"And how did you know you were going back?"
"I thought Mel told you," said Harnason.
"Well, you tell us," said Tommy.
Harnason took some time to study his pudgy folded hands.
"You know, I've known the man forever. Sabich. Professionally. If that's what you call this." Harnason ran his hand between Molto and him. Tommy shrugged: close enough. "And after he gave me bond, I just started to wonder about him. I thought, Maybe he feels bad. About sending me away to start. He should, Lord knows."
Neither Tommy nor Brand knew that part, and Harnason explained his first encounters with Rusty long ago. Tommy could still remember the queer busts Ray Horgan used to stage right before elections, out in the public forest and in the Center City Library men's room and at various bars, herding the arrestees onto school buses in front of the cameras. Times change, Tommy thought. He still wasn't sure how he felt about gays marrying or raising kids, but God didn't put an entire community on earth unless they were part of His plan. Live and let live, was what he felt now. But back in the day, he knew he would have handled Harnason's case the same way Rusty did.
Confused about whether Sabich actually remembered him, Harnason on impulse had decided to pay him a visit after the oral argument, just a hello and happy birthday and thanks for the bail ruling. Tommy took a second to wonder what part Harnason's visit had played in Sabich's dissent in the case.
"Mel chewed me out for that," Harnason said. "The last thing I wanted was for Sabich to get off the case. But there was something strange when I saw him."
"Meaning?" Tommy asked.
"A connection. Sort of-" Harnason took a great deal of time, and his soft face, with islands of pink color, moved several times around the words he was thinking of. "Peas in a pod," he said.
Tommy got it. Lawyers. Fuck-arounds. And murderers. Tommy couldn't help it. He was starting to like Harnason.
Brand was beside Tommy, making notes on a yellow pad now and then but mostly watching Harnason closely, clearly trying to make up his own mind. Harnason was speaking most of the time with his head down, his sparse gray hair and his bald spot all you saw of his face, as if the memory of all of this weighed about eighty pounds. Tommy realized the problem. Harnason appreciated what Sabich had done for him. He didn't enjoy peeing on the guy.
"Sabich had said something vague, they heard my arguments, something, it sounded a little hopeful, but it wore on me," said Harnason, "the not knowing, waiting for the decision. Sometimes you can't take any more. So I figured, Well, he talked once, maybe he'll tell me at least what's going to happen. So I followed him a couple of times. I waited for him to go out to lunch and I followed him."
The first time, Rusty went to the Grand Atheneum. It was interesting that it was not the Hotel Gresham, where Marco Cantu got paid for doing nothing. Apparently Rusty had been on a bed tour, probably because he'd seen too much of Marco while he was boinking his sweet young thing over there. But Harnason didn't know about Marco or the STD test. So his story was checking out so far.
"Was Sabich with anybody?"
"I assume." Harnason smiled. "Not that I saw her. I watched him head straight to the elevator. He was gone a long while. Longer than I could wait. It started pouring. So I beat it and followed him again the next week. Same deal, except a different hotel. But straight to the elevator and upstairs forever." Harnason had forgotten the name of the hotel, but from the location it had to be the Renaissance. "I was outside over three hours. But there he comes. A little skip in his walk. Soon as I saw that, I knew for sure he'd been getting it on."
"Anybody with him this time?"
"Negative. But the look on his face when he saw me-You know, that pie-eyed, 'oh shit' kind of look. Instead of pissed off. I mean, maybe that's why he talked. He tried to blow me off. But I asked him, just as a mercy, really, Tell me. Am I going back or not? And he did. Get ready for bad news. You're at the end of the road. I just blubbered like a little girl."
"And all this while you're standing there on the street? You and the chief judge, and the chief judge tells you your case is going to be affirmed?" The whole thing was crazy. Lunchtime on Market Street, a hundred people must have seen them, and Rusty is blabbing ex parte? A defense lawyer-Sandy Stern was who Rusty would get if he wasn't dead-would fillet Harnason. But the standard rebuttal made sense. If Harnason was going to make something up, it would have come without bumps and blemishes like that. Often they spit out stories like this, too strange not to be true. "And you told Mel about that?"
Harnason looked at Mel, who beckoned with his hand. Harnason said he'd called him that day.
The four men sat there in silence, while Tommy played it all out. Tooley was right. They were going to scuttle Rusty Sabich's ship with this. The best part was it wouldn't be Tommy's case. The way Harnason told the story, Sabich had not committed a crime. Tommy would just pass the information to the Courts Commission. They in turn would pay Rusty a visit, and he'd probably end up resigning quietly, take his pension, and go into practice rather than endure a public hearing where the stuff about the chick in the hotel was likely to come out.
Tommy looked over at Jim to see if he had anything else. Brand asked Harnason if he'd repeated the whole conversation with the chief judge.
"That was the important part as far as I was concerned," Harnason said quietly, smiling a trifle at his own expense. "There was a little more back-and-forth."
"Well, let's hear it."
Harnason took his time. It seemed like he was trying to understand the part coming next himself.
"Well, you know I'm carrying on, and he says to me, basically, Come on, cut it out, you killed him, didn't you?"
"Did you?" Brand asked.
Mel interrupted-he didn't want Harnason confessing-but Tommy said there could be no holdbacks. Brand asked again if Harnason killed Ricky.
"Yeah." Harnason thought about that and nodded. "Yeah, I did. And that's what I told Sabich, I did. But, I said, you got away with murder yourself, and he looks at me and he says, The difference is I didn't do it."
Molto cut in. "That's what he told you? You were talking about twenty years ago?"
"Absolutely. He said he didn't do it. And he was looking me in the eye, too."
"You believed him?"
Harnason considered that. "I think I did."
This back-and-forth dizzied Tommy for a second. But he didn't miss the point in the present. Harnason was savvy enough to know what Tommy wanted to hear, yet he wasn't going to say it. The man was one of those weird cons, one with principles. There was not the remotest chance he wasn't speaking the truth.
"Anything else?" asked Brand.
Harnason tried to scratch his ear and realized the manacles wouldn't let him reach that far. "I asked him who he was with in the hotel."
"Did he answer that?"
"Just turned his back on me. That was the end of the conversation."
Brand said, "He didn't deny that part? He just turned away?"
"Right."
"Any more? Anything else between you and the chief judge?"
"That's pretty much it."
"Not pretty much," said Brand. "Everything. You remember anything else?"
Harnason looked up to recall. He made a face.
"Well, one other thing was a little weird. When I told him I killed Ricky, he asked me what it was like to poison somebody."
Tommy could tell from the way Tooley jolted, he hadn't heard that before. Brand was too cool even to quiver, but sitting next to him, Tommy could already sense the uptick in Jimmy's pulse.
"He asked you what it was like to poison somebody?" Brand repeated.
"Right. How did I feel? Day after day? What was it like?"
"And why did he want to know that?" asked Brand.
"I guess he was curious. We were already pretty far off the reservation. That's when I said to him, You know what it's like to kill somebody, and he said he hadn't done it."