Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (37 page)

He kept walking, step after step. His factual voice. 'Yes there is.'

'I don't suppose you get to Washington much.'

'That's a good guess.'

She stopped him, studied the sand, drew a few lines in it with her toes. 'I'm here at the recess, couple of times during the year, mostly campaigning.'

Over her head the breaking waves had a phosphorescence. Glitsky thought he saw the lights of a tanker out at the horizon. Behind him rose the faint wail of a siren.

'Okay,' he said.

Her arms were around his waist. 'Would you mind very much hugging me a minute?'

She was holding him tight, her body pressed against him. He felt a shiver pass through her. 'Are you cold?'

Her head shook. 'That's not it.' He kept holding her. 'You tell yourself you don't need this,' she whispered, almost as though it were to herself.

'I know.'

'You get good at it. You have to.'

Glitsky didn't trust himself to say much. 'Yep.'

Gradually, her arms let him go, fell to her sides. He released her and she stepped back. Even in the dim lights from the moon and the street behind him, her eyes were liquid, shining. The hint of a smile fluttered and died. 'Senators aren't allowed to cry. It's in the oath.'

He touched her cheek.

'I want to ask you to stay with me.'

He shook his head no. 'You said it yourself. You've got to give Elaine some time. She needs you. And I've got to check in. If Farrell's called ... to say nothing of the fourteen messages which my trained police eye sees blinking on your answering machine. And tomorrow looks to be another long one.'

They were just inside her front door. 'Are you always this responsible?'

'Yes, ma'am. Like yourself, I'm a humble servant of the public.'

'All right,' she said, pulling him down and kissing him. She opened the door, looked out theatrically, back and forth. 'All right, it's all clear. No reporters.' She faced him. 'Come to think of it, maybe I should start getting a little worried about no reporters. Where have they been? They should be here.'

'Staking out your house ...?'

She hugged him again. 'I'm teasing you, Lieutenant. Now get out of here. As it is, I'm going to need a cold shower before I'm going to be able to get my head back into my work.'

Glitsky's scar stretched a little. 'Now you didn't say anything about a shower...'

She pushed him outside. 'Git... but tomorrow.'

He pointed a finger at her. 'Tomorrow.'

He walked to the car and stared back at her mansion, which was, he thought, far more intimidating than the woman herself.

It must have been Dana's. It was strange to think of her living here, so close to him, all these years. Of course, for most of them, he'd had Flo, he hadn't been looking, told himself he wouldn't have seen it if it had danced in front of him.

Another siren, this one not far away. He turned and looked at the orange glow of more flames somewhere in the eastern sky. Come on, Mr Farrell, he thought, let's get this over with.

It was still early enough – not yet ten. And he knew no one was home chez Glitsky. It was literally the most free that he'd been in probably fifteen years and he was going to check back in at work. Somebody might need him.

He got in the car. The seat was still jammed up under the steering wheel where Loretta had needed it. He smiled to himself and said 'one two three,' pushing it back to where he could drive. Small packages, he was thinking. What was that expression? What was it that came in them – good things? Or was it dynamite?

This late at night Glitsky's first inclination was to pull directly up to the front of the Hall on Bryant Street and park along the curb. He was aware of heavy traffic even north of Market, and by the time he got where he worked he was barely crawling. Black-and-whites were double- and triple-parked along the entire length of the block. Near the center of the street, by the entrance to the Hall, where he'd been interviewed earlier in the day, the television vans had staked their turf. There was a line of busses for transporting people. He could see the traffic backed up both coming off the Freeway at 7th and down from the lower Mission on Bryant, and he knew at least one of the other side streets was a parking lot. Finally, turning into an alley jammed with what he knew were unmarked police cars parked on the curbs and sidewalks, he crept through the one open lane to the city lot behind the Hall.

A long, partially covered corridor ran between the new jail and the old morgue and led to the back door of the Hall. Although it had grill-covered light bulbs spaced infrequently, at this time of night the walkway had a spacey, almost eerie dimness. Maybe it was in contrast to the startling brightness visible through the tall windows in the Hall's lobby or just the sense that you were entering some kind of cave that happened to abut where they stored dead people, but when it was dark out, this walkway always gave Glitsky the creeps. He half-expected bats to be scared out of their resting places when he passed, exploding by him in a flurry of wings and squeaks.

So he was hurrying and didn't even notice John Strout until the man said hello from the shadowed entrance to the morgue.

After Glitsky landed, the coroner smiled genially. 'I didn't mean to startle y'all.'

'You're working late.' He gestured toward the main building. 'So's everybody else.'

Strout nodded. 'I don't suppose you're down here just to take the waters, either, Lieutenant.'

'I don't suppose so.'

'Anything specific?'

This was an unusual question from Strout. It could be he was making conversation, but Glitsky suddenly didn't think so. 'Not really,' he replied. Then, on reflection: 'Why?'

Mr Noncommittal, Strout shrugged, considered, raised his eyebrows. 'No reason, just—'

'Just what?'

'Just Art Drysdale was by here near closing time, wanted to pay his respects to Mr Locke. Also probably wanted to hide out a while, everybody on his ass for everything he did or didn't do the last five years.' This was a justified beef – Strout and Drysdale had worked together a long time with great mutual respect. 'Mr Locke's death hit him pretty hard.'

Glitsky hadn't been much of a Locke fan, but he understood Drysdale's reaction – the two had been on the same team, fought the same battles for a long time together. It was natural that a bond would develop.

'All the events of the day, I think he was finally gettin' around to the story on what actually happened with Mr Locke. Asked me who was handlin' it and I told him you'd been by.'

For the usually laconic Strout, this much conversation qualified as a philippic. Glitsky thought he was probably going somewhere with it and waited for him to continue.

'Well, he went on up to your place and one of your men told him he didn't think it had been formally assigned, something like that. It was on your desk but—'

Glitsky straightened up. 'John, Marcel Lanier and I
both
interviewed Loretta Wager, who was our only—'

Strout had his hands up. 'This is not me, Lieutenant. I'm not in the middle of this, this is Art's reaction, that's all.'

'All right.'

'Art seemed to think that some inspector might have gone out and spent the day down by Dolores Park' – the riot location where Locke had been shot – 'and put a little effort into finding this shooter, done some door-to-door in the neighborhood ...'

'You know, John, it's not exactly been a slow news week. Maybe Art hasn't noticed.'

'I think he has, Abe. I really do. I think he just knows how fast these trails get cold. Now a day's gone by an' nobody seems inclined to do the routine. Mr Locke bein' the district attorney an' all, he thought it might have gotten itself a little more priority, the investigation, I mean.'

'There were other—' Glitsky didn't mean to snap. He stopped himself. Drysdale, of course, was right as far as he went. Glitsky
should
have assigned someone to go canvass the area of the shooting, wherever that had been exactly. But that was the point – he should have that knowledge, should know for a certainty that there wasn't any forensic evidence at the site. Maybe there was a strand of fabric, a bloodstain, a shoe print, a bullet casing (although Glitsky knew that the caliber of the bullet that killed Locke didn't come from an automatic so it wouldn't have ejected). Still, something . . .

Drysdale
was
right – his boss and buddy Chris Locke had been killed and Glitsky, the head of homicide, was neglecting to investigate the death thoroughly. No wonder Art had come down and mentioned it to Dr Strout.

But damn – Glitsky's blood was rushing – he couldn't do everything. He had every one of his inspectors, including himself, triple-assigned – hell, quintuple-assigned – and he knew that the odds of getting even a long-shot lead to finding the man who had shot Chris Locke – on a dark evening in the midst of a riot – approached absolute zero.

This was the kind of extra helping of the unexpected personal stuff that made his job so frustrating. Not that Drysdale didn't have a point. Not that he wasn't justified that his best friend's death wasn't getting the priority he felt it deserved. But that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how responsible you were – he remembered Loretta's remark – you could never do enough. You were going to piss off someone, hurt someone, let someone down.

And Drysdale, whom Abe worked well with, was having a tough enough time. In fact, he knew, he should have assigned it, long shot or no. Many – most – murder investigations were long shots. The simple, galling truth was that he'd gotten distracted and hadn't entirely been doing his job. And that made him furious at himself, at Drysdale, even at the messenger right here.

But there was no point in losing it with Strout. The person with whom he was really put out lived closer.

'You see Art before I do,' he said evenly to Strout, 'tell him I realized the same thing, thought I'd come down and correct the oversight.'

Just as he entered the building someone started yelling in the cavernous, packed lobby.

The person manning the metal detector at the back door was a former street cop named Jimmy Mercy who had been hit on the head with a tire iron years before and appeared punch drunk ever since. A sweet guy.

'Been like this all night, sergeant.' Mercy would need another year or two, if ever, before he got used to Glitsky being a lieutenant. 'Everybody's in real bad moods lately.'

'Everybody includes me, Jimmy.' He was moving forward, into the noise.

Which was escalating quickly.

A pair of uniforms came out the double-doors of the hallway – the downstairs of the Hall of Justice contained a regular administrative police post, Southern Station, out of which a small contingent of cops worked. Glitsky also knew that the police assembly room on the sixth floor had people on call the last few nights, ready for 'disturbance' assignment. He hoped some of them were still up there now because it looked like the party was coming here tonight.

One of the uniforms turned around and yelled to the area behind him. 'WE GOT SOME SHIT HAPPENING OUT HERE!'

A shrill emergency bell started to ring in the building.

In the lobby Sheriff Boles had continued with his makeshift booking procedures. And in spite of the National Guard presence and Mayor Aiken's orders, looting was continuing throughout the city. From Glitsky's perspective, basically nothing was working.

They had more than a hundred people in the lobby and had just unloaded what looked like another bus from another scene. Thirty-five city policemen were roaming around inside and outside the Hall, herding in the new group; another twenty-five or so sheriff's deputies, all inside, were guarding the lines and doing paperwork at the desks. In the line itself mingled a complete set of San Francisco's ethnicities, some of them bruised, some crying,
all
pissed off.

And after the procession, Boles was simply letting these people go. And there was nowhere to go. Some people wanted to get away as quickly as they could, but most were turned loose downtown in the middle of the night – no cabs, no friends picking them up, a loose mob of recent rioters and looters milling on the steps and environs of the Hall of Justice.

Another fight seemed to be breaking out in the ranks of the new arrivals. Inside, the line of detainees, unruly at best, swelled toward the entrance, pushing. A couple of men went down. A woman screamed.

The bell kept ringing and more policemen appeared from the hallway, out of the elevators – probably from the sixth floor.

A burly white youth broke from the inside line, ran at the three cops at the front door, took down one of them, punched at another. Glitsky saw him go down in a flurry of nightsticks – echoes of Rodney King – kicking, refusing to be subdued.

More cops, and as they ran to the outbreak, leaving their guard posts, more detainees began rushing for the door, a stampede where the line had been breached. Some of them making it outside. Whistles blowing, that damn bell just going on and on, and over it the sound of explosions outside. Was some idiot firing his gun in all this?

Jesus, all hell breaking ...