DISMAS HARDY'S WINDSHIELD WIPERS couldn't keep up with the downpour. They thwacked as fast as they could go, but this latest in a series of March squalls reduced his visibility to near zero. He could barely make out the first gate until he was at it. He loved his little two-seater Honda convertible with the top down in the summer and fall, but it wasn't made for this kind of weather. The plastic back window had long since gone opaque and even with the defrost fan blasting, the inside surfaces of the door windows were fogged over too. He pushed the button to lower his driver's window so he could present his identification to the guard and the rain misted in over his face.
Behind him, someone honked, then honked again. His rearview mirror was useless; he couldn't see his side mirrors, either, through the condensation on the windows. The rain pounded down on the cloth roof. He was inside a drum. Blinded, cocooned, he had to lower his window another few inches so he and the guard could see each other. Opening the window allowed more water in, enough to soak through the fabric of his suit in seconds.
Another blast from the impatient prick behind him. Hell, Hardy was already wet; he had half a mind to jump out and confront the guy, pull him out of his ride, deck him, dump him into the churning brown stream that ran over the road's gutters.
Instead, he squinted out to see the guard, flashed his driver's license, and spoke so he could be heard over the rain. "Dismas Hardy, to visit one of your inmates, Evan Scholler."
The guard, all but invisible through the downpour, spoke loudly, too, from his semienclosed space, "I'll have to see your ID better than that, please, sir. Sorry."
Seething, Hardy handed it out. Waited. He had time to decide that if the car behind him honked once more, he would go take the driver out, but then his wallet was back at the window and he heard a crisp "Thank you, sir. Ahead to your right after the next gate."
And he rolled up his window and let the clutch out simultaneously.
When he'd left the city a couple of hours ago, the sky had been light gray, but it hadn't even been drizzling. So he didn't have an umbrella or a raincoat with him.
After he found his spot in the parking lot, he turned off the motor and parked to wait out the worst of the squall. Regain some of his composure. Whoever had been behind him-some delivery guy maybe-didn't follow him to this lot. He thought it was probably just as well.
Composure was an issue. Even before the rain, Hardy's physical reaction to the scheduled visit to the prison had caught him off-guard. It had been a while since he'd had a client in prison, and he was out of practice. He kept having to reach for a breath, his palms were sweaty, an unaccustomed emptiness had hollowed out his lower rib cage. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head back and drew in a long breath through his mouth, which he then exhaled with a certain deliberation. He did it again. And again.
When at last the drumming of the rain stopped, he opened his eyes. Now, suddenly, it was just a light drizzle. Seizing the moment, he opened the car door and stepped out onto the asphalt.
***
HARDY HAD SEEN pictures of Evan Scholler in the newspapers, caught some glimpses of him on the TV news as the trial had gone on, so he thought he'd recognize him on sight. But when the guard first opened the door to the very small room to bring the inmate in, Hardy took a quick glance and decided that this couldn't be his man; the guard must have gotten it wrong and this shackled guy must be going to see another attorney in a different room.
For one thing, Evan was younger, just thirty-one now; this inmate looked at least forty. Further, in photos and on television, Evan was far better-looking, with a stronger chin, lighter hair, a better complexion, smaller in the gut and bigger across the shoulders. This guy here was big, casually buffed, physically intimidating, especially wearing a flat-affect expression that made his thin mouth look mean, even cruel. At first glance, this guy looked like a stone killer.
But the guard, checking the slip of paper in his hand, said, "Dismas Hardy?" A nod. "Here's your mope."
Evan took the slur without reaction. He stood at attention, but relaxed in the pose, seemingly uninterested in what, if anything, happened next. He looked Hardy up and down as he might a side of beef hanging in a cooler.
"You can take the shackles off," Hardy said.
For the obvious reason, guards in prison did not carry guns on their persons, so in any one-on-one encounter such as this delivery, shackles on prisoners tended to be the norm. Hardy knew several attorneys who visited their clients here and most of them were happy to let the shackles stay put. A shackled convict was a controllable convict, and with many of these inmates, you couldn't be too careful.
The guard hestitated for an instant, then shrugged. "Your call." With practiced precision, he unlocked the handcuffs from the chain that was threaded through the Levi's belt loops encircling Evan's waist. The cuffs still dangled from the waist chain at his sides.
Now, though, his hands free, Evan rubbed at his wrists.
The room was four feet wide by about seven feet long. A heavy, solid, industrial gray metal desk squatted against Hardy's right wall and stuck out two-thirds of the way across the space; in a pinch it could serve as a first-line barrier in the event of a surprise attack. Folding chairs sat on either side of it. Hardy had a door with a wire-glass window in it behind him and another door just like that facing him. The guard who'd let him in had cautioned him to stay on his side of the desk, "just to be safe." He'd also pointed out the small button low in the wall in Hardy's side that could be pressed in the event of any trouble.
Evan's guard said, "I'm right outside the whole time," and then that's where he was, closing the door behind him.
Hardy said, "You want to sit down?"
Evan thanked him and sat. He put his free hands on the table, still looking through Hardy, until suddenly he focused. "You got a cigarette?"
"Sorry, I don't smoke."
"I didn't either," Evan said. "What a joke."
"What is?"
"Not smoking. Watching what you eat. Staying in shape. All that stuff outside. Then you wind up in here." Maybe he felt as though he'd given too much of himself away. As a cop or a soldier or at the prison or somewhere else, Evan had gotten good at the thousand-yard stare, and he reverted into it. After a minute inside himself, he came back to Hardy. "So who are you?" he asked.
"Dismas Hardy, your new attorney."
"Don't take this wrong," Evan said, "but it took you long enough."
"Yeah, well, it was a little complicated."
A beat. "What's that first name again?"
"Dismas. The good thief. On Calvary? Next to Jesus?"
Evan shook his head. "Don't know him. Dismas, I mean. I've heard of Jesus."
Hardy looked him in the face. If this was humor, it was damn subtle and wouldn't be a bad thing. But he couldn't tell. He could see, however, that his initial impression of the man's age was off-close up he came as advertised, thirty-one. Hard years.
"What happened to Charlie Bowen?" Evan asked.
"He went missing last summer. He's the equivalent of dead as far as the Court's concerned. My firm inherited his files, including yours. I got them about four months ago."
"You a slow reader?"
Hardy's glance came up at his new client again. The guy wielded words efficiently, short punches inside. First a wave at humor, then a cutting jab. A lot going on behind unyielding eyes. Hardy figured he deserved the rebuke-four months while he decided whether or not to take on the appeal himself must have felt a lot different to him than those same four months inside the prison had to Evan.
But Hardy was here now, and that's what mattered. Evan's trial had ended nearly two years before. Charlie Bowen obviously hadn't gotten too far with the appeal in the fourteen or so months that he'd worked on it. Nobody else had done anything on it for six months after Bowen disappeared. The four more months that Hardy had taken while he made up his mind after he got the files were the least of Evan's real problems.
So Hardy ignored the question. It was irrelevant now. He pushed his chair back from the desk, crossed his legs, started in a conversational tone. "I used to be a cop," he said. "Before that I was a Marine and did a tour in Vietnam. Sound familiar?"
"You enlist?"
"Marines," Hardy repeated. "They don't draft Marines."
"How old were you?"
"Twenty."
"Yeah, I was twenty when I joined the Guard, still in college."
"That was pre-nine-eleven?"
"Pre-everything," Evan said. "Different world. The Guard looked like easy money at the time. A good way to keep in shape. Who knew?"
"Did you go right into the Police Academy after school?"
"Pretty much. Couple of months off, maybe. You can only drink so much beer and do nothing else before it gets old."
"I don't know. I spent ten years doing that. I had a kid who died."
Hardy wasn't fishing for sympathy. He wanted Evan to know a little bit about who he was, why he might be taking on this case personally. The young man's history struck a chord in him. With his life apparently over, Evan was still seven years younger than Hardy had been when he'd awakened from his own long alcohol-powered slumber after the death of his first son, Michael. Starting over from scratch at thirty-eight, Hardy had resurrected himself and his life in a way he would have been unable to predict-success, wife, kids, even happiness. So he knew it could be done. You didn't want to bet on it, but the slim possibility was there. Maybe this kid-like Hardy an ex-cop, ex-soldier-could get another chance. "So how long," he asked, "did you walk a beat before they recalled you?"
"Three years, give or take. This isn't in my file?"
"How's it relate to your case?"
Perhaps unconsciously, Evan scratched with his right index finger at the surface of the desk. "I don't see how it would."
"That's why it's not in your file," Hardy said. "Not in Bowen's, anyway."
"What about Everett Washburn's?"
"It might be there, I don't know. I haven't talked to him yet. I wanted to meet you first. See what you had to say."
"Like what?"
"Like your own testimony at your trial. Was that Washburn's decision, or yours?"
"I don't remember, exactly. I think we agreed on it together."
"I don't understand why, when you were on the stand, you didn't take the chance to tell the jury yourself that you didn't kill Nolan. If you didn't."
The scratching stopped. Evan stared across at Hardy. "Maybe I did do it."
"Okay. That'd be a good reason. Did you?"
"You really want to know?"
"It's why I'm here."
"Washburn never cared one way or the other. If I actually did it, I mean. Said it didn't matter."
"That's what makes the world go 'round. I do care if you killed him. Did you?"
"I don't know," he said.
***
THE SECOND OFFICE out of which Everett Washburn practiced law was the lower flat of a Victorian building on Union Street in San Francisco. It was really more of a personal refuge than a business office. Everybody in Redwood City knew Washburn; aside from his managing-partner role in his own firm, he was a fixture at the Broadway Tobacconists down there, and sometimes the constant familiarity, having to be "on" all the time, got to be a little much for the old man. In San Francisco, he kept a secretary who came in for about ten hours every week. Her main job was to keep the plants watered. There were a lot of plants.
The place he favored most in the flat was all the way in the back. Twelve feet in diameter, octagonal in shape, with windows on four of the walls and bookcases stuffed with leisure reading-no law books-on the other four, the room was intimate and comfortable. It held his rolltop desk and slat-back chair, two small upholstered couches, a love seat, a large, square coffee table of distressed wood, and a couple of wing chairs. All of the furniture sat on a cream-colored Persian rug that had set him back twelve grand five years before.
"This is a great room," Dismas Hardy told him as he followed him in and stopped to admire it. "I could live in this room."
"It has a certain feng shui, I must admit. I do love the place. Have a seat, anywhere you'd like." Washburn plumped himself down in the middle of one of the couches, fixing Hardy with an appraising stare. "I've heard your name come up several times over the past few years, Mr. Hardy, but seeing you, I think we've met before, haven't we?"
Hardy took one of the wing chairs. "Yes, sir. And it's Diz, please. About five years ago in Redwood City. You put me in touch with an ex-client of yours and she wound up saving one of my associates' lives."
"Literally?"
"Well, the information she gave me. It solved a murder case about ten minutes before the guy could do it again."
Washburn pulled a look of pleased surprise. "I must say I don't hear that kind of story too often. An actual solved murder? My side of things, that never happens."
"Well, it did once. I probably should have gotten back to you, told you about it."
"You're telling me now. It's good to hear when a case turns out well. Did I charge you for the referral to my ex-client?"
"No."
Washburn clapped his hands together. "So much the better. Although as we all know, no good deed goes unpunished."
"I know," Hardy said. "I avoid them at every opportunity."
"And yet you've done me the courtesy to come down here to see me."
"That's not a good deed. I needed to talk to you and it was either my office or here. It gave me the chance to get out into the air in the middle of the day."
"Well, regardless, I appreciate your flexibility." And then, suddenly, as though he'd flicked a switch, Washburn shifted into business mode. He came forward to the very edge of the couch with his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely. "You said it was about Evan Scholler."
"It is. I'm doing the appeal."
"Ahh. So you're the guy who comes in after the battle to shoot the wounded."
"I hope not. I've reviewed the transcripts. So far, from what I see, I'm not inclined to go with incompetence of counsel."
"That's magnanimous of you. Though in all honesty that trial wasn't one of my finer moments, I'm afraid. But what are you going to do when your client won't plead? I know I could have gotten him a manslaughter, and he could be out by the time he's forty. Now…" He shook his head. "Anyway, when I heard it was about Scholler, I thought you were coming here as a courtesy to tell me in person that I'd fucked it up and that was the basis of your appeal."
"Nope."
"So what are you thinking? The PTSD?"
Hardy nodded. "The judge shouldn't have kept it out. My call is that Ninth Circuit judges are going to fall all over themselves spinning this thing when it gets in front of them. Scholler had a legitimate disability of some kind that the jury couldn't hear about? And he did, right?"
"Oh, yeah. We had the experts. The diagnosis was cold."
"Are you kidding me? And the judge didn't let it in? How could it not be relevant and admissible?"
"How indeed?"
They both, of course, were familiar with the notorious liberal slant of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had made countless rulings on the admissibility of extenuating circumstances in murder cases, such as childhood abuse, dysfunctional parenting, or exposure to violence on television. If PTSD being ruled inadmissible didn't get their attention, Hardy would eat his bar card.
"Well." Hardy held out his hands, palms up. "Need I go on?"
"Not to me," Washburn said. "I do think that PTSD's the best play, though that just might be my own self-interest talking. I've kicked myself a hundred times over some decisions I made in that case. If I were doing the appeal, I might go for incompetent counsel."
"What would you have done differently?"
"Well, fought harder with Evan to take a plea, is the main thing." Washburn focused on an empty space in the air between them. "Done more with the Khalil murders, maybe, although God knows what that would have been-I spent fifty grand on my private eye and he got nothing remotely usable. Then-this was my favorite-I got halfway through my own chief medical witness when I realized that his testimony, if anything, helped the prosecution. But the main thing, as I say, would have been a plea."
"But he wouldn't take one."
"Adamant. He didn't remember doing it and wasn't going to say he did. Period."
Hardy shook his head. "Dumb."
Washburn shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe he thinks he probably didn't do it."
"What do you think?"
The old man waved that off. "I never go there."
Going for levity, Hardy put on half a grin. "Even for fun?"
"Never, nohow, no way, ever."
"I can't stand a man who won't express his opinions."
"No. Me neither." Washburn sat all the way back on the couch. "But the poor fucking guy. You met him yet?"
Hardy nodded. "I went down there last week." A beat. "I bet he'd take that plea now."
"Yeah, I bet he would." Washburn had already given Hardy about twenty minutes of his time, call it two hundred dollars' worth, although he wasn't charging him for this visit. Still, time was money and if there was no business to be done between these two men, Washburn would not make any until Hardy left. "So. How else can I help you?"
"I was hoping to pick your brain a little."
"How little?"
"Six to eight hours over the next month or so."
Washburn came forward again. "My professional courtesy rate is two hundred."
"Sounds reasonable," Hardy said. "I don't know how much time you have right now, and I don't want to impose…"
Washburn held up a hand and looked over at the grandfather clock that stood sentinel where the windows met the bookshelves. It was quarter to four. "I'm comfortable going till five," he said. "Feel free. Pick away."
***
A MONTH into his new old job, his second hitch as head of San Francisco's homicide detail, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky walked alone down the fifth-floor hallway and turned into the small room-itself bisected by a counter-that served as the unit's reception area. It was five-twenty, and both of the clerks stationed here had left, probably gone home for the day. Glitsky, after his initial disapproval, was getting used to the idea of hourly employees putting in their time and going home. While he'd been deputy chief of inspectors over these past few years, he'd always felt it odd that even the clerical jobs were so personal-you got in early and you stayed until your boss went home because if you didn't, someone else might get close to him and then you might not rise in the bureaucracy when he did. Or she, of course.
In another few steps, he was in his office-a small room stuffed with file cabinets, crammed with a large flat working desk, windows high enough in the wall along the right to allow in a bit of natural light but that afforded no view of Bryant Street down below. Coming around the desk, Glitsky glanced up at his bulletin board of active homicides-nine of them today, about average, crimes committed in the past month or so on which his inspectors were still working. Settling into his chair, he sat back and wondered anew if his request for what amounted to a voluntary demotion had been a mistake.
He'd been on the job for more than a month now, and besides some of the personnel issues that had been and continued to be a bit troubling, he found that, much to his surprise, he somewhat missed his large official office with its bookshelves and plaques and wall decorations, its brace of leather chairs for important visitors, its reception area that discouraged passersby from stopping in to say hello. The deputy chief's office was that of an Important Man, and while he had occupied it, Glitsky often had not felt, at base, like he belonged there. Now, as head of homicide, he still had what he believed to be an important job, but it was mostly an invisible one. Could it be, he'd been wondering, that he'd grown accustomed to being in the public eye, to having his opinion matter to others, to being consulted by the chief and even the mayor about important civic issues?
He kept telling himself that he was in a period of adjustment to the new surroundings, that was all. Change itself was never easy. But two or three times already, he'd entertained the thought that maybe he'd made yet another mistake in a recent history of poor career choices.
And there was no getting around it. These new digs were different and they made the whole job, once so familiar, feel different. First, this office was physically separated from the inspectors' room. When the detail had been on the fourth floor, the internal windows in the lieutenant's office looked out over the crowded room that held the desks of the troops. Here, even if his new office had internal windows, which it didn't, he wouldn't have been able to see the inspectors, since the computer room was in the way. Inspectors could and did come and go, they never had to pass his door, and Glitsky might never know they'd been around.
The good news was that, barring emergencies, Glitsky's own hours had stabilized. As deputy chief, he'd considered it his duty to set an example of rigor, discipline, and enthusiasm, and he'd made it a point to be at work at seven-thirty. At the other end of the day, department meetings, press conferences, and public appearances often kept him out until nine, sometimes later. His weekends rarely were his own either. Deputy chief wasn't a job; it was a life.
And Glitsky was at a juncture-the crux of it, really-his desire in life was to be with his wife, Treya, and their two young children, Rachel and Zachary. The last couple of years, since Zack had been born, had been something of a strain. Treya worked as the secretary for San Francisco's district attorney, Clarence Jackman. She was at her desk at nine and left at five. There had been weeks while Glitsky had been deputy chief that they'd basically only gotten to speak to each other in this building, the Hall of Justice.
Now, having made sure that his desk was cleared, Glitsky was getting ready to check out for the day. He went out his door, closing it behind him. Passing through the empty computer room, he entered the inspectors' area and saw that fully eight of the fourteen homicide inspectors were in the room. This was unusual, since most of the time, these people were out interviewing witnesses, assessing crime scenes, building cases, and working out rebooking details and/or charges with assistant DAs.
Darrel Bracco looked over and raised a hand in greeting-at least one person in the unit apparently okay with the new status quo. As the vibe of Glitsky's presence passed through the room, other inspectors looked up. Glitsky caught a few nods from veterans who went back to their conversations and coffee, was ignored by a couple of others.
This was the way it had been since he'd come down here, his people misunderstanding his reappointment to homicide, wondering if in reality he was some kind of spy sent down by the brass to shake up the detail, screw up their jobs.
Glitsky hoped that this was simply the effect of change on his people, and that it, too, would shortly pass. But until it did, he wasn't having a good time. Getting up to Bracco's desk, he summoned a neutral tone. "I'm out the door, Darrel. Anything happening I might want to know about before I go?"
Bracco thought a minute, then shook his head. "Nothing new, Lieutenant," he said. "Slow day on the prairie, I guess."
"I guess so." Glitsky did a quick scan of the room. He didn't want to seem to be checking on anyone. In fact, he wasn't, but that didn't mean people might not think he was. "See you tomorrow, Darrel."
"Yes, sir," Bracco said. "Have a good one." Glitsky had turned and gone two steps when Bracco spoke again. "Wait a sec, Abe. I just remembered. There was something you might want to put back on your board." This was the active homicide board in Glitsky's office. Usually, once a name left that board, it stayed off forever, either because a suspect in the case had gotten arrested, or because the trail had gone too cold to waste the inspectors' time anymore, or if the only eyewitness fell terminally ill with lead poisoning, or if, for any of a zillion reasons, the case wasn't being actively worked anymore.
"Back on the board?"
"Yeah. One of my old ones. Bowen. But it's been closed since before your time. We can get to it in the morning. Here, I'm writing myself a note so I won't forget."
"How 'bout if I just walk back in there and write it back up?"
Sheepish, Bracco nodded, getting to his feet. "That would probably work too. I didn't want to keep you if you were leaving."
"How long can it take?" Glitsky asked. "B-O-W-E-N, is that right? Five letters. Shouldn't take me more than a few minutes." He was already back at his door, turning the key in it. "So what's the case?"
"Hanna Bowen. Finally ruled a suicide by hanging."
Glitsky turned and faced his inspector. "What? She unhang herself?"
"It's more like I promised the daughter that I'd take another look at it. She can't seem to get her arms around it. That her mom killed herself, I mean."
"Okay. But the coroner ruled suicide? And you're going to help this daughter how?"
"I know it's a long shot, Abe, but the girl's still torn up. You know all the classes we take that tell us to be sensitive to the victim's pain, and all that. I figure what can it hurt, and it might help her."
"What, though, exactly?"
"Well, evidently the mother kept a diary. Or the daughter-her name is Jenna-Jenna thinks her mom might have kept a diary and she asked me if I could try to find it."
"And do what with it?"
"See if it gave us any reason to think her mom's death might have been a homicide."
Glitsky boosted himself back onto his desk. "This was your case originally?"
"Yeah."
"Anything point to homicide back then? When was this?"
"Maybe early February, and not really, no. Except that Jenna had such a hard time with accepting that her mother would do that."
"Well, God knows we've seen that before, Darrel. Not that I blame her. Your mother goes that way, you don't want to believe it. Maybe you honestly can't believe it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen."
"I know. I told her I'd look, that's all. No promises."
"For this diary?"
"I don't know, Abe. That might not be all. I worked the case pretty hard when it was live. There were other elements at the time. Well, to be honest, mostly one other element, but it seemed worth checking out, although at the time I couldn't get anything on it."
"What was that?"
"The dad, Charlie. He disappeared last summer. That's supposedly why the wife killed herself."
"What do you mean, disappeared?"
"I mean poof, gone, vanished. No trace. Jenna thinks he wouldn't have just disappeared either. She thought he might have been killed."
"By who? Why?"
"No idea."
"Very strong, Darrel. So she thinks her father was killed, too, and that it's somehow connected to her mother's suicide?"
"Not suicide. She doesn't buy suicide. She thinks her mother was another homicide."
"Two homicides." Glitsky sat with it for another few seconds.
Bracco made a face. "The daughter lost both parents in the same year. If the diary turns up…" He shrugged. "Who knows. We might get something."
"So where are you gonna start?"
"I suppose I'll meet her and go through all the evidence again. Then maybe get to the father's files, which I never really looked into last time."
"What files?"
"His work files. He was a lawyer. Maybe it was something he was working on."
"What was?"
"The reason he was killed."
Glitsky scratched for a second at the corner of his mouth. Bracco had always been an enthusiastic cop, but he'd gotten promoted up to homicide originally because his father had been a driver to a former mayor, and sometimes his lack of experience showed. "You realize, I know, Darrel," Glitsky said, "that most middle-aged guys who disappear…I'm assuming this Charlie Bowen was middle-aged?"
"Fifty."
"There you go. Sometimes guys like him just walk away from it all on their own. They're not murdered."
"Right. I know that, Abe. Of course."
"And the wives of those men, who have been deserted by their husbands of, say, thirty years, might they find themselves depressed in the months following the desertion, even to the point of wanting to kill themselves?"
"Sure."
"Did we investigate Bowen as a homicide when he went missing?"
"No."
"And that was because…?"
"He was considered a missing person."
"Not a homicide?"
"Not a homicide. No, sir."
"Okay, then. Just to make the point."
"I hear you." Bracco shrugged away his misgivings. "Anyway, I'll be logging some time to the case and I thought you'd want to know."
"Okay." Glitsky pushed himself off his desk and wrote the word BOWEN onto the board, with the name BRACCO in the investigating inspector's column. "But, Darrel?"
"Yes, sir."
"Maybe not too much time, huh?"
***
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, Glitsky's grown boys-Isaac, Jacob, and Orel-and Treya's grown girl, Raney, had created a diaspora of their own to places as far-flung as Seattle, Milan, Washington, D.C., and-not so far-flung-Orel was living in San Jose. Now the new family unit with two toddlers ranged in the same old upper duplex on a cul-de-sac above Lake Street.
When Glitsky got home from work-driving his own car instead of being chauffeured by his driver in his city-issued vehicle-he and Treya and five-year-old Rachel had pushed Zack's baby carriage for a mile or so on the foot-and-bike path that ran behind their home at the edge of the Presidio's forest. In their backyard, in the still-warm evening, both kids swung on the new swingset Glitsky and Dismas Hardy and Hardy's son Vincent had built about three years before. Dinner was a store-bought roast chicken, the skin peeled off, with fresh steamed spinach and a side dish of noodles for the kids-since Glitsky's heart attack six years ago, Treya wouldn't let him eat anything with cholesterol in it.
By eight o'clock, both kids were asleep in their separate rooms down the hallway off the kitchen. Abe and Treya sipped tea sitting together in dim light on the leather love seat in the small living room. They had redecorated the room for the birth of Rachel, and now what had been a worn and dark interior sported blond hardwood floors accented with colorful throw rugs, yellow Tuscan walls, Mission-style furniture, plantation shutters.
Taciturn nearly to the point of muteness, Glitsky was happy to let Treya carry the conversational ball as she told him about her day, the machinations of the DA's office, Clarence Jackman's dealings with the board of supervisors, the mayor, the chief of police. It was endlessly entertaining because they both knew all the players and because the city was in many ways such a truly loony and fascinating place to live.
Today's drama featured Treya's boss on a tightrope walk between Mayor Kathy West's edict that declared San Francisco a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and the U.S. attorney's response that he was going to cut off every federal law enforcement grant to the city if she did anything to hamper the Justice Department's crackdown on arresting and deporting these people.
"That I'd like to see," Glitsky said. "What's he going to do, arrest Kathy?"
"If she actually does anything other than talk the talk."
"You think she will?"
"I don't know. She's talking about it." Treya's laugh was a low contralto. "Talking about not just talking about it."
"Very bold."
"Très. But you never know. She might really do something."
"So what's Clarence going to do?"
Treya laughed again. Sometimes Glitsky thought that her talent for laughter was what had attracted him the most about her. After his first wife, Flo, had died, he had thought for a long while that he would never laugh again. "Clarence," Treya said, "has got eight lawyer positions funded by federal money, but the rest of his budget comes from the city. He is going to wait."
"He's a good waiter," Glitsky said.
"One of the best." She put a hand on his leg. "But here I've been, me, me, me. You seem-I don't mean to spook you-but slightly more upbeat than you've been."
Glitsky shrugged. "Just getting used to the new world order. I actually had a possibly productive talk with Darrel Bracco today."
"I like Darrel. And possibly productive? Wow. The man gushes."
Sipping his tea, Glitsky gave her a sideways look. "Maybe saved him some hours of slog, that's all."
"Okay, retract the gush." She squeezed his leg. "And next you were probably going to tell me what Darrel talked to you about. If you were going to keep on talking, I mean. Not that you have to. No pressure."
This time his smile broke clear. "He was going to be spending half of forever looking into the case files of this lawyer who disappeared last summer because some poor heartbroken girl thinks maybe he didn't run away and desert her and her mother after all. Maybe he was killed instead."
"Is there any reason she thinks that?"
"Not that Darrel knows. But the thing that makes it so sad is that her mother killed herself over it a couple of months ago, and the girl just can't accept it."
Treya took a beat and sipped her tea. "And people say you're not really all that fun. How can that be?" She turned to him. "That heartening, upbeat story was what's made you feel better about the job?"
"Talking to Darrel," Glitsky said.
"Ah. The silver lining."
"I mean, first, you've got to believe Charlie Bowen was a homicide, which there's no sign of, so why are you even looking?"
"Charlie Bowen," Treya said. "Where do I know that name?"
"He's the father. The missing person."
"The lawyer? I knew him, Abe. He's the guy, Diz got all his files."
"Our own Diz?"
"Our own Diz." Treya gave his leg another squeeze. "Maybe Darrel ought to talk to him."