Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  Glitsky carefully lifted the piece of paper. Going into the bathroom, he folded it over and tore it into little pieces, then dropped the pieces into the toilet and flushed three times.

  He walked into the bedroom and lifted the phone next to Loretta's bed, punched the numbers nine ... one ... one.

  Monday The Fourth of July

  75

  Elaine Wager held herself erect. She had been through it all the past week. Was there almost a sense of relief in her bearing, Glitsky wondered, that nothing more could happen to her, that she had survived?

  He leaned over and pushed the passenger door open after he had stopped at the curb. Elaine was wearing jeans, lace-up brown shoes, a baggy sweater. Her hair was held back severely.

  'Thank you for picking me up,' she said. 'You didn't have to.'

  'Yes, I did,' he said. At her expression, he clarified it. 'Not pick you up. Go see her.'

  'I heard you found her...'

  He was driving now, didn't have to look over. 'We had an appointment,' he said.

  'Abe?' Her voice was suddenly tentative. 'What was she like, as a woman, I mean? You would know...'

  He was pulled up at a light. 'Beautiful,' he said, 'she was beautiful.'

  Elaine closed her eyes, nodded. 'That was how she was as a mother.'

  Glitsky was hunched forward on the first two inches of the plaster chair, his elbows on his knees, waiting, his hatchet face chiseled in a scowl of impatience. Across from him, Elaine stared at the tiny holes in the acoustic tile of the ceiling.

  The coroner, John Strout, opened the connecting door with a little whoosh and everybody was suddenly standing. When he nodded, Elaine steeled herself and walked into the morgue. Glitsky stayed behind.

  'I'm due for a few days off,' Strout said. 'I can't keep this up. People I know winding up in here ...'

  'Do you know what happened?'

  'Looks like about what it did before.'

  'I want to know your ruling,' Glitsky said. His voice had a hoarse quality – it raised a flag for Strout. 'I knew her personally, John.' He paused, wondering how much he had to say. He decided not much.

  'Well, you know as well as me, you can't ever say with pure certainty in a case like this, but I'm going to rule accidental death. I don't think she killed herself.'

  'Why not?'

  'Well, mostly because of everything else I know about her last hours. Spent the day with Elaine in there, who said everything seemed hunky-dory, better than it had ever been. Then, you know, she'd just had a couple of major successes. Shit, Abe, the woman was on fire. She was flying. That, plus you don't make dinner reservations and then kill yourself. You don't dictate five memos on next month's business and then kill yourself.'

  Unless you plan it so carefully that your daughter, above all, will never know, Glitsky thought. But he asked, 'Anything forensic?'

  'Strangely enough, yeah. The angle, the distance. Gun went off far enough it didn't give her any powder burns – she wasn't holding it against her temple, in her mouth, anything like that. Most folks do. Come to think of it, I never once had a suicide shot through the heart. Not from an arm's length away, Abe. I believe the gun just went off.' Strout pulled at the sides of his long face. Studied the lieutenant a minute. Carefully placed a hand on Glitsky's shoulder. 'It was an accident, Abe. There's nobody to look for.'

  Glitsky felt his legs go loose. Maybe his little talk to Loretta about the importance of forensic details had borne this fruit.

  He sat down a minute, then looked up at the coroner. 'It's what I wanted to hear, John. Thanks.'

  Superior Court Judge Maria Braun was extremely displeased to be contacted by the new district attorney on her holiday weekend, but thought that it probably served her right for not getting the hell away to Hawaii or Puerto Vallarta or Palm Springs as most of her colleagues on the bench did. Next year, next year she'd remember. But, of course, this was an important case and the city had already played it so poorly ... If she thought she was having a bad Fourth of July, she thought it didn't really compare to what they'd put this fellow Shea through, and he was still in custody.

  She'd read the moving papers of the attorney, Wesley Farrell – a vague memory of competence from somewhere, but she couldn't put a face to it – and then carefully gone over the three independent confirming stories from the police interrogations of the other witnesses. Three of these people – James A. O'Toole, Brandon W. Mullen, and Colin Devlin – seemed to be attempting to trade immunity or lesser pleas in exchange for avoiding a murder charge, while the fourth, Rachel Koshelnyk, seemed credible, never mind her poor English.

  She'd also read over the testimony of, so far, the only suspect to be charged in the murder, Peter M. McKay. Also the testimony of homicide lieutenant Abraham Glitsky. The file was nearly an inch thick and she'd read it all. Everybody seemed to agree that Kevin Shea had done nothing wrong.

  Judge Braun couldn't do a thing about possible federal charges against Kevin Shea. She couldn't quash the grand jury indictment without hearing all the evidence in the case. But she had heard enough, and what she could do was her good deed for the month and order Kevin Shea released on his own recognizance. She didn't think he was going anywhere.

  Farrell took Kevin Shea back to his place. Emotionally drawn and quartered, the young man did not want to go out to lunch, did not want to celebrate, did not want to hear instructions about his future behavior or strategy about his defense in the event that he would need one. What he really wanted to do was go home.

  Farrell understood and didn't press him. Kevin had been through the wringer and needed to decompress. Farrell, on the other hand, betook himself to lunch at John's Grill, where he thought he fit right in to the consolation party they were having in honor both of the Fourth of July holiday and of the owner's unsuccessful trip to New York City, where he had gone over the weekend to bid on one of the two original Maltese Falcons that had been used in the movie. His top bid of thirty thousand dollars fell a little short of the six hundred thousand dollars the trophy had eventually gone for, but the publicity and goodwill he had generated by the effort wasn't hurting his restaurant business.

  Farrell ordered sand dabs – butter, capers, lemon. He'd had enough frozen food, delivered food, plastic food to last a lifetime. Things were going to change. He had his day planned out, maybe the rest of his life. At least now it was going to start – he'd also go home and take Bart out for a long walk (the dog deserved a little attention), clean up his living room and wash the dishes in the sink, do a couple of sit-ups (not too many the first day), then pour himself one and only one extra bone-dry Bombay Sapphire martini and watch the fireworks from the roof of his apartment.

  Tomorrow morning, first thing, he was going to cut his damn hair, then place calls to some of his old colleagues, polish up his résumé, put the word out. He was back in the business.

  Glitsky made it down to Monterey by one twenty-five. Nat had persuaded the skipper to hold the afternoon boat until he got there. After all, this was five paying customers they were talking about at twenty bucks a pop. It was all Abe's money – Nat loved to watch it go. That's what money was for, though he hadn't thought so when he was younger. Well, that's what life was – you learned.

  The other three potential whale watchers didn't mind so long as the wait wasn't too long, and it hadn't been.

  By two o'clock they were four miles outside the breakwater in bright sunlight on calm seas. Isaac was sitting crosslegged on the coil of anchor rope, scanning the horizon with binoculars. Jacob was reading his horror novel and Orel – little Orel – was practicing some of his hip-hop dance moves to the delight of the other customers, his small portable radio propped on the wooden table in the center of the deck. Nat had stretched himself out on one of the benches and fallen asleep.

  Glitsky chewed saltwater taffy and walked to the bow, back to the stern. Disoriented, out of place. Out of a job, too, probably.

  He hadn't mentioned that to anyone. Not yet. God knew,
there'd be time. Plenty of time.

  He wasn't fooling himself. He didn't want to be there, with his boys, with his father, with the only people left in his world. What did that tell him? Why had he driven down here anyway – maybe see a fat sea-going mammal for eight or nine seconds? Whoopee. He couldn't wait.

  Nobody needed him anyway. He ought to leave the boys with his father and—

  'Hey, Dad!'

  ' Yo.' He jumped. Force of habit. It was Isaac. He checked the other two. Still reading. Still dancing. Everybody okay. He walked back next to his son, who patted the rail in front of him. 'I was just watching you walking back and forth. What are you thinking about?'

  The question caught Glitsky like an uppercut to the ribs. 'I don't know, Isaac. I guess I was thinking I ought to see more of you guys,' he lied. 'We ought to do more together.'

  Isaac gave him one of those teenage expressions. 'No,' Isaac said, 'that's a dad answer. I mean really.'

  Glitsky leaned back against the railing. 'Really?'

  'Right. Like what are you really thinking about? Like what is the world really like to you?'

  'Where does that question come from?'

  'It's the kind of stuff we talk with Nat about, I guess.' He paused. 'Your father...'

  'Yeah, Nat's my father...'

  'So why don't you talk to us about any of that stuff? About any real stuff? I mean, ever since Mom, it seems like you've just been doing what you had to do. I mean with us, your job, everything. Like nothing got to you.'

  Here, stab me someplace else, Abe was thinking. 'Things do get to me,'he said. 'A lot of things. You, for instance.'

  'What about me?'

  Glitsky let out a breath. 'Like why you don't ever talk to me. Why everything's territory, everything's a fight, everything's something you don't want to do ...'

  His sixteen-year-old son was nodding, listening. 'That's because the only time you talk to me is when you're telling me to do something. Like you're a cop at home, too.'

  'I am a cop, Isaac. What do you want me to talk about?'

  The boy swallowed. 'I don't know. How about sometime you talk to me just to say Hi there, how's it goin'? Like that.'

  Glitsky looked up. The blue horizon was out there, limitless and empty, and he was here, floating in the vastness of the sea with his oldest son reaching out to pull him aboard. What the hell was he waiting for?

  He could feel his face, the start of a real smile. 'Okay, hi,' he said. 'How's it really going?'

  Even to a city numbed by tragedy and violence, the accidental death of Senator Loretta Wager at the moment of her greatest triumph was a great calamity. The President of the United States himself was flying out in the middle of the week to attend the state funeral. Mayor Conrad Aiken declared a month of mourning in the city of Saint Francis.

  Philip Mohandas was already proposing a new name – the Loretta Wager Memorial Playpark – for the Hunter's Point project for underprivileged youth that he, in all likelihood, would be administering.

  The chairman of the Democratic National Committee said that Senator Wager's untimely death would send the search for a vice-presidential candidate in the next general election back to the drawing board. After her heroic personal intervention in the events surrounding the arrest of Kevin Shea, she had been a shoo-in for the nomination.

  'She was,' he said, 'a very special woman with enormous personal stature, absolute integrity, and a feeling for the common man that set her apart from all of her contemporaries. She was not first or even most importantly a politician, but a person with traditional values and real emotions who somehow managed, at the same time, to be larger than life. I believe that, had she decided to pursue the office, she could have been our first female president of the United States.'

  And a Harris Poll conducted late Sunday afternoon – the day after the accident – concluded that, had the coming November's Senate election been held on that day, Loretta Wager would have beaten her nearest opponent by twenty-four points.

  Kevin walked slowly, exhausted, flight by flight, all the way up the stairs and turned the key to his door.

  The bed had been made, the covers turned down. The windows were open, the blinds up. He didn't remember the place being so light. Outside, the view sparkled in the clear air. A light, warm, flower-scented breeze ruffled the curtains.

  The dishes – mostly coffee cups and beer mugs – had been washed and a large bouquet of flowers had been placed on the occasional table next to his chair. He surveyed the room once, walking in a big circle, then came back around to his bed and sat on the edge of it, facing one of the windows. Where was she?

  He took a shower – got the jail smell off. Put on a pair of clean blue jeans, went back to the bed, bare to the waist, letting the breeze dry him.

  Fifteen minutes, twenty. He didn't stir, wasn't moved to think. He was just there, sitting, waiting, letting some of the nightmare recede.

  He knew she was going to come. He knew. From behind him on the landing, steps on the hardwood. He stood and turned and was going for the door when it opened.

  She was carrying a brown paper shopping bag with a loaf of bread sticking out of the top.

  The impression – the sense of her – all at once in a rush – her hair down and shining. An unadorned light yellow dress, simple lines, the thin material of it shimmering with the beating of her heart. He could see it.

  She put the shopping bag on the bed, straightened up, meeting his eyes. Her smile broke – relief, joy, with him again.

  'Remember that key I was going to send back to you when we broke up? I didn't.' Then: 'I thought you'd be a little later getting home. I wanted to be here.'

  'Wes dropped me right off.'

  She stopped, afraid to move forward, the last tentative doubt. A tenuous smile, and in it the question. Did he still want her?

  It was all there – he could read it.

  Silence. Both of them skittish. Afraid they might blow it right now, the first minutes here in real life. Aware of how much it all meant.

  She stood across from him, two arms' lengths, hands straight by her sides, her eyes ...

  Something he had never seen before, anywhere, had really never believed he would. She saw him and still loved him. It was everything he wanted in the world.

  She asked him, 'Do you need to be alone right now? Do you want me to go?'

  He moved forward and put his hands on her arms. He felt a tremor there. 'Not ever,' he said quietly, 'not ever.'

  Her arms came up around him, moving into him. He could feel her heart against him. He could feel his own.

  They were beating in the same time. Together. Real time, real life.

  In the old days, not the old old days (since the Little Shamrock had been in existence since 1893) but back in the Fifties, the bar had been as popular for its lunches as for its drinks.

  Moses McGuire and his silent partner, Dismas Hardy, thought it would be a good promotional move and a pretty good time to roll back the clock for the Fourth of July, and they had obtained a city permit to cook hot dogs and serve clam chowder (ten cents and fifteen cents, respectively) out on the sidewalk in front of the bar, on Lincoln, across the street from Golden Gate Park. They had draped a huge American flag from the roof of the Shamrock, which covered the front of the building down to the top of the windows. The whole area out front was cordoned off with saw-horses, and the weather had cooperated as it so rarely did in San Francisco.

  Now at seven in the evening it was warm and still. The holiday traffic was light on Lincoln, and Hardy and McGuire were standing behind a table under which kegs of Guinness Stout, Bass Ale and Anchor Steam sat in metal containers filled with ice. All around them, inside and outside the sawhorses in front, spilling out and over into the street, in the bar behind them, a mixed crowd of at least two hundred people ate and drank to a background of some John Philip Sousa marching band music, which Moses had thought would be appropriate and which Hardy had agreed to, although it wasn't his favorite. McGuire
was the three-quarter majority owner.

  They had been pouring beer as fast as it would flow for the past hour and suddenly there was a lull.

  'Where's your friend Glitsky?' Moses asked. 'I thought he was going to be here.'

  'He might show yet – he said something about going down to Monterey. Priorities.' Hardy gestured at the throng. 'Glitsky or not, though, this looks like it's working.'

  'It may be our best idea ever,' Moses answered. He tended to hyperbole even when he wasn't drinking, and he'd had about four beers already.

  'It might be your best idea, but I personally have had better ones.'

  'Yeah, such as what?'

  'Such as marrying your sister.'

  Which, of course, Moses couldn't dispute.

  'Still,' Hardy was conciliatory. 'I have to admit I was worried.'

  McGuire had poured himself another paper cupful of stout. He drank off a third of it. 'About what?'

  'About what, he asks. Oh, nothing, Mose, it's been so mellow in the city lately, whatever could one find to worry about?'

  Moses drank again, shook his head. 'Not here. It would never happen here. Not in my bar.'

  'I've heard that song before ... never in San Francisco either, but guess what...?'

  Moses gestured. 'Hey, look out there now, Diz. Just look.'

  Hardy's eyes raked the crowd. There was a sea of faces, all kinds. 'Okay . . . so? This proves something?'

  'I think so, Diz. I really do. Hey, two days ago, all last week, you remember ... now look at this. We're moving on.'

  Hardy hit his Guinness tap and let an inch or two of the black nectar fall into his cup. He drank it off in a gulp, scanned the crowd one more time, turned to his brother-in-law. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Let's hope so.'

  The End

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