Elaine Wager swung her bare legs to the floor. On top she wore a man's Warriors T-shirt. Waking up as she walked, she found herself becoming dimly aware of a conceit of sirens down below, out in the city. The digital clock on her dresser read twelve-fourteen. Her apartment was a one-bedroom, twelve stories up, a few blocks north of Geary Street on Franklin near Lafayette Park. She glanced out the window – there seemed to be several fires a few blocks away in the Western Addition. To the south, too, the sky glowed orange.
Still carrying the phone, she moved quickly now through her sparsely furnished living room.
'What's going on, Chris?'
The tiny portable television was on the counter in the kitchen area. She flicked it on.
'We're in riot mode, Elaine. The projects are on fire. They lynched one of the brothers tonight.' Elaine sat down hard on one of the stools by the counter. 'Arthur Wade.'
'What about Arthur?' she asked stupidly.
'You know him?'
'Of course I know him. He went to Boalt with me. What about him?'
There was a pause. 'Elaine, Arthur Wade is dead. A mob lynched him.'
'What do you mean, lynched?' She was babbling, trying to find a context for it, an explanation for the inexplicable.
On the television, more of the now-familiar visions – already the crowds were out in the streets, already the shop windows were being smashed, buildings were burning. Her eyes left the screen, went out to the real city again.
'Chris?'
'I'm here. I was wondering if you'd heard from your mother.'
'No, not yet. I'm sure I will. Meanwhile, what are we going to do?'
'Are you still in front of your TV?'
'Yes.'
'Look at it now.'
On the screen was a still photograph that would in the coming days become as famous as the Rodney King videotapes. Arthur Wade was hanging from a streetlight and under him a white male was hugging him, apparently pulling down on his legs, trying to break his neck. Wade, in his last futile seconds, was holding the rope above his head with one hand, and with his other appeared to be trying to strike the man pulling his legs, to drive him away and purchase himself another few seconds of life.
Elaine stared transfixed at the horror of the scene. She had never expected to see it played out in her lifetime again, especially here, in supposedly liberal San Francisco.
She forced herself to look again – the black man hanging by the neck, surrounded by the white mob. All the faces were blurred except the two in the center, and they were in perfect focus. Arthur Wade and the man who'd hung him, whoever it was.
Chris Locke sounded raspy, drained. 'We're going to get proactive here, Elaine. That man's got to be found. And then we've got to crucify him. Can you come down to the Hall…?'
'You mean now?'
'I mean yesterday, Elaine.'
7
Shea made it home, walking.
It took him over two hours to make it on the smaller streets from where he had been dropped in the grassy center divider of Park Presidio Boulevard to his apartment on Green Street near Webster.
The details kept coming back. The black man struggling. Reaching for him. The man's weight on his shoulders while he was still alive.
Maybe, Shea kept thinking, reliving it, he shouldn't have gone for the guys near the fire hydrant, should have just stayed holding the man up, maybe then it would have turned out…
It still wasn't real.
He limped, stopped, leaned on things, vaguely aware of sirens, of the sky glowing now off to his right. At the moment, he couldn't put it together.
There were six apartments in his three-story building, three up front and three in the back. He had the one all the way back and all the way up. He wasn't sure he could make it.
He'd better see a doctor soon. Maybe he should call the police, although they'd already be all over the scene back at the Cavern. Still…
Finally he made it, took out his key and got inside, locking the door back behind him. God, his arm was killing him. His ribs. Everything.
From his cupboard, he took down a bottle of vodka, poured about six ounces into a glass, added two ice cubes and a spoonful of orange juice concentrate and, drinking, went into the bathroom. He finished the drink before the shower had gotten hot, before he'd been able to strip off his shirt.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He shouldn't be drinking now, he told himself. He should call the police, a doctor, somebody. But first he needed the one drink tonight, now. Who'd blame him for that, after what he'd been through? And the shower, wash off the blood, check the damage. Then he'd have one more before bed, dull things a little, the pain. There was nothing they could do tonight anyway.
That poor bastard…
8
By three in the morning units of the police force, fire department and emergency crews had been mobilized within the city and county of San Francisco. The mayor, Conrad Aiken, had also put in a call to the governor's office in Sacramento requesting that the National Guard be called out, that martial law be declared. There were already nineteen fires and property damage was going up faster than the national debt.
Here in the middle of the night Aiken had forsaken his ornate digs at City Hall in favor of the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant streets, the home of the police department, the district attorney's office and the county jail. He had commandeered District Attorney Chris Locke's outer office and sat behind what was usually a secretary's desk.
The mayor was an imposing figure in spite of considerable physical drawbacks for a politician – he stood only five-foot-seven and was so thin that the joke was when he stood sideways, unless he stuck out his tongue you couldn't see him. He was also nearly bald, with a half-dollar-sized port-wine stain that ran under his left eye and halfway across the bridge of an aquiline nose with a bump in the middle of it.
Most people put him a decade younger than his stated age of sixty-two. He had that spring in his step, contained energy and piercing gray-blue eyes. He had all his teeth, and they were pearly white, though he wasn't flashing any of them now.
With him in the office were Locke, Assistant DA Elaine Wager, Police Chief Dan Rigby, Assistant Chief Frank Batiste, County Sheriff Dale Boles (pronounced Bolus), who was in charge of the jail and its prisoners, Aiken's administrative assistant, a young man named Donald, and Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, a forty-four-year-old Jewish mulatto who headed San Francisco's homicide detail.
Aiken had started off by wanting to get a report on the status of the riots from Chief Rigby – the affected areas, what measures were being taken, how many men were on the street and so on. Rigby was in the middle of running it down for him.
'… mostly containment at this stage. We don't have a hope of any real control until we get more people on the streets, and of course we've got the usual looting-'
'We're not gonna have that,' the mayor said. 'I want you to put out the word. We're not tolerating looting. This isn't Los Angeles.' He looked around the room for effect, his port-wine stain glowing. 'This isn't Los Angeles,' he repeated.
'No, sir,' the chief replied, 'but how are we planning to stop it, the looting?'
'I'm in favor of shooting to kill.'
Rigby looked shocked. Pleased but shocked. 'Well, we can't do that.'
'Why not? Don't they do it in the midwest after tornadoes. We'll do it here. Why not? I'm not going to allow looting in San Francisco.'
Chris Locke took a step forward. He was a big man, half again the mayor's weight, the only person present in a business suit. 'Sir, the only people you'll shoot will be black. It's racist.'
Aiken didn't like that. 'I'm no racist, Chris. The only people I'd have shot would be looters. Black, white or magenta, I don't give a damn.'
Elaine Wager spoke up. 'But the only people rioting so far are African-Americans, sir, the same as you had in Los Angeles -'
'There's a lot of rage,' Locke added.
'I don't want to hear that shit. I
don't want to hear about rage. Rage isn't any issue here, and it sure as hell isn't any excuse. Keeping the law is what this is all about.'
Rigby said, 'It's moot. Black officers won't shoot black looters.'
Lieutenant Glitsky almost spoke up for the first time to say that he would – half-black and half-white himself, he had little patience with the posturing and excuses from either side. But he kept his mouth shut, for now.
'What the hell?' Aiken said. 'Don't black officers arrest black lawbreakers every day?'
Rigby shook his head. 'It's not the same thing.'
The mayor wasn't buying. 'Look. I'm talking about preserving the city, protecting all its citizens. Let's not turn this thing into a race war.'
Elaine Wager spoke up again. 'But that's what it is. That's the issue. A black man's been lynched… sir.'
'Goddamnit, I know that. But what we're talking about now, this minute, is not a racial question. It's about people who're breaking the law. Riot control.'
Rigby repeated that he couldn't shoot looters.
Aiken held up a hand. 'Look, I don't want to talk about shooting looters. I don't even know if we've got looters at this stage, but I don't want them tolerated. I think we've got to make a stand somewhere. We're not going to just sit and watch 'em. I want them prosecuted-'
'Where do we put 'em?'
This was Dale Boles. His jail upstairs was already filled to capacity. If Aiken wanted the police to start arresting looters he was going to have to take responsibility for housing them.
Aiken glared at him, chose not to respond and turned to Glitsky. 'What have you found out about the lynching itself? Was it random or what? Maybe we can get some handle on how to stop this thing faster if we know what started it.'
Glitsky, in corduroys and a leather flight jacket, was sitting on a low filing cabinet at the back of the room. He had a hawkish nose and an old gash of a scar running through his lips, top to bottom, almost as though he'd had an operation for a cleft palate. He was a light chocolate color, wore his hair in a buzz cut, and had startling blue eyes. Answering Aiken, he nevertheless fixed a flat gaze on Chris Locke. 'Jerohm Reese,' he said, 'not that that's any excuse.'
The mayor cocked his head. 'Who's Jerohm Reese?'
'What's Reese got to do with this, Abe?' Locke said.
'I said "who's Reese?",' Aiken repeated.
Glitsky stood up and quickly told the story. The carjacking. Mike Mullen. The release. Glitsky looked at his watch, glanced at Locke – disdainful. 'Reese was released less than thirteen hours ago. We have a couple of witnesses, not to the lynching itself but they seem to think the mob came from the Cavern, a pub on 2nd and Geary.'
'Okay,'Aiken said, 'And?'
'And I was down there. I went into the Cavern myself. Place was empty except for a bartender named Jamie O'Toole who told me it had been dead all night. Slowest night they'd ever had. He'd heard the mob outside, of course, but got scared and didn't want to go out and check-'
Locke interrupted. 'Jerohm Reese, Abe.'
The scar between Glitsky's lips went almost white – perhaps he was smiling. 'On the back wall of the Cavern was a huge blown-up picture of a guy. I asked O'Toole who it was and he said it was Mike Mullen. He'd been the accountant for the place. Seeing as I was a homicide cop and all, maybe I'd heard of him.'
Silence in the room, finally broken by Elaine Wager. 'You mean because Jerohm Reese was released…?'
Chris Locke answered everybody. 'I released Jerohm Reese because there wasn't going to be a conviction on him.'
Glitsky looked at him. 'Well, some of these people seemed to take it wrong, sir.'
Aiken rubbed a hand over his face. 'You're telling me that this mob happened because of the release of this Jerohm Reese?'
'That's how I read it, yes, sir. Just the way some people took it wrong when they let off the cops who beat up Rodney King.' He paused and added, 'Again, in Los Angeles.'
Locke wanted to get back to the nuts and bolts. 'Have we identified any of the mob?'
'No, sir, not yet. We're working on it, but it's a stonewall out at the Cavern.'
'We've got one.' Elaine Wager felt free to talk whenever she wanted. Glitsky thought it must be great having a U.S. senator for a mother. 'Have any of you seen the news tonight?'
Glitsky nodded at her. 'Yep,' he said, 'we're working on him, too. Real hard.'
9
Rolling over on his arm woke Shea up. It was still dark out, about the time the somnolent effects of the alcohol usually wore off. His mouth was dry. Unlike most mornings when the throbbing was an insistent dull pounding inside his head, today he lay in his bed immobilized by the pain.
The pulse of the jackhammer in his skull made him fear to lift his head from the pillow – his ribs, his arms, his hips. He wondered for a moment if he was seriously hurt. This, he told himself, was not a hangover. Hangovers didn't feel like this. (Many mornings he would tell himself that he wasn't hung over, he was sure he hadn't drunk enough to make him hung over, he just hadn't had enough sleep.)
He rolled to his side and bile came up on him. Staggering in the dark, he bumped five steps to the bathroom and barely made it, crumpling to the floor and hugging the commode.
Finally he stood and urinated. The jackhammer was not going to let up. He had to try to get back to bed, to sleep some of this off. He should call a doctor.
The bathroom light was an explosion that nearly knocked him down again but he had to wash his face, brush his teeth. There were two of him in the mirror, he couldn't focus down to one.
Cold water on his face. Washing off crust from the beating. Still two faces, both swollen, cut.
Back on his bed, the room spun some more.
The jangle of the telephone ringing next to his ear almost tossed him out of the bed. He jolted up, arms and ribs feeling ripped from their sockets, joints, whatever it was that attached them.
He got it halfway through the second ring.
'Kevin?'
A girl. Melanie. No, it couldn't be. They'd broken up – face it, he'd dropped her – three weeks before. He flopped back on the bed, the phone pressed to his ear. 'Timezit?' he moaned.
A pause while she processed the slur in his voice. He was sure that was it. Now, if tradition held, would come two minutes of rebuke.
Okay, he was drunk. Did she want to fight about it? Again? Well, not tonight, honey, I've got a headache. He almost hung up, then heard her say, 'It's five-fifteen.' The time didn't surprise him. During the school year, when they'd still been going out, she'd always set her alarm for five so she could get up and study and get a jump on the day. It was another reason they'd broken up.
'Melanie…'
'God, Kevin, how could you do it?'
'Do what?'
She told him.
10
The streetlights glared off the wet-looking street. The whole short block – it was a cul-de-sac that backed up to the Presidio – was empty, dark, forbidding. The windows facing the street caught a glint here and there, ghosts flitting across the fronts of the buildings.
Abe Glitsky, noticing all this, told himself he didn't used to think this way. It was only since Flo had died. Only. Sure, only. Only nine months of her struggle against the ovarian cancer that killed her in its own quick time, in spite of the chemotherapy and other atrocities they had colluded to commit to ward off the inevitable. Nine months with Glitsky at her side every step of the way, both of them struggling against the urge to despair and – perhaps more difficult – the random appearances of their irrational yearning to hope. And then, after she was gone, trying to maintain the facade these last fifteen months – not to show the pain, not even (and it tortured him on the days he managed it) to feel it as fresh as it had been.
Fifteen months. Only fifteen months. God.
It was – unusually – still shirtsleeve weather in this the darkest hour before the dawn. Since his duplex didn't come with a garage, he'd wound up parking in the nearest spot – four blocks a
way – and by the time he hit his block he was almost shaking from fatigue. But still, in no hurry to get home. He never was anymore.
There was a sliver of moon through the trees in the Presidio – the morning was dead still and his footfalls echoed. He realized he hadn't heard a siren since he'd started walking. That knowledge didn't fill him with any hope. He knew what it was – he knew what false hope was and he wasn't going to indulge anymore. Today would be hotter than yesterday, and today it would all break loose.
Behind him as he turned up the sidewalk a bus rumbled by on Lake Street. Turning, he saw that it was empty except for the driver and a passenger sitting alone way in the back.
His wife Flo had always wanted a real house. Their plan was to have Flo stay with the kids until the youngest, Orel, got into junior high, which would have been, would be, the next September. At that time Flo would have gone back to teaching and they would have saved for a couple of years, maybe moved out of the city, got their house.
Would have, should have…
Putting it off a minute longer, he stood in front of the cement stairs leading up to the second floor. The light over the door had blown out or Rita, his live-in housekeeper, had forgotten to leave it on. It was a long twelve steps to the landing – his own self-improvement, one-day-at-a-time program.
Inside, there was the old sense memory – the familiar smells, the shadows. A tiny bulb burned over the stove in the kitchen and he quietly made his way back. When they had first moved in eleven years ago he and Flo hadn't been able to get over the spaciousness of the place – two bedrooms, study, living room, dining room, kitchen. They had only had the first two boys then – Isaac and Jacob – and they had put them in one bedroom, used the other themselves, and still had an adults' room where they kept files, wrote checks, locked the door when they needed to get away. After Orel came around (they called him O.J. back then – they'd since dropped the nickname), the older boys shared a bunk bed until they finally had to acknowledge there was no room for three of them – their beds and all their stuff – in the one ten-by-twelve room. They had given their eldest, Isaac, the old study as his own bedroom.
A Certain Justice Page 3
