Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (33 page)

'We will pay you,' Kevin said. He was getting out his wallet. 'What do you want?'

Frank spread his hands. "That won't be necessary. Come on, Maggie, please move your car, let 'em pull out.'

Maggie, arms still folded across her chest, stared at the three others, tapping her foot once or twice, sighing. 'Oh, all
right
.' She slid back behind the wheel of her Mercedes, slammed the door closed, rolled down her window. 'This is not the end of this, Frank.'

Melanie was heading for her car. Frank fell in beside Kevin and the two of them walked to the button by the gate.

'I'll get the gate,' Frank said. 'I want to close it up after you're out.'

The Mercedes started up, pulled forward a couple of feet – enough to let the GEO out of the space – and Melanie hit the ignition. Kevin jogged a few ragged, painful steps in her direction.

When he got to the car he turned around. The gate was open, Frank standing by the button. Suddenly, just as Kevin was getting into the GEO, Frank snapped his fingers and called out. 'Maggie! Back up, quick! Stop 'em.'

At the same time, he turned and pushed the button to close the gate again. 'That's Kevin Shea! That's who it is! Kevin Shea!'

Melanie yelled, 'Get
in
,' and Kevin half fell into the front seat as the car jerked forward. The Mercedes had not yet had the time to react, but the gate was closing and Frank stood in the center of the drive, blocking them as they turned into it. Melanie leaned on the horn.

'I'm gonna have to ... to run him over ...'

'He'll jump out of the way! He'll have to.'

She pressed down on the accelerator and the tires squealed on the smooth concrete. The gate was nearly halfway closed. She kept her hand on the horn, heading toward Frank, whose hands were up in front of his face.

'I
can't
,' Melanie said. She hit the brakes. The gate slammed into Kevin's side of the door. Frank came forward a step and put his hands on the hood.

'Hold on,' Melanie said, and pressed her foot down, the sudden movement lifting Frank onto the hood as it went out over the sidewalk. He fell off into the street as she turned into it.

She ran the stop sign at the corner of Junipero Serra, turned right at the next one, then left, then back up to 19th Avenue, where the traffic was lighter and at least it appeared that no one knew who they were.

Melanie was driving north on 19th Avenue. The sun was setting below the clouds, bright red with smoke in the atmosphere.

Frank's recognizing Kevin built on the closeness of the previous night's escape. Neither said a word for seven blocks, until Kevin pointed. 'What's that?' On either side of them up ahead pillars of smoke were rising – new outbreaks beginning to erupt as the day wore to dusk. Ahead of them, the traffic was slowing.

'I don't know.'

She changed into the right lane. Ahead of them a crowd of people was visible a couple of intersections ahead. Were they throwing things onto passing cars? That was what it looked like. They could make out people running, coming out into the street. 'I'm turning,' she said.

Twenty minutes later they had parked at the end of Page and walked around the corner of Stanyan by the border of Golden Gate Park. Ann's apartment building was a U-shaped four-story brick structure that faced the park, with the entrance in the center, behind a smallish courtyard with a weed-filled garden, a waterless fountain and chipped Spanish tiling. The wind had collected volumes of paper trash and deposited them in the corners by the building.

Melanie let them into the apartment building with her key. When the door closed behind them she made sure it had locked, then something seemed to go out of her. She stopped and turned into Kevin, pressing herself against him, shaking. He enfolded her into him and they stood there a long moment, embracing as the last rays of the sun slanted through the ancient vestibule windows. Finally he lifted her chin and kissed her. 'We'd better get upstairs,' he said.

Ann's apartment was on the fourth floor in the front, overlooking both the scenic courtyard and, across Stanyan, the lawns and evergreens of Golden Gate Park.

As soon as they had let themselves in, Kevin crossed to the windows and pulled the blinds. He turned on a couple of low-watt lights, made a quick tour of the living room. Potted plants squatted on every available surface – a million plants. Also a video camera on a tripod – Ann was a film major – some books and CDs, a television and audio gear and telephone, botanical posters and prints of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bogart. It was a typical student's apartment, busier and more feminine but not really so different from Kevin's own place. He lowered himself down into the stuffed chair.

'Melanie?'

'What?'

She was standing by the entrance to the kitchen and turned. Their eyes met, and they froze with the realization of what they'd come to, what they were doing ....

Minutes passed. The room had darkened, the sun now fully down. Kevin lifted his body from the chair. Melanie was somewhere in the back half of the apartment. 'What are you doing?' he called.

'Might as well feed the fish since I'm here. And water the plants,' she called back.

Kevin looked around again. 'That could take weeks. How many plants does old Ann have?'

'I've never counted. She's only got three fish. Want to meet them?'

'It would give meaning to my life. But first maybe we should call Wes, find out how it all went.'

'Oh, come meet the fish. Wes is either going to be back or not, and either way we left the note saying we'd call. He'll wait.'

That was true enough, but Kevin wasn't disposed to wait. This was his life, and hers too, they were talking about. He made his way through the living room and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

Melanie was feeding the goldfish, her hands passing back and forth over the aquarium. She had taken off Wes's white shirt, which along with her bra was hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

Kevin stood in the doorway, watching the action of the smooth muscles in her back as she moved her arm over the water. She half-turned, her face betraying nothing, then came all the way around, facing him. 'I know we could call Wes right now,' she said, 'but then again I thought – '

He moved toward her.

Farrell was surprised at the note but couldn't blame them for their caution. They'd both had a hairy couple of days and he thought they had earned the right to get cautious. Still, Glitsky had given his word, and even though they were on opposite sides – prosecution and defense – he sensed the man played straight.

'Yo, Bart!'

He had the television set turned back on, had cracked another beer and was opening a can of dog food by the kitchen window that overlooked Junipero Serra when the doorbell rang from down below. At the box by his front door he pushed the intercom button.

'Wesley Farrell?'

Wesley? He thought. Not even his wife had called him Wesley. 'That's me,' he said.

'This is Sergeant Stoner, a special investigator for the district attorney's office. I have a warrant down here to search your apartment on information and belief that you may be harboring a fugitive ...'

Glitsky sat at his desk, fingers drumming on the blotter. After meeting with Farrell, his chat with Elaine had left him with the impression – incorrect, as it turned out – that the DA would be open to negotiation regarding the Kevin Shea issue. Somehow he would oversee Shea's technical arrest in the next twenty-four hours and this particular segment of the crisis would be over.

He had returned to homicide to find the place still deserted, which didn't bother him ... his troops were out there doing their jobs. He decided to catch up on his paperwork on the chance that the call from Wes Farrell would come in soon. Since the riots had begun, the run-of-the-mill homicides in the city had continued at their usual pace. Predictably, a couple of gang lords had decided to use the cover of the disturbances to mask a few raids on rival turf – last night a drive-by into a milling crowd had killed two children, wounded fourteen adults and left no known gang members even scratched. A typical result, but the case had to be assigned and followed up.

Likewise the Korean businessman who had been killed, and Glitsky had to make sure that his inspectors were trying to identify the killers. There were also the Molotov-cocktail fires and their victims, the North Beach domestic, the boys who had been pulled from their cars. The weight of it all eventually slowed him down. Four more folders to go, and he simply stopped.

For over a decade his life had been the study and investigation of a seemingly endless succession of violent deaths. It had bred in him a profound hatred of violence – possibly because of that, but also because it was part of Flo's protective nature – and he and Flo had never hit any of their children, which, he was convinced, was where it all began. A cuff here, a back of the hand there, the other abuses piling up – verbal, sexual, simple neglect. Nobody paid enough attention – it was a rough road and if you wanted it cleared you pushed people out of the way. You didn't say, 'May I be excused' – you kicked some ass.

He shook his head. The folders lay there, Post-its stuck on like Band-Aids. Forcing himself, he grabbed the next one, the file on the late Christopher Locke. He opened it and saw that Lanier's taped interview with Loretta last night was first up, transcribed in record time – probably one of the secretaries interested in what the senator would have had to say – grist for the Hall's thriving gossip mill.

The senator ...

And he'd just been thinking about Flo, about the way they'd tried to raise the kids ... he still had a picture of her in his desk drawer. Now he opened it, pulled it out. She was blonde, smiling, radiant, impossibly dead at forty.

The room, small enough in any event, closed in, finally wasn't there.

Flo had been so different from Loretta – that, he supposed, had been one of her attractions in the beginning. A white woman, tall, athletic rather than curvy, nurturing instead of combative, as Loretta had been before she'd – apparently – mellowed. Flo did not overvalue what Loretta liked to call the life of the mind. Flo valued life. She also wasn't competitive the way Loretta was. And, having less to prove, she lived on a different plane – more serene, more truly self-confident.

Loretta had always projected herself as supremely competent and sure of herself, but her life-of-the-party, nothing-can-touch-me persona was, Glitsky knew, mostly a front, a reaction to her roots. She had grown up the third of four children in a low-income section of San José. Her parents had been, in Glitsky's view, people of integrity and self-respect who had worked their whole lives, her mother in the same dry-cleaning establishment for over twenty years, her father in a variety of clerical or retail or service jobs – shoe salesman, short-order cook, bus driver, whatever he could get.

By the time Glitsky had met the parents, they had seemed old and used-up, even though they were probably close to his age now. Their first- and second-born sons, both of Loretta's older brothers, had been drafted and killed in Vietnam. Which went a long way to explain Loretta's early radicalization and identification with, especially, the Black Student Union. Her main issue when she had first met him was more that her black brothers were fighting the white man's war than that the objectives of the war might be wrong in themselves. Later, of course, the Sixties being what they were, that evolved, too.

Loretta's younger sister Estelle had already had one illegitimate child when Abe met her, and he had read in an article about the senator a few years back that her little sister was at that time eking out a welfare existence in Los Angeles with three children and a succession of men. The article said that Loretta and Estelle were no longer close (nor, Abe knew, had they ever been).

Flo had had none of that – nothing to scratch and claw her way out of. Resolutely middle-class, she had attended Gunn High School in Los Altos ('Stanford Prep'), then had switched gears and taken a swimming scholarship out to the Central valley – University of the Pacific in Stockton, of all places.

Glitsky had met her in San Francisco at the Jewish Community Center gym, where he went to work out and where she used the pool. Her goggles had been fogged up and he'd been swimming laps, and she executed a perfect swimmer's shallow dive into him, nearly giving them both concussions. (Later she would say she had noticed him at the pool and couldn't think of any better way to introduce herself.) At UOP she had majored in child psychology (now called early childhood learning), after which she had put in two years teaching pre-schoolers at the Community Center. Then, as it turned out, she was ready to have a few children of her own. Glitsky and Flo had fashioned a successful existence together. Many of the 'issues' that had seemed so important to him when he had been with Loretta in college faded from their everyday lives, and he found he didn't much miss them. Yes, he had dark skin and, yes, he had suffered the usual prejudice when he had been younger and even afterward, but, though it continued to enrage him when it occurred (and Flo, too, for that matter), they refused to let it become their focus –
that
remained the two of them, the kids, the family. He made no apologies for his private life – this was who he had become and it was worthwhile.