The Mercy Rule

by John Lescroart

  Escaping his attention until this moment – it was, after all, an imaginary line – now he couldn’t shake the conviction that this might be the axis around which the Russo case revolved.

  It had gotten late, he wasn’t sure how. He did finally return the storage-room key, then ran into some attorneys outside the municipal courtrooms who wanted to talk about the case, buy him some drinks, which he refused.

  Then Jeff Elliot appeared outside the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall and another forty minutes or so went away. He tried to keep a lid on what he was thinking, knowing that unless you wanted to leak something specific or start a rumor, and that wasn’t his intention now, it wasn’t a good policy to speculate to newspaper reporters.

  Now, somehow, it was nearly five o’clock. He was relieved that he had made it to the building before the main fire department offices would close.

  A bright sun flirted with the tops of Twin Peaks, but the day itself continued truly cold. The biting wind of the previous afternoon had picked up steam and an attitude coming across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, erasing the last memories of Indian summer.

  Hardy hurriedly thrust some bills at the cabbie. Briefcase in hand, he half ran two at a time up the wide steps leading into the building.

  In the lobby the late-afternoon glare against the polished right-hand wall was blinding. Shading his eyes, he found the office he wanted on the opposite wall and walked in.

  For a city office the place appeared to run very well. Hardy was approaching the counter when a uniformed young black woman saw him, stood up at one of the desks, came around it, and asked if she could help him.

  ‘This might be unusual,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to know if you can identify something for me.’ He took out the belt and placed it on the counter.

  Picking it up, she turned it over once or twice, noted the E-2 stamp on one side, put it back down. ‘This is a hose-and-ladder strap,’ she said as if she saw one every day, and maybe she did. ‘We use ’em to wrap up gear on the trucks. This one’s stamped by North Beach station. Where’d you get it?‘

  Hardy kept it vague. ‘A friend of mine had it,’ he said. ‘He gave it to me. I thought I might make it into a belt.’

  The woman laughed. ‘This old thing? You’d have to cut off half of it first. Repolish it. Get it tooled.’

  This had been Glitsky’s second point, which Hardy felt he should have seen much earlier. The ‘belt’ was far too big for Graham or for Hardy, and Sal had been a wiry old man. What had made Hardy think it would fit him, that it was a belt in the first place?

  The woman was turning it in her hand again, then snapped it a time or two. ‘Besides, it’s pretty brittle,’ she said. ‘Your friend must have had it a long time. Did he say where he got it?’

  ‘I think he found it left behind at a fire scene,’ Hardy said. ‘Forgot to return it.’

  She gave him another smile, obviously assuming that Hardy’s ‘friend’ was himself, that guilt over the stolen strap had finally caught up with him. ‘I don’t think North Beach would use it anymore. You might as well hang on to it. Or I could just throw it away here. It won’t make much of a belt.’

  ‘I’ll bring it back to him,’ Hardy said. ‘Maybe it’s got sentimental value.’

  She gave him a dubious look, handed the strap back to him. ‘Maybe. Is that all you need?’

  ‘I think so. Would North Beach know where they lost this? Or when?’

  ‘I don’t know that. You could go and ask them. Maybe they keep some kind of inventory of losses, something like that. Stations do things differently. But that thing is old. I’d be surprised.’

  Hardy was wrapping it around his hand. He slipped it off and put it back into his briefcase, snapping the clips. ‘Me too.’ There was nothing else to say. ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been a big help.’

  He walked back out into the lobby, took a few steps, and came to a stop. For a moment he considered turning around and going right back down to Glitsky’s office. Since Graham’s release Sal Russo’s death was again an unsolved homicide, and in theory Abe ought to be interested in any evidence related to it.

  Except that now, thanks to Hardy’s efforts, the entire city believed the story that Graham had killed his father out of mercy. Nobody – except possibly Graham himself, Sarah, and Hardy – nobody was looking for a killer anymore. The case, although technically still open and unsolved, was concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Even to Glitsky’s.

  Subliminally aware that people were beginning to stream out of the elevators and offices around him at the end of the workday, Hardy felt strangely rooted to where he was. He didn’t want to lose his train of thought. If he was going to bring up anything about this case with an eye to another suspect, he would need a lot more than this hose-and-ladder strap.

  But he did have an idea where he might get just that. First he’d go back down to the Chronicle and re-examine the archives related to the fire at Giotti’s Grotto. It might have been months before the date on the wrapped money, but months, after all this elapsed time, was close enough. Without the strap any connection between that fire and Sal was a tenuous stretch. With it Hardy thought he had a causal link that was compelling. It was damn near conclusive of something. He just couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.

  He would turn Sarah loose on it too. She wouldn’t share any of Glitsky’s reluctance. Whoever had killed Sal Russo was her enemy, her man’s torturer, and Sarah was going to bring that person down if she could.

  Could it have been Giotti? Hardy visualized the affable and brilliant jurist. He could, though it was a big ‘maybe,’ imagine the judge helping Sal kill himself, as Hardy had argued that Graham had. Try as he might, though, and much as the symmetry appealed to him, he couldn’t see Giotti murdering Sal. Not struggling with his oldest friend who was now a feeble old man, then knocking him out, fatally injecting him with morphine.

  And that, Hardy reminded himself, is precisely what had happened, regardless of the story he’d made so convincing to the jury, to the city at large.

  Far to the west the sun finally kissed Twin Peaks, then abruptly dropped below them. Downtown fell into shade as though somebody had drawn the blinds; the glare that had been bathing the lobby off the polished wall vanished. The startling sudden dimness, the transformation in the feel of the cavernous room, pulled Hardy, blinking, from his thoughts.

  Automatically it seemed, his eyes went to the wall – etched marble with gilt inlay. Here were the names of those who’d died fighting fires in the city since before the Great Earthquake and Fire of ‘06.

  The lobby had mostly cleared. Echoing footsteps from behind him, muffled voices carrying from a great distance.

  Hardy stood transfixed, a premonition tickling at the edges of his consciousness. He moved a step closer to the wall, focusing down from his wide angle.

  Another step, feeling it somehow before he recognized anything. It was here.

  And then, suddenly jumping out, appearing as out of a Magic Eye poster, there it was.

  He blinked again, now forcing himself to slow down. To make sure of what he was seeing.

  R-A-N-D-A-L-L.

  One letter at time, he told himself. Don’t miss one and get it wrong. Not now.

  G.

  Okay. Stop and make sure. He raked the name slowly, left to right.

  P-A-L-M-I-E-R-I.

  It was just a name on a wall. But he knew that it was more, much more: it was the key to everything.

  Randall Palmieri could have died in 1910 or 1950 for all Hardy could be sure, but he was certain that wasn’t the case. His bones and heart knew that Palmieri had died in November of 1979, fighting the fire that had burned down the Grotto.

  He retraced his steps back to the fire department’s door, but it was closed now, locked up.

  Timing, he thought; life’s little reminder that you couldn’t control a damn thing.

  He looked at his watch – five-ten. He w
as furious at the efficient office he’d admired fifteen minutes before. He bet the fire department opened punctually at nine too.

  All but running now, he descended the front steps and hailed another cab.

  Insane frustration.

  The Chronicle archives were also closed for the day by the time he arrived there. From a pay phone across the street he placed a call to Jeff Elliot, who he hoped would be working late in the basement. Jeff always worked late. He worked early. He worked all the time. Hardy’s plan was that he would give Jeff the scoop first. The columnist would be satisfied with that. It was the way things were done.

  But, of course, Jeff wasn’t in. Hardy didn’t even leave him a voice mail message. He wanted answers now. He’d waited long enough.

  Without giving it much thought he got the number of the federal courthouse – another government office sure to be closed – and found that it was. He got a recording.

  Which didn’t mean that no one was working in the building. All right, perhaps the receptionists and some secretaries had gone home, but Hardy knew the law business and it was an absolute certainty that the judges’ offices at the federal courthouse were little beehives of activity even as he stood here shivering. Graham had told him that while he’d been clerking for Harold Draper, there had been times when he hadn’t gone outside the building for three days in a row.

  So someone was there.

  His instincts were telling him to slow down now. Fate was lobbying to make him stop. Nobody was around. The message was loud and clear: This wasn’t the propitious moment. It wasn’t meant to be. He should stop and think about the implications of all his discoveries and hunches and methodically follow things up tomorrow and the next day and the one after that.

  But he was so close. So close. He felt it. Suddenly he couldn’t wait. It was right here and it would escape if he gave it the chance. He couldn’t do that.

  Rather than fight for another parking space, he legged it down Mission a couple of blocks, freezing now in the stiff gale. Jaws clenched, he told himself that all his working out over the past months was finally paying off. He made it to the courthouse in under five minutes.

  This time he was unmoved by the immensity of the building, the solid bronze doors that extended to over twice his height, the iron lanterns that had come from some Florentine palace. These doors, as he’d expected, were closed. But there was the other entrance by the gate to the parking area, in front of the Lions Arms, in the alley.

  The security guard had seen it a hundred times. Here was some frantic lawyer who’d missed a deadline, waving him over, wanting to get into the building, perhaps have his brief accepted although it was half an hour late. The odds of that, he knew, were slim and none.

  ‘Is Judge Giotti still in? I’d like to see him.’

  ‘Business hours are over, I’m afraid.’

  ‘This isn’t strictly business. It’s not court business.’

  ‘Is the judge a friend of yours?’

  The lawyer seemed to think about it. Maybe he was a friend of the judge’s and didn’t want to presume on it. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He asked me to keep him up on the progress of a case of mine. I’ve got a few things to tell him about.’

  The guard looked Hardy up and down. The rule was ‘When in doubt, don’t’. The judges got a lot of their work done after the formal workday, and all of them hated being interrupted. But if this guy was a friend of Giotti’s…

  Of course, if he were a friend, he’d have a private number. On the other hand, he wasn’t pushing, really, though he was cold right at the moment and probably wouldn’t mind being inside. ‘You want to wait a sec, I’ll go check with his office, see if anybody’s there.’

  ‘They wouldn’t even take a message?’ Graham didn’t have a high regard for the denizens of the federal courthouse in any case, but even he was surprised that no one had come down to talk to Hardy.

  ‘Apparently they were busy.’

  Hardy had cooled off, figuratively, since striking out with Giotti’s office too. He was back on Sutler Street, at his desk. Graham had come up on his summons. It wasn’t much after six in the middle of the week, and the gristmill was humming along nicely. Hardy’s original inclination was to get Graham to help him do some research on this ancient fire situation. He could use Sarah’s help too.

  But in the middle of venting his frustrations Hardy had changed his mind. He wouldn’t be giving anything else away in this case until he’d narrowed it down somewhat. If the fire had been important in Graham’s life, Hardy would give him the opportunity to talk about it. But if it hadn’t, he didn’t want Graham and Sarah asking around indiscriminately, raising warning flags for whomever he was hunting.

  This investigation now, finally, was something Hardy felt he had to keep under his own close control. The outline of what he sought was still fairly nebulous. He reminded himself that Jeanne Walsh had never heard of Sal Russo; her mother, Joan Singleterry, had never mentioned him. Perhaps, even, Graham’s Joan Singleterry had never been Joan Palmieri. He had to get all that straight first.

  Graham had picked up his darts and threw the first one. Bull’s-eye. He almost didn’t seem to notice. ‘Why’d you want to see Giotti?’

  Hardy kept it vague. ‘That painting of Sal’s. It got me thinking. I wanted to ask him again about the Grotto fire. Do you remember much about it?’

  Graham shook his head. ‘I was fifteen. If you couldn’t bat it or throw it, it didn’t exist for me.’

  ‘The fire obviously made an impression on Sal.’

  ‘That’s just the way he was, Diz. Things affected him.’ He threw another dart, got another bull’s-eye. ‘That painting, to me, it’s the loss of innocence in general. The fire’s just another symbol. The ruined boat in the foreground, the boy with the broken pole. You notice all the garbage in the water? He’s painting the thing out in the garage while he and Mom are breaking up. Think about it. It’s impressionistic. It’s his whole world breaking up.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Hardy said.

  After Graham left, he tried calling Jeanne Walsh again. She hadn’t bought an answering machine since yesterday, or if she had, she’d neglected to plug it in.

  It wasn’t his night. He was going home.

  When he opened the door to his house, it was almost eerily silent and he listened for a minute, then called out. ‘Frannie!’

  Furtive noises from the back of the house. ‘Frannie. Kids. Dad’s home.’

  In seconds he was in the kitchen. ‘Anybody here?’

  Muffled giggling – at least recognizable as benign – from farther back. He walked through the master bedroom and into Vincent’s, which had been transformed into an impenetrable maze of blankets, pillows, ropes strung from bed to chairs to bookshelves. He lifted up one of the blankets and looked under. ‘Hey, guys.’

  Rebecca held a finger to her lips. ‘Shh!’

  ‘Where’s Mom?’ he whispered.

  ‘I don’t know. Shh!’

  This was not Hardy’s favorite answer, but since a game was obviously in progress he didn’t want to be a spoilsport, so he stood up and turned around.

  ‘Mr Hardy? Hi.’

  It took him a moment. This was Mary, their baby-sitter, having come out of hiding from wherever. What was she doing here? ‘I’s Frannie all right?’ he asked foolishly.

  The girl’s face was all confusion. ‘I guess so. Weren’t you meeting her someplace? That’s what she said.’

  It was all coming back to him. It was Wednesday night. Date Night. He was picking Frannie up at the Shamrock at seven. His mind, in its dance of frustration and speculation, had spun that little fact out of its galaxy. He’d not so much forgotten as absolutely misplaced the information.

  He looked at his watch – seven-twenty – and gave Mary an apologetic grin. ‘Sorry to break in on you like this. My brain’s turned to mush. I’ve got to use the phone.’

  They were at Stagnola’s. Hardy and Frannie never ate on the Wharf, although
the food was often wonderful. It was just such a tourist place, with traffic hassles and exorbitant parking rates. There were dozens of other spots offering great food in the city. Tonight, though, Hardy felt as though he needed to be here.

  He also felt like he’d traveled a hundred miles in the past three-plus hours – from the Hall of Justice to the fire department main office, back to the Chronicle. Then the jog to the Federal Building and back. His office. Driving his own car all the way across town to his home in the Avenues, almost to the beach. Now halfway back downtown to the Shamrock to meet the long-suffering Frannie.

  Until at last he was settled at his table, Chianti poured, tucking into an antipasto plate – pepperoncini, salami, mortadella, provolone, artichoke hearts, olives, caponata. Hot sourdough rolls by the basket. Heaven.

  She’d given him several rations of grief since he’d finally arrived to pick her up. ‘No, I understand, lots of times I’ll get caught up in things around the house and forget that you exist too. Then I’ll snap my fingers and go, “Oh, that’s right, Dismas.” ’ Et cetera.

  Since Hardy felt he basically deserved it, he’d let her go on. Except now it had all wound down, she was holding his hand over the table, glad they were together. He had to tell her, bounce it off her, see where he didn’t have it right.

  She listened carefully, then went another way. ‘I think you should turn it over to the police.’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Whatever you’ve got. Let them go with it. Give it to Abe. This is what he does, Dismas.’

  But Hardy was shaking his head. ‘No, it’s not. He’s got to have a murder, a case.’

  ‘How about Sal Russo? Doesn’t he count?’

  ‘Sure, he counts. But I don’t have any proof of anything that would get him involved. All I’ve got is this hose-and-ladder belt, a fire in this place eighteen years ago, a dead fireman who might or might not have been at this fire.’

  ‘And fifty thousand dollars.’

  ‘So what? Nobody stole that from Sal, as a matter of fact. He had it when he died. Or Graham did, which is the same thing.’