The Mercy Rule

by John Lescroart

  Giotti’s face seemed by degrees to be growing darker now, the black circles under his eyes becoming more pronounced, the jowls heavier as his chin went down, resting on his chest. He let out a long breath and came back to Hardy. ‘The man who died in the fire.’

  A nod. ‘That’s right. You knew him?’

  ‘Who he was, of course. The name’s forever burned into my memory. It was a tragedy. How could I not know it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t suppose you could. But then, by the same token, I’m afraid I don’t understand how you could forget the name Singleterry.’

  ‘But Singleterry wasn’t her name. How would I-?’

  Hardy couldn’t make himself listen to it anymore. He had to cut him off. ‘Because, Judge, your trust – the BGG, that’s your trust, isn’t it? Bruno Giotti’s Grotto Memorial Trust? It sent her money for seventeen years. I’m just having a hard time seeing how that could have slipped your mind.’

  Giotti was nodding repeatedly, his eyes on the middle distance between them. After a long minute he got up and crossed the room back to his desk, stared above it out the window into the gray mist. ‘I remember thinking I liked the way your mind worked, Mr Hardy. Maybe that was misguided. Now you’re implying I had something to do with that fire, aren’t you? With arson and murder.’ Finally he turned around. ‘I’m afraid I’m too busy for this. It’s arrant nonsense.’

  ‘I’d be glad to hear your explanation.’

  Giotti’s nostrils flared. ‘I don’t need to give you any explanation, Mr Hardy. Like everyone else in America I am innocent until proven guilty. If you’ve got some proof of these outrageous accusations, why don’t you bring it to the attention of the police? Right now this interview is over.’ He pointed at the door. ‘You know your way.’

  Hardy stood up, but instead of moving toward the door, he assumed an at-ease position in front of his chair. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Clearly unaccustomed to anything less than immediate obedience at any display of his authority, Giotti stiffened. ‘I said get the hell out of here!’ He reached for the telephone. ‘I’ll have you removed.’

  ‘You don’t want to do that,’ Hardy said calmly. ‘I’m not talking about a twenty-year-old fire. I’m talking about Sal Russo.’

  Giotti gently replaced the receiver. ‘What about him?’

  ‘The fifty thousand dollars.’

  The judge waited.

  ‘Somehow it came from the fire. I don’t know exactly how it got into Sal’s hands, but the police are going to want to find out. They’re going to see a connection between you and Sal’s death. Maybe a motive for you to have killed Sal. I don’t have to tell you this.’

  ‘You think I killed Sal?’

  ‘I don’t think Sal was ready to die when you injected him. That makes it murder.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  Hardy didn’t care about the judge’s transparent denial. ‘I want to know what happened. I don’t have to go to the police. This is for me. I’m not going away until I find out.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you would.’ Giotti went around behind his desk, pulled out his chair, and sat down on it. ‘This Palmieri person died in a fire at my father’s restaurant. We’ve helped take care of the family.’

  ‘You denied knowing the name. That’s consciousness of guilt.’

  The judge shrugged. ‘We like to keep our charity anonymous. Perhaps you see a crime there. I don’t think many other people would. Certainly not the police.’ He picked up the telephone again. ‘Now do I call security or do you leave on your own?’

  This was high-stakes poker and the judge was calling his bluff. But Giotti had already tipped his hand – Hardy wouldn’t still be here if he didn’t have winning cards. He did, and he knew it. Now he was going to raise. ‘You’d better call in the troops,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. Not on my own power. After everything you’ve already put me through, you think I’m going to let this go?’

  Giotti’s eyes were a black glare. ‘You son of a bitch.’ His hand was still on the telephone.

  Hardy kept his voice low, calm. ‘Security comes here, they’ll have to file a report. It all gets official. We’re not there yet, though, are we?’

  The glare never wavered. ‘What’s stopping it?’

  ‘Me, that’s all.’

  ‘And you’re offering me some kind of… what?’

  ‘I’m not offering you anything, Judge. I want to know what happened. I’m an officer of the court. If I have to go to the police, I will. If I don’t have to…’ He left it unsaid.

  Giotti glowered another moment, then picked up his telephone, and Hardy feared he had lost. Giotti would call in some political chits among the honchos, the police would at best cursorily look into Hardy’s information and decide that a respected federal judge had done no wrong. Hardy was yet another unscrupulous, meddling defense attorney looking for more headlines, ready to slander a beacon of the legal community if it would get him a few more clients.

  ‘And then, of course, there’s the newspaper,’ he said.

  Giotti took in the last warning, made his decision, and pushed a button on the telephone.

  He waited, then asked his secretary to hold his calls. Replacing the receiver, he looked across at Hardy. ‘Do you want to know what happened, or do you want to go to homicide? You’re not going to get both, not from me. And whatever happens, it looks as though I’m going to need some legal counsel.’ Giotti reached under his robes, took out his wallet, and pulled a bill from it. ‘Do you want to be my lawyer, Mr Hardy?’

  Giotti was offering him a five-dollar retainer. If Hardy accepted it, every word between them would then be subject to the attorney-client privilege. He could never take it to the police.

  This was, Hardy thought, truly Faustian. He reminded himself, though, that in the eyes of the law, justice had already been done. No one else was looking for the murderer of Sal Russo. He had to know.

  Still, he hesitated.

  Giotti’s voice, though he never raised it, cut at him. ‘Do you honestly think you’re going to find physical proof of a fire that occurred almost eighteen years ago? Proof that would stand up at trial? The insurance company looked pretty hard before they paid out, you can believe me.’

  Again, the tone shifted. Impatience? Command? ‘Now, you can come over and take this bill or you can walk out of here. One way you’ll know and the other you won’t. It’s your call.’

  Hardy crossed the room. Giotti, still seated, watched him all the way. The bill was lying on the desk between them and Hardy picked it up and put it into his pocket.

  ‘All right, counselor,’ said the judge. ‘Now sit down and let me tell you a story.’

  ‘Let’s say the Grotto was having a tough time, tourism was down, the restaurant business is always skin of your teeth anyway. Then let’s say one day we get a notice from the state about inadequate handicap access. We’ve got to build a ramp, renovate the lobby… to make a long story short, we’ve got to lay out, say, forty-five thousand dollars to bring the place to code or they’re going to shut us down.

  ‘Now let’s also say the owner’s son is a young attorney with political aspirations. But he still works in the kitchen sometimes – he loves it back there. He’s all conflicted about his career, where it’s going, what he’s doing. So he keeps his hand in at the restaurant, and then suddenly it looks like the business is going belly up, because there’s no place the owners are going to find thirty or forty thousand dollars for handicap upgrading.

  ‘So this smart kid, he comes up with this smart idea. If there’s a small fire – controlled – starts, say, in the kitchen, does a little damage, but basically it’s so the insurance can cover the renovation. Let’s say the young attorney has a good friend – his oldest and best friend – call him Sal, who owns a boat moored right out behind the place. And these guys are out fishing together – night fishing, they do it all the time – when the fire starts. They don’t get back in till t
he skyline’s ablaze.

  ‘The attorney’s thinking it’s impossible the fire could spread. The place is rigged so it could never burn up. There’s backup systems on the backup systems, but maybe he didn’t figure on the grease in the kitchen, maybe it got too hot too fast… anyway, whatever, the place goes up.

  ‘But a guy dies. A fireman, by mistake. Sweet-faced young guy, two little kids, pretty wife.

  ‘There’s no evidence of arson. It looks like one of the pilot lights caught some grease that had dripped down. One of the service staff must have left an apron near the stove. And, not that anybody’s really asking, but the two friends alibi each other. They weren’t anywhere near there all night. They were out under the bridge, knocking down the halibut. They got a boatload of fish to prove it.’

  Giotti was leaning back in his oversized chair, his hands crossed over his middle. He sighed wearily. ‘Let’s say something like that happened, counselor. You going to try and take that to trial?’

  Hardy was too wired for any games. Although he knew Giotti was absolutely correct: there was no evidence here anymore. Murder might have no statute of limitations, but to convict you still needed more than he’d ever be able to produce.

  Any physical evidence of the fire was long gone. Sal’s rock-solid alibi, and Giotti’s, went that way to the grave with him. Joan Singleterry was dead. Even the insurance company’s investigators had found no wrongdoing. There was no chance. No police department would waste a minute on it.

  But there was more Hardy felt he needed to know. ‘How do you think somebody like Sal could have gotten ahold of fifty thousand dollars in cash?’

  ‘In this scenario it could have been part of the insurance money.’

  ‘A payoff, you mean, to keep quiet.’

  ‘A show of gratitude maybe. Maybe a little of both.’ Giotti shrugged. ‘Life’s complicated.’

  ‘And Sal couldn’t handle the guilt, could he? He killed somebody, an innocent man, a guy just like himself, wife and kids. And it ruined him.’

  Another shrug.

  Hardy dug into his pocket and removed the bill, placed it on the desk. ‘We’re out of hypothetical now, Judge, and you’re not my client anymore. You killed Sal, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Because he’d started talking about it, didn’t he? He was back in the past, telling people about the fire, wasn’t he?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ Giotti repeated.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  The judge pulled the bill back toward him, centered it in front of him. ‘I don’t care what you believe, Mr Hardy. Sal was my best friend. He saved my whole life, my career, everything, and he suffered terribly for it – really lost everything. You think after that, after all he went through for me, I’m going to reward him by killing him?’

  ‘I don’t think you had any choice.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong. The fire was a tragedy, an accident, a mistake. I’ve tried to make it up to that poor family as well as anybody could. To Sal too. We stuck together, even if he sometimes made it a little hard on me. I never would have killed him. Don’t you understand that? Never, under any conditions. I’d have gone down myself first.’

  38

  He didn’t get out of Giotti’s until after three and then, unable to refocus, he’d walked to the Chronicle building, gone to the archives, and read every story he could find on the fire, on Palmieri, on Giotti.

  By now the rain was falling steadily, and he had walked back uptown to his office in the thick of it. There he discovered that in the past two days he’d collected twenty-one call slips and his voice mail ran to over ten minutes. There was no question, Graham Russo’s trial had given his career a shot in the arm, even if at the moment he couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to pay for the services of a bumbling moron such as himself.

  Where had he gotten everything wrong? What had he missed?

  He had to put that – all of it – out of his mind. The day hadn’t been a total failure. He had found Joan Singleterry and her connection to Sal Russo. Her kids were going to get the money. Whoopee.

  His biggest problem – he had trouble even phrasing it to himself – he didn’t quite disbelieve Mario Giotti. The judge’s vehemence and passion at the end of their discussion about Sal’s role in his life had struck a resonant chord, and suddenly Hardy had lost the conviction that Giotti was lying.

  Killing Sal was beyond Giotti’s pale. He had never intentionally killed anyone. He had been trying to make moral restitution to the victims of the one accidental death – technically a murder, but certainly unintentional – he’d been involved with. He was not a cold-blooded man, a man who would kill with premeditation, even if his victim was already on the verge of death. That distinction would be critical to him. His life’s work in the law could never let him forget it.

  So who had killed Sal?

  His office had grown dark and he flicked on his green-shaded banker’s lamp. Guilt over his unanswered messages didn’t just gnaw at him, it was taking huge bites. He was going to have to miss dinner, get caught up. Frannie would deal with it, possibly would relish some time away from his intensity. Besides, they’d had a date just the night before, a wonderful family dinner with friends at home the night before that.

  He had to do some billable work, business development, something worthwhile.

  Frannie had been able to tell from the tone of his voice that he needed to feel as though he’d accomplished something before he came home; it almost didn’t matter what it was. She told him she’d be fine, she’d wait up. She had a book she was loving. She’d kiss the kids for him.

  And, oh, she almost forgot, some potential client had called a little earlier and Frannie had said Hardy would be working late in his office. She’d given his office number, so he might expect a call.

  But now, nearly three hours later, there hadn’t been one. He wouldn’t wait around for it. It would come later or it wouldn’t.

  Over the past few hours he’d been subliminally aware that the associates downstairs were going home. Their muffled voices carried up the stairs as they passed through Phyllis’s lobby in twos and threes on their way out.

  By a little after nine-thirty he’d made all of his return phone calls, mostly to various answering machines, although he had held the hand of one of his prospective new doctor clients and flatly turned down handling two divorces.

  He was now doing some substantive preparation, taking notes on a stack of recent briefs that had been filed in various federal courts on the right-to-die issue.

  Because he preferred his banker’s lamp to the overheads, he was working almost completely in the dark. The green glass shade cast a soothing pool of light over his desk. Somehow it helped his concentration.

  He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes briefly. The building was quiet. Outside, the wind gusted and threw some raindrops against his window, reminding him that it was still coming down. He got up, stretched, crossed back to his window, and looked down on Sutter, nearly deserted at this hour. One dark car was parked directly across from him, but otherwise the curbs were empty. The rest of the street shone darkly, streetlights reflecting off the wet surfaces.

  He returned to his desk, pulled his yellow legal pad toward him, grabbed a copy of another published brief, and stopped.

  He really ought to go home. He could do this note-taking anytime. It was late on a miserable night. He felt he’d finally paid himself back for the wasted daytime hours, although he couldn’t say he’d accomplished much.

  The building’s night bell sounded. This in itself was mildly surprising, since the only people who would normally be coming to the office at this hour would be night-owl associates who had their own keys. It was unlikely that it was a client, especially since Hardy was all but certain that he was the last person in the building. Probably, he thought, it was one of the city’s homeless who’d wandered up the small stoop to get out of the rain, pressed the lit button by
mistake.

  But it sounded again and he decided he’d better go check. The lighting in the hallway outside of his office was on dim. On the stairway, the same thing. The cavernous lobby ceiling had a few feeble pinheads of light. It was dark as a movie theater.

  Hardy descended the curving main staircase and got to the circular marbled alcove at the bottom. Turning the dead bolt in the heavy wooden doors, he pulled the door open.

  No one was there.

  He stepped out onto the sidewalk to look. No one. Squinting through the rain at the car parked across the way, he couldn’t see anybody in the front seats. The back windows appeared to be darkly tinted. He couldn’t make out anything through them.

  Enough of this. He was going home. First back upstairs to his office, where he’d pack his briefcase, and then out of here, out the front door again, down to the parking garage under the building. Home.

  The back door to the Giottis’ car swung open. It had been essential to ring the bell to find out if anyone else was in the building, also to be sure that the third-floor light was Hardy. It didn’t look as though there was anyone else still working, but at a time like this one couldn’t be too sure. There were no lights left on in the lower-floor offices.

  When the bell rang the second time, the person working upstairs got up, came all the way down, opened the front door, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. It was Hardy, all right, though not exactly the well-dressed version that he presented to the court, whose picture had been all over the newspapers, his sound bites on the news. This was the working attorney, tie undone, coat off, collar open. But even from across the street there was no mistaking him.

  There were shadows now, moving in his office. He’d gone back up there. Now the thing to do was ring the bell again, wait for him this time, until he opened the door again.

  Then do the thing.

  Hardy was just going to finish these last three pages. Otherwise, he’d have to go back and reread the first twelve again to catch up to his place in the brief, to where he was now, if he wanted to reboard the paper’s train of thought. Now, the opening pages were still clear enough in his memory, the syllogistic rhythm of the argument unbroken. He went right back to the spot where he’d left off, picked up his pen, read a few words.