Damage

by John Lescroart

  28

  Farrell stood in a brown study in the mid-afternoon, aimlessly flicking the handles at his foosball table, keeping the ball in play.

  Someone knocked on his door. He looked up, stopped defending, and the ball went into the right-hand goal as he said, “Come on in.”

  “Where’s Treya?”

  “Don’t ask. Get the door, please.”

  Amanda Jenkins wasn’t showing off her legs today. She was wearing stone-washed jeans and a simple black T-shirt. She hadn’t combed her hair since she had gotten up and didn’t look like she’d had too much sleep before then, either. For the first split second when he saw her, Farrell almost cracked wise about her appearance here on the job, but one look into her red-rimmed eyes told him that wouldn’t be sensitive or wise, and so instead he said, “I don’t expect you to be in here, Amanda. Maybe you want to take a couple of days off, give things a chance to settle.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “That’s why I’m in here. I don’t want anything to settle. I want to string that bastard up by his balls.”

  “You want the grand jury?”

  “Absolutely. I want it sooner than you do.”

  “I doubt that.” He came around and leaned back against the foosball table. “Could you get the case prepared sooner?”

  “If I don’t sleep, and that’s what seems to be happening.”

  “Well, don’t sacrifice your prep. You don’t want to go in and not get him.”

  “I’ll get him. I swear to Christ I’ll get him.”

  “You think—really?—by next Tuesday?”

  “Well, I’ve got all the evidence from Sandoval, I’ve got testimony about Matt’s assignment, I’ve got Nuñez and Janice Durbin and revenge, and then I’ll have to see what else I can gather from Abe, but ...”

  “Speaking of which, did you see Marrenas’s column this morning?”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Well, sure, but you didn’t read the column?”

  “No. Why?”

  “She’s turned up the heat on Abe in a big way.”

  “On Abe? How can that be?”

  “He’s not investigating Michael Durbin. He’s fixated on Ro. It’s a vendetta. Blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile, just in case things are getting too dull around here, guess who called me yesterday about this grand jury thing?”

  Jenkins ran her hands through her hair. “What is this bullshit, Wes? This is Alice in Wonderland.”

  “Yes, it is. Welcome to San Francisco.”

  “So who called you about the grand jury? Marrenas?”

  “Well, yes, of course, first. But the real fun part was Cliff the-man-himself Curtlee, who seemed to think that the personal threat is an effective negotiating tool.”

  “Runs in the family.”

  “Apparently. Anyway, there’s no goddamn instruction booklet on this DA thing I seem to have gotten myself elected to. He’s threatening me and I’m holed up here in the office without any clear plan on how to fight him. Not exactly kicking ass doing the people’s work. I’m starting to think that this is something that try as I might, I just don’t have the chops to do.”

  “We’ll get him, Wes. We really will.”

  “Well, somebody’s going to get somebody. That’s for sure.” Wes finally crossed the room and half collapsed on the couch. “And don’t think I don’t realize how much of this is me, is my fault.” He looked up at his chief assistant. “I am so, so sorry, Amanda, about Matt, and about you. To say nothing of the other victims. I ought to be impeached.”

  “Well, hold on that,” Amanda said, striving to lighten it up. “Not now when you’re just starting to get it.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Farrell said. “I don’t get it at all.” Wes’s cell phone went off at his belt and he pulled it out, looked at the screen, and told Amanda, “This is Sam. I’ve got to take it. It’ll just be a minute.” He pushed the answer button. “Hey ... No, I’m just . . . Easy, easy. What? . . . She’s what? . . . Well, call the police, get somebody down there right away. I’m on my way, too.”

  Closing the phone, Farrell’s face was a study in confusion and panic.

  “What?” Amanda asked. “What now?”

  “Somebody fucking killed my dog,” Farrell said, his voice breaking. “They killed my fucking beautiful dog.”

  Glitsky drove back from the crematorium service to Polk Street where he parked and got in the line for the Swan Oyster Depot. An hour and a half later, he reemerged from the very far end of the bar, his stomach uncomfortably stuffed, into the sunlight, having broken about every dietary law he knew of either for a sometimes–kosher Jew or a recovering heart attack victim. He’d had two dozen raw oysters, half a dozen clams, a half loaf of sourdough bread with an uncounted number of pats of real butter, half a Dungeness crab with mayonnaise and more melted butter, and his first two beers—in fact, his first sip of any kind of alcohol—in over three years.

  Back out in his car, he called Treya down in Los Angeles and they had a short conversation that resolved nothing. She still wasn’t coming home, the kids were fine. He told her about the Marrenas article and she had said, “Well, what would you expect?” And then, after five more minutes, he told her he loved her as he said good-bye, and she’d said, “Okay.”

  Actually getting some rubber from his tires as he pulled out of his parking place, he drove in a cold fury out to the Curtlees’ house. There was no sign of any twenty-four-hour watch on the place, but then Glitsky realized that the surveillance team might be out following Ro around. On the chance that Ro might show up, although God knew what he planned to do if that happened, Glitsky sat in the street across from the house for about twenty minutes until his head became too heavy to hold up.

  Waking up from the following forty-minute doze, disoriented and cotton mouthed, he started the car back up, hung a U-turn, and headed back downtown, never exceeding the speed limit by less than fifteen miles an hour, the dark side of his nature almost hoping that some patrolman would try to pull him over or write him up or fuck with him in any way.

  Bearded and burly, Jeff Elliot was in his wheelchair in his glass-enclosed office downstairs at the Chronicle Building, and of course when he’d heard that Glitsky was at the front desk, he’d had them send him right on down. He might have done this in any case, since the two men had known each other, mostly as tacit allies, for more than twenty years. But today Glitsky was big news, and if he wanted to make time for Jeff, Jeff would find time for him.

  And now here he was, looming in the doorway, breathing through his nose, his mouth under tight control, the scar through his lips burning white. Glitsky’s menacing face wore a brand-new, terrifying expression that Elliot couldn’t read. And in fact, so threatening was the visage that Elliot unconsciously backed himself away before he recovered and put on a welcoming smile, perhaps meant to disarm.

  “Doctor Glitsky,” he said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Off the record until I say so.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “I want to kill somebody, Jeff. I mean literally. And I figured if I didn’t get myself off the street, I actually might do it.”

  “Ro Curtlee?”

  “He’d be a start.”

  “Sheila.”

  “Yep. Her, too. I thought maybe you could talk me out of it.”

  “Why would I want to?” Finally letting out the breath he’d been all but holding, Jeff indicated the chair just to the left of his door. “You want to sit?”

  Now Glitsky eased a breath out, and nodded as though convincing himself. “I could sit,” he said. And he did, ramrod straight.

  Jeff regarded him for another brief moment. “Bad day at Black Rock, huh?”

  Glitsky shook his head. “If you only knew.”

  “You want to tell me your side, I’ll get it into print.”

  “Just so you’re perfectly clear on it,” Glitsky said, “I haven’t ruled out anybody yet in the Durbin murder, including her husband, in
cluding Ro Curtlee. But to pretend, as Marrenas did, that Ro doesn’t have a bona fide motive, is just insane. He saw Michael Durbin at his arraignment last week and recognized him. It’s a matter of public record that Michael was the jury foreman in his trial and that he persuaded a few of the hanging jurors to come around to convict. So there’s a revenge motive and anybody who doesn’t believe it’s there is deluding themselves.”

  Elliot picked up a transcribing tape recorder from his desk and held it up.

  “Knowledgeable sources?” Glitsky asked.

  “How about high-ranking sources within the police department ?”

  “Sources with knowledge of the investigation.”

  “Sold,” said Elliot, and he turned on the tape recorder.

  Back in the 4Runner, Eztli picked Ro back up at around four o’clock at MoMo’s, where he’d had another lunch and sat in the same seat in the bar that he’d anchored yesterday. Tiffany was on duty, working the late shift today, and Ro wasn’t going to wait around until two o’clock or whenever the hell it was that she got off, so he had called Eztli and asked for the pickup. “So what’d I miss?” Ro asked him as they drove down the Embarcadero. “I feel like I’ve been gone a week. That girl is one enthusiastic piece of ass. Once more and I think, I swear to God, she might have broke it.”

  Eztli looked across at him with something very like affection. He loved this kid’s attitude. “You’re breaking my heart,” he said. “And there have been a couple of developments, mostly that they’ve pulled off the tail.”

  “Must have been going around. I pulled off a little tail myself.” Ro chuckled at his cleverness. “You wouldn’t have a jay on you, would you?”

  “Sure.” Eztli pulled a joint from his inside pocket and passed it across. “The tail being the cops who were supposed to be following you,” he said.

  “Well, they didn’t do shit anyway.” Ro lighting up, sucking in a lungful of smoke. Then, blowing out, he asked, “But I don’t get why’d they pull ’em off. Not that it matters.”

  “Sheila’s been busy. She told Lapeer she was going to write up all about the tail tomorrow, how it was more harassment, and Lapeer just can’t take any more heat.”

  “I would love to fuck that woman.”

  “Lapeer?”

  “No. Well, maybe. But I’m talking Sheila. Hit?” He passed the joint across. “So. Just like that we’re free again?”

  Eztli had a toke. “Looks like.”

  “You got any plans?”

  “Nothing definite.”

  “Well, I was thinking,” Ro said. “I got an idea.”

  Glitsky talked to Jeff Elliot for more than an hour, then stopped back at the Hall to show his face. Farrell had gone off somewhere, and most of Glitsky’s own troops were running on autopilot, writing up their cases in the detail. In the detail, he’d received a nice, informal show of support from all the homicide inspectors, and taking any little bit of goodwill where he could get it, had stayed just to shoot the breeze for a while.

  Now he was driving around and around, trying to find a parking spot someplace within five or six blocks of his duplex and running out of hope.

  Not helping matters, out to the west, a fog bank presaged the end of the cold and clear weather they’d been tolerating. Next up, Glitsky thought, ought to be cold and wet. There it was, black and foreboding, bearing down on him from thirty blocks away.

  When his cell phone rang, he was tempted to simply turn it off without even looking at it. He’d already worked a full and grueling day, he felt a little sick from his stupid lunch, and he was exhausted. But on second thought, he thought it might be Treya, and he looked down to check.

  Michael Durbin.

  “Lieutenant,” Durbin said. “You’ve got to get over here. You’re not going to believe what he’s done now.”

  29

  By the time Glitsky got out to Rivera Street, the bank of bad weather had completely engulfed the neighborhood. Wipers slashing back and forth against the thick mist, his lights on in the fog and darkness, Glitsky pulled up at Durbin’s address and could barely discern the outlines of the house from the curb.

  A figure sat behind the wheel of the car Glitsky pulled up behind, and no sooner had he pulled over when the driver’s door of that car opened and his headlights revealed Michael Durbin stepping out into the street. Glitsky killed his lights and ignition and was out of the car before Durbin got back to him.

  “Thanks for coming out. I really think this is something.”

  Glitsky crossed his arms against the chill. “Well, let’s go take a look.”

  In silence, Durbin led the way up the driveway and back behind the house to where an unattached garage filled up half the backyard space. Because it wasn’t part of the house, it had escaped any fire damage, and now with bits of broken glass and cinders crunching under their feet, they proceeded around to a side door. A bare lightbulb burned over the door.

  Durbin reached into his pocket for a set of keys and fitted one into the dead-bolt slot. “I probably should have thought about touching the doorknob,” he said, “but it never occurred to me there’d be anything to see in here.”

  Glitsky glanced down at the standard plain brass doorknob, something that would take and hold a fingerprint beautifully. “Hold on. So you’ve already gone in this way?”

  “Just the once.”

  Backing Durbin away, Glitsky stepped closer, pulling on the pair of latex gloves that he always carried with him. “I’ll open it this time. I don’t want you to touch anything else out here or inside. Nothing at all. Is that clear?”

  “Sure.”

  Glitsky turned the dead-bolt key and gripped the doorknob with his gloved hand, turning it and pushing. The door came right open, and he stepped into the doorway and felt to the right of the door for the indoor light switch, which he turned on, bathing the room in brightness from three lines of track lighting up in the ceiling.

  Somewhat warned of what to expect, Glitsky still wasn’t completely prepared for the sight that greeted him. Durbin had obviously used this place as a painting studio. Somewhere between a dozen and twenty very large, colorful, and—to Glitsky’s eye—professional-looking portraits of very real people stared back at him from canvases that were stacked and leaning all along the back and side walls. In the center of the wide-open space, three others of what looked to be works in progress sat on the ground, leaning up against the wooden tripods or easels that held them.

  Someone had come in here, though, and slashed every one. Sometimes only once, sometimes five or six times, the canvas simply shredded, but there was no painting Glitsky could see that hadn’t been cut into. And what made the vandalism all the more disturbing were the pictures themselves. Glitsky did not consider himself any kind of connoisseur of art, but these paintings—none of them less than three-by-four feet, and a few as large as six or even eight feet on a side—were clearly the work of, at the very least, a talented artist. Whatever else his misgivings about Durbin, the man’s work had an undeniable power and quality.

  Glitsky was standing as though hypnotized just one or two steps inside the door when Durbin came up next to him. Glancing over at him, he was not unduly surprised to see what might be incipient tears in his eyes.

  “You’re thinking Ro did this?” Glitsky asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  “How would he have known these were even here?”

  “Marrenas. She wrote about my derivative, amateur, ludicrous stuff back in the day while she was libeling both of us. This place has been my studio forever. I never made any attempt to hide it. Why would I? Who cared?”

  Glitsky found himself focusing on one of the unfinished paintings sitting on the floor. It was a woman’s face, filling the frame with almost no background showing. Durbin had caught her turning around, her beautiful dark eyes a mystery, her skin touchable. Even with the one slash through her right eye and down across her nose and lips, she was arresting, especially caught in that pose. And, of course,
even so, the portrait wasn’t yet completed. “Is that Liza Sato?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Or was.”

  “Did she come over here and pose for you?”

  “No. No, of course not. People don’t have the time to pose. I don’t have the time to work with them that way, anyway. Mostly I just start with a picture, a photograph.” He was staring at the piece. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  Glitsky nodded. “Yes, she is. Did your wife ever see this?”

  Durbin shook his head. “I keep telling you, Lieutenant, I didn’t kill Janice. I didn’t do this, either, slash my paintings. This is my life’s work for the past ten years.”

  This might be true, but Glitsky was aware that he hadn’t answered the question. “Did your wife ever see this?” he asked again.

  Defeated, Durbin’s shoulders sagged. “I just don’t know. She wasn’t my art’s biggest supporter, Lieutenant, and I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t sell these things back when we really needed me to.”

  “They look pretty saleable to me.”

  “Well, thank you, but you don’t know the market. Or how to play it. It’s brutal out there for realistic fine art, which is unfortunately what I do, what I’ve always wanted to do. But it doesn’t pay the bills. And that’s the bottom line when you’ve got a wife and kids. Sad but true. So I haven’t even tried to sell in years.” He ran his eyes over his ruined work. “But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t break my heart. That this doesn’t feel more wrong than almost anything I can conceive of.”

  Glitsky could not help but understand; this was a soul-shattering display of pure inhumanity. Glitsky’s own stomach had gone hollow at the waste and destruction. But he was also aware that Michael Durbin might still have performed this vandalism on his own works in an effort to keep Ro Curtlee in the picture as a viable candidate for Janice’s murder. The timing—coming so soon after Ro had provided an alibi for the time of the crime—was suspicious, as was the fact that Michael Durbin had been the one who had discovered these slashed paintings.