John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

Graham’s bank! Hardy had thought. Video records at the bank could prove, perhaps, that Graham hadn’t gone there with his father’s money after Friday. That would mean that, whatever else might have happened, he didn’t kill Sal so that he could get at the safe. It would get any murder charge out of the range of special circumstances.

Once the idea about videotapes at the bank came to him, the rest of the day was an agony of detail and protocol. Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that even during this apparent hiatus, his inability to get out of Tryptech’s office might be costing Graham Russo years of his freedom. Hardy’d let himself be lulled by the media attention around the idea that the death of Sal Russo had been an assisted suicide. That was, after all, the express reason that Sharron Pratt had declined to file charges.

But – the realization came to him in a bolt – if the attorney general was going to play hardball politics and bring a charge against Graham Russo, it wasn’t likely to be for less than first-degree murder.

Still, Hardy couldn’t very well leave his bread-and-butter corporate client and his brand-new associate together and tell them to just catch up on things. He had to sell Brunei on Michelle’s skills and competence, simultaneously giving her a chance to show off what she had – miraculously – mastered in such a short time.

As if that weren’t enough, he also felt they needed to conduct some real business, going over deposition testimony he’d taken in the past couple of weeks, squeezing hard data from the elusive Brunei. The three of them and some of Tryptech’s staff remained at it until after seven.

Then Hardy decided to stop by his own office downtown and check his messages. From the pile of slips and first four phone calls on his answering machine, all from reporters, it was immediately obvious that the Russo case had gone ballistic.

Making his delay more crucial.

He tried calling Graham at home – by now it was nine-thirty – and no one answered, not even the machine. Hardy reasoned that if his own tangential connection to the case had produced today’s volume of mail and phone calls, then Graham must have been absolutely inundated by the flood. No doubt he was lying low.

He didn’t get home until eleven-thirty, and Frannie was by then asleep. His dinner was on the dining-room table, cold.

This morning, out in the Avenues, where Hardy lived, it was more than mere fog. It was wet as rain, although for some reason the droplets didn’t fall, just hung in the air. The temperature was in the low forties and a bitter wind whipped his coat as he approached his car.

Things at home were not good.

He thought he remembered telling Frannie yesterday that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He had never planned to be home for dinner last night. If he had told her, though, she didn’t remember it, and in all honesty he wasn’t completely certain that he had.

Though he ached with every bone in his body to be out of the house – he needed a court order and then he needed to get to Graham’s bank – he also knew he had better wait and talk to Frannie when she got back from taking the kids to school.

Which he had done.

Now, driving downtown through the soup, he wasn’t sure if he was happy or not that his wife wasn’t a nag. If she’d only yelled at him, he could have responded in kind or worked himself up a froth of righteous indignation that she didn’t appreciate all the hours he was putting in so that he could support the family, and all by himself, he need hardly remind her.

It was a grueling responsibility – the daily grind. But it was his job, and he was sorry if once in a very great while he had to miss a goddamn dinner. Some wives actually understood this.

That’s what he would have said if she’d come back in on the warpath.

But if she had lost her temper at any time last night, she’d found it by the time she talked to him this morning. She wasn’t mad, and this threw him, as she knew it would, back on himself.

Was this the way it was always going to be? She simply wanted to know, so she’d be able to deal with it. So she could be a better mom to the kids. (She didn’t say, ‘in the absence of a father figure,’ but he heard it.)

So he tried a few clichés – ‘Life is complicated.’ ‘We have different roles we’re trying to juggle.’ ‘This is just a busy time’ – but he’d ended up by apologizing. He’d try to communicate better in the future. She was right: something had to change.

Well, he thought, something already had. He’d brought on Michelle to help with Tryptech. He’d more or less committed to Graham Russo’s defense. This case intrigued him as corporate litigation never would. There was no passion for him in business law and it took all of his time, wasting him for anything else – like his family. It made him feel old.

He might – no, he would - wind up working the same kind of hours for Graham Russo, but it would be in the service of something he believed in. Maybe, at forty-five, he was finally getting down to the core of who he was.

The car behind him honked and he moved forward, then pulled over to the side of Geary Street, letting the traffic flow past him.

This was the way he always reacted when he began caring too much: he went on autopilot and ran from it. There was too much to lose. It wasn’t safe.

It was what he’d done after his son had died during his first marriage, when he was twenty-seven. Something in him decided he wouldn’t survive looking over into the chasm. He closed up and went to sleep.

He and Jane had gotten divorced, he’d quit the law entirely, and for nearly ten years he’d tended bar at the Shamrock. Drinking a lot, but rarely getting drunk. Functioning quite well, thank you, but keeping any feeling on a short tether. Sleepwalking.

Then, suddenly, Frannie. Realizing that the essence of him had nearly dried up and would surely blow away if he didn’t risk part of it, he’d started over. Fatherhood, again. Criminal law, again. Caring too much again.

What if he lost all this now, or even any part of it?

No, he couldn’t let that happen. He was at his limit of risk tolerance. It was too dangerous; it was a matter of his survival, he had to pull back.

And that’s what he’d done: gotten back to sleepwalking. Functioning, keeping too busy. He was on the run, avoiding the only kind of work he found fulfilling, maintaining a low level of interaction with his family.

It stunned him – he’d become afraid. Of change, of failure in his job, of caring too much at home.

It had to stop, he thought. He had to wake himself up. What was the point of protecting the essentials in your life – your talents, your family, your friends – if you never took the time to enjoy them? If you were already dead?

Superior Court Judge Leo Chomorro, a brush-cut, swarthy block of well-tailored muscle, was in his chambers, playing chess with his computer. He had blocked out six days for a murder trial in his courtroom, and this morning one of Pratt’s young wunderkind had forgotten to subpoena the witness he had planned to call at the start of the day. So Chomorro had a morning off, not that this had put him in an especially good humor. On the other hand, one of Hardy’s trials had been in Chomorro’s courtroom, and there was no evidence that anything put him in a good humor. Nevertheless, he was the only available judge this morning, and Hardy needed him.

He kept it short: he’d like the judge to sign a court order to look at the surveillance videotapes from Graham Russo’s bank. He explained why he needed it.

‘Why don’t you use a subpoena?’ the judge asked him.

‘I can’t. There’s no case pending.’