John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

A pause. ‘That’s not it. I’m bringing Graham Russo in this morning. I wanted to let you know.’

‘That’s really swell, thanks. I’ll pass it along.’

He hung up, took another look at his very own bullet hole, then opened the door and went out into the detail.

Graham spent the night alone on Edgewood and called Hardy as soon as he got up, before sunrise. Ha, ha, yeah, that was funny, they agreed, the whole Bay to Breakers thing. Hardy picked him up on the way in to work.

Now they were in his office, on either end of the couch. The doors were closed behind them. Phyllis was holding calls, although Hardy had already phoned out to Glitsky. But the morning paper had contained yet another new story about his client. He wanted to ask Graham about it. Barbara Brandt, the Sacramento lobbyist, had taken a lie detector test for Sharron Pratt, saying that she’d spoken to Graham on the day Sal died. And she passed. Ostensibly, she was telling the truth.

‘So what about that?’ Hardy asked. ‘She says she counseled you before you went over to your dad’s. And you’re telling me you don’t know her.’

‘You got it.’ Graham, in slacks and a sport jacket, was shaking his head no. He seemed truly baffled. ‘I have no idea where she’s coming from, Diz. I never met her in my life. No, correct that, she called me once.’

Hardy was sitting with studied casualness, legs crossed, hands clasped on his lap. ‘Graham, she took a lie detector test and passed it.’

‘I don’t care. I’ll take one too. I don’t know her. She’s got to be some fruitcake.’

‘She’s a lobbyist in Sacramento.’

Graham smiled. ‘I rest my case.’

Hardy’s brow was etching itself a few new lines. ‘You don’t know her?’ he repeated a last time. ‘Then what-?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s some kind of publicity stunt.’

‘But she did talk to you on the phone?’

Graham was showing his impatience. ‘We didn’t even get to what she wanted.’ He shifted forward, elbows on knees. ‘I still don’t know what she wants. What does this get her?’

Hardy was wondering the same thing. ‘You’re on the cover of Time . It was a sympathetic article. Maybe she’s on your coattails. For her cause.’

Graham sat back. ‘But the conclusions in Time , the way he made it all sound, it was all wrong.’ This was what he’d argued about with Sarah, although he couldn’t very well tell that to Hardy right now. ‘I never went inside, Diz. I went over early, Sal wasn’t home, I left. I didn’t talk to any Barbara Brandt or anybody else. I’m not lying.’

There was real anguish in his voice, and Hardy was almost glad to hear it. Maybe Graham was at last starting to get some understanding of the predicament he was in. But there was still one last hurdle before Hardy could sign on for the duration, and they had to jump it now. ‘Okay, Graham, you’re not lying. That’s good news. I believe you. But the bad news is I might not be able to stay on with this case.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘But it’s true.’

Graham looked at him imploringly. He hung his head for a teat, looked back up. ‘Why not?’

This was his least favorite part, but Hardy had to explain his position. ‘As it stands now, you’re into me for maybe four hundred dollars, two hours.’

‘It’s been more than that.’

Hardy waved off the objection. ‘We’re talking round figures. Four hundred gets us to here, but if I continue and we go to trial, then you get most of my time for most of a year.’

‘Or else I take the public defender?’

‘That’s right. There’s some good lawyers in that office. I could recommend-’

But Graham stopped him. ‘So could I. I know those guys, they got fifty cases going all the time. I’d be one of them.’

Hardy didn’t want to waste breath arguing it. Many public defenders were decent enough trial attorneys, but Graham was right. In general, workload remained a factor in quality of defense. But they couldn’t sit here all day either. Hardy had already alerted Glitsky that he was bringing Graham to the Hall, and judging from the lieutenant’s mood, he wouldn’t put it past him to send a car down here and make the arrest in Hardy’s office – a little object lesson in the etiquette of friendship.

‘How about this?’ Graham asked. ‘You take me on for a small retainer – say a couple of grand – and after six weeks you tell the judge I’m busted, then the court appoints you to represent me, and it pays you.’

Hardy was shaking his head. ‘No, I don’t do that.’

‘Yeah, I don’t blame you. It’s pretty sleazy.’

‘So where does that leave us? You want a private attorney, you’ve got to pay for one. That’s the way it works.’

‘I know. You’re right.’ He pulled an envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat. ‘Deduct the four hundred I already owe you and that’s eleven thousand, six hundred.’

Hardy flicked at the envelope a few times, then left it on the couch, got up, and walked over to the window. He hated this. There was a time, he knew, when he would have taken this case, literally, for nothing. He would have lived on beans and burgers and somehow made it work. But it wasn’t only him now. He had a family that depended on him absolutely. He thought of Talleyrand’s axiom that a married man with children will do anything for money.

Leaving aside the thornier question of where this money had come from, he turned back. ‘I’m sorry, Graham. It’s not close.’

‘Not even as a retainer? I could sign a promissory note for the rest.’

‘And what about if you’re convicted? It’s notoriously hard to make a good living in prison.’ He didn’t mean to be such a hard-ass, but he knew this was gentle compared to what Graham would be facing in the coming months.

‘If you put my Beemer up for sale, you could probably clear another twenty-five. Sal’s baseball cards, maybe another thirty.’

‘Except that Sal’s cards aren’t yours. They’re under seal.’

Since Graham was going to be charged with killing Sal for the money and the baseball cards, if he was convicted, those items would be permanently confiscated by the state. They were untouchable assets.

But Hardy badly wanted this case. He’d been living with it for a couple of weeks and he couldn’t imagine letting it go now. He’d committed. Thirty-seven thousand dollars – twelve in the envelope and twenty-five from the BMW – wasn’t going to cut it for a year’s work in a murder trial, but it was a reasonable retainer under normal business conditions.

They’d just have to figure some other way. Hardy was convinced that Graham was doing his best to show good faith, although he really didn’t want to think about the provenance of the cash in the envelope he was holding. It was probably money saved from his softball tournaments, maybe left over from his well-paying law job.

It broke the first law of the defense attorney, which is ‘Get your payment up front’, but Hardy did not care. As with all acts of faith it was irrational and in many ways unexplainable. It was just something he felt he had to do. ‘All right, Graham,’ he said, ‘my fees are two hundred an hour, twice that at trial. You want to sign a note that you’ll pay it all when this is over, no matter how it comes out?’

It was a no-brainer – maybe, Hardy thought, on both sides -and Graham gave it all the time it deserved. About a second. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’

Hardy put out his hand. ‘Then you got yourself a lawyer.’

When Hardy returned to his office in the late afternoon, there was a call from Helen Taylor, Graham’s mother – a cultured voice – saying she’d like to make an appointment at his earliest convenience to discuss the case.