Ever since he had been a child Glitsky had taken a perverse pleasure in keeping an eye on water as it heated, giving the lie to the old adage that a watched pot never boils. He stood over the stove now and waited, eyes trained on the simmering liquid – any second now it was going to begin to roll and he intended to be there to see it.
The house felt strange with no one else in it. He had given Rita the weekend off after Nat had absconded with the boys. She had a sister – Glitsky suspected perhaps even a child, although she hadn't mentioned one when she'd come to work for him – somewhere else in town and she would always disappear when Glitsky made the offer. She had moved the screen in the living room aside, and when he had first walked out in the morning he had almost felt he was in the wrong house. It wasn't that there was so much room, but that there was so much more of it.
Gotcha! The water was boiling and he'd seen it.
He made his tea – Earl Grey Morning Blend – in a pot with an old-fashioned silver-plated tea bulb. He poured the water in, covered the pot and took it two steps across to his kitchen table – there was no 'dining room.' He often felt lucky they could fit five chairs around the table in what space they did have.
There were two hard-boiled eggs on a small plate in front of him and he absently cracked the first one while he opened the folder he had brought home the previous night – Chris Locke.
The first problem was going to be to determine exactly what street corner they had been at when the attack had occurred. If he didn't know that, he was going to have a hard time locating trace-evidence there. Loretta knew the city well enough, but he wanted to keep her out of it as much as he could – the experience had been traumatic enough without bringing her back to the scene.
When she had told him the story she'd said that she and Locke had been driving out near Dolores Park, the site of the dual, segregated tent cities. But what route had they taken from downtown to get there?
Reading through Lanier's questions and Loretta's responses he was beginning to doubt that he could get any real answers without Loretta. He flipped some more pages of text, scanning. The officers in the squad car she had pulled over near Mission and 19th Street – already some blocks from the murder scene… If the uniforms who had filed their report had been doing their jobs, one of the first things they should have done was drive back with Loretta to pinpoint where the shooting had occurred, but they had evidently been unnerved, shaken out of their routine – as everyone else had been – by the state of siege the city was in, the sight of the fatally wounded District Attorney, and the presence of a U.S. senator.
So the ambulance had been called out to Mission Street, forensics had come there and begun their process of going over the car. Marcel Lanier's primary concern had been protecting Loretta, getting her out of harm's way as quickly as he could. In this Lanier had been successful but he hadn't done squat-all about moving the investigation forward. Nor, Glitsky reflected ruefully, had he.
Checking the clock on his kitchen wall – it was six-forty – he decided it was still too early to call Wes Farrell, which he had intended to do as his first order of business this morning. Get that out of the way, or at least moved to the front burner. Enough was enough. He had given Farrell plenty of time to make the first move, to beep him wherever he might have been all of last night, but once in a while you had to make your own timetable. He'd get some action on this; he had the leverage – something to offer Kevin Shea as an inducement to come in – so long as Elaine had been able to convince Reston, which he was sure she had.
Still, he remembered, he'd better call her first. Make sure.
He poured his tea out into the surprisingly dainty porcelain cup – one of the service that Flo had given him for their twelfth anniversary. He finished the last bite of the first egg, started cracking the second and continued his waltz through the rest of the paperwork – Locke's admission to the emergency room at SF General (where he was pronounced DOA), Strout's late lab microscopies corroborating his earlier assessment of the cleanliness of the entry wound – the car's safety-glass window had spiderwebbed, preventing any tiny glass shards from spraying inward. Other preliminary and follow-up reports: the trajectory of the bullet that had barely missed Loretta – across and slightly downward, just what you'd expect from a man standing outside firing in. The bullet itself -.25 caliber – the same size Lanier had predicted; also a match with the one taken from Locke's brain. Glitsky had entertained a small hope that there might have been fingerprints on the shattered window, perhaps even a shoe print on one of the fenders. Some hairs or fabrics. Something. But there were no surprises at all.
Which meant, unfortunately, nothing new to start with, no handle to wedge something open. They'd have to go back to the beginning, which meant bothering Loretta, locating the scene of the shooting, assigning someone to go cover the area, talk to neighbors, do forensics all over again.
He almost laughed. Assign some staff who would get to it exactly when?
Closing the folder, he noticed the clock again – not yet seven. Time was creeping, which he supposed was a clue that he wasn't having much of a good time.
He called Elaine on the stroke of the hour. She told him that Reston wasn't offering Kevin Shea as much as the time of day and that was the end of that. Shea could turn himself in, but then he was going to be treated like any other murder suspect. Maybe worse.
'I thought the priority was getting this guy behind bars, Elaine. So we could at least say he'd been apprehended.'
'This isn't me, Abe. This is Alan Reston.' She hesitated. 'I got the feeling he didn't necessarily want him behind bars.'
'As opposed to what? On the street?'
Elaine stammered, getting it out. 'I… I thought about this last night, what Alan might be doing.'
'I'm listening.'
'I explained to him everything you showed me yesterday, showed him how the second picture might be… anyway, all that. And he hinted that maybe it would be better if Shea didn't get to tell his story, if something happened that would keep everything, as he put it, clean and uncluttered.'
'Something like what?'
'Well, I mean, Alan never said any of this outright. It was just, he wasn't going to give Shea any real chance to come in, any reason to. Make it a no-win situation for him. Then, if it came to some kind of showdown, if he just got shot or something by a mob or by resisting while he was getting arrested
'Shot or something…' This was not possible, Glitsky thought. Then again, neither was anything else that had happened during the last few days. But Elaine must have misinterpreted something – there was no possible explanation for this as a remotely reasonable prosecutorial strategy. 'Listen, are you on the way downtown? Would you mind if I stop by your place and pick you up on the way in?'
'Well, I'm not going in. Not right yet.' She paused. 'The funerals.'
Glitsky had forgotten about the funerals. The information had crossed his brainpan sometime during the day yesterday, but he'd filed it someplace and hadn't retrieved it until now. The mayor had prevailed in his personal appeal to the families of Arthur Wade and Chris Locke to have their funerals at the same time and location (and thereby reduce the possibility of two separate riots) – at Saint Mary's Cathedral.
True, that had meant that Locke would not lie in state at the Rotunda of City Hall, but his wife had agreed. She didn't care about that. Not anymore. If it would ease the mayor's burdens, she would do what he asked.
'I'd like to stop by, anyway.' Glitsky had to get some answers, get a take on Reston, on what was happening. He had to push. She hesitated, then said, 'All right,' and gave him her address.
Wearing a two-piece dark charcoal suit with a light maroon shirt of raw silk, Elaine Wager opened the door to her apartment. Glitsky followed her into the living room with its view of the western half of the city. The furniture was green leather; there was a glistening ficus, a teak entertainment center with books in the bookcase. The tasteful young Spartan look. A framed picture of Loretta smiled at them from the bar counter that divided the room. He glanced at it.
'You look a lot like your mother,' he said. 'I guess I never really noticed it before.'
She smiled. 'Taller,' she said. 'Not as pretty, really.'
Glitsky let that go. She wasn't fishing for compliments. Then she surprised him. 'My mother told me about you two.' He tried to think of something to say. 'In college. Just so you know I know.'
'It wasn't a secret,' he said. 'It just hasn't come up much recently. Does it bother you?'
'No.'
'Good.'
'But she's coming by to get me in' – she checked her wrist – 'about forty-five minutes. I just didn't want it to be uncomfortable.'
Glitsky suppressed a smile. 'I'll probably be gone by then anyway. But I could see her and handle it. It was a long time ago.' He sat down on the front six inches of one of her chairs.
She took the couch, settled back a bit, closed her eyes and he recognized a pallor. 'How are you holding up?'
She let out a little mirthless sound. 'Fine. Great. Except I'm obviously in the wrong field.'
'Why do you say that?'
She gestured, dismissing it. 'What I said about Alan, it was mostly only a feeling, but I couldn't think of any other reason he wouldn't offer some kind of deal. Can you?'
Glitsky shrugged. 'He just came on the job. Doesn't want to get a rep as soft. The situation's pretty explosive…'
'That might be it.'
'But the point is, you don't think he's going to change his mind?'
She shook her head. 'No. I think what bothers me is that he says it would be betraying my mother.'
'How's that? She's the one pushing for Shea's arrest since the beginning.'
'I know. But Alan's her protegé. He's got a vested interest in protecting her interpretation of the lynching, Kevin Shea, everything she's been pushing for. And if the charges don't stick… anyway, it's the same theory I told you before. If Shea doesn't get to refute it, nobody made a mistake.'
Glitsky sat back in his chair. 'He can't be saying he doesn't want Shea to have a trial?'
'No. In fact he specifically keeps saying he does. But what's he going to say? I'm just not sure that I believe him. He's not acting like it.'
'Maybe I ought to talk to your mother. Maybe you should.' He slapped his knees and started to get up. 'And maybe we should get going, get this thing moving along. Even without a deal the odds are decent I can get Shea downtown. His lawyer talks the language. I'll call him as soon as I get downtown. You mind if I use your bathroom?'
She motioned. 'Down that hall, just off the bedroom.'
The bedroom blinds were pulled down. His eyes weren't adjusted and the light switch wasn't where it should have been next to the door, so he stood a moment until he could see, then crossed the room. The bed was made. Next to it, on the end table, was another framed photograph, something familiar about it even in the low light. He leaned over, picked it up. Chris Locke.
Next to her bed?
The pallor, the fatigue, the confusion… he stood, rooted to the spot.
The light came on overhead. Elaine at the door. 'I keep forgetting, they put this switch…'Then, seeing him with the picture: 'Oh…'
A long silent moment. She crossed to the bed, sat, smiled weakly at him.
'Yeah. Me and Chris.'
'Does anybody else…?'
She nodded. 'Just my mother. I had to tell her.'
Glitsky finally put down the picture and went into the bathroom. When he came out she was in the same place on the bed, staring at nothing. He came around to her, paused, then turned around and walked to the bedroom door. 'I'd better get downtown,' he said.
She drew a deep breath. 'I don't know – '
'You and me and your mother,' he said. 'It doesn't go anywhere else. It stops right here.'
Glitsky broke through the cordon of functionaries outside the office, opened the inner door to the War Room and strode up to Rigby. 'We've got to talk.'
The days had taken their toll on the usually genial chief of police. He straightened from where he had been hunched over his desk and raised his voice. 'I'm not in the habit of taking orders from my lieutenants. Or in tolerating that insubordinate tone of voice from anyone. AM I MAKING MYSELF CLEAR?'
The room died behind them.
'And you're right,' the chief continued, booming, 'we've got to talk. BUT IT'S MY GODDAMN CALL. AGAIN, LIEUTENANT, IS THAT PERFECTLY CLEAR?'
Glitsky hadn't been formally dressed down since the Academy – it startled him. 'Yes, sir,' he said. 'Sorry, sir.'
Rigby – Marine brush-cut, bulldog face – looked every inch the police chief. He glared at the minions in the room. 'You people,' his voice boomed, 'the lieutenant and I need five minutes. Exactly.'
The two men waited while the room cleared, Glitsky at attention, Rigby apoplectic while still appearing to hold himself back. 'Where the hell have you been?'
'When, sir?'
'Whenever the hell I've been trying to reach you, is when, Lieutenant. You get a message from me? Urgent?'
'Yes, sir, last night.'
'Well?'
'I called immediately, sir. No one was here.'
'That's impossible. What time was that?'
'I'm not sure exactly… eleven o'clock, midnight.'
The chief slumped a fraction of an inch, lowered his voice a decibel. 'Goddamn it, Abe, what the hell?'
Glitsky waited.
'You remember the chat we had yesterday with our new district attorney? Where we requested you not meddle in the DA's internal affairs?'
'Yes, sir. Although that wasn't-'
'And then, not an hour later, you're pleading the case for Kevin Shea's innocence with Elaine Wager, who then goes to try and sell it to Reston?'
That's not-'
'I don't care, do you understand me? I count on you. You run one of my departments and, until this week, you've done a goddamn fine job.' He came down to a whisper. 'You are a homicide inspector. You don't argue for somebody's innocence. Don't you understand that! In fact, you don't argue for anything. You're not a lawyer. You don't make deals. You arrest people. Period. The end. Goddamn it.'
Rigby pulled at the collar of his shirt, suddenly sucking in air. Glitsky began to move forward, but the chief stopped him. 'I'm fine, goddamn it, but I am about at the end of my rope here.' The heavy breathing slowed down, the voice modulated again. 'Now, I have promised Mr Reston to take care of this situation, and here's what I'm doing – you are off Kevin Shea. You are not investigating the riot or any part of it. The FBI is in on this now and they're taking it under their federal jurisdiction as a civil rights matter.'
'A murder?'
'That's right, a murder that deprived Arthur Wade of his civil rights-'
'But it's also under our jurisdiction, no matter-'
'Are you hearing me, Lieutenant, or do you want to hand me your badge right now?'
Glitsky almost bit through his tongue. 'Yes, sir. I hear you.'
'Then you're dismissed. Thank you.'
Rigby looked down immediately, back to whatever he was studying on his desk. Glitsky turned and walked to the door, opened it and marched through the suddenly silent crowd hovering in the outer office.
There was little that any civic leader could do about the funerals. No one was about to suggest to Arthur Wade's grieving wife Karin that for the sake of civic peace they postpone putting her husband in sacred ground. She did not object to the mayor's idea of a 'martyr's funeral' to include Chris Locke and his family.
Arthur Wade had been a practicing Catholic and the High Mass had already been moved from his parish church, St Catherine's, out in the Avenues to the expansive reaches of Saint Mary's Cathedral on the same Geary Street that – down at the corner of 2nd Avenue – used to be the location of the Cavern Tavern.
The Most Reverend James Flaherty, Archbishop of San Francisco, had originally intended to preside at the Mass but the Archdiocese had soon found itself in rancorous deliberations with, among others, Philip Mohandas, the Board of Supervisors, the mayor's office, The National Organization For Women and the National Council of Churches.
These negotiations had ultimately altered the format for the Mass, which would be celebrated by what was viewed as a more appropriate, more ecumenical triumvirate of clerics of color, two of whom had been flown in – the female from Philadelphia and the native African from Kenya – under one of the city's emergency budget provisions.
It was nine-thirty on a clear and still morning, half an hour before the service was to begin, and already the concrete open area in front of the cathedral – the size of a football field – throbbed with humanity, mostly well-dressed, mostly African-American, clustered in groups of five to fifteen, moving toward the church's doors.
The limousine door opened and Senator Loretta Wager reflexively reached over, protecting her daughter from the curious who had crowded around the tinted windows to see who was pulling up. On the way to Elaine's apartment and then again on the short ride here the limo had passed armored trucks on the back streets they had been able to drive on.
Elaine stepped out first, then her mother. Around the square, policemen patrolled on foot and on horseback. Overhead, two helicopters circled just low enough to be annoying.
Loretta firmly shooed away the swarm of reporters. This was not the time for a comment. She and her daughter were here to pay their respects to two martyrs of civil rights. If might be a better use of everyone's time, Loretta said, if the reporters put their microphones away and went inside and prayed for the future of our great city and country. Astoundingly, Loretta thought, a couple of them nodded, gave their equipment to their assistants and fell in behind them.
Mother and daughter walked arm-in-arm across the concrete, moving with the flow of the crowd. Inside the high modern cathedral a gospel choir filled the air – beautiful and appropriate, Loretta thought. Tears had broken on Elaine's face. The two caskets were up front at the altar, side-by-side, and she and Elaine continued their walk until they came to them, kneeled, lowered their heads in an attitude of prayer.
Elaine slid into the ribboned section reserved for them three rows back, but Loretta took another moment. Walking to the front of the first pew, she held out her hand to Margaret Locke, who was sitting with her four teenaged children, all of them looking stunned, vacant.
'Margaret,' she said. Locke's widow stood and the two women embraced. 'If there is anything I can do…'
Then, crossing the center aisle, she paused. The front pew on this side held a dozen mourners – she supposed they were Arthur Wade's parents, brothers, sisters, his wife's family. It was obvious which one was Karin, Arthur's wife. Attractive but without expression except an attitude of rigid control, her gaze straight ahead and unseeing, the young woman sat flanked by her toddler twins. Loretta walked over to her.
'Mrs Wade?' She introduced herself, striving to sound like a person and not a senator. 'I just want to tell you how terribly sorry I am. I know that it can't be any help. Not now. But if you find you do need anything or if there is anything I can do…'
It did seem to matter. A little. In a surprisingly strong voice, Karin Wade thanked her, introduced her to the twins – Brenda and Ashley – and then to Arthur's mother and father, both of whom shook her hand in dignified silence.
A glance back at her daughter, sitting rigidly next to Alan Reston, who must have just come in. In front of them, braving the censure of the crowd, was Mayor Conrad Aiken and his wife. He had to be here, and to his credit, she thought, he was.
In the same row on the opposite side – Arthur Wade's side – sat Philip Mohandas with his two bodyguards.
Loretta was in a quandary over Philip's latest calls for action, his march tomorrow, his verbal attacks on Art Drysdale, his demand for the release of Jerohm Reese. But as soon as she got her executive order on Hunter's Point signed she would have secured her political base for the next election and then, even if Mohandas went off the deep end and proved himself unworthy of the public trust of administering the project, it wouldn't be her fault. She had tried. She had reached out to his people. She had other friends who wouldn't have Philip's problem with the twelve million dollars. Who would appreciate it more.
In fact, in a way, she had been relieved to hear about Philip's latest move. With his own small but vocal constituency he could prove to be very difficult to control. He had decided he could make an end run around her and still get his hands on Hunter's Point. Well… she already had Alan Reston positioned. That had been that trade. Philip Mohandas would soon enough find out how power worked.
For now let him have his little march. Let him foment things even further. So long as Kevin Shea remained the focal point for a little longer – and Philip's latest strategy seemed guaranteed to accomplish that – she was going to get what she asked for in the name of racial harmony.
Of course, if it turned out that Shea was not the pure symbol of hatred she had helped set him up to be, and if that fact came out too soon, it could all backfire. She had been so certain that Shea was guilty, had set up her whole structure on that foundation, but some of the things she had been hearing from Alan Reston, from Elaine, even from Abe…
Well, those things just couldn't come out, not until Hunter's Point was settled at the very least; maybe not ever. If Kevin Shea in fact was not guilty…
She inclined her head politely at Mohandas, took Karin Wade's hand in hers one last time and made her way back to Elaine's pew just as the assorted ecumenical ministers came out to begin the service.
Too angry to feel safe about returning to his office in homicide – he thought that at the very least he would deface some property, throw a chair through a window, something – Glitsky took the internal stairway down to the lobby of the Hall.
Walking through the same outdoor corridor where he had been rebuked last night by John Strout about paying too little attention to the Chris Locke investigation, he decided to stroll through his city.
Really pushing his luck, he turned up 6th Street, where in the first block up from the Hall of Justice you could be stabbed to death for bus change. Hands in his pockets, he stalked up the block with his edge on, making eye contact with everybody, silently daring one of the lowlifes to try something. He was just in the mood.
The walk took him all the way down to the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, where he was calmed down enough to get another cup of tea, drinking it out of a paper cup, sitting on one of the pilings as the flat water lapped under him.
It occurred to him that now would be a good time to call Supervisor Wrightson. It was the only thing he could think to do that would, he hoped, not involve Kevin Shea in some way and would keep him out of the office.
Yes, Wrightson would still like to see him and if this morning had opened up unexpectedly for Lieutenant Glitsky, that would be fine. The supervisor would make the time for an appointment at ten o'clock sharp.
Glitsky's experience with the Board of Supervisors was limited to scurrilous rumors and to the Chronicle's political cartoon that had been on the bulletin column outside his office for five years, showing the door to the supervisors' chambers, the motto over the lintel reading: WE WILL NOT BE CONFUSED BY REALITY.
But the Supes did pay Glitsky's salary. To be more precise, they approved the city budget and the salaries of city employees, so they were not a group to antagonize gratuitously, and Greg Wrightson was the eminence grise of the Supes. At sixty-two, he had been around City Hall for nearly twenty years. Glitsky knew that the supervisors made twenty-four thousand dollars a year. As recently as fifteen years ago their salary had been only six hundred dollars a month. And yet Wrightson, a man from a middle-class background who had been drawing down this piddling wage for most of his adult life, was a very wealthy man. Abe had been making more than Wrightson for longer, and he was still a wage slave punching a clock.
Having pondered these imponderables on his walk back across town, Glitsky's mood had not improved by ten sharp when he walked into the reception area to Wrightson's office.
Wrightson's administrative assistant wore a tailored suit. The inscribed nameplate on the front of the desk read 'Nicholas Binder.' (Glitsky was a department head and he didn't have an inscribed nameplate anywhere.) If Nicholas had gotten this job randomly by taking a civil-service test, they had upgraded the pool of applicants considerably from the last time Glitsky had looked. Somebody's cousin had pulled a string.
'Mr Wrightson will be right with you, Lieutenant.'
Glitsky waited. Nicholas went back to his computer, occasionally stopping to pick up the telephone, make a note. Were there riots going on outside? Was the city falling apart? No sign of it here. Clearing his throat, Abe checked his watch. It was nine minutes past ten.
'Are you sure I can't get you something, Lieutenant?'
Glitsky's patience had disappeared. 'You can get me inside that door there by ten-fifteen. How about that?'
Nicholas tried one of those 'what can you do?' shrugs, but it was the wrong day for it. 'I've got this fifteen-minute rule I'm pretty strict about and I'm either in there talking with Mr Wright-son in six minutes or we'll have to do it another time.'
'Sir?'
'My appointment was for ten o'clock?'
'That's right.'
'Okay, then, ten-fifteen.'
Nicholas seemed to decide the lieutenant wasn't kidding because he got up, crossed the office, knocked on and then disappeared through Wrightson's thick, solid, darkly stained wooden floor.
'Lieutenant Glitsky, sorry to keep you waiting.' Wrightson was striding forward, hand outstretched. 'I'm afraid I got involved in one of those conference calls and lost track of the time. Come on in, come on in. Can Nicholas get you anything?'
'I'm fine.'
Glitsky was standing, shaking his hand, taking his measure. The thumbnail sketch put him at five-ten, one seventy-five, nearly bald, piercing gray-blue eyes.
They went, Glitsky following, into an enormous, elegantly furnished office that resembled Abe's in no conceivable fashion. The view looked out through some clean windows (how did that happen?) over the six square blocks of the Civic Center Park – now a tent city. But usually, out this window, would be expanses of lawn, sculpted shrubbery, the pool and fountain, cherry and flowering pear trees. This was the face San Francisco put out for the world, and it was a beautiful one, laid out at the feet of Greg Wrightson.
He did not go to his desk, as Glitsky expected he would, but led them both to a sitting area – a couch and two stuffed chairs around a polished coffee table on a South American rug. Glitsky took one of the chairs, sinking deeply, and Wrightson started right off.
'I wanted to thank you for making the time to come and see me. As you know, we're faced with some tough decisions this year on the city's budget, and in the past we've been forced to try to cut back – trim the fat so to speak – on some vital services… such as the police department.'
There was no sign of irony, though there was good reason for it. The supervisors had just voted an extra two hundred thousand dollars for Kevin Shea's reward and Wrightson had picked now to talk about the police budget?
Glitsky wondered if he should mention his missing door to Wrightson but he kept it straight. "There isn't much fat anymore. It's pretty lean down at the Hall,' he said.
Wrightson nodded. He was leaning forward in the chair now, hands clasped in front of him. 'Well, with these riots and the perception that San Francisco is not a safe place anymore I think we've got a window of opportunity here. We'll be able to free up some money for police services.'
Glitsky sat, listening to him go on, stifling the replies he would have given if he were getting this kosher baloney from anyone else, wondering why he was here at all. Finally Wrightson wound down. '… which is why I thought I'd talk with the individual department heads.'
'Okay.'
'I'd like to know what you really need to do your jobs.'
'That'll be easy.' But if Wrightson was asking him for specific examples of how short money had hampered investigations, he'd be talking until Christmas.
Wrightson clapped his hands once. 'Good. We might as well start with the personnel breakdown in homicide. I could look it up but-'
'What do you mean?'
'You know, how many people, ethnicities, genders…?' At Glitsky's look, he hurried on. 'That's what's going to loosen the purse strings, Lieutenant. You know that.'
'I thought it was the lack of funds hampering our ability to perform.'
Wrightson waved that off. 'Oh, sure, there's that, but let's be realistic. Your best shot at beefing up your department is increasing your head count. That increases the overheads all around and presto suddenly you've got money for a new coffee machine.'
'A new coffee machine? How about a lab that's open on weekends? How about overtime instead of comp time? How about guys getting paid when they stay late writing reports?'
Wrightson was shaking his head. 'No, no. I mean, all of that's important, don't get me wrong, but nobody's going to vote money for that stuff. It's just not sexy, you know what I mean?'
'I guess not.'
'Well, I do. You tell me about your department and I'll tell you what it needs.'
Glitsky ran it down – twelve inspectors, all male, of which four were African-American, two he thought probably qualified as Spanish-surname.
'You really ought to know that kind of thing for sure,' Wrightson said. 'It's in your best interest.' Then: 'What about women?'
'No. We don't have any women.'
'Oriental?'
'No.'
'Gay?'
'Doubt it, don't really know. Does this stuff matter?'
'Native American?'
'I didn't realize we had an appreciable percentage of the city and county that was Native American.'
Wrightson gave a conspiratorial grimace. 'You're going to be in good shape. You'll need at least three, maybe five new inspectors.'
Glitsky sat forward. 'Mr Wrightson, we don't need more inspectors. We need more support.'
'Yeah, but you won't get the support, Lieutenant. What you need is to get closer to compliance.'
'But isn't that for the PD as a whole…?'
'Well, yes, originally, but this was the idea I took to Chief Rigby. He liked it.' Wrightson was pumped up about his role in all of this. 'Look, the force needs money and this is the way it's going to get it. The quotas – we don't call them that, of course – we amend the compliance-factors language so that it applies to each individual detail instead of the department as a whole.'
'But homicide is… it's the top of the pyramid. I mean, you don't just plunk people into homicide and make them inspectors to fill some quota – '
Wrightson's eyes were shining now, his color high. 'Where have you been, Lieutenant? This is San Francisco. Of course, that's what you do.'
'But-'
'This should make you especially happy – '
The scar in Glitsky's lips was white with tension. He could feel it. He didn't want to react angrily to Wrightson. Not personally. Not this morning. Not with all the other thin ice he was walking on. Maybe Wrightson was right – he was out of step and should be delighted at lowering the admissions standards for his detail.
But he couldn't stop himself. 'It makes me puke,' he said.
So much for the first two items he had left in the center of his desk the night before – Rigby's urgent call and the two messages from Greg Wrightson. Glitsky flashed his badge at a black-and-white out on Polk in front of City Hall and bummed a ride back to the Hall of Justice.
All these Halls and no shelter to be found.
Rigby had told Glitsky he was off the Kevin Shea matter, but on reflection Glitsky realized that he hadn't been specifically told to stop supervising his troops. Had that been on purpose, he wondered, Rigby covering his own ass in case Glitsky was on the verge of coming up with something? At the very least, that interpretation gave Glitsky an argument in the event he got called in front of the Police Commission.
In ten minutes he was back in his office, Carl Griffin sitting across from him, as angry, if that were possible, as Glitsky was. The inspector had a gooey-looking red stain on the front of his shirt. Either the remains of a jelly donut or he'd been wounded in the line of duty and hadn't noticed.
'So I caught Feeney' – this was another assistant district attorney, Tony Feeney – 'last night before I went home, got a tentative okay on immunity for him being in the mob if Devlin testifies. I got everybody down here, this morning eight sharp. Devlin, his dad, his lawyer, the whole gang, and Feeney comes in and announces no deal.'
'No deal at all?'
Griffin popped a couple of sticks of gum. 'Nada. Alan Reston isn't giving deals. New policy. How's he gonna get any witnesses, I ask, if he don't trade for nothing? So Colin Devlin's lawyer says why you wastin' our times, and they all go out, get a nice breakfast someplace.'
Glitsky was sitting all the way back in his chair, fingers templed in front of his mouth. 'What was this Devlin going to say?'
'Well, you had us looking for guys in the mob-'
'I remember, Carl. And Devlin admits he was there?'
'Not only there, he was part of it. His version – what he told me yesterday – started coming down to being that he got swept up in the mob, couldn't get out of it, and got between Arthur Wade and whoever was trying to get to him.'
'Did he say why somebody might have been trying to get to Wade? Trying to cut him down maybe? Did he see who it was? Kevin Shea, for example?'
Griffin was shaking his head. 'None of that. Sorry. I tried but the guy got his Achilles tendon cut in half, Abe. He went down like a sack. It never got beyond that, at least for him. But how we gonna-?'
'I know, I know. Wait a minute.' He brought his feet down. 'If Devlin was in the mob he'd be an accessory…' Glitsky was thinking that without a deal they could still arrest Devlin on that fact alone.
'Sure, that was the plan, but nope. I ran that one by Feeney, too, before everybody'd even left, while Devlin's lawyer was still there. I told him, "Look, you don't cut him a deal, what are you gonna want me to do, arrest him?" and Feeney looks at me and says what for? So I tell him 'cause he was in the mob and he tells me without Devlin's confessing to it there's no proof of that, so I tell him he did confess, more or less. Admitted he was there, at least. The guy just shrugs. Doesn't necessarily prove intent, he says. Christ! Whose side these guys on downstairs? Who is this Reston asshole anyway? Where'd he come from?'
'Devlin might have compromised their case on Kevin Shea,' Glitsky said. 'They don't want any of that on the record.'
'What record? We got no record.'
'That's right.'
Carl Griffin fixed his belt, scratched, frowning at the stain on his shirt. He wasn't going to waste his time trying to pretend he understood all this. He had just spent yesterday finding a guy with a knife wound, which had been that day's assignment. So what did the lieutenant want him to do today?
Glitsky sighed, still in his head with the other questions. 'I'll tell you what, Carl…'
The orders now were to go out to Dolores Park, try to locate the exact corner where Chris Locke had been shot – someone in one of the tent cities out there would have heard it, perhaps even seen something. Lots of people had been demonstrating, something would turn up. And when he found the spot, call forensics out there and run the battery, see what they came up with.
This was the kind of work Griffin did well. It gave him something to do and it would keep Abe from having to put Loretta through another round of trauma.
Griffin wasn't out of his office before Glitsky began punching Wes Farrell's number into his phone. Enough of this waiting – Rigby or not, he was going to make something happen.
Wes Farrell had stopped all drinking early the previous day and hadn't resumed after Sergeant Stoner had left at night. He had decided he had slipped up the day before with Lieutenant Glitsky, reading the man all wrong by trusting him. He thought that today he'd better be a little sharper if he was going to do any good work for his client and, while he wasn't ready to admit that his alcoholic intake had slowed him down or affected his judgment, he didn't want to take any chances.
He had been watching the television ever since he had gotten up and there had been no sign of Kevin's tape. Whether or not anyone would believe it, Wes had a hard time imagining that a news station wouldn't run it. True or not, they had to see it as a development in the case of the most wanted fugitive in the United States. It should have appeared on every station from here to Bangor, Maine, within minutes of its arrival at the station. What could have gone wrong?
He realized he had also erred in neglecting to ask Kevin for the phone number where he was, so he was reduced to waiting on the off chance…
And after his lecture the previous night about the probability of Kevin being the defendant in a murder trial, Kevin and Melanie might have decided – at last – to change their names and get into a witness-protection program. In Brazil, or something.
Bart was whining by the door, running around in little circles, needing to go relieve himself. Wes hadn't wanted to leave the apartment, thinking he should be there if Kevin or Melanie called, but the dog was giving him the guilts. It was nearly ten-thirty and he wasn't acting in the SPLA-approved manner. He could be fined, even jailed, his reputation smeared, branded as an animal-hater. Failing to believe in the anthropomorphism of animals was turning into the next cardinal sin among the PC set.
He looked down at his suffering pet, not wanting to allow Bart to experiment again with the newspapers in the kitchen. Could be a bad precedent – Bart might get so he liked it. 'Okay, guy, we gave 'em a chance. Let's roll it out of here.'
He opened the door and Bart rushed to the top of the stairs, whining and circling again. Not entirely trustful of the police, who had blindsided him only hours before, Wes atypically locked his difficult deadbolt, not that it would do any good if anybody really wanted to get in but it made him feel more secure.
He was four steps toward Bart at the head of the stairs when he thought he heard the telephone begin to ring. He cocked his head, listening over the dog's whine. Second ring. Yep, the phone.
'Perfect,' he said aloud, reaching into his pocket for the keys, which had caught on a loose thread in his pocket. He pulled and out came his comb and all his coins, flung all over the floor.
Ring.
The keys were stuck to the inside of his pocket, which was now pulled inside out. Swearing, holding the keys awkwardly, he crab-walked to his door. Bart came running up, barking.
Hey, master! Wes! My man. We're going out, remember? I've got to pee a river! I mean it. I'll do it in the hallway here if…
Ring.
He knew the trick. He could get the deadbolt on the first try if he calmly inserted the key all the way and then pulled it out the one sixteenth of an inch…
Ring.
… and wiggled it just the right amount. There!
'Shut up, Bart.'
The other lock was a piece of cake. In, turn, open.
Ring.
Cross the room, running, still holding the keys, which still stuck to the threads in the bottom of his turned-out pocket. Into the kitchen, the wall phone.
'Hello.'
Dial tone.
He dropped his hands in frustration and the keys, magically undoing their hermetic knot, fell to the floor. He stepped to the side and saw Bart looking up at him, moaning piteously over a fresh deposit.
His pocket still hanging all the way out, Wes stood stock still, then deliberately undid his zipper and pulled out his penis. 'I am a fucking one-eared elephant,' he told Bart, then tucked himself back in and went for a beer.
'That wasn't you?'
'No. This is the first time I've tried to call. We just plugged the phone back in. We wanted to get some sleep.'
'That's nice,' Wes said. 'So who was it?' He couldn't figure who else might have tried to call him. He never imagined it might have been Glitsky – not after the betrayal yesterday.
'I don't know,' Kevin said. 'How would I know who called you?'
Wes dropped it. 'Anyway, you get your nice sleep?'
'Yeah. We both feel better. Even my ribs…'
'Great. So what are you planning to do now?'
A short pause, then: 'We don't know, Wes. Maybe just wait.'
'You know what for?'
'No. We don't know what to do. Maybe wait 'til tonight and then try to get down to Mexico, then I don't know, call you when things maybe calm down, see if by then something's turned up. I mean, somebody's got to be out there who can say what happened. Besides me.'
'Don't you think they would have come forward by now?'
'Yeah. But maybe not. Maybe they're scared, too. I mean, all this stuff outside. But after my tape comes out…'
'Speaking of which…'
'Yeah, I know. We're calling the station right after this. Something went wrong there. Melanie says it must have been the guard.'
'The guard?'
"The place was closed up. She left it at the night desk.' Wes bit off his reply. He'd like a nickel for every time a detail like this had cost someone a case. You didn't drop things off with second parties – you delivered them to principals even if you had to wait all night. 'You want me to call the station, take it from there?'
'I thought you said it wouldn't do any good.'
'On the other hand, as you just pointed out, it might bring somebody out of the woodwork, a believable witness, and you might get out of this yet.'
'You think so?'
'I don't know, it's a big if. I wouldn't get my hopes up. But at least it's possible. As things stand now, you either run or you go to trial. It's probably worth doing, that's all I'm saying. I could do it for you, keep you guys out of it.'
He heard mumbling at the other end of the line, Kevin discussing it with Melanie, then he was back on. 'If you really would…'
'I said so, didn't I?'
'It's better than running, isn't it? It's the right thing?'
It was odd hearing someone ask that question nowadays, but Wes thought it very much in character. Kevin was a throw-back, a believer in doing the right thing – it was what had gotten him into this in the first place. All the right moves that had turned out so disastrously.
And Wes realized he had no choice either. The way Kevin was now was the way Wes had tried to be, had believed in being, before events in his life had soured him on believing anymore.
It was irrational blind faith, but giving solace to Kevin and Melanie, committing to help them, Wes realized he felt a whole lot better about himself than he had in a long time. It was the trick he had forgotten ever since Mark Dooher, since his wife… sometimes people didn't screw up on you. That was the thing he'd forgotten. You had to take chances. If you didn't you were dead, or might as well be.
'Wes?'
'Yeah, I'm sure. I do think it's your best shot, Kev. If you run and you're caught… no telling what would happen.' He didn't have to draw a picture. 'For now, I'd say lay low. Wait another day. Nobody knows where you are. Maybe something will break in your favor. You can always run, but once you do that, you're committed.'
Glitsky was home for lunch. He was never home for lunch on a workday but he had spent the rest of the morning assigning cases, following up with his inspectors who weren't working Kevin Shea in one way or another, checking over some other autopsies, scheduling courtroom appearances, liaising (an FBI word if ever there was one) with Special Agent Margot Simms on the 'progress' of the Kevin Shea investigation. The FBI had decided that this was a civil-rights case and that the federal government had at least parallel jurisdiction in the matter. They didn't need to be invited to investigate by the local police anyway, no more than they would if they were looking into the murders of civil-rights workers in the deep South. Now, on their own authority, they were on hand, and Chief Rigby seemed inclined to let them take whatever glory the case might provide, or whatever heat. Special Agent Simms was more than happy with this arrangement, although she hadn't been much interested in knife wounds, Jamie O'Toole, photographic inspections, the Mullen/McKay cousins, Rachel from eastern Europe, any of that.
What did interest Simms was the personality profile that depicted Kevin Shea as armed and very dangerous. Glitsky thought this had probably originated from Elaine Wager's outburst to the media, then been goosed up by FBI staff researchers who knew what they were looking for, and hence often found evidence of it, even when the data wasn 't particularly compelling.
Knowing the FBI and their propensity to shoot first, Glitsky had tried to set Simms straight on that notion. But she clearly didn't want to hear it – this was the kind of high-visibility case a young female agent needed if she wanted to get really equal and make her own bones among the men who hadn't been afraid to use firepower when the situation had called for it. If they needed them – she wasn't telling Glitsky they would, but if they did – she had two weapons specialists, including a marksman, at her disposal.
Next she wanted to know what Glitsky thought of Wes Farrell, was he their best bet to make contact with Shea – maybe a federal tap on his phone line? Special Agent Simms was 'connected' to a federal judge who, she said, would issue a warrant to her to go look for just about anything 'on half a molecule of ten-year-old DNA' whenever she asked.
Glitsky had said he thought it was possible that Shea and Farrell would telephonically connect. He'd kept his face impassive the whole time.
He had really just been spinning his wheels all morning, waiting to have meaningful discussions with two people – Ridley Banks and Loretta Wager.
Banks had not appeared at the office – not unusual in itself, he was a field inspector – but the no-show left intact the mystery of the Mo-Mo House note, which was the next item of those Glitsky had centered on his desk. Perhaps whatever that was about had nothing to do with Kevin Shea, and therefore Glitsky could officially pursue it. (When Wes Farrell hadn't answered his phone he had to shelve even his informal hunt for Shea. He had no trail to follow. Maybe Special Agent Simms would put him onto one.)
And he knew that Loretta was at one of the burials and would be neither at home nor her office until the early afternoon, at least. He kept telling himself that he wanted to talk to her so soon, now, again, for business reasons. He could even wait if he had to – it wasn't that he needed to talk to her for anything personal. Whatever they had to decide about each other would develop in its own time… Finally, he had given up on trying to appear busy and had driven home.
Now he was watching a pan filled with canned chili through tearful eyes chopping an onion. He'd already grated up the remains of a rock-hard lump of what looked like cheddar cheese that had been stuck in the back of the refrigerator.
He was still worrying the question of talking to Loretta about all of this; he had been in the bureaucracy long enough to know that going over your supervisor's head was the quickest and most thorough way to threaten your position and reputation. But he'd put enough of the pixels together to be getting a fairly clear image of what was happening, and he realized that the solution to the problem might well lie with Loretta Wager. It was all, as Strother Martin had observed to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, 'a failure to communicate.'
Glitsky would have to go to Loretta, who was undoubtedly unaware that Alan Reston, in his zeal to please his powerful benefactor, was abusing his new-found power, the authority of his office, to undermine the interests of justice. Reston (Glitsky reasoned) was going on the assumption that Shea had to continue to look guilty – if he wasn't guilty it would make Loretta look bad… Glitsky didn't think Loretta gave a good goddamn about that, she didn't want the guy railroaded. But Reston's position was that he didn't want to deal, just now, with anything that appeared to weaken the DA's case against Shea.
It was typical – short-sighted but common enough that it didn't even mildly shock him. Reston, the new guy, wanted to deliver his first major case to the person who had managed his appointment. He would be a hero. It would make Loretta a hero too. Everybody wins. And to a career prosecutor like Reston, it was an article of faith that Shea, like every other defendant on the planet, was certainly guilty of something.
Reston figured he was protecting Loretta, and from the DA's perspective, Glitsky wasn't. Therefore Glitsky was the enemy. For the time being, anyway. Nothing personal in it – he'd even warned Glitsky to keep a low profile to avoid it coming to this. But it had.
Glitsky reminded himself that Loretta didn't know anything about Farrell's information, about Rachel's statement (Shea lifting Wade up, not pulling him down), Colin Devlin, Jamie O'Toole starting to weaken – about any of the reasons Glitsky had now arrived at for a formidable state of doubt regarding Shea's guilt on any level. He and Loretta hadn't spent last night – or any of their time – rapping down the intricacies of Kevin Shea's case. There had been more immediate issues.
But now it had gone too far. He was going to have to bring it up with her, go over Rigby's head, over Reston's. Special Agent Simms, with her sharpshooter, had finally put it over the top for him. He was going to have to talk to Loretta, open those lines of communication between her and Reston, get people back to thinking about how they ought to do their jobs. Pretty basic stuff, not unreasonable.
But what he still couldn't understand was why Farrell hadn't even tried to call him yet. That made no sense unless Shea had gotten some cold feet, which was not, after all, so far-fetched. As far as Farrell knew, Glitsky's offer of a deal still held – that at least Shea would get a listen. In fact, Reston's refusal through Elaine to offer any protection to Kevin had changed all that – the message was that he wasn't going to listen privately to anything Wes Farrell or Kevin Shea had to say. No, Reston was committed – his position was Shea was guilty and that was that.
Now Glitsky had no deal to offer in exchange for Kevin Shea coming in, but Farrell wouldn't yet know that. So why hadn't he called?
He stuck his index finger into the small pan, stirred. Almost ready, and the doorbell rang.
A strip of gauze covered the narrow glass window beside the front door, and he moved it to one side. No one was out on the landing. He opened the door.
'If I were a trained assassin you'd be dead right now. Why are you crying?' His friend Dismas Hardy had pressed himself against the house on the stairway, stepping out when the door had opened.
'I'm not crying, I was cutting onions. I thought you were in Ashland.'
'Rumor had it that Hamlet could be missed this year. I'd just spent a week in the wilderness, camping with a three-year-old and a five-year-old. We got worried about the house with all these fires you mentioned when we talked. Seemed like a good time to come home.'
'Not so good, actually.'
They were inside, halfway to the kitchen. 'Maybe you don't remember the experience of camping with toddlers,' Hardy said. 'You ever do that with your guys?'
'Sure. Lots of times. Peace, tranquility, the experience of nature.'
'Except for the peace and tranquility part.' Hardy leaned over the stove. 'Umm, chili. I don't think I've had chili in a year. Smells great.'
'You're not having it now, either. This is the only can in the house, the first time I get a whole can of chili all to myself in like fifteen years.'
'A whole can? You can't eat a whole can.'
'Watch me.'
'This is cruel and unusual, making me watch this. Fritos even!'
Glitsky was pouring Tapatio sauce over a large serving bowl – a normal soup bowl wouldn't have been nearly big enough to hold the mixture of chili, onions and cheese, covered by a whole bag of Fritos that Glitsky had layered over the top. He stopped long enough to point. 'The door's where you left it. Close it on the way out.' He took a mouthful, providing more sound effects than he would have if he'd been alone.
Hardy sat across the kitchen table. He was wearing his non-lawyer clothes – jeans, a long-sleeved green-and-white rugby shirt, tennis shoes. He had placed another bowl in front of himself, as well as an oversized spoon, but Glitsky had ignored the hint. 'You're turning into a mean person, Abe. I hate to see that.'
Glitsky swallowed. 'You don't know the half of it.' He spooned more chili. 'The promotion's gone to my head,' he said. 'That's probably it.'
Hardy watched his friend eat for another minute, then – when it didn't appear that guilt was going to work its magic – stood up and went back into the kids' hallway.
Presently, Glitsky heard the familiar drone of the news on the boys' television. He poured a little more Tapatio over the chili, picked a Frito off the mass. The name Kevin Shea came through, and when he heard it a second time he picked up his bowl, stuck the spoon in and walked out of the kitchen back into the kids' hallway.
Hardy was lounging on Isaac's bed, hands crossed behind his head, catching up on all he had missed. A commentator was talking about the effect Mr Shea's tape was going to have… 'What tape?'
'They're going to play it again. They just said.'
'When?'
'Soon. Wait.'
Glitsky came into the room, pulled around a wooden chair, sat on it backward and put his chili down onto the floor, by which time Kevin Shea's face had filled the screen.
'… and I didn't do any part of this. I was in the bar, and when everybody started moving I got kind of propelled outside. I saw what was happening to Arthur Wade and I tried to push myself through the crowd. I took out my Swiss Army knife and cut a few people who were in my way. The police should be looking for people with knife cuts, not for me…
'Mr Wade was already off the ground when I got to him, and I swear to God I was trying to hold him up, not pull him down. I gave him my knife so he could cut himself down. But then they… the crowd… they knocked that away, and then somebody hit me and I went down. Then I got kicked in the head. I don't remember after that, except when I looked up, Arthur Wade was dead. Some guys came and threw me into a pickup truck and got me away from there. They said they'd kill me if I said anything about what happened.'
There was a pause in the tape. Hardy said 'southerner,' and Glitsky responded 'Texas.'
Shea was continuing. 'I have not left the city. I want to tell what really happened, but every time I've tried to contact the police and get some protection they have… they have betrayed my trust.'
'That's b.s.,' Glitsky said.
'Just now – it is Thursday night – my lawyer told me that he had been followed home by the police after going downtown and trying to arrange my surrender. I don't want to run away – that would make me look guilty, and I haven't done anything wrong. I don't know what else to do, so I'm making this video. I hope someone listens to it. I did not do this. You have to believe me.'
As soon as the tape went blank, Hardy answered it. 'I don't.'
The station broke for a commercial and Glitsky muted the screen. Hardy was sitting up. 'Good strategic idea, though, to get the heat off himself. But it's going to backfire. Who's the lawyer?'
'Wes Farrell,' Glitsky told him.
'I heard he'd retired. He hangs out sometimes at the Shamrock, doesn't he? I should ask Moses. I'd never let a client of mine do that.'
'Why not?'
"Cause it reeks of guilt, that's why. It's going to blow up in his face.'
'It might be true, though.'
Hardy shot him a glance. His friend Abe the cop did not often come down on the side of suspects. 'What do you mean?'
'Well, the part about Farrell being followed home is bullshit, but the rest of it.'
'Hello? If one part of it is false, you can bet the rest of it is. Typical client mistake. They put in too much and then can't take it out.' He picked up the bowl of chili and got it grabbed away from him. He scowled. 'So how come you think it might be true?'
Glitsky was punching Fritos down with the spoon. 'The knife wounds he mentioned – his version is about the only explanation for them. Other things.'
Hardy nodded. 'Secret police business, no doubt.'
'Secret enough.'
In the living room now, Glitsky threw Hardy another bag of Fritos. 'But,' he said, 'that's all it said.'
The conversation, with a few hairpins, had gotten around to the cryptic note about Mo-Mo House. 'So what's the "watch this" part?'
'It was a joke Ridley Banks told me.'
Glitsky repeated the joke and when he had finished Hardy pulled a Frito from the bag and chewed on it. 'That's it? That's the whole thing?'
'It's also an IQ test,' Glitsky said. 'If you don't think it's funny you're dumb. Try it on your friends, you'll see.'
But Hardy was pondering it – the note, not the joke. 'I'd wait and ask Banks.'
'I would, too, but he's not around. I get the feeling it's not a coincidence.'
'So what could it be?'
'Well, you know, I've asked myself that question.'
Hardy got up and walked to the window, the early afternoon rays of sunlight beginning to come through. Hands in his pockets, he stood still. 'Whatever it was, he didn't want anybody who might read the note on your desk to recognize what it was about. You guys have an office business going on between just the two of you? Maybe whatever you were talking about – you and Banks – when he told you the joke, if you call that a joke? Kind of a memory jog?'
'No. Nothing.'
But of course there had been. He wasn't going to tell Hardy about it – he hadn't mentioned his new relationship with Loretta to a soul and wasn't about to start now. But suddenly he recalled the exact moment yesterday with Ridley, the look between them when he'd been about to mention something else about Loretta, something to warn his lieutenant about, but Glitsky had cut him off – he hadn't wanted to hear more slander about Loretta.
Could that have been what the 'watch this' was all about? It was way beyond cryptic – that Ridley wanted Abe to reflect not on the joke itself but on what they'd been about to discuss when he referred to it. On the other hand, the Byzantine logic seemed to be in the realm of acceptable to Hardy.
Glitsky chewed his cheek. Last night Loretta had quite plausibly explained the reality behind Ridley's whole Pacific Moon scenario. And Ridley's reference to Mo-Mo House in the ambiguous note had to be about Jerohm Reese. Didn't it?
And yet if Hardy's theory held – the hidden meaning behind 'watch this' – Ridley was in reality advising Glitsky to go see Mo-Mo House about something to do with Loretta Wager. And if that were even the implication, Glitsky didn't think he ought to ignore it.
Glitsky was on his feet, moving to the door.
'Let's go, Diz. Back to work.'
'I'm not working today.'
He stopped at the door, opening it. 'I am. Let's go.'
On the way down the steps, Hardy told him he was turning into a really lousy host, and Glitsky told him that next time he should maybe wait until he got an invitation before he came over.
Jerohm Reese, sitting within the thirty square feet of the attorney's visiting room on the Sixth floor, thought his lawyer Gina Roake was looking pretty fine lately. Lost some weight, maybe put some highlights in her dark hair where he'd noticed her getting some gray strands. She looked good with the makeup looking fresh. Woman must be near forty – time to get serious she wants to get herself fixed up with some man. She doing okay.
It was after lunchtime at the jail and people could say what they wanted, but Jerohm, he'd take meals on the county anytime – today breakfast he got eggs, sausage, potatoes, three slices of bread, juice, cup of fruit. Then, not four hours later, they were bringing up his tray with two thick slabs that good meat loaf, mashed potatoes, country gravy, green beans, three slices bread (they always did the three slices bread), big old square carrot cake with that maple-syrup icing, couple cartons milk. No complaints 'bout the jail food – most times better than what Carrie put out.
'Damn, girl,' he was grinning at his lawyer, 'you lookin' good.'
Gina Roake had already placed her briefcase on the floor beside the tiny table. She had been with the public defender's office for eight years and had represented Jerohm three times since his early days at the Youth Academy. She was the one who had gotten him leniency on his 'first offense' (as an adult) and who had argued successfully with the late Chris Locke on the insurmountable evidence problems the prosecution faced regarding the murder charge on Mike Mullen.
Seem like every time Gina show up Jerohm walk out of the slam, so she lately Jerohm's favorite – Gina didn't quite share the feeling.
'Sit down, Jerohm.'
'Hey, I'm sittin', but I tell you, I like that new thing, the hair… wachu doin' with color…'
She leaned back as far as she could, arms crossed over her suit jacket. 'What are you doing with your brains, Jerohm?'
'Huh? Hey, what?' It hurt him when she came down on him like this. Girl got no call…
But she was going on. 'Not even one week ago we get you out of here, you remember that? We talk and say maybe it be a good idea' – Gina slipped into the jargon like an old pair of shoes – 'be a good idea if you stayed inside, watch a lot of television, like that. You remember that?'
She got no call talkin' like that at him. He sat back now, mimicking her, arms crossed, sullen. He shrugged. 'They giving everybody else tickets. Me they lock up.'
She pointed at him. 'You,' she said, 'had two thousand dollars worth of assorted merchandise which didn't belong to you in the trunk of your stolen car, Jerohm. You see any difference here?'
Another shrug. 'They just out to get me. Looking for me, is all. Hasslin'.'
She was forward now, halfway across the table, trying to keep her temper in check. 'Hey, listen up, Jerohm. Hasslin' is like when they're following you around, bust your chops for jay-walking, you hear what I'm saying?'
'Hey, now, girl, you listen…'
'AND DON'T YOU GIRL ME ANYMORE.' The outburst felt so good, she forced herself to rein in. 'I'm not your girl. I'm your attorney, and you're putting me in a position where I can not do you any good. Don't you understand that?'
One of the guards who had been standing outside knocked on the door, opened it. 'Everything okay in here?'
Ms Roake nodded. 'Everything's fine, thanks.' The door closed and with an almost visible effort she brought herself back to her client. 'Sometimes, Jerohm, I have to wonder why I want to get you off. I mean what are you doing out there in the middle of the night robbing these stores? This is your 'hood, these are your people.'
Jerohm rolled his eyes. 'Hey shi… they leave the door open, who's problem is that? 'Sides, they got insurance, likely. Ain't nobody gettin' hurt.'
' 'Cept if somebody show up, try to stop you.'
'Well, nobody did. QED. Hey, look, you get me off 'cause that's what they pay you for. Weren't for guys like me, you got no work. Maybe you out on the street yourself.' Smug and secure, a charmer, he broke a toothy smile.
She sucked in some air. The chain reaction that had begun with the negotiated release of Jerohm a few days before had led Gina to question the very nature of what she was doing. In her mind there had been no question that Jerohm had shot Mike Mullen point-blank in cold blood for the temporary use of his car, though of course Jerohm was smart enough (if that word applied) to deny it to his attorney, but that had not been the issue.
The issue had been, as it always was in defense work, does the prosecution have enough evidence to constitute proof beyond a reasonable doubt? And when all the eyewitnesses had gone sideways, she had realized that in this instance there was no case. She had argued that before the late Christopher Locke and she had prevailed.
And look what had happened.
Always before, whenever she'd have these doubts, she'd talked with her fellow public defenders, had a couple of drinks, gotten resold on the idea that her job was to provide the best defense the law allowed. It was the give and take of the law – win some, lose some.
But Jerohm, suddenly and unexpectedly, had made it all more significant, and personal. This was a murderer, a thief, a mugger, a sociopath of the absolutely first rank, and he sits here joking with her as though the whole thing's a lark. She found herself wondering if 'doing her job' fell under the general rubric of 'following orders' that had been the great rationalization for so much evil for so long. Gina Roake was Jewish and she was intimately familiar with the parallels. And they were shaking her.
But, for the moment, she was here. She was supposed to represent Jerohm again. She folded her hands together on the table in front of her. 'Okay, so… where do we go now, Jerohm? You're getting arraigned on Tuesday…'
'Tuesday? What's this Tuesday?' With attitude now, a bit of the street push, seeing he was getting to her.
'We got a holiday weekend, Jerohm. The courts are closed on the Fourth of July, which is Monday, so it's Tuesday.'
'Now wait a minute, can't you get me like habeas corpus, something like that?'
It was her experience that a great percentage of the jail's population could spout Latin like Jesuits when they had to. She thought it was a powerful example of motivation being the key to learning.
Gina shook her head. 'No habeas corpus, Jerohm. And I think we're going to have a problem with a not guilty here. We might have to cop a plea.'
'Hey, no way, man. I ain't going down for no jail time on this.' He studied her a minute, trying to figure what game she was playin' on him. He didn't see it. 'Hey, c'mon, Gina, you know, this wasn't nothin'.'
'Well, actually, it was… we got stolen goods, Jerohm, we got presumption of looting, resisting arrest, we got breaking the curfew.'
'Yeah, but we also got the fact that everybody else doin' this shit is walking out with-'
'It's not exactly the same shit.'
'Close enough and you know it is, girl.' At her reaction to the second 'girl' he held up a hand and said he was sorry. 'But you know the truth is it don't matter what I did - if that was it you know I ain't in no county lockup. They have me up to San Quentin. We gotta say I'm bein' prejudiced against. That the shot.'
That was the best shot. Gina knew that. She could go down to the new DA's office and argue passionately for that position. She had done similar things many times and sometimes it worked. But this time she wasn't sure she could do it. She felt that at some point you had to draw the line, and she was at hers.
'Jerohm, this time that's not gonna go.'
He leaned back, truly sullen now. Frowning. 'Well, I say it and you gotta do it, ain't that right?'
'Well, you can always ask for a new lawyer.' She allowed the trace of a smile. 'Put me out on the street.'
Getting his bluff called rattled him a little. 'But hey, you and me, we been good together. We done some good shit.'
'That may be the case, Jerohm, but I can't go down and argue prejudice here. I don't think it was prejudice. I think we're going to have to cut a deal.'
'C'mon, girl, you think I white this happen?'
This was a trick question and she avoided it. 'The cops that picked you up, Jerohm, they black?'
He nodded. 'One of 'em.'
'And the DA who brought you upstairs here, she was black?'
'Okay.'
'And the new DA himself, Alan Reston, who says he's holding you for trial, he's black, too, am I right?'
'Right.'
'So who was prejudiced exactly?'
Jerohm chewed on his cheek a minute, stumped that even the multiple-choice question had no correct answer. 'Must of been somebody,' he said at last.
Gina took up her briefcase, stood and knocked on the door. When the guard opened it, she turned back to her client. 'You figure out who, Jerohm,' she said, 'you give me a call.'
Not seventy-five feet away as the crow flies, Special Agent Margot Simms sat with District Attorney Alan Reston in his new office. The new DA had recently returned from his predecessor's funeral, where he'd had a private discussion with Senator Wager in the cathedral's sacristy after the service.
Three men were in the process of removing Christopher Locke's personal possessions. Since Reston had known he wouldn't be in for most of the morning he had directed them to start early, and they had taken most of the books down from the shelves. Packing boxes lined the walls.
Reston and Simms were discussing Kevin Shea. She professed to having a difficult time understanding why, since the fugitive was still in the city, he had not been apprehended. Reston laid it off on the police department, then offered up his excuse for them – with the disturbances they had been undermanned, overwhelmed. The point was, now the FBI was taking over and what were Simms's plans?
'We've got a task force of fifteen agents attempting to contact every known acquaintance of either Shea or Sinclair-'
'Sinclair?'
'Melanie Sinclair, the girl with him.' The expression told Reston he had better pick up in context the allusions he didn't immediately grasp. He should have known who Sinclair was. He had to be careful what he asked about. 'We've got Shea's address book from his apartment. Sinclair's got her addresses on the computer in her apartment.' At his glance she nodded and quickly explained. 'We don't have a warrant problem here. This is a priority case. So we're interviewing everybody on either list, and, of course, we've got some people in Texas with the mother and sister.'
'What about the tape?' Referring to the videotape Shea had made and that had been played on television.
'We've got a couple of specialists analyzing the background. There's some distinctive molding – maybe you noticed – at the windows and ceiling line behind him. Perhaps we can date the building he's in. Long shot, but you never know. Could be one of a kind.'
'I'm impressed.'
'Yes.' Special Agent Simms was accustomed to impressing. She was intelligent, professional and attractive. Shaded dark blonde hair fashionably cut. Nice legs. 'We also have a team talking to this Cynthia Taylor – she's the woman who originally identified Kevin Shea, you may recall. Melanie Sinclair and Taylor are – were – close, it seems. There's some chance she'll know likely places for the pair to go underground – friends, friends of friends, that sort of thing.'
Reston was thinking that manpower was a wonderful thing.
'I did want to run by you, though, just so we're clear on it, that we still believe our best move is a tap on Shea's lawyer's telephone. Wes Farrell. Lieutenant Glitsky expects that the two of them will get back into contact. In any event, you know some of the legal issues that arise over wiretaps, and I wanted to make sure we were kosher on any local rules.'
Reston knew that California law made wiretaps functionally impossible, but that the fruits of a lawful federal wiretap were admissible. He told her to pick herself a federal judge if she needed to get a tap approved. He didn't think there'd be a problem.
'Good. I'll follow through on that.' She clapped her hands together briskly. 'Which leaves the question of apprehension.'
Reston thought this was in fact and the law one of Chief Rigby's areas of responsibility, but he had Simms here now and thought it wouldn't hurt to plant a seed. 'Naturally, our interest is in placing him under arrest.'
She nodded. 'Of course. But I wondered if you had anything that doesn't appear here' – she tapped the folder in front of her – 'regarding his state of mind, anything we might want to watch out for.'
Reston took a moment getting the phrasing right. 'Well… we know he's had military training. He knows how to use weapons, although we don't know if he has any with him now. But judging from the high-speed chase as well as the panic evident on the videotape, we know he's fairly desperate by now. And then, he is charged with murder. I don't imagine killing someone else if it would help him get away would particularly bother him.'
Agent Simms took that in. 'That's a good insight,' she said, standing up, extending her hand. 'Thanks for your time, sir. If in fact Shea is still in the city we stand a decent chance of locating him within twenty-four hours. This kind of limited manhunt this is what we do.'
'Excellent,' Reston said. 'We'd like to get this behind us.'
'I understand,' she said.
They shook hands again.
Despite its location and outward appearance, Glitsky thought the Kit Kat Klub wasn't that bad a place. True, the walls on the street outside were tagged all the colors of the rainbow and both the picture window and the porthole in the door were blacked out and crisscrossed with bars, but the same was true of most of the establishments in this neighborhood.
Inside it was dim and close, but the place smelled of beer and cigarettes, not urine and dope. This, Glitsky thought, was a big difference. The club featured some pretty hot blues on weekends, local guys working on their chops during the week, but at this time of the day it was just a slow bar, a half-dozen people sitting around with glasses and bottles in front of them.
Glitsky still wasn't one hundred percent sure why he was there. He pulled up a stool and waited for the bartender to make it down to see him. Some vintage Clapton grunged out from the box, loud, and Glitsky reflected that while it was a fact that white men really couldn't jump worth a damn, a few of them – Clapton, Robben Ford, the late Stevie Ray Vaughn, a local guy named Joe Cellura – could blow some pretty mean blues.
With a heavy sigh the bartender lifted his three-hundred-pound bulk off the industrial-strength stool he half sat, half stood on behind the bar. 'Comin'.' It was a good thing he announced it – otherwise it might not have been obvious that he was moving. Glitsky, one elbow on the bar, waited patiently. Here was a man built for comfort, not speed. The wooden slats on the floor creaked beneath him and the fifteen-foot walk seemed to just about tap him out.
'I'm looking for Mo-Mo House.' Glitsky had his wallet out on the bar and opened it, flashing his buzzer.
The man looked down, as slowly as he did everything else. 'You found him.' He wore gold-framed round lenses. The shining black forehead was high, the dreadlocks brushed with gray even in the dim light. The voice had wasted itself with whiskey – a talking blues voice – or maybe he gargled with tacks, razor blades. The fat man waited. If you don't ask, you don't ask the wrong question.
'I thought I might run into a Ridley Banks down here.'
Mo-Mo shrugged, rotated his head a few degrees. 'I don't see 'im. Get you a drink?'
Maybe it was because his friend Hardy had been around. Maybe Flo was hovering somewhere nearby – sometimes before bed she used to pour herself a shot of frozen vodka – but Glitsky surprised himself. 'What's in the Stoly bottle?'
Mo-Mo threw a look over his glasses, backed up a couple of steps, and with some effort leaned and opened a cabinet under the bar. Reaching in, he rummaged a minute, grunting, then came up with an unopened bottle of Stolichnaya, the seal still intact over the cap. He placed it on the bar, grabbed a glass, fished some ice into it. 'Help yourself. On me.'
Glitsky pointed to the other bottle of Stolichnaya on the shelf behind him. 'I don't need a new bottle.'
Mo-Mo almost smiled. 'You with the ABC?'
The Alcoholic Beverage Control would take a dim view of Mo-Mo refilling his premium vodka bottles with piss, but it didn't matter to Glitsky. These were the trades you made if you wanted results on the street.
Glitsky cracked the new bottle and poured a half inch over his ice. 'So how's business?'
Mo-Mo held up his hands. 'Hey, the blues, you know.' He glanced out over his domain. The music had changed, now either Albert or B.B., still loud. No one was paying any attention to Mo-Mo or Glitsky. 'This about Jerohm?'
'Should it be?'
Mo-Mo shrugged. 'Jerohm,' he said, 'he some bad nigger. But he old news. He in jail again?'
'I hear.'
'Me, too.' Mo-Mo settled his bulk against the counter behind him. 'So it ain't him.'
'No. I don't think so.'
Another silence. 'Some bad shit going down out there, huh?'
Glitsky nodded. 'Not good.' He took a small sip and the straight spirits, as always, constricted his throat. How did people drink this stuff every day? He swallowed again, wished he'd ordered tea, dug out a cube of ice and chewed at it.
'So, what?' Mo-Mo asked.
There wasn't really any subtle way to get what he thought he wanted, so Glitsky figured he might as well just out with it. 'You know Loretta Wager, Mo-Mo?'
No movement. Not a tic of the eye or a twist of the head. It was as though Glitsky hadn't spoken a word. Finally, the body heaved slowly and Mo-Mo reached for the well in front of him. He poured what looked in the dimness to be some yellow custard out of a bottle into a large glass into which he dumped a handful of ice, then drank off half of it.
'Can't say I really know her,' he said at last. 'Ain't seen her now in a long time. Girl goin' pretty for husself, ain't she?'
'Looks like. When you were seeing her, how was that?'
He sucked some more of the pudding out of his glass. 'We had some of the same friends, best way to put it.'
'The same friends?'
Mo-Mo nodded. 'Other day, your man axed me again 'bout this.'
'Ridley Banks?'
'That's him. Man who take down Jerohm. He and me, we go back.' His voice went down further. Glitsky had to lean halfway across the bar to hear him over the music. 'We do some tradin' now and again.'
Glitsky knew what this meant. Banks had evidently discovered something about Mo-Mo or his operation here at the Kit Kat that wasn't exactly kosher. But it didn't concern any of Ridley's active homicides. The most obvious thing would be that drugs got sold out of here. And armed with that information, Banks would make a deal – he wouldn't drop the dime on the fat man, and Mo-Mo would become an informer. This, Glitsky reasoned, was how Jerohm Reese came to be found here at the Kit Kat in such a timely manner after he had shot – oops, allegedly shot – Michael Mullen.
In his career, Glitsky had himself maintained relations with any number of criminals – prostitutes, drug couriers, con artists, burglars, car thieves. He was a homicide cop, and if these people didn't kill anybody, it wasn't his mission to bust them. They were sources of information you couldn't get at, say, the Lions' Club. So you left them alone if they stayed out of your own personal face.
'Ridley asked you about Loretta Wager?'
Mo-Mo shook his head. 'Not direct, no. Not her. But you now axin' me 'bout her, I put it together.'
'Put what…?'
'The Pacific Moon, must be.'
Glitsky felt a chill run up his back.
'But hey, them statues of limitations, they all gone run out now. Been like fifteen, sixteen years
'What has? Since what, Mo-Mo?'
'Since them days.' He obviously wasn't going to elaborate. 'You look aroun' here now. This place is what I do. Straight and legal, got no time for that crazy blow. Got a bidness here.'
'I can see that, Mo-Mo. You got a business now. But what happened all these years ago?'
Mo-Mo put down the last of his custard, belched discreetly and placed the glass on the bar. Holding out his hands defensively, an innocent man.
'Ain't none of this no secret now.'
'No. All right.'
'I mean Ridley he know all about this.'
'Okay, Mo-Mo, I read you. But what?'
'Well, one deal. Last one I done.' Glitsky swirled his ice, waiting, and Mo-Mo went on. 'Got, like, a load of bread all at once, was like a bean, bean and a half, like that, I don't remember exactly.' Mo-Mo was talking about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That was a load of bread all right.
'But it was gettin' ugly, people gettin' theyselves killed over that kind of green just layin' around. I figure I stay in the bidness I don't get old. I am not the fastest-movin' man they is, you might have noticed. But the blues, man, I love the blues. I say, "Mo, get out of this. Put that money down on some dive, make it you own." But the money needs cleanin' up. You follow me?'
Glitsky nodded. 'So you invested it in the Pacific Moon.'
"Zackly. They take a lot out, mind you, but I get like eighty ninety clean. I put it in this place. Hey, look around. Fifteen years, I still goin' strong.'
There was a hole in the blues as another song ended. One of the patrons came up and ordered a couple of longnecks while Glitsky sat there playing with his glass; Mo-Mo got the beers from the cooler, then lumbered down to the end of the bar, got his stool and carried it back with him. He sat with a sigh.
'And Loretta Wager was in this with you? Her husband?'
'Not with me. Nobody in it with me.' He lifted his heavy shoulders. 'People mind they own business. Her name come up, that's all.'
'Laundering money?'
An expansive gesture. 'I don't know that. Don't know what she doin'. Her husband either.'
'So it's possible she might have had a legitimate investment with the restaurant?'
Mo-Mo balanced himself a little more securely on his stool. 'Anything possible,' he said.
Glitsky was inundated with more stacks of paper – reports, phone messages, the day's mail – strewn across his desk, three of his inspectors hovering outside in the all-too-visible doorway. He had already made two phone calls, both to Wes Farrell. On the first one, Shea's lawyer told him that he had a lot of nerve and hung up on him. On the next, he got more personal.
With the third call, Glitsky was luckier – his friend Hardy had gone back home after his lunchtime visit at Abe's and was spending the day, he said, planing some windows.
'I've got a question for you.' Glitsky was holding up a finger, keeping his inspectors at bay. There were rumblings of impatience.
'And I've got an answer,' Hardy said. 'Just a second, let me think – the Greyhound bus station.'
'Amazing. You got it on the first try. The question was, name a common acronym for the initials TGBS?'
Hardy liked it. 'What's the real question?'
'The real question is how well do you know Wes Farrell?'
'Who?'
'Wes Farrell, the lawyer. You said he hung out at the Shamrock sometimes, which is the bar you own, am I right?'
'Oh, that Wes Farrell.'
'I just called that Wes Farrell and he wouldn't say boo to me.'
'You know what, Abe? Sometimes I feel that way, too.'
'Yeah, well yesterday he wanted to talk to me in the worst way and today he's a stone wall. I've got to find out what's going on.'
'Okay. Go find out.'
'He won't talk to me. Are you listening? Are you hearing me at all?'
'You ring his doorbell, say you're the police, I don't think he's got an option.'
'I don't want to do that.' He omitted the information that he had been forbidden to work on Kevin Shea at all. He couldn't assign any of his inspectors. The sudden realization that Hardy could help him had been a bolt of inspiration.
There was a silence on the line. 'You want me to do that?'
'I don't want to alienate him any further. I may need him.'
'You may need him?'
'That's right.'
'What for?'
'To get Kevin Shea to give himself up.'
'Without a deal?'
'If I need to. If I can. At least I've got to know what's going on, and right now I don't have a clue. I'd put off mentioning my name for the first couple of minutes, though. He really doesn't want to talk to me, I can tell.'
'What if he won't talk to me?'
'Why wouldn't he? A fellow defense attorney? You guys are all a big happy family, aren't you?'
'Oh, that's right, I forgot for a minute.'
'Hardy…'
'All right, I'll call him. Get the lay of the land. Do I bill you or the city?'
'I'll buy you a can of chili,' Glitsky said, and hung up.
For the next twenty-five minutes, the lieutenant put in a few licks on his regular job, listening to the complaints, problems, strategies of his men. They were working on the usual – witness interviews, getting warrants, plans to testify in court, report writing, rebookings (an administrative process whereby after a suspect was arrested for a given crime – in all Glitsky's cases, degrees of murder – the district attorney's office then decided on the formal charge). It was never ending, especially lately – he discovered he had two more non-riot-related homicides that he needed to assign, families that had to be informed, witnesses to cajole or hassle, legwork, background checks and alibis. He called in two men at random and gave them the cases, told them – a joke – he wanted both cases closed in under twelve hours and went downstairs to the cafeteria for a cup of tea, maybe settle his stomach.
Griffin was eating again – there were two unopened bags of Twinkies in front of him, one of the tiny cakes in his hand, and cellophane and cardboard from at least two more packages on the table in front of him. A quart of milk.
Glitsky stood across from him with his tea. 'You on a diet, Carl?' He sat down.
'I was on my way up.'
'That's all right. I was on my way down. What'd you get, anything?'
Griffin chewed happily, nodding. 'Just a minute,' he said, hoisting the milk carton and holding it to his mouth for three swallows. 'Okay. Something.' He used his notes, pulling a steno pad from somewhere beside him. He brought that, too, up to the table.
'General consensus seems to be that it went down near Dearborn and 18th Street.' San Francisco had both numbered streets and numbered avenues – it could be bad luck to get them confused. 'There's a dead end halfway down Dearborn.'
'A dead end?'
'Yeah. Bird Street.'
Glitsky frowned, but Griffin didn't see it. He was consulting his notes. 'All this is about a block and a half east of Dolores Park, where they used to have the tents up.'
'What do you mean, used to?'
'I mean they're gone. They relocated after the fire down there. Moved 'em somewhere else.'
'So who'd you talk to?'
'I went door to door. I knew it was on the Guerrero side so I rang doorbells.'
'And…?'
'And the usual. Got one guy…' He flipped some of his pages, searching for names and addresses he could show his lieutenant. 'Says he heard a shot on Dearborn. Another coupla ladies live together' – he flipped the page – 'they say no, it was Bird. Another guy on Bird says it was Bird. I figure two out of three. But there's apartments all up and down the block. You couldn't tell where from hearing – the sound of the shot bounced off the buildings around the corner.'
'But there would have been two shots?'
'Yeah, I know. But I couldn't find anybody who'd heard two. Nobody recognized two, anyway.' He shrugged, chewed some Twinkie. 'Hey, we're lucky we got one. We can talk to 'em again, the people who heard one, maybe they'll remember.'
'Anybody actually see anything?'
'No. It was dark, or just near it. The streetlights don't work on Bird. A few people mentioned it.'
'Maybe some of the rioters?'
Griffin was finishing the Twinkie, shaking his head. "They were all gone, remember. I got no idea where they are now, who was there then.'
Glitsky didn't like it but he had to take it.
'So I go, it must be Bird. Except there's nothing to call forensics about on Bird. No fresh treadmarks. No accumulation of glass. No big rocks might have gotten thrown. No nothing. I walk the whole street and I'm just about through when the old ladies are coming out for lunch, and they say the riot never came around to Bird – it stayed out by 18th, maybe pitched a little into Dearborn. So now I'm thinkin' that it's the reverse of what I thought before – the shots were on Dearborn, they bounced around the corner to Bird.'
'So you checked out Dearborn?'
'What I could. You want to come down again, look with me, I'd do it again. But I didn't see anything in the street.'
Glitsky took a sip of his tea. It had gone lukewarm. He grimaced – it wasn't turning out to be his day. 'But listen to this, Carl. You're telling me there's a riot below these apartment buildings and nobody's looking out their windows, down at it?'
'No. I talked to half a dozen folks saw the riot-'
'But those people didn't see anything, the car…?'
'Somebody might have, Lieutenant, just nobody I talked to. You want, I'll go back tonight. More people home. Somebody will have seen something. Maybe.'
Glitsky sat chewing on it for a minute. 'You'd better. Why don't you pick one of the guys, have him go out with you. And maybe find out where the residents of the tent city have been relocated to.
Somebody in that riot killed Chris Locke, and somebody must have seen him do it.' Glitsky spread his hands. 'Seen something, at least. But it could be a long night.'
Griffin was holding his next Twinkie. 'Won't be the first one,' he said.
'Gin.' Melanie laid her hand face up. 'Read 'em an' weep.'
Kevin folded his cards into the deck.
'Hey, you're supposed to count-'
'You won, Melanie. That's the game. I guarantee I'm over a hundred. I might be over two hundred after that last hand, which was a no-brainer if I've ever seen one.'
'Hey, you are a bad sport.'
'Maybe I'm just tired of gin.'
He got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting, and went into the living room. The apartment was feeling a little small. They had slept in, then awakened with both of them feeling a bit shaky after the Fred party. They'd checked the television to see if Kevin's tape was ready for prime time (it wasn't), made love, gone back to sleep. When they'd gotten up the second time Kevin had plugged the phone back in and called Wes Farrell, taken his offer to go see what had happened to the tape, then foraged for food and finally dealt the cards. Two plus hours of gin rummy.
He was standing by the living-room window, shades drawn against the light. Melanie came up behind him. She did not touch him but he felt her there. 'I think this is really getting to me,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't take it out on you.'
'It's all right.' She ran a hand down his back. 'A lot of people can't play cards very well. It takes a certain kind of mind and you just don't have it. It doesn't mean you're stupid or anything. I mean about other things.'
He turned around, his face a blank. Stepping past her, he hooked a leg, reached an arm out and… 'hey!'… executed an expert judo takedown, lowering her gently the last six inches to the floor. 'Oh. Sorry,' he said, continuing across the room, 'I guess I didn't see you.' He sat in the stuffed chair.
She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees, put her elbows up on his knees, rested her head in his lap. He combed his fingers through her hair. 'I wonder if this is what being married is like.'
'If what is? You're trapped forever so you play gin to pass the time?'
'Well, that's the romantic view, but I was thinking more about this feeling like you're the whole world, like there's nobody else in it.'
She looked up at him, her eyes gone soft. He wasn't teasing her. 'I think that's the way some marriages start out. But I don't know too many people who feel like that anymore, who even think you should. Do you?'
Kevin shook his head. 'No. I don't know if I ever did.'
'Well, your parents – '
'No, not mine. It was everybody for themselves in my family. My dad was always preoccupied with business, and Mom was… Mom was mostly interested in Mom. And Patsy as just Mom junior. Except maybe… Joey.'
'Your brother – '
'Yeah. He was a good guy,' Kevin sighed. 'Anyway, what got us on that?'
'I think we were talking about not feeling like you were in it alone. You still miss him, don't you? Your brother?'
Again a sigh. 'You know, the word came and I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. I mean, it couldn't have been Joey. They must have got it wrong. Of course, they didn't get it wrong. The one time the army didn't screw up…'
Her head still in his lap, she held his legs tightly.
'So after that, I just… I don't know.'
'You and Wes,' she said.
'What do you mean?'
'I think I'm starting to see why you two guys get along so well.' She told him what she knew of the Mark Dooher story, Wes's loss of faith, the distrust of commitment. 'But that really isn't either of you, is it? That's not who you started out to be-'
'I don't know anymore, Mel. I spent the last three years… well, you know what I've been, how I've been living. I didn't want to get into any of this' – he gestured vaguely – 'this whatever we're in. I sure as hell didn't choose this. This isn't my fight, my story-'
'Maybe it is. Maybe your story is what you wind up doing.'
'I don't want to wind up doing this.'
'Maybe we don't get that option. There's a comforting thought.' She shrugged against him. 'Anyway, it's got us back. That's something, isn't it?'
A long moment passed. He was rubbing gently, moving his hand over her back, her shoulders, her neck. 'I was a jerk. I mean before. With you.'
'Well, that was me, too. I shouldn't have let you be such a jerk. I should have stood up for myself more but I was afraid you'd leave me.'
'I wanted to. That's what I did, see? I left people. I did not feel things, except that I started feeling things about you. I liked you, was the problem. I liked that you were motivated and smart and organized, that you were this quality person…'
'You liked that?'
'Do you have any idea how rare that is, Mel? Yeah, I liked that. Finally, I meet somebody who's not a flake. Who's got some substance.'
'I thought you hated that I wasn't any fun…'
'You were fun, at first, if you remember, until I-'
'It wasn't you.'
'It was too. It scared me – liking you so much – I mean, what if you weren't really who I thought? Then I'd really be up a creek, wouldn't I… so, anyway, I had to see if you were really so tough, so sure of yourself, so competent - and my test was that if you continued to like me when I treated you so badly then you couldn't be so great after all. Not if you'd take that…'
She shook her head, looked up at him, tears in her eyes. 'I didn't just like you, Kevin. I didn't just want a boyfriend. I fell in love with you. I loved you. I still love you.'
'I saw that. That was another strike against you.'
'Why?'
'Why? What was to love? What do you think I'm hiding from with all my craziness? No kidding, I don't see how anybody's got any business loving me…'
She glared up at him. 'Why do you think you're here in the first place, Kevin? Why do you think we're here? Because you, Kevin Shea and nobody else, tried to save Arthur Wade's life. Because you are probably the one person I have ever known who thinks it's important to stay here and get the truth out, even if no one wants to hear it. Not to run, not make excuses, just to do what you've got to do. And you know what? You're right. You've been right all along. And I love you. Am I getting repetitious?'
'A little. I can handle it.'
'And you know, I wasn't so perfect either. Being so controlled all the time. You were right about that. I just needed my… my bottom kicked.'
He patted. 'You mean this pretty thing?'
'That very one. And you did it. Kicked my ass good and proper.'
'And would again, I might add.' He pulled her up the rest of the way into his lap.
'Your ribs,'she said.
'Suddenly my ribs are fine.'
Melanie lay her head in the crook of his neck as he enfolded her to him.
Melanie was taking a bath. Kevin was in the stuffed chair. He had started to take a look at the News at Four, but one of the lead stories had included a statement by Alan Reston on how the fugitive Kevin Shea's tape was inherently not believable – an obvious ploy to evoke sympathy by taking his case directly to the people. It was not going to work. There was a murder warrant out on Kevin Shea and all efforts were still being employed to bring this dangerous criminal to justice. He'd turned it off then.
What was he going to do now? Wes Farrell hadn't been home. He'd called three times in the past half hour. The DA's escalation – the words 'dangerous criminal' – bothered him. He was beginning to realize a new and scarifying truth: that the longer he hid out, the more irrational the 'official' reaction would become. The perception that he had somehow become more 'dangerous,' more unstable, wouldn't help him if they got close to capturing him, and if they somehow discovered where he was, he was afraid it would come to that…
He couldn't let it come to that. He also couldn't let Melanie stay any longer if he thought it would. The 'dangerous criminal' rhetoric was eating his guts – somebody out there might not be planning on taking him alive.
But he was also distrustful of what might happen to him if he was brought to jail – he believed that there was a too real chance that he would not survive inside long enough to get to trial.
He punched the buttons on the phone again. Wes had evidently done a good job getting the tape – finally – recognized and played. But they needed a better way to stay in contact. He hadn't realized that things could move this fast, could cut off his options, take decisions out of his hands. He was getting that feeling now. Events had taken things out of his control, and he had to try to stop their inexorable rush, and without Farrell and some legal plan he didn't have any idea how he was going to do it.
At that moment Farrell was pulling up a chair at the one window table at the Little Shamrock. He had, in fact, gone back to his apartment after his successful mission with the videotape, intent on waiting until Kevin called him again. But ten minutes after he had gotten home Dismas Hardy had called, asking if he could talk with him, off the record, about Kevin Shea. They could meet at the Shamrock.
Word was getting around, all right.
Farrell knew Hardy slightly. He had known him since the days when Hardy had bartended at this very bar. Now he assumed that Hardy, another defense lawyer with a growing reputation on newsworthy cases, was churning the water, angling to get a spot on whatever high-profile murder trial Kevin Shea was going to have. Well, he could go and talk to him – his day wasn't exactly overbooked. Kevin had promised him that he was going to lay low for at least twenty-four hours, so there was no immediate crisis with him, so far as he knew.
Besides, Hardy said he was buying.
So here they were, Moses McGuire coming over from the bar with two pints of Guinness. Farrell and McGuire had exchanged some pleasantries about the last time Farrell had been in the bar a couple of days before, the evening he had spent on McGuire's couch. And was McGuire's wife talking to him yet?
Neither of the two men – Hardy in his rugby shirt and Farrell in a Pendleton – looked much like lawyers at the moment. They clinked their glasses and Farrell asked Hardy what he could do for him.
'I've heard Kevin Shea is your client.'
'Glitsky?'
So much, Hardy thought, for not bringing up Abe in the first couple of minutes. 'Yeah, Glitsky mentioned it to me.'
'That guy is a shithook.' Hardy was silent. Farrell quaffed some stout. 'I go down with an offer to bring in Kevin Shea, who by the way is as innocent as you or me in all this. 'At Hardy's expression, Farrell stopped him. 'I know, I know, but this time it's not a bill of goods. The guy just flat did not do what they're saying he did. No part of it.'
'You know this for a fact?'
'Let's say to a moral certainty. It's the only thing that could have got me back doing this, believe me.'
'So what happened with Glitsky?'
'Glitsky and I have a nice talk. He seems receptive, says he's going to go sell the idea of special protection to the DA, meanwhile keep it all between us.'
'And?'
'And next thing I know I'm in my apartment and there's somebody downstairs with a search warrant to look for Kevin Shea. Glitsky had me followed home.'
Hardy killed a little time with his glass. 'That doesn't sound much like Abe.'
'You a friend of his?'
'We talk from time to time.'
'He tell you about this?'
'About what?'
The tail, the warrant, any of it?'
'No. We were talking, he mentioned you had Kevin Shea. I thought it sounded like a good case.'
This was the reason Farrell thought Hardy had called in the first place. Though it might turn out he could use some help if things ever did come to trial – and Hardy might be a good choice in that eventuality, he was starting to get a reputation as a good man in front of a jury – Farrell didn't want to send any false messages. 'I'm not sure about that. There's no pockets.' Meaning that the defendant had no money.
Hardy shrugged. 'Sometimes there are other considerations. You never know. I gather Shea wasn't there, at your place.'
'I thought he was at the time. He was there when I went out to meet Glitsky. He sent his girlfriend – you know about Melanie? the getaway girl – they got what I thought at the time was a dose of paranoia, except it turns out it wasn't. Now they're someplace else. I really don't know where.'
Hardy took it in. On its face it didn't make sense. Glitsky would not – in fact, Hardy was 'morally certain' he didn't – order anybody to follow Farrell home. Glitsky had known nothing about any of this – if he had, he wouldn't have asked Hardy to step in and find out why Farrell wasn't talking to him. He would have known.
Not only that, Glitsky knew, morality aside, that this kind of backstabbing did not produce results. It just wasn't Glitsky's style. If Abe had given his word, it simply hadn't happened as Farrell saw it.
'You sure it was Glitsky?' he asked, repeating that it just didn't sound like him. 'What would be his motive?'
'Get the collar, the fame of it, maybe even claim the reward. Hell if I know. But he was the only one that knew I was with Shea, and he told me flat out he'd keep it right there.' Farrell put a hand to his heart, then drank some more stout. 'The guy lied, that's all.' Hardy swirled his own glass. 'The warrant was for Shea himself, not documents or papers?'
'It was a search warrant for the premises.' Farrell's face twisted in distaste. 'Sergeant Stoner was very thorough.'
'Sergeant Stoner?'
'Yeah, that was it. I remember I thought the name was a bit… ironic.'
'Stoner's not with the police department,' Hardy said. 'He's a DA investigator. I used him when I was a DA. The District Attorney's office in San Francisco has its own staff of detectives that aren't under the jurisdiction of either the SFPD or the county sheriff.' Typically, the role of the detectives was to locate witnesses, although occasionally they were used for other purposes.
'So?'
'So it would be odd – to say the least – for Glitsky to assign a DA's investigator to serve a warrant.'
'So he told the DA-'
'That's not Abe.'
Farrell looked at Hardy. 'He sent you down to talk to me, didn't he? You guys are pals.'
Hardy nodded. 'He didn't know why you wouldn't talk to him. He really didn't know.'
'Well, he must have leaked it somehow.'
'Maybe not. It could have gone down another way. But the point is, he doesn't think Shea did it, either. He thinks he can still help you.'
'It might be too late for that. If the DA-'
'He wants to talk to you. I think he's got an idea.'
'And what's your part in it?'
'My fee is a can of chili.' Hardy put down the remainder of his stout. 'Private joke,' he said, rising from his chair. 'Get you another one?'
Special Agent Simms was back in Alan Reston's office, the door closed behind her, standing at ease in front of his desk. 'The subject was one Dismas Hardy, another lawyer in town, do you know him?'
Reston shook his head.
'He mentioned Kevin Shea and the two of them met at a bar out in the Avenues called the Little Shamrock. We followed Farrell there and both men drank two beers, then went back to their domiciles afterward. No sign of Shea.'
Reston was nodding to himself. 'Probably just the vultures figuring how they're going to split the pie.'
'Yes, sir. That's what we've come to. In any event, it's all we've got to this point, but we're still on-line. I just wanted to keep you informed. We'll get him.'
Reston sat up, eyes clear, back straight. 'I'm sure you will.'
Art Drysdale was back at work in his office, juggling his baseballs in a convincing display of sangfroid. 'I've weathered that whole racist storm before, Abe. It comes and goes. Fact is, I've got no ax to grind here and everybody I work with seems to know it.' He smiled genially. 'You ought to see what some of our female colleagues have to say about me.'
'What for?'
'I took an early public stand against using the word "fore-person". You know, like injuries, the foreman. I thought it would be needlessly confusing, poetically uninspired, and – well, how can I put this? – stupid. Let's face it, I can't be trained. I'm sure I'm a menace on some level. Next it's the women's caucus, I'm sure.'
The preliminaries completed – they were allies again – Glitsky sat back comfortably. Drysdale actually had upholstered chairs in his office. 'I just wanted to stop by to tell you I've got two inspectors assigned to Chris Locke. I'm afraid with everything else I didn't jump on it as quickly as I could've.'
Drysdale stopped juggling, squared himself around in his chair, all attention now. 'You finding anything?'
Glitsky explained the little that Griffin had come up with, and then went over his plans for the evening – more interviews, more legwork. The talk wound down.
'I'm still having a hard time with it.'
Glitsky nodded. 'Yeah, I know.'
'He was… he had a lot of flaws, Chris did. Everybody knows about the woman-thing…' Even aside from his bombshell discovery of the morning about Locke's relationship with Elaine Wager, Glitsky was not so subliminally aware of Locke's many sexual conquests. 'But I think his heart was in the right place where the law was concerned. He understood the ones we could win, when he had to drop one. He didn't want to waste everybody's time.'
A eulogy on Chris Locke by Drysdale was going to be wasted on Glitsky, but he could listen politely if it made Drysdale feel better. Art had done the same for him enough times. The first months after Flo…
'Even the tough calls,' Drysdale went on. 'Hell, Jerohm Reese. You think it didn't kill Chris to let that scumbag go? But what was he going to do? He had no witnesses. He wasn't going to get a conviction, so what was the point? Waste the people's time and money?'
'That was a tough call.' Glitsky at his most diplomatic. He really had not liked Locke at all. But the man had been a chameleon – to Drysdale he had remained the loyal friend, the good lawyer, the able administrator. The office had run smoothly, and that was what counted to Drysdale.
'Damn straight, and it wasn't the only one.'
Glitsky knew that, too. Locke hadn't been too bad as District Attorneys went – certainly he would not now be pulling the idiocy Alan Reston was attempting with Kevin Shea.
Drysdale was juggling the baseballs again, calming himself. Glitsky was about to get up and go when something else occurred to him, something he hadn't meant to discuss here, but Drysdale's mention of the light evidence on Jerohm Reese had triggered it. Drysdale had been the chief assistant district attorney for almost twenty-five years, since long before Chris Locke's first term. He would have been around. 'Art, you ever do any work on the Pacific Moon case? White collar? Maybe fifteen years ago?'
Again, the balls stopped. Drysdale's brow wrinkled in concentration. He prided himself on never forgetting a case. 'It go to trial?'
'I don't think so, but I believe it got talked about down here and then dropped. Not enough evidence.'
'The Pacific Moon?'
Glitsky nodded. 'Restaurant out on Balboa. Got hot for a while with white collar, then died.'
'Money laundering.' Drysdale had placed it.
'That's the one.'
'What about it?'
'Nothing. I don't know exactly. It's come up lately.'
Drysdale gave him a look. 'It's come up lately – that's a good answer.'
'The real answer is I just don't know, Art.' He took a beat, then realized who he was talking to. Once he'd brought it up, Drysdale would look over the old files, put out feelers, get it back into the grapevine on some level and Glitsky didn't want that. Better to be up front with him now. 'With Loretta Wager in town now, there's been some-'
'That's it! 'Art snapped his fingers. He had it now. 'Sure, I can't believe it took me this long. It's come up a couple of times with the elections.'
'Probably.'
'No probably – it has. People digging for dirt. You can imagine.'
'So you've reviewed it? I heard some figures kicked around that are… provocative. Huge.'
'I'm sure you have,' Drysdale said. 'I remember it clearly now. The numbers were always getting wildly exaggerated.' He thought a minute longer. 'Because of the profile – black woman, U.S. senator – Chris took it himself. He was the original prosecutor assigned, I'm talking now back in prehistory. The case didn't have any legs then, doesn't now. That was another one, though,' he added enigmatically.
'Another what?'
'Another one of the tough calls for Locke.'
'What was tough about it?'
'Well, this is between us now, Abe, but Chris did some fancy steppin' getting his hands on that one.'
'He wanted the case?'
Drysdale nodded, remembering. 'It was mostly black people, the investors, although I believe Dana Wager, of course, was one of them. Anyway, Chris was new, wanted to prove he didn't have a color barrier. He badly wanted this indictment, make his bones against the brothers, prove he could be a DA for all the people. But believe me, I remember him coming to me about this indictment, asking my opinion, my help – but there was nothing to get it on.'
Glitsky let out the breath he'd been holding. 'I heard the figure of three million dollars.'
Drysdale just shook his head. 'My recollection, Abe, is that's not even in the ballpark. I don't think it was even one million back when Chris was looking at it. Somebody got lucky with an investment or something if I recall…'
'And it's not ongoing? Not anymore?'
'I haven't even sniffed it, Abe, and I think I would have. And then, of course,' Drysdale continued, getting back to his theme, 'what made it a tough call for Chris is that when he had to drop it, he had to take the flak for dropping it because it was mostly a black enterprise. And he couldn't very well come back out swinging, defending himself that he wanted to indict these people. Not if they hadn't done anything wrong, and it finally didn't look like they had.' He sighed. 'The world, huh, Abe?'
'The world,' Glitsky agreed.
Loretta was downtown in her City Hall office. It was nearly eight o'clock in Washington DC, Friday night, the end of the week. If deals were going to get cut, now was the time. They always said 'close of business,' meaning five o'clock, but in the Capitol the close of business lasted at least three hours. Nobody went home until everything that could be done was done. Still, she thought, checking her watch again, it should be about time.
She was confident. The reports she had gotten during the day – both from her own office and those of her senate colleagues – indicated that the president's chief of staff had been working and lobbying around the clock to facilitate the transfer of the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation by executive order to the Federal Parks Program, with the stipulation that the land be dedicated to Loretta's idea of a camp for underprivileged youth, and administered by an African-American.
Evidently (as Loretta had both hoped and expected), the president had seen it as she had – this was a monumental political opportunity, a no-lose situation that for maximum effect should be done immediately, as a symbol of the president's ongoing commitment to civil rights and in the interests of continued racial harmony. The telephone buzzed and she forced herself to wait through two full rings, picking up on the third. It was her secretary calling from one of the public phones at the Old Ebbett Grill, a few blocks from the White House.
'… and I think we can say that congratulations are in order. The president's going ahead with the order.'
'For sure?'
'He's scheduled the signature for noon tomorrow, our time. Nine o'clock out there. It ought to be ideal for you.'
'That is perfect,' Loretta said. She had spoken again to Alan Reston. He was confident that with the FBI's help they'd have Kevin Shea by then. That would de-fang Philip Mohandas and his march on City Hall, which Loretta knew stood a good chance of getting out of hand. And she didn't want that to happen – not now, not when a real solution was so close.
With the apprehension of Kevin Shea and the timing of the executive order, she was sure things would calm down. The city would return to normal, or some semblance of it. And she would be at the crest of the wave of peace and harmony – a hero to the community at large, not to any racial segment within it. She had fought for – and won – concessions for her own people, but she had also proved again that she was more than willing to work within the existing white, predominantly male power structure. She was a pragmatist with ideals intact, she told herself.
'You see the president tomorrow, honey, you tell him it's Loretta Wager making him look so good. Nice and subtle, though, hear?'
'I hear you.'
'I know you do, sugar.'
And then there was Abe.
He stood leaning against the jamb, filling the doorway, half-smiling, the simple enjoyment of watching her. She'd been making notes on her projected press conference for the next day, hadn't even sensed his arrival.
'How do you stay so invisible?' he asked her.
'God! Oh, Abe!' Her hand went to her chest. 'You scared me to death.'
'We homicide inspectors are trained to silently stalk our prey. Is it a good time?' Meaning for them to be alone. He stepped into the room, looking a question at her, getting a nod, closing the door behind him. Barefoot as usual, she came around the desk into his arms.
'God,' she said again, holding him, 'how can I have missed you this much?'
'I know. It's pretty ridiculous, isn't it?'
'Totally.'
Eventually they came untangled. 'What do you mean, invisible?' she asked.
'I mean normal humans usually only see senators on television surrounded by whatever the technical term is for flunkies…'
'Pages.'
'Okay, pages. Or at least secret service people.'
'We don't have that.'
'… or reporters of one kind or another. Somebody, anyway, at least. And here you sit all alone in your diddly little office…'
'This is a nice office, Abe.'
'Well, yes, compared to some, like mine. But still, you're alone so much. It's just never been my fantasy of the power-broker life.'
'You think I'm a power broker?'
'I don't think you're anybody's page.'
She broke a small smile. 'No, I suppose that's right.' Boosting herself onto the desk, she sat facing him. 'You want to have a lot of other people around, is that it?'
He moved to her again, stood against the desk, between her legs. She was no taller against him than when she'd been standing. 'I just don't know how you do it.'
'I don't think that door locks.' She had her hands around his waist, looking up at him. 'Well, believe it or not, when Elaine called – when was it, Tuesday night – and this whole thing looked like it was going to blow up, I just bought myself a ticket and got on a commercial flight to San Francisco. I had to be out here, see if I could help. Sometimes you've got to be free to move. I thought this would be one of those times. And I'm kind of glad I did.' She squeezed him. 'Are you?'
He went to the door, checked that it did not, in fact, lock, then opened it and looked out in the hallway. 'There's nobody out there,' he said, crossing the office, picking up one of the chairs and placing it under the doorknob. Back to her. 'It's six o'clock. Place is probably empty.' She brought her feet to the floor, slid her hose off and lifted herself back onto the edge of the desk. 'We'd better hurry,' she said, pulling at his belt, bringing him to her.
'Can I borrow your telephone for thirty seconds?' He was already punching in numbers. She had moved the chair away from the doorway and was sitting in it.
'This is Glitsky,' he said after a short wait. 'You beeped me.' He listened for another moment, checked his watch. 'I can be there in an hour.' He pulled a pad around, wrote something on it, tore off the page and stuffed it into his shirt pocket. 'Good. See you then.'
'An hour?' Loretta asked.
Glitsky moved to the other chair and sat facing her. 'That was a friend of mine with news about Wes Farrell,' he said. 'Kevin Shea's attorney.'
He couldn't read her expression, though for a moment it seemed as though some of the warmth had left her face. 'I meant to ask,' she said.
'It's been a busy day, I meant to tell you.'
He told her about it – so much to do with Kevin Shea. The last time they'd discussed it – before they'd gone out to dinner last night – Glitsky said he'd been optimistic that he'd be able to apprehend Shea within hours. Now he told her of his difficulties with Reston, with Farrell, Rigby, the FBI.
When he finished, Loretta said, 'And you're saying you think Alan's not offering a deal on Shea's safety because of me?'
'Essentially that's it. How I see it.'
'Well, that's got to stop,' she said. 'I'm not out to get Kevin Shea. Abe, you know that. I've been pushing for his proper arrest since I got here.'
Glitsky nodded. 'I know that, Loretta, but meanwhile Wes Farrell offers to give him up – just like that – all he needs is some minimal guarantee from Alan Reston, and Reston won't do it. Then, for some reason, Farrell goes sideways about meeting up with me. Then Shea comes out with this videotape explaining his side of things, which never would have happened if Reston… Did Elaine mention any of this to you?'
At the mention of her daughter's name Loretta clearly tensed. 'She told me a lot about… no, not this. Not specifically.' She paused. 'She told me you know.'
'Her and Locke?'
'And me and you.'
'I kept that vague. In the past tense,' he said.
'I'm afraid I didn't.'
A hollow of silence.
Then Glitsky: 'Well.' He blew out a breath.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'But you can see… we didn't talk too much about Kevin Shea.'
Glitsky stood up, paced the small room. He stopped by the window, looked out into the lengthening shadows. 'That phone call,' he began. 'My friend says he thinks he's got Farrell agreeing to talk to me again. If he does I'm going to need some assurance for Shea, which means Reston.'
'And you would like me to talk to Alan?'
'I think it might break the logjam, Loretta. If we could bring him in… it would all be over.'
One leg curled under her, she sat back on the chair. 'Elaine did say there was some indication that Shea might not be… that the case might be difficult to prove.'
'He's got himself a different version of the events, but that's not exactly unique among defendants. You've got to have a story.'
'Do you think – personally, now, Abe – do you think Kevin Shea's story is true?'
At the window, he turned. 'What are you really asking?'
'I'm at least in part asking how this is going to affect my daughter, Abe. I picked Kevin Shea as the symbol of white racism, and I believed it, but she's got to live with him. I mean, she's gone public, as a lot of us have, with condemning him.'
'I know. I tried to counsel her against that.'
'But she's already done it. What's she going to do about it now?'
The harsh tone – the note of panic. Glitsky went over to Loretta, down to one knee, his arm around her back. He pulled her to him. 'Hey. This is why we're talking, all right?'
She slumped into him. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It's not you. I'm just so worried for my daughter. Are you telling me Shea really might not have done it?'
Glitsky nodded. There's some chance of that, yes.'
'And what will that do to Elaine, to her career?'
After a minute he replied, 'It'll be better than having it come out after he's been shot down by some overzealous FBI SWAT team.'
'I think that's a little extreme, Abe. It's not going to come to that-'
'Have you met Special Agent Simms?'
'No.'
'I wouldn't write it off until you have.'
Loretta shook her head. 'Abe, the FBI agents I know are professionals. They don't want firefights they can't explain or justify.'
'That's my point, Loretta. I think Simms wants exactly that – a firefight she could plausibly deny. She'll just say that her information was that Shea was armed and dangerous. She had no choice. But the bottom line to her superiors is she's not afraid to pull the trigger. And believe me – I'm in law enforcement, I know – this is considered a good thing.'
Loretta still wasn't convinced. 'I just have a hard time believing that the FBI…'
'You ever read Chekhov?' At her blank expression he said 'Old Chekhov says you don't introduce a gun in the first act of a play unless you're going to use it in the third.'
'All right?'
"The FBI is here with marksmen. Sharpshooters. Believe it, they did not bring them for a dress rehearsal.'
'You can't think they're planning to kill Kevin Shea?'
'That's exactly what I think. While everybody has the perception he's still guilty as hell. That's why Alan Reston isn't going to offer any protection. He's setting up a scenario that he figures is going to protect you, Loretta. Maybe Elaine, too, but mostly you, I think.'
'Me?' The enormity of it apparently settling on her, she half-collapsed backward, molding to the chair. 'Because I made Shea the center of it?'
'That's right.'
'Oh Lord. I do have to call Alan.'
Unsteadily, she got up and walked to her desk, to the phone, pushed the faceplate. As she was waiting Glitsky reminded her not to mention his name, he'd been ordered off the case.
No one picked it up. 'He's not there. I'll try his home.' She pulled her own yellow pad around, flipped some pages and punched more numbers, leaving a message on the service that as soon as he got in, whatever time it was, Alan should call Loretta Wager. It was urgent. She left three numbers – one here at the office, two at her home.
'He'll call,' she said. 'I'll tell him.'
She came back to Abe and put her arms around him again. 'Thank you for talking to me.' Then, pushing away, 'You go see your friend. As soon as I hear from Alan, I'll call you.'
The way Farrell had left it with Hardy was, 'Yeah, you can tell your friend Glitsky to call me.' Damned if Wes was going to call the lieutenant. He didn't want to say he'd call Glitsky, anyway, because he had no idea for sure when – or even if – Kevin Shea was going to call him again. And he couldn't call Shea even if he had something specific to tell him, which he didn't.
Just cool the heels until something broke.
So he'd gone home, waited, killed time watching the news, waited some more. Story of his life the past few days, waiting. Except this time with two pints of Guinness inside him. He dozed, woke up, looked at his watch.
Was Glitsky going to call him or what?
Finally, he again put a leash on Bart and the two of them almost ran out of his apartment. He didn't want to hear the phone ringing again four steps after he'd locked his deadbolt as he made his escape.
They turned north this time, along Junipero Serra, maybe make it all the way to the shopping district on ocean. There were places there where he'd eaten at outside tables with Bart.
It was a typical July evening in San Francisco, cool and breezy. He had changed from his shorts and Pendleton into a gray sweatsuit, incongruously carrying with him the super-wide 'lawyer's briefcase' (now containing only two pens and a yellow legal pad) that he hadn't pulled from his closet in over a year. Waking from his lethargy, beginning to plan his moves, he whistled tunelessly. Bart, his leash in Farrell's other hand, stopped periodically for territory, enjoying the romp.
Actually, except for the disturbing lack of connection with the police, things didn't appear to be going too badly. If what Dismas Hardy had said was true about Glitsky not being the one to have sent Stoner with his warrant, there still might be a chance that they could negotiate some terms that would protect Kevin and at the same time get him into custody.
In fact, Farrell was already into the next step – the trial. He found he was actually looking forward to it. This was a case he could win! And, unlike the one with his ex-friend Mark Dooher, this time he would be on the side of justice – a concept that until only a day ago he had consigned to the trash heap of ancient history. The thought – that he might play some real role in defending an innocent man – galvanized him. Once he got the case moving into the courts, in fact, he was starting to feel that he could maybe get the charges dismissed before it even came to trial.
Turning onto Ocean, his brain had finally kicked in. The whistling had stopped. Abruptly, he ceased to walk and hooked Bart's leash around the top of one of the wrought-iron fence posts that bounded a manicured landscape of bonsai and sedgegrass beside a gingerbread house. He sat on one of the large square stone steps and opened his briefcase, oblivious to the weather or the scenery.
What was it that had gotten to him? Oh yes… the knife wounds. He had to remember when he talked to Glitsky (when? when? – maybe he would break down and make the call) to ask the lieutenant to do a search for people with knife wounds. (Of course, Farrell had no inkling of Colin Devlin or Mullen or McKay.) This was the kind of detail – since it hadn't been released to the public – that a judge might decide constituted a lack of probative evidence to convict Kevin right at the git-go. Oh shit, except that Kevin had mentioned it on his tape. He scratched out what he had written.
But that was just the first significant detail that had occurred to him – he thought of his other arguments to Glitsky at Lou the Greek's. If he could get this client off with an eleven-eighteen motion – a directed verdict of acquittal – at trial, now wouldn't that be sweet?
He made more notes – the lawyer back in his element. There were a million things he could do for Kevin… call Glitsky as a witness – a cop as a defense witness. He loved it. The theater of it should be persuasive to a jury. He had to get a doctor to look at Kevin, and soon. Make some determination on the cracked ribs, if that's what they were. The lacerations on the face.
Shit again. He'd forgotten to take Polaroids of Kevin, and the scratches were healing. Oh, but the videotape would show them. He hoped. He wasn't sure he remembered. He had to start training himself again. Get sharper. Trials were war and you didn't get into one if you weren't prepared to win or die trying.
Other things? What? He was chewing on the back end of his pen, some ink leaking out and staining his lower lip. He had to think about the jury – what the hell was he going to do about the racial makeup of the jury? That was going to be thorny, a crap shoot as always. Still, he was getting so he believed he could find twelve people who wouldn't be racially biased, even in a case this potentially explosive.
How many black friends did Kevin have? Okay, maybe it was a cliché, but it also happened to be a fact. He knew there were at least a couple – they'd all been out drinking together. Good witnesses. Kevin would know the names.
But what he was going to need more than anything was a couple of other suspects – hell, not just suspects - he reminded himself. The guys who goddamn did it.
He tore back another page from his legal pad, scribbling like a madman. Maybe he was mad. Here's a long-haired fifty-year-old pot-bellied man in a sweatsuit, a smudge of black ink emanating from his mouth, mumbling incoherent words. His old fat dog lay curled at his feet – a dog who, truth be told, farted more often than he really should – due to the rich, canned, all-meat (and occasional beer) diet that his owner felt was the proper nutrition for a dog. He hadn't wanted the goddamn animal in the first place, but since he had him, he wasn't going to have the guy live on kibble and meal, not a real man's dog like Bart Dog Farrell. No siree.
The streetlights came up – most of them functioned properly on Ocean Street. As it sometimes did, the wind died at sunset. Wes Farrell looked up, surprised not so much at where he was as at where he'd been.
Caught up in it. Alive.
Marcel Lanier had been snagged by Carl Griffin to go with him and look again at the Dolores Park area, so Ridley Banks, who had been teaming with Marcel the last few days, was on his own.
The day had been circumscribed for him by his decision to stay away from the homicide detail. He had every excuse to do it – in their zeal to lay something on Peter McKay and Brandon Mullen, both he and Marcel had allowed their regular workloads to slide a bit, and some time working the street might yield fruit with their other homicides.
But also, Ridley had sensed that if he began any more exchanges with his lieutenant about his suspicions concerning Loretta Wager's past, Glitsky would blow. So he had left his encoded note and things would proceed or not, but either way he felt he had done all he could. He had no more evidence than he'd given Abe, but he still felt that Senator Wager had some skeletons that homicide inspectors ought not to dance with – but he didn't want to argue about it, make a stink. He just wanted to be thorough or, more precisely, he wanted Glitsky to understand what he might be dealing with. Whether he chose to do anything with that understanding would be his decision.
Ridley's girlfriend, Jacqueline, worked as a legal secretary in one of the high-rise firms, and he was waiting now in the reception area to see if she would be getting off soon and would want to get something to eat. Though it was full dusk, the workday for the secretaries in Jacqueline's firm ended when their attorney bosses went home – officially there were normal business hours, but anyone who left at five or five-thirty soon found themselves unemployed. Jacqueline's day ended not when her work was done, not when she had put in her time, but when her attorney told her she could leave and not before.
She came into view around a corner down the long muted hallway, and, watching her approach, he appreciated her matter-of-fact style. Ridley wasn't into either flash or sleaze, although – actually because - he had experimented with both when he had been younger. Jacqueline was a working woman, as he was a working man. She had a good heart, a warm smile, a civil tongue and bone structure.
There was a tension in her bearing, but she greeted him normally. She had, he thought, too much class to display all her emotions. 'Good timing,' she said. A buss on the cheek. More tension. She was wearing a long woolen skirt and lavender blouse. Ridley was aware of a vague scent of cinnamon. He thought he might marry her before too long, though they hadn't really talked about it yet.
In the elevator, he took her hand. 'What's the matter?'
She took a long breath, held it for a couple of floors. 'Stan's working all weekend,' she said. 'He wants me to come in.'
This wasn't at all unusual. Stan was Stansfield Butler, III, 'her' attorney – a thirty-four-year-old married white man with two young children, bucking for partner next year after six years with the firm. Hours meant nothing to him. He lived his law.
Ridley shrugged, reluctantly accepting this news. 'That's all right,' he said, squeezing her hand. 'All the troubles, I'm sure I can pull some comp time.'
They had tentatively talked about getting away, maybe up to Point Reyes for a couple of days, but this kind of last-minute demand was always a possibility. Jacqueline had been Butler's loyal and highly efficient secretary-assistant for four years. She was under no illusions, however – if she said no too many times (once? twice? she didn't know the precise number), she would be replaced. It had happened to too many of her co-workers. She was black and she was staff. If she wanted to keep this good-paying professional job she should not put any priority on her personal life. That had to come second if she were to survive.
'Well, that's not it, exactly.'
'Not what?'
The elevator door opened and they stepped into the enormous marble-tiled foyer. There was a fern bar for young professionals across the lobby and they gravitated, by habit, in that direction. Jacqueline would often take a glass of chardonnay after work.
She stopped walking, turned to him. 'I'd hoped to go to the march, Ridley. I'm not sure if I'm going to come in for Stan. Not tomorrow. I… I told him that.'
Ridley chewed on that for a moment. 'And what did he say?'
'When he picked up his jaw, he said that was my decision. If I didn't come in, then I'd have made it for myself. He said that this late he'd have trouble getting another secretary, and if he lost the client because his secretary wasn't available, well…'
They both knew where that was going. Ridley put his hand gently in the small of her back and they were through the doors into the bar. The taped music was New Age. There were a couple of free tables in the front by the floor-to-ceiling windows.
After they had ordered (Ridley had a ginger ale), they linked hands on the small table. 'You were going to the march? With Philip Mohandas?'
'Not were.' She was matter-of-fact, not defiant. 'Am.'
'You think it's worth your job?'
'It may sound old-fashioned, Ridley, but I think we've got to take a stand. This has gone on too long and nothing changes.'
'And you think standing up there with Philip Mohandas and a few hundred brothers is going to change something?'
'It won't be a few hundred. I don't know anybody who isn't going.'
'Yes you do.' Ridley detached his hand from hers.
'Don't,' she said.
'You don't.'
'This isn't you, Ridley.'
'No? That's funny. Somehow I thought here I was a cop and this march is all about how us cops aren't doing our job, how we're all controlled by a passel of honky trash, isn't that it? That's how I heard it. And you want to be part of that? And then you tell me it isn't about me? Give me a break, Jacqueline.'
'Don't be mad.' She had her hand out on the table.
'Don't be mad. Okay.'
'Maybe you're not seeing it… like us. I mean, maybe you've been inside it too long-'
'Gone Oreo, huh?' He glared across at her. 'You any idea what I been doing the last three days when I haven't had any time to see you or anybody else?'
'I-'
'I'll tell you what. I've been hunting down the people, trying to find the people who strung up Arthur Wade. No march on City Hall is gonna help me get any closer to those people.'
'You mean that person?'
'Kevin Shea?'
'Yes, him.'
Banks lowered his head, pulled himself back. His hand went to the table and took hers. 'Jacqueline, honey, listen to me. There was a mob of people killed Arthur Wade, not just-'
Now it was Jacqueline's turn to react. She slammed both of their hands down on the table. The ashtray rattled. People at surrounding tables looked over. 'You don't feel it, do you? You don't feel it anymore?'
'I feel it every day, Jacqueline. I'm in it every day.'
'But it's not in your guts anymore, is it?'
'What does that mean?'
'It means they sold it and you bought it. It means-'
'I didn't buy anything, Jacqueline. I walk around with my eyes open, is all.'
'No, you walk around being one of the cops, one of them, Ridley. You think you're on some team, like some gang where you're all protected by each other…'
'Jesus, Jacqueline, where do you get this?'
'I get it from watching you. I get it from seeing what's changing and what's not. And you're fooling yourself, Ridley Banks. You think you're one of them now, you've made it. You're an inspector, high-class, can't be touched. But let me tell you something, and this week should have proved it to you all over again. We are second-class. That's what we're marching for. That's what this is all about.'
'Lord, Jacqueline,' he began, then stopped. 'And you think that's worth your job?'
She banged the table again, glared back at everyone who looked over. 'It shouldn't have anything to do with my job! It's a Saturday, for God's sake. It's the Fourth of July weekend. And no warning. What am I supposed to do, drop everything for the rest of my life every time Stansfield Butler the Third wants a goddamn cup of coffee, with skimmed milk yet. You think I weren't black, I'd have to worry over that?'
'But you are, girl, and you do.'
'And that's what we're marching against.'
'But it might also be anger that you're just a secretary, not a lawyer. Maybe black's got nothing to do with it-'
'Just a secretary! I…'
A man who looked like a young athlete in a coat and tie approached the table. 'Excuse me,' he said, 'I'm the manager here and some of the other patrons…' A gesture, not his fault. 'I wonder if I could ask you to continue your discussion outside.'
Jacqueline gave it back. 'And I wonder if I could ask you-'
But Ridley had her hand covered, lifting her, pulling her by it. 'Jacqueline, come on…' Arm strongly around her now, leading her to the door.
Outside on the sidewalk she turned on him. 'Get your hands off me. Get away from me.'
'Jacqueline, please…'
She struck out at him, turning away.
He grabbed for her again, but she spun, hitting him high on the forehead, the force of it pushing him back a step. 'You stay away from me. I don't want to see you. Get away.' She was backing up, facing him, a hand held up. Then, abruptly, she whirled and ran.
He followed her a few steps, gave it up and stopped in front of the huge windows of the bar. A sea of all white faces stared out at him through the glass.
He didn't feel like one of them. Not even a little bit.
The cupboard, as they say, is bare.' Melanie was opening the doors to the cabinet shelves. 'I mean, nothing.' She reached out and pulled a can of mixed fruit cocktail from the back of the shelf, a tiny tin of Vienna sausages. Kevin appeared in the kitchen doorway.
'What's your friend Ann live on?'
'I guess we're looking at it.' She opened the refrigerator. It, too, contained little in the way of food or drink. For breakfast, they'd finished some cheese and stale crackers. Lunch had been two eggs, scrambled, for the two of them, with water.
'I sure feel like a pizza,' Kevin said. 'I wouldn't mind a beer either.'
'Maybe we can order up. Do you have any money?'
Kevin checked his wallet, counting fifty-eight dollars out onto the kitchen table. He placed one of the ubiquitous flowerpots on top of the bills. 'Which reminds me,' he said, 'I haven't called work, told them I wouldn't be in for a while.' (He had worked twenty-five hours a week as a telemarketer selling business software to small companies, manning one of a bank of telephones out of a converted home in the Marina.) 'I wonder if they've noticed? Probably haven't even missed me.' Neither of them smiled when he said it. The banter couldn't cover the tension.
Melanie went back to the living room, flipped pages of the phone book and called a place she knew. When she hung up she said, They're not delivering, not with the riots.'
'Try someone else.'
Seven calls later – three pizza places, two Chinese, a Mongolian Bar-B-Que and a piroshki house – and not one was delivering. Melanie was standing by the phone in the living room, starting on the eighth, when Kevin looked up from his stuffed chair. 'I think I'm going nuts here, is what I think. Are you going nuts, or is it just me?'
She nodded. 'A little.'
'Hey, it's Friday night. It's dark out. People – normal people – are on dates, into themselves.' Her look was not encouraging. 'We go out, maybe Ann's got a wig or something, I stuff some cotton balls in my cheeks…'
'You're going to eat pizza with cotton balls in your cheeks?'
'Okay, no cotton balls. But maybe a little lipstick, a tasteful touch of rouge
Melanie was shaking her head. 'Kevin…'
His hands were flat against his sides. 'I am truly going crazy here.'
'So am I,' she said, 'but it seems every time we poke our heads outside-'
'Not every time,' he reminded her. 'Last night we sat in the line at that drive-in for a half hour and nobody recognized us.'
'Nobody was looking at us there.'
'Or for us, which they also wouldn't be at some local little dive, either. In fact, think about it, out in public is about the last place anybody would expect to see us. Even if they looked right at us, just sitting casually eating a pizza, they'd go, "No way. It couldn't be. They wouldn't be that stupid." '
Melanie sat by the phone, giving it some thought. 'On the other hand, look at, say, John Dillinger. Coming out of a movie theater…'
'He was set up, Melanie. Nobody knows where we are right now, where we're coming from, where we're going.' He was up out of the chair. 'I actually think it's a smarter choice than if we just went out to get some food at the store. We go, we eat, we come back, what do you say?'
Ann did have hats, and they each wore one – Kevin's a multicolored ski cap that he pulled to his eyebrows, Melanie's a faux-velvet beret into which she tucked her hair. They selected accessories, and Melanie applied an extra coat of fire-engine red lipstick. She also painted two moles on her face. Kevin had opted for the more natural look, although he couldn't resist a small golden ear cuff.
The city, when they were out in it, still smelled of smoke, and, contrary to Kevin's notion that people were dancing all over the place, there wasn't much sign of it. The tent city in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park was, after all, only two blocks north of them. At the cross-streets, looking through, they could see campfires and the harsh blinking of yellow caution lights on the sawhorses that set off the campground.
Melanie had her arm around Kevin's waist – the night was chilly – her hand in his back pocket. He held her tight against him and they walked fast. Haight Street itself was not a curfew area, although there was almost no street traffic and few pedestrians. Every few doorways homeless people asked them for money. Kevin dropped his last few quarters.
As Kevin had predicted, no one seemed to notice. The street might have been empty, but Pizzaiola was crowded enough at nine something on a Friday night. Kevin picked a booth in a back corner.
'Under the Exit sign, just in case.'
'That's not funny.'
Melanie went up to order – a large combination with anchovies, a pitcher of Sam Adams, two glasses.
'Could I see some ID, please?' the man behind the bar was an African-American about Kevin's age. He smiled at her, no threat, waiting.
She froze. She had been twenty-one now for six months and, especially while she had been dating Kevin, had gotten used to ordering beer and not getting 'carded.' Now she stared, all but open-mouthed, wondering what to do. She couldn't bolt out of here alone, not without Kevin, not without alerting the whole neighborhood. She half-turned – Kevin wasn't even looking her way.
'Ma'am?'
'Oh, sorry.' Nothing else to do. She took out her wallet and presented her driver's license, which the man held under the light. 'Thanks. Who's the other glass for?'
Oh God… they were going to get caught. She should just run – yell to Kevin and run. 'My boyfriend, back there,' she said, striving for control. 'He's older than I am.'
The man squinted over through the dimness. 'That old, huh?' He was still smiling, drawing the pitcher of beer. 'Waitress will bring it right over.' In a daze, she crossed back to the corner, sat down at their table.
'This was a good idea,' Kevin said. 'Tomorrow we… what's the matter?'
The waitress arrived, put the pitcher down between them, left without a glance. Melanie was trying to control herself, shaking her head so Kevin would stop asking, not call any more attention to them. Kevin leaned over the table, closer to her. 'What is it?' Whispering. He put out his hand and she covered it with hers and told him.
At the bar Melanie's bartender was a dervish, more pitchers were getting filled. Behind the open counter, one of the cooks was spinning pizza dough in the air. Sting was on the jukebox singing Love Is Stronger Than Justice. Though there wasn't a dance floor a few people were free-form dancing, apparently immune to the rhythm changes in the tune. Nobody was paying any attention to Kevin and Melanie. Kevin mentioned this.
'I know. But you… what if…?'
He patted her hand. 'We'd take off. We're getting pretty good at that.' He flashed his confident grin. 'Hey.' He touched a finger to her face. 'It's okay, Mel.'
'Kevin, I'm no good at this stuff anymore. That guy looked over at you and I thought I was going to be sick.'
'But you are good at it.'
She shook her head. 'What's going to happen to us? When does it stop? Does it stop?'
He pulled his hand out from under hers and made a show of filling both glasses, stalling for time. 'That's what we're going for, stopping this, aren't we?'
'I don't know what we're going for anymore. I'm just scared, that's all I know. Scared to death.' She paused. 'Sometimes I think we're not even going to live through this. That somebody's going to kill us before it's over.'
He leaned all the way back in his chair. 'That's not going to happen.'
'You want to knock on wood when you say that. Please.' Dutifully, Kevin rapped once on the table. It wasn't entirely to make Melanie feel better. 'You know, come to think about it, it's really only me. Mel, you've got other options. You could-'
Her eyes flashed. 'No way! You think I'm leaving you now, after all this?'
'I thought you just said-'
'I never said that. I don't want that. I'm just scared, Kevin. I'm scared for both of us. Who in his right mind wouldn't be scared right now?'
'What I'm saying is, you could just walk out of here, this minute, take a cab down the Peninsula to your parents' house, get a lawyer…'
'No. Shut up, Kevin.'
His face was near hers again, his voice low. 'Maybe you should, Mel. This isn't fair to you.'
She took a sip of her beer, swept the room with a glance. She broke a steely smile, met his eyes. 'Fuck fair,' she said. 'This whole thing isn't fair. If the world were fair you'd be getting a medal at the White House…'
'I don't know if I'd go that far. I'd settle for the warrant getting lifted.'
A nod. "That would be a good start.'
The waitress arrived with their pizza, slapped it steaming onto the table, was gone.
Kevin gestured after her. 'See? Perfectly safe,' he said.
'There's hope,' Wes said.
Kevin was talking on the pay phone in the hallway by the restrooms and the emergency exit at Pizzaiola. 'We were just talking about that.'
'Where are you? What's that noise?'
'Pizzaiola. Pizza place out on Haight.' Into the black hole of silence: 'We had to get out, Wes. We were going stir crazy. It's cool. Nobody knows who we are-'
'Kevin, everybody knows who you are. Maybe, let's hope, nobody's recognized you where you're at right now, but that's not the same thing. Could you please try and remember that?'
'Sure, Wes, sure. Look, we're leaving in a minute anyway, going back to our cosy little hideaway. What about the hope?'
Wes was having trouble with his friend and client – the most wanted fugitive in the city, county, state, possibly the whole country – hanging out in some pizza joint, but there was nothing he could do about it now. 'Evidently Glitsky didn't have me followed home,' he said. 'It was somebody else, the DA, not the police.'
'Okay?'
'Okay, so suddenly I think we might have a decent chance to get what we wanted last night – a hearing at least, extra protection.'
'A decent chance…?'
'Better than none, Kev. I'm trying.'
'I know. I just… so you've talked to this Glitsky…'
'Whoa. Not yet. He's calling sometime tonight. Frankly, I expected it by now.'
Kevin couldn't repress the sarcasm. 'Gosh, this is heartening…'
'It is bad, really, Kevin. I promise you. At least now we've got a good reason for you to stay put, not take off. This morning, you remember-'
'I remember.'
'Okay, then. This time tomorrow, I think we'll have something worked out. I know Glitsky's going to call me – he went to some lengths to get me back talking to him. I believe he's on our side – a cop. This is not bad news, Kev.'
'Okay, you've convinced me, I'm happy. Jubilant, in fact.'
Farrell sighed. 'Why don't we just set up a time when you'll definitely call me? You could also just give me your number.'
'I would, but I don't know it. It's not mine, after all. Or Mel's.'
'All right,' Farrell said, 'but this not being able to reach you is making me old.'
'I don't think that's it.' Kevin paused. 'Something, though. Something is definitely making you old. Has made you old. Did I ever tell you my cosmic radiation theory as the cause of old age?'
'I got a theory, too, Kevin. Old age is caused by living a long time.'
'That's a good one, too. Okay, so when?'
'Nine.'
'Nine? Wes, it's Saturday. It's criminal to have to wake up at nine on a Saturday.'
'Saturday! What's the difference – Saturday, Tuesday, who cares? Jesus, Kevin…'
'Nine's all right. I'm kidding you.'
'You're a riot, Kevin.'
'Don't use that word, Wes. Riot…'
'Nine,' Wes growled. 'Do it.'
This was her first job in San Francisco, and Special Agent Simms could not believe the weather – the first day of July and she was freezing. In DC it had been ninety, ninety degrees and ninety humidity, since the middle of May, and she had figured summertime in California would be close to the same except for the humidity. Previous assignments in LA, Modesto, Sacramento, even as nearby as Oakland had not prepared her for the microclimate here. Had she been the literary sort, she might have taken some warning from Mark Twain's oft-quoted remark that the coldest winter he'd ever spent was a June in San Francisco, but Margot Simms had not read anything but manuals in six years, and little else before that.
She was around the corner from where the surveillance van was parked in front of Wes Farrell's apartment, her hands wrapped around a tall glass of caffe latte. Though there was no wind, the temperature had abruptly fallen to the mid-fifties and she was wearing only a skirt and blouse and a lightweight tailored jacket. During the three plus hours she had spent in the unheated van after she had finally left the Hall of Justice, the increasing chill had worked its way into every cell of her being.
Ten minutes earlier she had given up, leaving her post in the van in a quest for a little warmth, which she had found a block up the street in a mini-mall. A corner diner – in DC they would call it a diner – except that here it was all angles, high ceilings, dramatic light. San Francisco was into drama, she'd give it that. Substance zero, form ten. California fruit and nuts everywhere you went.
She had come in because the place looked warm and served coffee. Also beer, wine, breads, strops and flavored waters, pretentious crapola – you wouldn't just want a place to grabba quick cuppa, no, not here. The menu – even the coffee drinks – was all in Italian and there was an enormous glass counter under which were serving platters filled with exotic pastas and salads. Simms was only here for the warmth, for a mug of coffee to wrap her hands around. The latte was the closest they had.
It wasn't just the cold. She sat there alone at her cute tiny table, still shivering – most of the other little tables were filled with groupings of chattering urbanites her age and younger – it was near San Francisco State, that might have been part of it. Suddenly Simms realized she hated San Francisco with all her heart.
She was seized with an urge to take out the gun she wore under her ineffectual linen jacket and take a few pops at the track lighting, the tinted ftoor-to-ceiling windows, the espresso machines, maybe a few of the trendoids themselves. Wake 'em up.
What did they think was going on here anyway? The whole sham structure of a melting pot was being dismantled brick by brick all over the city at this very minute – had been all week – and here the intellectuals and bon vivants and liberals and faggots sat with their lattes and strops and the occasional white wine – what did they call it, schmoozing! Well, they weren't her problem, but God, she hated them. Let 'em eat – she scanned the blackboard menu – let 'em eat foccacia, whatever the hell that was.
Her thoughts were interrupted by one of her technicians – Sam the Van Man – scanning through the windows of the place, recognizing her, getting to the door, through the maze of creative floor arrangement to her table. She was already up, coming toward him. 'We've got him,' he said, nearly breathless from his run. 'It's definitely Shea. Place called Pizzaiola – eighteen hundred block of Haight Street.'
Forgetting the cold and everything else, she was on her way out, dragging Sam in her wake. 'Let's roll.'
Kevin covered Melanie's hand again – easy, easy – as the black-and-white police car pulled up on the street in front.
'We'd better get the check.' Matter-of-fact.
But before they could catch the waitress's attention the two uniformed policemen walked into the pizza place, chatting, apparently taking a break, filling up – it seemed to Kevin – a lot of the space inside, using up a lot of breathing air.
'Will that be all?' Their efficient waitress.
"Thanks. It was great. Just the check, please.'
A quick turn and she was gone.
The cops stood together by the ordering bar, talking with one of the dough throwers. The waitress stopped up front next to the cops, said a few words, laughed.
Kevin and Melanie huddled together in their corner, keeping their faces as covered as they could. 'Just keep cool,' he said, and she nodded, squeezing his hand.
Not soon – say about the half-life of carbon later – the waitress came back with their check, dropped it face down, left. Kevin picked it up – $34.64 for a pizza and some beer – and reached for his wallet.
The cops finished with their order and turned to look for a table.
'No. Not here, not here,' Kevin intoned.
'Shhh.'
'You'd hate it here, there's a horrible draft. Also, I think something must have died in the hallway…'
'Shhh! Kevin…!'
Moving back through the restaurant, the policemen pulled chairs up less than three feet from where Kevin and Melanie sat at the next table over.
'I'm going to throw up,' Melanie whispered.
Kevin opened his wallet. He looked again. There was no money in it. Keeping his voice low, he gripped Melanie's hand. 'Where's the money? Did you take the money?'
She looked at him as though he were insane. 'You had the money, don't tease like this…'
Kevin folded open the wallet, showing her. 'I think we left it on the table back at Ann's.'
'We didn't…'
'I put it under a flowerpot on the kitchen table. I don't remember taking it. I must have left it.'
Melanie covered her face with her hands. She wanted to run. She couldn't run. The police were right herel Looking at Kevin. 'Oh God!' It just came out.
Hearing her, one of the policemen – an older guy with a kind face – leaned over to them. 'You kids okay? Everything all right?'
Melanie stared at him. Frozen. Finally: 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'My cat, it just died, today.' She tried to smile.
Kevin gave them half of his profile – more than half would be inviting disaster. 'Murray,' he added, 'his name was Murray. Had him for six years.'
'Gee, that's tough,' the cop said. 'Myself, I'm not a cat man, but my wife is.'
Simms was the only woman in the team. The four men who'd been hanging out in the van were more prepared for the cold than she was – leather jackets, heavy pants. They had already patched a call to the back-up unit at the hotel – including the other marksmen – all of them would rendezvous at the famous corner of Haight and Ashbury and move in from there.
In her car, flying now out to Geary, but without a siren – damned if she was going to let any of the local authorities in on this. The San Francisco police would just screw it up. This was an FBI bust – Simms sat in the front seat on the passenger side, her three guys primed but controlled on the way out. They didn't say much, they didn't have to recheck their weapons, any of that – the weapons would work if they were needed. Her men were pros.
'What I want you to do is just walk to the bathroom.'
'Kevin, we've got to pay. We can't just leave…'
Kevin was using all of his strength to keep his voice down. 'I'm not giving them my credit card. I don't think you should either. I think you have to go to the bathroom, don't you?'
Melanie struggled with it, got up and disappeared into the hallway behind them. Kevin waited as long as he could stand it, then turned around to the policemen – more than halfway around. In the low light he had to take the chance.
'Excuse me,' he said. They stopped talking, both of them turning to him. 'I'm just going back to see if my girlfriend's okay.' He pointed to the unpaid bill. 'She's got the money with her. In case the waitress comes, sees we're both gone' – he flashed a grin – 'would you please tell her we didn't cut out on the check. We'll be right back.'
The nice cop nodded, said sure, and Kevin was gone.
Melanie, white as death, shivered by the back door, which was clearly labelled 'Emergency Exit Only. Alarm will Sound.'
Kevin stopped in front of her, studied the sign. 'You ready? Let's go.'
'What do you mean, let's go?'
He took her hand, bringing her along with him, pushed into the bar that held the door. No sound. The door opened into an alley.
Margot Simms pulled up behind the police car that was parked by the curb in front of Pizzaiola. 'What's that doing here?' she asked of no one, getting out of her car.
She had already positioned a man each at the opposite ends of the alley that ran the length of the block behind the restaurant. She and the last one – Sam the Van Man – were going in through the front door.
Simms had decided that there would be no point in making a fuss. No sense inviting resistance or worse. Kevin Shea would have no idea who she was – just another customer – until she flashed her badge and, if need be, pulled her weapon.
Standing just inside the door, surveying the room, she did not see anybody resembling Kevin Shea. There were only about twenty tables – and it took that many seconds. One of the tables, back by where a couple of city cops were sitting, had not been cleared off yet but its seats were empty. She turned and issued an order to Sam to check the bathroom.
Back with the policemen, she identified herself, took out Kevin Shea's picture, asked them if they had seen anyone who looked like…
A frozen glance between the men. One of them cattle-prodded, almost knocked the table over jumping up, reaching for his gun, going into the hallway. Simms followed in hot pursuit.
Sam came out of the bathroom. 'Nothing,' he said.
They were gathered in the narrow hallway. The older San Francisco cop hesitated by the back door, then pushed.
Nothing.
He let it swing all the way closed. Pushed at it again. 'Alarm must be out of whack,' he said.
'I literally thought I was going to die,' Melanie said. They were turning off Haight onto Stanyan, fifty yards from the lobby entrance to Ann's building. 'What are we going to do about the bill?'
Kevin gave her the eye. 'You're worried about the bill?'
'Well, you just don't walk out without paying.'
'Sometimes you do. It's called situational ethics, I think.'
'We're going to go back and pay them sometime, though, aren't we?'
Kevin squared her around to him and kissed her. 'Yes,' he said. 'That's a very important point and I concur that we should do it at the first opportunity. Which might not be tonight.'
She snuggled up against him, the relief flooding through her.
'Okay. But let's try not to forget, okay?'
'I won't forget. I've got a mind for this kind of stuff.' He kissed her again. 'You are such a dork,' he said tenderly. 'I don't know why suddenly I'm so in love with you.'
She came up as though she were going to kiss him back, but instead took his bottom lip in her teeth, held him there, whispering with equal gentleness, 'Birds of a feather.'
Before dinner Dismas Hardy had loaded up about five hours worth of opera on the CD player and now a male tenor – beyond Pavarotti, Glitsky wasn't too hot on the names – was barely audible, singing to break your heart. His heart.
After leaving Loretta, Glitsky had originally planned on zipping by here, getting the lowdown on Hardy's interview with Farrell, then calling Farrell and moving out on Kevin Shea.
As soon as he had come in he had called Farrell's number but there had been – maddeningly – no answer. Why didn't the man have an answering machine? All lawyers had answering machines – Glitsky thought they had dispensers for them in the bathrooms at law schools.
Then he had come into the kitchen and given Hardy's wife Frannie a kiss hello and Frannie had taken one look at him and said he was staying for dinner and that was the end of that. It was obvious that he wasn't taking good care of himself. Just look at him – what did he weigh anymore? What was the matter with him? He should at least think of his children.
Frannie was Moses McGuire's little sister, a petite woman with long flaming red hair, skin the color of cream, green eyes. More than a decade younger than Glitsky and Hardy and everybody else he saw outside of work, she was idealistic, headstrong, quite beautiful.
When Flo had died, and though the Hardys had two young children of their own, Frannie had taken all of Glitsky's boys for a month while he had pretended he was starting to get his life back together. It was a crucial time – and it had enabled him to find, interview and hire Rita; it had given the boys some sense of continuity when they needed it most. And it had given him an excuse to come someplace and not be alone after work.
So tonight they had fed him – Dismas and Frannie were turning into some sophisticated eaters, but Abe thought there were probably worse fates. They called it risotto, whereas Abe would have said rice and fish, but by any name it tasted good. He even had most of a glass of wine. White.
A half shot of Stoly during the day, a glass of wine at night. He was turning into a drunk. And speaking of drunk…
He'd called Farrell again. Or tried. It was frustrating to realize that his own sense of urgency involving Kevin Shea didn't appear to be shared by the suspect's own attorney. Or maybe it was – it could be they were having a meeting, a strategy session. He thought of his meeting with Farrell at Lou the Greek's, Hardy's description of his own tête-à-tête with Farrell in the Shamrock, and had come to the conclusion that whatever Farrell was doing, it was over drinks.
Well, he'd have to be patient.
Over dinner they had covered the riots, Abe's kids and his dad, Monterey, Ashland, the production of The Tempest, camping in general, which led to the Glitsky household's rules committee, on to early childhood development (the Hardys' kids were five and three, respectively), somehow over to Supervisor Wrightson, the city's wrong-headed policies on affirmative action, then on to events at the Hall, Art Drysdale, Chris Locke, the future of the United States political system. The usual stuff.
The subject of Loretta Wager had come up as well. As had Elaine. In catching up with the week's events, Hardy had not been thrilled by the role the two women had played – the rush to the indictment of Kevin Shea, the cynical way they had manipulated the media.
But Glitsky – not really wanting to dissemble in front of his friends – had segued to a different topic, saying all of that was just politics. Nothing to talk about. And how about these green beans – how did Frannie keep them so crisp? With all of the other topics they did not get around to the specifics of Hardy's talk with Wes Farrell, the fact that the search warrant had been served by a DA's investigator. It just never came up.
Now Glitsky sat on the low couch in the warm and spacious – compared to his – front room of the Hardys' house. He couldn't help noticing with some measure of regret and envy that there wasn't a large and unsightly changing screen – as there was in his own cramped duplex – separating the living area from the sleeping area. Of course, there was no need. The Hardys didn't have a nanny. Frannie stayed at home with the two kids. Dismas went to work. Old-fashioned, but there it was. The way it had been with him and Flo, and the way it wasn't anymore.
An oak fire crackled in the fireplace and he could hear his friends in the back of the house, the familiar and comfortable chit-chat as they got dessert together.
Frannie appeared now from the kitchen – her hair was back in a ponytail and she wore a white 'Cal' sweatshirt and Nike running shorts and sandals, no socks. Carrying a tray with two pots and cups and cookies, she set it down on the coffee table in front of Abe, sat kitty-corner to him in Hardy's lounger. 'What do you say? Let's be bold and not watch television tonight.'
Glitsky smiled, began squeezing some lemon over his tea. Frannie did think of everything. 'You mean just talk?'
She nodded. 'Unusual but I say go for it.' She reached over, grazed a hand lightly on his knee. 'We haven't talked about you at all. How are you doing?'
Stirring his tea, studying the swirl of the liquid. 'I'm fine.'
Frannie poured herself some coffee, adding a little cream from a carved crystal pitcher. 'I think what I like about you most, Abe, is your gushing nature, the way you just spill out everything that's on your mind.'
He kept stirring the tea. 'I'm fine, Frannie. Really. That's all there is to it.'
'Well, you seem, if you'll pardon me, a little run down.'
'It's been a long week.' He sipped. 'I'm fine, really.'
Frannie nodded. 'Dismas says if you say you're fine three times in under a minute, you're not.'
'Dismas says that, huh?'
'And if you add "really" at least once, you really aren't.' She was leaning forward. 'You said "really" twice. I noticed.'
He had to chuckle. 'Maybe this is one of your husband's theories that will prove unfounded.'
'What is this heresy I hear?'
Hardy arrived from the kitchen through the dining room with a snifter of something. 'One of my theories?'
Frannie looked up at him. 'Abe's fine,' she said. 'Really, he says.'
Hardy nodded. 'Good.'
'He doesn 't want to talk about it.'
'Better.' Motioning for Glitsky to slide over, Hardy found a place on the couch. 'I don't want to talk about Abe either.'
'There's nothing to talk about,' Glitsky said. 'I'm working, life's going on.'
Frannie was shaking her head. 'You have not had a date in one year and three months.'
Glitsky had been through variations of this scene before. His scar stretched through his lips. 'That's 'cause you're already taken.'
Frannie beamed at him, said to Hardy, 'He's so sweet.'
'A cupcake,' Hardy agreed. 'In spite of what everybody says.'
'But really, Abe…' Frannie didn't want to give it up.
Glitsky slapped his thighs, was standing. 'But really, guys, I've got to try Wes Farrell again.'
Farrell finally answered his phone. He sounded sober, pumped up. 'I just talked to my client, Lieutenant, not twenty minutes ago. He's very anxious to get this thing moving. So am I. Your friend Hardy indicated to me that you had some kind of plan and I'd like to know what you have in mind.' Then, more sharply: 'I did think you might have tried to get in touch a little earlier.'
Glitsky snapped back. 'You weren't home. I did try. And I was around all day yesterday. You were going to call me, maybe you don't remember?'
There was a brief silence, then the reply, curt and formal. 'I thought I explained that adequately to Mr Hardy.'
Glitsky could feel the spirit of cooperation slipping away. The lawyerly tones were kicking in, the defense vs. the prosecution, and Glitsky was with the prosecution. Hardy had become Mr Hardy. Glitsky was going to lose Farrell and therefore Shea and everything else if he didn't rein in the general antagonism that was threatening to overcome him, the frustration.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm afraid I haven't had any real time with Hardy. His message to me was that you'd talk to me. That's all we got to. I'm glad you are.'
Another pause, Farrell perhaps considering his sincerity. 'So what's your idea?'
Now it was Glitsky's turn to hesitate. How much did he dare tell? 'I've spoken to Senator Wager,' he said. 'Alan Reston is her protegé and he's our stumbling block, yours and mine. She promised me she'd talk to Reston, convince him to cut Shea the slack he needs, guarantee him some safety.'
'You talked to the senator personally?'
'Yes.' Then, feeling he needed to explain: 'We went to college together. We know each other.'
'That's a fortuitous relationship. And she said she'd do it?'
'She said she'd talk to Reston, yes. She seemed confident she could convince him to soften up some, make some guarantees, which is all Shea needs, right? That hasn't changed?'
'Not as far as I know. But that's his minimum, Lieutenant. He still wants to come in, get his story heard. I should tell you, though, I'm going to try very hard to get this whole indictment quashed. It's bogus.'
Glitsky figured now was as good a time as any to cement the newly wrought alliance. 'You need me to give my two cents to anybody, Mr Farrell, I'll say what I think.'
'And what's that?'
'I don't think your boy did it. I don't think the evidence says he did it. He may even have been the hero here. I think he ought to walk.'
Glitsky heard the sigh of relief over the phone wire. 'I appreciate that,' Farrell said.' Can I ask you another question?'
'Sure.'
'You got any leads on who might have been behind it, the mob, the lynching?'
Glitsky decided he could share that information, such as it was. 'A couple. Nothing firm, but yes, there are some things, some other people we're looking at.'
'I wanted to hear that.' Dead air. Then: 'So when are you going to hear back from the senator? Or Reston?'
'I'd expect by tonight sometime, morning at the latest. Loret- the senator couldn't reach Reston at the office and left a message for when he got home. No one knows when that's going to be but she said it was urgent. He'll call her.'
'I should probably get an answering machine,' Farrell said out of left field. 'But that timing works. I'm talking to Shea at nine in the morning.'
'I should have heard before that. And you'll be around? This number?'
'I'm not leaving. I'll be here.'
'Okay. I'll call you.'
'All right. And, Lieutenant?'
'Yeah?'
'Thanks. This is above and beyond.'
'It shouldn 't be, it should be how it works.'
'Yeah, well,' Farrell said, 'if my uncle had wheels he'd be a wagon.'
Glitsky cut it short at the Hardys'. Something in their domestic bliss, so obvious and unforced, wrenched at his insides tonight. He didn't know if he was pulling away from the memory of Flo and the life they'd shared, so similar in many respects to the Hardys', or experiencing a kind of foreshadowing of the loss he was bound to feel with Loretta.
No question about it – the two of them would never sit, legs casually intertwined on the couch they'd bought after much discussion with the money they'd saved for it. He knew they would never live in her house together – in the mansion Dana Wager had built in Pacific Heights. Nor she in his, with the boys. Loretta was a United States senator and her husband had been one of the developers who had helped refashion San Francisco's skyline into what it was today – high-rises and pyramids and glass monoliths to the edge of the famous bay.
Glitsky was a working cop.
It wasn't going to last – no sense pretending it was, and he'd been doing that. Perhaps seeing the Hardys dosed him back up with reality. He and Loretta had now, but they had no future. He knew he had to face that, prepare for it, accept it – he simply wasn't ready to just yet.
He climbed the darkened twelve steps and let himself into his house. After turning on the light in the hallway he went to the closet, removed his flight jacket, hung it up. The thermostat on the wall read sixty-one degrees – without his jacket on it felt like ten below. He moved the heater lever all the way to the right and within moments heard the heater kick in, felt air begin to move around him. The furnace had a distinctive smell when it hadn't been turned on in a while and it kicked in now, dusty and stale.
He stood as though rooted in front of the thermostat for a long time. Something had stopped him dead. It wasn't a specific thought, or a thought at all. He just didn't move. There was nothing to move for – if everything stopped now, nothing would ever get worse.
Or better.
He was in the kitchen, more lights on, getting more tea – habits, habits. He didn't want to drink any more tea, but, all alone now, he found himself afraid – no, not afraid, nervous - that if he stopped doing things he would just stop, period.
The water wasn't boiling yet. He went back into the kids' hall and checked the two rooms, the closets, the lock on the back door. In his bedroom, the photograph of Flo was still turned down on his bureau and he picked it up, staring at the once-so-familiar face for a long time.
The light on his message machine was blinking and he walked over to it, pushed the button.
'Dad. Hi. It's Isaac. Grandpa says he thinks we should stay down here another couple days and we were thinking… like if you've got the weekend, it's not that far, I mean you could be down here in a couple of hours.' A pause. 'If you want. I mean, we'd like it. Okay?'
Something rushing up at him, Glitsky pushed the stop button, sat down heavily on his bed, his back bent, holding his forehead in his hands.
He talked to all the boys – Isaac, Jacob, Orel – hearing the difference in the way they talked. Only two days with his father and they were back to the way they used to be with him and Flo, back before he had begun to think only in terms of their protection. He had to stop thinking like that. Had to.
His father Nat came on. They were having a great time. They'd gone to the Aquarium again, a minor-league baseball game, bought eight Dungeness crabs…
'Eight?'
…and shelled and eaten them on the breakwater.
'… not kosher I know, but, Abraham, I tell you, crabs like these, Solomon would have eaten these crabs, believe me.'
Tomorrow they were going to temple in the morning, 'since I don't think these boys, they're going so much, am I right? It can not hurt them.' Did Abe think he could make it down to Monterey? It was the boys' idea – they missed him. Nat lowered his voice. 'Even Isaac,' he said, 'he misses you.'
He would try. If he could clear up the Kevin Shea thing by, say, noon, there was a chance…
Some more tea wouldn't be so bad after all. Get some sleep, big day tomorrow. Back in the bedroom with the steaming mug – no porcelain daintiness this time.
He pushed the answering-machine button again.
'Lieutenant, this is Chief Rigby and this is an official call. I don't know what the hell you've been doing, but I thought I'd made it clear to you this morning that you were relieved of your duties in the Kevin Shea matter. So imagine my surprise when I just now got a call from Alan Reston' – Rigby's volume was going up – 'and he tells me he has unimpeachable evidence that you're working with Kevin Shea's lawyer, that you're offering Kevin Shea immunity from prosecution, that you've even volunteered to testify on Kevin Shea's fucking behalf. Unimpeachable evidence, do you understand, Lieutenant?'
A brief break while Rigby got his anger under control. Glitsky had the impression Rigby wasn't alone, wherever he was.
'Now, in view of this, effective immediately, I am putting you on administrative leave, as soon as you hear this message. I've left another message just like this one at your office. Paper covering it is on the way. If you want to grieve this decision, you know the channels. I am very disappointed, both personally and professionally, but if you cannot follow my direct and unambiguous orders I will not have you responsible for one of my departments.'
After his adrenaline had dissipated itself into his bloodstream, he made himself sit in his lounger in the front room, and there it didn't take him long, maybe five minutes, before he figured out that all of Rigby's information – and none of it was false, although the offer of immunity for Shea was an exaggeration – got conveyed to Wes Farrell during the phone call from Hardy's house. Therefore, Farrell's phone was being tapped. The FBI was on the case – wiretaps were one of its common tools. And Farrell would lead them to Shea as soon as Shea-
Bolting straight up in the chair, Glitsky ran back to the hall closet and pulled on his flight jacket. Down the stairway and into his car, he was at the nearest gas station to his house – four blocks away – within five minutes. At the public booth he pushed some numbers.
The groggy voice answered – it was nearly eleven-thirty – Glitsky said into the receiver: There's a tap on your phone. Don't call Shea and don't let him call you.' He hung up.
He tried Loretta, each of the three numbers he had. None answered.
If Reston was at City Hall with Rigby he would have gotten the message Loretta had left for him, wouldn't he? And if so, then why wouldn't she have called him immediately, as she'd promised – sworn – she would? It nagged at him. And where was Loretta now?
The other question had come to him driving home. And the more he thought about it the more important it became. Maybe it was the only question.
The last person he could call, he knew, was Hardy.
Back home now, it was after midnight. He still wore his jacket. He didn't know – he might be going out.
A mumbled midnight hello.
'Hardy.'
'Abe? What time is it?'
'Why wouldn't Wes Farrell talk to me yesterday?'
'What?'
He repeated the question.
'Because he thought you'd had him followed to his home.' Glitsky then heard: 'It's Abe, honey. Yeah. He's okay, I think.'
'Why did he think that?' Glitsky asked.
Hardy ran the facts for him – Sergeant Stoner, the DA investigator, the warrant.
Now Glitsky was truly stumped. 'I didn't send Stoner, Diz.'
'That's what I told Farrell. I told him Reston must have. That's why Farrell changed his mind, said he'd talk to you.'
'They're tapping his phone.'
'Whose? Farrell's?'
'Yeah.'
'Why? Never mind, I know why.'
How could Reston have sent Stoner? How could Stoner have known who Farrell even was to know to follow him? And pick him up from where, Lou the Greek's. No one had known of Glitsky's meeting with Farrell, not a soul except the two of them. Glitsky had kept it to himself.
It made no sense. None of it made sense.
Then, like a tinkling bell, came the thought – he'd mentioned it to no one except Loretta Wager.
He had told Loretta, told her he was going to be closing up the Kevin Shea matter, was meeting Shea's attorney at the bar across the street, they could expect the whole thing to be over in a day at the most.
But Loretta wasn't…
What she was, though, was Alan Reston's ally in this. She could have called Reston, told him about the meeting, directed Stoner to Farrell and brought Shea in before all the evidence about his innocence became public, before she and her daughter, of whom she was so protective, would be made to look so bad…
Or was that ridiculous?
But she was his lover, his…
His what?
And where was she? What the hell was going on?