Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (3 page)

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.’

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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 Lanier’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.

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Hardy was serious about not wanting to handle any more murder cases.

He’d never bought into the ethic of his landlord, David Freeman, a truly
professional
defense attorney. Hardy did it for the money; Freeman’s vision of life and the law accepted the necessity, and even the r
ightness
, of defending bad people for heinous acts they had actually committed.

Hardy had been a cop for a couple of years after college and a hitch in Vietnam. After that he spent a few years as a prosecutor for the district attorney’s office. When his first marriage broke up in the wake of the accidental death of his son, he took close to a dozen years off to tend bar and contemplate the universe through a haze of Guinness stout.

Eventually, the haze lifted. He became part owner of the Little Shamrock. He married again. Frannie was the younger sister of Moses, his partner in the Shamrock. He returned to the law — again as a prosecutor.

Office politics, not a philosophical change of heart, had driven him from the DA’s office and a benevolent fate had delivered him to defense work. He had believed in the innocence of his first two clients, and his instincts had been right.

After that there were opportunities to get ‘not guilty’ verdicts for other clients, but this was not the same thing as the clients themselves being innocent.

Hardy wasn’t going to defend criminals and use his glib Irish tongue to get them off on legerdemain, on legal technicalities. He did not feel any kinship with criminals, and didn’t much care what societal influences had made them go bad. He didn’t want to help keep them out of jail, even if it put bread on his table. Not that he didn’t believe that defendants were entitled to the best defense the law allowed. Personally, though, he just wasn’t going to provide it.

So his professional life had devolved into estate planning, business contracts, litigation. Occasionally, he’d take a fee for walking a client through the administrative maze of a DUI or shoplifting charge.

He often dreamed of dropping the pretense altogether, go back to his bar and pour drinks full-time — but that was another problem. The world was a different place than it had been before the kids.

In those days he and Frannie felt rich. They had money in the bank. Hardy’s house was tiny but paid off. Every six months they got a profit-sharing check from the Shamrock in the five-thousand-dollar range that cleared their credit cards. He’d made some money on those first two murder cases. They’d been able to get by, comfortably, on three grand a month.

Now they needed nearly three times that. Home insurance, medical insurance, life insurance, saving for college (assuming his kids went), the loan payment for the house addition they’d built. Food, clothing, the occasional sortie into the non-child world of restaurants and nightlife.

He couldn’t afford to stop working at the law. Loving what you did was a luxury he couldn’t permit himself anymore. Frannie was talking about going back to work next year when Vincent started first grade. This was an issue — they both knew she’d be lucky to break even on the day care they’d need.

Of course, there was a second option: she could go back to school in family counseling, incur another mound of debt, possibly position herself to make more money (‘In
family counseling?
Hardy would ask) so that in ten years…

This was the downsized American nineties. You tightened the belt and everybody pitched in and worked all the time and maybe someday your kids would have it only a little worse than you did now.

Hardy knew he wasn’t ever going back to his little bar where he could get by on tips. He was going to keep his nose at his desk and bill a hundred and fifty hours every month — which meant he actually
worked
two hundred — until he died.

Adulthood. He was developing a theory that it might be one of the country’s leading causes of death. Someone, he thought, ought to do a study.

Life was too short as it was. He wasn’t doing any more murder cases.

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He did, however, follow Glitsky back across Bryant Street and into the familiar unpleasantness of the Hall of Justice, a huge, square, faceless, blue-gray monstrosity. Its address, seven increasingly depressing blocks south of Market, did not begin to convey the light-years of distance between the Hall and the sophisticated center of culture that it served.

Since Hardy’s last visit the huge glass-front doors had been backed by graffitied plywood — a less-than-inspired design solution, if part of the building’s visual statement was to make the citizenry feel safe. A cattle chute led through a metal detector into the lobby.