John Lescroart: The Mercy Rule

The woman nodded. ‘Palmieri?’

Hardy nodded and spelled it for her. ‘Randall G.’

‘I’ll be right back.’

He waited at the counter for about five minutes, at which time she returned with a black binder. ‘Sorry that took so long,’ she said, ‘I wanted to ask my boss how confidential this stuff was.’ She shrugged. ‘I can’t give you addresses or anything without a court order, but if you give me a name, I can tell you if it’s here. That’s all you said you needed?’

Hardy would have to take what he could get. ‘Essentially, yes. Randall Palmieri,’ he repeated.

She opened to the page and waited.

Hardy didn’t need his written notes. ‘His wife’s name was Joan and she moved to Eureka and married a Ron Singleterry. She had two children, Jeanne and Margie, since married with different names.’

The woman nodded. ‘That’s what I have.’

‘Do they still get the pension, the daughters?’

‘No. The benefit ends with the death of the spouse.’

‘So they’re not getting any money anymore, any help?’

‘Not from us.’ The woman was still looking down at the page, then came up at him. ‘I don’t see how this could hurt. If you want more information, there’s a trust listed here, cross-referenced. The Singleterrys may have been getting money from it, too, on top of the pension. Maybe they’d be free to tell you more about it.’

‘Okay, thanks. Where’s this trust located?’ She read it out. ‘It’s called the BGG Memorial Trust of 1981. It’s administered, let’s see… oh, it’s only a couple of blocks away, at Baywest. You could probably walk right over.’

He didn’t want to see anyone, least of all either David Freeman or Graham Russo, but both of them were hanging around the lobby when he got to his building at a little after eleven. There was no avoiding them, but he could try to keep it short and sweet. He put on his best harried air, ostentatiously looked at his watch.

‘I’m running through here…guys, on the way to someplace else. I’ve got an appointment at lunch. Big dollars, David, you’ll be proud of me at last.’

Phyllis looked disapprovingly over her bank of phones. Too much noise. Hardy ignored her. ‘But, Graham, you might want to call your brother and sister, advise them not to go spending their inheritance money. We’ve got a real lead on Joan Singleterry. I’ll tell you all about it later.’ He kept moving toward the stairs, climbing.

Graham tailed behind him. ‘But that’s what I wanted to tell you.’

Hardy stopped, turned. Graham was brushing by him, two steps at a time. ‘I left it in your office.’

Feigned outrage. ‘You broke into my office?’

At the top of the stairs Graham grinned back down at him. ‘It’d be harder if you locked it.’ The young man was excited; clearly he’d found something. ‘We would have called you last night but it was after nine-thirty. We figured you old guys were already asleep.’

‘Get out of my way.’

Graciously, still beaming, Graham let Hardy open his own door. He crossed to the desk and in the middle of the blotter found a large article, stapled together, from an old copy of the Chronicle . Nineteen eighty-eight.

While he read, Graham was filling him in. ‘So we had all these boxes, mostly just junk and paper, taking up room. Sarah thought we ought to go through everything in them, page by page, throw away everything we didn’t want. Clean the place up.’

Hardy glanced up at him. ‘And I think I live a wild life, going to bed at nine-thirty and all.’

‘I didn’t say it was all we did. Anyway, Sarah found that.’

It was one of those follow-up stories the papers sometimes run: ‘What Happened To?’ or ‘Life After…’ This one concerned the patched-together lives of six women whose husbands had been killed doing their jobs in the prime of their lives. A construction worker, two cops, a race-car driver, a charter pilot, and Randy Palmieri, fireman.

‘This guy’s wife, Joan Palmieri,’ Graham was saying, ‘she moved to Eureka and married a man named Ron Singleterry.’

‘And her husband, I notice, was killed in the Grotto fire.’

‘She’s got to be our Joan Singleterry,’ Graham said.

‘She is.’

Graham went mute for a beat. ‘You know about her?’

‘A little. That’s what I wanted to tell you about.’

‘The only thing is,’ Graham said, ‘I called information in Eureka, she isn’t listed. There’s no Singleterry there, no Palmieri either.’

No, Hardy thought, but there’s a Walsh and a Sanford and you don’t need to know that right now. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s someplace to start. Look, I’ve really got to run. We’ll get to it later.’

But Graham, this close to something, didn’t want to let him go. ‘Wait a minute. What did you find?’

‘Same thing, different story. Chronicle archives. I’m going to see if I can talk to Mario Giotti today, see how Sal was connected to the fire at the Grotto. If he was.’

‘You don’t think Sal started it by mistake, do you? Got drunk or something?’

‘No,’ Hardy said honestly. ‘No, I don’t think that.’

But at last he now knew the mechanism by which Sal had come to know Joan Palmieri’s married name. He knew, as he would say, how it was all connected.

‘Mr Hardy.’ Judge Mario Giotti had not shrugged himself out of his robes, although he was alone, reading in his chambers. Hardy didn’t think this was an unintentional oversight. The trappings of power and authority. ‘You said it was an emergency.’

‘I am sorry to bother you, Judge, and thanks for seeing me. I know you’re busy.’

‘If I didn’t see people when I was busy, I’d never see anybody.’ The strong smile. ‘You want to sit down?’

Hardy went to the seating arrangement by the ornate fireplace, with its electrical heater purring within it against the bitter day. The wind had brought in a low blanket of cloud cover and as Hardy, in a trench coat, had been walking from his office to Giotti’s, it had started to mist.

He got right to it. ‘Judge, I’ve got a big problem.’

‘I’d assumed that. What is it?’

Hardy considered his response. He wanted to blurt out, ‘It’s you,’ but he had to restrain his tendencies. He had to box him in until there was no escape.

‘I’m afraid it’s about the fire at your restaurant again. I’ve come upon some information that leads me to think Sal had something to do with it.’

Giotti leaned back in his wing chair, fingertips templed at his lips. ‘Go on.’

‘You remember that morning I stopped you on your run out back here in the alley and asked you if you knew anybody named Singleterry?’

‘Of course.’

‘At that time I was hiding some information from the public, keeping it out of the trial because it seemed so inherently not credible.’

‘And what was that?’

Hardy outlined Sal’s request to Graham, that he give the money to this Singleterry woman. ‘Since we didn’t have her, I didn’t believe anyone in the courtroom would believe the story. So we decided not to bring it up.’

‘It does seem like a reach,’ Giotti agreed. ‘Now I gather you’ve found her.’

‘Almost,’ Hardy said, ‘- her daughters.’

The judge took that in. ‘That would be good, then, wouldn’t it? You could find out what you need about Sal?’

‘That’s true. I’ve done that. Joan Singleterry’s first husband was Randy Palmieri.’

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