Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  No reaction. A still frame of the moment of impact. Next, slowly – so slowly – Glitsky's arms coming uncrossed, his face going slack.

  Loretta, nodding now, the tears beginning to fall freely. On her feet, another tentative step toward him. 'She's your daughter, Abe. Elaine is your daughter.'

  'Get the hell away from me!'

  'Abe!'

  'Get away!'

  Somehow, he had crossed the room. His face – flashes of heat. A tingling, terrifying. A jab in his left arm – his heart was stopping.

  'Abe, please ...'

  'Goddamnitgoddamnit...' A snifter. On the bar. Grabbing it up, squeezing. Impossible. No more control.

  The explosion on the hardwood. Shards of broken crystal.

  'YOU TELL ME THIS NOW?'

  'Don't yell at me, Abe. Please

  'DON'T YELL AT YOU? Don't yell at you? Jesus ...'

  Walking in small circles, turning. Nowhere to go. 'Goddamnit.'

  Another try. 'Abe . . .?'

  He pointed at her. 'Don't come near me! Don't you dare take another step!'

  She waited, hands at her side.

  Slumped in the chair, he heard her moving around in the house.

  Minutes had passed.

  He still had to do it – do his job – but he found he couldn't move. It had come to where he had known it must. But she had rocked him. He knew it was true. The old nagging sense of familiarity, of vague but real recognition. Elaine was his daughter.

  He could not make himself stand up, go in and accuse Loretta, face her. He was afraid of what he might do.

  The doorbell rang. Her limo.

  He had to move.

  Get up, Abe, get up!

  If he moved, if he saw her face ...

  Steps echoing on the floor, the door opening. 'Hello. Yes, I'll be ready in five minutes. You can wait in the car.' He couldn't let her. He couldn't stop her. She'd beaten him. She'd won.

  70

  'All right, Kevin, call.' Wes Farrell stood in his coat and tie by his kitchen wall phone, talking to it like an idiot. 'It's eight after nine and you said you'd call at nine on the dot and this isn't the time to go flaky on me.'

  He had the television on in the war zone of his living salon, and CNN was broadcasting, live near Kezar Pavilion. The whole country was following San Francisco this Saturday morning. Mohandas had appeared a couple of times, the same sound bite about the plans for this to be a peaceful march, a demonstration to the city's leaders, the country's leaders, that... blah blah blah.

  The phone jangled. Wes snapped for it, knocked it from its cradle, grabbed again but the receiver fell to the floor. He snagged it up. 'Kevin? Give me your address.'

  'Drop the phone, Wes?'

  'Kevin, listen to me. We got some big problems. Just give me your address and I'll be right over there.'

  'Are you watching this thing on TV?'

  'Kevin, give me your fucking address right now.'

  'What kind of problems, Wes?'

  'I'll explain when I get there. Give me your address.'

  Kevin's tone shifted. 'We're still on go, though? I mean, the basic plan...'

  Wes was silent. Then: 'Where?'

  Kevin gave him the address, the apartment number. 'Fourth floor, in the front,' he said. 'Looks right over the park. There's a million people down there.'

  Wes was swearing at himself all the way down to his garage. He couldn't believe that his own brain was failing him so badly. What he should have done was just give Kevin the phone number on Glitsky's beeper, tell him to get out now and go someplace else, then beep him and tell him where he was, which would be where they'd meet. But of course, he was too incredibly stupid to have thought of that. Not when it could have done any good.

  Special Agent Simms was in her car with her three fellow agents and moving before Farrell had pulled out of his garage, so she had at least some blocks on him.

  It had been unwise of Farrell, she thought, but good for her side, to ask Shea for the address. Still, what else could he have done? Anyway, she had all of the advantage now. The address, the apartment number, the jump on the chase. Maybe they wouldn't need to use any firepower, unless...

  Well, she would see. Certainly she wasn't going to get scared out of using the tools they had brought. She wasn't about to show any weakness on that score. The public might have screamed about that woman and her kid the FBI had had to kill up in Montana, but within the ranks of the bureau it was generally conceded that the whole thing had been unavoidable. It had been – what was his name? – the guy Webster's fault for getting them all in that position, certainly not the Bureau's. Start worrying about criticism, the media response, you might as well hang up your badge. You wouldn't get anything done.

  She would do what she had to do.

  The first action would be the simplest and most direct. She would go up and knock on the door, say she had a federal warrant and he was under arrest. In a perfect world he would open the door and come out with his hands over his head.

  Somehow she didn't have the feeling it was going to go down exactly like that.

  In spite of Mohandas's best efforts to get things going, the rally wasn't about to start on time. They never did. His mouth was dry in spite of the constant popping of Tic-Tacs. He couldn't stop pacing inside the tent. Allicey, taller than he was, kneaded his shoulders whenever he passed by her.

  It was nearly nine-fifteen and there were still people pouring into the Pavilion. The police were patrolling but all seemed calm. There had been two more skirmishes that he had seen from up here, but both had been quickly suppressed.

  The smoke from the Divisadero fire was getting a little worse – the wind and all. He'd definitely have to skirt north when the march began. He wasn't going to give much of a speech. There wasn't that need today – he'd already said it publicly so many times – and the turnout was so great that he thought it would be more effective just to get them moving, let it speak for itself.

  What he'd do was welcome everybody, talk a minute about the reality of how things worked, not the lip-service they always got but the way results just didn't seem to come all the way to them. The mayor had played into his hands so beautifully he couldn't believe it, but he'd have been a fool not to use what he'd been handed on a platter. He could almost hear himself: '... but in spite of the words we have all heard time and time again about this city's cooperation, the plain fact is, my brothers and sisters, that even this rally, even this peaceful gathering to show our concern, our despair, over the denial of justice for the tragic murder of our brother Arthur Wade ...' He would pause here for the outburst to die down. 'The plain fact is that they have even made this gathering illegal. They said we couldn't have this march. They wouldn't give us the permit. But I say our strength is our permit. Our unity is our strength. And let God himself be our judge!'

  It was going to sing all right.

  And then he'd lead them out, down the seething streets all the way to City Hall. In righteousness, in rage, and in glory.

  71

  She came briskly out of the back room. She was wearing her dark blue hat, suit coat, clutch purse. Things were moving along. She had defused Abe, and now she had to hurry.

  As she got to the foyer she stopped, her body sagging. She, herself, was wearing down. 'I've got to go out. Please get out of my way.'

  Glitsky stood blocking the front door. 'I'm going to call Wes Farrell from here and tell him that you're coming with me to personally guarantee Kevin Shea's safety.'

  'I'm going to the rally, Abe. The mayor has asked me to deliver a permit—'

  'I'm not asking, Loretta. I'm telling you. Forget the permit. I'm giving you a last chance – although God knows why.'

  'A chance for what?'

  'You've been saying all along that all you wanted was Kevin Shea arrested. Of course he deserved some consideration, some safety. Well, I'm giving you a chance to prove you're not lying.'

  'I'm not lying. Why would I lie?'

  '
Why? Because your career is over if Kevin Shea is innocent and you know it. You can't have him be innocent. You can't let him be arrested and get a chance to be heard. That's why you've been blocking me.'

  'This is stupid ... I haven't been blocking anybody, Abe. Not you, not anybody. You've just gotten—'

  He raised a hand. 'I know, I know. Paranoid, overworked, irrational, any and all of the above. Yeah, that's me. You got me.'

  She moved forward. 'I've heard enough of this. Let me by!'

  Pushing at him, he might have been a wall. Until he exploded, grabbing her by the shoulders and shoving her backward. She stumbled, nearly went down, recovered. Her eyes blazing, she straightened up. 'You want to talk about careers being over, Abe. You just ended yours.'

  Glitsky didn't care. He spoke with a forced calm. 'You're not getting by. Understand that. You've got about ten seconds to agree to go out of here with me. And then you're not going to have a choice about it anymore.'

  She stared for a beat, then told him he was crazy.

  'Six seconds,' he said.

  'Why would I agree to something like that? I've got a driver waiting right outside the door here. I've got to—'

  'All right. Time's up.' Glitsky's face was set, ashen. 'Don't say I didn't give you an out, Loretta. You wouldn't take it.' He took a labored breath. 'I'm arresting you for the murder of Christopher Locke.'

  The reaction took a moment – a squinting, a half-turn, lack of belief. 'You can't... this is absurd.'

  'No, Loretta, this is the truth.'

  'Did you dream this up last night or something? Abe, you're out of your mind. I wouldn't...'

  He was shaking his head. 'He wasn't turned around in the car, looking out the back window. He was sitting next to you, without a clue.'

  'You're insane.'

  He ignored it. 'You were near the riot all right, even driving toward it, inside the car. But you never made it, did you?'

  'Of course we did. How can you even say—?'

  'Because there's this thing I work with called evidence. There were no signs that a crowd had been anywhere near your car, much less throwing rocks at it, kicking it from behind. I walked all around it. Looked.'

  'Then you missed it.'

  'No, I didn't. I wondered about it the first time I inspected the car. What I missed was what it meant.'

  'And what did it mean?'

  'It meant that what you did do was you pulled up a couple of blocks short of the action and shot Locke behind the ear. That was the shot no one heard.'

  'I did not. That did not happen—'

  Glitsky's voice didn't waver. 'But it was also the shot that left no glass shards at all in the wound and too many powder burns around it – but you wouldn't have known about any of that. That isn't politics. It's just stupid grinding, police forensic stuff – not very interesting.'

  She folded her arms in front of her, shaking her head. 'And what did I do then?'

  'You drove down a dark dead-end street – all the streetlights were out – and walked around the car and fired a shot through the passenger window that would appear to have been fired at you, and then you probably used the butt of the gun to knock a bigger hole in the safety glass.'

  'Probably. Only probably? You're not sure?'

  'I don't know for sure what you used, but probably we'll find out eventually. But what it was – it was another mistake.'

  He waited. She didn't ask, eyes fixed, unyielding. So he continued. There was just the one bullet hole in the safety glass, which was the problem. You thought the window would break with the shot, but it just made a nice neat little hole, didn't it, some spiderwebs around it. So you had to hammer a bigger one, something two bullets might have passed through. Except for the reality that even two .25 caliber bullets won't put a fist-sized hole in safety glass. You probably couldn't get one with four.'

  Her expression remained impassive, but she eased herself down onto the bench against the hallway wall. 'This is fascinating,' she said.

  'Right. The other thing, the clincher if you want to hear it...'

  'Oh, please ..."

  The venom in her voice paralyzed him for a second. In a way it was salutary, helping wipe out the last traces of any sympathetic feeling. He felt the scar stretch through his lips, knew he was giving her his piano-wire smile, the one Flo had told him could give nightmares to mass-murderers.

  'This was the moment, just this morning, when it all came together. Before that, almost everything was there – I didn't know that nobody had heard two shots, but the rest of it. Except I didn't want to see it. I went to adjust the seat in the Plymouth. You know the car. It's the same one you and Locke rode in.'

  Still nothing. No reaction.

  'Remember the other night, you and me counting "one two three", pushing the seat up so you could drive? You remember that? So this morning, there I was sitting in the driver's seat, and it struck me what was so wrong about the bullet hole in the door of your car, the driver's door. You want to know what that was?'

  Silence.

  'It would have had to go through you first.'

  Finally, against her will: ' What are you talking about?'

  'I'm talking about you being unable to drive, to reach the foot pedals without the seat pushed all the way forward. And if the seat was forward, which it had to be, the trajectory of the shot from the hole in the window to the hole in the upholstery would have had to hit you. It would have had to go through you, Loretta.' He waited. 'So you weren't in the seat. You were outside, in the street, firing the one shot – the one shot everybody heard – through the safety glass. The one you said almost hit you.'

  'You're wrong. I was trying to get away from there. Chris had just been shot, the seat must have slid back with the acceleration.'

  Glitsky had broken witnesses before, and when you started getting denials of details, you knew you were there. He crossed the foyer, sat at the opposite end of the bench. He didn't intend to break her. Not before he made her undo some of the damage she'd done – to herself, to Elaine, to Kevin Shea – and she was the only one who could do it. He needed her for that first, then he'd deal with the rest.

  He almost whispered it. 'You killed him, Loretta. You had to.'

  She wasn't giving it up. 'Why should I have killed Chris Locke?'

  She was leading him there. 'The simple answer is because you couldn't control him anymore. But it really wasn't that simple. He was blackmailing you, you were blackmailing him. You knew each other's secrets.'

  'About what?'

  'About the money you laundered through the Pacific Moon.'

  That he had come to this knowledge, finally, rocked her, although she covered it – her tightened lips were all that betrayed it. 'I explained that to you, Abe. That was completely legitimate.'

  'No,' he said. 'Chris Locke was prosecuting the case, and then he met you and the two of you became involved, wasn't that it?'

  'No. None of this is it.'

  'He represented the DA's office and dropped the charges, said there wasn't a case and you got to keep the money...'

  'That's not true. This is ...' She was standing up, but he took hold of her by the wrist, held her. She sat back down.

  'But the money wasn't why you killed him. What he knew made you nervous maybe, but the records had been destroyed, cleaned up, sanitized. You had the same thing on each other. You could live with that.'

  She looked at him, waiting. She'd give him nothing.

  'Because he rejected you and he took up with Elaine. Because now he was really out of your control. He was going to play fast and loose with your daughter, your baby. You could handle that for yourself – but your daughter wasn't going to have it like you did. She was going to have it better. You were going to protect her because you knew what Chris Locke would do. It would be what he'd done to you.'

  'And exactly what was that?'

  'He'd use her, then throw her on the slag heap when she became ... inconvenient.'

  'I haven't been
with him in years. I wouldn't...'

  Glitsky nodded, the first admission.

  'Besides, you can't prove any of this. I did not kill Chris, I did not launder any money. For God's sake, Abe, it's just...'

  He stood, walked to the window next to the door and looked out, his back to her. The limo was parked right there.

  He counted to fifteen, then without turning, said, 'The proof is in your hand, Loretta. You going to shoot me in the back? What are you going to say? That you thought I was a burglar? A rapist?'

  He turned around.

  Loretta was standing by the hallway bench, clutch purse in one hand, the small gun leveled at him in the other.

  Glitsky's eyes went to it. 'I've got a good friend who's an attorney and I've left a letter with him,' he lied. 'It says that in the event of my death, they should compare the ballistics on the bullet that killed me with the one that killed Chris Locke.' He nodded at the gun. 'They're going to match, Loretta. And the letter goes on about a few of the other things we've talked about this morning. It also mentions your name.'

  He took a step toward her. 'It's over, Loretta. It's over.'

  Slowly she lowered the gun. 'I had to kill Chris. He was going to ruin my daughter ... was already doing it...'

  Glitsky nodded. He already knew this. 'I'm going to need to take that gun for evidence,' he said.

  'You can't think I'm going to give you this gun.'

  'I'd prefer it,' he said, 'but it doesn't really matter. I don't need it.'

  'Without it you don't have any physical evidence. You don't have a case.' She took a step toward him, her expression set, tone low. 'We don't have to have this happen, Abe. I can throw it away, get rid of it...'

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pocket recorder he always carried, turned it off, played back the last few moments, her admission that she had killed Locke. When he flicked it off, he held out his hand. 'The gun,' he said.

  She gave it one last try. 'Abe. This won't work. Alan Reston won't prosecute me. You won't even get him to go to a judge for an arrest warrant.'