John Lescroart - Guilt

'I've got to meet this guy. Wes thinks he's God, too.'

'Speaking of…'

'God – or Wes?'

Christina nodded. 'MrFarrell.'

'I'm afraid I let lonesome get the better of me and pursued him a little more, uh, recklessly than I would have liked. Now I like to think we're moving cautiously toward friendship, but we've got a ways to go before we get beyond superficial.'

'Which isn't so bad, is it?'

Sam shrugged. 'I don't really know. That's the funny thing. It makes me a little nervous – what we've been talking about all day here. There's no way I'm investing any of this,' she tapped her heart, 'until I know him better.'

'Until you know it's real.'

Sam's face was a kaleidoscope of emotions. She nodded sheepishly. 'That's always the question, isn't it?'

Glitsky really hated it when he talked himself out of a plausible murder suspect, and that's exactly what his two talks – the one with his wife and the other with Paul Thieu – had accomplished.

Not only did he lack any physical evidence pointing to Mark Dooher as Victor Trang's killer, but – as he had told Flo – there was no reasonable way that a successful corporate lawyer was going to stab another lawyer to death over the terms of a possible settlement. That solution, much as he would love it if it did, just didn't scan.

So he was going to have to get another approach, and to that end he had dropped in on Paul Thieu in Missing Persons and asked him to call Felicia Diep and set up an appointment for some time, if possible, before afternoon tea.

In the meanwhile, Glitsky went upstairs to Homicide.

The room looked as it always did – a large open area with twelve desks, no more than three of them occupied at any one time; the doorless corner cubicle 'office' of the Chief of Homicide, Lieutenant Frank Batiste; two massive dry wall columns papered, stuck and tagged with every poster, fax, ammo sale notice, car repo slip, random prostitute's phone number – and so on – that had crossed some Inspector's desk in the past four years or so and which, at the time, had seemed too important, funny, or unusual to simply discard in a waste basket.

Glitsky's desk was next to one of these columns. He pulled his chair in, crossed his arms behind his head, and put his feet up. His eyes came to rest on the Xeroxed note at his eye level: Don't let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash.

He let his chair back down, trying to will away the nagging sense that he shouldn't stop concentrating on Mark Dooher who was, in some ways, the least likely probable candidate for the murder. But for just that reason…

Instinct counted. That was the problem. Glitsky's instincts were screaming something that he couldn't prove – Trang's murder had to have been personal. Someone had hated him passionately.

And that element just didn't seem to be there with his business adversary, Mark Dooher. So Glitsky should stop wasting energy on him. Except if Trang represented something Dooher hated passionately. Like Vietnamese people.

No. Forget that. He had a lot of other work, six other pressing homicides.

It might, after all, be the girlfriend, Lily. Girlfriends always had a motive or two. And Lily stood to benefit if Trang accepted Dooher's settlement. Maybe she'd gotten mad at him when he hadn't? Yesterday he'd told himself that no, she was too small; she could never have held Trang up. But – sudden thought – what if she had another boyfriend? She'd known Victor was alone in the office. He'd overlooked that. If she sent boyfriend number two over…

'Abe – got a minute?'

Frank Batiste stood in the doorway to his cubicle. The Lieutenant and Glitsky had come up together through the ranks. Both were nominal minorities – Glitsky half-black, Batiste a 'Spanish surname' – and both had elected to disregard any advantages, and they were legion, accruing to that status in San Francisco. It had created a bond of sorts. And although Batiste currently outranked Glitsky, they'd been in the department the same number of years and felt like equals.

So Glitsky got up and by the time he reached the doorway, the Lieutenant was sitting behind his desk.

'What's up, Frank?'

'Come on in. Sit down. Get the door.'

A joke, since there was no door. Glitsky took the folding chair across from the desk. Batiste pulled a pencil from his drawer and began tapping the table. 'So you know how to tell the prostitute in the Miss America contest?'

'I'm afraid I don't, Frank.'

'She's the one with the banner reading I-da-ho?

The one saving constant in the office, Glitsky thought. Somebody's always got a dumb joke. And Batiste was on a roll. 'Okay, another chance for you: you know the difference between Mick Jagger and a Scotsman?'

Glitsky broke a small smile. 'I give up.'

'Mick Jagger says "Hey, you, get offa my cloud," and the Scotsman says "Hey, McCloud, get off my ewe.'"

'You gotta get an agent, Frank. The right agent could make you a star.'

'That's true, the downside being that it would leave a vacancy here,' Batiste said. He pulled himself up straighter, getting to business. 'Which is what this is about. I notice you aren't taking this year's Lieutenant's exam. You don't want to make more money?'

'More money would be good.'

'Then what?'

'Maybe I don't want to be a Lieutenant. Maybe I don't want to leave Homicide.' Typically, a promotion to Lieutenant meant a transfer out of the detail to which an officer had been assigned. There were exceptions to this rule. Batiste himself had been a Homicide Inspector before his promotion. That wasn't something to count on, but Batiste was hinting that it could happen again with Abe. But, of course, first he had to take the exam.

Batiste opened the side drawer of his desk and took out a giant handful of peanuts in the shell. He dumped them on the desk between them, then grabbed one and cracked it. The peanuts were a constant in the Homicide detail. No one remembered when or how they'd first arrived, but they were always there. 'That's fine if that's what you want. I just didn't want it to be an oversight. I know you've had a lot on your mind lately.'

Batiste chewed and cracked another peanut, busy with it. This was awkward ground. 'You want my opinion, you want to take the test, keep your options open.'

Glitsky gave it a minute, then nodded. 'Okay, I'll do that. Thanks for mentioning it.'

'Good.'

The sound of peanuts being cracked. Neither of the men moved. 'Hey, Frank.'

'Yeah?'

Another long moment. Batiste took another handful of nuts out of his drawer and Glitsky got up, dropped his shells into the waste basket, looked out through the open entrance of Batiste's office, then sat back down. 'Are you sure there isn't anything else? I could handle it, there was.'

'Like what?'

'Like I've got so much on my mind that I'm not doing my job?' Glitsky's voice remained matter-of-fact, but his eyes became distant. 'That I'd be better off pushing paper as a Lieutenant in the traffic division than as a lowly Inspector with a real job in Homicide.' The eyes rested on his Lieutenant. 'I'd like to know, Frank, I really would. If I'm an embarrassment…'

'Who's saying that?'

His shoulders sagged. 'I am, I guess. I'm asking. I couldn't close on Levon Copes. Then I get assigned this clown who shoots up the Tastee Burger when there is no investigation to conduct but it keeps me off the streets? This kind of stuff, it makes me wonder.'

Batiste had stopped with the peanuts. He shook his head. 'Nobody's saying anything like that, Abe. I don't even think it.'

Glitsky took a breath. A beat. Another one. Three.

Batiste. 'You all right?'

'I'm reading everything wrong, Frank. Sorry. I didn't mean to lay it on you. I'm just getting everything wrong.'