Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (46 page)

'But those people didn't see anything, the car ...?'

'Somebody might have, Lieutenant, just nobody I talked to. You want, I'll go back tonight. More people home. Somebody will have seen something. Maybe.'

Glitsky sat chewing on it for a minute. 'You'd better. Why don't you pick one of the guys, have him go out with you. And maybe find out where the residents of the tent city have been relocated to.

Somebody
in that riot killed Chris Locke, and somebody must have seen him do it.' Glitsky spread his hands. 'Seen something, at least. But it could be a long night.'

Griffin was holding his next Twinkie. 'Won't be the first one,' he said.

'Gin.' Melanie laid her hand face up. 'Read 'em an' weep.'

Kevin folded his cards into the deck.

'Hey, you're supposed to count—'

'You won, Melanie. That's the game. I guarantee I'm over a hundred. I might be over two hundred after that last hand, which was a no-brainer if I've ever seen one.'

'Hey, you are a bad sport.'

'Maybe I'm just tired of gin.'

He got up from the kitchen table, where they had been sitting, and went into the living room. The apartment was feeling a little small. They had slept in, then awakened with both of them feeling a bit shaky after the Fred party. They'd checked the television to see if Kevin's tape was ready for prime time (it wasn't), made love, gone back to sleep. When they'd gotten up the second time Kevin had plugged the phone back in and called Wes Farrell, taken his offer to go see what had happened to the tape, then foraged for food and finally dealt the cards. Two plus hours of gin rummy.

He was standing by the living-room window, shades drawn against the light. Melanie came up behind him. She did not touch him but he felt her there. 'I think this is really getting to me,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't take it out on you.'

'It's all right.' She ran a hand down his back. 'A lot of people can't play cards very well. It takes a certain kind of mind and you just don't have it. It doesn't mean you're stupid or anything. I mean about other things.'

He turned around, his face a blank. Stepping past her, he hooked a leg, reached an arm out and ... 'hey!'... executed an expert judo takedown, lowering her gently the last six inches to the floor. 'Oh. Sorry,' he said, continuing across the room, 'I guess I didn't see you.' He sat in the stuffed chair.

She crawled across the floor on her hands and knees, put her elbows up on his knees, rested her head in his lap. He combed his fingers through her hair. 'I wonder if this is what being married is like.'

'If what is? You're trapped forever so you play gin to pass the time?'

'Well, that's the romantic view, but I was thinking more about this feeling like you're the whole world, like there's nobody else in it.'

She looked up at him, her eyes gone soft. He wasn't teasing her. 'I think that's the way some marriages start out. But I don't know too many people who feel like that anymore, who even think you should. Do you?'

Kevin shook his head. 'No. I don't know if I ever did.'

'Well, your parents – '

'No, not mine. It was everybody for themselves in my family. My dad was always preoccupied with business, and Mom was ... Mom was mostly interested in Mom. And Patsy as just Mom junior. Except maybe ... Joey.'

'Your brother – '

'Yeah. He was a good guy,' Kevin sighed. 'Anyway, what got us on that?'

'I think we were talking about not feeling like you were in it alone. You still miss him, don't you? Your brother?'

Again a sigh. 'You know, the word came and I didn't believe it. I didn't believe it. I mean, it couldn't have been Joey. They must have got it wrong. Of course, they didn't get it wrong. The one time the army didn't screw up ...'

Her head still in his lap, she held his legs tightly.

'So after that, I just... I don't know.'

'You and Wes,' she said.

'What do you mean?'

'I think I'm starting to see why you two guys get along so well.' She told him what she knew of the Mark Dooher story, Wes's loss of faith, the distrust of commitment. 'But that really isn't either of you, is it? That's not who you started out to be—'

'I don't know anymore, Mel. I spent the last three years ... well, you
know
what I've been, how I've been living. I didn't want to get into any of this' – he gestured vaguely – 'this whatever we're in. I sure as hell didn't choose this. This isn't my fight, my story—'

'Maybe it is. Maybe your story is what you wind up doing.'

'I don't
want
to wind up doing this.'

'Maybe we don't get that option. There's a comforting thought.' She shrugged against him. 'Anyway, it's got us back. That's something, isn't it?'

A long moment passed. He was rubbing gently, moving his hand over her back, her shoulders, her neck. 'I was a jerk. I mean before. With you.'

'Well, that was me, too. I shouldn't have let you be such a jerk. I should have stood up for myself more but I was afraid you'd leave me.'

'I wanted to. That's what I did, see? I left people. I did not feel things, except that I started feeling things about you. I liked you, was the problem. I liked that you were motivated and smart and organized, that you were this quality person ...'

'You liked that?'

'Do you have any idea how rare that is, Mel? Yeah, I
liked
that. Finally, I meet somebody who's not a flake. Who's got some substance.'

'I thought you hated that I wasn't any fun ...'

'You were fun, at first, if you remember, until I—'

'It wasn't you.'

'It was too. It scared me – liking you so much – I mean, what if you weren't really who I thought? Then I'd really be up a creek, wouldn't I... so, anyway, I had to see if you were really so tough, so sure of yourself, so
competent –
and my test was that if you continued to like me when I treated you so badly then you couldn't be so great after all. Not if you'd take that.. .'

She shook her head, looked up at him, tears in her eyes. 'I didn't just like you, Kevin. I didn't just want a boyfriend. I fell in love with you. I loved you. I still love you.'

'I saw that. That was another strike against you.'

'Why?'

'Why? What was to love? What do you think I'm hiding from with all my craziness? No kidding, I don't see how anybody's got any business loving me ...'

She glared up at him. 'Why do you think you're here in the first place, Kevin? Why do you think
we're
here? Because
you
, Kevin Shea and nobody else, tried to save Arthur Wade's life. Because you are probably the one person I have ever known who thinks it's important to stay here and get the truth out, even if no one wants to hear it. Not to run, not make excuses, just to do what you've got to do. And you know what? You're right. You've been right all along. And I love you. Am I getting repetitious?'

'A little. I can handle it.'

'And you know, I wasn't so perfect either. Being so controlled all the time. You
were
right about that. I just needed my ... my bottom kicked.'

He patted. 'You mean this pretty thing?'

'That very one. And you did it. Kicked my ass good and proper.'

'And would again, I might add.' He pulled her up the rest of the way into his lap.

'Your ribs,'she said.

'Suddenly my ribs are fine.'

Melanie lay her head in the crook of his neck as he enfolded her to him.

Melanie was taking a bath. Kevin was in the stuffed chair. He had started to take a look at the News at Four, but one of the lead stories had included a statement by Alan Reston on how the fugitive Kevin Shea's tape was inherently not believable – an obvious ploy to evoke sympathy by taking his case directly to the people. It was not going to work. There was a murder warrant out on Kevin Shea and all efforts were still being employed to bring this dangerous criminal to justice. He'd turned it off then.

What was
he going to do now? Wes Farrell hadn't been home. He'd called three times in the past half hour. The DA's escalation – the words 'dangerous criminal' – bothered him. He was beginning to realize a new and scarifying truth: that the longer he hid out, the more irrational the 'official' reaction would become. The perception that he had somehow become more 'dangerous,' more unstable, wouldn't help him if they got close to capturing him, and if they somehow discovered where he was, he was afraid it would come to that...

He
couldn't
let it come to that. He also couldn't let Melanie stay any longer if he thought it would. The 'dangerous criminal' rhetoric was eating his guts – somebody out there might not be planning on taking him alive.

But he was also distrustful of what might happen to him if he was brought to jail – he believed that there was a too real chance that he would not survive inside long enough to
get
to trial.

He punched the buttons on the phone again. Wes had evidently done a good job getting the tape – finally – recognized and played. But they needed a better way to stay in contact. He hadn't realized that things could move this fast, could cut off his options, take decisions out of his hands. He was getting that feeling now. Events
had
taken things out of his control, and he had to try to stop their inexorable rush, and without Farrell and some legal plan he didn't have any idea how he was going to do it.

At that moment Farrell was pulling up a chair at the one window table at the Little Shamrock. He had, in fact, gone back to his apartment after his successful mission with the videotape, intent on waiting until Kevin called him again. But ten minutes after he had gotten home Dismas Hardy had called, asking if he could talk with him, off the record, about Kevin Shea. They could meet at the Shamrock.

Word was getting around, all right.

Farrell knew Hardy slightly. He had known him since the days when Hardy had bartended at this very bar. Now he assumed that Hardy, another defense lawyer with a growing reputation on newsworthy cases, was churning the water, angling to get a spot on whatever high-profile murder trial Kevin Shea was going to have. Well, he could go and talk to him – his day wasn't exactly overbooked. Kevin had promised him that he was going to lay low for at least twenty-four hours, so there was no immediate crisis with him, so far as he knew.

Besides, Hardy said he was buying.

So here they were, Moses McGuire coming over from the bar with two pints of Guinness. Farrell and McGuire had exchanged some pleasantries about the last time Farrell had been in the bar a couple of days before, the evening he had spent on McGuire's couch. And was McGuire's wife talking to him yet?

Neither of the two men – Hardy in his rugby shirt and Farrell in a Pendleton – looked much like lawyers at the moment. They clinked their glasses and Farrell asked Hardy what he could do for him.

'I've heard Kevin Shea is your client.'

'Glitsky?'

So much, Hardy thought, for not bringing up Abe in the first couple of minutes. 'Yeah, Glitsky mentioned it to me.'

'That guy is a shithook.' Hardy was silent. Farrell quaffed some stout. 'I go down with an offer to bring in Kevin Shea, who by the way is as innocent as you or me in all this. 'At Hardy's expression, Farrell stopped him. 'I know, I know, but this time it's not a bill of goods. The guy just flat did not do what they're saying he did. No part of it.'

'You know this for a fact?'

'Let's say to a moral certainty. It's the only thing that could have got me back doing this, believe me.'

'So what happened with Glitsky?'

'Glitsky and I have a nice talk. He seems receptive, says he's going to go sell the idea of special protection to the DA, meanwhile keep it all between us.'

'And?'

'And next thing I know I'm in my apartment and there's somebody downstairs with a search warrant to look for Kevin Shea. Glitsky had me followed home.'

Hardy killed a little time with his glass. 'That doesn't sound much like Abe.'

'You a friend of his?'

'We talk from time to time.'

'He tell you about this?'

'About what?'

The tail, the warrant, any of it?'

'No. We were talking, he mentioned you had Kevin Shea. I thought it sounded like a good case.'

This was the reason Farrell thought Hardy had called in the first place. Though it might turn out he could use some help if things ever did come to trial – and Hardy might be a good choice in that eventuality, he was starting to get a reputation as a good man in front of a jury – Farrell didn't want to send any false messages. 'I'm not sure about that. There's no pockets.' Meaning that the defendant had no money.

Hardy shrugged. 'Sometimes there are other considerations. You never know. I gather Shea wasn't there, at your place.'

'I thought he was at the time. He
was
there when I went out to meet Glitsky. He sent his girlfriend – you know about Melanie? the getaway girl – they got what I thought at the time was a dose of paranoia, except it turns out it wasn't. Now they're someplace else. I really don't know where.'