John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

‘For the money?’

‘Sure.’

‘But you just said it was assisted suicide.’

‘Maybe it started that way, and the idea that when it was done he would have the money, maybe that kind of grew on him. Then he got started and panicked when the old man changed his mind. Anything could have happened, Sarah, but whatever it was, he was there. He did it. This stuff happens. I had a guy once killed his wife. Same thing.’

‘She was sick?’

‘Oh, yeah. Same thing. Wouldn’t admit he did it.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re going to love this. Guy was like sixty years old. He didn’t want his eighty-year-old mother to be mad at him.’

‘What?’

‘God’s truth. You heard it here first. The mother didn’t believe in the concept, so the son tried to fake it and make it look like a straight suicide, but he botched it all up.’

‘Did he also try to make it look like a murder? Steal his wife’s jewelry, anything like that?’

‘No. But that would have just been going into more detail. He just wasn’t as smart as this Russo guy, that’s all. Same basic idea, though.’

‘Well, thanks for making that clear.’

‘Anytime. You think he’ll be home?’

‘Russo? I doubt it.’

Sarah didn’t simply doubt that Graham wasn’t at his home. She knew it for a fact. He’d been staying at her apartment since the long night they’d spent with each other after she’d licked his palm. Sarah’s argument to herself (fatuous, and she knew it) was that Graham had not been under indictment at that time and was, in theory, a citizen who was to be presumed innocent. Now the indictment had come in and though it had been expected, like it or not it changed everything.

He saw it as soon as she walked through the door, closed it carefully behind her, kept her distance from him. For the last few days she’d entered the apartment and they’d fallen into each other’s arms. He stood in the middle of the living room. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘The matter is you got yourself indicted this morning by the grand jury. I’m not supposed to tell you that. I’m not supposed to be in love with you. I’m supposed to arrest you right now.’

He tried a tentative smile. ‘You going to?’

‘This isn’t funny.’

‘I don’t think it’s funny.’

‘Then do me a favor. Don’t laugh about it.’

‘That ought to be easy. Not laughing, I mean.’ He couldn’t make himself move toward her. He could feel the aura from where he stood; she had to keep a distance between them. He wasn’t going to push it. ‘What do you want me to do, Sarah? I’ll go if you want, leave here if it’ll make it easier for you. Or you can take me in. Whatever you want.’

‘Don’t you understand? Shit. I don’t want to take you in!’ Her strong shoulders sagged. She bit at her lip. ‘This is wrong. This is all so wrong.’

This time he did take a step toward her, but she held out a hand. ‘Don’t!’

He stopped, waited, spoke quietly. ‘My dad and I, I didn’t-’

She interrupted him. ‘That’s not the point, Graham.’

‘So what is?’

‘The point,’ she said tightly, ‘is that I’m a cop and you’re indicted. If I was doing my job, I should have come here with Marcel in the middle of the afternoon, taken you downtown-’

‘I’m not kidding you,’ he said. ‘I’ll go. I’ll go right now. I’ll beat this, and then-’

‘No! God damn it, no! We’re not doing that.’

He waited. ‘Then what?’

She slumped onto one of the kitchen chairs. ‘I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.’ She was about to cry.

‘I’ll give you a dollar if you let me come over and hug you.’ He crossed the room, went down on a knee, and put his arms around her shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

‘How?’ She was shaking against him. ‘What are we going to do? I can’t see you. You can’t even be here. If I don’t take you in, I’m committing a felony myself. In fact, I am now. How can I commit a felony?’

‘You’re right, you can’t,’ he said. ‘Look, I’ll just turn myself in. I’ll call Hardy, find out where he lives, show up at his house, and have him do it.’

‘But I don’t want to leave you to them, even to him. I want you to be here. This can’t be the only time we’re ever going to get. I can’t, I just can’t… I mean, we just started, and it’s so good, Graham. It’s so good. Don’t you feel that?’ Her cheeks were wet now and he wiped the tears gently away.

‘We’ve had a few days,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold on to them, how’s that? We won’t lose this.’

‘You don’t know that. Who knows how long you’ll be in jail, with the trial, even if you win…’

‘I’ll win.’

She shook her head, sniffling. ‘But what if you don’t?’

‘I will. Nobody’s going to be able to prove I did anything wrong. I’ll beat it. And however long it is, we’ll get through it, okay?’

She shook her head again. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know how we can, if we can.’

‘We will. I promise. I’ve been looking for this for too long and now we’ve got it. I’m not letting you go, and that’s all there is to it.’

Hardy was intensely unhappy with Graham’s disappearance, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. The police would probably find him first and Hardy would get a call from jail.

Meanwhile, he did have other clients who needed consistent, if perhaps low-level, effort. He tried to leave Friday afternoons open for the motions and correspondence that covered a decent part of the overhead of a small commercial practice like his own. He was just finishing up a memo for one of these clients, when he looked up and saw Abe Glitsky standing in his open doorway.

Momentarily startled, Hardy sat back. ‘Now I know how you must feel. People turning up in your office without any warning. Hey, wasn’t today the day? Tell me your door’s been installed.’

‘It’s in.’ Glitsky nodded, but there was a set to his features. He wasn’t here to talk about his door.

‘What’s the matter?’

The lieutenant took a step into the room. ‘I tell you something in confidence as a friend, and you take it to the DA and try to make your own juice out of it, I feel kind of like you’re a sack-of-shit lawyer instead of my old pal.’

Any profanity from Glitsky was unusual, but a directed vulgar insult was unheard of, serious. ‘You want to come in? I’m sorry. I was wrong.’

Glitsky didn’t move. ‘I don’t think I do. I’m just here with the message, so you’d know I knew.’

Dan Tosca was allowing himself to be treated to a nice dinner at Firenze by Night. Lanier had wanted the information sooner if he could have gotten it, and now, technically, it was too late; the attorney general had already got its indictment on Graham Russo, though he and his partner hadn’t been able to serve the warrant.

Lanier didn’t really think there would be anything with Sal Russo’s business dealings that might complicate the investigation into his death. But, as it turned out, he was wrong.

Tosca was eating coniglio con pancetta - Lanier called it bunny and bacon – and Marcel was having spaghetti and meatballs. ‘… so I was surprised, mostly because I hadn’t heard a word about it.’

‘But it was a heart attack, you’re sure?’

Tosca shrugged, pushing sauce around his plate with a piece of bread. ‘Nobody’s sure of anything, come right down to it, but Pio gets a pain in his chest, he goes to the hospital, he dies.’

‘Pio?’

‘Pio, yeah. Ermenigeldo Pio. He ran the fish operation.’

‘For who?’