Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (48 page)

‘I was right.’

‘Yeah, well, join the crowd. Pratt thinks she’s right too. Always.’

Sarah had an arm resting on the open windowsill and stared out at the grimy Tenderloin streets. ‘Look, Marcel, what if we go out now with Glitsky’s blessing and find a killer here? What if the wrong guy’s in jail and we put him there? That bother you at all?’

‘I’ll tell you what bothers me, Sarah. What bothers me is you’re my backup, and suddenly I’m seeing you’re not there for me. That’s what bothers me.’

‘How am I not there? One word yesterday?’

They were at a red light and it afforded him the opportunity to turn and face her. ‘It’s a team game. Yeah, one word puts you on the other side.’

Her lip quivered, but she was damned if she was going to break. ‘I’m not on any other side. I’ve
always
said Graham Russo didn’t kill his dad. I’ve always told you that.’

‘That’s me, here, privately. That’s in the family. A witness stand’s a whole different thing.’

‘What about you looking at Tosca? What was that all about? You’re telling me that’s different?’

‘That was on my personal time, doing a favor for the AG. Yeah, it’s different.’

‘So we don’t care about getting the right suspect?’

‘Yep. We do.’

‘All right, so?’

‘So. We got him.’

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‘My name is Blue. I work as a model.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Soma said. ‘Your full name, please.’

‘Blue is my full name.’

Sal Russo’s downstairs neighbor stared at the young prosecutor as though daring him to ask her again. She was dressed in a black leotard and a black sweater. She was leaning forward, resting her hands on the rail at the front of the witness box, tapping her metallic blue, inch-long fingernails.

In the morning’s session, at the hands of Art Drysdale, Marcel Lanier had run through the kind of grilling that Sarah had gone through yesterday. He’d recounted Graham’s lies again for the jury, definitely leaving the strong impression that at least one of the investigating officers — the man, the guy who identified with the jury as a working-stiff cop — did not find the handsome young defendant trustworthy at all. Hardy and Freeman had let his testimony go without cross-examination.

But Blue was going to be different. Blue’s testimony was about the struggle that had undoubtedly occurred, which Hardy had to keep her away from connecting to Graham.

‘Now, Ms… ?’

Soma had talked to Blue a minimum of half a dozen times in preparation for her testimony today, but apparently he was having a hard time with the concept of formally addressing a one-named witness on the stand, and this worked to Hardy’s advantage. Blue was Soma’s baby and he was making her impatient and cross with him from the outset.

‘Just Blue,’ she snapped. ‘Blue is my legal name. I had it changed like five years ago.’

‘All right, Blue, I apologize.’ Soma gathered himself, tugged at an ear, cleared his throat. ‘Can you tell us your address, please?’ She did. ‘And where is this apartment in relation to the deceased’s apartment? Sal Russo’s apartment?’

Soma’s tongue was tripping him up. Hardy thought he must have done far better in moot court appearances during law school or he never would have gotten selected for his clerkship. This was not his finest hour and Hardy thought it couldn’t have come at a better time.

‘Right underneath it.’

‘One floor below?’

Another exasperated expression from Blue. What the hell else did
right underneath
mean if not one floor below? But she answered him. ‘Yeah, my ceiling was his floor.’

‘Good. Now on May ninth, the day Sal Russo died, were you in your apartment during the afternoon?’

‘Yeah. I had a session. Modeling.’

‘One session? All afternoon?’

Again, Soma — trying to make it crystal clear to the jury — was stomping on her toes. Blue stiffly pulled herself up straight. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘And did you hear any unusual noises from Sal Russo’s apartment?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Can you tell the jury what they were?’

With obvious relief Blue turned in her seat and faced the panel. ‘I heard some stomping around, then Sal yelled out, “No, no, no,” like that’ — she did a good impersonation of it herself, waking up anybody who’d been dozing — ‘and then there was this bumping, which I guess I heard was like a chair getting knocked over—’

Hardy stood. ‘Objection, Your Honor. Speculation.’

Salter overruled the objection, and Soma nodded, then continued. ‘You heard a loud thump?’

‘Yes.’

‘And voices?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you hear other voices besides Sal’s?’

Again, Hardy stood. ‘Objection. Speculation.’ He knew this would be overruled, but he thought it would be important to focus the jury right away on his position that there was no way Blue could be sure that voices came from Sal’s apartment.

Salter knew what Hardy was doing: making unfounded objections to argue his case to the jury. He didn’t like it, and as expected, he overruled him.

Blue got the question again, and nodded. ‘Yeah, there was somebody else there.’

‘And this other voice, was it a male or female voice?’

‘Objection.’ Hardy might be alienating her and the judge, but so be it — he had to try again. ‘Your Honor, the witness could not possibly know for a fact that these voices came from Sal Russo’s apartment, much less that it was Mr Russo’s
voice
. Similarly, she couldn’t know for a fact if the voice belonged to a male or female.’

Salter’s tone was brusque. ‘Mr Hardy, that’s why we have cross-examinations — you know, the part where
you
ask questions. I’m sorry, Mr Soma, proceed.’

Soma asked about the upstairs speaker’s gender again.

‘It was a man.’

Hardy was up again. ‘Objection. The witness couldn’t possibly be sure it was a man, Your Honor.’

Blue’s insistence upon her career as a model got shaky. She shot back at Hardy, across the courtroom. ‘I know men’s voices, sugar.’

This brought a little titter to the gallery, quickly squelched by a look from Salter, who then took off his glasses and tapped them on his podium. ‘Blue,’ he said, ‘please don’t talk to the attorneys out there on your own. Let’s have counsel approach the bench.’ He waved them forward.

Hardy got up with Freeman. Drysdale walked forward with them and met Soma at the podium.

Salter leaned down. ‘Mr Hardy, I’ve already ruled on your repeated objections. Let’s move along.’

‘I guess I’m asking you to reconsider, Your Honor. Blue may well have heard voices and they may just as well have come from Sal’s apartment, but she can’t state that as fact.’

Freeman, true to form, stuck in his two cents. ‘As a matter of law, judge, he’s right. Ask Art, he’ll tell you.’

The judge glared down at him. ‘I don’t need him to tell me, David, or you either.’

In a murder case the specter of a verdict being overturned on appeal due to judicial error hangs like a scimitar over the neck of every trial judge. Salter put the ear ends of his eyeglasses into his mouth and considered carefully.

By repeating the objection over and over, Hardy had bullied him into second-guessing himself. ‘On reflection, I believe Mr Hardy has a point. I’m going to sustain his objection, and reverse my decision on the previous objection.’

Soma threw his hands wide. ‘But, Your Honor…’

The judge stopped the histrionics with a pointed finger. Drysdale helped, laying a soft hand on his partner’s sleeve. Salter’s first ruling
had
been right, but having already changed his mind once, he was never going to change it back. Hardy had stolen one. Salter put his glasses back on. ‘All right, gentlemen, thank you.’

When the attorneys had all returned where they belonged, the judge turned to the jury. ‘You will disregard Blue’s statement that she heard voices from Mr Russo’s apartment, or the gender of those voices. Back to you, Mr Soma.’

The prosecutor went back to his table for a sip of water, trying to buy himself the time to think of another tack. He took a deep breath, threw a look at the ceiling, then turned back to the witness.

‘Blue,’ he said, ‘have you ever seen the defendant before?’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

‘Would you please tell us where?’

‘Oh, lots of times. He come by the apartment, be out in the alley with his dad, like that. Lately he be there all the time.’

‘And did you ever talk to him?’

‘Couple of times. Say hi, like that. Nothing really to speak of.’

Soma was about to ask another question, perhaps in this same vein, but Drysdale had a small coughing fit and raised his hand, asking the judge if they could have a couple of minutes recess, which was granted.

When, after five minutes, court was called back to order, Soma announced that he was through with this witness.

She’d given him nothing.

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But she was going to give Hardy quite a bit. He knew why Drysdale had had his coughing fit. Soma, flustered by the reversal on Salter’s objection ruling and floundering while he thought up another line of questioning, had asked a question for which he didn’t know the answer, and it had opened a door for the defense. The coughing fit had tried to slam that door shut, but it hadn’t come in time.

‘Blue.’ Hardy wasn’t going to go formal on this woman, get hung up over nomenclature and make her mad. He smiled at her. ‘During the many times you saw Graham with Sal, did you ever see them fight?’

‘No. Nothing like fighting.’

‘What do you mean, nothing like fighting?’

‘Well, they was always laughing, more, you know. Most the time. Sometimes they just be sitting on the back of his truck, talking. Mostly that’s when I see ’em. Just talkin‘, laughin’. Sometimes in the lobby, the halls like.‘

‘So you would say they acted as though they liked each other, is that right?’

‘Objection! Conclusion.’ Soma knew he had brought this on himself. By degrees his vocal register was going up. His objection was sustained, but Hardy didn’t care.

He smiled at the witness again. ‘Blue, during the time you lived below Sal, did you ever hear any other bumps, things falling over, stuff like that?’

‘Sure, sometimes, maybe he bump into some lamp, something like that.’

‘Did you ever go to his apartment?’

She showed her teeth. ‘Not on business.’ Another ripple of laughter. ‘Couple of times, he told me he had some good salmon, I could come and get it. I love that salmon.’

‘Me too,’ Hardy said. ‘And during those times you went to his apartment, did you notice if Sal was a good housekeeper? If the place was clean and uncluttered?’

‘Lord, no,’ she said. ‘There was magazines and boxes and stuff everywhere.’

‘Any of which he might have tripped over as he was walking around, isn’t that true?’

Soma objected again, got sustained again. But Hardy felt he was making his point to the jury and pressed on. ‘All right, Blue, now I’d like you to try to remember the day Sal died and you heard this noise upstairs, like something falling. Do you remember that?’

‘I said I did.’

‘That’s right, you did. Then you told Inspector Lanier that sometime later you heard the door upstairs closing, isn’t that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Now, to the best of your recollection, how much time passed between this bump you heard and the door closing?’ Hardy wanted to establish a temporal distance between the two events. The longer the lag between the bump and the door closing, the less likely there was any causal relation between the two. Therefore, a struggle became a less likely scenario.

Blue sat back in the witness stand, pulling her hands off the rail. Methodically, she began cracking her knuckles one at time. Her eyes were far away. ‘I hear the bump. I hear him kind of moaning, “No, no, no.” Pretty good amount of time, I ’spect.‘

Hardy pounced on this. ‘While you were hearing these noises upstairs, you were having a modeling session? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘That’s right. That’s why I don’t go up there, see what’s the matter, when I hear this bump and him saying, “No.” ’

‘All right, Blue. Now, this “pretty good amount of time” you’ve just referred to, could it have been more than a half hour?’

‘Could have been.’ She paused, obviously nervous that she’d get caught in a lie. So she decided to come clean. ‘I fell a little asleep.’ She leaned forward now, looked at the judge, down into her lap.

Hardy played the card he’d picked up from Sarah. It had not been on any of the transcripts, but Lanier had mentioned to Sarah his feeling about the smell emanating from Blue’s place. ‘Blue, did you smoke marijuana this day? Is that why you fell asleep?’

Cornered, Blue’s eyes were all over the room. ‘It wasn’t that long,’ she said ambiguously.

‘You mean that you were asleep?’

‘And afterwards, after he was gone, I went up, but nobody answered.’

‘You didn’t try the door?’

‘No.’

‘Do you clearly remember that the sound of the door closing was after you woke up from your doze?’

‘Yes.’

‘And was the scraping or bumping before?’

‘Yes, sir. It was.’

‘So it might have been as long as an hour between the scraping and bumping and the entirely separate sound of the door closing, is that right?’

Another objection, this one overruled. In Salter’s view this last point wasn’t speculation. Blue could make a reasonable estimate of how long she’d been asleep. She told Hardy he was right: the sounds weren’t really all that close together.

‘Thank you, Blue. That’s all my questions.’

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Soma got up on redirect and tried to repair some of the damage. ‘Blue, I’ve got here a transcript of your interview with Inspector Lanier. It says, and I quote, “I hear the door open, then the ceiling creaks, somebody else there.”’