There was always a line of black-and-white police cars parked along the curb in front of the Hall of Justice, but this day they clogged four of Bryant Street's five lanes.
Elaine Wager had to take a cab – her usual bus wasn't in service this morning. She stood at the corner – Seventh and Bryant – again with the overriding sense that reality had shifted in some fundamental way. A parking and traffic enforcement meter minder was casually writing out citations on the police cars as though they were normal vehicles, writing down license numbers and sticking his handiwork under wiper blades as though someone had told him this was a reasonable use of his time amid all this madness. And he had believed it...
The crowd inside the Hall had thinned, no doubt as a result of the curfew – fewer bodies getting hauled in during the night for processing. Elaine spacewalked through the metal detector and came around one of the columns, the cavernous lobby opening out before her.
There were maybe a dozen officers in uniform, standing loose guard over their charges. Why, she thought, were there so many police cars in front of the building? Where were the rest of them? The disconnected observation struck her like a message from a half-remembered world. She had no idea.
The men in the line this morning were the usual unkempt and motley collection, shuffling along, exhausted, black-eyed. As she was waiting for the elevator one of them caught her attention.
She had been planning to take the elevator up, get to her office, close the door. Maybe try calling her mother again, talk to Jerry Ouzounis or to Chief Assistant DA Art Drysdale ... somebody upstairs ... find out what had happened, what she could do. She had to do something. Do something for Chris.
Walking to the yellow tape that delineated the temporary booking area, she stepped over it and got a better look at the man.
'Excuse me,' she said to an officer talking to another uniform.
'Yes, ma'am.' Then, seeing she was a civilian: 'I've got to ask you to go back over there. You're not supposed to be behind the yellow tape.'
There weren't any cordial smiles left in Elaine. 'I'm with the DA,' she said, flashing her ID. 'Elaine Wager.'
If either of the two cops in earshot put together any relationship between this attractive young woman and the senator from California, they hid it well. But the DA was the DA, and if this woman was part of that office she could talk to them and they would listen.
'Yes, ma'am,' the officer repeated, 'how can I help you?' Elaine gestured with her head. 'Isn't that man Jerohm Reese?'
'Hey, hey, this ain't right. Hey. I'm talking to you. You hearing me. I am talking to you.'
Elaine ignored him. The officer, with J. Dealey on his name tag, was between her and Jerohm, and he told Jerohm to shut up. They were riding up in the visitors' jail elevator, which was faster than the public elevator and stopped at the sixth floor only – the entrance to the jail.
'No, I mean it, 'cause hey, this is no shit. They got no warrant on me. I just got sprung. This is bullshit, man; just a pure hassle. I didn't do nothing
Dealey turned to Elaine, as though they were enjoying a stroll in the park: 'We pulled him over in a curfew zone, in a stolen car loaded with merchandise he'd looted from—'
'Hey, now, hey ... that wasn't no stolen car, that—'
'Did I mention shut up, Jerohm?' Dealey gave a jerk on the handcuffs, almost lifting Jerohm off his feet.
'This is brutality! Po-lice brutality. You seein' it, sister. This is it, now. Hey, c'mon, this guy—'
'I'm not your sister,' Elaine told him, meeting his eye and staying with it. 'I am your worst nightmare.'
Art Drysdale, the chief assistant district attorney, was living his worst nightmare. It wasn't yet nine in the morning and he'd been up all night, getting downtown by five-forty. He refused to work even temporarily in Chris Locke's office – he didn't want any misinterpretation, he wasn't angling to become the new DA – and his own space wasn't even marginally close to big enough for the parade of humanity he'd been entertaining this morning, everybody wanting answers or consolation or decisions he wasn't empowered to make.
Normally Drysdale had a carefree style, often juggling baseballs behind his desk – he'd been a major-league player for several weeks in his youth – while he discussed office policy or negotiated plea bargains with defense attorneys. Today he wore a white shirt, his tie loosened, arms resting on his desk and hands folded in front of him, knuckles whitened. 'All right, send her in.'
Elaine came through the door and stood in front of him. 'I hope I didn't hear this right,' he began. 'You've got Jerohm Reese ... the same Jerohm Reese we released two days ago without charging him with murder – that Jerohm Reese we've got back upstairs?'
'Yes, sir.'
Drysdale brought a hand to his forehead and rubbed. He squeezed his temples. 'On the same charges as everybody else we're letting go with citations?'
'A few more,' she said.
'A few more. Enough to make an arrest mandatory? From downstairs in the GODDAMN LOBBY! Excuse me, I don't mean to yell, but we can't have this. We don't need Jerohm Reese here right now.'
'I'm sorry—'
'I'm sure you are.' He shook his head. 'Elaine, why did you feel you had to do this?'
'I thought... I thought if word got out that we'd arrested Jerohm Reese again and let him go again—'
'I know, I know. But now we've got him in jail. And we're not keeping anybody else in jail for doing the same things he's done.'
'But we can't let him go now. We can't just give him a ticket and let him walk.'
'No, I don't think we can. Not now.' He sucked in a breath, let it out in a whoosh. 'Goddamn it.'
'I just felt I had to do something. I wasn't thinking clearly. This thing with Chris, Mr Locke...'
Drysdale held up his hand. He was sensitive to the realities of this situation. Elaine was the daughter of Loretta Wager. She was black. In the real world she couldn't be seriously reprimanded, much less suspended, for something like this, possibly not for anything. She was as bulletproof as Kevlar. And he had Jerohm Reese upstairs, which maybe he could somehow keep the media from discovering and exploiting. But meanwhile there was nothing of substance to charge him with, beyond, of course, the usual crimes that Boles was letting everybody else walk on.
'This thing has us all upset, Elaine. I don't know what I'm going to do and I don't know what's going to happen to this office. But our job is putting on trials, not facilitating arrests. We're supposed to think clearly before we take any action like this, you understand that?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I know you do.' Drysdale's hands were back together, the knuckles white again. He'd make some decision on what to do with Jerohm Reese. Legally, the DA had only two days to charge him, but Drysdale was getting an idea that with the Fourth of July weekend coming up he might be able to finagle putting off an arraignment until the following Tuesday, which might be long enough to avoid continuation of this disaster.
He brought himself back to Elaine. 'You're on the Arthur Wade case.' It wasn't a question. 'You're working with homicide on this, right? Closely?'
She wasn't, but she remembered talking with Lieutenant Glitsky at length about it just yesterday, so she wasn't strictly lying when she said, 'Yes, sir.'
'Just see that you do, all right. If you need any help, come to me, ask for it. You don't have to do this alone.'
'Yes, sir. Thank you.'
'Right. Don't mention it. And send in the next victim.'
He didn't smile when he said it.
35
Glitsky was in the police lot behind the Hall of Justice inspecting the last car Chris Locke had ever ridden in.
It was the same year, make and model of the car he had driven back to the Hall this morning, the same one he had taken Loretta home in the previous night, or, for that matter, the same as the one he had driven home earlier last night and sent a patrolman to retrieve and return to the city lot this morning.
The colors were different, that wa
s all. The city had bought a fleet of twenty-seven Plymouths for the convenience of its employees and guests – plainclothes policemen, assistant district attorneys, the occasional visiting dignitary.
Inspector Marcel Lanier, putting in yeoman's hours building up his comp time, was giving Glitsky the grand tour of the crime scene. It was cold and foggy and some wind had come up. The two men wore heavy flight jackets, and Marcel kept his hands in his pockets. Glitsky, into feeling things, had the front-side passenger door open.
Halfway bent over, Glitsky squinted at the passenger's window. It had been rolled up when Locke had been shot and what was left of it was a cobweb of safety glass with a fist-sized hole in the middle of it.
'Forensics got all the glass?'
'All we found.'
'It's a big hole.'
Lanier checked it out. 'Two bullets, Abe. Point blank.'
Glitsky nodded. 'You find the second slug?'
'Other side.'
They walked around the car, Glitsky stopping at the back fender for a moment.
'What? You see something?'
'Nothing. I don't see a damn thing.'
Opening the driver's door, Glitsky went down to one knee, examining the bullet hole in the car's upholstery, then slid in behind the wheel, eyeballed the hole in the window across from him and traced the trajectory of the second bullet with his hand. 'She is one lucky lady,' he said. According to his trajectory the bullet would have scraped the front of his chest; Loretta, of course, wasn't as thick as he was, and so it had missed her, but not by much.
'She must have got lucky with the ride home, too. Last night.' Lanier kept his face straight, but he was jabbing.
Glitsky should have expected it – homicide cops tended to know everything and comment on it with a minimum of respect. Evidently the word was already out that he'd spirited Loretta from the Hall in the middle of the night.
'Give me a break, Marcel. The woman's a senator. It was on my way.'
'Another lucky break for her.'
He could feel the scar in his lips getting tight and fought to control his face. He had to take this without a sign – any response at all would tip a guy like Marcel. 'Where's the rest of the blood?' he asked.
Lanier leaned over him. 'You're looking at it.' There was a small, perhaps three-inch circular stain on the seat next to him. 'We're talking .22, maybe .25 caliber here. They'll have it this morning. Small hole, not much pop. No exit wound even. Lucky for her again. She didn't even get splattered.'
Glitsky itched to give his inspector a few choice words about the amount of luck it took for Loretta to get herself shot at in the first place, but this, again, would be too much reaction – an admission of something out of the ordinary. So he held his tongue, except to say 'okay' as he slid out of the driver's seat, carefully closing the door. They started walking back toward the Hall.
'So what's she like? You talk to her?' Lanier asked.
'Not much,' Glitsky lied. 'She was close enough to shock, pretty exhausted. I think it hit her pretty hard.'
Their footfalls crunched on the gravel.
Nat Glitsky was sitting in one of the plastic yellow chairs in front of his son's desk when the lieutenant reappeared in his office. Seventy-six-years-old and the man was still cooking. As always, a yarmulke covered his wispy white crown. Hiking boots, a multicolored woolen sweater, old-fashioned and paint-stained khakis. He had draped what he called 'the classic men's blue sports coat' – he wore it everywhere – over the back of the chair.
Word had gotten out about Jerohm Reese being back in custody upstairs, and Glitsky, who had heard about it coming down the hallway, was trying to fit that information into his matrix of How Things Worked. It wasn't exactly tongue and groove.
He stopped in the doorway. His father did not show up every day, even most days. Hardly ever, in fact, so something was up. Nat had come downtown a little more often during the months of Flo's illness, taken his son out to lunch once in a while, but since her death Glitsky couldn't remember a single other time.
His dad, never predictable, tossed at him a plastic-wrapped bagel filled with cream cheese. Glitsky spied some lox peeking out, too – the combination being his favorite thing to eat in the known universe. He had not treated himself to one in so long he'd forgotten.
Six inches shorter than Abe, Nat came over and gave him a kiss on the jaw, which was how he had always greeted his son and always would, convention and embarrassment be damned. Glitsky had hated it from kindergarten through the police academy, but now it didn't bother him at all. People didn't like it, that was their problem. He was becoming his dad. There were worse fates he could imagine.
'We've got to talk, Abraham.'
But this wasn't the best time. In the homicide detail behind him, he could see Lanier, Banks, two other inspectors looking in, waiting for him to be free so they could get some direction. He also wanted to see the coroner, John Strout, regarding the autopsies on both Arthur Wade and Chris Locke – something he liked to do with every homicide in the jurisdiction.
On top of the stack of phone messages he was flipping through he noticed one from Greg Wrightson, one of the city's supervisors – a rare pleasure. Chief Rigby wanted to see him again. Unrelated to the riots, there had been a run-of-the-mill domestic-disturbance homicide last night in North Beach.
Not to mention Loretta Wager – what all that meant.
But this was his father, who wouldn't be here if it wasn't important in some way – Nat was no hysteric. 'Should I close the door?'Abe asked. Of course, there was no door.
Nat pointed an index finger. 'Eat your bagel.'
Which Glitsky was doing, enjoying the hell out of it. 'So?' he asked. 'What?'
As always, Nat got right to it. 'You know Jacob Blume? You do. He's my rabbi and would be yours you start going to synagogue again.' He held up a hand. 'This is not what I'm here about – you. I'm here about Blume. A good man.'
'Okay.'
Again, the hand. 'Don't rush. Chew. I'm getting there. So a couple of nights ago – you know this – the riot is not two blocks from the temple
Abe did know it and was surprised that it hadn't occurred to him before. His father's synagogue – Beth Israel – was at Clement and Arguello, around the corner from the site of the lynching. 'I'm sorry, say that again.'
'This is not your old father railing away, Abraham. This is your work here. Put your mind on. Pay attention.' Nat waited, got a nod from his son – Abraham was listening. 'This woman Rachel with some last name you don't believe, she is here maybe three months from Lithuania or the Ukraine or whatever they call it now. She comes to Blume, who comes to me.'
'What about Rachel?'
'She is scared and confused and comes to Blume and he talks to her two hours yesterday – her English, oy – but better than my Ukrainian, I suppose – and it comes out she was on Geary, going home from temple, when the mob starts coming out
'Out of the Cavern? She saw that?' This was what Abe needed, a credible witness who had been there and could say what had happened. It could be a wedge to get some truth out of the barkeep Jamie O'Toole, among others.
Nat nodded. 'But she is scared, Abraham. A Jew, the police. This is not something to comfort her where she comes from. She has seen something. She knows she should tell. But she did nothing to stop it. So is she guilty of a crime? It's a shanda, certainly, taking no stand. What does she need to do? She doesn't know. She wants no trouble here in the U.S. So, finally, a day goes by, she sees what's happening in the city. Maybe she has a duty – she wants to do right... So Blume comes to me, asks me will I talk to you, see if this can be ... if you need this. Which I must tell you there's no guarantee Rachel's going to go through with.'
The telephone was ringing. Glitsky stuffed in the last bite of bagel and worked it to the side of his cheek. 'Set it up, Dad, I'll be there.' He picked up. 'Glitsky, homicide.'
It was another one of the assistant district attorneys, Ty Robbins, asking him where the hell he was
– he was supposed to be testifying in Judge Oscar Thomasino's courtroom today in People v. Sully, a trial for Murder Two in Department 34. Had he forgotten?
Come on, lieutenant, life was going on. The judge had given a ten-minute recess but he'd better get his ass down there in a New York minute if he didn't want to get slapped with contempt.
Nat Glitsky tapped his son's cheek, said it was nice chatting with him. He'd call.
The ten-minute recess found itself transformed into a day-long continuance – Mr Sully's defense attorney had developed a migraine and pronounced herself unable to continue, and neither Judge Thomasino nor Mr Robbins had had any objection.
This did not sit well with Glitsky, who had thrown on the tie he kept in his desk drawer for just such an occasion and run down to Department 34, wishing he had thought to borrow his father's all-purpose classic men's blue blazer. All he had was his flight jacket – the judge might ream him for a poor sartorial showing just to vent his displeasure at the delay.
Except that now the original delay meant nothing. The entire exercise had been futile and the day was too full for this idiocy. Abe was starting to decide that he was going to mention as much to Ty Robbins when Ridley Banks crabwalked into the pew next to him and sat down, beginning without preamble in a low, insistent voice.
'Couple of things. One, on the Mullen thing, I think we might have a bite. I drove out to McKay's after our little soiree yesterday at the Greek's. Poor guy – McKay – can't seem to find work, just sitting around the house. Wanted to talk to me on the stoop. Actually, didn't want to talk to me at all. I'm a trained investigator, I could tell.'
'It's a useful skill, Ridley.'
'So I mentioned the word warrant...'
'You got a warrant? What for?'
'I didn't. I just mentioned the word and said he didn't have to let me in, but if he didn't I'd probably come back and it wouldn't be so friendly.'
Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A Page 15
