John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

‘I don’t think they were going to,’ Cerrone said. He never took his eyes from her. In fact, Graham had mentioned her, but only in passing. Now it seemed to Cerrone – an instinct – that there was something more here, or might be. More story. An attractive female investigator coming up alone to interview him at night? ‘How ’bout coffee instead? Go inside, kill an hour, get sober.‘

‘Coffee just makes you wide-awake drunk.’

‘I don’t think I’m drunk.’

‘Nobody thinks they’re drunk. That’s kind of the problem.’

‘Hey!’ Graham said, getting their attention. ‘What’s with you guys? I think I’m drunk, how about that? I’ll make coffee.’

Evans looked at him levelly. ‘If you invite me in without a warrant…’

But Graham had already turned, heading for his door. ‘What a hardass,’ he said. ‘I’m going in, I’m freezing. You can come or don’t, I don’t care.’

Cerrone, in a mock gallant gesture, indicated Evans should precede him. She did.

Nobody was in a hurry to get down to business. Graham had put on the coffee, then some music – Celine Dion’s French Album . Cerrone hated it. Didn’t Graham have any Alanis Morissette? Evans was somehow relieved that Graham didn’t. She didn’t want to think he had that much affinity for rage. In the end he put on Chris Isaak’s Baja Sessions , came back to the table. Sarah finally asked him again about his father’s phone calls on the morning of his death.

Graham sighed wearily. ‘Okay, we talked twice on Friday.’

‘What did you talk about?’

Graham drank some of his coffee, then seemed to remember something. ‘Are you recording this? Not that it matters. With Mike here I’ve been recording all day. How many tapes we go through today, Mike?’

‘Five.’

Sarah processed that, then got out her own recorder. ‘The electronic age, you gotta love it.’ Her face dimpled prettily. ‘Thanks for reminding me.’ She gave her introduction, and asked again.

‘We talked about his pain mostly.’ He paused and stared out at the blackness. ‘Actually’ – his voice took on a husky edge – ‘Sal and me, we had the same discussion twice. The first one kind of went away. Maybe the second one, too, I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘It was one of his bad days.’

Sarah found that she had to blink. This response – ‘It was one of his bad days’ – was Graham’s first real reference to the day-to-day fact of Sal’s condition. In her concentration on the son she’d nearly forgotten the father.

With difficulty she found the thread and picked it up again. ‘Your father called you seventeen times in the past month, Graham.’

He nodded. ‘Something like that, I guess.’

‘So what did he want you to do?’

The huskiness remained in his voice. He’d obviously been drinking. His defenses were down. She was sure this was honest and raw emotion, an open wound. ‘I don’t know what he wanted that day. It wasn’t one thing – it varied. He was dying, you understand? He’d wake up and not know where he was. He was scared. He needed his hand held. He just wanted to talk to somebody. Take your pick, Sergeant. He counted on me.’

At the opposite end of the table Cerrone was an irritant. God only knew what impression this interrogation was making on him. But Sarah had a tipsy and emotional Graham talking voluntarily. The opportunity had to be taken if she was to get what she needed.

Cerrone stared at her disapprovingly, but she ignored him. ‘All right, he counted on you. And what did you do, that day, after the second call?’

Graham sipped at his coffee. He put the cup down and brought his hand to his face, rubbing at his jawline as though it had gone numb. When he spoke, his voice was flat. ‘It wasn’t just a bad day. It had been a terrible couple of weeks, just terrible. Everything was going downhill – the pain, the forgetting, all the sudden, way worse than it had been. I don’t know what happened, if the tumor affected the Alzheimer’s somehow. I don’t know what it was. But something had changed. Something was going to have to be done.’

‘Did you know what?’

Graham shook his head. ‘When we first got back together, we’d talked a little about having to put him in a home someday. Back then he’d gotten lost a few times, but the disease wasn’t very advanced. He was functioning pretty well. I think he went to see somebody, some doctor, to get diagnosed, but chickened out before they could run all the tests. He didn’t want to know for sure, didn’t want to face that he had it. But he knew.’

‘And what did he think about being in a home?’

‘There was no way. He wasn’t going to end his life as a vegetable. He made me promise I’d kill him first.’

‘And did you do that? Promise that?’

Cerrone leaned forward. ‘Graham?’

The trance was broken. Momentarily. ‘What?’

‘I’m sure the sergeant meant to inform you that you don’t have to answer any of this. That you can have your lawyer here.’

The alcohol was a definite if subtle presence. Graham reached over and patted the reporter on the arm. ‘Hey, it’s cool, Mike. It’s cool. Sarah’s not here to bust me’ – he turned to her – ‘are you?’

Their eyes met, held. Finally Sarah broke it off. ‘I’m just trying to get to the truth, Graham. I’m trying to find out what happened. You just told me you promised your dad you would kill him…?’

‘ If .’ Graham held up a finger. ‘There was a big if.’

‘And what was that?’

‘If the Alzheimer’s snuck up on him, and suddenly his brain wasn’t there. That was when I was going to do it.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t figured that yet. Or even if I was really going to. We hadn’t got there. He was still functioning. But then he started getting the headaches and we found out about the tumor…’

‘How did you find out about that?’

Graham’s eyes went to Cerrone for a moment, then to Sarah. ‘This is starting to sound like an interrogation, you know that?’

Sarah tried to bluff it. ‘We’re just talking, Graham.’

He motioned to the tape recorder. ‘With that thing running? You’re telling me you won’t use anything on there?’

She shook her head. ‘No, I can’t tell you that.’

‘So this is an official visit after all?’

Again, the eyes. ‘What else would it be?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A guy can hope.’ He paused for a longish moment. ‘Sure, Sal went to a doctor, I guess.’

‘Do you know who?’

Another pause, longer this time. Graham sighed heavily and lowered his head, shaking it like a tired dog. ‘You want to go off the record?’

She considered, then shook her head. ‘I can’t do that. I’m investigating your father’s death, Graham. If you know something about it, you can tell me. Do you know the doctor your father consulted or not?’

Graham’s eyes moved to the tape recorder. ‘On the record I don’t know. He went alone. I didn’t live with him, you know. He had a life.’

‘Did he tell you how he paid for this doctor? Didn’t you talk about money?’

Graham shrugged. ‘He told me about the cancer, that they couldn’t operate, it was going to kill him. Then the whole question of putting him in a home kind of became moot. He wasn’t going to get old as some shell in a wheelchair. He wasn’t going to get old at all.’

The simple truth of this fact struck them all dumb. The CD even chose this moment to pause between cuts. Finally, Graham shrugged. ‘Anyway, as I said, the last couple of weeks it got worse.’

But Sarah, now, wasn’t quite ready to move on. Something else was eating at her. ‘The last time we talked on the record,’ she said, ‘you didn’t know what was causing your father all this pain. Now you did know. Do I have that right?’