Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  'This is Lieutenant Inspector Abraham Glitsky, star number 1144. I am currently at an interview room in the Hall of Justice, 880 Bryant Street, in San Francisco. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Paul Westberg, a freelance photojournalist, Caucasian male, born March 4, 1971. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 950867731. Today's date is June 29, Wednesday, at 0825 hours on the AM.'

  Glitsky was going to do it by the book, as a regular interview conducted in the course of a murder investigation. He sat across from Westberg at a small pitted wooden table, a tape recorder switched on between them. After walking through the standard battery of questions, again going over the basics of what Westberg claimed he had seen the night before, they got down to the crux of it:

  Q: So the crowd was yelling 'pull, pull!' Something like that. And what happened then?

  A: Well, this man was pulling on him, hanging on him, like in the picture.

  Q: He was pulling on the hanging man, pulling him down?

  A: Yes.

  Q: How do you know that?

  A: [Pause.] Well, it was obvious.

  Q: That's my question, Mr Westberg. How was it obvious? Look at this picture. [Glitsky had the late edition of the morning Chronicle in the room.] The man has one arm around the victim, another holding up what appears to be a knife.

  A: It was a knife. He had it at the guy's throat.

  Q: Okay. Then what?

  A: Then what What!

  Q: Then what happened?

  A: I took the picture. Two of them.

  Q: In quick succession?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Have you seen the other one?

  A: Yeah, sure. I developed them both at home. It didn't come out as good.

  Q: Do you mean it wasn't dramatic, or there was some technical problem – focus, lighting, like that?

  A: No, there wasn't a technical problem. It was only, like, two seconds away from this one. Basically the same picture, just not as good.

  Q: All right, let's go on. After you took these pictures, what did you do?

  A: I ran. The crowd reacted a little to the flash. A couple of guys started coming for me. I thought they were going to smash the camera, maybe me, too, so I ran.

  Q: You used a flash? A: Yeah. It was in shadow, the street, near sunset, maybe right after.

  Q: So how long in total were you there, witnessing all this?

  A: I don't know. A minute, ninety seconds, something like that. It was pretty scary, crazy.

  Q: And before you snapped your picture, did you happen to notice this man who you say was pulling on the victim?

  A: He was pulling on the victim. Look, that's what the lady downstairs told me, too. She said stick by my story. I thought you guys were on the same side.

  Q: The lady downstairs, Ms Wager?

  A: Yeah, that was her.

  Q: She told you to stick by your story? Which story?

  A: That he was pulling down on the guy ...

  Q: Well, is that a story or is it what happened?

  A: [Pause.] It's what happened. It's what I saw. The picture shows it plain as day – look!

  Q: [Pause.] If he was holding on with two hands and his feet were off the ground . . . but you're saying you saw him pull down. That's your testimony?

  A: Well, what else could it have been? He was in the mob ... [Pause.] Yes, that's my testimony.

  15

  Melanie was crying. 'Cindy told them.'

  'Cindy told them what, Melanie?'

  'Who you were.'

  'What? Why? Why did she do that?' But he knew. 'How did she...?'

  'I called her, Kevin. Oh, God. I needed somebody, I just felt so bad, Kevin. I needed to talk to somebody ...'

  'I've told you a hundred times, Cindy is not your friend.' But this was a stupid discussion, he decided. 'Anyway, thanks for the tip—'

  'Kevin, don't—'

  'Don't! You tell me don't!'

  She was crying. It tore at him, and he realized he still cared about her, didn't want to hurt her, but now she'd gone and done this ...

  'Kevin, I'm so sorry. I love you, I still love you and I can help you. You can come stay here—'

  'Why would I need to come stay there, Melanie?'

  'Cindy ... Cindy told them where you live.'

  He took the receiver away from his ear and stared at it. This was too bizarre.

  Goddamn Cindy. Kevin, this is where the dick leads you. That one night with her – before he'd hooked up with Melanie – was turning into the worst mistake of his life. And it had been nothing but a casual one-nighter, nothing like what he had had with Melanie.

  Letting go of the phone, leaving it off the receiver, he went to the window and looked down over the rooftops. He stepped out onto the fire escape, climbed the iron ladder holding on with his one good arm, up to the roof. God, it was hot. It was never this hot in San Francisco.

  His head throbbed and this time he was willing to concede that it might be part hangover. He was dressed in a pair of old 501 Levi jeans, running shoes, a UCLA sweatshirt, and he moved in a crouch to the front of his building, looking over the ledge down onto Green Street. Two black-and-white police cars were pulled up at the curb, and he saw four men talking.

  Again, a sense of disbelief. This could not be happening. Damn that Cindy. Hell hath no fury indeed ...

  Now the policemen split up, two of them going toward the front door, the other two separating, going around the two sides of the building. Surrounded.

  16

  Glitsky knew that he was on edge – a bad sign. He was chomping on ice cubes, sitting at his desk, warning off all would-be intruders with the evil eye as they appeared in his doorway.

  Not very professional, he knew. It was the kind of body language he would use on occasion when he'd been a sergeant and wanted solitude, but now that he was the boss it had a different feel, a kind of self-aggrandizing ...

  Well, screw it, he thought. Things were starting to pile up – he'd known they would – but as was usually the case in emergencies, you knew it was going to whack you but you could never predict where or how hard. The answer was starting to turn out to be – really hard and almost everywhere.

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night, maybe his biorhythms were low; Isaac, Flo, the whole Wager family; but events were hitting him the wrong way and he was struggling to contain himself.

  The patrolmen had not been able to arrest Kevin Shea. The suspect was gone when they'd gotten there – he had left suddenly. The apartment manager had been cooperative and let them in and the back window had been open. There was a half-consumed cup of still-warm coffee on an end-table. The television set was still on. The phone was off the hook, the receiver lying on the bed. Someone had obviously tipped Shea off and he had gotten out with minutes to spare.

  Contributing to Glitsky's ill humor was the impression he had taken away from the interview with Paul Westberg, which was that Elaine Wager's chat with the witness had affected the man's testimony. And there was a bigger issue – the reason he had felt compelled to visit Chief Rigby earlier in the morning: the district attorney's office, perhaps at the urging of Senator Loretta Wager, seemed to be opting for a political solution to the problems, and this was asking for more trouble than Glitsky cared to consider. They were building a case on Kevin Shea which would not allow for the fact that he might, in fact, be innocent.

  Actually, on the basis of what he knew, Glitsky didn't think Shea was innocent. But he was uncomfortable with something that smacked of a witchhunt, and that's what Elaine Wager's interrogation (and Westberg's responses) had reeked of.

  Evidently the powers had decided that Kevin Shea was the quintessential white racist, and that feeding him to the maw of the mob was the best answer to the complicated questions they were facing. That this was a fairly typical response didn't make Glitsky hate it any less.

  He knew – Christ, he should, he embodied it – he knew that while all the bureaucracies in the land were m
eeting de facto quotas, providing hard, statistical support for the notion that the country was making progress toward integration and racial harmony, in reality the polarization was increasing every day. Glitsky was on the street enough – he saw it.

  The truth was that racism was all around him – the enlightened white workers here in the Hall always referring to black people as Canadians, the black parents at his boys' schools who wouldn't let their kids play with white children.

  On the surface everything was working. People were generally polite, proper, friendly. Now the thing that had become unfashionable – and in San Francisco the worst crime was to be unhip – was acknowledging the depth of the problem. Race? Please, didn't we do all that in the sixties? Better to pretend it wasn't really there. Certainly it wasn't an issue in San Francisco. Everybody accepted everybody else nowadays. This was the nineties. We solved all that stuff years ago. Get real.

  And then, one sunny summer evening, a black man named Arthur Wade gets lynched.

  And that brought him to the last cause of his ice crunching – the one person who was calling the infection systemic, Philip Mohandas, was abandoning any hope for understanding because he was taking it too damn far. There were so many other things, constructive things, he could do. He could be responsible. He could call for some restraint. Dialogue.

  Instead, because Mohandas knew that nobody was going to arrest an African-American leader in the coming days for what amounted to sticks and stones, he would be excused for not doing the right thing. He had cause, he was a victim of his own rage. Old-fashioned laws didn't matter if you had a good enough reason. Ask the Menendez boys.

  What most got to Glitsky was when the leaders who claimed to represent all the black people caved in to that temptation and then those failures were cited by white people as a justification – hell, the white side of Glitsky even felt it himself – for distrusting legitimate black motives and aspirations.

  And now Mohandas was clearly breaking the law, openly calling for vigilantism, being allowed – even encouraged – to rant and vent to his heart's content. And his presence and rhetoric were raising the odds.

  Glitsky felt it made no sense to let him inflame the situation but no one seemed to be inclined to try and stop it. Glitsky thought he wouldn't mind a shot at it – he had a few ideas that might get Mohandas's attention – but it wasn't his job. His job was homicide. All this other political crap was just that – crap.

  But such sensible thoughts weren't doing his mood any good. He continued to crunch his ice, his eyes fixed ahead of him.

  The telephone rang in his office. His receptionist being the same person who guarded his door – nobody – he picked the phone up with a more than usually unpleasant, 'Glitsky. Homicide.'

  A pause, an almost inaudible sigh. 'Abe Glitsky.' He might have imagined it, but there was a sense of relief in the words, as though at great personal expense she'd broken through some psychic barrier. He recognized the voice instantly.

  'Loretta...?'

  'One word and you sound exactly the same.'

  Glitsky, adrenaline still running, answered her words. 'No,' he said, 'I'm pretty different. You'd be surprised.' It sounded more hostile than he felt but the words were out, unchecked, and maybe some truth ...

  'Well, of course.' That deep throaty laugh. 'We're all different, Abe, we've all changed. But we're all still the same, too, deep down.'

  This was as strange an opening as he could have imagined, bantering with his ex-lover who was now a United States senator as though they'd seen each other, perhaps intimately, a couple of days before.

  Grabbing the styrofoam cup, a quarter inch of ice water, he drank it for time to get his bearings, then asked what he could do for her. This, he figured, had to be about Elaine.

  'I was just in the mayor's office,' she said. 'When he mentioned ... I mean, there aren't many Abe Glitskys ...'

  'I'm in the phone book, Loretta, always have been.' She seemed to hesitate, then went on as though he hadn't responded. 'But when Conrad brought you up... he said you were a lieutenant.'

  Suddenly Glitsky's edge sharpened – a red anger flared. Loretta was looking for a toehold to satisfy her curiosity and he wasn't going to help her out. 'You thought you'd just call and catch up?'

  This time the hesitation was more pronounced. 'You're still mad at me? After all these years?'

  'I'm not mad at you at all, Loretta.'

  'At what I did, I mean?'

  'I'm still not sure I know what you did, or why you did it. But I can't say it's been a big deal the last, oh, couple of decades or so. I have a family ...' His voice was winding down.

  'I was sorry to hear about your wife ...'

  Glitsky's knuckles had stiffened around the telephone and he opened and closed his fingers. One of his inspectors, Carl Griffin, knocked on his doorjamb and got waved away. 'I just suddenly wanted to hear your voice, Abe. See if you were all right, how you were doing. Is that so odd?'

  No answer.

  He heard her let out a breath. 'All right, Abe. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

  She was hanging up. He hadn't meant to cut her off. He should have...

  'Loretta!'

  But the connection was gone.

  17

  Kevin Shea did not want to think about the jump he had taken to the roof next door. It looked maybe eight feet across but it felt like twenty – he would have to go back and measure it someday. If his life ever became normal again. Sure. He really didn't want to think about how far down it was. Far enough.

  Fortunately the roof was flat and, like his own, had a low ledge. After he had landed, rolling over on his bruised arm and aching ribs, he made his way back to the ledge and lay down against it in the wide shady lane made by the early-morning sun. He heard the police come up to his roof next door, the one he had just abandoned. He heard them go down again.

  After an endless ten minutes he had risked a glance over there. Okay, they were really gone. It seemed safe. Relatively.

  The door that poked up through the roof was unlocked, and Shea limped his way down the four flights of stairs, seeing no one. On Green Street the police cars had pulled out. The curb was empty. He turned right and started walking, as normally as he could, away from his building.

  Shea had grown up in suburban Houston, attended Rice University, majoring in economics, intending to get into some kind of management role in his father's company.

  His mother's maiden name was Janine Robitaille, of the New Orleans Robitailles. She was a statuesque southern belle who favored beehive hairdos long after they were out of style. But on her, somehow, the hairstyle never looked dated – those piles of her dark hair lifted away from the creamy cameo of her face, framing its near-flawless lines, making her always appear taller than her husband Daniel.

  His father – Daniel Shea – was half-owner, along with Fred Bronin, of Flexitech, a company that manufactured athletic accessories and supplies – batting and golf gloves, wristbands, orthopedic tensors, hard little rubber balls ('Flexits') that you held in your hand and squeezed to strengthen your grip.

  When Kevin was twenty-two and just out of college, Daniel had come home early one afternoon after an extended sales trip to find his beautiful wife Janine in bed with his best friend and partner Fred Bronin.

  Being a good ol' boy, Daniel's reaction perhaps should have been to take up the nearest gun and shoot them both, but he fooled them. Kevin's father had always had a streak of insecurity, a tendency to melancholy, and though he had raised a good family (two boys and a girl) and become, after a fashion, successful, he never quite believed in the worth of anything he accomplished, that it had any real meaning. And the double betrayal of a wife and best friend rocked him – so he turned the gun on himself instead.

  In the aftermath, the Sheas' world and everything in it fell apart. Janine and Fred Bronin did not get married and live happily ever after. They had a bitter legal and personal battle over Flexitech, which Fred eventually lost becaus
e he had a stroke in the middle of it, leaving Janine with de facto ownership of the company. She, having never spent a moment of her life on business, subsequently orchestrated the company into bankruptcy in just under two years.

  Meanwhile, Kevin Shea and his younger brother Joey had both appalled their Vietnam-era mother, as they had intended, by enlisting in the army. During their three-year hitch the boys had been trained in survival, weapons, strategy, then sent separately to Desert Storm. Kevin had done a lot of marching and sweating but saw no action. His brother Joey was inside the one bunker that had been destroyed by an Iraqi Scud missile – and had been killed. Kevin's mother and little sister Patsy blamed Kevin for talking Joey into enlisting in the army in the first place, and they had made it clear he was unwelcome in Texas forever, not that it had been his intention to go back there anyway.

  Kevin Shea was completely alone. Sometimes he even felt he deserved to be.

  Kevin had really made only one connection since he had gotten out of the army and decided to settle in San Francisco and go to graduate school on his GI Bill. There was an older guy – maybe late forties – named Wes Farrell, who was in his program at SFSU. Farrell and Kevin had done some drinking together, had a few semi-serious talks about life. Farrell had been a lawyer, raised his own family, then something had happened – Kevin didn't know what exactly – and he had quit. He didn't believe in the law anymore. Or justice. Or in most people much either.

  They had both gravitated to studying history. Somehow it was more acceptable that all they were studying was in the past and so, presumably, couldn't effect anybody ever again.

  They were, in their fashion, a good team. They also both liked to drink, which tended to help.

  Shea was at a public phone in the Julius Hahn Playground at the southern edge of the Presidio. The smell of smoke was everywhere now in the heated air, even here in the shade of the cypresses, and he could hear sirens and see spires of smoke rising to his left in what he presumed was the Fillmore District and to his right, over the big hill, around what must be Clement.