A Certain Justice

'Try someplace small and upscale. Say, Hillsborough or Atherton. I've got to have something I can give Farrell.'

'Abe.' She reached a hand out and touched his knee. 'Do you really think this is what's happening?'

He fixed her with his eyes. 'Yep.'

'And you think you can really do this, get Shea in custody this morning?'

'I'd better.' Then: 'You want to call your Sergeant Stoner for me, see if you can find out if he remembers where Farrell lives?'

'Can't we just call Farrell and ask?'

Glitsky shook his head. 'I don't know if I mentioned it. I'm pretty sure Farrell's phone is tapped,' he said. 'It gives me pause.'

66

Philip Mohandas normally would have been gratified by the turnout so far, but he'd been wrestling with demons for the better part of the night and they had beaten him down.

It was just seven-thirty and already there were hundreds of people milling about Kezar Pavilion on the southeastern border of Golden Gate Park (about three hundred yards from the apartment at Stanyan and Page where Kevin Shea and Melanie Sinclair were just waking up). He could see the stream of people flowing down the side streets across the lawns of the park. It was a beautiful morning, a little windy with a heavy smoky smell to the air.

Mohandas knew that the combination of wind and fire was making problems in Bayview, for the first time in North Beach, and he noticed a small pillar of smoke rising due east and a little south, perhaps over by Divisadero. The march might have to jog north a few blocks if it got much worse, but the wind wasn't really his problem.

His problem, if he was going to have one, would be crowd control. This was the case often enough that he was used to it, but it always caused him concern, especially here today when his credibility was so clearly on the line. This was his show. He'd called it into being, and the response – from the look of things so far – was going to be overwhelming. He couldn't allow things to get out of hand.

And unfortunately, in spite of the early arrivals – a good thing – there were signs of other, potentially disruptive elements.

First was the presence of so much armed authority – he had passed truckloads of National Guard troops on his drive out here earlier, mobilized and ready to roll, parked all along Fell Street. In addition, at least a hundred city police were on patrol, many on horseback but a large number on foot, too, in the open pavilion and its surrounding streets, even by the tent that he was using as his staging area.

The uniforms weren't the worst of it. Since the release of Kevin Shea's tape the previous afternoon, he had become increasingly aware of the backlash problem, which – to be honest – he'd expected a little sooner. But now, even though the official response to the tape had initially been skeptical across the color spectrum, he had been hearing reports of spontaneous outbreaks of angry white people taking to the streets.

Already this morning he had seen the police subdue and carry away one belligerent white man with a placard. True, it was an isolated case, but it was worrisome. That the man had come out at all, knowing how badly he'd been outnumbered… he must have thought there would have been others, perhaps many others.

Mohandas held no illusions – he knew any meeting between a white and black group, in this context, today, could get ugly fast. He had to get the show on the road as quickly as he could, keep his crowd moving and focused. That was the key.

Suddenly Allicey was standing next to him. 'Lot of the people with us, Philip, hearing us, what we're saying.'

He nodded. She motioned out to the growing crowd. 'This is it,' she said. 'This is the difference between you and Loretta Wager. You are with the people.'

'You think so?' He often thought that the most important function Allicey served for him – out of hundreds – was her belief. She never wavered. The mission was the freedom of her people, of their people. They had been oppressed for so long, still were. And that's because they had struggled to be included. That had been wrong, he'd decided. The path lay in separation and co

'You are, Philip. With the people.'

He shook his head. 'I must be getting old. My vision is a little blurred. '

She rested a hand on his arm. 'You have been tempted.'

He nodded. 'So much of it now seems to be logistics, money, getting concrete things done.'

'But, Philip, the world isn't made of concrete.'

'More than you'd think, Allicey.' He sighed, smiled weakly, then turned toward the tent behind them. But he did not walk on.

Instead he stopped and faced her. 'I can't put a name to what it is.'

'The temptation.'

'To what?'

There was sadness in his face; his eyes were shot with red. The week had been grueling. 'To not believe. To not believe it's going to change. And if not, should I take the devil's offer? That way, something I do might have an ending." He folded his hands together in front of him. 'Something might close up, Allicey, feel finished. You hear what I'm saying?'

'The river just flows on, Philip. It doesn't close up. It doesn't end.'

'But where's it goin', girl, where's it all goin'?'

'The point is, it's going, Philip. It's moving ahead.'

'Is it? ' he asked.

Carl Griffin pulled into the city lot under the freeway overpass behind the Hall of Justice. Exhausted from the long late fruitless nights and only marginally aware that it was a Saturday, he wasn't even hungry.

Griffin was a working dog who basically liked his weekends and his Monday Night football, but when he had a report to finish he liked to get it done so it didn't hang over his head, and he and Marcel Lanier had interviewed, together, over twenty people last night. All of whom had agreed that there had been a riot, that the DA had gotten killed, yeah, all of that, but so what? What else was new?

People seemed sick of it – talking about it, dealing with it. Others, not knowing what they should admit they saw or didn't see, did or didn't do, were scared of the cops. Griffin could see it in faces, in their body language. Nobody was talking very much. But the reports had to get done – lack of paperwork would bite you every time you didn't get to it, or did it sloppily. Griffin thought they didn't call it the homicide detail for nothing. Griffin himself was not what he would call an idea man, but he remembered every step of things he did and could assemble the basic package in twenty-five minutes or less.

So he and Marcel had flipped a coin at the Doggie Diner on Army at a quarter to twelve last night to determine who would come in this morning – or before Monday at least – and write the report on what they hadn't found, and Griffin had lost.

The roasting-coffee smell – was it coffee? – was strong here in the lot, riding on a morning breeze coming off the Bay. Griffin schlumped across the pavement, down the corridor by the morgue and the new jail, into the back door, around the metal detector.

Glancing into the lobby, he saw that the lines of cited rioters had vanished, perhaps in response to the outbreak here a couple of nights ago. He didn't know what the sheriff was doing with those people anymore and he didn't much care just so long as they were kept out of his way.

Only Ridley Banks was in the office, arms crossed, slumped in his chair, feet on his desk. He appeared to be sleeping, maybe had spent the night here. Griffin put on a pot of coffee, emptied his pockets and plopped his papers down on his desk, pulling his chair up to it with a sigh.