'Bandage off?'
'Not yet. Couple more days.'
'Is Petey in trouble?' Patsy asked. She had a smoker's voice.
She'd moved forward a step into the light – Banks didn't think she looked fifteen. But, he noticed, there was a gold band on her finger.
'No, ma'am, not now. We're just double-checking a few things he said last time he talked to us.'
'Like what?' She got in front of her husband.
Marcel Lanier spoke from behind Banks, over his shoulder. 'Like how he hurt his arm, for example?'
'He cut it on a door,' she said. 'The glass broke.'
'Well, that's what he told us.' Marcel was jockeying for position on the stoop, stepping up now behind Banks. 'But the thing is, we went back – well, actually, my partner Ridley here did – he is kind of thorough, kind of like Colombo, remember him? Always that "uh, just one more thing." Drives us all crazy sometimes but there you go. Anyway, how the arm got cut… You mind if we come in? It is definitely not warm, and you look a little chilly yourself.'
Accompanied as it was by a glance downward, Lanier was being more antagonistic than he sounded – Patsy McKay's nipples were protruding like gumdrops, poking at the thin fabric of the tank top.
'Why don't you go put on a shirt, hon,' McKay said. 'You guys got a warrant or we can talk right here. What about my arm?'
But Patsy didn't leave, so Banks spoke over her. 'About your arm is that your cousin Brandon Mullen said you both cut yours falling through your sliding back door and when I was by here yesterday I happened to notice that the door isn't broken. You get it fixed right up? Got a receipt for the repair?'
But Patsy was shaking her head. "That was at Brandon 's, not here.'
Banks half-turned, glanced at Lanier. ' Brandon said clear as a bell that you both came back here to have your own private wake for Mike Mullen. To Petey's, is what he said.'
McKay moved forward. 'First-'
'Shh.' Patsy held a hand out, spoke gently but firmly to her husband. 'Hush now.' Back to the inspectors: 'I had a bad headache. They kept waking me up so I asked them to please go over to Brandon 's, which is what they did.'
Banks begged to differ. ' Brandon said they came here.'
'They came here first. Then they went there. Why don't you go ask him again? We'll even go over there with you. Petey didn't do nothing wrong. We got nothing to hide.'
Brandon Mullen was home and acted for all the world as though he had been expecting them. He lived in a lower duplex on 22nd Avenue in the Richmond District, five blocks from the McKays. The sliding glass doors that led to his tiny patio were brand new. And why, yes, inspectors, he did just happen to have a receipt right here for it – two days ago, isn't that right, signed and all? Reardon Glass and Screen.
'I'm going to go bust some chops.'
'Can't do it, Rid.'
They were sitting outside of Brandon Mullen's place, waiting – for nothing. Marcel had the driver's side window down, his elbow on it. 'McKay told Brandon about you coming by his house. Somebody put it together about the window.'
'The wife.'
'Maybe. Anyway, they figured they better break some window.'
'I already figured that out. Thanks.'
'You want to go talk to Reardon of Reardon Glass and whatever the fuck else it is?'
'See if he made the repair yesterday or two days ago, the date on the invoice? No. I don't think he'd be honest with us.'
'I'm shocked. A good Irish Catholic boy?'
'Welcome to police work,' Banks said. 'Shocks abound.'
Working by himself, Carl Griffin took another tack.
He knew he wasn't going to get squatola from any of the other good ol' boys – O'Toole, Mullen, McKay, Shea – the black Irish pulling close round their own men.
His first thought had been to try the emergency rooms at the various local hospitals, but one or two calls had disabused him of that notion – with the city's upheavals, the emergency rooms were, if anything, more swamped than the Hall of Justice, and there weren't many people with the time, inclination or memory to be of much help.
So – methodically, doggedly – he started cross-working a map and a telephone book, phoning every private doctor's office within a two-mile radius of the Cavern Tavern, identifying himself as a homicide inspector and asking if any of the doctors had seen anything remotely resembling a knife wound during the last three days.
Doctors' records were not protected by the evidence code in criminal investigations. In fact, in some cases – such as incidents with gunshot wounds or sexual assaults – doctors were mandated to report to authorities.
It was at the tail end of an eggplant parmesan submarine sandwich. Griffin had parked his beefy frame at his desk in the homicide detail. Leaning back, the heels of his black brogues on the pitted desk, he balefully contemplated the new jail, the slice of clouds and blue above. He was on 'E.' Flipping the pages labelled 'Physicians,' he realized he had another five pages to go.
This was Carl Griffin's brand of police work – you did it by the numbers, you were not inspired, you slogged it out, and eventually, if you covered everything, once in a while you hit it. He considered going to the end of the listings and started backward from 'Z.' But then, he knew, the one he'd left off on at 'E' would turn out to be the jackpot. So he dialed the number for 'Epps.'
Miss Manners would have disapproved of the last bite he took of his sandwich. The telephone was ringing in his ear and when it picked up he had to swallow without chewing and for a fleeting instant thought it wasn't going to go down, that this was his last moment.
'Hello, doctor's office,' the voice repeated.
He swallowed again – saved – and cleared his throat. It turned out that Dr Epps was having her own lunch in the coffee room and she listened without speaking while he gave his spiel. 'Since when was this?' she asked when he had finished.
'Tuesday night.'
'Just a minute.'
Griffin was suddenly elated he hadn't jumped to 'Z.' She was back on the line. 'I had a rather severe Achilles tendon slash that I sewed up on Wednesday morning. The patient was a young man who said he'd gotten tripped up, then fallen over a shovel in his backyard, one of those freak accidents, but I don't think it was a shovel – '
Griffin waited.
'The wound looked like a suture cut – clean and straight.'
'I see. And did you mention this to him?'
'I asked about it, yes. But he said, no, it was a shovel. Brand new, never used, edge like a knife. He didn't blink and I guessed it was possible. I sewed it up.'
'How old was the man?'
'Just a second. Colin Devlin. Twenty-four. Do you want his address?'
41
The waiting area of the bowels of the San Francisco morgue, on the other side of the heavy door that leads to the examination room, was drab and windowless. Plastic yellow chairs, sagging with age and perhaps the accumulation of grief, hugged the shiny light green walls. The two plastic rubber trees no longer looked remotely real, but no one had removed them, no one had noticed. The people in this room were thinking of other matters.
As the assistant district attorney handling the Arthur Wade homicide, Elaine Wager had been called down to the morgue by John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, to go over the forensic report, which, due to the crushing workload over the recent days, had been a little slower coming than usual.
Knees pressed together, hands clasped in her lap, Elaine waited in the anteroom. Strout had told her when he had called upstairs that it would be at least an hour, but she had picked up her folders and gone down immediately, content to be in hiding.
She had spent a good deal of time in the morning fighting herself, keeping busy doing background work on her suspect – his friends, workplace, history. Anything to avoid thinking of Chris, of what had happened… The police had forwarded to her the name of the woman who had provided Kevin Shea's name in the first place – Cynthia Taylor – and, while she had picked up very
little in the way of evidence that would be useful in court, the picture of the man had begun to emerge.
According to Ms Taylor, Shea was a half-step up from white trash. He came from a broken family somewhere down south (which fitted perfectly with what he'd done, she thought). He was one of those hangers-on at SESU, drifting from class to class, drunk a lot of the time. Though Ms Taylor believed he worked part-time in some kind of telemarketing ('no way he could hold a real job'), he also bragged about using the GI bill to buy his booze, didn't have any friends to speak of, although he'd had a relationship with one of Ms Taylor's friends for a couple of months, and now appeared to have hoodwinked that hapless victim into becoming his accomplice in escaping. Ms Taylor had ended the interview with the statement that she thought he was 'really dangerous, unstable. You never know what he's going to do.'
And then the coroner had called, and Elaine realized that she had had enough. The walls were closing in. She needed time to let her emotions flow, to be alone. The room outside Strout's lab gave her that opportunity.
Suddenly – any movement in the dead room appeared sudden – the big door swung open and Strout's lanky form was pulling up a chair next to hers. Strout had a strong deep-south accent and no enemies on the police force or in the DA's office. A true professional, he lived for his forensics. He also had a sly humor and a skeptical eye that had many times discovered a homicide in what at first appeared, even to the police, to be an accidental or benign death.
'I'm gettin' real tired of lookin' at dead people,' he drawled. He had his latest ME forms on a clipboard that he held on his lap. 'Couple a day seems to be my limit. Get up to four, five, gives me a sour stomach.'
Elaine didn't react. This was how Strout always was. It wasn't personal. 'Is that Arthur Wade?' she asked, motioning to the clipboard.
He nodded, enough with amenities. 'No surprises, not that I expected any. Cause of death was asphyxiation, which you'd expect gettin' pulled up – must have taken some minutes. Poor man. Long time to hang. Hey, let me get you some water.'
'No, I'm all right.'
But she found herself resting her head back against the wall, closing her eyes. This was too much. She couldn't sit and listen to someone talk about Arthur Wade hanging for a long time like this – at Boalt, Arthur had seemed one of those wonderful people, not that she'd known him all that well. And now, four years later, his future was the past and that was all.
And Chris Locke… no, don't start, she told herself. Don't open that up.
More time had gone by. Strout was back with lukewarm water in a paper cup. 'Y'all want to lay down a minute, there's a couch in my office?'
But she couldn't help herself. 'Chris Locke is in there, isn't he?'
'Yes, ma'am.' Strout sucked some air between his front teeth. 'Sometimes…' His voice, with a sudden guttural quality, trailed off.
She put a hand on his knee, took it away. 'I know.'
Back in her office – ancient desk, stacks of files, smell of paper and dust – she closed the door behind her. Since an hour ago when she 'd left to go to the morgue, someone had come by and dropped a large yellow envelope in the center of the desk. She sat, dropped her Arthur Wade files on the floor by her feet and opened the envelope.
It was another copy of the original Paul Westberg photo that was in the newspapers and everywhere else. But then, about to slip it back into the envelope and throw the whole thing into the file folder, she stopped. Something had caught her eye and she pulled the photo all the way out.
With everything that had happened since then, she had forgotten that she'd asked the photographer – a request, not a demand – to send her the other picture that he had developed. Which he had now done.
It was very close, as Westberg had said, and he had been right, too, that the likeness of Kevin Shea was a little better in the picture everybody had seen. It was obvious why he had gone with the one and not the other.
But there was something strange about the second one. She picked up the file folder, dug for the first picture, and held them side by side. She was struck by one detail – in the second photo Arthur Wade was clearly holding the knife that, in the other picture, was in Kevin Shea's hand.
Well, so what?
Lots of people – professionals even – carried small knives in their pockets. She herself had a penknife in her purse.
She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the moment, the threatening crowd, Shea in the center of it, deciding – now that Arthur was hanging and helpless – that he would take a stab at him as well, put a knife in his ribs, and Arthur had somehow managed to see it, to reach down with one hand, grab for it, a last moment of struggle, captured here in Westberg's photo.
Or another explanation – weaker but, she considered, still possible. Arthur had somehow managed to pull a knife of his own before they had lifted him from the ground, realizing he'd have to try to cut the rope. It would be his last chance to survive. And then Shea, reaching up, had grabbed it from him, wresting it away. It didn't change any of the basic facts of what had happened – fact, it made the picture clearer.
But something else.
And it came on her in a wave of revulsion that nearly doubled her over, then straightened her back up with rage. There was Kevin Shea, grimacing with the efforts to pull down on her old classmate, setting off the chain of events that had killed Chris Locke, her boss, her lover…
It was intolerable that this man – this bigoted southern schoolboy – was still at large. Her mother was right – so were the supervisors, the mayor, even Philip Mohandas. One man was responsible for all this. It may have been a mob, but this one man had led it. This one man had driven the city to its knees – and he had to be taken. He had to be taken now. The madness wouldn't stop until he was. He had to be found.
Elaine pushed out from her desk. She had to make people see this, she had to make them hate Shea for what he'd done the way she hated him.
There were procedures and there were levels of hierarchy, but she also knew who she was. She could go outside channels, direct to the people. Art Drysdale might reprimand her but the reprimand would have no teeth. No one would dare to touch her.
The city provided the media with two rooms – one for print and one for radio and television – on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, both of them just outside the frosted doors that led down the hallway to the District Attorney's office. Both of these were now full to overflowing, with tables set up in the hall – coffee containers, donuts, half-eaten sandwiches.
Over the past days Elaine and most of the other assistant district attorneys had avoided this hallway in an effort to skirt the schools of piranha journalists who had been in a perpetual feeding frenzy over any scraps that fell into their waters. She had ascended and descended by any of the several internal stairways that connected the floors of the Hall.
Now, her anger high and clear and overlaying the exhaustion in her face, she was hip-deep in the main hall, laying a trail of chum.
'I don't believe this.'
'I do,' Wes Farrell replied. He had not moved. He looked typically slob-like in his khaki shorts and his 'On Strike From Major League Bull-' T-shirt, bare feet up on a milk crate, another can of beer in his hand, Bart's head in his lap.
They were all fixed on Elaine Wager's live interview. 'This is how they do it. Get it on the tube, it becomes fact.'
'How do they find out all this stuff?' Kevin whispered. Talking in his normal voice was painful. He couldn't shake the feeling that he was getting weaker rather than improving. His left arm had a constant throb, and at every breath his ribs pinched at him. When he had gotten up, the consensus had been that what he needed was a hot bath. He'd taken one but it had seemed to make everything hurt even worse.
He was drinking coffee. 'What is she talking about, "unstable"? "Despondent over the death of his brother?" "Liable to do anything?" Where does all this come from?'
Melanie was – force of habit – cleaning up in the room behind the men.
She had already washed two loads of dishes and now was stacking the piles of newspapers, arranging the paperbacks in the brick-and-board bookcase in alphabetical order by author – she stopped moving for a moment.
'Cindy,' she said. Then, to Wes: 'One of Kevin's earlier conquests that didn't work out so well.' But then she quickly softened it, coming up behind Kevin, planting a kiss on the top of his head. 'A lesson for us all.'
On the tube, Elaine – indignant – was answering another question. 'Well, the fact that he's gone this long without contacting the authorities argues compellingly that he has no reasonable defense. This office is proceeding on the assumption that he is dangerous…'
Slumped, Kevin said, 'Yeah, a major threat.'
'… and I urge any citizen who thinks they have seen Mr Shea to get in touch with the police or the District Attorney's office immediately.'
Farrell was shaking his head. 'Ah, the temperate voice of reason…'
'I've got to go in,' Kevin said.
'You've got to go in to that? Are you listening to this, Kevin? To what's happening out there?' Wes shook his head, finished his beer, number three. 'We need to have ourselves a talk, you and me.'
The image on the screen had changed, and Farrell pointed his remote and turned up the sound. A man with a forbidding countenance was standing on the steps outside the Hall of Justice, collar up against the wind, obviously not enjoying the camera or the microphones in his face.
The male voice-over was explaining that '… Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, the chief of the homicide detail, apparently doesn't share Ms Wager's certitude.'
And then Glitsky, terse: 'We continue to gather evidence. We're trying to get to the truth. That's all the comment I can give you.'
Glitsky was trying to get by but the reporter was in front of him again. 'What about Kevin Shea, Lieutenant? Shouldn't he be your focus? With the mayor's increased reward and the-?'
The camera closed in, and Glitsky said: 'Shea's a suspect. We want to question him, get his story. The end.'
A Certain Justice Page 19
