Damage (11 page)

There are three ways that law enforcement officers can make a valid arrest in California, and Glitsky had had a great deal of experience with all of them.

In the first instance, the grand jury issues an indictment. The court issues a warrant and a couple of officers are assigned to arrest the suspect and deliver him or her to the jail. In the second case, investigators conclude that they have enough evidence to satisfy the probable-cause requirement, and they bring this evidence to a magistrate (one of the rotating superior court judges), who then signs off on an arrest warrant, after which, again, a couple of officers go out to effect the arrest. The third type, the so-called no-warrant arrest, is both the most common and the most challenged because it almost always includes an element of subjectivity—an officer or team of officers makes a unilateral decision that the suspect must be taken into custody immediately for any number of reasons, usually because he was caught in the act, but perhaps to stop him from committing another crime or to keep him from fleeing the jurisdiction.

Glitsky didn’t know offhand who was the presiding magistrate on this Saturday afternoon, but he did know two other things for sure: that the magistrate might be Sam Baretto, who would be very unlikely to sign off on a warrant; and that Ro Curtlee needed to be in jail right now. These were two possibly irreconcilable scenarios, and the second one, in Glitsky’s mind, was nonnego tiable.

So by the time he was on the elevator heading down to the lobby, Abe had made up his mind. Because of the overt threat to his own family, he believed he had plenty to justify a no-warrant arrest. Wes Farrell had already promised him that if he had anything substantive to bring Ro in on, the DA’s office would back him up. Besides, in police work—as in so many other endeavors—it was always better to ask for forgiveness later than for permission before.

His duty was clear and Glitsky was going to do it.

On reflection, Glitsky knew Jenkins was right that it would be hard for him to make the arrest himself. He was just too close to the case. He also knew he couldn’t go into any suspect’s house without an arrest warrant, even for a felony. But what he could do was put a bunch of officers in surveillance around the house who would nail Ro Curtlee the first time he set foot outside.

It only took him a couple of minutes to explain the situation and to pick up two pairs of uniformed patrolmen and another squad car from Southern Station, the precinct that worked out of the ground floor of the Hall of Justice. They would take the initial shifts around the Curtlee home until Glitsky could call in some of the detectives from night investigations to take over the surveillance.

Now the five policemen had pulled up and parked at the curb down the street from the Curtlee home, Glitsky in his city-issue and his troops behind him in their black-and-white patrol cars with the wire mesh between the front and back seats.

They got out of their cars and gathered near Glitsky’s back bumper. The light drizzle continued and in the late afternoon limited visibility to about fifty yards. The weather didn’t seem to bother or even much register with any of the men.

Glitsky liked the trim of these youngsters—solid guys, all probably under twenty-five, pumped up and eager to be working with the head of homicide. They all looked like they worked out with some regularity. The biggest white kid—his name tag read DALY—stood with his arms folded across his chest. His partner, Monroe, lean and dark black, kept his hands in his jacket pockets and shifted his weight from foot to foot, loose and easy. The two others might have been their cousins. All the men wore their belts—guns, batons, and handcuffs. Glitsky, in plainclothes, had no patrolman’s belt, just his service weapon in a shoulder holster underneath a dark brown Gore-Tex jacket.

“What if he doesn’t come out?” Daly asked.

Glitsky’s mouth turned up a fraction of an inch, anticipating a smile that never quite materialized. “We wait till he does. The man’s going to jail.”

The patrolmen exchanged a glance, galvanized by the thought of real action.

“Oh,” Glitsky added, “and there may be a butler, large gentleman, who has a carry permit and might want to make this an issue. He interferes in any way, we restrain him and bring him downtown as well, clear? No chances with either of these guys.”

“Yes, sir,” the four men said in unison.

“All right. Let’s go.”

Glitsky sent one of the squad cars beyond the house to the end of the block so that if Ro came out, whether he turned left or right, there would be someone to cut him off. In their enthusiasm, the officers in this car turned on their overhead flashing lights to drive the fifty yards down the street. Glitsky flinched. At least, he thought, they didn’t turn on their sirens.

But it turned out that the red strobes were enough.

Glitsky turned and had only taken two steps back toward his car when Ro Curtlee emerged from the house, his drink in his hand, striding purposefully down the walk, looking up the street toward the patrol car with its lights flashing. Today he was wearing a gray hoodie with the top down, new jeans, new tennis shoes. “
I don’t believe this shit
,” he yelled into the night. Still focused on the patrol car up the street, he never even noticed Glitsky until he and the other two patrolmen were almost upon him.

“You’d better believe it,” Glitsky said. “Ro Curtlee, I’m placing you under arrest for threatening a police officer’s family. You have the right to remain . . .”

Shaking his head, seemingly enjoying himself, Ro flipped Glitsky the bird and turned to head back toward his front door.

Daly, on Glitsky’s left, blocked the line of escape, leaving Ro surrounded by police. But Ro hadn’t spent eight years in prison for nothing. His face actually broke a smile. “Hey, easy,” he said.

He held his hands up as though he posed no threat, giving up. Taking a step forward, he slashed out his right hand in a vicious karate chop that Daly only partially blocked before it hit him in the throat. Staggered, Daly slumped enough for Ro to block him into a tree by the drive. Still coming forward in the same movement, Ro got ahold of Daly’s belt and brought his knee up into Daly’s groin. When the officer bent over, Ro reached around him and got his hand on the butt of Daly’s gun, holding on to and pulling it out of the holster as he pushed him away, then butted him with enough force to send him back out into Glitsky.

Ro came around with the gun, but Monroe was ready for the attack and came around with his nightstick, hitting Ro a solid crack on the elbow. Amazingly the blow had no apparent effect. Ro swung at Monroe’s face with Daly’s gun, a blow that Monroe blocked with his own nightstick, then came down with a counterstrike on Ro’s arm, following it with a full-on body slam.

Ro brought the gun up in Monroe’s general direction and pulled the trigger, but Daly hadn’t chambered a round, and nothing happened but a click.

This gave Monroe just time to jab Ro in the gut and to take a swing at his gun hand, connecting and sending the semiautomatic skittering over the flagstones. Monroe then backed away just enough to get room for another swing.

But Glitsky came up and blocked him, grabbing his suspect by his sweatshirt, throwing him to the ground. Ro went sprawling facedown onto the wet flagstones, then used his momentum to flip himself over, get upright, and kick out at Monroe’s legs with a guttural grunt. The second cop let out a cry and went down.

But by now Glitsky had Daly’s nightstick and he swung it once in a roundhouse backhand that Ro tried to block with his forearm. A crack as hard wood met bone, and Ro let out a yell of agony, and almost simultaneously Daly slammed into him with a football tackle, taking him down, holding on as Ro continued to kick at him. Monroe scrambled over a few feet, brought up his nightstick, and hit Ro in the head, the shoulders, and then in the head again.

Daly yelling, “I got him! I got him!” he tried to wrestle Ro’s arms behind his back while reaching for his handcuffs. The suspect kept up the struggle under him, but by now Monroe had come over and pinned his upper body while Glitsky got down by his feet and held him there.

In a few more seconds, it was over.

The two patrolmen jerked Ro to his feet. He was bleeding from his scalp and his mouth, spewing invective all over Glitsky, who’d by now drawn his gun. “You broke my arm, you cocksucker! You broke my fucking arm!”

“And your nose, too,” Daly said, hitting him in the face as hard as he could.

“I’m going to sue your asses,” Ro screamed. “I’ll have your badges.”

“Tell somebody who gives a shit,” Monroe said, jerking Ro around, Daly now on Ro’s other arm, pulling him off into the street, Ro keeping up his abuse all the way.

Following them, Glitsky took one last look back at the house’s open door, then sucking for a breath, he fell in behind his two limping officers and his prisoner. The whole thing had taken less than a minute. The other two officers joined them, and they manhandled Ro into the patrol car and slammed the door behind him.

By eight thirty P.M., the drizzle had turned into a steady cold rain.

Wes Farrell was not the only new elected official in San Francisco that year. The two-term previous mayor, Kathy West, had moved out and, by some accounts, up to the State Assembly in Sacramento. Her successor as mayor was a forty-five-year-old former public defender and supervisor named Leland M. Crawford. These two electoral changes also coincided with a changing of the guard in the police department—Chief Frank Batiste’s retirement had become official on the day before Farrell and Crawford had been sworn in, and in his place, hired after a nationwide search that ignored many candidates from the city’s own pool of veteran police officers, was Vi Lapeer, a forty-eight-year-old African American woman and the former assistant chief of police of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After he’d received his call from the Curtlees before Ro had even made it down to San Francisco General Hospital—where they’d treated his injuries and where he was currently under guard—Mayor Crawford had ordered an emergency confab in his ornate city hall office. Now Crawford was going to get his first chance to assert his dominance and capacity for leadership. He stood about six foot four. His thick black hair was going gray at the temples. He might have been handsome but for an overly toothy smile and a continual battle with facial rosacea. Unlike Farrell, Crawford’s general tendency was to use his enormous antique desk to separate himself from his visitors, but tonight that was not his intention. Instead, in shirtsleeves, he sat on the front of that desk in front of a semicircle of folding chairs, on which, left to right, sat Farrell, Lapeer, Glitsky, and Amanda Jenkins.

Crawford was not a pro-cop politician. Like Farrell—one of their few similarities—he was a lifelong member of the defense bar. He believed that excess and denial of due process was part of police culture, the rule rather than the exception. Now he had a prime example of it occurring only a few weeks into his administration and from the Curtlees’ reaction, it looked as though he was going to be blamed for it, at least to a certainly not-insignificant percentage of the electorate.

He wasn’t inclined to sit idly by and let that happen, so he’d called this meeting. “You’re telling me, Lieutenant,” he was saying to Glitsky, “that even knowing what we know now, you’d pursue the same course of action?”

“In a heartbeat,” Glitsky said. “The man threatened my family. I’d do it again tomorrow if it came to it.”

Crawford spoke up heatedly. “You’d do it again tomorrow? Without a warrant? After the district attorney told you not to, with no notice to your chief or my office. Are you completely insane, Lieutenant, or merely totally out of control?”

“Excuse me, sir,” Vi Lapeer said, “but if Ro Curtlee hadn’t come out drunk and attacked the officers, none of this would have happened. All the lieutenant was trying to do was to neutralize the threat while we went through the usual process.”

“That’s not what I understand.” Crawford was prepared for this and answered in clipped tones. “From what the Curtlees explained to me, Ro didn’t go over to the Glitskys’ home to threaten anybody.”

Jenkins barked out a laugh. “Right.”

Crawford fixed his gaze on her. “It is right, Ms. Jenkins. Maybe you don’t know that Lieutenant Glitsky had gone over to Ro’s house the night before, apparently just to harass the man, and Ro just wanted the lieutenant to know how that felt.”

Lapeer squirmed in her chair. Even if she did not think that her lieutenant had acted correctly, she would have felt compelled to stand behind him, at least until she got him alone. The fact that she actually agreed with the way he’d proceeded underscored her words with a low-key vehemence. “With all respect, Lieutenant Glitsky went over there last night to question the suspect about his whereabouts when one of the witnesses in his upcoming murder trial was killed. That was official police business.”