Melanie let them into the apartment building with her key. When the door closed behind them she made sure it had locked, then something seemed to go out of her. She stopped and turned into Kevin, pressing herself against him, shaking. He enfolded her into him and they stood there a long moment, embracing as the last rays of the sun slanted through the ancient vestibule windows. Finally he lifted her chin and kissed her. 'We'd better get upstairs,' he said.
Ann's apartment was on the fourth floor in the front, overlooking both the scenic courtyard and, across Stanyan, the lawns and evergreens of Golden Gate Park.
As soon as they had let themselves in, Kevin crossed to the windows and pulled the blinds. He turned on a couple of low-watt lights, made a quick tour of the living room. Potted plants squatted on every available surface – a million plants. Also a video camera on a tripod – Ann was a film major – some books and CDs, a television and audio gear and telephone, botanical posters and prints of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bogart. It was a typical student's apartment, busier and more feminine but not really so different from Kevin's own place. He lowered himself down into the stuffed chair.
'Melanie?'
'What?'
She was standing by the entrance to the kitchen and turned. Their eyes met, and they froze with the realization of what they'd come to, what they were doing ....
Minutes passed. The room had darkened, the sun now fully down. Kevin lifted his body from the chair. Melanie was somewhere in the back half of the apartment. 'What are you doing?' he called.
'Might as well feed the fish since I'm here. And water the plants,' she called back.
Kevin looked around again. 'That could take weeks. How many plants does old Ann have?'
'I've never counted. She's only got three fish. Want to meet them?'
'It would give meaning to my life. But first maybe we should call Wes, find out how it all went.'
'Oh, come meet the fish. Wes is either going to be back or not, and either way we left the note saying we'd call. He'll wait.'
That was true enough, but Kevin wasn't disposed to wait. This was his life, and hers too, they were talking about. He made his way through the living room and stopped in the kitchen doorway.
Melanie was feeding the goldfish, her hands passing back and forth over the aquarium. She had taken off Wes's white shirt, which along with her bra was hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs.
Kevin stood in the doorway, watching the action of the smooth muscles in her back as she moved her arm over the water. She half-turned, her face betraying nothing, then came all the way around, facing him. 'I know we could call Wes right now,' she said, 'but then again I thought – '
He moved toward her.
Farrell was surprised at the note but couldn't blame them for their caution. They'd both had a hairy couple of days and he thought they had earned the right to get cautious. Still, Glitsky had given his word, and even though they were on opposite sides – prosecution and defense – he sensed the man played straight.
'Yo, Bart!'
He had the television set turned back on, had cracked another beer and was opening a can of dog food by the kitchen window that overlooked Junipero Serra when the doorbell rang from down below. At the box by his front door he pushed the intercom button.
'Wesley Farrell?'
Wesley? He thought. Not even his wife had called him Wesley. 'That's me,' he said.
'This is Sergeant Stoner, a special investigator for the district attorney's office. I have a warrant down here to search your apartment on information and belief that you may be harboring a fugitive ...'
47
Glitsky sat at his desk, fingers drumming on the blotter. After meeting with Farrell, his chat with Elaine had left him with the impression – incorrect, as it turned out – that the DA would be open to negotiation regarding the Kevin Shea issue. Somehow he would oversee Shea's technical arrest in the next twenty-four hours and this particular segment of the crisis would be over.
He had returned to homicide to find the place still deserted, which didn't bother him ... his troops were out there doing their jobs. He decided to catch up on his paperwork on the chance that the call from Wes Farrell would come in soon. Since the riots had begun, the run-of-the-mill homicides in the city had continued at their usual pace. Predictably, a couple of gang lords had decided to use the cover of the disturbances to mask a few raids on rival turf – last night a drive-by into a milling crowd had killed two children, wounded fourteen adults and left no known gang members even scratched. A typical result, but the case had to be assigned and followed up.
Likewise the Korean businessman who had been killed, and Glitsky had to make sure that his inspectors were trying to identify the killers. There were also the Molotov-cocktail fires and their victims, the North Beach domestic, the boys who had been pulled from their cars. The weight of it all eventually slowed him down. Four more folders to go, and he simply stopped.
For over a decade his life had been the study and investigation of a seemingly endless succession of violent deaths. It had bred in him a profound hatred of violence – possibly because of that, but also because it was part of Flo's protective nature – and he and Flo had never hit any of their children, which, he was convinced, was where it all began. A cuff here, a back of the hand there, the other abuses piling up – verbal, sexual, simple neglect. Nobody paid enough attention – it was a rough road and if you wanted it cleared you pushed people out of the way. You didn't say, 'May I be excused' – you kicked some ass.
He shook his head. The folders lay there, Post-its stuck on like Band-Aids. Forcing himself, he grabbed the next one, the file on the late Christopher Locke. He opened it and saw that Lanier's taped interview with Loretta last night was first up, transcribed in record time – probably one of the secretaries interested in what the senator would have had to say – grist for the Hall's thriving gossip mill.
The senator ...
And he'd just been thinking about Flo, about the way they'd tried to raise the kids ... he still had a picture of her in his desk drawer. Now he opened it, pulled it out. She was blonde, smiling, radiant, impossibly dead at forty.
The room, small enough in any event, closed in, finally wasn't there.
Flo had been so different from Loretta – that, he supposed, had been one of her attractions in the beginning. A white woman, tall, athletic rather than curvy, nurturing instead of combative, as Loretta had been before she'd – apparently – mellowed. Flo did not overvalue what Loretta liked to call the life of the mind. Flo valued life. She also wasn't competitive the way Loretta was. And, having less to prove, she lived on a different plane – more serene, more truly self-confident.
Loretta had always projected herself as supremely competent and sure of herself, but her life-of-the-party, nothing-can-touch-me persona was, Glitsky knew, mostly a front, a reaction to her roots. She had grown up the third of four children in a low-income section of San José. Her parents had been, in Glitsky's view, people of integrity and self-respect who had worked their whole lives, her mother in the same dry-cleaning establishment for over twenty years, her father in a variety of clerical or retail or service jobs – shoe salesman, short-order cook, bus driver, whatever he could get.
By the time Glitsky had met the parents, they had seemed old and used-up, even though they were probably close to his age now. Their first- and second-born sons, both of Loretta's older brothers, had been drafted and killed in Vietnam. Which went a long way to explain Loretta's early radicalization and identification with, especially, the Black Student Union. Her main issue when she had first met him was more that her black brothers were fighting the white man's war than that the objectives of the war might be wrong in themselves. Later, of course, the Sixties being what they were, that evolved, too.
Loretta's younger sister Estelle had already had one illegitimate child when Abe met her, and he had read in an article about the senator a few years back that her little sister was
at that time eking out a welfare existence in Los Angeles with three children and a succession of men. The article said that Loretta and Estelle were no longer close (nor, Abe knew, had they ever been).
Flo had had none of that – nothing to scratch and claw her way out of. Resolutely middle-class, she had attended Gunn High School in Los Altos ('Stanford Prep'), then had switched gears and taken a swimming scholarship out to the Central valley – University of the Pacific in Stockton, of all places.
Glitsky had met her in San Francisco at the Jewish Community Center gym, where he went to work out and where she used the pool. Her goggles had been fogged up and he'd been swimming laps, and she executed a perfect swimmer's shallow dive into him, nearly giving them both concussions. (Later she would say she had noticed him at the pool and couldn't think of any better way to introduce herself.) At UOP she had majored in child psychology (now called early childhood learning), after which she had put in two years teaching pre-schoolers at the Community Center. Then, as it turned out, she was ready to have a few children of her own. Glitsky and Flo had fashioned a successful existence together. Many of the 'issues' that had seemed so important to him when he had been with Loretta in college faded from their everyday lives, and he found he didn't much miss them. Yes, he had dark skin and, yes, he had suffered the usual prejudice when he had been younger and even afterward, but, though it continued to enrage him when it occurred (and Flo, too, for that matter), they refused to let it become their focus – that remained the two of them, the kids, the family. He made no apologies for his private life – this was who he had become and it was worthwhile.
It was obvious why the world's injustice cut so much more deeply into Loretta's flesh, her psyche, her life. Given her own younger sister, given the way it so often turned out for black women, it was small wonder the senator was so protective of Elaine, her own daughter. Glitsky understood, for the first time now, that Loretta had pulled some strings with the District Attorney to set up her daughter in her position.
He was even starting to see, perhaps dimly to understand, why she might have felt the attraction of an older, white, rich Dana Wager so compelling, more even than young love had been. She wasn't going to end up powerless and in despair, the way her parents had. Good people, but... good didn't guarantee anything.
Funny, the differences, he thought... Loretta had married white, pretty much against her own politics, to get out of the ghetto, to insure she would never have to go back. And now she was making her amends, identifying with her blackness, rationalizing that Elaine's figurative one drop of black blood made her one hundred percent black. Glitsky, on the other hand, had married white because he had fallen in love with a woman who had happened to be white.
Now whatever was happening between Loretta and him was because of their chemistry, not their color. On her side, did that make it purer? On his, what...?
What if they had stayed together from the beginning?
It was, he figured, better all around that they hadn't. Certainly, Flo had centered his life, took him out of currents that might have washed him away. And Loretta had done very well by herself. To the objective eye, she had reached a pinnacle of the American Dream never before touched by anyone of her background.
But now ...
Well, now they were both grown, both free. As Abe's father had told him, the thing to do now was look ahead. Loretta already knew – her life had taught her – that it was pretty much all random. Events, basically, could not be controlled. And Flo's death had reminded him of that, rocked him, knocked him off balance.
Maybe now he and Loretta, by their separate routes, had finally arrived at close to the same place. Maybe his own sense of balance could be restored. He didn't know. That, too, might be random.
But he had to find out, keep trying until it got clear.
The room came back into focus. Where had he been? He looked down at the open file on the desk ... oh yes, Loretta's transcript, probably the rest of Strout's forensics, the microscopies. He flipped a page, scanning the lines of type. He didn't need to read it again – he'd gotten the story from her the previous night. He'd talk to Marcel Lanier tomorrow. Now she was at City Hall and had asked him to come by on his way home. Just for a minute even, she said.
Pulling his flight jacket off the chair behind him, he closed the folder and left it in the middle of his desk, hitting the light on his way out.
'Hey!'
He stopped. Ridley Banks was sitting at his own desk in the dusky light.
'Sorry,' Glitsky said, 'I didn't know anybody'd come back.'
'You were in a trance. I didn't want to interrupt.'
Glitsky flipped the switch and the light came back on. 'How'd it go?'
Banks sat back in his chair. 'Jamie O'Toole seems to be getting some recollection that there might have been a mob. He might have even seen someone in it. I think it'll come to him in a dream or something real soon. And speaking of him, you know the last two words a redneck says?'
Glitsky shook his head.
With a down-home accent, Banks said, 'Watch this!' And waited.
Impassive, Glitsky stood by the door. 'That's the joke?'
'I love that joke. "Watch this!" Think about it. It gets funnier.'
'I will.' Mystified. 'Meanwhile, what about Mullen and McKay?'
'These guys!' Banks shook his head. "These guys are just too clever.' He told Glitsky about the 'mistake' as to whose sliding doors had been broken through.
'See if you can find their doctors,' Glitsky said, and went on to explain a little about how the knife fitted into the picture. 'If there are knife wounds, not caused by breaking glass, that means they were close enough to Arthur Wade to get cut. If that's the case, we've got enough to bring them both down, book them with something. I heard a good story today about what started it all off.'
A questioning look. 'So what about Kevin Shea?'
'I expect we'll be seeing Shea before too long. These stories I've been hearing, they come from his lawyer.'
'He's got a lawyer? He's still in town?'
Glitsky nodded. 'Interesting, isn't it? Makes you wonder. And guess what?'
"The lawyer says he didn't do it?'
'Sometimes you do this clairvoyance thing, Ridley — it's spooky. But yes, he does say that. And here's the interesting part – it might even have some truth in it.' He came up to Banks's desk and sat on a corner of it.
Banks sat back. 'You're not telling me Shea had no part of it?'
'Off the record, I think there's even a chance of that. He might be the good guy, might have tried to cut Wade down.'
Banks chewed on that a minute. 'Uh oh.'
'I know. But we're still bringing him in, let it work itself out. You seen the other guys?'
'Marcel went home. He was talking about getting some sleep. Griffin, I don't know, someplace.'
He hesitated, and Glitsky read it. 'What?'
'Nothing.'
But Glitsky knew what remained on his inspector's mind – Banks was tempted to say a few more words about his Pacific Moon theory, that there was something new he had discovered, or remembered, about Loretta Wager and how they said she had laundered money she'd allegedly smuggled out of Colombia in 1978. Banks, eyeing his lieutenant, thought he recognized in Glitsky a warning not to bring it up. Not now. Not, at least, until all this upheaval in the city was in the past.
Neither man said anything else. Glitsky stopped at the door, half-turned. 'Watch this!' he said, deadpan, and hit the light switch again.
48
Loretta Wager was sitting in her small office at City Hall. Her desk was covered by a map of the city. She had been letting her fingers do the walking and now she sat back, folded her arms and allowed herself a moment of congratulation. She was proud of what she had accomplished in so short a time.
All that had to happen now to make it complete was the arrest of Kevin Shea, and Abe Glitsky had told her that that was imminent. Perhaps, even without Abe, it had already occurred.<
br />
Her eyes went again to the map and she rubbed a hand over it. What a beautiful city! Even the ugly parts ...
The Hunter's Point Naval Reservation covered almost three times the ground area of all of Candlestick Point – it was nearly half the size of the Presidio. Unlike the Presidio, however, the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation was flat, windswept, nearly treeless. The ground under it was poisoned by toxic waste. Its open spaces were dead or gone to seed; its buildings squat, deserted, crumbling. It abutted the most pernicious ghetto in San Francisco, the nadir of the Bay View District, called home by Jerohm Reese. No one was ever going to make a movie entitled Hunter's Point Naval Reservation as they had about the Presidio.
Loretta Wager knew the place well. Its negatives didn't bother her. You took negatives and turned them to your advantage, that was how politics worked. That was how life worked.
Take Alan Reston, for example. Reston was the son of perhaps her largest single contributor, Tyrone 'Duke' Reston, who years ago had begun bottling what, in Loretta's opinion, was the finest rib sauce in the world. Alan Reston, his son, had even campaigned for her directly, proving to her that he could be a player of the first order. Then she had supported him in his bid for deputy state attorney general. And then the Chris Locke vacancy had happened ... She needed a conservative African-American in Locke's position and with enough personal authority to continue delivering the white moderate vote in San Francisco. Alan fit the bill perfectly.
The negative was that because he was a crime-busting prosecutor he was not exactly aligned with the African Nation movement. He had no problem with putting people – be they black or otherwise – in jail. Philip Mohandas did not want to go near him, and Loretta had already positioned Mohandas to be the voice of the current outrage, the one Mayor Conrad Aiken would hear.
Loretta had wanted Reston in the DA's office, and she needed to convince Mohandas to sell the idea to Aiken. After all, she had argued to Philip, it wouldn't be all bad. Reston was African-American, as Locke had been. Mohandas, in pushing Reston, would have an opportunity to talk about Drysdale, get his message out there.
Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A Page 24
