Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The

by John Lescroart

  ‘I don’t know, Sal,’ Glitsky answered, ‘which one?’

  ‘Who cares?’

  Now Sal was dead and the newspapers had been rife with conjecture: early evidence indicated that someone had been in the room with him when he’d died. A chair knocked over in the kitchen. Angry sounds. Other evidence of struggle.

  The police were calling the death suspicious. Maybe someone had helped Sal die — put him on an early flight.

  * * * * *

  ‘I didn’t know Sal was your father,’ Hardy said. ‘Not until just now.’

  ‘Yeah, well. I didn’t exactly brag about him.’ Graham took a breath and looked beyond Hardy, out the window. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow.’

  When no more words came, Hardy prompted him. ‘Are you in trouble?’

  ‘No!’ A little too quickly, too loud. Graham toned it down some. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know why I would be.’

  Hardy waited some more.

  ‘I mean, there’s a lot happening all at once. The estate — although the word estate is a joke. Dad asked me to be his executor although we never got around to drawing up the will, so where does that leave it? Your guess is as good as mine.’

  ‘You weren’t close, you and your dad?’

  Graham took a beat before he answered. ‘Not very.’

  Hardy thought the eye contact was a little overdone, but he let it go. He’d see where this all was leading. ‘So you need help with the estate? What kind of help?’

  ‘That’s just it. I don’t know what I need. I need help in general.’ Graham hung his head and shook it, then looked back up. ‘The cops have been around, asking questions.’

  ‘What kind of questions?’

  ‘Where was I on Friday? Did I know about my dad’s condition? Like that. It was obvious where they were going.’ Graham’s blue eyes flashed briefly in anger, maybe frustration. ‘How can they think I know anything about this? My dad killed himself for a lot of good reasons. The guy’s disoriented, losing his mind. He’s in awesome pain. I’d’ve done the same thing.‘

  ‘And what do the police think?’

  ‘I don’t know what they can be thinking.’ Another pause. ‘I hadn’t seen him in a week. First I heard of it was Saturday night. Some homicide cop is at my place when I get home.’

  ‘Where’d you get home from?’

  ‘Ball game.’ He raised his eyes again, spit out the next word. ‘Softball. We had a tournament in Santa Clara, got eliminated in the fourth game, so I got home early, around six.’

  ‘So where were you Friday night?’

  Graham spread his Rodin hands. ‘I didn’t kill my dad.’

  ‘I didn’t ask that. I asked about Friday night.’

  He let out a breath, calming down. ‘After work, home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  He smiled. ‘Just like the movie. Home alone. I love that answer. The cop liked it, too, but for different reasons. I could tell.’

  Hardy nodded. ‘Cops can be tough to please.’

  ‘I worked till nine-thirty…’

  ‘What do you do, besides baseball?’

  Graham corrected him. ‘Softball.’ A shrug. ‘I’ve been working as a paramedic since… well, lately.’

  ‘Okay. So you were riding in an ambulance Friday night?’

  A nod. ‘I got home around ten-fifteen. I knew I had some games the next day — five, if we went all the way. Wanted to get some rest. Went to sleep.’

  ‘What time did you go in to work?’

  ‘Around three, three-thirty. I punched in. They’ll have a record of it.’

  ‘And what time did they find your dad?’

  ‘Around ten at night.’ Graham didn’t seem to have a problem with the timing, although to Hardy it invited some questions. If his memory served him, and it always did, Sal had apparently died between one and four o’clock in the afternoon. This was the issue Graham was skirting, which perhaps the police were considering if they were thinking about Graham after all. He would have had plenty of time between one o’clock and when he checked into work near three.

  But the young man was going on. ‘Judge Giotti, you know. Judge Giotti found him.’

  ‘I read. What was he doing there?’

  Graham shrugged. ‘I just know what everybody knows — he’d finished having dinner downtown. He had a fish order in and Sal didn’t show, so he thought he’d check the apartment, see if he was okay.’

  ‘And why would the judge do that?’

  The answer was unforced, Graham recounting old family history. ‘They were friends. Used to be, anyway, in high school, then college. They played ball together.’

  ‘Your father went to college?’

  Graham nodded. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Salmon Sal the college grad. Classic underachiever, that was Sal. Runs in the family.’ He forced a smile, making a joke, but kept his hands clamped tightly together, leaning forward casually, elbows resting on his knees. His knuckles were white.

  ‘So. Giotti?’ Hardy asked. Graham cast his eyes to the floor. ‘You weren’t his clerk, were you?’

  The head came back up. Graham said no. He’d clerked for Harold Draper, another federal judge with the Ninth Circuit.

  ‘I guess what I’m asking,’ Hardy continued, ‘is whether you and Giotti — him being your dad’s old pal and all — developed any kind of relationship while you were clerking.’

  Graham took a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. Giotti came by once after I got hired to say congratulations. But these judges don’t have a life. I didn’t even see him in the halls.’

  ‘And how long did you work there?’

  ‘Six months.’

  Hardy slid from the desk and crossed to his window. ‘Let me be sure I’ve got it right, he said. ’Draper hired you to become a clerk for the Ninth? How many clerks does he have?‘

  ‘Three.’

  ‘For a year each?’

  ‘Right. That’s the term.’

  Hardy thought so. He went on. ‘When I was getting into practice right after the Civil War, a federal clerkship was considered the plum job of all time right out of law school. Is that still the case?’

  This brought a small smile. ‘Everybody seems to think so.’

  ‘But you quit after six months so you could try out as a replacement player during the baseball strike?’

  Graham sat back finally, unclenched his hands, spread them out. ‘Arrogant, ungrateful wretch that I am.’

  ‘So now everybody in the legal community thinks you’re either disloyal or brain dead.’

  ‘No, those are my friends.’ Graham took a beat. ‘Draper, for example, hates my guts. So does his wife, kids, dogs, the other two clerks, the secretaries — they all really, really hate me personally. Everybody else just wishes I’d die soon, as slowly and painfully as possible. Both.’

  Hardy nodded. ‘So Giotti didn’t call you when he found your dad?’

  Graham shook his head. ‘I’d be the last person he’d call. You walk out on one of these guys, you’re a traitor to the whole tribe. That’s why I came to you — you’re a lawyer who’ll talk to me. I think you’re the last one who will.’

  ‘And you’re worried about the police?’

  A shrug. ‘Not really. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

  ‘I doubt they’re thinking anything, Graham. They just like to be thorough and ask a lot of questions, which tends to make people nervous. This other stuff with your background might have made the rounds, so they might shake your tree a little harder, see if something falls out.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to fall out. My dad killed himself.’

  2

  ‘Well, maybe he didn’t after all.’ Hardy was having lunch with Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky in a booth at Lou the Greek’s, a subterranean bar/restaurant across the street from the Hall of Justice.

  The place was humming with humanity today, and their booth was littered with the remains of their bowls and the fortune cookies that had co
me with their lunch special of tsatsiki-covered Hunan noodles — yogurt and garlic over sesame oil, pita bread on the side. Lou the Greek’s wife was the cook, and she was Chinese, so the place always served polyglot lunches, many of them surprisingly edible, some not. Today wasn’t too bad.

  When Glitsky smiled, it almost never reached his eyes. This kept it from being the cheerful thing that smiles were often cracked up to be. The effect wasn’t much enhanced by the thick scar through both his lips. Hardy knew that the scar had come from a boyhood accident on playbars, but Abe the tough cop liked to leave people with the impression that it had been acquired in a knife fight.

  The two men had been friends since they’d walked a beat as cops together twenty-some years before. This was their first lunch in a couple of months. Hardy and Graham Russo had spent half an hour covering questions about Sal’s ‘estate’: the old truck, some personal effects, thrift-shop clothes, a few hundred dollars. This discussion had left Hardy wondering what might really be going on, so he’d decided to call Abe.

  It was one thing to speculate about what the police might be thinking. It was another — and altogether preferable — to get it from the source. Except, perhaps, when the information was unwelcome, as it was now. ‘What do you mean, maybe Sal didn’t kill himself?’

  Glitsky kept the infuriating nonsmile in place. ‘What words didn’t you understand? None of them had too many letters.’

  For which Hardy wasn’t in the mood. He was happy enough to help Graham out with estate issues, but that was as far as it went. Although he had defended two murder cases in his time and won both of them, he had no intention of getting involved in another one. They invariably became too consuming, too personal, too agonizing.

  And now Glitsky was hinting that Sal might not have been a suicide. ‘It wasn’t so much the words as the meaning, Abe. Did Sal kill himself or didn’t he?’

  Glitsky took his time, draining his teacup, before leaning across the booth, elbows on the table. ‘The autopsy isn’t in yet.’ The humor vanished, mysterious as its appearance. ‘You got a client?’

  This was tricky. If someone had sought Hardy’s help in connection with a homicide, then that very fact would be relevant in the investigation of the death. But Hardy didn’t want to lie to his friend. He hadn’t accepted anything like criminal defense work with Graham, so he shrugged. ‘I’m helping one of the kids on the estate.’

  ‘Which one?’

  A smile. ‘The executor’s. Come on, Abe, what do you hear?’

  Glitsky spread his hands on the table. ‘What I hear is that there was trauma around the injection site.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning maybe he didn’t stick himself. Maybe he jerked, pulling away, something like that.’

  ‘Which would mean what?’

  ‘You know as well as me. I’m reserving judgment, waiting for Strout’ — John Strout, the coroner — ‘although the investigation, as they say, is continuing. As you know, we roll on homicides until Strout calls us off.’

  Hardy sat back. Glitsky waited another moment, then gave in. ‘Sal’s got a DNR in his freezer, a sticker telling about it on his coffee table. He was somewhere between very sick and about to die. The death itself is pretty humane — booze and morphine. Ends the pain.’

  ‘I didn’t read about pain. I thought the story was he had Alzheimer’s.’ Although Hardy knew that Graham had said his dad was in pain, he didn’t think this was public knowledge.

  Glitsky’s eyes had turned inward. He reached for his empty teacup, sucked at it, put it back on the table.

  Hardy was watching him. ‘What?’

  The two guys used a vast vocabulary of the unsaid, a shorthand of connection. Glitsky nodded. ‘We got our first woman inspector in the detail, up from vice. Sarah Evans. Very sharp, good, solid person. She got teamed with Lanier and pulled the case.’

  ‘And she doesn’t think it looks like a suicide?’

  ‘Your insight never lets up, does it?’

  Hardy nodded genially. ‘It’s why people both love and fear me,’ he said. ‘So this Sarah Evans is hot for a righteous murder investigation, and you’re afraid she might be seeing things that aren’t there?’

  This time Glitsky’s smile bordered on the genuine. ‘You got it all figured out. Why do you need me?’

  ‘I don’t. You’re just such a blast to hang out with. But I’m right?’

  ‘Let’s say you’re not all wrong.’

  ‘But there was this trauma? Evans noticed the trauma?’

  ‘And a couple of other things.’

  * * * * *

  Sarah Evans fancied herself a no-nonsense professional police person, and not too many people would disagree with her. After a decade of hard work she had conquered the perils of the job and the myriad sexual stereotypes of her superiors. Finally she’d attained her personal career goal and had been promoted to sergeant inspector of homicide.

  She had spent the weekend working on the death of Sal Russo. From the outset something hadn’t felt right about it to her. She’d sensed that Sal’s apartment was trying to tell her something, though she knew how stupid that would sound if she verbalized it. She didn’t know how to convey the idea to her partner, a veteran male named Marcel Lanier. (A redundancy, she realized, since all veteran homicide inspectors in San Francisco were male.)

  Still, the chair in the kitchen in Sal Russo’s apartment had been overturned, there were fresh chip marks in the counter.

  Other things, impressions really, struck her: the bump under Sal’s ear, the expression on the old man’s face, so far removed from what she would call peaceful.

  His position on the floor. Why should he be on the floor? she wondered. If he’d decided to kill himself, she thought he would probably have sat in the comfortable chair, given himself the shot, gone to sleep. But he’d been on the floor, curled fetally. It just didn’t feel right, although she wasn’t completely certain how things ought to feel.

  Was feeling part of it at all? Or was it, as Lanier had already repeated too many times, more cut and dried? The evidence points here or doesn’t point there and that’s all there is to it.

  The homicide detail was mandated to investigate any unnatural death until the coroner called them off, but Lanier had seen a lot more homicides than she had, and he thought this one was obviously a suicide. If they wanted to work the whole damn weekend, Lanier told her they could more productively spend their time interviewing witnesses from their other homicides. They had several, he’d reminded her. A domestic-violence homicide. A poor kid whose best friend’s father had kept his loaded .45 in the unlocked drawer next to his bed. Some gangbangers shooting each other up. It wasn’t as if there wasn’t work to do.

  But Sarah hadn’t wanted the trail with Sal, if there was one, to go cold. Not until Strout’s decision, anyway. So Marcel went out and interviewed the elder son, Graham, whose name had been supplied by Judge Giotti.

  Sarah had spent all of her Saturday with the Crime Scene Investigations team at Sal’s apartment, going through the closets and drawers and kitchen cabinets and cardboard boxes and garbage cans, finding more bits of what she was calling evidence — the large, rather substantial safe that lay on its back under the bed, the other syringes, more morphine, paper records. She asked the fingerprint expert to dust all of it, which he was inclined to do in any event.

  There was more paper than she would have imagined — crammed under the mattress, in the cardboard file boxes next to Sal’s dresser and along one wall, in the three wastebaskets. This was going to be a whole day’s work by itself. But there was one sheet of paper in the wastebasket in the bathroom that particularly caught her attention. It contained a long column of numbers, three to a group. Obvious enough. She went over to where they’d pulled the safe out from under the bed and tried them all.

  The last one, 16-8-27, worked. For all the good it did her. Except for an old leather belt the safe was empty.

  By Sunday afternoon she’d read La
nier’s interview with Graham. His story was that he and his dad hadn’t gotten along. Salmon Sal had abandoned his entire family when Graham had been fifteen years old. It wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. Or forgave. Graham told Lanier that he didn’t know where the morphine had come from. He’d been up to the old man’s dump once or twice, sure. His father knew he had gotten a law degree and wanted him to help with his ‘estate,’ such as it was. But it wasn’t as though they were friends.

  Lanier had gotten the names of the rest of the family from Graham, and Sarah got lucky making some Sunday phone calls.

  Debra, Sal’s daughter, also hadn’t seen much of her father, but she volunteered that she didn’t have the impression that his estate was as worthless as Graham had implied. She told Sarah that her older brother was probably lying, or hiding something. Graham wasn’t very trustworthy. Debra knew for a fact that Sal had had a baseball card collection from the early 1950s. He never would have gotten rid of that. Hadn’t the cards, Debra asked, been in the apartment?

  Sarah felt sure that there was something more Debra could have said about Graham, but in mid-conversation she seemed to think better of blabbing out all of her feelings to the police.

  Which in itself was instructive.

  The younger brother, George, was an officer at a downtown bank and didn’t like the fact that he was involved in a police investigation on any level. He hadn’t seen his father in years — in fact, he didn’t even consider Sal his father. His stepfather, Leland Taylor, had raised him. George had formed the impression that he, Graham, and Debra might come into some money when the old man died, but he’d called Graham when he got word of Sal’s death and Graham told him there wasn’t any money.

  Evans thought it interesting that George, like his sister, conveyed the impression that Graham was lying.