He eased himself all the way into the chair, closed his eyes, letting his head fall forward, then raising it again, his expression tortured. 'I keep seeing it,' he said. 'I close my eyes and I keep seeing him…'
'Arthur Wade…'
'I think if I'd just known. I mean, it was like I didn't believe it was going to go that far, so maybe I didn't-'
'Kevin, you did everything you could.'
Shaking his head, Kevin forced it out. 'No. It wasn't enough, Mel. If I'd just-'
'How could you have?'
'That's just it. Don't you see? I could have. I should have seen from the beginning. I was too damn slow.'
'But you did get to him.'
'I got to him. Then they got to me.'
'That isn't your fault.'
Again, he shook his head. 'I kept believing it would stop. After I got to him I must have eased up a minute. I didn't want to kick and punch and yell and stab at everybody around me. I mean, just five minutes before I was drinking with these guys. I thought once I got to holding him up, then everybody would realize like, "hey wait a minute, this has gone far enough, we can't do this." But it didn't happen. I just wasn't prepared for that much hate. I let them beat me, and it killed Wade. Now it might kill me, and you.'
Melanie came up off the bed onto her knees in front of him. 'You know what this is, Kevin? This is fatigue. This is total exhaustion. You don't have anything to be ashamed of.'
'I keep seeing him…'
She nodded. 'And you probably will for a long time. You tried to save him, that's what's important.'
'It didn't work, Mel.'
'Lots of things don't work, Kevin. That doesn't mean they weren't worth trying.'
He took in a breath and looked up at the darkened ceiling. 'How about if nothing works? Ever. How about that one?'
She held his arms tightly until he looked down into her eyes. 'That's a tougher one,' she said, 'but that's not you.'
She went into the bathroom and when she came out Kevin was stretched out on the bed, his breathing labored and heavy. When she sat on the side of the bed he opened his eyes. 'Thank you,' he said.
She brushed a finger over the side of his cheek. 'How bad are the ribs? Let's see.'
'I'll show you mine if you show me yours first.' She ignored that and started to pull the UCLA shirt. 'Easy, easy,' he said. Another heavy breath. 'I don't know if this is going to work.'
'Can you lift your arms?'
'A little.'
He raised them as high as he could, and Melanie tugged at the shirt, gently, until it cleared. 'Oh my God, Kevin.' The right side of his chest seemed to be encircled by a rope of bruises – black, red, purple. The skin was broken in half a dozen places, looking infected. 'We've got to get you to a doctor.'
'I don't think that's a great idea.'
'Then what are we going to do?'
'I think we should get some sleep and think about it in the morning. I don't think I've got much left, Mel.'
'Okay, you lay down.' She took his shoulders and carefully helped him lower himself. 'All the way up, head on the pillow,' she directed. When he was settled she saw the physical relief flood through him, his eyes closed, his body relaxing. Covering him to his waist with the thin comforter, she turned and went into the bathroom, got a washcloth and ran warm water over it.
By the time she was back to his side, perhaps one minute had elapsed, and Kevin was asleep.
She tested the washcloth against her arm, then with great care wiped the bruises on his chest, drying it with one of the bathroom's towels and bringing the comforter up to cover him to the neck. Going around the bed, she turned off the television, then the lights by the door and stepped out of her shoes. Otherwise still dressed, sliding in beside him, she lay down on her back, hands at her sides, hardly daring to breathe.
The knock was barely audible. 'Ms Sinclair? Melanie?'
What? No one knew she was here except…
She parted the drapes a couple of inches and was staring into the face of the clerk from the office. Not a young man, his deep-pitched gravelly voice seemed to make the window vibrate against her hand. 'I thought you might be lonesome, want a little company?' The look in his eyes chilled her, and she glanced quickly at the thin chain that, in theory, protected her.
She let the drapes fall, stepping back. Another knock, quietly. 'Ms Sinclair?' A pause. 'Okay, then, no offense.'
She waited as long as she could bear it, then tried the drapes again and looked. He was gone.
Getting into the bed again next to Kevin, she pulled the comforter up around her, but after a short while suddenly lifted it off and sat up.
She walked around the bed, picked up the telephone, and punched in some numbers. It was after ten and she'd been trained not to call anyone after that time, but this time she was going to make an exception.
The tired voice answered. 'Hello? What time is it?'
'Cindy?'
'Melanie? Where are you? Are you all right?'
'I'm fine. One thing, though…'
'Sure, what, anything.'
'Fuck you, Cindy.' And she hung up.
29
Glitsky went straight up to homicide, but Marcel Lanier, the inspector who had been on call in the office when Loretta Wager was brought downtown, had decided it would be wise to move the senator to avoid the media circus and had chosen a place he thought would be less likely to be used for the next couple of days – Chris Locke's office. He had borrowed a couple of uniformed officers and asked them to wait, standing guard in Locke's reception area until Lieutenant Glitsky arrived. The way things were going he just didn't know – the senator had almost been killed once tonight, and Lanier wasn't about to have anything like that happen again while he was on duty.
Glitsky dismissed the two men in the reception area, closed the door behind him and for the first time in almost twenty-five years was alone in a room with Loretta Wager.
She raised her head. She'd been sitting with her back stiff, one foot curled under her, on one of the couches in Locke's office. Her profile was to him and she held it there. He remained by the door a moment, struck by the control in her posture, the unexpected vulnerability of her face.
'Hello, Loretta.' He stepped toward her. 'Are you all right?'
Her voice had a mechanical quality – shock. 'I don't know how I am. I don't… they tell me a bullet missed me by less than six inches.' She uncurled the leg that had been under her, stood up and faced him. She was barefoot, shorter than he had remembered – an inch over five feet. Her shoes and a small clutch purse that matched the color of her blue suit lay on the floor by the end of the couch.
'But Chris…' She shook her head wearily, lapsed into silence. 'This isn't how I would have chosen to see you again.' She let her posture slip, something giving in her shoulders. 'But then again, you'd chosen not to see me at all.'
Glitsky ignored that, still standing at the doorway. 'You want to tell me what happened?' She cocked her head to one side, some expectation verified. Glitsky felt he should say something, explain himself, though he couldn't say why. Not exactly. 'I run the homicide department. Chris Locke is a pretty important homicide. I gather you're the only witness we've got. I'd like to hear about it.'
Loretta closed her eyes, sighed. Glitsky knew she must have been through it tonight. 'I told my story upstairs to several officers and a tape recorder. I'm sure they're writing it all down.'
'I'm sure they are.'
'But you want to hear it again?'
Glitsky shrugged. He didn't understand why she'd asked for him, but he did know why Lanier had humored her. Well, he was here now, and this is what he did. 'If you want to humor me I'd appreciate it. I understand you asked for me. Here I am.'
There was the start of a smile, but Glitsky couldn't read it. 'When you're bidden.'
'That's just the way I am, Loretta. I'm trying to do my job. You know that.'
A pause. Then: 'I remember.' Unexpectedly – he 'd crossed over to her n
ow – she reached a hand up to the side of his face. But no sooner had the touch registered than she pulled it away. 'All right,' she said, 'but God, I am so tired.'
Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard of tired. You want to sit down?'
Her voice sank. 'Sit down? Sugar, I want to lay this ol' body down.' But then she was back, her senatorial self. 'Just teasing, Lieutenant. Let us sit down.'
He turned on his pocket tape recorder and let her talk.
'Chris and I had dinner with Philip Mohandas and some of his people – I've been trying to coordinate our efforts so that we're all concentrating on the same way to end these problems, so we're not stepping on each other's toes. And Philip doesn't see things exactly… well, exactly as Chris Locke did. Or me either, for that matter. I keep trying to get the message to him… separatism is not the way. Segregation is not the way. We have to work together, all of us.
'Maybe it was naive, but I thought if Chris and I – two black people working and getting things done in the system – I thought if we could somehow make Philip see, to moderate just a little, we'd have a better chance of getting the city under control.
'Philip can't seem to stop looking on these… these tragedies… as something he can use. He sees this as a time to demand concessions across the board. So he spent most of the night lecturing Chris and me on his positions, as he insists on calling them. It got pretty tedious.
'Now I knew I was going to take a lot of this up later with Philip, try and get him to see a little of the light, so I gave Chris a kick under the table and reminded him – didn't he remember? – we said we'd go out to the Dolores Park tent city, which – you probably heard – some genius had decided to segregate. De facto. Keep the tensions to a minimum. Lord, the stupidity of bureaucrats.
'Chris didn't know exactly what we thought we were going to do out there. I told him I thought – still do – that it was maybe one of those times when you can make political points and do some good at the same time. That argument speaks – I'm sorry, spoke… to Chris Locke, as you probably know.
'But by the time we got down there, things had flared up. I think it got around – of course, none of the city planners had realized its implications – that this was about two blocks from the spot where Michael Mullen had been shot. So the white half – can you believe this, the white half – of the tent city decides to name itself Mullentown, and in retaliation or whatever you want to call it, someone put up a sign in the other area – the so-called African area – calling it Jerohm Reese City. Which, as you can imagine, lasted about five minutes.'
'Which got people to burning again.'
Loretta leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes, sighing. Straightening herself up, arching her back, she visibly steeled herself to continue. Her red-rimmed eyes met Abe's and she smiled wearily. 'We are so blind,' she said. 'We are so goddamn blind.'
Glitsky turned off the recorder. 'You really care that much?'
It stopped her, seemed to hurt her, but she simply echoed what he had said earlier: 'That's just the way I am, Abe. I'm trying to do my job.'
The scar between Glitsky's lips ran lighter for an instant and he looked down.
She didn't pursue the moment. Instead, taking a breath, she motioned to the tape recorder. He pressed the button and she was back at Dolores Park. 'Chris had had some wine with dinner so I was driving. We stopped but didn't get out of the car. Things had begun to spill into the streets. They'd pushed over a police car, put it on fire. It was just getting dark.
'Then, suddenly, I don't even know how it happened, it was so fast. Or I wasn't paying attention enough, but there were people behind us, on the car, and Chris was saying roll the windows up, let's get out of here. But there really was no getting out – I mean, all at once the mob was in front of us, blocking the street, the people behind starting to try to bounce our car, so I put it into reverse and decided to try to get out that way. Chris and I were both turned around. We're backing through this crowd, people are slamming the windows, screaming at us. Some rocks hit the car, something, I don't know, but I just kept going, not too fast, I didn't want to run anybody over, but we had to get out of there…
'And then we were through them, or I thought we were. I was still backing up, faster now with nobody in the way. We got to the end of the block and I stopped, figuring we could now go forward. Chris was still turned around, still looking behind us to make sure we were clear, and then, I don't know what – all of a sudden his window exploded and there was this man and I see he's pointing a gun at me now, so I jam the accelerator to the floor just as he fires again and I'm turning up Guerrero. Chris is slumped over. After that I guess I… I don't really know. I drove until I saw a police car, then I stopped.'
Glitsky sat forward on the couch. His face was impassive. 'Could you identify the man, the shooter?'
She thought a long moment, then shook her head. 'I don't think so, Abe. It was dark, I was mostly looking at the gun. He was white and if I had to guess, probably under thirty.'
'You see what he was wearing?'
' Some kind of jacket – it was open, I noticed, it flapped – maybe a T-shirt, jeans, nothing really distinctive.'
'Hair, beard…?'
Again, she shook her head. 'I really did tell all this to the inspectors upstairs, Abe. They said they'd look, they'd try. Try to find the gun, match it with something, see where it leads, but the man himself… he could have been anybody.'
A lengthy silence. Loretta Wager leaned back into the curve of the couch. Glitsky remained, hunched over, hands clasped between his knees, eyes on the floor. He flicked off his tape recorder.
When he finally spoke it came out husky and strained with fatigue, not unlike the tone he used with his boys. It wasn't his cop voice. 'I didn't mean to be so abrupt today. When you called. I started to apologize but you'd hung up.'
'I was… you were right. I shouldn't have intruded.' She seemed to pull herself back, farther from him, waiting, reading his posture. Their eyes met. Both of them looked away.
He had gotten up, gone over to the window, was rewinding his tape player. Then that was done and he still didn't move. Time passed. From across the room, she asked it so quietly he almost didn't hear it: 'You haven't talked about your wife yet, have you? You haven't told anybody.'
She wasn't prying. Anyone else, maybe even Loretta at any other time, he would have snapped off some answer that would have ended that kind of personal inquiry, but right now he was drained, empty, without even the strength to lift his guard.
She'd read something in him. He could at least explain why he wouldn't explain. 'It's not something you talk about.'
He never had, not since the diagnosis. His role had been to tough it out, support Flo in her own struggle, keep the boys from breaking…
'All right,' she said.
If she'd pushed at all, he would have pulled away. He didn't turn around, spoke into his reflection in the window, kept it matter of fact. 'She had ovarian cancer. By the time they discovered it there wasn't anything they could do. It took nine months.'
'Oh, Abe. I'm so sorry.'
'It's funny,' he said at last, 'all the planning we did, I mean so we'd be prepared, so Flo wouldn't feel so much like she was leaving us in the lurch. I think we really convinced ourselves that we were doing something. But then when… when she wasn't there, I looked at all these lists we'd made, all the things I'd have to remember to do with the boys, all of this… activity that was supposed to do something, keep us on some kind of even keel. I didn't have a clue.'
He lifted his head, took in a breath, stared at the black space outside.
'How many boys do you have?' she asked.
'Three.'
'Has it been a long time?'
'Sixty-four weeks Saturday.' He looked at her. 'I don't know why, I just remember it in weeks, like I don't want to admit it's been months, or a year. I mean, you can handle a week. A week isn't that long. How it feels is even less than that. Sometimes I… it seems like an h
our ago, she was here. She's just gone an hour and she'll be right back. It's stupid really. Denial. Just a way to handle it.'
'Not so stupid.'
His shoulders moved. 'The only thing is, you run up against real time, against how nothing is the same, it's all changed. That's how you know how long it's been. Everything about your kids, how things work with them, that's all different. How you work with yourself.' Winding down, stopping. 'Sorry. Running on.'
'Hardly that.'
'Well…'
After a beat, she rose from the couch and walked over to him. 'I was luckier with Dana. He died when Elaine was almost seventeen. And he was so much older. He'd lived his life.' She looked up at him. 'And still it took me a couple of years. You do whatever works.' She touched his arm. 'Would you mind driving me home, Abraham? I truly am exhausted.'
He'd been driven down to the Hall by a squad car, so he had to check out another city-issued vehicle, the same model car Loretta had been driving with Chris Locke earlier in the night. They didn't do any more talking as Abe filled out the requisition form for the car or on the walk down the outside staircase so they would avoid the media clustered still and always in the lobby of the Hall of Justice.
Now as they pulled out of the city lot she sat all the way across the seat from him, against the window, still silent, the intimate discussion upstairs now a barrier between them.
Glitsky was all eyes on the road. The previous driver of the vehicle had left the radio on and some bright-voiced deejay was telling whatever audience might remain in the traumatized city that it was exactly midnight, the first hour of Thursday, June 30. One more day until the official start of the Fourth of July long weekend and Happy Birthday America. It was sure going to be fun if we just make sure we load up on the beer and hot dogs and…
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