The First Law (17 page)

At a few minutes after eleven o’clock, about two hours after Glitsky had told Lanier about Creed’s perhaps bogus identification, there was one sharp rap at his door. Glitsky took his feet off his desk, snapped shut his latest Patrick O’Brian novel—
Desolation Island.
He opened his drawer, deposited the book, pulled some paperwork over in front of him. “It’s open,” he said.

Glitsky wasn’t altogether stunned to see Barry Gerson. He came to his feet with what he hoped was a warm greeting, invited the lieutenant in, shook his hand, told him to take a chair. “Returning the courtesy visit?” he finally asked.

Gerson, polite as an undertaker, inclined his head an inch. “Something like that.”

“But not exactly?”

“No, frankly, Abe. Not.”

“All right.” He squared himself, linked his fingers on the desktop in front of him. “How can I help you?”

“Actually, I came here to ask you the same thing. I thought I’d made it clear yesterday when you came down to the detail that my door was open to you. You needed anything, all you had to do was ask.”

“That’s true. I appreciated that, too, Barry, I really did. I still do.”

“But?”

“But then I had a talk with”—he almost named Batiste, stopped himself—“with some colleagues, who didn’t think it would be smart of me to abuse the privilege. It might look like I was trying to insinuate myself back into the detail.”

“Which you’re not.”

“No. Of course not.” Glitsky pushed his chair back, crossed his arms behind his head. “I’m minding my own business up here, keeping an eye out for payroll irregularities.”

But Gerson didn’t smile at the witticism. “So you’re denying that you went down to Silverman’s last night?”

Glitsky repressed his own rare urge to smile. Of course, as he’d told Treya, Gerson would have to find out. He was almost pleased that he’d predicted it. “Nobody’s asked me. If they did, if you’re asking me now, I admit it.”

Gerson nodded. “You mind if I ask you why?”

“Not at all. My father went down there with Mrs. Silverman and I didn’t think it was a good idea. I wasn’t there ten minutes.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

Glitsky let out a weary breath. “As I told you yesterday, my father was Silverman’s best friend.”

“You mentioned that. I remember.” Gerson straightened to his full length in the chair. “And as I believe I told you yesterday, I would inform you as soon as we unearthed anything that moved the case forward.”

“Of course. I appreciate that. It’s just that my dad and the wife hadn’t heard from your department and thought they’d take an inventory. I told my father it wasn’t a good idea for him to be involved because of the discussion I had with you. That’s what happened.”

“I was out yesterday. Cuneo and Russell both had personal time off. That’s why nobody called the wife.” At Glitsky’s look, he added, “Hey, it happens.”

“Yes it does.” Good, Glitsky thought, I’ve got him explaining, too.

“So you just went down to Silverman’s and found them there?”

“He called me and left a message. And I don’t need to answer these questions. I’ve got no interest.”

Gerson displayed a small air of triumph. “And because you’ve got no interest, you didn’t talk to Lanier this morning?”

“So what?” Glitsky pushed his chair back far enough to allow him to cross a leg. “You want to know the truth, Lieutenant, I was trying to do you a favor.”

“Goodness of your heart, huh?”

“Believe it or not, I actually have some understanding of the job you’ve got. I thought I could save you some misery.”

“And how would you do that?”

“Do you know Wade Panos?”

“By reputation, sure.”

“And what’s his reputation?”

“He does a good job. Maybe a little rough, but he keeps the scum factor down in his neighborhoods.”

“And that’s it?”

A shrug. “What else is there?”

Glitsky came forward again. “Do you know he’s being sued?”

“Who isn’t? People sue people all the time. What’s that mean?”

“Maybe nothing, except when there’s something like fourteen plaintiffs asking around thirty million dollars.”

“Again, I ask you, what does that prove? Hell, you know. Somebody’s
always
suing us. Brutality, invasion of privacy, stealing candy from schoolkids, you name it.”

“True enough,” Glitsky said. “You’re probably right. Panos is a saint.”

“I never said that.” But Glitsky still had a look, and Gerson said, “But what?”

“Only that I’d think hard before I gave him point in any homicide investigation.”

“He’s not point. He had leads, that’s all. The poker players.”

Glitsky locked his fingers on the desk. Said nothing.

Gerson raised his voice. “And in fact the names he gave us took my boys someplace. You got a problem with that?”

“Not at all.”

“So? What, then?”

“So, the usual suspects, huh? Two guys with sheets.”

“Three, as it turns out. Randy Wills isn’t any choirboy, either. So yeah, the usual suspects. Happens every day.”

“No question about it.” Glitsky turned a neutral face up at him. “Your boys find any evidence to go with their suspects?”

“They’ll be getting warrants.”

Glitsky clucked, then nodded, all understanding. “They looking at anybody else in the meanwhile?”

“Why do they want to do that when the guys Panos gave us look good for it?”

“You’re right,” Glitsky said mildly. “Waste of time. That’d be stupid.”

Perhaps correctly, Gerson must have gotten the impression that Glitsky was including him among the less intellectually gifted. He’d burst in here ten minutes ago holding the high moral ground and for the past several minutes had been drifting into the lower regions, and losing territory even there. It didn’t appreciably improve his attitude.

He stood up.

“Well, you know,” he said, “stupid or not, I’m running the detail now. I’m calling the shots with my troops and what I came up here to tell you still goes. Silverman is my case. I’m controlling the investigation. Yesterday I’m a good guy and bend a little and you take advantage of it, hiding behind your old man. Well, I’m telling you now. You keep you and your father out of it, all the way out, or I’ll haul your ass in before the deputy chief. Don’t think I won’t.” His voice was rasping now, low-pitched with anger and the need for control in the cramped room. “In fact, you might want to remember that
every
homicide in the city is my case now and my guys work for me.”

Glitsky knew he could a draw a punch with one sarcastic word and it hovered temptingly on the tip of his tongue. There’d be a great deal of pleasure in it. But he only leaned back, crossed his arms, and nodded. “I got it,” he said.

David Freeman had to be at his office at 1:30
P.M.
to hold the hand of another of his co-plaintiffs being deposed in the Panos lawsuit. Yesterday they’d started at 10:00
A.M.
with a gentle, turbaned professor of Comparative Religion at City College. In his mid-fifties now, soon after the terrorist attacks Casif Yasouf had been walking back to his car, parked at the Downtown Center Garage, from a meeting at the St. Francis Hotel, when he had the bad luck to run into Roy Panos, in uniform. The assistant patrol special was abusing a homeless man in an alley, kicking him and his shopping cart down toward the western border of Thirty-two.

Mr. Yasouf’s version of events was that he’d simply tried to intervene as a citizen, telling the policeman that he didn’t have to use such tactics. Panos, he said, had then abandoned his pursuit of the bum and turned on him, lifted him easily by his shirt, slapped his face hard twice and told him to take his rag-head ass back to Arabia. Frightened and bleeding, Mr. Yasouf finally fled. He reported the incident to the regular police the next morning, complete with Panos’s name from his tag. Two days later he abandoned the complaint. Again—his version—because someone had set fire to his car.

That deposition hadn’t finished up until twelve-thirty the next morning and by the time Freeman had gotten back, walking as always, to his apartment at the foot of Nob Hill, it was after 1:00
A.M.
and Gina Roake was asleep in his bed. It had been
their
bed now, since a few weeks after his physical confrontation with Nick Sephia.

About a year ago, things had started to change with Freeman and Roake. Before that, Freeman had maintained a discreet and rotating harem of up to a dozen women. He was, after all, a wealthy and successful old man with an established, urban, sophisticated lifestyle that did not include the sort of entanglements that he believed were the unvarying attendants of exclusive physical relationships. He had always kept an armoire of women’s robes for his visitors. The medicine chest was well-stocked—toothbrushes, creams and so on.

Roake was, at forty-eight, not exactly a babe in the woods herself. She, like Freeman, had had several long-standing but essentially casual relationships, and had never been married. They had seen each other in professional and social settings—courtrooms, fund-raisers, restaurants, even the occasional judge’s chambers—for years, but had never shared more than pleasantries.

Freeman had a long-standing tradition that whenever he won a large case, he would celebrate alone—a fine meal at one of the city’s restaurant treasures with an old and noble wine, then a final cognac or two at the Top of the Mark, or one of the other towers—the St. Francis, the Fairmont. That night, at the Crown Room in the Fairmont, he sat savoring his Paradis at a small table by the window overlooking the Bay side. He appreciated the walk of the shapely, grown-up woman as she got off the elevator, unavoidably registering that she appeared to be alone. It didn’t matter, he told himself. This was not how he met women, ever.

He’d been playing the case over and over again in his mind throughout the night, all the high points up to and including the glorious moment of the “Not Guilty” verdict. People had no idea what a rare and lovely thing it was, even in San Francisco, to get a defense verdict. The best defense lawyers in the world won maybe five percent of their cases—Freeman himself hovered around fourteen percent, but he believed himself to be an almost unparalleled genius. And he was right.

Except now the case was over. There would be no need, even, of an appeal. His mind, consumed by its strategies for most of a year, was suddenly empty. He felt a mild euphoria and with the meal and wine, a deep physical contentment. The cognac was the essence of perfection. He stared out the window, over the sparkling lights.

He turned back to the room. The woman had materialized in front of him.

“David? I thought that was you.”

Still half in reverie, he smiled. “Gina. Hello. What a pleasant surprise.”

“I don’t want to bother you if you’re busy,” she said.

“Not at all, at all. Please, join me if you’d like.”

She’d sat and they had talked until last call, after which she took a cab home. In the next month, he asked her to lunch nine times—he preferred lunch dates because there was less expectation of automatic intimacy than with dinner. Either party, in the get-to-know stage, could back out without embarrassment or loss of face. In that way friendship, which in Freeman’s opinion was always preferable to physical attraction, could be preserved.

In Roake’s case, though, a strange thing happened. By the time it became obvious that they’d be sleeping together, he’d stopped seeing anyone else. Before he asked her to his apartment for the first time, and without any kind of agonizing analysis, he got rid of the contents of his armoire, the other feminine accoutrements. Then slowly, over time, she’d started leaving articles of clothing of her own at his place until she had her own drawer in his bureau and the entire armoire all to herself. She hadn’t spent the night at her own apartment now for three months.

This morning, Freeman barely woke up in time to catch Roake as she was out the door on her way to work. He reminded her of the depositions that had now begun on Panos, and wondered if she might make it back here for lunch, even a little early if possible, since they wouldn’t get dinner together for who knew how long.

Now he checked his watch: 11:20. She should be home any minute. Billy Joel’s CD of piano concertos—a Gina find—played almost inaudibly in the background. Rubbing his palms together, he was shocked to find them damp with nerves. He caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and shook his head in amusement. David Freeman hadn’t been nervous arguing before the Supreme Court. He couldn’t remember his last attack of even minor jitters, but he had to admit he had them now. His eyes left his own image and went to the little eating nook in the cramped and narrow kitchen. Normally the table was a mess, piled high with yellow legal pads, lawbooks, half-empty coffee mugs, wineglasses and sometimes bottles, newspapers, binders and file folders.

Today, it looked perfect and elegant. He’d spent most of an hour removing the usual detritus and what remained were two simple place settings in silver, crystal champagne glasses, one yellow cymbidium in the center of the starched white cloth, echoing the sunlight that just kissed the edge of the table. There was a beaded silver champagne bucket to one side, a bottle of Veuve Cliquot’s
La Grande Dame,
purposely chosen for the name of course, nestled in it in chilled splendor. He’d arranged for Rick, the chef downstairs at the Rue Charmaine, to deliver the light lunch—pike quenelles in a saffron broth and an artichoke-heart-and-pancetta salad—precisely at noon.

One last glance at himself, and he had to smile. Certainly, no one would mistake him for handsome. But he’d done all right, and today he looked as good as he could, which is to say he probably wouldn’t scare most small children. He wore the one nice suit, a maroon-and-gold silk tie. He’d managed to shave without cutting his neck and his collar was free of his trademark brown specks of dried blood. It would have to do.

And here she was. On time, cheerful, kissing his cheek. God, he loved her.

“You’re looking good today, mister. If I didn’t have a meeting in two hours . . .” She kissed him again, then backed up a step. “I thought clients didn’t trust nice clothes.”