Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (15 page)

Police had to be called to a meeting of a previously planned anti-abortion protest group at an Elks Hall in Potrero Heights when differences on the morality of mercy killing erupted into a melee among the activists.

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Barbara Brandt was an attractive woman in her late thirties who made her living as a Sacramento lobbyist. As the state’s chairperson of the Hemlock Society, the national right-to-die organization, Brandt saw Graham Russo’s picture on the front page of
The Sacramento Bee —
young and movie-star handsome — and, after reading the story, realized that here was this year’s poster boy for major fund-raising.

She looked up Graham’s number in the telephone book and was a bit surprised when he picked up on the second ring.

‘I’m really not interested in talking about it,’ he told her after a couple of minutes. ‘I’m a lawyer, you know. If I break the law, they’ll yank my bar card. I’ve already had enough problems with my career.’

‘But you did the right thing,’ Brandt persisted.

‘You don’t know what I did.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I know just what you did. I’m on your side.’

But it wasn’t any use. He wasn’t budging. After he hung up, she considered it for several minutes. She’d heard enough to know the truth. Graham’s law career would be over before it had begun if he admitted he’d helped kill his dad.

But he’d done the right thing; he’d already committed his civil disobedience. All he needed now, Brandt thought, was the courage to admit what he’d done. And she thought she could help him find a way to do just that.

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The public television station made a controversial decision to change their early Thursday-morning programming. Entitled
Just Let Me Die
, the show later won television’s Humanitas Award and an Emmy for Best Local Documentary. It was a grueling and poignant half hour of hastily assembled and edited file videotape of suffering hospital and nursing-home patients — AI sufferers, cancer victims, other terminally patients of both sexes, all ages, creeds, and colors — and all conscious enough to voice their desire to die.

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‘This is Hank Travers with Bay Area Action News. I’m standing outside the offices of the California state attorney general’s office in San Francisco, and with me is Assistant Attorney General Gil Soma. Mr Soma, can you tell us whether the state has decided to bring charges against Mr Russo?’

Soma was a talking head. ‘We need to carefully review all the evidence, of course. But the law, and my office, believes that the deliberate killing of another human being is usually a crime.’

There was an avid glint in his eyes that belied the apparent objectivity. Clearly, Soma wanted the head of Graham Russo.

And just as obviously, Hank Travers recognized this. ‘Is it true that you and Mr Russo used to work together?’

The camera angle widened. Soma was the picture of the fighting young attorney. The cameras were out on the street and a freshening breeze was playing with his tie, messing with his hair. He ignored these distractions, giving all his attention to Hank. ‘It’s a matter of record that we were both clerks for Federal Judge Harold Draper. Beyond that I can’t comment.’

The camera moved in for a close-up. Hank’s voice came over Gil Soma’s intense glare. ‘But you know a different Graham Russo, don’t you? The man behind the outward appearance? And you believe he would have killed his father for fifty thousand dollars?’

‘No comment.’

Travers tried a last time. ‘But in your opinion he’s the kind of person who
could
have done it?’

Soma kept it straight. ‘We’re looking at the evidence. That’s all I can tell you.’ But he continued nodding into the camera, and the message came across loud and clear: Soma despised Graham Russo. He was going to take him down if he could.

9

Glitsky had Evans and Lanier in a borrowed office in the vice detail down the hallway from homicide. It was important that the office have a door that could be closed, and Glitsky’s cubicle did not provide that particular amenity. The situation regarding the continuing investigation into Sal Russo’s death was unusual and volatile.

He was taking them through the game plan. When he had finished his first pass, Evans raised a hand and the lieutenant, atypically, took on an amused expression. ‘We’re not in school here, Sarah, you can just speak up.’

She folded her arms back across her chest. ‘I’ve got just one question: what are we supposed to do that we didn’t do last time when they let him go?’

Glitsky nodded; it was a good question. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. Same stuff, just more of it.’

Marcel Lanier had been around long enough that he got the gist of it the first time. He was sitting in a comfortable chair next to his partner and he looked over at her. ‘Everybody has their guards down, Sarah. Witnesses think there won’t be any charges, so what they saw or heard might not be so threatening. People might open up. The investigation is still open. That’s really what Abe’s saying.’

‘That’s it.’ Glitsky was all agreement.

‘But Russo is still our suspect?’ Especially after last night this was not welcome news.

‘Best and only. He did it.’ Lanier was ready to hit the streets. Glitsky had delivered the message. Time to go to work. But Sarah was still in her chair, arms still crossed over her chest.

‘Is something wrong, Sarah?’ Glitsky asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, something.’ They waited. ‘I don’t think he did it,’ she said at last. ‘I think we were wrong.’

Lanier began sputtering something, but Glitsky stopped him with a gesture. He set a haunch on the corner of the desk. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I’m just not sure.’

‘What’s changed since yesterday?’ Glitsky asked. ‘

‘A couple of things.’ She hesitated, then came out with it. ‘I talked to him.’

‘When?’

She told them about the meeting at the softball diamond, leaving out her personal reaction. ‘He came up to me.’ Not precisely true but, she thought, close enough. She was positive he’d been about to approach her when she saw him staring at her. ‘I don’t think he would have done that if he’d killed his father.’

‘Sure he would have.’ This was Lanier’s territory. He’d interacted with a hundred murderers in his career and had not a doubt that he had the psychology down. Whatever it might be, he’d already seen it twice. ‘That’s exactly the kind of shit these assholes try to run on us. We let him out of jail, so he’s untouchable. He wants to know what we know. He’s sucking up to you, Sarah, trying to get under your skin.’

She didn’t believe it. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

Glitsky: ‘What was it like?’

‘There’s wasn’t any sucking up. He barely mentioned it.’

Lanier leaned in toward her. ‘I bet it did sneak its clever little way into the conversation, though, didn’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘He just said he didn’t do it. An afterthought.’

Lanier had seen that too. ‘Ahh, the subtle approach. He barely brings it up after he’s been arrested and spent the day in jail?’ The psychology of that failed Marcel’s litmus test, and he wanted his partner to know it. ‘If
you’d
just spent your first day in jail and met the person who’d put you there, don’t you think it might be kind of the main thing on your mind? Wouldn’t you want to talk about it just a tiny bit?’

‘Marcel, I think she gets the point.’ Glitsky came back to Sarah. ‘You said there were a couple of things. What was the other one?’

Her eyes fixed on each of the men in turn. ‘I thought about this all night, reread over the file. We don’t really have anything that puts him there.’

Glitsky nodded. This, too, was a valid point. ‘That’s why Drysdale wants the investigation to proceed. He says he needs more to get a conviction.’

‘You mean we shouldn’t have arrested him last time?’

‘Now, wait a minute!’ Lanier wasn’t about to accept that analysis. ‘The guy had already hired a lawyer—’

‘Not in itself a crime,’ Glitsky pointed out.

‘Sure, sure, but still…’ Lanier knew what cops knew, and that was that innocent people — if there were any — didn’t tend to bring their lawyers into the picture until they were charged, until they finally understood that they were in trouble. He continued. ‘Basically, we got an unemployed, selfish kid with a million-dollar lifestyle who needed the money and saw an easy way to take it.’

‘So it’s all the money?’

‘Absolutely. He had the safe combination at his place. That puts him at his old man’s.’

‘Then why didn’t he just pick up the safe deposit key while we were searching his place, put it in his pocket? We wouldn’t ever have found it.’

Lanier shrugged. ‘I give up. Maybe he thought we’d catch him if he tried. Maybe he didn’t believe we’d be so thorough. I’m not saying the guy’s a professional hit man. Maybe he was just nervous.’

‘If it was all about the money, he would have done something to hide it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘It would have been so easy. He couldn’t
not
have done it.’

The old bromide — that killers needed to tell somebody about what they’d done — wasn’t all false. ‘He wanted us to find it. Call it a type of confession.’

‘He wouldn’t feel the need to confess if it was an act of mercy, if he felt he’d done the right thing.’

Lanier shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. This wasn’t any assisted suicide either. This was murder. That bump under the ear—’

‘Which Strout said could have happened hours before.’

‘No no no. Our boy Graham cold-cocked him from behind with the whiskey bottle, gave him a veinful of morphine, cleaned out the safe, and tiptoed home through the tulips.’

‘So if Sal was cold-cocked, lying still on the ground, and Graham gives shots every day of his life, why was there trauma around the injection site? Why wasn’t it a clean little poke?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he was scared. He was hurrying. Maybe there was an earthquake. The needle was broke. Maybe he missed the vein. My doctor does every time.’

But Glitsky had listened to enough arguing. ‘All right, all right. This doesn’t matter. I think you had plenty to arrest Russo yesterday. If you keep looking, maybe you’ll find more. You’re authorized to keep looking, that’s all. Make it tight. If the AG wants to move on him, we’ll bring in Graham again. If the evidence points to somebody else, we’ll go after them. Sarah, you got anybody else you’re thinking about?’

She said she didn’t, ‘But Sal still might have killed himself, right? The autopsy didn’t rule that out.’

Glitsky nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He pushed himself off the desk. The meeting was over. ‘And that is precisely the reason that God in Her infinite wisdom invented the jury system.’ He spread his hands, as though blessing them. ‘Which, fortunately, never fails.’

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‘Well, at least we had a nice summer, didn’t we?’

Lanier had his jacket buttoned all the way up, his head down in his collar. Next to him Evans, her hands tucked into her own jacket, squinted into the face of the wind and the dust it was kicking up. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asked. They were both walking fast. ‘It just
can’t
be this cold.’

After their meeting with Glitsky, they’d driven the half mile from the Hall up Seventh Street and pulled into Stevenson Alley, a narrow and grimy, if schizophrenic, line of asphalt and garbage a half block south of the always exotic bus station.

The north side of Stevenson was lined with the backs and delivery doors of the ancient medium-rise buildings of retail businesses that were struggling to survive on Market Street. Of the few structures whose fronts faced the alley, the most prominent was the Lions (no apostrophe) Arms apartment building, where Sal Russo had lived and died in corner room 304. Stenciled in fading black paint onto the side of the building were the words
Daily, Weekly Rates
.

For most of the past decade the south side of Stevenson had fit in with the run-down ambience of the neighborhood — an open sore of a construction site while the Old Post Office Building was being renovated. Recently, though, that work had been completed.

The Postal Service now had its own new home out at Rincon Annex, and the building’s other tenant — the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals — had taken it over. The federal courthouse now loomed fresh and imposing, a massive and elegant structure between Stevenson Alley and Mission Street.

Lanier and Evans didn’t notice any of it. As they stepped around the homeless man camped, sleeping now, in one of the back doorways, all they saw on the south side of the alley, the courthouse side, was a solid gray wall, already sprayed with graffiti, topped with coils of razor wire. It wouldn’t have mattered to the two inspectors if the Taj Mahal had been across the way; the Lions Arms didn’t pick up any reflected majesty from its surroundings. It was a flophouse, pure and simple.

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The uniforms had canvassed the Lions Arms when Sal’s body had been found, but after dark were prime hours for a certain class of people who made their living on the street — lots of tenants hadn’t been home.

So Sarah and Lanier were back, planning to knock on more doors. Normally, inspectors don’t like to work alone in this kind of environment, but it was midday and they could get more done if they split up. Both were aware that they probably should have gotten back to this sooner, but in the crush of other priorities it had had to wait.