John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

And then, one sunny summer evening, a black man named Arthur Wade gets lynched.

And that brought him to the last cause of his ice crunching – the one person who was calling the infection systemic, Philip Mohandas, was abandoning any hope for understanding because he was taking it too damn far. There were so many other things, constructive things, he could do. He could be responsible. He could call for some restraint. Dialogue.

Instead, because Mohandas knew that nobody was going to arrest an African-American leader in the coming days for what amounted to sticks and stones, he would be excused for not doing the right thing. He had cause, he was a victim of his own rage. Old-fashioned laws didn't matter if you had a good enough reason. Ask the Menendez boys.

What most got to Glitsky was when the leaders who claimed to represent all the black people caved in to that temptation and then those failures were cited by white people as a justification – hell, the white side of Glitsky even felt it himself – for distrusting legitimate black motives and aspirations.

And now Mohandas was clearly breaking the law, openly calling for vigilantism, being allowed – even encouraged – to rant and vent to his heart's content. And his presence and rhetoric were raising the odds.

Glitsky felt it made no sense to let him inflame the situation but no one seemed to be inclined to try and stop it. Glitsky thought he wouldn't mind a shot at it – he had a few ideas that might get Mohandas's attention – but it wasn't his job. His job was homicide. All this other political crap was just that – crap.

But such sensible thoughts weren't doing his mood any good. He continued to crunch his ice, his eyes fixed ahead of him.

The telephone rang in his office. His receptionist being the same person who guarded his door – nobody – he picked the phone up with a more than usually unpleasant, 'Glitsky. Homicide.'

A pause, an almost inaudible sigh. 'Abe Glitsky.' He might have imagined it, but there was a sense of relief in the words, as though at great personal expense she'd broken through some psychic barrier. He recognized the voice instantly.

'Loretta…?'

'One word and you sound exactly the same.'

Glitsky, adrenaline still running, answered her words. 'No,' he said, 'I'm pretty different. You'd be surprised.' It sounded more hostile than he felt but the words were out, unchecked, and maybe some truth…

'Well, of course.' That deep throaty laugh. 'We're all different, Abe, we've all changed. But we're all still the same, too, deep down.'

This was as strange an opening as he could have imagined, bantering with his ex-lover who was now a United States senator as though they'd seen each other, perhaps intimately, a couple of days before.

Grabbing the styrofoam cup, a quarter inch of ice water, he drank it for time to get his bearings, then asked what he could do for her. This, he figured, had to be about Elaine.

'I was just in the mayor's office,' she said. 'When he mentioned… I mean, there aren't many Abe Glitskys…'

'I'm in the phone book, Loretta, always have been.' She seemed to hesitate, then went on as though he hadn't responded. 'But when Conrad brought you up… he said you were a lieutenant.'

Suddenly Glitsky's edge sharpened – a red anger flared. Loretta was looking for a toehold to satisfy her curiosity and he wasn't going to help her out. 'You thought you'd just call and catch up?'

This time the hesitation was more pronounced. 'You're still mad at me? After all these years?'

'I'm not mad at you at all, Loretta.'

'At what I did, I mean?'

'I'm still not sure I know what you did, or why you did it. But I can't say it's been a big deal the last, oh, couple of decades or so. I have a family…' His voice was winding down.

'I was sorry to hear about your wife…'

Glitsky's knuckles had stiffened around the telephone and he opened and closed his fingers. One of his inspectors, Carl Griffin, knocked on his doorjamb and got waved away. 'I just suddenly wanted to hear your voice, Abe. See if you were all right, how you were doing. Is that so odd?'

No answer.

He heard her let out a breath. 'All right, Abe. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

She was hanging up. He hadn't meant to cut her off. He should have…

'Loretta!'

But the connection was gone.

Kevin Shea did not want to think about the jump he had taken to the roof next door. It looked maybe eight feet across but it felt like twenty – he would have to go back and measure it someday. If his life ever became normal again. Sure. He really didn't want to think about how far down it was. Far enough.

Fortunately the roof was flat and, like his own, had a low ledge. After he had landed, rolling over on his bruised arm and aching ribs, he made his way back to the ledge and lay down against it in the wide shady lane made by the early-morning sun. He heard the police come up to his roof next door, the one he had just abandoned. He heard them go down again.

After an endless ten minutes he had risked a glance over there. Okay, they were really gone. It seemed safe. Relatively.

The door that poked up through the roof was unlocked, and Shea limped his way down the four flights of stairs, seeing no one. On Green Street the police cars had pulled out. The curb was empty. He turned right and started walking, as normally as he could, away from his building.

Shea had grown up in suburban Houston, attended Rice University, majoring in economics, intending to get into some kind of management role in his father's company.

His mother's maiden name was Janine Robitaille, of the New Orleans Robitailles. She was a statuesque southern belle who favored beehive hairdos long after they were out of style. But on her, somehow, the hairstyle never looked dated – those piles of her dark hair lifted away from the creamy cameo of her face, framing its near-flawless lines, making her always appear taller than her husband Daniel.

His father – Daniel Shea – was half-owner, along with Fred Bronin, of Flexitech, a company that manufactured athletic accessories and supplies – batting and golf gloves, wristbands, orthopedic tensors, hard little rubber balls ('Flexits') that you held in your hand and squeezed to strengthen your grip.

When Kevin was twenty-two and just out of college, Daniel had come home early one afternoon after an extended sales trip to find his beautiful wife Janine in bed with his best friend and partner Fred Bronin.

Being a good ol' boy, Daniel's reaction perhaps should have been to take up the nearest gun and shoot them both, but he fooled them. Kevin's father had always had a streak of insecurity, a tendency to melancholy, and though he had raised a good family (two boys and a girl) and become, after a fashion, successful, he never quite believed in the worth of anything he accomplished, that it had any real meaning. And the double betrayal of a wife and best friend rocked him – so he turned the gun on himself instead.

In the aftermath, the Sheas' world and everything in it fell apart. Janine and Fred Bronin did not get married and live happily ever after. They had a bitter legal and personal battle over Flexitech, which Fred eventually lost because he had a stroke in the middle of it, leaving Janine with de facto ownership of the company. She, having never spent a moment of her life on business, subsequently orchestrated the company into bankruptcy in just under two years.

Meanwhile, Kevin Shea and his younger brother Joey had both appalled their Vietnam-era mother, as they had intended, by enlisting in the army. During their three-year hitch the boys had been trained in survival, weapons, strategy, then sent separately to Desert Storm. Kevin had done a lot of marching and sweating but saw no action. His brother Joey was inside the one bunker that had been destroyed by an Iraqi Scud missile – and had been killed. Kevin's mother and little sister Patsy blamed Kevin for talking Joey into enlisting in the army in the first place, and they had made it clear he was unwelcome in Texas forever, not that it had been his intention to go back there anyway.