A Certain Justice

'Yes, sir.'

Drysdale brought a hand to his forehead and rubbed. He squeezed his temples. 'On the same charges as everybody else we're letting go with citations?'

'A few more,' she said.

'A few more. Enough to make an arrest mandatory? From downstairs in the GODDAMN LOBBY! Excuse me, I don't mean to yell, but we can't have this. We don't need Jerohm Reese here right now.'

'I'm sorry-'

'I'm sure you are.' He shook his head. 'Elaine, why did you feel you had to do this?'

'I thought… I thought if word got out that we'd arrested Jerohm Reese again and let him go again-'

'I know, I know. But now we've got him in jail. And we're not keeping anybody else in jail for doing the same things he's done.'

'But we can't let him go now. We can't just give him a ticket and let him walk.'

'No, I don't think we can. Not now.' He sucked in a breath, let it out in a whoosh. 'Goddamn it.'

'I just felt I had to do something. I wasn't thinking clearly. This thing with Chris, Mr Locke…'

Drysdale held up his hand. He was sensitive to the realities of this situation. Elaine was the daughter of Loretta Wager. She was black. In the real world she couldn't be seriously reprimanded, much less suspended, for something like this, possibly not for anything. She was as bulletproof as Kevlar. And he had Jerohm Reese upstairs, which maybe he could somehow keep the media from discovering and exploiting. But meanwhile there was nothing of substance to charge him with, beyond, of course, the usual crimes that Boles was letting everybody else walk on.

'This thing has us all upset, Elaine. I don't know what I'm going to do and I don't know what's going to happen to this office. But our job is putting on trials, not facilitating arrests. We're supposed to think clearly before we take any action like this, you understand that?'

'Yes, sir.'

'I know you do.' Drysdale's hands were back together, the knuckles white again. He'd make some decision on what to do with Jerohm Reese. Legally, the DA had only two days to charge him, but Drysdale was getting an idea that with the Fourth of July weekend coming up he might be able to finagle putting off an arraignment until the following Tuesday, which might be long enough to avoid continuation of this disaster.

He brought himself back to Elaine. 'You're on the Arthur Wade case.' It wasn't a question. 'You're working with homicide on this, right? Closely?'

She wasn't, but she remembered talking with Lieutenant Glitsky at length about it just yesterday, so she wasn't strictly lying when she said, 'Yes, sir.'

'Just see that you do, all right. If you need any help, come to me, ask for it. You don't have to do this alone.'

'Yes, sir. Thank you.'

'Right. Don't mention it. And send in the next victim.'

He didn't smile when he said it.

35

Glitsky was in the police lot behind the Hall of Justice inspecting the last car Chris Locke had ever ridden in.

It was the same year, make and model of the car he had driven back to the Hall this morning, the same one he had taken Loretta home in the previous night, or, for that matter, the same as the one he had driven home earlier last night and sent a patrolman to retrieve and return to the city lot this morning.

The colors were different, that was all. The city had bought a fleet of twenty-seven Plymouths for the convenience of its employees and guests – plainclothes policemen, assistant district attorneys, the occasional visiting dignitary.

Inspector Marcel Lanier, putting in yeoman's hours building up his comp time, was giving Glitsky the grand tour of the crime scene. It was cold and foggy and some wind had come up. The two men wore heavy flight jackets, and Marcel kept his hands in his pockets. Glitsky, into feeling things, had the front-side passenger door open.

Halfway bent over, Glitsky squinted at the passenger's window. It had been rolled up when Locke had been shot and what was left of it was a cobweb of safety glass with a fist-sized hole in the middle of it.

'Forensics got all the glass?'

'All we found.'

'It's a big hole.'

Lanier checked it out. 'Two bullets, Abe. Point blank.'

Glitsky nodded. 'You find the second slug?'

'Other side.'

They walked around the car, Glitsky stopping at the back fender for a moment.

'What? You see something?'

'Nothing. I don't see a damn thing.'

Opening the driver's door, Glitsky went down to one knee, examining the bullet hole in the car's upholstery, then slid in behind the wheel, eyeballed the hole in the window across from him and traced the trajectory of the second bullet with his hand. 'She is one lucky lady,' he said. According to his trajectory the bullet would have scraped the front of his chest; Loretta, of course, wasn't as thick as he was, and so it had missed her, but not by much.

'She must have got lucky with the ride home, too. Last night.' Lanier kept his face straight, but he was jabbing.

Glitsky should have expected it – homicide cops tended to know everything and comment on it with a minimum of respect. Evidently the word was already out that he'd spirited Loretta from the Hall in the middle of the night.

'Give me a break, Marcel. The woman's a senator. It was on my way.'

'Another lucky break for her.'

He could feel the scar in his lips getting tight and fought to control his face. He had to take this without a sign – any response at all would tip a guy like Marcel. 'Where's the rest of the blood?' he asked.

Lanier leaned over him. 'You're looking at it.' There was a small, perhaps three-inch circular stain on the seat next to him. 'We're talking.22, maybe.25 caliber here. They'll have it this morning. Small hole, not much pop. No exit wound even. Lucky for her again. She didn't even get splattered.'

Glitsky itched to give his inspector a few choice words about the amount of luck it took for Loretta to get herself shot at in the first place, but this, again, would be too much reaction – an admission of something out of the ordinary. So he held his tongue, except to say 'okay' as he slid out of the driver's seat, carefully closing the door. They started walking back toward the Hall.

'So what's she like? You talk to her?' Lanier asked.

'Not much,' Glitsky lied. 'She was close enough to shock, pretty exhausted. I think it hit her pretty hard.'

Their footfalls crunched on the gravel.

Nat Glitsky was sitting in one of the plastic yellow chairs in front of his son's desk when the lieutenant reappeared in his office. Seventy-six-years-old and the man was still cooking. As always, a yarmulke covered his wispy white crown. Hiking boots, a multicolored woolen sweater, old-fashioned and paint-stained khakis. He had draped what he called 'the classic men's blue sports coat' – he wore it everywhere – over the back of the chair.

Word had gotten out about Jerohm Reese being back in custody upstairs, and Glitsky, who had heard about it coming down the hallway, was trying to fit that information into his matrix of How Things Worked. It wasn't exactly tongue and groove.

He stopped in the doorway. His father did not show up every day, even most days. Hardly ever, in fact, so something was up. Nat had come downtown a little more often during the months of Flo's illness, taken his son out to lunch once in a while, but since her death Glitsky couldn't remember a single other time.

His dad, never predictable, tossed at him a plastic-wrapped bagel filled with cream cheese. Glitsky spied some lox peeking out, too – the combination being his favorite thing to eat in the known universe. He had not treated himself to one in so long he'd forgotten.

Six inches shorter than Abe, Nat came over and gave him a kiss on the jaw, which was how he had always greeted his son and always would, convention and embarrassment be damned. Glitsky had hated it from kindergarten through the police academy, but now it didn't bother him at all. People didn't like it, that was their problem. He was becoming his dad. There were worse fates he could imagine.