Abe reached over and snapped it off. 'That guy broadcasting from Mars or what?'
"They all do,' Loretta said.
Thursday, June 30
30
They were in her circular brick driveway in front of the colonnaded white mansion at one of the city's high points in Pacific Heights, overlooking the entire world, less than two blocks from where Kevin Shea had rested at the top of his climb earlier in the day. The landscaping around Loretta's house had been done before either she or Glitsky had been born, and now stately maples folded their branches over them, enclosing the space, insuring its privacy.
The ride had continued quiet, tense, laden with all that was unspoken. Glitsky was angry at himself for what he considered self-indulgence. And, unreasonably, at her for giving him the opening. Then seeing where Loretta lived – the involuntary comparison with his own physical setting, his cramped duplex – seemed to ratchet everything up another notch.
Between the fatigue and the unfamiliar rush of emotion, he knew he was in a dangerous mood – he should just open her door, help her out and say goodnight. But he didn't, he wanted to settle something. He'd waited long enough. 'Well, you married the right man after all, didn't you?'
She shot a look across the seat. 'Do you want to hear about Dana?' Glitsky didn't trust himself to say anything. 'Because I know you didn't understand. I don't know if I did.'
The words spilled out. 'What was to understand? You went with him, it's all right. If you hadn't I wouldn't have met Flo, so it all worked out. It was long ago, it doesn't matter now.'
'It does, Abe, I think it does.'
Suddenly, he slapped the steering wheel. 'Jesus, what was he then, forty-five? What could he have…? That's what I guess I never understood.'
She nodded her head, understanding the question. It was the crux of it. Her voice, like Abe's had earlier, remained flat. 'He had money, Abe. He had prestige and power and he was there. He wasn't working for it like we were. He wasn't hoping. It was all there, already part of the package. And I could be part of it. He wanted me to be part of it.'
'Everybody wanted you back then, Loretta. Probably still do. Why do you think you get elected? People respond to you, close up or far away. As you said, that's just who you are. I just thought, you and me, back then…'
He trailed off and the time lengthened in the car. 'I loved you, Abe, I really did.'
His hands gripped the steering wheel, something to hold onto. 'You left me, Loretta. You couldn't even be bothered to say goodbye.'
She couldn't deny it – it was true. She herself had avoided it for twenty-five years. 'I… I couldn't decide. I asked you, don't you remember?'
'You asked me what?'
'If you were ready, if you could commit…'
'And I said I needed a little time, I didn't say no. Hell, I wasn't yet twenty years old, not even out of school. It wasn't you, it was the idea. Marriage? A few more months, maybe. I would have been-'
'But I didn't have a few months.' She paused, cornered, her eyes flashing. 'Dana was ready right now. Don't you understand that? He was asking and he was going to leave if I didn't decide.'
'You could have decided not to.'
'No, I couldn't. Not without you. Not if you wouldn't be there. I couldn't give up what Dana had, not if I wasn't going to have you either.'
'We might have-'
'Might have wasn't good enough. Dana was my chance and I had to take it. He had what it would have taken me years to get on my own.'
So that was the answer. But there was one more question, maybe the most important one.
'Did you love him?'
'I came to…'
Glitsky slammed the steering wheel again, harder, biting out the words. 'Did you love him then, damn it? Were you stringing us both at the same time…?'
'Stringing you…?'
'You know what I mean, Loretta. Sleeping with us both at the same time.'
The question seemed to rock her. 'No, Abe. I never did that. I left you before… oh, my God, is that what you've thought all this time? I never would have done that.'
'It wouldn't have mattered. Leaving was what mattered.'
'I know,' she said. 'I don't know if I was wrong. I was young. I just didn't feel like I had a choice.'
'You did and you made one. You can't make a choice if you don't have one.'
'I wasn't smart or wise enough to see that then,' she said. 'I thought everything was easy back then, would be easy. That whatever I did would work out and Dana was a way to guarantee it.'
'And it's worked, see?'
She didn't answer, staring at him. So much bitterness there, so much anger. Where had it all come from? Could she have caused all of it? Avoided all of it?
He looked at her and could almost see the question written across her face.
She nodded. 'Yes, it's worked, but at what cost?' She reached for his hand and took it in hers, squeezed it tightly, then moved over and held it in her lap.
They'd gone from Dana to Elaine. Twenty-five minutes, maybe more. There was no time. His hand was in her lap. The cold was creeping into their bones. Now someone had moved to Kevin Shea, Loretta's plan to calm the city.
Glitsky thought he should bring up some of his reservations, not so much about Shea's guilt as the whole issue of due process and how once you started screwing with that you compromised the whole idea of keeping the law, which was his passion and his job.
But he also wasn't a child and wasn't kidding himself – they were both too tired for heavy philosophy. And like it or not, reasonable or not, the air was also thick with import… something was happening with them. She asked if he wanted to come inside, have a nightcap. He didn't drink more than five times a year, but he used the excuse to himself that he'd talk about Kevin Shea, about his work.
They were in a book-lined room. Glitsky sat in a red-leather armchair, his feet planted flat on the Oriental rug. Loretta was pouring amber liquid into snifters on a sideboard next to a fireplace. 'You ask somebody in for a drink, you ought to pour them a drink at least.'
She had taken off the jacket to her suit. Her blouse was purple silk. Glitsky had removed his own leather jacket and hung it on a peg by the hallway near the front door.
Now he sat mesmerized by the angle, the view, as she leaned over, striking a match and laying it against the gas log in the fireplace, the silhouette through the sheer blouse. Some memory stirred in him. He should get out of here.
She turned off the other lights in the room and brought the snifters over, handing him one, then opening his knees and kneeling between them. They touched the snifters – a clear ringing bell from the crystal – and drank. Resting her forearms along his thighs, she whispered to him. 'Hold my glass.'
He took it, chained.
Her fingers moved to his belt. She looked up at him then, confident. Her eyes came up and stayed on his. Slowly, the belt came undone, the zipper pulled, hands still burning where they rubbed him through the fabric.
She leaned forward, over him, and brought herself down, her hands holding him, around him, almost as if she might be praying.
He surrendered to the moment, the touch, the ecstasy.
31
Carrie, Jerohm Reese's live-in girlfriend, did not want him going out, not now, not so soon after he had just been released from jail. But Carrie was young. Unlike Jerohm, she didn't have an intuitive understanding of how things worked. Jerohm knew that you did what you did for one of two reasons – either when you were forced to or when it was easy. And tonight was going to be easy.
The times you were forced were when you were most likely to get caught. If you didn't plan, didn't take a little time, that's what happened. As it had with Mike Mullen.
Jerohm had been a mule for running dope for nearly three years and making a nice clean life of it, with a steady income, the occasional woman. He had learned about the dangers of spontaneous action, and tried to avoid it whenever possible, but with what turned out to be Mike Mullen, s
uddenly he had had to act and act immediately. He had had no time, no real choice in the matter.
It came down like this-
Jerohm's supplier and partner, Carlos, was expecting his supplier, Richard, to be delivering three kilograms of Chinese white heroin that had, supposedly, recently arrived in the city. Carlos, in turn, had arranged to unload his supply to a local bar owner named Mo-Mo House, who would then step on it and get it moving through its normal channels.
Which was how it always had worked in the past. Except on the day this delivery was due – the day before Mike Mullen died – Richard did not appear. There was no product. This made everyone more nervous than they normally would be – Carlos, Jerohm, Mo -Mo – looking over their shoulders, thinking their mothers might be undercover narcotics officers.
But Mo-Mo had worked a long time with Carlos, so he gave him a chance, with the condition that if the heroin wasn't delivered to Mo's place, the Kit Kat Klub, by sundown the next day, the deal was off. Mo-Mo would take his delivery from somebody else.
Which alone would have been all right, perhaps a hassle to reestablish Mo-Mo's confidence in the Carlos/Jerohm supply line, but nothing too serious. As it turned out, Richard finally did arrive near the end of the next day as the sun was sinking. Carlos had a commitment to buy the drug, but without the sale to Mo-Mo he wouldn't have anything to pay Richard with, and the last man who didn't pay Richard didn't see any more mornings.
Now Jerohm, by the time Richard showed up, had figured he wasn't going to have any work today, no run to the Kit Kat, so he had helped himself to a little PCP, and suddenly he found he had to go steal a car off the street in the time it might take him to blow his nose. And, with angel dust driving his engine, paranoid over Richard and Carlos and most everything else, Jerohm took his.38 Police Special from the place he kept it stashed under the stairs.
There had been no cars on the street. Nobody had parked and left their keys inside, he couldn't get the use of any wheels. And Jerohm was out of time.
Which turned out to be the worst bad karma for Mike Mullen, who was sitting, window down, bouncing along to some tune on the radio. Jerohm couldn't believe he had come all the way to Dolores Street already, which seemed as though it were halfway across town. He had to make his move. The sun was going down and if he didn't get his hands on a car he was dead meat.
So he shot Mike Mullen, pulled him out of the car, and took off. There wasn't any remorse, any particular thought involved at the time or later. Jerohm's feeling was that everybody had their allotted time and this had been Mullen's. It could have been anybody. It was nothing personal. He was merely the agent of blind fate.
Jerohm got the car, got it back to Carlos, took the heroin to Mo-Mo. Everybody was happy.
But though that episode had worked out fine from Jerohm's perspective, generally speaking he had been forced to do what he did, and in that direction lay trouble.
The other way, why he was out tonight, was when it was easy.
Jerohm was wearing black nylon warm-up pants, a black turtle-neck under a black sweater and a pair of Converse black tennis shoes. There had been riots earlier in the day not far from his house on Silver Avenue, and then later tonight up in the Mission District, Dolores Park. Jerohm reasoned they'd pull the National Guard up from Silver, leaving the place deserted, hoping most everybody would stay in because of the curfew.
He smiled to think of it. Citizens were so lame.
He was in good shape. The few days in jail hadn't hurt him any. He could have just run up to Silver but he needed something to carry the stuff away in, and he thought he'd wait a while before trying to score another car off somebody new. Last time hadn't worked out the best.
So leaving his apartment a little after one in the morning, he took his under car – the throwaway he used for business – and rode with the lights out all the way up to Silver, where he slowed down looking out at the playground, although nobody was playing.
He kept driving, running dark, until he came to the row of storefronts, then pulled over in front of the second building – Ace's Electrics – and got out, his sneakers crunching the broken glass under his feet. A few steps over the sidewalk and he was through the broken window, into the shop. He took out his flashlight and checked the shelves. More than he thought there'd be – the guard must have been doing good, keeping out the looters, until they left.
The problem was that the stuff in the shop wasn't high-end – it was the wrong side of town for that. Only radios, clocks, whatever the hell else Mr Ace thought he'd call 'electrics.' But Jerohm didn't waste any time moaning about it. Whatever was here was here for the taking. It would bring him something. Lifting a few of the fancier-looking radios, he came back out through the broken window and put them in his back seat.
Three doors down was Ratafia's Body Shop – a lot better, though he had to break his own window to get himself in. They had a couple of pretty good looking toolboxes jammed to the top with shining gear. They weighed a ton but it would be worth it to carry out – bring some real cash.
Across the street was the liquor store, window broken but bars, and he had to make do reaching through, pulling maybe twenty, thirty bottles out, the ones he could reach by hand or hook with his tire iron.
He kept moving steadily up the street, seeing no one, hearing nothing but his own footfalls over the broken glass. The thrift store was hanging open, but who wanted anything in there? He just lifted a couple of suits that might look good for himself, two or three dresses for Carrie and threw them into the car. Then, thinking about it, he reentered and grabbed a large toy truck for Damien, some scary looking guys with swords, couple of realistic submachine guns. The kid would think it was Christmas.
It wasn't much of a street, but hey, he wasn't complaining. It was all his. Couple more shops – bulk grains and canned goods that he piled in the trunk, a whole passel of what looked like good food stamps in the cash register.
Eighteen minutes. That was enough. He got back into the car, rolling back down Silver, turned onto Palou. Hadn't seen a living soul, which is what he'd told Carrie would happen. Curfew, he told her. People hang inside. Scared of getting shot at, which he wasn't.
But she worried. That was her. Let her. She'd be glad enough to see it when he got it all home.
He knew better, how it worked. You did things when you had to or when it was easy. And tonight was easy.
32
Wes Farrell had vague memories of no sleep.
If he recalled correctly, and he thought he did, Susan – Moses McGuire's wife – wasn't enthralled with the idea of her husband bringing home from his bar a drunk guy she didn't know to spend the night on their couch.
The baby woke up at least three times, although that assumed that she'd been asleep to wake up, and you couldn't have proved it by Wes. He had kept hearing noises all night, one or both of them shuffling around, opening the refrigerator, arguing – 'Would you please bring her in here? I'm not walking around in my nightgown with your friend out there on the couch.' To say nothing of the baby's cries.
As rosy-fingered dawn had lightened the sky, a bleary-eyed Moses McGuire had come into the room and dropped Wes's keys on the floor by the side of the couch. Subtle.
Lydia – Wes's ex-wife – had wanted the dog for companionship because Wes spent so much time away from the house, in the courtroom, and once the kids were gone she did not want to be all alone in the big house. A dog would make her feel safer, too.
But, during the divorce negotiations, Lydia had decided she didn't want the dog anymore. Well, Wes didn't want the boxer either. He'd never wanted it in the first place. It was always Lydia 's dog – Bartholomew D. (for 'Dog') Farrell, Bart for short. Bart, the sixty-five pound dog-doo machine.
And Lydia had said, 'Okay, then he's going to the pound.' It amazed him how Lydia could cut things like that. Had she always been able to? He just didn't know anymore, maybe had never known.
Wes couldn't let that happen. Too many other things had
fallen apart in the short years after his youngest – Michelle – had moved out. For some reason he found himself incapable of allowing Bart to go to the pound.
This particular morning he figured that Bart would be pissed off at him. After all, he had been gone close to eighteen hours. He turned the key and there was Bart, whining.
'Hey, guy. Sorry.' He gave him a scratch between the ears. The dog, tail between his legs, leaned into him for a few seconds, then led him to the kitchen. Wes had to be proud of him – Bart had pulled yesterday's Chronicle onto the floor from the table and used it properly. But Wes could tell he was embarrassed.
He really wasn't in the mood to take Bart for his walk in the trolley tracks that ran down 19th Avenue, but he felt it was his duty. His care for Bart was somehow his psychic life raft – his connection to the person he'd been when there had still been a home, kids, wife, a job – responsibilities that had sustained him and given him some day-to-day meaning. Now there was just Bart, and Wes knew he was just a dumb dog, but he wasn't really ready to give up on taking care of him.
Not that he was especially good at it – as the past hours had proved. But he hadn't been particularly successful at the earlier efforts with his family either.
Bart, turned loose, ran ahead, found a likely spot, took care of business. Shivering, still in his shorts and T-shirt, Wes walked on the black asphalt path along the tracks.
There had been feeble sunlight while he was driving back from where he had parked near the Shamrock last night, but as the earth turned the sun had hidden itself behind a lowering cloud cover. Now no one else was out. There were no shadows because there was no sun. No wind. The place, the normally humming thoroughfare – the whole city, come to think of it – seemed unnaturally, eerily silent. Wes stopped, listening. Bart reappeared from somewhere and sat beside him.
Turning, he caught a flutter of white in the corner of his eye and left the path and went over to it. He tore the makeshift wanted poster down from where it had been tacked to a telephone pole.
A Certain Justice Page 13