John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

The knock was barely audible. 'Ms Sinclair? Melanie?'

What ? No one knew she was here except…

She parted the drapes a couple of inches and was staring into the face of the clerk from the office. Not a young man, his deep-pitched gravelly voice seemed to make the window vibrate against her hand. 'I thought you might be lonesome, want a little company?' The look in his eyes chilled her, and she glanced quickly at the thin chain that, in theory, protected her.

She let the drapes fall, stepping back. Another knock, quietly. 'Ms Sinclair?' A pause. 'Okay, then, no offense.'

She waited as long as she could bear it, then tried the drapes again and looked. He was gone.

Getting into the bed again next to Kevin, she pulled the comforter up around her, but after a short while suddenly lifted it off and sat up.

She walked around the bed, picked up the telephone, and punched in some numbers. It was after ten and she'd been trained not to call anyone after that time, but this time she was going to make an exception.

The tired voice answered. 'Hello? What time is it?'

'Cindy?'

'Melanie? Where are you? Are you all right?'

'I'm fine. One thing, though…'

'Sure, what, anything.'

'Fuck you, Cindy.' And she hung up.

Glitsky went straight up to homicide, but Marcel Lanier, the inspector who had been on call in the office when Loretta Wager was brought downtown, had decided it would be wise to move the senator to avoid the media circus and had chosen a place he thought would be less likely to be used for the next couple of days – Chris Locke's office. He had borrowed a couple of uniformed officers and asked them to wait, standing guard in Locke's reception area until Lieutenant Glitsky arrived. The way things were going he just didn't know – the senator had almost been killed once tonight, and Lanier wasn't about to have anything like that happen again while he was on duty.

Glitsky dismissed the two men in the reception area, closed the door behind him and for the first time in almost twenty-five years was alone in a room with Loretta Wager.

She raised her head. She'd been sitting with her back stiff, one foot curled under her, on one of the couches in Locke's office. Her profile was to him and she held it there. He remained by the door a moment, struck by the control in her posture, the unexpected vulnerability of her face.

'Hello, Loretta.' He stepped toward her. 'Are you all right?'

Her voice had a mechanical quality – shock. 'I don't know how I am. I don't… they tell me a bullet missed me by less than six inches.' She uncurled the leg that had been under her, stood up and faced him. She was barefoot, shorter than he had remembered – an inch over five feet. Her shoes and a small clutch purse that matched the color of her blue suit lay on the floor by the end of the couch.

'But Chris…' She shook her head wearily, lapsed into silence. 'This isn't how I would have chosen to see you again.' She let her posture slip, something giving in her shoulders. 'But then again, you'd chosen not to see me at all.'

Glitsky ignored that, still standing at the doorway. 'You want to tell me what happened?' She cocked her head to one side, some expectation verified. Glitsky felt he should say something, explain himself, though he couldn't say why. Not exactly. 'I run the homicide department. Chris Locke is a pretty important homicide. I gather you're the only witness we've got. I'd like to hear about it.'

Loretta closed her eyes, sighed. Glitsky knew she must have been through it tonight. 'I told my story upstairs to several officers and a tape recorder. I'm sure they're writing it all down.'

'I'm sure they are.'

'But you want to hear it again?'

Glitsky shrugged. He didn't understand why she'd asked for him, but he did know why Lanier had humored her. Well, he was here now, and this is what he did. 'If you want to humor me I'd appreciate it. I understand you asked for me. Here I am.'

There was the start of a smile, but Glitsky couldn't read it. 'When you're bidden.'

'That's just the way I am, Loretta. I'm trying to do my job. You know that.'

A pause. Then: 'I remember.' Unexpectedly – he 'd crossed over to her now – she reached a hand up to the side of his face. But no sooner had the touch registered than she pulled it away. 'All right,' she said, 'but God, I am so tired.'

Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard of tired. You want to sit down?'

Her voice sank. ' Sit down? Sugar, I want to lay this ol' body down.' But then she was back, her senatorial self. 'Just teasing, Lieutenant. Let us sit down.'

He turned on his pocket tape recorder and let her talk.

'Chris and I had dinner with Philip Mohandas and some of his people – I've been trying to coordinate our efforts so that we're all concentrating on the same way to end these problems, so we're not stepping on each other's toes. And Philip doesn't see things exactly… well, exactly as Chris Locke did. Or me either, for that matter. I keep trying to get the message to him… separatism is not the way. Segregation is not the way. We have to work together, all of us.

'Maybe it was naive, but I thought if Chris and I – two black people working and getting things done in the system – I thought if we could somehow make Philip see, to moderate just a little, we'd have a better chance of getting the city under control.

'Philip can't seem to stop looking on these… these tragedies… as something he can use . He sees this as a time to demand concessions across the board. So he spent most of the night lecturing Chris and me on his positions , as he insists on calling them. It got pretty tedious.

'Now I knew I was going to take a lot of this up later with Philip, try and get him to see a little of the light, so I gave Chris a kick under the table and reminded him – didn't he remember? – we said we'd go out to the Dolores Park tent city, which – you probably heard – some genius had decided to segregate. De facto. Keep the tensions to a minimum. Lord, the stupidity of bureaucrats.

'Chris didn't know exactly what we thought we were going to do out there. I told him I thought – still do – that it was maybe one of those times when you can make political points and do some good at the same time. That argument speaks – I'm sorry, spoke… to Chris Locke, as you probably know.

'But by the time we got down there, things had flared up. I think it got around – of course, none of the city planners had realized its implications – that this was about two blocks from the spot where Michael Mullen had been shot. So the white half – can you believe this, the white half – of the tent city decides to name itself Mullentown, and in retaliation or whatever you want to call it, someone put up a sign in the other area – the so-called African area – calling it Jerohm Reese City. Which, as you can imagine, lasted about five minutes.'

'Which got people to burning again.'

Loretta leaned back against the couch, closing her eyes, sighing. Straightening herself up, arching her back, she visibly steeled herself to continue. Her red-rimmed eyes met Abe's and she smiled wearily. 'We are so blind,' she said. 'We are so goddamn blind.'

Glitsky turned off the recorder. 'You really care that much?'

It stopped her, seemed to hurt her, but she simply echoed what he had said earlier: 'That's just the way I am, Abe. I'm trying to do my job.'

The scar between Glitsky's lips ran lighter for an instant and he looked down.

She didn't pursue the moment. Instead, taking a breath, she motioned to the tape recorder. He pressed the button and she was back at Dolores Park. 'Chris had had some wine with dinner so I was driving. We stopped but didn't get out of the car. Things had begun to spill into the streets. They'd pushed over a police car, put it on fire. It was just getting dark.