The Mercy Rule

1

Dismas Hardy was enjoying a superb round of darts, closing in on what might become a personal best. He was in his office on a Monday morning, throwing his 20-gram hand-tooled, custom-flighted tungsten beauties. He called the game ‘20-down’ although it wasn’t any kind of sanctioned affair. It had begun as simple practice – once around and down the board from ‘20’ to bull’s-eye. He’d turned the practice rounds into a game against himself.

His record was twenty-five throws. The best possible round was twenty-one, and now he was shooting at the ‘3’ with his nineteenth dart. A twenty-two was still possible. Beating twenty-five was going to be a lock, assuming his concentration didn’t get interrupted.

On his desk the telephone buzzed.

He’d worked downtown at an office on Sutter Street for nearly six years. The rest of the building was home to David Freeman & Associates, a law firm specializing in plaintiff’s personal injury and criminal defense work. But Hardy wasn’t one of Freeman’s associates. Technically, he didn’t work for Freeman at all, although lately almost all of his billable hours had come from a client his landlord had farmed out to him.

Hardy occupied the only office on the top floor of the building. Both literally and figuratively he was on his own.

He held on to his dart and threw an evil eye at the telephone behind him, which buzzed again. To throw now would be to miss. He sat back on the desk, punched a button. ‘Yo.’

Freeman’s receptionist, Phyllis, had grown to tolerate, perhaps even like, Hardy, although it was plain that she disapproved of his casual attitude. This was a law firm. Lawyers should answer their phone crisply, with authority and dignity. They shouldn’t just pick up and say, ‘Yo.’

He took an instant’s pleasure in her sigh. She lowered her voice. ‘There’s a man down here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment.’ It was the same tone she would have used if the guest had stepped in something on the sidewalk. ‘He says he knows you from’ – a pause while she sought a suitable euphemism. She finally failed and had to come out with the hated truth – ‘your bar. His name is Graham Russo.’

Hardy knew half a dozen Russos – it was a common name in San Francisco – but hearing that Graham from the Little Shamrock was downstairs, presumably in need of a lawyer’s services, narrowed it down.

Hardy glanced at his wall calendar. It was Monday, May 12. Sighing, he put his precious dart down on his desk and told Phyllis to send Mr Russo right on up.

Hardy was standing at his door as Graham trudged up the stairs, a handsome, athletic young guy with the weight of this world on his shoulders. And at least one other world, Hardy knew, that had crashed and burned all around him.

They had met when Graham showed up for a beer at the Shamrock. Over the course of the night Hardy, moonlighting behind the bar, found out a lot about him. Graham, too, was an attorney, although he wasn’t practicing right at the moment. The community had blackballed him.

Hardy had had his own run-ins with the legal bureaucracy and knew how devastating the ostracism could be. Hell, even when you were solidly within it, the law life itself was so unrelentingly adversarial that the whole world sometimes took on a hostile aspect.

So the two men had hit it off. Both men were estranged from the law in their own ways. Graham had stayed after last call, helped clean up. He was a sweet kid – maybe a little naive and idealistic, but his head seemed to be on straight. Hardy liked him.

Before the law Graham’s world had been baseball. An All-American center fielder at USF during the late eighties, he’d batted.373 and had been drafted in the sixth round by the Dodgers. He then played two years in the minor leagues, making it to Double-A San Antonio before he’d fouled a ball into his own left eye. That injury had hospitalized him for three weeks, and when he got out, his vision didn’t come with him. And so with a lifetime pro average of.327, well on the way to the bigs, he’d had to give it all up.

Rootless and disheartened, he had enrolled in law school at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. Graduating at the top of his class, he beat out intense competition and got hired for a one-year term as a clerk with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But he only stayed six months.

In early 1994 – the year of the baseball strike – about two months after he passed the bar, he quit. He wanted, after all, to play baseball. So he went to Vero Beach, Florida, to try out as a replacement player for the Dodgers. And he made the team.

At the Shamrock he’d made it clear to Hardy that he’d never have played as a scab. All along, all he’d wanted out of the deal was for the Dodgers to take another look at him. The fuzziness had disappeared from his vision; he was still in great shape. He thought he could shine in spring training, get cut as a replacement when they all did, but at least have a shot at the minors again.

And that’s what happened. He started the ‘94 season with the Albuquerque Dukes, Triple A, farther along the path to the major leagues than he’d been seven years earlier.

But he couldn’t find the damn curveball and the new shot at his baseball career, upon which he’d risked everything, lasted only six weeks. His average was.192 when he got cut outright. He hadn’t had a hit in his last seven games. Hell, he told Hardy, he would have cut himself.

Graham had a lumberjack’s shoulders and the long legs of a high hurdler. Under a wave of golden hair his square-jawed face was clean shaven. Today he wore a gray-blue sport coat over a royal-blue dress shirt, stonewashed jeans, cowboy boots.

He was leaning forward on the front of the upholstered chair in front of Hardy’s desk, elbows on his knees. Hardy noticed the hands clasped in front of him – the kind of hands that, when he got older, people would call gnarled – workingman’s hands, huge and somehow expressive.

Graham essayed a smile. ‘I don’t even know why I’m here, tell you the truth.’

Hardy’s face creased. ‘I often feel the same way myself.’ He was sitting on the corner of his desk. ‘Your dad?’

Graham nodded.

Salvatore Russo – Herb Caen ’s column had dubbed him Salmon Sal and the name had stuck – was recent news. Despondent over poor health, his aging body, and financial ruin, Sal had apparently killed himself last Friday by having a few cocktails, then injecting himself with morphine. He’d left a Do Not Resuscitate form for the paramedics, but he was already dead when they’d arrived.

To the public at large Sal was mostly unknown. But he was well known in San Francisco ’s legal community. Every Friday Sal would make the rounds of the city’s law workshops in an old Ford pickup. Behind the Hall of Justice, where Hardy would see him, he’d park by the hydrant and sell salmon, abalone, sturgeon, caviar, and any other produce of the sea he happened to get his hands on. His customers included cops, federal, municipal, and superior-court judges, attorneys, federal marshals, sheriffs, and the staffs at both halls – Justice and City – and at the federal courthouse.

The truck appeared only one day a week, but since Sal’s seafood was always fresher and a lot cheaper than at the markets, he apparently made enough to survive, notwithstanding the fact that he did it all illegally.

His salmon had their tails clipped, which meant they had been caught for sport and couldn’t be sold. Abalone was the same story; private parties taking abalone for commercial sale had been outlawed for years. His winter-run chinooks had probably been harvested by Native Americans using gill nets. And yet year after year this stuff would appear in Sal’s truckbed.

Salmon Sal had no retail license, but it didn’t matter because he was connected. His childhood pals knew him from the days when Fisherman’s Wharf was a place where men went down to the sea in boats. Now these boys were judges and police lieutenants and heads of departments. They were not going to bust him.

Sal might live on the edge of the law, but the establishment considered him one of the good guys – a character in his yellow scarves and hip boots, the unlit stogie chomped down to its last inch, the gallon bottles from which he dispensed red and white plonk in Dixie cups along with a steady stream of the most politically incorrect jokes to be found in San Francisco.

The day Hardy had met Sal, over a decade ago, he’d been with Abe Glitsky. Glitsky was half black and half Jewish and every inch of him scary looking – a hatchet face and a glowing scar through his lips, top to bottom. Sal had seen him, raised his voice. ‘Hey, Abe, there’s this black guy and this Jew sitting on the top of this building and they both fall off at the same time. Which one hits the ground first?’

‘I don’t know, Sal,’ Glitsky answered, ‘which one?’

‘Who cares?’

Now Sal was dead and the newspapers had been rife with conjecture: early evidence indicated that someone had been in the room with him when he’d died. A chair knocked over in the kitchen. Angry sounds. Other evidence of struggle.

The police were calling the death suspicious. Maybe someone had helped Sal die – put him on an early flight.

‘I didn’t know Sal was your father,’ Hardy said. ‘Not until just now.’

‘Yeah, well. I didn’t exactly brag about him.’ Graham took a breath and looked beyond Hardy, out the window. ‘The funeral’s tomorrow.’

When no more words came, Hardy prompted him. ‘Are you in trouble?’

‘No!’ A little too quickly, too loud. Graham toned it down some. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t know why I would be.’

Hardy waited some more.

‘I mean, there’s a lot happening all at once. The estate – although the word estate is a joke. Dad asked me to be his executor although we never got around to drawing up the will, so where does that leave it? Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘You weren’t close, you and your dad?’

Graham took a beat before he answered. ‘Not very.’

Hardy thought the eye contact was a little overdone, but he let it go. He’d see where this all was leading. ‘So you need help with the estate? What kind of help?’

‘That’s just it. I don’t know what I need. I need help in general.’ Graham hung his head and shook it, then looked back up. ‘The cops have been around, asking questions.’

‘What kind of questions?’

‘Where was I on Friday? Did I know about my dad’s condition? Like that. It was obvious where they were going.’ Graham’s blue eyes flashed briefly in anger, maybe frustration. ‘How can they think I know anything about this? My dad killed himself for a lot of good reasons. The guy’s disoriented, losing his mind. He’s in awesome pain. I’d’ve done the same thing.‘

‘And what do the police think?’

‘I don’t know what they can be thinking.’ Another pause. ‘I hadn’t seen him in a week. First I heard of it was Saturday night. Some homicide cop is at my place when I get home.’

‘Where’d you get home from?’

‘Ball game.’ He raised his eyes again, spit out the next word. ‘Softball. We had a tournament in Santa Clara, got eliminated in the fourth game, so I got home early, around six.’

‘So where were you Friday night?’

Graham spread his Rodin hands. ‘I didn’t kill my dad.’

‘I didn’t ask that. I asked about Friday night.’

He let out a breath, calming down. ‘After work, home.’

‘Alone?’

He smiled. ‘Just like the movie. Home alone. I love that answer. The cop liked it, too, but for different reasons. I could tell.’

Hardy nodded. ‘Cops can be tough to please.’

‘I worked till nine-thirty…’

‘What do you do, besides baseball?’

Graham corrected him. ‘Softball.’ A shrug. ‘I’ve been working as a paramedic since… well, lately.’

‘Okay. So you were riding in an ambulance Friday night?’

A nod. ‘I got home around ten-fifteen. I knew I had some games the next day – five, if we went all the way. Wanted to get some rest. Went to sleep.’

‘What time did you go in to work?’

‘Around three, three-thirty. I punched in. They’ll have a record of it.’

‘And what time did they find your dad?’

‘Around ten at night.’ Graham didn’t seem to have a problem with the timing, although to Hardy it invited some questions. If his memory served him, and it always did, Sal had apparently died between one and four o’clock in the afternoon. This was the issue Graham was skirting, which perhaps the police were considering if they were thinking about Graham after all. He would have had plenty of time between one o’clock and when he checked into work near three.

But the young man was going on. ‘Judge Giotti, you know. Judge Giotti found him.’

‘I read. What was he doing there?’

Graham shrugged. ‘I just know what everybody knows – he’d finished having dinner downtown. He had a fish order in and Sal didn’t show, so he thought he’d check the apartment, see if he was okay.’

‘And why would the judge do that?’

The answer was unforced, Graham recounting old family history. ‘They were friends. Used to be, anyway, in high school, then college. They played ball together.’

‘Your father went to college?’

Graham nodded. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Salmon Sal the college grad. Classic underachiever, that was Sal. Runs in the family.’ He forced a smile, making a joke, but kept his hands clamped tightly together, leaning forward casually, elbows resting on his knees. His knuckles were white.

‘So. Giotti?’ Hardy asked. Graham cast his eyes to the floor. ‘You weren’t his clerk, were you?’

The head came back up. Graham said no. He’d clerked for Harold Draper, another federal judge with the Ninth Circuit.

‘I guess what I’m asking,’ Hardy continued, ‘is whether you and Giotti – him being your dad’s old pal and all – developed any kind of relationship while you were clerking.’

Graham took a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. Giotti came by once after I got hired to say congratulations. But these judges don’t have a life. I didn’t even see him in the halls.’

‘And how long did you work there?’

‘Six months.’

Hardy slid from the desk and crossed to his window. ‘Let me be sure I’ve got it right, he said. ’Draper hired you to become a clerk for the Ninth? How many clerks does he have?‘

‘Three.’

‘For a year each?’

‘Right. That’s the term.’

Hardy thought so. He went on. ‘When I was getting into practice right after the Civil War, a federal clerkship was considered the plum job of all time right out of law school. Is that still the case?’

This brought a small smile. ‘Everybody seems to think so.’

‘But you quit after six months so you could try out as a replacement player during the baseball strike?’

Graham sat back finally, unclenched his hands, spread them out. ‘Arrogant, ungrateful wretch that I am.’

‘So now everybody in the legal community thinks you’re either disloyal or brain dead.’

‘No, those are my friends.’ Graham took a beat. ‘Draper, for example, hates my guts. So does his wife, kids, dogs, the other two clerks, the secretaries – they all really, really hate me personally. Everybody else just wishes I’d die soon, as slowly and painfully as possible. Both.’

Hardy nodded. ‘So Giotti didn’t call you when he found your dad?’

Graham shook his head. ‘I’d be the last person he’d call. You walk out on one of these guys, you’re a traitor to the whole tribe. That’s why I came to you – you’re a lawyer who’ll talk to me. I think you’re the last one who will.’

‘And you’re worried about the police?’

A shrug. ‘Not really. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

‘I doubt they’re thinking anything, Graham. They just like to be thorough and ask a lot of questions, which tends to make people nervous. This other stuff with your background might have made the rounds, so they might shake your tree a little harder, see if something falls out.’

‘Nothing’s going to fall out. My dad killed himself.’

2

‘Well, maybe he didn’t after all.’ Hardy was having lunch with Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky in a booth at Lou the Greek’s, a subterranean bar/restaurant across the street from the Hall of Justice.

The place was humming with humanity today, and their booth was littered with the remains of their bowls and the fortune cookies that had come with their lunch special of tsatsiki-covered Hunan noodles – yogurt and garlic over sesame oil, pita bread on the side. Lou the Greek’s wife was the cook, and she was Chinese, so the place always served polyglot lunches, many of them surprisingly edible, some not. Today wasn’t too bad.

When Glitsky smiled, it almost never reached his eyes. This kept it from being the cheerful thing that smiles were often cracked up to be. The effect wasn’t much enhanced by the thick scar through both his lips. Hardy knew that the scar had come from a boyhood accident on playbars, but Abe the tough cop liked to leave people with the impression that it had been acquired in a knife fight.

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.’

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 midconversation 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.

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 rightness, 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 nonchild 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.

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.

At the elevator banks, frothing with vulgarity, Glitsky was stopped by a young Hispanic man who started talking to him about a case. The kid seemed to be an assistant DA, as Hardy had once been. Had he been that young?

Hardy contemplated as the elevators came and went. The DA’s office had truly undergone a sea change if this youngster had made it to prosecuting homicides already. But he was talking to Glitsky, so that’s what it had to be about. Glitsky wasn’t exactly Mr Idle Chitchat.

Abe finally got around to introductions, pointing a finger around. ‘New guy, Eric Franco. Old guy, Dismas Hardy. Hardy doesn’t work here anymore. He’s moved on to greener pastures. Private practice. Franco’s got his first one eighty-seven’ – a murder case – ‘he’s a little nervous.’ From Glitsky this qualified as an oration.

The doors opened. The elevator was empty. They all moved. Eric took up the patter, at Hardy. ‘You on a homicide here, talking to the lieutenant?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Social.’ Followed it with, ‘Hard to believe, I know.’

The doors opened on three and Hardy nearly got out from force of habit. This was the floor for the DA’s office, where he once had worked. Glitsky and the homicide detail were on four. When the doors closed on Franco, Hardy looked over at Glitsky. ‘How old is Eric?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty-five, thirty?’

‘And he’s pulled a murder?’

A shrug. ‘Probably a no-brainer.’

‘Still,’ Hardy persisted, ‘how many trials can he have done?’

The doors opened. ‘I don’t know, Diz. I didn’t hire him. The DA hired him. You want his resumé, it’s downstairs. Check it out.’ Without looking back he led the way down the hallway to the homicide detail.

Hardy followed, wondering how a man of Eric Franco’s age and experience could have been assigned to try a murder case in superior court and be expected to win even a no-brainer.

‘He’s not, is the simple answer,’ Glitsky said. ‘It’s politics.’

Hardy was standing in the doorless cubicle Glitsky used for an office. Outside in the detail, fourteen paired desks vied for floor space in the big open room. There were a couple of structural columns poking up here and there, festooned with wanted posters and yellowing memos, joined to watercoolers or coffee machines. Years before, forty square feet in the corner had been drywalled off and an ‘office’ created for the lieutenant. Some years after that the door had been removed for painting and never replaced.

Glitsky was behind his big, cluttered desk, catching up on paperwork. He’d had no objection to Hardy coming up to the detail to talk to inspectors Sarah Evans or Marcel Lanier – the Sal Russo investigating team – if they’d let him. If they didn’t want to talk, they wouldn’t be shy about letting him know. If they did, Hardy might get a hint about what Evans had found at the old fisherman’s apartment that had set off her warning bells: Sal might not have been a suicide.

But both inspectors had been out in the field, so Hardy went down to the bathroom, then wandered back into Glitsky’s space and asked again about the kid Franco and got told it was politics.

‘Losing trials is politics?’

‘You really ought to go down there’ – meaning the DA’s offices – ‘it’s a whole new world.’ Glitsky put down his report. ‘You’re not going to leave me alone, are you? Let me get back to my work?’

Hardy clucked. ‘I want to. I really do. I’m trying, even.’

‘I’m confident you can do it.’ The lieutenant picked up his report again. ‘Get the door on the way out, would you?’

David Freeman was in his trademark brown rumpled suit and wrinkled rep tie. Sitting in the low leather couch in Hardy’s office, smoking a cigar, his tattered brogues crossed over the rattan-and-glass coffee table, Freeman, the wealthy, famous landlord of the building, could have been mistaken for a destitute client. The man was retirement age or better, and sported tufts of white hair from the tops of his earlobes and eyebrows. Bald on top, round in the middle, liver spots wherever skin showed, he was still a force in the courtrooms of the city.

‘The reason it’s politics,’ he was saying – Hardy had worried it all the way back to his office – ‘is Sharron Pratt, our esteemed DA.’

Hardy knew the story of the election well enough. Pratt had beaten a reasonably popular incumbent named Alan Reston the preceding November. Although Reston was a Democrat, as nearly all elected officials in San Francisco had to be, and African-American to boot – potentially an even bigger plus – he was a career prosecutor. Many people in the city, including Hardy, found it ironic that what had done in Reston, running for the job of chief law-enforcement officer in the city, was his tough stance on crime. Sure, the DA was supposed to prosecute people who’d done bad things, but Reston seemed unable to make the leap of faith that this didn’t mean they were bad people. He thought they were bad people. He thought people who committed crimes ought to be punished, and punished hard.

Pratt, on the other hand, while she agreed that many criminals, indeed, had done bad things – murder, rape, burning kittens for Santeria rites – she did not agree that this necessarily made them bad people. They were misunderstood, surely, but she believed that with counseling and guidance, many of them could again become productive members of society.

Also, it hadn’t helped that Reston, a black man, had been a supporter of Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative. He opposed affirmative action, believing that trial lawyers, like brain surgeons, for example, ought to be hired and retained because of their ability to do their jobs getting convictions at trial and putting criminals in jail.

When he’d come aboard, Reston looked around the office he ran and saw that there were a lot of women, some people of color, a lot of old white guys. The job was getting done. When there were new openings, he hired the best person from a diverse pool of applicants – black, white, male, female, Asian, Hispanic – he didn’t care. Pratt did care, though. And Pratt got elected. ‘So this relates to how Eric Franco pulled a murder?’ ‘Pratt unloads all the old white guys, she’s still stuck with the cases, so to prove her theory that anybody can do this work, she hires her quotas and willy-nilly assigns the cases, and her people lose and it doesn’t matter. Eventually they might win.’ Freeman raised his shoulders expansively. ‘Who knows, it could happen. Almost everything happens sometimes.’

After he threw out Freeman, Hardy realized he’d blown nearly the whole day on Graham Russo’s problems, satisfying his own curiosity, catching up with the bureaucracy, city politics. He shouldn’t have done it – he couldn’t really spare the time – but somehow it had gotten inside him.

But the piper would have to be paid.

Hardy did not work within the organization of David Freeman & Associates, but Freeman’s overload was keeping him afloat. His life over the past six months had been dominated by a contractor’s liability lawsuit with the Port of Oakland over the failure of a loading transom. A container-load of personal computers – ten tons and over $18 million worth – fell sixty-some feet before glancing off the deck of the ship that was to take the computers to Singapore for distribution to the Asian market then sank into the bay. The accident had caused over $5 million in additional damages to the ship and, of course, delayed delivery of everything else on board.

As tended to happen, the lawsuits proliferated. The Port of Oakland was contending that the computer hardware manufacturing company – Tryptech – had overloaded its container. That had caused the transom’s failure. Other shippers who’d lost revenue on their own deliverables were lining up to sue both Tryptech and the Port. One of the workmen who’d been on deck at the time was claiming that he’d wrenched his back trying to avoid flying metal. He was seeking over a million dollars from one of the parties, whichever might be found at fault.

In the normal course of events a private practitioner like Hardy would never find himself involved in any of these lawsuits. The various litigants’ insurance carriers would slug it out through their mega-law firms and eventually somebody would settle or win and the attorneys would make a lot of money regardless.

But in this case Tryptech’s insurance carrier had refused to pay for its loss of computers because it had come to the conclusion that Tryptech had misrepresented the number of units in its transom. So the company’s president, a silver-haired Los Altos smoothie named Dyson Brunei, had come to David Freeman. He needed his own personal lawyer representing his own interests outside of the insurance chain.

There was a potentially large settlement down the road, he believed, and Freeman stood to collect a third of it. Deciding that Brunei ’s lawsuit against the Port had reasonable merit, Freeman accepted the case on a contingency basis plus expenses, and had farmed it out to Hardy, paying him by the hour.

It was a good fit all around.

So Hardy spent the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening crunching numbers. Now Tryptech seemed to be playing a game with him, its own attorney, on the number of computers that had actually been in the container, which was still sitting under forty-five feet of water at Pier 17 in Oakland. It was beginning to appear to him that his clients had, in fact, overloaded their container.

But Tryptech would contend – and Hardy would have to argue if he wanted to keep getting paid – that this, even if true, didn’t matter because the containers still weighed far less overloaded than the threshold strength of the transom…

And so on.

At eight o’clock Hardy packed it in, and it was dark by the time he finally found a parking space four blocks from his house. He was going to have to tear out his beautiful, tiny front lawn one day and put in some kind of parking structure. He could see it coming, the day he’d be getting home at ten-thirty, unable to find parking within a mile of his front door.

Instead, maybe he should give up his car. But that left the Muni, which was unthinkable. Even if the city bus system had worked, it wouldn’t fit his haphazard schedule, and it didn’t work anyway, so the point was moot. Urban living.

Maybe they’d have to move out of the city. That was it. Cash their little place in, move to the suburbs, spend half a million dollars on a three-bedroom, two-bath, in Millbrae, be the proud owner of his own garage.

Sighing, beat, lugging his fat lawyer’s briefcase and feeling a hundred years old, he arrived at his gate and stopped to take in the feel, the look, of his home.

There was no denying it: he loved the place. It was the only free-standing house on a street that was otherwise crammed to the lot lines with three- and four-story apartments. He was irrationally taken with the postage-stamp lawn, the white picket fence, the little stoop where, on evenings when he had gotten home before dusk – almost never anymore – Frannie and the kids would be out waiting for him.

Now the lights were on, inviting. He picked up the faint strains of music coming from inside, pushed open the gate.

Abe Glitsky was a surprise, sitting on his kitchen counter, carefully picking nuts out of the bowl next to him. ‘What are you doing here? You better have saved me some cashews.’

Hardy’s wife, Frannie, came up against him – long red hair and green eyes that were shining with good humor and perhaps a little Chardonnay. She was wearing black Lycra running shorts, tennis shoes, and a green-and-white Oregon sweatshirt as she pecked at his cheek, slipped an arm around his waist. He gave her a hug and felt the quick reassuring pressure of her thigh against him.

‘Abe was in the neighborhood with Orel,’ she said, ‘- soccer at Lincoln Park. I said I expected you any minute, he should wait. Orel ’s back with the kids.’

Hardy heard the unmistakable child noise from the back of the house. Orel was Glitsky’s youngest son – a twelve-year-old – and Hardy’s two kids – nine and seven – worshiped him. Glitsky, digging at the bottom of the nut bowl, looked up. ‘I’m afraid the cashews have vanished. I don’t know where they could have gone to.’

‘I asked them to stay for dinner,’ Frannie said.

‘He’s already had it.’ Hardy went over to the refrigerator. ‘Did he drink all my beer too?’

Glitsky slid off the counter. ‘I don’t drink beer. In fact, I don’t drink at all.’

Frannie was smiling at Glitsky. ‘We know you don’t drink, Abe. That’s all right. We still like you.’

Hardy wheeled. ‘How can you like a guy who eats all your cashews?’ He opened a bottle of Sierra Nevada pale ale, took a sip, faced his friend. ‘So what’s up?’

As though they’d been discussing it all along, Glitsky reported, ‘We got the autopsy back on Sal. I thought you’d want to hear. Strout’s going with homicide/suicide equivocal.’

Frannie didn’t like how this sounded. She put her wineglass on the counter and crossed her arms in front of her. ‘What’s this? What homicide?’

‘Just a case,’ Glitsky said, getting a pained glance from Hardy for his troubles.

‘Abe’s,’ Hardy said. ‘Not mine.’

‘That’s funny.’ Frannie wasn’t buying it. ‘It seemed like it had something to do with you.’

‘No. A client of mine, that’s all. His dad. Estate case.’

‘And that’s why Abe was telling you about it? Abe the homicide cop?’

Hardy had another pull of his beer. He shrugged. ‘One of life’s little coincidences. My client’s dad. It looked like he killed himself, but maybe somebody else did it. Doesn’t have anything to do with my client, necessarily. Right, Abe?’

A straight-faced nod. ‘Right. Not necessarily.’

Taking a beat, Frannie reached for her wineglass again. ‘Not necessarily, that’s good. That’s a nice show of solidarity. I’m impressed.’

‘Frannie doesn’t want me to take on any more murders.’

‘I gathered that.’

‘She thinks homicide equivocal can mean murder.’

‘Well, she’s not all wrong there.’

Hardy came back to his wife, gave her his biggest phony grin. ‘So, what’s on for dinner?’

Glitsky was gone.

As it turned out, Frannie had cooked a delicious chicken breast entrée with white wine and cream and artichoke hearts over rice. The kids had dominated the table talk with gross-out jokes – ‘What’s green and goes backwards? Snot’ – that kind of stuff, until the adults told the little darlings they could be excused. Abe’s ‘homicide equivocal’ didn’t get a chance to raise its head again.

But now, almost eleven o’clock, the kids finally in their beds, Hardy and Frannie stood in the center of the kitchen, surveying the wreckage of the dinner, the pans and dishes.

Hardy grabbed a sponge and turned on the hot water, started washing up. ‘This is why when I die I’ll be welcomed into heaven with fanfare and trumpets,’ he said.

But singing her husband’s praises wasn’t on Frannie’s agenda at the moment. She went back out into the dining room, brought in a load of dessert dishes, put them on the drain. Then she stopped and leaned against the counter. ‘Okay. What about this client? What client?’

‘Graham Russo.’

‘I’ve never heard you mention him. When did he become your client? Is it a big estate?’

‘Not really, and pretty recently, come to think of it,’ Hardy said. ‘Roughly this morning, in fact.’

‘And his dad was murdered?’

Hardy turned the water off. ‘He’s not charged with the murder, if it was a murder. I’m just helping the guy, Frannie. He’s a good kid. I know him from the Shamrock. He thinks the cops are hassling him.’

‘He thinks Abe’s hassling him? Abe doesn’t hassle people.’

Hardy shook his head. ‘No, not Abe. Abe’s just pushing paper anymore. It’s one of the new inspectors. Maybe.’

‘So your client is under suspicion?’

‘That may be a little strong. He’s worried that it may get there. He needs his hand held, that’s all. It’s no big deal.’

She was silent, arms crossed again. After a minute she said, ‘It’s no big deal, but the head of the homicide department came by here especially to tell you about it as soon as the autopsy was finished?’

Hardy put the sponge all the way down. He turned to face her. ‘I don’t want another murder case, Frannie. I’d probably turn it down if it got to that. I don’t have the time anyway. It just got my interest, that’s all. There are some elements that might be slightly more fascinating than Tryptech’s transom accident, if you can believe that. Graham’s dad evidently had Alzheimer’s. It looks like he killed himself, but it might have been an assisted suicide.’

‘So maybe Graham did do it?’

‘He says not. He wants help with the estate, that’s all.’

‘And you believe that?’

Hardy averted his eyes. ‘I don’t disbelieve it, not yet.’

Frannie nodded. ‘Very strong,’ she said. Her arms were still crossed. She sighed. ‘He’s going to get charged, and you’re going to wind up defending him, aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You promise?’

‘Frannie, I couldn’t defend him. First, I’ve got Tryptech, which is pretty full-time, you might have noticed. Next, Graham’s got no money, certainly not close to what he’d need for a murder defense, even at my rock-bottom rates. If he gets charged, he’ll take a public defender. It’d be a high-profile case – other defense sharks are going to swarm all around it.’

‘I didn’t hear a promise that you wouldn’t take it.’

‘It won’t get to there.’

She sighed again. ‘Famous last words.’

The autopsy report had been on Sarah’s desk when she and Lanier had come in from the field at the end of the day. That made it official. She remained late at the office, catching up on paperwork, and was there when the fingerprint expert checked in with his report. Graham Russo’s fingerprints were all over his father’s apartment – on the safe, on the morphine vials, on the syringes. Graham had told Lanier that he didn’t know how his father had come upon the morphine, had only been to the apartment ‘once or twice.’ Sarah’s suspicions took a quantum leap forward.

If the coroner was saying it wasn’t a definite suicide, then she and her partner would find out what it definitely was. And Sarah knew where they’d start. She figured they had probable cause to search Graham’s residence, see what else they could turn up. The judge who signed the search warrant agreed with her.

3

Next to Hardy’s bed the world began jangling all at once. He pulled himself up with a moan from what felt like world-record REM sleep and slapped at the alarm. There was a moment’s silence, then another jangle.

‘The phone too,’ Frannie said.

Hardy grabbed at the receiver and noted the time on the digital clock – seven o’clock. ‘Grand Central Station.’

‘They just woke me up with a search warrant. What am I supposed to do now?’

‘They’ve got a warrant?’

‘I just said that.’

‘Take it easy, Graham. You’ve got to let them in.’

‘I already have.’

Hardy threw a glance out his bedroom window. A heavy fog had rolled in during the night. ‘What are they looking for?’

‘Just a second.’ Graham sounded like he was reading from some official paper. ‘Morphine vials, used or unused syringes, baseball cards, sports memorabilia, documents reflecting number combinations of safe or safety deposit box…’

‘Why do they think you might have any of that stuff?’

‘They won’t tell me. They just showed me the warrant, not the affidavit. They’re doing me a favor letting me call you.’

Hardy knew this was true, so it couldn’t be too bad. Not yet. He hoped.

The police had rung Graham’s doorbell at exactly seven o’clock, the earliest possible moment. Because it tended to bring to mind visions of jackbooted Nazis breaking down doors in the middle of the night, the police were prohibited from serving search warrants between ten P.M. and seven A.M. unless there was immediate danger that evidence would be destroyed, or the suspect would disappear, or something specific of that nature.

So the fact that they hadn’t come in the middle of the night meant that this was probably a relatively routine search. On the other hand, ringing Graham’s bell at the first allowable second was not a good sign.

Hardy let out a breath. ‘Okay, you hang in there. Don’t be hostile. Give me your address, I’ll be right over.’

He swung out of bed. As he was pulling on his pants, Frannie spoke. ‘That would be Graham Russo?’ She was sitting up in bed, arms crossed over her chest. Children’s sounds came from the rooms farther back.

‘My psychic wife.’

‘The one who has nothing to do with a murder case?’

Hardy smiled. ‘That’s him. They’re hassling him, that’s all. He’s got some enemies downtown.’

‘Evidently.’

‘I’ve got to go, be there for him. Keep him calm.’

‘I know you do. Don’t worry about the kids, I’ll get them fed and clothed and off to school.’

He gave her a look. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow. It’ll be a trade, sharing those special parental moments.’

‘But I do have a real idea,’ she said.

‘My favorite kind. Let’s hear it.’

‘On the way to his place, start thinking about a defense attorney you can recommend for him. David Freeman, maybe?’

‘Maybe.’ A pause. ‘If he needs one.’

Hardy had his map out. He stopped for a minute to consult it at the corner of Stanyan and Parnassus. Graham’s street was well hidden. He turned right, went a block, then hung a left onto a nearly vertical lane that he thought was the equal of any incline in the city. Street signs warned off trucks and delivery vehicles - too steep. Another sign informed him that this was not a through street. Whoever lived up here, Hardy thought, didn’t want anybody else to know about it.

He checked his map again. With the fog he couldn’t see more than a hundred feet up the hill. He wished he’d gotten directions to Graham’s place instead of simply the address, but he was stuck now. Nothing to do but keep going. If he was lost, he’d find a phone.

He nosed his old Honda up the steep hill, ran into another ‘Not a Through’ street that snaked off to the right and took it, and then suddenly – miraculously – the fog was gone. He’d climbed right out of it.

Into, it seemed, a wonderland.

Edgewood Avenue was paved with red bricks, lined with custom gingerbread houses, bathed in bright morning sunlight. On either side of the street a variety of trees were in full white and pink blossom. He rolled down his window and heard birds chirping.

What was this place? Hardy had lived in San Francisco for nearly all of his adult life, and he’d never been here, never heard anyone mention it, although it was less than half a mile from the Little Shamrock.

He pulled over at an open space at the curb, farther up the hill, just about to the copse of pine and eucalyptus that marked the end of the amazing dead-end street. He stood a moment outside his car, marveling at the red bricks, at the scented air. The fog below was a blanket of thick billowing cotton. The red spires of the Golden Gate jabbed through it.

But beyond the fog, to the east, the downtown skyscrapers’ windows twinkled in the morning sun. Ships were moving on the bay. Across the water Treasure Island seemed close enough to touch. A ribbon of traffic was moving on the freeways, coming in over the Oakland Bay Bridge.

He found the address at the end of a driveway, a front door cut into stucco where once, obviously, there had been a garage. Standing at the door, he paused a moment.

As soon as he knocked and entered Graham’s converted-garage mother-in-law flat, he was going to fall into the role, representing the rights of his client. And then if the police did find anything, he would be hip deep in Graham’s defense.

Could he extricate himself after that, even if he wanted to? All his protestations to the contrary, would he really want to get out?

He was aware that his pulse had quickened. It never did that when he contemplated the mounds of paperwork and number crunching with Tryptech that awaited him in the office. But he couldn’t afford the luxury of loving his work, he told himself again. He had other priorities now. He was a grown-up.

Then there was some noise from inside, and he took in a breath and rapped on the door.

‘Your client isn’t cooperating, so we don’t either.’ Hardy wasn’t through the door yet. Inspector Marcel Lanier, whom he’d known for years, wasn’t letting him in. ‘We’re conducting a search. You’re not entitled to be in here. It’s simple.’

Hardy lowered his voice. ‘How’s he not cooperating?’

Lanier shrugged. ‘My partner’s got some questions. He said if he’s a suspect, he’d like his lawyer present.’

‘He’s smart, that’s why. That’s his right.’

‘Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. But it’s not his right to have anybody present while we look around here. People have been known to take things. You wouldn’t believe. So as soon as we finish up here, you can come on in and we’ll all have a nice talk on the record.’

Hardy could see Graham – barefoot, in running shorts and tank top – sitting at the huge country table by the floor-to-ceiling window, louvered shades blocking most of the sun and view in the back of the long, narrow one-room apartment. Lanier’s female partner was back talking with him.

It was a beautiful street, all right, but Hardy didn’t want to stand out in it for the better part of the day. Lanier wasn’t a bad guy. He’d just gotten his feathers ruffled. Hardy would have to talk to Graham about his behavior around the police. They could make life very difficult if you made them dislike you, even if you’d done nothing wrong.

‘Is he under arrest?’ Hardy asked.

‘He’s being detained.’

Hardy kept his patience. ‘Let me talk to my client. You guys’ being here freaked him out, that’s all. I’ll calm him down, maybe he’ll have something to say, something you can use.’ Hardy’s face cracked. ‘Come on, Marcel. If you do find something, you’re not going to want to tell Glitsky you had a chance to talk to your suspect and didn’t take it when it was easy.’

Lanier took a beat, then stepped back and motioned Hardy in. ‘All right. Sit at the table and don’t touch anything.’

Graham’s apartment was spotless and orderly. Hardy thought it was a fantastic living space. There was the huge picture window that dominated the back wall. Graham had adjusted the shades, and over the fog the view of downtown and points east was world class. There was a dark hardwood floor, Oriental carpets. The furniture was a mix of Danish and antique – heavy woods and teak – that somehow achieved a balance.

The wall to Hardy’s right was lined nearly to the ceiling with books. There was a tall wine rack nearly filled with expensive wines. Three tiny vertical windows above the shelves. The rest of the right wall, near the back of the house, was given over to a kitchen area, stove, overhead racks, good cookware.

The apartment radiated good taste. Graham Russo might be a jock, but there appeared to be a lot more to him than that. A further consideration raised its ugly head, though, and Hardy couldn’t put it aside: a place like this, and the lifestyle that went with it – the wine alone, for example – cost some serious money, and Graham was, at best, underemployed. He wondered how his young client could afford to keep all this up.

But he’d find that out on his own time. For now, he was here to hold hands, and that’s what he’d do. He asked permission to put on a pot of coffee and – another peace offering – offered it around.

He and Graham found themselves talking baseball at the table. Lanier was on the low leather couch on the left side of room, going through a stack of magazines, seeking stuff that might be tucked into them.

In her search for syringes and vials of morphine Sarah Evans had been looking through things in the bathroom, a small cubicle with a sink, shower, and toilet that had been patched onto the back corner of the room.

Hardy thought that Evans had a really wonderful, sincere smile. Like the Hispanic DA he’d met with Glitsky yesterday, she barely seemed old enough, in his eyes, to be a Girl Scout, much less a homicide inspector.

When Hardy poured the coffee, she came out and sat down with the men, smiled, and placed her pocket tape recorder on the table between them. Shoulder-length dark hair framed a freckled oval face, set off by widely spaced green eyes. A compact and athletic, very attractive body was evident under the utilitarian work-clothes. ‘You don’t mind?’ she said, still smiling. ‘Two birds with one stone.’

Graham knew the law. He knew that talking to a police officer during an official investigation was a very serious matter. He had called his attorney first thing because he hadn’t wanted to be tricked.

But then, after he’d admitted the two officers into his apartment, he’d really seen Sergeant Evans. He fancied that she’d noticed him as well. They were about the same age. The law was one thing, he knew, but this was a pretty woman and he had had some experience with them. He had no doubt that he could charm her and get her on his side, in spite of what her job might be, her professional role.

This went beyond the law. It was only common sense to take advantage of the way people worked. He would be in control. Talking to her would be a smart move, although the book recommended against it.

Sometimes you just had to go on what you felt.

Hardy began, ‘No. I’m sorry, but my client doesn’t-’

‘It’s all right.’ Graham held out his hand, stopping him. ‘You said it, didn’t you, Diz? I might as well cooperate. I don’t have anything to hide.’ He shrugged, casually looked over at Evans. ‘Shoot, Inspector.’ A broad smile. ‘Not literally, of course.’

Sarah returned the smile and took a sip of her coffee. She appraised him for another longish moment, then looked down, gathering herself, tucking away the last hint of the smile.

All right.

She launched into the standard police interview intro for the transcriber, then began. ‘When you talked to Inspector Lanier on Saturday, you said you didn’t know your father had morphine at his apartment-’

‘Wait a minute,’ Hardy said again. ‘I really have to object to this. You shouldn’t answer that, Graham.’

But the boy had gotten himself relaxed. ‘Diz, I want to explain.’

He focused on Inspector Evans. ‘That’s not exactly what I said. I said I didn’t know how it got there.’

Lanier abruptly closed the magazine he was leafing through, shifted on the couch, said, ‘Wait a minute.’ His face clouded. ‘No, all right.’ He grabbed the next magazine on the pile.

Evans asked, ‘But you knew it was there, the morphine?’

‘Graham.’ Hardy might be upsetting his client, but he had to speak up again. He really didn’t want Graham saying any of this. It could not help him. As a lawyer Graham must know this. What was he thinking? Didn’t Graham understand that this wasn’t casual conversation? It was being recorded and would be transcribed and perhaps used against him. Maybe Hardy’s getting inside wasn’t going to be worth the cost, and that worried him even more. ‘We can talk about this later, when we’re alone.’

Graham ignored him, smiled at the pretty inspector. ‘The morphine? I showed him how to give himself shots. He was in a lot of pain.’

The pain again. Graham kept bringing up the pain.

‘What from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘No. My father wouldn’t have told me. He would have said mind your own business. He didn’t want anybody to pity him.’

‘So you went up to your father’s apartment and showed him how to administer these morphine injections to himself?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Even though you weren’t particularly close?’

Graham cast a glance at Hardy. Looking for approval? Hardy couldn’t say. The horse was already a couple of acres from the barn and still running. Hardy had tried to stop Graham when it might have done some good. If his client reined himself in now, he would just look worse. So Hardy sipped his coffee and waited.

‘Just because we weren’t close, I didn’t want the guy to suffer.’ Graham shrugged. ‘He asked me to show him. I showed him, but I didn’t shoot him up. I knew what he was going to do.’

‘And what was that?’

Graham wasn’t blinking in the face of the questions. He leveled his gaze at her. ‘What he did do. Kill himself.’

Hardy thought he’d convey a little relevant information that his client might not know. ‘The autopsy came in last night, Graham,’ he said. ‘It didn’t rule out homicide.’

Graham stopped his cup halfway to his mouth, put it down on the table, sat all the way back in his chair. ‘Well, that’s bullshit.’

Hardy nodded. ‘Maybe, but it’s why these guys are here.’

Graham leaned forward, elbow on the table, and looked right at Evans. Again, the expression struck Hardy as a little much. The old eye-to-eye for sincerity was, he suspected, no guarantee that the truth was next up. ‘I didn’t kill my father. He killed himself.’

Sarah Evans wasn’t giving anything away. She nodded, moved the tape recorder slightly, sipped from her mug. ‘So how often would you say you saw your father in the last six months?’

‘I don’t know. Six, eight times.’

‘More than once a month, then?’

‘He was getting senile. He had Alzheimer’s, you know. He’d call me, then forget he called me. He didn’t remember where he’d put things. I’d come up and find them.’

‘The morphine?’

A pause. ‘Sure, yeah.’

‘What was the pain from?’ she asked again. ‘Who gave him the morphine?’

He smiled broadly this time. ‘You already asked that.’

‘And you said you didn’t know.’

That’s right. Still don’t.‘

She shifted gears on him. ‘Don’t you work for an ambulance company?’

‘I’m a paramedic. I ride in ambulances.’

‘And you carry syringes and-’

Hardy couldn’t sit still any longer. ‘Excuse me, but Graham already said he didn’t know where the morphine came from.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I’m asking now about the syringes.’

‘It’s the same-’

But Graham put a hand over Hardy’s arm, stopping him. ‘I may have brought some syringes, left some there. I wanted to make sure he had clean needles.’

In the silence that followed, Lanier turned another page of his magazine. Graham leaned across the table and adjusted the louvered blinds. The room lightened up by half again. It was a great day above the fog here on Edgewood.

Evans took another tack. ‘You’re the executor for your father. What do you know about the safe?’

Graham got to the bottom of his coffee mug. His eyes shifted out to the view, then back. ‘Not much,’ he said.

‘What did your dad keep in it?’

‘I doubt anything,’ Graham said. ‘He didn’t have anything worth saving.’

‘What about his baseball cards? Where did he keep them?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you want to ask what baseball cards?’

‘No. I know he had a collection once. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe it was in the safe. I don’t know.’

But Evans was closing in on something, and Hardy wanted to get there first and head her off if he could. The questions were rattling Graham. ‘Anybody want another cup?’ he said.

No takers.

Hardy got up and went to the machine, but Evans kept right on. ‘But you never – personally – saw inside the safe, or opened it, or anything like that?’

‘No. I think the safe was just a prop. Sal liked to pretend he was doing great, he didn’t need anybody, he had lots of money. But you saw where he lived.’

Lanier was leafing through the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Suddenly he held up a piece of paper, stationery from a Motel 6, and said, ‘Hey.’

Dear Graham,

Whatever anybody else thinks, I am proud of you. I don’t know what that means after all this time, but I am. I’ve been following you as best I could – the one hope I had left among my kids. Your mother doesn’t make it any too easy, and you all made it clear enough you didn’t want me around. Your mom, I guess, what she told you.

But I did keep an eye out. Your career in the minors, you know, and then law school. I know where Deb lives with that husband of hers, and Georgie. How’d they get so messed up? Me leaving. I suppose that was it.

Did your mom ever let on that I would call and ask about you? No, I guess not. Every three months, four, I would, though. You ought to know that. That’s how I found out about you quitting the law job, trying for baseball one last time.

I saw you play today. Two triples. Remember how we used to say you’d rather hit a triple than a homer any day? Most exciting offensive play in the game, am I right? So, anyway, plus you started that beautiful 3-6-4 double play. You owned the field, son, and I am so proud of you for trying baseball again.

That’s all any of us can do, and few enough try, and I just wanted – whether it means anything – I just wanted to say good on you, doing what you were born to do. Somebody appreciated it.

While Hardy looked over the letter, a heavy silence hung in the room. Then Lanier took the page out of Hardy’s hand. He looked down at it again, showing it to Evans. ‘This last is in a different handwriting. Sixteen, eight, twenty-seven.’

‘What’s that?’ Hardy asked. He felt sick that this was going on and, really, it was his fault, his stupid mistake. You simply don’t let your client talk to the police, and he’d not only done that, he’d facilitated it. The fact that Graham wasn’t telling them anything they couldn’t find out for themselves mitigated his self-loathing, but only slightly.

Evans knew what the numbers were right away. ‘That’s the combination to Sal’s safe. The one Graham here says he knows nothing about.’

It was after eleven o’clock.

Evans and Lanier weren’t about to let Graham go into the bathroom and close the door behind him to take a shower, so he was still in the clothes he’d slept in.

Graham and Hardy still sat, mostly in silence, at the large table by the back window. The blinds were completely open by now and the city outside, with the fog gone, shimmered in the sunlight. Graham had slid open the window a few inches and a light breeze freshened the air from time to time, but it was mostly quiet and unpleasant.

From Hardy’s perspective, the two inspectors – buoyed by their discovery that Graham had a means of knowing the combination to Sal’s safe – had increased the intensity of their search. Working as a team, they had begun again at the front door, working slowly, opening every book and drawer, lifting everything that wasn’t nailed down, checking pockets of clothes in the closet, canisters in the kitchen.

They had to be getting near the end, Hardy thought, and if the letter was all they wound up finding, it wouldn’t be too bad. Graham had even made the argument as soon as they’d found the letter: so what if he might at one time have known the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember the letter from his father had been stuck in the magazine. Did they honestly think he cared about the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember why he’d written it down. He just didn’t know.

Hardy wished his client hadn’t talked so much, but it appeared to be over now, and little real damage had been done. The two inspectors were back by the dining table with Graham and Hardy, having thoroughly searched from stern to, nearly, stem. Lanier had just pulled up a chair and opened the drawer to a small desk table next to the Murphy bed when Evans lifted a Skoal chewing tobacco can from the utensil drawer and shook, then opened, it.

‘Six keys,’ she said, raising her eyes to her partner. She lifted the plain metal ring, and jingled the keys.

Suddenly Graham was a deer caught in headlights. The moment passed as quickly as it had come, but to Hardy it was worrisome. There was real fear in his eyes. He’d been hiding something in plain view that he hadn’t expected them to notice, or if they did notice, he hadn’t expected them to connect it to anything. And now they had.

Sarah Evans turned back to Graham and dropped the ring onto the table. ‘Let’s play “Name the Keys.” What do you say?’

He raised his shoulders, drummed his hands – da da dum - on the edge of the table. He gave her his big smile. ‘I really don’t have a clue. They’re just keys. Everybody’s got a container full of keys.’ He reached over and picked up the ring. ‘These two are duplicates for my car, I guess. This one is the dead bolt for here.’

Evans held up one of them. ‘You got a safe deposit box? That’s what this looks like. What bank are you with?’

The smile faded. From his seat at the small table across the room, Lanier turned and looked over at the silence.

Just as Hardy put his hand up to warn Graham not to answer, he blurted out, ‘I don’t know.’

Lanier tapped on the desk with something he’d extracted from the drawer. ‘Checkbook here is from Wells Fargo. The branch isn’t five blocks away. We get done here, we ride down and take a look. Maybe get a brand-new warrant.’

Inspector Sergeant Sarah Evans pulled a chair up and sat upon it. ‘Graham,’ she said, ‘you’re telling me you don’t know if you have a safe deposit box? Is that what you’re saying?’

Graham just didn’t seem to get it – he was making some bantering noises at Evans, trying to make light of the situation here, keep things casual, apparently unable to envision himself as a man with handcuffs in his future.

Hardy had no idea what was in the safety deposit box, but judging from Graham’s reaction, when he found out, it was going to be ugly.

Hardy put a hand on Graham’s shoulder and stood up. The interview was over.

He was thoroughly disheartened. It had been a long and wasted morning. He hadn’t done much for Graham Russo up until now, and he knew there wasn’t anything he’d be able to do until this chapter had played itself out.

4

Mario Giotti sat at his regular table at Stagnola’s on the Wharf. He sipped his iced tea and gazed with a studiedly placid expression down to the fishing boats moored outside his window. He was a well-known man in the city and he thought it important to maintain a dignified, serene persona in public. In any event, it was a gorgeous May morning, a Tuesday, and when he’d arrived at the restaurant, he’d apparently been in fine spirits.

And why not? He was a U.S. federal judge, appointed for life, and he lived in the best city in the world. A vibrant sixty-year-old, he kept his sparkplug of a body in terrific shape by either jogging or spending an hour a day at the workout room in the basement of the federal courthouse. With his steel-gray eyes, his unlined face, the prominent nose, he knew he cut a dignified figure.

Although just at this moment, he was struggling to control his expression. The judge’s wife was late. He was peeved with her and didn’t want to show it.

He hated to wait, always had. Fortunately, in his life nowadays, people most often waited for him, waited on him. He never had to stand in a line. He came into his courtroom and he had a staff that made damn sure that the day’s business was ready to proceed upon his entrance. But he still had to wait for his wife. Always had, probably always would.

As he looked down at the fishing boats, a sigh escaped him. He wasn’t even aware of it. Coming here to Stagnola’s – which he did at least once a week when he wasn’t traveling – wasn’t so much a nostalgic experience as it was a return to his roots.

That’s how he felt about the place. It was his true home, his psychic touchstone. For sixty-five years, over three generations, the building had been Giotti’s Grotto.

The judge’s great-grandfather had opened the first cioppino stand here in the middle of the Depression, and it had stayed within the family, adding onto itself, growing into a Fisherman’s Wharf landmark, until Joey Stagnola had bought it from Mario’s father, Bruno, in 1982.

Mario was the last male of the Giotti line. But he’d been a lawyer, with dreams of becoming a judge. He wasn’t going to run a dago restaurant on the Wharf. His father, Bruno, understood – if he himself were young again and college educated, if he’d had the same options as his son, he’d do the same thing.

But Mario knew that secretly it had broken the old man’s heart. He sold the restaurant to Stagnola and, six months later, sitting in a red booth by one of these back windows, had died here. (He had just finished an after-lunch Sambuca and the coroner found three coffee beans – good Italian restaurants served them floating in the aperitif for luck – in his mouth, unchewed.)

‘More iced tea, Your Honor?’

Mauritio, the maitre-d‘, had sent the youngster over to check the judge’s glass. Mauritio always took good care of him.

Giotti gave his practiced, friendly nod to the white-jacketed waiter and the young man poured. The boy could have been him, forty-five years before, earnest and efficient, making sure the patrons were happy. He moved on to the next table and the judge sighed again.

‘You don’t look very cheerful. Is something wrong?’

Giotti hadn’t even noticed his wife’s approach. Pat Giotti was still a fine-looking woman, with an unlined, ageless face, high cheekbones, a graceful figure. He raised his face and she kissed him, then seated herself across the table, immediately reaching over and taking his hand, squeezing it. ‘Sorry I’m late. Are you all right?’

His face animated itself. ‘Just feeling old for a minute.’

‘You’re not old.’

‘For a minute, I said.’ He squeezed her hand. They had made love the night before and he was telling her he remembered very well. She was right, he wasn’t old.

‘Are you thinking about Sal?’

He shook his head. ‘Actually, no. The waiter just reminded me of when I used to work here.’ The judge looked down at the boats for a second. ‘Maybe a little.’

She eyed him carefully, seemed satisfied, then reached for a roll and broke it. ‘I’m sure it was for the best,’ she said. ‘Sal, I mean.’

‘I’m sure it was,’ he agreed. ‘It’s just…’ His voice trailed off. ‘I look down there at the moorings, I can almost see the Signing Bonus, see Sal waving up at me. It’s hard to imagine him gone.’

‘He’d lived his life, hon.’

‘He was my age. I think that’s part of it.’

‘He was sick, remember? He was dying anyway. It just would have gotten worse. His suffering’s over now.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘It isn’t all bad. It’s much better this way.’

‘I know you’re right.’ He looked out the window. ‘This was probably just the wrong table for today, being able to see down there. It brings back those memories.’

‘But this is our table, Mario. They hold it for you, the judge’s table.’

He squeezed her hand again. ‘I’m just saying he was my friend. I miss him, that’s all.’

‘The idea of him, love, the idea. He wasn’t the same friend at the end, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’

She met his eyes again, squeezed his hand.

‘You must know that,’ she said.

‘I do know it, Pat. It’s better all around. It’s just not easy.’

The waiter came by and took their orders. Pat ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio to go with her scallops. The judge was having a crab Louis and his iced tea – of course, no wine. He was going back to court in the afternoon.

They sat in silence for a while, until her wine arrived. She took a taste, then put her glass down. ‘Did you read this morning’s paper? They’re saying maybe it wasn’t a suicide.’

‘Maybe? It wasn’t,’ the judge said flatly.

The wine seemed to stick in Pat Giotti’s throat. She took another sip to clear it. ‘Why do you say that?’

The judge shrugged. ‘It’s got all the earmarks of an assisted suicide. Look at the morphine vials, the labels removed. Some medical person was there, helped him along. I had Annie’ – his secretary – ‘stop by at the Hall of Justice and pick up a copy of the autopsy this morning.’

‘And?’

The judge thoughtfully tore a piece of his sourdough, then seemed to forget about it. ‘The morphine dose wasn’t that large. Acting alone, Sal would have probably done lots more to be sure. He had three more vials at his place he could have used. But whoever helped him put it right in the vein.’

‘Which would not have been enough in the muscle?’

Giotti nodded. ‘So it was a medical professional. At any rate, somebody who’d know that.’ In spite of the topic the judge had to smile in admiration. ‘You don’t forget anything, do you? What was that, Ellison?’

His wife looked pleased at the compliment. Giotti was referring to a medical malpractice case he’d heard on appeal a few years back, U.S. v. Ellison Pharmaceuticals, where the doctor’s decision to administer one of Ellison’s drugs intravenously (IV), rather than intramuscularly (IM), had proved fatal to a patient. The doctor had tried to place the blame on the drug company, but the strategy hadn’t worked; drugs injected directly into a vein had a great deal more effective potency than drugs administered IM, and Giotti had ruled that every doctor on the planet knew that, or ought to.

Pat Giotti, whose life revolved around her husband’s, made it a point to read as many of his cases as she could. She didn’t have a profession hadn’t worked since the earliest days of their marriage. She harbored a lingering fear that she and her husband might someday have nothing to talk about, so she kept up on the law as well as the trivia that each case provided.

Giotti sat back, letting go of his wife’s hand as the waiter set their plates in front of them. ‘One thing I’m sure of,’ he said. ‘We haven’t heard the end of it, especially now they’re saying it might not be a suicide.’

Pat Giotti put her fork down. ‘They haven’t done that, have they?’

‘If it’s not a suicide, it’s some kind of murder. And murder means it gets investigated.’

‘That may be the law, but they shouldn’t do that. They ought to just leave it alone.’

He reached across the table and took her hand again. ‘Who can say how much pain he was in? And even if he was, what if he wanted to endure it for some reason? What if it wasn’t his decision to die just then, at that moment? That’s the issue.’

That was her Mario, she thought, ever the judge. Always considering the issues, the law.

‘That’s why they want to find out who was there,’ he said.

Hardy figured out how much time he’d spent outdoors on this beautiful day. He’d walked through the fog near his house this morning at a little after seven – call it four minutes to get to where he’d parked the night before. Then he’d stood outside Graham’s house for a total of about two minutes, taking in the sunlight, birdsong, smell of blossoms, talking to Lanier. Thirty seconds walking back to his car at one-fifteen. Two minutes getting from the downtown garage to his office.

Now it was seven forty-five and the sun was a recent memory, the dusk just settling on the buildings around the office. Hardy stood at his window overlooking Sutter Street, his tie undone, coat off, eyes burning. Between Graham Russo and Tryptech, he’d already put in a thirteen-hour day and in that time he’d spent all but eight and a half minutes indoors.

The deposition with Terry Lowitz of the Port of Oakland had ended fifteen minutes ago. They’d had sandwiches brought up at five-thirty when it looked as though it was going to go on for another couple of hours. He’d called Frannie and told her he was going to be late. She was less than thrilled.

Lowitz was a maintenance supervisor whose skills as a raconteur were, Hardy thought, woefully inadequate. It had taken Hardy three tries to get the guy to put his name on the record properly. Mr Lowitz was of the general opinion that the Port of Oakland had never in its history allowed one machine of any kind to run for an instant without being in perfect repair, especially the loading transoms.

Over the course of five hours Hardy had brought up perhaps thirty examples of accidents at the Port, large or small, that might have been attributed to faulty equipment, but Mr Lowitz, when he answered intelligibly at all, had an alternate interpretation for every mishap. He was not going to lose his job by criticizing his employer. Ever.

Hardy walked back to his desk and, without thinking, picked up one of the three darts that lay upon it and flung it at the dartboard across the room. A nanosecond after he released it, he remembered that he was theoretically in the middle of a record round and was shooting for the ‘3.’

The dart hit smack in the middle of the ‘20,’ David Freeman appeared in his doorway with a bottle of wine and some glasses, and the telephone rang.

He threw up his hands. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘it happens all at once.’

Freeman would wait and the phone wouldn’t, so he grabbed at it. ‘Yo.’

‘Hardy. Abe.’

‘By God, I think it is. You sound just like yourself.’

‘It’s a disguise for people who think I’m somebody else.’

‘So what’s up? You’re going to say Graham Russo.’

Freeman came over and put the glasses down on Hardy’s desk, then lifted a haunch onto the corner of it.

Over the phone Hardy heard his prediction come true. ‘I’m calling about Graham Russo.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘This is a courtesy call. You must have impressed Lanier and Evans with your manners. I asked them if they minded if I call you and they said no.’

‘They’re really quite perceptive individuals,’ Hardy said, ‘for police persons. So what about Graham?’

Glitsky told him.

Freeman repeated it, making sure he’d heard it right. ‘Fifty thousand dollars in wrapped bills? Four complete sets of early-fifties baseball cards?’

‘That’s it.’

The old man drank off most of his glass of red wine. Hardy noticed the world outside his window, that night had completely fallen.

He looked at his watch. Eight-fourteen. He had to stop now, call it a day, get home. He’d get a call later if Graham got booked tonight, and he’d have to come down to the jail. He didn’t feel he would survive without a little time off.

David Freeman, on the other hand, had no family or consuming interests outside of the law. He had lived this way for all of his adult life and now, after his own full day in court, he was settling down with a newly filled glass, enthralled with the details of yet another case. It never ended for Freeman – he never wanted it to. ‘So it’s not an assisted suicide after all?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean fifty grand plus the cards, taken from the old man’s safe. This is not what we call altruism. He offed the guy to get the money.’

Hardy waved that off. ‘I don’t think that happened, David. You’ve got to know him.’

‘I don’t need to know him if I’ve got the evidence. If the evidence says he did it, then he did it.’

‘You always say that.’

‘That’s because it’s always true.’ Freeman had settled himself on the couch. He’d brought the bottle over and put it on the coffee table in front of him. He poured himself more wine, swirled it in his glass, sloshed it around in his mouth, the connoisseur. ‘Why don’t you take off your coat and stay awhile? Share this excellent claret with me. Take a break, for Christ’s sake, you’ve been at it all day. This new case of yours has all the makings.’

Hardy threw another dart. The hell with the personal best game, he thought. He’d get it some other time. ‘Believe it or not, spending another hour or two here in the middle of the night discussing a case I’m not even taking is not my idea of a break. I’m thinking about going home, saying hello to my wife before she leaves me, maybe kissing my kids good-night.’

Freeman pursed his lips with distaste. ‘Aren’t you curious about the money?’

‘There’s an explanation for the money.’

‘That’s my point. Don’t you want to know what it is?’

‘I’ll catch it on the news.’ He had walked around his desk and grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair where he’d hung it, and now, on his way to the door, he was pulling it on. He stopped at the doorway and picked up his briefcase. ‘You want to lock up and get the lights when you leave? The landlord here’s a real tyrant.’

Freeman picked up his bottle and got himself to his feet. ‘No, I’ll go down to my office.’

His brown suit looked like he’d taken a shower with it on, then slept in it. There were half a dozen rusted dots around his shirt collar where he’d cut himself shaving. The tie could have been cut from.a tablecloth at an Italian restaurant. He was half a head shorter than Hardy and thirty pounds heavier, all of it in the gut. Nevertheless, David Freeman – the eyes, the manic energy – was impressive, even intimidating.

He came to a halt abruptly in front of Hardy, seemed to consider for a moment, then poked a finger into his chest. ‘You know, this life isn’t dress rehearsal. If you’ve got a vision of what really happened with Sal Russo, the boy’s got a right to hear it. You took him on, so you owe him that, however busy you think you are. And here’s a free tip: you might try fitting in a little fun.’

‘Like you do?’

‘Exactly! Like I do. I have fun all the time.’

‘You work all the time.’

Freeman lit up histrionically. ‘I love my work! I don’t do anything I don’t want to do.’

‘I hate to say this, David, but you don’t have kids.’

The old man squinted up at him. ‘Well, you do, so what?’

‘So I don’t do what I want to do anymore. I do what I have to do. That’s my life. That’s reality. I don’t even think about what I want to do.’

Freeman remembered his glass of wine and took a hit of it. ‘It was your choice having the kids, am I right?’ ‘Sure.’

‘So it’s your choice how you want to live with them.’ Hardy found himself getting a little hot. ‘That’s a fine and learned opinion, David, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You need this case, a murder case, something you can care about,’ Freeman said. ‘You’re burning out.’

Hardy didn’t need to hear this – it was too close to the truth. He hit the lights and closed the door behind them. ‘Well, thanks for the input.’

The short corridor was dark and ended in a stairwell down which the two men walked in silence. On the second floor Phyllis, the receptionist, had her station – deserted now – in the center of a spacious and extravagantly appointed lobby. The main lights had been turned down. Dim recessed pinpoints in the ceiling kept the space from blackness, but only just. Freeman grumbled a good-night and was nearly to his office when Hardy stopped at the top of the main circular stairwell. He sighed and put down his briefcase. ‘David.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You ought to take this Russo case.’

‘I’ll be honest with you. I would kill for this case.’

Hardy smiled in the gloom. ‘You don’t have to kill anybody. It’s yours. I mean it. From right now Graham’s your client. You can introduce yourself when they book him, which could happen in the next five minutes. If you hurry, you can beat him down to the jail.’

The old man wrestled with it for a few seconds. ‘It’s tempting, but I can’t take it. He can’t afford me.’

‘Do it pro bono. He can’t afford anybody, and it would be great advertising.’

‘It’s your case, Diz. He’s your client.’

‘I don’t want him, David. Forget hum not being able to afford me, I can’t afford him.’

Freeman’s voice cut into the darkness. ‘You want my opinion, or probably you don’t, you can’t afford not. All I’ve heard from you for years now is how my clients – my guilty clients – they’re the scum of the earth. They deserve the best defense the law allows, but it’s not going to be Dismas Hardy who gives it to them. No, sir. You’ve got higher standards, right? You’ve got to believe in your clients, in their essential goodness. But you know, I’ve got news for you about the nature of humanity – it fails all the time. Good people do bad things. That’s why we have the beautiful law.’

The old attorney moved a step closer, all wound up now. ‘You think the work you’re doing with Tryptech is cleaner than what I do. Well, my ass. Dyson Brunei is at best a liar and at worst a crook, and you don’t seem to have any problem doing his grunt work for a fee.’ Freeman lowered his voice even further, his anger building. ‘Graham Russo walks in because he needs you, and you tell me he didn’t kill his father for his money. You believe in him, don’t you? But you won’t help him. You can’t afford to. All right, but spare me the rationalizations and the self-righteous bullshit from now on, would you? I don’t have the time.’

Freeman whirled and stalked into his office, slamming the door closed behind him.

In his living room a line of tiny elephants marched tail to trunk in a caravan across the mantel above his fireplace. They were made of blown Venetian glass.

Frannie had seen them at Gump’s and fallen in love, though she knew there was no way she would ever have them. They were too expensive, too fragile. An unnecessary luxury back when they’d had nothing. But Hardy had bought six of them for her and then one each year on their anniversary.

Now, finally home a little after nine o’clock, he stood in front of them, wondering if he could hear what they might be saying to him.

The elephants were part of their history. When they had decided to get married, he and Frannie had had many discussions about where they would live together. Finally she said she’d move out of her duplex into this house – Hardy’s house. He thought the gift would begin to make the place her own home, and he’d been right. She rearranged the elephants every couple of days, circling them, lining them up, facing them all in one direction or another. Mood stones.

(Her brother, Moses, did the same thing – rearranged the elephants – almost every time he came to visit. Hardy thought it must be genetic.)

It was a night for shadows. The living room, as the lobby in his building had been, was dimly lit, in this case from one light over the telephone in the tiny sitting area off the dining room. The house was eerily quiet. It was a ‘railroad-style’ Victorian with a long hallway, living and dining rooms up front. In the back the house widened with the kitchen and, behind that, three bedrooms. j The kids were asleep and Frannie had gone to bed, apparently;to sleep. He microwaved the leftovers of macaroni and cheese, mixing in a can of tuna for the protein, or taste, or something. At the dining-room table he started to review some of the Tryptech pages from his briefcase, but he didn’t have the energy.

He poured an inch of Bushmills into one of the jelly glasses the kids used. Returning to the living room, he lit a fire and drank his drink. When it was finished, he showered and slid in beside his wife’s possibly sleeping form.

The elephants were dancing in an amber glow.

A naked man stood in front of the dying embers, watching the beasts. There were fourteen of them, in a line, perhaps preparing to caravan. The wind howled outside.

Outside the fire’s perimeter the night was pitch, and out of its shadow a woman appeared. She was dressed in something white and flowing. Red highlights shimmered in long hair, worn down. She was barefoot.

The man half turned, afraid to step toward her lest he stumble. Twice already he had free-poured Irish whiskey into the Tom and Jerry drinking glass, too thick to break.

‘Are you coming back to bed?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I guessed that.’ She laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’ A reference to the drinking. When he’d been younger, before this marriage or their children, he had a personal rule forbidding hard spirits in his house. Now he sometimes thought they could open a liquor store.

‘I love these elephants,’ he said. It appealed to him to see one of the strongest animals in the world rendered in the most fragile of substances. ‘They look like they’re dancing, don’t they? Excited about going somewhere, doing something.’

‘Come on back to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll rub your back.’

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Two. The kids’ll be up in five hours, Dismas. It’s going to seem like five minutes.’

His hand was around the glass, on the mantel over the fire. He was aware that he was leaning on it for balance.

Frannie was right. Tomorrow – another in the seemingly endless procession of them – would come too soon. Freeman was right too. He was burning out.

He sighed, left the half-empty glass where it was on the mantel, let her lead him back down the long hallway to their bedroom.

5

Hardy wasn’t going to acknowledge the fatigue, the slight headache, the buzz behind his eyes. He had set his internal alarm for six-thirty, and it didn’t fail him.

Of David Freeman’s words the night before, the ones that had the most impact were those concerning the children – Hardy had chosen to have them, and he could choose how he lived with them.

He was failing there, with his kids, lost in some downward spiral he didn’t quite understand. He wasn’t taking any joy in them, in Frannie, in his life. Certainly not in his work. He didn’t know if it was only a function of attitude, but he knew he’d recognized it at last.

Maybe all of that wasn’t too far gone to reclaim.

He didn’t even know any longer where his black pan was. The cast-iron fryer weighed ten pounds and was the only physical legacy of Hardy’s parents, Joe and Tola, who’d died in a plane crash when he was nineteen. For years – all through his first marriage and second bachelorhood – he had cooked almost everything he ate in that pan.

He’d kept it perennially on his stove, shined until it looked more like hematite than iron. He never put any water in it, just scraped it with a spatula, wiped it down with salt, then rubbed it with a rag. Even when he used neither oil nor butter, nothing Stuck to it. The pan had been one of his treasures. He told Frannie when they first got together that it was the symbol of who he was.

If that was true now, he thought, he was in trouble. He didn’t know where it had gone. He had searched the kitchen and finally found the pan under his workbench on the landing that led down the stairs and out to their backyard. Sometime in the past few years – and he hadn’t even noticed – Frannie had moved it out of the kitchen. He didn’t cook at home anymore. He was always working. And the damn thing was too heavy for her to lift. She’d essentially thrown it out.

This morning Hardy didn’t go through his routine: shower, dress in his suit and tie, coffee. Instead he pulled on his old jeans and a faded Cal Poly sweatshirt, slipped into his Top-Siders and, keeping quiet, first went in search of the black pan.

Twenty minutes later he had the French crepe batter made and the table set for breakfast at the kitchen table. He fixed a cup of coffee the way Frannie liked it, with real cream and two thirds of a spoonful of brown sugar, and brought it in to her, placing it beside the bed, waking her with a kiss on her cheek.

Rebecca – they called her the Beck – was Frannie’s child by her first husband, but Hardy had adopted her as his own. Now the nine-year-old lay on her back, covers off, mouth open. Her brother, Vincent, was seven and had his own room at the very back of the house, but for the past several months he’d been sleeping on a futon on the floor of Beck’s room. He was entirely covered by his comforter. Hardy stepped over him, sat on the side of the Beck’s bed, and leaned over, hugging her. ‘Maple syrup,’ he whispered. ‘Crepes.’

‘Crepes!’ She was immediately awake. Her arms came up around him and squeezed and then she squiggled free. ‘Vincent!’ she yelled. ‘Daddy’s making crepes.’

Vincent was up and on him before he knew what hit him. He was knocked backward, wrestled down onto the futon in a jumble of arms and legs and tumbling, kid-smell and laughter.

With a roar he grabbed at both of them, holding them to him, tickling whenever he could get a finger free. He caught a knee in the groin – a constant – and groaned, which the kids ignored as a matter of course.

Finally it stopped. His back was against the Beck’s bed and the kids settled against him, one on each side. He heard the shower start in the bathroom and the alarm went off next to his bed. He patted the kids on their backs. ‘Let’s get some clothes on,’ he said. ‘Breakfast in five.’

‘Four!’ The Beck was up, moving for the bathroom.

‘Three!’ Vincent was right behind her, but not fast enough.

Hardy heard the door slam, then a crash as Vincent skidded into it. ‘Dad! Beck slammed the door.’ More pounding. ‘Dad!’

Hardy got up. Crisis number one. He took a breath, preparing to mediate. His groin didn’t hurt anymore.

And his headache was gone.

When he got in to work, there was a call on his answering machine. Graham had called from jail. Evans and Lanier had shown up at his place again at seven A.M. This time they arrested him for murder.

Her partner was interviewing people in another homicide that had occurred long before Sarah had made it to the detail, so she drew the solo assignment to Sal’s place.

The apartment was still sealed off. It might have been the lowest of drudge work, but for some reason Sarah didn’t mind. There was something compelling about this old man who sold fish and his family who hated him.

She let herself in and closed the door behind her. In the living room the Venetian blinds were up, the glass in the windows opaque with grime. Although the sun had been shining outside, inside there was little sense of it. She flicked the switch by the front door – the six-bulb chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling made almost no difference. Four of its lights were burned out.

She took a couple of steps over to the sagging couch and sat on the front inches of it. Before her on the stained pine coffee table the fingerprinting powder was still visible, a thin film. Beyond the table was the lounge chair. She leaned forward, elbows on knees, templed her fingers in front of her mouth, and blew through them.

The profound stillness bored into her. Only gradually did she even become aware of the traffic sounds through the windows over Seventh Street. The air didn’t move at all.

What must it have been like, she wondered, to have lived here, to be dying here? Murder cases, she was beginning to realize, were of a different quality from the other crimes she’d been working on over the years: the robberies, assaults, vandalisms, frauds. The act, of course, the murder itself, might have been as considered, as violent, as brutish, or as passionate as any of the other crimes, but its consequence struck a far more resonant chord.

Here was where a life story had ended.

The consciousness that had once impressed its features on this inanimate stuff - furniture, walls, kitchen appliances, the air itself – had been replaced, now, with a vacuum.

Finally she got up, crossed the living room, threw open a west-facing window. There was a breeze outside. She could sense it before it breached the window, and the sun did shine. But it was as though the room conspired to keep these elements out, at least for another few seconds.

Sarah, turning to take in the place where Sal Russo had lived and died, suddenly, and clearly, experienced Sal’s presence hovering here, his ghost, almost as though it were a physical thing.

Who had he been, after all?

Finally, the breeze stirred a dust ball that had formed on one of the end tables, blowing it to the floor. She opened another window on another wall, moving to be moving. Maybe the answer to her question was somewhere among all the paper.

Ridiculous though it was, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Sal Russo was trying, somehow, to communicate with her.

If she could only hear what he might be saying.

On the first pass she went through every scrap of paper that wasn’t in some kind of a box. There was paper between the mattresses on his bed, in the kitchen cabinets, in the drawers of the end tables. She’d already discovered the paper with the safe combinations in the wastebasket in the bathroom, but there was more in the garbage in the kitchen. Under the threadbare living-room rug. Some of it was brown paper bag material, some was lined invoice paper, plain sheets of copy paper, anything that would hold an imprint, pencil or ink.

Almost every piece contained a first or last name or both. Telephone numbers, or parts of them. Addresses, Evans figured. A lot of legwork there, a ton of follow-up, but some of it, possibly, fruitful. She didn’t mind work; that’s what they paid her for.

But this collection of paper wasn’t getting her any closer to the man. She’d been sitting on the couch, going through it all piece by piece, placing it in one of the oversized yellow envelopes she’d brought along. Now, the envelope bulging, she dropped it on the table, and stood again.

The chalked outline where his body had lain crumpled was still visible on the rug. Somehow she’d avoided even seeing it when she’d come in. Now she squatted over it, trying to fill in the picture. Her finger dragged over the rug. ‘Come on, old man,’ she whispered, ‘talk to me.’

Most of the boxes, she knew, were in the bedroom, which was behind the kitchen off to her right, but there was one here in the living room, in the corner along the wall that held the couch. Crouching there on the floor, she saw it. And again, it was as though it were for the first time.

What else, she wondered, had she missed?

Her eyes came to rest on the piece of plywood that hung over the couch. She’d noticed the painting before, but had assumed it was just an el cheapo mass-produced rendering that had come with the furnished apartment. It hadn’t been varnished, and the paint had bleached out to the point where the grain of the plywood showed more than anything else.

But here, from her angle in the early afternoon light – the sun had deposited a rectangle of light onto the floor – the lines of the painting stood out. The depiction was recognizably Fisherman’s Wharf, but without the postcard patina. She squinted up at it, then stood and moved closer. If Sal had done this – as the rusted I brown initials S.R. in the lower right corner indicated – he had I had talent.

The fishing boat in the foreground, the Signing Bonus, was obviously abandoned. Crab pots lay in disarray around it, both on its deck and the nearby pier. The portholes were all hollows of jagged glass, the railing had caved on itself. There were no people anywhere. No, there was one. She imagined she saw a lone figure, what appeared to be a child, sitting with hunched shoulders on the flying bridge, holding a broken fishing pole. Behind the boat the charred skeleton of a building smoldered on the Wharf.

She stood back and stared for another minute, realizing that I what disturbed her – more than anything the painting showed – was the sensibility behind it. If he’d painted this, Sal Russo wasn’t your typical fleabag derelict. He had a tortured soul, or had had one at one time.

Then, shaking herself from her reverie, she went over to the corner, got the heavy cardboard box, put it on the table and folded back the flaps that had been interlocked, something that clearly had been done many, many times.

She supposed she’d been expecting more debris, the same mishmash of receipts and scribblings, except older, that she’d already gone through and bagged. Instead, she found two battered three-ring binders and four hardcover books.

Taking out the books first, she placed them to one side – Bernard Malamud’s The Natural; a well-thumbed Chapman’s technical handbook for sailors called Piloting; an ancient bookclub edition – leather bound, gold trimmed – of Moby Dick; and Albert Camus’s The Fall.

The binders were another surprise. They were photo albums, organized and cared for. Sal had kept them out here in the living room where he could get to them, and Sarah would have bet a lot that he got them out often.

Feeling a bit like an intruder, she opened the first one. Pictures of a young man, very handsome, with a beautiful young woman, progressively pregnant. She knew the man must have been Sal, but couldn’t very well reconcile it with the old man she had seen here on Friday.

Then the first baby picture – Graham Joseph Russo written under it in a strong male hand.

She flipped through the pages more quickly. Here was the fishing boat from the painting on the wall – but new and trimmed, a beaming Sal Russo at the helm. Then there were two more children. A smallish house, typical for the Sunset District.

Graham growing up, playing baseball. Sal playing accordion at parties, more fishing boat pictures on the Bay at the Wharf. Another child, a girl, Debra. George. The wife appearing less and less. Then, suddenly, halfway through the binder, a mansion.

After that the binder was empty.

The sunlight rectangle on the floor had grown, and Sarah stood and stretched her back. In the kitchen she walked around the chair, which still lay on its side, left there by the investigations team. She poured herself a glass of water. The sun was very much a presence in here, the one window much cleaner than those in the living room, and with no blinds or drapes covering it. There were three mugs on the drain, dark liquid still in the bottom of two of them. An unwashed plate was on the table, knife and fork on it. These artifacts bothered her. If there had been any kind of real struggle in here, wouldn’t something else have been disturbed?

Back in the living room she made a note to bring this up with Lanier, and reached for the second binder. Baseball, baseball, and more baseball. Despite herself Sarah sat back. She was going to enjoy this. Baseball was her game – she still played on her women’s team once a week, year round.

As an only child and a girl, baseball had been the bond with her father, whom she still adored. Her parents had now retired and moved to Palm Springs, so she didn’t see them often, but every time they talked, they still joked about their Giant-Dodger rivalry – Sarah was Giants all the way.

Her dad and mom had both been raised in Brooklyn before moving to California, and the blood in their veins, they said, ran Dodger blue. She’d have to tell them about Graham Russo, she decided – making their team as a replacement player. That’s the kind of team the Dodgers were, she’d say – they hired murderers. Her dad would love that.

This album started way farther back. Here were black-and-white pictures of a very young Sal Russo. She double-checked to make sure this wasn’t Graham, but no, it was his father, in his own youth – always in uniform, always with a mitt or a bat. The first press clippings: Sal Russo throws no-hitter and hits two home runs in Little League opener. Freshman makes varsity at Balboa High. All-city high school team. All-state at USF.

She turned the photo of the college team sideways. There was Sal in the second row, next to Mario Giotti, the judge who’d found him on Friday. Amazing, she thought, the ties.

After the story of Sal’s bonus-signing with the Orioles, there were two blank pages. Then the stories about Graham began, the same kind of stuff they’d written about his father. Little League, Pony League, high school, college, the Dodgers’ farms.

Finally, abruptly, the yellowing newsprint ended and the paper turned white – these were the recent articles from Graham’s aborted return. Even down to the box scores from spring training in Vero Beach, Sal seemed to have recorded everything about the baseball career of the son she had arrested for his murder this morning.

Closing the binder on her lap, she was still sitting back in the couch, her eyes stinging. All right, she thought. Maybe Sal had spoken to her, but she wasn’t at all sure what it was she’d heard. Above all, she couldn’t figure out how someone who had begun with such promise, as Sal had, blessed with musical, artistic, and athletic talent, with a personality, a beautiful wife, a healthy and attractive family – how could that have all gone away? How did he end up here? Could it all have been economics?

She didn’t believe it. Sure, business failure could destroy a person’s soul; she’d seen that often enough. But this wasn’t any simple bankruptcy. Sal wasn’t broke, by any means. He paid his rent, had a going business that supported him, even if it was illegal. He was a survivor. Plus, he had money stashed away, lots of money. And the bills were wrapped and bank-stamped, dated seventeen years before. What did that mean?

Something cataclysmic must have happened. Whatever it was had destroyed him, and now she couldn’t help but wonder if it had finally killed him as well. And what did that mean about his son, who was now in jail because of her?

Maybe the answer was somewhere in the boxes back in the bedroom. She put the second binder next to its mate on the table and stretched again. She’d been here an hour and a half and had done almost no real police work. She’d better get on it.

But she was at eye level with that painting once again. It reeled her in and held her for another moment. Could that be a baseball mitt – that smudge – next to the fishing boy? (If it was, in fact, a boy fishing.) Was there something else she was missing? Was she missing anything at all?

She didn’t know. The other boxes weren’t going away. She’d better get to them. With a last glance at the painting she headed back to the bedroom.

At one-thirty that afternoon, just as Sarah was getting to Sal Russo’s place, Hardy waited for the guard to open the door to Visiting Room B in San Francisco’s jail. It was a relatively new building directly behind the Hall of Justice, only open for business for the past year or so. The new attorney visiting rooms were a good deal larger than those in the old jail had been, but the size didn’t make much difference. In spite of its nickname among law enforcement personnel – the Glamour Slammer – it still wasn’t anyplace you wanted to be.

They hadn’t brought Graham down yet. Hardy asked the guard to leave the door open and walked the six steps over to the window. Six whole steps – the place was extravagant in its roominess! And the window, though glass block, was a definite improvement.

In the old jail the visiting rooms had essentially been closets, six by eight feet, with no ventilation and one overhead light bulb. A table and three wooden chairs took up all the space. Through a square pane of wire-reinforced glass set into the wall, you could see inmates and guards passing in the jail’s corridor. The inmates would slam the window every once in a while as you talked to your client.

Hardy didn’t think that could happen here. No prisoners walked down this hallway. The corridor outside was a kind of catwalk around the administrative rooms and holding cells, and with the glass block there was a lot of light, especially on a sunny day like this one. It wasn’t exactly cheery, but it wasn’t a dungeon either.

He turned away from the window, preparing himself. It was always a jolt, the initial meeting behind bars of a person you’d known in civilian life.

In a couple of minutes Graham Russo was going to walk in here and he wasn’t going to look the same. He was going to be in an orange jumpsuit, perhaps shackled. Some small piece of his soul was going to be gone. That would make Graham different in some fundamental way, and Hardy didn’t want to see it.

He put his hands in his pockets and waited.

They’d started out sitting across the table from each other, but Hardy was up and pacing now. Graham’s story had changed in another, and particularly unsettling, way. He seemed to be having trouble believing that Sergeant Evans had actually arrested him. ‘I never thought she’d do that.’

‘Why not? She’s a cop. That’s what they do.’

‘Yeah, but…’ He paused, considering his words.

‘But what?’

Coming out with it. ‘I was playing a little head game with her. I thought she’d bought it. I didn’t think she’d keep looking. Not at me. Not after I opened up and cooperated.’

‘But you didn’t tell the truth.’

Graham shrugged. ‘I guessed wrong.’

‘About what?’

‘About whether she cared about the truth, I guess. I thought she’d believe me, not the words so much.’

This was close enough to how Hardy felt to make him feel uncomfortable. ‘So what about now?’

‘What about now?’

‘You and me, the truth, all that silly stuff.’

‘I haven’t lied to you.’

‘As a matter of fact, you did. You said you weren’t close to your father.’

‘But I’d already told the police that. I… it didn’t seem like a big thing. I wanted you to help me out, and if I came across as inconsistent, you’d doubt me from the git-go. I screwed up, I guess. I’m sorry.’

Hardy closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Okay, so let’s get clear on this. Despite what you told me and the police – the police two times – you were close to your father?’

Graham nodded. ‘I figured it would be easier to just say I wasn’t.’

‘Easier how?’

‘That’s obvious, isn’t it? What everyone would think.’

Hardy stopped pacing. ‘You know what Mark Twain said? He said the best part about telling the truth is you don’t have to remember when you lied.’

‘I know. All this just came at me, Diz. I didn’t have any time to think about it. I said I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too.’ Hardy wanted to get it straight. ‘So you were afraid that if you admitted you and your father had reconciled, people would draw the conclusion that you helped him kill himself?’

‘Yeah.’

‘But you didn’t? Help him kill himself?’

Graham had his huge hands folded on the table. He looked down at them, then back up at Hardy. ‘No. I’ve told you that.’

Hardy came up to the table, laid a palm down on it. ‘Okay, you told me that. But at this point, how am I supposed to know when you’re telling the truth?’

‘This one isn’t a lie.’

‘You didn’t kill your father?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t help him kill himself? Talk him through it? Sit there with him? Any of that? Because if you did, it’s going to make a big difference. We’ve got a whole ’nother ball game.‘

‘No, I didn’t do that.’

‘You weren’t there on Friday at all?’

Again, the maddening hesitation.

‘Graham?’ Hardy slammed the table and his client jerked backward. ‘Jesus, what’s to think about? You were there or you weren’t.’

‘I was thinking about something else.’

‘Don’t. Keep your mind on what I’m asking you about. You think you can do that?’

Hardy pulled his chair out again and sat in it. ‘Okay.’ He modulated his voice. He wasn’t here to rebuke his client, but he had to get a handle on the truth. ‘Okay, Graham, let’s talk a minute about you and me. You’re a lawyer, so you know this stuff, but when you hired me the other day, I became your attorney. After that, anything we say to each other is privileged. Like now. Clear?’

‘Right.’

‘So I’ve got to know what happened with you and your dad. All of it. I’ll take it with me to my grave, but I’ve got to know so I can help you.’

Graham slid his chair back a few inches and folded his arms across his chest, his sculpted face impassive. His eyes scanned the room, came back to Hardy. ‘How long am I going to be here?’ he finally asked.

The abrupt segue – frustrating as it might be – was no surprise. Hardy’s experience with people who unexpectedly found themselves in jail was that their attention span lost a lot of linkage. ‘I don’t know.’

This was the exact truth. In spite of Glitsky’s warning the previous evening, nobody had arrested Graham until this morning. Evans and Lanier had discovered the safe-deposit money late in the afternoon – too late, according to Glitsky, to go to the district attorney and get an arrest warrant.

Then, last night Graham had neither been home nor at his paramedic job. Concerned that he might flee, the two inspectors had arrested him without a warrant when he opened his door to say hello. So the DA wasn’t yet involved in the case, and this meant that the exact charge – beyond simple murder – had yet to be determined.

Hardy went on with the explanation. ‘Your arraignment is tomorrow and we can’t get bail set until then, so you’re here at least overnight. Assuming I can get you reasonable bail, which maybe I can’t, you could be out tomorrow.’ He paused. ‘And if they’re not going for special circumstances.’

This got Graham’s complete attention. ‘What do you mean?’ The fingers spiked at his hair. ‘Jesus Christ, what are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about murder for profit or during a robbery. That’s specials.’

‘I didn’t-’ He stopped. ‘What robbery?’

Keeping it matter-of-fact, Hardy told him. ‘Fifty thousand dollars in cash. Another twenty or thirty in mint-condition baseball cards. That’s a lot of money, Graham. You kill somebody, you take their stuff or their money. That’s robbery.’

Arms crossed again, Graham was chewing his cheek.

‘So from an outsider’s point of view, including the inspectors who arrested you, and not to mention yours truly, let’s see how it looks. You make – what? – fifteen bucks an hour as a paramedic.’

‘Give or take.’

‘And you live in the nicest neighborhood in the city – what’s your rent up there?’

Graham sighed deeply, answered reluctantly. ‘Fifteen.’

‘Okay, your rent is fifteen hundred dollars in this place a judge would probably salivate over. You’ve got beautiful furniture, more fine wine than you can drink in a month, what kind of car do you drive?’

‘Beemer.’

Another fifty grand, Hardy thought. He should have guessed. ‘I don’t suppose it’s paid for.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘So what’s the hit on that?’

‘Six hundred eighty.’

The hard numbers didn’t matter so much – of course there would be other expenses, probably moving Graham’s monthly nut up into the range of four to five thousand dollars. He wasn’t making this riding in an ambulance.

‘So the picture, Graham, is that you quit your incredible job as a federal law clerk, then you got laid off by the Dodgers, now you work part time. You see a question developing here?’

Graham came forward, elbows on the table. He pulled at the neck of his jumpsuit. ‘I get at least fifty a game. That’s if we lose. A hundred if we win. Bonuses in tournaments, for home runs, like that. Last Saturday I made four hundred.’ He must have read Hardy’s blank look. ‘For softball,’ he explained.

‘Who pays you to play softball?’

‘Craig Ising.’

‘Who is?’

‘Some rich guy, he owns the Hornets. That’s my team.’ Hardy still wasn’t seeing it. Graham went on patiently. ‘When I made the big club, during the strike, there were a couple of articles in the papers about us – the replacement players – and Ising kept his eyes open and waited. When the Dodgers cut me and I got back home, he looked me up.’

Hardy heard the words, but felt he was missing some crucial point. ‘We’re talking slo-pitch softball? You’re saying there’s a professional league?’

‘No. It’s all under the table. It’s all gambling. These rich guys stack the teams and bet on the games.’

‘How much do they bet?’

Graham shrugged. ‘I don’t know for sure. I hear numbers. Ten grand, twenty. Per game.’

Hardy was shaking his head. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I don’t think so. It’s big business. The hitch is, I can’t declare any of the money – no taxes, no nothing.’

‘So how much do you really make?’

Attorney-client privilege or not, Graham didn’t want to say. ‘I don’t know. Some weeks I play three games, tournaments on weekends.’

‘And how many games are in a tournament?’

‘Usually five if you go all the way.’

Hardy was scribbling some numbers on his legal pad. ‘A grand a week?’ he asked.

Another shrug. ‘Sometimes.’ Then, suddenly, he spoke with the first real urgency Hardy had heard. ‘But this can’t come out. They get me for tax evasion, they’ll yank my bar card. I’ll really never work again.’

‘They get you for murder, that’ll be the least of your problems.’ This was inarguable, but Graham leaned back in his chair, pondering it. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be a lawyer anyway.’

‘Come on, Diz. Why do you think I went to law school? Of course I want to be a lawyer.’

‘But you-’

‘I just wanted one last chance to play ball. I figured I’d play a few years, make my millions, then go back and practice law. Then imagine my surprise when I came back to the city and found I wasn’t hirable. Good old Judge Draper had blackballed me, called everybody he knew, though of course he denies it.’

‘You asked him?’

‘I didn’t have to. The word got out. I’m untouchable.’ Another scan of the room. ‘And now this.’

‘Couldn’t Giotti help you? He was a friend of your father’s. Wouldn’t he…?’

But Graham was shaking his head before Hardy could finish. ‘No chance. Federal judges hang together. You’ve got to understand that I quit these guys, quit the court, rejected their whole lives. They’re never going to forgive me. Maybe I could find some work in Alaska, but I’m dead in this town. I’ve looked, believe me. I must have sent out five hundred resumes. I’m in the top of my class at Boalt. Not even an interview.’

‘So why didn’t you move to Alaska?’

The maddening hesitation suddenly reappeared. ‘I might,’ he said at last. The ambiguity seemed intentional. Whether he meant ‘I might have except for…’ or ‘I might now someday,’ Hardy couldn’t say. But either way, for Hardy the light came on. ‘Your father. He needed you. That’s why you came back and stayed on.’

But immediately Hardy regretted what he’d said – he might have given his client an idea.

Graham stood up, got to the wall, and stood facing the window. Finally, he spoke without turning. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I didn’t plan it. It just happened. He wrote me the letter – the one you saw yesterday – and I got in touch with him, and we just’ – a pause – ‘I just…’

Graham was silent so long that Hardy rose and crossed over to him. It shocked him to see tears, but in spite of himself, or wanting to, he wasn’t sure he believed them. Not anymore. Graham had already been too duplicitous. His admission about trying to charm Sarah. Maybe now he was playing for his attorney’s sympathy. Hardy put a hand on his client’s shoulder and felt the tension break, the shoulders give.

Graham hung his head, the weight of holding it up apparently too much to bear. ‘I loved him. He was my dad. He needed me.’ His voice went down a notch. ‘I needed him too.’

There was still the money.

Ten minutes later they were both back at the table. Hardy had been there for over an hour and had nothing substantive to show for it. He had to find out about the money.

‘My dad wanted me to take it, to give it to somebody else. He didn’t want anybody in the family to have it, didn’t want it to be part of the estate.’

Hardy took that in. Like nearly everything else to come from the mouth of Graham Russo, the response raised more questions than it answered. ‘Who did he want to give it to?’

‘The children of a woman named Joan Singleterry.’

‘Okay,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll bite. Who’s she?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t your father tell you?’

‘He started. Then the phone rang. When I brought it up again when he came back, he looks at me like I’m from Mars. No memory. Just not there. That’s the way he got.’

‘And you didn’t press him?’

Graham spread his palms. ‘That was my dad. He wouldn’t tell me, even if he remembered that he wanted me to know.’

‘The time he did mention her – what was that story?’

He shrugged. ‘He didn’t know where she lived, but he wanted me to find her after he was dead and give her the money.’

‘So he knew he was going to be dead?’

‘He knew he was going to kill himself, sure.’ Graham held up a hand. ‘I know what that sounds like, but it’s the truth.’

‘Why wouldn’t I believe it’s the truth?’ Hardy asked with heavy irony. ‘This happens all the time. Some guy’s father gives him fifty grand to give to somebody he doesn’t know.’ Hardy leaned across the table, punched up his voice. ‘Listen up, Graham, you’ve got to start telling me something I can believe pretty soon or I’m going to be out of here.’

‘This is the truth, Diz. I don’t know, maybe he had some kids with this woman a long time ago and-’

‘Where’d he get the money?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

Hardy slapped the table, shouted. ‘Jesus! What about the baseball cards? What did he want you to do with them, put ’em in a fucking time capsule?‘

It was the moment to leave – this anger wasn’t going anywhere productive. Hardy got his voice back under control, gathered his pen and his legal pad, stood up. ‘Let me tell you what this looks like, Graham. This looks like you killed your dad and stole fifty thousand dollars from him and you just didn’t have the chance – yet – to launder the money, or do whatever it is you do with that much cash. And cash seems to be your thing. I’m not saying that this is what I think’ – although Hardy was perilously close to believing just that – ‘but this is what it’s going to look and sound like to everybody who hears it. And if it looks, smells, and tastes like it, guess what?’

No reply.

Hardy took a breath. ‘Now, I’m still your lawyer and I’m going to listen to what you say, and if you want to change your mind, I’m not going to hold it against you and we’ll go on from there. But these are losing cards. This is a terrible hand.’

Graham looked up. ‘It’s what happened.’

‘Well, if that’s true, Graham,’ Hardy replied, ‘this has not been your lucky week.’

6

When the DA, Sharron Pratt, got the news that Graham Russo had been arrested without a warrant issued by her office, she angrily demanded that Glitsky report to her. She thought the police had seriously overstepped their bounds, particularly in this case where the larger issues surrounding assisted suicide needed to be thoroughly aired and debated. ‘I don’t understand,’ Pratt was saying, ‘why you didn’t come to me first, Lieutenant. Why did you just arrest him?’

‘We think he’s committed a murder.’ Glitsky didn’t yet understand Pratt’s anger, for while it was true that the police often came to the DA to get a warrant for an arrest, it was nearly as common to have inspectors make the arrest first. This tended to keep suspects from disappearing. ‘But look, ma’am, if you want, you can just dismiss the case.’

That’s what you’d like, isn’t it, Lieutenant?‘

‘No, ma’am. But it’s your right.’

‘Don’t try to con me, Lieutenant. That’s just what you want. If you’d come for a warrant for this boy’s arrest, you knew I would have turned you down, but now that you’ve arrested him first, you’ve focused the issue, putting me on the spot.’

Hands clamped behind her back, Pratt wore her half-moon glasses midway down her aristocratic nose. She looked over them.

Pratt was not Glitsky’s boss, and he didn’t much care how she felt about him, but he was trying to do his job, and considered his reply carefully before he gave it. ‘It was a timing issue,’ Glitsky said. ‘There was plenty of evidence to arrest, but if you want to play political football…’

Pratt’s eyes glared. Her nostrils flared. ‘Don’t you dare accuse me of playing politics with a man’s life. Your people made a mistake arresting this man.’

Glitsky couldn’t stop himself. ‘You know that the arresting inspector was a woman, don’t you?’

It slowed her for a moment. ‘That’s not the issue,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t care who arrested him. The point is we – this office – had not made a decision to prosecute. You knew we weren’t ready to issue a warrant, so you went ahead without one.’

‘I didn’t know that. Why would I even think it? Your office prosecutes homicides. What’s to know?’

Pratt nodded, as though Glitsky had confirmed something for her. She moved over to her desk, where the Russo file sat in its manila folder. ‘I’m going to bring this up with the mayor and the Board of Supervisors, Lieutenant. This police vendetta to discredit me, it has to stop.’

‘And why are we having this vendetta again?’ Glitsky asked. ‘I forget.’

‘Because I believe – and I’m right - that some of the things that you call crimes are simply not wrong, and I’m not going to prosecute them.’

‘I don’t call them crimes – the legislature does.’

Pratt was shaking her head. ‘I don’t care what’s on the books. The books are wrong. People are being hounded by you police, the city’s resources are being squandered by your harassment of prostitutes, casual marijuana users-’

‘Murderers?’

She leveled a finger at him. ‘That’s exactly my point. Based on the evidence I’ve seen here’ – the finger went down to the folder – ‘I don’t think Graham Russo is a murderer.’

‘You don’t think he killed his father?’

‘No, I do think he killed his father.’ She slapped her palm down on the desk. ‘Of course he killed his father, technically speaking,’ she said. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’

Deciding it would be wiser to sidestep a direct answer to that, Glitsky took a beat, tilted his head, ladled on the sincerity. ‘Then I really am missing something here. What’s the problem with us arresting him if you think he did it?’

Sighing heavily, Pratt pulled her chair over and sat down. ‘What I’m saying, Lieutenant, is that though technically this could have been a homicide-’

Glitsky interrupted. ‘Strout called it a homicide,’ he said, ‘so it’s a homicide.’

But she was shaking her head. ‘Regardless of that, it wasn’t a murder.’

‘No? Then what was it?’

‘An assisted suicide.’

‘Which is illegal.’

‘But not wrong. In fact it was right. The boy did the humane thing and it was probably the most difficult decision of his life. And you want to try him for murder?’

‘No. I arrested him for breaking a law. That’s my job.’

‘That’s not true. Your job is to process warrants through this office. We make the decision as to whether we’re going to charge a crime.’ All the way back in her chair, she pointed again, up at him, eyes flashing. ‘You police knew this office would make that distinction. So you circumvented me. You’ve been doing this kind of thing ever since I came on here. Can it be that you really think I don’t see it?’

Glitsky stepped over to a grouping of wing chairs at the side of the room and pulled one around, sitting on it. He pointed at the file, adopted a conversational tone. ‘You said you read this. So I’m curious – how do you rule out murder?’

‘I start with the Constitution, Lieutenant, by presuming the man innocent.’ When he didn’t comment, she continued with her own perfectly plausible theory on Sal Russo’s death: it was a mercy killing.

‘So you’re saying that from now on, in cases like this the DA decides we don’t need a jury trial to get at the facts? And what do we call this, the mercy rule?’ Pratt glared at him – it was no use arguing legal theory with her. He decided to return to the evidence. ‘Okay, then, what about the money?’

‘His father gave it to him. He loved him. He was still estranged from his other children. Apparently they hated him. Why would he want them to share his money?’

‘Then why didn’t Graham just admit it? Why did he lie about everything we asked him?’

‘He was cornered. He didn’t see a way to get out, so he panicked. People do it all the time.’

‘All right. How about the trauma to the head?’

‘He could have fallen down and knocked his head anytime before he died.’

Glitsky fell silent. There were many other evidentiary points, but he knew that Pratt would have an explanation for how each of them fit her own theory. And, in fact, she might be right. The truth might be exactly what Pratt thought it was.

But Glitsky believed that it shouldn’t be her call. It should go to trial, to a jury. That was how the system worked.

The DA sat back in her chair, fingers at her lips. ‘You know… Abe… I would think you’d be a little more sensitive to this issue. Didn’t your wife suffer terribly?’

His scar tightened through his lips. ‘I didn’t kill my wife. I didn’t help kill her.’

She came forward in her chair. ‘I didn’t say that. But she must have been in great pain.’

Glitsky, too, was on the front six inches of his chair. ‘She was taking drugs. She said they helped. She wanted to live as long as she could. She didn’t want to die.’

‘But what if she had wanted to die, Abe? Wouldn’t you have helped her? Wouldn’t you have wanted to?’

‘Of course I would have wanted to. I probably would have.’

‘And yet you don’t believe that’s what happened here, with Graham Russo and his father? You think what he did was wrong.’

He hung his head. Arguing with Pratt was like trying to move a cloud by pushing on it. ‘No,’ he said with all the patience he could muster, ‘I think what he did was illegal.’

She must have thought she’d convinced him. She put her elbows on the desk and spread her palms as though releasing a little bird she had between them. ‘Then the law should be changed.’

David Freeman’s associates called his conference room the Solarium. Under a glass-and-steel enclosure, rubber trees, ficus, lemons proliferated. Visible through the forest, outside, was an enclosed and landscaped courtyard, and this added to the greenhouse feel.

Dismas Hardy sat under the foliage at an elliptical mahogany table with Michelle Tinker. Demure to the point of shyness, Michelle possessed what Hardy knew to be a brilliant legal mind – far more focused, he thought, than his own. Freeman kept her on because, even though she was tongue tied before juries, she had a seemingly boundless aptitude for work and minutiae. And that’s exactly what Hardy had told Freeman he needed after he’d come in this morning.

He was going to be working with Graham Russo, and that case was going to take some significant portion of the time he was now giving to Tryptech. Would Freeman mind letting him borrow a workhorse who would take off some of the Tryptech load? Freeman, not very convincing hiding his pleasure at Hardy’s decision to take the criminal case, had been glad to comply.

Michelle had both an accounting and a law degree. In her mid-thirties, she was married with no children. Once you got beyond the shyness, she was friendly and well spoken, totally professional. Hardy knew Dyson Brunei would get along well with her, and she jumped at the invitation to assist with Tryptech. The lawsuit was all numbers and paper – she’d never see a jury, possibly not even a judge.

It was nearly five o’clock and Hardy had been getting her up to speed for the better part of two hours, outlining the issues, trying to acquaint her with the players. If Michelle’s questions were any indication, she seemed to have absorbed most of it.

His files were in cardboard boxes that he’d carried with him down to the Solarium. Michelle was going to be reading them over the next several days. This was authorized full-time billing.

‘So what about your role?’

Hardy smiled. ‘I’ll keep my finger in, but I’ve got other commitments, and this thing has been eating up all my time – it’s way too much for one person to handle.’

‘But you’ll still be on it? I’m reporting to you, not David?’

Hardy nodded. ‘The buck still stops here.’

‘Where?’

They turned to see Freeman, just back from court, a sartorial mess as usual, standing in the doorway. ‘Where does the buck stop? With you? You stealing my associates?’

Hardy nodded. ‘As we discussed. Michelle’s going to help me out with Tryptech. She said she had the time.’

Out of force of habit Freeman glared at them both, but then he focused on Michelle and his look softened. ‘Watch this man,’ he said, ‘he’s unorthodox and dangerous.’

Freeman reached into his breast pocket and extracted a cigar. Thoughtfully, he bit off the end, spit the tip into his hand, and deposited it into one of the potted plants. Finally, he spoke to Hardy. ‘When’s the last time you saw Graham Russo?’

‘After lunch,’ Hardy replied. ‘Couple of hours ago in jail. Why?’

Freeman was famous for his dramatic flair in the courtroom. He played it out now, lighting his cigar, taking his time, exhaling a long plume. ‘Nobody’s called you?’

Hardy didn’t like the sound of this. ‘No, nobody’s called me. Quit the games, David, what’s going on? Is Graham all right?’ He was up out of his chair.

‘I’d say he’s probably better than the last time you saw him. The word at the Hall was they were letting him go. I’d’ve thought somebody would’ve called you.‘

‘In a startling development today, District Attorney Sharron Pratt has announced in a special press briefing that she has declined to file charges against Graham Russo, the lawyer and former federal court clerk who’d been arrested in the apparent assisted suicide of his father, Sal.’

Hardy sat in the Little Shamrock at the far end of the bar, watching the television above it. It was still light outside the wide front windows, though traffic had thinned out on Lincoln Boulevard. Frannie would be here soon to meet him for the sacred and traditional Date Night – nearly every Wednesday since they’d been married. They would most often meet at the Shamrock – Hardy would drive halfway home, Frannie would cab it halfway downtown – and go someplace for dinner, maybe a movie, some live music.

Hardy sipped his stout and glanced up again at the tube.

Pratt’s face filled the screen, the six-second sound bite all the pols lived for. ‘I’ve read the file on this case and the autopsy revealed an advanced, irreversible brain tumor. Mr Russo was in great pain with no hope of recovery, and whoever helped ease him from this mortal coil should be congratulated, not prosecuted.’

Frannie was suddenly at his elbow, a married kiss on the cheek, pulling up the stool next to him as the television reeled her in.

The pretty young newscaster was continuing. ‘Right-to-die groups across the country have already begun applauding the DA’s action, while police officials here in the city refused to comment on Graham Russo’s arrest or subsequent release. Russo’s attorney, Dismas Hardy, who denied his client had killed anybody, said Mr Russo had no plans to sue the city for false arrest, so that may be the end of this episode, but sources at the Hall of Justice say they wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

‘That would be you,’ Frannie said. ‘Dismas Hardy, not the sources at the Hall of Justice.’

‘That’s me,’ he agreed. ‘Fame and glory.’

But the story wasn’t over. The screen widened to include the Serious Anchor. ‘One thing seems certain, though, Donna – the district attorney’s controversial decision will inflame the already heated national debate over assisted suicide.’

‘That’s a good bet, Phil. This was a political broadside by Sharron Pratt. No doubt of it. It’s going to have ripple effect.’

Phil nodded sagely and met the camera’s eye. ‘And meanwhile, our Bay Area Action News team has learned that the state attorney general’s office has not ruled out its own investigation into Sal Russo’s death. Graham Russo is a free man tonight, but who can say for how long?’

‘Who indeed, Phil?’

Hardy stood and went around behind the bar. He reached up and turned off the television. ‘How can there be so many idiots? Where do they come from?’

‘How’d you get Graham out of jail so fast?’ Frannie asked.

So it didn’t look as though the old TV-as-cultural-nemesis distraction was going to work with his wife tonight. He’d have to develop a new technique. ‘I didn’t,’ Hardy replied. ‘He just got out. Pratt let him go. What are you drinking?’

Frannie was white-wining, and Hardy waved Alan off and poured it himself while he was behind the bar. He went to the jukebox and put on Van Morrison. ‘Moondance’ was thirty years old and still sounded to Hardy as though it had been recorded yesterday.

He pulled up next to Frannie. A better kiss. ‘Okay,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘it is seven oh four and we are officially on a date. Now, for the record, I didn’t do anything with Graham Russo. Well, that’s not true. I talked to him in jail. How were the kids today?’

‘Notice the clever way he tries to change the subject.’ Frannie sipped her wine. He had to admit it, she was good, sticking right to the subject at hand. ‘The kids were fine. Nobody broke any bones. They had two fights after school, one less than usual. Do you think you and I ought to talk about Graham Russo? I thought if he went to jail you were out of it.’

‘I did too.’ Hardy tipped his glass up. ‘Then he went to jail.’ A shrug. ‘I couldn’t just drop him.’

‘No, you wouldn’t be able to do that.’ Frannie sighed. ‘So how did he get out? You really had nothing to do with it?’

‘Nada. Pratt just let him go. You heard Donna and Phil, so it’s got to be true. It was political.’

‘I also heard the case wasn’t over.’

‘That may also be true. In fact, I’m pretty sure of it. But I’m not certain he killed his father at all.’

Frannie put her glass down. ‘I thought he did. I thought that was a given.’

‘You’re not alone.’

‘So what did happen?’

‘I don’t know. I get the impression he might be protecting some doctor, somebody he knows. Maybe one of his family. He’s adamant he didn’t kill his dad or help him kill himself.’

She reached over and covered his hand with hers. ‘But, Dismas, don’t all clients say that, especially at first?’

‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘Still…’

‘Still you want to believe him.’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m intrigued, I guess.’ Suddenly, he snapped his fingers and jumped up.

‘What?’ Frannie asked.

He was behind the bar, rummaging. ‘Something I just remembered,’ he said, pulling out the phone book, opening it on the bar.

‘Who are you looking for?’

He ran a finger down the page. ‘Singleterry,’ he said. ‘There’s only four of them. No Joan, though.’ He told Frannie about the money, about Graham’s explanation, where Sal had wanted it to go. ‘Do you mind if I make a call or two? You have another glass of wine? The phone’s right up front there, you can watch me the whole time.’

‘A thrill a minute,’ she said. ‘Dismas, are we on a date? Are you working now?’ But she touched his hand again. ‘It’s all right. Go.’

In five minutes he was back, frowning.

‘What?’

‘Two of them were home and both of them said I was the second person asking about Joan in the last three days. They didn’t know any Joan.’

‘Okay?’

‘Which means that Graham had called looking for her. Which means maybe he didn’t make up the story about the money.’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘I don’t know, Fran. It might mean he was telling the truth.’

Sarah Evans gave herself an hour to sulk about Graham Russo’s release. It bothered her that she’d gone to all the trouble of investigating and then arresting him, and then the DA had simply let him go. She could fume for the rest of her life if she wanted. But she reminded herself it was only one case in what she hoped would be her long career. And she had done her job. No one had found any fault with her.

The rest of it – Pratt’s decision, the AG’s response – all of that was out of her control.

It wasn’t going to ruin her life, or even her night.

In fact, part of her was almost relieved. She’d thought Graham Russo was about the most attractive man she’d ever met and she hated to think that someone so good looking could be evil inside. That was superficial of her, she knew, and there were a million examples to the contrary, but before she and Marcel had started finding things at Graham’s apartment, she almost allowed herself to feel some kind of connection with the suspect. They were about the same age. He was a lawyer and, like her, a jock.

She had felt his eyes on her. Stupid, but it had been there. It was the first time she’d felt that kind of easy attraction in five years or more. More.

But – a cop to her bones – she wasn’t above using that attraction to get Graham to open up to her, as she’d done at his place. She could smile and feign enthrallment with his every word, and what made it work was that it wasn’t all acting.

And maybe, when she thought about it, it had been as Pratt had thought – Graham helping his father out of his misery. If that had been the case, Sarah didn’t necessarily have a problem with it. She had doctor friends who’d told her about pulling the plug at the request of anguished relatives of suffering patients. She didn’t think the practice ought to be institutionalized, lest it be abused, but she understood it privately.

Or maybe Graham hadn’t been any part of it. Even Strout’s autopsy, she had to admit, called the death suicide/homicide equivocal. In other words, Sal might have killed himself. The forensic evidence didn’t rule out that possibility. In any event, it was behind her now, and she wasn’t going to think about it, not tonight. Her softball team had a game.

She lived alone in a two-bedroom over a grocery store on the corner of Balboa and Fifteenth Avenue. When she opened the door, she stopped on her landing, loving the unusual – in San Francisco, almost unheard of – feel of a warm night. It was great to be in the yellow nylon Blazers shirt, the dark-green shorts, the yellow knee socks. She yanked the gold baseball cap with the green B down over her hair, pulled her ponytail through the adjusting slot in the back.

Forget the cop world. She was thirty-two years old, in great shape. She had the job she wanted and had worked for, but it didn’t rule her every waking moment. She knew it might, though, if she didn’t have other interests.

That was one of the reasons she played serious, organized women’s softball. It relieved the stress. It also guaranteed that she maintained her separate existence outside of the world defined by the Hall of Justice.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the grocery window as she passed it on the way to her car. She looked about eighteen. Life was good. The ball was going to carry a mile.

7

‘Oh, Graham, thank God you’re all right!’ His mother, Helen, rushed down the steps of the Manor in the exclusive Seacliff neighborhood on the northwest rim of San Francisco. He was only halfway up the slate walkway that bisected the enormous sloping lawn, and she ran down to greet him in the warm evening. She barely came up to his neck, but held his shoulders in her hands and pressed her cheek against his chest, a hug.

He put his arms around her and waited. The door to the Manor still hung open, but no one else appeared.

The skin on his mother’s face was as smooth as marble. Though he knew that several cosmetic surgeries stretched it to its limits, the results so far were seamless; she looked a decade younger than her age. This, Graham knew, was fortunate given the person she was married to, the role she played.

Helen had always attracted men, with her wide-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, cornsilk hair. Now, in the warm dusk, dressed in tailored pants and a scoop-necked blue cotton blouse, she could have been Graham’s girlfriend, not his mother. Beyond a doubt, on the outside she was a beautiful woman, as befitted Leland Taylor’s trophy wife.

He wondered if the mom she used to be when she was with Sal, when he’d adored her, before their lives had changed – he wondered if she had looked the same. In his memory her face had had a different quality back then, a softness. It wasn’t the one he was looking at now.

She pulled away and gazed up at him, a hand softly up to his cheek. ‘You look tired, Graham. They didn’t hurt you down there, did they?’

‘It wasn’t even a day, Mom. In and out.’

‘We would have come to see you – to the jail, I mean – but we didn’t know how you… we thought your lawyer would tell us something, but we never heard from him at all. I don’t think we know him, Dismas Hardy, do we? What kind of name is that, Dismas? But it was a mistake, after all, wasn’t it?’

He leaned over and kissed her. ‘It was all a mistake,’ he said. He met her eyes. ‘All of it, Mom. Every bit. I didn’t kill Sal. I didn’t help him die.’

A brief flash of perfect teeth. She took his arm and started steering him up the walkway. ‘Of course you didn’t. Now come on up. The family needs to talk about this. I’m so glad you could come right over.’

After Hardy had dropped Graham back at his apartment, he’d played back his mother’s message. It was the last of a half dozen on his answering machine – she’d called after his release had made the news. He’d taken a quick shower to wash away the jail. Within twenty minutes he’d been on his way to the Manor.

But the message had given him the impression only that his mother had been worried about him. She wanted to see him to make sure he was all right. Apparently, though, this was a misreading. ‘The whole family’s here?’

So his mother’s real purpose in running out to greet him, he realized, was to warn him what to expect when he entered the house, calm him down if he exploded. This was how it had always worked. He was the hothead, the emotional one. Most of the time Mom could neutralize him before he raised his voice or caused anyone to feel any embarrassment, the two cardinal sins in Leland Taylor’s home.

‘We decided earlier today to get together, Graham, after they’d arrested you.’ Holding his arm – protectively? to restrain him? – she stopped walking and looked up at him. ‘We thought we needed a strategy on how to deal with this, this whole situation.’

Graham recognized his stepfather’s involvement in this move. Leland Taylor probably strategized before he washed his hands.

‘Present a united front, you know.’

‘To who?’

But his mother continued, ignoring the question. ‘And then when you got out-’

‘You were all naturally so relieved…’

‘Graham. Of course we were. Don’t be like that.’

‘I hope Leland didn’t lose any business over the scandal. But, oh, that’s right then, why would he? My last name’s different. Nobody would have to know. That’s what this meeting’s about, isn’t it? Keeping a lid on it.’

‘No.’ His mother had been given her marching orders and she was a soldier. No wavering. ‘Emphatically not, Graham. We were worried about you.’

‘Which explains why everybody rushed on down to jail to see how they could help.’

Exasperated, his mother shook his head. ‘I’ve already explained that.’ She stopped one last time at the foot of the stairs that led up to the grand double-doored entrance. ‘Please don’t be difficult, Graham. Try to understand.’

He looked down at his mother’s face. Was it ravished or ravishing beauty? He could no longer tell. Of course, there were no worry lines. Lasers had erased them. He did think – hope? – he read some concern in her eyes, but he couldn’t tell for sure if it was for him or the mission upon which she had been dispatched, and which seemed now to be tottering on the brink of failure.

Helen Taylor’s husband’s family money came from banking. Roland Taylor had founded Baywest Bank in the late forties. Leland senior carried the torch for three decades through the late fifties and had passed it to his only son by the early eighties. Over the years the bank had merged and gobbled and steadily grown.

For a San Francisco entity it was remarkably conservative. The bank did not prefer to lend money to new or small businesses. It did not have a woman or person of color beyond middle management. It did not run touchy-feely ads on the television and had an all but open disdain for, as George called it, the ‘passbook crowd.’

No, Baywest was most comfortable with institutional lending, financing deals cut by men who wore suits at all times during the business day, belonged to exclusive country clubs, traded secrets behind closed doors. The bank knew a lot of secrets. And now Leland junior was at the helm. His stepson, George Russo, though only twenty-seven years old, was a first vice-president.

Through French doors, the formal dining room at the Manor was a couple of elegant steps down from the music room. Neither Leland nor Helen played, but this hadn’t stopped them from purchasing the nine-foot Steinway grand and customizing it with a digital box that played classical music at the flip of a switch. After it had been installed, the couple had discovered that the natural sound of the piano was a little loud for dinner music, so they’d added the French doors to muffle it somewhat.

Now the piano was silent, but the doors were closed anyway. Leland Taylor did not want any staff to be privy to family discussions. Knowledge might be power, he’d often say, but secrecy thrills the soul.

The dining room was round as a plate, the cherry table within it an elongated oval that easily seated eighteen. Tonight, with the unusually beautiful weather, Leland ordered the drapes pulled back. Through the wraparound windows this afforded a view that extended from the Farallon Islands, clearly visible twenty-seven nautical miles off the Golden Gate, all the way around the city to the Bay Bridge and the coast range beyond. Only a few degrees to the right of due north, the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge seemed to float over the headland.

But no one in the room showed any interest in the view. At the end of the table closest to the music room, Leland Taylor sat next to his wife. They weren’t, after all, having dinner, although coffee had been set out, some cookies. Leland was dressed in a dark charcoal suit, a red-and-blue rep tie. He always wore a plain white dress shirt. (‘A white shirt says you’re the boss.’) Graham thought of him as six generations of British inbreeding, and this wasn’t too inaccurate. He was tall and lean, with watery blue eyes, a thickish upper lip, skin reminiscent of pink crepe.

A couple of chairs down to Leland’s right – not, God forbid, directly next to anyone – Graham’s sister, Debra, and her husband, Brendan McCoury, tried and pretty much failed to act nonchalant in the face of all this opulence. Debra had grown up here, but her life situation had changed. This was nothing like home anymore. Brendan had what a portion of the world – although not Leland’s – would call a good job as an electrical contractor. Debra was a veterinarian’s assistant. Because she was a woman – not a particularly stunning or charismatic one at that – to Leland she essentially did not exist. Her presence, and especially Brendan’s, was suffered because in Leland’s view this qualified as family business and Debra technically belonged.

George, like his older brother, Graham, was a big man, well put together. In his three-piece gabardine he commanded the far end of the table, drinking Heineken from a chilled Pilsner glass. Two more bottles were on ice in a small designer cooler on the table next to him.

The entire left-hand side of the table was Graham’s. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he was answering Leland’s opening question, ‘it must be pretty obvious that I didn’t know this arrest was coming. Otherwise, I would have called you all and set up something like this to go over the estate.’

‘Yes, the estate.’ Leland kept a sneer off his face, but Graham heard it. ‘We were surprised to learn of the fifty thousand dollars, Graham. How did Sal get that kind of money? Surely not selling fish. That’s what I’d be interested to know.’

‘It’s not coming to any of us, so what difference does it make?’

‘What are you talking about, not coming to us?’ This was George. He spoke quietly, but nobody was fooled. ‘It gets divided three ways if there’s no will. I looked it up. And there wasn’t a will, was there?’

Graham had resolved to stay calm. He picked up one of the cookies and took a bite to slow himself down. ‘Not as such, but there-’

‘Excuse me,’ Leland interrupted mildly, ‘but if there was no will, Graham, how is it that you are the executor?’

Debra interrupted him. ‘I read it was wrapped.’ Debra was holding her husband’s hand out on the table. Living in the shadow of her stunning, social-climbing mother, she had long ago decided not to compete and now, at twenty-nine, was not so much unattractive as unadorned. She wore no makeup of any kind. Her hair had once shone like Helen’s, but she’d elected not to dye it, and now it was a drab strawberry-blond. She was also five months pregnant and her face had broken out. ‘What does that mean, wrapped? Where did Sal get wrapped bills? And what were you planning to do with the baseball cards? Steal them too?’

Graham nodded across the table at his sister. ‘Yeah, Deb. I was going to steal them. I was trying to screw everybody.’

‘Just like usual,’ George said.

Graham turned down the table, a dangerous smile in place. ‘Fuck you.’

Leland tapped the table for order. ‘Now, now. Let’s keep it civil, can we?’

‘Sure,’ Graham said. His hand was shaking and the coffee threatened to overspill the rim of his cup. He carefully put it down in the saucer. ‘You know, guys, I haven’t had my all-time best day, spending it as I did in jail accused of murdering my father. Then I come here and we play dump on Graham. But I’ll tell you what. You can all go to hell. I don’t need this abuse.’

From the time he’d been a child, when Graham got angry enough, tears came to his eyes. He wasn’t going to have that happen now, or at least he wasn’t going to let his siblings see it. Trying to maintain some dignity, though, he wasn’t about to bolt from the table either. Focusing on the ceiling, he was blinking hard, pushing back his chair, when his mother suddenly spoke sharply, stopping him.

‘For God’s sake. Children, stop. Sit down, Graham! Please. Sit down. You’re right. We’re all just a little overwrought. You know that. It’s been a very emotional time.’

An uneasy silence.

Leland took over again, the voice of reason. ‘Your mother’s right, all of you. It’s been a difficult week all around.’ He cast harsh glances at Debra and George, shutting them up. ‘No one means to accuse you of anything, Graham. But we have some questions and I’m sure that you have answers. We don’t mean to grill you, but they do seem important, don’t they?’

Graham had moved back up to the table. He’d folded his hands in front of him. He was unaware of it, but his knuckles burned white from the pressure. ‘You know, Leland, frankly, they don’t. Frankly,’ he repeated, ‘I can’t understand why Georgie here-’

‘George,’ his younger brother corrected him.

‘Sure,’ Graham said. ‘George. Why George here cares at all about fifty thousand dollars, or even a third of it, which he’s not going to get anyway because Dad wanted it to go to someone else.’

‘Well, that’s one of the questions,’ Leland retorted. ‘Who did your father want this money to go to?’

Down at his end George did his Leland impression, slapping the table three times. ‘First, I think I’d rather talk about why I shouldn’t care about seventeen thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money.’

Graham threw him a withering look. ‘What do you make a year, George – one thirty, one fifty?’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘It makes a difference how much you need seventeen thousand dollars.’

‘Yeah, that’s the way you think, all right, but it’s not a question of how much I need it. That’s completely irrelevant. The issue is that it’s mine, whether I need it or not.’

Graham had that dangerous smile again. ‘You know, Georgie, you’re turning into a fine banker. And it’s not yours anyway.’

Petulantly, his sister spoke up again. ‘Well, regardless of George, we need it. It’s a lot of money to us.’

Next to Debra, Brendan stiffened. If there was one thing Graham knew about Debra’s husband – and he knew more than he wanted to – it was that Brendan didn’t want or need anybody’s help, financial or otherwise, ever. He was a man and he did it his way, on his own, no matter what. ‘We’re doing all right,’ he insisted. ‘We don’t need it.’

‘We do too, Bren!’

‘Don’t argue with me,’ McCoury said. He appeared to be fighting the urge to strike her.

But Leland wasn’t going to referee marital disputes. He tapped the table again. ‘Excuse me, Debra. I don’t think Graham has given us Sal’s intentions here regarding this money.’

‘Excuse me, Leland’ – George again, the mimic – ‘but Sal’s intentions don’t matter. If he didn’t write a will, Graham can do whatever he wants with his third, but Debra and I get ours. That’s the law and he knows it.’

Outside, the sun had gone down and a mother-of-pearl sky was fast going dark. Graham’s patience – not his strong suit to begin with – was at an end. He couldn’t imagine that his father’s money would make even the slightest difference to George’s life. Debra’s, perhaps, for a short time.

His eyes swept the table quickly. This was his nuclear family. More, after Sal’s death, it was every relative he knew on earth, and he felt no connection to any of them.

How had they all come to this? he wondered. What had made the family go so wrong?

Maybe there had never been any hope for them, he thought. Maybe the incompatibility ran so deep, it was structural.

For as long as he could remember, the conflict between Sal and Helen had been apparent. When he’d been very young, Graham hadn’t been able to understand the causes of it, but even to the young boy there had been an obvious discrepancy simply in the way his mother and father were - in their very natures, it seemed – fundamental problems that went deeper than mere differences in the way they did things.

Sal was a second-generation Italian who grew up speaking the language in his home. He loved working with his hands, painting, fixing things, drinking, fishing, being with the guys, telling dirty jokes, and laughing out loud. He played party songs on his accordion. Darkly handsome with a wicked smile, Sal exuded physical confidence. He hugged even his male friends, kissed his wife in public, pinched her ass from time to time.

He was also a talented athlete. Like his son Graham after him, he had been signed to play baseball out of college; the Baltimore Orioles had given him a signing bonus of $35,000. Like his son – as with the great majority of players he never made the big leagues. At Helen’s urging, though, he’d saved his bonus, and had used it to buy his boat.

Helen had been raised on a different cultural plane. Her parents, Richard and Elizabeth (emphatically not Dick and Betsy) Raessler, were well-known jewelers. Helen had gone to Town School, the most prestigious private school in the city. She grew up in fine restaurants, at the opera, theater, symphonies, museums. She was a fine equestrienne – British style – and an outstanding cook.

By the time she was eighteen, she’d been to Europe with her parents five times, to the Far East twice. She met Leland Taylor while they both were in high school, and her parents considered him the perfect match for her, although believing they both should wait until a more seemly age.

Richard and Elizabeth had been torn by Helen’s desire to attend Lone Mountain College, an independent institution but, informally, the women’s adjunct to the University of San Francisco. They would have much preferred one of the eastern women’s colleges – Vassar, Brown – for cultural as well as protective reasons. Lone Mountain was run by nuns and, the Raesslers suspected, those crafty Jesuits.

Plus, Catholics were a much more rowdy group than Helen was used to.

On the other hand, Lone Mountain was close by. Their girl would be at hand and they could keep an eye on her. They would just have to keep her insulated from the riffraff, some of the working-class young men from across the street at USF.

And of course Helen went and fell in love with one of them.

It was 1965 and Helen was a freshman. Sal was finishing his senior year after a hitch in Vietnam, so to Helen he also possessed that indefinable cachet of the ‘older man’ – she was eighteen to his twenty-five.

To say that Richard and Elizabeth were not pleased would be a considerable understatement. When she became pregnant at the end of that first summer, before she and Sal were even officially engaged, they counseled their daughter to get an abortion.

But Helen and Sal wouldn’t have that. They were in love, they would get married and raise their family. When she eloped with the jock fisherman, the Raesslers cut their daughter off.

The slow thaw in relations between the families began at the birth of Graham, a name that, like George and Debra, did not exactly sing with Sal’s Italian heritage. It had been Richard’s father’s name, and Helen persuaded Sal that they should present it – their first child’s name – to her parents as a type of peace offering. Reluctantly, he’d agreed, although the peace never really extended to Sal.

A creeping bribery began. Elizabeth would buy nice clothes for the children and deliver them during the day, when she wouldn’t have to see their father.

Clothes, shoes, Christmas gifts, bicycles. Finally, Richard and Elizabeth wanted their grandchildren to grow up in a safe neighborhood, with the right kind of playmates. They weren’t trying to influence their daughter against her husband. No, it wasn’t anything like that. Sal would grow to be comfortable in Seacliff. They would put the down payment on a suitable place and Sal and Helen would make the monthly payments. It wasn’t a loan or charity. They were sharing equity, that was all. It was a partnership.

Sal hated all of this, but he told himself he couldn’t blame Helen if her parents remained important to her. He let it go on, thinking it a compromise. He was being reasonable, forgiving. It wasn’t so divisive.

Sal was wrong.

By the time Graham was old enough to notice, the difference in his parents was pronounced. Six days a week, before the sun was up, Sal was off fishing in the Signing Bonus. On Sundays he’d play some kind of sports with Graham and Georgie, except when the weather was prohibitive. On those days he’d go out to the garage and paint or drink or both.

In the meanwhile Helen had begun to see her parents more often. The clothes and other gifts had become a way of life. She would often meet her mother for lunch. Sometimes a childhood girlfriend of Helen’s would be invited – always a fashionable young woman married to her doctor or lawyer or accountant – or banker. Leland Taylor might show up and say hello, might inquire after her children.

Sal drew the line at accepting cash money from the Raesslers, but the pressure never let up. He kept thinking that if he could just get ahead on his own, he’d have the legs on which to take a stand. As it was, though, times were always tight. Proud and house poor, Sal could barely keep up with the monthly payments on the Manor.

By the time Graham was thirteen, the foundations of the marriage had begun to erode, but the collapse of the whole structure, when he was fifteen, happened with a jarring suddenness. From Graham’s perspective, one day Sal stopped going to work and the next he was gone from their lives. Completely cut off, as though he’d died.

In less than a year Helen had married again. To spare the children the trauma of another relocation, of more changes and domestic upheaval, Leland Taylor had moved into the Manor.

Perhaps finally, Graham thought, any real reconciliation between the Russo and the Raessler genes was hopeless. The schism was too profound. He was a Russo all the way, Sal’s kid. Debra and George were Helen’s.

Frustrated and angry, Graham pushed his coffee cup away from him, sharply blew out a breath. ‘I’d like a show of hands,’ he said. ‘Does anybody here care at all that Sal Russo died last Friday? That your father is dead. Has that made an impression on anybody here?’

Across the table Debra’s lip trembled at the question, while down at the far end George leaned forward. ‘Oh, please. Yeah, we’re heartbroken, can’t you see? He was such a great dad, always there when you needed him.’

‘Shut up, George,’ Debra said. ‘Don’t talk about him like that.’

‘Why not?’ He raised his voice. ‘Why the hell not?’ The younger brother stood up, nearly knocking his chair over behind him. His eyes were bright with anger. ‘You want us to feel bad that he died? I’ll tell you what – I feel good about it. Relieved. Do you have any idea the hell he’s put Mom through these last few months?’

Helen held up a hand to stop George, but nothing was stopping George, not now. ‘You don’t know anything about that, do you, Graham? All this late-in-the-day touchy-feely nonsense about dear old Dad, and you don’t have a clue the torture he was putting your own mother through.’

‘No. I didn’t know that. What-?’

Leland was firmer than Helen had been. He rapped sharply on the table. ‘We don’t need to speak of that, George. It’s over now. It did no lasting harm.’

‘What didn’t?’

George’s blood was up. He sneered at his older brother. ‘As if you care.’

‘I might if you’d tell me what it is.’

‘Dad came by here, that’s what. He was threatening Mom-’

‘I don’t believe that. That’s not true.’

Leland again. ‘George.’

But the young man couldn’t be stopped. ‘You think anybody believes this deathbed conversion of yours, Graham? You think all of us don’t see right through it?’

Leland tapped the table and said, ‘Son, please,’ but he might have saved his breath.

George was advancing toward Graham, who was out of his own chair now. ‘You know and I know – hell, we all know – he was a lousy father and husband and human being. He deserted us, Graham, all of us, maybe it slipped your mind. What happened was you found out he had some money. And after you blew off your law career, you knew you weren’t getting any more out of Leland, didn’t you? You thought you’d squeeze some cash out of old Sal. Wasn’t that it?’

George had closed to within two feet of Graham. His face had gone red. Suddenly he was on him, pushing at him, backing him up, shouting, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Tell me that wasn’t it, you lying son of bitch! Tell me it wasn’t-’

Graham pushed back, hard. His brother’s leg caught the side of a chair. Graham, pressing his advantage, pushed again, and George went down.

Everyone else was up as Graham whirled around, a hand out in warning. No one should come any closer. George was on his feet again, glaring.

Graham held them all back. His breath was coming in gasps. He took a last look around the table, at his family. Then, half running, the tears threatening to break again, he was past his mother and stepfather, up the steps through the French doors, and gone.

The Blazers had formed a line in the infield. Sarah Evans, who’d run in from left field after the last out, was at the end of the line. ‘Good game,’ she repeated as each of the Wombats came by her, slapping palms. And they said it back to her. It was a ritual, a nod to sportsmanship – they played hard, sure, but everyone realized it was just a game. You congratulated the other team on a good one and then you went home.

The dugout area was a bench behind a low fence, and the Blazers filed into it to grab their bats and equipment bags and clear out for the next team. Sarah, recounting the highlights of the game with some of the other women, suddenly stopped talking and focused on Graham Russo standing behind the fence in his Big Dog T-shirt and Giants hat. Staring at her.

Grabbing her bag – she had her gun in it – she walked out of the dugout and around the fence, up to him.

He smiled easily. ‘I thought that was you. I was pretty sure, actually.’

‘Did you follow me here?’

The question seemed to surprise him. ‘No.’

‘How did you know I was here, then?’

She wished her heart would stop its pounding. She could feel the light nylon fabric of her jersey pulsing to its rhythm.

‘I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I grabbed a burger at the beach and came here to watch a few games, take my mind off some things.’

‘Yeah, I’ll bet.’

He broke another smile. ‘I was cooped up inside most of the day, maybe you heard. It was such a nice night, I thought I’d sit outside awhile. I got a six-pack back in the stands, if you feel like a beer. Watch the late game.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think we ought to be seeing each other. If you think you’re scaring me showing up here, you’re wrong. It’s a bad idea, stalking a cop. I’ll put you back in jail so fast, you’ll forget you ever got out. I hope you’re hearing me.’

A couple of her teammates were passing them on the way to the parking lot. They heard the sharp tone and stopped. ‘Everything all right, Sarah?’

‘Sure. Fine.’ She turned back to Graham. ‘You stay away from me,’ she said quietly. Then, to her teammates, ‘Wait up, I’m coming.’

There were four softball diamonds, one in each corner of the enormous field. Sarah’s game had been on #2, closest to the parking lot, and she could sit in her car and see Graham clearly in the stands – ten rows of raised benches – behind home plate. With her windows down she watched him for twenty minutes. He appeared to be engrossed in the game, occasionally drinking from his can of beer. At least, she told herself, he hadn’t made any move to follow her out to the parking lot. She thought his plan might have been to let her get a head start, then light out after her. But he hadn’t even glanced after her when she’d left. He’d gone back to watch the next games as he’d said he was going to. Maybe he was telling the truth.

Which didn’t mean he hadn’t followed her here. He might have already found out what he wanted – where she lived and played. On the other hand, she told herself, his own explanation made sense. He’d been in jail all day and the city possibly wouldn’t have a nicer night for the rest of the nineties.

She opened her car door and grabbed her equipment bag. Pulling a light warm-up jacket on over her jersey, she crossed the dark space between the parking lot and the stands.

She stood awhile longer, watching him. He was sitting forward, hunched over, his elbows on his knees, his hands dwarfing the can of beer he held between them. His T-shirt stretched itself tightly over the muscles of his back.

The DA had let him go. He wasn’t charged with anything. She could go down and sit with him and there would be no grounds for any professional complaint. She rationalized another half-lie for herself – that he might make a verbal slip with some beer inside him and say something incriminating. She was still in cop mode, working. That’s why she was staying around, why it was defensible to go talk with him.

On the field a young man hit a ball well over three hundred feet, outside the circle of the diamond’s lights. Graham was on his feet, following the trajectory, his face alight with excitement, lost in the moment. It was a child’s look – unguarded, simple, innocent, pure. A doubt flashed briefly in her consciousness: could someone who had committed a murder summon such an expression? She didn’t think so.

She’d changed out of her cleats and now wore running shoes, which made no noise as she walked down the benches. She sat down next to him.

‘Okay, I’ll have that beer.’

He glanced over, his face showing nothing. Casually, he reached under him and pulled up a can, popping the top, handing it to her. ‘You see that hit?’ he asked.

She tipped the can. ‘That letter from your dad,’ she said, ‘you were playing pro baseball?’

He didn’t answer right away. On the field the shortstop went deep into the hole for a ground ball, flipped it back to second, then on to first for a double play. It ended the half inning.

Graham finished up his beer. ‘I thought I could hook on as a replacement during the strike. I couldn’t.’ He risked a look at her. ‘I really didn’t follow you,’ he said. ‘This is where I come sometimes, that’s all. Then I saw you, watched you play a little. I figured, what the hell, we’re both here, I might as well say hello. It didn’t occur to me you’d think I’d followed you.’

‘But I arrested you.’

Graham nodded, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘I did notice that.’

‘Most people,’ she said, ‘you arrest them, they don’t like you anymore.’

‘But then they let me go. They’re not charging me. So you and me, we’re both citizens.’

‘I don’t think so, not exactly. I’m still a cop. You’re still a suspect.’

He chewed on that for a beat, then shrugged it off. ‘Well, guess what? I myself am an officer of the court. And P.S., I didn’t kill my father.’ He indicated the field. ‘You play pretty good, Sergeant. I saw your triple.’

She found herself loosening up. ‘Most exciting offensive play in the game.’

‘So my dad said.’

‘You still think so?’

‘Sure.’

‘Me too.’

‘Well, there.’ Graham pulled another beer from underneath his seat, popped the top. ‘Something else we’ve got in common. You want another one?’

She’d nearly finished the first. Sarah had never been much of a drinker, and she was already feeling the slow warmth of even so little alcohol beginning to spread. ‘I’d better not,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be going. Work starts early.’

‘I remember,’ he said.

She hesitated another couple of seconds, taken aback by his ready acquiescence, surprised at the act of will it took for her to stand. ‘Thanks for the beer,’ she said.

He nodded. She’d gone off a couple of steps when he stopped her. ‘Sergeant Evans?’

She turned.

‘What’s your first name?’

Her face clouded, then suddenly cleared! She shook her head, laughing at herself, then met his eyes. ‘Sarah.’

‘Sarah,’ he repeated. His smile seemed completely genuine. Endearing. ‘I love that name.’

Back in her car, she checked her face in the rearview mirror. She felt absurdly pleased with herself and wondered if it showed. So what? Graham Russo liked her name. Big deal.

The warmth had spread. She told herself it was the alcohol. She’d better be careful driving home.