She tried another tack. ‘So you didn’t prescribe anything for him?’
‘No. We hadn’t gotten anywhere, really.’
‘Do you remember him at all, personally?’
A pause, then a sigh. ‘These last couple of years, I often don’t remember my name. I’m on autopilot. Supposedly it’s going to make me a better doctor someday.’
Sarah felt for the man. ‘I won’t keep you much longer, Doctor. It wasn’t you who prescribed a DNR tag for him, then?’
‘Don’t resuscitate? No. Did he finally kill himself, if he had a DNR and cancer? I thought you said somebody killed him.’
‘We think so. We’re trying to make sure. Here’s the last question: you’re a doctor and you couldn’t diagnose Alzheimer’s only a couple of years ago. Could it have progressed far enough by now that he was somehow incompetent to live alone?’
Finer gave it some thought. ‘I can’t say for sure. It could. It varies. He could be going in and out of dementia with more frequency and still live a semi-normal life if he had help. Of course there’s no cure. It just keeps getting worse. You know,’ Finer concluded, ‘if he had the DNR, that’s a pretty good argument he wanted to die.’
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘We’re trying to figure it out. Thanks for your help, Doctor. I’ll let you get back to sleep.’
The Hardy family was having a renaissance. They’d all eaten dinner together – an unusual occurrence over the past few months. Supposedly, that had been due to their father’s work schedule, but today he’d put in nearly as many productive hours as he usually did. This time, though, he’d made it a point to come home when he finished. After they ate, they had sprawled with popcorn on the living-room floor, playing a marathon tournament of Chinese checkers.
When he’d gone to tuck them in for the last time, both kids put their arms around him, not wanting to let go. As he came out to the kitchen, his wife did the same thing. ‘They miss you all the time. This is what they need. Once in a while I do too.’
He held her. ‘I know. I’m going to try and keep doing this. Being around.’
‘It’s a concept,’ she said. She moved closer against him. ‘Were they asleep?’
‘Asleep enough. We close the door and they won’t hear a thing.’
Snuggled together, they were dozing to the news. At first Hardy didn’t know if he’d dreamed or heard the name Graham Russo, but Frannie nudged him. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘What?’
But it had only been the teaser. They had to endure four commercials before the news came back on. ‘While local police still won’t comment on the apparent assisted suicide of Sal Russo ten days ago, saying only that the investigation is continuing, in Sacramento today, the chairperson of the Hemlock Society – a right-to-die group – came forward and said that Sal Russo’s son, Graham, had spoken to her just minutes before he went to his father’s apartment. For more on that story, live in Sacramento, here’s…’
Hardy was sitting all the way forward. ‘Oh, Lord, give me a break.’
Barbara Brandt, looking every inch the lobbyist, confidently met the eye of the camera. ‘He was very emotional and upset, as anyone would be when it comes to the moment. I think he just wanted some assurance. It was natural.’
Off camera the reporter asked why Graham hadn’t admitted this himself.
Brandt, understanding yet slightly disappointed in the nature of people, shook her head. ‘We argued about it last weekend on the phone. This was heroic. The public has a right to know the truth. Sal and Graham Russo together had the courage to act, but Graham doesn’t want to embody the issue. Well, it’s too late for that now. I’m going public to let Graham know that he’s not alone. The laws against assisted suicide and euthanasia must be changed.’ She stared at the camera. ‘Whatever the consequences, Graham, you did the right thing.’
Hardy hit the mute button. ‘I don’t believe this.’
Frannie, too, had come awake. ‘What don’t you believe?’ she asked. ‘That she came forward with this or what she’s saying?’
‘I don’t know. Who is she? I never heard of her. Graham never mentioned her.’ Hardy was shaking his head. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Whoever she is, she just screwed him.’
At eight forty-five, Sarah opened the door to her apartment, thinking she should get herself a cat or a hamster or a goldfish – something alive to greet her when she came home.
She had stopped in at the corner grocery downstairs and bought an apple and a TV dinner that she called ‘mean cuisine,’ and now she took off her jacket, unstrapped her holster and hung it on a kitchen chair, unwrapped the food and put it in the microwave, went into the bathroom to take a quick shower.
Fifteen minutes later she had eaten and gotten dressed again in civilian clothes – blue jeans, tennis shoes, a white fisherman’s sweater. She wasn’t planning to go out, but it was too early for pajamas and her robe.
She made the conscious decision not to pursue any thoughts on the Russo case tonight. Her workday was done. Dr Finer had been the end of it. Well, almost. After that discussion she’d sat at her desk, fingering her paper scraps, conjuring her own image of who Sal had been.
Carrying her afghan in from the bedroom, she got herself settled in her chair and spent most of another hour finishing a paperback about Kat Colorado going on tour with a country singer in Nashville, saving the woman’s life, of course, winning another one for the good guys.
Sarah liked these books about women private eyes, especially the quick-witted, smart-mouthed ones. She didn’t fancy herself like them, but it was fun to live in their shoes for the space of a book, although they always got so personally involved. That wasn’t like real police work.
She wasn’t going to think about it.
She turned the television on to pick up the end of the Giants game. They had just come back in the bottom of the ninth and beaten the Dodgers. She thought she’d call her parents and rub it in a little. But they weren’t home. She left a message, came back to her chair in front of the TV, sat down heavily. Her parents were always going out nowadays, having fun.
Three of her girlfriends and her little brother, Jerry, in Concord – three answering machines and one she woke up.
Okay, she told herself, it was just one of those nights.
But – the walls closing in, the droning television her only companion, she decided she’d go out for a walk, grab a cup of decaf at one of the places over on Clement, that’s what she’d do. By then her mom and dad might be home and she could talk to them for a few minutes and then turn in.
She considered calling her partner; but no, she saw enough of Lanier, and socially he was not her idea of company. Besides, they would wind up talking about the case.
It was eating her up.
She felt an unseen pair of hands pushing down on her, holding her in the chair. She was not going to turn out like Sal Russo, she told herself. So what if she lived alone in an apartment not too dissimilar from his? What did that mean? Half the city – hell, half the people her age in cities all over the world – lived like this. Or worse, sometimes much worse. It didn’t necessarily lead anywhere.
She wasn’t anything like Sal. She wasn’t going to wind up where he had. She was a success. By thirty-two she’d reached the peak of her profession.
The walls again. She hadn’t gotten around to hanging any art. With her work she hadn’t had time. And look, there were a couple of posters after all – the Monterey Aquarium, a saguaro cactus in a desert somewhere that reminded her of her parents – but they were both unframed, sagging from their tacks in the faded drywall.
She got up and took the five-step walk into the kitchen. It was neat enough, unlike Sal’s. (‘See?’ she said to herself.) There were no dirty dishes piled anywhere. But the linoleum was peeling up in the corners. The table and chairs were thrift store, secondhand. Nice enough, but after thirty more years, she wondered what they’d look like, what they’d feel like, at that time to someone who was her age now.
But that was silly. Of course she’d move up, into something better. Now she was young and unattached. She didn’t need any more. But Graham – damn him, coming back into her consciousness like this! – Graham’s place wasn’t at all like this, was it? It was elegant and fine. And he, too, was young and unattached.
In the door between kitchen and living room she surveyed her own place objectively, as if it were a crime scene, as if something had happened to her here, tonight, now.
The afghan had been tossed off, and lay half on the ancient wing chair, half on the woven throw rug. Everything in sight was well used: the homemade brick-and-board bookshelves with their dog-eared paperbacks and law-enforcement journals, the cassette player, the lion’s-claw coffee table, pocked with rings from hot, cold, wet glasses placed directly on the wood.
The couch was frayed and worn, its once-bright red, gold, and green brocade now lackluster, nearly sepia. The three-bulb standing lamp behind the sofa threw almost no light; two bulbs needed to be replaced.
She was going out. All right. This was just a mood. If she didn’t like her apartment, she’d change it soon. It had never bothered her before. She wasn’t stuck with it forever. She’d just turn off the television…
‘… Graham Russo, who was arrested, then released, last week for assisting at the suicide of his father…’
He was not home. The house was as dark as it had been the night before.
She’d parked at the bottom of the street, across from a streetlight under a canopy of trees. Now she stood leaning against the hood of her car, looking north, back toward her apartment, trying not to think.
Edgewood dropped off in a cliff. From where she stood, she could look down a hundred feet or so into the backyards and onto the roofs of the multi-story buildings below her, on Parnassus. In one of the upper windows – close enough to see clearly – two men were in a bed together, naked.
The chill had come up again, a brisk breeze out of the west, although with her fisherman’s sweater, she wasn’t cold. Still, she tightened her arms around herself. A stair street – Farnsworth – fell off steeply to her right. In the wake of the chik-chik-chik of an owl flying overhead, she heard footsteps coming up the steps.
She’d left her apartment hurriedly, unarmed. Now she backed into the shadow of the canopy as the steps came up to her, paced and rhythmic, jogging.
Suddenly certain, she stepped out into the light as Graham got to the top of the steps. Seeing her, breathing hard, he stopped. His shoulders dropped and he shook his head as if she’d finally beaten him. Gathering another breath, he spread his hands, palms out. ‘Am I under arrest?’
The thought was so far from her mind that she laughed out loud. ‘What are you doing?’
It took a minute for him to figure out what she meant. ‘Trying to stay in shape. Running off some of this’ – he gestured ambiguously, took in another lungful of air – ’all this madness.‘ He was still panting. ’Those are some serious stairs. More than a hundred, I’d bet, but who’s counting?‘ Then, focusing back on her, ’So if I’m not under arrest…?‘
She took a half step toward him. ‘I guess I’m finally off duty. I thought you might have some of that wine left.’
They walked uphill, in the middle of the street, in silence.
Inside, he turned on the indirect track lights and opened the curtains to the view. Downtown and the East Bay shimmered down below them. ‘I was going to take a shower,’ he said, indicating the tiny booth that was his bathroom. ‘There’s no room to change in there.’
She swiveled in the chair, grabbed one of the magazines. ‘I won’t look.’
When he got out of the shower, he opened a bottle of red and poured them both a glass. They moved to opposite ends of the low leather couch. Graham was back in his uniform – barefoot, baggy running shorts, a T-shirt. Sarah, tennis shoes and all, had her legs curled under her.
Though Barbara Brandt’s announcement that she’d counseled Graham in the minutes before he’d killed his father was the immediate catalyst that had gotten her out of her own apartment and up to here, Sarah felt no inclination to raise the subject. She’d told him she was off duty, and she was. Graham evidently hadn’t yet even heard about it; he’d been out jogging to the beach and back, over an hour. The phone, she noticed, was unplugged.
She had no idea where the words came from. ‘Your father painted,’ she began, out of the blue.
The comment seemed to require an adjustment to Graham’s mind-set. He shifted on the couch, averted his eyes. ‘He did a lot of things. Are you still off duty?’
She had to smile at that. ‘Yeah.’
‘You want to talk about my father?’
She nodded. ‘Looks like. I was at his place. It got a little bit inside me. So did he.’
Graham leaned down and put his wineglass on the floor, then stood again, crossing to the bookshelves. He turned. ‘You know, when I got the letter, I hadn’t talked to him in like fifteen years. He was at my high school graduation, just came up and said hello when my mom wasn’t around. Congratulations. I had no idea what to say back. I think I just looked at him. All I really remember is it made me feel sick.’
‘And that’s the last time you saw him? I mean, before the letter?’
Graham shook his head no. ‘That’s what’s funny. When I worked for Draper, I’d see him on Fridays all the time, out in his truck behind the courthouse. I’d stand at the window and watch him out in the alley. Everybody seemed to love him.’
‘But you didn’t go down?’
‘I thought I hated him.’ Still across the room from her, he pulled a kitchen chair over and straddled it. ‘Even after the letter…’ He stopped.
‘I thought the letter was when you connected.’
He considered that for a beat. ‘I saw him in Vero then, once. But it wasn’t very good. I was a jerk. I think it’s my truest talent, jerkhood.’
‘I think it’s jerkitude.’ Then, realizing how that could be interpreted, she added, ‘Not your truest talent. The word.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, whatever you call it, there it was. So right after I read the letter, I decided I’d sucked it up enough. I should spill out how I felt. It would do me good. My dad had caused us all so much grief and I’d never told him how I felt about it, what he’d put us all through. So he writes me this, this beautiful letter, reaching out really, and somehow this cues me – sensitive guy that I am – that the time is right to go and beat up on the old man.’
‘Literally? You hit him?’
‘No. I might as well have. I told him he was a son of a bitch who had a hell of a nerve thinking he could make some kind of amends.’
Sarah didn’t think Graham was aware that he’d stood up and begun pacing.
‘As though he’s going to somehow make up for leaving us, just walking out. In his dreams. What’d he think I was going to do, forgive him? Take him back with open arms? Get a life, Sal but I’m not letting you back in mine! I don’t want to make you feel better. Not now, not ever. I don’t care how you feel. And we’re not going to be friends, for Christ’s sake. You think we can be friends? I hate you, man. Don’t you fucking get it? I hate your guts!’
He was yelling by the end. Now, in the small room, the silence when he stopped left a vacuum. He was breathing hard, looking back at Sarah as though in panic. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I beat him up. I beat the hell out of him.’
She waited until he’d crossed to the kitchen sink and scooped a few handfuls of water into his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘So what did he do? How did he react?’
He was leaning against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, his massive shoulders slumped. ‘He said I was right. He was crying. And you know what, I was glad he was crying. He said he was so sorry.’ Graham blew out in frustration. ‘And right in character, I told him sorry wasn’t good enough. Sorry didn’t make any damn difference anymore.’
In the pause she asked, ‘And then what?’
‘Then I left.’
‘So how did you…?’
‘That was later,’ he said.
There was an old hose in the alley where he parked his truck across from his apartment. It had been left behind by the construction crew at the federal courthouse, and Sal Russo had claimed it. He had it hooked to a spigot and was washing out the bed of his truck, which got tolerably rank by the end of Friday.
There wasn’t any nozzle, but Sal was happy enough to control the spray with his thumb. It spit water back all over him, but he didn’t care. His life was sea spume and fish smell. This was part of it.
He’d polished off the last mouthfuls of the gallon bottles of Carlo Rossi that his customers hadn’t got to. He had the cigar butt in his teeth, chopping words off around it, half singing, half humming ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’. It was the middle of the summer, two or more hours of daylight left, and the wind was gusting up in front of him, blowing the spray back, soaking him by the second. Chomping down harder on his cigar, he grinned into the force of it, then turned to get another angle on the truck bed, flush out the scales.
Initially, he thought it was a premonition of one of his spells – a shadow in the center of the sun’s glare, something about the shape so mnemonic, it felt like a haunting. Moving to one side, he squinted up into it. ‘Graham?’
‘Hey, Dad.’
Sal bent the hose over on itself, stopping the flow of water. He hadn’t seen his son since that time in Vero, and that had been a stupid mistake. He had seen him play and then hadn’t been able to stop himself. He thought enough time might have passed. Maybe Graham could understand. But he’d been wrong.
And now here he was again. ‘What’s goin’ on? Your mother all right?‘ He couldn’t imagine any other reason his son would come to see him – not after the last time. Helen, he thought, must have died and they send Graham to tell him.
‘Mom s fine.’ He shifted on his feet. ‘I, uh, I came by to apologize. I’m sorry.’
The world took on a blurry edge for a beat, but Sal only blinked and nodded. ‘Yeah, well, like I said, you were right.’ He released his grip on the hose, pointed it vaguely at the truck. ‘So how you doin’?‘
His son didn’t answer right away, which forced him to look. ‘Not that great, to tell you the truth!
Sal kept the water going. ‘I saw they cut you!
‘I don’t blame ’em,‘ he said. ’I sucked.‘ There was a set to the face, a tight control. He looked about to break. ’I’m too old. It’s a kid’s game. I was stupid, the whole thing was stupid.‘
Sal nodded. ‘Yeah, probably. If it’s any consolation, it’s in the blood. I’d a probably done the same thing, then got cut too. Bet that makes you feel better!’
A smile started, but went nowhere. ‘Lots. Thanks!
‘Don’t mention it. You hungry?’ He squeezed off the water again, held it with one hand, and pulled a roll of bills out of his front pocket.
Sal had a regular spot at the U.S. Restaurant, a lone table that spearheaded the sidewalk at the narrowest point in the triangular building. The place was in the heart of North Beach and had been in its location half a block from Gino & Carlo’s bar, essentially unchanged, for as long as Sal could remember. You still couldn’t spend ten bucks on a meal there if you tried.
They were on their third carafe of red wine. The wineglass was a prop and Sal had his hands wrapped around his. A foot from them both, outside the glass, the tourist night was getting into swing, the lights coming up on the street.
‘I don’t know if there is a why anymore,’ Sal was saying. ‘Maybe there never was. I don’t know.’
‘But there had to be, Sal. You don’t just…’
‘Maybe you do. Maybe one day you wake up and you’re a different person. You’re going along and something happens and the whole vision you have of who you are – suddenly that whole thing just doesn’t work anymore. So everything it was holding up comes crashing down around it.’
‘What? Did Mom have an affair?’
Sal shook his head. ‘It wasn’t your mother. This was me. Who I was.’ He lifted the prop and used it, buying some time. ‘It wasn’t anything as easy as an affair.’
‘So what was it?’ Sarah asked him.
By now it was nearly midnight, although neither of them was much aware of the time. They were facing each other, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
‘To this day I don’t know. He said I didn’t realize how insecure a person my mother was – still is, if you want to know. No one who saw her out in the world would ever see that. Though we kids had seen it, of course, after we were older. The face-lifts now, the trappings. Stuff you don’t need if you’re together with yourself.’
Graham seemed embarrassed by the cheap psychology. He looked down at his hands. ‘Anyway, she loved him. Their backgrounds might never mesh, they got uncomfortable doing each other’s things, you know?’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, Mom wouldn’t go out on the boat. Sal wouldn’t get dressed up for anything. It broke down to money – Mom was used to things you bought, Sal liked things you did. It was a pretty big difference.’
‘But they got together?’
He nodded. ‘They’d never be friends like some couples were, but he loved her and knew he could make her keep loving him.’
‘He could make her?’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘And how did he do that?’
‘By being stronger than she was, having a stronger will.’
‘And that made her love him?’
‘Yeah, I think it might have.’
Sarah and Graham had never gotten around to drinking any of their wine – the glasses remained half filled on the hardwood by the couch. Graham was still trying to reason it through for himself, how it had happened with his father and mother.
So it wasn’t the hour or the alcohol. Still, with no real intention of doing so, he was becoming more aware of the planes of Sarah’s face, the soft bow of her lips, the way her hair fell across her cheek.
Sal’s eyes danced with the memory. ‘See? I knew who I was. I was happy in myself. I was a person – okay, a schlemiel like I still am, but I knew where I belonged, who I was. Your mother, she didn’t. She was looking, always looking for something solid, always unsure of where the ground was.
‘I think – no, hell, I know – that nothing in her parents’ life got inside her. She’d gone to the schools and had the clothes and the fancy friends, but you know what? They didn’t do it for her. Then when we got together, finally she was happy – not always thrilled with the way we lived, with no money, none of that society junk, but she loved you kids.’
‘And what about you? Did she still love you?’ His father leaned across the table and Graham could pick up the odor of fish, of cheap wine. But even with that, the old clothes and the stubble, the random fish scale on his skin, Sal remained a compelling figure. I told you. I made her.‘
Graham rolled his eyes and his father laughed.
‘That, too, but that wasn’t what I was talking about.’ Graham hadn’t touched his spumoni ice cream and now it had melted into a waxy, pinkish-brown liquid in its small, tarnished metal bowl. Sal pulled it over in front of him and dipped a spoon. ‘She’d get the doubts, you know. “Do we belong here?” “Maybe my parents are right.” “Where are we going?” “Did I still love her the way I did when we started?” All the time!’ He shook his head, sadly. ‘All the goddamn time, Graham’.
‘And you know what I’d do?’ He scooped up another spoonful of melted spumoni. ‘I’d tell her I was sure. That this is really what she wanted, down in her soul. That the kids, the house, the worries – this was real life. It was the only thing that had ever made her happy. She knew that. And that I loved her, not because of anything except for who she was.’
He sat back, scratched at his face, pulled at the sides of his mouth. Finally speaking about this after all these years, to his oldest son, bringing it up again – the memory seemed to be battering him. ‘It was just a constant battle, Graham. You can’t imagine – the conflict between how she was raised and how she was living. It seemed like she always had one foot out the door, ready to go back. So I couldn’t ever waver, couldn’t show any doubt of my own, or she’d lose faith. If I stopped acting like I believed, then she couldn’t go it on her own. It wasn’t her dream at all, really. It depended on who I was.’
‘And who were you?’
He sighed wearily and spoke with a huskiness that now betrayed the words. He had confidence in the memory. He knew who he ‘d been. ’I was Sal Russo. I’d never make a lot of money, never change the world, but I was as good a man as there was. I was strong, I worked hard, I didn’t cheat. I loved your mother with all my heart. Simple stuff, but it was what she needed to hear, who she needed me to be. And it was true.‘
‘So what happened?’
He searched the crowded restaurant for a minute, hiding or searching for the answer. Letting out a deep breath, he shrugged. ‘I lost my confidence, I guess. I couldn’t pretend I was anybody special anymore.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I wasn’t.’
It wasn’t really an answer, but another, more pressing, question kept Graham from pursuing it. ‘But what about us? Me? Deb? Georgie? How could you just leave us?’ He reached across the table and put a hand on his father’s arm. ‘I’m not here to bust your chops on this. I’d just like to understand it, that’s all.’
‘I would, too, Graham. I’d go back and live every minute of that time over again if I could. I don’t know how I could have done it. I want to blame your mother, but again, it was all me. I could have fought her.’
The implications here rocked Graham. The only story he’d ever heard was that his father didn’t want to see his children anymore. And, indeed – apparently – he hadn’t made any effort to. Not that Graham had heard of. ‘What do you mean,’ he asked, ‘you could have fought Mom?’
They were out of props: wineglasses, ice cream, coffee cups. At the U.S. Restaurant steady customers could sit all day and night over a demitasse if they wanted. Nobody hustled them out.
Sal had his hands folded on the table, the knuckles gnarled and white with pressure. ‘I don’t know exactly how to say this, but when we broke up, when it stopped working, your mother… it meant she’d failed. She’d gone up against everything she was raised with, because I’d convinced her it was somehow truer, or nobler, better. Then when it didn’t work, she had no choice, I think. She had to hate me. I had betrayed her. I was the devil.’
‘You couldn’t see us because of her?’
Sal didn’t like that slant on it. It wasn’t Helen’s fault. It was his own. ‘She got very protective of you. I had ruined her life. She wasn’t going to let me ruin yours.’
‘And you accepted that?’
He shook his head. ‘I was at the bottom, Graham. I was worthless. I guess I thought she must be right. It was too hard. I don’t know. Every time I tried, she was in the way until finally I just gave up.’
Graham’s hand was still on his father’s arm. He tightened down his grip. ‘How could you do that?’
Sal’s eyes leveled on his. ‘I got hit pretty hard by a few of life s pitches, Graham. I guess I got afraid to come back to the plate. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘It s kind of how I feel. Why I thought I ’d come look you up.‘
They were outside now, where Hardy and Graham had sat late that afternoon. Though by now the temperature had dropped to the fifties, Graham was still barefoot, still wore his shorts, although he’d pulled on a warm-up jacket. Sarah leaned against a lightpost, hands in her pockets.
Graham was concluding. ‘So that’s when we became friends again. I was pretty low. I didn’t know who else…’ He let it hang, but it was clear enough. Graham felt – and from all accounts with some justification – that he’d alienated everyone in his world, too, and didn’t know where to start to get back in. Maybe with his dad, who’d been there as well.
‘I wish I’d known him, somehow,’ she said.
‘I’m glad I did, finally.’ But the subject suddenly seemed too close, embarrassing him. ‘He was great.’
‘But that night, in North Beach, did he already have Alzheimer’s then?’
Graham nodded. ‘I know, that’s a question. It didn’t seem like it at all. He was like he’d always been. But the symptoms had started before. I found that out later, after we… after I became more involved with him. It was getting worse, of course, it doesn’t get better, but he was still trying to live with it.’
It was a clean opportunity to get back to the pursuit of her investigation, but she no longer had the heart for it. ‘So how sick was he at the end?’
‘It wasn’t the Alzheimer’s,’ Graham said. ‘AD wasn’t ever going to kill him. It wasn’t going to get the time.’ He shook off the thought. ‘The funny thing is, you know, we were so much like each other. Firstborn kids, jocks, confident to a fault. Even now…’ He stopped again.
‘Even now what?’
‘Even now, with everything that’s happened with the clerkship and with baseball, with being unemployable, getting arrested, then fired – I still know who I am. I’m fine with me. It’s everybody else’s reaction that’s a little hard to take.’
He wasn’t whining. It was said so matter-of-factly that another person might have missed it altogether, and that would have been fine with Graham. But Sarah knew what he was saying: he had no close friends anymore, no one to share what went on in his soul. There had been Sal, his father, and now Sal was dead.
His smile wasn’t a come-on; it was a question. ‘It makes one cautious.’
Sarah smiled back. ‘I’m a firstborn jock with attitude myself,’ she said. ‘Do you know the secret handshake?’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
Moving off the lamppost, she took his hand, raised it open to her mouth, and, holding his gaze, licked his palm.