Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A

by John Lescroart

  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 ...

  Forty minutes later Glitsky was behind his desk. They had finally subdued the riot – two hundred and fifteen police, and by the time it was over they had recorralled one hundred and four rioters. The rest of the potential arrestees had either seen or made their chance and taken it. The sheriff's tables that had been in the lobby were tipped over, torn apart. There had been a small paper fire. The earlier records of citations, for the most part, were gone.

  Sheriff Boles and his deputies had packed the remaining detainees into the commandeered busses and were taking them to Alameda County, where they would discover what a real jail was like.

  It was eleven-fifteen.

  Adrenaline was surging through him.

  This thing wasn't going away, wasn't even getting any better. For some reason his mind turned to the French Revolution, to a truth he'd only realized for the first time earlier this summer when he'd read about it in one of his continuing self-improvement programs. It was about the storming of the Bastille Prison in Paris on July 14, 1789. (He reflected on the fact that revolutions always seemed to happen in July, which was now only forty-five minutes away.) At the time the Bastille event hadn't seemed to mark the e
nd of the monarchy. For weeks afterward Louis XVI had made his rounds, giving speeches, doing damage repair, the usual. But from Bastille Day onward he was doomed. He just didn't realize it.

  Glitsky wondered if they were all in the same boat here in the City by the Bay. Three days in and, if tonight were any indication, on a roll.

  The pile of messages on his desk had grown exponentially, Chief Dan Rigby's message labeled 'URGENT' on top, but the first thing Glitsky did was go through the whole pile on the chance that Farrell had called.

  Nope.

  Why the hell not? What was going on with that guy?

  Next he called Rigby's office, only to hear the extension ringing and ringing in the War Room. It wasn't really any surprise – Rigby had probably gone home, along with his staff, for at least a few hours. If he had been in the building during the riot Glitsky would have seen him. He would check back with the chief first thing in the morning, find out what was so urgent.

  Supervisor Greg Wrightson had called him again. Although a nominal liberal, like every other supervisor, Wrightson was one of few members of the Board of Supes who at least pretended to care about the mostly so-called right-wing issues that concerned the police department. He also was in the bad habit of believing that he, as a city supervisor, somehow had a mandated authority to order police action whenever it suited him. He had been known to call up Rigby himself and ask him to start enforcing the violations on parking meters around City Hall. Important stuff like that.

  Glitsky knew Wrightson wouldn't be in his office in the middle of the night, but he moved the message onto the center of his desk, under Rigby's. If Wrightson had called twice in one day, he had something on his mind.

  Glitsky's father Nat's message was that he had also left a message at his home – where was Abraham, anyway? He and the boys were at the White Sands Motel in case he got this message. Monterey was quiet, idyllic. Abraham ought to get away himself on the weekend if he could.

  'Sure, Dad,' Glitsky muttered. 'Great idea.'

  Then the informal correspondence from his inspectors. Carl Griffin's note about a Colin Devlin who was going to come in tomorrow with a lawyer and make a statement about the Arthur Wade riot. And, by the way, Griffin wrote, Glitsky was right about the knife-wound connection. Devlin had been cut – that's how Griffin had found him. This brought a measure of satisfaction.

  But this emotion was short-lived, because looking up brought his stack of folders into his consciousness, among them the reminder of Art Drysdale's complaint to Strout about the Chris Locke investigation, or lack thereof. He reached over and pulled the entire pile over in front of him, digging down through the first four or five until he came to Locke.

  All right, this will be on top, too.

  And back to his guys – a crisp and cryptic few words from Ridley Banks – 'Re: PM, Mo-Mo House, Watch This!' Glitsky wrestled with it for a minute, squinting into nothing. Mo-Mo House was the proprietor of the Kit Kat Klub, the place where Ridley Banks had arrested Jerohm Reese many days ago. Had Mo-Mo called in the late afternoon, after Glitsky had gone? But why wouldn't he have spoken to Banks? And what was 'Watch This' beyond a reference to Ridley's redneck joke?

  He worked it some more – maybe Banks had been on his way out of the detail and in a hurry. Was he saying that Glitsky himself should go by and question Mo-Mo about Jerohm? Some evidence might have turned up? But then Ridley would have pursued it, wouldn't he? It made little or no sense as he'd written it. Glitsky would need to have an administrative chat with the guys about this kind of thing. A message that didn't convey any information wasn't much use to anyone.

  The sound of more sirens came up to him as he put down Ridley's note. He got up and crossed the darkened room, looked sideways and down where the jail did not block the view. What he saw was not the aurora borealis flickering orange out there. The city was still burning.

  52

  Melanie's fantasy had been that she would ride like the wind up to the television station, where a handsome young receptionist who perhaps doubled as a crusading news reporter would grab the tape and hustle into the studio – herself in tow – and interrupt whatever program was in progress for what would be an important flash news bulletin.

  The reality was more prosaic.

  She skirted riot areas in the Panhandle and lower Twin Peaks before she got lost and wandered in what she supposed must have been Noe Valley until she found herself on Church Street, from which she knew she could get down to Army (two more miles or so out of the way), then over to the freeway and up again into the city.

  Figuring that her best exit was Bryant Street, which she could then take back south ten blocks to Mariposa, she got off the freeway at the Hall of Justice. A mistake.

  A fugitive driving a vehicle with stolen license plates, she pulled off not only into a substantial traffic problem, but into a convention, a gaggle of – she estimated – roughly seven million police cars. Acutely aware of the lack of the sideview mirror, which had been sheered off the night before during her high-speed chase, she had to get across four lanes of this traffic to make her turn to the south. She was also positive the entire time that some cop would pull her over and issue her a ticket for the missing mirror.

  None of her worst scenarios developed. It took her nearly five minutes to go the one block but she made the turn, came around out of the traffic and headed south. At last, having arrived at KQED, she found the station dark, evidently closed for the night. The parking lot was fenced but there was an open entrance which she drove through, stopping six feet from a dimly lighted doorway. A fat, jowly security guard sat inside, feet on a desk, reading a comic book.

  She buzzed at the door and the man looked up, sighed, slowly straightened, got out of his chair and walked to the door, gesturing to her to indicate what she wanted. It didn't appear that he intended to open the door.

  Tentatively, she held the tape up. 'Tape?' she yelled through the glass.

  He nodded.

  'I've got a tape I'd like to leave for the newsroom. It's very important.'

  Another nod.

  'Please.'

  The guard only pointed to a box by the side of the door, yelling something through the glass that sounded like 'Stickney's got the pox,' but it was probably more like 'stick it in the box.'

  'It's really important, somebody's got to see it right away.'

  He continued to nod. She had a vision that maybe he had springs implanted in his neck. Maybe it was a physical impairment. Maybe he belonged to the Constant Nodders of America Club. He was also pointing at the box, yelling, 'box, box!'

  She couldn't just leave it like this. After all the hassle getting here, Kevin finally getting to tell his story, and now she had to entrust it to this Neanderthal with neck palsy.

  But what else could she do? She'd already been driving over an hour and a half. Kevin would be worried sick. She didn't remember the addresses – or even the approximate locations – of any of the other stations. She couldn't just drive around all night and she couldn't go home with the tape, not after all this.

  All right. She placed it against the wide slot and pushed. It was inside. Winkin' and Blinkin's buddy leaned over, picked it up, shook it, listened to it.

  'It's not a bomb,' Melanie whispered. Then, more loudly: 'It's a tape. It's a VCR tape.'

  Bobbing his head randomly, the tape now in his hand, he seemed to be waiting for something else. But she had nothing else. Pointing at the tape one last time, Melanie yelled at the glass, 'It's really important. Okay? Really.'

  The guard nodded.

  Kevin was up out of his chair as soon as he heard her key in the door, opening it before she could, pulling her to him, gathering her into his arms. 'What happened? Are you all right?' Kissing her, his hands over her back, through her hair, pulling away enough to see her face.

  She just held him. Held onto him. Both.

  The two of them embracing there in the open doorway, the hall yawning behind them. Finally Melanie remembered
where they were and got them both over the threshold, closed the door behind them. 'You know, I think I could use a drink.'

  'You? Melanie Sinclair? That's my girl.'

  'I could use a big drink. What's a big drink?'

  He thought a minute. 'Mai Tais.'

  'Okay.'

  Holding hands, they went to the kitchen. She was telling him her adventures while he rummaged in the closets, through the refrigerator.

  'So, after all that, we're not sure it's even going to get seen?'

  'I know. I mean I don't know. I feel like such a failure—'

  'Don't,' Kevin said. 'Wes says nobody would believe it anyway. He says I shouldn't have run in the first place. I should have—'

  'But you couldn't...'

  'I could, I guess, but I didn't. But now that we've gotten to here, he says it's going to come down to a trial.' He tried to drop it casually, even following it with a little riff on drinkmaking. 'Apparently Ann doesn't have any orgeat syrup. You can't make a Mai Tais without orgeat syrup.' But it didn't get by Melanie.

  'Exactly what would they try you for?'

  'What? Oh, murder, something like that. Wes thinks they might even prove it with the picture, public opinion, me being white and Arthur Wade black, all that. I told him I don't think ...' He looked up, noticed she had started to cry, crossed to her. 'Hey, hey.' Gathered her to him. 'It's not that big a deal, she doesn't have 151 rum either, so we couldn't have Mai Tais anyway. You really need a float of Myers's 151 if it's going to be any good. Actually, she doesn't have any rum, so the whole Mai Tai idea turns out to be kind of lame.'

  She didn't laugh, didn't even smile. Her body continued to tremble against his. He didn't know what to say.

  Melanie was in one of the overstuffed chairs, hands folded stiffly on her lap, staring straight ahead. She had continued to cry for a while – she still held a handkerchief tightly.

  Kevin came into the living room carrying two glasses in one hand and in the other a large pitcher of liquid with a head on it.