Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  Rigby pulled at the collar of his shirt, suddenly sucking in air. Glitsky began to move forward, but the chief stopped him. 'I'm fine, goddamn it, but I am about at the end of my rope here.' The heavy breathing slowed down, the voice modulated again. 'Now, I have promised Mr Reston to take care of this situation, and here's what I'm doing – you are off Kevin Shea. You are not investigating the riot or any part of it. The FBI is in on this now and they're taking it under their federal jurisdiction as a civil rights matter.'

  'A murder?'

  'That's right, a murder that deprived Arthur Wade of his civil rights—'

  'But it's also under our jurisdiction, no matter—'

  'Are you hearing me, Lieutenant, or do you want to hand me your badge right now?'

  Glitsky almost bit through his tongue. 'Yes, sir. I hear you.'

  'Then you're dismissed. Thank you.'

  Rigby looked down immediately, back to whatever he was studying on his desk. Glitsky turned and walked to the door, opened it and marched through the suddenly silent crowd hovering in the outer office.

  54

  There was little that any civic leader could do about the funerals. No one was about to suggest to Arthur Wade's grieving wife Karin that for the sake of civic peace they postpone putting her husband in sacred ground. She did not object to the mayor's idea of a 'martyr's funeral' to include Chris Locke and his family.

  Arthur Wade had been a practicing Catholic and the High Mass had already been moved from his parish church, St Catherine's, out in the Avenues to the expansive reaches of Saint Mary's Cathedral on the same Geary Street that – down at the corner of 2nd Avenue – used to be the location of the Cavern Tavern.

  The Most Reverend James Flaherty, Archbishop of San Francisco, had originally intended to preside at the Mass but the Archdiocese had soon found itself in rancorous deliberations with, among others, Philip Mohandas, the Board of Supervisors, the mayor's office, The National Organization For Women and the National Council of Churches.

  These negotiations had ultimately altered the format for the Mass, which would be celebrated by what was viewed as a more appropriate, more ecumenical triumvirate of clerics of color, two of whom had been flown in – the female from Philadelphia and the native African from Kenya – under one of the city's emergency budget provisions.

  It was nine-thirty on a clear and still morning, half an hour before the service was to begin, and already the concrete open area in front of the cathedral – the size of a football field – throbbed with humanity, mostly well-dressed, mostly African-American, clustered in groups of five to fifteen, moving toward the church's doors.

  The limousine door opened and Senator Loretta Wager reflexively reached over, protecting her daughter from the curious who had crowded around the tinted windows to see who was pulling up. On the way to Elaine's apartment and then again on the short ride here the limo had passed armored trucks on the back streets they had been able to drive on.

  Elaine stepped out first, then her mother. Around the square, policemen patrolled on foot and on horseback. Overhead, two helicopters circled just low enough to be annoying.

  Loretta firmly shooed away the swarm of reporters. This was not the time for a comment. She and her daughter were here to pay their respects to two martyrs of civil rights. If might be a better use of everyone's time, Loretta said, if the reporters put their microphones away and went inside and prayed for the future of our great city and country. Astoundingly, Loretta thought, a couple of them nodded, gave their equipment to their assistants and fell in behind them.

  Mother and daughter walked arm-in-arm across the concrete, moving with the flow of the crowd. Inside the high modern cathedral a gospel choir filled the air – beautiful and appropriate, Loretta thought. Tears had broken on Elaine's face. The two caskets were up front at the altar, side-by-side, and she and Elaine continued their walk until they came to them, kneeled, lowered their heads in an attitude of prayer.

  Elaine slid into the ribboned section reserved for them three rows back, but Loretta took another moment. Walking to the front of the first pew, she held out her hand to Margaret Locke, who was sitting with her four teenaged children, all of them looking stunned, vacant.

  'Margaret,' she said. Locke's widow stood and the two women embraced. 'If there is anything I can do ...'

  Then, crossing the center aisle, she paused. The front pew on this side held a dozen mourners – she supposed they were Arthur Wade's parents, brothers, sisters, his wife's family. It was obvious which one was Karin, Arthur's wife. Attractive but without expression except an attitude of rigid control, her gaze straight ahead and unseeing, the young woman sat flanked by her toddler twins. Loretta walked over to her.

  'Mrs Wade?' She introduced herself, striving to sound like a person and not a senator. 'I just want to tell you how terribly sorry I am. I know that it can't be any help. Not now. But if you find you do need anything or if there is anything I can do . . .'

  It did seem to matter. A little. In a surprisingly strong voice, Karin Wade thanked her, introduced her to the twins – Brenda and Ashley – and then to Arthur's mother and father, both of whom shook her hand in dignified silence.

  A glance back at her daughter, sitting rigidly next to Alan Reston, who must have just come in. In front of them, braving the censure of the crowd, was Mayor Conrad Aiken and his wife. He had to be here, and to his credit, she thought, he was.

  In the same row on the opposite side – Arthur Wade's side – sat Philip Mohandas with his two bodyguards.

  Loretta was in a quandary over Philip's latest calls for action, his march tomorrow, his verbal attacks on Art Drysdale, his demand for the release of Jerohm Reese. But as soon as she got her executive order on Hunter's Point signed she would have secured her political base for the next election and then, even if Mohandas went off the deep end and proved himself unworthy of the public trust of administering the project, it wouldn't be her fault. She had tried. She had reached out to his people. She had other friends who wouldn't have Philip's problem with the twelve million dollars. Who would appreciate it more.

  In fact, in a way, she had been relieved to hear about Philip's latest move. With his own small but vocal constituency he could prove to be very difficult to control. He had decided he could make an end run around her and still get his hands on Hunter's Point. Well... she already had Alan Reston positioned. That had been that trade. Philip Mohandas would soon enough find out how power worked.

  For now let him have his little march. Let him foment things even further. So long as Kevin Shea remained the focal point for a little longer – and Philip's latest strategy seemed guaranteed to accomplish that – she was going to get what she asked for in the name of racial harmony.

  Of course, if it turned out that Shea was not the pure symbol of hatred she had helped set him up to be, and if that fact came out too soon, it could all backfire. She had been so certain that Shea was guilty, had set up her whole structure on that foundation, but some of the things she had been hearing from Alan Reston, from Elaine, even from Abe ...

  Well, those things just couldn't come out, not until Hunter's Point was settled at the very least; maybe not ever. If Kevin Shea in fact was not guilty . . .

  She inclined her head politely at Mohandas, took Karin Wade's hand in hers one last time and made her way back to Elaine's pew just as the assorted ecumenical ministers came out to begin the service.

  55

  Too angry to feel safe about returning to his office in homicide – he thought that at the very least he would deface some property, throw a chair through a window, something – Glitsky took the internal stairway down to the lobby of the Hall.

  Walking through the same outdoor corridor where he had been rebuked last night by John Strout about paying too little attention to the Chris Locke investigation, he decided to stroll through his city.

  Really pushing his luck, he turned up 6th Street, where in the first block up from the Hall of Justice you could be stabb
ed to death for bus change. Hands in his pockets, he stalked up the block with his edge on, making eye contact with everybody, silently daring one of the lowlifes to try something. He was just in the mood.

  The walk took him all the way down to the Ferry Building at the end of Market Street, where he was calmed down enough to get another cup of tea, drinking it out of a paper cup, sitting on one of the pilings as the flat water lapped under him.

  It occurred to him that now would be a good time to call Supervisor Wrightson. It was the only thing he could think to do that would, he hoped, not involve Kevin Shea in some way and would keep him out of the office.

  Yes, Wrightson would still like to see him and if this morning had opened up unexpectedly for Lieutenant Glitsky, that would be fine. The supervisor would make the time for an appointment at ten o'clock sharp.

  Glitsky's experience with the Board of Supervisors was limited to scurrilous rumors and to the Chronicle's political cartoon that had been on the bulletin column outside his office for five years, showing the door to the supervisors' chambers, the motto over the lintel reading: WE WILL NOT BE CONFUSED BY REALITY.

  But the Supes did pay Glitsky's salary. To be more precise, they approved the city budget and the salaries of city employees, so they were not a group to antagonize gratuitously, and Greg Wrightson was the eminence grise of the Supes. At sixty-two, he had been around City Hall for nearly twenty years. Glitsky knew that the supervisors made twenty-four thousand dollars a year. As recently as fifteen years ago their salary had been only six hundred dollars a month. And yet Wrightson, a man from a middle-class background who had been drawing down this piddling wage for most of his adult life, was a very wealthy man. Abe had been making more than Wrightson for longer, and he was still a wage slave punching a clock.

  Having pondered these imponderables on his walk back across town, Glitsky's mood had not improved by ten sharp when he walked into the reception area to Wrightson's office.

  Wrightson's administrative assistant wore a tailored suit. The inscribed nameplate on the front of the desk read 'Nicholas Binder.' (Glitsky was a department head and he didn't have an inscribed nameplate anywhere.) If Nicholas had gotten this job randomly by taking a civil-service test, they had upgraded the pool of applicants considerably from the last time Glitsky had looked. Somebody's cousin had pulled a string.

  'Mr Wrightson will be right with you, Lieutenant.'

  Glitsky waited. Nicholas went back to his computer, occasionally stopping to pick up the telephone, make a note. Were there riots going on outside? Was the city falling apart? No sign of it here. Clearing his throat, Abe checked his watch. It was nine minutes past ten.

  'Are you sure I can't get you something, Lieutenant?'

  Glitsky's patience had disappeared. 'You can get me inside that door there by ten-fifteen. How about that?'

  Nicholas tried one of those 'what can you do?' shrugs, but it was the wrong day for it. 'I've got this fifteen-minute rule I'm pretty strict about and I'm either in there talking with Mr Wright-son in six minutes or we'll have to do it another time.'

  'Sir?'

  'My appointment was for ten o'clock?'

  'That's right.'

  'Okay, then, ten-fifteen.'

  Nicholas seemed to decide the lieutenant wasn't kidding because he got up, crossed the office, knocked on and then disappeared through Wrightson's thick, solid, darkly stained wooden floor.

  'Lieutenant Glitsky, sorry to keep you waiting.' Wrightson was striding forward, hand outstretched. 'I'm afraid I got involved in one of those conference calls and lost track of the time. Come on in, come on in. Can Nicholas get you anything?'

  'I'm fine.'

  Glitsky was standing, shaking his hand, taking his measure. The thumbnail sketch put him at five-ten, one seventy-five, nearly bald, piercing gray-blue eyes.

  They went, Glitsky following, into an enormous, elegantly furnished office that resembled Abe's in no conceivable fashion. The view looked out through some clean windows (how did that happen?) over the six square blocks of the Civic Center Park – now a tent city. But usually, out this window, would be expanses of lawn, sculpted shrubbery, the pool and fountain, cherry and flowering pear trees. This was the face San Francisco put out for the world, and it was a beautiful one, laid out at the feet of Greg Wrightson.

  He did not go to his desk, as Glitsky expected he would, but led them both to a sitting area – a couch and two stuffed chairs around a polished coffee table on a South American rug. Glitsky took one of the chairs, sinking deeply, and Wrightson started right off.

  'I wanted to thank you for making the time to come and see me. As you know, we're faced with some tough decisions this year on the city's budget, and in the past we've been forced to try to cut back – trim the fat so to speak – on some vital services ... such as the police department.'

  There was no sign of irony, though there was good reason for it. The supervisors had just voted an extra two hundred thousand dollars for Kevin Shea's reward and Wrightson had picked now to talk about the police budget?

  Glitsky wondered if he should mention his missing door to Wrightson but he kept it straight. "There isn't much fat anymore. It's pretty lean down at the Hall,' he said.

  Wrightson nodded. He was leaning forward in the chair now, hands clasped in front of him. 'Well, with these riots and the perception that San Francisco is not a safe place anymore I think we've got a window of opportunity here. We'll be able to free up some money for police services.'

  Glitsky sat, listening to him go on, stifling the replies he would have given if he were getting this kosher baloney from anyone else, wondering why he was here at all. Finally Wrightson wound down. '... which is why I thought I'd talk with the individual department heads.'

  'Okay.'

  'I'd like to know what you really need to do your jobs.'

  'That'll be easy.' But if Wrightson was asking him for specific examples of how short money had hampered investigations, he'd be talking until Christmas.

  Wrightson clapped his hands once. 'Good. We might as well start with the personnel breakdown in homicide. I could look it up but—'

  'What do you mean?'

  'You know, how many people, ethnicities, genders ...?' At Glitsky's look, he hurried on. 'That's what's going to loosen the purse strings, Lieutenant. You know that.'

  'I thought it was the lack of funds hampering our ability to perform.'

  Wrightson waved that off. 'Oh, sure, there's that, but let's be realistic. Your best shot at beefing up your department is increasing your head count. That increases the overheads all around and presto suddenly you've got money for a new coffee machine.'

  'A new coffee machine? How about a lab that's open on weekends? How about overtime instead of comp time? How about guys getting paid when they stay late writing reports?'

  Wrightson was shaking his head. 'No, no. I mean, all of that's important, don't get me wrong, but nobody's going to vote money for that stuff. It's just not sexy, you know what I mean?'

  'I guess not.'

  'Well, I do. You tell me about your department and I'll tell you what it needs.'

  Glitsky ran it down – twelve inspectors, all male, of which four were African-American, two he thought probably qualified as Spanish-surname.

  'You really ought to know that kind of thing for sure,' Wrightson said. 'It's in your best interest.' Then: 'What about women?'

  'No. We don't have any women.'

  'Oriental?'

  'No.'

  'Gay?'

  'Doubt it, don't really know. Does this stuff matter?'

  'Native American?'

  'I didn't realize we had an appreciable percentage of the city and county that was Native American.'

  Wrightson gave a conspiratorial grimace. 'You're going to be in good shape. You'll need at least three, maybe five new inspectors.'

  Glitsky sat forward. 'Mr Wrightson, we don't need more inspectors. We need more support.'

  'Yeah, but you won't get the
support, Lieutenant. What you need is to get closer to compliance.'

  'But isn't that for the PD as a whole ...?'

  'Well, yes, originally, but this was the idea I took to Chief Rigby. He liked it.' Wrightson was pumped up about his role in all of this. 'Look, the force needs money and this is the way it's going to get it. The quotas – we don't call them that, of course – we amend the compliance-factors language so that it applies to each individual detail instead of the department as a whole.'

  'But homicide is ... it's the top of the pyramid. I mean, you don't just plunk people into homicide and make them inspectors to fill some quota – '

  Wrightson's eyes were shining now, his color high. 'Where have you been, Lieutenant? This is San Francisco. Of course, that's what you do.'

  'But—'

  'This should make you especially happy – '

  The scar in Glitsky's lips was white with tension. He could feel it. He didn't want to react angrily to Wrightson. Not personally. Not this morning. Not with all the other thin ice he was walking on. Maybe Wrightson was right – he was out of step and should be delighted at lowering the admissions standards for his detail.

  But he couldn't stop himself. 'It makes me puke,' he said.

  So much for the first two items he had left in the center of his desk the night before – Rigby's urgent call and the two messages from Greg Wrightson. Glitsky flashed his badge at a black-and-white out on Polk in front of City Hall and bummed a ride back to the Hall of Justice.

  All these Halls and no shelter to be found.

  Rigby had told Glitsky he was off the Kevin Shea matter, but on reflection Glitsky realized that he hadn't been specifically told to stop supervising his troops. Had that been on purpose, he wondered, Rigby covering his own ass in case Glitsky was on the verge of coming up with something? At the very least, that interpretation gave Glitsky an argument in the event he got called in front of the Police Commission.