‘You couldn’t see us because of her?’
Sal didn’t like that slant on it. It wasn’t Helen’s fault. It was his own. ‘She got very protective of you. I had ruined her life. She wasn’t going to let me ruin yours.’
‘And you accepted that?’
He shook his head. ‘I was at the bottom, Graham. I was worthless. I guess I thought she must be right. It was too hard. I don’t know. Every time I tried, she was in the way until finally I just gave up.’
Graham’s hand was still on his father’s arm. He tightened down his grip. ‘How could you do that?’
Sal’s eyes leveled on his. ‘I got hit pretty hard by a few of life s pitches, Graham. I guess I got afraid to come back to the plate. You know what I’m talking about?’
‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘It s kind of how I feel. Why I thought I ’d come look you up.‘
They were outside now, where Hardy and Graham had sat late that afternoon. Though by now the temperature had dropped to the fifties, Graham was still barefoot, still wore his shorts, although he’d pulled on a warm-up jacket. Sarah leaned against a lightpost, hands in her pockets.
Graham was concluding. ‘So that’s when we became friends again. I was pretty low. I didn’t know who else…’ He let it hang, but it was clear enough. Graham felt – and from all accounts with some justification – that he’d alienated everyone in his world, too, and didn’t know where to start to get back in. Maybe with his dad, who’d been there as well.
‘I wish I’d known him, somehow,’ she said.
‘I’m glad I did, finally.’ But the subject suddenly seemed too close, embarrassing him. ‘He was great.’
‘But that night, in North Beach, did he already have Alzheimer’s then?’
Graham nodded. ‘I know, that’s a question. It didn’t seem like it at all. He was like he’d always been. But the symptoms had started before. I found that out later, after we… after I became more involved with him. It was getting worse, of course, it doesn’t get better, but he was still trying to live with it.’
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.’