Glitsky 02 - Guilt (11 page)

'You got him off?'

'They dropped the charges. The DA decided the evidence wasn't going to stick. He's out of jail.'

She took a breath. 'Well, that's not exactly what I called about. Maybe a little, but not mostly.' Another pause. 'Listen, if I promise not to get psycho on you, would you like to meet me sometime for some coffee or something?'

'Sure. I mean okay. I guess. Why don't you tell me when?'

'Would, like, about now be all right?'

Sergeant Paul Thieu, an investigator in Missing Persons who doubled from time to time as a translator, rode in the passenger seat of Glitsky's unmarked green Plymouth, chattering away as though he was on his way to a wedding or a party, instead of a murder scene. Next to him, Glitsky kept his eyes on the road – it was dusk and the fog clung around the car like wool.

Actually, Glitsky was thinking that it wasn't so bad hearing a voice with some animation in it. There wasn't much cheeriness in the rest of his life, especially around his house, where now they had a nurse coming in every day.

Flo wasn't going to spend her last days in any hospital – they'd discussed it and the family was going to be around her. Not that she was there yet, to her last days, but they were coming. Also, Nat – Glitsky's father – was spending a lot of nights on the couch in the front room, taking up the slack with the boys, trying to keep things in some perspective, as if there could be any.

But Glitsky had hjs job. Going to it was a kind of a relief. And Thieu, chatter or not, represented the beginning of what might turn out to be a more than normally interesting case.

By far the majority of homicides in the city were what law-enforcement personnel referred to as NHI – 'no humans involved' – cases. One person from the lowest stratum of intelligent life would kill another, or several others, for no apparent reason, or one so lame that it beggared belief.

Last week, Glitsky had arrested a twenty-three year-old woman whose IQ soared into the double digits and who'd killed her boyfriend in a dispute over what television show they were going to watch. After she'd shot him, she sat herself down and watched all of
Roseanne
before thinking, 'Well, hey, maybe I'd better see if I can wake old Billy up now.' Which, with a bullet in his heart, proved an elusive undertaking.

But occasionally someone with a more or less normal life got killed for a real reason; the deadly sins did continue to reap their grim rewards. These were the cases Homicide cops lived for. Glitsky and Thieu were driving to what looked like one of them now – an attorney named Victor Trang, who'd been stabbed in the chest.

'So the way I figure it, there's no way I'm going to get to Homicide by moving up the list.' Thieu was referring to the seniority list by which promotions in the SFPD were controlled. 'The other guys up there – isn't that true? – they put in their fifteen-twenty and by the time they get assigned to Homicide, they are completely burned out. Then they discover they actually have to work weekends and nights if they want results. But they don't want to put in that kind of time. Hell, Homicide's a reward, isn't it? But they can't be touched because of their seniority. And they still want the prestige of the Homicide detail, so they take the job and then don't do it.'

Glitsky shot him a glance. 'I do my job, Paul. Other guys do their jobs.'

Thieu didn't seem affected by Glitsky's lack of agreement. Certainly it didn't shut him up. 'I'm not saying that, Abe. I'm not talking about you. You know who I mean.'

A non-committal nod. Glitsky did know who he meant, and Paul had perfectly analyzed the deadwood problem within the unit. It was not Glitsky's inclination, however, to bad-mouth anyone else in his detail. These things had a way of getting around.

'But the point is, I'm being the squeaky wheel. I want to
do
this. This is the action and I crave it.'

Something in Thieu's enthusiasm for the work forced Glitsky to consider smiling. The idea of the thrill of the chase had slid away from his vision of his job over the years.

'And imagine this!' The gush went on. 'I get this call in Missing Persons and we wait our three days and I just
know.
I know this is a homicide.'

'It's a rare gift, Paul.'

Thieu caught the intonation and realized he was pushing too hard. But who could blame him for being excited? When he got the call from the Vietnamese-speaking mother about her missing son, he'd had a hunch. In San Francisco, a missing person had to be gone for at least three days before it became an official police matter. And Thieu had gone by the book, waiting the full three days, but sticking with the story as it developed.

'So how many calls did you get in total?'

Thieu didn't have to consult his notes. A graduate of UCLA in police science, crew-cut and clean-shaven, he represented the increasingly new brand of San Francisco cop. He wore a light green business suit and a flamboyant red and green silk tie that somehow worked. 'His mother, his girlfriend, one of his clients.'

'And how long was he missing?'

'This was in the first day, before it even got to us.'

'Three people in the first day? This was a popular guy.'

'Well, evidently that's a question.'

Glitsky, driving slowly, flicked him a glance.

'I looked into it a little, did some background before he got filed officially as an MP.' A missing person. 'Something the mother said about a lawsuit this guy was working on.'

'Which was?'

'Well, evidently he was well known, but not particularly liked – except by his mom and girlfriend.'

'Why not?'

'Why not what?'

'Why wasn't he liked?'

'Oh. Well, appears the guy was a politician in the Vietnamese community here. Glad hand, big smile, full of shit.' Thieu looked over at Glitsky, checking for his reaction, which was not forthcoming. He was watching the road. 'That's not me speaking ill of the dead. It's what I've heard.'

Glitsky was paying attention to Mission Street. They were now at the light on Geneva, which wasn't working. Traffic was a mess. The fog made it worse. Darkness was closing in fast.

So Thieu kept chattering. 'Anyway, seems this guy Trang was always showing up at parties, gatherings, weddings, funerals, giving his card to everybody… a real nuisance.'

'I think I met him,' Glitsky said, straight-faced.

'Really? You met Trang?'

Another sideways glance. 'Joke, Paul. Not really.'

Momentarily taken aback, Thieu slumped a little in his seat. Glitsky, perhaps oblivious to his passenger's distress, said, 'The heck with this,' and pulled his flasher out, putting it on the roof, turning on the siren. In five seconds, they were through the intersection, rolling. 'So what did his mother say?'

Glitsky's rhythms put Thieu off his own – he'd lost the thread of what he'd been saying. 'About what?'

'About some case he was working on that made you think there might be trouble, which as it turns out there is, if you define trouble as getting yourself killed, which I do.'

'Well, apparently Trang was suing the Archdiocese of San Francisco for a couple of million dollars or something…'

'What for?'

'I don't know. Not yet. The mom said he was over his head, and knew it, but it was a big case. He was scared, she said.'

'Of what?'

'I don't know. Just playing at that level, I think. The mom seemed confused about the Church and the Mafia and thought getting mixed up with one was like the other.'

Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard worse theories. So he was scared. Did he get any threats anybody knew of, the mother knew of? Anything like that?'

'No.'

'Well, there's a help.'

As was often the case, Glitsky was the first of the Homicide team to arrive. The body had evidently been discovered at around 4:15 p.m. by someone from Trang's weekly cleaning service, who, undoubtedly not wanting to call attention to his immigration status, had gone back to the main office and reported it to management. After suitable discussion, the company had called the police. Squad cars from Ingleside Station had confirmed the stiff.

Since they had a tentative identity for the victim, Glitsky had made a courtesy call to Missing Persons and asked if they had an outstanding MP named Victor Trang. Which had alerted Paul Thieu, who'd asked if he could tag along.

A couple of squad cars were parked in front of a squat, faceless, depressing building on a side street off Geneva. Two uniformed officers stood shivering four steps up in a little semi-enclosed portico, smelling of urine and littered with newspaper and broken glass. Identifying himself and Thieu, Glitsky asked them to wait until the coroner and the Crime Scene Investigators arrived.

Then he and Thieu opened the door and entered the building.

Inside, two bare bulbs illuminated a long hallway, in which three doors were staggered on opposite sides. At the far end, the other two officers and either another plainclothes cop or a civilian stood in a tight knot, whispering. Glitsky was aware of his and Thieu's echoing, hollow footfalls on the wooden floors.

Though the other doors in the hallway were wood-faced, pitted and stained, with the lacquer peeling off, this one's top half was of frosted glass, upon which had been etched the name
Victor Trang
and under it, in script,
Attorney At Law.

'He had that door made special,' the civilian said. His name was Harry something and he lived upstairs and said he managed the place.

Poorly, Glitsky thought.

Harry did have master keys for the building – the uniforms had located him as soon as they'd set up. It was a minor miracle, and Glitsky was grateful for it. 'Must of cost him a thousand bucks, the door.' Harry was trying to be helpful, talking to be saying something.

Glitsky ignored him and turned to Thieu, to whom the likely presence of a dead person was having the opposite effect than it was having on Harry. Thieu had stopped chattering. 'You ever do this before?'

'No.'

'You might want to wait then.'

Steeling himself- it was never routine – Glitsky opened the door, flicked on the light. Fortunately, he thought, it had been cold in the office. Even now the room was chilly, but he could detect, before he saw anything, the distinctive smell. Something was rotting in here.

In Glitsky's experience, real-life crime scenes tended to be prosaically ordinary, rarely capturing the
vividness,
the sense of evil and foreboding so favored by cop shows and B movies. This one, though, Victor Trang's office, came close.

Trang had evidently blown all of his appearances money on his door. Once inside, the office reverted to the form of the rest of the building and neighborhood. The long desk was an eight-foot slab of white-washed plywood – in fact, Glitsky realized, it was another door, perhaps the original. At an L to the desk, a table held a computer and printer, the phone and answering machine.

The walls were a fly-specked shiny beige which might once have been white, and they were absolutely bare – not a calendar, not a picture, not even a post-it. Behind the desk, a dark window, without blinds or curtains, was a black hole. There was an off-green couch along the side wall, a wooden library chair with a pillow seat, a folding chair set up facing the desk.

Slowly taking it in as he moved, Glitsky walked around the folding chair. Had it been set up for an appointment? Was it always where it was now?

He stopped. The chair behind the desk had been knocked over – he could see it now up against the back wall.

The body rested along the length of the desk in an attitude of repose, almost as though – no, Glitsky realized,
exactly
as though – it had been placed there. Carefully laid down.

Trang had been wearing an off-white linen suit, and now it was striped with red, in neat rows. There was a large bloodstain in the center of the chest, but it was roughly circular – it hadn't run down the front of his shirt. Therefore – strangely – it hadn't bled much until Trang was already on the floor.

Glitsky stood looking for a moment, letting it all sink in. He would wait until the coroner arrived, until he'd read the forensic reports, but his impressions were coalescing into a certainty. He knew what the red stripes were. It chilled him.

The killer had used a knife, then had held Trang up in some death embrace, holding him up, maybe for as long as a minute, leaving the knife in, perhaps twisting it toward the heart. Then, with his victim good and completely dead, he'd laid him down carefully on the floor, finally pulled out the knife, then calmly wiped the blade off on Trang's suit – two or three swipes at first glance.

Glitsky had been a cop for twenty-two years, in Homicide for the last seven of them. From the evidence of what he was seeing here, he thought he might be looking at the most cold-blooded, up-close and personal murder of his career.

'Mark, are you all right?'

Christina stood in the doorway, one arm propped against the frame. Her hair was down. She wore a navy blazer over a white silk blouse, two buttons open, just this side of demure. She wouldn't start her summer job until late June, but she'd been coming in regularly for the past couple of weeks – ever since Dooher had counselled her to be supportive yet independent – to help Joe get his workload organized for the move south.

She'd also gotten into the habit of stopping by Dooher's office after business hours, just before she went home. Daylight Savings Time had begun two weeks ago, and the office was above the fog layer, bathed in an amber light from the sunset. 'Is something wrong?'

'No. Nothing's wrong.'

'Something, I think.' Moving into the room, she stopped behind the brocaded easy chair, hands resting on it.

He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, exhaled heavily. 'The Trang thing, I guess. Can't get it out of my mind.'

He raised a hand to his eye and rubbed. Weary and distressed. An apologetic half-smile at Christina, a shake of his head. 'What's the sense in it, huh? Here's a guy who's just getting started, prime of his life, perfect health… I don't know. You wonder. It rocks you.'

'The big plan?'

'Yeah, I guess. The big plan.'

'Maybe there isn't one.'

'It's all random, you mean?'

'If it isn't, what's free will?'

He paused a minute, nodding as though in agreement. 'That's a good lawyer question. I'll have to get back to you on it.'

Her lips curved up slightly and she came around the chair, sat on the edge of it, pulling at her skirt, meeting his eyes, then looking down. 'You do hide behind that, you know? That lawyer pose. The glib answer.'

'I am a lawyer, Christina. If I'm glib, it's a line of defense. First we argue, then we deflect the direction words might be going, and on those rare occasions when it doesn't look like we're going to win, we… obfuscate. But I'm not hiding from you. I hope you believe that.'

'I do. I know that.'

He shook his head again. 'I feel bad about Trang, but what's the point of belaboring it? Nothing's going to bring him back. It's the simple
fact
of it… of life being so fragile. I don't feel so glib about that. Not at my age.'

'Your age again. How old are you, anyway? Sixty? Sixty-five? You couldn't be seventy.' She was teasing him, trying to cheer him up.

'Eighty-three next month,' he said. 'But I work out.' He pushed around some items on his desk. 'Actually, since you're as young as you feel, I couldn't be a day over eighty-one.' He shook his head. 'Sometimes the world gets to me, Christina. I shouldn't burden you with it.' Shifting around behind the desk, he flashed his self-deprecating grin. 'You're just lucky, I suppose, getting to listen to my moaning.'

'I do feel lucky.'

'Well, I'm glad. I do, too.'

'You do?'

He nodded. 'Why do you think the managing partner takes fifteen minutes at the end of the day just to visit, risking not only the office gossip but the wrath of people who think they need my time?'

'I don't know. Part of me thought you were just watching out for me, after talking me into coming here, that I wasn't screwing up.'

'I don't believe that.'

'Well, a small part, but some…'

'None. Not the smallest bit. I don't take care of people professionally – you either do it here or you're out.'

'No. You wouldn't…'

'I don't recommend you try me. But I have no worries about you. Not one.'

She sat back in the chair. 'Then I don't know why…?'

'Yes, you do, Christina.' He leveled his eyes at her across his desk. The moment called for a matter-of-fact, intimate tone, and he got it. 'You know, life goes along, and people get so they don't talk to people – I mean you talk, but it's mostly surface, but with you and me, maybe we got lucky that first morning, Ash Wednesday, you remember?'

'Of course.'

'What I mean to say is this, it's not common – in fact, it's rare. And valuable. I value it immensely. You ought to know that. I'd hate to die suddenly like Trang did, and you not know. This isn't business. You and me isn't business, okay?'

'Okay.'

'And another thing, while we're on it – I'm happily married. My wife is a great partner and a wonderful person and not a half-bad cook. I'm not going to accept any gossip about you and me that this office is likely to put out, and I hope you don't either.'

She was smiling now, with him. 'I won't. I don't.'

'Good. Now, how are things with your boyfriend?'

Abe Glitsky, in a pair of khaki slacks and a flight jacket, was walking down one of the muted hallways toward Dooher's office, accompanied by the night receptionist, an exceptionally attractive black woman of about twenty-five. She was explaining that Dooher's secretary had gone home – was Glitsky sure he had an appointment for this time, 6:30? Normally, the receptionist was explaining, if she'd known that, she would have stayed.

'I made it with Mr Dooher personally,' he said, non-committal. 'Maybe he didn't mention it to her.'

Glitsky was struck by the color of the light. The doors to several west-facing offices were open and the sun was going down over the cloud banks, spraying the hallway with crimson.

In almost every office he saw a young person hunched over a desk, oblivious to the sunset, to everything but what they were reading or writing. Fun job.

Dooher was standing in his doorway, talking to yet another beautiful woman. Glitsky figured they grew on trees at this altitude. 'Sergeant Glitsky?'

She was smiling at him, holding out her hand, and he realized he knew her – from the rape clinic, and then that visit to his office. What was she doing here?

'Christina Carrera.' Helping him out.

'Right. Levon Copes,' he said. 'And I'm still looking.'

This seemed to register positively. 'I'm glad.'

The man with her – Glitsky presumed it was Dooher – stepped forward. Protectively? 'You two know each other?'

Christina quickly explained while Glitsky checked out the man in his thousand-dollar pale gray Italian suit. The only wrong note was the hair – no gray, which meant the guy was vain and had a bottle of Grecian Formula hidden in the back of his sock drawer. Glitsky figured if he looked like Mr Dooher, he'd be vain, too. But he'd have to go some before he decided to dye his hair.

The receptionist had disappeared. Christina was asking if Glitsky was the only Homicide Sergeant in town. 'Sometimes it feels like it.'

'I don't know how you do it,' Christina said. 'Up until a couple of months ago, I never knew anybody who'd been murdered, and now I've met two -Tania Willows and Victor Trang. It's unsettling.'

'You knew Trang?'

'I met him here in Mr Dooher's office once. Still…'

'It is easier if you don't know them first.' Glitsky tried to mitigate the cop humor of what he'd just said by smiling, but his scar got in the way. 'I know what you mean, though.'

'It's terrible,' Dooher said. 'Christina here and I were just talking about Victor Trang, the waste of it.'

'You were in Vietnam?'

Christina had gone away – Glitsky had no questions for her. He and Dooher went into the big corner office and they had more or less finished with the routine questions. Glitsky was still seated on the sofa, his tape recorder spinning silently on the coffee table. The receptionist had brought him a cup of tea, and it was excellent. With a slice of lemon yet. He would take the moment of peace until the cup was drained. They were hard enough to come by.

Dooher was volunteering information. It probably had no connection with Victor Trang, but Glitsky's experience was that a murder investigation led where it took you, and the most innocuous comment or detail could be the hinge upon which it all eventually turned. He sipped his tea and leaned back in the soft leather, waiting for whatever was coming next.

The strange red sky had gone mother-of-pearl and Dooher had loosened his tie. He was drinking something amber without ice, pacing around, leaning on the edge of his desk, crossing to the easy chair, to the floating windows. Nervous, Glitsky thought. Which wasn't unusual. He knew that people -even attorneys – got jittery when they talked to Homicide cops. It would be more suspicious if he wasn't.

'That's why I was surprised I found myself liking him. Trang, I mean.' Dooher sighed. 'I don't like to admit it, but it's one of the prejudices I've carried around all these years. Maybe it's genetic. My dad had the same thing with the Japs – the Japanese.
He
always called them Japs. Me, now, some of my best friends…'

Glitsky kept him on it. 'So how'd you like it, Nam?'

'You go?'

He shook his head. 'Bad knees. Football.'

'Yeah, well, maybe you've heard – it sucked.'

Glitsky had come upon that rumor. 'You see action?'

'Oh yeah. We got ambushed and most of my squad got killed.' He swigged his drink. 'I still don't know why I survived and the other guys… and then the warm welcome at home, that was special.' He looked over at Glitsky. 'I was bitter for a while. Blamed it on the Vietnamese. Ruined my life – all that.'

'Did they?'

Dooher took in his plush surroundings. 'No, that was all youth, I suppose. Excuses. Look around, my life isn't ruined. I've been lucky.'

Suddenly he snapped his fingers, went around his desk and opened a drawer; he pulled something out and handed it to Glitsky. 'These were the guys.'

It was a framed color photograph of a bunch of soldiers, armed and dangerous, goofing and scowling. Dooher was in the front row, on the far right, with his captain's bars, his weapon propped next to him. 'I had this up in that space in the bookshelves here till just before Trang came up here the first time. Then I realized it would be offensive to him. I guess I can put it back up now.'

Glitsky handed it back. 'They're all dead?'

'I don't know all. Three of us came home, I know that. But I haven't seen either of the other two in maybe fifteen years.'

The tea had cooled. Dooher went back around the desk and placed the frame in its former space, in full view now. 'Anyway, they trained me pretty well,' he was saying, 'to hate 'em. Charlie, I mean.'

'So what happened with Trang?'

'Like anything else. You finally meet one personally, get to know 'em a little, and you realize they're people first. I just put off meeting any of them for a long time. I
wanted
to keep hating them, you see? So the war would make some kind of sense. Dumb. It's so long ago now.'

'So who still hated him?'

'Trang? I don't know.'

'I understand he was suing you.'

Dooher had settled in the easy chair. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. 'Well, that's technically accurate. He'd filed a lawsuit where some priest took money from a woman. He was amending the suit, that was all. Trying to get more. Hey, it's his job. Anyway, I represent the Archdiocese. The whole thing hadn't gone very far. That's just our business. Litigation. Personally, we were on good terms.'

Glitsky didn't have any reason to doubt Dooher. He did believe that the killer was probably a tall, strong male, and though that described Dooher, he didn't have a patent on the build. 'I'm wondering if he mentioned anything to you about anybody else – clients, colleagues…'

The attorney gave it a long moment. 'Honestly, I can't think of anybody. I'll put my mind to it if you'd like.'

'I'd appreciate that.' Standing, Glitsky turned off his recorder and slipped it into his pocket. He handed Dooher his card. 'If something comes to mind, that's me, day or night.'

Dooher accompanied him to the door, opened it for him. The cotton clouds out the window had begun to glow with the lights coming on in the streets below. 'Do you have any leads at all, Sergeant, on who might have done this?'

'No, not yet. It's still early, though. Something may come up.'

'Well, good luck.' They shook hands, and Glitsky turned to leave as the door closed quietly behind him.