Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The

by John Lescroart

  Twenty minutes later he had the French crepe batter made and the table set for breakfast at the kitchen table. He fixed a cup of coffee the way Frannie liked it, with real cream and two thirds of a spoonful of brown sugar, and brought it in to her, placing it beside the bed, waking her with a kiss on her cheek.

  Rebecca — they called her the Beck — was Frannie’s child by her first husband, but Hardy had adopted her as his own. Now the nine-year-old lay on her back, covers off, mouth open. Her brother, Vincent, was seven and had his own room at the very back of the house, but for the past several months he’d been sleeping on a futon on the floor of Beck’s room. He was entirely covered by his comforter. Hardy stepped over him, sat on the side of the Beck’s bed, and leaned over, hugging her. ‘Maple syrup,’ he whispered. ‘Crepes.’

  ‘Crepes!’ She was immediately awake. Her arms came up around him and squeezed and then she squiggled free. ‘Vincent!’ she yelled. ‘Daddy’s making crepes.’

  Vincent was up and on him before he knew what hit him. He was knocked backward, wrestled down onto the futon in a jumble of arms and legs and tumbling, kid-smell and laughter.

  With a roar he grabbed at both of them, holding them to him, tickling whenever he could get a finger free. He caught a knee in the groin — a constant — and groaned, which the kids ignored as a matter of course.

  Finally it stopped. His back was against the Beck’s bed and the kids settled against him, one on each side. He heard the shower start in the bathroom and the alarm went off next to his bed. He patted the kids on their backs. ‘Let’s get some clothes on,’ he said. ‘Breakfast in five.’

  ‘Four!’ The Beck was up, moving for the bathroom.

  ‘Three!’ Vincent was right behind her, but not fast enough.

  Hardy heard the door slam, then a crash as Vincent skidded into it. ‘Dad! Beck slammed the door.’ More pounding. ‘Dad!’

  Hardy got up. Crisis number one. He took a breath, preparing to mediate. His groin didn’t hurt anymore.

  And his headache was gone.

  * * * * *

  When he got in to work, there was a call on his answering machine. Graham had called from jail. Evans and Lanier had shown up at his place again at seven A.M. This time they arrested him for murder.

  * * * * *

  Her partner was interviewing people in another homicide that had occurred long before Sarah had made it to the detail, so she drew the solo assignment to Sal’s place.

  The apartment was still sealed off. It might have been the lowest of drudge work, but for some reason Sarah didn’t mind. There was something compelling about this old man who sold fish and his family who hated him.

  She let herself in and closed the door behind her. In the living room the Venetian blinds were up, the glass in the windows opaque with grime. Although the sun had been shining outside, inside there was little sense of it. She flicked the switch by the front door — the six-bulb chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling made almost no difference. Four of its lights were burned out.

  She took a couple of steps over to the sagging couch and sat on the front inches of it. Before her on the stained pine coffee table the fingerprinting powder was still visible, a thin film. Beyond the table was the lounge chair. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, templed her fingers in front of her mouth, and blew through them.

  The profound stillness bored into her. Only gradually did she even become aware of the traffic sounds through the windows over Seventh Street. The air didn’t move at all.

  What must it have been like, she wondered, to have lived here, to be dying here? Murder cases, she was beginning to realize, were of a different quality from the other crimes she’d been working on over the years: the robberies, assaults, vandalisms, frauds. The act, of course, the murder itself, might have been as considered, as violent, as brutish, or as passionate as any of the other crimes, but its consequence struck a far more resonant chord.

  Here was where a life story had ended.

  The consciousness that had once impressed its features on this inanimate stuff — furniture, walls, kitchen appliances, the air itself — had been replaced, now, with a vacuum.

  Finally she got up, crossed the living room, threw open a west-facing window. There was a breeze outside. She could sense it before it breached the window, and the sun did shine. But it was as though the room conspired to keep these elements out, at least for another few seconds.

  Sarah, turning to take in the place where Sal Russo had lived and died, suddenly, and clearly, experienced Sal’s presence hovering here, his ghost, almost as though it were a physical thing.

  Who had he been, after all?

  Finally, the breeze stirred a dust ball that had formed on one of the end tables, blowing it to the floor. She opened another window on another wall, moving to be moving. Maybe the answer to her question was somewhere among all the paper.

  Ridiculous though it was, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Sal Russo was trying, somehow, to communicate with her.

  If she could only hear what he might be saying.

  On the first pass she went through every scrap of paper that wasn’t in some kind of a box. There was paper between the mattresses on his bed, in the kitchen cabinets, in the drawers of the end tables. She’d already discovered the paper with the safe combinations in the wastebasket in the bathroom, but there was more in the garbage in the kitchen. Under the threadbare living-room rug. Some of it was brown paper bag material, some was lined invoice paper, plain sheets of copy paper, anything that would hold an imprint, pencil or ink.

  Almost every piece contained a first or last name or both. Telephone numbers, or parts of them. Addresses, Evans figured. A lot of legwork there, a ton of follow-up, but some of it, possibly, fruitful. She didn’t mind work; that’s what they paid her for.

  But this collection of paper wasn’t getting her any closer to the man. She’d been sitting on the couch, going through it all piece by piece, placing it in one of the oversized yellow envelopes she’d brought along. Now, the envelope bulging, she dropped it on the table, and stood again.

  The chalked outline where his body had lain crumpled was still visible on the rug. Somehow she’d avoided even seeing it when she’d come in. Now she squatted over it, trying to fill in the picture. Her finger dragged over the rug. ‘Come on, old man,’ she whispered, ‘talk to me.’

  Most of the boxes, she knew, were in the bedroom, which was behind the kitchen off to her right, but there was one here in the living room, in the corner along the wall that held the couch. Crouching there on the floor, she saw it. And again, it was as though it were for the first time.

  What else, she wondered, had she missed?

  Her eyes came to rest on the piece of plywood that hung over the couch. She’d noticed the painting before, but had assumed it was just an el cheapo mass-produced rendering that had come with the furnished apartment. It hadn’t been varnished, and the paint had bleached out to the point where the grain of the plywood showed more than anything else.

  But here, from her angle in the early afternoon light — the sun had deposited a rectangle of light onto the floor — the lines of the painting stood out. The depiction was recognizably Fisherman’s Wharf, but without the postcard patina. She squinted up at it, then stood and moved closer. If Sal had done this — as the rusted I brown initials S.R. in the lower right corner indicated — he had I had talent.

  The fishing boat in the foreground, the Signing Bonus, was obviously abandoned. Crab pots lay in disarray around it, both on its deck and the nearby pier. The portholes were all hollows of jagged glass, the railing had caved on itself. There were no people anywhere. No, there was one. She imagined she saw a lone figure, what appeared to be a child, sitting with hunched shoulders on the flying bridge, holding a broken fishing pole. Behind the boat the charred skeleton of a building smoldered on the Wharf.

  She stood back and stared for another minute, realizing that I what disturbed her — more than anything
the painting showed — was the sensibility behind it. If he’d painted this, Sal Russo wasn’t your typical fleabag derelict. He had a tortured soul, or had had one at one time.

  Then, shaking herself from her reverie, she went over to the corner, got the heavy cardboard box, put it on the table and folded back the flaps that had been interlocked, something that clearly had been done many, many times.

  She supposed she’d been expecting more debris, the same mishmash of receipts and scribblings, except older, that she’d already gone through and bagged. Instead, she found two battered three-ring binders and four hardcover books.

  Taking out the books first, she placed them to one side — Bernard Malamud’s The Natural; a well-thumbed Chapman’s technical handbook for sailors called Piloting; an ancient bookclub edition — leather bound, gold trimmed — of Moby Dick; and Albert Camus’s The Fall.

  The binders were another surprise. They were photo albums, organized and cared for. Sal had kept them out here in the living room where he could get to them, and Sarah would have bet a lot that he got them out often.

  Feeling a bit like an intruder, she opened the first one. Pictures of a young man, very handsome, with a beautiful young woman, progressively pregnant. She knew the man must have been Sal, but couldn’t very well reconcile it with the old man she had seen here on Friday.

  Then the first baby picture — Graham Joseph Russo written under it in a strong male hand.

  She flipped through the pages more quickly. Here was the fishing boat from the painting on the wall — but new and trimmed, a beaming Sal Russo at the helm. Then there were two more children. A smallish house, typical for the Sunset District.

  Graham growing up, playing baseball. Sal playing accordion at parties, more fishing boat pictures on the Bay at the Wharf. Another child, a girl, Debra. George. The wife appearing less and less. Then, suddenly, halfway through the binder, a mansion.

  After that the binder was empty.

  The sunlight rectangle on the floor had grown, and Sarah stood and stretched her back. In the kitchen she walked around the chair, which still lay on its side, left there by the investigations team. She poured herself a glass of water. The sun was very much a presence in here, the one window much cleaner than those in the living room, and with no blinds or drapes covering it. There were three mugs on the drain, dark liquid still in the bottom of two of them. An unwashed plate was on the table, knife and fork on it. These artifacts bothered her. If there had been any kind of real struggle in here, wouldn’t something else have been disturbed?

  Back in the living room she made a note to bring this up with Lanier, and reached for the second binder. Baseball, baseball, and more baseball. Despite herself Sarah sat back. She was going to enjoy this. Baseball was her game — she still played on her women’s team once a week, year round.

  As an only child and a girl, baseball had been the bond with her father, whom she still adored. Her parents had now retired and moved to Palm Springs, so she didn’t see them often, but every time they talked, they still joked about their Giant-Dodger rivalry — Sarah was Giants all the way.

  Her dad and mom had both been raised in Brooklyn before moving to California, and the blood in their veins, they said, ran Dodger blue. She’d have to tell them about Graham Russo, she decided — making their team as a replacement player. That’s the kind of team the Dodgers were, she’d say — they hired murderers. Her dad would love that.

  This album started way farther back. Here were black-and-white pictures of a very young Sal Russo. She double-checked to make sure this wasn’t Graham, but no, it was his father, in his own youth — always in uniform, always with a mitt or a bat. The first press clippings: Sal Russo throws no-hitter and hits two home runs in Little League opener. Freshman makes varsity at Balboa High. All-city high school team. All-state at USF.

  She turned the photo of the college team sideways. There was Sal in the second row, next to Mario Giotti, the judge who’d found him on Friday. Amazing, she thought, the ties.

  After the story of Sal’s bonus-signing with the Orioles, there were two blank pages. Then the stories about Graham began, the same kind of stuff they’d written about his father. Little League, Pony League, high school, college, the Dodgers’ farms.

  Finally, abruptly, the yellowing newsprint ended and the paper turned white — these were the recent articles from Graham’s aborted return. Even down to the box scores from spring training in Vero Beach, Sal seemed to have recorded everything about the baseball career of the son she had arrested for his murder this morning.

  Closing the binder on her lap, she was still sitting back in the couch, her eyes stinging. All right, she thought. Maybe Sal had spoken to her, but she wasn’t at all sure what it was she’d heard. Above all, she couldn’t figure out how someone who had begun with such promise, as Sal had, blessed with musical, artistic, and athletic talent, with a personality, a beautiful wife, a healthy and attractive family — how could that have all gone away? How did he end up here? Could it all have been economics?

  She didn’t believe it. Sure, business failure could destroy a person’s soul; she’d seen that often enough. But this wasn’t any simple bankruptcy. Sal wasn’t broke, by any means. He paid his rent, had a going business that supported him, even if it was illegal. He was a survivor. Plus, he had money stashed away, lots of money. And the bills were wrapped and bank-stamped, dated seventeen years before. What did that mean?

  Something cataclysmic must have happened. Whatever it was had destroyed him, and now she couldn’t help but wonder if it had finally killed him as well. And what did that mean about his son, who was now in jail because of her?

  Maybe the answer was somewhere in the boxes back in the bedroom. She put the second binder next to its mate on the table and stretched again. She’d been here an hour and a half and had done almost no real police work. She’d better get on it.

  But she was at eye level with that painting once again. It reeled her in and held her for another moment. Could that be a baseball mitt — that smudge — next to the fishing boy? (If it was, in fact, a boy fishing.) Was there something else she was missing? Was she missing anything at all?

  She didn’t know. The other boxes weren’t going away. She’d better get to them. With a last glance at the painting she headed back to the bedroom.

  * * * * *

  At one-thirty that afternoon, just as Sarah was getting to Sal Russo’s place, Hardy waited for the guard to open the door to Visiting Room B in San Francisco’s jail. It was a relatively new building directly behind the Hall of Justice, only open for business for the past year or so. The new attorney visiting rooms were a good deal larger than those in the old jail had been, but the size didn’t make much difference. In spite of its nickname among law enforcement personnel — the Glamour Slammer — it still wasn’t anyplace you wanted to be.

  They hadn’t brought Graham down yet. Hardy asked the guard to leave the door open and walked the six steps over to the window. Six whole steps — the place was extravagant in its roominess! And the window, though glass block, was a definite improvement.

  In the old jail the visiting rooms had essentially been closets, six by eight feet, with no ventilation and one overhead light bulb. A table and three wooden chairs took up all the space. Through a square pane of wire-reinforced glass set into the wall, you could see inmates and guards passing in the jail’s corridor. The inmates would slam the window every once in a while as you talked to your client.

  Hardy didn’t think that could happen here. No prisoners walked down this hallway. The corridor outside was a kind of catwalk around the administrative rooms and holding cells, and with the glass block there was a lot of light, especially on a sunny day like this one. It wasn’t exactly cheery, but it wasn’t a dungeon either.

  He turned away from the window, preparing himself. It was always a jolt, the initial meeting behind bars of a person you’d known in civilian life.

  In a couple of minutes Graham Russo was goin
g to walk in here and he wasn’t going to look the same. He was going to be in an orange jumpsuit, perhaps shackled. Some small piece of his soul was going to be gone. That would make Graham different in some fundamental way, and Hardy didn’t want to see it.

  He put his hands in his pockets and waited.

  * * * * *

  They’d started out sitting across the table from each other, but Hardy was up and pacing now. Graham’s story had changed in another, and particularly unsettling, way. He seemed to be having trouble believing that Sergeant Evans had actually arrested him. ‘I never thought she’d do that.’

  ‘Why not? She’s a cop. That’s what they do.’

  ‘Yeah, but…’ He paused, considering his words.

  ‘But what?’

  Coming out with it. ‘I was playing a little head game with her. I thought she’d bought it. I didn’t think she’d keep looking. Not at me. Not after I opened up and cooperated.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell the truth.’

  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?’