A Certain Justice

They separated, stared at each other. Both of them sighed. Elaine said, 'Hi,' broke half a self-conscious smile, though, again, Loretta couldn't read all of it.

'Hi, honey. How you handlin' this?'

'Scared I guess. Other things.' A pause. 'I knew Arthur Wade, you know. He was at Boalt with me.'

'Just makes it worse, don't it? You get any sleep?'

'Not yet. I brought us some lunch.'

'I could eat. It's near four in DC. What'd you get us?'

When they were alone together, in private, there was a faint echo of Loretta's roots in their rhythms. Elaine took out and opened the white styrofoam cartons on the desk: cornbread, roast beef, mashed potatoes, greens, diet Cokes.

Finally Loretta asked, 'What other things?'

'Oh, office stuff.' She took a quick drink of her Coke. 'Chris.'

'Everybody had gone home. I was leaving, too. I'd just called you, you know? On the plane?'

Loretta, her face a mask, nodded. Her hands were folded on the desk before her. She'd forgotten her sore feet. Her daughter was continuing.

'… but Chris wanted me to stay. He said he needed me to help him sort this out, how we were going to handle it. I told him it was too late, I was…' She shook her head. 'I was too tired, I supposed, to be of much help, 'specially knowing what today was going to be like. And he said that wasn't it exactly.'

Knowing what was coming, Loretta closed her eyes. A long breath escaped. 'He needed you personally.'

'I'd never seen him like that, Mom. Really. I mean, this was my boss. We're both lawyers. We know all the rules about sexual harassment so we tiptoe around each other. And he's older, and married, I know all that. But this wasn't sex, or just sex. Mom?'

Loretta opened her eyes. 'I'm here, child. How far did he take it?'

Elaine looked at the floor. 'All the way,' she whispered, 'as far as it could go.' She exhaled, the tension of letting it out.

'You sayin' you and Chris Locke made love in his office last night?'

'Don't be mad at me. I-'

Loretta held up a restraining palm, cold fury in her face. 'It's not you, child, not you, I ain't likely go

'It wasn't just him… I guess I-'

'I know, I know,' Loretta said. 'I know how it goes.' She stared over the desk at her beautiful daughter. 'The man got the heat, don't he?'

'He's always been so distant, I mean, good and kind and my true mentor, but distant. And I know you and he… I know he helped you, politically. But it was like, I don't know, this whole thing – this lynching, all of it – it just suddenly seemed to break him down.' Elaine looked across the desk, asking for understanding. 'He needed me, Mom, he really did.'

'I believe you, honey. So where you now?'

Her head down. 'I don't know. I haven't slept. I feel guilty. Confused. I don't know what it meant, means…'

'How's he…?'

Elaine sighed. 'Back to business today, but what can you expect with all this going on?'

'And you think you might love him?'

'I don't know.' Their eyes met and held for an instant, and Loretta knew that here, self-protectively, her daughter wasn't telling the truth. God help her, she was in love with her boss, with DA Chris Locke.

Loretta took a bite of her now-tasteless food, a sip of her Coke. 'I just want you to think on one thing, hon. I'm not sayin' word one against you now. But you consider that it might be your boss hit on you when you, not him, when you weren't able to stand up-'

'He didn't force anything, Mom.'

'I'm not sayin' he did. I'm sayin' you are emotionally drained – your old schoolmate is the victim, for God's sake. You haven't slept all night. The city's burning and you're suddenly elevated to the man's right hand. You're the one who's vulnerable here, you're the easy mark, child. Your boss, Mister Locke, he ain't got a damn thing to lose.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'That's all I'm asking, that you be sure it wasn't, that's all. Because it could have been.'

'It wasn't.'

Loretta reached out her hand, a peace offering. Elaine looked at it for a moment, then put her own hand over her mother's halfway across the desk.

'I believe you,' Loretta said. 'I just don't want you hurt. You still ain't too big to get hurt.' She softened it with a smile. 'Now tell me about Kevin Shea, what you all got?'

19

Bowing to pressure brought to bear by the District Attorney, the mayor and a visit by the United States senator from California, the grand jury met in special session, adjusted its agenda and took only three hours deliberating before it issued an indictment on Kevin Shea for the murder of Arthur Wade.

Which had a double-edged effect on Glitsky's team – they were no longer responsible for making the decision about whether Shea himself had to be brought in; on the other hand, their work trying to identify the other members of the mob who might have been equally involved fell back under the mantle of normal procedure, with nominally still a high – but in practice a far lower – priority.

'I am… I was Mike Mullen's brother.'

Brandon Mullen had tried to make himself presentable – decent clothes and neatly combed hair – but he had failed. Glitsky thought he looked like hell, lips cracked and swollen, eyes bloodshot. Blood, too, had seeped through the sling he wore on his right arm.

Glitsky had farmed out the interrogations – he had Jamie O'Toole down the hallway with Marcel Lanier, Brandon Mullen here in Homicide A with his African-American rookie inspector Ridley Banks, Peter McKay in the B-room with Carl Griffin.

Later the inspectors would get together and see if they could make something out of the stories, see where they co

It still wasn't one o'clock. Around the Bay Area, Oakland, Richmond and East Palo Alto were on fire. In the city itself, there were ongoing civic disturbances – Conrad Aiken, sensitive to terminology even in crisis, had decreed that riots should be called civic disturbances and thus, somehow, lessen their severity – in the Tenderloin, Hunter's Point, the Wester Addition, and down by City College. The homicide count in San Francisco for the day had risen from two to four, going on five – a sniper had killed a black man getting into his car on Fulton, and two white teenagers had been pulled from a convertible while they'd been stuck at a stoplight at 3rd and Palou. One of them was still alive though his condition was critical.

Glitsky had called his home four times, ordering Rita not to let the boys out, he didn't care what. He'd deal with getting them somewhere safe as soon as he could.

Now he stood in the witness room by the door behind Ridley Banks and looked across at Brandon Mullen with his hurt arm and cracked lips. He'd assigned Banks to Mullen because a week before, when Mike Mullen – the brother – had been a righteous i

Glitsky would go in and play bad cop. He was in the right mood for it.

'It started there, yeah,' Brandon Mullen was saying.

'The Cavern?' Glitsky, of course, knew this. He'd gotten the men's names from Jamie O'Toole the night before. It was why they were down here getting questioned.

'The Cavern, yeah. I mean, Petey and I…'

'Petey?'

'My cousin, Pete McKay, we were together, so…'