Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (34 page)

It was obvious why the world's injustice cut so much more deeply into Loretta's flesh, her psyche, her life. Given her own younger sister, given the way it so often turned out for black women, it was small wonder the senator was so protective of Elaine, her own daughter. Glitsky understood, for the first time now, that Loretta had pulled some strings with the District Attorney to set up her daughter in her position.

He was even starting to see, perhaps dimly to understand, why she might have felt the attraction of an older, white, rich Dana Wager so compelling, more even than young love had been. She wasn't going to end up powerless and in despair, the way her parents had. Good people, but... good didn't guarantee anything.

Funny, the differences, he thought... Loretta had married white, pretty much against her own politics, to get out of the ghetto, to insure she would never have to go back. And now she was making her amends, identifying with her blackness, rationalizing that Elaine's figurative one drop of black blood made her one hundred percent black. Glitsky, on the other hand, had married white because he had fallen in love with a woman who had happened to be white.

Now whatever was happening between Loretta and him was because of their chemistry, not their color. On her side, did that make it purer? On his, what...?

What if they had stayed together from the beginning?

It was, he figured, better all around that they hadn't. Certainly, Flo had centered his life, took him out of currents that might have washed him away. And Loretta had done very well by herself. To the objective eye, she had reached a pinnacle of the American Dream never before touched by anyone of her background.

But now ...

Well, now they were both grown, both free. As Abe's father had told him, the thing to do now was look ahead. Loretta already knew – her life had taught her – that it was pretty much all random. Events, basically, could not be controlled. And Flo's death had reminded him of that, rocked him, knocked him off balance.

Maybe now he and Loretta, by their separate routes, had finally arrived at close to the same place. Maybe his own sense of balance could be restored. He didn't know. That, too, might be random.

But he had to find out, keep trying until it got clear.

The room came back into focus. Where had he been? He looked down at the open file on the desk ... oh yes, Loretta's transcript, probably the rest of Strout's forensics, the microscopies. He flipped a page, scanning the lines of type. He didn't need to read it again – he'd gotten the story from her the previous night. He'd talk to Marcel Lanier tomorrow. Now she was at City Hall and had asked him to come by on his way home. Just for a minute even, she said.

Pulling his flight jacket off the chair behind him, he closed the folder and left it in the middle of his desk, hitting the light on his way out.

'Hey!'

He stopped. Ridley Banks was sitting at his own desk in the dusky light.

'Sorry,' Glitsky said, 'I didn't know anybody'd come back.'

'You were in a trance. I didn't want to interrupt.'

Glitsky flipped the switch and the light came back on. 'How'd it go?'

Banks sat back in his chair. 'Jamie O'Toole seems to be getting some recollection that there might have been a mob. He might have even seen someone in it. I think it'll come to him in a dream or something real soon. And speaking of him, you know the last two words a redneck says?'

Glitsky shook his head.

With a down-home accent, Banks said, 'Watch this!' And waited.

Impassive, Glitsky stood by the door. 'That's the joke?'

'I love that joke. "Watch this!" Think about it. It gets funnier.'

'I will.' Mystified. 'Meanwhile, what about Mullen and McKay?'

'These guys!' Banks shook his head. "These guys are just too clever.' He told Glitsky about the 'mistake' as to whose sliding doors had been broken through.

'See if you can find their doctors,' Glitsky said, and went on to explain a little about how the knife fitted into the picture. 'If there are knife wounds, not caused by breaking glass, that means they were close enough to Arthur Wade to get cut. If
that's
the case, we've got enough to bring them both down, book them with something. I heard a good story today about what started it all off.'

A questioning look. 'So what about Kevin Shea?'

'I expect we'll be seeing Shea before too long. These stories I've been hearing, they come from his lawyer.'

'He's got a lawyer? He's still in town?'

Glitsky nodded. 'Interesting, isn't it? Makes you wonder. And guess what?'

"The lawyer says he didn't do it?'

'Sometimes you do this clairvoyance thing, Ridley — it's spooky. But yes, he does say that. And here's the interesting part – it might even have some truth in it.' He came up to Banks's desk and sat on a corner of it.

Banks sat back. 'You're not telling me Shea had no part of it?'

'Off the record, I think there's even a chance of that. He might be the good guy, might have tried to cut Wade down.'

Banks chewed on that a minute. 'Uh oh.'

'I know. But we're still bringing him in, let it work itself out. You seen the other guys?'

'Marcel went home. He was talking about getting some sleep. Griffin, I don't know, someplace.'

He hesitated, and Glitsky read it. 'What?'

'Nothing.'

But Glitsky knew what remained on his inspector's mind – Banks was tempted to say a few more words about his Pacific Moon theory, that there was something new he had discovered, or remembered, about Loretta Wager and how they said she had laundered money she'd allegedly smuggled out of Colombia in 1978. Banks, eyeing his lieutenant, thought he recognized in Glitsky a warning not to bring it up. Not now. Not, at least, until all this upheaval in the city was in the past.

Neither man said anything else. Glitsky stopped at the door, half-turned. 'Watch this!' he said, deadpan, and hit the light switch again.

Loretta Wager was sitting in her small office at City Hall. Her desk was covered by a map of the city. She had been letting her fingers do the walking and now she sat back, folded her arms and allowed herself a moment of congratulation. She was proud of what she had accomplished in so short a time.

All that had to happen now to make it complete was the arrest of Kevin Shea, and Abe Glitsky had told her that that was imminent. Perhaps, even without Abe, it had already occurred.

Her eyes went again to the map and she rubbed a hand over it. What a beautiful city! Even the ugly parts ...

The Hunter's Point Naval Reservation covered almost three times the ground area of all of Candlestick Point – it was nearly half the size of the Presidio. Unlike the Presidio, however, the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation was flat, windswept, nearly treeless. The ground under it was poisoned by toxic waste. Its open spaces were dead or gone to seed; its buildings squat, deserted, crumbling. It abutted the most pernicious ghetto in San Francisco, the nadir of the Bay View District, called home by Jerohm Reese. No one was ever going to make a movie entitled
Hunter's Point Naval Reservation
as they had about the Presidio.

Loretta Wager knew the place well. Its negatives didn't bother her. You took negatives and turned them to your advantage, that was how politics worked. That was how life worked.

Take Alan Reston, for example. Reston was the son of perhaps her largest single contributor, Tyrone 'Duke' Reston, who years ago had begun bottling what, in Loretta's opinion, was the finest rib sauce in the world. Alan Reston, his son, had even campaigned for her directly, proving to her that he could be a player of the first order. Then she had supported him in his bid for deputy state attorney general. And then the Chris Locke vacancy had happened ... She needed a conservative African-American in Locke's position and with enough personal authority to continue delivering the white moderate vote in San Francisco. Alan fit the bill perfectly.

The negative was that because he was a crime-busting prosecutor he was not exactly aligned with the African Nation movement. He had no problem with putting people – be they black or otherwise – in jail. Philip Mohandas did not want to go near him, and Loretta had already positioned Mohandas to be the voice of the current outrage, the one Mayor Conrad Aiken would hear.

Loretta had wanted Reston in the DA's office, and she needed to convince Mohandas to sell the idea to Aiken. After all, she had argued to Philip, it wouldn't be all bad. Reston was African-American, as Locke had been. Mohandas, in pushing Reston, would have an opportunity to talk about Drysdale, get his message out there.

But she needed more. Mohandas told her he wasn't going to 'betray my principles,' not for just that. Which had made her think of the old line: 'We've already determined what you are. Now we're just haggling about the price.'

How about if she could somehow deliver to Mohandas control of the huge tract of prime real estate that was the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation? Sitting as it did right on the bay, with some of the best views in the city, in the heart of an African-American cultural enclave, the place was a diamond in the rough, simply waiting for the right vision, the leader who could make its facets shine.

Loretta was in fact a member of the Parks Reclamation Commission and sat on the Committee on Decommissioned Military Installations in the Senate. She knew that the site was a multi-million dollar headache for the federal government. Estimates on the cleanup of the toxics alone – if it could be done at all, and opinions varied widely on that – ran to over $30 million. After that gargantuan task had been accomplished, and it was then designated as a national park (as the Presidio had been), the renovations and improvements necessary before it actually could be opened to the public would cost an additional fifty-five to one hundred fifty million dollars. Finally, add to that the cost of administering the park – twelve thousand dollars a day – and the Hunter's Point Naval Reservation had to be seen, in even the kindest light, as a negative. But Mohandas needed to know none of this.

There were other considerations. First, she was certain she could in fact deliver. She'd been working for months now on some version of what was developing as her final plan. Because it was such a white elephant, Loretta knew that the federal government would like nothing better than to simply
give
the HPNR away, wash its hands of it, goodbye. Naturally, bureaucracies being what they were, this couldn't just happen in the normal course of events.

But that was the very point of the past few days – the normal flow of events had been radically altered. Symbols were needed, drastic action, red tape cut through to get the message across – we're all in this together, on the state and national level, good faith needed to be
demonstrated
, not talked about.

And so, early that morning Loretta had pitched the final draft of her proposal to a couple of her senatorial colleagues, as well as to the president's chief of staff, and it had been immediately embraced as brilliant and even visionary by each of them – the idea of an executive order that would release the HPNR to a trustee who would pledge to develop the site as a camp for underprivileged children. It would be a fine opportunity for the president to demonstrate his sensitivity to the plight of inner-city youth – give them a place to go, to play, to learn. (It would also get rid of a massive two-hundred-million-dollar administrative nightmare.) Of course, sources close to the president would leak that Senator Wager had come up with this brilliant idea.

And who better to be the trustee than Philip Mohandas – a man with a
vision
who had shown even in this crisis a willingness to compromise for consensus? Mohandas had an undoubted commitment to the people he'd be serving, an organization already in place to administer the project. The moderate Senator Wager would vouch for his good intentions.

Finally, she had told Philip, he could expect federal funding (not even including what he could expect in matching or co-payment funds from the state government in Sacramento and the city of San Francisco) in the neighborhood of twelve million per year. A million a month. No taxes. Essentially – cash.

And, like cash, it was nearly impossible to keep perfect tabs on it. No one really even expected it. So Philip Mohandas had gone to Conrad Aiken and sold Alan Reston to the city of San Francisco as its new District Attorney.

Chris Locke's death, Alan Reston, Philip Mohandas, the HPNR – all potential negatives, and wasn't it marvelous to see how they all seemed to be working out?

'Let me drive. You look exhausted.'

Glitsky hesitated briefly, then shrugged and handed his keys over to Loretta. 'I won't argue.'

'And I'm paying for dinner, too.'

'I don't—'

'No discussion. Senators do not brook argument with lesser mortals, which includes everyone except the President, who doesn't brook much argument himself.'

Glitsky enjoyed her, no doubt about it. He was crossing in front of the Plymouth, going to the passenger side, smiling. 'What about the Vice-President?'

She gave him a disdainful look. 'He's just a senator who doesn't get to vote very often. Definitely a lesser mortal.'