John Lescroart: The Hearing

The third book in the Abe Glitsky series, 1999

The legal world created in my books owes whatever verisimilitude it has to the rigorous oversight and unfailing intellect of my great friend and true collaborator Al Giannini, whose day job is to put on real murder trials in San Francisco. Without him, the legal stuff which is the foundation for this (and my other) novels would often be inexact, stupid, or just plain wrong. He the man – he really be the man.

Then there's Don Matheson, perennial 'best man', who regularly consents to endure my artistic and various other angsts from four hundred miles away. Despite an unfortunate predilection for overcooking his food, he remains one of the planet's unsung wonders. Closer to home, all the Dietrichs – Pete and Sandy, Margaret, Chris and Jason – help keep the spirit alive. Pete, aka Peter S. Dietrich, MD, MPH, also contributes mightily as medical guru and chief martini tester.

Others contributed in important ways: Fred Williams of the Davis Police Department saved one day; Mark Nicco told me all I needed to know about Special Masters; San Francisco Homicide Inspector Joe Toomey and Officer Charles Lyons were informative tour guides to the Evidence Room in the Hall of Justice. I'm indebted to Richard B. Seymour, MA, Managing Editor of Haight-Ashbury Publications, and Dr David E. Smith of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics for their insights into the terrible scourge of drug addiction.

I'm continually gratified by the generosity, expertise, and support of many friends and associates: Anne Williams; Bill Wood; Richard Herman, Jr; Max Byrd; Anita Boone; Nancy Berland; Frank Seidl; Gary F. Espinosa; Peter J. Diedrich; and Kathryn and Mark J. Detzer, PhD; Justine and Jack; and of course Taffy the wonder dog.

Next to Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky's bed, the telephone rang with a muted insistence.

A widower, Glitsky lived in an upper duplex unit with his youngest son Orel and a housekeeper/nanny named Rita. During his wife's illness, he'd deadened the phone's ringer so that it wouldn't wake anyone else in the house when, as often occurred, it rang in the middle of the night.

He located the source of the noise in the dark and picked up the receiver, whispering hoarsely, 'Glitsky. What?'

Surfacing slowly into consciousness, he didn't really have to ask. He was the head of San Francisco 's homicide detail. When he got calls in the dead dark, they did not tend to be salespeople inquiring about his satisfaction with his long distance service provider. It was nearly two hours past midnight on Monday, the first day of February, and the city had produced only two homicides thus far this year -a slow month. In spite of that, Glitsky spent no time, ever, wondering if his job was going to dry up.

The caller wasn't the police dispatcher, but one of his inspectors, Ridley Banks, on his cell phone directly from the crime scene. It wasn't standard procedure to call the lieutenant from the street – so this homicide must have an unusual element. Though Ridley spoke concisely with little inflection, even in his groggy state Glitsky detected urgency.

A downtown patrol car had seen some suspicious movement in Maiden Lane, a walking street just off Union Square. When the officers had hit their spotlight, they flushed a man squatting over what looked like, and turned out to be, a body.

The suspect ran and the officers gave chase. Apparently drunk, the man staggered into a fire hydrant, fell in a heap, and was apprehended. Cuffed now, in the back seat of the squad car, he had passed out awaiting his eventual trip to the jail.

'Guy appears to be one of our residentially challenged citizens,' Ridley said drily. 'John Doe as we speak.'

'No i.d. of course.' Glitsky was almost awake. The digital clock on the bedstand read 1:45.

'Not his own. But he did have the wallet.'

'The victim had a wallet?' To this point, Glitsky had been imagining that this homicide was probably another incident in the continuing tragedy of San Francisco 's homeless wars, where an increasingly violent population of bums had taken to beating and even killing each other over prime downtown begging turf. Certainly, the Union Square location fitted that profile.

But if the current victim had a wallet worth stealing, it lowered the odds that the person was a destitute vagrant.

'Taken from her purse, yeah.'

'It was a woman?'

'Yeah.' A pause. 'We know her. Elaine Wager.'

'What about her?'

'She's the stiff.'

Glitsky felt his head go light. Unaware of the action, he moved his free hand over his heart and clutched at his breast.

The voice in the telephone might have continued for a moment, but he didn't hear it. 'Abe? You there?'

'Yeah. What?'

'I was just saying maybe you want to be down here. It's going to be crawling with media jackals by dawn or the first leak, whichever comes first.'

'I'm there,' Glitsky said. 'Give me fifteen.' But after the connection was broken, he didn't move. His one hand dug absently into the flesh over his heart. The other gripped the telephone receiver. He simply lay there, staring sightlessly into the darkness around him.

When the phone started beeping loudly in his hand, reminding him that it was still off the hook, it brought him to. Abruptly now, he hung up, threw the covers to one side, and swung himself up to a sitting position.

And stopped again.

Elaine Wager.

'Oh God, please no.' He didn't know he'd said it aloud, didn't hear his own voice break.

Elaine Wager was the only daughter of Loretta Wager, the charismatic African-American senator from California who'd died a few years before. Elaine – tonight's victim – had worked for a couple of years as an assistant district attorney in the Hall of Justice.

No one was supposed to know it, but she was also Glitsky's daughter.

Somehow he'd gotten dressed, made it to his car. He was driving, the streets dark, nearly deserted.

No one knew. As far as Glitsky was aware, not even Elaine herself. She believed that her biological father was her mother's much older husband, Dana Wager- white, rich, crooked and connected. In fact, when Loretta had found out she was pregnant by Glitsky, she kept that fact to herself and pressed him to marry her. He didn't understand the sudden rush, and when he said he needed time to decide – he was still in college, after all, with no job and no money – Loretta dumped him without a backward glance and made her move with Wager, the other man courting her, with whom she'd not yet slept.

For nearly thirty years, the senator had kept her daughter's paternity secret, even and especially from the girl's true father. Until, finally, a time came when she thought she could use the fact as a bargaining chip to get Glitsky to agree that sometimes it was OK for a senator to commit murder.

That strategy hadn't worked. Abe and Loretta had once been lovers, true, but now he was a cop in his bones, and three years ago she'd killed someone in his jurisdiction. The knowledge that their past union had produced a daughter wasn't going to change what he had to do. Which was bring her to justice.

So when Glitsky let her know he was going to expose her, she decided she wasn't going to endure an arrest, a high-profile trial and the loss of her national reputation. At the time she was, after all, one of the most prominent and respected African-American women in the country. She chose her own way out – an 'accident' with a gun in her mansion.