The Mercy Rule

‘Around ten at night.’ Graham didn’t seem to have a problem with the timing, although to Hardy it invited some questions. If his memory served him, and it always did, Sal had apparently died between one and four o’clock in the afternoon. This was the issue Graham was skirting, which perhaps the police were considering if they were thinking about Graham after all. He would have had plenty of time between one o’clock and when he checked into work near three.

But the young man was going on. ‘Judge Giotti, you know. Judge Giotti found him.’

‘I read. What was he doing there?’

Graham shrugged. ‘I just know what everybody knows – he’d finished having di

‘And why would the judge do that?’

The answer was unforced, Graham recounting old family history. ‘They were friends. Used to be, anyway, in high school, then college. They played ball together.’

‘Your father went to college?’

Graham nodded. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Salmon Sal the college grad. Classic underachiever, that was Sal. Runs in the family.’ He forced a smile, making a joke, but kept his hands clamped tightly together, leaning forward casually, elbows resting on his knees. His knuckles were white.

‘So. Giotti?’ Hardy asked. Graham cast his eyes to the floor. ‘You weren’t his clerk, were you?’

The head came back up. Graham said no. He’d clerked for Harold Draper, another federal judge with the Ninth Circuit.

‘I guess what I’m asking,’ Hardy continued, ‘is whether you and Giotti – him being your dad’s old pal and all – developed any kind of relationship while you were clerking.’

Graham took a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. Giotti came by once after I got hired to say congratulations. But these judges don’t have a life. I didn’t even see him in the halls.’

‘And how long did you work there?’

‘Six months.’

Hardy slid from the desk and crossed to his window. ‘Let me be sure I’ve got it right, he said. ’Draper hired you to become a clerk for the Ninth? How many clerks does he have?‘

‘Three.’

‘For a year each?’

‘Right. That’s the term.’

Hardy thought so. He went on. ‘When I was getting into practice right after the Civil War, a federal clerkship was considered the plum job of all time right out of law school. Is that still the case?’

This brought a small smile. ‘Everybody seems to think so.’

‘But you quit after six months so you could try out as a replacement player during the baseball strike?’

Graham sat back finally, unclenched his hands, spread them out. ‘Arrogant, ungrateful wretch that I am.’

‘So now everybody in the legal community thinks you’re either disloyal or brain dead.’

‘No, those are my friends.’ Graham took a beat. ‘Draper, for example, hates my guts. So does his wife, kids, dogs, the other two clerks, the secretaries – they all really, really hate me personally. Everybody else just wishes I’d die soon, as slowly and painfully as possible. Both.’

Hardy nodded. ‘So Giotti didn’t call you when he found your dad?’

Graham shook his head. ‘I’d be the last person he’d call. You walk out on one of these guys, you’re a traitor to the whole tribe. That’s why I came to you – you’re a lawyer who’ll talk to me. I think you’re the last one who will.’

‘And you’re worried about the police?’

A shrug. ‘Not really. I don’t know. I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

‘I doubt they’re thinking anything, Graham. They just like to be thorough and ask a lot of questions, which tends to make people nervous. This other stuff with your background might have made the rounds, so they might shake your tree a little harder, see if something falls out.’

‘Nothing’s going to fall out. My dad killed himself.’

2

‘Well, maybe he didn’t after all.’ Hardy was having lunch with Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky in a booth at Lou the Greek’s, a subterranean bar/restaurant across the street from the Hall of Justice.

The place was humming with humanity today, and their booth was littered with the remains of their bowls and the fortune cookies that had come with their lunch special of tsatsiki-covered Hunan noodles – yogurt and garlic over sesame oil, pita bread on the side. Lou the Greek’s wife was the cook, and she was Chinese, so the place always served polyglot lunches, many of them surprisingly edible, some not. Today wasn’t too bad.

When Glitsky smiled, it almost never reached his eyes. This kept it from being the cheerful thing that smiles were often cracked up to be. The effect wasn’t much enhanced by the thick scar through both his lips. Hardy knew that the scar had come from a boyhood accident on playbars, but Abe the tough cop liked to leave people with the impression that it had been acquired in a knife fight.

The two men had been friends since they’d walked a beat as cops together twenty-some years before. This was their first lunch in a couple of months. Hardy and Graham Russo had spent half an hour covering questions about Sal’s ‘estate’: the old truck, some personal effects, thrift-shop clothes, a few hundred dollars. This discussion had left Hardy wondering what might really be going on, so he’d decided to call Abe.

It was one thing to speculate about what the police might be thinking. It was another – and altogether preferable – to get it from the source. Except, perhaps, when the information was unwelcome, as it was now. ‘What do you mean, maybe Sal didn’t kill himself?’

Glitsky kept the infuriating nonsmile in place. ‘What words didn’t you understand? None of them had too many letters.’

For which Hardy wasn’t in the mood. He was happy enough to help Graham out with estate issues, but that was as far as it went. Although he had defended two murder cases in his time and won both of them, he had no intention of getting involved in another one. They invariably became too consuming, too personal, too agonizing.

And now Glitsky was hinting that Sal might not have been a suicide. ‘It wasn’t so much the words as the meaning, Abe. Did Sal kill himself or didn’t he?’

Glitsky took his time, draining his teacup, before leaning across the booth, elbows on the table. ‘The autopsy isn’t in yet.’ The humor vanished, mysterious as its appearance. ‘You got a client?’

This was tricky. If someone had sought Hardy’s help in co

‘Which one?’

A smile. ‘The executor’s. Come on, Abe, what do you hear?’

Glitsky spread his hands on the table. ‘What I hear is that there was trauma around the injection site.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning maybe he didn’t stick himself. Maybe he jerked, pulling away, something like that.’

‘Which would mean what?’

‘You know as well as me. I’m reserving judgment, waiting for Strout’ – John Strout, the coroner – ‘although the investigation, as they say, is continuing. As you know, we roll on homicides until Strout calls us off.’

Hardy sat back. Glitsky waited another moment, then gave in. ‘Sal’s got a DNR in his freezer, a sticker telling about it on his coffee table. He was somewhere between very sick and about to die. The death itself is pretty humane – booze and morphine. Ends the pain.’

‘I didn’t read about pain. I thought the story was he had Alzheimer’s.’ Although Hardy knew that Graham had said his dad was in pain, he didn’t think this was public knowledge.

Glitsky’s eyes had turned inward. He reached for his empty teacup, sucked at it, put it back on the table.

Hardy was watching him. ‘What?’