A Certain Justice

'Money laundering through a restaurant?'

'Sure. In the old days before electronic transfers, it was pretty common. You have yourself a ton of dirty cash and you deal in a perishable like food, it's custom made. You write up receipts for meals that never got served and presto, there's the cash in your till, clean as a whistle, just like magic.'

'Okay. So the Pacific Moon laundered some money.'

'A lot of money, Lieutenant.'

'Okay, a lot of money. You get any indictments?'

In his own years on the force, Glitsky had heard a lot about 'on-going investigations' – he had conducted a few himself on people he didn't like, didn't believe, wanted to nail. Few of them pa

'Nope. Place came up clean.'

'Well…?'

'Well, I was young and a red hot. I started eating di

'Counting people?'

'There wasn't ever more than twenty people in the place. Ever. You know what the Pacific Moon grossed that year, this was eight years ago?'

Glitsky shook his head. 'A million dollars?'

'Two point nine million.'

A minute of pure silence. Glitsky said, 'Twenty tables?'

Bank's voice took on an edge. 'If they filled every table every night five nights a week and turned them over three times each, and if every di

"They must have sold a lot of drinks.' Glitsky scratched his cheek. 'You couldn't get an indictment on that?'

'Can you believe…? Nobody wanted to reopen the case. Evidently we'd blown a wad on it, the place had receipts like it was Chez Panisse, the books looked clean, White Collar lost its papers on it and the DA didn't seem to save anything, but I'm telling you, nobody goes there to eat.'

'Not twice anyway.'

'That's what I'm saying.'

Another dead minute. Then, Glitsky: 'Well, it's a good story…' Meaning, but-so-what?

One last look around the courtroom. 'So what is that – this was a few years before I got into it, but still – the word was that Dana Wager was a heavy investor in the place.'

'Dana…?'

'Right, the senator's husband. He filed for bankruptcy in 1977, all his real-estate investments had gone belly-up. He was done. Then he caught the rebound on the economy, reinvested, got lucky. All the sudden he's back on the high seas, and the Pacific Moon is his flagship.'

'People get lucky, Rid.'

'People also get money in ways that aren't legal. And then launder it.'

'You think that happened with Wager?'

Banks wasn't coming right out with anything. He wasn't sure where his lieutenant stood on it, didn't want to dig himself too deep a hole. 'There was some talk.'

'There's always talk.'

Another pause. How far to take it? 'This talk was about his wife, now our senator. How the rumor was that Dana's money came from Loretta, that she'd brought like a million dollars home with her from South America.'

Of course, Glitsky had heard about the incident: he had followed it closely at the time. It had been all over the place, reported in the media. He couldn't very well have missed it, even if he'd been disposed to, which he wasn't.

In 1978 Loretta had been an administrative aide to California congressman Theo Heckstrom, and the two of them, among others, had gone down to Colombia on a fact-finding mission before the 'war on drugs' had been openly declared. On a flight from Bogota to Quito, Ecuador, their small plane had gone down deep in the Colombian jungle. Among the six people in the aircraft, including Heckstrom, Loretta had been the sole survivor.

Badly hurt herself, with a compound-fractured leg, she had remained in the plane's wreckage with the dead for four days, living on candy bars and plantains, before she was finally rescued and airlifted out and back to the United States. Most believed that the publicity associated with the tragedy had made her a household name in San Francisco, and had helped fuel her first successful run for Congress.

After she had won, Glitsky had also begun to hear the rumors about the million dollars – although the amount always varied – about the suitcase full of cash that Loretta had supposedly found on the plane and somehow spirited back into the country.

Now Glitsky was shaking his head. 'The small problem with this phantom money, Rid, is customs.'

Banks was ahead of him on that. 'There weren't any customs. Everybody seems to forget this. They sent a special plane down there to pick her up, get her out in a hurry. Diplomatic airlift direct to Mayo.' He repeated it. 'No customs.'

The room was getting stuffy, the air unmoving. Glitsky pushed his back against the bench, stifled a stretch. 'You think Oswald killed Ke

Banks shrugged. 'Conspiracy theories, right?'

'Do you honestly think that if there was anything to all of this – and I'll admit it's a neat story – but do you think there is any way it wouldn't have come out? The woman's run – what? – four campaigns for office, two of them statewide, against people who I'd bet have some knack for finding dirt. Anything was there, it would have come up.' Banks didn't answer.

'You think I'm in denial here, Rid?' But there was a tone in it – half-joking.

'I'm telling you what a lot of guys working the street believe down to their toes, that's all. You know a lot of 'em. They're not generally into conspiracies.' The younger man slapped his hands on his thighs, took a short, sharp breath. 'Anyway, for what it's worth…'

The lieutenant pushed himself up and next to him Banks stood, too. 'It's worth knowing,' Glitsky said. 'Although this particular time, I think the senator might be doing some real good.'

'Okay.' His duty done, Banks nodded. 'I'll go put a call out to McKay, follow up on these guys, get 'em down here. You hear anything about Kevin Shea?'

'Nada. Guy's got any brains, he's in Scandinavia.'

They were at the double doors and Glitsky grabbed one of the handles, then stopped. 'Hey, Rid, I appreciate it, but you don't have to worry.'

'Okay, Lieutenant, I won't.'

Glitsky had wanted to protest to Ridley Banks that all he had done was drive the senator home. Except that wasn't all he'd done and he didn't want to start with small untruths. They tended to grow large and unruly.

As earlier with Lanier, he was hamstrung by the possibility that he would come across as saying too much. Banks was a good cop, and no group hung together like cops. Functioning as early warning, protective of his lieutenant, Banks was putting it out that people might be watching pretty closely. Were already hanging on the nuances. That maybe, on some level he couldn't define, Loretta Wager could be trouble for him.

And this – if he was honest with himself, and he tried to be – constituted a message Glitsky wasn't ready to hear.

He had given her his home telephone number and she had called him before he'd had his morning tea. Isaac had picked up the call and, handing it over, the expression he'd given Abe could have frozen a flame. Some instinct had told Ike that this wasn't a business call – it was a woman and his dad cared about her. And it was too… damn… soon.