Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (38 page)

He really ought to go stop in and see Graham, but it was three-thirty before he gave up waiting for another opportunity to apologize to Glitsky and began to brave the abysmal traffic back uptown to Sutler. He had had a two o’clock with Michelle which he’d rescheduled to three and then four, and he was going to be late for that too.

Even if someone hadn’t parked in his space under his own building.

Staring at the unfamiliar car in the spot for which he paid a fortune each month, he marveled anew that anyone could oppose capital punishment. Surely, stealing someone’s parking place was a death-penalty affront to civilization.

Just to add a certain je ne sais quoi of tension to the equation, he had a date with Frannie in less than two hours and at least another hour here with Michelle, so he’d told Phyllis no more calls the last time she’d put one through — a reporter. If it wasn’t Dyson or Frannie, he couldn’t talk to anybody. And now she’d buzzed him back, interrupting again.

He shook his head in frustration. ‘Sorry, Michelle.’ Then, out loud, ‘Who is it, Phyllis?’

‘A Dr Cutler.’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘It’s about the Russo case.’

‘What isn’t?’ He asked it to himself, getting up to cross to his desk, but an answer came from an unexpected quarter.

‘This.’

It was a flat statement from Michelle, with a harsh finality that nearly startled him. He suddenly realized that she wasn’t thriving under his tutelage. She was doing fine with the details and strategy of the case, but since her interaction with him was constantly being subverted by Graham Russo, she was getting understandably impatient. He gave her an ambiguous gesture, picked up the phone, and said hello.

He heard papers rustling and turned to see her going out the door, closing it behind her, so he missed his caller’s introduction. ‘I’m sorry, could you repeat that?’ He heard a sigh. Hardy wasn’t making many friends.

‘My name’s Russell Cutler. I play ball with Graham.’

‘My secretary said Dr Cutler?’

‘That too.’ There was a small pause, the sound of a breath being exhaled. ‘I prescribed the morphine for Sal Russo. I’ve been trying to live with it and I’m not doing very well. I thought telling somebody might help.’

Hardy took a moment. ‘It might.’ But then another thought occurred to him, and it nearly turned his stomach. His client had lied again — to him, maybe to his lover, certainly to the police and to
Time
magazine. If this doctor played ball with Graham, then the medical connection to the morphine was not through Sal — as Hardy had reluctantly come to accept — but through Graham himself.

Jesus Christ! he thought. Would it never end?

Struggling for a calm tone, he fell back upon his job, his role. The lawyer. ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else? The police, for instance?’

‘No. I thought it would be better if I told my story to Graham’s side, you know?’

‘That was a good thought,’ Hardy conceded. ‘Where are you located?’

Cutler told him he was a resident at Seton Medical Center in Daly City. He lived in San Bruno, had graduated from UCSF Medical School. He had played baseball for Arizona in college and had been ‘drafted’ by Craig Ising when he showed up in the city, playing haphazardly, but as often as he could get the time. He hit the long ball and it was great money. ‘So Graham and I became friends and he kind of told me about Sal. He was afraid to go to public health because he thought they’d report him because of the AD. He’d lose his driver’s license among other things. They’d put him in a home. You know the drill, the indigent sick? It’s appalling.’

‘I’ve heard,’ Hardy said, although he was daily getting a new appreciation for how bad it must be. ‘So you… what? With Sal?’

There wasn’t any answer for a minute, although the connection hadn’t been broken. When Cutler came back, his voice was muted. ‘Look, I’m in the lounge here…’

‘And you can’t talk?’

A false cheer, the voice back to normal. ‘Good. Right. Yeah.’

‘So when can we get together?’

*
    
*
    
*
    
*
    
*

‘This is always my favorite part.’

‘It’s why we’re such a great couple,’ Hardy said. ‘You’re always so eager to share the excitement.’

Frannie nodded. ‘That must be it.’

Hardy felt that there hadn’t been any choice, not that this was any consolation to Frannie. Nor had it been to Michelle, either, judging from the
Gone home
Post-it note on her office door when Hardy had finally stopped by to resume their stress-tolerance discussion. His trained legal mind intuited that she was displeased with him.

As was his wife now at his decision to meet with a witness at the Little Shamrock on Date Night. Her brother, Moses, having poured a round for a group in the front window, was back into earshot before Hardy was aware of it.

Hardy was trying to explain. ‘It couldn’t be helped, Frannie. The guy’s got eight hours off tonight and then he’s on call all the rest of the week. What am I supposed to do?’

His wife, nursing a Chardonnay, feigned pensiveness. ‘Here’s a radical concept, but what about waiting till next week? What do
you
think, Mose?’

A thoughtful pout. ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today?’

Hardy approved of this support. ‘See? Pure wisdom. Your brother has a doctorate, you know. He must be right.’

Frannie cast a look between them. ‘You know what they call the person who comes in last in the class in med school?’

‘I give up,’ Hardy said.

‘Doctor.’ Frannie smiled.

McGuire looked hurt. ‘I’m not that kind of doctor, anyway.’

Hardy wanted to get back to the topic. ‘Besides, Frannie, anything could happen in a week. What if my witness dies in the interim?’

Frannie histrionically slapped her palm on her forehead. ‘Silly me,’ she said, ‘I forgot all about that possibility, which
is
pretty likely, I suppose. The guy’s — what? — twenty-five? Thirty? Death must stalk him like a panther.’

‘I didn’t say it was likely. I’m trying to be careful.’

Hardy was sticking with club soda until he’d had a chance to interview Russell Cutler, who should be here any minute, he hoped. If he didn’t chicken out. He was already fifteen minutes late.

Frannie suddenly put her hand over his. ‘I’m teasing you. Mostly. But we
are
going out to a real restaurant later and eat real food that I don’t cook, right?’

‘Right.’

‘We’re in complete agreement?’

Total.‘

‘All right. I’m with you, then.’ She looked over her husband’s shoulder at the doorway. ‘This witness is a doctor?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think he’s here.’

*
    
*
    
*
    
*
    
*

Dr Cutler still wore his light green scrubs, maybe as a means of identification. If so, it worked. Hardy left his wife with her brother, and the two men shook hands at the door.

The Little Shamrock was San Francisco’s oldest bar, established in 1893. Twenty feet wide from side to side, it extended back three times that distance. Antique bicycles, fishing rods, knapsacks and other turn-of-the-century artifacts hung from the ceiling, and there was a clock that had stopped ticking during the Great Earthquake of 1906. Tonight, Wednesday, at seven twenty-two, there were two dozen patrons, half of them at the bar. The rest were shooting darts or sitting at tiny tables in the front. The Beach Boys were singing ‘Don’t Worry, Baby’ on the jukebox.

Hardy took Cutler to the back of the place. Here three couches were arranged sitting-room style. Tiffany lamps shed a feeble light. The bathrooms were behind some stained-glass screens, and people with a highly developed olfactory sense tended to avoid the area, at least until the place got rockin‘ and the beer smell overlaid anything else.

But Cutler didn’t seem to mind or even notice. ‘I have trouble believing I’ve let it go this long,’ he began before he’d sat down. ‘With all the articles, the media…’

‘It’s all right, you’re here now. That’s what matters.’ ‘You know why I told your secretary it was an emergency? I thought if I didn’t get it out today, I never would.’

Frannie had been right. Cutler was between twenty-five and thirty. At this moment there were black circles under his eyes and the outline of stubble on his cheeks, but Hardy guessed that when he was rested and shaved he would be fresh-faced, even boyish. He was neither as tall nor as broad in the shoulders as Graham, but possessed that same athletic grace of movement, although his cropped black hair made him appear more a Marine than a jock. ‘I’m a wreck about this. I don’t think I’ve slept since Graham was first arrested.’

The first job would be to reassure him. ‘Why don’t you just tell me the level of your involvement with Sal? I’m not the police, you know. What you tell me doesn’t necessarily have to go any farther.’

Cutler sighed. He kept opening and closing his hands. Finally, he linked them and leaned forward. ‘Graham was kind of being Sal’s caretaker toward the end, kind of waiting and watching. They had made some deal about the AD, and I think were both okay with it. Graham was going to help him die before he got… before he went to a home, I guess. But then Sal started getting these headaches.’

‘The cancer?’

Cutler nodded. ‘But we didn’t know that at first. So I ran the CAT scan. We got a second opinion, then a third. There wasn’t any hope. We couldn’t operate. We were convinced the size and location of the tumor was increasing his intracranial pressure. That appeared to be what was causing the headaches.’

As the story came out, Hardy realized that it had been as he’d begun to surmise. Sal was actively fighting the pain, not obsessing about the progress of the Alzheimer’s. ‘So I wrote up a scrip for the morphine. We tried oral painkillers first, of course, but they became less and less effective.’

Over his head, Hardy faked a layman’s understanding. ‘Of course.’ Added, ‘But you finally got to the morphine so Sal could use it to kill himself?’

Cutler nodded. ‘Eventually. Down the line.’

‘But you wrote the prescription? So there’s a record of it, anyway?’

This made Cutler’s hands clench, but his voice was under control. ‘Yeah, but… well, I wrote the prescription to Graham, in Graham’s name. He picked it up at the pharmacy at Seton. I guess he thought it was out of the city, it wouldn’t be as easy to trace.’

‘Okay, but why the secrecy? You have a sick man. You’re his doctor and you prescribe drugs. What’s the problem?’

‘There wasn’t one, not by itself He shook his head. ’It’s all so stupid, I shouldn’t have done it the way I did, that’s all.‘

‘What way was that?’

‘I wanted to refer Sal to a pain management center, but he refused. They have more sophisticated techniques and medications that could have kept him from having to give himself so many injections.’

‘But in the end you stayed with the morphine. Why was that?’

‘Basically it was because the old man was a pain in the ass. We started with morphine a couple of times and it worked, and he wasn’t going to take anything else.’ Cutler looked imploringly at Hardy, as though he hoped for absolution. ‘Look. I’m in the last year of my residency. I’m really not supposed to follow my own patients independently. I mean, it’s not illegal, but it’s frowned on in real life.
Strongly
frowned on. I’d be screwed. And after this many years it’s kind of important I get to the end.

‘See, Graham didn’t want his dad in the system in any way either. Sal was just terrified that somehow somebody would decide he had to be institutionalized. So I did all this on my own.’

‘What about the other opinions? How’d you get them?’

A shrug. ‘That was easy. I got a tech buddy helps me with the scan itself, then a specialist gives me a curbside consult and verifies it’s terminal and inoperable. There’s nothing that can be done anyway, so what are we supposed to do? See?’

Hardy saw. ‘So you knew, or thought, Sal was going to kill himself?’

‘Let’s just say we wanted to keep that option open.’

‘And so Graham scratched your name off the vials? You’re doing him a favor and in return he agrees to keep your name out of it so you don’t get screwed at work?’

‘Yeah, that’s it. I figure it’s bad enough if I follow a patient independently. If I even appear to assist at a suicide on top of it, then best case I’d be looking for another residency. Worst case they’d take my license.’

Hardy had to appreciate the similarities in the problems of the two young men. No wonder they became friends; their professional concerns were nearly identical.

‘But you didn’t help Sal kill himself?’

‘No. I did prescribe the drug, though.’ He shrugged. ‘We should have just been up front with it, I suppose. Now I see Graham in jail charged with murder and he’s still protecting me. I figure I’ve got to say something. Maybe it’ll help him.’

And having said it, suddenly he appeared to grow calm. Sitting all the way back on the couch, he let out a deep breath. ‘I bet they serve beer here. I could go for a beer.’

‘I’ll get it.’ Hardy got up, went behind the bar; and pulled at the Bass tap. When he got back, Cutler thanked him for the beer. ‘So what do we do now?’

Hardy sat across from him. ‘When is your residency over?’

‘Mid-July. Why?’

‘Because the trial starts in September. As soon as I put you on my witness list, people are going to want to talk to you. But we ought to be able to keep it between us until then. You didn’t break any law, did you?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Okay, then. And the police haven’t asked the mystery doctor — that’s you — to come forward, have they? No? So put it on hold, don’t worry about it. My main concern, to tell you the truth, is that these are more lies Graham told.’

‘But he was just protecting me.’

‘I understand that.’ Hardy wasn’t going to go into it. Graham’s penchant for benevolent falsehoods might well wind up hanging him. ‘But back to you. I won’t have to list you as a witness until just before the trial, so by the time any of this comes out, you’ll be clear with your residency.’