John Lescroart - The Oath

"They're probably better statesmen," Hardy said.

"I could be a statesman," Farrell said. "I'd like to kill lots of people." He was sitting now, rearranging the pens on his blotter. "Maybe then I could defend myself, which would mean I had a client."

Hardy sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. "Things a little slow lately?"

Farrell waved a hand vaguely at their surroundings. "Barely worth opening the office every day." He sighed. "If I didn't care so much about a couple of my clients…"

"The Mackeys, for example?"

Farrell's shoulders fell. He wagged his head back and forth a couple of times in despair, then looked up through bassett eyes. "Don't tell me they came to you?"

Hardy barked a note of laughter, then checked it. Losing business wasn't a laughing matter. "No," he said. "I promise. I'm not stealing your clients, Wes. But it is about the Mackeys."

"What about them, besides that they've not only lost a son, but are screwed to boot?"

"Screwed how?"

"Because our great Supreme Court recently ruled, as you may have heard, that individuals can't sue their HMOs for medical malpractice because they don't practice medicine. They're business entities, not medical entities." He spread his palms, lifted, then dropped them in frustration. "Unfortunately, Diz, this rejects more or less exactly the argument I'd filed in behalf of the Mackeys and my other five clients. And master of timing that I am, I hitched my wagon pretty much full-time to this issue, figuring it was the wave of the future. Anyway, so now I've got to rewrite all the pleading on some new cause of action. Failure to coordinate care, general negligence, the admin of the plan caused the P.I., like that. But meanwhile, there's no billings."

All the way back in his chair, Hardy sat with his arms crossed, halfway enjoying the rave. He knew the realities of billing. If you couldn't handle them, you didn't belong in the business. "So what happened with Shane?"

"Shane is like textbook." Farrell shot up and went to his file cabinet, from which he pulled a thick folder. "Look at this. Check this out."

Hardy stood and came over to the desk. Farrell had the medical records of everything that Moses McGuire had described in the Shamrock the previous night, but they went over it in a lot more detail, and with a final twist that made Shane Mackey's death even more tragic. One of Shane's doctors suggested that he might, possibly, have "something" that could respond to a new treatment being performed at Cedars-Sinai in L.A. But Shane's HMO had determined that this treatment was "experimental," so they would not cover him. Which meant the cost to Shane would be about three hundred thousand dollars out of pocket. "And after months of agony, trying to decide if he should incur the cost, he went for it. He and his parents sold their houses, basically cashed out, and he went down to L.A., where guess what?"

"He died," Hardy said soberly.

"He died," Farrell repeated. "But I've got a witness down there who says that if he would have come in three months earlier, they might have saved him."

Hardy whistled. "If he's credible, that could be worth a lot of money for you."

"Yeah, but it's not coming in tomorrow, let me tell you." Farrell closed the folder. "Anyway, the bad part for me is that it's all omission, very hard to prove. Stuff somebody might have or should have done, but didn't because Parnassus doesn't allow-"

Hardy straightened up, nearly jumped at the word. "Parnassus? That's the group here we're talking about?"

A nod. "Sure. Shane worked for the city, so they covered him."

"And what about your other clients? Were they with Parnassus, too?"

"Sure. They're the biggest show in town, after all."

"And with these other clients, somebody died every time?"

"Yep."

"Were they all omission cases, like with Shane?"

"Not all. There was one little girl-Susan Magers. She was allergic to sulfa drugs and the doctor she saw forgot to ask. I mean, can you believe that? You'd think they'd have allergies flagged in the computer when they call the patient's name up, but they elected not to load that software about five years ago, save a few bucks." He shook his head in disgust. "But let me ask you, Diz. If you don't have a client, what's your interest in all this?"

Hardy sat on the corner of the desk. "I'm not sure, to tell you the truth. I heard about Shane just last night and got to wondering if his fiance´e or his family needed any help, which brought me to you. But when I hear it's all Parnassus…"

"What's all Parnassus?"

Hardy frowned, reluctant by habit to disclose information he'd been given in relative confidence. Instead, he temporized. "The name's just been coming up a lot lately. You heard about Tim Markham, didn't you?"

"What about him?"

Hardy looked a question-was Wes putting him on?-but apparently not. "He got killed yesterday. Hit and run."

"You're kidding me!" Farrell's face went slack. "I've really got to start watching some nighttime television, reading the paper, something. When did it happen?"

"Yesterday morning. They got him over to Portola, where he died."

"God, in his own hospital. I love it. They must be shitting over there." Farrell broke a smile. "Maybe I could call his wife and see if she wants to sue them. Wouldn't that be sweet?"

"Sue who?"

"Portola, Parnassus, the usual suspects."

"Except that they didn't kill him, Wes. He got hit by a car."

Farrell sat forward, still grinning, his elbows on his desk. "Listen to me, Diz. Did you know Tim Markham? Well, I did. He gets admitted to a hospital filled with the doctors he's been screwing for fifteen years, he's not getting out alive no matter what. I guarantee it."

Hardy was smiling, too. "It's a good theory, Wes, but I don't think it happened."

Farrell pointed a finger. "You wait," he said.

Hardy sometimes wondered why he had a downtown office. He'd stopped in for an hour after seeing Farrell. Then he and Freeman had eaten a long lunch in Belden Alley. At a little after three o'clock, he had finally settled into the brief he was writing when he was interrupted by a call from his friend Pico Morales, who didn't want to bother him, but it was an emergency, having to do with one of his friends. He needed a criminal lawyer. Could Hardy please come down to the Steinhart Aquarium and talk to him? The guy, Pico said, was one of his walkers. Hardy knew what that meant. When Pico went on to say that the friend was a doctor named Kensing with Parnassus, that clinched it. Hardy was going for another drive, back to the Avenues.

As the curator of the Steinhart, Pico's long-standing ambition was to acquire a great white shark for the aquarium in Golden Gate Park. Four, six, nine times a year, some boat would haul up a shark and Pico would call his list of volunteers. A lifetime ago, Hardy had been one of the first. He would let himself in to the tanks in the bowels of the aquarium where, his mind a blank, he'd don a wetsuit and walk a shark for hours, round and round in the circular tank. In theory, the walking would keep water moving through the animals' gills until they could breathe on their own. It had never worked yet.

Half-hidden by shrubbery, the back entrance was all the way around behind the aquarium, down six concrete steps. In the dim hallway someone had left on a small industrial light. Hardy pushed at the wired glass door, which opened at his touch.

After all the years that had passed since he'd last been here, he was surprised at how familiar the place felt. The same green walls still sweated with, it seemed, the same humidity. The low concrete ceiling made him want to keep his head down, although he knew he had clearance. He heard muffled voices, sounding as if they came from the inside of an oil drum. His footfalls echoed, too, and he became aware of the constant, almost inaudible hum-maybe generators or pumps for the tanks, Hardy had never really learned what caused it.