John Lescroart: The Mercy Rule

His old friend – his old employee – drew himself up. The smile fled from his face. ‘Good afternoon, Your Honor,’ he said formally.

Giotti cocked his head to one side – a question. He still wore his smile. ‘Mauritio. What’s the matter? You look like you seen a ghost.’

‘Maybe I do, Your Honor.’

Giotti knew it felt wrong, but tried to make a joke of it. ‘Well, invite him in. He can sit at my table with me.’

‘I’m sorry, your table?’

‘Hey, my table.’ He started to push his way by, but Mauritio stepped in front of him.

‘You got a reservation, Your Honor? We got a packed house in here today.’

Giotti raised his voice. ‘What do you mean, you got a packed house? I’m talking my table, what do you…?’

He noticed that people had started to gather behind them, to notice. He couldn’t have that. He calmed himself. ‘No. I don’t have a reservation.’

Mauritio clucked. ‘Hey, I’m sorry, Your Honor, maybe some other day. Maybe you call first, couple of hours ought to hold one. Meanwhile, you might try next door, but they’re pretty crowded too. In fact, Judge, maybe you gonna have trouble finding fish anywhere on the Wharf. Since Sal Russo died, maybe you gonna have trouble finding good fish anywhere around here.’

Stiffly, Giotti stood a moment. Then he nodded and turned away.

Behind him he heard Mauritio barking to a knot of tourists. ‘Hey, how you folks doin’? Come on in, come on in. We’re saving a table just for you.‘

The wind was high off the ocean, rushing up the cliffs and inland across the peninsula, bending the cypresses nearly to the ground. A chill autumn sun was sinking into the water out at the horizon, and a young couple stood before a grave site at the ridge of the Colma cemetery. The man wore a baseball uniform.

Graham had played in the season’s last tournament down in Santa Clara during the day. The Hornets had gotten beaten on their third game, so Graham was finished early. He and Sarah had decided to drive over to the coastal town of Santa Cruz and have a late lunch, then up the coast on Highway One. And then, suddenly in Colma, they’d made the turn into here.

Graham had distributed the proceeds from the sale of the baseball cards and the fifty thousand dollars to Jeanne Walsh and her sister in Eureka, and in spite of the reactions of his brother and sister, felt he’d discharged a debt of honor. He’d gotten a letter from Leland’s lawyer on behalf of the other heirs telling him he couldn’t give away their inheritance and that the Singleterry offspring had no legal claim. Graham had told them to go ahead and sue him and distributed the money in cash anyway.

It was perhaps something neither Debra nor George would understand, but that was going to be their problem and their burden. Afterward, to her credit, Debra had called to tell him it was okay – she wasn’t going to be part of any lawsuit George might bring. Graham saw hope here.

He had no similar illusions about his brother or his mother. George and Helen would live and die in Leland’s camp at a level of physical comfort and social constriction. That was their choice.

It wasn’t his. He went to one knee and smoothed at the grass over where his father’s remains were buried. He’d taken his spikes up with him, wearing them over his shoulders with the laces tying them together. Now, as though they were a holy necklace, he removed them, over his head, and placed them by the headstone on the grass.

‘Don’t say maňana if you don’t mean it,’ Sarah said softly. She was quoting from an old Jimmy Buffett song, one of the cuts on a CD they’d been playing ever since the verdict: ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise,’ ‘Cowboy in the Jungle.’ Themes of freedom and rebellion, rum and sunshine. After his time in jail, the tunes seemed to help Graham with normalcy. He’d get there.

But hanging up the spikes was a different symbol, a different type of commitment. He stood looking down for a last moment. ‘I mean it,’ he said.

Hand in hand Sarah and Graham turned to walk down the hill. Sarah sighed. ‘There’s one thing I still don’t understand, even after all of this.’

‘What?’

‘All the paper, the notes, the names.’

‘What about them?’

‘Well, I must have made a hundred calls, maybe more, following up, checking addresses, trying to break the code. I reached maybe half a dozen people who remembered your father at all. And none of them were involved in fishing or baseball or gambling or anything else that related to anything. I just don’t get it. All those names Sal wrote down, all those numbers.’

They’d gotten back down to the parking lot, and Graham’s steps slowed, then came to a stop. Sarah waited.

‘It was everybody he ever knew. He didn’t want to forget.’ The wind gusted, stinging his eyes. ‘He thought if he wrote it all down…’ He stood motionless, overcome with emotion.

Sarah took a tentative step and put her arms up around him.

Sal sat at the kitchen table, writing furiously in the margins of the newspaper in front of him. One of the obituaries was Earl Willis, and the name had started a trail of connection. Sal had already been to see Finer and he knew what was coming. He wasn’t telling anybody what he knew. He wasn’t going to have anybody pity him, no, sir.

The kid who’d sat next to him in third grade was named Earl Willis. Was he the guy that had just died? A non-Catholic. Earl Willis, that was his name.

Sal remembered. Now who sat behind Earl? He had to remember, what was her name? Dorothy something, that was it. Blake. Dorothy Blake.

Closing his eyes, he tried to envision his old classroom – the map of the world tacked above the blackboard. Miss Gray! That was it. His teacher, Miss Gray. Now, how about his other teachers? He wasn’t going to forget those names. He was going to have them right here, written down, in case anybody asked, in case he forgot.

And his assistant coach on Graham’s Little League team – the Jaguars? Yep, Jaguars. Sal remembered the guy: smoked like a chimney, always had a cigarette tucked in his ear, a pack in the arm of his T-shirt. What was that name? He knew it. He knew he knew it, it just wasn’t coming, but he had that pad of paper by his bed in case it came to him tonight. He’d write it down then. No one would know that he was forgetting. He’d have it all right here.

But wait. What about the other kids on Graham’s team? He remembered the shortstop, Kenny Frazier, good glove no hit.

He was out of newspaper margin – Miss Gray, the other teachers, the Jaguars. But, aha! – here was a brown bag from the grocery store. He pulled it over, writing fast. His and Helen’s first phone number – the house on Taraval. He had to get that down.

But then the rest…

The rest of everything.

The afternoon sun poured in over him and he scribbled until the light was gone, thinking that if he wrote it all down -everybody and everything from the beginning – maybe he would be able to retrieve it all when he needed it. Maybe his life wouldn’t all go away.

Maybe he would live forever.

JOHN LESCROART, the New York Times best-selling author of such novels as The Mercy Rule , The 13th Juror, Nothing but the Truth , and The Hearing, lives with his family in northern California.