John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

It was going to come down to a matter of what the jury believed. Or whom they believed. In that sense it was good that no one had found any ‘other dudes’ to point at.

And now they were all committed. Hardy’s defense was really the only possible one left. But he couldn’t shake his intense discomfort over the fact that it was, basically, a cynical lie. A lie that served justice, he believed, but still a lie.

Freeman was not being his most endearing self. He appeared to have slept in his suit and certainly hadn’t showered – obvious in the cramped room. He had consumed a healthy, well-rounded breakfast of peanuts and had piled the shells in front of him on Glitsky’s desk. ‘Look, Lieutenant, we can go down to Judge Salter right now and get ourselves a month continuance, and I think we ought to do it and investigate the hell out of this gambling connection.’

Hardy tried to rein his partner in. ‘He’d never do that to the jury, David. Not at this stage. And it’s not about any gambling, anyway.’

Freeman paid no mind, breezing along, jawing at Glitsky, ‘We know that Craig Ising is in cahoots with at least two dozen other gamblers downtown, most of whom used Sal Russo to run their money around-’

‘A long time ago,’ Hardy put in.

‘- some of which might have been the wrapped bills in this case.’

‘There’s no evidence of that,’ Sarah said.

Freeman snapped, ‘None that you’ve found.’

Sarah’s eyes flashed at him. ‘That’s right. None that anybody could have found.’

Glitsky sat up. ‘Hey, hey, nobody has to get accusatory. Getting mad isn’t going to help anything.’

‘I’m not mad.’ Freeman appeared genuinely surprised. He was simply arguing his position, for him a function of drawing breath. How could it offend?

Evans, however, had some color in her cheeks. ‘I interviewed Craig Ising twice, Mr Freeman.’ Actually it had been four times, but Glitsky had only known and approved of the last two of them, so she went with that. ‘I told him we weren’t interested in his gambling, only in Sal. He said to his knowledge no one had used Sal in at least two full years.’

Freeman scoffed at that. ‘He says…’

‘Graham corroborates it,’ Hardy said.

Freeman looked from one of them to the other. ‘Here’s the deal,’ he said. ‘Sal had memory problems. This ring a bell, Pavlovs? He might have stumbled upon this opportunity to deliver a bag of cash and forgot he even did it.’

‘To who? From who?’ Glitsky asked.

‘Abe means whom , David. To whom, from whom.’ Hardy favored Abe with a smile.

Abe looked over. ‘Whom this, Diz.’

Freeman ignored the exchange. ‘That’s your job, Lieutenant. Find that out.’

Like Freeman, Glitsky wasn’t angry. He admired Freeman’s persistence, but he realized that he was fishing and had nothing. ‘Point me to any evidence, any direction, David, and we’re on it. I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened. I’m not even saying it didn’t happen. But I’ve got a suspect on trial for what we’d be asking these people about, if we could find out who they were.’

‘What about the cooperative Mr Ising?’

Hardy had to speak up again. ‘He’s our witness, David. He’s been nothing but a help.’

Freeman waved a hand. ‘That’s old news. What’s he done for us lately?’ Back at Glitsky. ‘Look, you call Ising in, rip him a new asshole over all this gambling, tell him you’re giving him up to vice if he doesn’t give us the name of every one of his cohorts, and then you call all of them downtown and find where their stories don’t coincide. Does he have a sheet?’ Meaning a police record.

Truly amused now, Glitsky rolled his eyes at Sarah, turned to Hardy. ‘Anything else, Diz?’

‘I think you went a bit over the line, David. Suggesting we arrest the entire young generation of the city’s power elite, I don’t know, maybe that didn’t seem reasonable.’

‘Glitsky could do it.’

They sat at their table in the empty courtroom. Freeman had tried another ploy, suggesting on round two that this time Glitsky arrest Dan Tosca and somehow squeeze him for information on the multimillion-dollar fish-poaching trade. But again, as Glitsky and Sarah had pointed out, there wasn’t even any smoke around Tosca. Why should they go looking for a fire?

‘The point is not that he could do it, David, but that he’d have to explain why , and there wouldn’t be any good reasons.’

The old man shook his head. ‘Picky picky picky.’

‘Besides,’ Hardy continued, ‘I thought we’d decided to stay in our tuck.’

‘That was you,’ Freeman said. ‘Me, I’d go to any lengths to keep a verdict away from a jury. If a judge would give me a five-year continuance, I’d take it on general principles.’

‘Spoken like a true defense attorney.’

‘Which, I might remind you, is what I am.’

‘And you’d let your client rot in jail?’

‘Absolutely.’

Hardy had to laugh. ‘Were you born with this great compassion for your fellow man or is it something you’ve developed over the years?’

‘Both. But all right, Glitsky washed. Now we’re back on Plan A. We calling Brandt?’

They’d beaten this decision to death but were pretty clear with what they should do. On the one hand, Barbara Brandt would be a stirring defender of assisted suicide and would put the issue right into the collective faces of the jury. But Freeman had already done just that on redirect with Russ Cutler. Only a moron – and Hardy hoped there were none on the jury – could avoid some sense of the real issue in this case.

On the other hand, Brandt would swear that Graham had killed Sal. She was probably a liar and certainly a loose cannon. Hardy didn’t know what, if anything, Drysdale and Soma had discovered about Brandt’s lie detector test, but the polygraph expert’s name was Les Worrell and he was on their witness list.

Hardy had questioned Worrell and believed that Brandt had in fact passed the test. But he’d also read newspaper and magazine reports opining that Barbara Brandt had been coached in how to pass the test. What Hardy didn’t know was if Worrell had been implicated in that collusion, and he was loath to ask about more things he didn’t know. The whole polygraph issue was inadmissible, but Hardy and Freeman thought they knew a land mine when they saw one.

‘I’m going to let my instincts decide,’ he said finally.

‘Go with what you feel, huh?’ Freeman asked.

‘Right.’

‘Dumbest idea I ever heard.’

Hardy shrugged. ‘You do it all the time.’

‘But I’m the incredible David Freeman.’ It wasn’t clear whether he was kidding or not.

‘I’m going to win them over, David. I’m going to make them see it.’

‘Without Brandt?’

‘Probably, now that I think of it. She can’t tell the jury anything they don’t already know from other sources.’

Freeman seemed to buy this. ‘So? You got a plan?’

Hardy cracked a craggy grin. ‘The outline’s a little vague. A little smile, a little dance, a little seltzer in my pants.’

Drysdale, Soma, and the big boss himself, Dean Powell, were having their own meeting in the state attorneys’ offices on Fremont Street. Though a day or so of the defense’s testimony had gone by before they’d seen it, they were no longer unaware that Hardy was conducting his portion of the trial on a different plane than they had.

They had a big decision to make and weren’t in precise accord about how to proceed. Dean Powell had the floor, which in this case was the head of the long functional state-issue table in the conference room. His face was set, and under the mane of white hair his color was high. ‘I don’t care about any face-saving strategy, Art, we’re not backing away from the specials.’