I saw you play today. Two triples. Remember how we used to say you’d rather hit a triple than a homer any day? Most exciting offensive play in the game, am I right? So, anyway, plus you started that beautiful 3-6-4 double play. You owned the field, son, and I am so proud of you for trying baseball again.

That’s all any of us can do, and few enough try, and I just wanted – whether it means anything – I just wanted to say good on you, doing what you were born to do. Somebody appreciated it.

While Hardy looked over the letter, a heavy silence hung in the room. Then Lanier took the page out of Hardy’s hand. He looked down at it again, showing it to Evans. ‘This last is in a different handwriting. Sixteen, eight, twenty-seven.’

‘What’s that?’ Hardy asked. He felt sick that this was going on and, really, it was his fault, his stupid mistake. You simply don’t let your client talk to the police, and he’d not only done that, he’d facilitated it. The fact that Graham wasn’t telling them anything they couldn’t find out for themselves mitigated his self-loathing, but only slightly.

Evans knew what the numbers were right away. ‘That’s the combination to Sal’s safe. The one Graham here says he knows nothing about.’

It was after eleven o’clock.

Evans and Lanier weren’t about to let Graham go into the bathroom and close the door behind him to take a shower, so he was still in the clothes he’d slept in.

Graham and Hardy still sat, mostly in silence, at the large table by the back window. The blinds were completely open by now and the city outside, with the fog gone, shimmered in the sunlight. Graham had slid open the window a few inches and a light breeze freshened the air from time to time, but it was mostly quiet and unpleasant.

From Hardy’s perspective, the two inspectors – buoyed by their discovery that Graham had a means of knowing the combination to Sal’s safe – had increased the intensity of their search. Working as a team, they had begun again at the front door, working slowly, opening every book and drawer, lifting everything that wasn’t nailed down, checking pockets of clothes in the closet, canisters in the kitchen.

They had to be getting near the end, Hardy thought, and if the letter was all they wound up finding, it wouldn’t be too bad. Graham had even made the argument as soon as they’d found the letter: so what if he might at one time have known the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember the letter from his father had been stuck in the magazine. Did they honestly think he cared about the combination to the safe? He didn’t even remember why he’d written it down. He just didn’t know.

Hardy wished his client hadn’t talked so much, but it appeared to be over now, and little real damage had been done. The two inspectors were back by the dining table with Graham and Hardy, having thoroughly searched from stern to, nearly, stem. Lanier had just pulled up a chair and opened the drawer to a small desk table next to the Murphy bed when Evans lifted a Skoal chewing tobacco can from the utensil drawer and shook, then opened, it.

‘Six keys,’ she said, raising her eyes to her partner. She lifted the plain metal ring, and jingled the keys.

Suddenly Graham was a deer caught in headlights. The moment passed as quickly as it had come, but to Hardy it was worrisome. There was real fear in his eyes. He’d been hiding something in plain view that he hadn’t expected them to notice, or if they did notice, he hadn’t expected them to connect it to anything. And now they had.

Sarah Evans turned back to Graham and dropped the ring onto the table. ‘Let’s play “Name the Keys.” What do you say?’

He raised his shoulders, drummed his hands – da da dum - on the edge of the table. He gave her his big smile. ‘I really don’t have a clue. They’re just keys. Everybody’s got a container full of keys.’ He reached over and picked up the ring. ‘These two are duplicates for my car, I guess. This one is the dead bolt for here.’

Evans held up one of them. ‘You got a safe deposit box? That’s what this looks like. What bank are you with?’

The smile faded. From his seat at the small table across the room, Lanier turned and looked over at the silence.

Just as Hardy put his hand up to warn Graham not to answer, he blurted out, ‘I don’t know.’

Lanier tapped on the desk with something he’d extracted from the drawer. ‘Checkbook here is from Wells Fargo. The branch isn’t five blocks away. We get done here, we ride down and take a look. Maybe get a brand-new warrant.’

Inspector Sergeant Sarah Evans pulled a chair up and sat upon it. ‘Graham,’ she said, ‘you’re telling me you don’t know if you have a safe deposit box? Is that what you’re saying?’

Graham just didn’t seem to get it – he was making some bantering noises at Evans, trying to make light of the situation here, keep things casual, apparently unable to envision himself as a man with handcuffs in his future.

Hardy had no idea what was in the safety deposit box, but judging from Graham’s reaction, when he found out, it was going to be ugly.

Hardy put a hand on Graham’s shoulder and stood up. The interview was over.

He was thoroughly disheartened. It had been a long and wasted morning. He hadn’t done much for Graham Russo up until now, and he knew there wasn’t anything he’d be able to do until this chapter had played itself out.

4

Mario Giotti sat at his regular table at Stagnola’s on the Wharf. He sipped his iced tea and gazed with a studiedly placid expression down to the fishing boats moored outside his window. He was a well-known man in the city and he thought it important to maintain a dignified, serene persona in public. In any event, it was a gorgeous May morning, a Tuesday, and when he’d arrived at the restaurant, he’d apparently been in fine spirits.

And why not? He was a U.S. federal judge, appointed for life, and he lived in the best city in the world. A vibrant sixty-year-old, he kept his sparkplug of a body in terrific shape by either jogging or spending an hour a day at the workout room in the basement of the federal courthouse. With his steel-gray eyes, his unlined face, the prominent nose, he knew he cut a dignified figure.

Although just at this moment, he was struggling to control his expression. The judge’s wife was late. He was peeved with her and didn’t want to show it.

He hated to wait, always had. Fortunately, in his life nowadays, people most often waited for him, waited on him. He never had to stand in a line. He came into his courtroom and he had a staff that made damn sure that the day’s business was ready to proceed upon his entrance. But he still had to wait for his wife. Always had, probably always would.

As he looked down at the fishing boats, a sigh escaped him. He wasn’t even aware of it. Coming here to Stagnola’s – which he did at least once a week when he wasn’t traveling – wasn’t so much a nostalgic experience as it was a return to his roots.

That’s how he felt about the place. It was his true home, his psychic touchstone. For sixty-five years, over three generations, the building had been Giotti’s Grotto.

The judge’s great-grandfather had opened the first cioppino stand here in the middle of the Depression, and it had stayed within the family, adding onto itself, growing into a Fisherman’s Wharf landmark, until Joey Stagnola had bought it from Mario’s father, Bruno, in 1982.

Mario was the last male of the Giotti line. But he’d been a lawyer, with dreams of becoming a judge. He wasn’t going to run a dago restaurant on the Wharf. His father, Bruno, understood – if he himself were young again and college educated, if he’d had the same options as his son, he’d do the same thing.

But Mario knew that secretly it had broken the old man’s heart. He sold the restaurant to Stagnola and, six months later, sitting in a red booth by one of these back windows, had died here. (He had just finished an after-lunch Sambuca and the coroner found three coffee beans – good Italian restaurants served them floating in the aperitif for luck – in his mouth, unchewed.)