A Certain Justice

It was going to sing all right.

And then he'd lead them out, down the seething streets all the way to City Hall. In righteousness, in rage, and in glory.

71

She came briskly out of the back room. She was wearing her dark blue hat, suit coat, clutch purse. Things were moving along. She had defused Abe, and now she had to hurry.

As she got to the foyer she stopped, her body sagging. She, herself, was wearing down. 'I've got to go out. Please get out of my way.'

Glitsky stood blocking the front door. 'I'm going to call Wes Farrell from here and tell him that you're coming with me to personally guarantee Kevin Shea's safety.'

'I'm going to the rally, Abe. The mayor has asked me to deliver a permit-'

'I'm not asking, Loretta. I'm telling you. Forget the permit. I'm giving you a last chance – although God knows why.'

'A chance for what?'

'You've been saying all along that all you wanted was Kevin Shea arrested. Of course he deserved some consideration, some safety. Well, I'm giving you a chance to prove you're not lying.'

'I'm not lying. Why would I lie?'

'Why? Because your career is over if Kevin Shea is i

'This is stupid… I haven't been blocking anybody, Abe. Not you, not anybody. You've just gotten-'

He raised a hand. 'I know, I know. Paranoid, overworked, irrational, any and all of the above. Yeah, that's me. You got me.'

She moved forward. 'I've heard enough of this. Let me by!'

Pushing at him, he might have been a wall. Until he exploded, grabbing her by the shoulders and shoving her backward. She stumbled, nearly went down, recovered. Her eyes blazing, she straightened up. 'You want to talk about careers being over, Abe. You just ended yours.'

Glitsky didn't care. He spoke with a forced calm. 'You're not getting by. Understand that. You've got about ten seconds to agree to go out of here with me. And then you're not going to have a choice about it anymore.'

She stared for a beat, then told him he was crazy.

'Six seconds,' he said.

'Why would I agree to something like that? I've got a driver waiting right outside the door here. I've got to-'

'All right. Time's up.' Glitsky's face was set, ashen. 'Don't say I didn't give you an out, Loretta. You wouldn't take it.' He took a labored breath. 'I'm arresting you for the murder of Christopher Locke.'

The reaction took a moment – a squinting, a half-turn, lack of belief. 'You can't… this is absurd.'

'No, Loretta, this is the truth.'

'Did you dream this up last night or something? Abe, you're out of your mind. I wouldn't…'

He was shaking his head. 'He wasn't turned around in the car, looking out the back window. He was sitting next to you, without a clue.'

'You're insane.'

He ignored it. 'You were near the riot all right, even driving toward it, inside the car. But you never made it, did you?'

'Of course we did. How can you even say-?'

'Because there's this thing I work with called evidence. There were no signs that a crowd had been anywhere near your car, much less throwing rocks at it, kicking it from behind. I walked all around it. Looked.'

'Then you missed it.'

'No, I didn't. I wondered about it the first time I inspected the car. What I missed was what it meant.'

'And what did it mean?'

'It meant that what you did do was you pulled up a couple of blocks short of the action and shot Locke behind the ear. That was the shot no one heard.'

'I did not. That did not happen-'

Glitsky's voice didn't waver. 'But it was also the shot that left no glass shards at all in the wound and too many powder burns around it – but you wouldn't have known about any of that. That isn't politics. It's just stupid grinding, police forensic stuff – not very interesting.'

She folded her arms in front of her, shaking her head. 'And what did I do then?'

'You drove down a dark dead-end street – all the streetlights were out – and walked around the car and fired a shot through the passenger window that would appear to have been fired at you, and then you probably used the butt of the gun to knock a bigger hole in the safety glass.'

'Probably. Only probably? You're not sure?'

'I don't know for sure what you used, but probably we'll find out eventually. But what it was – it was another mistake.'

He waited. She didn't ask, eyes fixed, unyielding. So he continued. There was just the one bullet hole in the safety glass, which was the problem. You thought the window would break with the shot, but it just made a nice neat little hole, didn't it, some spiderwebs around it. So you had to hammer a bigger one, something two bullets might have passed through. Except for the reality that even two.25 caliber bullets won't put a fist-sized hole in safety glass. You probably couldn't get one with four.'

Her expression remained impassive, but she eased herself down onto the bench against the hallway wall. 'This is fascinating,' she said.

'Right. The other thing, the clincher if you want to hear it…'

'Oh, please…"

The venom in her voice paralyzed him for a second. In a way it was salutary, helping wipe out the last traces of any sympathetic feeling. He felt the scar stretch through his lips, knew he was giving her his piano-wire smile, the one Flo had told him could give nightmares to mass-murderers.

'This was the moment, just this morning, when it all came together. Before that, almost everything was there – I didn't know that nobody had heard two shots, but the rest of it. Except I didn't want to see it. I went to adjust the seat in the Plymouth. You know the car. It's the same one you and Locke rode in.'

Still nothing. No reaction.

'Remember the other night, you and me counting "one two three", pushing the seat up so you could drive? You remember that? So this morning, there I was sitting in the driver's seat, and it struck me what was so wrong about the bullet hole in the door of your car, the driver's door. You want to know what that was?'

Silence.

'It would have had to go through you first.'

Finally, against her will: ' What are you talking about?'

'I'm talking about you being unable to drive, to reach the foot pedals without the seat pushed all the way forward. And if the seat was forward, which it had to be, the trajectory of the shot from the hole in the window to the hole in the upholstery would have had to hit you. It would have had to go through you, Loretta.' He waited. 'So you weren't in the seat. You were outside, in the street, firing the one shot – the one shot everybody heard – through the safety glass. The one you said almost hit you.'

'You're wrong. I was trying to get away from there. Chris had just been shot, the seat must have slid back with the acceleration.'

Glitsky had broken witnesses before, and when you started getting denials of details, you knew you were there. He crossed the foyer, sat at the opposite end of the bench. He didn't intend to break her. Not before he made her undo some of the damage she'd done – to herself, to Elaine, to Kevin Shea – and she was the only one who could do it. He needed her for that first, then he'd deal with the rest.

He almost whispered it. 'You killed him, Loretta. You had to.'

She wasn't giving it up. 'Why should I have killed Chris Locke?'

She was leading him there. 'The simple answer is because you couldn't control him anymore. But it really wasn't that simple. He was blackmailing you, you were blackmailing him. You knew each other's secrets.'

'About what?'

'About the money you laundered through the Pacific Moon.'