John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

In the jail most lights were out, but even here in his AdSeg unit there were always noises, always shadows.

Sal had slept in the cab again – another nap – and when he woke up he’d pulled out of it that day. Graham knew he should have done something right then. Sal had told him he would be going by the Manor, looking up Helen. He should have believed him. He should have done everything differently.

But he didn’t want to believe it. It was too hard. It was easier to deny the progress of the disease, to believe that Sal wasn’t quite gone yet mentally. He had more time. Graham had more time with him.

He lay flat on his back, his arm thrown over his eyes. He missed him horribly. This was the only time he had with Sal anymore.

Memories.

Dismas Hardy checked his watch. Where was the judge? He was five minutes late. The bailiff had even pulled Graham from the holding cell and sat him next to Hardy, unshackled and in his trial clothes rather than the jail jumpsuit.

David Freeman was sitting at the defense table with Hardy and Graham, and doing it for free. He had joined the defense team – wheedling his way in. Hardy was grateful, not only for the legal assistance, but for the company.

They in were Department 27 in the Hall of Justice on a Monday, the third week of September. As in all of the courtrooms at the Hall, there was no hint of the weather outside, but the morning had been warm and still – unusual in the city for most of the year, but relatively normal in the weeks after Labor Day.

Graham’s trial clothes were a pair of slacks and a sport coat. Freeman and Hardy had decided that a business suit would strike too formal a tone for the jury. They wanted to play up Graham’s ‘regular guy’ image, so for the past week during jury selection, the defendant had appeared in court in a respectful coat and tie, anything but a stuffy three-piece lawyer’s uniform.

Hardy was fighting his nerves. Freeman and Graham were talking quietly to his left. He was half turned away from them, peripherally aware of Drysdale and Soma at the prosecution table across from him on the other side of the courtroom.

He swiveled further to check out the gallery, now filled to bursting for the opening fireworks. Jury selection had taken nearly ten days, with the final juror selected last Friday, just before the evening adjournment. The trial proper was beginning any moment, with opening statements, the first evidence.

Hardy was damned if he was going to spend these last seconds reviewing his notes one last time. When his moment arrived, after he’d listened to Soma’s opening statement, he was reasonably confident that the right words would come in for him. His notes were just that: key phrases, high points, several don’t forgets . He never wanted to see the damn things again.

His eyes raked the gallery, rested for a second on Frannie, who’d surprised and delighted him by saying she wanted to come down to root for him, at least for his opening statement. The kids were back in school. She might bring him some luck. He gave her an imperceptible nod, touching hand to heart as though he were straightening his tie. She saw it and nodded back.

In front of Frannie, Graham’s mother, Helen, who’d come to court for every day of jury selection, imitated a trompe 1’oeil statue. Hardy stared at her for several seconds, during which time she did not so much as blink. Her ash-colored hair was off her face, hands clasped on her lap. A general murmur hovered over the courtroom – people talking, speculating, arguing – but Graham’s mother was by herself, alone, self-sufficient. Neither her husband nor her other son was there, nor had they appeared last week.

Hardy recognized other faces on Graham’s ‘side’ of the gallery, several staff from his office. These were Freeman’s acolytes, here to see the show, especially the opening statements. Freeman had shamelessly pimped Hardy to these Young Turks as a master, and they’d come to see him work his magic.

He’d never lost! Freeman had told them all, and Hardy had rushed in with the clarification that he’d only fought twice. Never losing would have a lot more punch six or eight trials down the line. But they’d come anyway.

Conspicuously absent was Michelle, who had assumed much of the day-to-day responsibility of Tryptech. She was clearly resentful of the trial, of the way Graham Russo had come to consume her boss’s life over the past months, but Hardy thought it was actually working out very well for all concerned. Never a trial lawyer, Michelle was superb in her new role as corporate litigator. Hardy’s billings on Tryptech had dropped to about five hours a week, Brunei’s limit on cash outlay, and Michelle was taking her pay in discounted stock. Hardy hoped that she wouldn’t wind up impoverished by that decision, but she had made it on her own.

On his side also, and it surprised him, was Sharron Pratt herself. The newspapers had it that she planned to attend as much of the trial as her schedule allowed. Barbara Brandt, too, the perhaps-lying lobbyist – a redundancy? – whose face had become familiar, talked nonstop to her contingent by the back doors.

On the other side, behind the prosecution table, in the first row and far to the side, sat Dean Powell, the attorney general of the state of California. Like Pratt he was here to observe, to be a presence.

Hardy glanced over at Freeman and his client, still head to head, chatting amiably. Hardy was too tightly wound up even to feign listening. He blew out heavily, then stopped midway in the breath, lest any sign of his nerves get misinterpreted by the jury. He must forever appear confident, though not too. Grave, friendly.

Juror #4, Thomas Kenner, was looking at him, and Hardy met his gaze, nodding as if they had been acquainted for ages. Leisurely he took in the rest of the panel.

Jury selection had not gone well. In one important sense the final panel failed to be a representative cross-section of the citizenry of San Francisco – and that had been Hardy’s primary goal. In spite of the jury experts he and Freeman had hired, they had nearly been unable to counter the prosecution’s strategy. By the (bad) luck of the draw the jury pool had contained a huge preponderance of men, and though Hardy and Freeman had used their peremptory and other challenges to eliminate as many as they could, still the final panel had eight men, six of whom were white.

It was a generalization, but Hardy had no illusions: these working class men would not be as sympathetic as women would be. Soma and Drysdale had been shamelessly gender biased about wanting men on the jury – all men! Gender bias was okay if you won. Anything was okay if you won.

Of the four women, Hardy had a young Asian mother, an African-American thirtiesish schoolteacher, a divorced white secretary in her fifties, and a young gum-chewer with short hair dyed a bright carmine who read meters for the gas company.

Friday night after the adjournment, after the jury had been empaneled, Hardy and Freeman were having a consolation drink in one of the back booths at Lou the Greek’s. Soma and Drysdale had come in and sat at the bar up front. They were in high spirits, raised their glasses and toasted one another. Hardy heard them clearly enough. ‘Here’s to the best jury in America!’

Freeman, his liver-spotted lugubrious face buried in his bourbon, raised it enough to nod knowingly. ‘Good thing you’re motivated by a challenge,’ he’d said. ‘I’d say you got one.’

Understatement. Freeman’s forte.

Gil Soma’s stridency at the bail hearing, his sharp-edged ironic tone when he’d been with Drysdale and first met Hardy, his obvious, vitriolic hatred for Graham Russo – these examples had all worked to convince Hardy that Soma’s courtroom behavior would not help his case. Jurors would not warm to him.