Dismas Hardy checked his watch. Where was the judge? He was five minutes late. The bailiff had even pulled Graham from the holding cell and sat him next to Hardy, unshackled and in his trial clothes rather than the jail jumpsuit.
David Freeman was sitting at the defense table with Hardy and Graham, and doing it for free. He had joined the defense team – wheedling his way in. Hardy was grateful, not only for the legal assistance, but for the company.
They in were Department 27 in the Hall of Justice on a Monday, the third week of September. As in all of the courtrooms at the Hall, there was no hint of the weather outside, but the morning had been warm and still – unusual in the city for most of the year, but relatively normal in the weeks after Labor Day.
Graham’s trial clothes were a pair of slacks and a sport coat. Freeman and Hardy had decided that a business suit would strike too formal a tone for the jury. They wanted to play up Graham’s ‘regular guy’ image, so for the past week during jury selection, the defendant had appeared in court in a respectful coat and tie, anything but a stuffy three-piece lawyer’s uniform.
Hardy was fighting his nerves. Freeman and Graham were talking quietly to his left. He was half turned away from them, peripherally aware of Drysdale and Soma at the prosecution table across from him on the other side of the courtroom.
He swiveled further to check out the gallery, now filled to bursting for the opening fireworks. Jury selection had taken nearly ten days, with the final juror selected last Friday, just before the evening adjournment. The trial proper was beginning any moment, with opening statements, the first evidence.
Hardy was damned if he was going to spend these last seconds reviewing his notes one last time. When his moment arrived, after he’d listened to Soma’s opening statement, he was reasonably confident that the right words would come in for him. His notes were just that: key phrases, high points, several don’t forgets. He never wanted to see the damn things again.
His eyes raked the gallery, rested for a second on Frannie, who’d surprised and delighted him by saying she wanted to come down to root for him, at least for his opening statement. The kids were back in school. She might bring him some luck. He gave her an imperceptible nod, touching hand to heart as though he were straightening his tie. She saw it and nodded back.
In front of Frannie, Graham’s mother, Helen, who’d come to court for every day of jury selection, imitated a trompe 1’oeil statue. Hardy stared at her for several seconds, during which time she did not so much as blink. Her ash-colored hair was off her face, hands clasped on her lap. A general murmur hovered over the courtroom – people talking, speculating, arguing – but Graham’s mother was by herself, alone, self-sufficient. Neither her husband nor her other son was there, nor had they appeared last week.
Hardy recognized other faces on Graham’s ‘side’ of the gallery, several staff from his office. These were Freeman’s acolytes, here to see the show, especially the opening statements. Freeman had shamelessly pimped Hardy to these Young Turks as a master, and they’d come to see him work his magic.
He’d never lost! Freeman had told them all, and Hardy had rushed in with the clarification that he’d only fought twice. Never losing would have a lot more punch six or eight trials down the line. But they’d come anyway.
Conspicuously absent was Michelle, who had assumed much of the day-to-day responsibility of Tryptech. She was clearly resentful of the trial, of the way Graham Russo had come to consume her boss’s life over the past months, but Hardy thought it was actually working out very well for all concerned. Never a trial lawyer, Michelle was superb in her new role as corporate litigator. Hardy’s billings on Tryptech had dropped to about five hours a week, Brunei’s limit on cash outlay, and Michelle was taking her pay in discounted stock. Hardy hoped that she wouldn’t wind up impoverished by that decision, but she had made it on her own.
On his side also, and it surprised him, was Sharron Pratt herself. The newspapers had it that she planned to attend as much of the trial as her schedule allowed. Barbara Brandt, too, the perhaps-lying lobbyist – a redundancy? – whose face had become familiar, talked nonstop to her contingent by the back doors.
On the other side, behind the prosecution table, in the first row and far to the side, sat Dean Powell, the attorney general of the state of California. Like Pratt he was here to observe, to be a presence.
Hardy glanced over at Freeman and his client, still head to head, chatting amiably. Hardy was too tightly wound up even to feign listening. He blew out heavily, then stopped midway in the breath, lest any sign of his nerves get misinterpreted by the jury. He must forever appear confident, though not too. Grave, friendly.
Juror #4, Thomas Kenner, was looking at him, and Hardy met his gaze, nodding as if they had been acquainted for ages. Leisurely he took in the rest of the panel.
Jury selection had not gone well. In one important sense the final panel failed to be a representative cross-section of the citizenry of San Francisco – and that had been Hardy’s primary goal. In spite of the jury experts he and Freeman had hired, they had nearly been unable to counter the prosecution’s strategy. By the (bad) luck of the draw the jury pool had contained a huge preponderance of men, and though Hardy and Freeman had used their peremptory and other challenges to eliminate as many as they could, still the final panel had eight men, six of whom were white.
It was a generalization, but Hardy had no illusions: these working class men would not be as sympathetic as women would be. Soma and Drysdale had been shamelessly gender biased about wanting men on the jury – all men! Gender bias was okay if you won. Anything was okay if you won.
Of the four women, Hardy had a young Asian mother, an African-American thirtiesish schoolteacher, a divorced white secretary in her fifties, and a young gum-chewer with short hair dyed a bright carmine who read meters for the gas company.
Friday night after the adjournment, after the jury had been empaneled, Hardy and Freeman were having a consolation drink in one of the back booths at Lou the Greek’s. Soma and Drysdale had come in and sat at the bar up front. They were in high spirits, raised their glasses and toasted one another. Hardy heard them clearly enough. ‘Here’s to the best jury in America!’
Freeman, his liver-spotted lugubrious face buried in his bourbon, raised it enough to nod knowingly. ‘Good thing you’re motivated by a challenge,’ he’d said. ‘I’d say you got one.’
Understatement. Freeman’s forte.
Gil Soma’s stridency at the bail hearing, his sharp-edged ironic tone when he’d been with Drysdale and first met Hardy, his obvious, vitriolic hatred for Graham Russo – these examples had all worked to convince Hardy that Soma’s courtroom behavior would not help his case. Jurors would not warm to him.
But this appeared now to have been wishful thinking. Soma was neither arrogant nor stupid, and his easy manner in front of the jury showed that he was aware of his personal shortcomings and had learned to harness them.
Now, attired in his charcoal suit, his muted blue tie, his artfully scuffed shoes (for the common touch – an old Freeman trick), he stood quite close to his mostly male jury and spoke to them quietly, without histrionics, sincerely convinced of the justice of his position.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The defendant, Graham Russo, murdered his father for money.’
There was a minor stir in the courtroom at the drama of the words, but it subsided before Judge Jordan Salter had to intervene. Soma’s eyes never left the jury box, calmly surveying them. ‘In this trial, in the coming days and perhaps weeks, we’ll be presenting a great deal of evidence, an overwhelming array of both direct and circumstantial evidence, that will prove to you, and prove beyond any reasonable doubt, that early on the afternoon of Friday, May ninth, the defendant, sitting right there at the table to my left’ – and here he pointed as naturally as if it had been at a lovely sunset, meeting Graham’s hard glance with a calm one of his own – ‘came to his father’s apartment, and while there, he killed his father with an injection of morphine, took money and property, and fled.
‘There may be evidence that Salvatore Russo – Sal, the defendant’s father – was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and from brain cancer. No one disputes these facts. There may be evidence that on some days the defendant came to his father’s apartment to administer morphine to help Sal deal with his pain. No one disputes this either.
‘But on May ninth the defendant came not as a helper, but as a thief. Not as a healer, but as an assassin.
‘The defense may suggest that Sal Russo was in pain, that he was dying anyway, that somehow the defendant Graham Russo was entitled to decide whether he should live or die. But whether through simple greed or some twisted sense of loyalty, Graham Russo took his father’s property and his father’s life. This the law calls robbery and murder, regardless of motive.
‘We will introduce witnesses who will testify that the defendant was a trained paramedic, skilled in giving injections, that he had nearly constant access to and in fact provided the syringe that was used in this fatal injection, that he obtained, under his own name, a prescription for the morphine he needed to kill his father.
‘We will bring before you a witness, Ms Li, a teller at the defendant’s Wells Fargo Bank branch, who will testify that on the very afternoon of Sal’s death, defendant placed into his own safety deposit box’ – and here Soma paused and lowered his voice – ‘fifty thousand dollars in cash and a collection of baseball cards from the early 1950s worth another many thousands more.’
Hardy had been worried sick about Alison Li’s testimony. But Freeman had noticed a crucial failing in everybody’s reading of Alison’s transcripts. And they had the videotapes anyway.
But the jury wouldn’t get to Freeman’s argument, or to the tapes, for several days, and right now Soma’s monologue was casting its spell.
Graham shifted in his chair. Subtly, Hardy moved his hand over Graham’s sleeve, giving a little squeeze – a message that this was okay, they had known it was going to sound bad at first. Graham was going to have to keep himself under control.
Soma was smoothly proceeding. ‘Sal Russo had his own safe, underneath his bed in his apartment. We will show you a letter from Sal to defendant, on the bottom of which is written, in defendant’s own handwriting, the combination to that safe.’
Several of the jurors made eye contact with one another. Soma’s rendering made an impressive litany of connection, Hardy had to admit. ‘We will show you that defendant was in desperate need of money. He had quit one job and lost another in the space of a couple of months. His work as a paramedic did not begin to cover his monthly costs. He drove a BMW sports car…’
The young attorney was laying out the case in textbook fashion to the jury, who gave every indication of believing him.
Soma paused. ‘Finally, I’m going to ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to listen to police inspectors as they will recount for you the many, many times where they gave the defendant the opportunity to explain his actions, his motives, his behavior. And time and again you will be struck, as I was, by the defendant’s absolute disregard for the truth. He has lied, and lied, and lied again. I will ask for your patience as I walk these inspectors through their interviews with the defendant, before he had even been charged with any crime, and you will hear lie upon lie upon lie.
‘We will prove his lies. We will prove his actions. We will prove his motive. We will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant, Graham Russo, killed his own father out of simple greed – for the money and baseball cards in his safe.’ Soma pointed to Graham one last time, his voice flat and uninflected, relating pure, rational, passionless fact: ‘There sits a murderer.’
At the bench, in the hush that followed, Salter made a few notes, then looked up. ‘Mr Hardy?’
Freeman leaned over around Graham at their table and whispered that they should ask for a short recess. Indeed, that’s what Hardy felt like. Actually, he wanted a long recess – say two to three weeks to rethink everything he thought he’d had clear before.
Naturally, he and Freeman had rehearsed all the probable scenarios they could devise about Soma’s opening statement. They had, in fact, nailed down a close approximation of what they’d just heard; after all, they knew the evidence, and that was all the prosecution was allowed to talk about.
Somehow, though, on this day, with Soma’s low-key delivery (which they hadn’t predicted), the case felt different. Suddenly the jitters gripped Hardy terribly – his stomach roiled with tension. The worst thing he could do, he realized, would be to delay. If he hesitated at all, his nerves would begin to throw off sparks, visible to the jury and his opponents. His doubts about his client and strategy would choke off his words, his throat, his breathing. Worst of all, the jury could use these precious moments to savor and digest the rich nourishment that Soma had just provided them.
In California the defense has the option of delivering its opening statement immediately following that of the prosecution, as a form of instant rebuttal, or waiting until later, at the beginning of the introduction of its own case-in-chief. Hardy had planned all along to deliver his opening right after Soma’s, but suddenly it seemed even more crucial. He had to get up – now! To start.
Brusquely, he shook off Freeman’s hand, not even seeing him really. He was on his feet, aware of a jelliness in his knees, a low-pitched roar in his ears.
At the same time he mustn’t forget that this was performance. He had to appear loose, especially in front of all of these men. If they were like Hardy, and at least a few of them had to be, that’s what they would relate to and respect.
He felt trapped in the endless psychic toll of maleness: weakness kills.
Anger, though, was all right, and was the closest Hardy could get to anything positive. Grim lipped, he got to the jury box and turned all the way around to face Soma. The message was controlled anger mixed with derision. A shake of the head. Hardy was disgusted by the untruth of what he’d just heard.
He was back facing the panel. He tore a page out of Soma’s book, subtly mocking his opponent’s only bit of flamboyance, pointing his own hand at his client. ‘Graham Russo,’ he began, ‘cared for his father, protected his father, and loved his father. These are the primary facts in this case. It is an obscenity that he has been charged with murder at all. Here is the true version of what happened on May eighth and ninth of this year.’
In the course of the trial Hardy would call his client by his first name, much as Soma had referred to him only as the defendant. ‘It’s true that Graham was a regular visitor to his father’s apartment. He went there to administer shots for Sal’s pain, but he also went there to visit, to take his father to dinner, to organize and clean and help with the laundry. He did this regularly for nearly two years, and much more frequently in the last six months of Sal’s life, as the Alzheimer’s progressed and the cancer in Sal’s brain became more debilitating.
‘Over the last few weeks Sal had suffered some rather more serious bouts of forgetfulness. Sal was terrified of being placed in a nursing home. He didn’t much trust the system. Incidentally, he passed that trait along to his son.’
Here Hardy risked an insider’s smile, confident that at least some of these jurors would share the feeling that bureaucrats were perhaps not the earth’s most exalted life form.
‘So what have we got here? We’ve got a simple Italian fisherman who didn’t want to end his life in lonely destitution. On May eighth he was lucid and spoke to his son. He had some money in the safe under his bed, money he’d saved for a long time. His son should take it and put it in a safe place so he could use it for pain medication, for Sal’s rent, for private nursing care in his apartment if it came to that before the cancer killed him. Anything, Sal said, just don’t leave him alone in a home to die.’
Freeman, Graham and himself had argued for hours over the entire Singleterry question, and finally had decided that Hardy’s instincts were right. Twenty-two hundred dollars in ads all over the country had resulted in a whole lot of responses, but no Joan. Sal’s request to Graham might have been genuine – certainly Graham seemed to believe it – but it wouldn’t play here before the jury. So the defense team had reached a consensus: Joan Singleterry must have been someone in Sal’s past, dredged up by the Alzheimer’s, by now quite possibly dead. She wasn’t going to get mentioned at the trial.
Hardy took a beat, realizing as he did that his legs were now firm under him. It was a relief. He looked up and down the panel, making some eye contact where it seemed natural.
‘So, yes, Graham had his father’s money. We will show you that it was on that day, May eighth, that Graham took this money and the baseball cards to his safety deposit box.
‘On May ninth his father called him again. Twice. The pain was terrible. Could Graham come right over when he got the message? The dutiful and caring son, he did go to his father’s apartment one last time.’
And, Hardy thought, here is where it gets tricky.
He took a deep breath. ‘You’re going to learn that Sal Russo died of an intravenous morphine injection. He had had a few drinks. Dr Strout, our city and county coroner, is going to tell you that his death was quick and relatively, if not completely, painless. Sal’s doctor had earlier prescribed for him a form called a “DNR.” It stands for “do not resuscitate.” It’s kind of like a “Medic Alert” bracelet that instructs paramedics to let a person die if that is nature’s course. Sal had his DNR sticker out when he was found. He was a very sick man, in great pain every day, terrified that he was losing the last of his mind, afraid of being sent to a home. This was the man who died. The victim. His son Graham loved him.
‘No murder for money was done here, no murder at all. The prosecution cannot and will not prove to you that Graham Russo killed his father. The evidence will not show that Graham is guilty, because despite all the prosecution’s desperate rhetoric and their urge to make headlines, he is innocent.’
Hardy paused, nodded at the empaneled jurors, and realized that he was done.
‘That little fucker’s pretty good.’ Freeman contentedly chewed his lo mein, his chopsticks poised for the next attack. They were sitting in the holding cell, the only place they could talk to Graham privately during recesses and lunch breaks. The cell was ‘furnished’ with two concrete shelves that served as benches built into the walls, and an open toilet. There was nothing for an inmate to steal or vandalize.
The place was littered with cardboard cartons from the takeout that Freeman had ordered up earlier in the day, as a special treat, from Chinatown. There were also containers of vinegar, Mongolian fire oil, packets of soy and other sauces, extra chopsticks, paper plates and napkins.
‘Gil’s not dumb. He was the star at Draper’s.’ Graham was dipping a duck leg into some plum sauce.
Hardy’s own appetite had disappeared. Even without the stink of the holding cell, ripe and cloying, his opening statement had left his stomach hollow, unsettled. He couldn’t imagine putting any food in it. Freeman noticed; he raised his eyes from his lunch. ‘You all right, Diz?’
Standing at the bars, arms crossed over his chest, looking back toward the courtroom, Hardy lifted his shoulders. ‘Nerves.’
‘You did fine, laid out the boundaries, drew the lines.’ Freeman popped a pot sticker, whole, into his mouth, chewed a moment. ‘It’s all Alison Li. There is no evidence that Graham put the money in the bank within months of Sal’s death. That’s it. We don’t have to prove anything except that. They’ve got to prove what they’ve got no evidence for. And they can’t do that.’
‘Right.’ Graham was all agreement, back to a carton he’d missed on his first pass. ‘Can’t be done.’
Hardy gave them both a weary smile. ‘Well, then, that’s settled. I think I’ll go say hi to my wife.’
‘Bring her in here,’ Freeman said.
Hardy threw a quick glance around at the depressing cell. Shaking his head, Hardy was moving toward the door. ‘I don’t think so.’
She’d waited in the gallery, now nearly deserted during the lunch hour. Greeting him with a kiss on the cheek, she read his mood. ‘Dismas, it wasn’t that bad.’
He pulled down the seat next to her and sat. ‘I can see the Chronicle headline tomorrow: “Russo Defense Not That Bad.” ’
‘It was better than that.’ She put a hand on his knee and squeezed it. ‘You’ll do fine. You’re doing fine. But I notice our friend Abe isn’t hanging around.’
Frannie knew about the original disagreement, of course, but the summer had intervened – the kids home all day, classes and camps and soccer and baseball – and she’d been assuming it had more or less blown over. ‘Are you still in a fight?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘I guess so.’
‘You ought to go see him.’
‘I’ve tried. I don’t know what else I can do. He thinks I’ve sold out somehow, that I’m not the same person.’
‘But you are.’
‘No. I’m defending somebody he arrested not once, but twice. He really believes Graham’s a killer, and not some kind of a mercy killer either. A bona-fide stone murderer. Which is, of course, how cops are supposed to think.’
‘But he’s always been a cop.’
‘I know, and I’ve always gotten the benefit of the doubt. But now Abe thinks I’ve sold myself a bill of goods too – that Graham suckered me and I’m an idiot for believing him.’
Frannie crossed her arms and looked away.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Just that I hope you didn’t. You’re not.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘No way, I’m not.’ He checked the courtroom, making sure it was otherwise empty. ‘Look at Evans, she’s a cop too.’
‘But she’s in love with him.’
‘She wouldn’t have let herself get there if she didn’t think he was innocent.’ He took in his wife’s expression. ‘I love that thing you do with your eyes when you think I’m full of it.’
Frannie smiled at him. ‘All I’m saying is that she could have found herself attracted to him and because of that convinced herself that he couldn’t have done it. That kind of thing has been known to happen. I fell in love with you, for example, before I knew everything about you.’
He grinned back at her. ‘And now that you know? If you’d known back then?’
‘It probably wouldn’t have made any difference.’
‘Which is my point,’ Hardy said.
‘No,’ Frannie countered. ‘It’s my point. Sarah Evans is a cop and she loves him. She doesn’t care if he’s a murderer or not.’
‘He’s not.’
‘I hope not, Dismas. I hope you’re both right. But listening to Mr Soma, I have to tell you I’m not so sure.’
There it was, Hardy thought – an honest take on the respective opening statements, and from his own wife no less, who might have been expected to give Hardy’s side the benefit of the doubt. If Frannie’s reaction was anything like the jury’s – and he had to assume it was close – he was in more trouble than he’d realized.
And he’d thought he’d been in it up to his eyeballs.
From his days as a prosecutor Hardy knew that one of the first orders of business in a murder trial, prosaic as it might seem, was to establish the fact that a murder had taken place. For this reason he predicted that Dr John Strout, the coroner for the city and county of San Francisco, would be the first witness Soma would call. But he was wrong.
It was the first workday of the week. It was directly after the lunch recess. Drysdale and Soma’s first witness was Mario Giotti. Apparently, even Salter had known of this arrangement; the two jurists entered the courtroom from Salter’s chambers. Maybe they’d even had lunch together.
Hardy surmised that this timing had been arranged entirely for Giotti’s convenience. He could come down to the Hall from the federal courthouse during his lunch break, testify immediately, say his piece for the record, endure a (hopefully) brief cross-examination, and be back in his chambers by two o’clock. What galled Hardy was that he and Freeman had been kept ignorant while every other principal in the trial had known about this arrangement. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. Giotti was on the stand, taking the oath.
Judge Salter had restricted the attorneys’ access to the witness box. He didn’t want either Hardy or Soma to intimidate any witnesses by getting too close to them physically. They were to ask their questions from the center of the courtroom. Soma stood there now.
‘Mr Giotti,’ Soma began, ‘can you tell us your full name and occupation please?’
When he got to ‘federal judge,’ there was an audible buzz in the courtroom. Several members of the jury glanced at one another – a lot of juice up there. Soma, shamelessly obsequious, asked Salter’s permission to address the witness either as ‘Judge’ or ‘Your Honor.’ Trying to make a gracious joke, Salter said he would allow it if the court reporter had no objection. He leaned over the podium and asked her approval. She wouldn’t get confused? Everybody had a chuckle, the universe bending over backwards to be nice to the federal judge.
Hardy dared not object. What would he object to? It would alienate Salter and possibly Giotti, and it was better luck to be hit by a truck than to get a judge mad at you.
‘Judge Giotti,’ Soma began, ‘on the night of Friday, May ninth, of this year, can you tell us what you did?’
Giotti knew a thing or two about how to give testimony, and he looked at Soma, then the jury, then sat back and told his story. Although technically witnesses weren’t permitted to give long answers – the lawyer was supposed to ask a series of questions – Giotti evidently wasn’t inclined to do it that way, and Soma let him go on.
‘I went out to dinner with my wife, Pat, to Lulu’s. After we finished, she took her car back home. She’d been downtown earlier in the day and I decided to pick up some papers that I’d left at my office so I could review them over the weekend. My office is at the federal courthouse on Seventh Street, which happens to abut the alley where Sal Russo had his apartment.
‘Mr Russo and I had been friends for many years and I’d made it a habit to buy fish from the back of his truck on Fridays, put it in a cooler in the trunk of my car, take it home for the weekend. On this Friday, Sal hadn’t shown up so I thought I’d go check and see if he was all right. I knew he’d been sick. I was in the neighborhood anyway.’
‘And what did you do then?’ Soma prodded.
The heavy brow clouded. Giotti didn’t appreciate getting prompted. He knew what he had to say and he’d get to it. The scowl faded slowly as he went on. ‘I walked up and knocked on his door. There was a light on inside, but no one answered, so I tried the doorknob and it opened and I saw him – Sal – lying on the floor in his living room.’
‘He was lying on the floor?’ Soma asked.
Giotti’s eyes narrowed. Soma wasn’t scoring points with the judge. ‘I said that, didn’t I?’
Trying to recover, Soma stammered. ‘Yes, you did. I’m sorry, Your Honor. So Sal Russo was lying on the floor? What did you do next?’
Giotti had delivered his message to Soma. Hardy wasn’t about to object. The judge went on without interruption for another couple of minutes. He’d called 911, waited for the paramedics and the police – first two uniformed officers and then the inspectors – noticed the DNR sticker on the table, the syringe and vial, the bottle of whiskey. He didn’t touch anything; he knew the drill. So he just waited, then answered the police questions and went home.
Though he’d guessed wrong on the timing, Hardy had assumed that Soma would call Giotti as a witness at some point, not because of any real strategic reason but simply because it was natural that the person who first came upon the body would be a necessary step in drawing the picture of what had happened. Giotti would fill in that blank.
But that was not Soma’s only rationale. After asking Giotti one or two innocuous questions – a chair had been knocked over in the kitchen; the syringe and empty vial were on the low coffee table – he got to some meat.
‘Your Honor, you’ve testified that Sal Russo was lying on the floor, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was there a chair or something nearby he could have been sitting on?’
Giotti closed his eyes, visualizing. ‘His chair. He had an old recliner he liked. He was on the floor in front of that.’
‘In other words, between the recliner and the coffee table?’
‘Yes.’
Soma went back to his table, grabbed a photograph passed to him by Drysdale, had it entered as People’s Exhibit One, and asked Giotti if the picture captured the reality he’d witnessed upon entered the apartment.
‘That’s the way it looked,’ he agreed. ‘Sal was on the floor, on his side, just like here.’
The image was clear and damaging, its message undeniable.
If something benign had happened, wouldn’t Sal have been sitting in his favorite recliner, at least? Wouldn’t his deliverer have tried to make him comfortable in his last moments? Instead, the victim lay on his side, in a hump on the floor. As though he’d been poleaxed.
Soma left the jury to ponder all of these things. He’d gotten what he wanted, so he thanked the judge and sat down.
Hardy felt that he and the federal judge were basically on the same side, although Giotti was, technically, a witness for the prosecution. His testimony in a fair world – ha! – should have come a little later in the trial, and Hardy had been almost looking forward to it; he thought he’d be able to put some points on the board. But first, now, he’d have to undo some of Soma’s damage.
‘Judge Giotti,’ he began, ‘you were good friends with Sal Russo, weren’t you?’
A nod, genial. ‘I’d known him for years, although we didn’t socialize much anymore. We were close acquaintances.’
‘And as his close acquaintance, did you see him often?’
Giotti considered this. ‘As I said, almost every Friday I’d pick up some fish when I wasn’t traveling. Once or twice I’d gone up to his apartment and had a drink with him. End of the day, end of the week.’
‘On your visits to Sal’s apartment for drinks, did he sit in his recliner?’
‘Sure. Yes.’ Then Giotti threw him a bone. ‘Sometimes.’
‘But not always?’
‘No.’
‘Where did he sit other times?’
‘Your Honor!’ Soma spoke quietly, reluctant to intrude upon Giotti’s testimony. ‘This is irrelevant.’
But Salter didn’t think so. ‘Overruled.’
Hardy repeated his question about where Sal sat. ‘He’d sit anywhere,’ Giotti said. ‘Sal was a free spirit. He’d sit on the coffee table, on the recliner, the couch, the floor. He’d move around.’
‘So he could have been sitting on the floor when he received this injection and-’
‘Objection!’ This was Drysdale, citing speculation, and this time Salter sustained him.
Hardy turned back to his table, and Freeman was surreptitiously motioning him over, so he pretended he was getting a drink of water. ‘What?’
Armed with Freeman’s quick advice and the photograph, he returned to the witness. ‘Judge Giotti,’ he said, ‘looking here at People’s One, is the reclining chair in a reclining position?’
Freeman, of course, had spotted that it wasn’t. In the picture it appeared to be straight up, and Giotti said as much. ‘Now, to the best of your recollection, was it like this when you entered the room?’
Giotti closed his eyes again briefly. ‘I’d say yes. I don’t remember it being down. I would have had to push it up to walk around it, and I didn’t do that.’
This was good enough and Hardy would take it. He could later argue that Sal’s body had simply either fallen out of its chair or, better, that he’d been seated on the floor when the injection was given. In all, he was heartened. Giotti had helped him. The jury would at least have some possible alternatives to consider. He considered it was time to move to the other point he’d originally intended to bring up.
‘Judge Giotti, you’ve testified that you were aware that Sal was sick. Did you know he had Alzheimer’s disease?’
‘Not for sure, no.’
‘Did you know he had cancer?’
‘Your Honor!’ Soma was behind Hardy, objecting, his voice developing its telltale shrillness. ‘I fail to see relevance.’
And of course, in a legal sense, there wasn’t much. But Hardy felt he had to get some human feeling for Sal’s pain into the proceedings. He had a sense Giotti would cooperate.
First, though, Salter had to be gotten around. And the trial judge seemed to agree with Soma; Hardy’s questions were irrelevant and unnecessary. But Giotti’s authority cut both ways in the courtroom, and when he looked up at Salter and told him he didn’t mind answering – though this was beside the point – Salter acquiesced and overruled the objection.
Giotti turned back to Hardy. ‘The headaches were evidently pretty horrible. Sal told me’ – now Giotti looked over to the jury, speaking to them – ‘half kidding, but you knew he meant it, that if I didn’t see him for a few days, I should check his apartment. He might be dead. If he didn’t die from the pain, he might just kill himself.’
‘And is that why you did just that on May ninth? Stop by his apartment?’
‘Essentially, yes. I think he’d planted that seed.’
Hardy nodded, pleased that he’d gotten it in. ‘He knew he was going to die soon, is that what you’re saying?’
Drysdale: ‘Objection, speculation.’
‘Sustained.’
Hardy: ‘I’ll rephrase, Your Honor. Judge Giotti, did Sal Russo ever seriously tell you he thought he was near death?’
Drysdale again: ‘Objection.’
But Salter overruled this one, and Giotti nodded. ‘Yes. He told me he’d be dead within a couple of months.’
‘He knew that?’
‘He thought he did, yes.’
‘Thank you, Your Honor. That’s all.’ He turned to Soma.
‘Redirect?’
But the prosecutors realized that perhaps, for all their fawning, Giotti was not exactly in their pocket, and they passed the witness.
As soon as the judge had left the stand, before he was through the bar back into the gallery, Salter pointed down at Soma with his gavel. ‘Your next witness?’
‘The People call John Strout.’
The tall man with the Deep South accent moved from the gallery into the bullpen, took the oath, and went around to the witness chair. Strout testified about once a week in one case or another and was a recognized forensic expert throughout the country. He often traveled to other jurisdictions to render second opinions on ambiguous causes of death. So he sat back, legs crossed, languidly at home on the stand, while Soma got his name, occupation, experience, on the record, asked the first few predictable questions.
Then, ‘In other words, Dr Strout, are you saying that twelve milligrams of morphine injected directly into the vein is sufficient to cause death?’
Hardy thought if Strout were any more relaxed up there, he’d be dead. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t paying attention. He corrected Soma. ‘Twelve milligrams intravenous could be sufficient to cause death, especially if there were other factors such as alcohol.’
‘And was there alcohol in the case of Salvatore Russo?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much?’
‘Well, his blood alcohol level was point one oh.’
‘And is that a lot, Doctor? Was Sal Russo drunk?’
‘In California he was legally drunk, yes.’
Hardy didn’t have any idea where Soma was going with all these questions about Sal and drinking, and that worried him. So what if Sal had been drunk? How did it relate to Graham? How could it hurt him?
‘Now, Doctor, could the alcohol level in the victim’s blood contribute to the effect the morphine might have?’
Strout took his time, wanting to be precise. After a moment he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in the witness box. ‘Yes, it could have.’
‘In what way?’
‘With that much alcohol aboard, the morphine would have caused his blood pressure to drop rapidly.’
‘Almost instantaneously?’
Strout nodded. ‘Almost.’
‘And then what would happen?’
‘Well, with no blood pressure, you get no blood to your head and you pass out.’
This was the answer Soma expected, and he nodded, pleased. ‘But if Sal Russo injected himself and went unconscious, he would not have had time to remove the needle from his arm, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in this photo’ – Soma entered the Polaroid print into evidence – ‘can you see the syringe on a table near the body with the cap in place over it, Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, assuming that the needle was found as shown in the photo, and assuming further that Mr Russo did fall unconscious from the combined effect of alcohol and morphine, it is true, is it not, that this scenario is not consistent with Sal Russo having administered the morphine himself?’
‘Yes,’ Strout replied. ‘Assuming those facts as true, this morphine was not self-administered.’
Hardy scribbled a note. He would hammer Strout with all of this ‘consistent’ and ‘inconsistent’ in his cross-examination, but he understood Soma’s point, and he thought the jury would too. Soma made it sound as though Strout were saying that someone had killed Sal Russo. It wasn’t a suicide.
But Soma, well on his way to establishing that, had more, and not in the category of maybe. ‘Dr Strout, was there any evidence of trauma on the victim’s body?’
Strout nodded, going on about the bruise to the head, behind the ear.
‘Could this bruise have knocked the victim out?’
‘Briefly. Yes, I think so.’
‘Do you know what could have caused this bruise?’ Hardy objected, citing speculation, but was overruled. This fell well within the doctor’s realm of expertise. ‘Well, whatever it was didn’t cause a concussion and left no imprint on the skull. I can say only that it was a relatively heavy blunt object without sharp edges.’
‘Such as a whiskey bottle?’
‘Objection. This is speculation, Your Honor.’
‘Overruled.’
‘Yes,’ Strout answered. ‘This would be consistent with the whiskey bottle at the scene.’
Soma kept at it, staccato style, barely taking time to draw breath between questions. ‘How about the injection site? How did that look?’
‘Well, there was trauma there too.’
‘What do you mean by trauma?’
‘In layperson’s terms the skin and muscles were slightly torn as the needle was coming out. Like a deep scratch.’
‘Not as the needle was going in?’
‘No. Definitely not.’ A small but important point, since a skilled shot-giver like Graham wouldn’t have botched the injection itself, whereas a jerk or a struggle after the needle was in could happen to anyone.
Soma thanked Strout and walked back to the prosecution table, where he glanced at some papers on the desk. Hardy was ready to pounce with objections should Soma, as he expected, try to wrap it up.
The picture, Hardy thought, was clear enough. Somebody loaded the victim up with alcohol, then hit him on the head, knocking him out long enough to get the shot in the vein, in the middle of which Sal jerked, either in spasm or waking up.
All of that would be speculation on Strout’s part, and not admissible.
But Hardy didn’t get his opportunity to object. Soma simply turned to him, amicable and professional for the jury’s benefit. ‘Your witness.’
Hardy took it right to him. ‘Dr Strout, did Sal Russo kill himself or did somebody kill him?’
Crossing his legs to get more comfortable, Strout settled in the witness chair. ‘Well, from the pure forensic evidence, it could have been either.’
‘Are you saying there is no way to tell, from a strictly medical standpoint, whether Sal Russo killed himself or someone else killed him?’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’ Strout waited. An experienced witness, he wasn’t about to lead an attorney so he could be interrupted and made to look unprofessional.
Hardy nodded, apparently intrigued with these unearthed truths. ‘Is there anything in the forensic evidence, Doctor, that would lead you to think one is more likely than the other?’
Strout thought this over briefly. ‘No.’
‘What about this bruise on the head we’ve heard about? Did that contribute to Sal Russo’s death in a medical sense?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘No, not at all. It was possibly enough to knock out Mr Russo, but it had nothing to do with his death.’
Hardy feigned a small surprise, bringing in the jury. ‘Doctor, did you just say that this bruise was possibly enough to knock out Mr Russo?’
‘Yes. It could have.’
‘And are you saying it might not have?’
‘That’s right too.’ Strout was showing a hint of impatience. ‘I said it wasn’t very serious.’
‘Yes, you did, thank you, Doctor. Essentially it was just a bump on the head, isn’t that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, was the head trauma suffered before or after the injection?’
‘I can’t say.’
‘So Sal Russo might have injected himself, fallen over, and hit his head?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if the head injury happened before the injection, can you tell how long before could it have happened?’
Strout thought for a moment. ‘Only from the bruising, within a day or two.’
Hardy feigned shock and disbelief. ‘Doctor, do you mean you can’t even say that Sal Russo got the bump on his head on the same day as his death?’
‘Not for sure.’
‘Not for sure. Well, then, Doctor, is it correct to say you don’t know if this bump on the head has any connection at all to Sal Russo’s death?’
‘Yes, that would be correct.’
‘Good.’ Soma had wanted to use Strout’s testimony to prove that a murder had taken place, but Hardy didn’t think it was going to work. He started hammering at another nail. ‘You’ve also told us about a trauma at the injection site. You said it was consistent with someone injecting Sal with the morphine. Yes?’
‘Correct.’
‘But it’s also consistent with Sal Russo injecting himself, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s true too.’
‘Sal Russo might have jerked as he was injecting himself, mightn’t he?’
‘Objection!’ Soma stood, which Hardy took as a good sign. The trial had barely begun, and already the younger attorney’s placid demeanor was showing signs of turbulence. ‘Speculation, Your Honor.’
This was overruled. Hardy tried to keep his face neutral. Strout said he was correct: Sal might have jerked as he was injecting himself.
Hardy nodded genially and pressed on. ‘Doctor, there’s one last point I’d like you to clarify. Didn’t you tell Mr Soma that Sal Russo had a blood alcohol level of point one oh, and that because of this, he might have become unconscious while the needle was still in his vein, and therefore not have been able to withdraw it?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said.’
‘You said this scenario was consistent with your finding, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But consistent only means it could be true, not that it is true. You can’t rule out other scenarios, can you?’
‘No.’
‘So even with Sal Russo’s elevated blood alcohol, might this just as easily not have happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘In other words, Doctor, just to be perfectly clear about this, there is nothing in your findings or testimony that indicates that Sal Russo did not kill himself. Would that be an accurate statement?’
‘Yes.’
‘This could be a simple suicide, couldn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Salter was frowning and Hardy liked the look of it. When you get a coroner saying you don’t necessarily even have a crime, an overworked judge might find himself wondering why he was presiding over a murder trial.
Hardy thanked the witness, but before he’d gotten back to his table, Soma was up on redirect. ‘Dr Strout,’ he said, ‘you’re not saying that this was a suicide, are you?’
‘No.’
‘And why was that?’
Strout shrugged, a drop of impatience finally leaking out. ‘There was just no way to tell, one way or the other.’
Hardy went home for dinner, stayed for most of two hours, kissed his little darlings good-night, then headed downtown again, first to the jail to keep Graham company and discuss the day’s events and their ongoing strategy, then back to his office for a more critical postmortem with David Freeman.
When he got back home at eleven-fifteen, he was ready to collapse and not altogether thrilled to find Sarah Evans at his dining-room table, talking with Frannie over coffee cups. ‘If that’s decaf,’ he said, ‘I’ll have some, though I’m philosophically opposed to the idea of it.’
His wife offered a cheek for a kiss.
In the past months Evans had become Sarah. The midnight phone calls gave way to the occasional meeting here at the house. She and Frannie, close to the same age, had interests in common. Sarah was talking about getting married, having babies; Frannie now about joining the police department. Both wanted all this to happen in the future sometime. They’d had some good discussions. Frannie said, ‘Sarah and I have decided that when the kids are gone, I should be a cop. Not a family counselor after all.’
Hardy pulled up a chair. ‘Good idea, I mean it. Fast times, great benefits. A really swell clientele. You’d enjoy it. But do you want to hear my idea about after the kids are gone?’
‘Okay, what?’
‘You travel the world and go to exotic ports with your retired husband and be his love slave.’
Frannie put a hand over his. ‘The reason I love him,’ she said. ‘It’s that wacky sense of humor.’ Frannie parted his hand. ‘He’s had a long day.’
Mentioning Hardy’s day brought them all back to reality, but especially Sarah. It was why she had come over. As a witness she wasn’t allowed in the courtroom. She’d worked in the field all day and by now was a wreck, needing to know how it had gone. Hardy was honest with her. ‘It’s Soma’s turn. He gets to lay out his case first. Later I show up and slay him.’
Not amused, Sarah sighed. ‘I just don’t feel like I’ve done enough.’
‘You’ve done more on this case than any cop I’ve ever heard of, Sarah.’
‘It still doesn’t feel like enough. If they’ve only got one suspect and that’s Graham, then all Soma’s got to do is make the murder and there’s no other option.’
Hardy knew that this was mostly true, and it wasn’t much comfort to him either. And he didn’t even want to start on his fears about the jury. Putting a good face on it, he kept his tone light. ‘He won’t make the murder.’
‘But, Dismas, it was a murder. You and I both think it was a murder.’
‘You do?’ Frannie suddenly asked.
Uh-oh, Hardy thought. He hadn’t consciously been trying to hide anything from Frannie, but neither had he wanted to burden his wife with all the ins and outs of the case. She had her own life she was handling here on the home front, and much more efficiently, he felt, than he was handling many parts of his.
He had outlined for her the general theory of his defense and told her that he honestly believed that Graham hadn’t done it, but not that someone else had.
One of Frannie’s main complaints about her husband being involved with murder trials was the fact that he would be working with someone who had killed someone on purpose and thus had a slightly better-than-average chance of doing it again, perhaps to his attorney and/or attorney’s family.
Now Hardy shrugged. ‘It could have been. We knew that.’
Frannie played with it for a while, then balled a fist and brought it down on the table. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Just shit.’
‘What?’ Sarah asked. ‘Didn’t we know it?’
‘We knew it,’ Hardy assured her. ‘Frannie didn’t.’
Sarah reached a hand over the table. ‘That’s what I’ve been looking for all this time, Fran. Who killed Sal.’
Her flat, stunned gaze went from one of them to the other. She let out a deep breath. ‘I’m going to bed.’ And she was up and out of the room.
Sarah started to rise, to follow her. ‘Let her go,’ Hardy said ‘It’s all right. I’ll talk to her.’
She sat back down, arms crossed. ‘I’m sorry, I thought… I should go.’
‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘I want you to understand that we’ve got an outstanding defense going here. Even David Freeman thinks it’s good, and he’s Mikey as far as I’m concerned. It’s going to work. I believe it will work.’
‘And what if it doesn’t?’
He didn’t answer. There wasn’t an answer.
Sarah had her elbows on the table and blew into her steepled hands. ‘I could just quit my job,’ she said. ‘I could work on it full time.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘You’re better inside.’
‘I’m no good. I haven’t found anything. Sal wasn’t carrying anybody’s money that I can find. Hadn’t for years. Not even a sniff of it. Nobody killed what’s-his-name for his fish business.’
‘Pio,’ Hardy said, hating his damned memory.
‘I should go strong-arm George, Graham’s brother. Shake him down. Find out where he was.’
‘And get fired?’
‘It doesn’t matter. If he did it…’
Hardy reached across the table and touched her elbow. ‘Slow down. Slow down. Take a breath.’ He waited. ‘Listen, this is always the worst, after you’re committed and you don’t know how it’s going to go. You just got to believe you made the right decision, that’s how it’s going to work.’
‘But I can’t just sit here! I can’t!’
‘Graham’s just sitting there.’
This seemed to hit home. She took a breath, let it out heavily. ‘So? What then? I can’t believe we’ve got a righteous suspect with no alibi and nobody’s even-’
‘No, we don’t. Who’s that?’
‘George.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘George is not any kind of suspect. He doesn’t need an alibi. Nobody saw him near Sal’s, ever. There’s no prints, no medical background, no real knowledge of his father’s situation, even. If he was going to kill Sal out of rage, he would have done it differently. If he knew he was going to die soon anyway, why would he do it at all? Besides, he wouldn’t let his brother go to prison for the rest of his life.’
‘I bet he would if it came down to either Graham or him.’
Hardy pondered a moment. ‘Look, Sarah, it wasn’t Graham, right?’
‘Of course.’
‘He really didn’t do it? That’s what you think?’
She stared at him. ‘You do?’
‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. He didn’t do it, so I’m going on the assumption that they can’t prove he did. That’s the system. I’ve got to believe in it.’ In fact, Hardy had serious doubts about the system, and supposed that Sarah did, too, but this wasn’t the time to air them. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if it makes you feel better, use some police magic and see if you can find out where George went, get some hard evidence: maybe he used a credit card, made a phone call.’
‘I wish Abe-’
Hardy shook his head, stopping her. ‘Abe’s got a suspect in custody. How is he going to justify continuing an investigation?’
Sarah sighed. ‘I know,’ she said at last. ‘I know. It’s just so frustrating.’
‘And you’re on the list for tomorrow, right?’ Meaning the witness list – she would probably be called the next day. ‘You ought to get some sleep. It’ll look better with a little rest.’
She sighed a last time and stood up. ‘Do you want me to go in and talk to Frannie?’
‘That’s all right,’ Hardy said. ‘We’ll work it out.’
Frannie was asleep, lying on her side facing away from his half of the bed. Her breathing was neither regular nor heavy, but she was asleep.
That was her story and she was sticking to it.
Hardy’s official workday the next morning carried over the tension from his kitchen. He’d finally fallen asleep after one o’clock and was up at five-thirty, going over his notes, trying to second-guess what would happen in the courtroom that day.
Frannie did not get up to make his coffee.
He was out of the house – he had to be out of the house – by seven-thirty, just as the kids and his wife were getting to the breakfast table. Kiss the kids good-bye – all he was doing anymore with them. Eyes from Frannie, no words in front of the children. Tonight maybe.
Then, at the Hall, waiting and waiting for his partner and co-strategist, David Freeman, who hadn’t arrived by the time the bailiffs brought Graham into the holding cell, surfer hair combed back neatly. He was putting on his civilian coat and tie at a few minutes after nine o’clock.
‘Where’s Yoda?’ Graham had christened Freeman after the Star Wars gnome. Hardy thought it a fairly astute characterization.
‘I don’t know. Probably doing a little cold-fusion work, keep his hand in.’ Studied nonchalance. In truth, though, Freeman’s absence left him with a low-voltage sense of unease – a good-luck charm misplaced. As though he needed any more bad vibes. But there was no point harping on it. Other matters pressed.
Hardy looked around behind him, lowered his voice. ‘You talk to Sarah this morning? She came by my house last night. She wants to go after your brother.’
‘I know. We talked about it.’ Graham’s massive hands were making confetti from the edges of a yellow legal pad. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad idea.’
‘You don’t? You did last time I asked.’ In the early days, when Hardy was gearing up for his ‘some other dude did it’ defense, he’d questioned Graham about George’s motives and opportunities. Graham had laughed at him; there was no chance his brother could have been involved. Now he was singing a different tune.
Graham looked as though he’d eaten some bad cheese. ‘Maybe I’m finally getting pissed off. I’ve been thinking about me, you know, my situation here’ – he motioned toward the door to the courtroom – ‘all this. But you know what?’
The eyes seemed to reach all the way into his soul. This was no act, or if it was, it was one Hardy hadn’t seen before in nearly five months of daily contact.
‘What?’ Hardy asked. ‘But quiet, okay?’ He raised his eyes, suddenly aware of voices from the courtroom, from the jury box, which was haphazardly filling up.
Graham leaned in toward him. ‘Somebody did kill Sal, Diz. That’s the thing. With all this concentration on getting me off, we kind of pushed that under the rug. Now I think about it, I want the son of a bitch, I don’t care if it’s Georgie.’
‘And you think it is?’
‘I’d like to make sure it isn’t, let’s put it that way. You know what I think? You know how I told you if Leland pays you, he gets something for it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What he’s getting here is keeping you off his favored son.’
Maybe on more sleep, with Freeman at his side and his wife not mad at him, Hardy would have reacted more coolly. But he felt a rush of blood, heard a pounding of it in his ears. He clipped it out. ‘I hope I’m not hearing you say you think I’m in Leland’s pocket.’
‘Easy, Diz. I don’t think you meant to be.’
‘I’m just too stupid to see it, right?’
Part of it, of course – suddenly clear – was that it could have been true, and Hardy in fact hadn’t seen it. By paying Hardy’s bills for Graham’s defense, Leland Taylor had effectively defused any investigations Hardy might have otherwise considered pursuing within the Taylor family.
Graham shrugged. ‘It’s an obvious stone and it’s unturned.’
‘There’s no way to turn it.’ Hardy’s voice echoed in the holding cell. ‘Glitsky won’t look at it. Sarah risks her job if she…’ He shook his head. ‘You know this. There’s no way.’
Graham remained calm. For one of the very first times Hardy got a glimpse of the legal mind that had gotten his client his federal clerkship. ‘There’s no way without alienating Leland, that’s true. And he’s set us up so we won’t. It’s subtle and it’s sweet, and that’s the way my stepfather works.’
‘You think he’s protecting George?’
Another shrug. ‘I know from Mom that he doesn’t know where George was. I know it worries the shit out of him. And Leland thinks a couple of other things.’
‘Like what?’
‘One, there’s bettable odds you’re going to get me off, so there’s no real risk anyway, just a few more months of my already wasted life. I’m a pawn he’ll risk losing to save his bishop.’
‘What’s the other one?’
‘Sal’s death wasn’t any great loss. He was old and feeble and a pain in the ass. If Georgie killed him, it wasn’t like a real murder. More like putting down a dog. Sal was a nonentity when he was alive. He didn’t count, not to Leland. And he would be dead anyway in a couple of months. What does it matter?’
Hardy sat back in his chair, ran a hand through his hair – shades of Dean Powell.
‘Tell him,’ Graham said. ‘See what he does.’
‘Tell who?’
‘Leland. Tell him you’re going to be looking into George’s alibi. See if he cuts off the money or, even better, offers you more if you don’t. Then at least we’ll know.’
‘We won’t know about George.’
‘But we’ll know for sure why Leland’s in. This is money, after all, thicker than blood. Georgie’s the heir apparent to the bank. If he killed Sal – hell, any scandal… good-bye line of succession.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Hardy said. He dug his thumbs into his eyes, a wave of exhaustion washing over him. He suddenly wondered if he wouldn’t be wise to plead some kind of personal crisis -toothache, migraine, chest pains – and ask Salter for a one-day continuance.
But this was only day two of the marathon that was the trial proper. It was unimaginable, but he knew he’d be more fatigued than this before it was over. If he was going to beg a day off – highly frowned upon – it should at least be when the danger of dropping dead from exhaustion was a real possibility.
But he couldn’t give in to any of this – it was the devil. ‘I might as well tell him we’re looking at Debra too.’
‘My sister?’
‘Debra’s a big reason you’re here.’
Graham shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Believe it,’ Hardy said. ‘I was reading Sarah’s reports this morning getting ready for her testimony. First phone call she made on the case was to Debra.’
‘And what did Debra say?’
‘She told Sarah you were probably lying. You couldn’t be trusted. She was the one who brought up the baseball cards, before anybody even knew about the money. She got Sarah looking at you, Graham. That’s what started it.’
‘She’s so stupid,’ he said flatly.
‘She also works at a vet’s, right? She gives shots to animals? My guts tell me a lethal injection is more a woman’s way to kill than a man’s. Debra needs the money more than anybody else.’
Graham had his head in his hands. ‘No no no. That’s not it. It’s nothing like that.’
‘What’s it like, then? You tell me.’
Sitting back, crossing his arms, Graham came back to Hardy, his voice low. ‘Deb and I were close until I was out of law school. She didn’t buy into the Taylor magic the way Mom and Georgie did, so we were on the same team. Then she married Brendan.
‘So two years after she’s married I’m at this nightclub and I look over and here’s Brendan flossing the tonsils of some babe who is not Debra. So I go over a little closer, make sure. Yep, it’s Brendan. He’s cheating on my sister.
‘So what do I do, the good brother? First I kick Brendan’s ass, then I go tell her.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘So she’s got two options, right? She either believes me and confronts Brendan, or she wimps out and tells herself some other story, like her brother’s lying to her instead of her husband.’
‘But why would you lie to her?’
‘I never liked Brendan. I didn’t think he was good enough for her, which, P.S., he isn’t. I’m trying to ruin her marriage.’ He spread his palms. ‘So anyway Brendan got home before I went to tell her and made up his own story first. He told her I’d been drunk and just teed off on him for no reason. So she blew up at me for beating up the son of a bitch, threw me out of her house, called me a liar. I wasn’t happy in my life and couldn’t stand it that she was.’
‘So that’s it?’
‘That’s it. I’m a liar. Brendan’s a good husband who loves her. End of story.’
Promptly at nine-thirty Salter pointed again at Soma, and he rose at his table. ‘The People call Sergeant Philip Parini.’
David Freeman still hadn’t made his appearance.
This was the first Hardy had seen of the Crime Scene Investigations specialist who’d drawn the Russo case, although he’d read his reports. The man himself was slight of build and precise of movement. His tailor had done a very good job on the dark blue suit. Parini parted his wispy crown of black hair in the middle of his head. A ramrod in the witness box, he rested his folded hands on the wooden railing in front of him.
From the middle of the courtroom Soma was ready once again to try to establish that a murder had taken place. ‘Sergeant Parini, was your unit the first to arrive at the scene – Sal Russo’s apartment at the Lions Arms?’
‘Oh, no, not at all. Judge Giotti was there. We also had paramedics, a couple of uniformed officers who had secured the scene, and inspectors Lanier and Evans.’
‘And can you tell the jury what you found there?’
Parini cleared his throat, but there was no sense that it was out of nerves. He wanted to be clearly understood, that was all. ‘First, I double-checked with the officers that nothing had been disturbed. The paramedics had arrived a few minutes after the officers and had been apprised of the DNR situation. The victim was clearly deceased. The lead EMT told me that the body had already cooled perceptibly by the time they arrived.’ This was hearsay, but Hardy didn’t object; it wasn’t the issue.
‘And would you describe the body, then, as you found it?’
Parini ran his pro-forma description, which he then verified against the photograph that was People’s One.
As this was going on, Freeman pushed open the swinging section of the bar rail, patted Hardy on the shoulder, and sat down at the defense table, on the other side of Graham. Hardy shot him a questioning look and Freeman mouthed, ‘Later.’
Soma, in the center of the courtroom, didn’t even notice the minor interruption. He was back at the witness. ‘So, Sergeant Parini, based on your training and experience, did the position of Sal Russo’s body look like a suicide to you?’
‘Objection.’ Hardy remained seated. ‘Speculation.’
From his bench Salter was a bit of a ramrod himself. ‘No, this is informed opinion, Mr Hardy. Your objection is overruled. Sergeant Parini, you may answer the question.’
Parini nodded. The drill of the witness stand had its own rhythm, and the sergeant was familiar with it. He waited while the court reporter reread Soma’s question and then picked it right up. ‘Yes, my initial impression, from the body – not just that it was on the floor. Its position was unnatural.’
‘Unnatural how?’
‘It seemed to have been dropped there.’
Soma did some light pantomime, sharing the import of this fact with the jury. ‘Did you find anything else, Sergeant, that led you to conclude that this was a homicide?’
‘Yes, I did. There was a whiskey bottle – Old Crow bourbon – on its side on the floor under the table. Its cap wasn’t on tight and quite a bit of the whiskey had seeped out onto the floor.’
‘And what was the significance of that, in your opinion?’
Hardy thought he could object, but he’d be overruled again. In the view of the criminal courts Crime Scene Investigations inspectors – so long as their training and experience was ritually invoked – had nearly the authority of expert witnesses. They were allowed a wide latitude in what would otherwise be speculation.
So Hardy kept quiet and listened to the words, all the more damning because he thought the theory they supported was what had, in fact, happened.
It just hadn’t happened with Graham.
Parini went ahead with the confidence of someone who’d thought it all through carefully. ‘I think the most reasonable explanation was that it was either knocked over in a struggle or perhaps kicked over in an assailant’s haste to get out of the apartment. It was still dripping slowly when I got there.’
‘Did you find the syringe, Sergeant?’
‘Yes. It was right there on the top of the coffee table, capped, along with an empty vial.’
‘In other words, the needle was not in the victim’s arm, was it?’
‘No.’
‘And what did you do with this syringe and vial?’
‘I bagged it and sent it to the lab for analysis, fingerprinting, and so on.’
‘And can you tell us, Sergeant, what the lab found?’
‘That the vial had contained morphine, and that there were fingerprints on both it and the syringe.’
‘And did you identify these fingerprints?’
‘Yes, we did. They belong to the defendant, Graham Russo.’
Parini stayed on the stand for the better part of two hours. He described the chair on the floor in the kitchen, the scratches on the cabinetry, the safe, Graham’s fingerprints all over the place, even on the DNR tube. Soma entered the vial, the syringe, the bottle of Old Crow, the tube and sticker, into evidence. It all took time, and Salter called a halt for lunch before Hardy could begin his cross-examination.
Hardy gathered his papers, asked Graham what they wanted to order for lunch. Freeman was uncharacteristically silent, brooding, leading the way for the three of them back to their holding cell behind the courtroom. When they got there, Freeman waited and let them both pass, then told Hardy that maybe he ought to sit down.
Graham took off his coat and was twisting his body back and forth, exercising. Hardy cricked his own back. ‘I’ve been sitting all morning, David. What’s up?’
Freeman shrugged. It had to come out anyway, and if Hardy wanted to stand, so be it. ‘I got a call at the office. One of the associates in crisis.’ He paused. ‘Michelle, as a matter of fact.’
Hardy made a face. Some kind of blow-up with Tryptech had been bound to happen sooner or later, they’d been in wait-and-delay mode for so long, some judge had probably decided enough was enough and set a hearing date in the next couple of weeks. But then another thought occurred. ‘Why didn’t she call me?’
Freeman blew out a breath. ‘Well, she feels a little awkward.’ Graham stopped his calisthenics, listening. Something in Freeman’s tone…
‘You know Ovangevale Networks?’
This was like asking Hardy if he’d heard of Disneyland. Ovangevale had come from nowhere and grown like ragweed in the last five years with its internet applications. They were the new kids on the block and a powerhouse in the industry.
Hardy swore. ‘They stole her, didn’t they?’
‘Not quite.’
Graham looked over at Hardy. ‘I love the way Yoda strings it out, don’t you? You want to go out for the sandwiches, David, let us have a guessing game till you get back?’
‘What?’ Hardy asked simply.
Freeman rolled his eyes. ‘They’re buying Tryptech,’ he said.
‘No, they’re not. That’s impossible.’ Hardy flatly didn’t believe it. ‘Not with this lawsuit hanging, they’d-’
‘Their own lawyers did some back-door contingency deal. They got the Port of Oakland to go along if Tryptech would settle for twelve five.’
‘Twelve five!’ Hardy’s voice echoed in the tiny space. ‘We can get close to thirty and they’re-’
Freeman held up his hand. ‘It’s an albatross, Diz. They don’t care about the short-term loss, they just want it out of the way. Get on to new business, move ahead.’
‘So how long has Tryptech known about this?’ He whirled with nowhere to go. ‘I’ve got to call Michelle. Why didn’t she call me?’
Although he knew at least one reason why: he hadn’t been there for her over these last months.
‘Well, that’s the other thing,’ Freeman said. He took in a breath. ‘The tender offer’s at fifteen a share. She’d been getting paid now for four months in discounted shares, as you knew.’
‘Yeah, I knew.’ Hardy’s head was going light. He’d turned down the same offer, but Michelle didn’t have a family to support. She could afford to take the risk. He found himself sitting down finally on the concrete bench.
Freeman was going on. ‘One and a half,’ he said.
‘One and a half what?’
‘The discounted share price. The original talk was two, you remember, but it finally went out at one and a half. Michelle’s got over forty thousand shares.’
Hardy was still trying to make sense of this. Sluggishly, his brain tried to compute the numbers, but the zeroes slowed him up and Graham had him by several seconds. ‘That’s six hundred thousand dollars,’ he said.
Never looking more like Yoda, the infinitely kind, infinitely wise, infinitely sad Freeman met Hardy’s eyes. ‘She feels really bad about this, Diz. She wanted me to break it to you.’
A sense of unreality hung over the afternoon. One part of Hardy realized that of course he was standing in the middle of the courtroom in Department 27, asking Parini questions. Most of him, though, felt as if it were floating somewhere in the ozone, disembodied, the precious silver astral cord snapped forever.
Six hundred thousand dollars for four months’ work!
‘Sergeant, does the fact that you found Graham Russo’s fingerprints on many surfaces in the room mean that he had been there on that day?’
‘No.’ Parini remained an eloquent robot. Although police inspectors tended to be witnesses for the prosecution, he was answering the defense counsel with the same cooperative efficiency. ‘Fingerprints are oil based. There’s no real time limit. A fingerprint on something only means that sometime the finger came in contact with it.’
‘So are you saying that Graham might not have been in his father’s apartment on that day at all?’
‘Yes. There would be no way to tell.’
‘All right.’
Nothing’s all right! He could have had that money! He’d be free!
‘I’d like to ask you a question about this whiskey bottle, if I may. Dr Strout has already testified that Sal Russo was legally drunk at the time of the injection. Was the bottle under the table within reach of his arm?’
‘Yes, I’d say so.’
‘So that, as Sal was lying there, he could have reached for the bottle and knocked it over? Would that have been possible?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet didn’t you tell Mr Soma that the bottle had probably been kicked over or knocked over during a fight?’
‘That was a surmise,’ Parini said.
‘There might not have been a struggle at all, is that what you’re saying?’
‘That conclusion isn’t inescapable from the whiskey bottle, yes, that’s what I’m saying.’
Hardy put on a smile. Who could smile at a time like this? He included the jury. ‘Good. A last question about the bottle. Did you find anything on it that indicated it had been used as a weapon of any kind? To hit Sal behind the ear, for example?’
‘No, we didn’t.’
‘None of his hairs? No blood?’
‘No. Neither.’
‘Any fingerprints that weren’t Sal’s?’
‘No.’
‘But you did find Graham’s fingerprints, did you not, on the vial of morphine and on the syringe?’
‘Yes, we did.’
Hardy thought this was clear enough. Certainly it would be absurd to believe that Graham had come in wearing gloves against leaving his fingerprints, picked up the bottle and knocked his father out with it, then taken off his gloves to administer the shot.
It was time to move to the next point. ‘Now I’d like to ask you about the kitchen, where the chair was on its side. How wide is this room?’
‘Not wide at all. Eight feet or so.’
‘And where are the stove and refrigerator?’
‘They’re both against the right wall.’
‘And is there a sink and counter?’
‘Yes, a sink at the end and a wraparound counter against the opposite wall.’
‘So are you saying there is a kind of corridor between the sink’s counter and the stove and refrigerator?’
‘Yes, that’s the way it was set up. With a window at the end, over the sink.’
‘It must be a narrow corridor, isn’t it?’
Parini knew that narrow was open to interpretation. He clarified it. ‘Four feet, maybe less.’
‘But wasn’t there a table in the kitchen, too, set into this corridor?’
‘Yes, there was.’
‘And did it appear to be in its normal position in the room?’
Parini gave this question a bit of thought, as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him. Perhaps it hadn’t. ‘Yes, it was centered, about where I’d expect it to have been.’
‘So are you saying that it didn’t appear to have been knocked sideways or in any way out of position in this purported struggle in the kitchen that was so violent, it knocked over the chair and scratched the cabinets?’
‘No. It was in the center of the corridor.’
‘And besides the chair and the scratches in the cabinetry, were there any other signs of struggle in the kitchen?’
‘No.’
‘Just a chair lying on its side?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Were there dishes on the drain? Cups, glasses, plates?’
‘Yes there were.’
‘And had any of these been knocked over by this supposedly violent struggle between two large men in the relatively tiny enclosure of the kitchen?’
Soma was up behind him, objecting. ‘Leading the witness, Your Honor.’
But on cross-examination the defense attorney is allowed to do just that. Salter knew this and correctly overruled Soma.
‘Was there anything you saw in the kitchen, Sergeant Parini, that would rule out the possibility that Sal Russo, drunk as he was, could just as easily have staggered against the chair, knocked it over, and simply left it there?’
This was the crux and Soma knew it. He objected again on grounds of speculation, and Hardy waited in suspension for Salter to rule.
Hardy was coming back to the present, though still sick in his heart. Walking an invisible tightrope between very close interpretations of the same evidence, he thought he’d phrased the question well. For his purposes all he needed was doubt about the struggle. Someone else could have been with Sal, could have helped him die, but there must not appear in the minds of the jurors that there had been any fight.
The judge finally spoke. ‘No, the question stands. I’ll overrule the objection. Sergeant, you may answer.’
The reporter read it back, and Parini gave it a reasonable amount of time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He could have stumbled against it just as easily. Nothing ruled it out.’
All at once his frustration over Michelle’s Tryptech treasure gave way to enthusiasm to plumb the vein he’d hit with Parini. In the midst of these emotions Hardy made a cardinal mistake. Forgetting one of the first precepts of cross-examination, which is never to ask a question for which you don’t know the answer, he said, ‘In fact, Sergeant, isn’t it true that there was nothing in the apartment that pointed to a struggle between Sal Russo and some purported assailant?’
‘Well, no, that isn’t true. There was the position of the body.’
Covering quickly, Hardy strolled back to his table and, stalling, took a drink of water. ‘That’s right, Sergeant, the position of the body. You said earlier that it looked like Sal Russo got dropped, do I have that right?’
‘That’s right.’
Hardy was moving to the exhibit table. Having dug himself this hole, he remembered that the Chinese used the same word for disaster and opportunity. He picked up People’s One. ‘Do you mean that the victim was not in the same position as shown here?’
Parini glanced at the photo. ‘No. That’s how he was.’
‘And to your mind, does that look like he was dropped?’
‘Yes.’
‘Or fell after being hit? Knocked out?’
‘Yes. He was sort of crumpled.’
Hardy knew where he was going and he picked up the pace. ‘Looking now at People’s One, Sergeant, where the victim is lying sort of crumpled as you put it. By this do you mean his legs are curled up under him? Not stretched out?’
‘Yes.’
‘As they might have been, say, if he’d been sitting on the floor and then collapsed with loss of consciousness?’
Parini did not answer. The unflappable witness darted a quick glance toward the prosecution table. Hardy didn’t wait for him. ‘Isn’t it true, Sergeant Parini, that Sal Russo’s position is exactly consistent with a collapse from a sitting position?’
‘Well, it would-’
‘Yes or no, Sergeant. Isn’t that true?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
‘And having collapsed in this unnatural position with his legs under him, might his arm have fallen in such a way to knock over the whiskey bottle we’ve heard about that was under the table?’
‘It might have, but-’
‘Is that a yes, Sergeant? Yes, it might have?’
Parini hated it, but he nodded. ‘Yes.’
Hardy took a breath. ‘All right, one last point. You’ve testified that the syringe and vial were left sitting on the coffee table. Would you describe for the jury in what way, if any, these implements show any evidence of a struggle, or haste, or violence?’
Parini studied his lap for a moment, then met Hardy’s eyes.
‘There was none.’
‘And the lamp in the room, Sergeant, had it been knocked over?’
‘No.’
‘Had the glass been knocked off the table?’
‘No.’
‘Was the table itself knocked over?’
‘No.’
Hardy nodded, walked over to the exhibit table, and picked up a handful of Polaroids. ‘Sergeant Parini, as we’ve seen, these photos show dozens of objects in this room, do they not? Was any one of them broken, or out of place, or disturbed in any fashion that you could tell?’
Parini’s scowl was profound. ‘No.’
‘So would it be fair to say that your opinion that this scene shows a struggle is based entirely on the position of the body and a whiskey bottle out of the place on the floor?’
Parini hesitated, but couldn’t think of anything else to bolster his testimony. ‘That’s right, I suppose.’
‘You suppose, I see. And you’ve already said that both the position of the body and the whiskey bottle can be explained without reference to any alleged struggle, isn’t that true?’
Hardy felt he couldn’t have scripted Parini’s reaction any more perfectly. The sergeant crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in the witness chair. Intransigence incarnate. Or, Hardy thought, bullheaded stupidity.
‘Well, counselor, it’s my opinion there was a struggle.’
‘Precisely,’ Hardy said. ‘That’s your opinion.’ Hardy hadn’t said a word about the safe, about all the evidence of Graham’s presence. There were a dozen areas into which he could have wandered, but only one that did his client any good. He’d damned well rebutted the argument that two grown men had left any sign of a struggle in the apartment.
This didn’t mean that Sal Russo hadn’t been cold-cocked from behind with the whiskey bottle and fallen like a lump – which Hardy believed was what had transpired – but that there was no evidence to support that theory. He’d leave it at that.
Sarah was next. The prosecution might have a secretly hostile witness in the female inspector, but she couldn’t do anything about the cards she held. They were excellent for Graham’s enemies. Directly after the midafternoon recess, after stretching and coffee or cigarettes, the men on the jury were especially unlikely to lose interest with a pretty woman on the stand.
She wasn’t in one of her cop suits, which were purposely formless and without style. Knowing that she’d be testifying, Sarah thought she should look as good as she could. So she was wearing a red silk blouse that showed no skin but shimmered tantalizingly over her breasts with each breath, with the beating of her heart. A short combed woolen skirt and low pumps flattered her good legs. Her hair was off her face, falling to her shoulders.
When she came through the bar rail, Hardy put a hand over his client’s arm, squeezed hard enough to draw blood. ‘Look down,’ he whispered. ‘She catches your eyes, you’re both done for.’
Inexplicably, perhaps ominously, Art Drysdale rose and walked to the center of the courtroom. Hardy caught a worried glance from Sarah but, like his client, could make no sign that it meant anything. He looked across to Freeman, who shrugged again, but beneath the nonchalance Hardy detected a note of concern. Could they have found out? Would Drysdale, in his homespun way, hang Sarah out to dry?
If so, there was no immediate sign. Drysdale quickly introduced himself to the jury and to Sarah and started in. As he was going along with it, Hardy began to see the logic behind choosing Drysdale for this witness. Endlessly affable, he would remain the same calm and reassuring inquisitor as he drove home lie after lie after lie.
Soma, on the other hand, by about the fifth lie, would have his adrenaline running. Unable to stop himself, he would speed up. And this was evidence to be savored, lingered over.
This was a lovely young woman putting stake after stake into the heart of a handsome man. It would have been a very difficult Q & A, even if she’d had no feelings for him, and no one would suspect that she did. The more her answers seemed wrung from her, the more devastating they would be.
‘Inspector Evans, you’ve had a great number of opportunities to interview the defendant personally, have you not?’
Sarah nodded, then spoke, her voice a tempered contralto. ‘Yes, sir, I have.’
‘When did you first speak with him?’
‘At his home, on the day after’ – she paused and searched for a neutral phraseology – ‘the victim’s death.’
‘That was a Saturday, was it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did you ask the defendant if he’d seen or talked to his father the day before?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And what did he say?’
Sarah looked over at Graham. Hardy thought he saw a flush creeping into her complexion, but in a moment she was back at Drysdale. ‘He said no. He hadn’t seen or talked to his father the day before.’
And so it began. To get to most of the answers Drysdale had to use the same approach he’d used on the first question. ‘Did you ask?’ ‘What did he say?’
Throughout, Sarah managed to retain her composure. Hardy had coached her that her testimony would not ultimately affect the verdict. She should tell the truth, and he’d explain the falsehoods in his closing statement.
But Hardy had to admit that listening to this almost unbelievable litany of lies was more than disheartening. He prayed that the jury would buy his version of why Graham had lied, but perhaps he’d underestimated how much people valued the truth. He saw it in the eyes of almost all the jurors.
Say what one will about evidence, juries were often helped along in their deliberations by a perception of the kind of person who was charged with the crime. And Graham, with this testimony, looked very, very bad.
Under Drysdale’s patient and meticulous examination, the jury learned that Graham had lied to the police about being close to his father, about knowing what was causing Sal’s pain, about the number of phone calls he’d received from Sal, about the morphine supply and the doctor who’d supplied it. He’d lied about giving the shots themselves.
He’d lied to his own brother about the existence of the money, to his sister about the baseball cards.
He’d denied knowing about his father’s safe, professed ignorance of his own bank, to say nothing of his safe deposit box, denied that he and Sal had ever talked about money to pay for doctor bills.
It was four-twenty and Drysdale had to be getting to the end. Hardy couldn’t even remember any more lies that Graham had told him, although he was sure that given time he could come up with some. Finally he heard those magic words, ‘Your witness.’
Freeman reached over, around Graham, and touched Hardy’s sleeve. ‘Let me take her,’ he whispered.
Graham, joking, poked him with an elbow. ‘She’s mine,’ he said, and Hardy told him to shut up again.
Freeman didn’t let go. ‘I can undo it. Soma sat down for her and let Drysdale do it. You can sit down and let me.’
Hardy wasn’t sure what Freeman had in mind, but the old man had a well-deserved reputation in the courtroom. He shook things up, often with great success. Indeed, this was precisely the reason Hardy had agreed to let him sit in with them. And now he wanted to play.
Hardy nodded. ‘Go for it.’
Freeman wasted no time. He stood up at his place at the table and, as Drysdale had done, introduced himself and began. ‘Inspector Evans,’ he asked, ‘in your opinion, and based on your training and experience as a law-enforcement officer, is the defendant here, Graham Russo, a man that you can trust?’
There was a long, dead pause of shock in the courtroom.
Freeman had obviously given this question a lot of thought during the ninety minutes or so that Drysdale had kept Sarah on the stand and Hardy thought it was perfect – pure Freeman. He would never had thought of it.
Of course it was inadmissible. It was speculation. It wasn’t based on evidence. It was, from any legal perspective, a just plain dumb question.
But Hardy had a sense – and Freeman probably knew - that neither Drysdale nor Soma would object. After all, they had a police officer up on the stand who had just recounted what seemed like a million lies the defendant had personally told her. What was she going to say? How could she possibly say that, yes, she trusted him?
Sarah bit her lip, looked at Drysdale, then Graham, finally Freeman. Hardy threw a look up to Salter, who seemed to be waiting for the objection that did not come.
‘Yes,’ she said.
In the room itself order of a sort was restored in time for Salter to call an end to the day’s proceedings.
But as the gallery began filing out, the orderly queue trying to get through the double doors dissipated into pushing and name-calling. The fireworks picked up out in the hallway and overflowed out the back door – the legal professionals’ exit from the building.
Hardy went with Graham back to the changing room; the defendant would be sleeping, as usual, in his jumpsuit. Pleased that Freeman had so beautifully undercut Sarah’s damaging testimony, Hardy’s mind nevertheless kept going back to Michelle and Frannie and what in the world he was going to do with the rest of his life.
So twenty minutes later, accompanied by the bailiff and Graham, he was surprised when they got to the corridor behind the building on the way back to the jail and were stopped by the gathered crowd of at least eighty people.
The reaction to Sarah’s testimony.
Pratt was in the thick of it. The district attorney had been in the courtroom and had raised her fist and said, ‘Yes,’ very audibly, right after Sarah had uttered the same word.
Now, back behind the hall, it was a mob scene. Hardy saw Freeman standing over by Drysdale. Barbara Brandt was there, Soma, a bunch of cops in uniform, tons of press.
In nearly twenty years under a great variety of stresses and burdens, Hardy had never before seen Art Drysdale really lose his temper. But he’d lost it now with Sharron Pratt, the person who’d fired him a few months ago.
‘I’ll tell you what you are, Sharron.’ His voice carried all the way back to where Hardy stood with Graham and the bailiff at the doorway. ‘You are an absolute disgrace to law enforcement. In fact, you’re not in law enforcement at all. You’re in social engineering.’
To Pratt this was a badge of distinction. ‘You’re damn right I am! The people elected me, Art. You know why? They were tired of the letter of the law, and the spirit be damned! They were tired of deals getting cut in back rooms.’
The bailiff decided he ought to get Graham back into the jail, to his cell, but Hardy stopped him. ‘You’re going to want to hear this, Carl.’ So they stayed, flies on the back door.
Cameras were rolling. Microphones were pointed. Hardy saw Sarah next to Marcel Lanier, inside the knot of acrimony. She hadn’t been the grenade, but she was the pin that, once pulled, had led to the explosion.
‘We didn’t cut any deals in back rooms.’ Drysdale was raving, standing on a concrete planter box. He stormed at the crowd. ‘This woman has no clue! Doesn’t anybody see that?’
Pratt shot back at him. ‘You put Graham Russo on trial for murdering his father when you know he didn’t. That says it all.’ The DA played it for the crowd, raising her own voice. ‘Anybody out here think this wasn’t an assisted suicide? Anybody think this was a murder? I’m waiting.’
Hardy didn’t miss the irony in the fact that the defense team and Sarah were probably the only ones who did think Sal had been murdered. But this wasn’t the time to bring it up.
Taking his cue from Pratt, Drysdale struck again. ‘Ask your friend Barbara Brandt, Sharron. Ask her if she’s ever met Graham Russo. I’ll tell you what – she hasn’t! We checked her out, Sharron. It’s all made up.’
Brandt yelled out, ‘That’s a damn lie. That’s-’
Drysdale shouted her down. ‘But don’t let the truth get in your way. It never has before.’
Suddenly, even Sarah was in his sights. He turned to her and pointed. ‘And while we’re at it, what reward are you giving Sergeant Evans for her testimony today? You going to let her be your chauffeur?’
Freeman, in the unaccustomed role of peacemaker, reached a hand up to Drysdale. ‘That’s out of line, Art. Come on down.’
‘This is a travesty. This is a goddamn travesty.’
The climax was over. Hardy heard Pratt say something about ‘sore loser,’ loud enough for the crowd, but the public face-off wasn’t good politics, and evidently this had finally occurred to her. Drysdale was pushing his way, Soma in tow, to the back lot.
Suddenly Abe Glitsky was standing at Hardy’s elbow. ‘What’s going on? What was Art doing?’
Hardy looked over. ‘Evans went sideways. Art thinks Sharron had something to do with it. He’s a little worked up.’
‘How sideways?’
‘Not much,’ Hardy lied.
Shackled next to them in his jumpsuit, Graham wasn’t intimidated. ‘She said she believed me.’
The scene shifted for Glitsky, registered. ‘How special for you,’ he said. Then, to the bailiff, ‘Carl, what’s this guy still doing here?’
Carl could take a hint. He was moving with his prisoner before the question was over. ‘He’s on his way to AdSeg.’
In front of them the crowd had thinned. Part of it – some reporters and supporters and David Freeman – had followed Soma and Drysdale. Pratt, enjoying the photo op, had led another group off on a different walkway.
Evans and Lanier stood by themselves, alone, arms folded, and watched as Graham was led by them.
‘All politics aside, Abe, you’ll be happier in the long run if you look into George Russo’s alibi,’ Hardy said. ‘Graham’s brother?’
‘I know who he is.’
‘You know where he was when Sal bought it?’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t try.’
But neither of the men moved away. Hardy had his hands in his pockets, wondering if Sarah was going to come over and say something. Glitsky, his jaw working, the scar white through his lips, stood with his arms crossed, feet planted. Eventually, his chest heaved. ‘Evans said on the stand she believed your man?’
‘She said he was trustworthy.’
‘How did that come up? How’d the judge let it in?’
‘Freeman. The guy’s a wizard. It was just one word. Drysdale objected afterwards and got sustained, but who cares? The jury heard it.’
‘How’d Freeman guess about Evans?’
Hardy shrugged, unable to divulge what he knew. ‘Instinct, I suppose. He was right.’
‘I’ve got to talk to her. She doesn’t think Graham did it?’
‘That’s the impression I got.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lies, lies, lies. He wanted to tell Abe, but didn’t dare. The higher priority at the moment was protecting Sarah – and Graham. He wasn’t happy about it, but felt he had no choice. ‘You’ll have to ask her.’
Frannie’s saving grace was that she didn’t carry a grudge. In this way she was the polar opposite of her husband, who could nurse a slight for decades if the stars were aligned just right.
Beaten down or not, and Hardy felt utterly tromped upon, it wasn’t his style to slink. He let himself in his front door, put down his briefcase, walked into the living room, and stood in the middle of it. After a few seconds, letting out a long breath, he went over to the mantel and moved the elephants around.
He smelled baking bread. He heard the kids in the backyard, several neighboring youngsters out there with them. He’d come directly home. There wasn’t any point in going by his office and checking up on Tryptech, talking to Freeman, reviewing anything. He wanted to be with his family. Everything else was truly out of his control.
The weather continued warm. A breath of sea-scented air wafted through the open front windows.
Frannie’s arms were around him from behind. ‘Why did you marry such a ball-breaker?’ she asked.
He turned, his arms around her. ‘I didn’t mean to keep anything from you. There was just so much going on, I forgot.’
Leaning into him, she was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a blue tank-top, no bra. ‘I was tired. Maybe jealous of all the time you spend with Sarah. Both of you knew something I didn’t.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m really sorry, Dismas. It just hit me wrong.’
Kissing her, he said he’d punish her later. ‘Meanwhile, want to hear a fun story about Tryptech? Maybe you’ll want to sit down.’
They were in the living room again, but four hours had evaporated into the children’s routines. Taking that essential half hour to brief Frannie on Michelle and Tryptech and his lost fortune – never mind any emotional reaction to it – had cost them all of their potential down time.
And because they hadn’t called their children in early from the backyard, the games with the neighborhood kids went on until well after six. Late dinner. Brush teeth. Pajamas.
Then, for an added bonus, Vincent remembered that he’d forgotten his homework. He had to write a poem – at least sixteen lines and it had to rhyme and his parents weren’t allowed to help him except that he needed his dad to approve every word, but not give him any of his own.
‘Daddy, no help allowed.’ Eyes overflowing, the glare. ‘It has to be mine. You don’t think I can do anything myself!’
Frannie had earlier decreed that this would be a bath night too. Rebecca decided to take a shower, no more bath with her little brother – more weeping and gnashing of teeth from Vincent. It wasn’t fair. Everybody hated him. Rebecca got everything she wanted.
Vincent hated everybody and was going to run away and live with the wolves or Balto or somebody who cared about him.
Finally, nine-thirty, Hardy pulled the windows down, drew the blinds against the darkness. A chill evening breeze had freshened, the breath of autumn. ‘Well, that was a good time.’
With an exhausted sigh Frannie dropped onto the couch in the front room. ‘No kidding. I am going to drink a glass of wine,’ she announced. ‘Perhaps two. Would you like to join me?’
‘Gin,’ Hardy said. ‘Three fingers. One ice cube. No olive.’
The television was all over it. The war between the prosecutors. Cops divided among themselves. Sharron Pratt and Barbara Brandt and social engineering. Art Drysdale and David Freeman with their sound bites on Sarah.
Drysdale: ‘Sharron Pratt’s wrongheaded policies have so permeated the system that good cops don’t even know what the law is anymore.’
Freeman: ‘Inspector Evans knows the truth in her heart. Graham Russo loved his father.’
Hardy hit the remote, killing the picture. ‘God bless David.’ The gin was nearly gone. ‘He’s got his lines and he rides ’em like a racehorse.‘
‘But Sarah’s in big trouble, isn’t she?’
‘That could be, although in today’s climate, if Pratt’s got anything to do with it, she might get a medal.’ Hardy sighed.
‘It’s serious down there, isn’t it?’
‘As bad as I’ve seen it. It’s civil war – brothers against brothers, sisters against sisters. Everybody hates everybody. I’ve got one last problem, too, fairly serious.’
She looked over at him sympathetically. ‘Not a new one?’
He smiled wearily. ‘This one’s almost ancient – seven, eight hours. Leland Taylor.’
‘He hasn’t stopped paying you? Not now?’
‘No,’ Hardy said, ‘but he might.’
He told her about his morning discussion with Graham, that he really should tell Leland he was going to be investigating the family. Leland would cut him off. ‘And if you’re doing the math, my love, you’ll realize that he’s my last regular source of income.’ He tipped up the glass of gin, the last drops. ‘I can’t tell him, not after today.’
‘Do you need George?’
He shook his head. ‘I tell myself no, but that’s just what I want to hear. If we found out he killed Sal, then Graham’s free and we won. So of course we need him. I’ve got to find out about him and if I even start to look, I’m dead.’
Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Hardy looked at his watch: ten-fifteen. It must be Sarah, he thought, wrecked over her testimony today, needing more counsel and comfort.
Hardy’s day had begun at five-thirty after last night’s late one and the tension with Frannie. He’d actually considered asking Salter for a continuance this very morning for fatigue, and that was before he learned he’d missed out on more than half a million dollars, before the long day in the courtroom, the marathon with the children.
It had to stop, he thought. He couldn’t continue like this.
But if Sarah needed him, he had to be there for her. She was doing so much work for him, and doing it well. He couldn’t abandon her now and wimp out. Willing himself out of his chair, he got up and opened the door.
‘We’ve got to talk.’ It was Glitsky.
Sarah thought the car ride into town was about as free from tension as a dentist’s waiting room. Marcel was driving, silent. He’d turned up the squawk box, which he never did. The dispatcher was sending squad cars to Potrero Hill for a domestic disturbance. There was a robbery in progress at a fast-food store down by San Francisco State. A couple of backup units were needed at a fire site in Chinatown.
Finally Sarah reached over and turned the thing down. ‘Get over it,’ she said. ‘I’ve always told you he didn’t do it.’
‘Not the point,’ her partner said. ‘We’re on the stand, we are with the DAs. They might fuck up our cases, they might be assholes, but they’re our assholes.’
‘Maybe yours, not mine. And Glitsky finally woke up.’
Lanier cast her a disgusted glance, quick, then brought his eyes back to the road. ‘What else’s he gonna do, you rub his face in it? Makes him look like a horse’s ass for not pursuing it sooner, even though there was no way he could have done it. I’ll tell you-’ He stopped, biting his tongue.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Doesn’t matter.’
‘Nothing, doesn’t matter,’ she mimicked.
He set his teeth. ‘Maybe it does, then. I’ll tell you something, Sarah. You’re the first woman we got here in homicide, and if you weren’t one you’d be out of it. So don’t tell me Glitsky’s your pal now. You showed him up, and he’s covering his ass.’
‘I didn’t make it here on some kind of gender quota, Marcel, if that’s what you’re saying.’ He was silent and she raised her voice. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’m saying a man pulling that shit on the stand would be directing traffic out in the Taraval.’
‘I was right.’
‘Yeah, well, join the crowd. Pratt thinks she’s right too. Always.’
Sarah had an arm resting on the open windowsill and stared out at the grimy Tenderloin streets. ‘Look, Marcel, what if we go out now with Glitsky’s blessing and find a killer here? What if the wrong guy’s in jail and we put him there? That bother you at all?’
‘I’ll tell you what bothers me, Sarah. What bothers me is you’re my backup, and suddenly I’m seeing you’re not there for me. That’s what bothers me.’
‘How am I not there? One word yesterday?’
They were at a red light and it afforded him the opportunity to turn and face her. ‘It’s a team game. Yeah, one word puts you on the other side.’
Her lip quivered, but she was damned if she was going to break. ‘I’m not on any other side. I’ve always said Graham Russo didn’t kill his dad. I’ve always told you that.’
‘That’s me, here, privately. That’s in the family. A witness stand’s a whole different thing.’
‘What about you looking at Tosca? What was that all about? You’re telling me that’s different?’
‘That was on my personal time, doing a favor for the AG. Yeah, it’s different.’
‘So we don’t care about getting the right suspect?’
‘Yep. We do.’
‘All right, so?’
‘So. We got him.’
‘My name is Blue. I work as a model.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Soma said. ‘Your full name, please.’
‘Blue is my full name.’
Sal Russo’s downstairs neighbor stared at the young prosecutor as though daring him to ask her again. She was dressed in a black leotard and a black sweater. She was leaning forward, resting her hands on the rail at the front of the witness box, tapping her metallic blue, inch-long fingernails.
In the morning’s session, at the hands of Art Drysdale, Marcel Lanier had run through the kind of grilling that Sarah had gone through yesterday. He’d recounted Graham’s lies again for the jury, definitely leaving the strong impression that at least one of the investigating officers – the man, the guy who identified with the jury as a working-stiff cop – did not find the handsome young defendant trustworthy at all. Hardy and Freeman had let his testimony go without cross-examination.
But Blue was going to be different. Blue’s testimony was about the struggle that had undoubtedly occurred, which Hardy had to keep her away from connecting to Graham.
‘Now, Ms…?’
Soma had talked to Blue a minimum of half a dozen times in preparation for her testimony today, but apparently he was having a hard time with the concept of formally addressing a one-named witness on the stand, and this worked to Hardy’s advantage. Blue was Soma’s baby and he was making her impatient and cross with him from the outset.
‘Just Blue,’ she snapped. ‘Blue is my legal name. I had it changed like five years ago.’
‘All right, Blue, I apologize.’ Soma gathered himself, tugged at an ear, cleared his throat. ‘Can you tell us your address, please?’ She did. ‘And where is this apartment in relation to the deceased’s apartment? Sal Russo’s apartment?’
Soma’s tongue was tripping him up. Hardy thought he must have done far better in moot court appearances during law school or he never would have gotten selected for his clerkship. This was not his finest hour and Hardy thought it couldn’t have come at a better time.
‘Right underneath it.’
‘One floor below?’
Another exasperated expression from Blue. What the hell else did right underneath mean if not one floor below? But she answered him. ‘Yeah, my ceiling was his floor.’
‘Good. Now on May ninth, the day Sal Russo died, were you in your apartment during the afternoon?’
‘Yeah. I had a session. Modeling.’
‘One session? All afternoon?’
Again, Soma – trying to make it crystal clear to the jury – was stomping on her toes. Blue stiffly pulled herself up straight. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘And did you hear any unusual noises from Sal Russo’s apartment?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Can you tell the jury what they were?’
With obvious relief Blue turned in her seat and faced the panel. ‘I heard some stomping around, then Sal yelled out, “No, no, no,” like that’ – she did a good impersonation of it herself, waking up anybody who’d been dozing – ‘and then there was this bumping, which I guess I heard was like a chair getting knocked over-’
Hardy stood. ‘Objection, Your Honor. Speculation.’
Salter overruled the objection, and Soma nodded, then continued. ‘You heard a loud thump?’
‘Yes.’
‘And voices?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you hear other voices besides Sal’s?’
Again, Hardy stood. ‘Objection. Speculation.’ He knew this would be overruled, but he thought it would be important to focus the jury right away on his position that there was no way Blue could be sure that voices came from Sal’s apartment.
Salter knew what Hardy was doing: making unfounded objections to argue his case to the jury. He didn’t like it, and as expected, he overruled him.
Blue got the question again, and nodded. ‘Yeah, there was somebody else there.’
‘And this other voice, was it a male or female voice?’
‘Objection.’ Hardy might be alienating her and the judge, but so be it – he had to try again. ‘Your Honor, the witness could not possibly know for a fact that these voices came from Sal Russo’s apartment, much less that it was Mr Russo’s voice. Similarly, she couldn’t know for a fact if the voice belonged to a male or female.’
Salter’s tone was brusque. ‘Mr Hardy, that’s why we have cross-examinations – you know, the part where you ask questions. I’m sorry, Mr Soma, proceed.’
Soma asked about the upstairs speaker’s gender again.
‘It was a man.’
Hardy was up again. ‘Objection. The witness couldn’t possibly be sure it was a man, Your Honor.’
Blue’s insistence upon her career as a model got shaky. She shot back at Hardy, across the courtroom. ‘I know men’s voices, sugar.’
This brought a little titter to the gallery, quickly squelched by a look from Salter, who then took off his glasses and tapped them on his podium. ‘Blue,’ he said, ‘please don’t talk to the attorneys out there on your own. Let’s have counsel approach the bench.’ He waved them forward.
Hardy got up with Freeman. Drysdale walked forward with them and met Soma at the podium.
Salter leaned down. ‘Mr Hardy, I’ve already ruled on your repeated objections. Let’s move along.’
‘I guess I’m asking you to reconsider, Your Honor. Blue may well have heard voices and they may just as well have come from Sal’s apartment, but she can’t state that as fact.’
Freeman, true to form, stuck in his two cents. ‘As a matter of law, judge, he’s right. Ask Art, he’ll tell you.’
The judge glared down at him. ‘I don’t need him to tell me, David, or you either.’
In a murder case the specter of a verdict being overturned on appeal due to judicial error hangs like a scimitar over the neck of every trial judge. Salter put the ear ends of his eyeglasses into his mouth and considered carefully.
By repeating the objection over and over, Hardy had bullied him into second-guessing himself. ‘On reflection, I believe Mr Hardy has a point. I’m going to sustain his objection, and reverse my decision on the previous objection.’
Soma threw his hands wide. ‘But, Your Honor…’
The judge stopped the histrionics with a pointed finger. Drysdale helped, laying a soft hand on his partner’s sleeve. Salter’s first ruling had been right, but having already changed his mind once, he was never going to change it back. Hardy had stolen one. Salter put his glasses back on. ‘All right, gentlemen, thank you.’
When the attorneys had all returned where they belonged, the judge turned to the jury. ‘You will disregard Blue’s statement that she heard voices from Mr Russo’s apartment, or the gender of those voices. Back to you, Mr Soma.’
The prosecutor went back to his table for a sip of water, trying to buy himself the time to think of another tack. He took a deep breath, threw a look at the ceiling, then turned back to the witness.
‘Blue,’ he said, ‘have you ever seen the defendant before?’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
‘Would you please tell us where?’
‘Oh, lots of times. He come by the apartment, be out in the alley with his dad, like that. Lately he be there all the time.’
‘And did you ever talk to him?’
‘Couple of times. Say hi, like that. Nothing really to speak of.’
Soma was about to ask another question, perhaps in this same vein, but Drysdale had a small coughing fit and raised his hand, asking the judge if they could have a couple of minutes recess, which was granted.
When, after five minutes, court was called back to order, Soma announced that he was through with this witness.
She’d given him nothing.
But she was going to give Hardy quite a bit. He knew why Drysdale had had his coughing fit. Soma, flustered by the reversal on Salter’s objection ruling and floundering while he thought up another line of questioning, had asked a question for which he didn’t know the answer, and it had opened a door for the defense. The coughing fit had tried to slam that door shut, but it hadn’t come in time.
‘Blue.’ Hardy wasn’t going to go formal on this woman, get hung up over nomenclature and make her mad. He smiled at her. ‘During the many times you saw Graham with Sal, did you ever see them fight?’
‘No. Nothing like fighting.’
‘What do you mean, nothing like fighting?’
‘Well, they was always laughing, more, you know. Most the time. Sometimes they just be sitting on the back of his truck, talking. Mostly that’s when I see ’em. Just talkin‘, laughin’. Sometimes in the lobby, the halls like.‘
‘So you would say they acted as though they liked each other, is that right?’
‘Objection! Conclusion.’ Soma knew he had brought this on himself. By degrees his vocal register was going up. His objection was sustained, but Hardy didn’t care.
He smiled at the witness again. ‘Blue, during the time you lived below Sal, did you ever hear any other bumps, things falling over, stuff like that?’
‘Sure, sometimes, maybe he bump into some lamp, something like that.’
‘Did you ever go to his apartment?’
She showed her teeth. ‘Not on business.’ Another ripple of laughter. ‘Couple of times, he told me he had some good salmon, I could come and get it. I love that salmon.’
‘Me too,’ Hardy said. ‘And during those times you went to his apartment, did you notice if Sal was a good housekeeper? If the place was clean and uncluttered?’
‘Lord, no,’ she said. ‘There was magazines and boxes and stuff everywhere.’
‘Any of which he might have tripped over as he was walking around, isn’t that true?’
Soma objected again, got sustained again. But Hardy felt he was making his point to the jury and pressed on. ‘All right, Blue, now I’d like you to try to remember the day Sal died and you heard this noise upstairs, like something falling. Do you remember that?’
‘I said I did.’
‘That’s right, you did. Then you told Inspector Lanier that sometime later you heard the door upstairs closing, isn’t that right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Now, to the best of your recollection, how much time passed between this bump you heard and the door closing?’ Hardy wanted to establish a temporal distance between the two events. The longer the lag between the bump and the door closing, the less likely there was any causal relation between the two. Therefore, a struggle became a less likely scenario.
Blue sat back in the witness stand, pulling her hands off the rail. Methodically, she began cracking her knuckles one at time. Her eyes were far away. ‘I hear the bump. I hear him kind of moaning, “No, no, no.” Pretty good amount of time, I ’spect.‘
Hardy pounced on this. ‘While you were hearing these noises upstairs, you were having a modeling session? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘That’s right. That’s why I don’t go up there, see what’s the matter, when I hear this bump and him saying, “No.” ’
‘All right, Blue. Now, this “pretty good amount of time” you’ve just referred to, could it have been more than a half hour?’
‘Could have been.’ She paused, obviously nervous that she’d get caught in a lie. So she decided to come clean. ‘I fell a little asleep.’ She leaned forward now, looked at the judge, down into her lap.
Hardy played the card he’d picked up from Sarah. It had not been on any of the transcripts, but Lanier had mentioned to Sarah his feeling about the smell emanating from Blue’s place. ‘Blue, did you smoke marijuana this day? Is that why you fell asleep?’
Cornered, Blue’s eyes were all over the room. ‘It wasn’t that long,’ she said ambiguously.
‘You mean that you were asleep?’
‘And afterwards, after he was gone, I went up, but nobody answered.’
‘You didn’t try the door?’
‘No.’
‘Do you clearly remember that the sound of the door closing was after you woke up from your doze?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was the scraping or bumping before?’
‘Yes, sir. It was.’
‘So it might have been as long as an hour between the scraping and bumping and the entirely separate sound of the door closing, is that right?’
Another objection, this one overruled. In Salter’s view this last point wasn’t speculation. Blue could make a reasonable estimate of how long she’d been asleep. She told Hardy he was right: the sounds weren’t really all that close together.
‘Thank you, Blue. That’s all my questions.’
Soma got up on redirect and tried to repair some of the damage. ‘Blue, I’ve got here a transcript of your interview with Inspector Lanier. It says, and I quote, “I hear the door open, then the ceiling creaks, somebody else there.”’
‘That’s right.’
‘Good. Now, continuing with the transcript, you told Inspector Lanier – well, maybe you can read what it says here. Would you do that?’
Blue took the paper and read the highlighted text. ‘ “And then some other noises.” ’
Soma patiently nodded, leading her through it. ‘In other words, Blue, aren’t you saying here that the noises occurred after this someone arrived upstairs?’
Her face took on a pained expression. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’
‘But didn’t you say “then some other noises”?’
Blue was shaking her head. ‘But I don’t mean then like meaning after. I mean then like next thing I thought.’
This was bad news for the young attorney, who hadn’t given much thought to the woman’s syntax. She’d said then, which to him meant after. In this context that’s all the word meant to him. To someone with a little less education than Soma, however, the word could be almost endlessly fluid.
As Hardy had discovered when he’d talked to Blue, preparing for his cross.
But Soma couldn’t leave it. It struck him as unfair. He had the right meaning and he was, somehow, wrong. He turned to the jury, including them, his voice getting that familiar stridency. ‘But then means after, Blue. Isn’t that the meaning of the word?’
Hardy could have objected that he was badgering the witness, but Soma was shooting himself in the foot anyway and Hardy thought he’d let him do it. Blue pulled herself up. ‘Sometime it might. But that’s just not what I meant.’
During one of the afternoon recesses a uniformed police officer stuck a note in front of Hardy. Glitsky wanted to know where he could meet Hardy in moderate privacy after he got off today. Hardy thought a moment, then scribbled his reply and sent the officer on his way.
Glitsky had saved Hardy’s bacon.
By authorizing Sarah to look into George and Debra’s possible connection to Sal’s murder, he’d relieved Hardy of any obligation to tell Leland that his money was being used to investigate his own family. It was a police matter now.
Hardy and Glitsky hadn’t said a lot of words the previous night about their ongoing feud. It was behind them, leaving its slightly bitter residue. Instead, they mostly talked about the lieutenant’s long interview with Sarah Evans, which had led him to reconsider his earlier decision to drop the investigation.
The rest of Hardy’s afternoon was taken up by four witnesses, various other residents of Sal’s building, people who’d seen Graham in the vicinity. Hardy asked each of them the same questions: had they ever witnessed anything like a fight between Sal and Graham? Did they see or hear a struggle of any kind in or around Sal’s apartment on May 9?
They all said no to everything.
The breeze was stiff out of the west, bending the cypresses in the Park as the lieutenant headed west along Lincoln. A fitful sunlight struggled through the intermittent cloud cover and, when it could, cast long shadows. Traffic was heavy until he turned on Masonic, winding his way back up to Edgewood.
He parked and got out of his car. There was no sign of any wind up here, though in the sky some angels had raked the cirrus into neat rows. He crossed the street and walked up to the address Hardy had given him.
Hardy was leaning against his car, his arms crossed over his chest. ‘You said private. I thought you’d like it here.’
The lieutenant threw another look all around. ‘What is this place?’
‘Graham Russo lives here.’
Glitsky nodded. ‘I wish I did.’ Then, ‘Evans and I had another talk today. We didn’t do this right.’
‘I know that.’
‘You know about Tosca and this guy Ising?’
‘Graham’s mentioned them both.’
‘You didn’t hire an investigator? Find out what they’ve been up to?’
Hardy told a fib of omission. ‘Money’s tight, Abe. I’m barely breaking even.’ He shrugged. ‘I can’t worry about who did it. It’s my job to get my client off.’
‘What I hear, you might be doing that.’
Again, a shrug. ‘It could happen, though we got a bad jury for it. So what are we doing up here, me and you?’
‘This time of day there’s lots of eyes at the Hall.’ Glitsky looked around the quiet street as though checking for spies. He took his time answering. ‘I wanted to let you know we’re going to keep looking. Evans wants to go and question the brother and sister directly, but that gets squirrely. We’d have to give them a reason, and then what?’
‘I’ve had the same problem.’
‘And these possible money angles.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Contrary to popular belief I don’t want to ace the wrong guy.’
‘Time’s running out, Abe. It might be too late already.’
‘I know,’ Glitsky said. ‘But for the record.’
There was only a slim chance it would do much good in the time he had left. Still, it was a grand gesture for a professional cop and administrator. ‘For the record,’ Hardy said, ‘I appreciate it.’
Frannie was asleep by nine.
Hardy tossed until eleven, then got up and turned on the news. After yesterday’s human-interest bombshell with Sarah and the fallout from her testimony, the trial was back to hot copy. Hardy learned that evidently he’d done well with Blue today; the newscaster reported that one of the prosecution’s major witnesses had failed to establish that any struggle had taken place in the apartment between Sal Russo and his son.
‘But tomorrow is Alison Li, the bank teller who-’ Hardy hit the remote and decided to give sleep another try.
This wasn’t possible, Hardy was telling himself. Could it be that his own stupidity was going to cost him the case? It looked that way right now. The four attorneys were in Salter’s chambers talking about the admissibility of the videotapes. Freeman might believe that the defense didn’t need them, that the entire money/bank issue was beside the point, but to Hardy they were the equivalent of a smoking gun for the defense. If the videotapes were admitted after Soma had gone to great lengths to prove that Graham had, for whatever reason, come to the bank on Friday, Hardy had proof that he hadn’t. It would devastate the prosecution’s argument.
But now it was looking as though it wasn’t going to happen. Drysdale and Soma hadn’t questioned the tape’s admissibility in any of the pretrial hearings, but now, with Alison Li coming up next, they’d requested this hearing in chambers, charging that Hardy couldn’t lay any foundation for the tape – what it was, where it came from, how it was relevant. It should be ruled inadmissible.
‘Judge’ – Hardy was on his feet in front of Salter’s desk – ‘I got this tape months ago. It was in my discovery that I shared with the prosecution. Mr Soma and Mr Drysdale have had every opportunity to review it. It clearly shows that my client didn’t go into the bank on Friday, which is one of the cornerstones of their case.’
If Hardy wasn’t so hot himself, he might have been concerned by his partner, David Freeman’s, posture. The old man was in a corner of the room, seated, arms crossed, keeping out of it. A bad sign in itself.
Drysdale, too, had recovered from his explosion of the other afternoon. He was low-affect here, and he did most of the talking.
Soma stood next to him, barely concealing his smugness. Drysale was talking: ‘We have no problem with the original tape, Judge. Our problem is with Mr Hardy’s copy.’
‘All right, so let’s use the original,’ Hardy said, giving up a point far too quickly. The greatest enemy in any trial was surprise, and Hardy had just opened himself up for another one.
‘We were told the original’s been erased.’ Soma couldn’t keep the note of triumph out of his voice.
Hardy had no idea how long Soma had known this, or for how long he’d been planning his ambush, but he was obviously enjoying the hell out of it now.
Hardy turned to him. ‘It has not been erased.’ But even as he said it, he knew it had to be true. Soma wouldn’t have any reason to bluff. ‘I asked the bank to save it.’
He had figured he had the copy. He’d even copied the copy to give to Soma and Drysdale. The efficient and personable Ms Reygosa, the manager, had assured Hardy that the bank would keep the original as backup.
With his infuriating calm, Drysdale was back at Salter. ‘Naturally, we wanted to review the original for accuracy after we’d seen Mr Hardy’s copy, Your Honor. Evidently the bank misinterpreted Mr Hardy’s request and thought that once the tape had been copied, they would be free to reuse it.’
Hardy pressed his fingers against his temples. This could not be happening. It was completely his incompetence. He couldn’t believe it, and there was no one to blame but himself. ‘Your Honor, I have the copy and it has remained unedited and in my possession-’
Soma cut him off, shaking his head in disagreement. ‘The copy could have come from Blockbuster, Your Honor. There’s no date or time on it. It could be anything.’
‘I’ll get Ms Reygosa to testify it is a complete and accurate copy of the original that’s been erased, Your Honor. That’s sufficient foundation.’
‘Alas, Mr Hardy’ – Soma’s dramatic reading made Hardy want to punch him – ‘Ms Reygosa didn’t make the copy. The copy was made by one Juan Xavier Gonzalez, who has returned to his native Honduras after somebody took a hard look at his immigration status.’
‘You son of a-’
‘Look, Diz.’ This was Drysdale, serious now, cutting Hardy off before he talked himself into a contempt fine. ‘Technical inadmissibility aside, your tapes are supposed to cover three working days, right? Twenty-four hours.’
‘We all know this,’ Hardy said.
‘Except they’re only a little over twenty-two and a half hours long. There’s an hour and a half missing.’
Hardy well remembered his day of fast-forwarding the videos to the good parts. Evidently Soma hadn’t let his own boredom make him sloppy.
Drysdale went on. ‘This guy Gonzalez not only erased the originals. He couldn’t have given you full copies.’ He turned to Salter. ‘There’s no foundation, Judge, and more to the point, these tapes don’t prove a thing.’ Drysdale didn’t have the gloating tone, but the words alone were enough.
Unnoticed by Hardy, Freeman had pulled himself out of his chair. Hardy felt a hand on his shoulder, reassuring.
Salter had heard enough. The tapes were inadmissible.
Gil Soma started on each witness with an enthusiasm that Hardy found daunting, especially so after the defeat he’d just suffered in chambers. No videotapes! After all of his effort to procure them. What a fool he was.
Now, on Thursday afternoon, Soma was approaching the end of his case in chief. From his self-confident demeanor it was clear that he barely, if at all, felt any of the wounds that Hardy had inflicted.
Alison Li started out as nervous as she’d been at the bank on the day Hardy had first interviewed her. Soma was gentle with her, leading her through the standard witness questions – name, place of business, and so on – gradually getting to the meat. ‘Ms Li, do you recognize the defendant here’ – pointing – ‘Graham Russo?’
‘Yes, I do. He’s a customer at the bank where I work.’
Pleased out of all proportion, Soma slowly walked back to his table and picked up a piece of paper, and entered it into evidence. ‘Now, Ms Li, I’d like you to look at People’s Fourteen here and tell us if you recognize this document.’
She took the paper and scanned it quickly. ‘Yes, this is a sign-in form for customers holding safe-deposit boxes.’
‘And did you see Graham Russo, the defendant, sign this document?’
‘Yes, I did.’
Now Soma put his enthusiasm to good use. ‘Ms Li, aren’t customers supposed to sign in and date this form?’
‘Yes.’
‘But, as we see here, Mr Russo didn’t do that, did he?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ask him to do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet he didn’t?’
Hardy wanted to break up the rhythm, so he stood up. ‘Asked and answered, Your Honor.’
Perhaps Salter was sympathetic to Hardy’s despair. This wasn’t much of an objection. Still, the judge nodded. ‘True enough. Sustained. Move along, Mr Soma.’
But Soma had a knack for the small and telling variation. ‘Did the defendant give a reason why he wouldn’t put the date on this form?’
‘No. I didn’t notice. He said he would and I thought he did, but he didn’t.’
And so it went.
By the time Hardy stood to begin his cross-examination, Alison Li had drawn the picture clearly. Graham Russo had come in sometime that Friday afternoon and deposited something in his safe deposit box. He appeared nervous. He was in a hurry.
They thought they’d have the videotapes to fall back upon, and without them Hardy was forced to bring David Freeman’s argument into play. The defense team had prepared extensively for it, and Hardy was possessed of a near ethereal, desperate calm as he walked to the center of the courtroom.
He brought a smile forth and showed it to the witness. ‘Ms Li. You have testified that Graham Russo brought a briefcase with him on the afternoon in question. At any time, did you see the contents of the briefcase?’
Alison’s nerves were back in play. She shifted in her chair, looked at the jury, then at Soma, finally back to Hardy. ‘I never said I did.’
‘I didn’t say you did either.’ Hardy kept any threat out of his voice. They were having a conversation, that was all. ‘But I am asking you now. Did you see what was in the briefcase?’
‘No.’
‘Not at any time?’
‘No, never.’
‘So you don’t know what was in the briefcase, or in fact if anything was in the briefcase, isn’t that true?’
Hardy took the moment to get a read on the jury. Obvious as this question was, it did what Freeman had predicted: poked a hole into one of the prosecution’s main assumptions, its scenario of the day of Sal’s death. He saw several members of the jury sit up, digesting this.
Alison Li nodded her head and told him that yes, it was true. She didn’t know what was in the briefcase.
Hardy was making the point that Graham had not necessarily taken the money and baseball cards from Sal’s apartment and essentially hidden them in his safe deposit box. There was no proof that Graham had deposited the money or anything else within months of Sal’s death.
In fact, Hardy believed Graham’s version completely, he had had the money and the baseball cards in the briefcase, and he’d put them into his safe deposit box on Thursday. But the truth here did not serve the ends of justice – Hardy was beginning to wonder if it ever would in this case – so he jettisoned the truth without a backward glance.
Hardy continued. He was going to nail this down. ‘Did you, personally, Ms Li, ever get a chance to see the contents of Graham Russo’s safe deposit box?’
‘No. Customers generally go into a private room.’
‘So to your own personal knowledge, do you know how long the baseball cards and money were in Mr Russo’s box?’
This slowed her to a stop. Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times and she looked at the jury as though asking for help. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Could it have been weeks?’
‘Yes, possibly.’
‘Months?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Hardy had gotten what he wanted. To the jury, he’d gotten to reasonable doubt about whether Graham had killed Sal and then taken the money and run it to the bank to hide it.
His own confidence was beginning to come back, and he still had another point to make. ‘Do you remember talking to me at your bank last May sometime?’
At this line of questioning Alison’s eyes took on a defiant glow. ‘Of course.’
‘And during our discussion, didn’t you tell me you thought that Graham Russo had come in to make his deposit on Thursday?’
‘No. I said I wasn’t sure. I thought it might be Thursday or Friday.’
Hardy tried again. This was either an outright lie or a faulty memory. ‘You don’t remember telling me it was Thursday?’
‘No.’
He took a breath, pausing. ‘All right, Ms Li, so you say it was Friday that Graham came in, is that right?’
‘Yes. It was Friday.’ Evidently she’d spent enough time repeating it to the police that she’d come to believe it.
‘Do you remember that clearly?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, then, Ms Li, since you remember it so clearly, perhaps you can remember what time it was on Friday. Can you tell us that?’
She thought a couple of seconds. ‘It was the afternoon.’
‘The late afternoon? Early afternoon? When?’
He didn’t much like to do it, but she was defensive and still defiant and he could play that against her. She was starting to snap her answers out at him. ‘Later.’
‘After three? After four?’
‘It seemed like it was near the end of the day.’
That’s because it was, Hardy thought. But it was Thursday, not Friday. He had her. The jury would know that Graham had been working on Friday afternoon.
‘You’re sure it was near the end of the day?’
‘I just said that. Yes, I’m sure.’
‘After three?’
‘Definitely, at least.’
‘After four?’
‘It seemed like it. Maybe. Yes.’
‘On Friday, was it?’
She almost screamed in her anger. ‘Yes, on Friday. That’s what I said, didn’t I?’
Hardy smiled at her now, a genuine smile. ‘Yes, you did, Ms Li. Friday, late in the afternoon. After four. Thank you, no further questions.’
Salter nodded, pointed to the prosecution table, whose inhabitants looked a little glum, asked for redirect.
Soma stood up. ‘No redirect for this witness.’ He leaned over and conferred a moment with Drysdale. ‘The prosecution rests, Your Honor.’
Hardy had shown them. His adrenaline had kicked in after losing his videotapes, and he’d turned it on them. He dared half a grin at Soma, flashing on a sign he’d seen affixed to a motorcycle outside a bar someplace: This Harley belongs to a Hell’s Angel. Fuck with it and find out.
‘That was pretty sweet,’ Graham was saying. They had adjourned for the day and had gathered in the holding cell. ‘Friday I was at work after three. I can prove it. You got her.’
‘I think I did,’ Hardy agreed.
‘Not that it matters,’ Freeman grunted. He had boosted himself up onto the table and was swinging his feet.
‘Yoda unhappy,’ Graham said. ‘Yoda sad.’
‘I’m not unhappy. It was a good show, but I’m saying it doesn’t matter. If I were Soma – no, I don’t want to be Soma – if I were Drysdale, I would simply amend my story. It’s not too late if the jury’s leaning toward him anyway.’
‘To what?’ Hardy asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know, pick one. How’s this? Graham has the combination to the safe and, thinking Sal never even looks in it anymore, he waits till his dad’s out of the room and takes the money – it doesn’t matter when – and puts it in his own box at the bank. So on May ninth Sal happens to check the safe and sees it’s gone. That’s why he makes the two calls to Graham that morning. That’s why Graham rushes over. That’s why he has to kill him.’
Hardy had had little enough to celebrate this week. He didn’t need to get his parade rained upon right now. ‘There’s no proof of any of that.’
Freeman twinkled. ‘Exactly right. My point. There’s no proof of anything. There is no physical evidence. Soma’s just drawing you both into a pissing contest. Don’t go there. You don’t need it.’
Graham let out a deep sigh. ‘I just enjoyed watching Mr Hardy here kicking a little butt.’
‘Don’t get me wrong. Nobody likes fireworks as much as I do, Graham, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about evidence. Keep focused on that. Diz, you’ve got to write your eleven eighteen. Get it to Salter tonight, argue it tomorrow morning.’
Freeman was referring to a motion routinely made by defense counsel after the prosecution has rested, under Section 1118.1 of, the California Penal Code. It is nearly always rejected by the trial judge. The motion – called a directed verdict of acquittal – asks the judge to dismiss all charges against the defendant on the grounds that the prosecution has failed to provide probative evidence sufficient to justify a guilty verdict.
Hardy had considered it, of course, but it seemed a waste of time in this case. He turned to his old partner. ‘It’s not worth it, David. Salter’s going to turn me down anyway. He couldn’t direct a verdict, not with all the big guns out.’
Freeman nodded. ‘He sure could. I don’t think he will, either, but stranger things have happened.’
‘When?’ Graham asked, joking.
Freeman slid off the table. ‘We can’t get complacent. To quote the great Yogi Berra, it’s not over till it’s over, and sometimes not even then.’
‘That wasn’t Berra who said that, was it?’ Graham asked.
‘The first part, I think. Wasn’t it Berra?’
Hardy picked up his briefcase. ‘You titans work on that one. I’m going to write the damn motion.’
It was after five o’clock on a Thursday night and he came up through the main office, past the reception desk where Phyllis, answering telephones, ignored him. He looked in at the Solarium, hoping to see someone, but all of the associates were in their cubicles, working.
Or maybe avoiding him. They’d have heard about Michelle’s coup, or his idiocy, and in his mind they pitied him or had decided he was a terminal loser. Either way, no one stepped out and greeted him and he trudged up the stairway to his office, carrying the briefcase that, from the feel of it, was where he kept his barbells.
Dust had settled heavily over every smooth surface. The window hadn’t been opened in a week. He turned on the desk light – a green-shaded relic from the days when what was now Rebecca’s room had been his office at home – then turned around and threw up the sash. From Sutler Street wafted the smells of diesel and coffee and, more subtly, patchouli and crab. The city.
The letter from Michelle was centered in the middle of his desk. Sitting in his chair, he opened the envelope and gave it a once-over. No new news. He got halfway through his second pass on it before balling and throwing it toward the wastebasket. It missed.
Running his palm over the wide expanse of his desk, he cleared away a path of dust, then put his feet up.
He had no idea how much time went by. He wasn’t thinking in the sense of having discrete thoughts. Nor was he relaxing, not precisely. He was on ‘charge,’ listening or feeling for something that…
He wasn’t sure.
Maybe just letting the mass of facts settle: the stratagems, issues, distractions. Something, the weight of all of it, had simply stopped him. Was he missing something?
Of course, you always did. He couldn’t see the killer of Sal Russo, and someday he would need that. This he knew on a level beyond reason – he was kidding himself if he denied it.
He would need the closure.
Even if it didn’t help Graham’s verdict, and in spite of the mass of detail he had internalized, he knew he needed more facts. And worse, some sense told him he already had access to what he needed to know; he just didn’t recognize it.
So he shut down, the cogs locked. He wouldn’t be able to move until one of them shifted slightly.
It had gotten measurably darker and he hadn’t noticed. He spun his chair so he could see out the window. Above the street, through the canyons of the buildings, the sky burned a dark turquoise. The line of traffic below had disappeared.
His green banker’s lamp threw a pool of light onto his desk, the only light in the room. He stood and walked around to the dartboard, pulled the three darts, and began throwing in the semidarkness.
Sarah always prided herself on being far too tough to cry, but the past two days – since she’d told the world she believed in Graham – she’d felt like it often enough.
It wasn’t just her partner. She’d worked hard for some grudging acceptance among the men in the detail and thought she’d made inroads. Now all of that had vanished.
After ‘The “Yes” Heard Round the City,’ as Jeff Elliot had called it in ‘CityTalk,’ Sarah got called into Glitsky’s office. He appeared to listen to everything she had to say, though it ran counter to the company line.
She told him she’d come to the conclusion that while Sal had been murdered, it hadn’t been his son who’d done it. She admitted that she had talked to him personally – the softball connection, the Time magazine moment in his apartment – and thought she had some sense of who he was.
All of Graham’s lies, she explained, misguided as they might have been, were reducible to one impulse and then, as lies will, they’d had to multiply to cover each other. He hadn’t killed Sal. Somebody else had.
Glitsky had sat back slumped, elbows resting on the arms of his chair. He spoke so quietly, she could barely hear him. ‘If this turns personal, Sergeant, or is personal, and anybody finds out, you realize you screw your partner, me, the whole department. You know that?’
Sarah had felt sick. Glitsky knew. She was dead meat. But he didn’t go that way. Instead, he drew a deep breath and sat himself up. ‘Okay, you want to find your killer?’
If she did, he’d turn her loose on it.
Glitsky had approved hours for Sarah on the Russo case, though they would be billed to administration. Now at least she was getting paid for what she’d been doing anyway.
But her lieutenant had severely restricted her movements. Glitsky wasn’t about to get his rear end put in a wringer by Dean Powell’s troops if word got out that now, with the trial almost concluded, the police were checking witnesses, maybe looking for another suspect.
She started with George Russo. When she’d first revealed herself to Hardy and begun helping him, she’d gone to George’s Bush Street Victorian half a dozen times, on random nights. George, she’d concluded, had no life. It might be that he was genetically wired for rage at his natural father. He could have rushed out at lunch one day and killed Sal over the imagined slight to the honor or peace of mind of his mother. That, Sarah thought, was in the realm of the possible.
But whatever else might be going on, George kept his nose clean. He was the heir apparent to a banking empire, and his role transcribed his life. He did not party with anyone outside of his ordered little universe. Stalking him, she was convinced, was a waste of time, and she’d stopped.
But tonight, with nothing else substantive to pursue, she was going to try again. Marcel had been only too happy to dump her off early at the Hall, and she’d taken her own car up to Baywest Bank on Market Street and waited.
As always, George was a dream to tail. He was big and dressed handsomely. In spite of the relative warmth of these September evenings, he sported what she thought was an enormously affected homburg over a cashmere overcoat.
At a little after six he had left the bank on foot. Hands in pockets, he’d strolled purposefully a few blocks, never slowing or looking behind him, through the Tenderloin district – pimps and whores and derelicts. She wondered about the route – this wasn’t George’s turf by any stretch – but the question resolved itself when he turned into a small, expensive French restaurant on Polk, where he sat in the window and ate his dinner, alone.
There was nothing for her to do but wait for him to come out and see what he did next.
Now it was almost eight-thirty and she was sitting in her car alone and suddenly the tears threatened. Exhaustion was killing her. She hadn’t been alone with Graham in over three months. She hadn’t had time for any exercise. She’d almost forgotten the physical connection between her and Graham. Had it been as real as it felt? Or would all this have been for nothing? Would their love still exist when he got out? If he got out…
This was the specter that haunted, that she tried to ignore. Graham might not get out, not ever. Hardy and Freeman and -admit it – she herself might fail him.
Graham had a very real opportunity to spend the rest of his life in jail. And then what of her? How could she continue to be a cop, knowing that the system she was sworn to uphold had ruined her life? Glitsky hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know: she was way over the line. And if she couldn’t be a cop, what would she become?
She was saved from further introspection when George exited the restaurant and walked by his earlier route to Baywest, where he retrieved his car in the parking lot. Sarah was ready to follow him back to his home, when he turned right off Market, surprising her, back into the lower Tenderloin.
By now it was full dusk. The few streetlights that still worked in this part of town had come on. George drove slowly up Eddy to Polk, hung a right, then another one, and started back uptown. He turned right again. And again. Going in a circle.
Suddenly, her pulse beginning to race, Sarah knew what George was doing. He was cruising.
Reaching for her handheld, she put in a call to her dispatcher. ‘I need an Adam unit’ – a black-and-white patrol car – ‘ASAP for backup at…’
When George pulled over and the woman got into his car, she was ready. She waited until he had pulled into an alley, then told her Adam to roll.
She was right behind the squad car and so had a bird’s-eye view as the two uniformed officers came up to George’s car and knocked on the windows, one on either side, shining their flashlights down, illuminating what was going on inside.
Finally, a wedge.
The two uniformed officers took the prostitute over to the black-and-white car, fifty feet up the street. Sarah kept George back by his car. It was doubtful he would have recognized her in any event, but clearly now, in darkness and in terror, he didn’t know who she was except trouble. He’d taken off his coat for the business and now he was visibly freezing in the wind. She thought it was good for him.
Sarah had his wallet in her hands, was ostensibly checking over his ID. ‘George Russo. Do you know it’s illegal to traffic in prostitution?’
He decided to try a ridiculous bluff. ‘I don’t-’ Stopping. ‘She’s a friend of mine.’
Sarah smiled at him and yelled up the street. ‘Hey, guys! This John says he and the girl are friends. Ask her if she knows his name.’ She turned back to him. ‘I’m betting not, George. You know her name?’
George had the eyes of a spooked horse. He glanced out behind Sarah as though searching for something – salvation, maybe. Sarah gazed levelly at him. ‘Linda, Julie, what?’
From the other car one of the officers called down. ‘She says he can go to hell. She doesn’t know him.’
‘Look at that,’ Sarah said. ‘I won my bet.’
‘All right, so what now? I pay some fine? What?’
Sarah could waste a lot of time putting him through hoops, but she knew exactly what she wanted, and the best way to get it. She told him a lie. ‘You know we’ve got a new program to cut down on this vice traffic, George. It’s really getting out of hand, and you Johns tend to just walk away. So you know what we’re doing now? We’re putting names and pictures in the paper.’
‘You don’t do that.’
She nodded. ‘We do now. It’s a new program. Didn’t I say that?’
‘I can’t have that.’
‘You don’t get to choose.’ She hardened up her voice, put her hand on her gun. ‘All right, come on along with me.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To my car. I’m parked right behind my friends there. Then we all go downtown. Where do you think?’
‘Are you saying I’m under arrest?’
Again, she gave him nothing and he stammered into the breach. ‘Look, I can’t let this happen to me. I cannot get arrested for prostitution. I don’t care what that girl says – she’s a friend of mine. I’ve got to call my lawyer.’
‘If you’re going to call your lawyer, you can do it just as well from the Hall of Justice.’
He lowered his voice. ‘Look, what if… I mean, can’t we take care of this here? Maybe we can-’
She cut him off. ‘Don’t make it worse, George. Attempting to bribe a police officer is a crime too. Maybe you didn’t know that. Let’s pretend that for now, huh? Now let’s go.’
He was cracking. ‘No, look, please-’
She raised her voice again. ‘Hey!’
One of the officers stopped what he was doing and began trotting down to her. ‘Everything all right, Inspector?’
She held up a hand, keeping the officer out of earshot distance. ‘One minute, thanks. Stay close.’
She looked back to George. ‘Turn around,’ she said. ‘Put your hands behind your back.’
The officers wanted to put him in the black-and-white, where there was a screen and no handles on the back doors. But Sarah was a homicide inspector – the top of the hierarchy – and they knew it from the call number the dispatcher had given them: 14-H. She told the uniforms they could drive the hooker around the corner and let her go. The John was a witness in a homicide investigation and she was going to squeeze him now. In her car.
He was in the backseat, handcuffed, shivering with fear or cold or both. She got into the front seat and spun around. ‘I’d like to make you a trade.’
A born trader himself, George narrowed his eyes at the unexpected gambit.
Sarah didn’t let him get an answer out. ‘My real interest is your brother.’
‘Graham? What’s Graham got to do with this?’
‘This is going to make you tell me where you were when your father got killed.’
‘Fuck you. Why should I?’
Sarah looked flatly at him for a minute, then turned around and started the car.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute!’
‘We can talk downtown.’
‘No, no. I was just…’
‘Being an asshole?’
‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry. What do you want to know about Graham?’
She turned the car’s engine off. ‘I don’t want to know anything about Graham. I want to know about you. Graham didn’t kill your father.’
‘My father isn’t dead,’ George said. ‘I work with him every day.’
‘Sal.’ She clipped it. ‘Don’t get even slightly cute with me one more time or this discussion’s over. Understand?’
George didn’t give much away, but he did nod. ‘Okay, Graham didn’t kill Sal. So what?’
‘Okay, so somebody else did. I’m eliminating suspects.’
He leaned back, the haunted look in his eyes giving way to something else. Shrewdness, a deal in the making. ‘You can’t think I had anything to do with that. I didn’t even know where Sal lived.’
‘That’s what you’ve said, but I don’t know it’s true. You wouldn’t tell Graham’s attorney or anybody else where you were that afternoon.’
‘Why should I? It’s nobody’s business. You cops never asked.’
‘Well, it’s my business. I’m asking now. You can tell me where you were and I’ll go away and that’ll be the end of tonight’s little adventure. Or not, and I can write you up, fill out an incident report, you get to see your name in the newspaper.’ She leaned forward. ‘Look, all I want to know is where you were. You don’t tell me, I’m going to become a lot more interested in you as a murder suspect. Every minute of your last year is going to get a profile.’
‘I don’t-’
‘On the other hand, you tell me where you were and if it’s got nothing to do with your father, then this moment tonight, your girlfriend, everything – it all stops here.’
‘You don’t write it up? Or whatever it is you do?’
‘I won’t do anything.’
‘My father, especially. He can’t know.’
This phraseology slowed her momentarily until she realized George was talking about Leland, not Sal. ‘He won’t.’
Infuriatingly, as she was closing in, he skittered away again. ‘How do I know I can believe you?’
She smiled. ‘Well, the truth is, George, you can’t. Either way, you’re no worse off than you are right now.’ Her voice became conversational. She knew the battle was hers if she kept it cool. There was no need for the heavy artillery; enough hits with the light gauge would accomplish the same thing. ‘Look, George, it’s simple. You’ve got nothing to lose. Just tell me.’
He closed his eyes and swallowed, then mumbled it out. ‘Mitchell Brothers.’
‘What?’
He repeated it. The Mitchell brothers had been San Francisco’s kings of pornography for years until one of them had shot and killed the other one, which threw a damper on their partnership. Still, the original Mitchell Brothers Theater – five or six blocks from Baywest Bank – continued to thrive under the original name.
In terms of sexual provender, it went a good deal farther than the titillating nudity of the North Beach tourist shops. Featuring hard-core live sex shows, private booths, one-on-ones, and kinkiness of every imaginable kind, it was as raunchy a place as San Francisco could provide.
‘It’s my rotten luck.’ George was slumped now, going on. ‘The one day I do anything, the one hour, that’s when Sal dies and everybody wants to know where I am, where I was. And if Leland finds out where I was…’ He shook his head. ‘He’d cut me out, too, like Sal did. Then it would really be over.’
‘What would?’
‘My life,’ he said. ‘My career, everything he’s raised me to do.’
She had to ask. ‘So why did you risk it? Why’d you have this girl tonight? Why don’t you get yourself a girlfriend?’
This was torture. ‘There’s no… Leland wouldn’t…’
‘Like any of them? Approve?’
He shook his head. ‘I can’t make any mistakes.’
She tried to understand. George blamed himself for being abandoned; if he had been better or more lovable or something, it might not have had to happen. He might never understand the way it had formed him, but now he was an adult with an adult’s needs and desires, and, stunted by the fear of rejection, he was afraid to pursue them. Legitimately.
It saddened her, so she spoke gentry. ‘I’m afraid you’re on the wrong planet for no mistakes, George. Everybody makes them here on earth. They’re allowed.’
‘Not to me. You don’t know.’
But the defenses were coming back up. He straightened in the seat. His eyes narrowed again, seemed to focus more sharply. The slackness went out of his face. ‘So anyway, that’s where I was,’ he said. ‘Is that what you wanted? Do we have a deal?’
‘Yes.’
‘You won’t tell my father?’
‘That’s right. But sooner or later, you know, something else like this is going to happen. He’s going to find out.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s going to stop.’
Just what he needs, she thought, as though he weren’t already one of the most repressed young men she’d ever met. But she wasn’t his counselor. She’d tried, even – against her instincts – cared for a moment.
Someday he’d change, or he would implode. Or he might stay the same and live a miserable, pinched life of money and toys. Either way, Sarah wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.
She didn’t know how she could check it out, but for the moment George had given her a believable alibi. And this solved one of her immediate problems.
But it hadn’t solved Graham’s.
Hardy smelled bacon and felt the soft touch of his wife’s lips against his cheek. ‘I turned off the alarm and gave you an extra half hour.’
‘You’re my savior.’
‘I know. Come eat and get dressed after.’
It was five forty-five. He stepped into a pair of jeans and threw a jersey over his head. Out their bedroom window he could discern the outline of the Oakland hills, so the sun must have been somewhere behind them, but it hadn’t marched into the sky yet.
His coffee was poured in an oversized mug. Eggs were scrambled and steaming on his plate with six fat strips of bacon, English muffins, and marmalade. He loved marmalade and for some reason never thought to eat it.
He sat down. ‘Did I already mention the savior thing?’
She smiled. ‘What time did you get in?’
‘Twelve-thirty, one, something like that. I finished the motion. Salter might-’
She stopped him, putting her hand over his. ‘Later. Trial later.’ She pointed. ‘Breakfast now. Eat.’
He closed his eyes and nodded, smiling. She was so right. ‘Good plan,’ he said.
‘Everybody needs one.’
At seven-thirty A.M. the sturdy jogging figure appeared in his running clothes at the end of the alley. Hardy, waiting at the automatic gate to the parking lot behind the federal courthouse, was dressed for court in a dark suit and blue tie.
With a good sweat worked up, Giotti didn’t stop until he was almost upon him. He didn’t expect any interruptions on his morning run through the downtown alleys, certainly not from a lawyer on business.
‘Morning, Judge.’
Giotti was breathing heavily, but managed a half-smile of welcome. He took a moment – recognition not quite there. ‘Mr Hardy. You’re up early.’
To Hardy it felt like high noon. ‘I’ve got to deliver a motion at the Hall before eight. I wanted to catch you first. I remember you said you jogged most mornings.’
‘Not enough.’ He indicated the gate behind them, which had somehow swung open – a guard watching for the judge? a remote switch in his pocket? ‘You want to go inside?’
‘No. Here’s fine. I’ve only got a minute.’
‘Okay, how can I help you?’
‘Do you know if Sal knew anybody named Singleterry? Joan Singleterry?’
This was the cog that had slipped for Hardy last night. He and Graham had spent hours in the past months surmising about Sal’s early life, the mysterious Singleterry woman, and had come up with nothing. But suddenly, in his open-vessel state at his office, Hardy remembered that Giotti had actually known Sal Russo during those early days, had fished and worked with him, played ball and partied with him.
Hardy was starting to have a feeling that Joan Singleterry might have a bigger role here than he’d understood, and Giotti could be the key to her identity.
Did he imagine it? The judge’s clear gaze seemed to flicker for an instant. But then he was back as he’d been, still catching some breath, thinking about it. Dashing Hardy’s hopes. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘She wasn’t an old girlfriend, before Helen, maybe?’
Giotti pondered some more, shook his head no. ‘I’m sorry. Is it important? What’s this about?’
Keeping it vague, Hardy said it was just a name in discovery that led nowhere. He was starting his defense today and needed everything he could lay his hands on. If this Singleterry woman was a source of the money – something like that – it might lead to another suspect.
He must have betrayed a little of his disappointment. The judge gave him a manly pat on the shoulder. ‘I don’t know if you’re going to need any suspects. I’ve been following the trial pretty closely. It seems to me it’s going pretty well.’
‘It’d go better if I could produce a killer.’
Giotti appreciated the sentiment. ‘Well, that, sure. But you kept the struggle out pretty good, I thought.’
‘I meant to thank you for that. The idea.’
The judge shrugged. ‘I just told the truth. There was no physical proof of any struggle. Since I know your strategy, I’ve got an inside track, but I get the feeling Soma and Drysdale don’t have a clue what you’re up to.’
Hardy allowed himself a small smile. ‘Well, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?’
Giotti broke a true grin. ‘Hemingway allusions, yet. You’re a well-rounded human being for an attorney, Mr Hardy. When this is all over, if you don’t appeal’ – again, the reminder – ‘we ought to have a drink sometime.’
‘You could probably twist my arm.’
The judge nodded. ‘I might do that.’ A kind of wistful look came over him. ‘I just remembered how I miss Sal. Isn’t that funny?’
‘How is that?’
Perhaps he shouldn’t say. His mouth tightened, his body language briefly saying ‘No, never mind,’ but then that pose broke and he smiled sheepishly. ‘Do you have a lot of good friends, Mr Hardy?’
Hardy shrugged. ‘A few. I’m lucky with that, I suppose.’
‘I used to be too. That’s what they don’t tell you about this job.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Well, to get it – and don’t get me wrong, it’s all I’ve ever wanted. But to get it you’ve got to – how can I put it? – develop friendships. You make real friends when you’re on the rise, some would say on the make. You give parties, go to them, hobnob. You impress people with your brains – your legal knowledge and learned opinions and quick wit. It’s heady.’
‘I’d imagine it would be.’ Though Hardy had no idea where Giotti was going with this, or why he was divulging these intimacies to him.
‘Then you get appointed.’ Giotti’s expression said a lot about disappointment, the alternate roads not taken. ‘It all ends. You’re cut off. Some of the more cerebral judges, they do fine. Others miss the friendships, but friendships aren’t on the docket. Too much opportunity for conflict of interest, see? And these are the very people who put you here. Suddenly you can’t fraternize anymore, certainly not the same way. You wind up pretty much alone.’
Hardy suddenly understood. ‘Except Sal?’
‘The last one of my old friends. I could go up and just’ – he instinctively looked around for other people, other ears – ‘and just bullshit with him. I think it must have been you digging up that Hemingway just now. That was Sal. He knew a lot, he was funny, I could be who I was around him.’
Hardy motioned behind him, toward the federal courthouse. ‘You brethren don’t play a lot of practical jokes on each other in there, huh?’
The judge’s voice rasped. ‘It’s a serious life, Mr Hardy. Don’t let ’em tell you different.‘ Giotti gave himself a last beat of reflection, then put it behind him. He was too busy for any more of this. ’So someday maybe you and I, we’ll go have a drink somewhere. I’ll call you Dismas, how’s that sound?‘
‘I’ll still call you “Your Honor.” ’
Giotti laughed out loud. ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said. ‘That’s just what I mean.’
Hardy handed his directed-verdict motion over to Salter in his chambers and sat in exquisite suspense while the judge read over the five pages.
This was a murder case. Discussion of Hardy’s motion would be on the record. So over by the judge’s window, Soma, Drysdale, and Freeman quietly kept up the flow in the mighty stream of law gossip. They’d all previously read Hardy’s motion out in the hall and made informal small talk about it before the judge had them come into his chambers.
The court reporter sat in the chair next to Hardy, ready to catch any precious pearl, should one fall.
Hardy thought he had done a more than competent job on his motion, clearly laying out each factual allegation made by the prosecution, and then demonstrating in turn how they had failed to prove any of them: they hadn’t placed Graham at the apartment, they couldn’t prove a struggle, they couldn’t even get the coroner to state unequivocally that it had been a homicide. There was no temporal connection or relevance to the money or the baseball cards. Alison Li’s testimony was meaningless.
The prosecution had nothing.
By contrast, Judge Salter had a lot. He had a multi-photo-op hot-potato case of the very first order, hand-delivered to his courtroom by his good friend and political crony Dean Powell. He had an indictment by the grand jury that had brought things to this pass. He was privy to the backstage maneuverings of the attorneys, the motions here in his chambers, the lies of the defendant. He also had social relations with Federal Judge Harold Draper, Graham’s old boss – not quite enough to compel him to recuse himself from the case for conflict, although Hardy would make that argument should it come to an appeal.
None of these were matters of law. All of them, taken together, mattered more than the law.
Hardy had no doubt that one day Salter would leave the bench to pursue a political career. He had the bland good looks, the social connections, the inoffensive public personality. He was unfailingly polite, even friendly in an impersonal way.
Now he had finished reading Hardy’s motion and he took off his glasses, squared the pages on his desk, and laid them there. The frown that meant ‘I’m in deep thought’ gave way to the smile that said, ‘We’re friends here.’
‘Gentlemen,’ He motioned the other attorneys over, then gave his attention to Hardy. ‘This is one hell of a well-written motion, Diz. I mean it. You make a very colorable argument.’
Colorable, Hardy thought. Uh-oh. He exchanged a look with Freeman, who shrugged. It was expected, and it was over.
But Salter was observing the niceties. ‘Do you want to add any oral argument?’
‘They’ve failed to prove anything, Judge. Certainly not robbery, which is why we’ve got the specials. There’s no causal relation between the money and the death. There’s no paper showing when Graham got the money or the cards. The boy was taking care of his dad. He loved him.’
Out of the corner of his eyes Hardy could see that Soma was moved to comment, but Drysdale laid a hand on his sleeve, cutting him off before he began.
Salter let a small silence build. It wouldn’t do to reject such a well-written, colorable motion out of hand. An important ruling such as this one, although almost foreordained by its very nature, demanded at least some minutes of cogitation.
La politesse.
‘I don’t know, though,’ Salter finally admitted. ‘I’m still very concerned about all the lies.’
‘I think I’ve covered them, Judge. He panicked and then had to backfill.’
‘But why did he panic if he had done nothing?’
‘Homicide coming to his door. He freaked. It happens all the time.’
This was all pablum, totally irrelevant, and everybody knew it. Salter was going to turn him down because Hardy didn’t have enough to compel him not to. He didn’t have the murderer. He didn’t have Strout saying it was definitely a suicide. Anything less wouldn’t get it done.
Salter paused again, then drew in a lungful of air and let it out. Another smile among friends. ‘I think we’re going to have to let the jury decide, Diz. I’m going to deny the motion.’
‘I want you to visualize something,’ Freeman said. They were waiting for Salter to enter the courtroom. Graham sat between them at their defense table. Behind them the gallery was its usual din before court was called to order, although the noise was so familiar by now that no one noticed it. ‘No, I mean it. Close your eyes.’
‘If I close my eyes I will be asleep when the judge comes in. I guarantee it. I’ve done experiments.’
Graham looked back and forth between them, settled on Hardy. ‘Better what Yoda says do. Otherwise he use Force. You die.’
Part of Hardy was relieved by Graham’s tendency to keep things light. He rolled his eyes, then closed them. ‘See, what did I tell you? I’m asleep.’
‘You’re talking,’ Graham said.
‘In my sleep. Happens all the time.’
‘Diz.’ He heard Freeman’s voice. ‘You’re on a diving board, a high one. You’re going to try a one and a half forward flip. You with me?’
‘I’m there,’ Hardy said.
Freeman kept on. ‘Think the dive through. Commit to it. You’re going all the way around and then halfway around again, a long time in the air. All right?’
‘Ready.’
‘Think it!’
Hardy forced the image.
‘All right, now jump! Tuck hard, spin, you feel it? Don’t pull out. Don’t pull out.’
Hardy rolled with the dive. It was a long way around, but he held his tuck, entered the water cleanly, opened his eyes. ‘Okay.’
‘You get around?’
‘No splash,’ Hardy said. ‘Cut it like a knife.’
Graham looked from one to the other again. ‘You guys are crazy,’ he said.
But Freeman had a valid point. This morning Hardy would open the case-in-chief for the defense. He would be calling his defense witnesses, and this was where their strategy could not waver. It would seem that they were hanging in the air, spinning, for a good deal of the time.
They weren’t going to try to get the judge to instruct on lesser included offenses; the jury would have no option to convict Graham of manslaughter as a compromise. Graham wouldn’t take the stand to appear sympathetic and likable. There was going to be no chance for a couple of years in prison and a life resumed. It was to be murder or nothing – life or freedom.
This was the agonizing crux of it. As it stood now, some members of the jury might still believe that Graham had had no part in his father’s death. After Hardy presented his case-in-chief, however, no one would doubt Graham had done it, an ‘it’ that the law defined as murder: the deliberate taking of a human life. What the defense needed to do was to polarize the jury to convince them that if they did not believe Graham had killed his father for money, then they should acquit rather than convict on a lesser offense.
The prosecution had emphasized the financial motive for the killing to bolster their charges of a first-degree murder conviction. Hardy’s gambit was going to make the game winner take all -first or nothing.
This course was fraught with tremendous risk, although they all agreed that it was their best chance for acquittal.
But it would destroy the defense if Hardy forgot even for a moment and began to pull out of the spin before he reached the end. He could not allow himself the luxury of bringing up his possible ‘other dudes.’ He had one and only one story and he had to commit to it now, before he began, or they would lose.
Dr Russ Cutler was the young man Hardy had met and questioned for the first time at the Little Shamrock. Back then he’d been unshaven and exhausted, draped in his medical scrubs and his guilt over not having come forward about prescribing the morphine. Now he had finished his residency and gone into private practice. He had also spent a good deal of time rehearsing his proposed testimony with Freeman and Hardy.
In a tan linen suit and maroon tie, well rested and confident, he took the stand and swore to tell the whole truth and nothing but.
‘Dr Cutler, would you please tell the court your relationship to Graham?’
‘We play softball together on the same team. I consider myself his friend. I was his father’s doctor.’
At these last words the white noise in the courtroom went away. Hardy’s voice cut into the silence. ‘Now, Doctor, as Sal Russo’s physician, did you examine him in the last six months before his death?’
‘Yes, I did. Graham told me that he had a sick father, and asked if I would look at him.’
‘And would you tell the jury what you found?’
Cutler was happy to. Hardy thought him the perfect witness for his male-dominated jury. First, he was a guy himself, neither too young nor too old. He was dressed neatly enough for authority, but not much more. With solid features, he wasn’t quite handsome, though he showed a lot of teeth when he smiled. Easy and approachable, that’s what Cutler was.
Even better, Hardy realized. He cut nearly the same figure as Judge Salter, except that he was twenty years younger, and he was sincere.
‘And when you discovered what you thought was a brain tumor on the CAT scan, what did you do?’
‘Well, then I went to an MRI.’ With Hardy’s nudging, Cutler explained a little about magnetic resonance imaging.
‘And what did that reveal?’
‘What I had suspected and feared – that the cancer had advanced beyond any ability to treat it. It was terminal.’
Behind him Hardy heard Drysdale’s voice. ‘Your Honor, excuse me, may we request a sidebar?’
Hardy didn’t like this at all. ‘Your Honor, I’m in the middle of something here.’
‘It relates to what Mr Hardy is doing, Your Honor.’
Salter gave it about three seconds, then motioned the attorneys forward to the bench.
Once in front of the judge Drysdale wasted no time either. ‘Your Honor, the prosecution will stipulate that Sal Russo had terminal cancer and perhaps Alzheimer’s disease. He was going to die soon. All these questions by Mr Hardy aren’t addressing any evidentiary issues.’
Freeman spoke under his breath. ‘Neither did your case in chief.’
Salter glared him quiet. ‘Mr Hardy?’
‘Your Honor, it’s our intention to show how the deceased’s physical condition might have driven him to want to die.’
Soma’s high-pitched voice rang out. ‘So what? It’s still murder.’ The attorneys all turned to him at the outburst. Salter remained calm. ‘Address your remarks to the court, all of you. That’s me, Mr Soma. Mr Freeman.’ He stared to make sure his point had come across. ‘Mr Hardy, are you getting to some kind of mental defense? Are you going to be asking for manslaughter based on some theory?’
Hardy didn’t answer directly. ‘Your Honor, I’m getting to the relationship between Graham and his father. The prosecution is contending that he robbed from Sal, although they couldn’t prove it, as you yourself noted this morning.’
Salter rebuked him. ‘That’s not entirely accurate. I did deny your motion, however close I thought it was.’
But Hardy kept at him. This was crucial to his case and he couldn’t let it go. ‘Nevertheless, Your Honor, Dr Cutler’s testimony bears on the motive of the defendant. Graham Russo would not have stolen from his father. He loved him.’
The judge chewed on his cheek, slipped on his reading glasses, took them back off. ‘Motive?’
‘Yes, Your Honor.’ Hardy had to have it, but it was another huge risk.
Salter thought another moment, then delivered his judgment. ‘I’m going to allow it.’
Hardy let out a breath of relief. The attorneys returned to their tables. ‘Dr Cutler,’ he began again. ‘You’ve just told us that Sal Russo’s cancer was terminal. Did you have a prognosis on how long he would live?’
‘Yes. Six months to a year.’
‘And what about the disease itself, the tumor? Was it painful?’
‘Indirectly, from the increased pressure in his head. This produced horrible headaches and began to cause visual changes and motor weakness.’
‘And over the next six months or a year, would these symptoms grow progressively worse?’
‘Yes.’
‘There would be great pain, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes, unbearable pain.’
‘Unbearable.’ Hardy nodded and went back to his table to get a drink of water. There he was stunned and somewhat pleased to see his client, usually a devil-may-care wiseguy, with his jaw hard set, apparently blinking back tears. Hardy didn’t want to draw attention to the moment – it would appear staged – but he noticed some of the jury had followed him over. He could only hope that they would see and draw the proper conclusion from it.
Back at the center of the courtroom Hardy began again. ‘During this diagnostic stage, Doctor, all the tests and second opinions and so on, did Sal come to see you often?’
‘Two or three times a week for a couple of months.’
‘And did he come alone?’
‘No, never. Graham always came with him.’
‘Graham Russo came every time?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And these visits and tests, how did Sal pay for them? Did he have insurance?’
‘No. That was one of his main problems.’
‘And how did he solve that problem?’
‘Graham paid for everything out of his pocket.’
The defense side of the gallery came alive now, and Salter had to gavel for quiet.
‘Can you tell us more specifically what Graham paid for?’
Cutler remained completely at ease, talking to the jury, who were rapt. ‘He paid for everything. The visits, the CAT scans, the MRI, the prescription.’
‘Thank you, Doctor. We’ll get to the prescription in a minute, but how can you be sure that this was Graham paying you personally, and not just handing you his father’s money?’
Cutler crossed one knee over the other. Again, he brought it right to the jury. ‘Graham and I play softball on a semipro team. After the games we’d collect our pay and he’d hand me his money. I’d take it in and pay his bill.’
‘All right. Now referring to the prescriptions you wrote for Sal. Was one of these for the “Do Not Resuscitate” form?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Could you please tell us about that?’
‘Sure.’ Cutler had already been on the stand awhile, and Hardy’s questioning would go on a little longer, but the doctor was still enthusiastic and, Hardy noted, he was holding the jury. ‘It’s pretty self-explanatory’ – he had an almost apologetic tone – ‘but Sal didn’t want any extraordinary measures done to keep him alive. If the paramedics found him apparently dead, they were to leave him that way. He was pretty adamant about it. He had a lot of dignity.’
‘And did he ask for the DNR himself?’
‘Yes. Graham was there, but Sal wanted it in case he decided to kill himself.’
Hardy heard the susurrus sweep the gallery, but he kept it moving. ‘Did Sal specifically tell you he planned to kill himself?’
Cutler, bless him, chuckled. ‘Not exactly. We discussed his options. That was one of them.’ He turned to the jury, explaining. ‘That’s the way these things go.’
‘What do you mean by that, Doctor?’
‘Well, you’ve got a patient who is going to die soon in great pain. On top of that, in Sal’s case, you had his fear of the progress of Alzheimer’s disease. So there was a lot of subtext, a lot of backwards questions.’
‘Backwards questions?’
Cutler contemplated how to rephrase it. ‘Okay. On the morphine, for example, Sal asked if twelve milligrams could be a lethal dose. “I don’t want to kill myself by mistake,” he said. But what he meant was “Can I kill myself with this if I decide to?” ’
‘Your Honor! Objection. Speculation. Dr Cutler can’t know what Sal Russo meant by his question.’
Salter started to sustain, but Cutler had had enough of lawyers telling him what he, as a doctor, could or couldn’t do. ‘I know exactly what he meant,’ he blurted out. ‘He asked me how to kill himself, would it be more effective with alcohol, and I told him that if I answered his question I could lose my license and even go to jail. So we played this game where-’
Salter stopped him. ‘Doctor, please. Confine yourself to answering specific questions. That’s how we do it here.’
A tense silence settled over the courtroom. But Cutler had made the point and the jury would understand: terminal patients were often driven by the law to speak in code. The communication was clear on both sides.
Salter finally spoke again. ‘Go ahead, Mr Hardy.’
Hardy nodded. ‘This discussion about suicide, Doctor, was Graham there when you had it?’
‘Yes. He was always there.’
Hardy took a small break, another sip of water. Graham had recovered his composure and gave him a nod. Cutler’s testimony had clearly registered with the jury. Several of the men were taking notes. No one appeared distracted. They were waiting for his next sally. ‘Dr Cutler, you knew that Graham worked as a paramedic, did you not?’
‘Sure. Guys get hurt playing ball, Graham and I were the two medical people. It’s how we got to know each other.’
‘And to your personal knowledge, did he give his father morphine injections?’
‘Yes. The first time or two during visits. It makes a big difference with drugs whether you give them into the muscle, which is called IM, or the vein, which is IV. Initially, I recommended higher doses to be given IM. These could be lethal if injected IV. Later, Sal began to have breakthrough pain, so I instructed Graham on IV dosing guidelines. I wanted him to be especially clear on it.’
The jury had already heard this, but Hardy didn’t think it would hurt them to be reminded. Graham had known what they knew.
‘So Graham could have given these injections IV or IM without Sal’s knowledge that he was doing anything unusual or different?’
Hardy heard Drysdale’s voice. ‘Your Honor. Objection. Relevance?’
‘Mr Hardy?’ In spite of himself Salter seemed to have gotten interested and was giving him wide leeway with Dr Cutler, but he thought Drysdale might have a point here. Where was this going?
Hardy was delighted with the objection, since it gave him a chance to explain. ‘Your Honor, Mr Drysdale and Mr Soma have gone to some lengths to try to leave the impression that Graham hit his father behind the ear with the bottle of Old Crow so he could administer this shot without his father objecting. Though they haven’t proven it, my question to Dr Cutler clarifies whether Graham would have had to do that in any event.’
Salter considered and then overruled the objection. The question was relevant. Cutler had it read back to him, and then told the jury that an experienced person such as Graham could have injected Sal IV or IM with complete impunity.
Which made clear to the jury, Hardy hoped, that Sal would never have had to suspect a thing. There would have been no struggle or need of one, not if Graham had been there.
Which he hadn’t been, of course. But that was no longer the point.
Tactically, Hardy thought Soma and Drysdale made a mistake letting the younger man take Cutler’s cross-examination. The two men were polar opposites, and Graham’s friend the doctor was far more likable than the strident prosecutor.
Of course, both the men were fast-track urban professionals and almost by definition had to possess Type-A personalities to have gotten where they were. They probably were – deep down inside – more similar than not. It was a matter of style more than anything, but style counted here, and played into Graham’s hands. At least at first.
‘Dr Cutler, you’ve said that you consider yourself a friend of the defendant. Have you known him for a long time?’
Cutler shrugged. ‘About two years.’
‘And you play baseball with him, is that correct?’
‘Softball, but yes.’
‘Outside of softball, do you see each other socially?’
This struck Cutler as funny. ‘Outside of softball I don’t have a social life.’
Humorless, Soma clucked. ‘That would be no, Doctor, wouldn’t it? You didn’t see defendant socially?’
‘Right,’ Cutler agreed.
This answer, simple as it was, frustrated Soma. ‘Your Honor,’ he said to Salter, ‘the question calls for a negative and Dr Cutler has answered in the affirmative.’
Salter huffed, ‘So ask clearer questions, Mr Soma. Let’s move along.’
Obviously swallowing his bile, Soma turned back to the witness box. ‘Doctor, one more time, outside of softball, did you see defendant socially?’
Hardy wondered what Soma hoped to accomplish by this display. He was coming across as unusually petty and foolish, and to get what? That Cutler and Graham didn’t party together? Who cared?
But the doctor just smiled, unruffled, and answered as bidden.
‘No.’
Stiffly, Soma intoned, ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
A ripple of laughter in the gallery. Even Salter seemed to be suppressing some amusement. Soma finally seemed to get it. He forced a little smile of his own. ‘Did defendant share with you any of his motives for accompanying his father?’
‘Yes, of course. The obvious ones. I thought they were pretty obvious, anyway.’
‘You did?’ Soma raised his eyebrows and brought in the jury.
He’d started roughly, but had picked up a scent. He knew what trail he was going to follow now. ‘You thought it was obvious why Graham brought his father down?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Did you think it was obvious that he was being the dutiful son?’
‘Yes.’
‘And do you know for how long he had been this loving son?’
Hardy stood up. ‘Objection, Your Honor.’
‘Sustained.’
‘We’ve heard testimony in this trial that the defendant hadn’t seen his father for the previous fifteen years. Is that what you’d call being a loving son, Doctor?’
Again, Hardy was on his feet, objecting.
Soma fought back. ‘Your Honor, the jury doesn’t have to buy the defendant’s late attack of altruism.’
The judge sustained Hardy, but Soma’s attack continued. ‘On any of these visits, was Sal Russo difficult to attend to?’
‘What do you mean, difficult?’
‘Well, doctor, here is a man with Alzheimer’s disease, sometimes he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know who you are, he’s got a tremendously painful cancer in his brain. Surely he was a little cranky from time to time. Would you say that was the case?’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘And did the defendant ever mention to you that his father was being burdensome or difficult to take care of?’
‘Well, he was-’
‘Yes or no, Doctor?’
‘Yes.’
‘And maybe he was getting a little tired of it?’
‘Objection! Hearsay. Speculation. Badgering the witness.’
But Soma whirled, flashed a malevolent glance at Hardy, spun back to Salter. ‘I’m asking the witness what he heard with his own ears, Your Honor. It’s neither hearsay nor speculation. And I’m not badgering. I’m trying to get straight exactly what he heard.’
Salter allowed the question, overruling Hardy, and was about to ask the recorder to read it out again, when Soma delivered it word for word. ‘And maybe he was getting a little tired of it? Did Graham Russo ever say that?’
‘All right, maybe he did.’
‘Maybe he did. Yes. Now, let’s move to these medical bills and doctor’s bills and so on that the defendant was paying. They must have been expensive. Were they expensive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very expensive? In the hundreds? Thousands? Ten thousands?’
‘Say the high thousands.’
‘All right, let’s say the high thousands. Did the defendant ever mention to you that this was becoming difficult? This was a financial burden he could do without?’
‘No.’
‘No? He was paying thousands of dollars to keep alive a man who was near death anyhow, and he never mentioned any frustration about that?’
‘No. That never came up.’
‘It never came up. Perhaps that’s because he wasn’t spending his own money.’
Hardy stood again. ‘Your Honor-’
But Soma stepped in again. ‘Your Honor, Dr Cutler has told us he received money from Graham for these bills after Softball games, and now we learn it was thousands of dollars.’
‘Proceed,’ Salter intoned.
‘Are we to believe, Doctor, that the defendant makes thousands of dollars playing softball and that every time he paid you for medical services you witnessed the source of the money?’
‘Not every time-’
‘Ah, so the defendant would sometimes bring money from, apparently, another source?’
Cutler threw an apologetic look across the courtroom to Graham and Hardy. What could he do? ‘Yes, sometimes,’ he said.
‘And that source was his father, isn’t that so?’
‘Objection! Speculation.’
But Soma kept right on, his voice rising in pitch and volume. ‘And maybe that source was drying up, wasn’t it, Doctor? And there wasn’t as much money anymore as defendant-’
‘Your Honor! I object.’ Hardy was forced to raise his own voice.
For nearly the first time in the entire trial Salter banged his gavel. ‘Mr Soma, please! Get yourself under control. Another outburst like that and I’ll find you in contempt. You hear me?’
‘Yes, Your Honor, I’m sorry.’ But he looked neither diminished by the rebuke nor sorry for what had caused it. He was drawing some rich blood.
‘Doctor,’ he continued, ‘did the defendant ever indicate to you that he was entitled to something for all the trouble he was going through?’
‘No. He was-’
‘Did Sal Russo, defendant’s father, did Sal ever complain about how much these visits were costing?’
‘Yes, sometimes he would-’
‘Did it ever occur to you that he meant to ask how much it was costing him, not Graham?’
‘No, it wasn’t-’
‘Do you know it wasn’t his father’s money?’
‘No, but-’
‘Do you know his father didn’t pay back even the softball money as soon as they got back to his apartment?’
‘No, but I-’
‘Your Honor.’ Hardy had to try to break up this rhythm. ‘The witness is entitled to explain his answers.’
‘They’re all yes-and-no questions, Your Honor.’ Soma was really on a roll. He didn’t want to give the judge time to make any ruling on the objection. The jury would remember what he’d gotten, not how. ‘I’ll watch it, Your Honor.’ Which was easy to say – he was finished. He’d gotten what he’d come for. ‘No further questions.’
‘I have one.’ Freeman the wild card came up and around the defense table for redirect. He hadn’t even cleared it with Hardy, so he must have been sure he was on to something. ‘Dr Cutler, at any time in all of your treatments of Sal Russo, did you, Sal, and Graham ever frankly and fully discuss the possibility of assisted suicide?’
There was a collective gasp in the gallery. This was the kind of question Soma might have asked. To hear it from the defense table was shocking.
But Freeman had done it and it was now on the record. Cutler, shell shocked anyway from Soma’s assault, now looked stunned. ‘Yes, many times. He asked me if I’d help kill him if he got too far gone. I said I couldn’t.’
‘And was Sal Russo lucid during at least some of these discussions?’
‘Yes. Many of them. Most.’
‘It was brilliant, if I do say so myself, and I do.’ Freeman was in the holding cell defending himself. Hardy and Graham were both having trouble appreciating his genius. ‘We got assisted suicide in the front of everybody’s brains now.’
‘We did before, David. It was more subtle was all.’
‘Subtle schmuttle.’ Unwrapping his Reuben sandwich, Freeman scoffed at the idea. He took a juicy bite, leaned over so the bag would catch his drippings, swabbed his thick lips with a napkin. ‘Listen up. Graham didn’t say that he was thinking of killing his dad, for any reason. Remember, we’re loving this assisted suicide defense, but it’s still illegal, my sons.’ He pointed at Graham. ‘Even if it’s going to get you off.’
Graham was unconvinced. ‘Yoda better that clearer make.’ Freeman motioned over to Hardy. ‘That’s for this silver-tongued devil in closing.’
‘How can I thank you enough?’ Hardy asked.
Freeman grinned and took another bite. ‘No charge.’
Thursday afternoon, all day Friday, Monday and Tuesday of the next week, was a long, slow waltz for the defense. Hardy had to get the jury to hear about the progress of Alzheimer’s disease, about Sal’s relations with the rest of the estranged family, about the places and times Sal and Graham had been together in public. So he called Helen and George and Debra and the young Dr Finer, who’d first examined Sal at the county clinic. He called the owner of the U.S. Restaurant, where they had frequently eaten.
Keeping up on the motive issue, he brought up many of Graham’s past co-workers and associates. One at a time Hardy called as witnesses several EMTs – three male, two female – who’d crewed with him over the past two years, all of whom had nothing but good to say about his compassion, bedside manner, cooperative spirit, medical knowledge, punctuality, and general competence. He’d made no enemies within his ambulance company.
Besides Russ Cutler, three other members of Graham’s softball team, the Hornets, testified that he’d brought his father to games, introduced him around, went out for food afterward. He was a solicitous and dutiful son.
Especially effective was Roger Stamps, who’d been with them in Fremont after a game a year or more ago when Sal had wandered away from the softball field. He and Graham had driven the darkened streets for over an hour before locating Sal in the coffee shop of a bowling alley.
Graham had paid his father’s tab, got him belted into the car, and drove him home. He’d never shown impatience or anger. Stamps hoped that when he got old he could have a son as devoted as Graham.
Craig Ising was a guy’s guy and hence a good call for this jury, but there was a risk to calling him as well. In Hardy’s mind there was a very real legal question as to whether Graham’s knowing participation in the high-stakes softball games, even leaving aside the question of claiming his income from it, constituted a felony.
In the end they decided to call Ising as a witness anyway. He, better than anyone else, could put a positive spin on Graham’s apparently irresponsible defection from Harold Draper’s courtroom, as well as explain the intricacies of his motivation to be a replacement player: that Graham had correctly predicted the end of the baseball strike, had wanted another look from the major league clubs, wouldn’t play as a scab, and so on.
If Graham wasn’t going to testify, somebody else had to make the jury aware of his state of mind, and Ising was the best choice. Graham hadn’t acted like a selfish flake – he was a man in pursuit of a dream.
Soma and Drysdale kept a low profile. The occasional objection would come up over a witness’s characterization of one of Graham’s actions, but generally the prosecution seemed happy to let Hardy call his people and let them talk.
None of the witnesses were rebutting the evidence that had been presented. What could there be to worry about?
On Wednesday morning at seven-thirty Hardy sat behind the closed door of Abe Glitsky’s office with David Freeman and Sarah Evans. They were reviewing all the leads that, as Sarah had independently discovered over the past four months, had gone nowhere. Hardy and Freeman were contemplating calling one more witness and then they were going to wrap up the defense, Hardy getting to tie the pieces of his story – Graham’s story -together at last.
The early confidence he felt in their strategy had completely disappeared by now. Not that the trial hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped, but a jury was always a crapshoot, and this one particularly. Hardy had been in the air with his dive now for most of four court days, and it was all he could do to hold his tuck for the next hours.
He hadn’t rebutted any prosecution evidence in his own case in chief. Oh, yes, he’d done his best to discredit witnesses on the issue of whether there had been a struggle, but that had been about the extent of his arguments. He had presented an affirmative defense that was simply an alternative explanation of the same facts that the prosecution had used.
It was going to come down to a matter of what the jury believed. Or whom they believed. In that sense it was good that no one had found any ‘other dudes’ to point at.
And now they were all committed. Hardy’s defense was really the only possible one left. But he couldn’t shake his intense discomfort over the fact that it was, basically, a cynical lie. A lie that served justice, he believed, but still a lie.
Freeman was not being his most endearing self. He appeared to have slept in his suit and certainly hadn’t showered – obvious in the cramped room. He had consumed a healthy, well-rounded breakfast of peanuts and had piled the shells in front of him on Glitsky’s desk. ‘Look, Lieutenant, we can go down to Judge Salter right now and get ourselves a month continuance, and I think we ought to do it and investigate the hell out of this gambling connection.’
Hardy tried to rein his partner in. ‘He’d never do that to the jury, David. Not at this stage. And it’s not about any gambling, anyway.’
Freeman paid no mind, breezing along, jawing at Glitsky, ‘We know that Craig Ising is in cahoots with at least two dozen other gamblers downtown, most of whom used Sal Russo to run their money around-’
‘A long time ago,’ Hardy put in.
‘- some of which might have been the wrapped bills in this case.’
‘There’s no evidence of that,’ Sarah said.
Freeman snapped, ‘None that you’ve found.’
Sarah’s eyes flashed at him. ‘That’s right. None that anybody could have found.’
Glitsky sat up. ‘Hey, hey, nobody has to get accusatory. Getting mad isn’t going to help anything.’
‘I’m not mad.’ Freeman appeared genuinely surprised. He was simply arguing his position, for him a function of drawing breath. How could it offend?
Evans, however, had some color in her cheeks. ‘I interviewed Craig Ising twice, Mr Freeman.’ Actually it had been four times, but Glitsky had only known and approved of the last two of them, so she went with that. ‘I told him we weren’t interested in his gambling, only in Sal. He said to his knowledge no one had used Sal in at least two full years.’
Freeman scoffed at that. ‘He says…’
‘Graham corroborates it,’ Hardy said.
Freeman looked from one of them to the other. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘Sal had memory problems. This ring a bell, Pavlovs? He might have stumbled upon this opportunity to deliver a bag of cash and forgot he even did it.’
‘To who? From who?’ Glitsky asked.
‘Abe means whom, David. To whom, from whom.’ Hardy favored Abe with a smile.
Abe looked over. ‘Whom this, Diz.’
Freeman ignored the exchange. ‘That’s your job, Lieutenant. Find that out.’
Like Freeman, Glitsky wasn’t angry. He admired Freeman’s persistence, but he realized that he was fishing and had nothing. ‘Point me to any evidence, any direction, David, and we’re on it. I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened. I’m not even saying it didn’t happen. But I’ve got a suspect on trial for what we’d be asking these people about, if we could find out who they were.’
‘What about the cooperative Mr Ising?’
Hardy had to speak up again. ‘He’s our witness, David. He’s been nothing but a help.’
Freeman waved a hand. ‘That’s old news. What’s he done for us lately?’ Back at Glitsky. ‘Look, you call Ising in, rip him a new asshole over all this gambling, tell him you’re giving him up to vice if he doesn’t give us the name of every one of his cohorts, and then you call all of them downtown and find where their stories don’t coincide. Does he have a sheet?’ Meaning a police record.
Truly amused now, Glitsky rolled his eyes at Sarah, turned to Hardy. ‘Anything else, Diz?’
‘I think you went a bit over the line, David. Suggesting we arrest the entire young generation of the city’s power elite, I don’t know, maybe that didn’t seem reasonable.’
‘Glitsky could do it.’
They sat at their table in the empty courtroom. Freeman had tried another ploy, suggesting on round two that this time Glitsky arrest Dan Tosca and somehow squeeze him for information on the multimillion-dollar fish-poaching trade. But again, as Glitsky and Sarah had pointed out, there wasn’t even any smoke around Tosca. Why should they go looking for a fire?
‘The point is not that he could do it, David, but that he’d have to explain why, and there wouldn’t be any good reasons.’
The old man shook his head. ‘Picky picky picky.’
‘Besides,’ Hardy continued, ‘I thought we’d decided to stay in our tuck.’
‘That was you,’ Freeman said. ‘Me, I’d go to any lengths to keep a verdict away from a jury. If a judge would give me a five-year continuance, I’d take it on general principles.’
‘Spoken like a true defense attorney.’
‘Which, I might remind you, is what I am.’
‘And you’d let your client rot in jail?’
‘Absolutely.’
Hardy had to laugh. ‘Were you born with this great compassion for your fellow man or is it something you’ve developed over the years?’
‘Both. But all right, Glitsky washed. Now we’re back on Plan A. We calling Brandt?’
They’d beaten this decision to death but were pretty clear with what they should do. On the one hand, Barbara Brandt would be a stirring defender of assisted suicide and would put the issue right into the collective faces of the jury. But Freeman had already done just that on redirect with Russ Cutler. Only a moron – and Hardy hoped there were none on the jury – could avoid some sense of the real issue in this case.
On the other hand, Brandt would swear that Graham had killed Sal. She was probably a liar and certainly a loose cannon. Hardy didn’t know what, if anything, Drysdale and Soma had discovered about Brandt’s lie detector test, but the polygraph expert’s name was Les Worrell and he was on their witness list.
Hardy had questioned Worrell and believed that Brandt had in fact passed the test. But he’d also read newspaper and magazine reports opining that Barbara Brandt had been coached in how to pass the test. What Hardy didn’t know was if Worrell had been implicated in that collusion, and he was loath to ask about more things he didn’t know. The whole polygraph issue was inadmissible, but Hardy and Freeman thought they knew a land mine when they saw one.
‘I’m going to let my instincts decide,’ he said finally.
‘Go with what you feel, huh?’ Freeman asked.
‘Right.’
‘Dumbest idea I ever heard.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘You do it all the time.’
‘But I’m the incredible David Freeman.’ It wasn’t clear whether he was kidding or not.
‘I’m going to win them over, David. I’m going to make them see it.’
‘Without Brandt?’
‘Probably, now that I think of it. She can’t tell the jury anything they don’t already know from other sources.’
Freeman seemed to buy this. ‘So? You got a plan?’
Hardy cracked a craggy grin. ‘The outline’s a little vague. A little smile, a little dance, a little seltzer in my pants.’
Drysdale, Soma, and the big boss himself, Dean Powell, were having their own meeting in the state attorneys’ offices on Fremont Street. Though a day or so of the defense’s testimony had gone by before they’d seen it, they were no longer unaware that Hardy was conducting his portion of the trial on a different plane than they had.
They had a big decision to make and weren’t in precise accord about how to proceed. Dean Powell had the floor, which in this case was the head of the long functional state-issue table in the conference room. His face was set, and under the mane of white hair his color was high. ‘I don’t care about any face-saving strategy, Art, we’re not backing away from the specials.’
‘All I’m saying, Dean’ – Drysdale’s tone was mild – ‘is that we don’t want to let this boy go free. If the jury’s only choice is to convict on robbery murder or acquit, they might just acquit, and then what’s all this been for?’
‘All this has been to bring a murderer to justice.’ Powell wasn’t entertaining other suggestions. ‘That’s what all this has been for. It’s what it’s always been for. Besides, they’re not going to acquit.’
Fearless, Soma waded into it. ‘We just want to drive a stake into the heart of that possibility, Dean. Give them another option to consider. Ask for manslaughter as a possible lesser verdict.’
‘Hardy’s leading them in that direction, Dean,’ Drysdale added. ‘Gil and I just want to cut him off.’
‘God damn it,’ Powell clipped, ‘are you boys listening to me? Am I speaking some foreign language? We have charged our man Russo here with robbery murder. Don’t you think I understand the implications of that? I assure you I do. And I’ll tell you something else: if we back off, if we even appear to back off, we’ll be broadcasting the news to the jury that we didn’t prove the case. And then they will acquit.’
There was that familiar bubble of silence that succeeds the moment when a boss swears at underlings. Drysdale took a breath. ‘How about this, Dean? We don’t argue assisted suicide-’
Powell: ‘Damn straight we don’t.’
‘- but we give it to Salter in our jury instructions?’
The dilemma they faced was a real one. In the same way that Hardy and the defense had gone into their tuck, vowing not to pull out of it until they had presented their entire argument, so, too, the prosecution had avoided muddying the murder waters by never alluding to the possibility that Sal’s death was less than murder. Assisted suicide was still, both technically and in fact, a crime in the state of California. It might not be first-degree murder, but it was at least second, and no way less than a long prison term.
Drysdale was admitting the validity of Powell’s position – that they might open themselves to ridicule (and acquittal) if they switched over and added the assisted-suicide argument at this point. But if they did do that, they would vastly increase the odds that the jury would not set Graham Russo scot free.
Drysdale believed that he could persuade Judge Salter to direct the jury that assisted suicide was still murder. Then, the jury could return with a verdict of first- or second-degree murder and Powell could still claim some sort of victory.
But the attorney general was adamant. He wasn’t doing that. His team wouldn’t play on that field. ‘We picked this fight six months ago, Art. We get him on robbery murder or we let him go-’
Tempers were fraying and Soma cracked under the pressure, slapping his palm loudly on the table. ‘Shit.’
Powell snapped back, the strike of a snake. ‘Don’t you give me that attitude, Mr Soma. You’ll find yourself unemployed in a fucking heartbeat. You hear me? You afraid you didn’t prove the case?’
Soma raised his eyes. ‘We proved the case, sir.’
Powell stared him down. ‘Let’s hope you did. Because I don’t want to hear one word in your closing about assisted suicide except to say it’s no defense to a murder charge. Our boy killed his father for his money. That’s what he did and that’s why he did it. If you’ve got any kind of problem with that at this stage, either of you’ – he paused, glaring – ‘well, that’s just too damn bad. You’re going to have to live with it.’
Sarah’s early-morning meeting with Hardy and Freeman in Glitsky’s office was ancient history as she and her partner decided not to wait for the elevators and took the stairs on their way down to the lobby. On the second-floor landing Sarah glanced into the hallway and saw a pregnant woman, feet spread and planted, sitting on a bench alone outside of Graham’s courtroom. Now, on a hunch, she asked Lanier to wait a minute and walked over.
‘Are you Debra McCoury?’
The woman’s face was blotched and she appeared to be near tears. She nodded. ‘Who are you?’
Sarah sat next to her, introducing herself. ‘I’m the one who arrested your brother. I don’t know if you remember, but we spoke on the phone when I first-’
‘I remember.’ The face closed up.
‘I’ve called since a few times. You’ve been a little hard to get in touch with.’
‘Well, I work.’ And evidently hated the fact.
‘But you’re here now?’
‘And the other day too. I was a witness. I got time off,’ Debra said. ‘Without pay. They said they’re doing the closing arguments today. I wanted to be here.’
From Graham, Sarah had learned quite a lot about Debra.
Like her mother had with Sal, she had married below some perception of her station in life, and it was playing the same kind of havoc with her. Graham felt nothing but sorry for her. She didn’t have be so miserable, to keep herself looking so plain. Certainly, she didn’t have to remain in a relationship with a cheating husband.
But it was the same as the case with George. Sal’s abandonment had brought with it a nearly paralyzing loss of her self-esteem, along with a bitterness that soured everything in her world. Debra believed in her heart that she wasn’t worth loving, that no one would ever truly love her. Sarah thought one look at her revealed her story. And now she was going to have Brendan’s baby and life was going to get more complicated, sadder.
‘So why are you down here?’ Sarah asked. ‘You told me you didn’t like Graham, that he couldn’t be trusted.’
Debra swallowed with some effort. ‘He is my brother.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘That means I don’t want to see him sent to jail.’
‘Do you think he killed your father?’
The blotches rose on her heavy neck. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But you do think he stole this money?’
‘I don’t know that, either, anymore. I was here and heard that bank person. Nobody seems to know what happened about that. What did you want to see me about?’
In fact, she’d called Debra for the most part because Dismas Hardy had asked her to do so before they had finally left the ‘other dude’ phase of the investigation. Not that she or Hardy had thought Debra would lead to anything substantial.
Still, when she’d made herself unavailable, Sarah had wondered. ‘I was following up on some other questions. You told me about the baseball cards. You also gave me the impression that you knew Sal had more money stashed away somewhere.’
‘Which, it turns out, he did.’
‘True, but that’s not my point. My point is how did you know it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t sure of it. I guess Graham told me.’
‘But I thought you hadn’t talked to Graham in a couple of years.’ Debra moved her hands over her belly, her face a brown study. There was a glint of moisture in her eyes. ‘You also said Sal kept the baseball cards in his apartment. Had you been there? To his apartment? How did you know he kept them there?’
She was shaking her head. ‘No. I just assumed…’ Suddenly she whirled on Sarah. ‘What are you asking me all of these questions for? I didn’t do anything.’
‘I didn’t say you did.’
‘But you’re-’
‘I’m just asking you to explain how you knew some of the things you told me about.’ Lanier grew tired of waiting in the stairway. He came across the hall and stood in front of the two women. ‘This is my partner, Inspector Lanier,’ Sarah said.
Lanier nodded. ‘Everything all right here?’
Sarah kept up the press. ‘I’m sure you remember where you were on the afternoon that your father was killed. You wouldn’t forget that.’
‘No. I don’t forget it. It was a Friday, wasn’t it? I was at work.’
‘All day? You didn’t take lunch?’
‘Yes. No. I think so. I don’t remember. Probably.’ Debra’s hands massaged her stomach. ‘Look, I don’t like this. This is making me feel sick.’ Perhaps because of Lanier’s looming presence she made no effort to rise. ‘Sal always had the baseball cards, from when I was a kid,’ she said. ‘I mean, he had to still have them. And the way my mother talked, she always said he had other money. That’s why I thought that.’
‘So why did you tell me Graham was hiding something and couldn’t be trusted?’
Sarah knew the real answer to this question, but she wanted to hear the way Debra got around it. Finally, her eyes spilled over. She dug in her purse for something to wipe the tears away. ‘He’s not bad,’ she said.
‘Who isn’t bad, Debra? Graham?’
But she was shaking her head from side to side, snuffling. ‘I just don’t want them to send him to jail. He didn’t kill Sal for any money. I know that.’
‘How do you know it?’
‘I just know him. He wouldn’t have done that.’ She looked pleadingly at Sarah and Marcel. ‘I don’t care about the money either. Not anymore. I don’t even want my share. I don’t care about it. Brendan wanted-’ She stopped.
‘Your husband? What about your husband?’
‘He’s the one who wanted the money, who was on me to get the money.’ She sobbed once. ‘I didn’t mean to get Graham in trouble. I just want our family back again, the way it was. Anything the way it was. Why can’t it be that way anymore?’
The tears were falling freely now, and Sarah finally touched her shoulder, then stood up and motioned to Marcel that they should go.
Two days later Hardy rested the defense case without calling Barbara Brandt, or Graham Russo. Gil Soma spent a moment conferring quietly with Art Drysdale at the prosecution table. They were disappointed, but not surprised, that they wouldn’t get a chance to hack at Graham.
They’d spent a full day in chambers arguing jury instructions. Salter had been very uncomfortable about not giving manslaughter instructions – not giving the jury any choice but murder or acquittal. But neither side wanted manslaughter, and that seemed to be a correct reading of the law, so Salter shrugged his shoulders and wished both sides good luck.
Now Hardy flashed a look behind him at the courtroom, which was filled to overflowing. It was reminiscent of day one, with Pratt and Powell and their respective acolytes in attendance, one team on each side. There was Jeff Elliot, the ‘CityTalk’ columnist from the Chronicle. And Barbara Brandt – bravely camouflaging her disappointment at being snubbed – surrounded by her entourage. Helen Taylor was in the first row behind Hardy. Graham’s very pregnant sister, Debra, who’d evidently had an emotional morning, was next to her mother.
But Soma was up now, commanding all of Hardy’s attention, that of all the courtroom. First he would give his closing argument, then it would be Hardy’s turn. Finally, Soma would get the last word and Salter would give the jury their instructions. Then, at last, the jury would go into deliberation.
Hardy leaned over and whispered to Graham, asking him if he was all right, telling him this might get rough, he should stay calm, try not to react.
The young man smiled gamely, grabbed Hardy’s arm, and gave it a squeeze. ‘No fear.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
After a lunch break when he hadn’t been able to force a bite, Hardy was back with David Freeman and Graham Russo at their table in the courtroom. Soma had borrowed the low-key approach he’d used to such good effect in his opening statement and in about an hour had told the by-now familiar story in a straightforward and plausible manner. Reflecting Dean Powell’s decision, he’d made no mention of assisted suicide as a reasonable second interpretation of the evidence for the jury, and this had been a huge relief for the defense.
Hardy and Graham now thought they had a chance. David Freeman was of the opinion that it was locked up; they would get their acquittal. And because Freeman had no sense of superstition and little of decorum, he’d kept repeating it during the recess, making the other guys crazy.
Graham had snapped at Freeman. ‘You ever heard of not mentioning it when you’re in the middle of a no-hitter, David? You don’t tell the pitcher.’
‘Why not?’ Freeman asked.
Saying, ‘Never mind, don’t try,’ to Graham, Hardy had left the holding cell.
Now he stepped out in front of his table, closer to the jury box than he’d been when talking to witnesses. He paused to slow himself down, gave a confident nod to Graham and Freeman, took a deep breath, and began.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. I told you at the beginning of this trial that Graham Russo loved his father and I’m telling you that again now.’
He moved a step closer to the jury box. ‘Sal Russo lived in a world that was closing up on him, a world of murky memories and ever-increasing pain. For years and years he’d been estranged from all three of his children, but about two years ago he reached out to one of them, to Graham, his oldest son.
‘At the time Graham was having troubles of his own, troubles that I’m sure many of you have experienced as you’ve tried to get settled in your jobs and your life’s work.’
Hardy had to get this jury, and in particular these men, to recognize the common ground they shared with his client.
‘He had quit the prestigious appointment he got after law school to pursue his dream of playing major-league baseball, but then that dream, too, had fallen apart.’ Hardy humanized it a little more. ‘He just couldn’t hit the curveball. I’m sure many of us know how that feels.’ He got a chuckle or two.
‘When he came back to San Francisco, resigned now finally to being a lawyer, he found that he couldn’t find any work, that the people he’d thought were his friends in the yuppie world of the law had abandoned him.’ These were calculated words, designed to move these mostly working-class men into Graham’s corner.
Hardy continued. ‘This is when he reconnected with Sal. We’ve also heard the members of his family – his mother and brother and sister – testify that it’s also when Graham discovered that his father was having problems with his memory. He was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Occasionally he would forget where he was, what he needed to do. Graham was the only one who would help.
‘But he did more than simply help. He became his father’s companion and friend. They went out to dinners together, to ball games. They drove around the city, talking, laughing together, reconnecting. Until finally, as we learned from Dr Cutler, Sal began getting these terrible, unbearable headaches.’
Hardy paused for a moment. He was going to change his direction now and confront the prosecution. ‘You’ve heard Mr Soma and Mr Drysdale make assertions that Graham resented his father, the time he spent with him, the money he spent for his treatment. Let me remind you that no one in this trial has ever, not once, presented any evidence in support of these assertions. And you know why that is? Because they aren’t true.
‘Graham never got tired of helping his father, of nursing his father. Judge Giotti told you that Graham visited Sal several times a week to make sure he was comfortable, was taking his shots, right up until the end. Blue, Sal’s downstairs neighbor – a witness for the prosecution – told us the same thing. Graham never wavered in his devotion. He loved Sal.’
Another pause. Hardy walked over to his table for a sip of water. He glanced at the yellow pad on his desk, on which were written only three words: Love. Evidence. Close. He’d barely touched on evidence yet, the burden of proof, the usual smorgasbord. He had to give it its due now. Tearing a page from Soma’s book, he came right to the jury rail, talking to them now not in a speech, but human to human.
‘Some of you may have noticed that I’ve spent very little time trying to rebut the evidence that the prosecution has presented. That’s because there is precious little evidence. No one ever saw or even said they saw Graham treat his father other than as a friend and companion. The famous fifty thousand dollars? The baseball cards? Did Mr Soma or Mr Drysdale prove anything to you about them, other than that they once were in Sal’s possession, and later they were in Graham’s?
‘Isn’t it more reasonable to assume that Sal knew he was losing his reason and wanted his son, who was his caretaker and friend anyway, to hold his valuables so that, at the least, they wouldn’t get lost or misplaced? Or so that Graham could use the money and proceeds from the cards to help defray some of the costs of Sal’s treatment? From what you’ve heard about Graham Russo, doesn’t that make a lot more sense than that suddenly, one day, Graham struggled with his father and stole his money? It’s ridiculous. It didn’t happen.
‘Similarly, there was no proof of any struggle. Let me tell you something, and Judge Salter will repeat it to you when he gives you his jury instructions: the prosecution has to prove Graham’s guilt to you beyond a reasonable doubt, and I don’t have to prove anything. The burden of proof never shifts; it is always on the prosecution, and unless they can prove something, as far as you must be concerned, it just didn’t happen.’
Salter cleared his throat and interrupted. ‘Mr Hardy, I’ll be instructing them on the law when you’re finished.’
Hardy took it calmly. Salter was right. But it wouldn’t hurt for the jury to see his passion. He turned back to the panel with an apologetic smile.
‘As it turns out, you have heard quite a lot of testimony about Graham’s character, about his relationship with Sal, about the kind of person he is. But even if you had none of that or didn’t believe it, even if Graham sat there friendless and alone with no one to speak up for him, the prosecution has presented nothing to support their theory. That’s all it is – a misguided theory with no facts, no evidence, no proof, to support it.
‘Then how did it get to here, all the way to trial? I know you’re all asking yourselves that question, and I don’t blame you. So I’ll tell you.
‘It got here for one reason, and one reason only.’
Really there were two, and he hoped the jury had read the newspapers or talked to family members or somehow had discovered the personal connection between Gil Soma and Graham Russo. Freeman had bitched about Soma’s involvement to the press on many occasions early on in the proceedings, and then Hardy had alluded to it in a couple of discussions with his reporter friend Jeff Elliot, who printed it in his ‘CityTalk’ column. It couldn’t be admitted at trial, of course, but sometimes you got things to juries any way you could.
But Hardy, now, had to get to the lies. It was unpleasant and dicey, but he had to address the issue. ‘Graham panicked when the police came to talk to him. He didn’t panic because he thought he’d done anything morally wrong’ – and here his phraseology had to be precise – ‘but because he’d been close to someone who had taken his own life. He’d shown him how to use the syringe. He’d even on occasion administered the drug himself. He’d comforted and counseled him when nobody else would. And he knew he might be condemned for it. He knew his kindness and compassion might be twisted by those more interested in politics than in justice, more eager to exact a pound of flesh than to do the right thing.
‘Graham Russo knew the world was full of bureaucrats, small men and women who live to control the lives of others. Men and women who like nothing more than to tell men like Dr Cutler what medical advice to give and tell us all what medicine we can and cannot take to ease our pain.
‘Graham knew that these petty people weren’t content to control only our lives; they seek even to control our deaths as well. Sal Russo finally was beyond their control now, but Graham Russo was not, and he was afraid. That is why he lied.’
Another pause to let it all sink in.
‘As a licensed attorney in the state of California, Graham was faced with the very real possibility that, guilty or innocent, he would lose his ability to practice law. He might be disbarred. He could then never work in the profession for which he’d spent three grueling years in school and thousands of dollars in tuition. He couldn’t let that happen.
‘So he lied to police, and then he lied to cover his earlier lies. I wish this weren’t the case, and believe me, so does he. But he did, and it’s put him here. And let me add that even Sergeant Evans, who heard all of Graham’s falsehoods firsthand, has told you she thinks Graham is a trustworthy person, not a liar.’
Hardy took a breath, relieved. He’d expected to be interrupted by objections at every second, but the closing argument was just that, an argument. He was making his case and evidently keeping within the bounds of specificity. That was going to change in a minute, but for the moment he was on safe ground.
‘Graham knew that it looked like Sal had committed suicide. Indeed, Dr Strout, the coroner, is still not able to say it wasn’t suicide. Perhaps Graham knew better. Perhaps he knew about the DNR sticker that was out for the paramedics when they arrived. Perhaps he knew that his father’s pain had become unceasing, that life had become truly unbearable, that Sal was ready to die. That death itself, when it came, would be a peaceful and blessed relief.’
Hardy scanned the jury box, resting on several jurors. He wasn’t offering any challenge, just telling them what he believed, what they had to believe.
He lowered his voice to a near whisper. ‘Graham is a trained paramedic. He got two calls from his father on the morning of his death. He went to the apartment, where his father was in blinding pain. Perhaps Sal, sitting on the floor by his coffee table, had a last drink or two for courage. An intravenous morphine shot is – as Dr Strout has told you – instantaneous and painless. There was no struggle at any time. And for Sal Russo, there would be no more pain, no more confusion as the past inexorably slipped away from him, no loss of dignity. There would, finally, be peace.’
He met the eyes of every juror, one by one. It seemed to take forever.
‘I tell you that Graham Russo has committed no crime. No murder was done here, no injury to society that requires retribution. This is an innocent man. Legally, factually, and, above all, morally innocent. You must find him not guilty – for all of our sakes.’
CityTalk, by Jeff Elliot
The hottest ticket in town on Thursday was Department 27 at the Hall of Justice, the courtroom of Judge Jordan Salter. There, to an SRO crowd comprised of most of the state’s legal powerhouses, including California Attorney General Dean Powell and San Francisco District Attorney Sharron Pratt, euthanasia lobbyists, citizens’ groups, and media representatives, the murder trial of lawyer/athlete Graham Russo closed in a flurry of rhetoric from both sides.
This reporter’s view has always been that this trial was less about the murder of Salmon Sal Russo than it was a kind of grudge matchup between Gil Soma and Graham Russo, both of whom served a few years ago as clerks for Federal Judge Harold Draper. Soma hated Russo for leaving him a big workload, and here was the chance to pay him back.
Petty? You bet.
Defense Attorney Dismas Hardy took a bold stance and ignored the great majority of evidence presented by Messrs Soma and Drysdale for the prosecution, and instead painted his own picture of a devoted son who found himself in the agonizing dilemma of his father’s terminal illness.
The jury evidently believed him. After deliberating only one and a half hours, at about three-thirty yesterday afternoon, as all the country now knows, they returned with a verdict of acquittal. They didn’t say that Graham Russo assisted in his father’s suicide. The way the law is written, that’s just not an option.
Instead, they had to say that Graham did nothing wrong.
I think they were right.