John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Present a united front, you know.’

‘To who?’

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

‘You were all naturally so relieved…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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