by The Hearing
“Like . . . not,” she said.
“Okay, maybe stylin’ a bit more.” He picked her up with one arm, kissed her on the cheek, put her back down, then narrowed his eyes at Hardy’s son. “Yo, Vin.”
“Cool hair, Isaac.” Vincent, eleven years old and the quiet one in the family, finally logged in.
“What hair?” Hardy put in. “He doesn’t have any hair.”
Vin ignored him. “Can I shave my head, too, Mom?”
Hardy answered for her. “The next time Uncle Abe smiles, Vin.”
“He’s smiling now.” Vincent thought he had him.
“This time doesn’t count. In fact, tonight doesn’t count.”
“Your father means the next separate time on another day.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Why not?” Frannie asked.
“Because Uncle Abe never smiles.”
“He does sometimes,” Hardy said. “And when he does, you can shave your head. Promise.”
“Promise?”
Glitsky joined the discussion. “You remind me, Vin, and I’ll make a special effort.”
Hardy turned to him. “It’s got to be a sincere smile. Not one of those phony ‘I’m going to rip your legs off in a minute’ smiles like cops make.”
“You can’t change the rules,” Vincent said. This was serious stuff. “You said a smile, Dad, just a smile.”
“Sometimes he smiles at home.” Orel was a hero to Hardy’s kids. “I could call you at home, Vin.”
“This whole discussion is pathetic,” Isaac said. But he was clearly enjoying it. “I go away for a few years and the level of discourse devolves to this point?”
“Discourse?” Hardy said. “Devolves? What is that? Is that college?” He turned to the bed. “Abe, you’ve got to help us here.”
But suddenly, Glitsky had lost all interest in the conversation. He was staring over Hardy’s shoulder. He was wearing his old face, his everyday face. The smile gone. All trace of it gone.
“Abe?” Hardy repeated.
And suddenly everyone else became aware of something, a different vibration. Heads turned. The silence was profound.
Just inside the doorway, Treya Ghent had stopped where she stood. She was holding a large mixed bouquet of winter greenhouse flowers—daisies, daffodils, carnations. Her daughter shifted nervously beside and a half step behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to interrupt. I just wanted . . . I thought . . .”
Glitsky cleared his throat and the awkwardness held until Frannie turned completely, broke a wide and genuine smile, moved toward her. “Those are beautiful,” she said. “Abe loves flowers. I should have brought some myself.”
It was nothing like Treya thought it would be. It hadn’t really occurred to her that he had a family, friends, a life. Since he had never functioned as a father to Elaine, she’d assumed he didn’t have that gene. Until he’d collapsed yesterday morning, he’d only been a cop to her, not a person.
Now here was Glitsky’s father, an old Jewish man of all things, yarmulke and all. Two well-behaved and good-looking boys. That awful attorney Hardy—Elaine’s killer’s lawyer—from the arraignment, and his pretty wife and sweet children.
She’d heard the conversation about one of them shaving his head before they’d seen her. The obvious, warm connection between everybody. It was the last thing she expected. The tough and heartless Lieutenant Glitsky. Uncle Abe?
People.
And now here she was in the midst of them. Introductions to Frannie, Dismas, Isaac, Nat.
A Hispanic woman, Rita, taking her flowers, exclaiming over them. Raney and Orel checking each other out, but cool about it. Fast eyes.
“We can’t really stay,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you were all right.” She felt she had to continue. “About yesterday, Lieutenant.”
“It wasn’t you,” he said.
But she shook that off. “I didn’t think . . .”
The lieutenant raised a palm. “Please. Stop. Okay? It wasn’t you,” he repeated. He turned to Frannie. “Somebody needs to tell Ms. Ghent she didn’t make this happen.”
“Yes, sir.” Frannie went with it. “You didn’t make this happen,” she said to Treya. She made eye contact, somehow making her feel welcome. Then back to the lieutenant. “What, though?”
“I’m starting to think it didn’t happen at all.” Frannie’s husband was being inclusive, too. There was none of the anger Treya had seen from him in the courtroom. He spoke matter-of-factly to her, humor in the tone. “Abe will sometimes do this kind of thing to get attention. He lives a sad and lonely existence.”
“We all feel sorry for him,” Frannie added.
The little boy, Vincent, couldn’t follow the irony. “We do? I don’t. I like Uncle Abe.”
“Thank you,” Glitsky said.
His mother patted him on the head. “We’re kidding, Vince. We like him, too. We don’t really feel sorry for him.”
“I do,” the attorney said, smiling. He, too, rubbed a hand in his boy’s hair, gave him a wink.
Treya could see that no one was going to acknowledge that she’d played a role in the lieutenant’s collapse. She realized with some surprise that these were good people, protecting her while supporting him.
Glitsky spoke to her. “I appreciate your coming down, I really do. But this would have happened anyway.”
She didn’t believe it for a minute. “Well,” she said, “I’m still sorry.”
Treya’s plan—apologize, drop the flowers and run—disintegrated in front of her. Dr. Campion came in and Frannie Hardy took control and dispatched Nat and Rita with the two teenagers and the younger kids down to the gift shop to get ice cream. So Treya’s daughter, now part of the gang, was gone and so they were staying at least until she returned.
When Campion left, the four that remained clustered around the bed. Treya and Frannie had the chairs, with Frannie’s husband and Abe’s son standing. Now without all the people diffusing the energy, Treya much more acutely felt like an outsider.
She sat listening to them all talk about Glitsky’s release, which the doctor thought would be Thursday, although everyone else seemed to think that would be too soon. But the lieutenant was explaining that was how they did it nowadays. “Besides,” he said, turning to Hardy, “if you’re doing the hearing a week after that, I’ve got some work to do.”
“Dad, you’re not going back to work.”
“Well . . .”
“Grandpa said you were on leave anyway.”
This was news to Treya. What did that mean, he was on leave? And if he was, when had it begun and why had he interviewed her?
But he was telling Isaac that he’d take it easy. He wouldn’t push things. Then he came back. “So Diz, did you ever talk to your client about the gun? The snitch who said he gave it to him?”
Hardy slapped his forehead. “I would have if I wasn’t brain-dead. But we just talked plea.”
Glitsky sat up straighter. “What about his plea?”
“No deals,” Hardy answered. “We go.”
The scar in the lieutenant’s lips went white. He was sitting forward now, his back off the mattress. “Why would you do that?”
“What do you mean, ‘why’?” Hardy asked.
Frannie spoke up. “I don’t think we need to talk about this now.” She was on her feet, up from the chair by the bed, the color high in her face. “I really don’t.”
Glitsky turned his face to her. “It’s okay, Fran, it’s fine. Just a little business.”
“It is not fine.” Flint in Frannie’s tone. “And I know you two. It’s not a little business.” She turned to her husband. “This can wait, Dismas, okay? This is exactly what the doctor meant five minutes ago when he said to avoid stress.”
“No.” Glitsky was trying to keep it light, normally not his strong suit. “He meant physical stress. I shouldn’t lift heavy objects, like that. This work stuff,” he indicated Hardy, “it’s just a
job. It rolls right off me.”
Isaac piped in. “I don’t think so.”
He turned to his son. “You haven’t been around, Ike. I’m much more mellow now.”
“Dad, five times as mellow would still put you in the top ten percent of uptight.”
Treya had to smile at that, but then Glitsky was looking at her. “But I did want to talk to you about Elaine, though. Before you leave?”
She looked to Frannie, as though for permission. A silence clamped down again over them all.
“Who’s Elaine?” Isaac asked.
Hardy jumped in, too fast, out of rhythm. “Elaine Wager. The victim in this case we were talking about.”
But it hung there. Everyone but Isaac knew, and they were all aware of it. Finally, Glitsky looked over to his son. “I’ve got to talk to you about Elaine, too.”
“What about her? I didn’t know her.”
“No, but—”
Frannie started. “Abe, I don’t know if now is the time . . .”
But he held up a hand. “If anybody should know.” He turned back to his son. “When I was about your age, Ike, I went out with Loretta Wager.”
“Who became the senator. Mom mentioned that you dated her. We all knew that.”
“Yeah, well, what maybe didn’t get mentioned is that we were pretty serious.” He hesitated, then came out with it. “Anyway, to make a long story short, a few years ago I found out I’d gotten her pregnant.”
“You didn’t know back then? When it happened?”
“She never told me. Suddenly she dumped me and married Dana Wager.”
“But it was your kid?”
He nodded. “Elaine. Yeah.”
Isaac ran a palm over his skull, looked around at the assemblage. “Wow.” But Isaac was an intelligent young man, and the other ramifications began to kick in. Treya could see him beginning to process them. “I mean . . .”
Footsteps and high-pitched laughter outside in the hallway stopped him. Then Rebecca exploded through the door at a dead run, a step or two ahead of her brother. “I win! I win!”
Treya thought that the lawyer and his wife gave a damn good example of what zero tolerance for inappropriate behavior really was. It did her heart good, since she’d just about come to believe she was the last of the breed. With no hesitation, both of them were laying down the law in tandem. Unheard of. “Beck! Hey! Vincent! Enough.”
“What are you doing? Don’t you know people are trying to sleep?”
“This is a hospital, get it? Sick people.”
“Think! Use your brains! Have a little respect, all right?”
By the time they were through and had marched both kids over and had them apologize, Nat, Rita and the teenagers were back, and Frannie was up by the bed, bussing Glitsky’s cheek. “That’s enough excitement for one night. We’ll be back tomorrow, maybe without children.”
“It’s Date Night,” Hardy said. “Definitely without children.”
Treya was standing, too. Raney had come back over by her side, put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Visiting hours weren’t officially over, but everybody was heading out, Rita and Nat shooing Orel over to his dad to say good night.
Although Isaac wasn’t quite ready. “What’s the earliest I can get back in here tomorrow?” he asked.
“Morning might be tricky,” Abe said, mentioning angiograms and perhaps some other testing. “But anytime after that.” He turned his head. “And Ms. Ghent?”
“Treya, please.”
“All right. Treya then. About Elaine. If you get a little time . . .”
She nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
With all the bedlam, Glitsky found it hard to believe that Roy had gone to sleep. He’d pulled the sheet around his bed, though, and the light was off on his side of the room. More tellingly, so was the TV, which had been gently droning for the entire rest of the day. If it was off, Roy was sleeping.
He wasn’t even slightly tired, but he turned the room light down, lowered the back of the bed slightly and settled himself against it. Nat had brought him a book by Patrick O’Brian called Master and Commander. According to his father, this was the first in a long series of seafaring tales that he was sure Abe would love. He’d loved Hornblower as a young man, and Nat thought this stuff was better, although Abe was skeptical. What could be better than Hornblower?
But the gift also delivered the subtle hopeful message that Abe would be around to read more books in the series, which had been running now for nearly thirty years. That Abe had never heard of it nagged slightly at him, but you set your priorities and he’d had other things he’d been doing. Reading was even among those things, but most of his reading over the years had been to improve his mind or to feed it more facts, which he consumed like the peanuts in his desk. The few novels he read tended to be mysteries, and with a few exceptions, more often than not he put them down halfway through, the law people who populated them bearing little or no resemblance to anyone in the real world of cops and killers in which he lived.
So books about the Royal Navy set a couple of centuries in the past? He couldn’t take the time.
Now, holding this new book in his hands, he wondered why that had been so. He closed his eyes, remembering. He used to love stories like this one promised to be—pure adventure, with the fore-t’gallant sails and the mizzenmasts, whatever they were, and the salt spray in your face as shot and ball peppered the quarterdeck.
“If Vincent were here, Mr. Hardy would have to let him shave his head.”
He started back into awareness, on some level equally thrilled both at the sound of the contralto laughter that accompanied his surprise and at the unexpected sight of the woman who’d produced it. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Treya said. “You looked so happy.” She pointed. “I love those books. Are you just starting?”
Sheepish, he looked down at the book in his hand. “I haven’t read a page yet. I was remembering Hornblower.”
“And smiling.”
“And smiling, I suppose. Don’t tell Hardy.”
“I won’t.” She was sitting in the chair, now moved up close to the head of the bed. Her hand rested on the railing. “Hornblower was great, too, wasn’t he?”
“Still is, I’d bet.” He looked at her, a question. Why was she here?
“On the ice cream run, your dad got the kids talking, even the teenagers.”
“Nat,” Glitsky said. “The guy’s a miracle.”
“Apparently. Anyway, it turns out my daughter and your son both play basketball for Washington. We, you and me, live about five blocks from each other. So I’m trying to work out with Raney when I could get back and talk to you about Elaine, and your dad overhears and asks me why don’t I just stay now while I’m here. He’ll take Raney home, make sure she’s locked in.” She shrugged apologetically. “It seemed like a good idea. I hope you don’t mind. Were you going to sleep? I could come back another day if you’re tired.”
“I’m not tired.”
“Good,” she said. She looked down. “I also didn’t really want to leave until I told you I was sorry. I mean, yesterday. And before even. I don’t think I’ve been fair to you.”
“It’s all right.”
“No it isn’t.” She took a breath. “I was sitting up last night, worrying about all this, not able to sleep. I told a little of it to my daughter, why I’d jumped all over you, and she said maybe you felt the same way Elaine had. Why she didn’t feel she could come to you.”
“She felt like it wasn’t her place. I was busy enough with my own life. I didn’t need her in it mucking it up. If it was important enough, I’d come to her.”
“Right.”
“Genetics.”
Her mouth softened. “Maybe that.”
“Funny how I’ve got all the excuses down pat.”
“It’s like you practiced them.”
“Plus, there was always tomorrow. I could always just decide it was time. Maybe if I’d known that she
knew . . .” He shook his head regretfully. “How stupid we are.”
She let a moment go by. “Can I ask you a question?”
“No.” At her reaction—a fractional clouding of her brow—he realized he’d hurt her somehow. He reached out his hand, touched hers on the railing, then withdrew it quickly. “I’m kidding. I’m a great kidder, famous for it, in fact.” He met her eyes. “You can ask me anything you want.”
“Your son mentioned you were on leave, but when you came by to interview me—”
“That was before.” He recounted enough of the story to give her the idea.
“They’re not going to fire you, are they?”
“Unlikely. Maybe knock me down a grade, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Back to doing cases. Or transfer me out of homicide, which would be worse.”
“But you were investigating Elaine?”
“That was because it was Elaine. Normally I don’t get involved with investigations.” A bitter chuckle. “Which is for the best if the hash I made of this is any indication. They’re all probably right. He just made a bad confession, but there isn’t any doubt. He did it.”
“But you’re not sure.”
Again, her eyes drew him. “No, not that exactly.” Then, “No. Not as sure as I want to be. In a lot of ways I just . . . I can’t accept it.” He shook his head, stopped.
“What?” The eyes pleaded with him. “What?”
And he gave in. “This will sound strange, even downright weird, but it’s as though she’s finally talking to me, telling me there has to be a better reason than a chance encounter with some junkie. And after all the denial I’ve had with her up to now, I just can’t make myself ignore it.” A pause. “Dumb, I know.”
She pondered a moment. “Why did you come to me first?”
A shrug. “As opposed to who else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Jonas? Her fiancé?”
“I would have gotten to him. But you were close by. I talked to Clarence Jackman and he told me that if she was involved in something squirrelly with her work or any of her projects, you’d probably know about it.”
A rueful expression. “Probably.”
“But you said there was nothing.”
