Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The

by John Lescroart

  Another silence. Graham looked across at her. ‘So what did happen that you’re so sure of?’

  ‘Graham. Come on.’

  ‘No, really. I want to know.’

  She took her eyes from the road. It didn’t matter, they were barely creeping. ‘What are you saying?’ she finally asked.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he shot back at her. ‘After all this time, after everything, you still think I killed Sal?’

  ‘I’m saying somebody was there. If it was you, helping him, it wouldn’t matter to me, Graham. That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘It would matter to me! Jesus, Sarah, don’t you believe anything I’ve told you?’

  ‘Don’t yell at me. Please don’t yell at me.’ She was afraid to look over at him again. Her eyes were glued to the road, hands tight on the wheel at ten and two. ‘Because I’ll tell you something,’ she said. ‘Somebody was there. Somebody did help him die. Or killed him.’

  20

  Abe Glitsky stood in the main doorway to the homicide detail, seemingly unable to move. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out.

  It was the beginning of a new week and most of his inspectors were already in the big open room, sitting at their desks, drinking coffee while doing paperwork, going over their day’s schedule, writing reports on witness interviews, taking notes on transcripts, busy busy busy. No one looked up.

  Abe wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction. He finally got his legs moving and walked into his office, closing the door quietly behind him. His door, installed and freshly varnished on Friday with a nice new-wood yellowish finish, wasn’t yet completely covered with bumper stickers and wanted posters and shooting targets from the police range, but someone — or a team of trained professionals — had done a pretty good job getting to most of it. There was even a bullet hole. The centerpiece was a large picture of Bozo the clown with the international symbol for no through it.

  Taking deep breaths, he sat at his desk. The room seemed smaller with the door closed. He couldn’t see anybody outside the windows in the drywall. He had not been able to before the door was in, either, but he hadn’t noticed.

  Now he suddenly felt cut off from the detail. He steeled himself, and finally brought his eyes right. Inside, the door looked pretty much the same as it had on Friday, new and nicely varnished, except for where the bullet had splintered the wood around its exit hole.

  He remembered that years before, during one or other of the endless labor disputes in which the city always seemed to be embroiled, some unknown and never apprehended officers had released chickens on a Friday night into the offices of Police Chief Dan Rigby. Apparently, some felt at that time that their chief was acting in a chickenshit manner, not standing up for the demands of his troops. It was a not-so-subtle but ultimately effective way to express their displeasure.

  Glitsky didn’t think there was anything like that going on here. The detail wasn’t in the midst of any turmoil that he knew of. He got along with everybody.

  Pratt, he thought. Her staff. But no, not here in the detail. Nobody who worked with her would have risked it.

  This was just a practical joke. He didn’t find it very funny, but he remembered that Rigby hadn’t laughed all that much about the chickens either. In fact, Rigby’s reaction had been so over the top that it had cost him some respect. Glitsky wasn’t going to have that happen to him. He was going to remain cool and never mention it to a soul.

  But he was as mad as he’d ever been.

  Pushing back from the desk, he walked over and scratched away at the splintered wood. The hole went all the way through. Instinctively, he searched the opposite wall. There it was, up by the ceiling, the next place the bullet had hit. He couldn’t believe that some idiot inspector, goofing off, would discharge a firearm in the building, even if it had been during the weekend when the odds of hitting someone with the bullet were marginally lower.

  For just a second he toyed with the idea: maybe he could find the slug somewhere in the building and run ballistics on it and all the weapons of his inspectors. This might identify the shooter, whom he would then publicly humiliate, horribly torture, and then fire, not necessarily in that order. He crossed over to the hole. Sure enough, the slug had been pried out.

  Of course, he realized, these were pros. Idiots, but professional idiots.

  Whoever did it had customized themselves a light load of powder — probably not as light as they’d intended. But they’d given the matter some thought — and then dug the slug out and disposed of the evidence. Pros.

  His telephone jarred him back to where he was. ‘Glitsky.’

  ‘Hardy.’

  He was already angry enough, and now Hardy wanting to banter his way back into his good graces. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You get a message over the weekend?’

  ‘Yeah. Great, you’re sorry. I got that Friday, too, at your office, remember? Sorry’s a big help. Is that it? I’m busy.’

  A pause. ‘That’s not it. I’m bringing Graham Russo in this morning. I wanted to let you know.’

  ‘That’s really swell, thanks. I’ll pass it along.’

  He hung up, took another look at his very own bullet hole, then opened the door and went out into the detail.

  * * * * *

  Graham spent the night alone on Edgewood and called Hardy as soon as he got up, before sunrise. Ha, ha, yeah, that was funny, they agreed, the whole Bay to Breakers thing. Hardy picked him up on the way in to work.

  Now they were in his office, on either end of the couch. The doors were closed behind them. Phyllis was holding calls, although Hardy had already phoned out to Glitsky. But the morning paper had contained yet another new story about his client. He wanted to ask Graham about it. Barbara Brandt, the Sacramento lobbyist, had taken a lie detector test for Sharron Pratt, saying that she’d spoken to Graham on the day Sal died. And she passed. Ostensibly, she was telling the truth.

  ‘So what about that?’ Hardy asked. ‘She says she counseled you before you went over to your dad’s. And you’re telling me you don’t know her.’

  ‘You got it.’ Graham, in slacks and a sport jacket, was shaking his head no. He seemed truly baffled. ‘I have no idea where she’s coming from, Diz. I never met her in my life. No, correct that, she called me once.’

  Hardy was sitting with studied casualness, legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap. ‘Graham, she took a lie detector test and passed it.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’ll take one too. I don’t know her. She’s got to be some fruitcake.’

  ‘She’s a lobbyist in Sacramento.’

  Graham smiled. ‘I rest my case.’

  Hardy’s brow was etching itself a few new lines. ‘You don’t know her?’ he repeated a last time. ‘Then what—?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of publicity stunt.’

  ‘But she did talk to you on the phone?’

  Graham was showing his impatience. ‘We didn’t even get to what she wanted.’ He shifted forward, elbows on knees. ‘I still don’t know what she wants. What does this get her?’

  Hardy was wondering the same thing. ‘You’re on the cover of Time. It was a sympathetic article. Maybe she’s on your coattails. For her cause.’

  Graham sat back. ‘But the conclusions in Time, the way he made it all sound, it was all wrong.’ This was what he’d argued about with Sarah, although he couldn’t very well tell that to Hardy right now. ‘I never went inside, Diz. I went over early, Sal wasn’t home, I left. I didn’t talk to any Barbara Brandt or anybody else. I’m not lying.’

  There was real anguish in his voice, and Hardy was almost glad to hear it. Maybe Graham was at last starting to get some understanding of the predicament he was in. But there was still one last hurdle before Hardy could sign on for the duration, and they had to jump it now. ‘Okay, Graham, you’re not lying. That’s good news. I believe you. But the bad news is I might not be able to stay on with this case.’


  ‘That’s not funny.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  Graham looked at him imploringly. He hung his head for a teat, looked back up. ‘Why not?’

  This was his least favorite part, but Hardy had to explain his position. ‘As it stands now, you’re into me for maybe four hundred dollars, two hours.’

  ‘It’s been more than that.’

  Hardy waved off the objection. ‘We’re talking round figures. Four hundred gets us to here, but if I continue and we go to trial, then you get most of my time for most of a year.’

  ‘Or else I take the public defender?’

  ‘That’s right. There’s some good lawyers in that office. I could recommend—’

  But Graham stopped him. ‘So could I. I know those guys, they got fifty cases going all the time. I’d be one of them.’

  Hardy didn’t want to waste breath arguing it. Many public defenders were decent enough trial attorneys, but Graham was right. In general, workload remained a factor in quality of defense. But they couldn’t sit here all day either. Hardy had already alerted Glitsky that he was bringing Graham to the Hall, and judging from the lieutenant’s mood, he wouldn’t put it past him to send a car down here and make the arrest in Hardy’s office — a little object lesson in the etiquette of friendship.

  ‘How about this?’ Graham asked. ‘You take me on for a small retainer — say a couple of grand — and after six weeks you tell the judge I’m busted, then the court appoints you to represent me, and it pays you.’

  Hardy was shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t do that.’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t blame you. It’s pretty sleazy.’

  ‘So where does that leave us? You want a private attorney, you’ve got to pay for one. That’s the way it works.’

  ‘I know. You’re right.’ He pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat. ‘Deduct the four hundred I already owe you and that’s eleven thousand, six hundred.’

  Hardy flicked at the envelope a few times, then left it on the couch, got up, and walked over to the window. He hated this. There was a time, he knew, when he would have taken this case, literally, for nothing. He would have lived on beans and burgers and somehow made it work. But it wasn’t only him now. He had a family that depended on him absolutely. He thought of Talleyrand’s axiom that a married man with children will do anything for money.

  Leaving aside the thornier question of where this money had come from, he turned back. ‘I’m sorry, Graham. It’s not close.’

  ‘Not even as a retainer? I could sign a promissory note for the rest.’

  ‘And what about if you’re convicted? It’s notoriously hard to make a good living in prison.’ He didn’t mean to be such a hard-ass, but he knew this was gentle compared to what Graham would be facing in the coming months.

  ‘If you put my Beemer up for sale, you could probably clear another twenty-five. Sal’s baseball cards, maybe another thirty.’

  ‘Except that Sal’s cards aren’t yours. They’re under seal.’

  Since Graham was going to be charged with killing Sal for the money and the baseball cards, if he was convicted, those items would be permanently confiscated by the state. They were untouchable assets.

  But Hardy badly wanted this case. He’d been living with it for a couple of weeks and he couldn’t imagine letting it go now. He’d committed. Thirty-seven thousand dollars — twelve in the envelope and twenty-five from the BMW — wasn’t going to cut it for a year’s work in a murder trial, but it was a reasonable retainer under normal business conditions.

  They’d just have to figure some other way. Hardy was convinced that Graham was doing his best to show good faith, although he really didn’t want to think about the provenance of the cash in the envelope he was holding. It was probably money saved from his softball tournaments, maybe left over from his well-paying law job.

  It broke the first law of the defense attorney, which is ‘Get your payment up front’, but Hardy did not care. As with all acts of faith it was irrational and in many ways unexplainable. It was just something he felt he had to do. ‘All right, Graham,’ he said, ‘my fees are two hundred an hour, twice that at trial. You want to sign a note that you’ll pay it all when this is over, no matter how it comes out?’

  It was a no-brainer — maybe, Hardy thought, on both sides —and Graham gave it all the time it deserved. About a second. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’

  Hardy put out his hand. ‘Then you got yourself a lawyer.’

  * * * * *

  When Hardy returned to his office in the late afternoon, there was a call from Helen Taylor, Graham’s mother — a cultured voice — saying she’d like to make an appointment at his earliest convenience to discuss the case.

  ‘Of course we want to help Graham any way we can. Are we allowed to come and visit him at the jail? Where did he go this last week, do you know? When is he being… what’s the word, arraigned?’

  ‘That’s the word. Tomorrow morning, nine A.M., but these things aren’t very exact in terms of time,’ he explained, understating considerably. ‘If you’re there at nine-thirty, Superior Court, Department Twenty-two, you won’t miss it. We can meet after that.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘My husband too.’

  ‘Fine,’ Hardy replied. ‘I’ll be the one in the suit standing next to your son.’

  * * * * *

  Lanier and Evans had spent the afternoon going door to door in Hunter’s Point, questioning the residents who lived near one of the neighborhood’s busiest intersections, wondering whether any of them had noticed the fusillade of eighty shots from at least three different weapons last Thursday night that had killed two teenagers and wounded four others, broken sixteen windows, and set off alarms in five of the street-front businesses.

  Mostly, nobody had seen or heard a thing. Thursday? No, Thursday be pretty quiet most times.

  Sarah had been in the game a long time, so this didn’t surprise her. But it did make her angry. Between them, she and Marcel had located and interviewed a grand total of three witnesses who had seen the car drive up and fire randomly into the crowd gathered on the corner. But it had been dark, and there was no telling the make or model, or the color or size or sex of the driver or other occupants, if any.

  ‘What really gets me’ — Sarah was a few minutes into milkshake therapy at the closest McDonald’s — ‘is they treat it like it’s a natural disaster, some act of nature. Nobody’s fault, it just happens.’

  Since this was the essence of police work, it didn’t seem to faze Marcel, who’d walked the walk through dozens of similar incidents. ‘I don’t know why they make these things so thick. I cannot get a drop out of this straw. You think if I went back and told ’em I was a cop, they’d add some milk or something?‘

  ‘Here’s a wild concept, Marcel — you could use a spoon. See? Just like I’m doing. But doesn’t it make you crazy?’

  He put the shake down and lifted his shoulders. ‘The thing is, Sarah, nothing that happens is anybody’s fault. Things just happen to people. So you called it — it’s a natural disaster.’

  ‘But somebody did this, Marcel. Somebody drove up and shot these kids—’

  ‘Hey, don’t you go losing sleep over these poor kids. Somebody in that crowd had guns on ’em. That’s a guarantee.‘

  ‘And so you shoot at the whole crowd?’

  ‘And miss,’ Marcel said. ‘Don’t forget that part. You are not a true gangbanger if you actually hit any part of the person you go to take out. You only hit bystanders. It’s kind of like the unwritten rule. Maybe an inside joke. I’m not sure which. I’m going to go get a spoon.’

  When he came back to the table, Sarah was staring at nothing, eyes glazed. Marcel slid in. ‘What now?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Lanier spooned some milkshake. ‘Look, Sarah. You want some free advice? Probably not, but here it is. You can’t worry so much. You take all this too seriously.’

  ‘Thanks, but I wasn’t thi
nking about this anymore. I’m thinking about Graham Russo.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean. Graham Russo is in jail. That means we’re done with him until he goes to trial. What are you thinking about?’

  Wondering how much she could say, she stirred at her shake. ‘There’s something going on we don’t know. There has to be.’

  ‘This is always true,’ Lanier said. ‘But a lot of what’s going on doesn’t have squat to do with our jobs.’

  ‘This does. Look, they ask us to go find everything we can to make sure Russo’s not the wrong guy and give us three days to do it? So we don’t find it in three days it doesn’t exist?’

  Marcel was dipping his spoon, his brain reluctantly engaged. He nodded. ‘Essentially.’

  ‘Okay, now we’re six days down the road. Tosca tells you about a power struggle that Sal’s smack in the middle of, and I learn that there’s at least some chance he was holding a big bag of cash on the day he’s killed. So what do we do with this information? You’re telling me you believe it doesn’t relate?’

  Lanier shrugged. ‘Even if it does. So what?’

  She just stared at him.

  ‘Do you really think the attorney general of the state of California would bail on this now after sticking his neck so far out? There is no chance. I know Dean Powell. He used to work here. And Soma? Jesus. These guys could get an affidavit signed by two dozen eyewitnesses that Graham Russo was in New York for the week all around Sal’s death and they’d say then he must have killed him by phone.’

  Sarah sat back, drummed her fingers on the table. ‘I mink we ought to tell Abe. Cover ourselves, if nothing else.’

  ‘And what’s he going to do?’ Lanier gave up on his milkshake, pushing it aside. ‘Look, they got the grand jury to indict Russo already. He’s in jail. Anything but a smoking gun in somebody else’s hand — and maybe not even that — it’s not going to matter. From now on the evidence talks.’