The Mercy Rule

by John Lescroart

  But Rebecca, her face betraying every nuance of the quandary, hadn’t lost the thread. ‘Like what? What isn’t wrong but is against the law?’

  He searched his brain. ‘Well, you know those places we passed coming here, with all those posters of naked women?’

  ‘Yeah. That was gross.’

  ‘It might be gross or whatever, but it’s not against the law. It might not be the way you’d want to choose to live, to do that kind of stuff. You might even think it’s wrong, but it’s still not against the law.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Are you sure you want to talk about this? Is this a little… serious?’

  A frown. ‘Dad-dee. I’m nine, you know. I think about a lot of things.’

  ‘I know. I know you do.’ He smiled at her, this justice-freak daughter of his with a passion for knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the example he’d just given her was backwards – something perhaps morally suspect but within the law. He wanted the opposite to make the point. ‘Okay, let’s start over. Maybe I used the wrong word, like wrong, for instance. There’s the law, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay. So the law is just a bunch of rules. That’s all it is. Some good rules and some rules where it doesn’t make too much sense that they even have the rule. The point is, though, good or bad, if you break one of the rules, you’re going to get punished. That’s another one of the rules.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But sometimes you break a rule – a law – because you think there’s no reason for it, or it’s just plain wrong. Now you’re still going to get punished, because you can’t allow people to just go breaking the rules, but maybe when you go to trial to get punished, people will realize that the law is dumb, and they’ll change it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Hardy thought a moment for a clean example. ‘Well, like it used to be against the law for black people to sit on buses with white people.’

  ‘I know, but that was just stupid.’

  ‘Of course, but it was a law nevertheless, until this lady named Rosa Parks-’

  ‘Oh, I know all about that. We learned that in school. She sat on the bus and they went on strike-’

  ‘Yeah, well, and then they changed the law, and then it wasn’t against the law for black people to sit on buses. It was the same thing - in this case a right thing – but one day it was against the law, and the next day it was okay. It wasn’t the thing itself, it was the rule. Is this making any sense?’

  ‘Sure. I get it completely.’

  ‘Okay, I bet you do. Anyway, this thing with Graham – my client – it’s a little like that example, but not exactly. I’m not sure the law about letting you kill your father or mother ought to be changed.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because then how do you decide for sure whether or not it’s a good reason? If the person who’s sick really wants it? Or even knows what’s happening?’ Hardy decided to test his martini, buy another few seconds to think. ‘Or sometimes sick people are really hard to take care of, and maybe the people taking care of them get tired of it and just want the person to go away.’

  ‘That would be horrible!’

  ‘Well, yes, it would. But if there wasn’t some law preventing it, it might happen. There’s just all kinds of problems. It’s really really complicated. But in this case what Graham did might not have been wrong. I think. I hope.’

  She met his eyes. ‘I know, Daddy, if you’re helping him, he didn’t do the wrong thing.’

  Hardy had to laugh. ‘You know that, huh?’

  ‘Cross my heart.’

  Graham and his father didn’t only have Hallmark moments.

  ‘Who do you think you are, telling your old man what to do?’ Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, Sal had been drinking. He took a feeble swing at his son, as though he were going to cuff him. ‘I’m the dad here. You are just my little snot-nosed kid and you do what I tell you, not the other way round.’

  Graham easily ducked away from the roundhouse, but that was the only thing that was going to be easy about this morning.

  ‘We got an appointment, Sal. The doctor, you remember?’

  ‘I ain’t going to no doctor. I told you. They take my driver’s license, what am I supposed to do for a living?’

  Graham tried to remain patient. ‘This is Dr Cutler, Sal, my friend. Not the other one – what’s his name? – Finer.’

  ‘They’re all the same. Finer, Cutler. I don’t care. I’m not going. He had settled himself onto his couch, arms crossed, the picture of resistance. There was a flask on its side on the table in front of him and he grabbed it and swigged from it. ’You know how tired I am of getting poked at?‘

  ‘Yeah, I do, Dad.’ Almost as tired as I am of all this, Graham thought. And Russ Cutler had told him the AD was only going to get worse unless this brain tumor turned out to be inoperable. Which – the good news – looked like the diagnosis.

  Graham didn’t think it was funny, but the irony didn’t escape him. He’d brought Sal down to Russ Cutler for the Alzheimer’s. Sal’s eccentricity had suddenly become far less manageable. Graham had wanted an opinion whether his father should be left to live alone, or should be placed in the dreaded home. Would he even know it if he was?

  Alzheimer’s wasn’t Cutler’s specialty, but he knew enough. The disease began almost imperceptibly, with smaller losses of short-term memory gradually becoming larger, more all encompassing. The distant past began to assume a more immediate reality than the present.

  For Graham the most heart-rending aspect of the situation was its apparently random appearance. Forgetfulness, then a reversion to normalcy, or near normalcy. You kept wanting to deny that it had reached a point of no return. You kept hoping.

  Up until a couple of months ago he had spent lots of time with his father, making his fish rounds, playing cards, going to meals, taking walks – Graham trying to get his own reality into focus. What he was going to do with his life. Where, if anywhere, he fit in. And Sal had been great. His best friend. A wise, albeit vulgar, counselor, playmate, drinking buddy.

  But then, all at once, Sal wouldn’t be there in an almost literal sense. He wouldn’t know who Graham was. ‘Son, my ass! I haven’t seen either of my sons in fifteen years. Who the hell are you trying to fool? What do you want out of me? You think you’re going to get my money, you got another think coming.’

  The hours Graham had spent camped in the stinking hallway of the Lions Arms, making sure Sal didn’t go out when he was this way. It was killing Graham, never mind Sal.

  So he ‘d gone to Russ and learned that this randomness was part of the progress of the disease, until finally the brain didn’t appear to process anymore. Whether or not it did was impossible to say.

  ‘And even then,’ Russ had told him, ‘you’ll go into the nursing home to visit your dad one day. He hasn’t said a meaningful word in six months and he’ll look up and know you and say hi like it was yesterday, and maybe for him it was.’

  But then they’d found the tumor and would be doing the tests on that. That was today, the first of these tests. The tumor, if it wasn’t fatal, might be affecting the Alzheimer’s, moving its schedule forward. Although that, too, wasn’t more than informed conjecture. It was possible that arresting the tumor’s growth might inhibit Sal’s memory loss for a time.

  ‘Come on, Dad. Dr Cutler’s going to be waiting for us. He’s a good guy.’

  But Sal’s eyes were closed now. He had collapsed to one side on the couch. His pants were wet at the crotch – either alcohol or urine.

  God! Graham couldn’t keep doing this for long. He wished the old man would have the good grace to go and die.

  19

  The ritual of a cup of coffee over the newspaper had fallen victim on most days to the mad rush of getting the kids washed, dressed, fed, teeth brushed, hair combed, lunches made, out the door to school. But Sundays still had some of that old charm.

  Hardy and Frannie were still in their be
d with the Sunday paper spread out all around them. They had their mugs of coffee. Last night, before he’d left North Beach with Rebecca, he stopped and picked up some cannoli and biscotti, and the crumbs in the sheets would have to be dealt with, but later.

  Vincent and Rebecca hadn’t slept in – on a weekend? don’t be absurd – but for the moment were cooperating in building the world’s largest Lego castle, both of them quiet and happy.

  Hardy had cracked one of the windows two inches to let in some fresh air. Sunshine filled the whole room.

  The telephone rang. The portable phone by their bed had disappeared, so someone was going to have to get up and answer at the kitchen extension. Frannie flashed a smile at Hardy. ‘The walk might do you some good after your jog yesterday.’ But she was up, answering it. Reappearing a moment later, she stood in the doorway, her hand up through her long red hair, one foot resting on the other one. ‘It’s Graham Russo,’ she said.

  It was also Bay to Breakers Sunday.

  Every year upward of a hundred thousand people flock to the City by the Bay to run approximately seven miles from the Ferry Building on the Bay to Ocean Beach. Although only about one tenth of one percent of these people come to compete in any meaningful way, the event has evolved into a party of significant proportions.

  There are running teams outfitted as caterpillars, barefoot teams, naked runners, participants who sprint for the first three blocks and then duck into bars to watch themselves on television, grandmothers, children, dogs, snakes, marching – no, jogging – bands. A party.

  Graham Russo called Hardy from Jack London Square in Oakland. He told his attorney he’d gone into hiding for a few days to make some decisions, to consider his options.

  Now it was time. If Hardy would like to take the Alameda ferry over and meet him, Graham was ready to turn himself in. They could talk strategy and Graham would answer Hardy’s questions as they chugged back across the Bay.

  As a plan it wouldn’t have been bad on most days. But it left the race out of the equation. Hardy hadn’t even gotten to his car when the crowds and traffic around his house told him something was going on.

  After a minute’s reflection – even before yesterday’s painful reminder of his lack of conditioning, Hardy had never been a Bay to Breakers kind of guy – he realized what he was dealing with. He knew it was going to be iffy taking a ferry anywhere in the next several hours. Even getting to the Ferry Building was going to be a challenge.

  But he tried. He’d told Graham he’d be there in an hour, maybe a little more, though he had been hoping for less. Clients about to turn themselves in on murder charges had been known to change their minds.

  Since the route of the race was along the edge of Golden Gate Park, which was several blocks south of the main east-west corridor, Geary Boulevard, he thought he might have some hope of making it. He vaguely knew that the race began at about eight o’clock, and it wasn’t yet ten. It was possible, he knew, that some of the participants still hadn’t crossed the starting line; they queued up for miles along the Embarcadero before the gun that started the race. So maybe the outbound arteries wouldn’t be clogged yet with people who’d finished and were leaving the city to go to their post-race parties.

  And indeed, he got nearly to Van Ness, the western edge of downtown, before things stopped. Dead.

  After ten minutes at one corner he got out of his car and looked around him. The honking was in full blare. Lines of cars, glaring in the bright sunlight, stretched out in all directions. A river of humanity – waving, singing, high-fiving, having a great old time on that fabled runner’s high, although few were actually running – flowed by. There was no place even to pull over and park, after which he could try to walk it. He wasn’t going anywhere for at least a couple of hours.

  Vincent had a birthday party to attend in the early afternoon, and while that went on, Frannie and Rebecca met her grandmother – Frannie’s first husband’s mother, Erin – for a picnic on the cliffs just outside the Legion of Honor. So no one was home to answer Graham’s next couple of calls, though Hardy did hear them on his answering machine, progressively angry and frustrated, when he finally arrived back at the house a little after four.

  He was somewhat angry and frustrated himself.

  The last incoming ferry was at the dock in Alameda. Graham sat in a windbreaker next to his duffel bag on one of the pilings by the gangplank where it tied up.

  Sarah, as she had when the last four boats had docked, hung back by the shops. When Graham’s lawyer came up to him, she was planning to leave and go home. But they both agreed there was no sense in Graham waiting all afternoon alone until Hardy showed.

  And now it looked like he wasn’t going to. Sarah was really unhappy that Hardy hadn’t found a way to get to Graham. What the hell kind of lawyer was he, anyway?

  ‘He’s a good guy,’ he said. ‘Something must have happened.’

  ‘What could have happened?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe he was on an earlier ferry and we just missed each other.’

  ‘With you sitting here on a piling that everybody has to walk past? No. You’re visible. He wouldn’t have missed you.’

  A last group of passengers disembarked and started up the gangplank – four couples in their twenties and face paint, not sober, laughing a lot, wearing Bay to Breakers T-shirts over the body armor they’d evidently run in.

  Graham and Sarah had spent the whole day here, saying goodbye, preparing themselves for what was to come. Every time a ferry had arrived, the tension had overwhelmed them. Where was Hardy? What was going to happen to Graham now? To them? Everything else was invisible.

  Now, suddenly, together, they both realized what they were looking at. ‘Bay to Breakers,’ Sarah said. ‘Smart of us to pick today.’

  Graham picked up his duffel bag. ‘I think our timing’s off.’

  ‘That must be it.’

  They were stopped in the middle of the Bay Bridge when she brought it up to him. It had been haunting her since she’d been so thoroughly uncharmed by Craig Ising the day before. She had to get it clear.

  ‘You know, your friend Craig Ising-’

  He interrupted her. ‘He’s not my friend. He pays me. That’s our entire relationship.’

  This, while gratifying, was not the point. ‘Well, whatever he is, he told me your dad used to deliver money around the city for him and some other gamblers.’

  ‘Yeah, he did. So what?’

  ‘Don’t get mad. I’m trying to get a handle on your father, that’s all. Who he was.’

  But Graham took offense at this tack. ‘He lived on the fringe, Sarah, okay? He sold illegal fish, he might have run some money, so sue him.’

  ‘I’m not saying-’

  ‘Yes, you are. Maybe he wasn’t a good citizen, but there’s no way he did anything that hurt anybody. He’s not so unlike his oldest son that way.’

  ‘What way exactly?’

  ‘You follow the rules, you play fair, and you get screwed anyway. It makes you lose faith in the sacred rules.’ He lowered his voice. ‘You’re doing it here with me, Sarah, right now. The rules don’t work sometimes. Then what do you do?’

  ‘You don’t break them, I know that. Or if you do,’ she added, mostly for herself, ‘when you’re caught and punished, you don’t whine about it.’

  He looked over at her – the strong face, the set jaw. He reached across and put a hand on her leg. ‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘I shouldn’t have put you in this. I’m sorry.’

  She let out a breath. ‘I put myself in this, Graham. If I didn’t want to be here, I wouldn’t be. And I know people break rules all the time and sometimes it seems justified. What I was trying to get to was Sal – if running this money around might have gotten him killed.’

  Graham let out a sigh of his own. ‘But he stopped a long time ago.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know. Couple of years at least.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

&nbs
p; ‘I think so, yeah. When he started forgetting more, he thought it wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘Which is what I’m getting at.’

  Graham pondered for a minute, his feet up on the dashboard. It was just dusk. The window on his side was open and the skyline was a sparkling jewel over the darkening water. ‘He wouldn’t have started up again. There was no reason to. He didn’t need the money and it wasn’t that much anyway. A hundred now and again. Not worth the risk he might forget and lose enough money for somebody to make them mad at him.’

  ‘Maybe that somebody ran into him recently, last week even. Asked for a favor. One time. And he forgot. Or forgot that he would forget and said okay.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I’m just thinking. It might be a motive, that’s all.’

  Graham put his hand on her leg. ‘Sarah, we don’t need a motive. He killed himself.’

  She turned to him. ‘Stop saying that, Graham! Please. Nobody believes that.’

  ‘I do.’

  She moved his hand off her. ‘It’s not true. That’s why I don’t believe it. I know what happened well enough now. I’m just trying to come up with some theories that might help your defense. This might be one of them.’

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

  ‘Graham. Come on.’

  ‘No, really. I want to know.’

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

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

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

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

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