Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  In three steps he was by the bed. Leaning over, planning to gently pull the covers off his head, he saw the shoes sticking out from under the blanket. Ike didn't normally sleep in his shoes.

  'Hey,' he whispered, sitting on the edge of the bed, laying a hand on his son's shoulder. 'Nice try.' For another few seconds the form was still. Sighing, Glitsky lay the knife on the desk, crossed his hands, elbows on his knees.

  The blanket moved. Glitsky pulled it down. His oldest son – seventeen next month – had been crying. He was also fully dressed.

  Glitsky tried to pull the boy toward him, to get an arm around his neck and hold him there against him. 'Come here.'

  But he jerked away. 'Leave me alone!'

  The first time Glitsky had heard that from him, it took what he'd thought was the last unbroken piece that was left of his heart and stomped on it. Now, he wasn't used to it, exactly, but he'd heard it enough that it had lost a little of its hurt. 'All right.' He got to where he knew his voice would sound controlled, nonchalant. 'You been out?'

  No answer.

  'Do me a favor. Don't go out. It's bad out there.'

  Still no answer.

  'You heard all the sirens? They lynched a black man tonight, not ten blocks from here. It's not safe out there.'

  Isaac was one-fourth black, with light skin and his father's kinky hair. But everyone with an ounce of visible black knew the reality – you were white or you were non-white. Black.

  Glitsky was looking straight into his son's eyes, which were doing their best to avoid his. He saw enough of that at the Hall every day. He wasn't going to lose this boy, or his brothers. But he believed that the way to keep people's respect was demand that they keep some for themselves. He moved ahead. 'The rules committee has a meeting and didn't invite me?'

  'The rules committee is a joke.'

  The rules committee was something Glitsky had implemented in the first months that he and the boys were all trying to survive after Flo. It was made up of all of them, including Rita, the housekeeper. The adults had two votes, the boys one each, and so if there was unanimity between them they could outvote either Glitsky or Rita alone.

  The rules committee had navigated them through some rough seas – when the boys had felt that there was no order, that life itself was precarious. Glitsky believed it gave them some sense of control. It also caused a lot of fights – but fighting was all right. Glitsky could take fighting. Just don't give him silence.

  Which was what he was getting now.

  He stood up. 'Look up here, Ike, look at me.' The son moved out of the light so he wouldn't get the glare from the hall light. He raised his eyes – red.

  'You weren't home. When I heard you go out—'

  'They've got an emergency downtown, Ike. All over the city. They called me. I had to go.'

  'You always have to go.'

  Glitsky ran a hand through his hair. 'I know,' he said. He was too tired to go into it. It was true, but so what? 'I don't want you going out there, Isaac. Not for a couple of days.'

  'You're grounding me? The middle of summer you're grounding me?'

  'I'm saying I don't want you boys to go out.'

  'For how long?'

  'I don't know. Maybe a day, maybe two. I don't know. It's not safe out there.'

  'Oh, but it is safe for you, huh?'

  Glitsky hated the tone but it was his house and his sons were going to obey his rules and that was that. 'Don't give me any grief, Ike. We can talk about it in the morning.'

  He felt the need to reach and touch his boy, soften it somewhat, explain, but didn't dare try. It would just escalate, like everything else. He stood up. 'Sleep tight.'

  Closing the door behind him, he walked out.

  Rita was asleep. Glitsky heard the regular sibilance of her breathing on the other side of the screen as he lowered himself into the old lounger on 'his' side of the living room.

  Closing his eyes, the events of the night came racing up at him – from Isaac to the Cavern Tavern to the meeting with the mayor and the brass downtown. Then suddenly, to Elaine Wager – why had she been there?

  Oh yes, of course. Her mother.

  Loretta Wager.

  Startled by the unexpected clarity of the memory, he opened his eyes. The quiet room. The deep shadows. That was all. Suddenly, his brain exhausted and his emotions frayed – perhaps he was starting to doze in dawn's first light – there was the vision of Loretta Wager again, as she'd been back in college, the first time, in her apartment with the Huey Newton chair and the dominating wall posters: for Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice and the other, of Martin Luther King's face with his dream and the crowd in front superimposed.

  She'd invited Glitsky up to go over some of the San José team rosters and choose likely candidates they could recruit for the Black Student Union, the BSU.

  Glitsky had pretended that it was innocent – hoping it wouldn't turn out to be, but not daring to admit that. They were in her bedroom, looking over the lists, when she excused herself for a minute and went out to get a coke. Then she called out his name.

  At twenty-two, she was near-perfect in form, a goddess reclining naked with her legs parted on the couch in her living room, the slanting rays of the afternoon sun streaking her, her fingers stroking herself, asking him if she scared him, if he wanted her and had the balls to take her—

  He sat up, opening his eyes. This, he thought, was pathetic indulgence, stupid, recalling an adolescent encounter, getting half-tumescent on his barco-lounger across the room from his children's nanny as she slept and the city burned.

  Disgusted with himself, he pushed himself up and went into his bedroom. There was Flo's picture on the dresser, smiling at him. He turned off the overhead, got undressed in the half-light and fell into bed.

  He didn't want to see Flo smiling. Or fantasize about some romanticized past with Loretta Wager. Especially, he did not want to think about what was going to happen in a few hours, when the sun came up again, as it always did.

  He tried to force himself to sleep, to forget, to ignore.

  He was still hard.

  11

  After finally forcing himself to get out of bed an hour after the sun had come up, Kevin Shea had stood at his widest back window taking in his view. Nothing in his vision resembled an area struggling with poverty. His apartment on Green Street backed onto Cow Hollow, whose artery in turn was Union, San Francisco's yuppiest mile. Beyond Union were the upscale Fort Mason and Marina neighborhoods. To Shea's right, looking east, he could catch a glimpse of Russian Hill and the glittering bay beyond. To his left, the green expanse of the Presidio provided a lush foreground to the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  This morning seven distinct columns of smoke rose in an arc through the panorama. Opening the window a crack to look further around, he heard a constant wail from sirens, dopplering nearer, then farther in the streets below. He closed the window and lowered the blinds, darkening his living room.

  In the kitchen he fumbled for coffee beans, half of which he spilled before he got them into the electric grinder. He got some water over one of the burners, then turned on the television.

  He was beginning to hope he had only dislocated his arm. It had regained some mobility and in certain positions didn't hurt so much, and he thought if it was broken that wouldn't be the case. His ribs, on the other hand, hurt like hell in every position.

  A mug normally intended for beer was full of coffee. Slumping nearly horizontal in a stuffed chair of worn, cracking, yellow faux-leather, he was too low to see over the ledge of any of his windows, and anyway the shades were drawn.

  Melanie on the phone had started out being convinced by what the television was saying about his role last night and that really worried him. Did she really think that he had somehow been a ringleader in the lynching? She should have known he was incapable of anything like that. But if even she thought he'd been involved, he had bigger problems than a few broken ribs.

  In his hun
gover daze he had managed to ask her how she could think what she was saying was possible?

  'You've got to see the picture,' she had told him, and then had hung up.

  The television cast its muted glow back into the half-lit room. Shea, hunkered down in his chair as though against an onslaught, sipped his coffee. The screen filled with a close-up of an anchorman as the morning news came on the air:

  'The lead story here and across the country today is the lynching of a black attorney by an all-white mob here in San Francisco last night and the devastating escalation of violence and rioting that has swept the Bay Area and is already being reflected in other major cities – New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, DC and Los Angeles.

  'Here in San Francisco Mayor Conrad Aiken has called for a dusk-to-dawn curfew and has asked the governor to declare a state of emergency for the city and county. Property damage is already estimated at some two hundred fifty million dollars and that figure is certain to go up, perhaps into the billions. The Red Cross and other relief organizations are setting up tent cities and emergency medical centers in Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, Marina Green and several other locations around the city for those who need shelter or assistance, and even at this early hour people are flooding to these areas. Our News Center crews report nineteen fires are still burning in several areas of the city, including the site of the lynching itself. We're going to take you there now, live ...'

  Shea had forgotten his coffee. The fire he was seeing on the tube was in the process of consuming nearly the entire square block bounded by Geary (and the Cavern Tavern) and Clement Streets between 2nd and 3rd – businesses and family duplexes.

  The anchorman was talking to his stringer over the images of the flames: 'We understand, Terri, that authorities are especially concerned about the location of this blaze ...?'

  'That's right, Mark. This appears to be a very different reaction from the frustration and rage we saw in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. As you know, this is not a ghetto area and police were here earlier this morning when these fires began with a kind of drive-by firebombing attack centering on what used to be the Cavern Tavern, which is where the mob reportedly first developed.'

  'An attack?'

  'That's right. Witnesses tell us that several cars converged here at one time, crashed the police barricades and started throwing Molotov cocktails. Fortunately there weren't many people on the street or it might have been much worse. The police on the street were shot at from the cars and two were wounded. So it was more a planned raid than a spontaneous explosion of rage.'

  'A call to arms? The start of a civil war?'

  Terri shook her head. 'Let's hope not, Mark, but it could be, it certainly could be.'

  And then, suddenly, Shea was looking at the picture – his own picture – hearing the anchor's voice-over. 'And here is how it all began. Police Chief Dan Rigby speculates that there was an informal memorial service for a man named Michael Mullen who was shot to death during a carjacking a couple of weeks ago. The man arrested for that crime was an African-American named Jerohm Reese and he ...'

  They kept the picture on the screen, and his face was the clearest thing in it. But to him it still looked like it captured what he had actually done – held up the guy, tried to get him the knife to cut himself down. His attention came back to the screen: '... and the mayor is asking this man, who is still unidentified, to come forward...'

  The mayor was on a street somewhere in the pre-dawn, in shirtsleeves, looking haggard. A fire burned behind him. 'We must not let this divide us,' he was saying. 'This does not have to be black versus white. This was a small group of individuals, of misguided white men who broke the law and who will be punished. Every decent person in San Francisco, and that's the overwhelming majority of us, wants this group, and especially its leader, brought to justice.'

  In disbelief, Shea watched and listened to more of it. Senator Loretta Wager had flown in overnight and they had caught her coming off the plane at the airport. 'Certainly the first step before we can ever talk about starting to heal these wounds,' she said, 'has to be a good-faith effort on the part of San Francisco's authorities to apprehend these murderers, to demonstrate to the minority communities, to all of us, that hate-based lawlessness will not be tolerated. And this can't be done with talk – only with results. We've had enough of talk. If the mayor and the police chief want us to believe they are truly concerned about the black community and all our decent citizens, then this man in the picture, and the others, have got to be found and put on trial. And quickly. Give them the benefit of a justice that they denied Arthur Wade. And, if they are found guilty, give them the penalty that fits the crime.'

  The coffee was cold and so was his sweat. Shea did not feel his ribs or his arm anymore as the news broke for a commercial and he heard yet another siren outside.

  12

  Lieutenant Abe Glitsky sat at his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco's Hall of Justice. After an hour of no sleeping he had given up and gone back downtown. He had been in since seven-fifteen, trying to get a handle on the madness, to coordinate the efforts of his department, which had already, previous to yesterday's incident, been up to its eyeballs in domestic-violence homicides, drive-by homicides, drug-related homicides, senseless, stupid homicides – the usual harvest of the urban streets.

  Now, the workday not even officially begun, and not including Arthur Wade and of course the still unsolved murder of Mike Mullen, he already had two new verified homicides – victims of the street violence. These were a three-year-old white child who'd been burned to death in one of the duplexes that had gone up in the aftermath of the firebombing of the Cavern and a Korean store owner who had caught a brick in the head while he had been trying to defend his fresh-fruit and vegetable store in the lower Fillmore.

  To say Glitsky had an open-door policy at work would have been a misnomer – in fact, his office had no door. There used to be a door. Then, one day, it was removed to be varnished or painted or something and had never made it back. So anyone who desired an audience with the lieutenant could simply walk into the large room that held the twelve desks of the homicide-detail inspectors, turn left and pass into his inner domain – a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot area set off by dry wall.

  There were two windows. From his desk, looking right, was the double-door entrance to the detail, a not-so-early warning system that told him – if he was looking – who might or might not be coming through his doorway in the next moment or two. In front, his view was not the touristy one seen on postcards of Baghdad by the Bay. Instead it featured a foreground of the old, pitted and cluttered desks of homicide detectives, an unpainted concrete column stuck with official department announcements, wanted posters, joke faxes that made the office rounds, pictures of male and female prostitutes, the occasional morgue shot, yellowing newspaper articles ... the column was the detail's unofficial bulletin board.

  Beyond the desks and the column was a six-foot window of crisscrossed panes, thick with grime, through which – when the fog allowed – one used to be able to spy the artery of the 101 Freeway, pulsing with life, and beyond that, the rooftops south of Market. At last, on clear days, in the distance rose the glitter-dome of Nob Hill, with its fabled hotels, architecture, history.

  Now, and for the past two years, the view through the soot-stained panes consisted of parts of the second, third and fourth floors of the new jail, a truly hideous committee-designed incarceration unit, whose rounded glass and chrome exterior was somehow expected to meld aesthetically with the hulking gray box that was the Hall of Justice.

  Just outside the detail was a small reception area that due to budget cuts had not been manned – or womanned – in four years, so that anyone who took a notion to could waltz directly in – both to the open area and to Glitsky's own office.

  Glitsky loved it on television where the buzzer sounded and the lieutenant said 'yes?' and the receptionist – usually a twenty-
something knockout in full makeup and no uniform – informed him that the mayor or the district attorney or Mr Flocksmith was there for an appointment, at which the lieutenant, sighing, said, 'Keep him on ice for a mo, Marcia, then send him in.' He really loved it.

  Chris Locke was in the doorway, through it, and standing in front of Glitsky's desk, knuckles down on it, hovering, before the lieutenant had a chance to look up.

  'I'd like a few words with you, Abe, you got a minute.'

  'Come on in, Chris. Make yourself at home.'

  Locke was alone, which was unusual. Glitsky wondered if he had gone home and gotten any sleep. He was dressed in his coat and tie as he had been in the middle of the night.

  Glitsky started to lean back in his chair, to look up at the district attorney. It occurred to him, though, that Locke enjoyed putting people in this position, so instead he stood – Locke was a big man but Glitsky had an inch on him. 'Coffee, Chris? Tea?'

  Locke wasn't buying the hospitality. 'Abe, I'm confused.'

  'So am I, Chris. All the time. But I've stopped worrying about it.'

  Locke took his knuckles off the desk. He was, Glitsky thought, one of those people who didn't like to stand unpropped, and no sooner had he straightened up than he half-turned and rested his hind quarters on the front of the desk.

  Glitsky went into his best at-ease, hands clasped behind his back.

  'I always thought we got along' – Locke began – 'and then this crap you drop last night about Jerohm Reese. I take it you didn't agree with my decision to let him go, even though he had no chance in hell of turning into a conviction.'

  'Perhaps.'

  'What does that mean?'