A straight-faced nod. ‘Right. Not necessarily.’
Taking a beat, Frannie reached for her wineglass again. ‘Not necessarily, that’s good. That’s a nice show of solidarity. I’m impressed.’
‘Frannie doesn’t want me to take on any more murders.’
‘I gathered that.’
‘She thinks homicide equivocal can mean murder.’
‘Well, she’s not all wrong there.’
Hardy came back to his wife, gave her his biggest phony grin. ‘So, what’s on for dinner?’
Glitsky was gone.
As it turned out, Frannie had cooked a delicious chicken breast entrée with white wine and cream and artichoke hearts over rice. The kids had dominated the table talk with gross-out jokes – ‘What’s green and goes backwards? Snot’ – that kind of stuff, until the adults told the little darlings they could be excused. Abe’s ‘homicide equivocal’ didn’t get a chance to raise its head again.
But now, almost eleven o’clock, the kids finally in their beds, Hardy and Frannie stood in the center of the kitchen, surveying the wreckage of the dinner, the pans and dishes.
Hardy grabbed a sponge and turned on the hot water, started washing up. ‘This is why when I die I’ll be welcomed into heaven with fanfare and trumpets,’ he said.
But singing her husband’s praises wasn’t on Frannie’s agenda at the moment. She went back out into the dining room, brought in a load of dessert dishes, put them on the drain. Then she stopped and leaned against the counter. ‘Okay. What about this client? What client?’
‘Graham Russo.’
‘I’ve never heard you mention him. When did he become your client? Is it a big estate?’
‘Not really, and pretty recently, come to think of it,’ Hardy said. ‘Roughly this morning, in fact.’
‘And his dad was murdered?’
Hardy turned the water off. ‘He’s not charged with the murder, if it was a murder. I’m just helping the guy, Frannie. He’s a good kid. I know him from the Shamrock. He thinks the cops are hassling him.’
‘He thinks Abe’s hassling him? Abe doesn’t hassle people.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘No, not Abe. Abe’s just pushing paper anymore. It’s one of the new inspectors. Maybe.’
‘So your client is under suspicion?’
‘That may be a little strong. He’s worried that it may get there. He needs his hand held, that’s all. It’s no big deal.’
She was silent, arms crossed again. After a minute she said, ‘It’s no big deal, but the head of the homicide department came by here especially to tell you about it as soon as the autopsy was finished?’
Hardy put the sponge all the way down. He turned to face her. ‘I don’t want another murder case, Frannie. I’d probably turn it down if it got to that. I don’t have the time anyway. It just got my interest, that’s all. There are some elements that might be slightly more fascinating than Tryptech’s transom accident, if you can believe that. Graham’s dad evidently had Alzheimer’s. It looks like he killed himself, but it might have been an assisted suicide.’
‘So maybe Graham did do it?’
‘He says not. He wants help with the estate, that’s all.’
‘And you believe that?’
Hardy averted his eyes. ‘I don’t disbelieve it, not yet.’
Frannie nodded. ‘Very strong,’ she said. Her arms were still crossed. She sighed. ‘He’s going to get charged, and you’re going to wind up defending him, aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You promise?’
‘Frannie, I couldn’t defend him. First, I’ve got Tryptech, which is pretty full-time, you might have noticed. Next, Graham’s got no money, certainly not close to what he’d need for a murder defense, even at my rock-bottom rates. If he gets charged, he’ll take a public defender. It’d be a high-profile case – other defense sharks are going to swarm all around it.’
‘I didn’t hear a promise that you wouldn’t take it.’
‘It won’t get to there.’
She sighed again. ‘Famous last words.’
The autopsy report had been on Sarah’s desk when she and Lanier had come in from the field at the end of the day. That made it official. She remained late at the office, catching up on paperwork, and was there when the fingerprint expert checked in with his report. Graham Russo’s fingerprints were all over his father’s apartment – on the safe, on the morphine vials, on the syringes. Graham had told Lanier that he didn’t know how his father had come upon the morphine, had only been to the apartment ‘once or twice.’ Sarah’s suspicions took a quantum leap forward.
If the coroner was saying it wasn’t a definite suicide, then she and her partner would find out what it definitely was. And Sarah knew where they’d start. She figured they had probable cause to search Graham’s residence, see what else they could turn up. The judge who signed the search warrant agreed with her.
3
Next to Hardy’s bed the world began jangling all at once. He pulled himself up with a moan from what felt like world-record REM sleep and slapped at the alarm. There was a moment’s silence, then another jangle.
‘The phone too,’ Frannie said.
Hardy grabbed at the receiver and noted the time on the digital clock – seven o’clock. ‘Grand Central Station.’
‘They just woke me up with a search warrant. What am I supposed to do now?’
‘They’ve got a warrant?’
‘I just said that.’
‘Take it easy, Graham. You’ve got to let them in.’
‘I already have.’
Hardy threw a glance out his bedroom window. A heavy fog had rolled in during the night. ‘What are they looking for?’
‘Just a second.’ Graham sounded like he was reading from some official paper. ‘Morphine vials, used or unused syringes, baseball cards, sports memorabilia, documents reflecting number combinations of safe or safety deposit box…’
‘Why do they think you might have any of that stuff?’
‘They won’t tell me. They just showed me the warrant, not the affidavit. They’re doing me a favor letting me call you.’
Hardy knew this was true, so it couldn’t be too bad. Not yet. He hoped.
The police had rung Graham’s doorbell at exactly seven o’clock, the earliest possible moment. Because it tended to bring to mind visions of jackbooted Nazis breaking down doors in the middle of the night, the police were prohibited from serving search warrants between ten P.M. and seven A.M. unless there was immediate danger that evidence would be destroyed, or the suspect would disappear, or something specific of that nature.
So the fact that they hadn’t come in the middle of the night meant that this was probably a relatively routine search. On the other hand, ringing Graham’s bell at the first allowable second was not a good sign.
Hardy let out a breath. ‘Okay, you hang in there. Don’t be hostile. Give me your address, I’ll be right over.’
He swung out of bed. As he was pulling on his pants, Frannie spoke. ‘That would be Graham Russo?’ She was sitting up in bed, arms crossed over her chest. Children’s sounds came from the rooms farther back.
‘My psychic wife.’
‘The one who has nothing to do with a murder case?’
Hardy smiled. ‘That’s him. They’re hassling him, that’s all. He’s got some enemies downtown.’
‘Evidently.’
‘I’ve got to go, be there for him. Keep him calm.’
‘I know you do. Don’t worry about the kids, I’ll get them fed and clothed and off to school.’
He gave her a look. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow. It’ll be a trade, sharing those special parental moments.’
‘But I do have a real idea,’ she said.
‘My favorite kind. Let’s hear it.’
‘On the way to his place, start thinking about a defense attorney you can recommend for him. David Freeman, maybe?’
‘Maybe.’ A pause. ‘If he needs one.’
Hardy had his map out. He stopped for a minute to consult it at the corner of Stanyan and Parnassus. Graham’s street was well hidden. He turned right, went a block, then hung a left onto a nearly vertical lane that he thought was the equal of any incline in the city. Street signs warned off trucks and delivery vehicles - too steep. Another sign informed him that this was not a through street. Whoever lived up here, Hardy thought, didn’t want anybody else to know about it.