The Mercy Rule

by John Lescroart

  Graham shrugged. ‘I guessed wrong.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About whether she cared about the truth, I guess. I thought she’d believe me, not the words so much.’

  This was close enough to how Hardy felt to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘So what about now?’

  ‘What about now?’

  ‘You and me, the truth, all that silly stuff.’

  ‘I haven’t lied to you.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you did. You said you weren’t close to your father.’

  ‘But I’d already told the police that. I… it didn’t seem like a big thing. I wanted you to help me out, and if I came across as inconsistent, you’d doubt me from the git-go. I screwed up, I guess. I’m sorry.’

  Hardy closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Okay, so let’s get clear on this. Despite what you told me and the police – the police two times – you were close to your father?’

  Graham nodded. ‘I figured it would be easier to just say I wasn’t.’

  ‘Easier how?’

  ‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? What everyone would think.’

  Hardy stopped pacing. ‘You know what Mark Twain said? He said the best part about telling the truth is you don’t have to remember when you lied.’

  ‘I know. All this just came at me, Diz. I didn’t have any time to think about it. I said I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’ Hardy wanted to get it straight. ‘So you were afraid that if you admitted you and your father had reconciled, people would draw the conclusion that you helped him kill himself?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you didn’t? Help him kill himself?’

  Graham had his huge hands folded on the table. He looked down at them, then back up at Hardy. ‘No. I’ve told you that.’

  Hardy came up to the table, laid a palm down on it. ‘Okay, you told me that. But at this point, how am I supposed to know when you’re telling the truth?’

  ‘This one isn’t a lie.’

  ‘You didn’t kill your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You didn’t help him kill himself? Talk him through it? Sit there with him? Any of that? Because if you did, it’s going to make a big difference. We’ve got a whole ’nother ball game.‘

  ‘No, I didn’t do that.’

  ‘You weren’t there on Friday at all?’

  Again, the maddening hesitation.

  ‘Graham?’ Hardy slammed the table and his client jerked backward. ‘Jesus, what’s to think about? You were there or you weren’t.’

  ‘I was thinking about something else.’

  ‘Don’t. Keep your mind on what I’m asking you about. You think you can do that?’

  Hardy pulled his chair out again and sat in it. ‘Okay.’ He modulated his voice. He wasn’t here to rebuke his client, but he had to get a handle on the truth. ‘Okay, Graham, let’s talk a minute about you and me. You’re a lawyer, so you know this stuff, but when you hired me the other day, I became your attorney. After that, anything we say to each other is privileged. Like now. Clear?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So I’ve got to know what happened with you and your dad. All of it. I’ll take it with me to my grave, but I’ve got to know so I can help you.’

  Graham slid his chair back a few inches and folded his arms across his chest, his sculpted face impassive. His eyes scanned the room, came back to Hardy. ‘How long am I going to be here?’ he finally asked.

  The abrupt segue – frustrating as it might be – was no surprise. Hardy’s experience with people who unexpectedly found themselves in jail was that their attention span lost a lot of linkage. ‘I don’t know.’

  This was the exact truth. In spite of Glitsky’s warning the previous evening, nobody had arrested Graham until this morning. Evans and Lanier had discovered the safe-deposit money late in the afternoon – too late, according to Glitsky, to go to the district attorney and get an arrest warrant.

  Then, last night Graham had neither been home nor at his paramedic job. Concerned that he might flee, the two inspectors had arrested him without a warrant when he opened his door to say hello. So the DA wasn’t yet involved in the case, and this meant that the exact charge – beyond simple murder – had yet to be determined.

  Hardy went on with the explanation. ‘Your arraignment is tomorrow and we can’t get bail set until then, so you’re here at least overnight. Assuming I can get you reasonable bail, which maybe I can’t, you could be out tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘And if they’re not going for special circumstances.’

  This got Graham’s complete attention. ‘What do you mean?’ The fingers spiked at his hair. ‘Jesus Christ, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking about murder for profit or during a robbery. That’s specials.’

  ‘I didn’t-’ He stopped. ‘What robbery?’

  Keeping it matter-of-fact, Hardy told him. ‘Fifty thousand dollars in cash. Another twenty or thirty in mint-condition baseball cards. That’s a lot of money, Graham. You kill somebody, you take their stuff or their money. That’s robbery.’

  Arms crossed again, Graham was chewing his cheek.

  ‘So from an outsider’s point of view, including the inspectors who arrested you, and not to mention yours truly, let’s see how it looks. You make – what? – fifteen bucks an hour as a paramedic.’

  ‘Give or take.’

  ‘And you live in the nicest neighborhood in the city – what’s your rent up there?’

  Graham sighed deeply, answered reluctantly. ‘Fifteen.’

  ‘Okay, your rent is fifteen hundred dollars in this place a judge would probably salivate over. You’ve got beautiful furniture, more fine wine than you can drink in a month, what kind of car do you drive?’

  ‘Beemer.’

  Another fifty grand, Hardy thought. He should have guessed. ‘I don’t suppose it’s paid for.’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘So what’s the hit on that?’

  ‘Six hundred eighty.’

  The hard numbers didn’t matter so much – of course there would be other expenses, probably moving Graham’s monthly nut up into the range of four to five thousand dollars. He wasn’t making this riding in an ambulance.

  ‘So the picture, Graham, is that you quit your incredible job as a federal law clerk, then you got laid off by the Dodgers, now you work part time. You see a question developing here?’

  Graham came forward, elbows on the table. He pulled at the neck of his jumpsuit. ‘I get at least fifty a game. That’s if we lose. A hundred if we win. Bonuses in tournaments, for home runs, like that. Last Saturday I made four hundred.’ He must have read Hardy’s blank look. ‘For softball,’ he explained.

  ‘Who pays you to play softball?’

  ‘Craig Ising.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Some rich guy, he owns the Hornets. That’s my team.’ Hardy still wasn’t seeing it. Graham went on patiently. ‘When I made the big club, during the strike, there were a couple of articles in the papers about us – the replacement players – and Ising kept his eyes open and waited. When the Dodgers cut me and I got back home, he looked me up.’

  Hardy heard the words, but felt he was missing some crucial point. ‘We’re talking slo-pitch softball? You’re saying there’s a professional league?’

  ‘No. It’s all under the table. It’s all gambling. These rich guys stack the teams and bet on the games.’

  ‘How much do they bet?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘I don’t know for sure. I hear numbers. Ten grand, twenty. Per game.’

  Hardy was shaking his head. ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s big business. The hitch is, I can’t declare any of the money – no taxes, no nothing.’

  ‘So how much do you really make?’

  Attorney-client privilege or not, Graham didn’t want to say. ‘I don’t know. Some weeks I play three games, tournaments on weekends.’

  ‘A
nd how many games are in a tournament?’

  ‘Usually five if you go all the way.’

  Hardy was scribbling some numbers on his legal pad. ‘A grand a week?’ he asked.

  Another shrug. ‘Sometimes.’ Then, suddenly, he spoke with the first real urgency Hardy had heard. ‘But this can’t come out. They get me for tax evasion, they’ll yank my bar card. I’ll really never work again.’

  ‘They get you for murder, that’ll be the least of your problems.’ This was inarguable, but Graham leaned back in his chair, pondering it. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be a lawyer anyway.’

  ‘Come on, Diz. Why do you think I went to law school? Of course I want to be a lawyer.’

  ‘But you-’

  ‘I just wanted one last chance to play ball. I figured I’d play a few years, make my millions, then go back and practice law. Then imagine my surprise when I came back to the city and found I wasn’t hirable. Good old Judge Draper had blackballed me, called everybody he knew, though of course he denies it.’

  ‘You asked him?’

  ‘I didn’t have to. The word got out. I’m untouchable.’ Another scan of the room. ‘And now this.’

  ‘Couldn’t Giotti help you? He was a friend of your father’s. Wouldn’t he…?’

  But Graham was shaking his head before Hardy could finish. ‘No chance. Federal judges hang together. You’ve got to understand that I quit these guys, quit the court, rejected their whole lives. They’re never going to forgive me. Maybe I could find some work in Alaska, but I’m dead in this town. I’ve looked, believe me. I must have sent out five hundred resumes. I’m in the top of my class at Boalt. Not even an interview.’

  ‘So why didn’t you move to Alaska?’

  The maddening hesitation suddenly reappeared. ‘I might,’ he said at last. The ambiguity seemed intentional. Whether he meant ‘I might have except for…’ or ‘I might now someday,’ Hardy couldn’t say. But either way, for Hardy the light came on. ‘Your father. He needed you. That’s why you came back and stayed on.’

  But immediately Hardy regretted what he’d said – he might have given his client an idea.

  Graham stood up, got to the wall, and stood facing the window. Finally, he spoke without turning. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I didn’t plan it. It just happened. He wrote me the letter – the one you saw yesterday – and I got in touch with him, and we just’ – a pause – ‘I just…’

  Graham was silent so long that Hardy rose and crossed over to him. It shocked him to see tears, but in spite of himself, or wanting to, he wasn’t sure he believed them. Not anymore. Graham had already been too duplicitous. His admission about trying to charm Sarah. Maybe now he was playing for his attorney’s sympathy. Hardy put a hand on his client’s shoulder and felt the tension break, the shoulders give.

  Graham hung his head, the weight of holding it up apparently too much to bear. ‘I loved him. He was my dad. He needed me.’ His voice went down a notch. ‘I needed him too.’

  There was still the money.

  Ten minutes later they were both back at the table. Hardy had been there for over an hour and had nothing substantive to show for it. He had to find out about the money.

  ‘My dad wanted me to take it, to give it to somebody else. He didn’t want anybody in the family to have it, didn’t want it to be part of the estate.’

  Hardy took that in. Like nearly everything else to come from the mouth of Graham Russo, the response raised more questions than it answered. ‘Who did he want to give it to?’

  ‘The children of a woman named Joan Singleterry.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll bite. Who’s she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t your father tell you?’

  ‘He started. Then the phone rang. When I brought it up again when he came back, he looks at me like I’m from Mars. No memory. Just not there. That’s the way he got.’

  ‘And you didn’t press him?’

  Graham spread his palms. ‘That was my dad. He wouldn’t tell me, even if he remembered that he wanted me to know.’

  ‘The time he did mention her – what was that story?’

  He shrugged. ‘He didn’t know where she lived, but he wanted me to find her after he was dead and give her the money.’

  ‘So he knew he was going to be dead?’

  ‘He knew he was going to kill himself, sure.’ Graham held up a hand. ‘I know what that sounds like, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I believe it’s the truth?’ Hardy asked with heavy irony. ‘This happens all the time. Some guy’s father gives him fifty grand to give to somebody he doesn’t know.’ Hardy leaned across the table, punched up his voice. ‘Listen up, Graham, you’ve got to start telling me something I can believe pretty soon or I’m going to be out of here.’

  ‘This is the truth, Diz. I don’t know, maybe he had some kids with this woman a long time ago and-’

  ‘Where’d he get the money?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  Hardy slapped the table, shouted. ‘Jesus! What about the baseball cards? What did he want you to do with them, put ’em in a fucking time capsule?‘

  It was the moment to leave – this anger wasn’t going anywhere productive. Hardy got his voice back under control, gathered his pen and his legal pad, stood up. ‘Let me tell you what this looks like, Graham. This looks like you killed your dad and stole fifty thousand dollars from him and you just didn’t have the chance – yet – to launder the money, or do whatever it is you do with that much cash. And cash seems to be your thing. I’m not saying that this is what I think’ – although Hardy was perilously close to believing just that – ‘but this is what it’s going to look and sound like to everybody who hears it. And if it looks, smells, and tastes like it, guess what?’

  No reply.

  Hardy took a breath. ‘Now, I’m still your lawyer and I’m going to listen to what you say, and if you want to change your mind, I’m not going to hold it against you and we’ll go on from there. But these are losing cards. This is a terrible hand.’

  Graham looked up. ‘It’s what happened.’

  ‘Well, if that’s true, Graham,’ Hardy replied, ‘this has not been your lucky week.’

  6

  When the DA, Sharron Pratt, got the news that Graham Russo had been arrested without a warrant issued by her office, she angrily demanded that Glitsky report to her. She thought the police had seriously overstepped their bounds, particularly in this case where the larger issues surrounding assisted suicide needed to be thoroughly aired and debated. ‘I don’t understand,’ Pratt was saying, ‘why you didn’t come to me first, Lieutenant. Why did you just arrest him?’

  ‘We think he’s committed a murder.’ Glitsky didn’t yet understand Pratt’s anger, for while it was true that the police often came to the DA to get a warrant for an arrest, it was nearly as common to have inspectors make the arrest first. This tended to keep suspects from disappearing. ‘But look, ma’am, if you want, you can just dismiss the case.’

  That’s what you’d like, isn’t it, Lieutenant?‘

  ‘No, ma’am. But it’s your right.’

  ‘Don’t try to con me, Lieutenant. That’s just what you want. If you’d come for a warrant for this boy’s arrest, you knew I would have turned you down, but now that you’ve arrested him first, you’ve focused the issue, putting me on the spot.’

  Hands clamped behind her back, Pratt wore her half-moon glasses midway down her aristocratic nose. She looked over them.

  Pratt was not Glitsky’s boss, and he didn’t much care how she felt about him, but he was trying to do his job, and considered his reply carefully before he gave it. ‘It was a timing issue,’ Glitsky said. ‘There was plenty of evidence to arrest, but if you want to play political football…’

  Pratt’s eyes glared. Her nostrils flared. ‘Don’t you dare accuse me of playing politics with a man’s life. Your people made a mistake arresting this ma
n.’

  Glitsky couldn’t stop himself. ‘You know that the arresting inspector was a woman, don’t you?’

  It slowed her for a moment. ‘That’s not the issue,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t care who arrested him. The point is we – this office – had not made a decision to prosecute. You knew we weren’t ready to issue a warrant, so you went ahead without one.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Why would I even think it? Your office prosecutes homicides. What’s to know?’

  Pratt nodded, as though Glitsky had confirmed something for her. She moved over to her desk, where the Russo file sat in its manila folder. ‘I’m going to bring this up with the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, Lieutenant. This police vendetta to discredit me, it has to stop.’

  ‘And why are we having this vendetta again?’ Glitsky asked. ‘I forget.’

  ‘Because I believe – and I’m right - that some of the things that you call crimes are simply not wrong, and I’m not going to prosecute them.’

  ‘I don’t call them crimes – the legislature does.’

  Pratt was shaking her head. ‘I don’t care what’s on the books. The books are wrong. People are being hounded by you police, the city’s resources are being squandered by your harassment of prostitutes, casual marijuana users-’

  ‘Murderers?’

  She leveled a finger at him. ‘That’s exactly my point. Based on the evidence I’ve seen here’ – the finger went down to the folder – ‘I don’t think Graham Russo is a murderer.’

  ‘You don’t think he killed his father?’

  ‘No, I do think he killed his father.’ She slapped her palm down on the desk. ‘Of course he killed his father, technically speaking,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

  Deciding it would be wiser to sidestep a direct answer to that, Glitsky took a beat, tilted his head, ladled on the sincerity. ‘Then I really am missing something here. What’s the problem with us arresting him if you think he did it?’

  Sighing heavily, Pratt pulled her chair over and sat down. ‘What I’m saying, Lieutenant, is that though technically this could have been a homicide-’

  Glitsky interrupted. ‘Strout called it a homicide,’ he said, ‘so it’s a homicide.’