It was Friday in the third week of May. Hardy was at an outside table, alone, just finishing an order of mussels from a lunch at Plouf, a bistro on Belden Alley, smack in the middle of the financial district. Belden was a true downtown alley, perhaps a dozen feet wide, shaded except at high noon by the buildings on either side of it. The sun had just passed out of sight, and the slice of sky above the alley was bright blue.
Hardy had taken Frannie to Paris the previous summer, leaving the kids with Moses and Susan, for five too-short days. He hadn’t been to France since just after his hitch in Vietnam, and going back had nearly broken his heart. He’d been a free man in Paris, the one Joni Mitchell had written her song about – unfettered and alive.
Well, the savory smells of great food cooking here on Belden didn’t completely mask the underpinning aromas of fish and tobacco and urine. With those, plus the half-dozen French restaurants in the space of its one block, the place was Paris.
Sitting over his crock of mussel shells, Hardy had that feeling again. Not exactly unfettered, but alive. Energized by the tastes and smells and bustle around him, he was certain that very soon he was going to be back in the thick of what he was born to do, and it wasn’t Tryptech. He’d looked in on Michelle back at the office, up to her elbows in paper, and had left for lunch with nary a trace of guilt.
There was one problem, though. He hadn’t been able to reach Graham. Calls hadn’t been answered. He’d left notes tacked to the front door on Edgewood. Nothing. His client had vanished without a trace. And given their disagreement over the plea bargain he’d struck with Pratt, Hardy wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he still had a client at all. After what he’d been through adjusting his attitude and priorities, this was something he’d rather not consider.
‘This seat taken?’
The familiar face belonged to Art Drysdale, who’d long ago been Hardy’s mentor. Art had even rehired him to the district attorney’s office, getting him back into the practice of the law after his decade-long self-imposed exile.
Since then their professional lives had put them in different corners, but Hardy had always liked Art and was glad to see him. The other guy with him, he didn’t know. ‘Have you met Gil Soma?’
The two shook hands. The lawyer club. It didn’t have to be personal. Not yet, at least.
Hardy looked from one man to the other. ‘The mussels are really great,’ he said, smiling. ‘Going on the assumption that you being here with me is a coincidence.’
Drysdale grabbed a leftover piece of bread and dipped it in Hardy’s sauce – wine, parsley, garlic. ‘Mostly. I did happen to call your office right after you’d left and Phyllis told me you were coming here.’
‘She’s very efficient.’ Hardy had his poker face on. It was good practice. He’d been out of the game awhile.
‘Then, since it was such a nice day and lunchtime to boot, we figured we’d take a walk, get out and enjoy the city.’
‘Good idea.’ He waited. Let them come out with it. It was what had brought them here.
They pulled chairs and got themselves arranged. ‘Have you heard from your client today?’ Drysdale finally asked.
‘Which one, Art? I’ve got clients coming out of the woodwork. I can’t keep track of them all.’
Soma didn’t appreciate all this pirouetting. He snapped it out. ‘The famous one. Graham Russo.’
‘Oh, your buddy? Didn’t you guys use to work together?’
‘Till he stiffed us.’ Soma was smiling, but Hardy was getting the feeling that it wasn’t sincere.
Even before Barbara Brandt had entered the picture with her claim that she’d counseled Graham just before Sal’s death, the case was developing a lot of momentum. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Cerrone’s article had indeed made the cover of Time.
Graham’s handsome, guileless face had stared out at Hardy from every newsstand he’d passed on his way to lunch. The photographer had captured a vulnerable moment, and the tale it told was wrenching. Hardy thought the story was also probably true or mostly true – at least in some respects close to true. Unfortunately for his client, two out of three of those choices were disastrous.
But he got back to the point. ‘Anyway, no, Art. I haven’t heard from him. He’s probably lying low. Maybe he left town. I think I would have.’
Soma jumped at this. ‘Did you counsel him to do that? Where did he go?’
Hardy took in Soma for a beat, then turned to Drysdale. ‘The reporters were getting on his nerves. Tell you the truth, they’re getting on mine too.’
‘Then you did talk to him?’
Resolutely mild, Hardy kept his eyes on Drysdale, which he knew was making Soma crazy. ‘Did you read that little piece about me and Sharron, Art?’
Jeff Elliot’s ‘CityTalk’ column this morning had alluded to Hardy’s aborted plea bargain and Pratt’s displeasure with the way things had turned out. Reading it at their kitchen table in the morning, Frannie had commented that her husband seemed to have a knack for alienating district attorneys. Hardy allowed as to how that was probably true. It wasn’t the worst possible trait in a defense attorney.
To which Frannie had raised her eyebrows. Her husband was precise with his words, and if Dismas was calling himself a defense attorney right out loud, that’s what he meant.
But Drysdale was nodding, smiling. Pratt, after all, had fired him recently enough that he still didn’t wish her all the best. ‘She shouldn’t have leaked it before the deal was done,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it made her look less than astute. Bumbling, in point of fact.’ The wattage on the smile increased. ‘Poor woman, my heart goes out to her, but I do think, Diz, it put you on her list.’
‘I’ll try to make it up to her.’ Hardy, enjoying himself, finally turned to Soma. ‘Anyway, to answer your question, Gil, Graham’s been a little tough to reach. He hadn’t been indicted. In her wisdom Ms Pratt let him go. He was a free man.’ He smiled all around. ‘It’s a free country.’
Drysdale cut to it. ‘He’s been indicted now. And I expect you to surrender him.’
Though this was news, it was hardly unexpected, and Hardy took it calmly. ‘What charge?’
‘Murder one with specials.’
Expected or not – and it was the official confirmation of what Hardy had predicted – this wasn’t good news. ‘You can’t be asking for death on this?’
‘LWOP.’ This was Soma, rapping the rap, trying out the sound of the jargon, pretending to be an old pro. Hardy wondered if Soma had given any thought to the reality of life in prison without the possibility of parole for someone very much like himself, as Graham was. If, in fact, Soma had given thought to much except getting high-profile cases and winning them. Hardy guessed not; the boy had all the signs of testosterone poisoning, which meant he wouldn’t do it by the numbers.
Also, the case had a personal edge, which increased the odds – if Soma was smart, which also appeared to be the case – that he’d come up with some tricks in the courtroom.
But here in Belden Alley the attorneys for both sides of this highly publicized case were at the same table, informally, in some kind of free-form mode. From what they’d said, they hadn’t found Graham yet to arrest him. Hardy knew Drysdale well, and thought he’d orchestrated this meeting for some specific purpose. Maybe get another plea in play.
Although – a zing of caution – maybe Art thought he could get information they didn’t have while Hardy’s guard was down. He’d find out. ‘Either of you read the article in Time?’
Cerrone had done a masterful job of creating an impression without ever crossing the line into accusation. The Graham Russo case, he’d written, was a poignant illustration of the many ambiguities facing the country surrounding the entire problem of elderly care/assisted suicide/the right to die.
Woven into the fabric of the legal story of the arrest and subsequent release of Graham Russo was the relationship between him and his father, the desperation of Sal’s condition, Graham’s access to morphine and syringes. Reading the article, Hardy concluded that no reasonable person would assume that Graham had not helped his father die with dignity.
Hardy had his ear to the ground, and as far as he could tell, the article, coupled with Barbara Brandt’s confession, had pretty much settled the question for the public. Even some of the legal public – Freeman, Michelle.
These two lawyers with him now, however, represented something entirely different. A waiter had come and taken their lunch orders and Hardy had decided on a cup of espresso, high octane. After it arrived, he slowly stirred in a spoonful of sugar. ‘I’ve got to say, Art, this is a terrible call. If you read the article-’ True to form, Soma butted in again.
‘The article left out just a few things.’
‘Yes it did.’ Hardy was all agreement. ‘And I know all about them – the money and the so-called struggle? But I’ll tell you something: Graham didn’t kill Sal for the money. You’ll never be able to prove he did.’ He found himself addressing Art again. ‘Powell’s got to know this, Art. It’s damn near frivolous.’
‘We did get the indictment.’ Drysdale shrugged. ‘The grand jury didn’t think it was frivolous.’
Hardy sat back in his chair, amused. ‘Wasn’t it your very self, years ago, who assured me that if the prosecution asked nice enough, the grand jury would indict a ham sandwich?’
Drysdale nodded. ‘I might have said something like that when I was but a callow youth, but I was wrong.’ He grinned. ‘Besides, the ham sandwich might have done it.’
‘So remind me again, why are we having this discussion? You came down here looking for me, remember? Why didn’t you just give me a call and tell me to bring in my man?’
Putting a hand over the arm of Soma, who looked equal parts ready to interrupt again and in sore need of a bathroom break, Drysdale leaned forward. ‘Dean’s made his point getting the indictment, Diz. He’s upholding the law, Pratt isn’t. I don’t think this kid has to spend the rest of his life in jail.’ He threw a quick glance at Soma, shutting him up.
‘So what do you want?’
‘You tell me. The word was you went to manslaughter, no time, with Pratt. I don’t think Dean will go there, but he might bend down from the specials.’
But Hardy was shaking his head. ‘My client didn’t even cop to probation, Art. He says he didn’t do it.’
‘Although the entire country now thinks he did.’
Hardy spread his palms. ‘Be that as it may. And even if that’s true, even if some jury comes to that view, they won’t see murder with specials. They’ll see an assisted suicide.’
Finally, Soma could hold it no longer. ‘Which is murder.’
Drysdale agreed. ‘Forget the legal niceties, Diz. This was a murder. We can prove murder.’
‘Which means Graham did it,’ Soma blurted.
Hardy took a beat. ‘That’s an interesting legal theory,’ he said.
‘The point,’ Drysdale went on, ‘is this: you know Powell, Diz. He’s not immune to public opinion…’ This, Hardy thought, was surely one of the great understatements of Drysdale’s career, but he let him go on. ‘He doesn’t necessarily want to try a case where sixty percent of his constituency thinks his suspect is a good guy who did the right thing.’
‘But-’
Drysdale’s hand went back to Soma’s arm. ‘But Dean is convinced – and I agree – that this was a murder. You will, too, Diz, when you’ve seen all the discovery. So if you plead, it’s win-win. Dean gets a W in his column for upholding the law, you get a W for pleading down. Pratt picks up an L.’
‘I love the sports analogy,’ Hardy said. ‘So Graham gets time in the slammer? My guess is he’d call that one the big L for him. What do you think?’
‘L, for life is the big L,’ Soma said. ‘This would be lower case.’
‘It’s not going to happen,’ Hardy replied, standing up, ‘but I’ll convey your kind offer to my client.’
If I can find him.
Shaking hands, he was effusively friendly. He told Art it was nice seeing him again. They ought to plan a lunch together sometime, catch up on their families, the changes in their jobs, old times.
Turning to the younger man, extending his hand, Hardy broke a practiced smile. ‘It was nice to meet you, Mr Soma. I wish you luck in your career.’
The young man wasn’t blind or stupid. He caught the dismissive tone and served one back to Hardy. ‘We need to see Russo by tomorrow. We don’t mean the day after.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Yes, sir. I guess I hear that message loud and clear. Thank you very much.’
An hour after Soma and Hardy exchanged their pleasantries, Marcel Lanier sat double-parked in front of the office of the attorney general on Fremont Street, drumming his hands on his steering wheel.
This was supposed to have taken five minutes – whip by here and get confirmation that Graham Russo was in the system. He’d sent Sarah up and she’d already been gone for twenty. Marcel sat with his driver’s window down, eyes closed. It was a nice afternoon, smells of coffee roasting and diesel fumes – not altogether unpleasant.
He was half dozing until another cop pulled up behind him. Marcel flashed his badge and explained the situation and tried to go back to dozing. Until two minutes later when another traffic-and parking-enforcement meter-minder tapped him – hard! – on the elbow. ‘Come on, now, move it along.’
Another flash of the buzzer, this one not as effective. ‘I don’t care about the badge, Inspector. You’re blocking the street here. You gotta move it along.’
So Marcel, humoring this bozo, drove in a big circle, hoping Evans would be back down when he returned. But she wasn’t, so he double-parked again in the same spot, closed his eyes again. It couldn’t be long now, he told himself, it just couldn’t be.
But it was long enough for a pair of indigents, one of them wearing a football helmet and the other pushing a stolen shopping cart loaded with recyclables, to stop at his window and ask him for money. Marcel revved the motor and took off again for another tour of the surrounding three blocks.
When he returned this time, he at least got the time to start drumming his fingers before Evans appeared, coming out of the building with the skinny young lawyer.
Lanier was watching the guy move. Soma had come all the way down from the third floor with Sarah Evans when all he needed to do was have his secretary check the computer? So that’s what it was – Soma was hitting on her.
Leaning on the horn, he saw her wave, gesturing to him, making excuses. As though she needed to explain to this dweeb that she was supposed to be doing her job. He rolled down the window on her side. ‘Hey, Sarah!’
He didn’t know what it had been – whether Soma had been overbearing, or he’d honked too often. Maybe it was PMS. You never knew. He was the one who’d had the frustrating twenty minutes out in the car, but now she was sulking, her elbow out her own window as they drove west, staring out away from him.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine.’ Except, of course, that the man I love is now a fugitive and the next time I see him I’ve got to arrest him.
‘That guy Soma bothering you?’
She shrugged, still not looking over.
The silence went on for another few blocks. Finally, Lanier spoke again. ‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, nothing seems to have got you pretty upset.’
Now she turned. ‘I’m not upset.’
‘Right. That’s right. You’re always this way. Quiet and kind of moody.’
Another block. ‘I told him he was making a mistake.’
‘Who?’ Lanier asked. ‘About what?’
She flicked at the folder containing the file. ‘Gil Soma. This thing.’
Marcel threw her a concerned look. ‘The warrant? What’s the matter with it?’
‘Russo.’
‘You back on that again? Give it a rest. He did it.’
‘Oh, okay. Never mind.’
‘Sarah.’ Asking her to be reasonable.
‘No, really. You think he did it, therefore he did it.’
‘Who cares? It’s Soma’s problem. It’s not our problem. We’re just doing the delivery.’
‘You’re right. There’s nothing to discuss.’
‘Besides, he did it. Nobody else could have done it. We checked. Everybody else is clean. You read that Time story? That woman up in Sacramento? He did it.’
She was silent.
‘What?’
‘He helped his dad die to put him out of his misery, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So what about the struggle? What about the hooker downstairs, what she heard? The bump on the head?’
Marcel was nodding. ‘That’s what I mean. He did it.’
‘For the money?’
‘Sure.’
‘But you just said it was assisted suicide.’
‘Maybe it started that way, and the idea that when it was done he would have the money, maybe that kind of grew on him. Then he got started and panicked when the old man changed his mind. Anything could have happened, Sarah, but whatever it was, he was there. He did it. This stuff happens. I had a guy once killed his wife. Same thing.’
‘She was sick?’
‘Oh, yeah. Same thing. Wouldn’t admit he did it.’
‘Why not?’
‘You’re going to love this. Guy was like sixty years old. He didn’t want his eighty-year-old mother to be mad at him.’
‘What?’
‘God’s truth. You heard it here first. The mother didn’t believe in the concept, so the son tried to fake it and make it look like a straight suicide, but he botched it all up.’
‘Did he also try to make it look like a murder? Steal his wife’s jewelry, anything like that?’
‘No. But that would have just been going into more detail. He just wasn’t as smart as this Russo guy, that’s all. Same basic idea, though.’
‘Well, thanks for making that clear.’
‘Anytime. You think he’ll be home?’
‘Russo? I doubt it.’
Sarah didn’t simply doubt that Graham wasn’t at his home. She knew it for a fact. He’d been staying at her apartment since the long night they’d spent with each other after she’d licked his palm. Sarah’s argument to herself (fatuous, and she knew it) was that Graham had not been under indictment at that time and was, in theory, a citizen who was to be presumed innocent. Now the indictment had come in and though it had been expected, like it or not it changed everything.
He saw it as soon as she walked through the door, closed it carefully behind her, kept her distance from him. For the last few days she’d entered the apartment and they’d fallen into each other’s arms. He stood in the middle of the living room. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The matter is you got yourself indicted this morning by the grand jury. I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m not supposed to be in love with you. I’m supposed to arrest you right now.’
He tried a tentative smile. ‘You going to?’
‘This isn’t funny.’
‘I don’t think it’s funny.’
‘Then do me a favor. Don’t laugh about it.’
‘That ought to be easy. Not laughing, I mean.’ He couldn’t make himself move toward her. He could feel the aura from where he stood; she had to keep a distance between them. He wasn’t going to push it. ‘What do you want me to do, Sarah? I’ll go if you want, leave here if it’ll make it easier for you. Or you can take me in. Whatever you want.’
‘Don’t you understand? Shit. I don’t want to take you in!’ Her strong shoulders sagged. She bit at her lip. ‘This is wrong. This is all so wrong.’
This time he did take a step toward her, but she held out a hand. ‘Don’t!’
He stopped, waited, spoke quietly. ‘My dad and I, I didn’t-’
She interrupted him. ‘That’s not the point, Graham.’
‘So what is?’
‘The point,’ she said tightly, ‘is that I’m a cop and you’re indicted. If I was doing my job, I should have come here with Marcel in the middle of the afternoon, taken you downtown-’
‘I’m not kidding you,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. I’ll go right now. I’ll beat this, and then-’
‘No! God damn it, no! We’re not doing that.’
He waited. ‘Then what?’
She slumped onto one of the kitchen chairs. ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.’ She was about to cry.
‘I’ll give you a dollar if you let me come over and hug you.’ He crossed the room, went down on a knee, and put his arms around her shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
‘How?’ She was shaking against him. ‘What are we going to do? I can’t see you. You can’t even be here. If I don’t take you in, I’m committing a felony myself. In fact, I am now. How can I commit a felony?’
‘You’re right, you can’t,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll just turn myself in. I’ll call Hardy, find out where he lives, show up at his house, and have him do it.’
‘But I don’t want to leave you to them, even to him. I want you to be here. This can’t be the only time we’re ever going to get. I can’t, I just can’t… I mean, we just started, and it’s so good, Graham. It’s so good. Don’t you feel that?’ Her cheeks were wet now and he wiped the tears gently away.
‘We’ve had a few days,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold on to them, how’s that? We won’t lose this.’
‘You don’t know that. Who knows how long you’ll be in jail, with the trial, even if you win…’
‘I’ll win.’
She shook her head, sniffling. ‘But what if you don’t?’
‘I will. Nobody’s going to be able to prove I did anything wrong. I’ll beat it. And however long it is, we’ll get through it, okay?’
She shook her head again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how we can, if we can.’
‘We will. I promise. I’ve been looking for this for too long and now we’ve got it. I’m not letting you go, and that’s all there is to it.’
Hardy was intensely unhappy with Graham’s disappearance, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. The police would probably find him first and Hardy would get a call from jail.
Meanwhile, he did have other clients who needed consistent, if perhaps low-level, effort. He tried to leave Friday afternoons open for the motions and correspondence that covered a decent part of the overhead of a small commercial practice like his own. He was just finishing up a memo for one of these clients, when he looked up and saw Abe Glitsky standing in his open doorway.
Momentarily startled, Hardy sat back. ‘Now I know how you must feel. People turning up in your office without any warning. Hey, wasn’t today the day? Tell me your door’s been installed.’
‘It’s in.’ Glitsky nodded, but there was a set to his features. He wasn’t here to talk about his door.
‘What’s the matter?’
The lieutenant took a step into the room. ‘I tell you something in confidence as a friend, and you take it to the DA and try to make your own juice out of it, I feel kind of like you’re a sack-of-shit lawyer instead of my old pal.’
Any profanity from Glitsky was unusual, but a directed vulgar insult was unheard of, serious. ‘You want to come in? I’m sorry. I was wrong.’
Glitsky didn’t move. ‘I don’t think I do. I’m just here with the message, so you’d know I knew.’
Dan Tosca was allowing himself to be treated to a nice dinner at Firenze by Night. Lanier had wanted the information sooner if he could have gotten it, and now, technically, it was too late; the attorney general had already got its indictment on Graham Russo, though he and his partner hadn’t been able to serve the warrant.
Lanier didn’t really think there would be anything with Sal Russo’s business dealings that might complicate the investigation into his death. But, as it turned out, he was wrong.
Tosca was eating coniglio con pancetta - Lanier called it bunny and bacon – and Marcel was having spaghetti and meatballs. ‘… so I was surprised, mostly because I hadn’t heard a word about it.’
‘But it was a heart attack, you’re sure?’
Tosca shrugged, pushing sauce around his plate with a piece of bread. ‘Nobody’s sure of anything, come right down to it, but Pio gets a pain in his chest, he goes to the hospital, he dies.’
‘Pio?’
‘Pio, yeah. Ermenigeldo Pio. He ran the fish operation.’
‘For who?’
Tosca lowered his voice. ‘It was his shop. He built it up.’
‘And how big was it? Not just Russo’s, the whole thing?’
‘Dollar volume? Thirty, thirty-five.’
‘A month?’
Tosca shrugged, agreeing. ‘People like fish. Everybody’s worried about cholesterol. Me’ – he pointed down at his plate – ‘I like this. I don’t worry about it.’
Marcel put his fork down. ‘I don’t feel good about Pio dying just now.’
A smile. ‘I bet he don’t either. And it’s not now. It was last week.’
This really set off warning bells. Like all veteran cops Lanier set little store in coincidence. ‘They do an autopsy?’
‘Why? It was a heart attack. Guy’s sixty-two. Probably didn’t eat enough fish.’ Tosca speared some meat. ‘But you ask me, it’s all genes anyway. You get your time, then you’re dead.’
‘You’re a philosopher, aren’t you, Dan?’
Another shrug. ‘Part time. Look, if it makes you feel better, I can tell you, this has nothing to do with Sal Russo and his one truck of fish. Pio was doing vans, he’s got a fleet. He’s doing Half Moon Bay up to Tomales seven days a week.’
‘So who’s doing that now? Who’s taking that over?’
Tosca’s eyes twinkled. ‘I don’t think that’s all settled yet.’ He reached over the table and patted Lanier’s arm. ‘A vacuum like this comes up, there’s always a little power struggle. It’ll work itself out. But I guarantee you this has nothing to do with Sal Russo.’
If it was all fish, Lanier could believe that, even at the enormous volumes they were discussing. But if it was anything else… ‘You would tell me if you’d run into drugs, wouldn’t you?’
Tosca put his fork down. ‘Marcel, this is not how dope is handled. You know this. You got your Koreans, your Vietnamese, the Chinatown tongs, your longhairs. Bunch of guinea Pescadores go up against these hard-ons? I don’t think so. Besides, I thought you told me you were arresting the boy, his son.’
‘We are.’
‘And wasn’t there some magazine story he admitted it?’
‘Yeah.’
Tosca spread his hands. ‘So what’s the problem?’
Sarah wasn’t sure whether it had been her idea or Graham’s, but somehow they’d decided they would spend a last weekend together, after which Graham would turn himself in.
But it wouldn’t be in San Francisco, where the risk was too great. Sarah already felt so compromised that she barely considered what difference another day or two would make, especially over a weekend.
Graham had a Saturday tournament across the Bay. If his team won, he would have more money for his defense, which he would need. So at nine-fifteen Saturday morning they parked at the tournament site, a multidiamond complex in a valley surrounded by oak-strewn rolling green foothills. Graham was pulling his bat bag from his trunk when a trim man in a designer sweatsuit, gold chain, sunglasses, came jogging up. ‘I can’t believe it, I can’t believe you’re here.’
Graham turned. ‘Hey, Craig, how you doin’?‘ A bounce of the shoulders. ’We got games, I’m here.‘ Graham’s macho pose was kicking back in. Sarah saw little sign of the man she’d been with for the past week, for whom she was sacrificing everything. This untouchable athlete needed no one. It was an unsettling moment.
But this man, Craig, was going on. ‘You’re having some week, aren’t you? I know some important people, let me tell you, and I don’t know anybody who’s ever been on the cover of Time.’
‘It’s just stuff around me,’ Graham said. ‘I’m here to play ball, that’s all.’ He put out his hand to include Sarah, bring her up to them. ‘This is a friend of mine, Sarah Evans. Sarah, Craig Ising, our sponsor.’
Shaking hands with him, Sarah was struck by his relative youth. He wasn’t much older than they were, certainly not over forty. From Graham’s description of him – really from what she knew he must be worth – she had expected someone in his fifties, at least.
Half an hour later Sarah was eating a Sno-Kone, watching the teams warm up. Ising appeared from somewhere and sat next to her. ‘So, you been seeing my star a long time?’
‘Couple of weeks,’ she said.
‘You live in the city?’
‘Yeah.’ She glanced out the side of her sunglasses. ‘How’d you find Graham?’
‘I knew his dad.’
‘Sal?’
‘You knew him too?’
‘Graham talks about him a lot.’
‘Yeah. Hell of a funny guy. Was, I mean. Shame about that. He had some great jokes. Anyway, Graham was in Triple A and got cut, and Sal told me I ought to try him out. I’m glad I did. Kid’s made me a bundle.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘He’s mature, you know, a leader.’
She smiled. ‘I like him already, Craig. So what was it? You bought fish from Sal?’
‘Naw.’ He lowered his voice. ‘He had protection, you know? He was good luck.’
Sarah felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. ‘What do you mean, protection?’
The game had started and the shortstop for the Hornets took a hit away from the first batter, going deep into the hole. When Ising sat down again, Sarah repeated her question.
‘I’m just curious. Protection from what? This kind of thing fascinates me.’
Ising, impressing the pretty girl, unraveled the mystery for her. ‘He was connected, I don’t know. Somebody way up there. He looked like a bum and nobody touched him.’
‘So how did you meet him?’
‘One of my friends. I do a little betting, maybe Graham told you, these games, other things. So sometimes cash moves around downtown.’
‘You’re saying Sal carried this cash?’
He playfully hit her lightly on the knee. ‘Hey, you got a knack for this, Sarah, I’m not kidding you. Yeah, you give Sal a paper bag and a bill and off he goes. He stopped lately. He must have known he was getting forgetful, didn’t want to lose track of anybody’s money.’
All those names, she was thinking, all those numbers. They weren’t the people who supplied his fish to him. Could it be they were gamblers – high-stakes gamblers? ‘Did Graham know about this?’
‘I don’t know, you ought to ask him. Hey, by the way.’ He was fishing in his pockets for something and came out with a business card – his name and a number. ‘Don’t take this wrong, but it wasn’t real clear. Are you and Graham an item?’
She shrugged. ‘Close. Kind of.’
‘Well’ – he handed her the card – ‘if it doesn’t work out, give me a call. I have a pretty good time.’
‘I can see that,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’
Right after Hardy got up Saturday, he’d called Glitsky to apologize again and the nanny told him the lieutenant was busy. She didn’t know when he’d be available. He asked her to make sure and give him the message that his friend Hardy was a horse’s ass, but he wasn’t sure she’d deliver it verbatim.
Then, while he was telephoning, he’d tried Graham Russo’s home for the fun of it and gotten the expected result. Nothing.
Then Frannie reminded him that the kids had arranged for some school chums to come over and play, and Frannie was going to her Saturday jazzercize class, so Hardy was in charge.
She’d told him! Didn’t he remember? Of course he did, he had told her, although this was a lie. He said he was just teasing her.
So for three hours Hardy had baby-sat. Although, as his wife never tired of telling him, he shouldn’t think of it as baby-sitting. They were his children. He wasn’t merely watching them. He was their father, responsible for their guidance and development.
Too true, he admitted every time this topic surfaced. He even believed it. But there were moments – as for example when five pre-ten-year-olds were playing some kind of parade game with every pillow, blanket, cushion, and stuffed animal in the entire house on the living-room floor – that his parental role seemed limited, more or less, to just baby-sitting. Neither his kids nor their friends really cried out to have old Dad guiding their development at that particular moment.
This was not to say there was not a great deal of crying out in general – and screaming and giggling and fighting and running around – and Hardy never for a moment doubted that if he wasn’t in baby-sitting mode, they would destroy the house as surely and as efficiently as Vesuvius had destroyed Pompeii.
Finally, Frannie came home. Hardy, nearly insane with enduring the kid stuff, asked her if she minded if he took a little break. He’d be back in a while – going for a jog.
Until three years before, Hardy had been religious about running a four-mile circle from his house on 34th Avenue, out to the beach, south as far as Lincoln, then back east along Lincoln to Park Presidio, up through Golden Gate Park, and back home.
Frannie warned him that maybe he should warm up for a week or so, get back in some aerobic condition before tackling four miles. To which he’d beaten his chest like Tarzan, getting a big laugh from the kids – their dad was funny – and told his wife he’d be home in forty-five minutes. He was still in shape.
He had never given the workout much thought; it had been part of his daily routine. Today, before he’d even made the fifteen or so downhill blocks to the beach, he was truly winded. But never one to let a little physical discomfort stand in his way, especially when he thought it could be overcome by an act of will, he turned south and kept jogging.
Frustrated by the burning in his lungs and leg muscles, he decided he’d just show his uncooperative body who was boss and run in the soft sand, not the hard pack by the breakers.
When he finally realized that the cramp that stopped him a mile farther on was not a fatal heart attack, he was in a real pickle. He hadn’t brought either his wallet or keys.
So now, at the farthest possible point from his house, he was stopped in agony, without cab fare or ID. He was going to have to walk, or limp, home.
He’d better start walking. Getting back home wasn’t going to be quick. It was sometime after noon and the wind off the ocean had picked up. His sweat glands worked fine, and the dampness of the sweats he wore made it even colder.
He wasn’t going to make it home. He would die here, limping on the beach. The fine-blowing sand would imbed itself into his damp sweatsuit, his very pores, and turn to cement, and leave him permanently frozen in place.
He could see it clearly: generations hence, tourists would flock to San Francisco, to the binoculars at the Cliff House, and pay a quarter to look down the beach and marvel in wonder at the origins of the manlike form that had magically appeared one day in the late nineties, an eternal sandstone monument to middle-aged flabbiness and stupidity.
It took him nearly an hour and a half to get home from the beach. He had a bath, tried Glitsky and Graham again to no avail, got in a twenty-minute nap. He was going to survive, although the next few days might not be much fun.
That night, he and Rebecca were having their own ‘date.’ The word had a lot of emotional resonance in the family due to the traditional Wednesday ‘Date Night.’ They’d instituted something of the sort with their kids – Hardy with the Beck, Frannie with Vincent.
He and his daughter got to North Beach with time to kill before their dinner reservation, so they strolled the neighborhood together. The Beck’s dress was a flounced floral print in pinks and greens. She wore black patent leather shoes and white tights. Holding hands, flushed with excitement to be in the grown-up world with her dad, Rebecca chartered her way through the tail end of Chinatown with its ducks hanging whole in the windows, its bushels of strange green vegetables and even stranger brown tubers on the sidewalks, its fish in tanks, live poultry in cages.
‘Can we go in one?’
‘Sure.’
In front of them a tiny Asian woman ordered something and the man behind the counter took a turtle from a tank and a cleaver from the butcher block, eviscerating and cleaning it as he would have any other foodstuff.
‘I didn’t know people ate turtles,’ she whispered as they left.
Hardy bought an orchid from a street vendor and leaned down to arrange it under his daughter’s hair band.
They quickly passed – Rebecca silent, holding Hardy’s hand tightly – through the gaudy tourist Saturday-night gauntlet of strip shows and adult theaters, the hawkers and gawkers and rubes from out of town, and then up Broadway by the tunnel to the quiet serenity of Alfred’s.
At their banquette the Beck smiled at her father with an adoring radiance. Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled back off her broad, unlined forehead, usually hidden by bangs. It made her look three or four years older. Her manners were flawless.
‘What a little doll!’ ‘Such a charming child!’ ‘You are one lucky man!’ ‘You must be so proud of her!’
The two of them – Rebecca was meant to hear – took the compliments in stride, modestly, graciously. ‘Thanks.’ ‘She is a gem, isn’t she?’ ‘I know – her dad is so proud of her.’
It was difficult to reconcile the sophisticated daughter who sat across from him now, dazzling the waiters and staff, with the jelly-covered dervish of the morning. But then Hardy realized it would be equally difficult to recognize the well-groomed man in the dark suit as the limping, teeth-chattering hunchback of Ocean Beach he’d been only a few hours ago.
‘And for the lady?’ the waiter asked.
She ordered a Shirley Temple in a martini glass to go with her father’s Bombay. After the drinks arrived, they clinked their glasses. ‘To you,’ Hardy said. ‘I’m so glad we do this.’
Rebecca looked down demurely. ‘Me too.’ She sipped and put the glass down carefully, then looked back up at him. ‘Daddy? That man you’re helping, why did he kill his father?’
Out of the mouths of babes, he thought.
‘Well, I don’t know if he did.’
‘They said at school he did.’
‘They did, huh?’
She nodded solemnly. ‘Because he was sick – the dad, I mean. We had a big talk about it, if it was okay. They said he killed him because he was so sick, but I know I wouldn’t want to kill you, even if you were sick. Then I wouldn’t have you anymore.’
‘No, that’s true, you wouldn’t.’ Hardy searched for an approach. ‘Have you been thinking about this a lot?’
She shrugged. ‘A little. I mean, I know you’re helping him, right? So you must think it’s all right.’
‘I don’t think it’s bad, hon, not necessarily. It depends on the person who’s sick, I think, if he wants to die.’
‘But that would mean he’d want to leave his son too.’
‘Well’ – Hardy rubbed at the table with his fingertip – ‘not that he’d want to. But what if he was hurting all the time? What if I was? You wouldn’t want me to spend my life suffering, would you?’
‘But I wouldn’t want you to die!’
He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. ‘This is just something we’re talking about, Beck. I’m not going to die, okay? We’re talking about my client’s dad, and he was old and really really sick. I think he wanted to die and he needed his son to help him. He couldn’t trust anybody else to do it right.’
‘Well, then, why is there going to be a trial if it was the right thing?’
‘Because the law says it’s wrong. But sometimes things that are against the law aren’t really wrong. They’re just against the law.’ He heard himself uttering these words and wondered if he really believed them. When he’d been a prosecutor, the distinction wouldn’t have mattered a fig to him. He wondered if he was beginning to even think like a defense attorney, and, for the millionth time, wasn’t sure if he was comfortable with it.
But Rebecca, her face betraying every nuance of the quandary, hadn’t lost the thread. ‘Like what? What isn’t wrong but is against the law?’
He searched his brain. ‘Well, you know those places we passed coming here, with all those posters of naked women?’
‘Yeah. That was gross.’
‘It might be gross or whatever, but it’s not against the law. It might not be the way you’d want to choose to live, to do that kind of stuff. You might even think it’s wrong, but it’s still not against the law.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Are you sure you want to talk about this? Is this a little… serious?’
A frown. ‘Dad-dee. I’m nine, you know. I think about a lot of things.’
‘I know. I know you do.’ He smiled at her, this justice-freak daughter of his with a passion for knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the example he’d just given her was backwards – something perhaps morally suspect but within the law. He wanted the opposite to make the point. ‘Okay, let’s start over. Maybe I used the wrong word, like wrong, for instance. There’s the law, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Okay. So the law is just a bunch of rules. That’s all it is. Some good rules and some rules where it doesn’t make too much sense that they even have the rule. The point is, though, good or bad, if you break one of the rules, you’re going to get punished. That’s another one of the rules.’
‘Right.’
‘But sometimes you break a rule – a law – because you think there’s no reason for it, or it’s just plain wrong. Now you’re still going to get punished, because you can’t allow people to just go breaking the rules, but maybe when you go to trial to get punished, people will realize that the law is dumb, and they’ll change it.’
‘Like what?’
Hardy thought a moment for a clean example. ‘Well, like it used to be against the law for black people to sit on buses with white people.’
‘I know, but that was just stupid.’
‘Of course, but it was a law nevertheless, until this lady named Rosa Parks-’
‘Oh, I know all about that. We learned that in school. She sat on the bus and they went on strike-’
‘Yeah, well, and then they changed the law, and then it wasn’t against the law for black people to sit on buses. It was the same thing - in this case a right thing – but one day it was against the law, and the next day it was okay. It wasn’t the thing itself, it was the rule. Is this making any sense?’
‘Sure. I get it completely.’
‘Okay, I bet you do. Anyway, this thing with Graham – my client – it’s a little like that example, but not exactly. I’m not sure the law about letting you kill your father or mother ought to be changed.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because then how do you decide for sure whether or not it’s a good reason? If the person who’s sick really wants it? Or even knows what’s happening?’ Hardy decided to test his martini, buy another few seconds to think. ‘Or sometimes sick people are really hard to take care of, and maybe the people taking care of them get tired of it and just want the person to go away.’
‘That would be horrible!’
‘Well, yes, it would. But if there wasn’t some law preventing it, it might happen. There’s just all kinds of problems. It’s really really complicated. But in this case what Graham did might not have been wrong. I think. I hope.’
She met his eyes. ‘I know, Daddy, if you’re helping him, he didn’t do the wrong thing.’
Hardy had to laugh. ‘You know that, huh?’
‘Cross my heart.’
Graham and his father didn’t only have Hallmark moments.
‘Who do you think you are, telling your old man what to do?’ Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, Sal had been drinking. He took a feeble swing at his son, as though he were going to cuff him. ‘I’m the dad here. You are just my little snot-nosed kid and you do what I tell you, not the other way round.’
Graham easily ducked away from the roundhouse, but that was the only thing that was going to be easy about this morning.
‘We got an appointment, Sal. The doctor, you remember?’
‘I ain’t going to no doctor. I told you. They take my driver’s license, what am I supposed to do for a living?’
Graham tried to remain patient. ‘This is Dr Cutler, Sal, my friend. Not the other one – what’s his name? – Finer.’
‘They’re all the same. Finer, Cutler. I don’t care. I’m not going. He had settled himself onto his couch, arms crossed, the picture of resistance. There was a flask on its side on the table in front of him and he grabbed it and swigged from it. ’You know how tired I am of getting poked at?‘
‘Yeah, I do, Dad.’ Almost as tired as I am of all this, Graham thought. And Russ Cutler had told him the AD was only going to get worse unless this brain tumor turned out to be inoperable. Which – the good news – looked like the diagnosis.
Graham didn’t think it was funny, but the irony didn’t escape him. He’d brought Sal down to Russ Cutler for the Alzheimer’s. Sal’s eccentricity had suddenly become far less manageable. Graham had wanted an opinion whether his father should be left to live alone, or should be placed in the dreaded home. Would he even know it if he was?
Alzheimer’s wasn’t Cutler’s specialty, but he knew enough. The disease began almost imperceptibly, with smaller losses of short-term memory gradually becoming larger, more all encompassing. The distant past began to assume a more immediate reality than the present.
For Graham the most heart-rending aspect of the situation was its apparently random appearance. Forgetfulness, then a reversion to normalcy, or near normalcy. You kept wanting to deny that it had reached a point of no return. You kept hoping.
Up until a couple of months ago he had spent lots of time with his father, making his fish rounds, playing cards, going to meals, taking walks – Graham trying to get his own reality into focus. What he was going to do with his life. Where, if anywhere, he fit in. And Sal had been great. His best friend. A wise, albeit vulgar, counselor, playmate, drinking buddy.
But then, all at once, Sal wouldn’t be there in an almost literal sense. He wouldn’t know who Graham was. ‘Son, my ass! I haven’t seen either of my sons in fifteen years. Who the hell are you trying to fool? What do you want out of me? You think you’re going to get my money, you got another think coming.’
The hours Graham had spent camped in the stinking hallway of the Lions Arms, making sure Sal didn’t go out when he was this way. It was killing Graham, never mind Sal.
So he ‘d gone to Russ and learned that this randomness was part of the progress of the disease, until finally the brain didn’t appear to process anymore. Whether or not it did was impossible to say.
‘And even then,’ Russ had told him, ‘you’ll go into the nursing home to visit your dad one day. He hasn’t said a meaningful word in six months and he’ll look up and know you and say hi like it was yesterday, and maybe for him it was.’
But then they’d found the tumor and would be doing the tests on that. That was today, the first of these tests. The tumor, if it wasn’t fatal, might be affecting the Alzheimer’s, moving its schedule forward. Although that, too, wasn’t more than informed conjecture. It was possible that arresting the tumor’s growth might inhibit Sal’s memory loss for a time.
‘Come on, Dad. Dr Cutler’s going to be waiting for us. He’s a good guy.’
But Sal’s eyes were closed now. He had collapsed to one side on the couch. His pants were wet at the crotch – either alcohol or urine.
God! Graham couldn’t keep doing this for long. He wished the old man would have the good grace to go and die.
The ritual of a cup of coffee over the newspaper had fallen victim on most days to the mad rush of getting the kids washed, dressed, fed, teeth brushed, hair combed, lunches made, out the door to school. But Sundays still had some of that old charm.
Hardy and Frannie were still in their bed with the Sunday paper spread out all around them. They had their mugs of coffee. Last night, before he’d left North Beach with Rebecca, he stopped and picked up some cannoli and biscotti, and the crumbs in the sheets would have to be dealt with, but later.
Vincent and Rebecca hadn’t slept in – on a weekend? don’t be absurd – but for the moment were cooperating in building the world’s largest Lego castle, both of them quiet and happy.
Hardy had cracked one of the windows two inches to let in some fresh air. Sunshine filled the whole room.
The telephone rang. The portable phone by their bed had disappeared, so someone was going to have to get up and answer at the kitchen extension. Frannie flashed a smile at Hardy. ‘The walk might do you some good after your jog yesterday.’ But she was up, answering it. Reappearing a moment later, she stood in the doorway, her hand up through her long red hair, one foot resting on the other one. ‘It’s Graham Russo,’ she said.
It was also Bay to Breakers Sunday.
Every year upward of a hundred thousand people flock to the City by the Bay to run approximately seven miles from the Ferry Building on the Bay to Ocean Beach. Although only about one tenth of one percent of these people come to compete in any meaningful way, the event has evolved into a party of significant proportions.
There are running teams outfitted as caterpillars, barefoot teams, naked runners, participants who sprint for the first three blocks and then duck into bars to watch themselves on television, grandmothers, children, dogs, snakes, marching – no, jogging – bands. A party.
Graham Russo called Hardy from Jack London Square in Oakland. He told his attorney he’d gone into hiding for a few days to make some decisions, to consider his options.
Now it was time. If Hardy would like to take the Alameda ferry over and meet him, Graham was ready to turn himself in. They could talk strategy and Graham would answer Hardy’s questions as they chugged back across the Bay.
As a plan it wouldn’t have been bad on most days. But it left the race out of the equation. Hardy hadn’t even gotten to his car when the crowds and traffic around his house told him something was going on.
After a minute’s reflection – even before yesterday’s painful reminder of his lack of conditioning, Hardy had never been a Bay to Breakers kind of guy – he realized what he was dealing with. He knew it was going to be iffy taking a ferry anywhere in the next several hours. Even getting to the Ferry Building was going to be a challenge.
But he tried. He’d told Graham he’d be there in an hour, maybe a little more, though he had been hoping for less. Clients about to turn themselves in on murder charges had been known to change their minds.
Since the route of the race was along the edge of Golden Gate Park, which was several blocks south of the main east-west corridor, Geary Boulevard, he thought he might have some hope of making it. He vaguely knew that the race began at about eight o’clock, and it wasn’t yet ten. It was possible, he knew, that some of the participants still hadn’t crossed the starting line; they queued up for miles along the Embarcadero before the gun that started the race. So maybe the outbound arteries wouldn’t be clogged yet with people who’d finished and were leaving the city to go to their post-race parties.
And indeed, he got nearly to Van Ness, the western edge of downtown, before things stopped. Dead.
After ten minutes at one corner he got out of his car and looked around him. The honking was in full blare. Lines of cars, glaring in the bright sunlight, stretched out in all directions. A river of humanity – waving, singing, high-fiving, having a great old time on that fabled runner’s high, although few were actually running – flowed by. There was no place even to pull over and park, after which he could try to walk it. He wasn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of hours.
Vincent had a birthday party to attend in the early afternoon, and while that went on, Frannie and Rebecca met her grandmother – Frannie’s first husband’s mother, Erin – for a picnic on the cliffs just outside the Legion of Honor. So no one was home to answer Graham’s next couple of calls, though Hardy did hear them on his answering machine, progressively angry and frustrated, when he finally arrived back at the house a little after four.
He was somewhat angry and frustrated himself.
The last incoming ferry was at the dock in Alameda. Graham sat in a windbreaker next to his duffel bag on one of the pilings by the gangplank where it tied up.
Sarah, as she had when the last four boats had docked, hung back by the shops. When Graham’s lawyer came up to him, she was planning to leave and go home. But they both agreed there was no sense in Graham waiting all afternoon alone until Hardy showed.
And now it looked like he wasn’t going to. Sarah was really unhappy that Hardy hadn’t found a way to get to Graham. What the hell kind of lawyer was he, anyway?
‘He’s a good guy,’ he said. ‘Something must have happened.’
‘What could have happened?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe he was on an earlier ferry and we just missed each other.’
‘With you sitting here on a piling that everybody has to walk past? No. You’re visible. He wouldn’t have missed you.’
A last group of passengers disembarked and started up the gangplank – four couples in their twenties and face paint, not sober, laughing a lot, wearing Bay to Breakers T-shirts over the body armor they’d evidently run in.
Graham and Sarah had spent the whole day here, saying goodbye, preparing themselves for what was to come. Every time a ferry had arrived, the tension had overwhelmed them. Where was Hardy? What was going to happen to Graham now? To them? Everything else was invisible.
Now, suddenly, together, they both realized what they were looking at. ‘Bay to Breakers,’ Sarah said. ‘Smart of us to pick today.’
Graham picked up his duffel bag. ‘I think our timing’s off.’
‘That must be it.’
They were stopped in the middle of the Bay Bridge when she brought it up to him. It had been haunting her since she’d been so thoroughly uncharmed by Craig Ising the day before. She had to get it clear.
‘You know, your friend Craig Ising-’
He interrupted her. ‘He’s not my friend. He pays me. That’s our entire relationship.’
This, while gratifying, was not the point. ‘Well, whatever he is, he told me your dad used to deliver money around the city for him and some other gamblers.’
‘Yeah, he did. So what?’
‘Don’t get mad. I’m trying to get a handle on your father, that’s all. Who he was.’
But Graham took offense at this tack. ‘He lived on the fringe, Sarah, okay? He sold illegal fish, he might have run some money, so sue him.’
‘I’m not saying-’
‘Yes, you are. Maybe he wasn’t a good citizen, but there’s no way he did anything that hurt anybody. He’s not so unlike his oldest son that way.’
‘What way exactly?’
‘You follow the rules, you play fair, and you get screwed anyway. It makes you lose faith in the sacred rules.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You’re doing it here with me, Sarah, right now. The rules don’t work sometimes. Then what do you do?’
‘You don’t break them, I know that. Or if you do,’ she added, mostly for herself, ‘when you’re caught and punished, you don’t whine about it.’
He looked over at her – the strong face, the set jaw. He reached across and put a hand on her leg. ‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘I shouldn’t have put you in this. I’m sorry.’
She let out a breath. ‘I put myself in this, Graham. If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be. And I know people break rules all the time and sometimes it seems justified. What I was trying to get to was Sal – if running this money around might have gotten him killed.’
Graham let out a sigh of his own. ‘But he stopped a long time ago.’
‘How long?’
‘I don’t know. Couple of years at least.’
‘You’re sure.’
‘I think so, yeah. When he started forgetting more, he thought it wouldn’t be safe.’
‘Which is what I’m getting at.’
Graham pondered for a minute, his feet up on the dashboard. It was just dusk. The window on his side was open and the skyline was a sparkling jewel over the darkening water. ‘He wouldn’t have started up again. There was no reason to. He didn’t need the money and it wasn’t that much anyway. A hundred now and again. Not worth the risk he might forget and lose enough money for somebody to make them mad at him.’
‘Maybe that somebody ran into him recently, last week even. Asked for a favor. One time. And he forgot. Or forgot that he would forget and said okay.’
‘And then what?’
‘I’m just thinking. It might be a motive, that’s all.’
Graham put his hand on her leg. ‘Sarah, we don’t need a motive. He killed himself.’
She turned to him. ‘Stop saying that, Graham! Please. Nobody believes that.’
‘I do.’
She moved his hand off her. ‘It’s not true. That’s why I don’t believe it. I know what happened well enough now. I’m just trying to come up with some theories that might help your defense. This might be one of them.’
Another silence. Graham looked across at her. ‘So what did happen that you’re so sure of?’
‘Graham. Come on.’
‘No, really. I want to know.’
She took her eyes from the road. It didn’t matter, they were barely creeping. ‘What are you saying?’ she finally asked.
‘What are you saying?’ he shot back at her. ‘After all this time, after everything, you still think I killed Sal?’
‘I’m saying somebody was there. If it was you, helping him, it wouldn’t matter to me, Graham. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘It would matter to me! Jesus, Sarah, don’t you believe anything I’ve told you?’
‘Don’t yell at me. Please don’t yell at me.’ She was afraid to look over at him again. Her eyes were glued to the road, hands tight on the wheel at ten and two. ‘Because I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘Somebody was there. Somebody did help him die. Or killed him.’
Abe Glitsky stood in the main doorway to the homicide detail, seemingly unable to move. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out.
It was the beginning of a new week and most of his inspectors were already in the big open room, sitting at their desks, drinking coffee while doing paperwork, going over their day’s schedule, writing reports on witness interviews, taking notes on transcripts, busy busy busy. No one looked up.
Abe wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction. He finally got his legs moving and walked into his office, closing the door quietly behind him. His door, installed and freshly varnished on Friday with a nice new-wood yellowish finish, wasn’t yet completely covered with bumper stickers and wanted posters and shooting targets from the police range, but someone – or a team of trained professionals – had done a pretty good job getting to most of it. There was even a bullet hole. The centerpiece was a large picture of Bozo the clown with the international symbol for no through it.
Taking deep breaths, he sat at his desk. The room seemed smaller with the door closed. He couldn’t see anybody outside the windows in the drywall. He had not been able to before the door was in, either, but he hadn’t noticed.
Now he suddenly felt cut off from the detail. He steeled himself, and finally brought his eyes right. Inside, the door looked pretty much the same as it had on Friday, new and nicely varnished, except for where the bullet had splintered the wood around its exit hole.
He remembered that years before, during one or other of the endless labor disputes in which the city always seemed to be embroiled, some unknown and never apprehended officers had released chickens on a Friday night into the offices of Police Chief Dan Rigby. Apparently, some felt at that time that their chief was acting in a chickenshit manner, not standing up for the demands of his troops. It was a not-so-subtle but ultimately effective way to express their displeasure.
Glitsky didn’t think there was anything like that going on here. The detail wasn’t in the midst of any turmoil that he knew of. He got along with everybody.
Pratt, he thought. Her staff. But no, not here in the detail. Nobody who worked with her would have risked it.
This was just a practical joke. He didn’t find it very funny, but he remembered that Rigby hadn’t laughed all that much about the chickens either. In fact, Rigby’s reaction had been so over the top that it had cost him some respect. Glitsky wasn’t going to have that happen to him. He was going to remain cool and never mention it to a soul.
But he was as mad as he’d ever been.
Pushing back from the desk, he walked over and scratched away at the splintered wood. The hole went all the way through. Instinctively, he searched the opposite wall. There it was, up by the ceiling, the next place the bullet had hit. He couldn’t believe that some idiot inspector, goofing off, would discharge a firearm in the building, even if it had been during the weekend when the odds of hitting someone with the bullet were marginally lower.
For just a second he toyed with the idea: maybe he could find the slug somewhere in the building and run ballistics on it and all the weapons of his inspectors. This might identify the shooter, whom he would then publicly humiliate, horribly torture, and then fire, not necessarily in that order. He crossed over to the hole. Sure enough, the slug had been pried out.
Of course, he realized, these were pros. Idiots, but professional idiots.
Whoever did it had customized themselves a light load of powder – probably not as light as they’d intended. But they’d given the matter some thought – and then dug the slug out and disposed of the evidence. Pros.
His telephone jarred him back to where he was. ‘Glitsky.’
‘Hardy.’
He was already angry enough, and now Hardy wanting to banter his way back into his good graces. ‘What do you want?’
‘You get a message over the weekend?’
‘Yeah. Great, you’re sorry. I got that Friday, too, at your office, remember? Sorry’s a big help. Is that it? I’m busy.’
A pause. ‘That’s not it. I’m bringing Graham Russo in this morning. I wanted to let you know.’
‘That’s really swell, thanks. I’ll pass it along.’
He hung up, took another look at his very own bullet hole, then opened the door and went out into the detail.
Graham spent the night alone on Edgewood and called Hardy as soon as he got up, before sunrise. Ha, ha, yeah, that was funny, they agreed, the whole Bay to Breakers thing. Hardy picked him up on the way in to work.
Now they were in his office, on either end of the couch. The doors were closed behind them. Phyllis was holding calls, although Hardy had already phoned out to Glitsky. But the morning paper had contained yet another new story about his client. He wanted to ask Graham about it. Barbara Brandt, the Sacramento lobbyist, had taken a lie detector test for Sharron Pratt, saying that she’d spoken to Graham on the day Sal died. And she passed. Ostensibly, she was telling the truth.
‘So what about that?’ Hardy asked. ‘She says she counseled you before you went over to your dad’s. And you’re telling me you don’t know her.’
‘You got it.’ Graham, in slacks and a sport jacket, was shaking his head no. He seemed truly baffled. ‘I have no idea where she’s coming from, Diz. I never met her in my life. No, correct that, she called me once.’
Hardy was sitting with studied casualness, legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap. ‘Graham, she took a lie detector test and passed it.’
‘I don’t care. I’ll take one too. I don’t know her. She’s got to be some fruitcake.’
‘She’s a lobbyist in Sacramento.’
Graham smiled. ‘I rest my case.’
Hardy’s brow was etching itself a few new lines. ‘You don’t know her?’ he repeated a last time. ‘Then what-?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of publicity stunt.’
‘But she did talk to you on the phone?’
Graham was showing his impatience. ‘We didn’t even get to what she wanted.’ He shifted forward, elbows on knees. ‘I still don’t know what she wants. What does this get her?’
Hardy was wondering the same thing. ‘You’re on the cover of Time. It was a sympathetic article. Maybe she’s on your coattails. For her cause.’
Graham sat back. ‘But the conclusions in Time, the way he made it all sound, it was all wrong.’ This was what he’d argued about with Sarah, although he couldn’t very well tell that to Hardy right now. ‘I never went inside, Diz. I went over early, Sal wasn’t home, I left. I didn’t talk to any Barbara Brandt or anybody else. I’m not lying.’
There was real anguish in his voice, and Hardy was almost glad to hear it. Maybe Graham was at last starting to get some understanding of the predicament he was in. But there was still one last hurdle before Hardy could sign on for the duration, and they had to jump it now. ‘Okay, Graham, you’re not lying. That’s good news. I believe you. But the bad news is I might not be able to stay on with this case.’
‘That’s not funny.’
‘But it’s true.’
Graham looked at him imploringly. He hung his head for a teat, looked back up. ‘Why not?’
This was his least favorite part, but Hardy had to explain his position. ‘As it stands now, you’re into me for maybe four hundred dollars, two hours.’
‘It’s been more than that.’
Hardy waved off the objection. ‘We’re talking round figures. Four hundred gets us to here, but if I continue and we go to trial, then you get most of my time for most of a year.’
‘Or else I take the public defender?’
‘That’s right. There’s some good lawyers in that office. I could recommend-’
But Graham stopped him. ‘So could I. I know those guys, they got fifty cases going all the time. I’d be one of them.’
Hardy didn’t want to waste breath arguing it. Many public defenders were decent enough trial attorneys, but Graham was right. In general, workload remained a factor in quality of defense. But they couldn’t sit here all day either. Hardy had already alerted Glitsky that he was bringing Graham to the Hall, and judging from the lieutenant’s mood, he wouldn’t put it past him to send a car down here and make the arrest in Hardy’s office – a little object lesson in the etiquette of friendship.
‘How about this?’ Graham asked. ‘You take me on for a small retainer – say a couple of grand – and after six weeks you tell the judge I’m busted, then the court appoints you to represent me, and it pays you.’
Hardy was shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t do that.’
‘Yeah, I don’t blame you. It’s pretty sleazy.’
‘So where does that leave us? You want a private attorney, you’ve got to pay for one. That’s the way it works.’
‘I know. You’re right.’ He pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat. ‘Deduct the four hundred I already owe you and that’s eleven thousand, six hundred.’
Hardy flicked at the envelope a few times, then left it on the couch, got up, and walked over to the window. He hated this. There was a time, he knew, when he would have taken this case, literally, for nothing. He would have lived on beans and burgers and somehow made it work. But it wasn’t only him now. He had a family that depended on him absolutely. He thought of Talleyrand’s axiom that a married man with children will do anything for money.
Leaving aside the thornier question of where this money had come from, he turned back. ‘I’m sorry, Graham. It’s not close.’
‘Not even as a retainer? I could sign a promissory note for the rest.’
‘And what about if you’re convicted? It’s notoriously hard to make a good living in prison.’ He didn’t mean to be such a hard-ass, but he knew this was gentle compared to what Graham would be facing in the coming months.
‘If you put my Beemer up for sale, you could probably clear another twenty-five. Sal’s baseball cards, maybe another thirty.’
‘Except that Sal’s cards aren’t yours. They’re under seal.’
Since Graham was going to be charged with killing Sal for the money and the baseball cards, if he was convicted, those items would be permanently confiscated by the state. They were untouchable assets.
But Hardy badly wanted this case. He’d been living with it for a couple of weeks and he couldn’t imagine letting it go now. He’d committed. Thirty-seven thousand dollars – twelve in the envelope and twenty-five from the BMW – wasn’t going to cut it for a year’s work in a murder trial, but it was a reasonable retainer under normal business conditions.
They’d just have to figure some other way. Hardy was convinced that Graham was doing his best to show good faith, although he really didn’t want to think about the provenance of the cash in the envelope he was holding. It was probably money saved from his softball tournaments, maybe left over from his well-paying law job.
It broke the first law of the defense attorney, which is ‘Get your payment up front’, but Hardy did not care. As with all acts of faith it was irrational and in many ways unexplainable. It was just something he felt he had to do. ‘All right, Graham,’ he said, ‘my fees are two hundred an hour, twice that at trial. You want to sign a note that you’ll pay it all when this is over, no matter how it comes out?’
It was a no-brainer – maybe, Hardy thought, on both sides -and Graham gave it all the time it deserved. About a second. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’
Hardy put out his hand. ‘Then you got yourself a lawyer.’
When Hardy returned to his office in the late afternoon, there was a call from Helen Taylor, Graham’s mother – a cultured voice – saying she’d like to make an appointment at his earliest convenience to discuss the case.
‘Of course we want to help Graham any way we can. Are we allowed to come and visit him at the jail? Where did he go this last week, do you know? When is he being… what’s the word, arraigned?’
‘That’s the word. Tomorrow morning, nine A.M., but these things aren’t very exact in terms of time,’ he explained, understating considerably. ‘If you’re there at nine-thirty, Superior Court, Department Twenty-two, you won’t miss it. We can meet after that.’
‘I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘My husband too.’
‘Fine,’ Hardy replied. ‘I’ll be the one in the suit standing next to your son.’
Lanier and Evans had spent the afternoon going door to door in Hunter’s Point, questioning the residents who lived near one of the neighborhood’s busiest intersections, wondering whether any of them had noticed the fusillade of eighty shots from at least three different weapons last Thursday night that had killed two teenagers and wounded four others, broken sixteen windows, and set off alarms in five of the street-front businesses.
Mostly, nobody had seen or heard a thing. Thursday? No, Thursday be pretty quiet most times.
Sarah had been in the game a long time, so this didn’t surprise her. But it did make her angry. Between them, she and Marcel had located and interviewed a grand total of three witnesses who had seen the car drive up and fire randomly into the crowd gathered on the corner. But it had been dark, and there was no telling the make or model, or the color or size or sex of the driver or other occupants, if any.
‘What really gets me’ – Sarah was a few minutes into milkshake therapy at the closest McDonald’s – ‘is they treat it like it’s a natural disaster, some act of nature. Nobody’s fault, it just happens.’
Since this was the essence of police work, it didn’t seem to faze Marcel, who’d walked the walk through dozens of similar incidents. ‘I don’t know why they make these things so thick. I cannot get a drop out of this straw. You think if I went back and told ’em I was a cop, they’d add some milk or something?‘
‘Here’s a wild concept, Marcel – you could use a spoon. See? Just like I’m doing. But doesn’t it make you crazy?’
He put the shake down and lifted his shoulders. ‘The thing is, Sarah, nothing that happens is anybody’s fault. Things just happen to people. So you called it – it’s a natural disaster.’
‘But somebody did this, Marcel. Somebody drove up and shot these kids-’
‘Hey, don’t you go losing sleep over these poor kids. Somebody in that crowd had guns on ’em. That’s a guarantee.‘
‘And so you shoot at the whole crowd?’
‘And miss,’ Marcel said. ‘Don’t forget that part. You are not a true gangbanger if you actually hit any part of the person you go to take out. You only hit bystanders. It’s kind of like the unwritten rule. Maybe an inside joke. I’m not sure which. I’m going to go get a spoon.’
When he came back to the table, Sarah was staring at nothing, eyes glazed. Marcel slid in. ‘What now?’
‘Nothing.’
Lanier spooned some milkshake. ‘Look, Sarah. You want some free advice? Probably not, but here it is. You can’t worry so much. You take all this too seriously.’
‘Thanks, but I wasn’t thinking about this anymore. I’m thinking about Graham Russo.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean. Graham Russo is in jail. That means we’re done with him until he goes to trial. What are you thinking about?’
Wondering how much she could say, she stirred at her shake. ‘There’s something going on we don’t know. There has to be.’
‘This is always true,’ Lanier said. ‘But a lot of what’s going on doesn’t have squat to do with our jobs.’
‘This does. Look, they ask us to go find everything we can to make sure Russo’s not the wrong guy and give us three days to do it? So we don’t find it in three days it doesn’t exist?’
Marcel was dipping his spoon, his brain reluctantly engaged. He nodded. ‘Essentially.’
‘Okay, now we’re six days down the road. Tosca tells you about a power struggle that Sal’s smack in the middle of, and I learn that there’s at least some chance he was holding a big bag of cash on the day he’s killed. So what do we do with this information? You’re telling me you believe it doesn’t relate?’
Lanier shrugged. ‘Even if it does. So what?’
She just stared at him.
‘Do you really think the attorney general of the state of California would bail on this now after sticking his neck so far out? There is no chance. I know Dean Powell. He used to work here. And Soma? Jesus. These guys could get an affidavit signed by two dozen eyewitnesses that Graham Russo was in New York for the week all around Sal’s death and they’d say then he must have killed him by phone.’
Sarah sat back, drummed her fingers on the table. ‘I mink we ought to tell Abe. Cover ourselves, if nothing else.’
‘And what’s he going to do?’ Lanier gave up on his milkshake, pushing it aside. ‘Look, they got the grand jury to indict Russo already. He’s in jail. Anything but a smoking gun in somebody else’s hand – and maybe not even that – it’s not going to matter. From now on the evidence talks.’
‘Except what we’ve found since Friday-’
He was shaking his head. ‘None of it’s evidence. It’s all “maybe” and “what if.” ’
‘Sure, but there’s a hell of a lot of it. Any other case we’d still be looking around, see what we found.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well?’
He took a moment. ‘Well, this case we don’t.’ Lanier shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is.’
Sarah knew that, in general, Lanier was right. That was the way it was. They were in police work and it got ugly and intense. You took a position and you held it against the odds if you needed to. Above all, you did not criticize other cops.
If a person wanted touchy-feely, there were lots of other places to look for work. Because Sarah had come to believe that one suspect in her entire career was innocent, this did not make her a bad cop, a weak link. She’d prove that anytime she needed to. Abruptly she stood up. ‘Hey, Marcel,’ she said, ‘suck that up. We’re going back to the Point.’
Sarah had spent a lot of time at Hunter’s Point in the course of her career. It was a rough place where over eighty-five percent of the adult population had either committed or witnessed a violent crime. At the McDonald’s she suddenly realized that if they cruised the streets for a while in the neighborhood, she could find some somebody here she could break. And sure enough, there was Yolanda, coming out of one of the boarded-up establishments.
Marcel pulled up and Sarah was out of the car, badge out.
‘Hey, I didn’t do nothing. What you comin’ at me for?‘
‘Just get in, Yolanda. We’re going to talk.’
Now she had the twenty-year-old woman in the backseat of their unmarked car. Marcel was in plain sight on the corner, not fifteen feet away, but they weren’t going to good-cop, bad-cop this witness. Sarah was going to get some answers herself.
‘I saw you at the jail the other day, didn’t I, Yolanda? You were visiting Damon down there again, weren’t you? How is Damon?’
Damon Frazee was a goateed weight-lifter who occasionally did some mayhem on citizens, as he had a couple of weekends before – a friendly little bar fight with a knife or two. Unfortunately, Damon was looking at life in prison now under California’s three-strikes law. If convicted it would be his third violent offense and he would be gone from Yolanda forever. Sarah figured she could work this to her advantage.
‘Framed,’ Yolanda mumbled. ‘Damon got hissef framed.’
‘One of the brothers plant that knife on him, did they?’
A sullen nod. ‘But I ain’t do nothing. You got no business taking me in.’
‘I’m not taking you in. I’m talking to you, that’s all. I’m thinking maybe you can help Damon.’
‘Ain’t nothing gonna help Damon. You lyin’ if you think so.‘ The poor mixed-up girl was shaking, biting at her nails. Her eyes were glistening with unshed tears.
Suddenly, Sarah leaned in close, snapping out her words like a drill sergeant. ‘Get your fingers out of your mouth, child, and don’t you dare call me a liar, you hear me?’
A sullen nod. Sarah slapped at the window by Yolanda’s head. ‘I said DO YOU HEAR ME?’
‘I hear you.’
Sarah hated this kind of interview, but she’d done it many times before and knew she would again. Too bad – she was doing Yolanda a favor. But she was going to get what she came for.
‘Now, listen, we got this shooting down here last Thursday, maybe you heard something about it.’ She waited. ‘That’s a question, Yolanda. Maybe you heard something about it?’
Silence.
‘What I’m thinking, see, if you remembered anything important, anything I can use, like who might have been in the car, something like that, who set it up, what you heard about it, anything, maybe I can do something about Damon.’
The eyes, almost more scared of hope than of anything else, came up. ‘What you mean?’
‘I mean we don’t go for the strike, the third strike. He does some county time, he’s back home for Thanksgiving.’
‘If what?’
‘What I said.’
Yolanda huddled down into herself. ‘I give them brothers up, they come kill me.’
‘What boys, Yolanda? You give me a name, one name, we start looking, maybe get enough evidence on ’em – hardware in the car’s trunk, like that – we don’t even need you to testify at the trial.‘
This last was complete fabrication and Sarah knew it, but she wasn’t lying about cutting a deal involving Damon. The cops would trade a third-striker for a gangbanger any day. As for Yolanda, she was right. If she did someday have to testify, she might very well end up dead. But Sarah was willing to take that risk for her.
It was a tough profession.
Yolanda looked up, waited as though for further guidance. It wasn’t coming. People here in the projects knew that if they didn’t take help when it was offered, it tended to disappear. And Sarah was right here, nodding at her. ‘Just give me a name, Yolanda. One name.’
‘Lionel Borden. He hang the World Gym most days. He was drivin’.‘
Freeman was on the couch, thumbing through one of the Russo folders. Hardy, at his desk, had another half hour of work – he’d decided to try to leave the office at five-thirty so he could see his family - but he was glad enough for the silent company.
After getting back from dropping Graham at the jail, he’d put in two hours on Tryptech. Good work, too, he thought. Tedious as hell, but God was in the details. Checking his newly arrived records of past transom and conveyor failures at the Port of Oakland, he’d hit a vein in which there might be some pay dirt. It seemed that only seven months before the accident with Tryptech, the Port itself had sued the manufacturer who had produced the couplings for its transoms, alleging irregularities in their holding capacities.
It didn’t exactly get him up and dancing, but he did call Dyson Brunei with the news, and spent another forty minutes with Michelle, outlining their follow-up.
Now – more necessary tedium – he was preparing the first of the binders he’d be living with for the duration of Graham’s trial. It was mindless and pleasant work, labeling his tabs: Police Report. Inspector’s Notes. Inspector’s Chronological. Autopsy. Coroner. Witnesses. Beginning to organize the discovery he’d been given for Graham’s defense.
By the time he got to trial, he’d have a dozen binders jammed with everything even remotely connected to his client, the victim, the trial. What he found scary was that he’d have memorized most of it. He looked up. ‘I’m getting to Publicity, David. I’m going to need that folder.’
Freeman had his post-workday glass of wine at his elbow. He spoke calmly. ‘You can’t be considering change of venue?’
Hardy had to give it to his landlord – he was joined at the hip to the issues. But Hardy thought if anyone would want a change of venue in this case, it would be the prosecution. San Francisco, after all, was the town that had elected Sharron Pratt, possibly the only prosecutor in the entire world who was more interested in helping and understanding lawbreakers than in punishing them.
This was still the city that had accepted the notorious diminished-capacity ‘Twinkie’ defense when a supervisor had sneaked into a basement window in City Hall, shot the mayor to death, reloaded, walked down the hallway, and then slain another supervisor.
The jury’s decision in that case? Boy! That shooter must have been pretty upset, and besides, he was on a sugar rush from all those Twinkies and couldn’t really be held responsible for his actions.
So, as Freeman loved to say, it was a banner town for defense attorneys at any time, and now under Pratt even more so. Reasonable doubt had transmogrified here to any doubt at all. The slightest doubt about any issue in the trial would likely result in acquittal.
This was good news for Graham Russo, who would benefit from the city’s knee-jerk liberal bias, so Hardy wanted the trial here. And Graham had an absolute right to be tried where the alleged crime occurred. Here they’d stay.
But Hardy resisted any tendency to feel complacent. The stakes were too high to take anything for granted in a murder case. ‘No,’ he told Freeman, ‘I’m not going to ask for change of venue, but I’d like to file all that stuff and head on home, if you’re finished reading it.’
The accordion folder bulged with newspapers, magazines, Nexis and Lexis printouts, everything Hardy had found in print to date about the case. ‘I’ve got to just cut out the stuff about the case,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be unmanageable if I throw in whole newspapers every day.’
Freeman was only half listening, back with another article. ‘I wouldn’t do that. I’d save it all. You never know.’
‘You never know what?’ Hardy didn’t always agree with the old man, but he was always interested in his opinion. Freeman had forgotten more than many attorneys ever learned, and if he wanted to talk theories, Hardy would listen.
‘Context.’
Hardy repeated the word. ‘Meaning what?’
‘Here’s Time, right, your boy on the cover.’ He started flipping the pages. ‘I count at least eight related stories: assisted suicide, Kevorkian, Supreme Court, Ninth Circuit, states opposed and in favor. Here’s a guy with Lou Gehrig’s disease, wants to live forever. Pulling the plug.’ He closed the magazine. ‘It just goes on and on. Here’s all your research for closing, if you decide to go that way.’
He reached up to the coffee table and grabbed a newspaper. ‘Okay, forget that obvious stuff. Here’s the paper reporting Sal’s death for the first time. I myself noticed something in there, apparently unrelated to your client, that would arouse my curiosity. If you cut out the Graham articles, you’d never run across it.’
Hardy, intrigued, stepped over to the couch. Freeman handed him the newspaper, his eyes challenging. Could Hardy find it?
In a couple of minutes he’d scanned the entire first section. The story on Sal’s death was near the back, but there was nothing remotely relevant there. A follow-up story on the enduring legacy of Hale-Bopp and the Heaven’s Gate crusaders. A painter on the Bay Bridge had fallen to his death. Hardy closed the paper. ‘I give up.’
Freeman was savoring his wine, enjoying that and his little puzzle. ‘Front page.’
Another minute. A shake of the head. ‘Nothing. I don’t see it.’
‘How about the bomb threat?’
Hardy reread the article. The new federal courthouse had been evacuated a little before noon after someone had called in a threat. ‘I don’t know, David. I don’t think Sal had anything to do with that.’
‘I don’t either. But where is the courthouse?’
Freeman didn’t need to explain any further. ‘That’s what I mean by context, son,’ he said. ‘You got a hundred or so people, maybe more, milling outside in the alley under your victim’s window couple of hours before he’s killed.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what it means, if anything. Maybe not, probably not. It just catches my interest, that’s all.’
On its best day the third floor of the Hall of Justice was a study in controlled mayhem. Lawyers, cops, bailiffs, clerks, prospective jurors, relatives and friends of defendants or victims, the curious, law students, retirees, reporters, anyone with a legal or political ax to grind – these folks would congregate in the wide-open hallways.
Sometimes they didn’t all get along.
Unlike the federal courthouse, with its renovated marble-arched interiors inspiring confidence and even awe in the majesty of the law, the Hall of Justice, with its green paint and linoleum floors, inspired nothing. It was a big, loud place where bureaucrats worked and deals got cut.
The minute Hardy arrived for Graham’s arraignment, he was noticed. ‘That’s him!’ he heard. ‘There he is!’
The reporters were flies to his honey, shoving microphones into his face, shooting questions in their low-key and dignified manner, impeding his progress down the hall. A couple of minicams were rolling and the bright lights nearly blinded him.
His peripheral vision had picked up some placards behind the knot of reporters. There were a lot of bystanders today, even for the Hall. The show, after all, was about to start.
‘No comment. Sorry. I really can’t say anything yet. Please, I’ve got to get through here.’
He went through the special extra metal detector set up outside Department 22. He knew it was for his case, placed there to guard against the possibility that someone would try to kill his client to show the world that assisted suicide was wrong.
In the courtroom it was less frenetic, although every seat in the gallery was taken. The presiding Calendar judge, Timothy Manion, a youthful, dark-haired leprechaun with whom Hardy had tipped several glasses back when they’d both been assistant DAs, had ascended to the bench but appeared not to have called the first ‘line’ – a reference to the computer printout listing defendants and charges.
Walking up the center aisle and through the rail, Hardy breathed a sigh of relief. Graham hadn’t even been led out into the courtroom yet. At the jury box attorneys waiting for their lines to be called could sit when there was an overflow gallery, and Hardy took one of the chairs, next to an older courtroom regular. ‘This crowd here for you?’ the man asked.
Hardy said he thought so and the guy passed a business card over to him. ‘You need some motion work, background checks, anything, I’m available.’
Hardy nodded, friendly, but it bothered him. The hustling for clients, for work, it just never let up. He glanced at the card, then put it in his pocket. ‘I’ll keep it in mind, thanks.’
Finally, he got a chance to take in the surroundings. He hadn’t been in Superior Court for four years and it hadn’t changed in any way. High ceilings, no windows; the room was large and utterly bland. In front of the bar rail the gallery held about a hundred and twenty people on uncomfortable, theater-style seats of hard blond wood. There was also standing room for another forty or so.
Recognition was kicking in. Sharron Pratt herself was here, in the second row. At the end of the jury box Gil Soma conferred with Art Drysdale. Hardy checked for Dean Powell, but the attorney general was leaving it to his deputies.
Then the gavel came down and all eyes went to the bench.
To the judge’s left a door at the back of the courtroom led to the defendant’s holding tank, and as the fourth line was called this morning, that door opened and Graham Russo was brought in.
There was an audible hum in the gallery that Manion stilled with a warning glare. Hardy got up from his seat and went to meet his client at the podium in the center of the bullpen.
After his night in jail Graham looked wan and tired, and the orange jumpsuit reinforced that impression, but when Hardy asked him how he was doing, he said okay. Then, leaning across his attorney, he whispered at the prosecution table, ‘Hey, Gil.’
When Soma looked over, Graham smiled at him. Keeping his hand behind the podium so the judge couldn’t see, his body blocking it from the gallery’s view, he flipped him off. Hardy, of course, saw it. He immediately covered Graham’s hand with his own. But not in time.
‘Your Honor.’ Soma was up out of his chair. ‘The defendant just made an obscene gesture to me.’
‘Not obscene enough,’ Graham whispered.
‘Shut up,’ Hardy ordered him. He didn’t know what Soma hoped to achieve by bringing this little contretemps to the judge’s attention, but Hardy knew Manion, and he wasn’t going to react well to any grandstanding, particularly if it involved whining.
He’d been rearranging his papers, and now he raised his eyes. ‘Mr Hardy,’ he said simply, ‘control your client. I don’t want any shenanigans in here, is that understood? This is a court of law.’
‘Yes, Your Honor,’ Hardy said, and decided then and there to take a gamble, ‘but for the record, Mr Soma may be mistaken.’
The judge, sensing a pissing contest, wanted to keep his busy day moving. He bobbed his head and said, ‘Noted.’
Keeping his own expression under tight control, Hardy threw a look at Soma. The message, he was sure, got delivered. From now on every word counted. To every play Soma made, no matter how small, Hardy would fashion a defense. Best let Soma know he had a fight on his hands. Hardy would kick his ass in this courtroom if he could, every time he could. That knowledge might make the boy reckless. It might make him scared. If nothing else, Hardy had rattled his cage.
But the moment was just that, a moment. Hardy knew – indeed, most of the courtroom knew – what was coming next, and a stillness settled as the judge looked straight at Graham and intoned his name. ‘Graham Russo,’ he began, ‘you are charged by indictment with a felony filed herein.’
The words were pro forma but they always had an effect on the gallery. There was a stir behind Hardy. Manion glared for quiet, but it didn’t work this time. Some members of the gallery had come to make a stand.
‘This wasn’t any felony!’
‘It wasn’t even wrong!’
‘Sal Russo had a right to die!’
The gavel. When relative quiet had resumed, the judge raised his voice so he could be heard all the way to the back of the room, but his tone was mild. ‘I know a lot of you people have gone to some trouble to get down to this courtroom today, but I’m not going to tolerate this kind of disturbance. So all of you do yourselves a favor and do not interrupt these proceedings again. I will remove every one of you all the hell out of here. Is that clear?’
Apparently it was.
‘Mr Russo.’ Manion repeated the formula, continuing, ‘… to wit, a violation of section 187 of the Penal Code in that you did, in the City and County of San Francisco, State of California, on or about the ninth of May, 1997, willfully, unlawfully, and with malice aforethought’ – and here the judge paused again, as if he himself were questioning the language. But he took a heavy breath and went ahead with it – ‘murder Salvatore Russo, a human being.’
Manion then had the clerk read the special circumstances alleged by the prosecution: murder in the course of a robbery. When he’d done, the judge nodded. ‘How do you plead, Mr Russo?’
Graham spoke right up. ‘Not guilty, Your Honor.’
‘All right.’ This wasn’t any surprise. Manion consulted his computer sheet again. ‘This being a special-circumstances case, bail will be denied. Mr Hardy, do you have a comment?’
‘Yes, Your Honor. There is no way the prosecution can justify this as a special-circumstances case. My client should be allowed to post bail. Mr Russo voluntarily turned himself in to the authorities yesterday-’
Soma was on his feet. ‘After hiding out for four days.’
Hardy turned to him. ‘He left town before he knew there was in indictment against him.’
‘So he says.’
The gavel came down. Manion wasn’t yet angry – sometimes Calendar was so boring that these peccadilloes in courtroom etiquette were almost a relief to a judge who had to sit through eight hours of procedure – but he didn’t want to lose any more control. ‘Gentlemen,’ he reminded them, ‘all remarks get directed to me. That’s how we do it.’
Hardy apologized. Soma sat down. Drysdale put a restraining hand on his arm and Hardy heard him whisper, ‘Just listen!’
‘All right, Mr Hardy, go ahead.’
Hardy made his case. ‘Mr Russo will surrender his passport, Your Honor. There is no risk of flight. As I’ve already said, he voluntarily turned himself in just yesterday, as soon as he’d returned to the city after a few days away.’
Manion appeared to be giving his argument some thought. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘special circumstances precludes the possibility for bail. That’s the law.’
‘Yes, Your Honor, I realize that.’ Hardy took a deep breath, glanced at Graham, nodded, and waited. This was more argument than he’d expected. He suddenly wondered if Manion subscribed to Time.
People started coughing as time stopped for a while.
At last the judge invited counsel up to the bench. Hardy got there first and to his surprise found that Soma had remained back at his table. Drysdale was standing next to him. ‘The kid’s a little excited, Judge,’ he said quietly, referring to Soma.
‘No sweat, Art, don’t worry about it. But this bail thing.’
Drysdale nodded. ‘There’s no bail allowed. That’s the law, Judge.’ Apologetic. Really nothing Drysdale could do about it.
‘I know the law. But it seems to me what Mr Hardy says here is true. There’s very little if any flight risk, right?’
This was starting to make Drysdale uncomfortable. ‘There’s no bail allowed on specials, Your Honor,’ he repeated feebly.
‘But you do admit that this defendant is no danger to the community?’
‘We can’t be sure of that, Your Honor.’
But Manion was running out of patience. ‘So there is no public policy reason to deny bail to Mr Russo? There’s no risk of flight and he poses no danger to anybody?’
Drysdale didn’t even try to answer this time.
‘I don’t suppose the People want to drop the specials?’ Manion was giving Drysdale every opportunity to save face. Bail was permitted for non-special-circumstances murder. All Drysdale had to do was lower the charge; it would still be a murder case. But he was shaking his head. ‘I can’t do that, Your Honor.’
‘In other words, your office is simply making me deny bail to Mr Russo because it can? Is that what I’m hearing?’ The judge, disgusted, shook his head. ‘Next time you see Mr Powell, Art, I want you to tell him he makes me proud to be an American. Would you do that?’
He turned to Hardy and offered a sympathetic smile. ‘I guess we’ll be denying bail, Diz.’
Hardy hadn’t planned to have lunch with the Taylors – maybe a little snack at Lou the Greek’s. But the arraignment had begun later than he’d thought and then dragged on. Getting his case called had consumed an entire hour, and before they’d finished, getting a trial date three months hence, another twenty minutes had gone away. After that it had taken Hardy the rest of the morning to see Graham in jail, where they had conferred for another twenty minutes or so.
In that time the bailiff had come up and conveyed the good news that the sheriff (no doubt at Manion’s urging) was moving Graham to an AdSeg cell for the duration of his confinement. AdSeg, short for ‘administrative segregation,’ was most often used when an inmate was in danger of being hurt among the general population of the jail. In Graham’s case, Hardy was sure, it was a courtesy.
So Hardy finally got back to the hallway outside Department 22 at a little after noon. Helen and Leland were sitting like statues, sharing a wooden bench with an Hispanic teenager who was breast-feeding her baby. As Hardy approached, they stood and made their introductions and then Leland, with the force of edict, had suggested lunch. His office was up on Market, top floor of the bank. He had his own private dining room, his own chef. They’d just take the limo.
It was not a particularly large room, but it was beautiful, with its hardwood floor, the antique sideboard with its stunning floral arrangement of iris and gladioli. The wall covering was a soothing green silk. Water had been poured.
Hardy was seated in an amazingly comfortable upholstered armchair with a view to the northeast – Alcatraz and Angel Island. There was chop on the Bay, a high covering of cirrus. In front of him the table had been set for three: white linen, crystal, china, silver.
The setting was meant to intimidate, although of course not obviously. It simply made clear the line of command.
Leland Taylor was in touch with his inner self. He knew who he was, what he wanted, how to get it, and didn’t unduly concern himself with internal doubts or how his actions might appear to others. Hardy thought this might be one of the perks of being born to, and living a life insulated by, great wealth. Leland was in charge, an immutable fact of nature. His time was more valuable than Hardy’s, his opinions more valid. His stepson’s lawyer was, essentially, staff – a servant to do his bidding.
Evidently some unspoken rule dictated that chitchat precede business. Mrs Taylor – Helen – had been carrying the conversational ball for twenty minutes. She was good at it, but Hardy was relieved when they got down to tacks. ‘My wife was gratified to see you’d never lost a case,’ Leland said in his reedy voice.
Hardy sat back in his chair. ‘I’ve only done two murder trials. I’ve been lucky,’ he said modestly.
A dry chuckle. ‘Let’s hope it’s not that. You seemed very sure of yourself in the courtroom. That bail business, what I heard. Is the judge a friend of yours? I gather that would be to our advantage, hmm?’
Hardy explained a little about the system. Normally, cases stayed in Department 22 until the day of trial, when they were sent at random to other courtrooms and the judges who would actually preside over the case. This one was important, however, and got assigned now for trial in three months to Judge Jordan Salter in Department 27. That way the judge, who knew it was coming – as well as the lawyers – could prepare for unusual or unique issues that might arise.
Hardy did not view the choice of Salter, a Republican appointee and an old buddy of Dean Powell, as propitious.
Taylor put a hand over his wife’s. ‘Do we know him?’
Helen shook her head prettily. Everything she did was done prettily. She was very attractive, Hardy thought, nothing like what he’d imagined a wife of Sal Russo could have been. Not that he imagined Graham’s mother would be unattractive. It was more a matter of style. This woman fit her husband, Leland, to a T. Poised, confident, insincere.
‘Anyway,’ Hardy said, ‘the judge can have some influence, of course, but it boils down to the case against Graham, which fortunately has a lot of holes.’
There was no immediate response to this, although glances were exchanged, some message conveyed. Finally, Helen spoke. ‘Do you think Graham did this, Mr Hardy?’
‘Killed Sal for money? No, I don’t.’
‘It’s absurd,’ Leland said. ‘He could have all the money he wants by simply asking for it.’
‘Which of course he won’t do,’ Helen added. ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t want to feel in our debt, which is I suppose noble enough, but I’m his mother. It would not be debt. Leland and I have discussed this.’
‘But the fact remains,’ Hardy said, ‘he didn’t feel comfortable asking, did he?’ The dynamic, he saw, was transparent enough. There might not be monetary payback, but there would be strings. Lots and lots of strings. Behavior issues, how one acted. And if Hardy knew anything at all about Graham, he wasn’t a string kind of guy.
‘We did help him with law school.’ These petty details seemed distasteful to Leland, but he wanted them on the table. ‘Although that would appear to have been money ill spent.’ A tepid smile. ‘Well’ – he brought his hands together – ‘but that’s not the point, either, is it? We were just rather wondering how Graham was intending to pay you. You’re not doing this, what’s the word, pro bono, I assume?’
Hardy smiled. ‘No. Graham’s paying me. But I can’t really talk about those arrangements without his consent.’
‘Of course not,’ Leland said. ‘I wouldn’t suggest-’
A discreet knock on the door was immediately followed by a waiter bearing a tureen, from which he ladled a dark, clear consommé into their bowls.
After the waiter had gone, Leland tasted the soup to no comment or reaction. It was perfect – dark, intense, rich, perfectly balanced – perhaps the best soup Hardy had ever tasted in his life, and he had to say something.
‘Thank you,’ Leland said in response to the compliment. ‘Yes, it’s quite nice.’ Conveying an air of ‘What else could it be?’ Then he went back to Graham, precisely where they had left off, on the money. ‘But Helen would like to’ – another glance at his wife – ‘actually, we’d like to help out, monetarily.’
‘I don’t know,’ Hardy began, only to have Leland cut him off.
‘I have spoken to some of our attorneys here at the bank,’ he said, ‘and they tell me there’s no ethical question. My understanding is that you would be free to accept remuneration from any source, so long as it was understood that Graham was your client, that you represented his interests, not ours. Is that correct?’
Hardy had to laugh. ‘This question doesn’t exactly come up every day. What you say sounds right, though. I’ll check and make sure. I’d still want to talk to Graham about it.’
Helen reached over and this time put her hand over Leland’s. This was evidently some preemptive-strike code they’d worked out. ‘We’d expect that, wouldn’t we, Leland?’
‘Of course.’ A pause. ‘Sure.’
Leland Taylor wasn’t a man who said sure very often, and from Hardy’s perspective it came out stilted. But maybe not. Maybe everything just seemed a little bit skewed up here.
‘Good,’ Helen said. ‘Now, Mr Hardy, if we may, can we ask how you plan to proceed?’
Hardy nodded. ‘You can ask,’ he said, ‘but it’s pretty early. I’ve barely begun looking at the evidence, so anything I say now wouldn’t be set in stone.’
‘We understand that,’ Leland said. They were definitely two-teaming him. ‘But certainly the general plan will be to play up Sal’s illness, Graham’s closeness to him, particularly at the end? You’re shaking your head. You don’t agree?’
‘Actually, I do. Graham doesn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’ Helen asked.
‘He tells me he wasn’t there. He wasn’t any part of it.’
The waiter entered again during the ensuing silence, removed the tureen and the soup bowls, then set in front of each of them a little work of art featuring seared scallops, angel’s hair pasta, some zucchini blossoms. A limpid bright orange pool of sauce. A bottle of Kistler Reserve Chardonnay appeared, was poured.
Hardy thought he might swoon from the first taste, but again, to Leland it was just grub. As soon as the door closed, he continued as though there had been no interruption. ‘But isn’t that Graham’s best defense? That the killing was out of mercy?’
‘It might be, sir, but he wouldn’t even plead to that last week. Legally, that’s still murder.’
Helen spoke. ‘He’s afraid he won’t be able to practice law.’
Hardy nodded. ‘That’s right. That’s what he tells me too.’
‘He wasn’t exactly tearing up the field to this point, though, was he, Helen?’
This seemed to invite some response from Graham’s mother, and Hardy waited until it was clear none would be coming. ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘there are certain… irregularities. Somebody else may have been there. There might have been another motive. Sal might in fact have been murdered.’
‘But not by Graham.’ Helen was certain about this.
‘No, but that’s who’s going to trial for it.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Leland said. ‘I’m hearing all kinds of conflicting reports here, Mr Hardy. Do you believe Graham killed his father or not?’
Hardy thought for a minute. ‘I guess I don’t think he did.’
‘Even out of mercy?’
‘No.’
Helen blurted out, ‘But all those articles, all this…’ Winding down, she stopped.
Leland picked up the thread. ‘That means you think someone else did it?’
Shaking his head, Hardy grabbed for his wineglass. A sip during the daytime wouldn’t kill him and he wanted the extra second to think. ‘I don’t think it’s out of the question Sal killed himself. The coroner didn’t even rule it out. I might go that way.’
‘I see.’ Leland busied himself with another bite, thinking ‘What would happen, though, if you argued for assisted suicide and the jury believed you?’
‘Graham wouldn’t let me do that.’
‘But if he would…’
‘No one can predict what a jury is going to do.’
‘I’m not trying to. I’m asking you a simple factual question. What would be the result if a jury decided Graham had assisted Sal’s suicide, or helped him die in some compassionate way?’
This was in many ways a fascinating turn, and Hardy considered it a minute. ‘That’s not a technical defense,’ he said carefully, trying to be precise. ‘A jury that followed the law should convict on murder.’
‘Should?’ Helen picked up the nuance, the wrinkle.
Hardy nodded. ‘Except that this is San Francisco. Here you never know. Even a judge like Salter might not instruct the way the prosecution wants. Any given jury – if the defense can guide them right – might do anything.’
‘If they concluded it was an assisted suicide?’
‘They might.’
‘You mean they’d find him simply not guilty?’ Helen wanted to be sure she understood.
‘Yes. Not guilty.’
‘Well, then,’ Leland concluded, ‘that’s your defense.’
Hardy demurred. ‘It’s not that simple. The prosecution is going to make sure the jury knows that assisting a suicide isn’t a defense to murder, and the judge should instruct that way.’
‘But might not.’ Helen didn’t want to let it go.
Hardy wanted to keep her hopes in check. ‘But probably will. It’s moot anyway – Graham won’t let me do what we’re talking about here.’
‘So what’s your mandate,’ Leland asked him, ‘to do what your client wants, or to get him off?’
And that, Hardy thought, was a hell of a good question.
They’d gotten to dessert – a cream puff stuffed with brulee, fresh blueberries, coffee.
‘All right’ – Hardy put his cup down – ‘now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a couple of questions for you.’ They both were listening. ‘Sal broke into your house three times in the past couple of months, didn’t he? Why didn’t you press charges?’
The couple communicated in their wordless way, and Helen took it. ‘We thought he needed help. We did contact the social services. They were, I believe, arranging something when Sal… died.’
‘But it must have bothered you?’
Leland answered. ‘It was very traumatic for Helen. We thought the best approach would be to leave it to the authorities. You can appreciate that we didn’t want to become involved with Sal again. Helen had already been through all that years ago. It was painful.’
Hardy kept his eyes on the wife. ‘And you weren’t concerned it might happen again?’
‘I didn’t believe Sal would hurt me. It was more sad than anything, really. Pathetic. He just seemed so confused.’ Helen hadn’t really answered the question. He would never have accepted it from a witness, but here there wasn’t much he could do. She continued on. ‘He really seemed to believe he still lived with me. At the Manor.’
‘The Manor?’
A pretty, embarrassed smile. ‘Our home.’
‘He was that far along? With the Alzheimer’s?’ Hardy asked.
‘I don’t know anything about the disease,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t malicious. He just didn’t know where he was, where he belonged. I felt sorry for him,’ she repeated.
‘I didn’t,’ Leland interjected. ‘I wanted him arrested. It’s all right, Helen, I’m on the record with this. I thought he was a grave danger to my wife.’
‘And George, your other son,’ Hardy said to Leland, ‘I gather he agreed with you?’
This question appeared to stun both of them. Their magic code seemed to fail. Finally, Leland took a sip of coffee, wiped his lips with his napkin. ‘George isn’t any part of this,’ he said with finality. ‘To answer your question, yes. What dutiful son wouldn’t object to the father who’d deserted him coming back to harass his mother? But this is not a Taylor family matter. This is about Graham, not George.’
As if on cue – perhaps some button had been pushed under the table – the waiter reappeared. ‘It’s two o’clock, sir.’
Leland looked at his watch and made a face. ‘Some oil leases,’ he said apologetically. ‘I’ve really got to run. Mr Hardy, you’ll contact us after you’ve spoken to Graham, about what we discussed, helping him out? Good, then. Helen?’ He reached out a hand to help his wife up from her seat. Lunch was over.
When Leland Taylor’s limo dropped him back at his office, Hardy had a message from David Freeman asking him to come down. Something had come up with Dyson Brunei and Tryptech, and they needed to talk.
What now? Hardy thought.
But Freeman was – no surprise – in court for the afternoon. In the meanwhile a messenger delivered another box of discovery documents on Graham. This stuff kept pulling him along until nearly five o’clock, when he realized he had better try again to see what Freeman wanted.
The old man was buried in some legal text in the law library off the Solarium. He was chewing contentedly on the butt of a thick cigar. Three half-finished china cups of coffee told Hardy he’d been back in from court for at least an hour. But he showed no sign of impatience. Time didn’t exist for Freeman – only the beautiful law.
Hardy pulled up a chair next to him. ‘Dyson Brunei,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’
Freeman finished his paragraph, made a notation in ink in the margin of the book, marked his place with his cigar, and closed it. ‘This dredging fee.’
‘What about it?’
‘Dyson’s having trouble pulling the cash together to pay for it. Tryptech’s running a little thin. He wants to pay you and Michelle in stock options for a while.’
Shocked, Hardy sat back in his chair. ‘In stock options? For Tryptech?’
Freeman nodded. ‘It’s not unheard of.’
‘I’m not saying it is. I’m wondering what I’m supposed to live on until I can cash them in.’
‘I thought you’d wonder that, tell you the truth.’ Hardy didn’t need this at all right now. Tryptech was his main source of liquid income, his salary. ‘You’d tell me if you thought they were going belly up, wouldn’t you, David?’
‘I don’t think it’s like that, Diz. Brunei tells me the company’s still very strong. I think I believe him. It’s a cash-flow issue.’
‘But they don’t want to pay us in money? That’s one way to keep the rest of the old cash flowing.’
‘He says they’re doing some restructuring, trying to make their cash outflows look a little leaner.’ Freeman lowered his voice, implying a confidence. ‘The annual report is coming up, Diz. They’re carrying the eighteen-mil container loss forward on their books. And that, plus our legal fees…’
‘Not exactly the national debt, David.’
‘No, but all out of pocket. It directly impacts the bottom line.’ Freeman held up a palm, cutting off Hardy’s rejoinder. ‘I’m just delivering the message here. I didn’t think this up. Dyson says he’s worried about his shareholders, who tend to notice these things. He’s afraid the company won’t look as good on paper as it could. As it is.’
Hardy heard his warning bells going off. ‘And they’re offering stock options?’
‘No. Actual shares. I’m inclined to accept. I think we’re looking at a large recovery down the road, and we’ll do better than all right. The problem is, I won’t be able to keep paying you for your hours, or at least not as many of them. Brunei might manage half-time hourly cash for one employee…’
‘I’d call that a rather substantial problem, David. If I’m not paid, I can’t work. What am I supposed to live on?’
‘I know, 1 know. But even for a few months?’
‘Jesus, I don’t know, David. If it turns out to be worthless paper…’
‘Yeah, well, Brunei’s story is it could work out to be a very lucrative deal.’
‘What else is he going to say? That it probably won’t work? We’ll all get stiffed?’ But Hardy realized he was just whining. He might as well hear the complete proposal. ‘So what’s the offer?’
‘They discount their shares to two and deal you twenty thousand to carry you through, say, September.’
‘That’s very generous.’ The ironic tone was thick. ‘What’s the stock going for now, three?’
‘And an eighth.’ Freeman spread his hands. ‘I know, it’s low, but Dyson says that’s all the better for us – we’d get more of them. It’s been as high as nine. Maybe it’s going there again, maybe higher. It could be worth a fortune, way beyond your billables. I’m keeping the firm in, if that’s any consolation.’
‘It’s not a matter of consolation.’
And in truth – if the Tryptech ship wasn’t going down the way its container had – Hardy knew that potentially this was a great deal. At today’s price Dyson was offering him sixty thousand plus in stock, far more than he would make in the next four months. But he also knew that the operative word was could. Unfortunately, the stock market, like any given jury, was notoriously unpredictable. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe it could be lucrative,’ he said, ‘but I’m a working stiff who kind of depends on a paycheck every month.’
Freeman was silent for a beat. ‘You really might want to do this, Diz,’ he said at last. ‘As a long-run move it could really work out.’
Hardy’s brow creased. As a matter of course he knew that David had run a Standard & Poors on Tryptech before taking them on as clients, and if David still thought the company checked out, it would probably survive. It wasn’t the biggest manufacturer of computers and parts, but it wasn’t the smallest.
But even David Freeman had been fooled before. And after having worked with him for the better part of a year already, Hardy was of the opinion that Dyson Brunei wasn’t America’s most honest man. The offer more than worried him. Could Tryptech have gotten to the point where it could no longer pay any of its contractors, not just its lawyers? If that was the case, they were dead, and soon.
Plus, restructuring was a scary word; it meant they were laying off employees. Hardy knew this had been going on at Tryptech with increasing regularity. Of course, as long as the company was in business at all, it would need legal help, but this late-in-the-day finagling to get his services, essentially for nothing, in exchange for stock that had been in free fall for months, struck Hardy as desperate.
‘If they’re strapped for cash,’ he suggested, ‘maybe we could talk about getting the Port to settle.’ Hardy thought he could probably negotiate something like $10 million in a long weekend. Of course, Tryptech was hoping to get nearly three times that when all was said and done, but it might be bird-in-the-hand time.
‘I don’t think so,’ David said. ‘I suggested that to Dyson, of course. He’s not ready to go that way. Not yet.’ Another pause. ‘He said he had all his people to consider. Customers, shareholders, contractors, everybody.’
Hardy chuckled. This, coming from a man who was laying off workers and probably dissembling – which was the lawyer word for lying – about the actual number of computers he’d lost in his container, struck Hardy as plain silly. ‘Well, thanks anyway, David, but you’ll have to tell Brunei I don’t think so.’
A disappointed sigh. ‘All right. But if you don’t mind, I’m conveying the same offer to Michelle.’
Hardy left the room, shaken. Suddenly his main source of income looked good to be drying up.
‘What drives me nuts is I go into this litigation game for the security of it-’
‘There’s your problem,’ Frannie told him. ‘There is no such thing as security. It is a pure myth.’
His wife knew whereof she spoke. Orphaned as a young child, she’d been raised by her brother, Moses. Then her first husband had been killed within a week of her discovery that she was pregnant with the baby who turned out to be Rebecca. ‘This is why, my poor suffering husband, we should really really try to recognize and enjoy things when life is going well. Like now, for instance. This minute.’
There was a blanket under them and another one over them as they lay on the rug in the living room. The shades in the bay window were drawn, the kids were asleep, and the elephants on the mantel had circled and were at rest. Tony Bennett was on low, singing some Billie Holiday. A fire threw a flickering light.
‘This minute isn’t too bad,’ he admitted. ‘Why are we in the living room?’
‘Sexual urgency,’ she said.
‘That was it,’ Hardy agreed. ‘I remember now.’ He leaned over and kissed her. ‘I love you.’
‘Well, all right, if you must.’
‘I must.’ Her head was on his shoulder, a leg thrown over his. A long moment passed. ‘And you’re okay with all this?’
‘With what?’
‘All these changes coming up. It’s going to be different.’
‘You’re still going to be here, right?’
‘I’m considering it.’
‘So nothing’s really changed. You just think it might be changing, but you’ve been dying to get out from under Tryptech anyway…’
‘I just worry,’ he said.
Frannie went up onto an elbow, her red hair glowing in the firelight. ‘You? You’re kidding?’ She leaned up against him. ‘Dismas, everything changes all the time. Don’t you think life would be pretty boring if it didn’t?’
‘Boring would be nice,’ he said. ‘I could live with boring.’
‘You’d hate it. Your boredom tolerance is zero. You just want to guarantee everything.’
‘And what’s the matter with that?’
‘Nothing, except you can’t guarantee anything.’
‘I hate that part,’ he said.
‘The good news, though, is you’ve got a client you believe in whose parents seem to want to throw money at you.’
‘Which I’m not sure I can take.’
She was quiet for a minute. ‘Let’s play a game,’ she said. ‘I’ll say something, and then you try to think of something positive to say about it, instead of how it could all come back and bite you on the ass.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
‘It is.’ She kissed him. ‘You should try it.’
Eventually they got to the bedroom. Hardy was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang next to the bed.
‘Hello?’ He looked at his digital clock – eleven-fifteen.
‘Mr Hardy. I’m sorry to wake you up. This is Sergeant Evans. We need to talk.’
Adrenaline jolted in and suddenly he was awake, throwing off his blanket, grabbing a bathrobe. ‘Just a minute,’ he whispered, carrying the portable phone into the kitchen, closing the bedroom door behind him. He flicked on the light and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. ‘Is Graham all right?’
‘He’s fine. I just talked to him.’
Hardy tried to process this, but he must have been more asleep than he thought, because he couldn’t do it. ‘You just talked to him when?’
‘Just now. He called me.’
‘From jail?’ He was asking stupid questions. Of course he’d phoned her from jail. That’s where he was.
‘We decided we had to tell you.’
Hardy’s first thought was that Graham had confessed to the pretty young cop. She knew he’d be at his low ebb – lonely, depressed, and scared – and had gone back to nail him on his first night in the slammer. And succeeded.
‘We’re together.’
Again, Hardy’s brain didn’t seem to be accepting the data it was getting. ‘You’re together in what way?’ he asked.
‘I guess the usual way.’
Hardy’s experience with murder suspects and homicide inspectors who got ‘together’ in anything like an interpersonal relationship was limited, if you didn’t include one shooting the other.
‘I’m in love with him.’
‘You’re in love with Graham?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’
Frannie’s words came back at him. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was predictable. It wasn’t just the stock market or juries. It was everything. ‘Okay,’ he said again.
‘I know it’s a little weird.’
‘I’ll get used to it,’ Hardy said. ‘So does this mean you think he’s innocent?’
‘He didn’t kill his father.’
‘No, I don’t think so either.’
‘But somebody did.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I’d bet on it. In fact, I am betting on it.’
‘Do you know who it was?’
‘No. If I did, I’d arrest him, get my man out of jail. But they’ve pulled us off the case. It’s all politics. If they’d let us look, I’d find him. There’s something, I know that. More than you’ve seen.’
‘Maybe not,’ Hardy said. ‘I got another pile of discovery today.’
There was a brief silence, then Evans said, ‘This won’t be in any discovery.’
She outlined the efforts of both herself and Lanier: the fish supplier, Pio, who’d died within the same week as Sal; the fact that Sal had been a cash courier for some high-stakes gamblers. ‘This guy Soma just hates Graham and decided to go get him. When he had enough for that, we got called off.’
Hardy was silent for so long that she said his name.
‘I’m still here. I’m just wondering what you want to do.’
‘I want to help Graham,’ she said. ‘It can be on my own time, I don’t care. Find out where these other trails go. The only thing is, I can’t… I’d have to come to you, not my boss. I couldn’t go to him.’
‘That would be Glitsky?’
‘Yeah. You know him?’
‘Jesus,’ Hardy said.
‘What?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just a little late-night humor. Yeah, I know Glitsky. You could say that.’
‘I think he’d fire me. No, I think he’d shoot me.’
‘I think you’re right.’
‘So can we do that, me and you? Keep it between us. And Graham, of course.’
‘Could I have a free investigator working with me to help my client? Could I do that? Call me crazy, but I think so.’
Sarah hung up the telephone in her kitchen and sat at the table with her hands shaking. She’d done it, joined the enemy.
She’d told Hardy she was betting on Graham being innocent, but that was putting it mildly. In reality she was risking everything on it. Her credibility, her career.
Over the past few days she’d tried to take the long view of the developing situation between Graham and herself. If she were a man…
This always stopped her, for of course she wasn’t.
But if she were, she might be able to get away with having a relationship with one of her suspects. If she were a male cop, the old boy network would close in around her and though she might take a lot of grief about it, it would never become a public issue. Sarah had known three men on the force in her career who had ‘dated’ their suspects. If memory served, one of those had even been a murder rap. One of these liaisons – not the murder – got to marriage.
But if it came out about Graham and her, she had no illusions. She was going to be finished. Even if the Police Officers Association went to bat for her, Glitsky would see that she was reassigned out of homicide.
She hoped that by calling Hardy she was doing the right thing. Although she was no longer sure what the right thing was anymore.
Now wide awake, Hardy sat at his own kitchen table.
It had been an amazing day, Graham’s hidden allies appearing with no warning. The parents wanting to help pay for his defense, Sarah Evans volunteering to help with his investigation.
Sarah’s suggestion that someone else altogether might be involved widened the scope of things dramatically. It also provided him with a tactic that always played well for a jury: the so-called ‘SODDIT’ defense, an acronym for Some Other Dude Did It. Sarah wouldn’t even have to find another suspect. If Hardy could point clearly enough to where there might be one, he might be able to churn up enough doubt to get to reasonable.
But the thought that really refused to leave his mind was David Freeman’s magic trick with the newspaper of the other day – context, context, context.
Today’s discovery documents included a listing of all tagged physical evidence so far in the case. Hardy would have lots of time in the coming months to go to the evidence locker and physically examine every item on the list, but the list itself had provided at least one important, or potentially important, bit of context.
He had already known that the $50,000 Sal had kept in his safe, the money in Graham’s safety deposit box, had been bank-wrapped seventeen years before. What he hadn’t really considered until now was the fact that he had an exact date: April 2, 1980.
Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money now, and seventeen years ago it had been a fortune. Where had it come from? Had there been a bank robbery? A kidnapping? Something that might have been in the newspapers?
He didn’t know, but the Chronicle’s archives would be open tomorrow, and he was going to find out.
He started six months before the date the bills had been wrapped, skimming the headlines. He didn’t have to go very far. When he came to the first week of November, 1979, he figured he’d gotten what he’d come for, and stopped right there, nearly running out of the archives in his hurry to get to a telephone. ‘Judge Giotti, please. Dismas Hardy. Please tell him it relates to Graham Russo.’
‘This is Mario Giotti.’ Hardy had never expected the judge to pick right up. You didn’t just call a federal judge and have him come to the phone. But that’s what Giotti had done. Maybe he had some personal interest.
Hardy introduced himself. ‘I’m representing Graham Russo. I’ve got a few questions, if you could spare some time.’
‘Of course. Sal was one of my oldest friends. I assume you want to talk about the condition of the scene when I found the body. I can assure you I didn’t touch anything.’
Hardy knew there wasn’t going to be any way to finesse it. ‘Well, Your Honor, in fact what I’m curious about is the fire at your father’s restaurant, the Grotto.’
For a long moment there was no answer. Then, ‘You said this relates to Graham Russo?’
‘I don’t know if it does.’
‘I can’t imagine how it would. That was years ago.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Hardy waited and the judge didn’t let him down. ‘If you’re free for a while, why don’t you swing by here? I’m not due back in court until one-thirty.’
Even after the long walk through the seven rooms that comprised the judge’s law offices – half a city block long – Hardy wasn’t prepared for the majesty of the judge’s private chambers. He was used to the Hall of Justice, where the rooms were to human scale. Here at the federal courthouse, deities reigned. Giotti’s room measured about forty by fifty. The ceilings began halfway to the sky. There was an enormous fireplace, incongruously appointed with an artificial heating unit. With carved wood, exposed beams, inlaid marble, an entire wall of books, and three separate seating areas, the room underscored the power of the position: a federal judgeship was the job God wanted. Certainly His own celestial throne-room couldn’t have been much more imposing.
As Hardy entered, Giotti had gotten up from his beautiful Shaker-style desk and was moving forward with an outstretched hand. ‘Mr Hardy? Nice to meet you. Did my secretary get the name right? The good thief?’
‘Dismas, that’s right.’
‘Also the patron saint of murderers, if I’m not mistaken?’ Hardy nodded. ‘You’re not, although Graham Russo’s not been convicted.’
‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean to imply that.’ ‘And, perhaps more to the point, I’m no saint.’
A wider smile. ‘Then we ought to get along just fine. I’m not much of a saint either. Cup of coffee? Would you like to sit down?’
Hardy said that coffee would be fine and chose the seating arrangement closest to the fireplace, with its space heater turned up. ‘I know,’ Giotti said, ‘these enormous rooms. You can’t heat them. With all these fireplaces – all of us judges have them, you know – and in this entire building only one of them is functional.’
‘How did you decide among you who got it?’
‘The same way we decide anything. Seniority.’
Hardy clucked. ‘And we’re always hearing how federal judges get anything they want.’
‘We get eighteen percent more than average mortals, but that’s the limit.’
‘Another illusion shattered.’
‘May it rest in peace,’ Giotti intoned as the door opened and the secretary brought in a coffee service. After she’d gone, the judge sipped and sat back, balancing his cup and saucer on his knee. After making sure Hardy was comfortable, he moved along.
‘You want to know about the fire at the Grotto? I’d be curious to know how it even came up.’
Hardy explained the admittedly tenuous connection. Out loud, it sounded lame.
‘You’re saying Sal had a great deal of cash…’
‘Fifty thousand dollars,’ Hardy said.
Giotti waved that off; the exact figure didn’t matter to him. ‘All of it bank-wrapped and dated, so you went through the Chronicle’s archives and ran across the Grotto fire five months before that date?’
‘Yes, Your Honor, that’s what I did.’
‘And you surmise that there’s a connection of some kind between these two elements?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hardy said. ‘This is the third time your name has appeared in this case.’
‘The third?’
A nod. ‘You found Sal, then the bomb scare earlier that same day, the day he was killed-’
‘How did my name appear there?’
‘Not your name precisely, Your Honor. Some connection to the courthouse here.’
‘But then back to my name, my father’s name in any event, with the Grotto fire?’
Hardy could understand it if Giotti grew impatient with this, although he didn’t show any sign of it. He sipped his coffee again, a benign expression on his face, waiting for Hardy to tie together at least some part of these strings.
Which he couldn’t do. Spreading his palms, he smiled sheepishly. ‘I don’t even know what I came to ask, specifically,’ he said. ‘There seemed to be some… some…’
‘Connection?’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘To what?’
‘I don’t know.’ Hardy carefully placed his cup into his saucer, feeling very much a fool. ‘I’m sorry, Your Honor. I’m wasting your time. Quite often I actually think before I roll into gear. Evidently this wasn’t one of those times.’
Giotti didn’t seem to mind. He gestured expansively. ‘Don’t feel like you have to leave, Mr Hardy. This might not be a waste of anyone’s time. I’m curious as to how you plan to approach the overriding legal issue in the case.’
‘Assisted suicide?’
The judge nodded. ‘You know that here in the Ninth Circuit we expect to be in a bit of a war with the Supreme Court over this whole right-to-die question? It’s not unlike what seems to be going on between Sharron Pratt and Dean Powell.’ He leaned forward, placing bis cup and saucer on the coffee table. ‘We’ve already come down in Glucksberg on the side of the angels, but we’re going to be overturned. At least that’s my prediction. It’s my hope the Court doesn’t compel a blanket prohibition by the states, but they might.’
‘On assisted suicide, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
Hardy was extremely surprised – stunned even – that a federal judge would discuss such an issue with someone who might someday appear in his court as a litigant. He took his time framing an appropriate response. ‘Are you among the judges in favor of it?’
Giotti smiled in a weary way. ‘Let’s say I’m against prohibiting it for terminal patients. In legal terms, and Casey agrees with me, it’s a liberty interest issue, -not too dissimilar to abortion. Provided, of course, you’ve got cruise control.’
‘Cruise control?’ Suddenly they were talking about cars?
Giotti laughed. ‘Sorry. Jargon. Acronyms. CRUIS – competent, rational, uncoerced, informed, stable. You got a terminal patient on cruise control, he’s got the right to take his life.’
Hardy ran through the litany and a question rose. ‘Did Sal Russo fit your definition?’
‘I think so, when he formed the original intent. Recently, no, I’d say not.’
‘So you knew him pretty well?’
‘Both for a long time and pretty well, and those are not the same things at all.’ Giotti sat back and crossed his legs, comfortable. ‘I talked with him at least twice a month, sometimes more often’ – he pointed vaguely – ‘out there in the alley. Once in a while in his apartment.’
‘Selling fish?’
Giotti nodded. ‘That’s what he did. He was a great guy. Did you know him?’
‘I met him a few times.’
Hardy wasn’t sure where to take this. Giotti seemed to want to talk, perhaps reminisce, although it could be he was simply taking his lunch break and enjoyed talking to somebody. Hardy thought that his daily life here must be fairly isolated, proscribed. ‘I know Graham a lot better.’
This brought a frown, quickly suppressed. ‘Yes,’ the judge said, ‘I suppose you do. He’s not the most popular man in this building.’
Hardy smiled. ‘I’d heard some rumor like that.’
‘You don’t walk away from a clerkship. I don’t think it’s ever been done. It raised some hackles.’
‘Yours?’
Giotti considered this. ‘To be honest with you, yes. I had a lot of hopes for him. Through Sal. You know what I’m saying? Your friend’s kids? You hate to see a terrible cycle repeating itself. I didn’t want to see Graham turn out the way Sal had.’
‘Although he was your friend – Sal, I mean?’
‘Well, not like when we were younger.’ Giotti let out a deep sigh. ‘Sal failed. In life. I’d hate to see that happen with Graham, though that’s the way it looks like it’s going.’
‘So what happened with Sal? He wasn’t always a failure, was he?’
‘No. When he married Helen… have you met Helen?’
Hardy nodded.
‘Gorgeous woman, wouldn’t you agree? Well, that needs no discussion. When Sal married her, the whole town envied him. He was a gifted athlete, had this wonderful personality, ran his own business, had three beautiful kids…’
‘So what happened?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he was living a lie, doing some high-wire act and pretending he could keep his balance until something gave him a good knock and he went over. On the other hand, Helen married Leland pretty quick – she might have cut his heart out. He disappeared for a few years. After he came back, he wasn’t ever the same. He was beaten.’
With no idea what possessed him, Hardy played a hunch. ‘And you helped set him up as Salmon Sal?’
Giotti shifted in his chair. His eyes sharpened. Then he broke a grin. ‘Say what you will about lawyers, I love how their minds work. Yes, well, Sal was my friend. I felt sorry for what had happened to him. Although set up is perhaps a little too strong. Perhaps people were more willing to know Sal because I did.’
‘And he never talked to you about the money?’
A cock of the head. ‘What money?’
‘Remember? He had fifty thousand dollars, so he didn’t have to work. He had all this cash.’
‘How do you know he had it back then? I know it’s dated back then, but that doesn’t mean it was in his possession.’
‘You know, that’s a good point.’ Suddenly.
The bills had been wrapped and dated, but that said nothing about their history over the past seventeen years. In fact, maybe this was the money that Sarah Evans had suspected Sal had been delivering for one of her gamblers. Would Graham know anything about that? Did he suspect as much himself? Hardy would have to ask him.
And then, the horrible thought: Graham’s retainer money. Where had that come from?
Meanwhile, he felt the judge’s eyes on him, was pulled back by a comment. ‘He was very sick by the end, you know. In a lot of pain.’
‘But no longer, as you say, on cruise control?’
‘That’s true. The Alzheimer’s was getting pretty severe. You couldn’t miss it. He couldn’t make his own decisions.’
‘But you say that sometime earlier he might have told Graham he wanted to die, to take his own life when it got bad enough?’
The judge ventured another smile. ‘Did I say that?’
‘I’m his attorney. It might help to know if he did.’
‘So you are going with assisted suicide.’
‘We’ve already pled. Not guilty to murder one.’
Giotti blew out heavily. ‘Murder one is ridiculous.’
A grim smile. ‘That’s my position too. I hope the jury agrees with us.’
‘Get it in front of them and it can’t fail. Not in this town. Not that I should comment on this at all.’
‘I don’t hear any comment,’ Hardy said, making explicit their understanding. ‘But I’ve got a problem with Graham, who won’t admit to being there.’ He didn’t want to mention his other problem, that he was fairly certain Graham had not helped his father die at all, that he was telling the truth on that score.
‘He was there,’ Giotti said simply.
‘That day? You know that?’
But Giotti backed away from that. ‘I can’t say that day for sure, but he came all the time. Sal told me he saw him a couple of times a week.’
‘Graham says this wasn’t one of the days.’
‘Have him change his mind and he’ll walk.’ Meaning he wouldn’t be convicted.
Hardy leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘He won’t admit anything, Judge. He is one stubborn fellow. He thinks they’ll pull his bar card.’
Giotti considered that a moment. ‘All right. So you admit it for him.’ Now the judge, too, leaned over the coffee table and lowered his voice. ‘It wouldn’t be Graham’s fault – there’d be no ethical problem with the bar – if the jury came back with “not guilty”; just bought assisted suicide and let him go. Graham himself would never have to admit anything. The bar couldn’t yank his card if it was his attorney’s argument, not his own testimony. All you’ve got to do, Mr Hardy, is keep him off the stand.’
This was, suddenly, as strange a conversation as Hardy could ever remember having: a federal judge counseling him on his defense. And it was a strategy, he realized, that had every hope of success, not too dissimilar to Leland Taylor’s suggestion of the day before. If only he could convince his client.
‘That might work, Judge.’
‘If it doesn’t, and again I am not commenting directly here’ – Giotti waited and Hardy nodded his assent – ‘at least then you’ve based your case on the constitutional issue, and I can assure you with reasonable confidence that this circuit would tend to look favorably on any appeal.’
The moment froze, Hardy struck with an almost surreal awareness. The white light out the window. The space heater suddenly clicking off. A portrait of some Native American chieftain on the opposite wall. If he’d heard it right, Mario Giotti had just told him that if Hardy lost Graham’s case, the judge would see to it that the conviction was overturned on appeal.
He didn’t dare ask if he’d heard it right. He had. Any more direct confirmation would be collusive – downright indictable. Nodding like a puppet, setting the frame in his mind, he stood up. ‘Well, Your Honor, I want to thank you. It was very nice to meet you.’
‘My pleasure,’ the judge said. ‘It’s not every day I get any personal time. I appreciate it.’
They were moving to the door when Hardy stopped. ‘Can I ask you one more thing? Very fast.’
Giotti trotted out his smile again. ‘You can ask it slow if you want. What is it?’
‘You said Sal was unable to make a decision at the end.’
The judge corrected him. ‘An informed decision.’
‘And this was obvious to anybody who did any business with him?’
‘Maybe not. But certainly to anyone who had known him.’
Hardy frowned. The judge asked him what he was getting at. ‘I’m trying to get a picture of the last moments. If he was lucid one second, had made this decision, then in the middle of it changed his mind, that could account for the trauma they found around the injection site.’
The judge’s eyes went to the corner of the room, the filigreed redwood moldings hugging the distressed drywall. Lips pursed, his eyes went dull for a long beat. ‘He knew it was getting toward the time. He used to tell his bad Alzheimer’s jokes, you know? Then lately he’d stopped doing that, which I took as a sign that he was getting serious about it.’
‘But suddenly this tumor was going to end things quickly.’
Giotti waited. ‘And?’
‘And so he wasn’t facing the same thing. Instead of a long, slow advance into dementia where he’d lose his dignity, his new reality was about dealing with pain.’
‘Okay?’
‘Which from all I’ve heard about him, he was macho as hell. I’m just trying to get to his state of mind. He wasn’t going to let pain beat him, even great pain.’
Giotti took that in. ‘That flies,’ he said. ‘I remember one time we were out on the Bonus. We’d just landed a salmon and he slipped on the deck and the gaff went through the palm of his hand, all the way through.’
‘Yow!’
‘No kidding. Sal gave one good yell, then just twisted the gaff back out and wrapped his hand in an old T-shirt. Didn’t even head the boat back in. We fished the whole day and he never mentioned it again.’
That’s what I mean,‘ Hardy said. ’I don’t see him deciding to die over the pain.‘
‘Maybe the combination,’ the judge replied. ‘That and the Alzheimer’s. Whatever it was, something clearly got to him. It must have, don’t you think?’
‘Must have,’ Hardy said. ‘It must have.’
‘He says it’s an emergency.’ Phyllis’s clipped tones came over the speakerphone, filling his office. Hardy was huddled with Michelle, catching up on the ever-fascinating world of stress tolerance in various metals. It was Wednesday afternoon, almost evening, certainly after five -at any rate, way too late for what he still had to do.
He hadn’t even been to see Graham, who’d no doubt been languishing in his AdSeg unit all day, wondering what, if anything, his lawyer was up to. And he’d been working on Russo all day – after Giotti, over to the Hall for more discovery, a look at the actual evidence. The materials from the safe: the money, baseball cards, old belt. Then the syringes and vials with their labels stripped off.
He had a less-than-amiable chat with Claude Clark in the hallway, when Hardy had stopped him, honestly trying to help, perhaps to make amends about the blown deal with Pratt. He told Clark that Barbara Brandt was a liar. Not true, Clark had countered, and even if it were, Hardy made deals he couldn’t keep. Clark would take a liar anytime – at least you knew where you stood.
He really ought to go stop in and see Graham, but it was three-thirty before he gave up waiting for another opportunity to apologize to Glitsky and began to brave the abysmal traffic back uptown to Sutler. He had had a two o’clock with Michelle which he’d rescheduled to three and then four, and he was going to be late for that too.
Even if someone hadn’t parked in his space under his own building.
Staring at the unfamiliar car in the spot for which he paid a fortune each month, he marveled anew that anyone could oppose capital punishment. Surely, stealing someone’s parking place was a death-penalty affront to civilization.
Just to add a certain je ne sais quoi of tension to the equation, he had a date with Frannie in less than two hours and at least another hour here with Michelle, so he’d told Phyllis no more calls the last time she’d put one through – a reporter. If it wasn’t Dyson or Frannie, he couldn’t talk to anybody. And now she’d buzzed him back, interrupting again.
He shook his head in frustration. ‘Sorry, Michelle.’ Then, out loud, ‘Who is it, Phyllis?’
‘A Dr Cutler.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘It’s about the Russo case.’
‘What isn’t?’ He asked it to himself, getting up to cross to his desk, but an answer came from an unexpected quarter.
‘This.’
It was a flat statement from Michelle, with a harsh finality that nearly startled him. He suddenly realized that she wasn’t thriving under his tutelage. She was doing fine with the details and strategy of the case, but since her interaction with him was constantly being subverted by Graham Russo, she was getting understandably impatient. He gave her an ambiguous gesture, picked up the phone, and said hello.
He heard papers rustling and turned to see her going out the door, closing it behind her, so he missed his caller’s introduction. ‘I’m sorry, could you repeat that?’ He heard a sigh. Hardy wasn’t making many friends.
‘My name’s Russell Cutler. I play ball with Graham.’
‘My secretary said Dr Cutler?’
‘That too.’ There was a small pause, the sound of a breath being exhaled. ‘I prescribed the morphine for Sal Russo. I’ve been trying to live with it and I’m not doing very well. I thought telling somebody might help.’
Hardy took a moment. ‘It might.’ But then another thought occurred to him, and it nearly turned his stomach. His client had lied again – to him, maybe to his lover, certainly to the police and to Time magazine. If this doctor played ball with Graham, then the medical connection to the morphine was not through Sal – as Hardy had reluctantly come to accept – but through Graham himself.
Jesus Christ! he thought. Would it never end?
Struggling for a calm tone, he fell back upon his job, his role. The lawyer. ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else? The police, for instance?’
‘No. I thought it would be better if I told my story to Graham’s side, you know?’
‘That was a good thought,’ Hardy conceded. ‘Where are you located?’
Cutler told him he was a resident at Seton Medical Center in Daly City. He lived in San Bruno, had graduated from UCSF Medical School. He had played baseball for Arizona in college and had been ‘drafted’ by Craig Ising when he showed up in the city, playing haphazardly, but as often as he could get the time. He hit the long ball and it was great money. ‘So Graham and I became friends and he kind of told me about Sal. He was afraid to go to public health because he thought they’d report him because of the AD. He’d lose his driver’s license among other things. They’d put him in a home. You know the drill, the indigent sick? It’s appalling.’
‘I’ve heard,’ Hardy said, although he was daily getting a new appreciation for how bad it must be. ‘So you… what? With Sal?’
There wasn’t any answer for a minute, although the connection hadn’t been broken. When Cutler came back, his voice was muted. ‘Look, I’m in the lounge here…’
‘And you can’t talk?’
A false cheer, the voice back to normal. ‘Good. Right. Yeah.’
‘So when can we get together?’
‘This is always my favorite part.’
‘It’s why we’re such a great couple,’ Hardy said. ‘You’re always so eager to share the excitement.’
Frannie nodded. ‘That must be it.’
Hardy felt that there hadn’t been any choice, not that this was any consolation to Frannie. Nor had it been to Michelle, either, judging from the Gone home Post-it note on her office door when Hardy had finally stopped by to resume their stress-tolerance discussion. His trained legal mind intuited that she was displeased with him.
As was his wife now at his decision to meet with a witness at the Little Shamrock on Date Night. Her brother, Moses, having poured a round for a group in the front window, was back into earshot before Hardy was aware of it.
Hardy was trying to explain. ‘It couldn’t be helped, Frannie. The guy’s got eight hours off tonight and then he’s on call all the rest of the week. What am I supposed to do?’
His wife, nursing a Chardonnay, feigned pensiveness. ‘Here’s a radical concept, but what about waiting till next week? What do you think, Mose?’
A thoughtful pout. ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today?’
Hardy approved of this support. ‘See? Pure wisdom. Your brother has a doctorate, you know. He must be right.’
Frannie cast a look between them. ‘You know what they call the person who comes in last in the class in med school?’
‘I give up,’ Hardy said.
‘Doctor.’ Frannie smiled.
McGuire looked hurt. ‘I’m not that kind of doctor, anyway.’
Hardy wanted to get back to the topic. ‘Besides, Frannie, anything could happen in a week. What if my witness dies in the interim?’
Frannie histrionically slapped her palm on her forehead. ‘Silly me,’ she said, ‘I forgot all about that possibility, which is pretty likely, I suppose. The guy’s – what? – twenty-five? Thirty? Death must stalk him like a panther.’
‘I didn’t say it was likely. I’m trying to be careful.’
Hardy was sticking with club soda until he’d had a chance to interview Russell Cutler, who should be here any minute, he hoped. If he didn’t chicken out. He was already fifteen minutes late.
Frannie suddenly put her hand over his. ‘I’m teasing you. Mostly. But we are going out to a real restaurant later and eat real food that I don’t cook, right?’
‘Right.’
‘We’re in complete agreement?’
Total.‘
‘All right. I’m with you, then.’ She looked over her husband’s shoulder at the doorway. ‘This witness is a doctor?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I think he’s here.’
Dr Cutler still wore his light green scrubs, maybe as a means of identification. If so, it worked. Hardy left his wife with her brother, and the two men shook hands at the door.
The Little Shamrock was San Francisco’s oldest bar, established in 1893. Twenty feet wide from side to side, it extended back three times that distance. Antique bicycles, fishing rods, knapsacks and other turn-of-the-century artifacts hung from the ceiling, and there was a clock that had stopped ticking during the Great Earthquake of 1906. Tonight, Wednesday, at seven twenty-two, there were two dozen patrons, half of them at the bar. The rest were shooting darts or sitting at tiny tables in the front. The Beach Boys were singing ‘Don’t Worry, Baby’ on the jukebox.
Hardy took Cutler to the back of the place. Here three couches were arranged sitting-room style. Tiffany lamps shed a feeble light. The bathrooms were behind some stained-glass screens, and people with a highly developed olfactory sense tended to avoid the area, at least until the place got rockin‘ and the beer smell overlaid anything else.
But Cutler didn’t seem to mind or even notice. ‘I have trouble believing I’ve let it go this long,’ he began before he’d sat down. ‘With all the articles, the media…’
‘It’s all right, you’re here now. That’s what matters.’ ‘You know why I told your secretary it was an emergency? I thought if I didn’t get it out today, I never would.’
Frannie had been right. Cutler was between twenty-five and thirty. At this moment there were black circles under his eyes and the outline of stubble on his cheeks, but Hardy guessed that when he was rested and shaved he would be fresh-faced, even boyish. He was neither as tall nor as broad in the shoulders as Graham, but possessed that same athletic grace of movement, although his cropped black hair made him appear more a Marine than a jock. ‘I’m a wreck about this. I don’t think I’ve slept since Graham was first arrested.’
The first job would be to reassure him. ‘Why don’t you just tell me the level of your involvement with Sal? I’m not the police, you know. What you tell me doesn’t necessarily have to go any farther.’
Cutler sighed. He kept opening and closing his hands. Finally, he linked them and leaned forward. ‘Graham was kind of being Sal’s caretaker toward the end, kind of waiting and watching. They had made some deal about the AD, and I think were both okay with it. Graham was going to help him die before he got… before he went to a home, I guess. But then Sal started getting these headaches.’
‘The cancer?’
Cutler nodded. ‘But we didn’t know that at first. So I ran the CAT scan. We got a second opinion, then a third. There wasn’t any hope. We couldn’t operate. We were convinced the size and location of the tumor was increasing his intracranial pressure. That appeared to be what was causing the headaches.’
As the story came out, Hardy realized that it had been as he’d begun to surmise. Sal was actively fighting the pain, not obsessing about the progress of the Alzheimer’s. ‘So I wrote up a scrip for the morphine. We tried oral painkillers first, of course, but they became less and less effective.’
Over his head, Hardy faked a layman’s understanding. ‘Of course.’ Added, ‘But you finally got to the morphine so Sal could use it to kill himself?’
Cutler nodded. ‘Eventually. Down the line.’
‘But you wrote the prescription? So there’s a record of it, anyway?’
This made Cutler’s hands clench, but his voice was under control. ‘Yeah, but… well, I wrote the prescription to Graham, in Graham’s name. He picked it up at the pharmacy at Seton. I guess he thought it was out of the city, it wouldn’t be as easy to trace.’
‘Okay, but why the secrecy? You have a sick man. You’re his doctor and you prescribe drugs. What’s the problem?’
‘There wasn’t one, not by itself He shook his head. ’It’s all so stupid, I shouldn’t have done it the way I did, that’s all.‘
‘What way was that?’
‘I wanted to refer Sal to a pain management center, but he refused. They have more sophisticated techniques and medications that could have kept him from having to give himself so many injections.’
‘But in the end you stayed with the morphine. Why was that?’
‘Basically it was because the old man was a pain in the ass. We started with morphine a couple of times and it worked, and he wasn’t going to take anything else.’ Cutler looked imploringly at Hardy, as though he hoped for absolution. ‘Look. I’m in the last year of my residency. I’m really not supposed to follow my own patients independently. I mean, it’s not illegal, but it’s frowned on in real life. Strongly frowned on. I’d be screwed. And after this many years it’s kind of important I get to the end.
‘See, Graham didn’t want his dad in the system in any way either. Sal was just terrified that somehow somebody would decide he had to be institutionalized. So I did all this on my own.’
‘What about the other opinions? How’d you get them?’
A shrug. ‘That was easy. I got a tech buddy helps me with the scan itself, then a specialist gives me a curbside consult and verifies it’s terminal and inoperable. There’s nothing that can be done anyway, so what are we supposed to do? See?’
Hardy saw. ‘So you knew, or thought, Sal was going to kill himself?’
‘Let’s just say we wanted to keep that option open.’
‘And so Graham scratched your name off the vials? You’re doing him a favor and in return he agrees to keep your name out of it so you don’t get screwed at work?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. I figure it’s bad enough if I follow a patient independently. If I even appear to assist at a suicide on top of it, then best case I’d be looking for another residency. Worst case they’d take my license.’
Hardy had to appreciate the similarities in the problems of the two young men. No wonder they became friends; their professional concerns were nearly identical.
‘But you didn’t help Sal kill himself?’
‘No. I did prescribe the drug, though.’ He shrugged. ‘We should have just been up front with it, I suppose. Now I see Graham in jail charged with murder and he’s still protecting me. I figure I’ve got to say something. Maybe it’ll help him.’
And having said it, suddenly he appeared to grow calm. Sitting all the way back on the couch, he let out a deep breath. ‘I bet they serve beer here. I could go for a beer.’
‘I’ll get it.’ Hardy got up, went behind the bar; and pulled at the Bass tap. When he got back, Cutler thanked him for the beer. ‘So what do we do now?’
Hardy sat across from him. ‘When is your residency over?’
‘Mid-July. Why?’
‘Because the trial starts in September. As soon as I put you on my witness list, people are going to want to talk to you. But we ought to be able to keep it between us until then. You didn’t break any law, did you?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Okay, then. And the police haven’t asked the mystery doctor – that’s you – to come forward, have they? No? So put it on hold, don’t worry about it. My main concern, to tell you the truth, is that these are more lies Graham told.’
‘But he was just protecting me.’
‘I understand that.’ Hardy wasn’t going to go into it. Graham’s penchant for benevolent falsehoods might well wind up hanging him. ‘But back to you. I won’t have to list you as a witness until just before the trial, so by the time any of this comes out, you’ll be clear with your residency.’
‘I shouldn’t have done it,’ Cutler repeated.
‘I don’t know about that. You did the right thing. The morphine helped Sal while he was alive, didn’t it?’
Hardy could see he wanted to accept this, but still had doubts. He leaned forward and patted the young man’s knee. ‘This legal stuff, forget it. Nobody’s going to bust you for what you did. You tried to ease someone’s suffering. That’s what doctors ought to do, don’t you think?’
A sip of beer, a lopsided grin. ‘I don’t remember anymore. I used to think so when I had a life.’
Hardy patted his knee again. ‘Believe it,’ he said. ‘Now enjoy your beer, then go get some sleep. And thanks.’
Hardy and Frannie stayed in the Avenues at the Purple Yet Wah, a Chinese restaurant not fifteen blocks from their house. Eating their way through the appetizers – pot sticker, calamari, egg rolls, paper-wrap chicken, barbecue pork rib, deep-fry shrimp, and half a dozen more dishes – they were back home by ten-fifteen.
Hardy had five messages waiting. Glitsky left his name.
Michelle was really sorry she’d snapped at him and left so abruptly. They had a lot of work to catch up on tomorrow. Maybe he could set aside a little Tryptech time?
Graham Russo had understood that Hardy would come by every day. What was going on? Why hadn’t he come in? Was everything all right? His only visitor that whole day had been his mother. He’d been thinking, and maybe Hardy’s decision not to mention Joan Singleterry – the phantom woman from Sal’s past – was a mistake. Graham wasn’t making her up. Sal had really wanted to give her the money. Please call. Jail is hell.
Graham again. Same thing. Going nuts.
The last call was from Sarah Evans. Ten minutes ago. She had talked to Graham again and gotten an idea and thought maybe she was on to something.
There was a muted tone even in the public areas of Baywest Bank. This would have been noticeable even if the building weren’t located on such a blighted and vulgar thoroughfare. Since it was on Market Street, though, with its bums and garbage, its debris and stench, its fumes and pornography, the contrast was especially striking.
The other day when he’d come to lunch here with the Taylors, Hardy had passed right through the lobby to the elevators and had scarcely looked at the surroundings. Now his business was here and he took them in: polished floors, burnished dark wood, tinted windows to the outside.
There was nothing so obviously crass as a waiting line in the lobby here at Baywest. When you entered through the revolving front doors, you were greeted by a young man in a business suit and asked your business. If you needed to see a teller, of which there were only three, you were given a number and asked to have a seat in one of the upholstered chairs tastefully arranged around the lobby.
Hardy identified himself as Graham Russo’s lawyer and said he would appreciate a few minutes with George, although he didn’t have an appointment. It was nine-fifteen A.M. Mr Russo was at a meeting. Hardy said he would wait and was directed to another armchair in the back of the lobby.
The bank’s officers lived in cages, as they do almost everywhere. The burnished-wood motif from the public area was carried over here in the back, creating half-high walls around each unit. The upper half was glass, and Hardy, getting to his wingback chair, looked into George’s office for a quick glimpse.
Without the nameplate he could have picked him out from a hundred people. Dressed in a different style than Graham, sitting in a posture behind his desk that Hardy had never seen in Graham, George still bore a remarkable resemblance to his older brother.
As he waited, Hardy made a few notations on the yellow legal pad he’d begun carrying with him everywhere he went. There was so much to remember, so much to organize, and he only had three months before the trial – an absurdly short lead time that he’d argued bitterly against at the Calendar hearing. But his old colleague Tim Manion – the judge – though inclined to sympathy on the bail issue, had proved intractable in scheduling the trial.
After Hardy had argued for a couple of minutes, Manion had summoned him up to the bench and given him a little lecture. ‘I understand you turned down a very reasonable settlement offer, Mr Hardy’ – no ‘Diz’ on this topic – ‘so I assumed your client would be anxious to tell his story and clear his name.’
‘But, Your Honor, three months-’
The gavel. A tight smile. ‘Unless you’d like to start in sixty days as the law provides.’
So Hardy had until September. He knew he had to explain this to Michelle pretty soon too. He moved her to the top of his list. He owed her that much. He’d worked for bosses who didn’t tell him what they expected or what he could expect in terms of their support, and he had thought them cruel. He didn’t wish to leave Michelle with that impression of himself.
But he didn’t dwell on Tryptech. The grand jury indictment notwithstanding, he was actually going to file a nine-nine-five motion for dismissal that he would lose, but he felt he had to get on the boards with the fact that there was not enough evidence to justify holding Graham at all. There were signs that Sal had been murdered, perhaps, but no reasonable attempt to connect that murder to Graham by physical evidence.
So he’d try, make the point, get laughed at.
He made another note. Today he must remember to place ads to run for a month or more in the local newspapers, in the L.A. Times, the San Jose Mercury, and also – being thorough – in the various regional editions of The Wall Street Journal, maybe in The New York Times Book Review, asking anyone with information on a Joan Singleterry to come forward. He wouldn’t risk introducing her before a jury. Graham’s story about her, even if true in all respects, smelled bogus. But Graham was right: they would be unwise to abandon the search for her if she could shed some light on Sal, or on the money. If any part of Graham’s story was true and Hardy could verify it, it could destroy the prosecution case, as least insofar as the special circumstances.
Then there was Sarah Evans and her pursuit of the gamblers and fishmongers. He had to coordinate that more closely. It wasn’t merely a matter of his SODDIT defense. He didn’t need Sarah’s information so much for the jury as he might to get to the truth.
Which was why he was here now…
He raised his eyes. The door had opened and George was saying his name, a concerned look on his face. Hardy threw his legal pad into his open briefcase and stood up, tried a smile. ‘Mr Russo, how are you? I’m representing your brother-’
‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘And how I am is busy. What does my brother have to do with me?’
The tone made it even ruder than the words. Hardy cocked his head, trying to get a read on George, but it didn’t look like he was going to get much of an opening. ‘I haven’t seen my father in ten years. I don’t talk to my brother. I’m not interested.’ But his color was high. Like it or not, his emotions were engaged.
Hardy retained an even tone of his own. ‘I understood you saw Sal when he came to your mother’s house a month ago.’
‘So what?’
‘So you just said you hadn’t seen him in ten years.’
George’s eyes narrowed. It wasn’t clear whether it was with fear or rage. He pointed a finger at Hardy. ‘That’s a lawyer’s trick, turning my words.’
Hardy made the snap decision that he wasn’t going to score any points here with sweet talk. ‘Here’s another one,’ he said, ‘- where were you on the afternoon your father was killed?’
This stopped him dead. He opened his mouth to speak, thought better of it, closed it again. He glanced toward the lobby. Some customers had turned their heads, noticed the confrontation. Hardy pressed what he took to be his advantage. ‘It might be more comfortable in your office.’
They were inside. Hardy pulled the door to behind them while George retreated behind his desk. He’d obviously had enough time to think by the time he got seated. ‘I don’t have to answer any of your questions, do I? You’re not with the police.’
‘No, that’s right. Of course, I could go to the police and tell them you were uncooperative and acting suspicious, that you didn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder and you had a great motive. Plus you look enough like Graham that anyone who thought they had seen him at Sal’s might have been confused.’ Hardy sat back and crossed his legs. ‘Then you would have to answer them.’
‘I had nothing to do with my father’s death.’
‘I didn’t say you did.’
‘You just said I had a motive and no alibi.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m wrong.’ He waited.
George’s tone shifted. Suddenly the arrogant banker gave way to a frightened child. ‘What made you come here? I don’t even know why you’re talking to me.’
Sitting back, Hardy decided he’d played enough hardball. He could ease up a little. ‘Your mother.’
A confused, betrayed look. ‘What about my mother? She told you to talk to me?’
Hardy walked him through it, leaving out any reference to Sarah, his secret agent who’d been the conduit. ‘Your mother went to see your brother in jail yesterday and told him, among other things, that she was worried about you. You’d blown up at some family gathering a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you? You were so hateful to your father.’
‘He was hateful to us. He just walked out on us.’
‘Yes, he did. And you could never forgive him, could you?’
‘Why should I?’
Hardy let that question lie. Instead, ‘Your mother thinks it’s possible that you killed Sal.’
‘Jesus, what are you saying?’ George took a handkerchief from his lapel pocket and wiped his forehead.
‘You told your father you went to some client’s but you didn’t go there, did you?’
‘How do you… how can you say that?’
‘Your mother said it. She told Graham. He told me.’
‘He’s a liar.’
‘Maybe it runs in the family. Where were you?’
George ran a hand around under his collar. Gradually, though, over ten seconds or so, he got himself back under control. ‘I was at a client’s on a confidential matter.’ He checked his watch. ‘And I am very busy. This interview is over.’
Hardy didn’t move. ‘Do you want me to go to the police with this? You think I ask hard questions, you should see them.’
But the younger brother had made his decision. ‘I don’t think you ask hard questions. And you can inform the police or not. I didn’t see my father. I didn’t even know where he lived.’ He picked up the phone. ‘If you’re not ready to leave, I can call security.’
Hardy was sitting in the jail’s visiting room and Graham was in his orange jumpsuit, standing by the window. Hardy had just told him about Helen and Leland’s offer of financial help.
‘Graham?’
Finally, he turned around. ‘They want something, but I don’t see how I can tell you no.’
‘Maybe they want to help you.’
‘No, they want to buy me.’
‘They wouldn’t even be buying me, only some of my hours. I made it clear: I’d be working only for your interests, not theirs.’
Graham eased himself onto the corner of the table. He wore a weary smile and was shaking his head. ‘That’s not how it works. Leland pays you and then eventually you come to see where your interests lie. I’ve seen it happen a thousand times.’
His hands crossed in front of him, Hardy met his client’s gaze. ‘I’ll rise above the temptation.’ Then, more seriously, ‘I’ve thought a lot about this, Graham. A lot, believe me. It’s the only way I defend you and not go broke, which of course I’d gladly do on your behalf, although not if I didn’t have to. But I leave it up to you.’
Hardy watched the young man wrestle with it, family ties and financial bonds. He sighed. ‘My mom sure puts the “fun” in dysfunctional, doesn’t she?’
‘I don’t think she’s dysfunctional. Confused, maybe. You interested in my call on this, really?’
‘Sure.’
‘She sees your dad in you. Apparently a lot of people do. It’s her second chance that way. She wants to give you a chance to make your life turn out all right, to save yourself, and the only language she has is money. You don’t do things her way, Leland’s way, but something in her wishes that that way – your way – could work. She wants to help.’
‘And what about Leland?’
‘He doesn’t have to matter if you don’t let him.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Take the damn money.’
Carefully keeping any elation out of his voice – this really was a critical decision that would keep them both afloat – Hardy felt his shoulders relax. He turned to his legal pad. ‘Oh, by the way, I had a nice talk with your friend Russ Cutler last night. Funny how you forgot to mention him.’
Graham didn’t shrink from it. Caught again, oh, well. ‘I had other things on my mind. I tried to go off the record and tell Sarah. She wouldn’t let me.’
‘It’s going to come out as more lies.’
Graham shrugged. ‘I promised him I wouldn’t bring him in. What was I supposed to do, betray the guy?’
‘I don’t know if I’d characterize it as betrayal, maybe telling your attorney, trust that he could keep a lid on it.’
Graham accepted the rebuke. ‘You’re right, I’m sorry.’
Hardy smiled. ‘You gotta love a guy who’s so consistent, but last night I passed a few pleasant moments plotting to kill you after I get you off.’ He shrugged. ‘It passed, but I really would love it if you had any other little secrets you’ve been keeping up to now. If you wanted to share them, this would be a good time.’
Still sitting on the table, Graham swung his legs under it like a child. ‘Craig Ising’s holding ten grand for me. My money.’
Hardy had to laugh. ‘You are a piece of work.’
Embarrassed, Graham remained matter of fact. ‘One way or the other, this thing’s over in six months, I figure. I didn’t want to lose my apartment, so Craig’s keeping up on the rent. If I’m in jail, it doesn’t matter. But if I win, then what?’
In spite of himself Hardy thought he had a point. In fact, he had wondered what Graham’s plans might be regarding his wonderful place. It was human nature to protect his own hearth before he worried about Hardy’s home and family, not that it didn’t rankle just a bit.
‘So that’s it?’ he asked. ‘I realize we’ve got the proverbial loaves and fishes of falsehoods here, but maybe we keep at this long enough we’ll run out. You didn’t run off on your lost weekend and get married to Evans, did you?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t know anything about your father’s money except what you’ve already told me about Joan Singleterry, whoever the hell she is?’
‘Right.’
‘And you don’t know who she is?’
‘No idea.’
‘And if I catch you in even the smallest fib, I get to stick an icepick under your kneecap?’
‘Both of ’em.‘
‘You swear on your father’s grave?’
This sobered him, as Hardy had meant it to. ‘I swear,’ he intoned.
This would have to be good enough and Hardy took it. ‘Okay. Now let’s talk some matters of law.’
Without naming Graham’s stepfather as one source of the idea, Hardy outlined in some detail the suggestion that both Leland and Giotti had proposed as a defense. As a lawyer himself, Graham seemed to appreciate the distinction between admitting he’d done something and having a jury conclude he’d done the same thing. If he never admitted it, ever, to anyone, he would be legally blameless. He could resume his life with a clean slate.
They discussed the strategy until the lunch bell. Graham’s acquiescence was a nice surprise, especially after his earlier refusal to plead to essentially the same thing. But, as Graham pointed out, they weren’t the same thing at all.
Not in the eyes of the law.
Of course, there were great risks. Graham was charged with first-degree murder and, if convicted with special circumstances, would spend the rest of his life in prison. But Giotti’s offer seriously mitigated that risk.
They left it unresolved, but kept the door open.
Driving back uptown, Hardy was going around with it. It was starting to look as though his defense would be to admit that Graham, who couldn’t admit it himself, had committed a murder that in fact he hadn’t committed. For a reason that he didn’t have.
And this, if it worked, might set his client free.
The law, he thought, was a sublime and terrible thing.
Sarah Evans planned to take full advantage of yet another beautiful wrinkle in the system.
The city and county of San Francisco were physically coterminous; they shared the same geographic boundaries. This created interesting possibilities in the always complicated world of legal jurisdiction.
Practically, one of the results of this arrangement was that the jail was controlled by the county sheriff’s office, not by the city’s police department. Although it was directly behind the Hall of Justice, in what used to be part of the Hall’s parking lot, the jail might as well have been on the moon for all of its official connection to police events at Southern Station, which was the city’s name for the police presence at the Hall.
Sarah told Marcel Lanier she had some reports to catch up on after their shift – she’d hitch a ride home later. He left her working at her desk in the homicide detail.
At some time between six and seven the coming and going of other homicide inspectors slowed down, and Sarah cleared her desk, took the back steps out of the Hall, and walked around to the entrance to the jail, flashed her ID, and told the admitting deputy that she had to see Russo. She signed in, knowing that her bosses in the PD were unlikely to review the log. Attorney room B would be all right. She checked her weapon at the desk.
‘I can’t come here very often.’
They sat across the table from each other now, inspector and prisoner. Graham longed for her hands over the table, but knew he couldn’t.
A silence settled. They simply looked at each other. Graham told her he loved her. She bit at her lip and found she couldn’t respond. ‘What’s it like out there?’ he asked finally. ‘Outside.’
‘Windy. I’ve got a game tonight, you know. Thursdays.’ She sighed. ‘How are you holding up?’
‘Better now.’ But he couldn’t hide his uncertainty about it. ‘I think I got the right lawyer.’
Sarah nodded. ‘Did he tell you he talked to your brother? George won’t say where he was.’
A shake of the head. ‘Georgie didn’t kill Sal.’
‘Okay.’ She didn’t want to argue about it. She thought it was entirely possible, in fact, that George had killed Sal. Nothing Hardy had told her ruled him out in any way, and her training was to keep pushing until you got to something. ‘But I wish I could talk to him. I’d shake his tree a little harder than he’s used to.’
‘So why don’t you?’
‘I can’t. I’ve got no case. If I shake him down off duty and he complains, which he would, it’s harassment and there goes my job. Hardy’s trying to get my boss to move on it.’
‘Your boss?’
‘Lieutenant Glitsky – he and Hardy know each other. But it won’t matter. Glitsky won’t do it. There’s nothing to move on, especially since Glitsky’s already got a suspect in jail.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
‘I am looking at the other things, Graham. Craig Ising’s friends. The fish stuff.’
‘I know.’ Then, quietly. ‘I know you are.’
She could see him being brave and it was tearing her up. Say what she would about his chances at his trial, the fact remained that he was locked up, a prisoner. He wasn’t going out to play ball tonight the way she was. He was here, alone, scared. She felt like she had to hold him. He needed her. But she couldn’t do that, although if she stayed any longer, she might. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
The headache had been bad this morning and he’d gotten a call near dawn. He came right on down and gave Sal his shot. His father hated to shoot himself up. Hated it!
After that Sal slept and Graham read for a while, some magazine, passing the time, dozing a little himself. He didn’t have to be in at work until midafternoon and had come to love these times with his dad, even to depend on them, difficult as they sometimes were. In his dad’s presence he felt like he belonged somewhere. He was loved for who he was. He felt important, needed. It was as simple as that. He didn’t feel that way anywhere else.
He heard Sal stirring in his room down past the kitchen and a minute later he appeared. ‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘Still here. How about I take you down for lunch at the Grotto. I love their cioppino. Nobody makes cioppino better than Bruno Giotti.’
Halfway out of his chair, Graham sat back down, his stomach churning, and not over the mention of food. Since his father’s headaches had started, the bouts of forgetfulness had become more frequent as well, but this morning was more than forgetfulness. This, to Graham, was new.
‘Dad, the Grotto isn’t there anymore. It’s Stagnola’s now, remember?’
Sal laughed. ‘What kind of boy am I raising here? What are you talking about, you don’t know your own backyard? Come on, get up, fish don’t bite all day.’
To look at him there was no change. He ‘d even dressed, for Sal, with a degree of proper conservatism: tennis shoes and khaki slacks and a blue workshirt that had been pressed before he ’d taken a nap in it. ‘So we going or not?’
Graham was going to have to talk to Russ Cutler, he thought. He didn’t know what to do, how to handle this – humor Sal or dig his heels in. He just didn’t know.
‘Yeah, we’re going,’ he said.
He’d stick with him until this passed, if it did.
In the alley, getting into the truck, Sal had another idea. ‘Hey, why don’t we swing by the Manor, surprise Georgie and Deb, take ’em out with us? They love the Grotto.‘
‘They went out with Mom, shopping, remember?’
Sal didn’t seem entirely sure, but said, ‘Oh, that’s right. Well, we can still go.’
‘Sure. I’ll drive, okay?’
Again, Sal hesitated before accepting this, but finally climbed up into the cab. ‘That fucking Mario,’ he said conversationally.
‘Who?’
‘Giotti.’
‘The judge?’
Sal gave his boy a look. ‘What are you talking about, the judge? No, I’m talking Mario Giotti, Bruno’s kid.’ He gave his son a hard whack on the arm. ‘You been smoking something, bambino?’
‘No. Sorry. What about Mario?’ Graham was heading east on Mission, down to the old Embarcadero – now Herb Caen Way. He’d turn north at the Bay and head up along the piers to Fisherman’s Wharf. Maybe by the time they arrived, Sal would know where he was. ‘What about Mario?’ he repeated.
Sal was smiling, remembering something. ‘That fucking guy, he’s in at work last night in his suit and tie, cutting garlic, tomatoes. Can’t decide if he wants to stay and help his old man or go on in the law. I tell him stay and help his old man. Family, huh? That’s what counts.’
Graham nodded, let his lungs go. ‘Yeah. You went to the Grotto last night?’
‘Yeah, shit, after work. Get some courage before I go home. Your mother… well, I won’t say anything bad about your mom, but this life, me, you kids… it’s the only one she’s got, you know. Her mom and dad fucked her up so bad. Wasn’t for me, she’d be some dried-up old society lady, only sometimes she forgets that and I gotta remind her.’
Sal was right, Graham thought. Helen never should have stopped loving him, no matter what Sal had done. Family counts. She should be here with them now, in this truck. She should see this, help them both. But she wasn’t, couldn’t be. Not now, not anymore. And Graham knew it was a tragedy for her as well.
He reached over and laid a hand for a moment on his father’s knee. ‘She loves you, Sal.’
‘I know,’ he answered breezily, this man who hadn’t seen his wife in fifteen years. ‘But 1 got to talk to her, straighten her out. She s all mixed up. We ought to go home maybe.’ They were getting to the Wharf. ‘After lunch.’ It wasn’t yet noon in midweek and there were plenty of places to park in the lot. The ferry had just disgorged a stream of commuters and Sal bounced out of the cab. ‘We better shake it.’ Graham hustled next to him to keep up. ‘This crowd’s going to beat us, we don’t get a move on. Smell that cioppino. I love that smell, nothing better.’
They came to the door of Stagnola’s and stopped. Sal’s face dropped and he reached a hand out to Graham, as though he needed to be steadied. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. ‘This isn’t the Grotto!
‘I know, Dad. The Grotto’s closed.’
‘Well, that’s just bullshit! I was here last night. Mario was in the kitchen in his suit cutting tomatoes.’
Graham said nothing. He put his arm around Sal, but the old man twisted away and walked out into the street, turning back to look at the building. He stood there a long time, squinting in the bright sunlight.
Graham walked out to him and put his arm around him again. This time his father leaned into him. ‘This ain’t the Grotto,’ he whispered hoarsely, his voice skirting the edges of panic. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Graham shot up in his cot, breathing hard. He’d almost been asleep, almost been dreaming, wasn’t sure which.
In the jail most lights were out, but even here in his AdSeg unit there were always noises, always shadows.
Sal had slept in the cab again – another nap – and when he woke up he’d pulled out of it that day. Graham knew he should have done something right then. Sal had told him he would be going by the Manor, looking up Helen. He should have believed him. He should have done everything differently.
But he didn’t want to believe it. It was too hard. It was easier to deny the progress of the disease, to believe that Sal wasn’t quite gone yet mentally. He had more time. Graham had more time with him.
He lay flat on his back, his arm thrown over his eyes. He missed him horribly. This was the only time he had with Sal anymore.
Memories.