John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

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

What else, she wondered, had she missed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After that the binder was empty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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