Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A (8 page)

And then the hawk-faced black man with the flight jacket and scar through his lips, breaking into the room and scaring the shit out of him, taking over from the lovely assistant district attorney. Ms Wager had been cool about it, composed, but still struck him as somebody caught doing something wrong.

The man, Lieutenant Glitsky, he said, the head honcho of the homicide detail, suggested they go upstairs to continue the interview. Convinced that he hadn't much of a choice in the matter, Westberg had gone along with him.

'This is Lieutenant Inspector Abraham Glitsky, star number 1144. I am currently at an interview room in the Hall of Justice, 880 Bryant Street, in San Francisco. With me is a gentleman identifying himself as Paul Westberg, a freelance photojournalist, Caucasian male, born March 4, 1971. This interview is pursuant to an investigation of case number 950867731. Today's date is June 29, Wednesday, at 0825 hours on the AM.'

Glitsky was going to do it by the book, as a regular interview conducted in the course of a murder investigation. He sat across from Westberg at a small pitted wooden table, a tape recorder switched on between them. After walking through the standard battery of questions, again going over the basics of what Westberg claimed he had seen the night before, they got down to the crux of it:

Q:
So the crowd was yelling 'pull, pull!' Something like that. And what happened then?

A:
Well, this man was pulling on him, hanging on him, like in the picture.

Q:
He was pulling on the hanging man, pulling him down?

A:
Yes.

Q:
How do you know that?

A:
[Pause.] Well, it was obvious.

Q:
That's my question, Mr Westberg. How was it obvious? Look at this picture. [Glitsky had the late edition of the morning
Chronicle
in the room.] The man has one arm around the victim, another holding up what appears to be a knife.

A:
It
was
a knife. He had it at the guy's throat.

Q:
Okay. Then what?

A:
Then what
What
!

Q:
Then what happened?

A:
I took the picture. Two of them.

Q:
In quick succession?

A:
Yes.

Q:
Have you seen the other one?

A:
Yeah, sure. I developed them both at home. It didn't come out as good.

Q:
Do you mean it wasn't dramatic, or there was some technical problem – focus, lighting, like that?

A:
No, there wasn't a technical problem. It was only, like, two seconds away from this one. Basically the same picture, just not as good.

Q:
All right, let's go on. After you took these pictures, what did you do?

A:
I ran. The crowd reacted a little to the flash. A couple of guys started coming for me. I thought they were going to smash the camera, maybe me, too, so I ran.

Q:
You used a flash? A: Yeah. It was in shadow, the street, near sunset, maybe right after.

Q:
So how long in total were you there, witnessing all this?

A:
I don't know. A minute, ninety seconds, something like that. It was pretty scary, crazy.

Q:
And before you snapped your picture, did you happen to notice this man who you say was pulling on the victim?

A:
He
was
pulling on the victim. Look, that's what the lady downstairs told me, too. She said stick by my story. I thought you guys were on the same side.

Q:
The lady downstairs, Ms Wager?

A:
Yeah, that was her.

Q:
She told you to stick by your story? Which story?

A:
That he was pulling down on the guy ...

Q:
Well, is that a story or is it what happened?

A:
[Pause.] It's what happened. It's what I saw. The picture shows it plain as day – look!

Q:
[Pause.] If he was holding on with two hands and his feet were off the ground . . . but you're saying you
saw
him pull down. That's your testimony?

A:
Well, what else could it have been? He was in the mob ... [Pause.] Yes, that's my testimony.

Melanie was crying. 'Cindy told them.'

'Cindy told them
what
, Melanie?'

'Who you were.'

'
What
? Why? Why did she do that?' But he knew. 'How did she...?'

'I called her, Kevin. Oh, God. I needed somebody, I just felt so bad, Kevin. I needed to talk to
somebody
...'

'I've told you a hundred times, Cindy is not your friend.' But this was a stupid discussion, he decided. 'Anyway, thanks for the tip—'

'Kevin, don't—'

'Don't! You tell
me
don't!'

She was crying. It tore at him, and he realized he still cared about her, didn't want to hurt her, but now she'd gone and done this ...

'Kevin, I'm so sorry. I love you, I still love you and I can help you. You can come stay here—'

'Why would I need to come stay there, Melanie?'

'Cindy ... Cindy told them where you live.'

He took the receiver away from his ear and stared at it. This was too bizarre.

Goddamn Cindy. Kevin, this is where the dick leads you. That one night with her – before he'd hooked up with Melanie – was turning into the worst mistake of his life. And it had been nothing but a casual one-nighter, nothing like what he had had with Melanie.

Letting go of the phone, leaving it off the receiver, he went to the window and looked down over the rooftops. He stepped out onto the fire escape, climbed the iron ladder holding on with his one good arm, up to the roof. God, it was hot. It was
never
this hot in San Francisco.

His head throbbed and this time he was willing to concede that it might be part hangover. He was dressed in a pair of old 501 Levi jeans, running shoes, a UCLA sweatshirt, and he moved in a crouch to the front of his building, looking over the ledge down onto Green Street. Two black-and-white police cars were pulled up at the curb, and he saw four men talking.

Again, a sense of disbelief. This could not be happening. Damn that Cindy. Hell hath no fury indeed ...

Now the policemen split up, two of them going toward the front door, the other two separating, going around the two sides of the building. Surrounded.

Glitsky knew that he was on edge – a bad sign. He was chomping on ice cubes, sitting at his desk, warning off all would-be intruders with the evil eye as they appeared in his doorway.

Not very professional, he knew. It was the kind of body language he would use on occasion when he'd been a sergeant and wanted solitude, but now that he was the boss it had a different feel, a kind of self-aggrandizing ...

Well, screw it, he thought. Things were starting to pile up – he'd known they would – but as was usually the case in emergencies, you knew it was going to whack you but you could never predict where or how hard. The answer was starting to turn out to be – really hard and almost everywhere.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night, maybe his biorhythms were low; Isaac, Flo, the whole Wager family; but events were hitting him the wrong way and he was struggling to contain himself.

The patrolmen had not been able to arrest Kevin Shea. The suspect was gone when they'd gotten there – he had left suddenly. The apartment manager had been cooperative and let them in and the back window had been open. There was a half-consumed cup of still-warm coffee on an end-table. The television set was still on. The phone was off the hook, the receiver lying on the bed. Someone had obviously tipped Shea off and he had gotten out with minutes to spare.

Contributing to Glitsky's ill humor was the impression he had taken away from the interview with Paul Westberg, which was that Elaine Wager's chat with the witness had affected the man's testimony. And there was a bigger issue – the reason he had felt compelled to visit Chief Rigby earlier in the morning: the district attorney's office, perhaps at the urging of Senator Loretta Wager, seemed to be opting for a political solution to the problems, and this was asking for more trouble than Glitsky cared to consider. They were building a case on Kevin Shea which would not allow for the fact that he might, in fact, be innocent.

Actually, on the basis of what he knew, Glitsky didn't think Shea was innocent. But he was uncomfortable with something that smacked of a witchhunt, and that's what Elaine Wager's interrogation (and Westberg's responses) had reeked of.

Evidently the powers had decided that Kevin Shea was the quintessential white racist, and that feeding him to the maw of the mob was the best answer to the complicated questions they were facing. That this was a fairly typical response didn't make Glitsky hate it any less.

He knew – Christ, he should, he embodied it – he knew that while all the bureaucracies in the land were meeting de facto quotas, providing hard, statistical support for the notion that the country was making progress toward integration and racial harmony, in reality the polarization was increasing every day. Glitsky was on the street enough – he saw it.

The truth was that racism was all around him – the enlightened white workers here in the Hall always referring to black people as
Canadians
, the black parents at his boys' schools who wouldn't let their kids play with white children.

On the surface everything was working. People were generally polite, proper, friendly. Now the thing that had become unfashionable – and in San Francisco the worst crime was to be unhip – was acknowledging the depth of the problem. Race? Please, didn't we do all that in the sixties? Better to pretend it wasn't really there. Certainly it wasn't an issue in San Francisco. Everybody accepted everybody else nowadays. This was the nineties. We solved all that stuff years ago. Get real.

And then, one sunny summer evening, a black man named Arthur Wade gets lynched.

And that brought him to the last cause of his ice crunching – the one person who was calling the infection systemic, Philip Mohandas, was abandoning any hope for understanding because he was taking it too damn far. There were so many other things, constructive things, he could do. He could be responsible. He could call for some restraint. Dialogue.

Instead, because Mohandas knew that nobody was going to arrest an African-American leader in the coming days for what amounted to sticks and stones, he would be
excused for
not doing the right thing. He had cause, he was a victim of his own rage. Old-fashioned laws didn't matter if you had a good enough reason. Ask the Menendez boys.

What most got to Glitsky was when the leaders who claimed to represent all the black people caved in to that temptation and then those failures were cited by white people as a justification – hell, the white side of Glitsky even felt it himself – for distrusting legitimate black motives and aspirations.

And now Mohandas was clearly breaking the law, openly calling for vigilantism, being allowed – even encouraged – to rant and vent to his heart's content. And his presence and rhetoric were raising the odds.

Glitsky felt it made no sense to let him inflame the situation but no one seemed to be inclined to try and stop it. Glitsky thought he wouldn't mind a shot at it – he had a few ideas that might get Mohandas's attention – but it wasn't his job. His job was homicide. All this other political crap was just that – crap.

But such sensible thoughts weren't doing his mood any good. He continued to crunch his ice, his eyes fixed ahead of him.

The telephone rang in his office. His receptionist being the same person who guarded his door – nobody – he picked the phone up with a more than usually unpleasant, 'Glitsky. Homicide.'

A pause, an almost inaudible sigh. 'Abe Glitsky.' He might have imagined it, but there was a sense of relief in the words, as though at great personal expense she'd broken through some psychic barrier. He recognized the voice instantly.

'Loretta...?'

'One word and you sound exactly the same.'

Glitsky, adrenaline still running, answered her words. 'No,' he said, 'I'm pretty different. You'd be surprised.' It sounded more hostile than he felt but the words were out, unchecked, and maybe some truth ...

'Well, of course.' That deep throaty laugh. 'We're all different, Abe, we've all changed. But we're all still the same, too, deep down.'

This was as strange an opening as he could have imagined, bantering with his ex-lover who was now a United States senator as though they'd seen each other, perhaps intimately, a couple of days before.