John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

‘We’ve already pled. Not guilty to murder one.’

Giotti blew out heavily. ‘Murder one is ridiculous.’

A grim smile. ‘That’s my position too. I hope the jury agrees with us.’

‘Get it in front of them and it can’t fail. Not in this town. Not that I should comment on this at all.’

‘I don’t hear any comment,’ Hardy said, making explicit their understanding. ‘But I’ve got a problem with Graham, who won’t admit to being there.’ He didn’t want to mention his other problem, that he was fairly certain Graham had not helped his father die at all, that he was telling the truth on that score.

‘He was there,’ Giotti said simply.

‘That day? You know that?’

But Giotti backed away from that. ‘I can’t say that day for sure, but he came all the time. Sal told me he saw him a couple of times a week.’

‘Graham says this wasn’t one of the days.’

‘Have him change his mind and he’ll walk.’ Meaning he wouldn’t be convicted.

Hardy leaned forward, elbows on his knees. ‘He won’t admit anything, Judge. He is one stubborn fellow. He thinks they’ll pull his bar card.’

Giotti considered that a moment. ‘All right. So you admit it for him.’ Now the judge, too, leaned over the coffee table and lowered his voice. ‘It wouldn’t be Graham’s fault – there’d be no ethical problem with the bar – if the jury came back with “not guilty”; just bought assisted suicide and let him go. Graham himself would never have to admit anything. The bar couldn’t yank his card if it was his attorney’s argument, not his own testimony. All you’ve got to do, Mr Hardy, is keep him off the stand.’

This was, suddenly, as strange a conversation as Hardy could ever remember having: a federal judge counseling him on his defense. And it was a strategy, he realized, that had every hope of success, not too dissimilar to Leland Taylor’s suggestion of the day before. If only he could convince his client.

‘That might work, Judge.’

‘If it doesn’t, and again I am not commenting directly here’ – Giotti waited and Hardy nodded his assent – ‘at least then you’ve based your case on the constitutional issue, and I can assure you with reasonable confidence that this circuit would tend to look favorably on any appeal.’

The moment froze, Hardy struck with an almost surreal awareness. The white light out the window. The space heater suddenly clicking off. A portrait of some Native American chieftain on the opposite wall. If he’d heard it right, Mario Giotti had just told him that if Hardy lost Graham’s case, the judge would see to it that the conviction was overturned on appeal.

He didn’t dare ask if he’d heard it right. He had. Any more direct confirmation would be collusive – downright indictable. Nodding like a puppet, setting the frame in his mind, he stood up. ‘Well, Your Honor, I want to thank you. It was very nice to meet you.’

‘My pleasure,’ the judge said. ‘It’s not every day I get any personal time. I appreciate it.’

They were moving to the door when Hardy stopped. ‘Can I ask you one more thing? Very fast.’

Giotti trotted out his smile again. ‘You can ask it slow if you want. What is it?’

‘You said Sal was unable to make a decision at the end.’

The judge corrected him. ‘An informed decision.’

‘And this was obvious to anybody who did any business with him?’

‘Maybe not. But certainly to anyone who had known him.’

Hardy frowned. The judge asked him what he was getting at. ‘I’m trying to get a picture of the last moments. If he was lucid one second, had made this decision, then in the middle of it changed his mind, that could account for the trauma they found around the injection site.’

The judge’s eyes went to the corner of the room, the filigreed redwood moldings hugging the distressed drywall. Lips pursed, his eyes went dull for a long beat. ‘He knew it was getting toward the time. He used to tell his bad Alzheimer’s jokes, you know? Then lately he’d stopped doing that, which I took as a sign that he was getting serious about it.’

‘But suddenly this tumor was going to end things quickly.’

Giotti waited. ‘And?’

‘And so he wasn’t facing the same thing. Instead of a long, slow advance into dementia where he’d lose his dignity, his new reality was about dealing with pain.’

‘Okay?’

‘Which from all I’ve heard about him, he was macho as hell. I’m just trying to get to his state of mind. He wasn’t going to let pain beat him, even great pain.’

Giotti took that in. ‘That flies,’ he said. ‘I remember one time we were out on the Bonus . We’d just landed a salmon and he slipped on the deck and the gaff went through the palm of his hand, all the way through.’

‘Yow!’

‘No kidding. Sal gave one good yell, then just twisted the gaff back out and wrapped his hand in an old T-shirt. Didn’t even head the boat back in. We fished the whole day and he never mentioned it again.’

That’s what I mean,‘ Hardy said. ’I don’t see him deciding to die over the pain.‘

‘Maybe the combination,’ the judge replied. ‘That and the Alzheimer’s. Whatever it was, something clearly got to him. It must have, don’t you think?’

‘Must have,’ Hardy said. ‘It must have.’

‘He says it’s an emergency.’ Phyllis’s clipped tones came over the speakerphone, filling his office. Hardy was huddled with Michelle, catching up on the ever-fascinating world of stress tolerance in various metals. It was Wednesday afternoon, almost evening, certainly after five -at any rate, way too late for what he still had to do.

He hadn’t even been to see Graham, who’d no doubt been languishing in his AdSeg unit all day, wondering what, if anything, his lawyer was up to. And he’d been working on Russo all day – after Giotti, over to the Hall for more discovery, a look at the actual evidence. The materials from the safe: the money, baseball cards, old belt. Then the syringes and vials with their labels stripped off.

He had a less-than-amiable chat with Claude Clark in the hallway, when Hardy had stopped him, honestly trying to help, perhaps to make amends about the blown deal with Pratt. He told Clark that Barbara Brandt was a liar. Not true, Clark had countered, and even if it were, Hardy made deals he couldn’t keep. Clark would take a liar anytime – at least you knew where you stood.

He really ought to go stop in and see Graham, but it was three-thirty before he gave up waiting for another opportunity to apologize to Glitsky and began to brave the abysmal traffic back uptown to Sutler. He had had a two o’clock with Michelle which he’d rescheduled to three and then four, and he was going to be late for that too.

Even if someone hadn’t parked in his space under his own building.

Staring at the unfamiliar car in the spot for which he paid a fortune each month, he marveled anew that anyone could oppose capital punishment. Surely, stealing someone’s parking place was a death-penalty affront to civilization.

Just to add a certain je ne sais quoi of tension to the equation, he had a date with Frannie in less than two hours and at least another hour here with Michelle, so he’d told Phyllis no more calls the last time she’d put one through – a reporter. If it wasn’t Dyson or Frannie, he couldn’t talk to anybody. And now she’d buzzed him back, interrupting again.

He shook his head in frustration. ‘Sorry, Michelle.’ Then, out loud, ‘Who is it, Phyllis?’

‘A Dr Cutler.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘It’s about the Russo case.’

‘What isn’t?’ He asked it to himself, getting up to cross to his desk, but an answer came from an unexpected quarter.