Part One
1
Dismas Hardy was enjoying a superb round of darts, closing in on what might become a personal best. He was in his office on a Monday morning, throwing his 20-gram hand-tooled, custom-flighted tungsten beauties. He called the game ‘20-down’ although it wasn’t any kind of sanctioned affair. It had begun as simple practice — once around and down the board from ‘20’ to bull’s-eye. He’d turned the practice rounds into a game against himself.
His record was twenty-five throws. The best possible round was twenty-one, and now he was shooting at the ‘3’ with his nineteenth dart. A twenty-two was still possible. Beating twenty-five was going to be a lock, assuming his concentration didn’t get interrupted.
On his desk the telephone buzzed.
* * * * *
He’d worked downtown at an office on Sutter Street for nearly six years. The rest of the building was home to David Freeman & Associates, a law firm specializing in plaintiff’s personal injury and criminal defense work. But Hardy wasn’t one of Freeman’s associates. Technically, he didn’t work for Freeman at all, although lately almost all of his billable hours had come from a client his landlord had farmed out to him.
Hardy occupied the only office on the top floor of the building. Both literally and figuratively he was on his own.
He held on to his dart and threw an evil eye at the telephone behind him, which buzzed again. To throw now would be to miss. He sat back on the desk, punched a button. ‘Yo.’
Freeman’s receptionist, Phyllis, had grown to tolerate, perhaps even like, Hardy, although it was plain that she disapproved of his casual attitude. This was a law firm. Lawyers should answer their phone crisply, with authority and dignity. They shouldn’t just pick up and say, ‘Yo.’
He took an instant’s pleasure in her sigh. She lowered her voice. ‘There’s a man down here to see you. He doesn’t have an appointment.’ It was the same tone she would have used if the guest had stepped in something on the sidewalk. ‘He says he knows you from’ — a pause while she sought a suitable euphemism. She finally failed and had to come out with the hated truth — ‘your bar. His name is Graham Russo.’
Hardy knew half a dozen Russos — it was a common name in San Francisco — but hearing that Graham from the Little Shamrock was downstairs, presumably in need of a lawyer’s services, narrowed it down.
Hardy glanced at his wall calendar. It was Monday, May 12. Sighing, he put his precious dart down on his desk and told Phyllis to send Mr Russo right on up.
Hardy was standing at his door as Graham trudged up the stairs, a handsome, athletic young guy with the weight of this world on his shoulders. And at least one other world, Hardy knew, that had crashed and burned all around him.
They had met when Graham showed up for a beer at the Shamrock. Over the course of the night Hardy, moonlighting behind the bar, found out a lot about him. Graham, too, was an attorney, although he wasn’t practicing right at the moment. The community had blackballed him.
Hardy had had his own run-ins with the legal bureaucracy and knew how devastating the ostracism could be. Hell, even when you were solidly within it, the law life itself was so unrelentingly adversarial that the whole world sometimes took on a hostile aspect.
So the two men had hit it off. Both men were estranged from the law in their own ways. Graham had stayed after last call, helped clean up. He was a sweet kid — maybe a little naive and idealistic, but his head seemed to be on straight. Hardy liked him.
* * * * *
Before the law Graham’s world had been baseball. An All-American center fielder at USF during the late eighties, he’d batted .373 and had been drafted in the sixth round by the Dodgers. He then played two years in the minor leagues, making it to Double-A San Antonio before he’d fouled a ball into his own left eye. That injury had hospitalized him for three weeks, and when he got out, his vision didn’t come with him. And so with a lifetime pro average of .327, well on the way to the bigs, he’d had to give it all up.
Rootless and disheartened, he had enrolled in law school at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. Graduating at the top of his class, he beat out intense competition and got hired for a one-year term as a clerk with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. But he only stayed six months.
In early 1994 — the year of the baseball strike — about two months after he passed the bar, he quit. He wanted, after all, to play baseball. So he went to Vero Beach, Florida, to try out as a replacement player for the Dodgers. And he made the team.
At the Shamrock he’d made it clear to Hardy that he’d never have played as a scab. All along, all he’d wanted out of the deal was for the Dodgers to take another look at him. The fuzziness had disappeared from his vision; he was still in great shape. He thought he could shine in spring training, get cut as a replacement when they all did, but at least have a shot at the minors again.