'What is this about, Chris?'
'It's about civil war, Elaine. Is your television on?'
'Almost never.'
'Well, check it out. Now. I'll wait.'
'What channel?'
'Any channel.'
Elaine Wager had been asleep. The call was from her boss and self-appointed mentor, San Francisco District Attorney Christopher Locke, who took a special interest in Elaine Wager.
She, like Locke, was black. She was also intelligent and already, though just barely twenty-five, a good lawyer, a tenacious prosecutor. Added to this were her considerable physical charms – mocha-colored skin as finely pored as Italian marble, a leggy, thin-waisted body, an Assyrian face. Of more importance to Chris Locke than any of these attributes, though, was Elaine's mother, Loretta Wager, a United States senator and the first African-American of either sex to be elected to that office from California.
Elaine Wager swung her bare legs to the floor. On top she wore a man's Warriors T-shirt. Waking up as she walked, she found herself becoming dimly aware of a conceit of sirens down below, out in the city. The digital clock on her dresser read twelve-fourteen. Her apartment was a one-bedroom, twelve stories up, a few blocks north of Geary Street on Franklin near Lafayette Park. She glanced out the window – there seemed to be several fires a few blocks away in the Western Addition. To the south, too, the sky glowed orange.
Still carrying the phone, she moved quickly now through her sparsely furnished living room.
'What's going on, Chris?'
The tiny portable television was on the counter in the kitchen area. She flicked it on.
'We're in riot mode, Elaine. The projects are on fire. They lynched one of the brothers tonight.' Elaine sat down hard on one of the stools by the counter. 'Arthur Wade.'
'What about Arthur?' she asked stupidly.
'You know him?'
'Of course I know him. He went to Boalt with me. What about him?'
There was a pause. 'Elaine, Arthur Wade is dead. A mob lynched him.'
'What do you mean, lynched?' She was babbling, trying to find a context for it, an explanation for the inexplicable.
On the television, more of the now-familiar visions – already the crowds were out in the streets, already the shop windows were being smashed, buildings were burning. Her eyes left the screen, went out to the real city again.
'Chris?'
'I'm here. I was wondering if you'd heard from your mother.'
'No, not yet. I'm sure I will. Meanwhile, what are we going to do?'
'Are you still in front of your TV?'
'Yes.'
'Look at it now.'
On the screen was a still photograph that would in the coming days become as famous as the Rodney King videotapes. Arthur Wade was hanging from a streetlight and under him a white male was hugging him, apparently pulling down on his legs, trying to break his neck. Wade, in his last futile seconds, was holding the rope above his head with one hand, and with his other appeared to be trying to strike the man pulling his legs, to drive him away and purchase himself another few seconds of life.
Elaine stared transfixed at the horror of the scene. She had never expected to see it played out in her lifetime again, especially here, in supposedly liberal San Francisco.
She forced herself to look again – the black man hanging by the neck, surrounded by the white mob. All the faces were blurred except the two in the center, and they were in perfect focus. Arthur Wade and the man who'd hung him, whoever it was.
Chris Locke sounded raspy, drained. 'We're going to get proactive here, Elaine. That man's got to be found. And then we've got to crucify him. Can you come down to the Hall…?'
'You mean now?'
'I mean yesterday, Elaine.'
Shea made it home, walking.
It took him over two hours to make it on the smaller streets from where he had been dropped in the grassy center divider of Park Presidio Boulevard to his apartment on Green Street near Webster.
The details kept coming back. The black man struggling. Reaching for him. The man's weight on his shoulders while he was still alive.
Maybe, Shea kept thinking, reliving it, he shouldn't have gone for the guys near the fire hydrant, should have just stayed holding the man up, maybe then it would have turned out…
It still wasn't real.
He limped, stopped, leaned on things, vaguely aware of sirens, of the sky glowing now off to his right. At the moment, he couldn't put it together.
There were six apartments in his three-story building, three up front and three in the back. He had the one all the way back and all the way up. He wasn't sure he could make it.
He'd better see a doctor soon. Maybe he should call the police, although they'd already be all over the scene back at the Cavern. Still…
Finally he made it, took out his key and got inside, locking the door back behind him. God, his arm was killing him. His ribs. Everything.
From his cupboard, he took down a bottle of vodka, poured about six ounces into a glass, added two ice cubes and a spoonful of orange juice concentrate and, drinking, went into the bathroom. He finished the drink before the shower had gotten hot, before he'd been able to strip off his shirt.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He shouldn't be drinking now, he told himself. He should call the police, a doctor, somebody. But first he needed the one drink tonight, now. Who'd blame him for that, after what he'd been through? And the shower, wash off the blood, check the damage. Then he'd have one more before bed, dull things a little, the pain. There was nothing they could do tonight anyway.
That poor bastard…
By three in the morning units of the police force, fire department and emergency crews had been mobilized within the city and county of San Francisco. The mayor, Conrad Aiken, had also put in a call to the governor's office in Sacramento requesting that the National Guard be called out, that martial law be declared. There were already nineteen fires and property damage was going up faster than the national debt.
Here in the middle of the night Aiken had forsaken his ornate digs at City Hall in favor of the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant streets, the home of the police department, the district attorney's office and the county jail. He had commandeered District Attorney Chris Locke's outer office and sat behind what was usually a secretary's desk.
The mayor was an imposing figure in spite of considerable physical drawbacks for a politician – he stood only five-foot-seven and was so thin that the joke was when he stood sideways, unless he stuck out his tongue you couldn't see him. He was also nearly bald, with a half-dollar-sized port-wine stain that ran under his left eye and halfway across the bridge of an aquiline nose with a bump in the middle of it.
Most people put him a decade younger than his stated age of sixty-two. He had that spring in his step, contained energy and piercing gray-blue eyes. He had all his teeth, and they were pearly white, though he wasn't flashing any of them now.
With him in the office were Locke, Assistant DA Elaine Wager, Police Chief Dan Rigby, Assistant Chief Frank Batiste, County Sheriff Dale Boles (pronounced Bolus), who was in charge of the jail and its prisoners, Aiken's administrative assistant, a young man named Donald, and Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, a forty-four-year-old Jewish mulatto who headed San Francisco's homicide detail.
Aiken had started off by wanting to get a report on the status of the riots from Chief Rigby – the affected areas, what measures were being taken, how many men were on the street and so on. Rigby was in the middle of running it down for him.
'… mostly containment at this stage. We don't have a hope of any real control until we get more people on the streets, and of course we've got the usual looting-'
'We're not gonna have that,' the mayor said. 'I want you to put out the word. We're not tolerating looting. This isn't Los Angeles.' He looked around the room for effect, his port-wine stain glowing. 'This isn't Los Angeles,' he repeated.
'No, sir,' the chief replied, 'but how are we planning to stop it, the looting?'
'I'm in favor of shooting to kill.'
Rigby looked shocked. Pleased but shocked. 'Well, we can't do that.'
'Why not? Don't they do it in the midwest after tornadoes. We'll do it here. Why not? I'm not going to allow looting in San Francisco.'
Chris Locke took a step forward. He was a big man, half again the mayor's weight, the only person present in a business suit. 'Sir, the only people you'll shoot will be black. It's racist.'
Aiken didn't like that. 'I'm no racist, Chris. The only people I'd have shot would be looters. Black, white or magenta, I don't give a damn.'
Elaine Wager spoke up. 'But the only people rioting so far are African-Americans, sir, the same as you had in Los Angeles -'
'There's a lot of rage,' Locke added.
'I don't want to hear that shit. I don't want to hear about rage. Rage isn't any issue here, and it sure as hell isn't any excuse. Keeping the law is what this is all about.'
Rigby said, 'It's moot. Black officers won't shoot black looters.'
Lieutenant Glitsky almost spoke up for the first time to say that he would – half-black and half-white himself, he had little patience with the posturing and excuses from either side. But he kept his mouth shut, for now.
'What the hell?' Aiken said. 'Don't black officers arrest black lawbreakers every day?'
Rigby shook his head. 'It's not the same thing.'
The mayor wasn't buying. 'Look. I'm talking about preserving the city, protecting all its citizens. Let's not turn this thing into a race war.'
Elaine Wager spoke up again. 'But that's what it is. That's the issue. A black man's been lynched… sir.'
'Goddamnit, I know that. But what we're talking about now, this minute, is not a racial question. It's about people who're breaking the law. Riot control.'
Rigby repeated that he couldn't shoot looters.
Aiken held up a hand. 'Look, I don't want to talk about shooting looters. I don't even know if we've got looters at this stage, but I don't want them tolerated. I think we've got to make a stand somewhere. We're not going to just sit and watch 'em. I want them prosecuted-'
'Where do we put 'em?'
This was Dale Boles. His jail upstairs was already filled to capacity. If Aiken wanted the police to start arresting looters he was going to have to take responsibility for housing them.
Aiken glared at him, chose not to respond and turned to Glitsky. 'What have you found out about the lynching itself? Was it random or what? Maybe we can get some handle on how to stop this thing faster if we know what started it.'
Glitsky, in corduroys and a leather flight jacket, was sitting on a low filing cabinet at the back of the room. He had a hawkish nose and an old gash of a scar running through his lips, top to bottom, almost as though he'd had an operation for a cleft palate. He was a light chocolate color, wore his hair in a buzz cut, and had startling blue eyes. Answering Aiken, he nevertheless fixed a flat gaze on Chris Locke. 'Jerohm Reese,' he said, 'not that that's any excuse.'
The mayor cocked his head. 'Who's Jerohm Reese?'
'What's Reese got to do with this, Abe?' Locke said.
'I said "who's Reese?",' Aiken repeated.
Glitsky stood up and quickly told the story. The carjacking. Mike Mullen. The release. Glitsky looked at his watch, glanced at Locke – disdainful. 'Reese was released less than thirteen hours ago. We have a couple of witnesses, not to the lynching itself but they seem to think the mob came from the Cavern, a pub on 2nd and Geary.'
'Okay,'Aiken said, 'And?'
'And I was down there. I went into the Cavern myself. Place was empty except for a bartender named Jamie O'Toole who told me it had been dead all night. Slowest night they'd ever had. He'd heard the mob outside, of course, but got scared and didn't want to go out and check-'
Locke interrupted. 'Jerohm Reese, Abe.'
The scar between Glitsky's lips went almost white – perhaps he was smiling. 'On the back wall of the Cavern was a huge blown-up picture of a guy. I asked O'Toole who it was and he said it was Mike Mullen. He'd been the accountant for the place. Seeing as I was a homicide cop and all, maybe I'd heard of him.'
Silence in the room, finally broken by Elaine Wager. 'You mean because Jerohm Reese was released…?'
Chris Locke answered everybody. 'I released Jerohm Reese because there wasn't going to be a conviction on him.'
Glitsky looked at him. 'Well, some of these people seemed to take it wrong, sir.'
Aiken rubbed a hand over his face. 'You're telling me that this mob happened because of the release of this Jerohm Reese?'
'That's how I read it, yes, sir. Just the way some people took it wrong when they let off the cops who beat up Rodney King.' He paused and added, 'Again, in Los Angeles.'
Locke wanted to get back to the nuts and bolts. 'Have we identified any of the mob?'
'No, sir, not yet. We're working on it, but it's a stonewall out at the Cavern.'
'We've got one.' Elaine Wager felt free to talk whenever she wanted. Glitsky thought it must be great having a U.S. senator for a mother. 'Have any of you seen the news tonight?'
Glitsky nodded at her. 'Yep,' he said, 'we're working on him, too. Real hard.'
Rolling over on his arm woke Shea up. It was still dark out, about the time the somnolent effects of the alcohol usually wore off. His mouth was dry. Unlike most mornings when the throbbing was an insistent dull pounding inside his head, today he lay in his bed immobilized by the pain.
The pulse of the jackhammer in his skull made him fear to lift his head from the pillow – his ribs, his arms, his hips. He wondered for a moment if he was seriously hurt. This, he told himself, was not a hangover. Hangovers didn't feel like this. (Many mornings he would tell himself that he wasn't hung over, he was sure he hadn't drunk enough to make him hung over, he just hadn't had enough sleep.)
He rolled to his side and bile came up on him. Staggering in the dark, he bumped five steps to the bathroom and barely made it, crumpling to the floor and hugging the commode.
Finally he stood and urinated. The jackhammer was not going to let up. He had to try to get back to bed, to sleep some of this off. He should call a doctor.
The bathroom light was an explosion that nearly knocked him down again but he had to wash his face, brush his teeth. There were two of him in the mirror, he couldn't focus down to one.
Cold water on his face. Washing off crust from the beating. Still two faces, both swollen, cut.
Back on his bed, the room spun some more.
The jangle of the telephone ringing next to his ear almost tossed him out of the bed. He jolted up, arms and ribs feeling ripped from their sockets, joints, whatever it was that attached them.
He got it halfway through the second ring.
'Kevin?'
A girl. Melanie. No, it couldn't be. They'd broken up – face it, he'd dropped her – three weeks before. He flopped back on the bed, the phone pressed to his ear. 'Timezit?' he moaned.
A pause while she processed the slur in his voice. He was sure that was it. Now, if tradition held, would come two minutes of rebuke.
Okay, he was drunk. Did she want to fight about it? Again? Well, not tonight, honey, I've got a headache. He almost hung up, then heard her say, 'It's five-fifteen.' The time didn't surprise him. During the school year, when they'd still been going out, she'd always set her alarm for five so she could get up and study and get a jump on the day. It was another reason they'd broken up.
'Melanie…'
'God, Kevin, how could you do it?'
'Do what?'
She told him.
The streetlights glared off the wet-looking street. The whole short block – it was a cul-de-sac that backed up to the Presidio – was empty, dark, forbidding. The windows facing the street caught a glint here and there, ghosts flitting across the fronts of the buildings.
Abe Glitsky, noticing all this, told himself he didn't used to think this way. It was only since Flo had died. Only. Sure, only. Only nine months of her struggle against the ovarian cancer that killed her in its own quick time, in spite of the chemotherapy and other atrocities they had colluded to commit to ward off the inevitable. Nine months with Glitsky at her side every step of the way, both of them struggling against the urge to despair and – perhaps more difficult – the random appearances of their irrational yearning to hope. And then, after she was gone, trying to maintain the facade these last fifteen months – not to show the pain, not even (and it tortured him on the days he managed it) to feel it as fresh as it had been.
Fifteen months. Only fifteen months. God.
It was – unusually – still shirtsleeve weather in this the darkest hour before the dawn. Since his duplex didn't come with a garage, he'd wound up parking in the nearest spot – four blocks away – and by the time he hit his block he was almost shaking from fatigue. But still, in no hurry to get home. He never was anymore.
There was a sliver of moon through the trees in the Presidio – the morning was dead still and his footfalls echoed. He realized he hadn't heard a siren since he'd started walking. That knowledge didn't fill him with any hope. He knew what it was – he knew what false hope was and he wasn't going to indulge anymore. Today would be hotter than yesterday, and today it would all break loose.
Behind him as he turned up the sidewalk a bus rumbled by on Lake Street. Turning, he saw that it was empty except for the driver and a passenger sitting alone way in the back.
His wife Flo had always wanted a real house. Their plan was to have Flo stay with the kids until the youngest, Orel, got into junior high, which would have been, would be, the next September. At that time Flo would have gone back to teaching and they would have saved for a couple of years, maybe moved out of the city, got their house.
Would have, should have…
Putting it off a minute longer, he stood in front of the cement stairs leading up to the second floor. The light over the door had blown out or Rita, his live-in housekeeper, had forgotten to leave it on. It was a long twelve steps to the landing – his own self-improvement, one-day-at-a-time program.
Inside, there was the old sense memory – the familiar smells, the shadows. A tiny bulb burned over the stove in the kitchen and he quietly made his way back. When they had first moved in eleven years ago he and Flo hadn't been able to get over the spaciousness of the place – two bedrooms, study, living room, dining room, kitchen. They had only had the first two boys then – Isaac and Jacob – and they had put them in one bedroom, used the other themselves, and still had an adults' room where they kept files, wrote checks, locked the door when they needed to get away. After Orel came around (they called him O.J. back then – they'd since dropped the nickname), the older boys shared a bunk bed until they finally had to acknowledge there was no room for three of them – their beds and all their stuff – in the one ten-by-twelve room. They had given their eldest, Isaac, the old study as his own bedroom.
Now, with Rita living on the premises, space was an issue. Half the living room, the area around the couch set off by a changing screen, was Rita's. The only place to sit was at the kitchen table. Glitsky's barco-lounger was still where it had always been in the living room, but it was awkward sitting there while Rita was trying to go to sleep across the room.
So he went and sat at the kitchen table, made tea and was drinking it, feeling the ghosts.
Glitsky usually wore his gun, even at home, but tonight for the call-up he had left his holster hanging in the closet in his bedroom, so when he heard the 'chunk' he grabbed a butcher's knife from the block on the drain and switched on the light in the hallway leading back to Isaac's room.
Where all was quiet.
He stood in the open doorway, pumped up, breathing hard. After all that had gone down already tonight he was ready to explode. If anybody touched his home…
The only light came from the hall, but Isaac's room wasn't much bigger than a bread box, and all of it was visible. His son was completely covered by his blankets – Glitsky could see them rising and falling.
The back door was locked. He told himself it could have been a raccoon getting into the garbage, dropping the lid on the cement. It surprised people to hear it, but there were lots of raccoons in the city, big and fearless as mastiffs, breeding like rabbits in the brush of the Presidio.
As he passed Isaac's door again Glitsky decided to take another look. Still covered. In the past, whatever time he got in, he'd always check the boys before he went to sleep. Not that they ever needed it. It was just a habit he'd acquired – walk to their beds, look at their faces, check their breathing, make sure the blankets were over them. Dad stuff.
In three steps he was by the bed. Leaning over, planning to gently pull the covers off his head, he saw the shoes sticking out from under the blanket. Ike didn't normally sleep in his shoes.
'Hey,' he whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed, laying a hand on his son's shoulder. 'Nice try.' For another few seconds the form was still. Sighing, Glitsky lay the knife on the desk, crossed his hands, elbows on his knees.
The blanket moved. Glitsky pulled it down. His oldest son – seventeen next month – had been crying. He was also fully dressed.
Glitsky tried to pull the boy toward him, to get an arm around his neck and hold him there against him. 'Come here.'
But he jerked away. 'Leave me alone!'
The first time Glitsky had heard that from him, it took what he'd thought was the last unbroken piece that was left of his heart and stomped on it. Now, he wasn't used to it, exactly, but he'd heard it enough that it had lost a little of its hurt. 'All right.' He got to where he knew his voice would sound controlled, nonchalant. 'You been out?'
No answer.
'Do me a favor. Don't go out. It's bad out there.'
Still no answer.
'You heard all the sirens? They lynched a black man tonight, not ten blocks from here. It's not safe out there.'
Isaac was one-fourth black, with light skin and his father's kinky hair. But everyone with an ounce of visible black knew the reality – you were white or you were non-white. Black.
Glitsky was looking straight into his son's eyes, which were doing their best to avoid his. He saw enough of that at the Hall every day. He wasn't going to lose this boy, or his brothers. But he believed that the way to keep people's respect was demand that they keep some for themselves. He moved ahead. 'The rules committee has a meeting and didn't invite me?'
'The rules committee is a joke.'
The rules committee was something Glitsky had implemented in the first months that he and the boys were all trying to survive after Flo. It was made up of all of them, including Rita, the housekeeper. The adults had two votes, the boys one each, and so if there was unanimity between them they could outvote either Glitsky or Rita alone.
The rules committee had navigated them through some rough seas – when the boys had felt that there was no order, that life itself was precarious. Glitsky believed it gave them some sense of control. It also caused a lot of fights – but fighting was all right. Glitsky could take fighting. Just don't give him silence.
Which was what he was getting now.
He stood up. 'Look up here, Ike, look at me.' The son moved out of the light so he wouldn't get the glare from the hall light. He raised his eyes – red.
'You weren't home. When I heard you go out-'
'They've got an emergency downtown, Ike. All over the city. They called me. I had to go.'
'You always have to go.'
Glitsky ran a hand through his hair. 'I know,' he said. He was too tired to go into it. It was true, but so what? 'I don't want you going out there, Isaac. Not for a couple of days.'
'You're grounding me? The middle of summer you're grounding me?'
'I'm saying I don't want you boys to go out.'
'For how long?'
'I don't know. Maybe a day, maybe two. I don't know. It's not safe out there.'
'Oh, but it is safe for you, huh?'
Glitsky hated the tone but it was his house and his sons were going to obey his rules and that was that. 'Don't give me any grief, Ike. We can talk about it in the morning.'
He felt the need to reach and touch his boy, soften it somewhat, explain, but didn't dare try. It would just escalate, like everything else. He stood up. 'Sleep tight.'
Closing the door behind him, he walked out.
Rita was asleep. Glitsky heard the regular sibilance of her breathing on the other side of the screen as he lowered himself into the old lounger on 'his' side of the living room.
Closing his eyes, the events of the night came racing up at him – from Isaac to the Cavern Tavern to the meeting with the mayor and the brass downtown. Then suddenly, to Elaine Wager – why had she been there?
Oh yes, of course. Her mother.
Loretta Wager.
Startled by the unexpected clarity of the memory, he opened his eyes. The quiet room. The deep shadows. That was all. Suddenly, his brain exhausted and his emotions frayed – perhaps he was starting to doze in dawn's first light – there was the vision of Loretta Wager again, as she'd been back in college, the first time, in her apartment with the Huey Newton chair and the dominating wall posters: for Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and the other, of Martin Luther King's face with his dream and the crowd in front superimposed.
She'd invited Glitsky up to go over some of the San José team rosters and choose likely candidates they could recruit for the Black Student Union, the BSU.
Glitsky had pretended that it was innocent – hoping it wouldn't turn out to be, but not daring to admit that. They were in her bedroom, looking over the lists, when she excused herself for a minute and went out to get a coke. Then she called out his name.
At twenty-two, she was near-perfect in form, a goddess reclining naked with her legs parted on the couch in her living room, the slanting rays of the afternoon sun streaking her, her fingers stroking herself, asking him if she scared him, if he wanted her and had the balls to take her-
He sat up, opening his eyes. This, he thought, was pathetic indulgence, stupid, recalling an adolescent encounter, getting half-tumescent on his barco-lounger across the room from his children's nanny as she slept and the city burned.
Disgusted with himself, he pushed himself up and went into his bedroom. There was Flo's picture on the dresser, smiling at him. He turned off the overhead, got undressed in the half-light and fell into bed.
He didn't want to see Flo smiling. Or fantasize about some romanticized past with Loretta Wager. Especially, he did not want to think about what was going to happen in a few hours, when the sun came up again, as it always did.
He tried to force himself to sleep, to forget, to ignore.
He was still hard.
After finally forcing himself to get out of bed an hour after the sun had come up, Kevin Shea had stood at his widest back window taking in his view. Nothing in his vision resembled an area struggling with poverty. His apartment on Green Street backed onto Cow Hollow, whose artery in turn was Union, San Francisco 's yuppiest mile. Beyond Union were the upscale Fort Mason and Marina neighborhoods. To Shea's right, looking east, he could catch a glimpse of Russian Hill and the glittering bay beyond. To his left, the green expanse of the Presidio provided a lush foreground to the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge.
This morning seven distinct columns of smoke rose in an arc through the panorama. Opening the window a crack to look further around, he heard a constant wail from sirens, dopplering nearer, then farther in the streets below. He closed the window and lowered the blinds, darkening his living room.
In the kitchen he fumbled for coffee beans, half of which he spilled before he got them into the electric grinder. He got some water over one of the burners, then turned on the television.
He was beginning to hope he had only dislocated his arm. It had regained some mobility and in certain positions didn't hurt so much, and he thought if it was broken that wouldn't be the case. His ribs, on the other hand, hurt like hell in every position.
A mug normally intended for beer was full of coffee. Slumping nearly horizontal in a stuffed chair of worn, cracking, yellow faux-leather, he was too low to see over the ledge of any of his windows, and anyway the shades were drawn.
Melanie on the phone had started out being convinced by what the television was saying about his role last night and that really worried him. Did she really think that he had somehow been a ringleader in the lynching? She should have known he was incapable of anything like that. But if even she thought he'd been involved, he had bigger problems than a few broken ribs.
In his hungover daze he had managed to ask her how she could think what she was saying was possible?
'You've got to see the picture,' she had told him, and then had hung up.
The television cast its muted glow back into the half-lit room. Shea, hunkered down in his chair as though against an onslaught, sipped his coffee. The screen filled with a close-up of an anchorman as the morning news came on the air:
'The lead story here and across the country today is the lynching of a black attorney by an all-white mob here in San Francisco last night and the devastating escalation of violence and rioting that has swept the Bay Area and is already being reflected in other major cities – New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, DC and Los Angeles.
'Here in San Francisco Mayor Conrad Aiken has called for a dusk-to-dawn curfew and has asked the governor to declare a state of emergency for the city and county. Property damage is already estimated at some two hundred fifty million dollars and that figure is certain to go up, perhaps into the billions. The Red Cross and other relief organizations are setting up tent cities and emergency medical centers in Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, Marina Green and several other locations around the city for those who need shelter or assistance, and even at this early hour people are flooding to these areas. Our News Center crews report nineteen fires are still burning in several areas of the city, including the site of the lynching itself. We're going to take you there now, live…'
Shea had forgotten his coffee. The fire he was seeing on the tube was in the process of consuming nearly the entire square block bounded by Geary (and the Cavern Tavern) and Clement Streets between 2nd and 3rd – businesses and family duplexes.
The anchorman was talking to his stringer over the images of the flames: 'We understand, Terri, that authorities are especially concerned about the location of this blaze…?'
'That's right, Mark. This appears to be a very different reaction from the frustration and rage we saw in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. As you know, this is not a ghetto area and police were here earlier this morning when these fires began with a kind of drive-by firebombing attack centering on what used to be the Cavern Tavern, which is where the mob reportedly first developed.'
'An attack?'
'That's right. Witnesses tell us that several cars converged here at one time, crashed the police barricades and started throwing Molotov cocktails. Fortunately there weren't many people on the street or it might have been much worse. The police on the street were shot at from the cars and two were wounded. So it was more a planned raid than a spontaneous explosion of rage.'
'A call to arms? The start of a civil war?'
Terri shook her head. 'Let's hope not, Mark, but it could be, it certainly could be.'
And then, suddenly, Shea was looking at the picture – his own picture - hearing the anchor's voice-over. 'And here is how it all began. Police Chief Dan Rigby speculates that there was an informal memorial service for a man named Michael Mullen who was shot to death during a carjacking a couple of weeks ago. The man arrested for that crime was an African-American named Jerohm Reese and he…'
They kept the picture on the screen, and his face was the clearest thing in it. But to him it still looked like it captured what he had actually done – held up the guy, tried to get him the knife to cut himself down. His attention came back to the screen: '… and the mayor is asking this man, who is still unidentified, to come forward…'
The mayor was on a street somewhere in the pre-dawn, in shirtsleeves, looking haggard. A fire burned behind him. 'We must not let this divide us,' he was saying. 'This does not have to be black versus white. This was a small group of individuals, of misguided white men who broke the law and who will be punished. Every decent person in San Francisco, and that's the overwhelming majority of us, wants this group, and especially its leader, brought to justice.'
In disbelief, Shea watched and listened to more of it. Senator Loretta Wager had flown in overnight and they had caught her coming off the plane at the airport. 'Certainly the first step before we can ever talk about starting to heal these wounds,' she said, 'has to be a good-faith effort on the part of San Francisco's authorities to apprehend these murderers, to demonstrate to the minority communities, to all of us, that hate-based lawlessness will not be tolerated. And this can't be done with talk – only with results. We've had enough of talk. If the mayor and the police chief want us to believe they are truly concerned about the black community and all our decent citizens, then this man in the picture, and the others, have got to be found and put on trial. And quickly. Give them the benefit of a justice that they denied Arthur Wade. And, if they are found guilty, give them the penalty that fits the crime.'
The coffee was cold and so was his sweat. Shea did not feel his ribs or his arm anymore as the news broke for a commercial and he heard yet another siren outside.
Lieutenant Abe Glitsky sat at his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco 's Hall of Justice. After an hour of no sleeping he had given up and gone back downtown. He had been in since seven-fifteen, trying to get a handle on the madness, to coordinate the efforts of his department, which had already, previous to yesterday's incident, been up to its eyeballs in domestic-violence homicides, drive-by homicides, drug-related homicides, senseless, stupid homicides – the usual harvest of the urban streets.
Now, the workday not even officially begun, and not including Arthur Wade and of course the still unsolved murder of Mike Mullen, he already had two new verified homicides – victims of the street violence. These were a three-year-old white child who'd been burned to death in one of the duplexes that had gone up in the aftermath of the firebombing of the Cavern and a Korean store owner who had caught a brick in the head while he had been trying to defend his fresh-fruit and vegetable store in the lower Fillmore.
To say Glitsky had an open-door policy at work would have been a misnomer – in fact, his office had no door. There used to be a door. Then, one day, it was removed to be varnished or painted or something and had never made it back. So anyone who desired an audience with the lieutenant could simply walk into the large room that held the twelve desks of the homicide-detail inspectors, turn left and pass into his inner domain – a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot area set off by dry wall.
There were two windows. From his desk, looking right, was the double-door entrance to the detail, a not-so-early warning system that told him – if he was looking – who might or might not be coming through his doorway in the next moment or two. In front, his view was not the touristy one seen on postcards of Baghdad by the Bay. Instead it featured a foreground of the old, pitted and cluttered desks of homicide detectives, an unpainted concrete column stuck with official department announcements, wanted posters, joke faxes that made the office rounds, pictures of male and female prostitutes, the occasional morgue shot, yellowing newspaper articles… the column was the detail's unofficial bulletin board.
Beyond the desks and the column was a six-foot window of crisscrossed panes, thick with grime, through which – when the fog allowed – one used to be able to spy the artery of the 101 Freeway, pulsing with life, and beyond that, the rooftops south of Market. At last, on clear days, in the distance rose the glitter-dome of Nob Hill, with its fabled hotels, architecture, history.
Now, and for the past two years, the view through the soot-stained panes consisted of parts of the second, third and fourth floors of the new jail, a truly hideous committee-designed incarceration unit, whose rounded glass and chrome exterior was somehow expected to meld aesthetically with the hulking gray box that was the Hall of Justice.
Just outside the detail was a small reception area that due to budget cuts had not been manned – or womanned – in four years, so that anyone who took a notion to could waltz directly in – both to the open area and to Glitsky's own office.
Glitsky loved it on television where the buzzer sounded and the lieutenant said 'yes?' and the receptionist – usually a twenty-something knockout in full makeup and no uniform – informed him that the mayor or the district attorney or Mr Flocksmith was there for an appointment, at which the lieutenant, sighing, said, 'Keep him on ice for a mo, Marcia, then send him in.' He really loved it.
Chris Locke was in the doorway, through it, and standing in front of Glitsky's desk, knuckles down on it, hovering, before the lieutenant had a chance to look up.
'I'd like a few words with you, Abe, you got a minute.'
'Come on in, Chris. Make yourself at home.'
Locke was alone, which was unusual. Glitsky wondered if he had gone home and gotten any sleep. He was dressed in his coat and tie as he had been in the middle of the night.
Glitsky started to lean back in his chair, to look up at the district attorney. It occurred to him, though, that Locke enjoyed putting people in this position, so instead he stood – Locke was a big man but Glitsky had an inch on him. 'Coffee, Chris? Tea?'
Locke wasn't buying the hospitality. 'Abe, I'm confused.'
'So am I, Chris. All the time. But I've stopped worrying about it.'
Locke took his knuckles off the desk. He was, Glitsky thought, one of those people who didn't like to stand unpropped, and no sooner had he straightened up than he half-turned and rested his hind quarters on the front of the desk.
Glitsky went into his best at-ease, hands clasped behind his back.
'I always thought we got along' – Locke began – 'and then this crap you drop last night about Jerohm Reese. I take it you didn't agree with my decision to let him go, even though he had no chance in hell of turning into a conviction.'
'Perhaps.'
'What does that mean?'
'It's a seven-letter word that means "maybe," Chris. I thought letting Jerohm go, after we went to the trouble of finding him, then arresting and booking him and all, seemed a little, well, precipitous.'
Locke picked a piece of Scotch tape off the roll on the desk, working it between his fingers. 'This is really about the lieutenant thing, isn't it?'
He was referring to the test the city gave, and which Glitsky had taken a year ago, to determine eligibility for promotion to lieutenant. While the candidates had waited for the results Locke had invited Glitsky up to his office and said he was going to use his pull to get him bumped to lieutenant even if he failed the test. He had gone on to explain that 'people of color' were discriminated against by the testing process, that Glitsky was a good cop and deserved the promotion even if his grades didn't measure up.
Glitsky had felt insulted by the assumption that he wouldn't pass (he got a ninety-seven, second highest among the candidates). Also, he didn't like the obvious politics of it – a mixture of backass affirmative action and loading up the police department with lieutenants for whom the DA had done 'favors.'
'A little of that, Chris,' Glitsky was saying. 'But mostly just plain old Jerohm Reese. And now, of course, the rest of it.' Glitsky raised his head, indicating the world outside.
Rolling the tape between his fingers, Locke sighed. 'Anything about Reese going to help us now?'
'You mean like arrest him again? I doubt it. But I thought it would help last night if we got some understanding of what might have started this whole thing.'
'What started this whole thing, Abe, was lynching Arthur Wade. And what's going to end it is finding the guy that led that mob.'
'You really think so?'
'Yeah, I do, Abe. Other people do, too.'
Glitsky took a breath, letting it out slowly. New to his so-called leadership role, he was still mostly a street cop in his heart – a protector of victims, a collector of evidence, the man who made the arrests. All of his training and experience was in enforcing laws and policies, not in making or interpreting them. But now, as head of a department, he caught a whiff of a change and it didn't smell too good. 'Well, as I mentioned last night, Chris, we're investigating it.'
Locke stepped closer and leaned over the desk. 'I don't know if that's going to do it, Abe. If that's going to be enough.'
Shea's hand was on the telephone.
He had pulled up a couple of the blinds so he could have a sense of what was happening outside. The television stayed on.
He had decided that there was really only one thing to do – call the police and turn himself in, tell them what had really happened. The longer he let this thing grow of its own accord, the more this crazy interpretation was going to be accepted as reality. He had to stop it now. He picked up the receiver.
The face of Philip Mohandas suddenly filled the television screen. Mohandas was the leader of the African Nation movement and the embodiment of the voice of African-American separatism. Shea had written an entire chapter of his thesis – Segregation to Integration and Back Again – on Mohandas and now the face on the screen caught all his attention. Like the mayor had earlier, Mohandas was speaking outdoors, live, in what looked like one of San Francisco 's projects. They punched up his voice in mid-soundbite.
'… we don't believe that the white man's government don't know who led the mob that murdered Arthur Wade. We don't accept their lies. We don't believe that there's any commitment to punish the guilty, because the truth is that the white man's law don't punish the white man. If we want justice, we're going to have to make it. If we want our streets back we're going to have to take them!'
The gleaming face turned. Mohandas seemed to have an understanding of where the camera was. 'You're out there,' he said, pointing at Shea through the television, 'we know you are. And we are going to find you. And you are going to pay.'
As the picture cut away from Mohandas, Shea again saw the photograph of himself on the screen in a blurry close-up. Then the camera pulled back and the anchors chattered away, explaining what Shea needed no explanation for. His face was the centerpiece of a wanted poster, offering a reward of one hundred thousand dollars.
Suddenly the voices of the anchors came back into Shea's consciousness. '… denial that this is, in effect, a contract on the man's life, isn't that right, Karen?'
'That's true, Mark, but the talk here in the streets is that the money is being offered for the man's death. Even if somebody gets to him after he's been arrested, even if he's already in jail.'
Shea put the telephone back down in its cradle. Calling the police and giving himself up had just turned into a bad idea.
Melanie Sinclair had never done anything wrong until she'd met Kevin Shea, and now it seemed that everything she did turned out badly. The last thing she had wanted to do was get him mad at her again, accuse him of anything, put him on the defensive. That, she had come to believe, was how she had lost him.
But then on television she had seen what he'd done last night, or what it looked like. She couldn't believe it, that wasn't Kevin. But what was she supposed to think?
Before she had met Kevin Shea, Melanie had always done the right thing. She had gotten 'A's all the way through school. She kept her shoes neatly arranged in her closet underneath her color-coded hangers, on which hung, in order, dresses, skirts, slacks, blouses, coats, sweaters, vests. She combed her hair a hundred strokes every night, smiled easily without putting it on, was a genuine asset to any organization she decided to join. She loved both her parents and her younger brother and sister and they felt the same about her.
Up until now, at age twenty-one, she had experienced only one serious wrinkle in the otherwise smooth fabric of her life, and that had been Kevin Shea, who was not all, but quite a lot of what she tried not to be.
It should have worked out. Kevin was the right age for her, unattached, with an aura of sophistication that implied experience. Whatever his flaws – none of them too serious – she could help him with them and thereby insure his appreciation and love. Plus, to tell the truth, she had been very much physically attracted to him. She knew that that was important.
Just how important she couldn't be sure, since she was still a virgin. She had decided that Kevin Shea was going to be the man to deflower her and then marry her. Melanie Sinclair truly believed in the old-time values and virtues.
And for a few months it had worked. Melanie had good genes, shining auburn hair, nice breasts, shapely legs. She was considered a catch and she was honest enough to know it. She had picked Kevin Shea to be caught by. And then, five months after their first date, two months after they had been making love, three weeks ago, he had said goodbye.
Just like that.
He was sorry, he didn't love her and didn't want to change. He didn't want to stop drinking, for example. Or laughing out loud. In fact, he had said maybe she should consider changing – lightening up a bit. People should try for excellence, he said, not perfection because perfection, after all, was impossible, whereas excellence was occasionally attainable. Something to shoot for.
Well, to hell with him! That had been her original reaction. It was a phony distinction anyway.
But she hurt. God, how she still hurt!
And now she'd gone and made it worse. Calling him that way… she'd just thought there might have been something she could do.
She hadn't been able to keep that judgmental tone out of her voice. Why did she do that? She loved him. She knew he hadn't done what they were saying, but she was only trying to play a little devil's advocate, get him to understand the seriousness of it. Except, of course, he would know, she didn't have to tell him. He could figure things out on his own. But Melanie – dumb, dumb Melanie – she just couldn't leave well alone. And now she'd gone and lost him…
Kevin hadn't liked Cindy either. Cindy Taylor, her best friend. That had been another big problem.
'She's fooling you,' he had told her. 'She's using you, Mel, and you're carrying her. You watch, she's jealous, she's using you.'
(That was another thing – he called her Mel. No one had ever called her Mel and she kept correcting him about that too until he broke up with her.)
'How is she using me?'
'She's holding you back so that she can be the wild one, the exciting one. Not that she's exactly Madonna herself.' He'd even told her that Cindy had come on to him, which couldn't be true, because Cindy had told her that she didn't even think much of Kevin. Although, come to think of it, Cindy had been the one to notice him at school, to get her interested.
Well… no matter now, that was over. And Cindy, for better or worse, was still her best friend, and she had to talk to somebody… The tears wouldn't stop. She was going crazy.
'My God, that is Kevin.' The call had awakened Cindy too, but Cindy was used to it. 'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know. I called him. He was…' She was going to say hungover but held it back.
'What did he say?'
'I didn't let him say much. I just asked him why.'
'And what did he say?'
'He didn't say anything.'
'He didn't even deny it?'
Melanie had put that down to shock, but the fact was that he hadn't. 'No.'
'I knew he was capable of something like this.' The way she said it made Melanie feel uncomfortable, the effect Kevin seemed to have on her. It was too strong a reaction somehow. But she couldn't think about that now.
Dead air. Melanie could hear Cindy's television. 'They're saying anyone who can identify him should notify the police,' Cindy finally said.
'Well, I'm not going to do that.'
'I don't know, Melanie.'
'Cindy, come on. This is Kevin we're talking about. Whatever it looks like, he didn't-'
'It sure does look like it, though, doesn't it? If he did, the police should-'
'He didn't! I know he didn't.'
'I don't know that.'
'Cindy!' Calling her had been a mistake, too. Everything she did nowadays was turning out wrong. 'Cindy, come on, don't you do anything, either, okay?'
Silence.
Then, calling on every reserve of calm she had: 'Just promise me you won't do anything, would you? Promise?'
A long pause. Then: 'I'll try.'
'Kevin Shea. And he was home as of about an hour ago. The snitch supplied the address, too.'
Glitsky didn't much like this emphasis on one man. After all, it had been a mob, and even if this one guy had been the leader – and it did look that way – he wasn't the only guilty party. There were somewhere between twenty and sixty people somewhere in the city who'd had a hand in this. Glitsky had sent out a team to go and persuade Jamie O'Toole, for example, the bartender of the Cavern, to drop down to the Hall before noon for a few questions. He also craved an audience with Paul Westberg, the photographer, whose identity he had only just learned.
'But now there was nothing to do but move on this Kevin Shea. Glitsky gave the order to dispatch a black-and-white to the address they had been given. Then, thinking about it, he made two more decisions: to send second and third cars as backups to Shea's place, and to stroll over to his chief's office and get the latest version of how things stood, bureaucracy-wise.
'To tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I don't know how to react to it. It's the least of my worries at the moment.'
Chief Dan Rigby sat in his leather chair behind his desk. Glitsky had been a department head for less than a year and the two men had never met socially. Nevertheless, when the lieutenant had come calling the chief had admitted him right away. Now Glitsky stood on the Iranian rugs and looked across the shining expanse of mahogany desk that separated him from his boss. He wondered, briefly, if Rigby's desk would fit into his whole office, and decided it might but it would make walking around a bit of a chore.
'I'm just saying that, technically, sir, we don't have much in the way of evidence if we're going to charge-'
'What about that picture?' Rigby gave Glitsky a hopeful look, knowing as well as his lieutenant that normally a photograph such as Westberg 's would have to pass a battery of tests for authenticity before it could go before a grand jury or any finder of fact as admissible evidence.
Glitsky stood impassively, as though considering the chief's words. 'Yes, sir,' he said at last, finessing the question. 'But to charge someone with murder before the grand jury has had a chance-'
'I'm hearing, lieutenant, that we need something, almost anything, and right away if we're going to have any hope of containing this thing.'
'Mr Locke came by my office this morning and that was pretty much the message he delivered, so I've heard it, too, but frankly, it makes me nervous. That's why I came here to talk to you. I don't exactly know how to handle it-'
'What's to handle? We arrest the guy, book him, give him to Locke. Everybody takes a deep breath, maybe the streets settle down. Do you have any doubts about this man, what's his name, Shea?'
'No, sir, but that's not my point. I'm saying we don't have a usual case to make an arrest on. We could take a lot of flak on it. In normal times we wouldn't go near this yet.'
'These aren't normal times.'
'No, sir, they're not. But I'd like an eyewitness all the same. Something to make the arrest more… defensible.'
'Well, you've got that.'
Glitsky waited.
'The photographer, he's downstairs on three getting questioned right now.'
'By the DA? How'd that happen?' They both knew this was way outside the realm of procedure, that normally the police interrogated everyone associated with a crime and the district attorney pretty much stayed out of it at least until there was enough to present a case to the grand jury.
'Locke told me, as a courtesy, that they were talking to him. As a courtesy,' Rigby repeated. 'They're building their case on Shea.'
'Before they knew who he was?'
"They decided who he was, Abe.'
'Who did? Locke?'
Rigby nodded. 'Locke. The mayor. The senator.'
'The senator?'
'Loretta Wager, in the flesh. She flew in here this morning. I gather she's sold this idea to the mayor – offer up Shea, although you didn't hear it here. Focus it on him, then deliver him, restore the faith of the black community and even the score. Let justice take its course. And now you say we've got him, right? Shea?'
'I sent some cars to go pick him up. We'll worry about a warrant later.'
'Okay, then, we've done our job.'
Glitsky bit his lip, surprised at the length of time the chief had given him, and the confidence he'd shared. 'What if it doesn't work?'he said.
'What, our job?'
'No. What if we get Shea and the place still keeps erupting?'
'Loretta Wager says it won't. The mayor's betting it won't. And Chris Locke's betting his job on it.'
If wasn't exactly an answer but perhaps there wasn't one. Glitsky nodded. 'I'd like to go talk to the photographer.'
'He's downstairs. Help yourself.'
After he got the picture developed in his darkroom and ran it down to the KPIX studios, Paul Westberg had not been able to talk himself into going back home. There was no way he would get back to sleep.
They had offered him five hundred dollars for his picture and all rights, but he had studied the scenario that had developed around the Rodney King videotapes – every photographer's dream – and had fantasized about some similar piece of good fortune happening to him, planning how he would handle it. And now it had happened. He had held out for twenty-five hundred dollars, retaining world rights to the shot.
Fielding the calls in the middle of the night in the studio basement, he'd then sold licenses to air the picture on CNN, Fox and the major networks for their news shows only. In the past sixteen hours he had grossed some twenty-four thousand dollars. He had three agents and a couple of lawyers sniffing around and he hadn't even been home yet. They'd found him.
What he hadn't counted on was the police. He was, after all, not only a photographer, but a witness. He was the only one who couldn't deny that he'd seen it all. He'd been there – the downside to fame and glory.
The two officers had been polite but firm. He was going to go downtown with them for questioning. Sure, he could take his own car. They'd follow him.
They hadn't taken him to the police station upstairs but through the district attorney's corridors on the third floor of the Hall of Justice and for twenty minutes left him sitting alone, sweating, in a small room unguarded and abandoned. He had stopped feeling on the cusp of untold good fortune. In fact, he had become vaguely fearful – his mouth sour and his eyes bagged and he wanted to go home and crawl into his bed.
Finally the heavy wooden door creaked open and a beautiful young black woman wearing a business suit had been standing in front of him, smiling, and identifying herself as Assistant District Attorney Wager. After assuring him that he wasn't a suspect in the lynching, she asked if he wanted a lawyer present anyway. He had sipped at the excellent coffee (she had brought him a fresh cup), and said no, what did he need a lawyer for? He hadn't done anything illegal or wrong.
She proceeded to walk him through the events of the previous night, and she had helped him reconstruct the truth as he remembered it, how he had been walking down the other side of Geary Street, heard the commotion, looked over and thought it might be news. Finally, getting to the moment of the picture, how the crowd had been yelling 'pull on him, pull, pull!' and the guy had been doing just that. No, there was no doubt about it. Sure, he'd testify to it. He saw it. That was what had happened.
And then the hawk-faced black man with the flight jacket and scar through his lips, breaking into the room and scaring the shit out of him, taking over from the lovely assistant district attorney. Ms Wager had been cool about it, composed, but still struck him as somebody caught doing something wrong.
The man, Lieutenant Glitsky, he said, the head honcho of the homicide detail, suggested they go upstairs to continue the interview. Convinced that he hadn't much of a choice in the matter, Westberg had gone along with him.
'This is Lieutenant Inspector Abraham Glitsky, star number 1144. I am currently at an interview room in the Hall of Justice, 880 Bryant Street, in San Francisco. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Paul Westberg, a freelance photojournalist, Caucasian male, born March 4, 1971. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 950867731. Today's date is June 29, Wednesday, at 0825 hours on the AM.'
Glitsky was going to do it by the book, as a regular interview conducted in the course of a murder investigation. He sat across from Westberg at a small pitted wooden table, a tape recorder switched on between them. After walking through the standard battery of questions, again going over the basics of what Westberg claimed he had seen the night before, they got down to the crux of it:
Q: So the crowd was yelling 'pull, pull!' Something like that. And what happened then?
A: Well, this man was pulling on him, hanging on him, like in the picture.
Q: He was pulling on the hanging man, pulling him down?
A: Yes.
Q: How do you know that?
A: [Pause.] Well, it was obvious.
Q: That's my question, Mr Westberg. How was it obvious? Look at this picture. [Glitsky had the late edition of the morning Chronicle in the room.] The man has one arm around the victim, another holding up what appears to be a knife.
A: It was a knife. He had it at the guy's throat.
Q: Okay. Then what?
A: Then what What!
Q: Then what happened?
A: I took the picture. Two of them.
Q: In quick succession?
A: Yes.
Q: Have you seen the other one?
A: Yeah, sure. I developed them both at home. It didn't come out as good.
Q: Do you mean it wasn't dramatic, or there was some technical problem – focus, lighting, like that?
A: No, there wasn't a technical problem. It was only, like, two seconds away from this one. Basically the same picture, just not as good.
Q: All right, let's go on. After you took these pictures, what did you do?
A: I ran. The crowd reacted a little to the flash. A couple of guys started coming for me. I thought they were going to smash the camera, maybe me, too, so I ran.
Q: You used a flash? A: Yeah. It was in shadow, the street, near sunset, maybe right after.
Q: So how long in total were you there, witnessing all this?
A: I don't know. A minute, ninety seconds, something like that. It was pretty scary, crazy.
Q: And before you snapped your picture, did you happen to notice this man who you say was pulling on the victim?
A: He was pulling on the victim. Look, that's what the lady downstairs told me, too. She said stick by my story. I thought you guys were on the same side.
Q: The lady downstairs, Ms Wager?
A: Yeah, that was her.
Q: She told you to stick by your story? Which story?
A: That he was pulling down on the guy…
Q: Well, is that a story or is it what happened?
A: [Pause.] It's what happened. It's what I saw. The picture shows it plain as day – look!
Q: [Pause.] If he was holding on with two hands and his feet were off the ground… but you're saying you saw him pull down. That's your testimony?
A: Well, what else could it have been? He was in the mob… [Pause.] Yes, that's my testimony.
Melanie was crying. 'Cindy told them.'
'Cindy told them what, Melanie?'
'Who you were.'
'What? Why? Why did she do that?' But he knew. 'How did she…?'
'I called her, Kevin. Oh, God. I needed somebody, I just felt so bad, Kevin. I needed to talk to somebody…'
'I've told you a hundred times, Cindy is not your friend.' But this was a stupid discussion, he decided. 'Anyway, thanks for the tip-'
'Kevin, don't-'
'Don't! You tell me don't!'
She was crying. It tore at him, and he realized he still cared about her, didn't want to hurt her, but now she'd gone and done this…
'Kevin, I'm so sorry. I love you, I still love you and I can help you. You can come stay here-'
'Why would I need to come stay there, Melanie?'
'Cindy… Cindy told them where you live.'
He took the receiver away from his ear and stared at it. This was too bizarre.
Goddamn Cindy. Kevin, this is where the dick leads you. That one night with her – before he'd hooked up with Melanie – was turning into the worst mistake of his life. And it had been nothing but a casual one-nighter, nothing like what he had had with Melanie.
Letting go of the phone, leaving it off the receiver, he went to the window and looked down over the rooftops. He stepped out onto the fire escape, climbed the iron ladder holding on with his one good arm, up to the roof. God, it was hot. It was never this hot in San Francisco.
His head throbbed and this time he was willing to concede that it might be part hangover. He was dressed in a pair of old 501 Levi jeans, running shoes, a UCLA sweatshirt, and he moved in a crouch to the front of his building, looking over the ledge down onto Green Street. Two black-and-white police cars were pulled up at the curb, and he saw four men talking.
Again, a sense of disbelief. This could not be happening. Damn that Cindy. Hell hath no fury indeed…
Now the policemen split up, two of them going toward the front door, the other two separating, going around the two sides of the building. Surrounded.
Glitsky knew that he was on edge – a bad sign. He was chomping on ice cubes, sitting at his desk, warning off all would-be intruders with the evil eye as they appeared in his doorway.
Not very professional, he knew. It was the kind of body language he would use on occasion when he'd been a sergeant and wanted solitude, but now that he was the boss it had a different feel, a kind of self-aggrandizing…
Well, screw it, he thought. Things were starting to pile up – he'd known they would – but as was usually the case in emergencies, you knew it was going to whack you but you could never predict where or how hard. The answer was starting to turn out to be – really hard and almost everywhere.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night, maybe his biorhythms were low; Isaac, Flo, the whole Wager family; but events were hitting him the wrong way and he was struggling to contain himself.
The patrolmen had not been able to arrest Kevin Shea. The suspect was gone when they'd gotten there – he had left suddenly. The apartment manager had been cooperative and let them in and the back window had been open. There was a half-consumed cup of still-warm coffee on an end-table. The television set was still on. The phone was off the hook, the receiver lying on the bed. Someone had obviously tipped Shea off and he had gotten out with minutes to spare.
Contributing to Glitsky's ill humor was the impression he had taken away from the interview with Paul Westberg, which was that Elaine Wager's chat with the witness had affected the man's testimony. And there was a bigger issue – the reason he had felt compelled to visit Chief Rigby earlier in the morning: the district attorney's office, perhaps at the urging of Senator Loretta Wager, seemed to be opting for a political solution to the problems, and this was asking for more trouble than Glitsky cared to consider. They were building a case on Kevin Shea which would not allow for the fact that he might, in fact, be innocent.
Actually, on the basis of what he knew, Glitsky didn't think Shea was innocent. But he was uncomfortable with something that smacked of a witchhunt, and that's what Elaine Wager's interrogation (and Westberg's responses) had reeked of.
Evidently the powers had decided that Kevin Shea was the quintessential white racist, and that feeding him to the maw of the mob was the best answer to the complicated questions they were facing. That this was a fairly typical response didn't make Glitsky hate it any less.
He knew – Christ, he should, he embodied it – he knew that while all the bureaucracies in the land were meeting de facto quotas, providing hard, statistical support for the notion that the country was making progress toward integration and racial harmony, in reality the polarization was increasing every day. Glitsky was on the street enough – he saw it.
The truth was that racism was all around him – the enlightened white workers here in the Hall always referring to black people as Canadians, the black parents at his boys' schools who wouldn't let their kids play with white children.
On the surface everything was working. People were generally polite, proper, friendly. Now the thing that had become unfashionable – and in San Francisco the worst crime was to be unhip – was acknowledging the depth of the problem. Race? Please, didn't we do all that in the sixties? Better to pretend it wasn't really there. Certainly it wasn't an issue in San Francisco. Everybody accepted everybody else nowadays. This was the nineties. We solved all that stuff years ago. Get real.
And then, one sunny summer evening, a black man named Arthur Wade gets lynched.
And that brought him to the last cause of his ice crunching – the one person who was calling the infection systemic, Philip Mohandas, was abandoning any hope for understanding because he was taking it too damn far. There were so many other things, constructive things, he could do. He could be responsible. He could call for some restraint. Dialogue.
Instead, because Mohandas knew that nobody was going to arrest an African-American leader in the coming days for what amounted to sticks and stones, he would be excused for not doing the right thing. He had cause, he was a victim of his own rage. Old-fashioned laws didn't matter if you had a good enough reason. Ask the Menendez boys.
What most got to Glitsky was when the leaders who claimed to represent all the black people caved in to that temptation and then those failures were cited by white people as a justification – hell, the white side of Glitsky even felt it himself – for distrusting legitimate black motives and aspirations.
And now Mohandas was clearly breaking the law, openly calling for vigilantism, being allowed – even encouraged – to rant and vent to his heart's content. And his presence and rhetoric were raising the odds.
Glitsky felt it made no sense to let him inflame the situation but no one seemed to be inclined to try and stop it. Glitsky thought he wouldn't mind a shot at it – he had a few ideas that might get Mohandas's attention – but it wasn't his job. His job was homicide. All this other political crap was just that – crap.
But such sensible thoughts weren't doing his mood any good. He continued to crunch his ice, his eyes fixed ahead of him.
The telephone rang in his office. His receptionist being the same person who guarded his door – nobody – he picked the phone up with a more than usually unpleasant, 'Glitsky. Homicide.'
A pause, an almost inaudible sigh. 'Abe Glitsky.' He might have imagined it, but there was a sense of relief in the words, as though at great personal expense she'd broken through some psychic barrier. He recognized the voice instantly.
'Loretta…?'
'One word and you sound exactly the same.'
Glitsky, adrenaline still running, answered her words. 'No,' he said, 'I'm pretty different. You'd be surprised.' It sounded more hostile than he felt but the words were out, unchecked, and maybe some truth…
'Well, of course.' That deep throaty laugh. 'We're all different, Abe, we've all changed. But we're all still the same, too, deep down.'
This was as strange an opening as he could have imagined, bantering with his ex-lover who was now a United States senator as though they'd seen each other, perhaps intimately, a couple of days before.
Grabbing the styrofoam cup, a quarter inch of ice water, he drank it for time to get his bearings, then asked what he could do for her. This, he figured, had to be about Elaine.
'I was just in the mayor's office,' she said. 'When he mentioned… I mean, there aren't many Abe Glitskys…'
'I'm in the phone book, Loretta, always have been.' She seemed to hesitate, then went on as though he hadn't responded. 'But when Conrad brought you up… he said you were a lieutenant.'
Suddenly Glitsky's edge sharpened – a red anger flared. Loretta was looking for a toehold to satisfy her curiosity and he wasn't going to help her out. 'You thought you'd just call and catch up?'
This time the hesitation was more pronounced. 'You're still mad at me? After all these years?'
'I'm not mad at you at all, Loretta.'
'At what I did, I mean?'
'I'm still not sure I know what you did, or why you did it. But I can't say it's been a big deal the last, oh, couple of decades or so. I have a family…' His voice was winding down.
'I was sorry to hear about your wife…'
Glitsky's knuckles had stiffened around the telephone and he opened and closed his fingers. One of his inspectors, Carl Griffin, knocked on his doorjamb and got waved away. 'I just suddenly wanted to hear your voice, Abe. See if you were all right, how you were doing. Is that so odd?'
No answer.
He heard her let out a breath. 'All right, Abe. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'
She was hanging up. He hadn't meant to cut her off. He should have…
'Loretta!'
But the connection was gone.
Kevin Shea did not want to think about the jump he had taken to the roof next door. It looked maybe eight feet across but it felt like twenty – he would have to go back and measure it someday. If his life ever became normal again. Sure. He really didn't want to think about how far down it was. Far enough.
Fortunately the roof was flat and, like his own, had a low ledge. After he had landed, rolling over on his bruised arm and aching ribs, he made his way back to the ledge and lay down against it in the wide shady lane made by the early-morning sun. He heard the police come up to his roof next door, the one he had just abandoned. He heard them go down again.
After an endless ten minutes he had risked a glance over there. Okay, they were really gone. It seemed safe. Relatively.
The door that poked up through the roof was unlocked, and Shea limped his way down the four flights of stairs, seeing no one. On Green Street the police cars had pulled out. The curb was empty. He turned right and started walking, as normally as he could, away from his building.
Shea had grown up in suburban Houston, attended Rice University, majoring in economics, intending to get into some kind of management role in his father's company.
His mother's maiden name was Janine Robitaille, of the New Orleans Robitailles. She was a statuesque southern belle who favored beehive hairdos long after they were out of style. But on her, somehow, the hairstyle never looked dated – those piles of her dark hair lifted away from the creamy cameo of her face, framing its near-flawless lines, making her always appear taller than her husband Daniel.
His father – Daniel Shea – was half-owner, along with Fred Bronin, of Flexitech, a company that manufactured athletic accessories and supplies – batting and golf gloves, wristbands, orthopedic tensors, hard little rubber balls ('Flexits') that you held in your hand and squeezed to strengthen your grip.
When Kevin was twenty-two and just out of college, Daniel had come home early one afternoon after an extended sales trip to find his beautiful wife Janine in bed with his best friend and partner Fred Bronin.
Being a good ol' boy, Daniel's reaction perhaps should have been to take up the nearest gun and shoot them both, but he fooled them. Kevin's father had always had a streak of insecurity, a tendency to melancholy, and though he had raised a good family (two boys and a girl) and become, after a fashion, successful, he never quite believed in the worth of anything he accomplished, that it had any real meaning. And the double betrayal of a wife and best friend rocked him – so he turned the gun on himself instead.
In the aftermath, the Sheas' world and everything in it fell apart. Janine and Fred Bronin did not get married and live happily ever after. They had a bitter legal and personal battle over Flexitech, which Fred eventually lost because he had a stroke in the middle of it, leaving Janine with de facto ownership of the company. She, having never spent a moment of her life on business, subsequently orchestrated the company into bankruptcy in just under two years.
Meanwhile, Kevin Shea and his younger brother Joey had both appalled their Vietnam-era mother, as they had intended, by enlisting in the army. During their three-year hitch the boys had been trained in survival, weapons, strategy, then sent separately to Desert Storm. Kevin had done a lot of marching and sweating but saw no action. His brother Joey was inside the one bunker that had been destroyed by an Iraqi Scud missile – and had been killed. Kevin's mother and little sister Patsy blamed Kevin for talking Joey into enlisting in the army in the first place, and they had made it clear he was unwelcome in Texas forever, not that it had been his intention to go back there anyway.
Kevin Shea was completely alone. Sometimes he even felt he deserved to be.
Kevin had really made only one connection since he had gotten out of the army and decided to settle in San Francisco and go to graduate school on his GI Bill. There was an older guy – maybe late forties – named Wes Farrell, who was in his program at SFSU. Farrell and Kevin had done some drinking together, had a few semi-serious talks about life. Farrell had been a lawyer, raised his own family, then something had happened – Kevin didn't know what exactly – and he had quit. He didn't believe in the law anymore. Or justice. Or in most people much either.
They had both gravitated to studying history. Somehow it was more acceptable that all they were studying was in the past and so, presumably, couldn't effect anybody ever again.
They were, in their fashion, a good team. They also both liked to drink, which tended to help.
Shea was at a public phone in the Julius Hahn Playground at the southern edge of the Presidio. The smell of smoke was everywhere now in the heated air, even here in the shade of the cypresses, and he could hear sirens and see spires of smoke rising to his left in what he presumed was the Fillmore District and to his right, over the big hill, around what must be Clement.
'Wes? Kevin.' He didn't know what he was expecting – that Wes would hang up, yell at him, be astounded at the call? Something.
'Hey, Kev. What's happening?'
Kevin waited a long moment. Surely Wes knew all about his problem, about the Arthur Wade tragedy, what was going on in the city – he must be pulling Kevin's leg. 'So what's up?' he asked. 'Can you believe this heat?'
Then again, maybe not.
The mayor saw to it that Loretta Wager got a temporary office – after all, she was a U.S. senator – downtown at City Hall. It was on the second floor, up from the rotunda, down an echoing corridor, behind an anonymous door. And that suited her fine.
Her feet were sore. For some reason, her feet always hurt after plane flights. After she became president, she'd modify something on Air Force One that would…
Smiling, she settled for rubbing her bare feet. Her shoes were off under the desk. She leaned back in her chair, checked her watch. Twelve-fifteen. Elaine should be here any time.
She wasn't sure how she felt about the level of Elaine's ' involvement. On the one hand, it was good to be in the middle of things, in the loop, with a hand in the outcome. Elaine, thanks to Chris Locke, had already drawn the short straw – she was, single-handedly it seemed, handling the prosecution of Kevin Shea. And seemed to her mother to be doing a good job of it. The downside was that Elaine would shoulder a lion's share of the blame if anything went wrong. And this early in her career, that could hurt her. But, Loretta thought, that was the price of playing with the big boys.
Loretta had left a message at Elaine's as she was leaving Washington last night, and her daughter had called back within two hours, reaching her on the Airfone, filling her in on the status of events so that by the time Loretta had landed, she'd not only grasped those events but had had time to put the right spin on them in front of the media who had gathered to meet her at the airport.
Kevin Shea, she said, was the symbol of what was wrong, not only here in San Francisco but across America. The fact that he had not yet been apprehended, arrested, even located, was proof that the white man's system wasn't working, didn't work for the black man.
Her plan was simple: the crisis had come at a moment when she could use it to her political advantage. If she could now just keep the focus on apprehending Shea, Loretta might in fact have a forum that would take her a large forward step toward the Oval Office. And no smiles this time.
It really wasn't out of the question. She was the right age – only forty-seven and a young-looking one at that. There wasn't much doubt in her mind that within sixteen years there would be a woman candidate. There would also, she felt, be a black candidate. And if they were one and the same person…
Now, nearing the end of her first term as senator, she had an interesting and, she thought, ironic problem to solve, and her instinct had told her, as soon as it had arisen, that this crisis, if properly handled, could be the solution. For Loretta Wager had spent the better part of the past six years learning the historic lesson of survival in American politics – compromise. If you wanted to get ahead, especially in the white men's club that was the Senate, you had to move within an extremely narrow band of exposure.
Loretta had been good at that, had always been skilled with people. Unfortunately, the pre-campaign polls she'd conducted were beginning to confirm what she had already begun to suspect – while she'd retained and even added to her fund-raising rolls, her voting record, her perceived moderation had gone a long way toward alienating her so-called 'natural' constituency of African-Americans, and this turnaround had to be corrected or it could, and quite probably would, cost her everything she'd worked for up to now.
In her last campaign she had won eighty-seven percent of the African-American vote. Now the polls were giving her thirty-five to forty-five percent. Even if she picked up another one or two percent of the white vote she wouldn't win with those black numbers. She needed the perception that she'd reconnected with her community.
And Kevin Shea was the way to do it.
'Where's the staff?'
Her daughter smiled tentatively, closing the door behind her, putting down a brown paper bag. Elaine looked exhausted, her sculpted, angular face now blotched with worry, lack of sleep, and something else that Loretta didn't recognize.
But Loretta put her questions on hold and got up and came around the desk barefoot, her arms outstretched, letting herself be enfolded in her daughter's embrace. Elaine was several inches taller than her mother and held her tightly for a long moment.
They separated, stared at each other. Both of them sighed. Elaine said, 'Hi,' broke half a self-conscious smile, though, again, Loretta couldn't read all of it.
'Hi, honey. How you handlin' this?'
'Scared I guess. Other things.' A pause. 'I knew Arthur Wade, you know. He was at Boalt with me.'
'Just makes it worse, don't it? You get any sleep?'
'Not yet. I brought us some lunch.'
'I could eat. It's near four in DC. What'd you get us?'
When they were alone together, in private, there was a faint echo of Loretta's roots in their rhythms. Elaine took out and opened the white styrofoam cartons on the desk: cornbread, roast beef, mashed potatoes, greens, diet Cokes.
Finally Loretta asked, 'What other things?'
'Oh, office stuff.' She took a quick drink of her Coke. 'Chris.'
'Everybody had gone home. I was leaving, too. I'd just called you, you know? On the plane?'
Loretta, her face a mask, nodded. Her hands were folded on the desk before her. She'd forgotten her sore feet. Her daughter was continuing.
'… but Chris wanted me to stay. He said he needed me to help him sort this out, how we were going to handle it. I told him it was too late, I was…' She shook her head. 'I was too tired, I supposed, to be of much help, 'specially knowing what today was going to be like. And he said that wasn't it exactly.'
Knowing what was coming, Loretta closed her eyes. A long breath escaped. 'He needed you personally.'
'I'd never seen him like that, Mom. Really. I mean, this was my boss. We're both lawyers. We know all the rules about sexual harassment so we tiptoe around each other. And he's older, and married, I know all that. But this wasn't sex, or just sex. Mom?'
Loretta opened her eyes. 'I'm here, child. How far did he take it?'
Elaine looked at the floor. 'All the way,' she whispered, 'as far as it could go.' She exhaled, the tension of letting it out.
'You sayin' you and Chris Locke made love in his office last night?'
'Don't be mad at me. I-'
Loretta held up a restraining palm, cold fury in her face. 'It's not you, child, not you, I ain't likely gonna be mad at you.' It was her turn to sigh. 'But you are my baby. How could he…?'
'It wasn't just him… I guess I-'
'I know, I know,' Loretta said. 'I know how it goes.' She stared over the desk at her beautiful daughter. 'The man got the heat, don't he?'
'He's always been so distant, I mean, good and kind and my true mentor, but distant. And I know you and he… I know he helped you, politically. But it was like, I don't know, this whole thing – this lynching, all of it – it just suddenly seemed to break him down.' Elaine looked across the desk, asking for understanding. 'He needed me, Mom, he really did.'
'I believe you, honey. So where you now?'
Her head down. 'I don't know. I haven't slept. I feel guilty. Confused. I don't know what it meant, means…'
'How's he…?'
Elaine sighed. 'Back to business today, but what can you expect with all this going on?'
'And you think you might love him?'
'I don't know.' Their eyes met and held for an instant, and Loretta knew that here, self-protectively, her daughter wasn't telling the truth. God help her, she was in love with her boss, with DA Chris Locke.
Loretta took a bite of her now-tasteless food, a sip of her Coke. 'I just want you to think on one thing, hon. I'm not sayin' word one against you now. But you consider that it might be your boss hit on you when you, not him, when you weren't able to stand up-'
'He didn't force anything, Mom.'
'I'm not sayin' he did. I'm sayin' you are emotionally drained – your old schoolmate is the victim, for God's sake. You haven't slept all night. The city's burning and you're suddenly elevated to the man's right hand. You're the one who's vulnerable here, you're the easy mark, child. Your boss, Mister Locke, he ain't got a damn thing to lose.'
'It wasn't like that.'
'That's all I'm asking, that you be sure it wasn't, that's all. Because it could have been.'
'It wasn't.'
Loretta reached out her hand, a peace offering. Elaine looked at it for a moment, then put her own hand over her mother's halfway across the desk.
'I believe you,' Loretta said. 'I just don't want you hurt. You still ain't too big to get hurt.' She softened it with a smile. 'Now tell me about Kevin Shea, what you all got?'
Bowing to pressure brought to bear by the District Attorney, the mayor and a visit by the United States senator from California, the grand jury met in special session, adjusted its agenda and took only three hours deliberating before it issued an indictment on Kevin Shea for the murder of Arthur Wade.
Which had a double-edged effect on Glitsky's team – they were no longer responsible for making the decision about whether Shea himself had to be brought in; on the other hand, their work trying to identify the other members of the mob who might have been equally involved fell back under the mantle of normal procedure, with nominally still a high – but in practice a far lower – priority.
'I am… I was Mike Mullen's brother.'
Brandon Mullen had tried to make himself presentable – decent clothes and neatly combed hair – but he had failed. Glitsky thought he looked like hell, lips cracked and swollen, eyes bloodshot. Blood, too, had seeped through the sling he wore on his right arm.
Glitsky had farmed out the interrogations – he had Jamie O'Toole down the hallway with Marcel Lanier, Brandon Mullen here in Homicide A with his African-American rookie inspector Ridley Banks, Peter McKay in the B-room with Carl Griffin.
Later the inspectors would get together and see if they could make something out of the stories, see where they connected and where they fell apart, and later still Glitsky planned, if he got the time, to read all the transcriptions, and maybe even view the videotapes, but for now he was getting a feel, looking in on one, then the other.
It still wasn't one o'clock. Around the Bay Area, Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto were on fire. In the city itself, there were ongoing civic disturbances – Conrad Aiken, sensitive to terminology even in crisis, had decreed that riots should be called civic disturbances and thus, somehow, lessen their severity – in the Tenderloin, Hunter's Point, the Wester Addition, and down by City College. The homicide count in San Francisco for the day had risen from two to four, going on five – a sniper had killed a black man getting into his car on Fulton, and two white teenagers had been pulled from a convertible while they'd been stuck at a stoplight at 3rd and Palou. One of them was still alive though his condition was critical.
Glitsky had called his home four times, ordering Rita not to let the boys out, he didn't care what. He'd deal with getting them somewhere safe as soon as he could.
Now he stood in the witness room by the door behind Ridley Banks and looked across at Brandon Mullen with his hurt arm and cracked lips. He'd assigned Banks to Mullen because a week before, when Mike Mullen – the brother – had been a righteous innocent victim, Ridley had been the inspector on the case, going out and seeing the bereaved family. He'd be a sympathetic interrogator, on Brandon 's side.
Glitsky would go in and play bad cop. He was in the right mood for it.
'It started there, yeah,' Brandon Mullen was saying.
'The Cavern?' Glitsky, of course, knew this. He'd gotten the men's names from Jamie O'Toole the night before. It was why they were down here getting questioned.
'The Cavern, yeah. I mean, Petey and I…'
'Petey?'
'My cousin, Pete McKay, we were together, so…'
'And you had some drinks there. And cut your arm on a wine glass?'
This wasn't bad cop, it was pure belligerence, and Glitsky knew better. Mullen drew himself back on his seat, his head to one side, hostility now all over him.
'Look, man, I'm here voluntarily. I thought I could help. I don't even have a lawyer 'cause there's nothing I'm afraid of. Now you want to listen or hassle me or charge me with something? It's your choice.'
Ridley, the good cop, said they weren't planning to charge him with anything. 'We 're just trying to get a sense of what happened.' He glanced at Glitsky, a hand extended. Back off.
'That's what I'm trying to tell you.'
'Okay, go ahead.'
'I thought I should go, y'know. They were havin' this, like, memorial, so Petey and I thought we'd go down an' have a drink. For Mikey. How it would look if we didn't?'
'And what time was this?'
'Must have been seven, seven-thirty.'
'Okay.'
'So we drank a few pints.'
'Was the place filling up by then?' Glitsky, in a calmer tone, leaned casually against the door, with his arms crossed.
'I don't know. Half the bar, maybe. Fifteen or twenty heads spread around.'
Banks leaned over the table. 'Was Kevin Shea there?'
'I didn't notice.'
Glitsky again: 'You know Shea?'
Mullen's eyes went from Glitsky to Banks. 'To nod at, I guess.'
Banks picked it up. 'And then…?'
'And then we thanked Jamie and packed it up.'
'You went home?'
'To Petey's. Do a wake of our own.' He spread his hands, sincere. 'We knew we were gonna get good an' pissed and we didn't want to drive.' At Glitsky's expression Mullen said, 'Believe me or don't.'
Glitsky shrugged it off. 'So what happened to your arm?'
'Petey and I got to swinging at each other…'
'About what?'
Mullen's hands were still out on the pitted table. Now he turned them up, guileless, with maybe a touch of embarrassment. 'Who knows anymore? We were pretty drunk, Petey and me, mourning for Mikey. We sort of crashed through the sliding door.'
Glitsky came up to the table and put his mouth near Banks, whispering just loud enough. 'The famous Irish break-the-sliding-door ritual to lay the dead to rest.'
'It's what happened, like it or not.'
The lieutenant laid a hand on his inspector's shoulder, then turned and walked out the door without a glance back at the witness.
The idea was that Wes Farrell and Kevin Shea would meet at Saint Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of San Francisco and from there Farrell would drive them to his apartment on Junipero Serra down by Stonestown, where they would try to figure out a strategy.
The problem was that to get to USF, Kevin – on foot – first had to climb the second steepest hill in a city justly renowned for them, then had to find his way across the Western Addition, which was burning down. He had overlooked those details when he'd suggested USF as the meeting place and they were proving to be significant.
The temperature was an unbelievable, for San Francisco, ninety-four degrees. The air smelled of fire. The sky was a white-edged pewter plate pressing down on him. Kevin limped his way up the Divisadero escarpment, panting through his ribs, trying to ignore the throbbing in his useless arm, the remains of yesterday's alcohol still pounding behind his eyes, doubling his vision, forcing him to sit every three or four houses, resolve to continue, move another twenty feet up the hill.
He had to get something non-alcoholic to drink, put something in his belly or he wasn't going to get anywhere. But when he finally reached the top of the hill there was nothing resembling a fast-food place. As he would have known if he'd been thinking, if he'd been able to think. This area – with the view and, normally, the freshening breeze – was prime real estate, full of embassies and private mansions. Shea knew that the mayor lived up here, one of the senators.
It was the wrong place to be if you craved a slurpee.
He stood a minute at the crest, breathing hard, looking north – the million-dollar view from the Pacific to Berkeley. The Golden Gate. The Presidio. Alcatraz. Today none of it gleamed – the air was too bad. The water was the color of lead – poisoned and flat.
A siren wailed nearby and Kevin turned too quickly, bringing on another rush of dizziness. He collapsed into a planter box filled with rosemary, leaning back into the hedge. The patrol car passed, slowly over the hill, gunning it down into…
Were the cops staring at him? He'd forgotten how exposed he was. He forced himself up, walked a block west, then turned south again onto a tree-lined street, blessedly shaded. Under the boughs, and then farther on over the low, dun apartment buildings of the Western Addition, he could see the spires of Saint Ignatius not a half mile away as the crow flew.
But between it and where he stood, several plumes of smoke roiled upward. And directly in front of him, on California, he saw an overturned car and what looked like army troops in some loose formation along the sidewalks.
Then another black-and-white patrol car – or was it the same one? – turned into the street and was coming up toward him. For an instant he thought he'd step out, turn himself in and beg for an isolated cell. They could at least protect him, couldn't they?
Except that even here, already, stuck on one of the trees, was the wanted poster with his own face staring out at him, grimacing with the effort of holding up Arthur Wade. Or – for the first time now he saw it objectively – contorted in what could have been taken for hatred.
The numbers were printed on the bottom. One hundred thousand dollars. But, more chillingly, hand-lettered, the addendum – 'Dead or Alive.'
Hoping that the shadows had camouflaged him, he turned into the nearest walkway, a brick path between a manicured lawn leading to a shingled Victorian with a covered entryway, a front door with a large pane of inset cut-glass. Kevin curled himself back inside the recess.
The patrol car passed again, slowly. He didn't dare look.
A light came on overhead and the door to the house opened. A well-dressed woman in her mid-fifties, the television news droning in the background. 'Can I help… Oh…'
Recognition. She must have been glued to the tube all morning. Backing up a step, she got herself behind the door, putting something between them. She whispered through the crack. 'You're Kevin Shea.' Suddenly she was begging him, terrified. 'Please go away, I don't want any trouble.'
The door slammed. The bolt slammed to.
When he wasn't working the streets Philip Mohandas had arranged to base his operations out of a converted two-room storefront in the Bayview District, a mile or so north of Hunter's Point, only blocks from the apartment building Jerohm Reese called home.
Having been out on the barricades from the middle of the night until nearly noon, he was now taking a moment of rest on a low couch in the darkened room in the rear of the storefront. The coat to his business suit hung on the back of a folding chair, and he lay there breathing easily, his tie loosened the half-inch that allowed his prominent Adam's apple to pass unobstructed under his collar when he swallowed. His eyes were closed and a folded damp towel rested on his forehead. On his chest, his hands were together in an attitude suggesting prayer.
Philip Mohandas was not going to sleep very long. He never did, getting by, often for days at a time, on catnaps. He had two personal assistants – Allicey Tobain and Jonas, with the unfortunately phonetic last name of N'doum – who travelled with him at all times, scheduling his time and protecting his privacy. Now they were stationed outside his door on their own folding chairs.
In the outer room, copies of the Kevin Shea poster vied for wall space with several different color posters of Mohandas in mid-speech, invariably with one fisted hand held in the air – his trademark.
The afternoon sun was beginning to stream through the plate-glass windows. Newspapers littered the floor and the wide windowsills. A long, folding table had been set up along one wall, sagging under the weight of African Nation literature and cases of bottled water. Reporters, the occasional minicam crew, professional activists, and concerned citizens all ebbed and flowed through the outer doors, speaking – mostly – in low tones.
Out in the street, a late-model green Plymouth pulled to the curb and stopped. An attractive, diminutive black woman, from the looks of her maybe forty years old, opened the driver's door, squinted at the bright facade of the storefront, and started to come around her car.
One of the reporters recognized her. 'My God, that's Senator Wager.' In the back, Allicey Tobain knocked once and pushed open the door she'd been guarding.
'What is that woman doing here?' Mohandas swung his feet to the ground, wiped his face quickly with the damp towel, then stood and let Allicey arrange his coat. 'I have got nothing to say to her. She is in the wrong camp.'
His assistant touched his hairline briefly with a comb, correcting it, then without a word handed him two Tic-Tac mouth fresheners.
Mohandas was frowning, apparently trying to find an advantage in this. 'Did she call?'
'No calls.' Allicey pulled an imaginary strand of lint from his coat. 'No word at all. She's making a play.'
'But what for?'
Allicey crossed to the door and flipped the light switch. A tall, big-boned, ebony-skinned woman with an enormous bust, her hair done in corn rows, she was wearing black pants, sandals, and a black, red and yellow dashiki cinched at the waist by a gold thong.
She straightened his coat again and ran a finger over the side of his face. 'Votes,' she said. 'Don't forget that, Philip. Votes.'
'Senator, how are you? What a wonderful surprise! Welcome.'
Mohandas wasn't big but his voice boomed, cutting through all the chatter. Flanked by Allicey and Jonas, he came forward, his arms outstretched. The front-office crowd parted, television cameras rolled, and the two leaders embraced, only to be interrupted by a reporter.
'Senator, what brings you down here? Isn't this an unexpected call?'
'An unexpected pleasure.' Mohandas held onto Loretta's hand, both of them now turned to face the camera.
'I'm here to help,' Loretta said. 'If I can. Any way that I can.'
Mohandas intoned a deep amen.
'This community has suffered not only the tragic loss of one of our brightest stars, not only the insult of the horrible crime itself, but the far deeper and meaningful loss of abandonment by the very power structure that we are struggling, against great odds, to work within.'
Loretta took a moment to include the crowd in her vision, then raised Mohandas's hand halfway in a conscious imitation of his own trademark gesture.
"This is a time, and I think Philip would agree, that we African-Americans, as well as all people of color, must unite – not only in justifiable anger but to create out of this chaos some spirit of hope and renewal, some sense that now, finally, we are going to make changes that will make a difference in the way we live, how we're treated, the voice we have in how things are done!'
A chorus of 'amen' and 'right on,' through which the senator picked her way, with Mohandas, to the back door, flanked again as though by magic by Allicey and Jonas.
Which closed on their passage inside.
'You want to just make noise, Philip, or you want to get somethin' done here?'
All alone with her in the tiny, hot room, Mohandas didn't feel like he needed to listen to a lecture from an Oreo. 'I get things done, Senator. I haven't sold anyone out.' He jerked his head sideways. 'Those are my people out there. They have heard enough lies, they know who is not lying to them, and that's me, Senator, that's me.'
'I'm not lying to anybody, Philip. I haven't sold anybody out.'
Mohandas showed his teeth briefly, then pulled at his collar. His stock in trade was certainty. He was right and that was the way it was. 'That doesn't seem to be how many of us are reading it.'
'Then you're reading it wrong.' This was the problem she had flown out here to solve. And she wasn't going to succeed facing off against Mohandas, getting into a shouting match. He didn't play on her field, so he couldn't understand. She had more knowledge, and she had to use it. 'Wait. Let's stop.' She stepped closer to him. 'Out there, just now, that was no lie. I came down here to help if I can. And I think I can, Philip. I can help you.'
'I'm listening.'
'Why don't you talk instead. Tell me what you want.'
This, she knew, was the crux. If she could get him away from the generalities that marked his agenda. From the rhetoric. 'You know what we want, Senator…'
She smiled at him. 'How about Loretta, Philip? Loretta, not Senator. And I don't know what you want. I don't know the specifics. If you could have anything you want, what would it be? Because listen to me – now's the time you can get it.'
Mohandas stopped pacing the small room, pulled at his collar again, then sat in the folding chair, motioning Loretta to the couch he'd napped on. 'The African Nation platform is clear.'
'Philip, when you say you want a voice, you want representation, the end of oppression, you want the laws applied fairly – who doesn't? But then you go on to say you want your own separate system, and that just don't fly. Can't you see that? The numbers aren't there, and the numbers drive the dollars. You want to take over a state? Move the people back to Africa? You want a black Israel on some sand in Africa? That what you want?'
Mohandas was sweating as the heat built in the room, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. 'We want it here. We can get it here.'
'You tell me how, Philip.'
'I'm talking about equality under the law, I'm talking about our entitlements, our rights.'
Loretta shook her head in frustration, found herself raising her voice. 'I'm talking money, Philip. I'm talking federal funds. Today, here and now. For this good cause. This situation can get it for us, for you…'
Mohandas walked to the closet door, listened through it, then came back in front of where Loretta sat. 'All right, Senator,' he said, 'talk to me about money.'
Kevin knew he wasn't going to make his meeting with Wes Farrell at USF.
The realization came to him after he had crossed California Street and came out of the trees. Now there was no cover at all, just apartment houses on both sides of the one street in the Addition that didn't appear to have community problems just at this minute. He was halfway down the block when a police car turned the corner up ahead, coming toward him.
Ducking into another apartment building's paper-strewn entry-way, he looked back where he'd come from. Another police car. Two on the one street, closing in.
The door was locked but there were six mailboxes and he pushed all the buttons beneath them. The front door buzzed and he pushed it open as the cars passed behind him.
'Yes? Who's there?'A raspy male voice from up the stairs.
'Sorry. Wrong place.'
Kevin opened the door again, closed it loudly for effect. But he stayed inside the building in the hallway, thinking now what?
Apartment 3, on the ground floor in the back, had its mailbox stuffed with envelopes. The residents were either very popular or on vacation. Kevin had to hope it was the latter. He tried the old credit-card-in-the-doorjamb and, to his amazement, it worked. For the first time that day, he almost laughed. Maybe his luck was turning, but he thought it still had a hell of a long way to go before it got to good.
He tried Wes's number first. Ten rings, no answering machine. Wes was probably waiting for him less than a mile away. Maybe he should just call the cab and make a run for it. What were the odds that some random cabbie would know who he was? Still, credit card or no, he couldn't bring himself to risk it. This seemed like a time for caution – one hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money for a cab driver or anyone else. He was pacing the apartment, limping a little, trying to decide – footfalls on hardwood.
He froze as he heard a knock on the door, then a voice. 'Dave? Dave, you home? Anybody in there?'
He supposed there had to be places in his body that weren't cramping, but he didn't know where they were. He barely dared breathe.
The shadow of feet under the crack in the door remained. Kevin fought back the adrenaline, the pain, lack of oxygen, fear – he couldn't let himself pass out. He felt on the brink of it.
The neighbor was stubborn. He'd heard something – Kevin pacing? – and wanted to be sure. So he stayed and listened.
Please, Kevin thought, please God, don't let him have a key.
The neighbor was gone. Kevin gave it another five minutes, stretching, trying to get some relief to his burning muscles, then tiptoeing across the room and lowering himself into the thick upholstered chair – the couch was closer to where he 'd frozen but it looked like it might creak. Besides, the phone was on an end-table next to the chair.
With infinite care he raised the receiver and punched some numbers. Maybe Wes had given up on him and gone home.
Nope.
He put his head back and closed his eyes.
It was mid-afternoon.
'So what do we have?'
Glitsky was in a booth with three of his inspectors – Carl Griffin, Ridley Banks and Marcel Lanier. They were having an informal meeting convened by the lieutenant at Lou the Greek's, the cop and DA watering hole across the street from the Hall of Justice. You got to Lou's either through an alley and an unmarked side door or down a stained, carpeted stairway dark enough not to show what was making it smell that way.
Lou's was what it was – they poured a good shot cheaply. The food was usually tasty, hearty, possibly nutritious. Lou's wife was Chinese and Lou, of course, was Greek, and you'd often get a lunch special like avgolemo soup with won-tons or Kung-pao chicken moussaka. They'd had a special for years that they called 'Yeanling Clay Bowl' and no one could say for sure what was in it.
But the main thing about Lou's was that the place was close to the Hall of Justice, you could hang there and not be bothered, there weren't many citizens around, and known reporters and other members of the media didn't seem to get the same personalized service from Lou as law-enforcement personnel did – just one of those hard-to-explain flukes of nature.
'They were all there,' Ridley Banks said.
Glitsky and his men were nearly alone in the place, and the lieutenant was still having a hard time keeping his patience. Of course they – the witnesses they'd interrogated – had all been there. They all admitted that much. But not during the lynching. The inspectors' job was to put them on the street during the violence and it didn't look to Glitsky like that would be happening in the near future.
'I say we just arrest them and put the squeeze on.' Carl Griffin was the least sophisticated homicide inspector on the force, but that didn't mean all his ideas were bad.
'We got a problem with arrests,' Glitsky said.
'Which is…?' Lanier, sardonic, leaning back in his flight jacket, was drinking a glass of red wine.
'Which is enough space upstairs,' Glitsky said. He took a sip of his tea. 'Boles says we're full up and getting worse. He's trying to get Rigby to agree to give citations for everything up to and including armed robbery.'
Griffin raised bloodshot eyes. 'Are you serious?' Humor was lost on Griffin, and Glitsky explained that he was exaggerating but not by much – only about the armed-robbery part.
Ridley Banks spoke up. 'But we are talking 187 here.' Section 187 of the California Penal Code is murder. '… if these guys were in the action, it was murder.'
Glitsky sucked his teeth. 'Well, that's the other thing. It's why we're down here at Lou's instead of my plush private suite. I don't want to get overheard and misconstrued.' His subordinates waited. 'You might have noticed we've also got a political situation developing.'
Lanier sipped wine, made little swirls out of some vagrant drops with his index finger on the table. 'The Kevin Shea thing.'
Glitsky nodded. 'The official line is that he's the only one who did it.'
Banks, the young red-hot, sat forward. 'But there… I mean, it was a mob…'
'We got any witnesses saying it was?'
'O'Toole. Didn't he?' Banks looked at Lanier, who shook his head no.
'O'Toole never went outside.' Lanier kept his face straight. 'Stayed in the bar. Poured drinks. And the other clowns, Mullen and McKay, they went home before it started, isn't that right, Abe?'
'The facts as we know them.'
Griffin spoke up. 'The photographer, what's his name?' The lieutenant inclined his head a quarter inch. 'Okay, him. One guy. Westberg. Point is, the mob's too unwieldy or something. God's mouth to the chief's ear, boys, they want Shea and only Shea. Symbolism or something like that. The mayor wants him, Rigby's going along, Locke's leading the charge. We get Shea and the whole problem is solved.'
Lanier continued his doodling. 'Okay, so? We bring 'em Shea.'
'We can't find him. Guy's got any brains, he's long gone anyway,' Glitsky said. 'The thing is, if we do come across some hard evidence that any of these yo-yo's – McKay, O'Toole, any of them – were part of it, I'm not much inclined, personally, that is, to just let it slide, and I wanted to convey that message to all of you.' He looked around at his inspectors. 'When things cool down, after things cool down, I don't much cotton to the idea of getting called on the carpet because we didn't pursue our investigations thoroughly. This is the kind of political' – he paused, seeking the right word – 'machination that has a way of coming back to bite at you, and I just wanted to bring it all, up front, out on the table. Okay?'
Lanier raised his finger. 'You don't think Shea was in it?'
'I'm not saying that. I've got no reason to believe that. I've seen the picture, too. It's just when things get this convenient…' He shrugged. Everybody knew what he was talking about. 'It was probably him and all the others, so yeah, we break him and we get the rest. But I'm a little worried none of our boys back in there seemed to know him.'
Banks put in, 'Mullen said he knew him to nod at.'
Glitsky's scar stretched between his lips. 'I heard that, Rid. I wouldn't build my house on it. After today, the whole city knows him to nod at. Also, either of you guys' – he motioned to Banks and Griffin – 'did either of you get an offer to take a look at the cuts on Mullen and McKay? You might want to talk to their doctors. Maybe pay a call on McKay's house and see about that sliding door.'
Lanier shot the remainder of his wine, swallowed. 'You're saying go after these guys, aren't you, Abe? Whatever anybody else tells us?'
'We got, say, a minimum of ten guys who had to be accessories here. Let's say I'd like to find at least a couple of them.'
'And Shea?' This was from Griffin.
'Sure. Shea, too. See you all upstairs.'
Finally, the wind came back up, the fog was rolling down Bryant Street and it had gotten back to the usual – cold. Glitsky pulled his jacket closer around him to keep it from blowing open. His eyes were bleary from fatigue, his head heavy.
In the lobby of the Hall of Justice, Sheriff Boles had set up a makeshift area for processing arrests – they were in fact giving out citations, just like parking tickets, to some of the scores of people who'd been arrested in the civic disturbances since the day before – for looting, mayhem, trespass, battery, whatever. Boles had persuaded Dan Rigby, the police chief, to let him sweep for outstanding warrants on other charges, after which – if the person being charged had none – they were to be processed on the citations and released.
The place was bedlam and Glitsky pushed his head further down within his jacket and made for the elevators. He had to get upstairs to his office, call Rita again, check on his boys. He also had to get some sleep sometime. He had no idea when that would be. He knew that the strands of his temper were beginning to fray, and soon his judgments would begin to suffer. The fatigue was weighing him down.
But the elevator opened and there, facing him, stood Elaine Wager. 'I was just in your office, Abe. Nobody knew where you were.' Was there a rebuke there? A warning? Was someone really watching? 'You got a minute?' she asked. 'We can ride back up.'
'Sure." There was no point in arguing it. He'd do later what he'd felt he absolutely had to get done now. He couldn't call his sons.
He had to come when bidden. It was the job.
He squeezed in next to her as the usual press of bodies piled into the eight-foot-square box – perhaps twenty people of all races, a microcosm of the city outside. The doors closed and all sounds from the lobby vanished, exaggerating the silence in the elevator. There was a palpable tension in the enclosed space, suspicion and mistrust choking off the usual chatter.
When the door opened on the third floor, Elaine nudged Glitsky. 'My office.' He'd thought they were headed up to homicide on the fourth, but Elaine was making the call and he tagged along behind her.
Her room was the standard cubicle used by the assistant district attorneys – two desks, as many ancient file cabinets as would fit, a coffee maker, two grimy windows with Charming View of Freeway Overpass #4. Elaine waited at the door for Glitsky to pass her, then closed it behind them.
Glitsky parked his rear on Elaine's office mate's desk. Whoever normally sat at that desk wasn't there now. Elaine turned, slumping slightly, and, to ease the tension, Abe found himself asking if she'd had as much fun on the elevator coming up as he had.
Elaine gave him a weak smile. Like him, she was exhausted and the fatigue was showing. 'This is so unreal,' she said. ' San Francisco just doesn't have this kind of problem.'
'You know how many unions we've got? The PD? I'll tell you. Three. We've got one for white cops, one for women cops, one for black cops. Even as we speak, the gay cops are lobbying for another one.'
'But you all work together, I mean like we do, you and me. People get along, do their work, right?'
'Generally. Things spill over.'
'But not like this.'
'It's a logical enough extension. People stop being just people first, well…' Glitsky shrugged, standing up, stretching his back. 'But you didn't look me up to talk about this.'
Elaine sighed. For an instant Glitsky saw her mother in her eyes, something almost more familiar in her expression, in the shape of her face. He rubbed his own eyes while she agreed with him – she hadn't looked him up to talk about the general situation. She paused, considering. 'Can this be off the record?'
'What's to be on it?'
Glitsky was vaguely aware of his reputation as a hardass. He supposed it wasn't totally undeserved since he tended to make a point of being straight with people. At least he didn't sugarcoat or dissemble, and with the right look on his hatchet face, he knew he could tell someone that he loved and cherished them and come across as abrupt and cold. It had happened with Flo.
But Elaine had thicker skin than he'd supposed. She gave him a look, the start of another smile, this one with a few more watts, and he finally nodded. 'Okay, sure. Off the record. What?'
'My mother…'She stopped. 'Well, no, not… not her. I don't want to bring her into this.' She bit her lip, looking beyond Glitsky out through the windows.
'Isn't she already?'
'Not exactly. That's not what I want to talk about. What I guess I mean is this whole thing.'
Glitsky nodded again. 'It's unusual, I'll give you that.'
'It's my career,' she said.
'It could be. You're right.'
'I've got to know if there's no case.'
'Elaine, you're making the case,' he told her.
'I know. I'm supposed to be. I'm assembling the facts.'
Silence.
'I just want to keep the door open between us.'
Glitsky took in a breath and walked over to the windows. The fog was thin and he could see some spires of smoke still rising across the Bay in Oakland and, he supposed, Richmond. Suddenly, seeing Elaine's direction here, he felt his anger stir again – it seemed to be on a steady slow simmer, ready to boil at any time.
He turned to face her. 'You know, Elaine, you're a charming person and I think you're probably also trying to do the right thing here, but I really hate getting bullshitted and especially today I don't have much stomach for it.'
Her eyes went wide. 'But I'm not-'
'You're covering your ass, Elaine, and okay, we'll leave it off the record, but my door has always been open. We don't have to make special arrangements to keep doors open.'
'This isn't a special arrangement.'
'No? Funny, then, that here we are in a locked room and off the record.'
'I just didn't want to be interrupted. I didn't want Chris…'
Glitsky pointed a finger. 'Now we're getting somewhere. You didn't want Chris…?'
'But he's my boss. He gives me my assignments.'
'So do them. But don't come around me playing both sides. Either you're on his agenda – maybe your mother's, too, I don't know about that – or you're being a righteous DA. Whichever one you pick is your call.'
'I don't want to make a mistake, Abe. I can't.'
Glitsky's scar stretched white through his lips. 'I wouldn't worry about it. I make them all the time. But I'll tell you one thing that makes life easier.'
'What's that?'
'Do things in order. There's a way it's supposed to get done so everybody's time doesn't get wasted.' Glitsky turned the doorknob, then stopped. 'You know, for what it's worth, I got no bleeding heart for Kevin Shea. I'm just more comfortable doing things by the book. You go different, you see too many bad guys walk when the smoke clears.'
'You do think he's it, then?' This seemed to hearten her.
Glitsky, risking a charge of assault, sexual harassment and general political incorrectness, reached out a hand and rested it for a moment on Elaine's shoulder. 'I'm not trying to get him off. What I want is what you want – a righteous case on him. And my door's always open. Period.'
'Is anybody with you?'
'Kevin, is that you? Can you talk a little louder?'
'Yes, it's me, and no, I can't. Can you hear me?'
'Enough, I guess. Where are you? Are you all right?'
'I asked is anybody with you?'
'No.'
'Are you sure?'
'Kevin…'
'Because I need some help, Melanie. I need serious help, and I don't need Cindy Taylor or anybody else – damn.'
'What?'
He whispered even lower. 'There's a guy upstairs. He's moving around again. I just heard the door close.'
'What?'
'Wait. Just hold on. I can't talk. Just a minute.'
He heard the steps approach again, saw the faint shadow of feet under the doorway. The good neighbor upstairs was a model citizen, no doubt about it, keeping an eye on the empty apartments when people went on vacation. There was another knock on the door. 'Hey, anybody in there?'
In the phone, Melanie's voice. 'Kevin?'
He didn't let out a breath. Melanie would either hang up or not. He'd told her to wait. Maybe she would.
Finally, after maybe two minutes, the shadows under the door disappeared, and he heard the retreating steps. He waited another ten seconds, made sure, whispered into the phone. 'You still there?'
'Yes. Kevin, what's happening?'
'Can you come get me?'
A pause. 'Sure. Where are you?'
A problem. He didn't know where he was. There were a couple of magazines on the table in front of the couch and he risked rising and walking a couple of steps. The tiny noises he made – a spring giving in the chair, a squeaky floorboard – might as well have been bombs going off. He read the address off one of the magazines. ' One forty-eight Collins Street, number three. You know where that is?'
'No.'
Great.
'Western Addition. A block or two south of California. You might have to go around. There's some National Guard…'
'All right, I got it. I'll find you.' It surprised him. She was being all business. No panic in her voice. Who was this Melanie? She repeated the address.
There was another knocking now, urgent, behind him. Kevin turned, holding the phone. There, seven feet away from him, looking in through the ground-floor window, was, he presumed, the good neighbor from upstairs, still pounding on the window, yelling.
'Mel!' Thank God, she hadn't yet hung up. 'Forget Plan A. Don't move. Stay home 'til I call you. And don't call anybody.'
'Kevin, what's…?'
'Just stay home and wait, Mel. They found me again.'
He wondered where the cold had come from. It was the one thing about San Francisco he just hadn't been able to assimilate, how one minute it could be beautiful, sunny, clear, and ten minutes later, or three blocks away, you were freezing. Now, suddenly, it was in the fifties, the wind whipping wisps of fog through the depressing rows of apartment buildings.
On this street, whichever one it was, three adjacent buildings had burned, and the acrid smoke hit him with every turn of the wind, making him cough, tearing at his poor sore ribs.
He had no idea how far he 'd run – maybe five blocks, over three fences. The good neighbor wasn't much inclined to give up the chase, but finally Kevin felt like he'd lost him. The chase had had the salubrious side effect of bringing him closer to USF, through the worst of the Addition.
But so what?
He doubted Wes Farrell had waited all afternoon for him there – but he would check. Certainly he hadn't been back home. Kevin had called Wes's place when he'd woken up after crashing in the borrowed apartment – it had been going on five o'clock, and there'd been no response, no answering machine.
Ergo Melanie.
A truly last resort, but she 'd have come through for him on that last call if he could have stayed in the apartment and waited. He was sure of it. And that was a good sign. It could be the entire world wasn't lined up against him.
But for now his lungs ached from the run, pinched from the coughing. He wondered if one of his ribs was broken, if a broken rib could puncture a lung, if a punctured lung could suddenly collapse, bring on a coma…
He was coming up to a bigger cross-street, with traffic flowing. Geary? Was normal life going on someplace in the city? He found it difficult to believe but there was evidence of it right in front of him.
Shivering, coughing some more, he crossed with the light at Masonic, found another phone, and called Melanie again, telling her where he was. It was only another couple of blocks up to St Ignatius. Melanie knew where that was. She'd meet him there in fifteen minutes.
He sat in a pew in the back of the church, pretending to pray. He hadn't prayed much in the past five years, since the Houston diocese had refused to bury his father – a suicide – in the family plot in which his father, Kevin's grandfather, had been buried. Kevin's faith, never particularly strong, wavered after that. In the army, in Kuwait, after Joey's cleaning up on the Road of Death, it disappeared entirely.
But his hands were folded. He was on his knees. A priest came up the center aisle and nodded at him, blessedly without recognition, then he stopped, paused – about to say something? – thought better of it and moved along. Kevin let out a breath.
The door opened again. Please, he thought, don't let it be the priest coming back. He was too weary to run any further.
Melanie Sinclair slid in beside him. It startled him. Underneath her concern, the fear in her eyes, she looked radiant, alive, beautiful. Had he really dropped her? He must have been out of his mind. But she'd been, had seemed, such an uptight pain in the ass. He thought he remembered that – was sure he did – but the plain fact was that right at that moment he had never in his life been so glad to see anyone. Ever.
'I think you ought to get out of here.'
She was driving and he was slumped in the passenger seat, his face below the window line.
'I might do that,' he said.
'Kevin, you should do it…'
He glanced over at her, a look she'd seen before. 'Let's give the should a rest, huh, Mel. What do you say?'
Biting her lip, she almost, instinctively, corrected him again, telling him her name was Melanie. Not Mel. But she found she really didn't care if he called her Sweet Sue. She half-smiled at that, almost said it to him, could just see herself saying, 'Hey, Kevin, why don't you just call me Sweet Sue?'
'What's funny?' he asked.
'Nothing.'
He didn't pursue it, but Melanie wanted to make sure the air was clear. 'I didn't mean should like I knew, Kevin. I meant should like it seems like it might be a better idea to get away until this blows over a little. You're just too visible here. I could drive you right now. Just keep going.'
'You'd do that?'
She looked over, biting her lip again. 'Yes, I would.'
He took that in, satisfied. 'Except then I'm really on the run. If I'm caught…'
'But you're on the run now.'
This is true.'
They stopped at a burned-out streetlight where a policeman was directing cars through. 'Don't keep too low,' she said. There was more National Guard presence here, camouflage trucks lining the street, the traffic coming down to single file.
Kevin straightened up slightly. 'You're right.' He waved, smiling at a few of the soldiers. 'We're having some fun now.'
'Don't overdo it, okay. Please.'
He came back to her. 'You remember Farrell…?'
'Yes.' Wes, another unrepentant partyer, had been a sore point between them. 'Well, I figure my only decent shot is to get the story out on what really happened. Anything else – running, turning myself in, whatever – anything else and when they do get me I'm totally screwed.'
'What can Wes do?'
'Wes is a lawyer. He can get through.'
'He's not anymore.'
'Sure he is. He knows the ropes. He can do it.'
'Will he?'
'Sure. I'm sure he will.'
'And then?'
Then at least I figure I've got a chance. I just didn't do this, Mel, you know.'
She reached across and laid a hand on his, pulled it away. She wasn't pushing anything. She was helping him. He didn't need complications. 'I do know. I'm just saying I think it's a big risk, that's all.'
He shrugged. 'At this point, everything's a risk. This whole thing's gotten so out of hand. And then, if I run… anyway, I don't want to run.'
'It would look like an admission that you'd done it?'
'Yeah, that, I guess. But more because it just feels wrong. I mean, I know the truth. I know what happened. I was there, Mel.
And that's got to come out. What really happened. It's not just me.'
'And you think Wes Farrell is the man who's going to get you in a position to clear yourself?'
'I think Wes Farrell's a pretty good human being for a lawyer.'
She couldn't help herself. 'A lawyer who drinks too much and has a pretty low view of life, including his own.'
Kevin almost snapped back but held himself. This wasn't the time to get into it with her. She was there for him now. What was more important than that? He took her right hand from the steering wheel and held it on the seat between them. She looked down at it, smiled and took his hand firmly.
'Not here,' Kevin said.
They had swung by Wes Farrell's place and the 'pretty good human being for a lawyer' still wasn't there. Melanie was of the opinion, and Kevin couldn't deny it outright, that he was out getting drunk someplace. He had tried joking her out of it – 'doesn't mean Wes isn't a nice person' – but Melanie wasn't much in the mood for jokes, and, truth be told and though it had been his own protective reaction to stressful situations for as long as he could remember, Kevin wasn't either.
Small wonder that he couldn't shake the feeling that the whole damn city was after him. The elderly lady in whose doorway he'd huddled had recognized him earlier. The cruising cops had also seemed to. Maybe the guy upstairs from the apartment he'd borrowed.
Isolated occurrences? Maybe. Maybe not. These things had happened to him. It wasn't as though somebody might know who he was. Somebody – random and disinterested – already had.
And now Melanie was turning them into the drive-thru lane – into a line of cars – front and back, get out of here – at a hamburger place off 19th Avenue.
'Not here!' he repeated. 'What are you doing?'
'We've got to eat,' she said. 'We're not going inside.'
'Inside isn't the point. We've got to-'
All at once it was too late to back out. Somebody had pulled in behind them. Now it was either sit in Melanie's car or get out and make a run for it. But a run for what? And what were the odds on going unrecognized out on the street? Were they better than this, where he was a sitting duck? Did he want to bet on it? Bet his life? Hers, too?
It was not yet dusk. There was no problem with visibility. He honestly didn't think he'd get two blocks.
Twisting his head from side to side he saw a seemingly endless procession of faces everywhere – in the car in front of him (the backseat folks turning around – Why?), behind them, crossing at the intersection, up and down the sidewalk – and all of them with eyes focused on him.
Casual glances or studied stares – they were all directed at him. Melanie had picked a popular place on a crowded street close to the dinner hour. It had to be only a matter of time before somebody recognized him.
He slumped down, far into the seat. Melanie rolled her window down. 'What do you want?' she asked.
'I want to get out of here, that's what I want.'
She glanced into her rearview mirror. 'Not possible,' she said. 'What's your second choice?'
Her window was still open. 'You know, Melanie, I'd like to, but I can't seem to get myself feeling too casual about all this-'
'I'm not casual,' she said. 'But we have got to eat and the fact is that nobody's looking at you, not here.'
'Everybody's looking at me!'
The driver behind them honked and Melanie waved a conciliatory hand out her window, then ordered two double cheeseburgers, fries, shakes. She pulled forward. 'I can understand how you'd feel that, Kevin, but I don't think it's true.'
They were still in the line, hemmed in, the cars edging forward slowly. It was going to take at least five minutes to go around the building and get to the service window. 'It's heartening you don't think that, Melanie, but if you're wrong, I'm dead.'
'I'm not wrong. You have to trust me-'
'I have to trust my instincts. They've gotten me this far.'
She looked over at him. 'For the record, Kevin, I've had something to do with getting you this far. I understand… you saw a man get lynched last night, for God's sake. Who wouldn't be scared? I'm scared, too. But I think I'm seeing things a little more clearly.'
He had to admit he was on the edge of panic and she seemed almost creepily calm. 'Maybe you're right but-'
'I'm only sure that right here is as safe for us as anywhere in the city, and you're the one who wants to stay here and make your stand, so I'd say the best advice is, get used to it.'
They inched forward. Honks behind them – people talking loud, laughing, yelling – off to the side out Melanie's window, but no one seemed to be moving toward them. Kevin looked down and put a hand to his forehead. 'How are we getting out of this?' he asked.
'It'll look better on a full stomach,' she said deadpan.
Melanie had been right. She had played a major role in getting them to where they were right now… no one had recognized him, the drive-thru burger joint had been an inspired choice, and, right or wrong, things did look better on a full stomach. He took in this woman sitting across from him and was washed with an intense gratitude.
Most importantly, she had believed him, believed in him.
He had always suspected there was more to her – much more – than he'd seen when they'd been 'dating,' but something about their chemistry, or his own guilty conscience, or both, had made it all, finally, futile. The relationship wasn't going to work, not under the ground rules they'd tacitly established, so he'd decided he had to move on.
But now his dire situation had shifted the balance between them. They were partners, equals; And this realization suddenly made him feel like a cheat. He'd been unfair to Melanie by not being up front with her when they'd been going out, by not telling her that before they had gotten together he had slept – once, one night only – with her friend Cindy Taylor. Now he felt he at least owed Melanie the truth – both about him and her supposed 'best friend.' She hadn't just 'come on to him,' as he had said.
So he told her.
And now Melanie, who had weathered his flight and panic attack with stoic calm, now Melanie had balanced her half-full milkshake cup on the steering wheel and was, quietly, crying.
The early-evening sun peeked through the low cloud layer, highlighting the red in her dark hair, the glistening wetness on her cheeks. 'I don't believe it,' she said. 'Cindy?'
'I thought I ought to tell you.'
'I don't know why… why didn't you feel you should tell me before, when we were… I mean when I thought we were together.'
'We were together, Melanie.'
She almost laughed. 'Sure. God, what a fool I was. You must have both been laughing at me the whole time.'
'No. It wasn't like Cindy and I were an item. It was one night, before you and I got together.'
'But she said… she told me-'
'She lied, Mel.'
She turned toward him. 'Why didn't you tell me?'
'What would that have done, Mel, except hurt you? Besides, I half-figured Cindy had told you anyway and you knew and decided it wasn't that big an issue.'
Melanie threw him a long glance. 'Nice try, Kevin…'
'No, I guess that wouldn't have been your response.'
'I guess not.'
The windows were down a quarter inch, the wind whistling through. 'Besides,' Kevin said, 'I wanted you. If I told you about Cindy, I figured no chance.'
She looked at him again, not knowing quite what to believe. 'Maybe you just wanted somebody-'
'If I'd just wanted any old body I would have hung with Cindy or somebody else who might, frankly, have been a little easier to deal with.'
'Oh, that's nice. Thanks very much.'
Kevin turned toward her. 'Come on, Mel, what do you want me to say? I thought you were great. You think I felt anything about Cindy? Not likely. All right, so you and I didn't work – that doesn't mean it wasn't honest. I tried, we both tried, we just didn't fit.'
'But we did, I thought we did. We could have.' Melanie made a fist and banged it against her thigh. 'Oh damn, why are you telling me all this now?'
He reached out to her, grimacing at the pull on his ribs, touched her shoulder across the car seat. 'Because you're here now, Mel. I don't think you would have been here six months ago.'
'That's not true, I would have.'
'No. You would never have really believed I wasn't part of this madness. You wouldn't have questioned what you saw with your own eyes. You would have written me off, for the guy who never took anything seriously. But hey, at least now you already know all about my bad character. And I'm the same guy and you're still here in spite of it. That's different.'
He grabbed the dregs of Melanie's milkshake off the steering wheel. She was allowing a half-smile. He needed that.
'So now,' he went on, 'I thought it would be better if I laid it all out – Cindy, the whole thing. No surprises. This is who I am. Maybe, when, if this thing ever blows over we can, you know, like go on a date or something.'
Melanie sucked at her lower lip for a moment, then said she'd consider it.
Glitsky had come home just before five and had slept nearly four hours. Rita had gotten him up for dinner as he'd asked, all of his boys furious, stir crazy and squirrely at their long day indoors, wanting answers, thinking their dad was a paranoid who'd been a cop too long and the older ones telling him so.
"Now, dinner finished, the boys sat facing him across the kitchen table, the three of them en bloc, sticking together (which he thought was good), bonded against their old man (not so good). Even Orel, whose gangling body Glitsky had held snuggling in his lap as recently as six months before, he was working on his eleven-year-old interpretation of the evil eye – and though not as developed as the glare of his brothers, Jake and Ike (ave atque vale Jacob and Isaac), Orel was the one who most favored Flo, and so his hard look cut Abe the deepest. Which was not to say that the two older guys, who had it down to an art, were any easier for him.
Rita had her arms folded across her more than ample bosom. She was frowning. Glitsky was frowning. The kitchen windows were steamed with condensation – they'd had spaghetti for dinner and outside it was now dark and blustery. The dishes remained on the table.
Tonight's issue (as though there had never been a riot, as though life outside the windows was blithely proceeding in some kind of reasonable fashion): back in the spring, Glitsky had planned a camping trip for the following weekend in Yosemite. The Glitskys had always camped – it was one of their family 'things.' Flo had favored the wilderness, but they'd also done their share of site camping and the boys, even Orel, had jobs they excelled at, favorite things to do – putting up the tent, tying mantles on the lanterns, the fire, fishing, backpacking, finding edibles, cooking. So they'd called and reserved their spot and sent their deposit.
But one of Isaac's friends had invited him (and Jake, if he wanted to go) up to a cabin on a lake in the Sierras for the same days. Glitsky was hearing about it for the first time and told Isaac he'd have to make it another weekend. Ike countered by proposing that they not cancel the family camping – he'd just go with his friend and the rest of the family could go to Yosemite and do their camping thing.
Glitsky told him he didn't think so.
So here they were having a rules committee meeting because now Jake had been enlisted and he, of course, would rather go up waterskiing with the big kids than sweat and hike and look at waterfalls in Yosemite. And – now, while they were at it – if the two older boys weren't going to Yosemite, why would Orel want to go with just his father, alone?
'Guys,' Glitsky said, 'we reserved a place. We made a commitment.'
'Who cares?' Isaac.
'Somebody gonna fine us or something if we don't show up?' Jacob.
Older than Methuselah, Glitsky persisted. 'The commitment is what it is – they've kept other people out because we're in.'
'So they'll let somebody in at the last minute. Big deal, they always do.' Isaac was leading the charge so Glitsky thought he'd try to defuse him first.
'Look, Ike, we've paid our money. We said we'd be there. That's the end of it. You just tell your friend thanks, you'll do it another weekend. A deal's a deal.'
Jake pushed some spaghetti around on his plate. 'Mom would've let us.'
This was below the belt as well as beside the point. 'Mom isn't here, Jake. We're here. So how about we vote and get it settled?'
Isaac pushed his chair back. That's the other thing.'
'What is?'
Rita spoke up for the first time. 'They don't want me to vote.'
Isaac took the floor. 'It's not wanting, Rita. It's just not fair.'
Glitsky hated 'not fair.' Especially today, he hated people blaming everything but themselves for what was wrong with the world, for the troubles they had. That was Philip Mohandas's platform – in his own kids, it made him crazy. The fuse was burning, but Glitsky kept his voice low. 'What's not fair, Ike?'
At the refrigerator, he turned. 'Rita gets next weekend off, whatever happens, right? I mean, isn't that why we pick the dates when we do things? So she can get some of her own time? She's not going either place with any of us.'
'Okay. So what?'
Jake picked it up – they'd obviously gotten their strategy down. 'So she's not involved.'
'So why should she get to vote?' Ike finished for him, and even Orel chimed in. 'Right.'
Glitsky looked sideways at Rita. She was still frowning. 'What they say is right, I'm not involved.' She didn't even begin to like it, but she was a fair and honest woman, one of the reasons Glitsky was delighted with her. In general.
Isaac jumped right on her admission. 'See!'
Glitsky could do a pretty fair evil eye himself. Beaten, and knowing it, Glitsky threw one around the room at them. 'All right,' Glitsky said, 'Rita doesn't vote this time.'
So they put it to the vote and, no surprise, it came down three to two, the boys over dad. Glitsky lost.
He listened to the telephone ring in his ear, heard the answering machine of his best friend, Dismas Hardy. He thought he could use a few minutes of easy camaraderie with an adult male friend, somebody to talk to, who spoke his language, or he would lose his mind entirely.
The television in the divided living room droned in the background, more news about the fires, the riots, Kevin Shea. Where was Shea? he wondered distractedly. Maybe fled the jurisdiction?
Dismas Hardy, Abe's pal, was informing whoever the caller might be that he and his family had gone away for the weekend to Ashland, Oregon, for the Shakespeare Festival, where they would not have access to a telephone. Would the caller please call back after next Monday?
He remembered – the Glitskys and the Hardys had gone up to Ashland together two of the past four years. Camping (that dirty word). Frannie, Hardy's wife, had even begged Abe to bring the boys and come up with them this year. But, somehow, without Flo, Abe hadn't felt right about it. Ashland had been more Flo's thing, he'd told Frannie, although that wasn't really true. Glitsky loved Shakespeare, theatre, had even taken a shot at opera and found it fascinating. He took a lot of grief at work about this stuff – these were supposedly non-cop interests – but he was comfortable with them, with who he was.
Nevertheless, he'd told Frannie they couldn't make this year. So the Hardys were up in Ashland now and he was here in a burning city losing rules committee meetings with his children even after he'd rigged them all to go his way.
Glitsky left his usual terse message on Hardy's machine, then forced himself up, back through the kitchen. Everybody was in the larger bedroom of the two younger brothers, watching the other television, some inanity with a laugh track. Isaac and Jacob were sprawled across the floor. Orel slept open-mouthed, leaning against a sleeping Rita.
'Hey, guys,' he said, and the older boys glanced and said, 'hey,' waiting, resenting the intrusion.
'Nothing. Just checking in.'
They shrugged and went back to the program and Glitsky gave up the effort of making an effort and headed for his bedroom, falling across the bed with his clothes on.
Isaac was shaking him. 'Dad! Dad! Come on!'
He forced an eye – it weighed the proverbial sixteen tons. 'What?'
'The phone.' His son seemed truly concerned over his lack of response.
'Phone didn't ring, Ike.' Glitsky didn't hear the phone, and it was right next to his bed. He always heard the phone. It was his primary wake-up medium. He rolled over again, closed his eyes. He was nearly back asleep.
'Dad!'
God, why wouldn't the kid let it rest? 'What?'
'The phone. Some emergency. They need you. Some senator or something.'
That got through. A shiver of adrenaline got him up, his son handing him the receiver. 'Glitsky,' he said.
He listened a minute. It was Marcel Lanier, pulling a late one. He needed his boss downtown. Immediately or sooner. All hell was breaking loose again. Chris Locke, the district attorney, had been shot. Killed. Someone in another mob. Senator Wager, who was in the same car, had barely escaped herself. She was down at the Hall now, in shock, waiting in one of the interview rooms, asking for Glitsky himself.
Glitsky put a hand to his throbbing head. 'Lord.'
Isaac was still standing there, watching him. 'What, Dad? What?'
Into the phone. 'I'll be right down, Marcel. See if there's a black-and-white nearby, send them here to pick me up. Call me back if you can't.'
The connection went. Abe laid the receiver back down and noticed Isaac striking an I-don't-believe-this pose. The boy said, 'You're not goin' out again?'
Glitsky swung off the bed. 'Got to.' But he softened his voice, reaching a hand to bring the boy nearer, give him a little physical contact. Isaac ducked again, glaring.
'What are we supposed to do now, Dad? When are you coming home?'
Glitsky checked his watch. A little after ten. He must have hit the bed and died. He wondered what time Locke… then it struck him again.
Jesus. Chris Locke dead.
Isaac was still glaring, breathing hard with emotion. Glitsky's mind was racing, covering too much territory, losing track of where he was. He tried to focus on his son. 'I'm sorry, Ike, what?'
Isaac's eyes filled with tears, then fury. Swiping at his eyes, he turned, swore and ran from the room.
'Isaac!'
Glitsky was up, following, but before he'd gotten out of the room he heard Isaac's door slam on the other side of the house. Rita, hair tousled, wrinkled smock askew, rudely pulled out of her own sleep, faced him in the doorway to the kitchen. 'I've got to go out again,' he said. 'Please keep them inside, I don't care what they say or how you do it.'
She was shaking her head, a deep frown creasing her face. 'I don't know, Abe. Orel, I can keep him, but the other boys…' She motioned back with her head. 'What do I tell them?'
She was right and that, too, was terrifying. Beyond any consideration of the disorder out in the streets, the realization suddenly that the older boys were old enough – they could just disobey and walk out and Rita would be powerless to stop them.
He nodded. 'I'll tell them.' And they'd either obey him or go out into the streets. Authority – he either had it or he didn't. He was going to find out.
He gave Rita a weak smile and walked past her toward the back bedrooms.
Another Irish bar – the Little Shamrock, oldest one in the city – on a slow Wednesday night. Nobody out at all. Streets dark. Curfew in half the town and the rest content to stay indoors, which was probably smart.
Wes should be in himself. Probably would head back after a couple more, but this was pleasant, sitting here. These Sambucas kind of put him in mind of his days in Italy when he'd been an exchange student, nights under the stars with Lydia, back when she'd loved him.
Sambuca Romana. Pretty much the same stuff as Pernod, or ouzo in Greece, which they drank with ice all over Europe, the clear stuff turning milky with the ice and water. Here, he'd asked Moses McGuire to put the Sambuca on ice and got a full second of hesitation before he'd said okay.
McGuire was around the same age as Wes, a simpatico guy, if a bit of a purist around his drinks. That was all right. Wes considered himself a kind of purist, too, regarding his drinking. If it didn't have alcohol in it, he didn't drink it. So there was a bond there.
He smiled, took another sip, watching the television, which normally wasn't turned on in this bar. But tonight was real slow, and it was just Wes and a couple of hardcore darts players and McGuire, bartending. Besides, since last night every television in the country was going full time. He didn't blame McGuire. The country was coming apart and everybody wanted to see it live on five.
Wes had missed the opening volleys, the lynching, the first riots, the fires, Kevin's problem. He'd slept in (as he did every morning). Last night he'd been out in North Beach, did a little Brasilia Club cha-cha and tango and the parts he remembered had been fun. He woke up at home on the futon in the living room, his brain, by the feel of it, about two sizes too large for his skull.
He'd had some vodka and orange juice. Not too much vodka – a little hair of the dog was all. And then Kevin had called him before he'd even read the paper, which he still did out of some perverse sense that something might happen that might make a difference or that made sense. About four months ago he had made the decision that he wouldn't cut his hair again until something made sense – the mane had reached his shoulders, graying but still thick on top. He sported a ponytail from time to time, but mostly let it hang free, as it did tonight.
When Kevin hadn't shown up after an hour's wait at the church at USF, Wes drove out through Golden Gate Park, had a Foster's Lager, then took a nap in the Shakespeare Garden, getting away from the tent cities they seemed to be erecting in any area bigger than a softball field. He then treated himself to a piroshki dinner at a fast-food place on 9th before finally putting in his appearance at the Shamrock a little before seven. He was riding a slow buzz, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of loose-fitting khaki shorts, which now that the fog had descended was decidedly the wrong attire. He would freeze his nuts getting home, if he wound up staying unlucky and going home after all. The T-shirt said 'Ask Somebody Who Cares.'
Wes Farrell was fifty-three years old. He sipped at his Sambuca and was gently tapping on the bar to get McGuire's attention when the television interrupted its own news report with a fast-breaking development:
'We've just received a confirming report that the flare-up in the civic disturbances south of Mission has in fact claimed the life of District Attorney Christopher Locke. Earlier reports that Senator Loretta Wager had also been shot, perhaps killed, appear to have been mistaken.
'The two had driven to the neighborhood together to analyze the situation at the scene. Both Locke and Wager are African-Americans and the largely white crowd was in full riot before they arrived. Details are unclear at this time but it seems that as their car pulled away, some shots were fired. We'll take you there now, live, with Karen Wallace, who's been working around the clock for two days now. How bad is it down there,"Karen?'
'It's pretty bad, Tom…'
And in fact it looked pretty bad. Karen was backlit by another rash of fires, and, with the wind picking up, the place was an inferno. Most of the people had disappeared, with the occasional shadow rushing behind the newscaster. The cameras caught some of the National Guard, braced for action, moving through the shining streets. Overhead, several contiguous buildings burned.
'Another one?'
Wes turned away from the television. DA Locke killed! Well, it wasn't his problem. And neither was Kevin. The guy hadn't shown up after he'd called him. He nodded at the bartender. He'd been coming into the Shamrock pretty regularly for the past year and he and McGuire were almost friends. 'Sure, hit me. Get you something, Mose?' Wes had his pockets emptied out on the bar – bills, change, keys. He pushed the pile toward McGuire.
McGuire said he wouldn't mind a McCallan and Wes told him to pour himself a big one. Then he pointed at the screen. 'You see that? They killed the District Attorney.'
McGuire stopped pouring to look up and listen for a moment. He shook his head, setting loose his own thoughts. 'I should have never had a kid. How are you supposed to raise a kid in this?'
'How old's your kid?'
'Three months.'
Wes had nothing to say to that. They might be almost friends but that didn't mean they'd exchanged ten words about their personal lives. Wes figured, given McGuire's age, he might have teenagers. But a three-month infant? The bartender was staring at the screen. 'You think it's going to escalate? All this?'
Farrell nodded. 'I think it just did.' He tapped his glass. 'You know, my first kid was born in '68. You remember '68, Mose? Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Chicago, middle of Vietnam, Nixon gets elected. Worst year in American history, am I right?'
'I was over there. Nam. I missed a lot of the stuff at home.'
'Yeah, well, believe me, it was the shits. I remember me and Lyd, we asked ourselves the same thing. How could we bring a baby into this world? Now, here they are, my kids, mid-twenties and doing the same thing themselves. Everybody does – it's the Baby Blues, is all. They get to be three or four years, you stop asking. Three months, though, that's tough.'
Wes didn't want to say that the mid-twenties wasn't a cakewalk either, especially when your kids didn't have a lot to say to you anymore, but that was another thing he wasn't thinking about. He was here to party – that was his mission, his goal, his quest. But McGuire was on his own tangent.
'We got another black guy dead, it's gonna go up for sure. I ought to shut it down here for tonight, get home to my wife and kid.' He sipped at his Scotch. 'Correct me if I'm wrong, but black guys kill white guys every day and nobody has a riot about it.'
'Yeah, but I don't think they lynch 'em.' Wes kept it laconic. There was too much hate in the city already, everywhere, he wasn't going to add to it.
'You're right. Hey, listen to me, turning into some kind of a bigot. Next thing, I'll be wanting 'em to find this poor bastard Shea and lynch him, call it even.'
'I think that's the plan, don't you? That's what I keep hearing.'
'Well, if he did it, I got no problem with that.'
'If he did it…'
'That's what I said, but I don't think there's any doubt about that.'
Farrell brought his glass to his mouth. 'There's always a doubt.'
'You seen the picture?'
Wes nodded. 'I know. But I also know Kevin Shea. He's been in here, you've seen him. He didn't do it.'
McGuire was trying to place the face now. 'So who did?'
'I don't know.'
Two of the dart throwers came over and ordered some more beer, but McGuire told them he was closing up early. Coming back to Wes, he leaned over the bar. 'Call you a cab?'
'Nah, my car's just around the corner.' Wes reached down, looked down in mild, anaesthetized surprise. His glass had disappeared from the bar in front of him. So had his keys.
'I'll call you a cab. Even pay for it.' McGuire lifted the Sambuca from below the gutter and put it back on the bar. 'It's my ass you get pulled over. We live in a litigious age. Enjoy your drink. I'll make the call.'
'McGuire, I can drive.'
'You know what, Wes? I personally have poured you seven stiff drinks in a little under three hours. You are legally drunk, which normally I wouldn't pay much attention to, but tonight seems like a bad night to be driving around under the influence. Cab'll be here in ten.' He yelled across the small room. 'Okay, guys, suck 'em up, we're closing.'
But twenty minutes later the cab hadn't arrived. McGuire called again and learned that they wouldn't drive Farrell to his address because the route passed through an area that had been placed under curfew.
'So just give me the keys and I'll go the long way.'
McGuire wasn't having that. His mind was made up. 'You can stay at my place, crash on the couch. It's two blocks. Pick up your car in the morning.'
'McGuire, I'm fine.'
'Whatever,' McGuire said. 'That's what's happening.'
They finally gave up on Wes Farrell's return and agreed that Kevin's apartment was too likely to be under surveillance. Lexi – Melanie's roommate – had taken a summer job as a camp counselor, which left the two-bedroom apartment all to Melanie for the summer. It was the next most logical spot to hide out, not too far from Wes Farrell's place.
Getting there – Cecilia Street, on the way up from San Francisco State, between the Sunset and Parkside districts – they ran into a National Guard blockage and had to go all the way around, out to the beach and back. With the other traffic, it took them nearly an hour. Melanie drove carefully, occasionally looking over at Kevin, his seat back, arms crossed, eyes closed. His face was set – he was hurting, not wanting to betray it but every bump gave him away.
She was still upset about Cindy.
Cindy! He'd been with Cindy, and then her supposed best friend had gone on pretending and just plain lying to her the whole time – but at least, as Kevin admitted, it had happened before they'd started going out. What was he supposed to do, tell her the details of everybody he'd ever slept with in his life? She couldn't expect that, didn't even want that. Maybe he had been trying to spare her feelings. Maybe whatever he'd done with Cindy didn't matter that much to him, although she couldn't imagine sleeping with someone and not having it matter.
It was also possible that the other reason he'd given was the true one – that he'd have lost any chance to get together with her if she knew he'd been with Cindy. Well, at the time, he may have been right about that.
She pulled the car off 19th, which always had traffic, but didn't tonight – most of the other cars had been diverted or had taken the hint. The streets were nearly deserted. Her own block was illuminated by streetlights and, as usual, the parking was impossible.
Luckily, she noticed somebody who might be pulling out. Whoever it was hadn't turned on his headlights yet, but somebody was sitting in the driver's seat, and she slowed.
'We there?' Kevin slowly eased himself up in the seat.
'I just want to ask this guy if he's leaving…' She'd stopped, leaned over to roll down Kevin's window. 'Excuse me,' she said, 'are you…?'
The man's own window was down and suddenly there was a bright light shining in their faces. Kevin put a hand up, shielding his eyes or trying to hide, but she had no time to react before there was a forceful knock right at her ear, on the window on her side. A man standing there, holding a badge.
'Kevin…!'
'Jesus…jam it!'
'I don't know, I-'
'Melanie…!'
And her foot was down and her little GEO Sport actually got some rubber, squealing on the fog-slicked street.
'What am I doing…? I can't do this…'
'You're doing it. Just keep going, drive!' He was turned around, looking behind them. In her rearview she saw headlights come on, then the terrifying red-and-blue flash of the police, which must have reminded Kevin…
'Turn off your lights!'
It was a short block, and as she turned the corner she saw them pull out, thought she heard another screech of tires, the sound of a siren winding up. No more looking back. She had a block on them. She would whip the next corner before they'd even come into view.
'Damn streetlights…'
'Don't hit your brakes.'
'I know, I know.'
Their pursuers had to slow at the corner to see where they were. Melanie took the next turn, back onto Santiago, coming up on Hoover Junior High. 'Which way? Which way? Are they back there?'
'Nobody yet. Oh yeah, here they come.'
'Shit shit shit.'
Kevin looked at her, pleased and surprised in the midst of it all. 'Well, will you listen to that?'
'Shut up, Kevin, where are they?'
They had turned back onto another of the abbreviated streets. As long as they had short blocks so the pursuers couldn't pick up speed, they had a chance, but they were fast running out of them. Taraval was a fairly main thoroughfare, running up toward Twin Peaks, and if they got stuck on that the other car could catch them in two minutes, less.
Still, there wasn't any choice. They couldn't continue straight, couldn't go back the way they had come. She turned left, running dark. 'Watch out!' A delivery van nearly smashing her, honking, swerving. A batmobile-turn onto the next immediate left, a street dead-ending in half a block at the entrance to the school, a pedestrian walkway with a three-foot-high metal post in the middle of it, on either side a six foot maximum clearance before you hit fences. She was heading directly for it.
Kevin, turning back: 'What are you doing?'
'Stay down!' she yelled, 'I'm jamming it!'
'Shee-it!'
'They back there?'
'Not yet.'
'All right. Now.' There's no way, she was thinking.
But it was the only way. Aiming the car at the dead center of one side of the walkway, she slammed her foot to the floor. She didn't realize that the screaming she heard was her own.
The side mirror snapped off with a pop, and they were in the school's open asphalt playground. She jerked the wheel as hard left as she could, hoping they were out of sight of the street behind them.
They there?'
'No.'
She kept moving, along the fence, seeing her spot, streaking then across the lot to the corridor between the low buildings, finally daring to use the brakes – lights or no lights, she had to stop – pulling up, killing the engine.
They both sat, breathing heavily, Kevin's attention still glued to the gate they had barely cleared.
Ten seconds passed.
Twenty.
They'd lost them.
'How did they know where you lived? Cindy?'
'I think so. Must have been.'
They waited a couple of minutes in their hiding place between the buildings at the school, then turned on their lights and exited at the main-entrance parking lot, getting back out to 19th and turning south, away from the city.
Melanie needed to spell it out for herself. 'She must have told the police about us, that you might try to get in touch with me.'
'She's a sweetheart, that Cindy. What do you say we go by her apartment and kill her.'
Melanie shook her head. Almost, for a minute, took him seriously. 'I think we should break her kneecaps first,' she said.
Kevin chuckled, going with her. 'Her kneecaps are already astoundingly ugly.'
'All of her is ugly.'
'Hideous. Grotesque. The ugliest woman on the planet. And you did good.'
'I'm prettier than her, that's why. You're as ugly as her, you can't drive straight.'
He reached a hand over and touched her hair, spoke softly. 'No part of you is as ugly as the prettiest part of her.'
She brought her hand up to cover his. 'So what do you think we ought to do now?'
' I think,' she said,' we' ve got to get you out of town, for a while, at least.'
A small hesitation, then Kevin nodded. 'Okay, one night. You call it, Melanie, you're doing better than me.'
It was a little after eleven. She took the first turnoff into Brisbane, home of the Cow Palace and little else. There was a row of strip motels, and Melanie pulled into the third one down on the right, the Star, because it had an interior courtyard invisible from the street. Kevin waited while she went to the office, his shoulders hunched, his ribs aching, unmoving.
'You know I've never done that before?'
'What?'
'Registered at a motel. I told the man it was just me. I think he was hitting on me a little.' She was whispering, turning on the television for background white noise, turning the channel to avoid news programs until she came to a rerun of 'Land of the Giants' and left it there, turned low.
Kevin had come in from his scrunched-down position in the car, which Melanie had parked directly in front of the room's door. Now he was making sure the drapes were closed all the way. Turning, he sat on the one double bed and looked across at Melanie sitting with one leg crossed over the other on the room's single, mostly green, upholstered chair.
Kevin thought that even though she had spent the better part of the day under tremendous pressure in the driver's seat of her car, Melanie was likely the best-looking female the night clerk had seen in a lot of days. No doubt he had tried to hit on her, an unattached young thing staying alone in a place like this.
In the room's dim light her dark hair still managed to shine. She wore a man's white shirt tucked into a pair of jeans that fit ideally. The shirt still looked ironed, its top three buttons undone and beginning to reveal the shadowy swell of her breasts. A glimpse of white brassiere with a lace border. He had no idea how she managed to retain her freshness under these conditions, and where before it would have bothered him that she was so perfect, tonight he thought it wasn't so bad.
Her shoulders seemed to settle. She let out a small sigh. 'Are you all right?' she asked.
'I don't know,' he said, the effort at speaking almost too much. 'I guess I should try Wes again.' He staggered over to the phone and listened to it ring eight times before he hung up. He didn't ask Melanie where she thought Wes might be – he knew what she'd say and he was afraid she'd be right, that Wes was somewhere getting himself into the bag.
He eased himself all the way into the chair, closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward, then raising it again, his expression tortured. 'I keep seeing it,' he said. 'I close my eyes and I keep seeing him…'
'Arthur Wade…'
'I think if I'd just known. I mean, it was like I didn't believe it was going to go that far, so maybe I didn't-'
'Kevin, you did everything you could.'
Shaking his head, Kevin forced it out. 'No. It wasn't enough, Mel. If I'd just-'
'How could you have?'
'That's just it. Don't you see? I could have. I should have seen from the beginning. I was too damn slow.'
'But you did get to him.'
'I got to him. Then they got to me.'
'That isn't your fault.'
Again, he shook his head. 'I kept believing it would stop. After I got to him I must have eased up a minute. I didn't want to kick and punch and yell and stab at everybody around me. I mean, just five minutes before I was drinking with these guys. I thought once I got to holding him up, then everybody would realize like, "hey wait a minute, this has gone far enough, we can't do this." But it didn't happen. I just wasn't prepared for that much hate. I let them beat me, and it killed Wade. Now it might kill me, and you.'
Melanie came up off the bed onto her knees in front of him. 'You know what this is, Kevin? This is fatigue. This is total exhaustion. You don't have anything to be ashamed of.'
'I keep seeing him…'
She nodded. 'And you probably will for a long time. You tried to save him, that's what's important.'
'It didn't work, Mel.'
'Lots of things don't work, Kevin. That doesn't mean they weren't worth trying.'
He took in a breath and looked up at the darkened ceiling. 'How about if nothing works? Ever. How about that one?'
She held his arms tightly until he looked down into her eyes. 'That's a tougher one,' she said, 'but that's not you.'
She went into the bathroom and when she came out Kevin was stretched out on the bed, his breathing labored and heavy. When she sat on the side of the bed he opened his eyes. 'Thank you,' he said.
She brushed a finger over the side of his cheek. 'How bad are the ribs? Let's see.'
'I'll show you mine if you show me yours first.' She ignored that and started to pull the UCLA shirt. 'Easy, easy,' he said. Another heavy breath. 'I don't know if this is going to work.'
'Can you lift your arms?'
'A little.'
He raised them as high as he could, and Melanie tugged at the shirt, gently, until it cleared. 'Oh my God, Kevin.' The right side of his chest seemed to be encircled by a rope of bruises – black, red, purple. The skin was broken in half a dozen places, looking infected. 'We've got to get you to a doctor.'
'I don't think that's a great idea.'
'Then what are we going to do?'
'I think we should get some sleep and think about it in the morning. I don't think I've got much left, Mel.'
'Okay, you lay down.' She took his shoulders and carefully helped him lower himself. 'All the way up, head on the pillow,' she directed. When he was settled she saw the physical relief flood through him, his eyes closed, his body relaxing. Covering him to his waist with the thin comforter, she turned and went into the bathroom, got a washcloth and ran warm water over it.
By the time she was back to his side, perhaps one minute had elapsed, and Kevin was asleep.
She tested the washcloth against her arm, then with great care wiped the bruises on his chest, drying it with one of the bathroom's towels and bringing the comforter up to cover him to the neck. Going around the bed, she turned off the television, then the lights by the door and stepped out of her shoes. Otherwise still dressed, sliding in beside him, she lay down on her back, hands at her sides, hardly daring to breathe.
The knock was barely audible. 'Ms Sinclair? Melanie?'
What? No one knew she was here except…
She parted the drapes a couple of inches and was staring into the face of the clerk from the office. Not a young man, his deep-pitched gravelly voice seemed to make the window vibrate against her hand. 'I thought you might be lonesome, want a little company?' The look in his eyes chilled her, and she glanced quickly at the thin chain that, in theory, protected her.
She let the drapes fall, stepping back. Another knock, quietly. 'Ms Sinclair?' A pause. 'Okay, then, no offense.'
She waited as long as she could bear it, then tried the drapes again and looked. He was gone.
Getting into the bed again next to Kevin, she pulled the comforter up around her, but after a short while suddenly lifted it off and sat up.
She walked around the bed, picked up the telephone, and punched in some numbers. It was after ten and she'd been trained not to call anyone after that time, but this time she was going to make an exception.
The tired voice answered. 'Hello? What time is it?'
'Cindy?'
'Melanie? Where are you? Are you all right?'
'I'm fine. One thing, though…'
'Sure, what, anything.'
'Fuck you, Cindy.' And she hung up.
Glitsky went straight up to homicide, but Marcel Lanier, the inspector who had been on call in the office when Loretta Wager was brought downtown, had decided it would be wise to move the senator to avoid the media circus and had chosen a place he thought would be less likely to be used for the next couple of days – Chris Locke's office. He had borrowed a couple of uniformed officers and asked them to wait, standing guard in Locke's reception area until Lieutenant Glitsky arrived. The way things were going he just didn't know – the senator had almost been killed once tonight, and Lanier wasn't about to have anything like that happen again while he was on duty.
Glitsky dismissed the two men in the reception area, closed the door behind him and for the first time in almost twenty-five years was alone in a room with Loretta Wager.
She raised her head. She'd been sitting with her back stiff, one foot curled under her, on one of the couches in Locke's office. Her profile was to him and she held it there. He remained by the door a moment, struck by the control in her posture, the unexpected vulnerability of her face.
'Hello, Loretta.' He stepped toward her. 'Are you all right?'
Her voice had a mechanical quality – shock. 'I don't know how I am. I don't… they tell me a bullet missed me by less than six inches.' She uncurled the leg that had been under her, stood up and faced him. She was barefoot, shorter than he had remembered – an inch over five feet. Her shoes and a small clutch purse that matched the color of her blue suit lay on the floor by the end of the couch.
'But Chris…' She shook her head wearily, lapsed into silence. 'This isn't how I would have chosen to see you again.' She let her posture slip, something giving in her shoulders. 'But then again, you'd chosen not to see me at all.'
Glitsky ignored that, still standing at the doorway. 'You want to tell me what happened?' She cocked her head to one side, some expectation verified. Glitsky felt he should say something, explain himself, though he couldn't say why. Not exactly. 'I run the homicide department. Chris Locke is a pretty important homicide. I gather you're the only witness we've got. I'd like to hear about it.'
Loretta closed her eyes, sighed. Glitsky knew she must have been through it tonight. 'I told my story upstairs to several officers and a tape recorder. I'm sure they're writing it all down.'
'I'm sure they are.'
'But you want to hear it again?'
Glitsky shrugged. He didn't understand why she'd asked for him, but he did know why Lanier had humored her. Well, he was here now, and this is what he did. 'If you want to humor me I'd appreciate it. I understand you asked for me. Here I am.'
There was the start of a smile, but Glitsky couldn't read it. 'When you're bidden.'
'That's just the way I am, Loretta. I'm trying to do my job. You know that.'
A pause. Then: 'I remember.' Unexpectedly – he 'd crossed over to her now – she reached a hand up to the side of his face. But no sooner had the touch registered than she pulled it away. 'All right,' she said, 'but God, I am so tired.'
Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard of tired. You want to sit down?'
Her voice sank. 'Sit down? Sugar, I want to lay this ol' body down.' But then she was back, her senatorial self. 'Just teasing, Lieutenant. Let us sit down.'
He turned on his pocket tape recorder and let her talk.
'Chris and I had dinner with Philip Mohandas and some of his people – I've been trying to coordinate our efforts so that we're all concentrating on the same way to end these problems, so we're not stepping on each other's toes. And Philip doesn't see things exactly… well, exactly as Chris Locke did. Or me either, for that matter. I keep trying to get the message to him… separatism is not the way. Segregation is not the way. We have to work together, all of us.
'Maybe it was naive, but I thought if Chris and I – two black people working and getting things done in the system – I thought if we could somehow make Philip see, to moderate just a little, we'd have a better chance of getting the city under control.
'Philip can't seem to stop looking on these… these tragedies… as something he can use. He sees this as a time to demand concessions across the board. So he spent most of the night lecturing Chris and me on his positions, as he insists on calling them. It got pretty tedious.
'Now I knew I was going to take a lot of this up later with Philip, try and get him to see a little of the light, so I gave Chris a kick under the table and reminded him – didn't he remember? – we said we'd go out to the Dolores Park tent city, which – you probably heard – some genius had decided to segregate. De facto. Keep the tensions to a minimum. Lord, the stupidity of bureaucrats.
'Chris didn't know exactly what we thought we were going to do out there. I told him I thought – still do – that it was maybe one of those times when you can make political points and do some good at the same time. That argument speaks – I'm sorry, spoke… to Chris Locke, as you probably know.
'But by the time we got down there, things had flared up. I think it got around – of course, none of the city planners had realized its implications – that this was about two blocks from the spot where Michael Mullen had been shot. So the white half – can you believe this, the white half – of the tent city decides to name itself Mullentown, and in retaliation or whatever you want to call it, someone put up a sign in the other area – the so-called African area – calling it Jerohm Reese City. Which, as you can imagine, lasted about five minutes.'
'Which got people to burning again.'
Loretta leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes, sighing. Straightening herself up, arching her back, she visibly steeled herself to continue. Her red-rimmed eyes met Abe's and she smiled wearily. 'We are so blind,' she said. 'We are so goddamn blind.'
Glitsky turned off the recorder. 'You really care that much?'
It stopped her, seemed to hurt her, but she simply echoed what he had said earlier: 'That's just the way I am, Abe. I'm trying to do my job.'
The scar between Glitsky's lips ran lighter for an instant and he looked down.
She didn't pursue the moment. Instead, taking a breath, she motioned to the tape recorder. He pressed the button and she was back at Dolores Park. 'Chris had had some wine with dinner so I was driving. We stopped but didn't get out of the car. Things had begun to spill into the streets. They'd pushed over a police car, put it on fire. It was just getting dark.
'Then, suddenly, I don't even know how it happened, it was so fast. Or I wasn't paying attention enough, but there were people behind us, on the car, and Chris was saying roll the windows up, let's get out of here. But there really was no getting out – I mean, all at once the mob was in front of us, blocking the street, the people behind starting to try to bounce our car, so I put it into reverse and decided to try to get out that way. Chris and I were both turned around. We're backing through this crowd, people are slamming the windows, screaming at us. Some rocks hit the car, something, I don't know, but I just kept going, not too fast, I didn't want to run anybody over, but we had to get out of there…
'And then we were through them, or I thought we were. I was still backing up, faster now with nobody in the way. We got to the end of the block and I stopped, figuring we could now go forward. Chris was still turned around, still looking behind us to make sure we were clear, and then, I don't know what – all of a sudden his window exploded and there was this man and I see he's pointing a gun at me now, so I jam the accelerator to the floor just as he fires again and I'm turning up Guerrero. Chris is slumped over. After that I guess I… I don't really know. I drove until I saw a police car, then I stopped.'
Glitsky sat forward on the couch. His face was impassive. 'Could you identify the man, the shooter?'
She thought a long moment, then shook her head. 'I don't think so, Abe. It was dark, I was mostly looking at the gun. He was white and if I had to guess, probably under thirty.'
'You see what he was wearing?'
' Some kind of jacket – it was open, I noticed, it flapped – maybe a T-shirt, jeans, nothing really distinctive.'
'Hair, beard…?'
Again, she shook her head. 'I really did tell all this to the inspectors upstairs, Abe. They said they'd look, they'd try. Try to find the gun, match it with something, see where it leads, but the man himself… he could have been anybody.'
A lengthy silence. Loretta Wager leaned back into the curve of the couch. Glitsky remained, hunched over, hands clasped between his knees, eyes on the floor. He flicked off his tape recorder.
When he finally spoke it came out husky and strained with fatigue, not unlike the tone he used with his boys. It wasn't his cop voice. 'I didn't mean to be so abrupt today. When you called. I started to apologize but you'd hung up.'
'I was… you were right. I shouldn't have intruded.' She seemed to pull herself back, farther from him, waiting, reading his posture. Their eyes met. Both of them looked away.
He had gotten up, gone over to the window, was rewinding his tape player. Then that was done and he still didn't move. Time passed. From across the room, she asked it so quietly he almost didn't hear it: 'You haven't talked about your wife yet, have you? You haven't told anybody.'
She wasn't prying. Anyone else, maybe even Loretta at any other time, he would have snapped off some answer that would have ended that kind of personal inquiry, but right now he was drained, empty, without even the strength to lift his guard.
She'd read something in him. He could at least explain why he wouldn't explain. 'It's not something you talk about.'
He never had, not since the diagnosis. His role had been to tough it out, support Flo in her own struggle, keep the boys from breaking…
'All right,' she said.
If she'd pushed at all, he would have pulled away. He didn't turn around, spoke into his reflection in the window, kept it matter of fact. 'She had ovarian cancer. By the time they discovered it there wasn't anything they could do. It took nine months.'
'Oh, Abe. I'm so sorry.'
'It's funny,' he said at last, 'all the planning we did, I mean so we'd be prepared, so Flo wouldn't feel so much like she was leaving us in the lurch. I think we really convinced ourselves that we were doing something. But then when… when she wasn't there, I looked at all these lists we'd made, all the things I'd have to remember to do with the boys, all of this… activity that was supposed to do something, keep us on some kind of even keel. I didn't have a clue.'
He lifted his head, took in a breath, stared at the black space outside.
'How many boys do you have?' she asked.
'Three.'
'Has it been a long time?'
'Sixty-four weeks Saturday.' He looked at her. 'I don't know why, I just remember it in weeks, like I don't want to admit it's been months, or a year. I mean, you can handle a week. A week isn't that long. How it feels is even less than that. Sometimes I… it seems like an hour ago, she was here. She's just gone an hour and she'll be right back. It's stupid really. Denial. Just a way to handle it.'
'Not so stupid.'
His shoulders moved. 'The only thing is, you run up against real time, against how nothing is the same, it's all changed. That's how you know how long it's been. Everything about your kids, how things work with them, that's all different. How you work with yourself.' Winding down, stopping. 'Sorry. Running on.'
'Hardly that.'
'Well…'
After a beat, she rose from the couch and walked over to him. 'I was luckier with Dana. He died when Elaine was almost seventeen. And he was so much older. He'd lived his life.' She looked up at him. 'And still it took me a couple of years. You do whatever works.' She touched his arm. 'Would you mind driving me home, Abraham? I truly am exhausted.'
He'd been driven down to the Hall by a squad car, so he had to check out another city-issued vehicle, the same model car Loretta had been driving with Chris Locke earlier in the night. They didn't do any more talking as Abe filled out the requisition form for the car or on the walk down the outside staircase so they would avoid the media clustered still and always in the lobby of the Hall of Justice.
Now as they pulled out of the city lot she sat all the way across the seat from him, against the window, still silent, the intimate discussion upstairs now a barrier between them.
Glitsky was all eyes on the road. The previous driver of the vehicle had left the radio on and some bright-voiced deejay was telling whatever audience might remain in the traumatized city that it was exactly midnight, the first hour of Thursday, June 30. One more day until the official start of the Fourth of July long weekend and Happy Birthday America. It was sure going to be fun if we just make sure we load up on the beer and hot dogs and…
Abe reached over and snapped it off. 'That guy broadcasting from Mars or what?'
"They all do,' Loretta said.