John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

Q: So the crowd was yelling 'pull, pull!' Something like that. And what happened then?

A: Well, this man was pulling on him, hanging on him, like in the picture.

Q: He was pulling on the hanging man, pulling him down?

A: Yes.

Q: How do you know that?

A: [Pause.] Well, it was obvious.

Q: That's my question, Mr Westberg. How was it obvious? Look at this picture. [Glitsky had the late edition of the morning Chronicle in the room.] The man has one arm around the victim, another holding up what appears to be a knife.

A: It was a knife. He had it at the guy's throat.

Q: Okay. Then what?

A: Then what What !

Q: Then what happened?

A: I took the picture. Two of them.

Q: In quick succession?

A: Yes.

Q: Have you seen the other one?

A: Yeah, sure. I developed them both at home. It didn't come out as good.

Q: Do you mean it wasn't dramatic, or there was some technical problem – focus, lighting, like that?

A: No, there wasn't a technical problem. It was only, like, two seconds away from this one. Basically the same picture, just not as good.

Q: All right, let's go on. After you took these pictures, what did you do?

A: I ran. The crowd reacted a little to the flash. A couple of guys started coming for me. I thought they were going to smash the camera, maybe me, too, so I ran.

Q: You used a flash? A: Yeah. It was in shadow, the street, near sunset, maybe right after.

Q: So how long in total were you there, witnessing all this?

A: I don't know. A minute, ninety seconds, something like that. It was pretty scary, crazy.

Q: And before you snapped your picture, did you happen to notice this man who you say was pulling on the victim?

A: He was pulling on the victim. Look, that's what the lady downstairs told me, too. She said stick by my story. I thought you guys were on the same side.

Q: The lady downstairs, Ms Wager?

A: Yeah, that was her.

Q: She told you to stick by your story? Which story?

A: That he was pulling down on the guy…

Q: Well, is that a story or is it what happened?

A: [Pause.] It's what happened. It's what I saw. The picture shows it plain as day – look!

Q: [Pause.] If he was holding on with two hands and his feet were off the ground… but you're saying you saw him pull down. That's your testimony?

A: Well, what else could it have been? He was in the mob… [Pause.] Yes, that's my testimony.

Melanie was crying. 'Cindy told them.'

'Cindy told them what , Melanie?'

'Who you were.'

' What ? Why? Why did she do that?' But he knew. 'How did she…?'

'I called her, Kevin. Oh, God. I needed somebody, I just felt so bad, Kevin. I needed to talk to somebody …'

'I've told you a hundred times, Cindy is not your friend.' But this was a stupid discussion, he decided. 'Anyway, thanks for the tip-'

'Kevin, don't-'

'Don't! You tell me don't!'

She was crying. It tore at him, and he realized he still cared about her, didn't want to hurt her, but now she'd gone and done this…

'Kevin, I'm so sorry. I love you, I still love you and I can help you. You can come stay here-'

'Why would I need to come stay there, Melanie?'

'Cindy… Cindy told them where you live.'

He took the receiver away from his ear and stared at it. This was too bizarre.

Goddamn Cindy. Kevin, this is where the dick leads you. That one night with her – before he'd hooked up with Melanie – was turning into the worst mistake of his life. And it had been nothing but a casual one-nighter, nothing like what he had had with Melanie.

Letting go of the phone, leaving it off the receiver, he went to the window and looked down over the rooftops. He stepped out onto the fire escape, climbed the iron ladder holding on with his one good arm, up to the roof. God, it was hot. It was never this hot in San Francisco.

His head throbbed and this time he was willing to concede that it might be part hangover. He was dressed in a pair of old 501 Levi jeans, running shoes, a UCLA sweatshirt, and he moved in a crouch to the front of his building, looking over the ledge down onto Green Street. Two black-and-white police cars were pulled up at the curb, and he saw four men talking.

Again, a sense of disbelief. This could not be happening. Damn that Cindy. Hell hath no fury indeed…

Now the policemen split up, two of them going toward the front door, the other two separating, going around the two sides of the building. Surrounded.

Glitsky knew that he was on edge – a bad sign. He was chomping on ice cubes, sitting at his desk, warning off all would-be intruders with the evil eye as they appeared in his doorway.

Not very professional, he knew. It was the kind of body language he would use on occasion when he'd been a sergeant and wanted solitude, but now that he was the boss it had a different feel, a kind of self-aggrandizing…

Well, screw it, he thought. Things were starting to pile up – he'd known they would – but as was usually the case in emergencies, you knew it was going to whack you but you could never predict where or how hard. The answer was starting to turn out to be – really hard and almost everywhere.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep last night, maybe his biorhythms were low; Isaac, Flo, the whole Wager family; but events were hitting him the wrong way and he was struggling to contain himself.

The patrolmen had not been able to arrest Kevin Shea. The suspect was gone when they'd gotten there – he had left suddenly. The apartment manager had been cooperative and let them in and the back window had been open. There was a half-consumed cup of still-warm coffee on an end-table. The television set was still on. The phone was off the hook, the receiver lying on the bed. Someone had obviously tipped Shea off and he had gotten out with minutes to spare.

Contributing to Glitsky's ill humor was the impression he had taken away from the interview with Paul Westberg, which was that Elaine Wager's chat with the witness had affected the man's testimony. And there was a bigger issue – the reason he had felt compelled to visit Chief Rigby earlier in the morning: the district attorney's office, perhaps at the urging of Senator Loretta Wager, seemed to be opting for a political solution to the problems, and this was asking for more trouble than Glitsky cared to consider. They were building a case on Kevin Shea which would not allow for the fact that he might, in fact, be innocent.

Actually, on the basis of what he knew, Glitsky didn't think Shea was innocent. But he was uncomfortable with something that smacked of a witchhunt, and that's what Elaine Wager's interrogation (and Westberg's responses) had reeked of.

Evidently the powers had decided that Kevin Shea was the quintessential white racist, and that feeding him to the maw of the mob was the best answer to the complicated questions they were facing. That this was a fairly typical response didn't make Glitsky hate it any less.

He knew – Christ, he should, he embodied it – he knew that while all the bureaucracies in the land were meeting de facto quotas, providing hard, statistical support for the notion that the country was making progress toward integration and racial harmony, in reality the polarization was increasing every day. Glitsky was on the street enough – he saw it.

The truth was that racism was all around him – the enlightened white workers here in the Hall always referring to black people as Canadians , the black parents at his boys' schools who wouldn't let their kids play with white children.

On the surface everything was working. People were generally polite, proper, friendly. Now the thing that had become unfashionable – and in San Francisco the worst crime was to be unhip – was acknowledging the depth of the problem. Race? Please, didn't we do all that in the sixties? Better to pretend it wasn't really there. Certainly it wasn't an issue in San Francisco. Everybody accepted everybody else nowadays. This was the nineties. We solved all that stuff years ago. Get real.