John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

He tried to force himself to sleep, to forget, to ignore.

He was still hard.

After finally forcing himself to get out of bed an hour after the sun had come up, Kevin Shea had stood at his widest back window taking in his view. Nothing in his vision resembled an area struggling with poverty. His apartment on Green Street backed onto Cow Hollow, whose artery in turn was Union, San Francisco 's yuppiest mile. Beyond Union were the upscale Fort Mason and Marina neighborhoods. To Shea's right, looking east, he could catch a glimpse of Russian Hill and the glittering bay beyond. To his left, the green expanse of the Presidio provided a lush foreground to the red spires of the Golden Gate Bridge.

This morning seven distinct columns of smoke rose in an arc through the panorama. Opening the window a crack to look further around, he heard a constant wail from sirens, dopplering nearer, then farther in the streets below. He closed the window and lowered the blinds, darkening his living room.

In the kitchen he fumbled for coffee beans, half of which he spilled before he got them into the electric grinder. He got some water over one of the burners, then turned on the television.

He was beginning to hope he had only dislocated his arm. It had regained some mobility and in certain positions didn't hurt so much, and he thought if it was broken that wouldn't be the case. His ribs, on the other hand, hurt like hell in every position.

A mug normally intended for beer was full of coffee. Slumping nearly horizontal in a stuffed chair of worn, cracking, yellow faux-leather, he was too low to see over the ledge of any of his windows, and anyway the shades were drawn.

Melanie on the phone had started out being convinced by what the television was saying about his role last night and that really worried him. Did she really think that he had somehow been a ringleader in the lynching? She should have known he was incapable of anything like that. But if even she thought he'd been involved, he had bigger problems than a few broken ribs.

In his hungover daze he had managed to ask her how she could think what she was saying was possible?

'You've got to see the picture,' she had told him, and then had hung up.

The television cast its muted glow back into the half-lit room. Shea, hunkered down in his chair as though against an onslaught, sipped his coffee. The screen filled with a close-up of an anchorman as the morning news came on the air:

'The lead story here and across the country today is the lynching of a black attorney by an all-white mob here in San Francisco last night and the devastating escalation of violence and rioting that has swept the Bay Area and is already being reflected in other major cities – New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, Washington, DC and Los Angeles.

'Here in San Francisco Mayor Conrad Aiken has called for a dusk-to-dawn curfew and has asked the governor to declare a state of emergency for the city and county. Property damage is already estimated at some two hundred fifty million dollars and that figure is certain to go up, perhaps into the billions. The Red Cross and other relief organizations are setting up tent cities and emergency medical centers in Golden Gate Park, Dolores Park, Marina Green and several other locations around the city for those who need shelter or assistance, and even at this early hour people are flooding to these areas. Our News Center crews report nineteen fires are still burning in several areas of the city, including the site of the lynching itself. We're going to take you there now, live…'

Shea had forgotten his coffee. The fire he was seeing on the tube was in the process of consuming nearly the entire square block bounded by Geary (and the Cavern Tavern) and Clement Streets between 2nd and 3rd – businesses and family duplexes.

The anchorman was talking to his stringer over the images of the flames: 'We understand, Terri, that authorities are especially concerned about the location of this blaze…?'

'That's right, Mark. This appears to be a very different reaction from the frustration and rage we saw in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict. As you know, this is not a ghetto area and police were here earlier this morning when these fires began with a kind of drive-by firebombing attack centering on what used to be the Cavern Tavern, which is where the mob reportedly first developed.'

'An attack?'

'That's right. Witnesses tell us that several cars converged here at one time, crashed the police barricades and started throwing Molotov cocktails. Fortunately there weren't many people on the street or it might have been much worse. The police on the street were shot at from the cars and two were wounded. So it was more a planned raid than a spontaneous explosion of rage.'

'A call to arms? The start of a civil war?'

Terri shook her head. 'Let's hope not, Mark, but it could be, it certainly could be.'

And then, suddenly, Shea was looking at the picture – his own picture - hearing the anchor's voice-over. 'And here is how it all began. Police Chief Dan Rigby speculates that there was an informal memorial service for a man named Michael Mullen who was shot to death during a carjacking a couple of weeks ago. The man arrested for that crime was an African-American named Jerohm Reese and he…'

They kept the picture on the screen, and his face was the clearest thing in it. But to him it still looked like it captured what he had actually done – held up the guy, tried to get him the knife to cut himself down. His attention came back to the screen: '… and the mayor is asking this man, who is still unidentified, to come forward…'

The mayor was on a street somewhere in the pre-dawn, in shirtsleeves, looking haggard. A fire burned behind him. 'We must not let this divide us,' he was saying. 'This does not have to be black versus white. This was a small group of individuals, of misguided white men who broke the law and who will be punished. Every decent person in San Francisco, and that's the overwhelming majority of us, wants this group, and especially its leader, brought to justice.'

In disbelief, Shea watched and listened to more of it. Senator Loretta Wager had flown in overnight and they had caught her coming off the plane at the airport. 'Certainly the first step before we can ever talk about starting to heal these wounds,' she said, 'has to be a good-faith effort on the part of San Francisco's authorities to apprehend these murderers, to demonstrate to the minority communities, to all of us, that hate-based lawlessness will not be tolerated. And this can't be done with talk – only with results. We've had enough of talk. If the mayor and the police chief want us to believe they are truly concerned about the black community and all our decent citizens, then this man in the picture, and the others, have got to be found and put on trial. And quickly. Give them the benefit of a justice that they denied Arthur Wade. And, if they are found guilty, give them the penalty that fits the crime.'

The coffee was cold and so was his sweat. Shea did not feel his ribs or his arm anymore as the news broke for a commercial and he heard yet another siren outside.

Lieutenant Abe Glitsky sat at his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco 's Hall of Justice. After an hour of no sleeping he had given up and gone back downtown. He had been in since seven-fifteen, trying to get a handle on the madness, to coordinate the efforts of his department, which had already, previous to yesterday's incident, been up to its eyeballs in domestic-violence homicides, drive-by homicides, drug-related homicides, senseless, stupid homicides – the usual harvest of the urban streets.

Now, the workday not even officially begun, and not including Arthur Wade and of course the still unsolved murder of Mike Mullen, he already had two new verified homicides – victims of the street violence. These were a three-year-old white child who'd been burned to death in one of the duplexes that had gone up in the aftermath of the firebombing of the Cavern and a Korean store owner who had caught a brick in the head while he had been trying to defend his fresh-fruit and vegetable store in the lower Fillmore.