John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

So she walked downstairs again, through the foyer, took another few sips of her drink. The door was unlocked.

A glance back through the library. The sun had moved lower – the prisms had vanished.

He would be on time when he came to arrest her. She was certain about that. He had said eight sharp.

It was her decision.

She walked back up the stairs into her dressing room, put down the snifter where it had been before.

She picked up Dana's old Colt revolver that she had always kept up here.

The note, in light pencil strokes, read: 'Abe. Remind people that Dana and I used to go target shooting together. There must have been an accident when I was cleaning his old gun…'

Glitsky carefully lifted the piece of paper. Going into the bathroom, he folded it over and tore it into little pieces, then dropped the pieces into the toilet and flushed three times.

He walked into the bedroom and lifted the phone next to Loretta's bed, punched the numbers nine… one… one.

Elaine Wager held herself erect. She had been through it all the past week. Was there almost a sense of relief in her bearing, Glitsky wondered, that nothing more could happen to her, that she had survived?

He leaned over and pushed the passenger door open after he had stopped at the curb. Elaine was wearing jeans, lace-up brown shoes, a baggy sweater. Her hair was held back severely.

'Thank you for picking me up,' she said. 'You didn't have to.'

'Yes, I did,' he said. At her expression, he clarified it. 'Not pick you up. Go see her.'

'I heard you found her…'

He was driving now, didn't have to look over. 'We had an appointment,' he said.

'Abe?' Her voice was suddenly tentative. 'What was she like, as a woman, I mean? You would know…'

He was pulled up at a light. 'Beautiful,' he said, 'she was beautiful.'

Elaine closed her eyes, nodded. 'That was how she was as a mother.'

Glitsky was hunched forward on the first two inches of the plaster chair, his elbows on his knees, waiting, his hatchet face chiseled in a scowl of impatience. Across from him, Elaine stared at the tiny holes in the acoustic tile of the ceiling.

The coroner, John Strout, opened the connecting door with a little whoosh and everybody was suddenly standing. When he nodded, Elaine steeled herself and walked into the morgue. Glitsky stayed behind.

'I'm due for a few days off,' Strout said. 'I can't keep this up. People I know winding up in here…'

'Do you know what happened?'

'Looks like about what it did before.'

'I want to know your ruling,' Glitsky said. His voice had a hoarse quality – it raised a flag for Strout. 'I knew her personally, John.' He paused, wondering how much he had to say. He decided not much.

'Well, you know as well as me, you can't ever say with pure certainty in a case like this, but I'm going to rule accidental death. I don't think she killed herself.'

'Why not?'

'Well, mostly because of everything else I know about her last hours. Spent the day with Elaine in there, who said everything seemed hunky-dory, better than it had ever been. Then, you know, she'd just had a couple of major successes. Shit, Abe, the woman was on fire. She was flying. That, plus you don't make dinner reservations and then kill yourself. You don't dictate five memos on next month's business and then kill yourself.'

Unless you plan it so carefully that your daughter, above all, will never know, Glitsky thought. But he asked, 'Anything forensic?'

'Strangely enough, yeah. The angle, the distance. Gun went off far enough it didn't give her any powder burns – she wasn't holding it against her temple, in her mouth, anything like that. Most folks do. Come to think of it, I never once had a suicide shot through the heart. Not from an arm's length away, Abe. I believe the gun just went off.' Strout pulled at the sides of his long face. Studied the lieutenant a minute. Carefully placed a hand on Glitsky's shoulder. 'It was an accident, Abe. There's nobody to look for.'

Glitsky felt his legs go loose. Maybe his little talk to Loretta about the importance of forensic details had borne this fruit.

He sat down a minute, then looked up at the coroner. 'It's what I wanted to hear, John. Thanks.'

Superior Court Judge Maria Braun was extremely displeased to be contacted by the new district attorney on her holiday weekend, but thought that it probably served her right for not getting the hell away to Hawaii or Puerto Vallarta or Palm Springs as most of her colleagues on the bench did. Next year, next year she'd remember. But, of course, this was an important case and the city had already played it so poorly… If she thought she was having a bad Fourth of July, she thought it didn't really compare to what they'd put this fellow Shea through, and he was still in custody.

She'd read the moving papers of the attorney, Wesley Farrell – a vague memory of competence from somewhere, but she couldn't put a face to it – and then carefully gone over the three independent confirming stories from the police interrogations of the other witnesses. Three of these people – James A. O'Toole, Brandon W. Mullen, and Colin Devlin – seemed to be attempting to trade immunity or lesser pleas in exchange for avoiding a murder charge, while the fourth, Rachel Koshelnyk, seemed credible, never mind her poor English.

She'd also read over the testimony of, so far, the only suspect to be charged in the murder, Peter M. McKay. Also the testimony of homicide lieutenant Abraham Glitsky. The file was nearly an inch thick and she'd read it all. Everybody seemed to agree that Kevin Shea had done nothing wrong.

Judge Braun couldn't do a thing about possible federal charges against Kevin Shea. She couldn't quash the grand jury indictment without hearing all the evidence in the case. But she had heard enough, and what she could do was her good deed for the month and order Kevin Shea released on his own recognizance. She didn't think he was going anywhere.

Farrell took Kevin Shea back to his place. Emotionally drawn and quartered, the young man did not want to go out to lunch, did not want to celebrate, did not want to hear instructions about his future behavior or strategy about his defense in the event that he would need one. What he really wanted to do was go home.

Farrell understood and didn't press him. Kevin had been through the wringer and needed to decompress. Farrell, on the other hand, betook himself to lunch at John's Grill, where he thought he fit right in to the consolation party they were having in honor both of the Fourth of July holiday and of the owner's unsuccessful trip to New York City, where he had gone over the weekend to bid on one of the two original Maltese Falcons that had been used in the movie. His top bid of thirty thousand dollars fell a little short of the six hundred thousand dollars the trophy had eventually gone for, but the publicity and goodwill he had generated by the effort wasn't hurting his restaurant business.

Farrell ordered sand dabs – butter, capers, lemon. He'd had enough frozen food, delivered food, plastic food to last a lifetime. Things were going to change. He had his day planned out, maybe the rest of his life. At least now it was going to start – he'd also go home and take Bart out for a long walk (the dog deserved a little attention), clean up his living room and wash the dishes in the sink, do a couple of sit-ups (not too many the first day), then pour himself one and only one extra bone-dry Bombay Sapphire martini and watch the fireworks from the roof of his apartment.

Tomorrow morning, first thing, he was going to cut his damn hair, then place calls to some of his old colleagues, polish up his résumé, put the word out. He was back in the business.