The Oath (3 page)

A
t around 6:20 on the morning of Tuesday, April 10, a forty-seven-year-old businessman named Tim Markham was on the last leg of his customary jog. Every weekday when he wasn’t traveling, Markham would run out the driveway of his mansion on McLaren within minutes on either side of 5:45. He would turn right and then right again on Twenty-eighth Avenue, jog down to Geary, go left nearly a mile to Park Presidio, then left again back up to Lake. At Twenty-fifth, he’d jog a block right to Scenic Way, cut down Twenty-sixth, and finally turn back home on Seacliff where it ran above Phelan Beach.

In almost no other ways was Markham a creature of habit, but he rarely varied either the route of his run or the time he took it. This morning—garbage day in the neighborhood—he was struck by a car in the intersection just after he left the sidewalk making the turn from Scenic to Twenty-sixth. The impact threw him against one of the trash receptacles at the curb and covered him in refuse.

Markham had been jogging without his wallet and hence without benefit of identification. Although he was a white man in physically good health, he hadn’t yet shaved this morning. The combination of the garbage surrounding him with his one-day growth of beard, his worn-down running shoes, and the old sweats and ski cap he wore made it possible to conclude that he was a homeless man who’d wandered into the upscale neighborhood.

When the paramedics arrived from the nearby fire station, they went right to work on him. Markham was bleeding from severe head trauma, maybe had punctured and collapsed a lung. He’d obviously broken several bones including his femur. If this break had cut an artery, it was a life-threatening injury all by itself. He would clearly need some blood transfusions and other serious trauma intervention immediately if he were going to have a chance to survive.

The ambulance driver, Adam Lipinski, was a longtime veteran of similar scenes. Although the nearest emergency room was at Portola Hospital, twenty blocks away in the inner Richmond District, he knew both from rumor and personal experience that Portola was in an embattled financial state right now. Because it was forbidden by law to do otherwise, any hospital would have to take this victim into the ER and try to stabilize him somewhat. But if he was in fact homeless and uninsured, as Lipinski suspected, there was no way that Portola would then admit him into the hospital proper.

Lipinski wasn’t a doctor, but he’d seen a lot of death and knew what the approach of it could look like, and he was thinking that this was one of those cases. After whatever treatment he got in the ER, this guy was going to need a stretch in intensive care, but if he didn’t have insurance, Lipinski was all but certain that Portola would find a way to declare him fit to move and turf him out to County.

Last month, the hospital had rather notoriously transferred a day-old baby—
a baby!
—to County General after she’d been delivered by emergency C-section in the ER at Portola in the middle of the night, six weeks premature and addicted to crack cocaine. The mother, of course, had no insurance at all. Though some saint of a doctor, taking advantage of the administration’s beauty sleep, had simply ordered the baby admitted to Portola’s ICU, by the next day someone had decided that the mother and child couldn’t pay and therefore had to go to County.

Some Portola doctors made a stink, arguing that they couldn’t transfer the mother so soon after the difficult surgery and birth—she was still in grave condition and transporting her might kill her, and the administration had backed down. But it countered that the baby, Emily, crack addiction and all, would clearly survive the trip across town. She would be transferred out. Separated from her mother within a day of her birth.

At County General, Emily had barely held on to life for a day in the overcrowded special unit for preemies. Then Jeff Elliot’s “CityTalk” column in the
Chronicle
had gotten wind of the outrage and embarrassed Portola into relenting. If not for that, Lipinski knew that the poor little girl probably wouldn’t have made it through her first week. As it was, she got readmitted to Portola’s ICU, where she stayed until her mother left ten days later, and where the two of them ran up a bill of something like seventy thousand dollars. And all the while politicos, newspaper people, and half the occupants of their housing project—whom the administration accused of stealing drugs and anything else that wasn’t tied down—generally disrupted the order and harmony of the hospital.

In the wake of that, Portola put the word out—this kind of admitting mistake wasn’t going to happen again. Lipinski knew beyond a doubt that once today’s victim was minimally stabilized, Portola would pack him back up in an ambulance and have him taken to County, where they had to admit everybody, even and especially the uninsured. Lipinski wasn’t sure that the victim here would survive that second trip and even if he did, the ICU at County was a disaster area, with no beds for half the people who needed them, with gurneys lining the halls.

But there was still time before he had to make that decision. The paramedics were trying to get his patient on a backboard, and the police had several officers knocking on doors and talking to people in the crowd that had gathered to see if anyone could identify the victim. Even rich people, snug in their castles, unknown to their neighbors, might recognize the neighborhood bum.

Because the body was so broken, it took longer than he’d originally estimated, but eventually they got the victim hooked up and into the back. In the meantime, Lipinski had decided that he was going directly to County. Portola would just screw around too much with this guy, and Lipinski didn’t think he’d survive it. He’d just shifted into gear and was preparing to pull out when he noticed a couple of cops running up with a distraught woman in tow.

He knew what this was. Shifting back into park, he left the motor running, opened his door, and stepped out into the street. As the cops got to him, he was ready at the back door, pulling it open. Half walking, half running, the woman was a few steps behind them. She stepped up inside and Lipinski saw her body stiffen, her hands come up to cover her mouth. “Oh God,” he heard. “Oh God.”

He couldn’t wait any longer. Slamming the door shut behind her, he ran back and hopped into his seat. They had their identification. And he was going to Portola.

I
n the days long ago before he’d hit the big four-oh, Dismas Hardy used to jog regularly. His course ran from his house on Thirty-fourth Avenue out to the beach, then south on the hard sand to Lincoln Way, where he’d turn east and pound the sidewalk until he got to Ninth and the bar he co-owned, the Little Shamrock. If it was a weekend or early evening, he’d often stop here to drink a beer before age wised him up and slowed him down. Later on, the beverage tended to be a glass of water. He’d finish his drink and conclude the four-mile circuit through Golden Gate Park and back up to his house.

The last time he’d gotten committed to an exercise program, maybe three years ago, he’d made it the first week and then about halfway through the second before he gave up, telling himself that two miles wasn’t bad for a forty-seven-year-old. He’d put on a mere eight pounds this past decade, much less than many of his colleagues. He wasn’t going to punish himself about his body, the shape he was in.

But then last year, his best friend, Abe Glitsky, had a heart attack that turned out to be a very near thing. Glitsky was the elder of the two men by a couple of years, but still, until it happened, Hardy had never considered either himself or Abe anywhere near old enough to have heart trouble. The two men had been best friends since they’d walked a beat together as cops just after Hardy’s return from Vietnam.

Now Glitsky was the chief of San Francisco’s homicide detail. Half-black and half-Jewish, Glitsky was a former college tight end. No one among his colleagues would ever have thought of describing the lieutenant as anything but a hard-ass. His looks contributed to the rep as well—a thick scar coursed his lips top to bottom under a hatchet nose; he cultivated a fiercely unpleasant gaze. A buzz-cut fringe of gray bounded a wide, intelligent forehead. Glitsky didn’t drink, smoke, or use profanity. He would only break out his smile to terrify staff (or small children for fun). Six months ago, when he’d married Treya Ghent, the administrative assistant to the new district attorney, several of his inspectors had bet that the new lifestyle would mellow him out considerably. They were still paying the installments.

Hardy was a successful defense attorney. Though he and Glitsky were on opposite sides of the fence professionally, there was also most of a lifetime of history between them. When Glitsky’s first wife, Flo, had died some years before, Hardy and his wife, Frannie, had taken his three boys in to live with them until Abe could work his way through some of the emotional and logistical upheaval. Last fall, Hardy had been the best man at Abe’s wedding.

They didn’t talk about it—they were guys after all—but each was a fixed point of reference in the other’s life.

The heart attack got their attention.

Since a month or so after Abe’s marriage, they’d fallen into some semblance of a regular exercise program, where a couple of days a week one would goad or abuse the other into agreeing to do something physical. After the macho need to demonstrate their awesome strength and breathtaking endurance to each other in the first few weeks had almost made them quit the whole thing because of all the aches and pains, they finally had arrived at a brisk walk a couple of times a week, or perhaps throwing some kind of ball on the weekend.

This morning they were eating up maybe three miles an hour walking on the path around Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park. It was a cool and clear morning, the sun visible in the treetops. A mist hung over the water, and out of it at the near shore a swan with her brood of cygnets appeared.

Glitsky was talking work, as usual, complaining about the politics surrounding the appointment of two inexperienced inspectors to his detail of elite investigators in reaction to the unexplainable renaissance of hit-and-run accidents in the City by the Bay. In the past twelve months, Glitsky was saying, ninety-three persons had been struck by motor vehicles within the city and county. Of these, twenty-seven had died. Of the sixty-six injury accidents that didn’t result in deaths, fourteen were hit and runs.

“I love it how you rattle off all those numbers,” Hardy said. “Anybody would swear you knew what you were talking about.”

“Those are the real stats.”

“I’m sure they are. Which is why I’m glad we’re on this path and not the street where we could be senselessly run down at any moment. But how do these numbers affect your department? I thought hit and runs weren’t homicides.”

Glitsky glanced sideways at him. “Technically, they are when somebody dies.”

“Well, there you go. That’s why they come to you. You’re the homicide detail.”

“But we don’t investigate them. We have never investigated them. You want to know why? First, because there’s a separate detail cleverly named ‘hit and run.’”

“That’s a good name if they do what I think,” Hardy said.

“It’s a fine name,” Glitsky agreed. He knew, although the police department would deny it as a matter of course, that no hit-and-run incidents—even the homicides—were more than cursorily investigated by inspectors. What usually happened was that a couple of members of the hitand-run detail would take the paperwork at the Hall of Justice the day after the incident. Maybe they would go to the scene of an accident and see if they could find a witness to provide a description or license number of the vehicle. If that failed, and there were no good eyewitnesses in the report, that was essentially the end of the investigation. If they had a license number, they punched it into their computers to see if they had a street address associated with the vehicle. Sometimes, if the accident got a lot of press and they had a vehicle description, they would call a body shop or two and see if any cars matching the hit-and-run vehicle had surfaced. Usually the answer was no. “It’s a fine department, even. But it doesn’t do what we do, which is investigate murders.”

“In spite of your detail’s name, which indicates an interest in all homicides.”

“Hence the confusion,” Glitsky said. “Some of our civic leaders remain unclear on the concept.”

They walked in silence for another moment. “What’s second?” Hardy asked.

“What’s second what?”

“You said you don’t investigate hit-and-run homicides, first, because there’s a separate hit-and-run detail. When you say first, it implies there’s a second.”

Glitsky’s pace slackened; then both men stopped. “Second is that hit-and-run homicides tend not to be murders. In fact, they’re
never murders
.”

“Never say never.”

“This time you can. You want to know why?”

“It’s hard to ditch the murder weapon?”

“That’s one reason. Another is that it’s tough to convince your intended victim to stand in front of your car when there are no witnesses around so you can run him over. Most people just plain won’t do it.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Glitsky said, “is that with twenty-seven dead people in twelve months, the citizenry is apparently alarmed.”

“I know I am,” Hardy commented. “Perpetually.”

“Yeah, well, as you may have read, our illustrious Board of Supes has authorized special funding for witness rewards and to beef up the investigation of all vehicular homicides.”

“And a good idea it is.”

“Wrong. It’s a bad idea,” Glitsky said. “There’s no special investigation of vehicular homicides to begin with, not even in hit and run. Ninety percent of ’em, you got a drunk behind the wheel. The other ten percent, somebody’s driving along minding their own business and somebody runs out from between two cars in front of them—
blam!
Then they freak and split. They probably weren’t even doing anything wrong before they left the scene. These are felony homicides, okay, because the driver is supposed to stick around, but they are not murders.”

“And this concerns you because…?”

“Because now and for the past two months I’ve had these two new politically connected clowns—excuse me, inspectors—in my detail that I’ve been telling you about, and they seem to be having trouble finding meaningful work. And let’s say that this hasn’t gone exactly unnoticed among the rest of my crack staff, who by the way refer to them as the ‘car police.’”

“Maybe they mean it as a compliment,” Hardy said.

Glitsky shook his head in disgust, then checked his watch. “Let’s walk.”

Hardy could imagine the plight of the new inspectors, and knew that their treatment at the hands of the veteran homicide cops wouldn’t be pretty. Despite all the scandal and controversy that had ravaged the self-esteem of other details in the police department over the past few years, the twelve men and women inspectors who served in homicide considered themselves the elite. They’d worked their way up to this eminence, and their jobs mattered to them. They took pride in what they did, and the new guys would not fit in. “So abuse is being taken?” Hardy asked.

“Somebody painted ‘Car Fifty-four’ on their city issue. Then you know the full-size streetlight we’ve had in the detail for years? Somehow it’s gotten plugged in and set between the two guys’ desks, so they can’t see each other when they sit down. Oh, and those little metal cars kids play with? Six or eight new ones every day on their desks, in their drawers, everywhere.”

“I guess we’re moving into the abuse realm.”

Glitsky nodded. “That would be fair to say.”

At a little after nine o’clock, Glitsky sat behind his desk in his small office on the fourth floor of the Hall of Justice. The door was closed. His two new men—Harlen Fisk and Darrel Bracco—had so far been called out on injury hit and runs about ten times in their two months here, and in theory they should have been rolling already on this morning’s accident involving Tim Markham. But this time, they were seeking their lieutenant’s guidance before they moved.

Glitsky blamed neither Fisk nor Bracco for being upset with the conditions they’d endured to date in the detail, but until this morning, he couldn’t say he’d lost any sleep thinking about it. They were political appointees and they deserved what they got in their brief stops up the promotion ladder, hopscotching over other inspectors who were smarter, more qualified, and worked harder.

Harlen Fisk was the nephew of City Supervisor Kathy West. He went about six three, two fifty, and was self-effacing almost to the point of meekness. Darrel Bracco was trim, crisp, clean, ex-army, the terrier to Fisk’s Saint Bernard. His political juice was a little more obscure than his partner’s, but just as potent. His father, Angelo Bracco, had worn a uniform for thirty years, and now was Mayor Washington’s personal driver—Bracco would have the mayor’s ear whenever he wanted.

So these men could just as easily have gone whining to their supporters and Glitsky could right at this moment be getting a formal reprimand from Chief Rigby, who’d heard from the mayor and a supervisor that he was running his detail in an unprofessional manner. But they hadn’t gone over his head. Instead, they were both here in his office, coming to him with their problem. The situation gave him pause and inclined him to listen to what they were saying, if not with sympathy, then at least with some respect for their position.

Bracco was standing at attention, and Glitsky had been talking for a while now, reprising many of the salient points of his earlier discussion with Dismas Hardy. “That’s why our office here in homicide is on the fourth floor,” he concluded, “with the lovely view of the roof of the medical examiner’s office, whereas hit and run has a back door that opens into the alley where the waste from the jail’s kitchen comes. Murderers are bad people. Hit-and-run drivers have made an unfortunate life choice. There’s a difference.”

Bracco sighed. “So there’s no real job here, is there?”

Glitsky came forward in his chair, brought his hands together on the desk before him. “I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

The young man’s face clouded over. “So then why were we brought onboard?”

This called for a careful response. “I understand both of you know some people. Maybe they don’t really understand some technical matters.”

Fisk was frowning. “What about the man who was hit this morning, Markham?”

“What about him?” Glitsky asked.

“He wasn’t dead at the scene, but if he does die, then what?”

“Then, as I understand it, you get the case from H and R.”

“And do what with it?” Bracco asked.

“Try to find the driver? I don’t know.” Glitsky—nothing he could do—spread his palms, shrugged. “Look, guys,” he said, “maybe I could talk to the chief and see if he can arrange some kind of move. You both might want to think about transferring to gangs or robbery or someplace. Do some good work on some real cases, work your way back up to here, where you’ll get some real murders, which this is not.”

Bracco, still in the at-ease position, wanted to know his assignment. “In the meanwhile, we’re here. What do you want us to do, sir? On this morning’s accident?”

The entire situation was stupid, but in Glitsky’s experience, stupidity was about the most common result of political solutions. Maybe these boys would learn some lesson. “You want my advice? Go out there yourselves. Look a little harder than H and R would. Maybe you’ll find something they missed.”

They weren’t happy about it, but Bracco and Fisk thoroughly canvassed the immediate neighborhood. Although they found no witnesses to the event itself, they did not come up completely empty-handed.

At very near to the time of the accident, a forty-fiveyear-old stockbroker named John Bandolino had come out of his house on Seacliff just west around the corner from Twenty-sixth to pick up his newspaper. He was on his way back inside when suddenly he heard a car with a bad muffler accelerate rapidly, then squeal around the corner. Since this was normally a serene neighborhood, Bandolino ran back down to the street to see if he could identify the troublemaker who was making so much noise so early in the morning. But the car was by then too far away to read the license plate. It was green, though, probably American made. Not a new car, certainly.