Jesus Christ! he thought. Would it never end?

Struggling for a calm tone, he fell back upon his job, his role. The lawyer. ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else? The police, for instance?’

‘No. I thought it would be better if I told my story to Graham’s side, you know?’

‘That was a good thought,’ Hardy conceded. ‘Where are you located?’

Cutler told him he was a resident at Seton Medical Center in Daly City. He lived in San Bruno, had graduated from UCSF Medical School. He had played baseball for Arizona in college and had been ‘drafted’ by Craig Ising when he showed up in the city, playing haphazardly, but as often as he could get the time. He hit the long ball and it was great money. ‘So Graham and I became friends and he kind of told me about Sal. He was afraid to go to public health because he thought they’d report him because of the AD. He’d lose his driver’s license among other things. They’d put him in a home. You know the drill, the indigent sick? It’s appalling.’

‘I’ve heard,’ Hardy said, although he was daily getting a new appreciation for how bad it must be. ‘So you… what? With Sal?’

There wasn’t any answer for a minute, although the connection hadn’t been broken. When Cutler came back, his voice was muted. ‘Look, I’m in the lounge here…’

‘And you can’t talk?’

A false cheer, the voice back to normal. ‘Good. Right. Yeah.’

‘So when can we get together?’

‘This is always my favorite part.’

‘It’s why we’re such a great couple,’ Hardy said. ‘You’re always so eager to share the excitement.’

Frannie nodded. ‘That must be it.’

Hardy felt that there hadn’t been any choice, not that this was any consolation to Frannie. Nor had it been to Michelle, either, judging from the Gone home Post-it note on her office door when Hardy had finally stopped by to resume their stress-tolerance discussion. His trained legal mind intuited that she was displeased with him.

As was his wife now at his decision to meet with a witness at the Little Shamrock on Date Night. Her brother, Moses, having poured a round for a group in the front window, was back into earshot before Hardy was aware of it.

Hardy was trying to explain. ‘It couldn’t be helped, Frannie. The guy’s got eight hours off tonight and then he’s on call all the rest of the week. What am I supposed to do?’

His wife, nursing a Chardonnay, feigned pensiveness. ‘Here’s a radical concept, but what about waiting till next week? What do you think, Mose?’

A thoughtful pout. ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today?’

Hardy approved of this support. ‘See? Pure wisdom. Your brother has a doctorate, you know. He must be right.’

Frannie cast a look between them. ‘You know what they call the person who comes in last in the class in med school?’

‘I give up,’ Hardy said.

‘Doctor.’ Frannie smiled.

McGuire looked hurt. ‘I’m not that kind of doctor, anyway.’

Hardy wanted to get back to the topic. ‘Besides, Frannie, anything could happen in a week. What if my witness dies in the interim?’

Frannie histrionically slapped her palm on her forehead. ‘Silly me,’ she said, ‘I forgot all about that possibility, which is pretty likely, I suppose. The guy’s – what? – twenty-five? Thirty? Death must stalk him like a panther.’

‘I didn’t say it was likely. I’m trying to be careful.’

Hardy was sticking with club soda until he’d had a chance to interview Russell Cutler, who should be here any minute, he hoped. If he didn’t chicken out. He was already fifteen minutes late.

Frannie suddenly put her hand over his. ‘I’m teasing you. Mostly. But we are going out to a real restaurant later and eat real food that I don’t cook, right?’

‘Right.’

‘We’re in complete agreement?’

Total.‘

‘All right. I’m with you, then.’ She looked over her husband’s shoulder at the doorway. ‘This witness is a doctor?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think he’s here.’

Dr Cutler still wore his light green scrubs, maybe as a means of identification. If so, it worked. Hardy left his wife with her brother, and the two men shook hands at the door.

The Little Shamrock was San Francisco’s oldest bar, established in 1893. Twenty feet wide from side to side, it extended back three times that distance. Antique bicycles, fishing rods, knapsacks and other turn-of-the-century artifacts hung from the ceiling, and there was a clock that had stopped ticking during the Great Earthquake of 1906. Tonight, Wednesday, at seven twenty-two, there were two dozen patrons, half of them at the bar. The rest were shooting darts or sitting at tiny tables in the front. The Beach Boys were singing ‘Don’t Worry, Baby’ on the jukebox.

Hardy took Cutler to the back of the place. Here three couches were arranged sitting-room style. Tiffany lamps shed a feeble light. The bathrooms were behind some stained-glass screens, and people with a highly developed olfactory sense tended to avoid the area, at least until the place got rockin‘ and the beer smell overlaid anything else.

But Cutler didn’t seem to mind or even notice. ‘I have trouble believing I’ve let it go this long,’ he began before he’d sat down. ‘With all the articles, the media…’

‘It’s all right, you’re here now. That’s what matters.’ ‘You know why I told your secretary it was an emergency? I thought if I didn’t get it out today, I never would.’

Frannie had been right. Cutler was between twenty-five and thirty. At this moment there were black circles under his eyes and the outline of stubble on his cheeks, but Hardy guessed that when he was rested and shaved he would be fresh-faced, even boyish. He was neither as tall nor as broad in the shoulders as Graham, but possessed that same athletic grace of movement, although his cropped black hair made him appear more a Marine than a jock. ‘I’m a wreck about this. I don’t think I’ve slept since Graham was first arrested.’

The first job would be to reassure him. ‘Why don’t you just tell me the level of your involvement with Sal? I’m not the police, you know. What you tell me doesn’t necessarily have to go any farther.’

Cutler sighed. He kept opening and closing his hands. Finally, he linked them and leaned forward. ‘Graham was kind of being Sal’s caretaker toward the end, kind of waiting and watching. They had made some deal about the AD, and I think were both okay with it. Graham was going to help him die before he got… before he went to a home, I guess. But then Sal started getting these headaches.’

‘The cancer?’

Cutler nodded. ‘But we didn’t know that at first. So I ran the CAT scan. We got a second opinion, then a third. There wasn’t any hope. We couldn’t operate. We were convinced the size and location of the tumor was increasing his intracranial pressure. That appeared to be what was causing the headaches.’

As the story came out, Hardy realized that it had been as he’d begun to surmise. Sal was actively fighting the pain, not obsessing about the progress of the Alzheimer’s. ‘So I wrote up a scrip for the morphine. We tried oral painkillers first, of course, but they became less and less effective.’

Over his head, Hardy faked a layman’s understanding. ‘Of course.’ Added, ‘But you finally got to the morphine so Sal could use it to kill himself?’

Cutler nodded. ‘Eventually. Down the line.’

‘But you wrote the prescription? So there’s a record of it, anyway?’

This made Cutler’s hands clench, but his voice was under control. ‘Yeah, but… well, I wrote the prescription to Graham, in Graham’s name. He picked it up at the pharmacy at Seton. I guess he thought it was out of the city, it wouldn’t be as easy to trace.’

‘Okay, but why the secrecy? You have a sick man. You’re his doctor and you prescribe drugs. What’s the problem?’

‘There wasn’t one, not by itself He shook his head. ’It’s all so stupid, I shouldn’t have done it the way I did, that’s all.‘