Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  'Wes? Kevin.' He didn't know what he was expecting – that Wes would hang up, yell at him, be astounded at the call? Something.

  'Hey, Kev. What's happening?'

  Kevin waited a long moment. Surely Wes knew all about his problem, about the Arthur Wade tragedy, what was going on in the city – he must be pulling Kevin's leg. 'So what's up?' he asked. 'Can you believe this heat?'

  Then again, maybe not.

  18

  The mayor saw to it that Loretta Wager got a temporary office – after all, she was a U.S. senator – downtown at City Hall. It was on the second floor, up from the rotunda, down an echoing corridor, behind an anonymous door. And that suited her fine.

  Her feet were sore. For some reason, her feet always hurt after plane flights. After she became president, she'd modify something on Air Force One that would . . .

  Smiling, she settled for rubbing her bare feet. Her shoes were off under the desk. She leaned back in her chair, checked her watch. Twelve-fifteen. Elaine should be here any time.

  She wasn't sure how she felt about the level of Elaine's ' involvement. On the one hand, it was good to be in the middle of things, in the loop, with a hand in the outcome. Elaine, thanks to Chris Locke, had already drawn the short straw – she was, single-handedly it seemed, handling the prosecution of Kevin Shea. And seemed to her mother to be doing a good job of it. The downside was that Elaine would shoulder a lion's share of the blame if anything went wrong. And this early in her career, that could hurt her. But, Loretta thought, that was the price of playing with the big boys.

  Loretta had left a message at Elaine's as she was leaving Washington last night, and her daughter had called back within two hours, reaching her on the Airfone, filling her in on the status of events so that by the time Loretta had landed, she'd not only grasped those events but had had time to put the right spin on them in front of the media who had gathered to meet her at the airport.

  Kevin Shea, she said, was the symbol of what was wrong, not only here in San Francisco but across America. The fact that he had not yet been apprehended, arrested, even located, was proof that the white man's system wasn't working, didn't work for the black man.

  Her plan was simple: the crisis had come at a moment when she could use it to her political advantage. If she could now just keep the focus on apprehending Shea, Loretta might in fact have a forum that would take her a large forward step toward the Oval Office. And no smiles this time.

  It really wasn't out of the question. She was the right age – only forty-seven and a young-looking one at that. There wasn't much doubt in her mind that within sixteen years there would be a woman candidate. There would also, she felt, be a black candidate. And if they were one and the same person ...

  Now, nearing the end of her first term as senator, she had an interesting and, she thought, ironic problem to solve, and her instinct had told her, as soon as it had arisen, that this crisis, if properly handled, could be the solution. For Loretta Wager had spent the better part of the past six years learning the historic lesson of survival in American politics – compromise. If you wanted to get ahead, especially in the white men's club that was the Senate, you had to move within an extremely narrow band of exposure.

  Loretta had been good at that, had always been skilled with people. Unfortunately, the pre-campaign polls she'd conducted were beginning to confirm what she had already begun to suspect – while she'd retained and even added to her fund-raising rolls, her voting record, her perceived moderation had gone a long way toward alienating her so-called 'natural' constituency of African-Americans, and this turnaround had to be corrected or it could, and quite probably would, cost her everything she'd worked for up to now.

  In her last campaign she had won eighty-seven percent of the African-American vote. Now the polls were giving her thirty-five to forty-five percent. Even if she picked up another one or two percent of the white vote she wouldn't win with those black numbers. She needed the perception that she'd reconnected with her community.

  And Kevin Shea was the way to do it.

  'Where's the staff?'

  Her daughter smiled tentatively, closing the door behind her, putting down a brown paper bag. Elaine looked exhausted, her sculpted, angular face now blotched with worry, lack of sleep, and something else that Loretta didn't recognize.

  But Loretta put her questions on hold and got up and came around the desk barefoot, her arms outstretched, letting herself be enfolded in her daughter's embrace. Elaine was several inches taller than her mother and held her tightly for a long moment.

  They separated, stared at each other. Both of them sighed. Elaine said, 'Hi,' broke half a self-conscious smile, though, again, Loretta couldn't read all of it.

  'Hi, honey. How you handlin' this?'

  'Scared I guess. Other things.' A pause. 'I knew Arthur Wade, you know. He was at Boalt with me.'

  'Just makes it worse, don't it? You get any sleep?'

  'Not yet. I brought us some lunch.'

  'I could eat. It's near four in DC. What'd you get us?'

  When they were alone together, in private, there was a faint echo of Loretta's roots in their rhythms. Elaine took out and opened the white styrofoam cartons on the desk: cornbread, roast beef, mashed potatoes, greens, diet Cokes.

  Finally Loretta asked, 'What other things?'

  'Oh, office stuff.' She took a quick drink of her Coke. 'Chris.'

  'Everybody had gone home. I was leaving, too. I'd just called you, you know? On the plane?'

  Loretta, her face a mask, nodded. Her hands were folded on the desk before her. She'd forgotten her sore feet. Her daughter was continuing.

  '.. . but Chris wanted me to stay. He said he needed me to help him sort this out, how we were going to handle it. I told him it was too late, I was ...' She shook her head. 'I was too tired, I supposed, to be of much help, 'specially knowing what today was going to be like. And he said that wasn't it exactly.'

  Knowing what was coming, Loretta closed her eyes. A long breath escaped. 'He needed you personally.'

  'I'd never seen him like that, Mom. Really. I mean, this was my boss. We're both lawyers. We know all the rules about sexual harassment so we tiptoe around each other. And he's older, and married, I know all that. But this wasn't sex, or just sex. Mom?'

  Loretta opened her eyes. 'I'm here, child. How far did he take it?'

  Elaine looked at the floor. 'All the way,' she whispered, 'as far as it could go.' She exhaled, the tension of letting it out.

  'You sayin' you and Chris Locke made love in his office last night?'

  'Don't be mad at me. I—'

  Loretta held up a restraining palm, cold fury in her face. 'It's not you, child, not you, I ain't likely gonna be mad at you.' It was her turn to sigh. 'But you are my baby. How could he ...?'

  'It wasn't just him ... I guess I—'

  'I know, I know,' Loretta said. 'I know how it goes.' She stared over the desk at her beautiful daughter. 'The man got the heat, don't he?'

  'He's always been so distant, I mean, good and kind and my true mentor, but distant. And I know you and he ... I know he helped you, politically. But it was like, I don't know, this whole thing – this lynching, all of it – it just suddenly seemed to break him down.' Elaine looked across the desk, asking for understanding. 'He needed me, Mom, he really did.'

  'I believe you, honey. So where you now?'

  Her head down. 'I don't know. I haven't slept. I feel guilty. Confused. I don't know what it meant, means ...'

  'How's he...?'

  Elaine sighed. 'Back to business today, but what can you expect with all this going on?'

  'And you think you might love him?'

  'I don't know.' Their eyes met and held for an instant, and Loretta knew that here, self-protectively, her daughter wasn't telling the truth. God help her, she was in love with her boss, with DA Chris Locke.

  Loretta took a bite of her now-tasteless food, a sip of her Coke. 'I just want you to think on one thing,
hon. I'm not sayin' word one against you now. But you consider that it might be your boss hit on you when you, not him, when you weren't able to stand up—'

  'He didn't force anything, Mom.'

  'I'm not sayin' he did. I'm sayin' you are emotionally drained – your old schoolmate is the victim, for God's sake. You haven't slept all night. The city's burning and you're suddenly elevated to the man's right hand. You're the one who's vulnerable here, you're the easy mark, child. Your boss, Mister Locke, he ain't got a damn thing to lose.'

  'It wasn't like that.'

  'That's all I'm asking, that you be sure it wasn't, that's all. Because it could have been.'

  'It wasn't.'

  Loretta reached out her hand, a peace offering. Elaine looked at it for a moment, then put her own hand over her mother's halfway across the desk.

  'I believe you,' Loretta said. 'I just don't want you hurt. You still ain't too big to get hurt.' She softened it with a smile. 'Now tell me about Kevin Shea, what you all got?'

  19

  Bowing to pressure brought to bear by the District Attorney, the mayor and a visit by the United States senator from California, the grand jury met in special session, adjusted its agenda and took only three hours deliberating before it issued an indictment on Kevin Shea for the murder of Arthur Wade.

  Which had a double-edged effect on Glitsky's team – they were no longer responsible for making the decision about whether Shea himself had to be brought in; on the other hand, their work trying to identify the other members of the mob who might have been equally involved fell back under the mantle of normal procedure, with nominally still a high – but in practice a far lower – priority.

  'I am ... I was Mike Mullen's brother.'

  Brandon Mullen had tried to make himself presentable – decent clothes and neatly combed hair – but he had failed. Glitsky thought he looked like hell, lips cracked and swollen, eyes bloodshot. Blood, too, had seeped through the sling he wore on his right arm.

  Glitsky had farmed out the interrogations – he had Jamie O'Toole down the hallway with Marcel Lanier, Brandon Mullen here in Homicide A with his African-American rookie inspector Ridley Banks, Peter McKay in the B-room with Carl Griffin.

  Later the inspectors would get together and see if they could make something out of the stories, see where they connected and where they fell apart, and later still Glitsky planned, if he got the time, to read all the transcriptions, and maybe even view the videotapes, but for now he was getting a feel, looking in on one, then the other.

  It still wasn't one o'clock. Around the Bay Area, Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto were on fire. In the city itself, there were ongoing civic disturbances – Conrad Aiken, sensitive to terminology even in crisis, had decreed that riots should be called civic disturbances and thus, somehow, lessen their severity – in the Tenderloin, Hunter's Point, the Wester Addition, and down by City College. The homicide count in San Francisco for the day had risen from two to four, going on five – a sniper had killed a black man getting into his car on Fulton, and two white teenagers had been pulled from a convertible while they'd been stuck at a stoplight at 3rd and Palou. One of them was still alive though his condition was critical.

  Glitsky had called his home four times, ordering Rita not to let the boys out, he didn't care what. He'd deal with getting them somewhere safe as soon as he could.

  Now he stood in the witness room by the door behind Ridley Banks and looked across at Brandon Mullen with his hurt arm and cracked lips. He'd assigned Banks to Mullen because a week before, when Mike Mullen – the brother – had been a righteous innocent victim, Ridley had been the inspector on the case, going out and seeing the bereaved family. He'd be a sympathetic interrogator, on Brandon's side.

  Glitsky would go in and play bad cop. He was in the right mood for it.

  'It started there, yeah,' Brandon Mullen was saying.

  'The Cavern?' Glitsky, of course, knew this. He'd gotten the men's names from Jamie O'Toole the night before. It was why they were down here getting questioned.

  'The Cavern, yeah. I mean, Petey and I...'

  'Petey?'

  'My cousin, Pete McKay, we were together, so ...'

  'And you had some drinks there. And cut your arm on a wine glass?'

  This wasn't bad cop, it was pure belligerence, and Glitsky knew better. Mullen drew himself back on his seat, his head to one side, hostility now all over him.

  'Look, man, I'm here voluntarily. I thought I could help. I don't even have a lawyer 'cause there's nothing I'm afraid of. Now you want to listen or hassle me or charge me with something? It's your choice.'

  Ridley, the good cop, said they weren't planning to charge him with anything. 'We 're just trying to get a sense of what happened.' He glanced at Glitsky, a hand extended. Back off.

  'That's what I'm trying to tell you.'

  'Okay, go ahead.'

  'I thought I should go, y'know. They were havin' this, like, memorial, so Petey and I thought we'd go down an' have a drink. For Mikey. How it would look if we didn't?'

  'And what time was this?'

  'Must have been seven, seven-thirty.'

  'Okay.'

  'So we drank a few pints.'

  'Was the place filling up by then?' Glitsky, in a calmer tone, leaned casually against the door, with his arms crossed.

  'I don't know. Half the bar, maybe. Fifteen or twenty heads spread around.'

  Banks leaned over the table. 'Was Kevin Shea there?'

  'I didn't notice.'

  Glitsky again: 'You know Shea?'

  Mullen's eyes went from Glitsky to Banks. 'To nod at, I guess.'

  Banks picked it up. 'And then ...?'

  'And then we thanked Jamie and packed it up.'

  'You went home?'

  'To Petey's. Do a wake of our own.' He spread his hands, sincere. 'We knew we were gonna get good an' pissed and we didn't want to drive.' At Glitsky's expression Mullen said, 'Believe me or don't.'

  Glitsky shrugged it off. 'So what happened to your arm?'

  'Petey and I got to swinging at each other ...'

  'About what?'

  Mullen's hands were still out on the pitted table. Now he turned them up, guileless, with maybe a touch of embarrassment. 'Who knows anymore? We were pretty drunk, Petey and me, mourning for Mikey. We sort of crashed through the sliding door.'

  Glitsky came up to the table and put his mouth near Banks, whispering just loud enough. 'The famous Irish break-the-sliding-door ritual to lay the dead to rest.'

  'It's what happened, like it or not.'

  The lieutenant laid a hand on his inspector's shoulder, then turned and walked out the door without a glance back at the witness.

  20

  The idea was that Wes Farrell and Kevin Shea would meet at Saint Ignatius Church on the campus of the University of San Francisco and from there Farrell would drive them to his apartment on Junipero Serra down by Stonestown, where they would try to figure out a strategy.

  The problem was that to get to USF, Kevin – on foot – first had to climb the second steepest hill in a city justly renowned for them, then had to find his way across the Western Addition, which was burning down. He had overlooked those details when he'd suggested USF as the meeting place and they were proving to be significant.

  The temperature was an unbelievable, for San Francisco, ninety-four degrees. The air smelled of fire. The sky was a white-edged pewter plate pressing down on him. Kevin limped his way up the Divisadero escarpment, panting through his ribs, trying to ignore the throbbing in his useless arm, the remains of yesterday's alcohol still pounding behind his eyes, doubling his vision, forcing him to sit every three or four houses, resolve to continue, move another twenty feet up the hill.

  He had to get something non-alcoholic to drink, put something in his belly or he wasn't going to get anywhere. But when he finally reached the top of the hill there was nothing resembling a fast-food place. As he would have known if he'd been thinking, if he'd been able
to think. This area – with the view and, normally, the freshening breeze – was prime real estate, full of embassies and private mansions. Shea knew that the mayor lived up here, one of the senators.

  It was the wrong place to be if you craved a slurpee.

  He stood a minute at the crest, breathing hard, looking north – the million-dollar view from the Pacific to Berkeley. The Golden Gate. The Presidio. Alcatraz. Today none of it gleamed – the air was too bad. The water was the color of lead – poisoned and flat.

  A siren wailed nearby and Kevin turned too quickly, bringing on another rush of dizziness. He collapsed into a planter box filled with rosemary, leaning back into the hedge. The patrol car passed, slowly over the hill, gunning it down into ...

  Were the cops staring at him? He'd forgotten how exposed he was. He forced himself up, walked a block west, then turned south again onto a tree-lined street, blessedly shaded. Under the boughs, and then farther on over the low, dun apartment buildings of the Western Addition, he could see the spires of Saint Ignatius not a half mile away as the crow flew.

  But between it and where he stood, several plumes of smoke roiled upward. And directly in front of him, on California, he saw an overturned car and what looked like army troops in some loose formation along the sidewalks.

  Then another black-and-white patrol car – or was it the same one? – turned into the street and was coming up toward him. For an instant he thought he'd step out, turn himself in and beg for an isolated cell. They could at least protect him, couldn't they?

  Except that even here, already, stuck on one of the trees, was the wanted poster with his own face staring out at him, grimacing with the effort of holding up Arthur Wade. Or – for the first time now he saw it objectively – contorted in what could have been taken for hatred.