“When the chief said you were good, Abe, he wasn’t kidding, was he?”
“I’ll take lucky over smart every time. I ran into the right people.”
They had gotten down as far as Seventh Street, and now the mayor’s eyes were flicking back and forth rapidly, scanning for the signs of urban decay that Glitsky knew would begin appearing any minute. But her mind hadn’t left their topic. “So what happens now?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With the investigation?”
“Well, it continues, of course. Back with Inspector Cuneo, which is where it belongs.”
A few more quick steps, and then she stopped abruptly. “This would be the same Inspector Cuneo who told the press this morning that this was a murder/suicide?”
Glitsky’s lips went tight for a beat before he answered. “That’s what it looked like to me, too, when I first got there.”
“Yes, but you didn’t tell anybody about it until you had more facts, did you?”
He showed her what he hoped would pass for a smile. “I’ve gotten a little more used to dealing with the media than your average inspector.”
“Be that as it may, Abe, the fact remains that you’ve made real progress in half a day, and Inspector Cuneo hasn’t been any part of it.”
“That’s not strictly accurate. He talked to Hanover’s daughter-in-law first last night. . . .”
“But managed not to learn that Paul had a withered arm.”
“He didn’t know where the entry wound was, so he wouldn’t have known why that mattered.”
“Precisely. When he could have shown some initiative and gone to the morgue with the body. Isn’t that the case?”
Glitsky could only shrug. “Maybe he should have done that.”
“You would have.”
This was true, but Glitsky shrugged it off again. “Well, either way,” he said, “we’ve got a good idea that Mr. Hanover didn’t do anything wrong. That’s what you wanted this morning.”
She fixed him with that avian intensity. “But unfortunately, that’s no longer the point.”
Glitsky waited.
“The point, Abe, is that we now know that Paul was murdered, don’t we? And you don’t think it was the girlfriend, Missy. Which means they were both murdered by someone else. And that being the case, do you think I have any confidence at all that Inspector Cuneo will be more successful catching the person who killed one of my close friends and benefactors than he was identifying the cause or manner of death in the first place? You don’t have to struggle with it. The answer is no.”
The gaggle of reporters following them had stopped when they did, and now out of the corner of his eye, Glitsky thought he picked up an increasing awareness among some of them, including Jeff Elliot, that something significant might be transpiring here right in front of them between the deputy chief of inspectors and the mayor. He considered that the time might be propitious to try to get some mileage out of West’s insistence that the two of them were really, basically, friends. He stepped closer to her, strove for a casual tone. “He couldn’t keep his job in homicide if he wasn’t effective, Kathy. Lanier would have lateralled him out.”
“Abe.” West wasn’t having it. “Help me out here. I understand a little bit about politics, and I see your concerns. If it makes it easier for you, you can let Inspector Cuneo remain on the case in some capacity, but I’d count it as a personal favor if you stayed on with it, too. Whoever killed Paul Hanover isn’t going to get away with it on my watch if I can help it, and you’re the best man to see that he doesn’t.” She reached out and put a hand on his arm, looked up into his face. “Abe. Please. For me.”
Glitsky glanced at the reporters, a couple of whom had already snapped some photos. This was turning into too visible a moment, laden with intrigue and import. It had to end or it would grow and become a real event, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. At last, coming back to her, he patted West’s hand in a fraternal gesture and nodded. “All right, Kathy,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”
5
Cuneo lived alone on what had formerly been the grounds of the Alameda Naval Air Station, across the bay from San Francisco. The nine-hundred-square-foot stand-alone building, which back in the fifties had housed a marine engine repair shop, sat perched on a concrete slab that jutted out ten feet into the channel. All day, every day, flotillas of mostly small saltwater craft glided by his bedroom window, sometimes close enough to touch. The ferry to San Francisco passed every hour or so, too, as well as the occasional Coast Guard or naval vessel.
After six hours of fitful sleep, Cuneo—dreaming of fire—started awake at twenty minutes after four in the afternoon. Tangled up in his blankets, he was breathing hard and sweating. Throwing and kicking the covers off, he shot up to sitting and looked from side to side, getting his bearings. The smoke smell was real enough, all-pervasive in the small house. He let his breathing slow down, the tendrils of his nightmare still clutching at his psyche.
For another minute or so, he sat as he almost never did, in absolute stillness. He wore only his Jockeys, but the stench of last night’s smoke still clung to his skin. At last, unconsciously, he lifted the heel of his right foot, let it fall, lifted it again. In seconds, still unaware, he was tapping a steady rhythm on the concrete floor.
Next to the bedroom on the water in the back, a tiny, low-ceilinged workroom huddled to one side of the house. Going forward, the kitchen and bathroom divided the central segment of the building two-thirds to one, and after putting some water on to boil, Cuneo stopped in at the bathroom for a shower, mostly to get the smell off him. When he was done, wearing his towel, he made some Nescafé—two spoons of crystals, no sugar or cream, and went back to put on his clothes.
Up in the front of the house, a relatively spacious living room provided two front and two side windows that gave the space an open feel and plenty of light. A leather love seat sat against one wall, a small teak bookshelf and television stand on the other. By far the most immediately noticeable furnishing, though, was a full set of Ludwig drums in the middle of the room. Cuneo didn’t have any idea where his nearest neighbor’s home might be, but it was at least out of earshot. He could play all day as loud as he wanted and nobody ever complained.
Three years ago, after his fellow inspector Lincoln Russell finally couldn’t take partnering with him anymore, Lieutenant Lanier had recommended that maybe he might want to see a psychologist—his insurance through the city would pay for the first three visits—and try to get some handle on why he couldn’t ever sit still, or shut up. He would sing to himself driving to crime scenes, hum during interrogations, often break into unconscious song while he wrote up his reports in homicide. Maybe he had Tourette’s syndrome, or Saint Vitus’ dance or something, Lanier had suggested, and if he did, it would be better to at least know what he was dealing with.
As it turned out, he only saw the shrink—Adrienne Schwartz—professionally the three times that his insurance covered it, though they dated for six weeks or so after that until she started hinting that she was looking for some kind of commitment. The best thing she’d done for him was recommend that he buy the drums and take some lessons, and now he’d almost always start his day with a twenty-minute workout, getting it all moving by playing along with some CDs of the classic big band guys—Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Louis Bellson.
Today, though, he didn’t do his full twenty. Ten minutes into it, in the middle of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” he suddenly stopped, stood up, grabbed his jacket. The Hanover woman from last night was a real babe, and he’d picked up the definite sense that she and her husband weren’t doing too well. She’d told him he was down in Mexico, fishing for a week, and it didn’t seem to bother her too much. He didn’t think he’d have too much to do with the murder/suicide—that appeared to be straightforwardenough—but he’d want to be thorough, find out what he could. You never knew. The arson inspectors and their police counterparts would have a hund
red or more names they’d picked up at the scene, and he’d want to find if any of those potential witnesses had seen anything that might be telling, might call the basic facts into question.
But first the Hanover woman again. See how she was handling the tragedy. If she was lonely. Or horny.
One of the benefits of working nights was commuting against the traffic. Cuneo checked in at the Hall of Justice within twenty minutes of walking out his front door. Up in the homicide detail, Lanier wasn’t in his office, and the other four inspectors still at work said hello from their desks and then cordially ignored him. The usual assortment of housekeeping and other messages cluttered his voice mail—a snitch needing some cash to hold him over until he testified in court; another witness sounding very afraid about her upcoming testimony against her husband, who was in jail for murdering their mutual lover; a friendly notice from payroll that his overtime last pay period had exceeded the approved hours; another call that he was behind on his credit union payments; the arson guy, Becker, wondering how he wanted to arrange his pickup of last night’s witness list; a woman he’d stopped seeing recently.
Barely audible to the other inspectors, he was humming the opening riff to “Satisfaction” over and over and over as he listened to the messages, writing notes and phone numbers on the pad he carried in his back pocket. Glitsky’s was the last message and, hearing it, Cuneo went silent. He played the message again, aware that a flush of anger was rising to his face, but otherwise trying to keep his expression neutral. He threw a quick glance around the room, wondering if any of his colleagues might have heard something, if they were watching for his reaction. But no one was paying him any mind.
The recording told him that he’d finished with his last message, to press one if he’d like to hear it again, two if he’d like to save it, three to delete it. It told him the same thing all the way through again. When it started to tell him for a third time, he finally heard it and slowly replaced the receiver.
What the hell did this mean? The deputy chief of inspectors didn’t just call and say, “Oh, by the way, I’ll be working with you on your latest case.” Cuneo had never heard of anything like it. He’d been without a partner for almost three years now and didn’t think much about whether he was popular or not. He was under the impression he’d been doing a good job, making triable cases on five killers in the past eight months, had gotten the collars. It was much better than the average for the detail. Certainly it was the best stretch he’d ever enjoyed professionally.
But what else could this be about except that somebody was checking up on him and his work? And on this of all cases, which on the face of it appeared very close to a slam dunk. It had to mean that they were going to begin some kind of bullshit documentation for moving him out of homicide, maybe out of the PD altogether.
And why would Lanier or anybody else want to do that?
Sitting back in his chair, he began tattooing the arms of it with a steady, rapid beat. It couldn’t be about his work product, he thought. If it was, Lanier was straight-shooter enough to have told him, even if it was true that he and Glitsky went way back, sometimes even saw each other socially. Cuneo wondered if his lieutenant even knew about the message Glitsky had left—if he did, he certainly would have given Cuneo some warning, or at least an explanation. This kind of thing just wasn’t done. It wasn’t right. More, it was an insult.
And then he stopped his drumming, took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. Suddenly, with a crystal clarity, he realized what this was really about, what it had to be about.
And it wasn’t his work.
Over the months and years since he’d started in homicide, Cuneo hadn’t made much of a secret of his feelings for Glitsky. When he’d been a newcomer to the detail, still partnered with Russell, one of his first cases had concerned the shooting of an old man named Sam Silver-man, who ran a pawnshop a couple of blocks off Union Square. At that time, the head of homicide was Barry Gerson, and Glitsky—nominally a lieutenant—worked in a sergeant’s position as supervisor of payroll. In the course of Cuneo’s investigation into Silverman’s death, this nobody Glitsky somehow insinuated himself into the detail’s business—butting in, offering his advice, getting in the way. He’d once run homicide, and the unwelcome interference struck Cuneo, Russell and Gerson as a power play to get his old job back.
Eventually his investigation made it clear to Cuneo that Glitsky’s other motive for his involvement in that case was to help out a defense attorney friend of his named Dismas Hardy, whose client, John Holiday, was the chief suspect in the killing. When Gerson finally went out to Pier 70 to arrest Holiday—Cuneo believed the event had to have been arranged by Hardy in some way—something went terribly wrong. Holiday, Gerson and three Patrol Specials that the lieutenant had brought with him as backup all wound up shot to death, the perpetrators never identified or, of course, apprehended.
Promoted to homicide lieutenant to fill Gerson’s spot, Lanier had conducted the investigation into the incident. He had a talk with his longtime friend and colleague Glitsky and, no surprise, found nothing. Hardy had never left his office that day, either—ten witnesses there said so. There was no case against either of the men, although Cuneo in his heart of hearts continued to believe that somehow they’d both been involved. When he learned that Glitsky’s alibi for the time in question was Hardy’s law partner Gina Roake, his belief became near certainty.
But though he took his questions to Lanier and then, on his own and top secret, to Jerry Ranzetti with the Office of Management and Control, which investigated internal affairs, he couldn’t get to anything approaching proof of wrongdoing. Ranzetti even told him that he’d run across issues—not exactly hewing strictly to the department’s best interests—with both Glitsky and Hardy working together in at least one other previous case. But not only were both men extremely well connected—tight with the DA, some supervisors, the chief of police, even the mayor—but knowing the system intimately as they both did, they played it like maestros and made no mistakes. His interest piqued by Cuneo’s theory, though, Ranzetti did nose around for a while on the Gerson killing—after all, this was a cop shooting, and so of the highest priority—but he hadn’t been able to put either Glitsky or Hardy anywhere near the scene when the shootings had occurred.
Then, the next thing Cuneo knew, Frank Batiste became chief and Glitsky the payroll clerk got himself promoted over half the rest of the qualified lieutenants to deputy chief. He considered the appointment a travesty and wasn’t particularly discreet about sharing his opinion with some of his fellow cops. Without a doubt, through Lanier or one of the other homicide people who’d heard him spouting off, Glitsky had heard of Cuneo’s disapproval—to say nothing of his allegations of criminal complicity and cover-up.
Cuneo sat dead still, The Thinker, his elbow resting on his chair’s arm, his chin in his hand. That’s what Glitsky’s phone message was really about—he was serving notice. Cuneo had trash-talked and then tried to backstab him, and Glitsky had found out.
Now it was payback time.
Catherine Hanover lived in a small Moorish-style two-story stucco home in the Marina District, on Beach Street a block east of the Palace of Fine Arts. As was his wont when time didn’t press, Cuneo parked within sight of the address she had given him last night and sat in his car, watching and getting a feel for the place while he drummed on the steering wheel.
What he saw was a low stucco fence that bounded a well-kept property at the sidewalk. The houses on either side were both noticeably larger, outsized for their lots. The Hanovers’ front yard wasn’t deep by any stretch, and a brace of mature trees canopied nearly all of it. He noted the black Mercedes-Benz C-Class sedan parked in the driveway, and the lights upstairs behind what looked like a functional wooden-railed deck. This area of the city tended to get more sunshine than points farther west, and the low evening rays painted the entire neighborhood in a mellow gold.
Cuneo popped a breath mint, checked his
hair in the mirror and opened the car door. A good breeze made him reach back in for his jacket.
The genes were good in the family, he thought. The teenage girl who answered the door might have been a face model. “Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?” Well brought up, too.
He had his badge out, his polite smile on. “I’m Inspector Cuneo, San Francisco homicide. I was hoping to talk to your mother.” He turned the wattage up on his smile. “I’m assuming Catherine Hanover is your mother?”
“You got it, every day. I’m Polly.” She half turned. “Mom! There’s a policeman out here to see you.”
Over the young woman’s shoulder, Catherine appeared from around a corner. She carried a dish towel and was wiping her hands with it. “Well, invite him in, then.” As she came closer, he noticed a white streak of something high on her cheek. Her daughter saw it, too, and she took the towel and wiped off the offending stuff, whatever it was, and gave the towel back. A friendly look passed between mother and daughter; then Polly went back to wherever she’d been and Catherine, as lovely as he’d remembered, was standing in front of him. “Hello again,” she said with some formality. She touched her cheek. “Flour,” she said, “I’m making pasta. It gets everywhere, I’m afraid. Please, come in.”
“Thank you.” He was already inside, closing the door. “Did you say you were making pasta?”
“That’s right.”
“Not the sauce, the actual noodles?”
She favored him with a smile. “The actual noodles. Do you like homemade noodles?”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever had them.”
“You should try. They’re a lot of work, but worth it, I think.” In the light of day, Catherine’s face was nearly as perfect as her daughter’s, rescued from mere cuteness by deeply set green eyes and a strong nose. A striking, mature face. “My children are so spoiled. They won’t even eat store-bought anymore. It’s got to be my own. Maybe I should be flattered.” She twisted the towel, took in and let out a quick breath.
The Motive Page 6