The Mercy Rule

by John Lescroart

  ‘This is Hank Travers with Bay Area Action News. I’m standing outside the offices of the California state attorney general’s office in San Francisco, and with me is Assistant Attorney General Gil Soma. Mr Soma, can you tell us whether the state has decided to bring charges against Mr Russo?’

  Soma was a talking head. ‘We need to carefully review all the evidence, of course. But the law, and my office, believes that the deliberate killing of another human being is usually a crime.’

  There was an avid glint in his eyes that belied the apparent objectivity. Clearly, Soma wanted the head of Graham Russo.

  And just as obviously, Hank Travers recognized this. ‘Is it true that you and Mr Russo used to work together?’

  The camera angle widened. Soma was the picture of the fighting young attorney. The cameras were out on the street and a freshening breeze was playing with his tie, messing with his hair. He ignored these distractions, giving all his attention to Hank. ‘It’s a matter of record that we were both clerks for Federal Judge Harold Draper. Beyond that I can’t comment.’

  The camera moved in for a close-up. Hank’s voice came over Gil Soma’s intense glare. ‘But you know a different Graham Russo, don’t you? The man behind the outward appearance? And you believe he would have killed his father for fifty thousand dollars?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Travers tried a last time. ‘But in your opinion he’s the kind of person who could have done it?’

  Soma kept it straight. ‘We’re looking at the evidence. That’s all I can tell you.’ But he continued nodding into the camera, and the message came across loud and clear: Soma despised Graham Russo. He was going to take him down if he could.

  9

  Glitsky had Evans and Lanier in a borrowed office in the vice detail down the hallway from homicide. It was important that the office have a door that could be closed, and Glitsky’s cubicle did not provide that particular amenity. The situation regarding the continuing investigation into Sal Russo’s death was unusual and volatile.

  He was taking them through the game plan. When he had finished his first pass, Evans raised a hand and the lieutenant, atypically, took on an amused expression. ‘We’re not in school here, Sarah, you can just speak up.’

  She folded her arms back across her chest. ‘I’ve got just one question: what are we supposed to do that we didn’t do last time when they let him go?’

  Glitsky nodded; it was a good question. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. Same stuff, just more of it.’

  Marcel Lanier had been around long enough that he got the gist of it the first time. He was sitting in a comfortable chair next to his partner and he looked over at her. ‘Everybody has their guards down, Sarah. Witnesses think there won’t be any charges, so what they saw or heard might not be so threatening. People might open up. The investigation is still open. That’s really what Abe’s saying.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Glitsky was all agreement.

  ‘But Russo is still our suspect?’ Especially after last night this was not welcome news.

  ‘Best and only. He did it.’ Lanier was ready to hit the streets. Glitsky had delivered the message. Time to go to work. But Sarah was still in her chair, arms still crossed over her chest.

  ‘Is something wrong, Sarah?’ Glitsky asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, something.’ They waited. ‘I don’t think he did it,’ she said at last. ‘I think we were wrong.’

  Lanier began sputtering something, but Glitsky stopped him with a gesture. He set a haunch on the corner of the desk. ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I’m just not sure.’

  ‘What’s changed since yesterday?’ Glitsky asked. ‘

  ‘A couple of things.’ She hesitated, then came out with it. ‘I talked to him.’

  ‘When?’

  She told them about the meeting at the softball diamond, leaving out her personal reaction. ‘He came up to me.’ Not precisely true but, she thought, close enough. She was positive he’d been about to approach her when she saw him staring at her. ‘I don’t think he would have done that if he’d killed his father.’

  ‘Sure he would have.’ This was Lanier’s territory. He’d interacted with a hundred murderers in his career and had not a doubt that he had the psychology down. Whatever it might be, he’d already seen it twice. ‘That’s exactly the kind of shit these assholes try to run on us. We let him out of jail, so he’s untouchable. He wants to know what we know. He’s sucking up to you, Sarah, trying to get under your skin.’

  She didn’t believe it. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  Glitsky: ‘What was it like?’

  ‘There’s wasn’t any sucking up. He barely mentioned it.’

  Lanier leaned in toward her. ‘I bet it did sneak its clever little way into the conversation, though, didn’t it?’

  She shrugged. ‘He just said he didn’t do it. An afterthought.’

  Lanier had seen that too. ‘Ahh, the subtle approach. He barely brings it up after he’s been arrested and spent the day in jail?’ The psychology of that failed Marcel’s litmus test, and he wanted his partner to know it. ‘If you’d just spent your first day in jail and met the person who’d put you there, don’t you think it might be kind of the main thing on your mind? Wouldn’t you want to talk about it just a tiny bit?’

  ‘Marcel, I think she gets the point.’ Glitsky came back to Sarah. ‘You said there were a couple of things. What was the other one?’

  Her eyes fixed on each of the men in turn. ‘I thought about this all night, reread over the file. We don’t really have anything that puts him there.’

  Glitsky nodded. This, too, was a valid point. ‘That’s why Drysdale wants the investigation to proceed. He says he needs more to get a conviction.’

  ‘You mean we shouldn’t have arrested him last time?’

  ‘Now, wait a minute!’ Lanier wasn’t about to accept that analysis. ‘The guy had already hired a lawyer-’

  ‘Not in itself a crime,’ Glitsky pointed out.

  ‘Sure, sure, but still…’ Lanier knew what cops knew, and that was that innocent people – if there were any – didn’t tend to bring their lawyers into the picture until they were charged, until they finally understood that they were in trouble. He continued. ‘Basically, we got an unemployed, selfish kid with a million-dollar lifestyle who needed the money and saw an easy way to take it.’

  ‘So it’s all the money?’

  ‘Absolutely. He had the safe combination at his place. That puts him at his old man’s.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he just pick up the safe deposit key while we were searching his place, put it in his pocket? We wouldn’t ever have found it.’

  Lanier shrugged. ‘I give up. Maybe he thought we’d catch him if he tried. Maybe he didn’t believe we’d be so thorough. I’m not saying the guy’s a professional hit man. Maybe he was just nervous.’

  ‘If it was all about the money, he would have done something to hide it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘It would have been so easy. He couldn’t not have done it.’

  The old bromide – that killers needed to tell somebody about what they’d done – wasn’t all false. ‘He wanted us to find it. Call it a type of confession.’

  ‘He wouldn’t feel the need to confess if it was an act of mercy, if he felt he’d done the right thing.’

  Lanier shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. This wasn’t any assisted suicide either. This was murder. That bump under the ear-’

  ‘Which Strout said could have happened hours before.’

  ‘No no no. Our boy Graham cold-cocked him from behind with the whiskey bottle, gave him a veinful of morphine, cleaned out the safe, and tiptoed home through the tulips.’

  ‘So if Sal was cold-cocked, lying still on the ground, and Graham gives shots every day of his life, why was there trauma around the injection site? Why wasn’t it a clean little poke?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he was scar
ed. He was hurrying. Maybe there was an earthquake. The needle was broke. Maybe he missed the vein. My doctor does every time.’

  But Glitsky had listened to enough arguing. ‘All right, all right. This doesn’t matter. I think you had plenty to arrest Russo yesterday. If you keep looking, maybe you’ll find more. You’re authorized to keep looking, that’s all. Make it tight. If the AG wants to move on him, we’ll bring in Graham again. If the evidence points to somebody else, we’ll go after them. Sarah, you got anybody else you’re thinking about?’

  She said she didn’t, ‘But Sal still might have killed himself, right? The autopsy didn’t rule that out.’

  Glitsky nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He pushed himself off the desk. The meeting was over. ‘And that is precisely the reason that God in Her infinite wisdom invented the jury system.’ He spread his hands, as though blessing them. ‘Which, fortunately, never fails.’

  ‘Well, at least we had a nice summer, didn’t we?’

  Lanier had his jacket buttoned all the way up, his head down in his collar. Next to him Evans, her hands tucked into her own jacket, squinted into the face of the wind and the dust it was kicking up. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asked. They were both walking fast. ‘It just can’t be this cold.’

  After their meeting with Glitsky, they’d driven the half mile from the Hall up Seventh Street and pulled into Stevenson Alley, a narrow and grimy, if schizophrenic, line of asphalt and garbage a half block south of the always exotic bus station.

  The north side of Stevenson was lined with the backs and delivery doors of the ancient medium-rise buildings of retail businesses that were struggling to survive on Market Street. Of the few structures whose fronts faced the alley, the most prominent was the Lions (no apostrophe) Arms apartment building, where Sal Russo had lived and died in corner room 304. Stenciled in fading black paint onto the side of the building were the words Daily, Weekly Rates.

  For most of the past decade the south side of Stevenson had fit in with the run-down ambience of the neighborhood – an open sore of a construction site while the Old Post Office Building was being renovated. Recently, though, that work had been completed.

  The Postal Service now had its own new home out at Rincon Annex, and the building’s other tenant – the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals – had taken it over. The federal courthouse now loomed fresh and imposing, a massive and elegant structure between Stevenson Alley and Mission Street.

  Lanier and Evans didn’t notice any of it. As they stepped around the homeless man camped, sleeping now, in one of the back doorways, all they saw on the south side of the alley, the courthouse side, was a solid gray wall, already sprayed with graffiti, topped with coils of razor wire. It wouldn’t have mattered to the two inspectors if the Taj Mahal had been across the way; the Lions Arms didn’t pick up any reflected majesty from its surroundings. It was a flophouse, pure and simple.

  The uniforms had canvassed the Lions Arms when Sal’s body had been found, but after dark were prime hours for a certain class of people who made their living on the street – lots of tenants hadn’t been home.

  So Sarah and Lanier were back, planning to knock on more doors. Normally, inspectors don’t like to work alone in this kind of environment, but it was midday and they could get more done if they split up. Both were aware that they probably should have gotten back to this sooner, but in the crush of other priorities it had had to wait.

  To accommodate a relatively spacious lobby and mailbox area – the building dated from a more gracious era – there were only four units on the first floor, and Sarah began knocking on them. The upper three stories had eight units each.

  Lanier mounted the stairs that began in the back of the lobby and took the second floor. He was going to start at 204, directly below Sal’s apartment, at the front of the building. He wasn’t even there when Sarah appeared on his landing. ‘Nobody home on the first floor. I’ll start on three.’

  The name in the slot next to the door said Blue, and Blue was coal-black. She was vaguely familiar by sight to Lanier – he had probably seen her around the Hall after she’d been busted for prostitution, for there was no question about her profession.

  After Lanier identified himself through the door, there was the sound of some movement inside. She must have been expecting a customer, Lanier thought. Probably was putting away some novelty items, maybe a bong. The door eventually opened. She’d opened the window, but the room still smelled strongly of marijuana and, somewhat less so, of musk. Blue was tucking a red teddy-bear top into a pair of skintight black denims.

  She stood in the open doorway, not asking him in. He showed her his badge. And then she surprised him. ‘This be about Sal, upstairs?’ Lanier said it was and she nodded. ‘I thought you be by sooner. I almost call you ’cept I don’t call cops. Sal was okay.‘

  ‘You knew him?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not real good. We talk a few times in the lobby, sometimes out the alley there. He brung me up some fresh salmon sometimes. I love salmon.’ Her eyes got wistful. ‘It was so sad, him dying. You find who killed him?’

  Out of habit and caution Lanier did not answer questions put to him by witnesses. Instead, he talked to her for a moment, realized he might have something, and pulled out the tape recorder he almost hadn’t bothered to bring along.

  After intoning the standard introduction for the transcriber, he came back at her. ‘Did you see or hear anything on last Friday, May ninth, that made you believe Sal Russo had been killed?’

  ‘I didn’t know killed at the time, but somebody be up in Sal’s place with him. I hear the door open, then’ – she indicated over her head – ‘the ceiling creaks, somebody else there.’

  ‘And where were you?’

  ‘Here, in my apartment. And then some other noises.’

  ‘What kind of noises were they?’

  ‘Like he fell down. Like some scraping furniture.’ She looked up. ‘This place, you know, the walls pretty thin, not ’zactly soundproof.‘

  But Lanier was going to keep her at it. ‘So you heard this noise, some furniture scraping on the floor?’

  That wasn’t precisely right. ‘Wasn’t like anything pushing, more like something fell, hit against it or something, and it scraped. Then he kind of moaned and yelled, “No,” bunch of times.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Yeah, like he was in pain or something. But pleading, like? The saddest sound.’

  ‘Did you hear anybody else, any other voices?’

  ‘Yeah, two voices. Sal and somebody else.’

  ‘Male, female?’

  ‘Male. Having some argument, it sounded like.’

  ‘This was before Sal moaned? Before the furniture scraped?’

  Blue closed her eyes, her face a study. ‘Before.’ But there was an uncertainty.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. It was just before.’

  ‘And then, after the moan, what? Anything else?’

  She took a moment, closing her eyes again, making sure. ‘No, just that. Then the door opened and closed again a few minutes later, and then it be quiet.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  The question seemed to spook her. She looked down, then at a place somewhere over Lanier’s shoulder. ‘I did go up, but later. No one answered.’

  Lanier almost got sarcastic with her – dead people generally didn’t answer doors too well. But he kept his tone neutral. ‘Yeah, Blue, but you heard this noise that sounded like Sal might be in trouble while you were right here underneath him. You said you guys were friends-’

  ‘I didn’t say we were friends. Not exactly friends. I knew him a little. He seem like a good guy, that’s all.’

  ‘Okay, so why didn’t you go up and see him while you still might have been able to help?’

  Again, that look over his shoulder. ‘Blue?’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ She paused and sighed. ‘Somebody was here, sleeping afterward, you know. I couldn’t get up.’


  10

  Dismas Hardy remained unaware of developing events for the whole day, until nearly nine o’clock Thursday evening. He had awakened at six and met Michelle at David’s Deli for a breakfast meeting an hour later. They were going down to Palo Alto – forty-some miles south – to meet with Dyson Brunei, Tryptech’s CEO, to introduce Michelle and discuss some of the substantive issues related to the lawsuit.

  Hardy hadn’t taken the time to even glance at a newspaper. From his perspective the Graham Russo case was still smoldering, but the immediate fire had been put out. Hardy was going to have his hands full anyway, bringing Michelle up to speed on this litigation, continuing with his daily work. He figured that Graham was going to be in his life sometime in the future, but for now it was important to will Graham onto a back burner, impending murder charge or not.

  It was easier said than done. Over lunch the conversation between Michelle, Brunei, and Hardy had come around to the surveillance equipment in use at the Port of Oakland. Perhaps, Michelle suggested, there was some video record of malfeasance, some smoking gun locked in the video camera at one of the security checkpoints. There was no record anyone had looked into that possibility.

  Graham’s bank! Hardy had thought. Video records at the bank could prove, perhaps, that Graham hadn’t gone there with his father’s money after Friday. That would mean that, whatever else might have happened, he didn’t kill Sal so that he could get at the safe. It would get any murder charge out of the range of special circumstances.

  Once the idea about videotapes at the bank came to him, the rest of the day was an agony of detail and protocol. Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that even during this apparent hiatus, his inability to get out of Tryptech’s office might be costing Graham Russo years of his freedom. Hardy’d let himself be lulled by the media attention around the idea that the death of Sal Russo had been an assisted suicide. That was, after all, the express reason that Sharron Pratt had declined to file charges.