John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

Hardy was still trying to make sense of this. Sluggishly, his brain tried to compute the numbers, but the zeroes slowed him up and Graham had him by several seconds. ‘That’s six hundred thousand dollars,’ he said.

Never looking more like Yoda, the infinitely kind, infinitely wise, infinitely sad Freeman met Hardy’s eyes. ‘She feels really bad about this, Diz. She wanted me to break it to you.’

A sense of unreality hung over the afternoon. One part of Hardy realized that of course he was standing in the middle of the courtroom in Department 27, asking Parini questions. Most of him, though, felt as if it were floating somewhere in the ozone, disembodied, the precious silver astral cord snapped forever.

Six hundred thousand dollars for four months’ work!

‘Sergeant, does the fact that you found Graham Russo’s fingerprints on many surfaces in the room mean that he had been there on that day?’

‘No.’ Parini remained an eloquent robot. Although police inspectors tended to be witnesses for the prosecution, he was answering the defense counsel with the same cooperative efficiency. ‘Fingerprints are oil based. There’s no real time limit. A fingerprint on something only means that sometime the finger came in contact with it.’

‘So are you saying that Graham might not have been in his father’s apartment on that day at all?’

‘Yes. There would be no way to tell.’

‘All right.’

Nothing’s all right! He could have had that money! He’d be free!

‘I’d like to ask you a question about this whiskey bottle, if I may. Dr Strout has already testified that Sal Russo was legally drunk at the time of the injection. Was the bottle under the table within reach of his arm?’

‘Yes, I’d say so.’

‘So that, as Sal was lying there, he could have reached for the bottle and knocked it over? Would that have been possible?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet didn’t you tell Mr Soma that the bottle had probably been kicked over or knocked over during a fight?’

‘That was a surmise,’ Parini said.

‘There might not have been a struggle at all, is that what you’re saying?’

‘That conclusion isn’t inescapable from the whiskey bottle, yes, that’s what I’m saying.’

Hardy put on a smile. Who could smile at a time like this ? He included the jury. ‘Good. A last question about the bottle. Did you find anything on it that indicated it had been used as a weapon of any kind? To hit Sal behind the ear, for example?’

‘No, we didn’t.’

‘None of his hairs? No blood?’

‘No. Neither.’

‘Any fingerprints that weren’t Sal’s?’

‘No.’

‘But you did find Graham’s fingerprints, did you not, on the vial of morphine and on the syringe?’

‘Yes, we did.’

Hardy thought this was clear enough. Certainly it would be absurd to believe that Graham had come in wearing gloves against leaving his fingerprints, picked up the bottle and knocked his father out with it, then taken off his gloves to administer the shot.

It was time to move to the next point. ‘Now I’d like to ask you about the kitchen, where the chair was on its side. How wide is this room?’

‘Not wide at all. Eight feet or so.’

‘And where are the stove and refrigerator?’

‘They’re both against the right wall.’

‘And is there a sink and counter?’

‘Yes, a sink at the end and a wraparound counter against the opposite wall.’

‘So are you saying there is a kind of corridor between the sink’s counter and the stove and refrigerator?’

‘Yes, that’s the way it was set up. With a window at the end, over the sink.’

‘It must be a narrow corridor, isn’t it?’

Parini knew that narrow was open to interpretation. He clarified it. ‘Four feet, maybe less.’

‘But wasn’t there a table in the kitchen, too, set into this corridor?’

‘Yes, there was.’

‘And did it appear to be in its normal position in the room?’

Parini gave this question a bit of thought, as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him. Perhaps it hadn’t. ‘Yes, it was centered, about where I’d expect it to have been.’

‘So are you saying that it didn’t appear to have been knocked sideways or in any way out of position in this purported struggle in the kitchen that was so violent, it knocked over the chair and scratched the cabinets?’

‘No. It was in the center of the corridor.’

‘And besides the chair and the scratches in the cabinetry, were there any other signs of struggle in the kitchen?’

‘No.’

‘Just a chair lying on its side?’

‘That’s all.’

‘Were there dishes on the drain? Cups, glasses, plates?’

‘Yes there were.’

‘And had any of these been knocked over by this supposedly violent struggle between two large men in the relatively tiny enclosure of the kitchen?’

Soma was up behind him, objecting. ‘Leading the witness, Your Honor.’

But on cross-examination the defense attorney is allowed to do just that. Salter knew this and correctly overruled Soma.

‘Was there anything you saw in the kitchen, Sergeant Parini, that would rule out the possibility that Sal Russo, drunk as he was, could just as easily have staggered against the chair, knocked it over, and simply left it there?’

This was the crux and Soma knew it. He objected again on grounds of speculation, and Hardy waited in suspension for Salter to rule.

Hardy was coming back to the present, though still sick in his heart. Walking an invisible tightrope between very close interpretations of the same evidence, he thought he’d phrased the question well. For his purposes all he needed was doubt about the struggle. Someone else could have been with Sal, could have helped him die, but there must not appear in the minds of the jurors that there had been any fight.

The judge finally spoke. ‘No, the question stands. I’ll overrule the objection. Sergeant, you may answer.’

The reporter read it back, and Parini gave it a reasonable amount of time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He could have stumbled against it just as easily. Nothing ruled it out.’

All at once his frustration over Michelle’s Tryptech treasure gave way to enthusiasm to plumb the vein he’d hit with Parini. In the midst of these emotions Hardy made a cardinal mistake. Forgetting one of the first precepts of cross-examination, which is never to ask a question for which you don’t know the answer, he said, ‘In fact, Sergeant, isn’t it true that there was nothing in the apartment that pointed to a struggle between Sal Russo and some purported assailant?’

‘Well, no, that isn’t true. There was the position of the body.’

Covering quickly, Hardy strolled back to his table and, stalling, took a drink of water. ‘That’s right, Sergeant, the position of the body. You said earlier that it looked like Sal Russo got dropped, do I have that right?’

‘That’s right.’

Hardy was moving to the exhibit table. Having dug himself this hole, he remembered that the Chinese used the same word for disaster and opportunity . He picked up People’s One. ‘Do you mean that the victim was not in the same position as shown here?’

Parini glanced at the photo. ‘No. That’s how he was.’

‘And to your mind, does that look like he was dropped?’

‘Yes.’

‘Or fell after being hit? Knocked out?’

‘Yes. He was sort of crumpled.’

Hardy knew where he was going and he picked up the pace. ‘Looking now at People’s One, Sergeant, where the victim is lying sort of crumpled as you put it. By this do you mean his legs are curled up under him? Not stretched out?’