Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (58 page)

Back at his office he punched in the number again, and this time it picked up on the second ring.

‘Hello, Jeanne Walsh?’

‘Yes.’ A young woman’s voice. The crying of a baby in the background.

‘You called me in response to an advertisement in the newspaper?’

‘That’s right, I did. What’s this about? Do I get the reward? I could seriously use a reward.’

‘It’s possible,’ he temporized. ‘Actually, though, we were trying to find Joan Singleterry herself. Do you know her?’

‘Of course. That’s why I called. Joan Singleterry was my mother.’ The past tense sprang up at Hardy, immediately amplified. ‘She died about four years ago.’

‘Would you mind answering some questions about her?’

‘No. I don’t mind at all. Can I ask who I’m talking to, though?’

Hardy apologized. ‘My name is Dismas Hardy. I’m a lawyer in San Francisco.’

‘San Francisco? That’s a long way away.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Eureka.’

Hardy had been doodling on his legal pad. Now he decided to take a couple of notes. Eureka was an old lumber port, the county seat of Humboldt County, California, three hundred miles up the coast.

‘And did your mother live there, too, in Eureka?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she always live there?’

‘Just a second.’ She was gone from the phone and he heard her scolding. ‘No, no, no. Don’t put that in there, Brittany. Mommy will be off in a minute, okay?’

Hardy could relate. Jeanne came back to the phone. ‘I’m sorry, where were we?’

‘Did your mother always live in Eureka?’

‘Mostly. She was born here, then lived in San Francisco for a while, and then moved back. But her name wasn’t Singleterry when she was down there. It was Palmieri, Joan Palmieri. Then back up here she married Ron Singleterry.’

Hardy’s heart sank. ‘But when she lived in San Francisco, your mother’s name was Joan what?’

‘Palmieri.’ Jeanne spelled it. Hardy wrote it on his pad.

‘Do you know a man named Sal Russo?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Do you remember if your mother ever mentioned him?’

‘Sal Russo?’ She was silent a minute. ‘No, it doesn’t even ring a tiny bell. Was she supposed to know him? Does this mean I don’t get the reward? Brittany, don’t!’

Reward or not, the child was commanding more than half of Jeanne Walsh’s attention. Hardy should let her go and get on his own horse. This, finally, was a definite link to Joan Singleterry and a new name with which to conjure. Palmieri.

He thanked her and told her he’d get back to her, this time unable to entirely suppress the rush of excitement. His hunch was becoming a certainty. He didn’t know the exact mechanism, but Joan Singleterry was going to lead him to Sal Russo’s killer.

36

The whole family pitched in making chili, quesadillas, and tacos. Pico and Angela Morales came by with their three children. Young and old ate together at the same table.

The law went undiscussed.

The kids went down to sleep before eight-thirty, five of them on the floor in Rebecca’s room. When Pico and Angela woke up their clan to go home three hours later, Hardy and Frannie still had some energy and didn’t let it go to waste.

This morning he made his four-mile jog and walk with something approaching ease. The city had turned cold by California standards — the high today would be 55 degrees — so he brought wood up from the cord of oak underneath the house. While Frannie baked bread, he cleaned his fish tank.

With all the domesticity he didn’t arrive at the office until nearly noon. Among his messages was a call from another of the doctors who’d signed the published admission that he’d helped one or more of his patients die.

Hardy could see a groundswell developing here. Yesterday, he’d forgotten to return the padlock key for the storage unit to the city custodian, and he decided to use that as an excuse to go to the Hall.

The door to Glitsky’s office was open. He sat at his desk and appeared to be buried in paperwork. Hardy walked in with his briefcase in one hand and some hot tea in the other, and the lieutenant sat back and graciously accepted the offering. The two men hadn’t talked since the day of the verdict, and Sarah and Graham had not hit the gossip mills yet by then. Now, of course, they had.

Abe carefully sipped at the scalding liquid. ‘Why don’t you get the door?’ he asked conversationally. ‘God, I love the sound of that.’ When they were good and alone, he took another sip. ‘I guess you didn’t know about Evans and your client.’

Hardy kept a straight face. ‘What about them?’

Glitsky moved some paper around. ‘I suppose you thought that if I’d known they were an item, I might have been a little skeptical about her professional opinion regarding his guilt or not. Might not have sent her out to investigate other innocent civilians with my blessing.’

‘George wasn’t all that innocent. Besides, Graham wasn’t guilty. The jury said so.’

The lieutenant went to his tea, decided to say a few more words. ‘She was a good cop. She had to be to get here. But you don’t sleep with your suspects.’

‘I never have, but I’d agree it’s good advice.’

Glitsky nodded again. This was pointless. What happened between Evans and Graham Russo hadn’t been Hardy’s doing. It was galling that Hardy had possibly — hell, probably; hell,
definitely —
known all about it for months and hadn’t mentioned a thing to Glitsky.

But then Glitsky realized that a part of it, perhaps the biggest part, was his own fault. It wasn’t Hardy who’d cut off the communication they’d always had — it was himself. He sipped more tea, settled back into his chair. ‘And this visit today is about?’

‘I honestly thought you’d never ask.’

‘Surprise,’ Glitsky said. ‘It’s a cop tool.’

‘Hey, that reminds me. Knock, knock.’

Glitsky shook his head. ‘No.’

‘No, really, come on. Humor me. One time. Knock, knock.’

Glitsky hesitated another second. There was no getting around Hardy. He’d just sit there with his shit-eating grin and keep repeating ‘Knock, knock’ until he got an answer. He growled it out. ‘All right, Jesus, who’s there?’

‘Interrupting cow.’

‘Interrupting co—’

‘Mooo!’

In a major victory for the defense Hardy got Glitsky to crack a tenth of a smile. ‘All right,’ the lieutenant said, ‘that wasn’t bad. I see you’re playing with your kids again. How are they? I ought to bring Orel by.’

Actually, with the trial over now and the first hectic weeks of school out of the way, his kids were giving him a period of joy. Last night, good as it had been, was becoming almost typical. Vincent actually preferred that Hardy tuck him in nowadays rather than Frannie, and miraculously, he’d been home a lot of nights to do just that. It seemed to make a difference to the boy, Dad being around with some regularity. Rebecca continued to be his darling.

‘Anytime,’ Hardy said. ‘They love Orel. But now, to the singular purpose of this particular business call.’ He grabbed his briefcase and pulled it up to his lap, unsnapping the clips. It was the first time he’d opened it since he’d left Graham and Sarah in the parking lot yesterday afternoon.

He couldn’t help laughing. Somehow — probably while Hardy was busy helping with loading the boxes yesterday in the parking lot — Graham had slipped Sal’s belt into his briefcase.

‘What?’ Glitsky sat forward in his chair, wanting to know. Hardy was just a bundle of laughs today. It wasn’t natural.

He pulled it out. ‘Among the contents of Sal Russo’s safe.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a belt, Abe. What’s it look like?’

‘In Sal Russo’s safe?’

Hardy nodded. ‘We just got it out of the evidence lockup yesterday.’

‘What’s it doing in your briefcase?’

Hardy avoided that. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff I accumulate in here.’

Glitsky held out his hand. Hardy stood and passed the belt over the desk. ‘
You
want it?’ he asked, keeping the joke running. ‘Maybe it’ll fit you.’

The lieutenant wasn’t smiling. ‘What was this evidence of?’

‘Nothing. We never used it.’

‘Though of course you checked it out?’

Hardy cocked his head. Suddenly Glitsky was interested and that made
him
interested. ‘Of course. Before they tool belts they call them blanks. This is one of them. Anyway, there’s no tannery mark, except that E-2 punch in the back. Nobody I talked to knew what that stood for, not even Freeman, and Freeman knows everything. Best we could come up with was a friend of Sal’s was going to make him a belt and the old man picked out the blank, then the other guy never got around to it.’ Glitsky stared across at him. The scar had gone pale across his lips, a sign of tension. ‘It might not be anything,’ he said, ‘but North Beach Station — all their stuff, they punch E-something on it, just like this. North Beach Station is E-2.’

‘The North Beach
police
station?’

‘No.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Fire.’

*
    
*
    
*
    
*
    
*

A line drawn from the Hall of Justice to Hardy’s office on Sutter Street would almost intersect the administrative offices of the main fire station on Golden Gate Avenue. Hurriedly grabbing a cab uptown, Hardy couldn’t help but notice, and thought it provocative, that that same line would probably cut through both Mario Giotti’s chambers and the living room in Sal Russo’s apartment.

Escaping his attention until this moment — it was, after all, an imaginary line — now he couldn’t shake the conviction that this might be the axis around which the Russo case revolved.

It had gotten late, he wasn’t sure how. He did finally return the storage-room key, then ran into some attorneys outside the municipal courtrooms who wanted to talk about the case, buy him some drinks, which he refused.

Then Jeff Elliot appeared outside the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall and another forty minutes or so went away. He tried to keep a lid on what he was thinking, knowing that unless you wanted to leak something specific or start a rumor, and that wasn’t his intention now, it wasn’t a good policy to speculate to newspaper reporters.

Now, somehow, it was nearly five o’clock. He was relieved that he had made it to the building before the main fire department offices would close.

A bright sun flirted with the tops of Twin Peaks, but the day itself continued truly cold. The biting wind of the previous afternoon had picked up steam and an attitude coming across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, erasing the last memories of Indian summer.

Hardy hurriedly thrust some bills at the cabbie. Briefcase in hand, he half ran two at a time up the wide steps leading into the building.

In the lobby the late-afternoon glare against the polished right-hand wall was blinding. Shading his eyes, he found the office he wanted on the opposite wall and walked in.

For a city office the place appeared to run very well. Hardy was approaching the counter when a uniformed young black woman saw him, stood up at one of the desks, came around it, and asked if she could help him.

‘This might be unusual,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to know if you can identify something for me.’ He took out the belt and placed it on the counter.

Picking it up, she turned it over once or twice, noted the E-2 stamp on one side, put it back down. ‘This is a hose-and-ladder strap,’ she said as if she saw one every day, and maybe she did. ‘We use ’em to wrap up gear on the trucks. This one’s stamped by North Beach station. Where’d you get it?‘

Hardy kept it vague. ‘A friend of mine had it,’ he said. ‘He gave it to me. I thought I might make it into a belt.’

The woman laughed. ‘This old thing? You’d have to cut off half of it first. Repolish it. Get it tooled.’

This had been Glitsky’s second point, which Hardy felt he should have seen much earlier. The ‘belt’ was far too big for Graham or for Hardy, and Sal had been a wiry old man. What had made Hardy think it would fit him, that it was a belt in the first place?

The woman was turning it in her hand again, then snapped it a time or two. ‘Besides, it’s pretty brittle,’ she said. ‘Your friend must have had it a long time. Did he say where he got it?’

‘I think he found it left behind at a fire scene,’ Hardy said. ‘Forgot to return it.’

She gave him another smile, obviously assuming that Hardy’s ‘friend’ was himself, that guilt over the stolen strap had finally caught up with him. ‘I don’t think North Beach would use it anymore. You might as well hang on to it. Or I could just throw it away here. It won’t make much of a belt.’

‘I’ll bring it back to him,’ Hardy said. ‘Maybe it’s got sentimental value.’

She gave him a dubious look, handed the strap back to him. ‘Maybe. Is that all you need?’

‘I think so. Would North Beach know where they lost this? Or when?’

‘I don’t know that. You could go and ask them. Maybe they keep some kind of inventory of losses, something like that. Stations do things differently. But that thing is old. I’d be surprised.’

Hardy was wrapping it around his hand. He slipped it off and put it back into his briefcase, snapping the clips. ‘Me too.’ There was nothing else to say. ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been a big help.’

He walked back out into the lobby, took a few steps, and came to a stop. For a moment he considered turning around and going right back down to Glitsky’s office. Since Graham’s release Sal Russo’s death was again an unsolved homicide, and in theory Abe ought to be interested in any evidence related to it.

Except that now, thanks to Hardy’s efforts, the entire city believed the story that Graham had killed his father out of mercy. Nobody — except possibly Graham himself, Sarah, and Hardy — nobody was looking for a killer anymore. The case, although technically still open and unsolved, was concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.

Even to Glitsky’s.

Subliminally aware that people were beginning to stream out of the elevators and offices around him at the end of the workday, Hardy felt strangely rooted to where he was. He didn’t want to lose his train of thought. If he was going to bring up anything about this case with an eye to another suspect, he would need a lot more than this hose-and-ladder strap.