All right.
She launched into the standard police interview intro for the transcriber, then began. ‘When you talked to Inspector Lanier on Saturday, you said you didn’t know your father had morphine at his apartment-’
‘Wait a minute,’ Hardy said again. ‘I really have to object to this. You shouldn’t answer that, Graham.’
But the boy had gotten himself relaxed. ‘Diz, I want to explain.’
He focused on Inspector Evans. ‘That’s not exactly what I said. I said I didn’t know how it got there.’
Lanier abruptly closed the magazine he was leafing through, shifted on the couch, said, ‘Wait a minute.’ His face clouded. ‘No, all right.’ He grabbed the next magazine on the pile.
Evans asked, ‘But you knew it was there, the morphine?’
‘Graham.’ Hardy might be upsetting his client, but he had to speak up again. He really didn’t want Graham saying any of this. It could not help him. As a lawyer Graham must know this. What was he thinking? Didn’t Graham understand that this wasn’t casual conversation? It was being recorded and would be transcribed and perhaps used against him. Maybe Hardy’s getting inside wasn’t going to be worth the cost, and that worried him even more. ‘We can talk about this later, when we’re alone.’
Graham ignored him, smiled at the pretty inspector. ‘The morphine? I showed him how to give himself shots. He was in a lot of pain.’
The pain again. Graham kept bringing up the pain.
‘What from?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t ask?’
‘No. My father wouldn’t have told me. He would have said mind your own business. He didn’t want anybody to pity him.’
‘So you went up to your father’s apartment and showed him how to administer these morphine injections to himself?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Even though you weren’t particularly close?’
Graham cast a glance at Hardy. Looking for approval? Hardy couldn’t say. The horse was already a couple of acres from the barn and still running. Hardy had tried to stop Graham when it might have done some good. If his client reined himself in now, he would just look worse. So Hardy sipped his coffee and waited.
‘Just because we weren’t close, I didn’t want the guy to suffer.’ Graham shrugged. ‘He asked me to show him. I showed him, but I didn’t shoot him up. I knew what he was going to do.’
‘And what was that?’
Graham wasn’t blinking in the face of the questions. He leveled his gaze at her. ‘What he did do. Kill himself.’
Hardy thought he’d convey a little relevant information that his client might not know. ‘The autopsy came in last night, Graham,’ he said. ‘It didn’t rule out homicide.’
Graham stopped his cup halfway to his mouth, put it down on the table, sat all the way back in his chair. ‘Well, that’s bullshit.’
Hardy nodded. ‘Maybe, but it’s why these guys are here.’
Graham leaned forward, elbow on the table, and looked right at Evans. Again, the expression struck Hardy as a little much. The old eye-to-eye for sincerity was, he suspected, no guarantee that the truth was next up. ‘I didn’t kill my father. He killed himself.’
Sarah Evans wasn’t giving anything away. She nodded, moved the tape recorder slightly, sipped from her mug. ‘So how often would you say you saw your father in the last six months?’
‘I don’t know. Six, eight times.’
‘More than once a month, then?’
‘He was getting senile. He had Alzheimer’s, you know. He’d call me, then forget he called me. He didn’t remember where he’d put things. I’d come up and find them.’
‘The morphine?’
A pause. ‘Sure, yeah.’
‘What was the pain from?’ she asked again. ‘Who gave him the morphine?’
He smiled broadly this time. ‘You already asked that.’
‘And you said you didn’t know.’
That’s right. Still don’t.‘
She shifted gears on him. ‘Don’t you work for an ambulance company?’
‘I’m a paramedic. I ride in ambulances.’
‘And you carry syringes and-’
Hardy couldn’t sit still any longer. ‘Excuse me, but Graham already said he didn’t know where the morphine came from.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m asking now about the syringes.’
‘It’s the same-’
But Graham put a hand over Hardy’s arm, stopping him. ‘I may have brought some syringes, left some there. I wanted to make sure he had clean needles.’
In the silence that followed, Lanier turned another page of his magazine. Graham leaned across the table and adjusted the louvered blinds. The room lightened up by half again. It was a great day above the fog here on Edgewood.
Evans took another tack. ‘You’re the executor for your father. What do you know about the safe?’
Graham got to the bottom of his coffee mug. His eyes shifted out to the view, then back. ‘Not much,’ he said.
‘What did your dad keep in it?’
‘I doubt anything,’ Graham said. ‘He didn’t have anything worth saving.’
‘What about his baseball cards? Where did he keep them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you want to ask what baseball cards?’
‘No. I know he had a collection once. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe it was in the safe. I don’t know.’
But Evans was closing in on something, and Hardy wanted to get there first and head her off if he could. The questions were rattling Graham. ‘Anybody want another cup?’ he said.
No takers.
Hardy got up and went to the machine, but Evans kept right on. ‘But you never – personally – saw inside the safe, or opened it, or anything like that?’
‘No. I think the safe was just a prop. Sal liked to pretend he was doing great, he didn’t need anybody, he had lots of money. But you saw where he lived.’
Lanier was leafing through the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Suddenly he held up a piece of paper, stationery from a Motel 6, and said, ‘Hey.’
Dear Graham,
Whatever anybody else thinks, I am proud of you. I don’t know what that means after all this time, but I am. I’ve been following you as best I could – the one hope I had left among my kids. Your mother doesn’t make it any too easy, and you all made it clear enough you didn’t want me around. Your mom, I guess, what she told you.
But I did keep an eye out. Your career in the minors, you know, and then law school. I know where Deb lives with that husband of hers, and Georgie. How’d they get so messed up? Me leaving. I suppose that was it.
Did your mom ever let on that I would call and ask about you? No, I guess not. Every three months, four, I would, though. You ought to know that. That’s how I found out about you quitting the law job, trying for baseball one last time.
I saw you play today. Two triples. Remember how we used to say you’d rather hit a triple than a homer any day? Most exciting offensive play in the game, am I right? So, anyway, plus you started that beautiful 3-6-4 double play. You owned the field, son, and I am so proud of you for trying baseball again.
That’s all any of us can do, and few enough try, and I just wanted – whether it means anything – I just wanted to say good on you, doing what you were born to do. Somebody appreciated it.
While Hardy looked over the letter, a heavy silence hung in the room. Then Lanier took the page out of Hardy’s hand. He looked down at it again, showing it to Evans. ‘This last is in a different handwriting. Sixteen, eight, twenty-seven.’
‘What’s that?’ Hardy asked. He felt sick that this was going on and, really, it was his fault, his stupid mistake. You simply don’t let your client talk to the police, and he’d not only done that, he’d facilitated it. The fact that Graham wasn’t telling them anything they couldn’t find out for themselves mitigated his self-loathing
, but only slightly.
Evans knew what the numbers were right away. ‘That’s the combination to Sal’s safe. The one Graham here says he knows nothing about.’
It was after eleven o’clock.
Evans and Lanier weren’t about to let Graham go into the bathroom and close the door behind him to take a shower, so he was still in the clothes he’d slept in.
Graham and Hardy still sat, mostly in silence, at the large table by the back window. The blinds were completely open by now and the city outside, with the fog gone, shimmered in the sunlight. Graham had slid open the window a few inches and a light breeze freshened the air from time to time, but it was mostly quiet and unpleasant.
From Hardy’s perspective, the two inspectors – buoyed by their discovery that Graham had a means of knowing the combination to Sal’s safe – had increased the intensity of their search. Working as a team, they had begun again at the front door, working slowly, opening every book and drawer, lifting everything that wasn’t nailed down, checking pockets of clothes in the closet, canisters in the kitchen.
They had to be getting near the end, Hardy thought, and if the letter was all they wound up finding, it wouldn’t be too bad. Graham had even made the argument as soon as they’d found the letter: so what if he might at one time have known the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember the letter from his father had been stuck in the magazine. Did they honestly think he cared about the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember why he’d written it down. He just didn’t know.
Hardy wished his client hadn’t talked so much, but it appeared to be over now, and little real damage had been done. The two inspectors were back by the dining table with Graham and Hardy, having thoroughly searched from stern to, nearly, stem. Lanier had just pulled up a chair and opened the drawer to a small desk table next to the Murphy bed when Evans lifted a Skoal chewing tobacco can from the utensil drawer and shook, then opened, it.
‘Six keys,’ she said, raising her eyes to her partner. She lifted the plain metal ring, and jingled the keys.
Suddenly Graham was a deer caught in headlights. The moment passed as quickly as it had come, but to Hardy it was worrisome. There was real fear in his eyes. He’d been hiding something in plain view that he hadn’t expected them to notice, or if they did notice, he hadn’t expected them to connect it to anything. And now they had.
Sarah Evans turned back to Graham and dropped the ring onto the table. ‘Let’s play “Name the Keys.” What do you say?’
He raised his shoulders, drummed his hands – da da dum - on the edge of the table. He gave her his big smile. ‘I really don’t have a clue. They’re just keys. Everybody’s got a container full of keys.’ He reached over and picked up the ring. ‘These two are duplicates for my car, I guess. This one is the dead bolt for here.’
Evans held up one of them. ‘You got a safe deposit box? That’s what this looks like. What bank are you with?’
The smile faded. From his seat at the small table across the room, Lanier turned and looked over at the silence.
Just as Hardy put his hand up to warn Graham not to answer, he blurted out, ‘I don’t know.’
Lanier tapped on the desk with something he’d extracted from the drawer. ‘Checkbook here is from Wells Fargo. The branch isn’t five blocks away. We get done here, we ride down and take a look. Maybe get a brand-new warrant.’
Inspector Sergeant Sarah Evans pulled a chair up and sat upon it. ‘Graham,’ she said, ‘you’re telling me you don’t know if you have a safe deposit box? Is that what you’re saying?’
Graham just didn’t seem to get it – he was making some bantering noises at Evans, trying to make light of the situation here, keep things casual, apparently unable to envision himself as a man with handcuffs in his future.
Hardy had no idea what was in the safety deposit box, but judging from Graham’s reaction, when he found out, it was going to be ugly.
Hardy put a hand on Graham’s shoulder and stood up. The interview was over.
He was thoroughly disheartened. It had been a long and wasted morning. He hadn’t done much for Graham Russo up until now, and he knew there wasn’t anything he’d be able to do until this chapter had played itself out.
4
Mario Giotti sat at his regular table at Stagnola’s on the Wharf. He sipped his iced tea and gazed with a studiedly placid expression down to the fishing boats moored outside his window. He was a well-known man in the city and he thought it important to maintain a dignified, serene persona in public. In any event, it was a gorgeous May morning, a Tuesday, and when he’d arrived at the restaurant, he’d apparently been in fine spirits.
And why not? He was a U.S. federal judge, appointed for life, and he lived in the best city in the world. A vibrant sixty-year-old, he kept his sparkplug of a body in terrific shape by either jogging or spending an hour a day at the workout room in the basement of the federal courthouse. With his steel-gray eyes, his unlined face, the prominent nose, he knew he cut a dignified figure.
Although just at this moment, he was struggling to control his expression. The judge’s wife was late. He was peeved with her and didn’t want to show it.
He hated to wait, always had. Fortunately, in his life nowadays, people most often waited for him, waited on him. He never had to stand in a line. He came into his courtroom and he had a staff that made damn sure that the day’s business was ready to proceed upon his entrance. But he still had to wait for his wife. Always had, probably always would.
As he looked down at the fishing boats, a sigh escaped him. He wasn’t even aware of it. Coming here to Stagnola’s – which he did at least once a week when he wasn’t traveling – wasn’t so much a nostalgic experience as it was a return to his roots.
That’s how he felt about the place. It was his true home, his psychic touchstone. For sixty-five years, over three generations, the building had been Giotti’s Grotto.
The judge’s great-grandfather had opened the first cioppino stand here in the middle of the Depression, and it had stayed within the family, adding onto itself, growing into a Fisherman’s Wharf landmark, until Joey Stagnola had bought it from Mario’s father, Bruno, in 1982.
Mario was the last male of the Giotti line. But he’d been a lawyer, with dreams of becoming a judge. He wasn’t going to run a dago restaurant on the Wharf. His father, Bruno, understood – if he himself were young again and college educated, if he’d had the same options as his son, he’d do the same thing.
But Mario knew that secretly it had broken the old man’s heart. He sold the restaurant to Stagnola and, six months later, sitting in a red booth by one of these back windows, had died here. (He had just finished an after-lunch Sambuca and the coroner found three coffee beans – good Italian restaurants served them floating in the aperitif for luck – in his mouth, unchewed.)
‘More iced tea, Your Honor?’
Mauritio, the maitre-d‘, had sent the youngster over to check the judge’s glass. Mauritio always took good care of him.
Giotti gave his practiced, friendly nod to the white-jacketed waiter and the young man poured. The boy could have been him, forty-five years before, earnest and efficient, making sure the patrons were happy. He moved on to the next table and the judge sighed again.
‘You don’t look very cheerful. Is something wrong?’
Giotti hadn’t even noticed his wife’s approach. Pat Giotti was still a fine-looking woman, with an unlined, ageless face, high cheekbones, a graceful figure. He raised his face and she kissed him, then seated herself across the table, immediately reaching over and taking his hand, squeezing it. ‘Sorry I’m late. Are you all right?’
His face animated itself. ‘Just feeling old for a minute.’
‘You’re not old.’
‘For a minute, I said.’ He squeezed her hand. They had made love the night before and he was telling her he remembered very well. She was right, he wasn’t old.
‘Are you thinking about Sal?’
/>
He shook his head. ‘Actually, no. The waiter just reminded me of when I used to work here.’ The judge looked down at the boats for a second. ‘Maybe a little.’
She eyed him carefully, seemed satisfied, then reached for a roll and broke it. ‘I’m sure it was for the best,’ she said. ‘Sal, I mean.’
‘I’m sure it was,’ he agreed. ‘It’s just…’ His voice trailed off. ‘I look down there at the moorings, I can almost see the Signing Bonus, see Sal waving up at me. It’s hard to imagine him gone.’
‘He’d lived his life, hon.’
‘He was my age. I think that’s part of it.’
‘He was sick, remember? He was dying anyway. It just would have gotten worse. His suffering’s over now.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It isn’t all bad. It’s much better this way.’
‘I know you’re right.’ He looked out the window. ‘This was probably just the wrong table for today, being able to see down there. It brings back those memories.’
‘But this is our table, Mario. They hold it for you, the judge’s table.’
He squeezed her hand again. ‘I’m just saying he was my friend. I miss him, that’s all.’
‘The idea of him, love, the idea. He wasn’t the same friend at the end, you know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course.’
She met his eyes again, squeezed his hand.
‘You must know that,’ she said.
‘I do know it, Pat. It’s better all around. It’s just not easy.’
The waiter came by and took their orders. Pat ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio to go with her scallops. The judge was having a crab Louis and his iced tea – of course, no wine. He was going back to court in the afternoon.
They sat in silence for a while, until her wine arrived. She took a taste, then put her glass down. ‘Did you read this morning’s paper? They’re saying maybe it wasn’t a suicide.’
‘Maybe? It wasn’t,’ the judge said flatly.
The Mercy Rule Page 5