He was halfway across the lobby at Freeman’s office – the sun was bright in the Solarium – when Phyllis called out from the reception desk. ‘Oh, Mr Hardy.’
Turning on a dime, he marched to her desk. ‘Oh, Phyllis.’ He stared down at her as she looked up at him. ‘Someday you’re going to smile and I’m going to catch you and tell everybody.’
This wasn’t the time, though. The phones were ringing all over the switchboard and she pointed vaguely off behind her. ‘Mr Russo’s in his office. He wants to see you.’
Yoda figured that proximity to his own august self during the four months of the trial preparation had been proper training to turn Graham into his very own Jedi knight, and after a week off to reacclimatize to civilian life, the ex-defendant had come in to work at the Freeman Building as one of David’s associates. So much for Graham’s worries about being unhirable in the law.
Hardy took a scintilla of pleasure from the fact that Freeman had given Graham Michelle’s old office. The usurper was gone, and with her the memory (well, most of it) of what she’d done, what he hadn’t.
Remaining for a moment at the reception desk, Hardy was deciding if he should go upstairs first, check his answering machine. He was out hustling jobs now, had been all morning, all the past couple of weeks since the trial had ended. The endeavor had not been entirely unsuccessful.
Since the conclusion of Graham’s trial Hardy had reacquired a bit of star status in town. He’d gotten a lot of press, and calls had come in. He was looking forward to facing some of Dean Powell’s minions again; the attorney general had decided to save face with his constituency by prosecuting some (but not all) of the doctors who’d admitted to being involved with their patients’ deaths. Two of these doctors had come to Hardy. He wasn’t sure he wanted assisted suicide to become ‘his’ issue, but on a case-by-case basis a lawyer could do worse – and at best find himself on the side of the angels.
He was still billing far less than he needed to live on, although he had a few months’ reprieve. Hardy had a second time broken the first rule of defense law with Leland Taylor. Confident that he would win with Graham, and therefore that Leland would be favorably disposed to pay, he’d allowed him, after a generous retainer up front, to make monthly payments for Graham’s defense. His trust had been justified and the checks had been coming in every month. There was no reason to suspect that the next one wouldn’t arrive in a couple of weeks.
Since Hardy made three times his normal hourly rate when he was in court (though he’d told Graham it was only double), it looked to be a substantial payment, able to hold him over for a while. But Leland’s payment would come to an end after that, and he’d need more steady work lined up by the time it did. Freeman would probably try to throw something his way again, but all in all he’d prefer now to go it alone, get his own practice into high gear. It was about time, and perhaps some of that work was waiting upstairs.
But his feet took him to Graham’s. He knocked once and tried the door; associates didn’t lock doors in the Freeman Building.
Graham wore a light blue suit and had cut his hair so it just brushed his ears. He looked absurdly young, fit, and handsome, obviously sleeping better than he had for the past six months. The bags had disappeared from under his eyes. But close up Hardy could still discern a sallowness, leftovers from the jail pallor. And something else – a sense of lingering fatigue, or a new worry.
Hardy closed the door behind him. ‘Our dear Phyllis said you wanted to see me.’
‘Oh. Yeah.’ Two separate words. He blew out sharply. ‘Sal’s stuff is ready to get picked up.’
He gestured meaninglessly, but Hardy thought he knew what he meant. Sal’s ‘stuff,’ both from the evidence locker and the storage bin where the city had moved it, was another emotional hurdle in the marathon that was the aftermath of a murder trial.
Picking up the last of his father’s remains, going back to the Hall of Justice, where for so long he’d been in chains.
Hardy considered for about two seconds. It would probably take him most of the afternoon, but this personal stuff was more important than business. At least, he thought so – he was sure it was among his greatest failings. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Give me five minutes to check my messages.’
His voice mail had seven calls.
The third one was from a Jeanne Walsh, who said she was calling about the Joan Singleterry advertisement. She left her number, which Hardy tried immediately, although no one replied.
One of Graham’s first concerns after the verdict – and it endeared him to Hardy – was the distribution of the money to Joan Singleterry’s children if they could find her with one last advertising blitz.
George and Debra had been as skeptical as Hardy would have predicted about the existence of a Joan Singleterry, and Sal’s directive to give her his money.
But realizing that it was probably their best chance to get their hands on Sal’s money without a legal battle, the siblings had told Graham they would let him give Joan Singleterry one last good try if he would split up the funds should it fail. Graham knew that any litigation to preserve the money after that would only eat up most of it, so he finally agreed.
But their last run at Singleterry was to be a good one. Instead of going nationwide with a tiny classified ad in the personals column of thirty or forty publications – Hardy’s earlier strategy -they decided to take out a three-inch box in the sports sections of five of California’s largest newspapers and, for good measure, a two-inch box in The Wall Street Journal. The advertisement, paid for by most of the money Graham had stashed with Craig Ising, would run for one full week. That week had passed on Sunday, two days before.
For Hardy, getting a call on the Singleterry question did not automatically give rise to soaring hopes. He’d received half a dozen similar replies that had proven worthless before the trial. Nevertheless, it did get his blood going. The trial was over, but the failure to achieve any sense of closure had kept him up several nights since the verdict had come in.
Someone had killed Sal Russo and gotten away with it. He couldn’t shake the feeling that this connected somehow to Joan Singleterry. And, of course, it didn’t escape him that if Singleterry were connected to a murderer, she herself might already be dead, murdered. The advertisement itself might, in fact, subject her to mortal danger. For this reason they had kept the ad as simple as possible. The name Joan Singleterry, Hardy’s phone number, reward. No mention of Graham, Hardy, Sal. It would either work or it wouldn’t.
Since it was on the way to the Hall of Justice and its evidence lockup, Hardy and Graham stopped off at the facility where the city had put up the rest of Sal’s goods – what there was of them.
Now, within the past few years, with the Moscone Center and plans for the new Giants Stadium in China Basin, the South of Market area had developed pockets of hope, change, life. But a great deal of the real estate between Market Street and the Hall of Justice, and this included the Lions Arms, remained as it had been for decades: seedy, scabrous, and sad.
Graham punched his combination into the box by the cyclone fence and they pulled into the forlorn and soulless monthly storage rental facility. Peeling yellow stucco walls, rust-red corrugated iron doors. They drove slowly down one long row, around a corner, back up another one.
‘Nice place for a party,’ Hardy said. ‘Couple of balloons, maybe a tuba band. A little imagination and you could really have a good time here.’
Hardy had picked up the key to the unit from the city custodian over a week ago. He was to return it when they’d finished cleaning it out. Sal’s leftover goods from his apartment were in it, and Graham hesitated one last minute in the car – perhaps steeling himself against the weather, perhaps against a more powerful psychic storm – before opening his door. The wind was up in the midafternoon, sending grimy clouds of dust, soot, flotsam, swirling around the car. ‘Gotta do it,’ he said, almost to himself.
Hardy waited in the car while Graham worked the heavy padlock and threw the door all the way up.
The unit was tiny – six feet deep and maybe four feet wide, and even so it wasn’t nearly filled. With a minimum of talk they started a chain gang, lifting things and putting them into the open trunk of the BMW. Five or six boxes of books and bric-a-brac, kitchen and bathroom utensils, photo albums, a small closet’s worth of Salvation Army clothes. None of this had been tagged as evidence or figured as part of discovery, and Hardy realized with a stab that he’d never before seen any of it.
Not that he’d needed it, he consoled himself. He’d won. But still, it rankled. Graham reached down and passed him a rectangular piece of plywood.
‘Why’d they throw this in?’ Hardy asked. ‘I think I saw a Dumpster by the gate.’
Graham’s expression went from hurt to anger, then dissolved when he realized that Hardy was looking at the back, obviously thinking that one of the movers had thrown a random board onto Sal’s pile of junk. ‘Other side.’
Hardy turned it over.
The light was right and the painting leapt out at him through the grain of the plywood: the boat by the wharf with the small boy fishing with a broken pole from the flying bridge. ‘What is this?’ he asked.
Graham shrugged. He was holding another box, waiting for Hardy to put the painting into the trunk and resume loading. ‘One of Sal’s.’
‘Your dad painted this?’
Graham put his box down and came over, looking at the painting. ‘He was pretty good, wasn’t he?’
Hardy thought so. But more, he was interested in the background. ‘Where was this?’
‘His berth at the Wharf. When he still had the Signing Bonus – that’s his boat, there. You can still make out the name. See?’
‘What’s this, then?’ Hardy was pointing at the burned-out building in the background.
‘The old Grotto. Right after it burned down.’
‘Is that when he lost his boat? Did it get caught in the fire or something?’
‘No. I think he sold it for parts a long time later. It just wore out.’
‘But it looks worn out here, in this picture. Which would have been at the same time.’
A gust of wind came up, nearly pulling the board out of Hardy’s hands. Graham was shaking his head, placing something. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I know he painted it after the fire. We were in the Manor. He did it out in the garage.’ He stared at it for another beat. ‘He always loved that painting.’
‘And obviously it was hanging in his apartment?’
A nod. ‘Over the couch.’ Hardy was still mesmerized. ‘What?’ Graham asked.
‘It’s just a powerful image.’
Graham agreed. ‘Sal was pretty good. Maybe I’ll hang it in my place. You want to grab that last box?’
The evidence lockup was in the bowels of the Hall, a huge room that smelled like an old library where people would occasionally change their oil. With its gray-green paint and interior cyclone fence, its bare-bulb lighting and cacophonous resonance, it had all of the building’s usual institutional charm and then some.
Sarah was waiting by the sign-out counter. Out of force of habit Hardy had brought along his lawyer’s briefcase and leaned over to place it at his feet. When he looked up, he was initially shocked by the casual kiss of greeting that she and Graham gave each other. Then he realized that the duty officer down here probably wouldn’t recognize Graham anyway, and even if he did, why would he care? Graham was a free citizen again – he could kiss a cop if he wanted to.
It only took a couple of minutes. There was some paperwork that Sarah, as arresting inspector of record, had to sign.
‘So where’s Marcel?’ Hardy asked.
Sarah gave him the bad eye. ‘I took the afternoon off,’ she said, which answered his question. The ostracism over her involvement with a murder suspect was, he suspected, just beginning. In the week after the trial the story about her and Graham had hit the press with a fury.
Hardy didn’t think anyone here today wanted to pursue it, so he turned back to the counter. There were three cardboard boxes: two filled with the miscellaneous papers from Sal’s apartment, and the third, the smallest one, with the contents of the safe, carefully labeled S. Russo. #97-0101254, Safe. Evans/Lainer, Homicide in indelible black marker.
Graham opened this last one first and peered inside, then looked up and nodded, a shaky smile in place.
‘Still there?’ Sarah asked.
‘Most of it, at least.’
Sarah spoke to Hardy. ‘I told him it wouldn’t get stolen out of evidence. He didn’t believe me.’
‘She has a trusting heart,’ Graham said.
‘Lucky for you.’ Hardy pulled back the flaps and started laying the money out on the counter – stacks of hundred-dollar bills. ‘But it couldn’t hurt to check before we leave.’
Under the bulging eyes of the duty officer, who asked if they had arranged for a guard out of the building, Hardy took out the tightly wrapped bundles, ten of them.
Next he reached back in and pulled out a shoe box, blew the dust off, opened it. The baseball cards didn’t even fill it; newspaper was stuffed in at the end and on the sides to keep them from shaking around. Hardy reached in again and picked up the second shoe box and Graham put his hand in and rummaged around.
‘How about if we put the money back in?’ Sarah asked.
Hardy nodded. ‘How about if we put everything back in? It’s all here. Take it somewhere safe.’
‘That’s our plan,’ Graham said. He lifted out the old belt and dropped one end to let it hang, then put it around his waist. ‘You think I could find somebody to put a new buckle on this thing?’
Obviously, Graham was thinking of a memento of his father, although perhaps this belt wasn’t his most stylish option; it was of unfinished black leather, heavy and thick. Graham held it around his waist. ‘Little big for me, though.’ He sucked in his washboard stomach. He smiled, turned to Hardy. ‘It might fit you. You want to try it?’
Hardy iced him a smile. ‘I’d respond appropriately except that there’s a woman present.’
In the back lot they loaded the boxes into the backseat of Graham’s BMW, the trunk having been filled at the storage place. With Sarah as armed escort Graham planned to get himself a new safety deposit box ASAP, then they’d take the rest of the stuff to his place up on Edgewood and decide what they’d do from there.
Graham had asked if he wanted a lift back uptown, but Hardy wanted to call his Joan Singleterry connection again. He had not told Graham about the call; no sense in getting his hopes up if it was a dead end.
The Beemer was idling and Graham and Sarah were ready to go. Hardy couldn’t stop himself from asking, ‘What have you found out about the cards?’
‘I’m checking out the trade shows. It looks like they’re going to bring in forty or fifty.’
‘And you’re splitting that with George and Debra too?’
Graham gave him a shrug. ‘Without Singleterry, I’m afraid, it’s their money. What can I do?’
Sarah leaned over from the passenger side. ‘He’s even thinking of declaring his softball earnings.’
Hardy deadpanned. ‘Whoa! Don’t get all carried away on me now.’
‘I’ve reformed.’ Graham was dead serious. ‘I’m reporting every cent of income I make for the rest of my life. I’m going back and filing amended returns. I am never ever under any circumstances spending one more night in jail.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Here’s a perfect example of the beauty of our criminal system. You go to jail for a few months, you come out a better person.’
Back at his office he punched in the number again, and this time it picked up on the second ring.
‘Hello, Jeanne Walsh?’
‘Yes.’ A young woman’s voice. The crying of a baby in the background.
‘You called me in response to an advertisement in the newspaper?’
‘That’s right, I did. What’s this about? Do I get the reward? I could seriously use a reward.’
‘It’s possible,’ he temporized. ‘Actually, though, we were trying to find Joan Singleterry herself. Do you know her?’
‘Of course. That’s why I called. Joan Singleterry was my mother.’ The past tense sprang up at Hardy, immediately amplified. ‘She died about four years ago.’
‘Would you mind answering some questions about her?’
‘No. I don’t mind at all. Can I ask who I’m talking to, though?’
Hardy apologized. ‘My name is Dismas Hardy. I’m a lawyer in San Francisco.’
‘San Francisco? That’s a long way away.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Eureka.’
Hardy had been doodling on his legal pad. Now he decided to take a couple of notes. Eureka was an old lumber port, the county seat of Humboldt County, California, three hundred miles up the coast.
‘And did your mother live there, too, in Eureka?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she always live there?’
‘Just a second.’ She was gone from the phone and he heard her scolding. ‘No, no, no. Don’t put that in there, Brittany. Mommy will be off in a minute, okay?’
Hardy could relate. Jeanne came back to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, where were we?’
‘Did your mother always live in Eureka?’
‘Mostly. She was born here, then lived in San Francisco for a while, and then moved back. But her name wasn’t Singleterry when she was down there. It was Palmieri, Joan Palmieri. Then back up here she married Ron Singleterry.’
Hardy’s heart sank. ‘But when she lived in San Francisco, your mother’s name was Joan what?’
‘Palmieri.’ Jeanne spelled it. Hardy wrote it on his pad.
‘Do you know a man named Sal Russo?’
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Do you remember if your mother ever mentioned him?’
‘Sal Russo?’ She was silent a minute. ‘No, it doesn’t even ring a tiny bell. Was she supposed to know him? Does this mean I don’t get the reward? Brittany, don’t!’
Reward or not, the child was commanding more than half of Jeanne Walsh’s attention. Hardy should let her go and get on his own horse. This, finally, was a definite link to Joan Singleterry and a new name with which to conjure. Palmieri.
He thanked her and told her he’d get back to her, this time unable to entirely suppress the rush of excitement. His hunch was becoming a certainty. He didn’t know the exact mechanism, but Joan Singleterry was going to lead him to Sal Russo’s killer.
The whole family pitched in making chili, quesadillas, and tacos. Pico and Angela Morales came by with their three children. Young and old ate together at the same table.
The law went undiscussed.
The kids went down to sleep before eight-thirty, five of them on the floor in Rebecca’s room. When Pico and Angela woke up their clan to go home three hours later, Hardy and Frannie still had some energy and didn’t let it go to waste.
This morning he made his four-mile jog and walk with something approaching ease. The city had turned cold by California standards – the high today would be 55 degrees – so he brought wood up from the cord of oak underneath the house. While Frannie baked bread, he cleaned his fish tank.
With all the domesticity he didn’t arrive at the office until nearly noon. Among his messages was a call from another of the doctors who’d signed the published admission that he’d helped one or more of his patients die.
Hardy could see a groundswell developing here. Yesterday, he’d forgotten to return the padlock key for the storage unit to the city custodian, and he decided to use that as an excuse to go to the Hall.
The door to Glitsky’s office was open. He sat at his desk and appeared to be buried in paperwork. Hardy walked in with his briefcase in one hand and some hot tea in the other, and the lieutenant sat back and graciously accepted the offering. The two men hadn’t talked since the day of the verdict, and Sarah and Graham had not hit the gossip mills yet by then. Now, of course, they had.
Abe carefully sipped at the scalding liquid. ‘Why don’t you get the door?’ he asked conversationally. ‘God, I love the sound of that.’ When they were good and alone, he took another sip. ‘I guess you didn’t know about Evans and your client.’
Hardy kept a straight face. ‘What about them?’
Glitsky moved some paper around. ‘I suppose you thought that if I’d known they were an item, I might have been a little skeptical about her professional opinion regarding his guilt or not. Might not have sent her out to investigate other innocent civilians with my blessing.’
‘George wasn’t all that innocent. Besides, Graham wasn’t guilty. The jury said so.’
The lieutenant went to his tea, decided to say a few more words. ‘She was a good cop. She had to be to get here. But you don’t sleep with your suspects.’
‘I never have, but I’d agree it’s good advice.’
Glitsky nodded again. This was pointless. What happened between Evans and Graham Russo hadn’t been Hardy’s doing. It was galling that Hardy had possibly – hell, probably; hell, definitely - known all about it for months and hadn’t mentioned a thing to Glitsky.
But then Glitsky realized that a part of it, perhaps the biggest part, was his own fault. It wasn’t Hardy who’d cut off the communication they’d always had – it was himself. He sipped more tea, settled back into his chair. ‘And this visit today is about?’
‘I honestly thought you’d never ask.’
‘Surprise,’ Glitsky said. ‘It’s a cop tool.’
‘Hey, that reminds me. Knock, knock.’
Glitsky shook his head. ‘No.’
‘No, really, come on. Humor me. One time. Knock, knock.’
Glitsky hesitated another second. There was no getting around Hardy. He’d just sit there with his shit-eating grin and keep repeating ‘Knock, knock’ until he got an answer. He growled it out. ‘All right, Jesus, who’s there?’
‘Interrupting cow.’
‘Interrupting co-’
‘Mooo!’
In a major victory for the defense Hardy got Glitsky to crack a tenth of a smile. ‘All right,’ the lieutenant said, ‘that wasn’t bad. I see you’re playing with your kids again. How are they? I ought to bring Orel by.’
Actually, with the trial over now and the first hectic weeks of school out of the way, his kids were giving him a period of joy. Last night, good as it had been, was becoming almost typical. Vincent actually preferred that Hardy tuck him in nowadays rather than Frannie, and miraculously, he’d been home a lot of nights to do just that. It seemed to make a difference to the boy, Dad being around with some regularity. Rebecca continued to be his darling.
‘Anytime,’ Hardy said. ‘They love Orel. But now, to the singular purpose of this particular business call.’ He grabbed his briefcase and pulled it up to his lap, unsnapping the clips. It was the first time he’d opened it since he’d left Graham and Sarah in the parking lot yesterday afternoon.
He couldn’t help laughing. Somehow – probably while Hardy was busy helping with loading the boxes yesterday in the parking lot – Graham had slipped Sal’s belt into his briefcase.
‘What?’ Glitsky sat forward in his chair, wanting to know. Hardy was just a bundle of laughs today. It wasn’t natural.
He pulled it out. ‘Among the contents of Sal Russo’s safe.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a belt, Abe. What’s it look like?’
‘In Sal Russo’s safe?’
Hardy nodded. ‘We just got it out of the evidence lockup yesterday.’
‘What’s it doing in your briefcase?’
Hardy avoided that. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff I accumulate in here.’
Glitsky held out his hand. Hardy stood and passed the belt over the desk. ‘You want it?’ he asked, keeping the joke running. ‘Maybe it’ll fit you.’
The lieutenant wasn’t smiling. ‘What was this evidence of?’
‘Nothing. We never used it.’
‘Though of course you checked it out?’
Hardy cocked his head. Suddenly Glitsky was interested and that made him interested. ‘Of course. Before they tool belts they call them blanks. This is one of them. Anyway, there’s no tannery mark, except that E-2 punch in the back. Nobody I talked to knew what that stood for, not even Freeman, and Freeman knows everything. Best we could come up with was a friend of Sal’s was going to make him a belt and the old man picked out the blank, then the other guy never got around to it.’ Glitsky stared across at him. The scar had gone pale across his lips, a sign of tension. ‘It might not be anything,’ he said, ‘but North Beach Station – all their stuff, they punch E-something on it, just like this. North Beach Station is E-2.’
‘The North Beach police station?’
‘No.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Fire.’
A line drawn from the Hall of Justice to Hardy’s office on Sutter Street would almost intersect the administrative offices of the main fire station on Golden Gate Avenue. Hurriedly grabbing a cab uptown, Hardy couldn’t help but notice, and thought it provocative, that that same line would probably cut through both Mario Giotti’s chambers and the living room in Sal Russo’s apartment.
Escaping his attention until this moment – it was, after all, an imaginary line – now he couldn’t shake the conviction that this might be the axis around which the Russo case revolved.
It had gotten late, he wasn’t sure how. He did finally return the storage-room key, then ran into some attorneys outside the municipal courtrooms who wanted to talk about the case, buy him some drinks, which he refused.
Then Jeff Elliot appeared outside the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall and another forty minutes or so went away. He tried to keep a lid on what he was thinking, knowing that unless you wanted to leak something specific or start a rumor, and that wasn’t his intention now, it wasn’t a good policy to speculate to newspaper reporters.
Now, somehow, it was nearly five o’clock. He was relieved that he had made it to the building before the main fire department offices would close.
A bright sun flirted with the tops of Twin Peaks, but the day itself continued truly cold. The biting wind of the previous afternoon had picked up steam and an attitude coming across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, erasing the last memories of Indian summer.
Hardy hurriedly thrust some bills at the cabbie. Briefcase in hand, he half ran two at a time up the wide steps leading into the building.
In the lobby the late-afternoon glare against the polished right-hand wall was blinding. Shading his eyes, he found the office he wanted on the opposite wall and walked in.
For a city office the place appeared to run very well. Hardy was approaching the counter when a uniformed young black woman saw him, stood up at one of the desks, came around it, and asked if she could help him.
‘This might be unusual,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to know if you can identify something for me.’ He took out the belt and placed it on the counter.
Picking it up, she turned it over once or twice, noted the E-2 stamp on one side, put it back down. ‘This is a hose-and-ladder strap,’ she said as if she saw one every day, and maybe she did. ‘We use ’em to wrap up gear on the trucks. This one’s stamped by North Beach station. Where’d you get it?‘
Hardy kept it vague. ‘A friend of mine had it,’ he said. ‘He gave it to me. I thought I might make it into a belt.’
The woman laughed. ‘This old thing? You’d have to cut off half of it first. Repolish it. Get it tooled.’
This had been Glitsky’s second point, which Hardy felt he should have seen much earlier. The ‘belt’ was far too big for Graham or for Hardy, and Sal had been a wiry old man. What had made Hardy think it would fit him, that it was a belt in the first place?
The woman was turning it in her hand again, then snapped it a time or two. ‘Besides, it’s pretty brittle,’ she said. ‘Your friend must have had it a long time. Did he say where he got it?’
‘I think he found it left behind at a fire scene,’ Hardy said. ‘Forgot to return it.’
She gave him another smile, obviously assuming that Hardy’s ‘friend’ was himself, that guilt over the stolen strap had finally caught up with him. ‘I don’t think North Beach would use it anymore. You might as well hang on to it. Or I could just throw it away here. It won’t make much of a belt.’
‘I’ll bring it back to him,’ Hardy said. ‘Maybe it’s got sentimental value.’
She gave him a dubious look, handed the strap back to him. ‘Maybe. Is that all you need?’
‘I think so. Would North Beach know where they lost this? Or when?’
‘I don’t know that. You could go and ask them. Maybe they keep some kind of inventory of losses, something like that. Stations do things differently. But that thing is old. I’d be surprised.’
Hardy was wrapping it around his hand. He slipped it off and put it back into his briefcase, snapping the clips. ‘Me too.’ There was nothing else to say. ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been a big help.’
He walked back out into the lobby, took a few steps, and came to a stop. For a moment he considered turning around and going right back down to Glitsky’s office. Since Graham’s release Sal Russo’s death was again an unsolved homicide, and in theory Abe ought to be interested in any evidence related to it.
Except that now, thanks to Hardy’s efforts, the entire city believed the story that Graham had killed his father out of mercy. Nobody – except possibly Graham himself, Sarah, and Hardy – nobody was looking for a killer anymore. The case, although technically still open and unsolved, was concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.
Even to Glitsky’s.
Subliminally aware that people were beginning to stream out of the elevators and offices around him at the end of the workday, Hardy felt strangely rooted to where he was. He didn’t want to lose his train of thought. If he was going to bring up anything about this case with an eye to another suspect, he would need a lot more than this hose-and-ladder strap.
But he did have an idea where he might get just that. First he’d go back down to the Chronicle and re-examine the archives related to the fire at Giotti’s Grotto. It might have been months before the date on the wrapped money, but months, after all this elapsed time, was close enough. Without the strap any connection between that fire and Sal was a tenuous stretch. With it Hardy thought he had a causal link that was compelling. It was damn near conclusive of something. He just couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.
He would turn Sarah loose on it too. She wouldn’t share any of Glitsky’s reluctance. Whoever had killed Sal Russo was her enemy, her man’s torturer, and Sarah was going to bring that person down if she could.
Could it have been Giotti? Hardy visualized the affable and brilliant jurist. He could, though it was a big ‘maybe,’ imagine the judge helping Sal kill himself, as Hardy had argued that Graham had. Try as he might, though, and much as the symmetry appealed to him, he couldn’t see Giotti murdering Sal. Not struggling with his oldest friend who was now a feeble old man, then knocking him out, fatally injecting him with morphine.
And that, Hardy reminded himself, is precisely what had happened, regardless of the story he’d made so convincing to the jury, to the city at large.
Far to the west the sun finally kissed Twin Peaks, then abruptly dropped below them. Downtown fell into shade as though somebody had drawn the blinds; the glare that had been bathing the lobby off the polished wall vanished. The startling sudden dimness, the transformation in the feel of the cavernous room, pulled Hardy, blinking, from his thoughts.
Automatically it seemed, his eyes went to the wall – etched marble with gilt inlay. Here were the names of those who’d died fighting fires in the city since before the Great Earthquake and Fire of ‘06.
The lobby had mostly cleared. Echoing footsteps from behind him, muffled voices carrying from a great distance.
Hardy stood transfixed, a premonition tickling at the edges of his consciousness. He moved a step closer to the wall, focusing down from his wide angle.
Another step, feeling it somehow before he recognized anything. It was here.
And then, suddenly jumping out, appearing as out of a Magic Eye poster, there it was.
He blinked again, now forcing himself to slow down. To make sure of what he was seeing.
R-A-N-D-A-L-L.
One letter at time, he told himself. Don’t miss one and get it wrong. Not now.
G.
Okay. Stop and make sure. He raked the name slowly, left to right.
P-A-L-M-I-E-R-I.
It was just a name on a wall. But he knew that it was more, much more: it was the key to everything.
Randall Palmieri could have died in 1910 or 1950 for all Hardy could be sure, but he was certain that wasn’t the case. His bones and heart knew that Palmieri had died in November of 1979, fighting the fire that had burned down the Grotto.
He retraced his steps back to the fire department’s door, but it was closed now, locked up.
Timing, he thought; life’s little reminder that you couldn’t control a damn thing.
He looked at his watch – five-ten. He was furious at the efficient office he’d admired fifteen minutes before. He bet the fire department opened punctually at nine too.
All but running now, he descended the front steps and hailed another cab.
Insane frustration.
The Chronicle archives were also closed for the day by the time he arrived there. From a pay phone across the street he placed a call to Jeff Elliot, who he hoped would be working late in the basement. Jeff always worked late. He worked early. He worked all the time. Hardy’s plan was that he would give Jeff the scoop first. The columnist would be satisfied with that. It was the way things were done.
But, of course, Jeff wasn’t in. Hardy didn’t even leave him a voice mail message. He wanted answers now. He’d waited long enough.
Without giving it much thought he got the number of the federal courthouse – another government office sure to be closed – and found that it was. He got a recording.
Which didn’t mean that no one was working in the building. All right, perhaps the receptionists and some secretaries had gone home, but Hardy knew the law business and it was an absolute certainty that the judges’ offices at the federal courthouse were little beehives of activity even as he stood here shivering. Graham had told him that while he’d been clerking for Harold Draper, there had been times when he hadn’t gone outside the building for three days in a row.
So someone was there.
His instincts were telling him to slow down now. Fate was lobbying to make him stop. Nobody was around. The message was loud and clear: This wasn’t the propitious moment. It wasn’t meant to be. He should stop and think about the implications of all his discoveries and hunches and methodically follow things up tomorrow and the next day and the one after that.
But he was so close. So close. He felt it. Suddenly he couldn’t wait. It was right here and it would escape if he gave it the chance. He couldn’t do that.
Rather than fight for another parking space, he legged it down Mission a couple of blocks, freezing now in the stiff gale. Jaws clenched, he told himself that all his working out over the past months was finally paying off. He made it to the courthouse in under five minutes.
This time he was unmoved by the immensity of the building, the solid bronze doors that extended to over twice his height, the iron lanterns that had come from some Florentine palace. These doors, as he’d expected, were closed. But there was the other entrance by the gate to the parking area, in front of the Lions Arms, in the alley.
The security guard had seen it a hundred times. Here was some frantic lawyer who’d missed a deadline, waving him over, wanting to get into the building, perhaps have his brief accepted although it was half an hour late. The odds of that, he knew, were slim and none.
‘Is Judge Giotti still in? I’d like to see him.’
‘Business hours are over, I’m afraid.’
‘This isn’t strictly business. It’s not court business.’
‘Is the judge a friend of yours?’
The lawyer seemed to think about it. Maybe he was a friend of the judge’s and didn’t want to presume on it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He asked me to keep him up on the progress of a case of mine. I’ve got a few things to tell him about.’
The guard looked Hardy up and down. The rule was ‘When in doubt, don’t’. The judges got a lot of their work done after the formal workday, and all of them hated being interrupted. But if this guy was a friend of Giotti’s…
Of course, if he were a friend, he’d have a private number. On the other hand, he wasn’t pushing, really, though he was cold right at the moment and probably wouldn’t mind being inside. ‘You want to wait a sec, I’ll go check with his office, see if anybody’s there.’
‘They wouldn’t even take a message?’ Graham didn’t have a high regard for the denizens of the federal courthouse in any case, but even he was surprised that no one had come down to talk to Hardy.
‘Apparently they were busy.’
Hardy had cooled off, figuratively, since striking out with Giotti’s office too. He was back on Sutler Street, at his desk. Graham had come up on his summons. It wasn’t much after six in the middle of the week, and the gristmill was humming along nicely. Hardy’s original inclination was to get Graham to help him do some research on this ancient fire situation. He could use Sarah’s help too.
But in the middle of venting his frustrations Hardy had changed his mind. He wouldn’t be giving anything else away in this case until he’d narrowed it down somewhat. If the fire had been important in Graham’s life, Hardy would give him the opportunity to talk about it. But if it hadn’t, he didn’t want Graham and Sarah asking around indiscriminately, raising warning flags for whomever he was hunting.
This investigation now, finally, was something Hardy felt he had to keep under his own close control. The outline of what he sought was still fairly nebulous. He reminded himself that Jeanne Walsh had never heard of Sal Russo; her mother, Joan Singleterry, had never mentioned him. Perhaps, even, Graham’s Joan Singleterry had never been Joan Palmieri. He had to get all that straight first.
Graham had picked up his darts and threw the first one. Bull’s-eye. He almost didn’t seem to notice. ‘Why’d you want to see Giotti?’
Hardy kept it vague. ‘That painting of Sal’s. It got me thinking. I wanted to ask him again about the Grotto fire. Do you remember much about it?’
Graham shook his head. ‘I was fifteen. If you couldn’t bat it or throw it, it didn’t exist for me.’
‘The fire obviously made an impression on Sal.’
‘That’s just the way he was, Diz. Things affected him.’ He threw another dart, got another bull’s-eye. ‘That painting, to me, it’s the loss of innocence in general. The fire’s just another symbol. The ruined boat in the foreground, the boy with the broken pole. You notice all the garbage in the water? He’s painting the thing out in the garage while he and Mom are breaking up. Think about it. It’s impressionistic. It’s his whole world breaking up.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Hardy said.
After Graham left, he tried calling Jeanne Walsh again. She hadn’t bought an answering machine since yesterday, or if she had, she’d neglected to plug it in.
It wasn’t his night. He was going home.
When he opened the door to his house, it was almost eerily silent and he listened for a minute, then called out. ‘Frannie!’
Furtive noises from the back of the house. ‘Frannie. Kids. Dad’s home.’
In seconds he was in the kitchen. ‘Anybody here?’
Muffled giggling – at least recognizable as benign – from farther back. He walked through the master bedroom and into Vincent’s, which had been transformed into an impenetrable maze of blankets, pillows, ropes strung from bed to chairs to bookshelves. He lifted up one of the blankets and looked under. ‘Hey, guys.’
Rebecca held a finger to her lips. ‘Shh!’
‘Where’s Mom?’ he whispered.
‘I don’t know. Shh!’
This was not Hardy’s favorite answer, but since a game was obviously in progress he didn’t want to be a spoilsport, so he stood up and turned around.
‘Mr Hardy? Hi.’
It took him a moment. This was Mary, their baby-sitter, having come out of hiding from wherever. What was she doing here? ‘I’s Frannie all right?’ he asked foolishly.
The girl’s face was all confusion. ‘I guess so. Weren’t you meeting her someplace? That’s what she said.’
It was all coming back to him. It was Wednesday night. Date Night. He was picking Frannie up at the Shamrock at seven. His mind, in its dance of frustration and speculation, had spun that little fact out of its galaxy. He’d not so much forgotten as absolutely misplaced the information.
He looked at his watch – seven-twenty – and gave Mary an apologetic grin. ‘Sorry to break in on you like this. My brain’s turned to mush. I’ve got to use the phone.’
They were at Stagnola’s. Hardy and Frannie never ate on the Wharf, although the food was often wonderful. It was just such a tourist place, with traffic hassles and exorbitant parking rates. There were dozens of other spots offering great food in the city. Tonight, though, Hardy felt as though he needed to be here.
He also felt like he’d traveled a hundred miles in the past three-plus hours – from the Hall of Justice to the fire department main office, back to the Chronicle. Then the jog to the Federal Building and back. His office. Driving his own car all the way across town to his home in the Avenues, almost to the beach. Now halfway back downtown to the Shamrock to meet the long-suffering Frannie.
Until at last he was settled at his table, Chianti poured, tucking into an antipasto plate – pepperoncini, salami, mortadella, provolone, artichoke hearts, olives, caponata. Hot sourdough rolls by the basket. Heaven.
She’d given him several rations of grief since he’d finally arrived to pick her up. ‘No, I understand, lots of times I’ll get caught up in things around the house and forget that you exist too. Then I’ll snap my fingers and go, “Oh, that’s right, Dismas.” ’ Et cetera.
Since Hardy felt he basically deserved it, he’d let her go on. Except now it had all wound down, she was holding his hand over the table, glad they were together. He had to tell her, bounce it off her, see where he didn’t have it right.
She listened carefully, then went another way. ‘I think you should turn it over to the police.’
‘What, exactly?’
‘Whatever you’ve got. Let them go with it. Give it to Abe. This is what he does, Dismas.’
But Hardy was shaking his head. ‘No, it’s not. He’s got to have a murder, a case.’
‘How about Sal Russo? Doesn’t he count?’
‘Sure, he counts. But I don’t have any proof of anything that would get him involved. All I’ve got is this hose-and-ladder belt, a fire in this place eighteen years ago, a dead fireman who might or might not have been at this fire.’
‘And fifty thousand dollars.’
‘So what? Nobody stole that from Sal, as a matter of fact. He had it when he died. Or Graham did, which is the same thing.’
Frannie sipped wine. ‘But you think they’re related?’
A nod. ‘They’ve got to be. I’ve just got to find out where a few things connect.’
‘Just.’
He shrugged.
‘All I’m saying is you might want to run it by Abe. Have him look up this Palmieri, call the woman in Eureka-’
‘Hassle a sitting federal judge.’ He knew Abe, knew he didn’t have enough. ‘Abe won’t do it, not yet, maybe not ever.’
Frannie’s point was well taken, though, and in a day or two, after he’d secured his inferences, that’s exactly what he’d do. He had no desire to get close to cornering a murderer. That was police work. It could be very unhealthy.
But he didn’t yet think it was Giotti. Or rather, he didn’t want to think it was Giotti, although he was convinced that the judge had some information that would move things along. Information that, whether he knew it or not, he’d somehow kept out of Hardy’s scrutiny. That’s all he needed – to talk to him.
The waiter had earlier introduced himself as Mauritio. He was one of those personable, talk-your-ear-off, swarthy and handsome older men in a tuxedo that you’re either in the mood for or not. Now he came up to ask them about their dinner.
Hardy broke his most disarming smile, squeezed Frannie’s hand gently, cueing her to be cool. She gave him a warning look; as if she wouldn’t be. ‘Does Judge Giotti still eat here all the time?’
‘Oh, yeah. They’re in here a couple of times a week for lunch, he and his wife. You a friend of the judge’s’ – he pointed at the Chianti – ’that bottle’s on the house.‘
‘I don’t know if he’d call me a friend. I’m a lawyer. But he’s a good judge. He raves about the food here.’ Hardy motioned down at his empty plate. ‘This antipasto, he’s right. He’s a great guy.’
‘The best,’ Mauritio replied.
‘Did I hear this place used to be in his family?’
‘Yeah. Long time ago. Used to be Giotti’s Grotto.’ Mauritio’s tired face took on a little more life. ‘Believe it or not, I used to bus tables back then.’
Hardy shamelessly flattered the man. ‘Before they had child labor laws?’ Frannie squeezed his hand – don’t pile it on too thick. ‘So you must have known Sal Russo too?’
Mauritio’s brow darkened briefly, but cleared when Hardy explained that he was the lawyer who’d gotten Sal’s son off.
‘Well, damn,’ Mauritio said, ‘that bottle is on us. That was good work. Poor Sal. Pray to God my son could do what his son did, I ever need it. What’s your name again?’
They went through the introductions. Then Hardy asked if Sal had been around during the Grotto years.
‘Oh, yeah. He and the judge, they were like this.’ Two fingers together. ‘Salmon Sal.’ A shake of the head, a wistful tone. ‘What happened to him, huh? But at least it was over fast. Any more time on the street, something worse might have happened.’
Hardy shot a look at his wife, went back to Mauritio. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, you know, at the end, the last few months, the guy was a real pain. Last time I snuck him a lunch here, back in the kitchen, he wound up wanting to fight me over some bet we must have made twenty years ago. I didn’t even remember it, something about Roberto Clemente, for Christ’s sake. So I break him the news that Roberto’s been gone awhile and suddenly he’s all over me, I owe him a large one, he’s gonna kick my ass.’ Mauritio smiled over at Frannie. ‘Scuse me the language.’
‘It’s all right.’ Her brilliant smile. ‘If I hadn’t heard it before, I wouldn’t know what it meant, would I?’
Hardy figured Mauritio was halfway to abiding love for his wife. He was going on. ‘Anyway, the poor guy. He makes a scene, I kick him out, so he’s yelling at me by the back door, says he gonna tell all the guys I’m a welsher. And I just made the guy a free lunch.’ He shook his head in commiseration. ‘You knew he couldn’t help it. You couldn’t hold it against him, but you didn’t want him around. It was probably better he went out when he did. His boy did him a big favor.’
After dinner, a couple more questions.
‘So the Grotto, it burned down or something?’
‘To the ground. Saddest night of my life. Nobody could believe it.’
‘Why not?’
He shrugged. ‘I mean, the old man, the judge’s father – fire was what scared him most. We had more hydrants and safety systems than anybody. Then the one time we need ’em, they don’t work worth a damn.‘
‘It’s a universal law,’ Hardy said. ‘Where’d it start?’
A sigh. ‘Kitchen, they think. Then just took off. One of the fireman died, even. Horrible. Well’ – he clapped his hands lightly – ‘hey, enough of this. You folks eat good? I see the judge, I’ll tell him you came by.’
As soon as Frannie had taken the kids out the door to school, he was at the kitchen table. With his wide-ranging if temporary amnesia yesterday, he was almost surprised that he’d remembered to throw Jeanne Walsh’s telephone number into his briefcase. But he had.
She picked up on the second ring. There was no baby noise in the background, and she sounded more relaxed. ‘Mrs Walsh, this is Dismas Hardy again. The lawyer from San Francisco?’
‘Sure. The reward. I remember.’
Might as well feed her the sugar first. ‘That’s what I’m calling about. The reward may not be out of the picture. I’d like to ask you a couple more questions, if I may. Do you have a minute?’
‘I hope so. Brittany’s down for a nap. She’s really pretty good most of the time. I don’t know why she was so cranky yesterday. Maybe she’s teething.’
Hardy was right back with her to the days of infancy, when there was nothing else in life but your child and its health and habits. Even the prospect of a reward, while possibly interesting, couldn’t hold a candle. ‘I’m sure she’s wonderful,’ Hardy said, ‘but I did want to ask you about your mother. You said when she was in San Francisco, she was Joan Palmieri? Was that her maiden name, or was she married before?’
A nervous laugh. ‘Didn’t I say that? No, I guess not. Yeah, she was married to my dad. My natural father, not Ron.’
Hardy was getting confused with all the names. ‘Ron?’
‘Ron Singleterry.’
‘But Palmieri?’
‘Palmieri was my own maiden name.’
Okay, he thought. Getting there. ‘And was your dad’s first name Randall?’
‘Randy, yes. How did you know?’
‘And he was killed in a fire at Giotti’s Grotto in 1979?’
‘Yeah, that was my father. I was just a baby then. Well, four or five I must have been, but I don’t really remember him. That’s why we moved back up here. Mom wanted to start over, I think. It was probably a good idea. It worked out pretty well for her. Ron was a good guy.’
Hardy had been taking notes, writing it all down. ‘But you still don’t remember anyone named Sal Russo?’
‘No. I thought about it all last night, I tell you. I even called my sister, but she didn’t remember it either.’
Hardy was closing in on it. Sal had referred to Joan Singleterry’s children – plural – not to her child. And now that was confirmed. ‘Do you have other family, Jeanne?’
‘No. Well, I mean my own family, Johnny and Brittany. But otherwise there’s just my sister Margie. Margie Sanford now.’
‘Okay, one or two more, if you don’t mind. How about Mario Giotti, that name? Do you know him?’
She laughed. ‘I will if we need to.’
‘You don’t need to. You’re doing fine. The reward doesn’t depend on you knowing Mario Giotti.’
‘That’s a relief, because I don’t.’
‘Never heard of him?’
‘Nope. Sorry.’
Me, too, Hardy thought.
But he’d gotten a lot more than he’d have dared hope for even a couple of days before. He ran more names at her. Brendan or Debra McCoury. Graham Russo. George Russo. Leland and Helen Taylor. Everybody he could think of – he almost said David Freeman. You just never knew. She didn’t know any of them.
He told her to hang tight. She appeared to be the child of the Joan Singleterry they were seeking. He’d get back to her.
But what was the connection? How had Sal known Joan? He poured himself a cup of espresso, working the possibilities.
Randy Palmieri had been killed in the fire at the Grotto. The Grotto had been owned by the Giotti family until a few months after it burned down. A mysterious fire that had eluded a state-of-the-art detection and sprinkling system started in the kitchen and wiped out the whole place. Sal Russo had kept a memento of that fire with him until he died, as well as fifty thousand dollars in cash, wrapped and dated a few months later.
On the personal side, Sal’s marriage had ended at about the same time. He no longer felt noble or special or whatever it was he’d always felt, no longer had the heart to stand up to the forces represented by Leland Taylor. He didn’t deserve Helen and their wonderful children anymore. She was right to cast him off. He wouldn’t even try to see his children anymore.
He had more than failed, he had fallen.
And in the present, Sal was more and more living in his past – where now perhaps he could undo his past sins, repay his past debts, reclaim his old love. It was happening now, all of this, his life.
And it made Sal, as Mauritio had said, a pain in the ass. Perhaps more than that as his mind slipped away, as he forgot what he was supposed to keep hidden and secret, as he remembered what he’d promised to forget.
Perhaps Sal had become a danger.
At the fire department office the same efficient woman helped him. ‘The hose-and-ladder strap was something else, wasn’t it?’
Mild chagrin. He’d been caught in his fib. ‘I really hate to admit this,’ he said, ‘but the truth is that I’m a lawyer. I was trying to be slick. It’s an occupational hazard.’
It rolled right off her. ‘So it wasn’t your friend’s belt?’
‘No.’ He got serious. ‘I found this out since last night. I believe the strap came from a fire that killed a man, Randall Palmieri. He’s on your wall out there. I wondered if I could talk to your Widows and Orphans person, find out a little how that works.’
‘You can just keep talking to me,’ she said. ‘I’m the information officer.’
‘I want to verify the identity of the man’s offspring. There’s a substantial reward involved. I think maybe they could use it. If a fireman dies on the job, I suppose there’s some kind of pension or settlement?’
The woman nodded. ‘Palmieri?’
Hardy nodded and spelled it for her. ‘Randall G.’
‘I’ll be right back.’
He waited at the counter for about five minutes, at which time she returned with a black binder. ‘Sorry that took so long,’ she said, ‘I wanted to ask my boss how confidential this stuff was.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t give you addresses or anything without a court order, but if you give me a name, I can tell you if it’s here. That’s all you said you needed?’
Hardy would have to take what he could get. ‘Essentially, yes. Randall Palmieri,’ he repeated.
She opened to the page and waited.
Hardy didn’t need his written notes. ‘His wife’s name was Joan and she moved to Eureka and married a Ron Singleterry. She had two children, Jeanne and Margie, since married with different names.’
The woman nodded. ‘That’s what I have.’
‘Do they still get the pension, the daughters?’
‘No. The benefit ends with the death of the spouse.’
‘So they’re not getting any money anymore, any help?’
‘Not from us.’ The woman was still looking down at the page, then came up at him. ‘I don’t see how this could hurt. If you want more information, there’s a trust listed here, cross-referenced. The Singleterrys may have been getting money from it, too, on top of the pension. Maybe they’d be free to tell you more about it.’
‘Okay, thanks. Where’s this trust located?’ She read it out. ‘It’s called the BGG Memorial Trust of 1981. It’s administered, let’s see… oh, it’s only a couple of blocks away, at Baywest. You could probably walk right over.’
He didn’t want to see anyone, least of all either David Freeman or Graham Russo, but both of them were hanging around the lobby when he got to his building at a little after eleven. There was no avoiding them, but he could try to keep it short and sweet. He put on his best harried air, ostentatiously looked at his watch.
‘I’m running through here…guys, on the way to someplace else. I’ve got an appointment at lunch. Big dollars, David, you’ll be proud of me at last.’
Phyllis looked disapprovingly over her bank of phones. Too much noise. Hardy ignored her. ‘But, Graham, you might want to call your brother and sister, advise them not to go spending their inheritance money. We’ve got a real lead on Joan Singleterry. I’ll tell you all about it later.’ He kept moving toward the stairs, climbing.
Graham tailed behind him. ‘But that’s what I wanted to tell you.’
Hardy stopped, turned. Graham was brushing by him, two steps at a time. ‘I left it in your office.’
Feigned outrage. ‘You broke into my office?’
At the top of the stairs Graham grinned back down at him. ‘It’d be harder if you locked it.’ The young man was excited; clearly he’d found something. ‘We would have called you last night but it was after nine-thirty. We figured you old guys were already asleep.’
‘Get out of my way.’
Graciously, still beaming, Graham let Hardy open his own door. He crossed to the desk and in the middle of the blotter found a large article, stapled together, from an old copy of the Chronicle. Nineteen eighty-eight.
While he read, Graham was filling him in. ‘So we had all these boxes, mostly just junk and paper, taking up room. Sarah thought we ought to go through everything in them, page by page, throw away everything we didn’t want. Clean the place up.’
Hardy glanced up at him. ‘And I think I live a wild life, going to bed at nine-thirty and all.’
‘I didn’t say it was all we did. Anyway, Sarah found that.’
It was one of those follow-up stories the papers sometimes run: ‘What Happened To?’ or ‘Life After…’ This one concerned the patched-together lives of six women whose husbands had been killed doing their jobs in the prime of their lives. A construction worker, two cops, a race-car driver, a charter pilot, and Randy Palmieri, fireman.
‘This guy’s wife, Joan Palmieri,’ Graham was saying, ‘she moved to Eureka and married a man named Ron Singleterry.’
‘And her husband, I notice, was killed in the Grotto fire.’
‘She’s got to be our Joan Singleterry,’ Graham said.
‘She is.’
Graham went mute for a beat. ‘You know about her?’
‘A little. That’s what I wanted to tell you about.’
‘The only thing is,’ Graham said, ‘I called information in Eureka, she isn’t listed. There’s no Singleterry there, no Palmieri either.’
No, Hardy thought, but there’s a Walsh and a Sanford and you don’t need to know that right now. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s someplace to start. Look, I’ve really got to run. We’ll get to it later.’
But Graham, this close to something, didn’t want to let him go. ‘Wait a minute. What did you find?’
‘Same thing, different story. Chronicle archives. I’m going to see if I can talk to Mario Giotti today, see how Sal was connected to the fire at the Grotto. If he was.’
‘You don’t think Sal started it by mistake, do you? Got drunk or something?’
‘No,’ Hardy said honestly. ‘No, I don’t think that.’
But at last he now knew the mechanism by which Sal had come to know Joan Palmieri’s married name. He knew, as he would say, how it was all connected.
‘Mr Hardy.’ Judge Mario Giotti had not shrugged himself out of his robes, although he was alone, reading in his chambers. Hardy didn’t think this was an unintentional oversight. The trappings of power and authority. ‘You said it was an emergency.’
‘I am sorry to bother you, Judge, and thanks for seeing me. I know you’re busy.’
‘If I didn’t see people when I was busy, I’d never see anybody.’ The strong smile. ‘You want to sit down?’
Hardy went to the seating arrangement by the ornate fireplace, with its electrical heater purring within it against the bitter day. The wind had brought in a low blanket of cloud cover and as Hardy, in a trench coat, had been walking from his office to Giotti’s, it had started to mist.
He got right to it. ‘Judge, I’ve got a big problem.’
‘I’d assumed that. What is it?’
Hardy considered his response. He wanted to blurt out, ‘It’s you,’ but he had to restrain his tendencies. He had to box him in until there was no escape.
‘I’m afraid it’s about the fire at your restaurant again. I’ve come upon some information that leads me to think Sal had something to do with it.’
Giotti leaned back in his wing chair, fingertips templed at his lips. ‘Go on.’
‘You remember that morning I stopped you on your run out back here in the alley and asked you if you knew anybody named Singleterry?’
‘Of course.’
‘At that time I was hiding some information from the public, keeping it out of the trial because it seemed so inherently not credible.’
‘And what was that?’
Hardy outlined Sal’s request to Graham, that he give the money to this Singleterry woman. ‘Since we didn’t have her, I didn’t believe anyone in the courtroom would believe the story. So we decided not to bring it up.’
‘It does seem like a reach,’ Giotti agreed. ‘Now I gather you’ve found her.’
‘Almost,’ Hardy said, ‘- her daughters.’
The judge took that in. ‘That would be good, then, wouldn’t it? You could find out what you need about Sal?’
‘That’s true. I’ve done that. Joan Singleterry’s first husband was Randy Palmieri.’
Giotti’s face seemed by degrees to be growing darker now, the black circles under his eyes becoming more pronounced, the jowls heavier as his chin went down, resting on his chest. He let out a long breath and came back to Hardy. ‘The man who died in the fire.’
A nod. ‘That’s right. You knew him?’
‘Who he was, of course. The name’s forever burned into my memory. It was a tragedy. How could I not know it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose you could. But then, by the same token, I’m afraid I don’t understand how you could forget the name Singleterry.’
‘But Singleterry wasn’t her name. How would I-?’
Hardy couldn’t make himself listen to it anymore. He had to cut him off. ‘Because, Judge, your trust – the BGG, that’s your trust, isn’t it? Bruno Giotti’s Grotto Memorial Trust? It sent her money for seventeen years. I’m just having a hard time seeing how that could have slipped your mind.’
Giotti was nodding repeatedly, his eyes on the middle distance between them. After a long minute he got up and crossed the room back to his desk, stared above it out the window into the gray mist. ‘I remember thinking I liked the way your mind worked, Mr Hardy. Maybe that was misguided. Now you’re implying I had something to do with that fire, aren’t you? With arson and murder.’ Finally he turned around. ‘I’m afraid I’m too busy for this. It’s arrant nonsense.’
‘I’d be glad to hear your explanation.’
Giotti’s nostrils flared. ‘I don’t need to give you any explanation, Mr Hardy. Like everyone else in America I am innocent until proven guilty. If you’ve got some proof of these outrageous accusations, why don’t you bring it to the attention of the police? Right now this interview is over.’ He pointed at the door. ‘You know your way.’
Hardy stood up, but instead of moving toward the door, he assumed an at-ease position in front of his chair. ‘I don’t think so.’
Clearly unaccustomed to anything less than immediate obedience at any display of his authority, Giotti stiffened. ‘I said get the hell out of here!’ He reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll have you removed.’
‘You don’t want to do that,’ Hardy said calmly. ‘I’m not talking about a twenty-year-old fire. I’m talking about Sal Russo.’
Giotti gently replaced the receiver. ‘What about him?’
‘The fifty thousand dollars.’
The judge waited.
‘Somehow it came from the fire. I don’t know exactly how it got into Sal’s hands, but the police are going to want to find out. They’re going to see a connection between you and Sal’s death. Maybe a motive for you to have killed Sal. I don’t have to tell you this.’
‘You think I killed Sal?’
‘I don’t think Sal was ready to die when you injected him. That makes it murder.’
‘You’re out of your mind.’
Hardy didn’t care about the judge’s transparent denial. ‘I want to know what happened. I don’t have to go to the police. This is for me. I’m not going away until I find out.’
‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’ Giotti went around behind his desk, pulled out his chair, and sat down on it. ‘This Palmieri person died in a fire at my father’s restaurant. We’ve helped take care of the family.’
‘You denied knowing the name. That’s consciousness of guilt.’
The judge shrugged. ‘We like to keep our charity anonymous. Perhaps you see a crime there. I don’t think many other people would. Certainly not the police.’ He picked up the telephone again. ‘Now do I call security or do you leave on your own?’
This was high-stakes poker and the judge was calling his bluff. But Giotti had already tipped his hand – Hardy wouldn’t still be here if he didn’t have winning cards. He did, and he knew it. Now he was going to raise. ‘You’d better call in the troops,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Not on my own power. After everything you’ve already put me through, you think I’m going to let this go?’
Giotti’s eyes were a black glare. ‘You son of a bitch.’ His hand was still on the telephone.
Hardy kept his voice low, calm. ‘Security comes here, they’ll have to file a report. It all gets official. We’re not there yet, though, are we?’
The glare never wavered. ‘What’s stopping it?’
‘Me, that’s all.’
‘And you’re offering me some kind of… what?’
‘I’m not offering you anything, Judge. I want to know what happened. I’m an officer of the court. If I have to go to the police, I will. If I don’t have to…’ He left it unsaid.
Giotti glowered another moment, then picked up his telephone, and Hardy feared he had lost. Giotti would call in some political chits among the honchos, the police would at best cursorily look into Hardy’s information and decide that a respected federal judge had done no wrong. Hardy was yet another unscrupulous, meddling defense attorney looking for more headlines, ready to slander a beacon of the legal community if it would get him a few more clients.
‘And then, of course, there’s the newspaper,’ he said.
Giotti took in the last warning, made his decision, and pushed a button on the telephone.
He waited, then asked his secretary to hold his calls. Replacing the receiver, he looked across at Hardy. ‘Do you want to know what happened, or do you want to go to homicide? You’re not going to get both, not from me. And whatever happens, it looks as though I’m going to need some legal counsel.’ Giotti reached under his robes, took out his wallet, and pulled a bill from it. ‘Do you want to be my lawyer, Mr Hardy?’
Giotti was offering him a five-dollar retainer. If Hardy accepted it, every word between them would then be subject to the attorney-client privilege. He could never take it to the police.
This was, Hardy thought, truly Faustian. He reminded himself, though, that in the eyes of the law, justice had already been done. No one else was looking for the murderer of Sal Russo. He had to know.
Still, he hesitated.
Giotti’s voice, though he never raised it, cut at him. ‘Do you honestly think you’re going to find physical proof of a fire that occurred almost eighteen years ago? Proof that would stand up at trial? The insurance company looked pretty hard before they paid out, you can believe me.’
Again, the tone shifted. Impatience? Command? ‘Now, you can come over and take this bill or you can walk out of here. One way you’ll know and the other you won’t. It’s your call.’
Hardy crossed the room. Giotti, still seated, watched him all the way. The bill was lying on the desk between them and Hardy picked it up and put it into his pocket.
‘All right, counselor,’ said the judge. ‘Now sit down and let me tell you a story.’
‘Let’s say the Grotto was having a tough time, tourism was down, the restaurant business is always skin of your teeth anyway. Then let’s say one day we get a notice from the state about inadequate handicap access. We’ve got to build a ramp, renovate the lobby… to make a long story short, we’ve got to lay out, say, forty-five thousand dollars to bring the place to code or they’re going to shut us down.
‘Now let’s also say the owner’s son is a young attorney with political aspirations. But he still works in the kitchen sometimes – he loves it back there. He’s all conflicted about his career, where it’s going, what he’s doing. So he keeps his hand in at the restaurant, and then suddenly it looks like the business is going belly up, because there’s no place the owners are going to find thirty or forty thousand dollars for handicap upgrading.
‘So this smart kid, he comes up with this smart idea. If there’s a small fire – controlled – starts, say, in the kitchen, does a little damage, but basically it’s so the insurance can cover the renovation. Let’s say the young attorney has a good friend – his oldest and best friend – call him Sal, who owns a boat moored right out behind the place. And these guys are out fishing together – night fishing, they do it all the time – when the fire starts. They don’t get back in till the skyline’s ablaze.
‘The attorney’s thinking it’s impossible the fire could spread. The place is rigged so it could never burn up. There’s backup systems on the backup systems, but maybe he didn’t figure on the grease in the kitchen, maybe it got too hot too fast… anyway, whatever, the place goes up.
‘But a guy dies. A fireman, by mistake. Sweet-faced young guy, two little kids, pretty wife.
‘There’s no evidence of arson. It looks like one of the pilot lights caught some grease that had dripped down. One of the service staff must have left an apron near the stove. And, not that anybody’s really asking, but the two friends alibi each other. They weren’t anywhere near there all night. They were out under the bridge, knocking down the halibut. They got a boatload of fish to prove it.’
Giotti was leaning back in his oversized chair, his hands crossed over his middle. He sighed wearily. ‘Let’s say something like that happened, counselor. You going to try and take that to trial?’
Hardy was too wired for any games. Although he knew Giotti was absolutely correct: there was no evidence here anymore. Murder might have no statute of limitations, but to convict you still needed more than he’d ever be able to produce.
Any physical evidence of the fire was long gone. Sal’s rock-solid alibi, and Giotti’s, went that way to the grave with him. Joan Singleterry was dead. Even the insurance company’s investigators had found no wrongdoing. There was no chance. No police department would waste a minute on it.
But there was more Hardy felt he needed to know. ‘How do you think somebody like Sal could have gotten ahold of fifty thousand dollars in cash?’
‘In this scenario it could have been part of the insurance money.’
‘A payoff, you mean, to keep quiet.’
‘A show of gratitude maybe. Maybe a little of both.’ Giotti shrugged. ‘Life’s complicated.’
‘And Sal couldn’t handle the guilt, could he? He killed somebody, an innocent man, a guy just like himself, wife and kids. And it ruined him.’
Another shrug.
Hardy dug into his pocket and removed the bill, placed it on the desk. ‘We’re out of hypothetical now, Judge, and you’re not my client anymore. You killed Sal, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t do that.’
‘Because he’d started talking about it, didn’t he? He was back in the past, telling people about the fire, wasn’t he?’
‘I didn’t kill him,’ Giotti repeated.
‘I don’t believe you.’
The judge pulled the bill back toward him, centered it in front of him. ‘I don’t care what you believe, Mr Hardy. Sal was my best friend. He saved my whole life, my career, everything, and he suffered terribly for it – really lost everything. You think after that, after all he went through for me, I’m going to reward him by killing him?’
‘I don’t think you had any choice.’
‘Well, you’re wrong. The fire was a tragedy, an accident, a mistake. I’ve tried to make it up to that poor family as well as anybody could. To Sal too. We stuck together, even if he sometimes made it a little hard on me. I never would have killed him. Don’t you understand that? Never, under any conditions. I’d have gone down myself first.’
He didn’t get out of Giotti’s until after three and then, unable to refocus, he’d walked to the Chronicle building, gone to the archives, and read every story he could find on the fire, on Palmieri, on Giotti.
By now the rain was falling steadily, and he had walked back uptown to his office in the thick of it. There he discovered that in the past two days he’d collected twenty-one call slips and his voice mail ran to over ten minutes. There was no question, Graham Russo’s trial had given his career a shot in the arm, even if at the moment he couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to pay for the services of a bumbling moron such as himself.
Where had he gotten everything wrong? What had he missed?
He had to put that – all of it – out of his mind. The day hadn’t been a total failure. He had found Joan Singleterry and her connection to Sal Russo. Her kids were going to get the money. Whoopee.
His biggest problem – he had trouble even phrasing it to himself – he didn’t quite disbelieve Mario Giotti. The judge’s vehemence and passion at the end of their discussion about Sal’s role in his life had struck a resonant chord, and suddenly Hardy had lost the conviction that Giotti was lying.
Killing Sal was beyond Giotti’s pale. He had never intentionally killed anyone. He had been trying to make moral restitution to the victims of the one accidental death – technically a murder, but certainly unintentional – he’d been involved with. He was not a cold-blooded man, a man who would kill with premeditation, even if his victim was already on the verge of death. That distinction would be critical to him. His life’s work in the law could never let him forget it.
So who had killed Sal?
His office had grown dark and he flicked on his green-shaded banker’s lamp. Guilt over his unanswered messages didn’t just gnaw at him, it was taking huge bites. He was going to have to miss dinner, get caught up. Frannie would deal with it, possibly would relish some time away from his intensity. Besides, they’d had a date just the night before, a wonderful family dinner with friends at home the night before that.
He had to do some billable work, business development, something worthwhile.
Frannie had been able to tell from the tone of his voice that he needed to feel as though he’d accomplished something before he came home; it almost didn’t matter what it was. She told him she’d be fine, she’d wait up. She had a book she was loving. She’d kiss the kids for him.
And, oh, she almost forgot, some potential client had called a little earlier and Frannie had said Hardy would be working late in his office. She’d given his office number, so he might expect a call.
But now, nearly three hours later, there hadn’t been one. He wouldn’t wait around for it. It would come later or it wouldn’t.
Over the past few hours he’d been subliminally aware that the associates downstairs were going home. Their muffled voices carried up the stairs as they passed through Phyllis’s lobby in twos and threes on their way out.
By a little after nine-thirty he’d made all of his return phone calls, mostly to various answering machines, although he had held the hand of one of his prospective new doctor clients and flatly turned down handling two divorces.
He was now doing some substantive preparation, taking notes on a stack of recent briefs that had been filed in various federal courts on the right-to-die issue.
Because he preferred his banker’s lamp to the overheads, he was working almost completely in the dark. The green glass shade cast a soothing pool of light over his desk. Somehow it helped his concentration.
He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes briefly. The building was quiet. Outside, the wind gusted and threw some raindrops against his window, reminding him that it was still coming down. He got up, stretched, crossed back to his window, and looked down on Sutter, nearly deserted at this hour. One dark car was parked directly across from him, but otherwise the curbs were empty. The rest of the street shone darkly, streetlights reflecting off the wet surfaces.
He returned to his desk, pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, grabbed a copy of another published brief, and stopped.
He really ought to go home. He could do this note-taking anytime. It was late on a miserable night. He felt he’d finally paid himself back for the wasted daytime hours, although he couldn’t say he’d accomplished much.
The building’s night bell sounded. This in itself was mildly surprising, since the only people who would normally be coming to the office at this hour would be night-owl associates who had their own keys. It was unlikely that it was a client, especially since Hardy was all but certain that he was the last person in the building. Probably, he thought, it was one of the city’s homeless who’d wandered up the small stoop to get out of the rain, pressed the lit button by mistake.
But it sounded again and he decided he’d better go check. The lighting in the hallway outside of his office was on dim. On the stairway, the same thing. The cavernous lobby ceiling had a few feeble pinheads of light. It was dark as a movie theater.
Hardy descended the curving main staircase and got to the circular marbled alcove at the bottom. Turning the dead bolt in the heavy wooden doors, he pulled the door open.
No one was there.
He stepped out onto the sidewalk to look. No one. Squinting through the rain at the car parked across the way, he couldn’t see anybody in the front seats. The back windows appeared to be darkly tinted. He couldn’t make out anything through them.
Enough of this. He was going home. First back upstairs to his office, where he’d pack his briefcase, and then out of here, out the front door again, down to the parking garage under the building. Home.
The back door to the Giottis’ car swung open. It had been essential to ring the bell to find out if anyone else was in the building, also to be sure that the third-floor light was Hardy. It didn’t look as though there was anyone else still working, but at a time like this one couldn’t be too sure. There were no lights left on in the lower-floor offices.
When the bell rang the second time, the person working upstairs got up, came all the way down, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was Hardy, all right, though not exactly the well-dressed version that he presented to the court, whose picture had been all over the newspapers, his sound bites on the news. This was the working attorney, tie undone, coat off, collar open. But even from across the street there was no mistaking him.
There were shadows now, moving in his office. He’d gone back up there. Now the thing to do was ring the bell again, wait for him this time, until he opened the door again.
Then do the thing.
Hardy was just going to finish these last three pages. Otherwise, he’d have to go back and reread the first twelve again to catch up to his place in the brief, to where he was now, if he wanted to reboard the paper’s train of thought. Now, the opening pages were still clear enough in his memory, the syllogistic rhythm of the argument unbroken. He went right back to the spot where he’d left off, picked up his pen, read a few words.
There was a sound.
His head came up and he listened carefully. There couldn’t be a sound. There was no one in the building and he’d locked the door behind him.
Or had he?
Suddenly he couldn’t remember if he’d turned the dead bolt back. It didn’t matter, really, since he was going back down almost immediately, but maybe…
No, he’d locked it. He was pretty sure. He’d be done here in two minutes anyway.
And he was.
He’d heard no other noise, although lost in his reading, hurrying now to finish, scribbling the odd note, he was not likely to have heard one anyway.
Finally, he finished the brief, closed it back to its cover, put down his pen, and leaned back in his chair. He looked up. A silhouette was outlined in the doorway to his office.
‘Mr Hardy?’
Hardy’s hand was over his heart. ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘Did I startle you? I’m sorry.’
‘No, that’s all right. As soon as I land I’ll be fine.’
‘Your wife said you’d be working late. I thought…’
‘It’s all right.’ His breath was coming back. ‘How’d you get in here? Was that you who rang the bell?’
‘Yes.’
He took another lungful of air. ‘Where’d you go?’
‘Nobody answered, so I went back to my car. Then – I must have looked away for a minute – I saw the front door closing behind you, then you moving around up here through the window, and I got out to try again, but this time the door was open.’
‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘Okay. But I’m afraid it’s a little late. I was just finishing up here, going home. I’m sorry. I can walk you back down, and we’ll make an appointment for tomorrow. How’s that?’
She stepped into the room. Hardy noticed that the strap to her purse was around her neck and that she was holding her purse in front of her with both hands. Or rather, that one hand was in the purse, the other holding it. ‘I’m afraid that won’t do.’
Hardy started gathering his papers, pushed away from the desk, started to stand up. ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s going to have to-’
‘Sit back down, please!’
Something in her voice. He looked back up.
She’d moved another step closer and pulled the purse away, down to her side. Her other hand held a small gun, and she trained it levelly on him. ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’
‘No, ma’am, but you’ve sure got my attention.’
‘My name is Pat. I’m Judge Giotti’s wife. I’m really sorry to be meeting you like this.’
You’re sorry? Hardy thought. But he said nothing.
Pat Giotti made some clucking sound. ‘You and Mario had a long talk today. He told me all about it.’
‘Yes, ma’am, we did. But he hired me as his lawyer, he may have told you, and I can’t repeat anything he said to me. It’s attorney-client privilege.’
A dry, mirthless chuckle. ‘I know all about that, Mr Hardy. I also know it has no real teeth. I know all the ways it’s been abused.’
‘I wasn’t planning to abuse it.’
‘No, I’m sure you weren’t, not now. But something could happen. Someday. The point is I can’t be positive about it and unfortunately, that’s what I have to be.’
Hardy’s brain was on fire, trying to find a way out in a last desperate spurt of mental energy before it was silenced forever. But no ideas came – other than to keep her talking if he could. ‘Were you this polite to Sal before you hit him?’
Her voice was tight with tension. ‘I don’t think rudeness serves any purpose. I didn’t want to hurt Sal. I don’t think I did hurt Sal.’
No, Hardy thought, only killed him.
But she was going on. ‘But he would have hurt us. He would have ruined everything. Nobody seems to understand that. Even Mario didn’t, always saying Sal was harmless, Sal was his old friend, a good guy. Well, let me tell you, Mr Hardy, Sal was out of control. He wasn’t going to stop on his own. Somebody had to stop him. And it didn’t matter, that was the amazing thing. He only had a few months anyway. He was dead in a couple of months at the most.’
‘I know,’ Hardy said. ‘So what happened that you had to do anything?’
Keep her talking. Think. Think!
‘You really don’t know? Mario didn’t tell you this?’ A bitter laugh. ‘It’s so typical. He’s always doing things like this, leaving it for me to clean up after him.’
‘Tell me,’ Hardy said.
In her calm hysteria she kept the gun trained on Hardy’s chest.
Her body shifted, its language terrifying. He thought she would pull the trigger now, that it was over. He sucked in a breath.
‘There was that bomb scare, that day, Friday. A little before lunchtime. You knew about that, of course.’
He nodded.
‘When they cleared the building, the courthouse, Mario was out in the alley with his staff. Suddenly Sal is there, pulling him aside, all in a panic, telling Mario he’s got to get the money together, the money isn’t in his safe. He’s thinking Mario took it back somehow. He tells him if he doesn’t get it back, he’s going to spread the word about the fire. He won’t keep quiet any longer.’
She lowered her voice, but not the gun. ‘Don’t you see, Mr Hardy? He would have destroyed Mario’s name. Which is all we have, all we’ve worked for all these years, Mario’s reputation with his peers. And to let that senile bum threaten it? No, he had to be stopped. I couldn’t let him bring Mario down. Sal wasn’t anybody. He was dead anyway.’
‘So your husband called you after he went back inside?’
She nodded. ‘He thought Sal had simply misplaced the money – taken it out of the safe, put it somewhere else and forgotten where. So he went back up to Sal’s room with him, to look for it. Can you believe the risk he took doing that? Anyone might have seen him and remembered. Then, when Mario couldn’t find any money, Sal went off at him. Mario yelled back.’
Another tumbler fell into place: Blue’s testimony, before her nap, the male voice in Sal’s apartment. It had been Giotti after all.
But his wife was going on, the gun still trained on Hardy’s chest. ‘After he got back to his chambers, he called and told me what had just happened. And still, he tried to tell me it was all right. Sal was just having a bad day. How could he believe that? How could he not see?’
‘So what did you decide to do?’
‘I didn’t know exactly. Not when I left to go there. Something, though. I was going to stop him. I brought this gun with me, just in case, but then there was the morphine out on the table. So much quieter and cleaner. I knew how to administer injections. One of my children is diabetic – I knew to put it in the vein. There was this heavy whiskey bottle. Sal never felt anything. I just knocked at his door and he let me in and we talked a minute, just like you and me now. And everything was there, laid out for me. As though God wanted me to do it, wanted to help me.’
With a jolt of terror Hardy realized that he’d led her to her moment. God had provided in this case as well: the building empty except for him. The open door. The cover of darkness for her escape.
It would be her second perfect crime.
He thought of a final question. ‘Does your husband know?’
It wasn’t really a laugh. It was too derisive. ‘Mario? How could I tell him? He’s a good man, a judge. He believes in justice. He doesn’t understand that sometimes you have to act, not pass some abstract judgment.’
‘So what does he think happened? That it was just his good luck?’
‘He believes it was Graham. I think you convinced him. For which I thank you.’
This was her closing statement. Hardy could feel it.
The notion came to him – an instinct, far less than a thought or an idea. There was no time to analyze how good it was. In despair, his last effort, trying not to give it away with his upper body, he moved his foot under the desk and kicked a leg of it, producing a wooden thud.
This was going to have to be fast if he was to have a prayer.
‘What was that?’ She had to take her eyes off him for an instant. If he could make her do that…
‘Maybe you forgot to lock the downstairs door behind you too.’
Her head began to turn, and only slightly. It was going to have to be enough. Hardy lunged for his banker’s lamp as she fired. He went rolling with it over, then off, the desk. The lamp crashed to the floor, plunging the room into darkness as the sound of more gunfire exploded in his ears and he knew in the blinding flash of pain, God, he’d been hit. A third shot. Another.
It was his leg, below the knee. Here came another shot. She wasn’t wasting any time. He felt her steps on the floor, the vibrations through it. She was coming toward him as he lay.
The only light now with the lamp broken, and it wasn’t much, came from the dimmers in the hallway outside his door. Fighting the shock and pain, he pulled his back up against the wood and the cover the desk barely provided. When he looked up, her form was there above him. Even in the darkness he could see the arm coming down. He was on his side, his back pressed against the side of the desk.
With no hesitation she fired again. The lick of flame across his belly.
He didn’t want to die like this.
Aiming for a last shot to finish him, she finally made a mistake, coming too close. She was now within his reach, and he grabbed for her near foot, catching her at the ankle, bringing his other hand up around her leg.
He pulled as hard as he could, twisting her foot as he did. She screamed and fell in a heap next to him.
The gun hit the floor and went off again. He couldn’t risk letting go of her leg, even for a second, but began pulling himself up her struggling body, arm over arm. He could feel a weakness spreading in him, but he couldn’t give in to that. He had to manage to hold on to her.
She was pounding her fists on his head and shoulders, screaming at him. ‘No! No! No!’ Rolling over onto something hard, he felt the gun and grabbed for it, getting it into his hand, then rolling away.
‘I’ve got the gun,’ he said. ‘Don’t move. It’s over.’
‘No!’ She kicked out in his direction. It wasn’t over for her. She wasn’t going to let him take her, not alive. The shadow of her came at him with all her strength, hit him full in the chest, knocking him backward again, grabbing for the gun.
His leg, as he tried to kick her off him, wouldn’t do what he asked it to. When he twisted to get at her, his stomach stabbed at him. He screamed involuntarily at the pain, but she was a wild animal over him, scratching at his face, lunging for the weapon in his left hand.
He had no other option, his strength and mobility were ebbing away. He snapped the gun up, feeling it connect with flesh and bone – the side of her head. It stunned her briefly and without any reflection he brought the gun up again, connected with flesh and she collapsed to the floor.
He had to get to a light, a phone, get some distance on her. With all he had left, he pushed her off him.
Then wasn’t sure he could get up at all. His leg wasn’t responding. His stomach prevented any turning of his torso.
But he had to.
Pulling himself up by the corner of the desk, he finally got his dead leg pulled over to his doorway and hit the light switch. Pat Giotti was already moving again, coming to.
‘Don’t. Don’t move!’ he gasped at her.
She was wearing black spandex leggings and a black nylon windbreaker and there was blood – his blood, he realized – all over her. He couldn’t get a breath. Hyperventilating, he kept the gun trained on her as he hobbled his way across to the desk again. Knocking the receiver off, he pushed 911, picked the receiver up again.
‘Stay back!’ It was all he could get out.
But she’d gotten to her knees now, again, less than five feet from where, shakily, he stood.
He had the telephone receiver in one hand, the gun in the other. When the operator answered, Hardy started to say his name. Consciousness was fading. He gasped to try to fill his lungs.
At that moment she leapt at him again, for the gun, over the desk.
He’d been wounded twice and had lost a deal of blood already, and she had only been stunned and now seemed to have regained all of her strength. With the adrenaline driving her, it was considerable.
When she hit him full body across the chest, he collapsed again under her. Both of her hands were on the gun now as she struggled to wrest it from him, twisted it back and got hold of it. She swung it around.
Hardy saw the black hole of the barrel center on his face.
A last, desperate grip, going to her wrist, bringing his other hand up, trying to slap it away, all the way around.
The gun fired and she screamed, her body arching back. ‘You’ve shot me! Oh, God, I’m shot.’
The hand holding the gun went to her shoulder, but she managed to keep hold of it. Falling forward onto Hardy to keep him from moving, she jammed the weapon forward into the flesh under his jaw.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Again. Click.
An anguished groan and Pat Giotti’s body, already collapsed on top of him, went limp. Hardy pushed to roll her off him. She’d been hit in the shoulder. She wasn’t going to die from it.
He struggled. Got himself up. To the telephone.
He mumbled something, tried to get out his name and address. It sounded funny, though, indistinct. He tried again.
Shooting.
Fading fast. Darkness closing in.
Hurry.
He blacked out.
Sarah stood before Glitsky’s desk, the door closed behind them. She was waiting for the boom to be lowered. Since the verdict on Graham, and then with the attack on Hardy and the resulting rumors and revelations about the Giottis, the Russo case continued to enthrall the public.
The feeding frenzy for the tiniest bits of news surrounding the principals had continued unabated. Over the weekend a television reporter, trying to make the connection between Craig Ising and Graham’s income, had interviewed Ising and stumbled upon the information that Sarah had been with Graham at his softball tournament on the weekend after he’d been indicted. This had made the news last night and her lieutenant had summoned her into his office first thing this morning. The last straw.
‘I don’t have any excuse, sir. I did it. I was there.’ Glitsky sat behind his desk, looking up at her. He didn’t want to hear this. Not only was it grounds for dismissal from the force, but harboring a fugitive was a felony. ‘All I can say is that I was sure Graham hadn’t committed any crime. And I didn’t harbor anyone. I had him turn himself in, didn’t I?’
‘Turn himself in? You had a man wanted for murder and you decided not to arrest him. That’s not your decision to make, Sergeant.’
‘Yes, sir, I realize that. I was wrong.’
‘The grand jury had indicted him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
She didn’t have to go on about the political circus surrounding that indictment; Glitsky knew it as well as she did. Now he opened his desk drawer, thought a minute, slammed it closed. ‘The POA’ – Police Officers Association – ‘doesn’t want you fired, of course. They’re telling me they’ll sue the department. First woman in homicide, all that crap. I hope you realize that if you were a man you’d be out of here.’
Evans stuck out her chin. ‘With all respect, sir, if I were a man, this wouldn’t be news. It would never have come up. It would have gotten buried.’
Glitsky snorted. ‘You really think that?’
‘Yes, sir. No offense. I’ve seen it happen several times.’
The lieutenant took that in. ‘If you wanted to step down on your own, you could save everybody a lot of trouble.’
‘It would make a lot of trouble for me, sir. I’ve worked hard to get here and I deserve to be here.’
Glitsky looked long and hard at the sergeant’s face. She had made a tremendous error in judgment, but she still had the spine, independence, and intelligence that made a great cop. He considered his words with care. ‘You know, Sergeant, this detail – homicide – it’s not heaven. You don’t get here and then stop.’
‘I didn’t say-’
He held up a hand. ‘You said you deserved to be here, you earned it. Well, that’s true, you did. But you don’t just earn it and that’s the end of it. You continue to deserve to be here, every day. Every single day, or you leave. That’s the gig.’
Sarah took the rebuke stoically. ‘He was found innocent, Lieutenant. He didn’t kill anybody. Nothing like this is ever going to happen to me again. Graham didn’t even get disbarred.’ She paused, considering, then added, ‘We’re going to be married.’
Glitsky opened the drawer again, looked down at the scratch he’d prepared and signed off on – the formal charges he’d planned to send to the chief. All at once he realized he wasn’t going to do that.
He pushed the drawer closed and brought his eyes up to hers. ‘I’m happy for you,’ he said.
There were days in the next few weeks, before he finally found out for sure, when Hardy wondered if it had all been worth it. He had had to know what had happened with Sal Russo, and the knowledge had nearly killed him. The gash that the second bullet had traced across his middle was a constant reminder of how close it had been. Another inch and a half and the slug would have ripped through both lungs and his heart.
He knew he still wasn’t finished with the nightmares; the last click under his jaw was burned into his psyche. He would jolt awake, as often as not drenched in sweat, and lie there in bed next to Frannie until he finally gathered the strength to rise, to limp through his darkened house. Look in on both children. Rearrange the elephants.
Sit in the chair in his living room in the dark. And still, with everything he’d suffered, he’d been lucky. The leg wound had passed cleanly through his calf muscle. His doctor assured him that he’d be able to jog his four-mile loop again within six months, although his long-jump career was probably effectively over.
Concentration, although improving, was still a problem. He would be sitting with Frannie or the kids and suddenly go blank, seeing the gun leveled at him, the perfect black little o.
He saw it now, at nearly noon on a Tuesday in the middle of October, and he jerked his head up. He was in the Solarium trying to follow an article in one of the law journals about some new ‘natural death’ hospice care facilities that were apparently operating within the law in Oregon and Montana and maybe several other states. He was making notes on arguments that might help his doctor clients here in San Francisco, although it was beginning to look as though Dean Powell was going to accept very reasonable nolo pleas – fines and light community service, which Hardy’s clients were doing anyway – for most of them.
Hardy had checked with the licensing board and already had a promise that the doctors would be allowed to continue to practice. Freeman had told him that under the circumstances, Hardy might even do better. ‘Hell,’ he’d said, ‘you could probably get a letter of apology.’
But neither Hardy nor his doctors, some of whom had recently discovered that political grandstanding had consequences in the real world, were willing to push their luck.
Hardy liked to think that the trial of Graham Russo had made the attorney general rethink his hard-line position on assisted suicide. If nothing else, Powell had come to realize that his earlier push for prosecution of these doctors was politically unpopular. And if it wasn’t going to win votes, the AG wasn’t interested in it.
Hardy was sitting up straight with his back against his chair. He told himself that the bandages around his chest were good for his posture. Any slouching was intolerable. There was a comforting and familiar buzz in the lobby behind him – associates coming and going, phones ringing. He looked out through the glass into the enclosed garden area where some pigeons were enjoying the sunshine.
Hardy was going to be all right, except that now his chest was an agony of itching from where they’d shaved him, where the last scabs were falling away. He tensed his calf and felt the familiar stab of pain. It, too, was healing, he supposed, but it wasn’t done yet. He went back to his article.
David Freeman, brown bag in hand, knocked at the Solarium lintel, walked right in, and began unpacking. He pulled out a couple of wrapped sandwiches, a large bottle of Pellegrino water, little plastic glasses, and a jar of marinated artichoke hearts. ‘I took the liberty,’ he said, unwrapping the white butcher paper. ‘Mortadella, sourdough, provolone. Brain food.’
Hardy pushed his journal to the side. ‘I thought that was fish.’
‘Fish too,’ Freeman said. He had finished unwrapping the sandwich, spreading the paper out under it, making it neat. Pushing it over in front of Hardy, he poured some Pellegrino into one of the glasses and placed it in front of him too. This kind of solicitude from Freeman was unusual, and Hardy glanced over at him. ‘What?’ he said.
‘What what?’
‘Don’t give me that, David.’
Freeman left his own sandwich unmolested, still wrapped in front of him. He sat back. ‘They cut a deal with the judge’s wife. Pratt accepted a plea.’
Hardy threw a disbelieving glance at the old man. ‘What do you mean, she accepted a plea? What plea?’
‘Manslaughter on Sal Russo, three years. Assault with a deadly weapon on you, three years concurrent, no additional time for the gun.’
For a second the room tried to come up at Hardy.
‘Diz?’
‘Assault with a deadly weapon? It was attempted murder, David, she tried to kill me. She did kill Sal Russo. And what do you mean no additional time for the gun?’
Freeman let out a long breath, cracked a knuckle. ‘It seems Mrs Giotti’s been under a lot of stress lately, imagining that Russo was a threat to her husband’s career and that you somehow were part of this giant conspiracy.’
‘Imagining? She told me her husband and Russo had started a fire that killed a fireman. She told me she’d killed Russo to shut him up. She told me she was going to kill me so I couldn’t talk about it.’
Nodding, Freeman went along with him. ‘Yes, indeed, my son. Quite mad, wasn’t she, imagining all these terrible things about her husband and some fire?’
‘But Giotti-’ Hardy stopped himself. He couldn’t say, and that realization choked him.
‘What? The judge denies everything and her doctors confirm that she’s imagining it, so we all know it never happened. Except, of course, for some nasty-minded columnists.’ Freeman eyed Hardy shrewdly. ‘Unless someone knew something admissible that could actually pin the arson on Giotti. You wouldn’t know anybody like that, would you, Diz?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. If you did, I’m sure at the very least you’d want to tell your old pal David?’
But Hardy knew he could never tell Freeman or anybody else what Giotti had told him under the seal of the attorney-client privilege. It had been the worst five dollars he’d ever earned. ‘I don’t know anything, David.’
The old man nodded. ‘I believe you. But you know, with Pratt not exactly being in love with you to begin with, the fact that you couldn’t provide any more information on Giotti didn’t make her want to throw the book at his wife. After all, the judge still has some influence. You cross him at your peril. Pratt knows that. You’re lucky she didn’t charge you for trying to kill her.’
‘Maybe the fact that it was her gun, that she brought…’ Hardy made a face. ‘Never mind that. What about Powell? Won’t he do anything?’
Freeman shrugged. ‘Why would he? And anyway he can’t. Double jeopardy’s still a no-no. Both crimes – you and Sal – they both happened in Pratt’s jurisdiction and she’s charged and prosecuted them. End of story.’
Fingertips to his temples, Hardy was trying to make his headache go away. ‘So what’s she going to serve, Giotti’s wife?’
Freeman shook his head in commiseration. ‘You haven’t heard the best part. The judge has just stayed her delivery to the prison system, postponed it.’
‘I know what stayed means. But how, for how long?’
‘Indefinitely. She’s going to do her time in the county jail, close to home.’
Hardy finally exploded. ‘Jesus Christ, David! This wasn’t some shoplifting spree! No judge could do that!’
‘Well, this one must know Giotti, and he just did, and since Pratt thinks it’s a swell idea, no one’s going to object.’
‘Well, I damn well object.’
‘But you, my son, are the proverbial person that nobody asked. I hate to mention it, Diz, but you’ve made a few enemies. You’re not even the player to be named later.’
Hardy took it stoically. It wasn’t too great a shock. But he was curious about Pat Giotti’s sentence. ‘So how much time you really think she’ll do?’
‘A couple of years plus or minus…’ Freeman trailed off. ‘She’s going to be a model prisoner, get an early release.’
‘So what about all this?’ Hardy vaguely indicated himself. ‘What did I do this for?’
Freeman took a huge bite of his sandwich and chewed awhile thoughtfully. He drank some Pellegrino water. ‘You won your case. Your client’s free. You got yourself a passel of new work.’
This wasn’t much satisfaction. Hardy had to ask. ‘So I’m shot twice and almost killed and the person who did this gets a few months in the country club? That’s it? What happened to justice here?’
Freeman nodded, took another sip of water, shrugged. ‘Justice? I think it went on vacation.’
Stagnola’s was packed with the Thursday lunch crowd.
October was high season for tourists in San Francisco and Fisherman’s Wharf swarmed with them, getting off the ferries, walking up from Pier 39, down from Ghirardelli Square.
Mario Giotti had been overwhelmed with his wife’s legal troubles over the past weeks. It had shocked and dismayed him to learn that she had killed Sal, but certainly once it became clear that she had, the next order of business was damage control. Which, given his influence and connections, hadn’t proved too difficult.
The community, his brethren, had closed ranks around him, as he knew they would. Pat – and thank God she was still alive – had even come to agree with his decision about their story. She’d been under too much stress with the accusations Sal had been making against her husband and had cracked under the pressure.
There had been a fire at the Grotto, certainly, but nothing like a cover-up, nothing that could come back to haunt the judge and mar his reputation. In fact, if anything, the judge’s anonymous contributions over the years to the family of Randall Palmieri were signs of his generosity and beneficence.
Throughout his attorneys’ negotiations with Sharron Pratt, Giotti had feared that Dismas Hardy would step up and ruin everything, but evidently he’d put the fear of God into the man. Should he take it upon himself to abuse the attorney-client privilege, the state bar would rise in righteous indignation and lift his license to practice law. Giotti never considered that Hardy was simply a man of honor – that he had entered into a contract and would keep his word.
Giotti did wonder if Hardy had leaked something of their privileged discussion to the columnist Jeff Elliot, but he had no way to prove it, and no way to accuse Hardy of anything without implicating himself. Elliot had come pretty close to what had happened, but hadn’t gotten it exactly right, and that in turn made Giotti think that Hardy had kept it close to the vest after all.
The reporter had dug and gotten lucky, but didn’t have all the pieces. So the rumors had flown for a few days, but they died down. He hadn’t even deigned to issue any kind of formal denial.
Everything was going to work out fine. This was his city; he belonged here. People loved him and always would.
And now here was his old friend Mauritio at the front door, greeting patrons as they filed in. Because of all the troubles, then having to decide some cases on the circuit in Idaho and then Hawaii, Giotti hadn’t been to his old psychic home, back to his roots, in nearly a month.
Now he arrived at the door.
‘Hey, Mauritio!’ His hale and voluble welcome.
His old friend – his old employee – drew himself up. The smile fled from his face. ‘Good afternoon, Your Honor,’ he said formally.
Giotti cocked his head to one side – a question. He still wore his smile. ‘Mauritio. What’s the matter? You look like you seen a ghost.’
‘Maybe I do, Your Honor.’
Giotti knew it felt wrong, but tried to make a joke of it. ‘Well, invite him in. He can sit at my table with me.’
‘I’m sorry, your table?’
‘Hey, my table.’ He started to push his way by, but Mauritio stepped in front of him.
‘You got a reservation, Your Honor? We got a packed house in here today.’
Giotti raised his voice. ‘What do you mean, you got a packed house? I’m talking my table, what do you…?’
He noticed that people had started to gather behind them, to notice. He couldn’t have that. He calmed himself. ‘No. I don’t have a reservation.’
Mauritio clucked. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, Your Honor, maybe some other day. Maybe you call first, couple of hours ought to hold one. Meanwhile, you might try next door, but they’re pretty crowded too. In fact, Judge, maybe you gonna have trouble finding fish anywhere on the Wharf. Since Sal Russo died, maybe you gonna have trouble finding good fish anywhere around here.’
Stiffly, Giotti stood a moment. Then he nodded and turned away.
Behind him he heard Mauritio barking to a knot of tourists. ‘Hey, how you folks doin’? Come on in, come on in. We’re saving a table just for you.‘
The wind was high off the ocean, rushing up the cliffs and inland across the peninsula, bending the cypresses nearly to the ground. A chill autumn sun was sinking into the water out at the horizon, and a young couple stood before a grave site at the ridge of the Colma cemetery. The man wore a baseball uniform.
Graham had played in the season’s last tournament down in Santa Clara during the day. The Hornets had gotten beaten on their third game, so Graham was finished early. He and Sarah had decided to drive over to the coastal town of Santa Cruz and have a late lunch, then up the coast on Highway One. And then, suddenly in Colma, they’d made the turn into here.
Graham had distributed the proceeds from the sale of the baseball cards and the fifty thousand dollars to Jeanne Walsh and her sister in Eureka, and in spite of the reactions of his brother and sister, felt he’d discharged a debt of honor. He’d gotten a letter from Leland’s lawyer on behalf of the other heirs telling him he couldn’t give away their inheritance and that the Singleterry offspring had no legal claim. Graham had told them to go ahead and sue him and distributed the money in cash anyway.
It was perhaps something neither Debra nor George would understand, but that was going to be their problem and their burden. Afterward, to her credit, Debra had called to tell him it was okay – she wasn’t going to be part of any lawsuit George might bring. Graham saw hope here.
He had no similar illusions about his brother or his mother. George and Helen would live and die in Leland’s camp at a level of physical comfort and social constriction. That was their choice.
It wasn’t his. He went to one knee and smoothed at the grass over where his father’s remains were buried. He’d taken his spikes up with him, wearing them over his shoulders with the laces tying them together. Now, as though they were a holy necklace, he removed them, over his head, and placed them by the headstone on the grass.
‘Don’t say maňana if you don’t mean it,’ Sarah said softly. She was quoting from an old Jimmy Buffett song, one of the cuts on a CD they’d been playing ever since the verdict: ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise,’ ‘Cowboy in the Jungle.’ Themes of freedom and rebellion, rum and sunshine. After his time in jail, the tunes seemed to help Graham with normalcy. He’d get there.
But hanging up the spikes was a different symbol, a different type of commitment. He stood looking down for a last moment. ‘I mean it,’ he said.
Hand in hand Sarah and Graham turned to walk down the hill. Sarah sighed. ‘There’s one thing I still don’t understand, even after all of this.’
‘What?’
‘All the paper, the notes, the names.’
‘What about them?’
‘Well, I must have made a hundred calls, maybe more, following up, checking addresses, trying to break the code. I reached maybe half a dozen people who remembered your father at all. And none of them were involved in fishing or baseball or gambling or anything else that related to anything. I just don’t get it. All those names Sal wrote down, all those numbers.’
They’d gotten back down to the parking lot, and Graham’s steps slowed, then came to a stop. Sarah waited.
‘It was everybody he ever knew. He didn’t want to forget.’ The wind gusted, stinging his eyes. ‘He thought if he wrote it all down…’ He stood motionless, overcome with emotion.
Sarah took a tentative step and put her arms up around him.
Sal sat at the kitchen table, writing furiously in the margins of the newspaper in front of him. One of the obituaries was Earl Willis, and the name had started a trail of connection. Sal had already been to see Finer and he knew what was coming. He wasn’t telling anybody what he knew. He wasn’t going to have anybody pity him, no, sir.
The kid who’d sat next to him in third grade was named Earl Willis. Was he the guy that had just died? A non-Catholic. Earl Willis, that was his name.
Sal remembered. Now who sat behind Earl? He had to remember, what was her name? Dorothy something, that was it. Blake. Dorothy Blake.
Closing his eyes, he tried to envision his old classroom – the map of the world tacked above the blackboard. Miss Gray! That was it. His teacher, Miss Gray. Now, how about his other teachers? He wasn’t going to forget those names. He was going to have them right here, written down, in case anybody asked, in case he forgot.
And his assistant coach on Graham’s Little League team – the Jaguars? Yep, Jaguars. Sal remembered the guy: smoked like a chimney, always had a cigarette tucked in his ear, a pack in the arm of his T-shirt. What was that name? He knew it. He knew he knew it, it just wasn’t coming, but he had that pad of paper by his bed in case it came to him tonight. He’d write it down then. No one would know that he was forgetting. He’d have it all right here.
But wait. What about the other kids on Graham’s team? He remembered the shortstop, Kenny Frazier, good glove no hit.
He was out of newspaper margin – Miss Gray, the other teachers, the Jaguars. But, aha! – here was a brown bag from the grocery store. He pulled it over, writing fast. His and Helen’s first phone number – the house on Taraval. He had to get that down.
But then the rest…
The rest of everything.
The afternoon sun poured in over him and he scribbled until the light was gone, thinking that if he wrote it all down -everybody and everything from the beginning – maybe he would be able to retrieve it all when he needed it. Maybe his life wouldn’t all go away.
Maybe he would live forever.