It was a clean opportunity to get back to the pursuit of her investigation, but she no longer had the heart for it. ‘So how sick was he at the end?’
‘It wasn’t the Alzheimer’s,’ Graham said. ‘AD wasn’t ever going to kill him. It wasn’t going to get the time.’ He shook off the thought. ‘The funny thing is, you know, we were so much like each other. Firstborn kids, jocks, confident to a fault. Even now…’ He stopped again.
‘Even now what?’
‘Even now, with everything that’s happened with the clerkship and with baseball, with being unemployable, getting arrested, then fired – I still know who I am. I’m fine with me. It’s everybody else’s reaction that’s a little hard to take.’
He wasn’t whining. It was said so matter-of-factly that another person might have missed it altogether, and that would have been fine with Graham. But Sarah knew what he was saying: he had no close friends anymore, no one to share what went on in his soul. There had been Sal, his father, and now Sal was dead.
His smile wasn’t a come-on; it was a question. ‘It makes one cautious.’
Sarah smiled back. ‘I’m a firstborn jock with attitude myself,’ she said. ‘Do you know the secret handshake?’
‘I’m not sure I do.’
Moving off the lamppost, she took his hand, raised it open to her mouth, and, holding his gaze, licked his palm.
PART THREE
17
It was Friday in the third week of May. Hardy was at an outside table, alone, just finishing an order of mussels from a lunch at Plouf, a bistro on Belden Alley, smack in the middle of the financial district. Belden was a true downtown alley, perhaps a dozen feet wide, shaded except at high noon by the buildings on either side of it. The sun had just passed out of sight, and the slice of sky above the alley was bright blue.
Hardy had taken Frannie to Paris the previous summer, leaving the kids with Moses and Susan, for five too-short days. He hadn’t been to France since just after his hitch in Vietnam, and going back had nearly broken his heart. He’d been a free man in Paris, the one Joni Mitchell had written her song about – unfettered and alive.
Well, the savory smells of great food cooking here on Belden didn’t completely mask the underpinning aromas of fish and tobacco and urine. With those, plus the half-dozen French restaurants in the space of its one block, the place was Paris.
Sitting over his crock of mussel shells, Hardy had that feeling again. Not exactly unfettered, but alive. Energized by the tastes and smells and bustle around him, he was certain that very soon he was going to be back in the thick of what he was born to do, and it wasn’t Tryptech. He’d looked in on Michelle back at the office, up to her elbows in paper, and had left for lunch with nary a trace of guilt.
There was one problem, though. He hadn’t been able to reach Graham. Calls hadn’t been answered. He’d left notes tacked to the front door on Edgewood. Nothing. His client had vanished without a trace. And given their disagreement over the plea bargain he’d struck with Pratt, Hardy wasn’t a hundred percent sure that he still had a client at all. After what he’d been through adjusting his attitude and priorities, this was something he’d rather not consider.
‘This seat taken?’
The familiar face belonged to Art Drysdale, who’d long ago been Hardy’s mentor. Art had even rehired him to the district attorney’s office, getting him back into the practice of the law after his decade-long self-imposed exile.
Since then their professional lives had put them in different corners, but Hardy had always liked Art and was glad to see him. The other guy with him, he didn’t know. ‘Have you met Gil Soma?’
The two shook hands. The lawyer club. It didn’t have to be personal. Not yet, at least.
Hardy looked from one man to the other. ‘The mussels are really great,’ he said, smiling. ‘Going on the assumption that you being here with me is a coincidence.’
Drysdale grabbed a leftover piece of bread and dipped it in Hardy’s sauce – wine, parsley, garlic. ‘Mostly. I did happen to call your office right after you’d left and Phyllis told me you were coming here.’
‘She’s very efficient.’ Hardy had his poker face on. It was good practice. He’d been out of the game awhile.
‘Then, since it was such a nice day and lunchtime to boot, we figured we’d take a walk, get out and enjoy the city.’
‘Good idea.’ He waited. Let them come out with it. It was what had brought them here.
They pulled chairs and got themselves arranged. ‘Have you heard from your client today?’ Drysdale finally asked.
‘Which one, Art? I’ve got clients coming out of the woodwork. I can’t keep track of them all.’
Soma didn’t appreciate all this pirouetting. He snapped it out. ‘The famous one. Graham Russo.’
‘Oh, your buddy? Didn’t you guys use to work together?’
‘Till he stiffed us.’ Soma was smiling, but Hardy was getting the feeling that it wasn’t sincere.
Even before Barbara Brandt had entered the picture with her claim that she’d counseled Graham just before Sal’s death, the case was developing a lot of momentum. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Cerrone’s article had indeed made the cover of Time.
Graham’s handsome, guileless face had stared out at Hardy from every newsstand he’d passed on his way to lunch. The photographer had captured a vulnerable moment, and the tale it told was wrenching. Hardy thought the story was also probably true or mostly true – at least in some respects close to true. Unfortunately for his client, two out of three of those choices were disastrous.
But he got back to the point. ‘Anyway, no, Art. I haven’t heard from him. He’s probably lying low. Maybe he left town. I think I would have.’
Soma jumped at this. ‘Did you counsel him to do that? Where did he go?’
Hardy took in Soma for a beat, then turned to Drysdale. ‘The reporters were getting on his nerves. Tell you the truth, they’re getting on mine too.’
‘Then you did talk to him?’
Resolutely mild, Hardy kept his eyes on Drysdale, which he knew was making Soma crazy. ‘Did you read that little piece about me and Sharron, Art?’
Jeff Elliot’s ‘CityTalk’ column this morning had alluded to Hardy’s aborted plea bargain and Pratt’s displeasure with the way things had turned out. Reading it at their kitchen table in the morning, Frannie had commented that her husband seemed to have a knack for alienating district attorneys. Hardy allowed as to how that was probably true. It wasn’t the worst possible trait in a defense attorney.
To which Frannie had raised her eyebrows. Her husband was precise with his words, and if Dismas was calling himself a defense attorney right out loud, that’s what he meant.
But Drysdale was nodding, smiling. Pratt, after all, had fired him recently enough that he still didn’t wish her all the best. ‘She shouldn’t have leaked it before the deal was done,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it made her look less than astute. Bumbling, in point of fact.’ The wattage on the smile increased. ‘Poor woman, my heart goes out to her, but I do think, Diz, it put you on her list.’
‘I’ll try to make it up to her.’ Hardy, enjoying himself, finally turned to Soma. ‘Anyway, to answer your question, Gil, Graham’s been a little tough to reach. He hadn’t been indicted. In her wisdom Ms Pratt let him go. He was a free man.’ He smiled all around. ‘It’s a free country.’
Drysdale cut to it. ‘He’s been indicted now. And I expect you to surrender him.’
Though this was news, it was hardly unexpected, and Hardy took it calmly. ‘What charge?’
‘Murder one with specials.’
Expected or not – and it was the official confirmation of what Hardy had predicted – this wasn’t good news. ‘You can’t be asking for death on this?’