A Certain Justice

47

Glitsky sat at his desk, fingers drumming on the blotter. After meeting with Farrell, his chat with Elaine had left him with the impression – incorrect, as it turned out – that the DA would be open to negotiation regarding the Kevin Shea issue. Somehow he would oversee Shea's technical arrest in the next twenty-four hours and this particular segment of the crisis would be over.

He had returned to homicide to find the place still deserted, which didn't bother him… his troops were out there doing their jobs. He decided to catch up on his paperwork on the chance that the call from Wes Farrell would come in soon. Since the riots had begun, the run-of-the-mill homicides in the city had continued at their usual pace. Predictably, a couple of gang lords had decided to use the cover of the disturbances to mask a few raids on rival turf – last night a drive-by into a milling crowd had killed two children, wounded fourteen adults and left no known gang members even scratched. A typical result, but the case had to be assigned and followed up.

Likewise the Korean businessman who had been killed, and Glitsky had to make sure that his inspectors were trying to identify the killers. There were also the Molotov-cocktail fires and their victims, the North Beach domestic, the boys who had been pulled from their cars. The weight of it all eventually slowed him down. Four more folders to go, and he simply stopped.

For over a decade his life had been the study and investigation of a seemingly endless succession of violent deaths. It had bred in him a profound hatred of violence – possibly because of that, but also because it was part of Flo's protective nature – and he and Flo had never hit any of their children, which, he was convinced, was where it all began. A cuff here, a back of the hand there, the other abuses piling up – verbal, sexual, simple neglect. Nobody paid enough attention – it was a rough road and if you wanted it cleared you pushed people out of the way. You didn't say, 'May I be excused' – you kicked some ass.

He shook his head. The folders lay there, Post-its stuck on like Band-Aids. Forcing himself, he grabbed the next one, the file on the late Christopher Locke. He opened it and saw that Lanier's taped interview with Loretta last night was first up, transcribed in record time – probably one of the secretaries interested in what the senator would have had to say – grist for the Hall's thriving gossip mill.

The senator…

And he'd just been thinking about Flo, about the way they'd tried to raise the kids… he still had a picture of her in his desk drawer. Now he opened it, pulled it out. She was blonde, smiling, radiant, impossibly dead at forty.

The room, small enough in any event, closed in, finally wasn't there.

Flo had been so different from Loretta – that, he supposed, had been one of her attractions in the begi

Loretta had always projected herself as supremely competent and sure of herself, but her life-of-the-party, nothing-can-touch-me persona was, Glitsky knew, mostly a front, a reaction to her roots. She had grown up the third of four children in a low-income section of San José. Her parents had been, in Glitsky's view, people of integrity and self-respect who had worked their whole lives, her mother in the same dry-cleaning establishment for over twenty years, her father in a variety of clerical or retail or service jobs – shoe salesman, short-order cook, bus driver, whatever he could get.

By the time Glitsky had met the parents, they had seemed old and used-up, even though they were probably close to his age now. Their first- and second-born sons, both of Loretta's older brothers, had been drafted and killed in Vietnam. Which went a long way to explain Loretta's early radicalization and identification with, especially, the Black Student Union. Her main issue when she had first met him was more that her black brothers were fighting the white man's war than that the objectives of the war might be wrong in themselves. Later, of course, the Sixties being what they were, that evolved, too.

Loretta's younger sister Estelle had already had one illegitimate child when Abe met her, and he had read in an article about the senator a few years back that her little sister was at that time eking out a welfare existence in Los Angeles with three children and a succession of men. The article said that Loretta and Estelle were no longer close (nor, Abe knew, had they ever been).

Flo had had none of that – nothing to scratch and claw her way out of. Resolutely middle-class, she had attended Gu

Glitsky had met her in San Francisco at the Jewish Community Center gym, where he went to work out and where she used the pool. Her goggles had been fogged up and he'd been swimming laps, and she executed a perfect swimmer's shallow dive into him, nearly giving them both concussions. (Later she would say she had noticed him at the pool and couldn't think of any better way to introduce herself.) At UOP she had majored in child psychology (now called early childhood learning), after which she had put in two years teaching pre-schoolers at the Community Center. Then, as it turned out, she was ready to have a few children of her own. Glitsky and Flo had fashioned a successful existence together. Many of the 'issues' that had seemed so important to him when he had been with Loretta in college faded from their everyday lives, and he found he didn't much miss them. Yes, he had dark skin and, yes, he had suffered the usual prejudice when he had been younger and even afterward, but, though it continued to enrage him when it occurred (and Flo, too, for that matter), they refused to let it become their focus – that remained the two of them, the kids, the family. He made no apologies for his private life – this was who he had become and it was worthwhile.

It was obvious why the world's injustice cut so much more deeply into Loretta's flesh, her psyche, her life. Given her own younger sister, given the way it so often turned out for black women, it was small wonder the senator was so protective of Elaine, her own daughter. Glitsky understood, for the first time now, that Loretta had pulled some strings with the District Attorney to set up her daughter in her position.

He was even starting to see, perhaps dimly to understand, why she might have felt the attraction of an older, white, rich Dana Wager so compelling, more even than young love had been. She wasn't going to end up powerless and in despair, the way her parents had. Good people, but… good didn't guarantee anything.

Fu

Now whatever was happening between Loretta and him was because of their chemistry, not their color. On her side, did that make it purer? On his, what…?

What if they had stayed together from the begi

It was, he figured, better all around that they hadn't. Certainly, Flo had centered his life, took him out of currents that might have washed him away. And Loretta had done very well by herself. To the objective eye, she had reached a pi