A Certain Justice

Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard of tired. You want to sit down?'

Her voice sank. 'Sit down? Sugar, I want to lay this ol' body down.' But then she was back, her senatorial self. 'Just teasing, Lieutenant. Let us sit down.'

He turned on his pocket tape recorder and let her talk.

'Chris and I had di

'Maybe it was naive, but I thought if Chris and I – two black people working and getting things done in the system – I thought if we could somehow make Philip see, to moderate just a little, we'd have a better chance of getting the city under control.

'Philip can't seem to stop looking on these… these tragedies… as something he can use. He sees this as a time to demand concessions across the board. So he spent most of the night lecturing Chris and me on his positions, as he insists on calling them. It got pretty tedious.

'Now I knew I was going to take a lot of this up later with Philip, try and get him to see a little of the light, so I gave Chris a kick under the table and reminded him – didn't he remember? – we said we'd go out to the Dolores Park tent city, which – you probably heard – some genius had decided to segregate. De facto. Keep the tensions to a minimum. Lord, the stupidity of bureaucrats.

'Chris didn't know exactly what we thought we were going to do out there. I told him I thought – still do – that it was maybe one of those times when you can make political points and do some good at the same time. That argument speaks – I'm sorry, spoke… to Chris Locke, as you probably know.

'But by the time we got down there, things had flared up. I think it got around – of course, none of the city pla

'Which got people to burning again.'

Loretta leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes, sighing. Straightening herself up, arching her back, she visibly steeled herself to continue. Her red-rimmed eyes met Abe's and she smiled wearily. 'We are so blind,' she said. 'We are so goddamn blind.'

Glitsky turned off the recorder. 'You really care that much?'

It stopped her, seemed to hurt her, but she simply echoed what he had said earlier: 'That's just the way I am, Abe. I'm trying to do my job.'

The scar between Glitsky's lips ran lighter for an instant and he looked down.

She didn't pursue the moment. Instead, taking a breath, she motioned to the tape recorder. He pressed the button and she was back at Dolores Park. 'Chris had had some wine with di

'Then, suddenly, I don't even know how it happened, it was so fast. Or I wasn't paying attention enough, but there were people behind us, on the car, and Chris was saying roll the windows up, let's get out of here. But there really was no getting out – I mean, all at once the mob was in front of us, blocking the street, the people behind starting to try to bounce our car, so I put it into reverse and decided to try to get out that way. Chris and I were both turned around. We're backing through this crowd, people are slamming the windows, screaming at us. Some rocks hit the car, something, I don't know, but I just kept going, not too fast, I didn't want to run anybody over, but we had to get out of there…

'And then we were through them, or I thought we were. I was still backing up, faster now with nobody in the way. We got to the end of the block and I stopped, figuring we could now go forward. Chris was still turned around, still looking behind us to make sure we were clear, and then, I don't know what – all of a sudden his window exploded and there was this man and I see he's pointing a gun at me now, so I jam the accelerator to the floor just as he fires again and I'm turning up Guerrero. Chris is slumped over. After that I guess I… I don't really know. I drove until I saw a police car, then I stopped.'

Glitsky sat forward on the couch. His face was impassive. 'Could you identify the man, the shooter?'

She thought a long moment, then shook her head. 'I don't think so, Abe. It was dark, I was mostly looking at the gun. He was white and if I had to guess, probably under thirty.'

'You see what he was wearing?'

' Some kind of jacket – it was open, I noticed, it flapped – maybe a T-shirt, jeans, nothing really distinctive.'

'Hair, beard…?'

Again, she shook her head. 'I really did tell all this to the inspectors upstairs, Abe. They said they'd look, they'd try. Try to find the gun, match it with something, see where it leads, but the man himself… he could have been anybody.'

A lengthy silence. Loretta Wager leaned back into the curve of the couch. Glitsky remained, hunched over, hands clasped between his knees, eyes on the floor. He flicked off his tape recorder.

When he finally spoke it came out husky and strained with fatigue, not unlike the tone he used with his boys. It wasn't his cop voice. 'I didn't mean to be so abrupt today. When you called. I started to apologize but you'd hung up.'

'I was… you were right. I shouldn't have intruded.' She seemed to pull herself back, farther from him, waiting, reading his posture. Their eyes met. Both of them looked away.

He had gotten up, gone over to the window, was rewinding his tape player. Then that was done and he still didn't move. Time passed. From across the room, she asked it so quietly he almost didn't hear it: 'You haven't talked about your wife yet, have you? You haven't told anybody.'

She wasn't prying. Anyone else, maybe even Loretta at any other time, he would have snapped off some answer that would have ended that kind of personal inquiry, but right now he was drained, empty, without even the strength to lift his guard.

She'd read something in him. He could at least explain why he wouldn't explain. 'It's not something you talk about.'

He never had, not since the diagnosis. His role had been to tough it out, support Flo in her own struggle, keep the boys from breaking…

'All right,' she said.

If she'd pushed at all, he would have pulled away. He didn't turn around, spoke into his reflection in the window, kept it matter of fact. 'She had ovarian cancer. By the time they discovered it there wasn't anything they could do. It took nine months.'

'Oh, Abe. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fu

He lifted his head, took in a breath, stared at the black space outside.