Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (21 page)

Even despair.

They couldn’t have friendships in the usual meaning of the word. It wasn’t so much that people couldn’t be trusted. No, it was more that if he served long enough — and the job was a lifetime appointment — sooner or later a federal judge would be called upon to make a decision that would impact nearly everyone he had ever known.

A casual friendship, an innocent prejudice, a personal comment, an inappropriate liaison, too great an attachment even to a son or a daughter, or a wife — any of these could sully the sacred objectivity of the law.

Pat Giotti knew that this was why all the federal judges were such a family. And in that artificial and ethereal family, where there were few real friendships and little outside influence, reputation was all.

Of course, she knew, Mario’s profanity wasn’t going to lose him his job, but it might lower the judge in the eyes of even one citizen, and Pat Giotti, bred to the culture of the Ninth Circuit, would not abide that. She, too, had made great sacrifices to further her husband’s career — her own friendships, her fun, the intimacy of their four children, her youth. Sometimes, she thought in her dark moments, her very life.

But these thoughts passed. They couldn’t be allowed. It had all been worth it. Mario Giotti was a federal judge now. He was someday, with luck, going to the Supreme Court, perhaps as its chief justice, the culmination of their every dream, the goal for which they had never ceased laboring. Together.

The couple had come back and the man was blathering on. ‘I’m just so sorry,’ Joe was saying. ‘I get too competitive. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Pat interrupted. ‘Spirit of the game. You don’t play if you don’t want to win, isn’t that right, Mario?’

The judge pulled the towel down from the bridge of his nose. His eyes were mild, the smile benign. ‘It’s one of the absolute truths, Joe.’ He took a long sip of the bottled water. Then, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Could’ve happened to anybody.’

*
    
*
    
*
    
*
    
*

Helen Taylor reclined in the oversized marble bathtub, soaking in scented oils. The disastrous meeting with Graham on Friday night had exhausted the family. After her children had gone, she and Leland went out to a late supper at the Ritz-Carlton and afterward, keeping the unpleasantness at bay, they’d danced at the Top of the Mark. The rest of the weekend had been given over to society events. They’d had no private time to talk. Until now. Leland knocked at the bathroom door and she told him to come in, which he did, taking a seat in the brocaded wing chair that graced the wall opposite the bath. Crossing one leg over the other, he leaned back, enjoying the sight of his wife in the water. He was wearing the pants to one of his Savile Row suits, a white shirt and dark blue tie, black shoes, black socks with garters.

Inhaling through his nose, he seemed to have suddenly encountered an off scent. His voice had a reedy tone, highly pitched and phlegmy. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to pay for Graham’s defense, aren’t we?’

Helen took a moment before answering. ‘I keep hoping they’re not going to arrest him again.’

‘No.’ Leland was certain. ‘It’s a matter of time, but they will. I wouldn’t squander my hope there.’

His wife sighed and moved. The water lapped gently once or twice. ‘Then I suppose we must. Pay his attorneys, I mean. I know he can’t.’

The phantom scent wasn’t getting any better. Leland held his chin high, turning his head from one side to the other, as if trying to place it. ‘We’ll have to keep it from George.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps it should be a loan this time. A real loan.’

‘Through the bank? If it’s through the bank, it would be impossible to keep from George.’

Her husband was shaking his head no. ‘I was thinking of a personal loan. We could—’

But another thought had crowded in, and Helen interrupted. ‘You don’t really think he’ll go to jail, do you?’

‘I don’t know, Helen. If he did kill his father for the money—’

‘Graham couldn’t have done that, Leland. It’s impossible. That’s not who he is. He might have helped him die, but it wasn’t for money.’

Her husband raised his eyebrows, a parlor trick of impressive eloquence. He lived in a world entirely circumscribed by money, and believed that to a substantial degree
everything
was connected to it. But there was no need to make this point to his wife, and he moved along. ‘I’m thinking, though — back to the loan now — that if he
doesn’t
get convicted, we might be able to get some reasonable behavior out of the boy, at least until the debt was retired.’

‘But if he does? Get convicted, I mean.’

‘I suppose then he’ll have rather a more difficult time paying us back.’ Leland seemed to savor the thought. ‘But that isn’t really the issue. When we paid for his law school — a mistake, as it turns out—’

‘Maybe it won’t turn out to be eventually.’

But there was no sign he heard her. ‘Law school, if you recall, supposedly wasn’t the money either.’ He held a palm up to forestall any interruption. ‘I’m only saying that if it had been a loan instead of a gift with no strings, if he’d felt the monthly burden of paying off a debt, he might have thought twice about quitting his job.’

‘No, he wouldn’t have. He thought he’d be stepping up, playing in the major leagues, making multiples of his clerk’s salary at the court. That was the whole problem. He probably wouldn’t take a loan anyway, knowing he couldn’t guarantee paying it back.’

‘So what’s this attorney of his working for?’

Helen shifted again, sitting up. Slipping the net from her hair, she shook it out and it fell gleaming — dyed, but gleaming — to her shoulders. Her breasts were buoyant at the water’s surface. ‘I don’t know. Advertising, maybe. I imagine there’ll be a lot of publicity.’

‘Of course. There always is.’ From Leland’s expression the bad smell was back. ‘Well, there’ll be time to decide. This assisted-suicide angle looks promising. Perhaps a jury will clear him on that score.’

‘But that would still ruin him,’ his mother said. ‘He couldn’t ever work in the law again, and I do think that eventually he intended to do just that.’

‘Don’t entertain these false hopes, Helen. He’s out of the law — that’s already come to pass.’ He uncrossed his legs and came forward in the chair, a great deal more urgency in his body language. He cleared his throat, his voice taking on a deeper pitch. ‘Now, I must tell you, I am worried about George.’

‘Yes,’ she said simply. Her younger son’s reaction to Graham had been wildly disproportionate as well as out of character. If George had any trademark, it was generally his
lack
of emotion, not his susceptibility to it. ‘That really wasn’t like him.’

‘I wondered if he’d talked to you.’

Her pretty face held a thoughtful frown. ‘About what?’

‘That Friday. Anything that might have happened that Friday.’

She shook her head. ‘No. Not to me.’

‘Because, you know, he wasn’t at the bank.’

Her eyes narrowed; apparently this was news to her. She slid back down, slightly, into the comforting water. ‘When wasn’t he at the bank?’

Leland stroked his upper lip. ‘I don’t have it precisely fixed, but it seems between about eleven and two.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘I did. But you know George. He said he must have been at a client’s, he couldn’t remember exactly. If it was important, he’d double-check. But he hasn’t gotten back to me. I wondered if he’d mentioned anything to you.’

‘No. Nothing, Leland. Honestly, nothing.’ She let out a sigh, watching as her husband resumed his old posture, his back rigid against the wing chair, one leg crossed over the other. ‘You don’t think he went to see his father?’

‘I’m afraid I think it’s quite possible. I don’t like to think it, but it’s almost as though I see it happening.’

Helen shook her head. ‘We shouldn’t have had him come over when Sal was here. That last time.’

But Leland brushed that off. ‘Well, what we should or shouldn’t have done is beside the point now. He did come. And in this one area, protecting you from Sal—’

‘I know. I think it was just he never got over the hurt. He continued to believe that anyone who could inflict such pain couldn’t be harmless.’

‘Maybe, at base, Sal wasn’t harmless after all.’

‘No.’ She was certain. ‘He was.’ She reached a hand out over the marble, and her husband took it. ‘He wasn’t like you, Leland. He really was a simple person. He wouldn’t ever have hurt me. He was sick and confused, that’s all.’

The tableau froze for a long moment. At last the banker’s eyes came back into focus. ‘I just wonder if George realized that. That we’d taken steps. Maybe if we had in fact filed charges—’

But Helen was firm. ‘There was no need, Leland. We did inform the social agencies. They would be getting around to him. This wasn’t a continual stalking, just an episode—’

‘Several actually.’

‘Three. Only three. But the point is that there wasn’t really any urgency. And these things always take time. There was no further danger — in fact, there hadn’t been any danger all along. Sal would just flip into the past. I
know
George realized that.’

‘I hope so,’ Leland said. ‘But I’m not at all so sure.’

13

On Monday morning, early, Hardy was in his office with Michelle, one of them on either end of the couch, folders and copies of briefs on the low table in front of them. ‘You know where we get the term
straight from the horse’s mouth
?’ Michelle looked up from some paper she’d been reading as though Hardy had broken into Sanskrit. ‘It relates, it relates.’

Small talk wasn’t Michelle’s long suit, but she had already learned that this was how her new boss liked to break up his work, so she sat back and listened.

‘No, this is important. We’re talking one of the major philosophical questions that plagued the early Middle Ages — right up there with “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”’

‘What was?’

‘How many teeth a horse had.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

Hardy was having a difficult time believing that Michelle — with the possible exception of David Freeman the most highly developed brain in the office — was ignorant of this fact. But then, he’d seen enough intellectual myopia that it didn’t shock him anymore. Here in the Age of Specialization if you held a double major in law and accounting, you weren’t expected to master any
context
. Any
history
. That was irrelevant junk for the most part.

But Hardy thought it wouldn’t kill her to know an oddball fact or two that wasn’t strictly related to the case at hand. ‘I’m not kidding. They argued about it all the time.’

‘Who would argue about that?’

‘Philosophers and theologians, most of whom, I think, would have been lawyers in today’s world.’

‘So why didn’t they just count them?’ She made a face at him, wondering if he was teasing her. ‘Are you making this up?’

‘No, I swear I’m not. It’s true. Okay, Michelle, you got the right answer, but you’re ahead of my story. Listen. These guys would sit around the old monastery, convinced that there was a Platonic ideal number of teeth in the perfect horse. They evidently debated this thorny problem for decades.’

‘These were not rocket scientists,’ Michelle said.

Hardy wondered if she realized they were talking about a time before there were rockets, or scientists, for that matter. ‘No, but these were intelligent men.’

‘No women?’

‘I doubt it. I’d be surprised. This was a guy thing.’

‘No wonder,’ Michelle said.

‘Well, anyway,’ Hardy continued, ‘one day a monk who was far ahead of his time decided on the revolutionary approach of going out, finding a horse, and counting the teeth in its mouth.’

‘And that settled it.’

‘Well, not exactly. I gather it took maybe a hundred years or so before everybody agreed that this was an acceptable way to get an answer to a question like this. Anyway,’ he pressed on in the face of Michelle’s sublime tolerance, ‘that’s where we get the expression.’

‘Great,’ she said dryly. ‘That’s fascinating. Really.’

The judge in the Tryptech case had just taken on the modern role of the monk who’d counted all those teeth. First thing this morning, Michelle had called Hardy at home with the news that they had been served with a cross-complaint. The Port of Oakland had evidently decided to press the charge that Tryptech had overloaded their container. Further, a judge had decided that Tryptech had the burden of proof as to how many computers were actally in the container. An affidavit from some shipping guy wasn’t going to do it.

Tryptech — through Hardy — had been making the argument that the container hadn’t been overloaded. He had presented the bill of lading, which, in theory, ‘proved’ the actual number of computers inside the container. Additionally, the computers were insured and therefore it would obviously be counterproductive for the company to claim
fewer
than had actually been there, since they were being paid for every one that had been lost.

Of course, Hardy knew it wouldn’t take a genius to realize that the monetary difference between say, two hundred extra computers at a thousand dollars each, and the millions the company stood to lose if the Port of Oakland won the lawsuit, was fabulously insignificant. Now the thing would have to be lifted from the bottom of the Bay, so that the computers within could be counted.

But pulling up the container would cost a bundle, and their client had told them he didn’t have a bundle on hand in cash just now.

The name of the game was delay, and Hardy had been successful in putting off this problem for nearly five months.

However, now that the judge had decided, it was going to happen.

The dredging fee of one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars might not be unreasonable in light of the potential size of the damage award, but Brunei was saying it was blood from a turnip.

Hardy didn’t know how he could delay any longer. Tryptech would have to figure out some way to come up with the money.