She stood in the open doorway, not asking him in. He showed her his badge. And then she surprised him. ‘This be about Sal, upstairs?’ Lanier said it was and she nodded. ‘I thought you be by sooner. I almost call you ’cept I don’t call cops. Sal was okay.‘
‘You knew him?’
She shook her head. ‘Not real good. We talk a few times in the lobby, sometimes out the alley there. He brung me up some fresh salmon sometimes. I love salmon.’ Her eyes got wistful. ‘It was so sad, him dying. You find who killed him?’
Out of habit and caution Lanier did not answer questions put to him by witnesses. Instead, he talked to her for a moment, realized he might have something, and pulled out the tape recorder he almost hadn’t bothered to bring along.
After intoning the standard introduction for the transcriber, he came back at her. ‘Did you see or hear anything on last Friday, May ninth, that made you believe Sal Russo had been killed?’
‘I didn’t know killed at the time, but somebody be up in Sal’s place with him. I hear the door open, then’ – she indicated over her head – ‘the ceiling creaks, somebody else there.’
‘And where were you?’
‘Here, in my apartment. And then some other noises.’
‘What kind of noises were they?’
‘Like he fell down. Like some scraping furniture.’ She looked up. ‘This place, you know, the walls pretty thin, not ’zactly soundproof.‘
But Lanier was going to keep her at it. ‘So you heard this noise, some furniture scraping on the floor?’
That wasn’t precisely right. ‘Wasn’t like anything pushing, more like something fell, hit against it or something, and it scraped. Then he kind of moaned and yelled, “No,” bunch of times.’
‘No?’
‘Yeah, like he was in pain or something. But pleading, like? The saddest sound.’
‘Did you hear anybody else, any other voices?’
‘Yeah, two voices. Sal and somebody else.’
‘Male, female?’
‘Male. Having some argument, it sounded like.’
‘This was before Sal moaned? Before the furniture scraped?’
Blue closed her eyes, her face a study. ‘Before.’ But there was an uncertainty.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. It was just before.’
‘And then, after the moan, what? Anything else?’
She took a moment, closing her eyes again, making sure. ‘No, just that. Then the door opened and closed again a few minutes later, and then it be quiet.’
‘So what did you do?’
The question seemed to spook her. She looked down, then at a place somewhere over Lanier’s shoulder. ‘I did go up, but later. No one answered.’
Lanier almost got sarcastic with her – dead people generally didn’t answer doors too well. But he kept his tone neutral. ‘Yeah, Blue, but you heard this noise that sounded like Sal might be in trouble while you were right here underneath him. You said you guys were friends-’
‘I didn’t say we were friends. Not exactly friends. I knew him a little. He seem like a good guy, that’s all.’
‘Okay, so why didn’t you go up and see him while you still might have been able to help?’
Again, that look over his shoulder. ‘Blue?’
‘I couldn’t.’ She paused and sighed. ‘Somebody was here, sleeping afterward, you know. I couldn’t get up.’
10
Dismas Hardy remained unaware of developing events for the whole day, until nearly nine o’clock Thursday evening. He had awakened at six and met Michelle at David’s Deli for a breakfast meeting an hour later. They were going down to Palo Alto – forty-some miles south – to meet with Dyson Brunei, Tryptech’s CEO, to introduce Michelle and discuss some of the substantive issues related to the lawsuit.
Hardy hadn’t taken the time to even glance at a newspaper. From his perspective the Graham Russo case was still smoldering, but the immediate fire had been put out. Hardy was going to have his hands full anyway, bringing Michelle up to speed on this litigation, continuing with his daily work. He figured that Graham was going to be in his life sometime in the future, but for now it was important to will Graham onto a back burner, impending murder charge or not.
It was easier said than done. Over lunch the conversation between Michelle, Brunei, and Hardy had come around to the surveillance equipment in use at the Port of Oakland. Perhaps, Michelle suggested, there was some video record of malfeasance, some smoking gun locked in the video camera at one of the security checkpoints. There was no record anyone had looked into that possibility.
Graham’s bank! Hardy had thought. Video records at the bank could prove, perhaps, that Graham hadn’t gone there with his father’s money after Friday. That would mean that, whatever else might have happened, he didn’t kill Sal so that he could get at the safe. It would get any murder charge out of the range of special circumstances.
Once the idea about videotapes at the bank came to him, the rest of the day was an agony of detail and protocol. Hardy couldn’t shake the feeling that even during this apparent hiatus, his inability to get out of Tryptech’s office might be costing Graham Russo years of his freedom. Hardy’d let himself be lulled by the media attention around the idea that the death of Sal Russo had been an assisted suicide. That was, after all, the express reason that Sharron Pratt had declined to file charges.
But – the realization came to him in a bolt – if the attorney general was going to play hardball politics and bring a charge against Graham Russo, it wasn’t likely to be for less than first-degree murder.
Still, Hardy couldn’t very well leave his bread-and-butter corporate client and his brand-new associate together and tell them to just catch up on things. He had to sell Brunei on Michelle’s skills and competence, simultaneously giving her a chance to show off what she had – miraculously – mastered in such a short time.
As if that weren’t enough, he also felt they needed to conduct some real business, going over deposition testimony he’d taken in the past couple of weeks, squeezing hard data from the elusive Brunei. The three of them and some of Tryptech’s staff remained at it until after seven.
Then Hardy decided to stop by his own office downtown and check his messages. From the pile of slips and first four phone calls on his answering machine, all from reporters, it was immediately obvious that the Russo case had gone ballistic.
Making his delay more crucial.
He tried calling Graham at home – by now it was nine-thirty – and no one answered, not even the machine. Hardy reasoned that if his own tangential connection to the case had produced today’s volume of mail and phone calls, then Graham must have been absolutely inundated by the flood. No doubt he was lying low.
He didn’t get home until eleven-thirty, and Frannie was by then asleep. His dinner was on the dining-room table, cold.
This morning, out in the Avenues, where Hardy lived, it was more than mere fog. It was wet as rain, although for some reason the droplets didn’t fall, just hung in the air. The temperature was in the low forties and a bitter wind whipped his coat as he approached his car.
Things at home were not good.
He thought he remembered telling Frannie yesterday that he wouldn’t be home for dinner. He had never planned to be home for dinner last night. If he had told her, though, she didn’t remember it, and in all honesty he wasn’t completely certain that he had.
Though he ached with every bone in his body to be out of the house – he needed a court order and then he needed to get to Graham’s bank – he also knew he had better wait and talk to Frannie when she got back from taking the kids to school.
Which he had done.
Now, driving downtown through the soup, he wasn’t sure if he was happy or not that his wife wasn’t a nag. If she’d only yelled at him, he could have responded in kind or worked himself up a froth of righteous indignation that she didn’t appreciate all the hours he was putting in so that he could support the family, and all by himself, he need hardly remind her.