Ten o'clock, a Wednesday morning in the beginning of July.
John Holiday extended one arm over the back of the couch at his lawyer's Sutter Street office. Today he was comfortably dressed in stonewashed blue jeans, hiking boots, and a white, high-collared shirt so heavily starched that it had creaked when he lowered himself into his slouch. His other hand had come to rest on an oversize silver-and-turquoise belt buckle. His long legs stretched out all the way to the floor, his ankles crossed. Nothing about his posture much suggested his possession of a backbone.
Women had liked him since he'd outgrown his acne. His deep-set eyes seemed the window to a poet's soul, with the stained glass of that window the odd whitish blue of glacier water. Now, close up, those eyes revealed subtle traces of dissolution and loss. There was complexity here, even mystery. With an easy style and pale features-his jaw had the clean definition of a blade-he'd been making female hearts go pitter-patter for so long now that he took it for granted. He didn't much understand it. To him, the prettiness of his face had finally put him off enough that he'd grown a mustache. Full, drooping, and yellow as corn silk, it was two or three shades lighter than the hair on his head and had only made him more handsome. When his face was at rest, Holiday still didn't look thirty, but when he laughed, the lines added a decade, got him up to where he belonged. He still enjoyed a good laugh, though he smiled less than he used to.
He was smiling now, though, at his lawyer, Dismas Hardy, over by the sink throwing water on his face for the third time in ten minutes.
"As though that's gonna help." Holiday's voice carried traces of his father's Tennessee accent and the edges of it caressed like a soft Southern breeze.
"It would help if I could dry off."
"Didn't the first two times."
Hardy had used up the last of the paper towels and now stood facing his cupboards in his business suit, his face dripping over the sink. Holiday shrugged himself up from the couch, dug in the wastebasket by the desk, and came up with a handful of used paper, which he handed over. "Never let it be said I can't be helpful."
"It would never cross my mind." Hardy dried his face. "So where were we?"
"You're due in court in forty-five minutes and you're so hung over you don't remember where we were? If you'd behaved this way when you were my lawyer, I'd have fired you."
Hardy fell into one of his chairs. "I couldn't have behaved this way when I was your lawyer because I didn't know you well enough yet to go out drinking with you. Thank God."
"You're just out of practice. It's like riding a horse. You've got to get right back on when it tosses you."
"I did that last night. Twice."
"Don't look at me. If memory serves, nobody held a gun to your head. Why don't you call and tell them you're sick? Get a what-do-you-call-it…"
"Continuance." Hardy shook his head. "Can't. This is a big case."
"All the more reason if you can't think. But you said it was just dope and some hooker."
"But with elements," Hardy said.
In fact, he hadn't done a hooker case for nearly a decade. In his days as an assistant DA, the occasional prostitution case would cross his desk. Hardy mostly found these morally questionable, politically suspect, and in any case a waste of taxpayer money. Prostitutes, he thought, while rarely saintlike, were mostly victims themselves, so as a prosecutor, he would often try to use the girls' arrests as some kind of leverage to go after their dope connections or pimps, the true predators. Occasionally, it worked. Since he'd been in private practice, because there was little money in defending working girls, he never saw these cases anymore. As a matter of course, the court appointed the public defender's office or private counsel if that office had a conflict.
In this way, Aretha LaBonte's case had been assigned to Gina Roake, a mid-forties career defense attorney. But Gina's caseload had suddenly grown so large it was compromising her ability to handle it effectively. If she wanted to do well by the rest, she had to dump some clients, including Aretha. By chance she mentioned the case to her boyfriend, Hardy's landlord, David Freeman, who'd had a good listen and smelled money. With his ear always to the ground, Freeman had run across some similar cases.
Aretha's arrest had been months ago now. Her case was interesting and from Freeman's perspective potentially lucrative because her arresting officer wasn't a regular San Francisco policeman. Instead, he had been working for a company called WGP, Inc., which provided security services to businesses under a jurisdictional anomaly in San Francisco. In its vigilante heyday a century ago, the city found that its police department couldn't adequately protect the people who did business within its limits. Those folks asked the PD for more patrols, but there was neither budget nor personnel to accommodate them. So the city came up with a unique solution-it created and sold patrol "beats" to individuals who became private security guards for those beats. These beat holders, or Patrol Specials, then and now, were appointed by the police commissioner, trained and licensed by the city. The beat holders could, and did, hire assistants to help them patrol, and in time most Patrol Specials came to control their own autonomous armed force in the middle of the city. On his beat, a Patrol Special tended to be a law unto himself, subject only to the haphazard and indifferent supervision of the San Francisco Police Department. They and their assistants wore uniforms and badges almost exactly like those of the city police; they carried weapons and, like any other citizen, could make arrests.
Aretha LaBonte's arrest had occurred within the twelve-square-block area just south of Union Square known as Beat Thirty-two, or simply Thirty-two. It was one of six beats in the city owned by WGP, the corporate identity of a philanthropic businessman named Wade Panos. He had a total of perhaps ninety assistants on his payroll, and this, along with the amount of physical territory he patrolled, made him a powerful presence in the city.
Aretha's case was not the first misconduct that Freeman had run across in Panos's beats. In fact, Freeman's preliminary and cursory legwork, his "sniff test," revealed widespread allegations of assistant patrol specials' use of excessive force, planting of incriminating evidence, general bullying. If Hardy could get Aretha off on this one assistant patrol special's misconduct, and several of the other "sniff test" cases could be developed and drafted into legal causes of action, he and Freeman could put together a zillion dollar lawsuit against Panos. They could also include the regular police department as a named defendant for allowing these abuses to continue.
But at the moment, Hardy didn't exactly feel primed for the good fight. He brought his hand up and squeezed his temples, then exhaled slowly and completely. "It's not just a hooker case. It's going to get bigger, and delay doesn't help us. There's potentially huge money down the line, but first I've got to rip this witness a new one. If he goes down, we move forward. That's the plan."
"Which gang aft agley, especially if your brain's mush."
"It'll firm up. Pain concentrates the mind wonderfully. And I really want this guy."
"What guy?"
"The prosecution's chief witness. The arresting cop. Nick Sephia."
Suddenly Holiday sat upright. "Nick the Prick?"
"Sounds right."
"What'd he do wrong this time?"
"Planted dope on my girl."
"Let me guess. She wasn't putting out for him or paying for protection, so he set her up."
"You've heard the song before?"
"It's an oldie but goodie, Diz. Everybody knows it."
"Who's everybody?"
A shrug. "The neighborhood. Everybody."
Suddenly Hardy was all business. He knew that Holiday owned a bar, the Ark, smack in the middle of Thirty-two. Knew it, hell, he'd closed the place the night before. But somehow he'd never considered Holiday as any kind of real source for potential complainants in the Panos matter. Now, suddenly, he did. "You got names, John? People who might talk to me? I've talked to a lot of folks in the neighborhood in the last couple of months. People might be unhappy, but nobody's saying anything too specific."
A little snort. "Pussies. They're scared."
"Scared of Wade Panos?"
Holiday pulled at the side of his mustache, and nodded slowly. "Yeah, sure, who else?"
"That's what I'm asking you." Hardy hesitated. "Look, John, this is what Freeman and I have been looking for. We need witnesses who'll say that things like this Sephia bust I'm doing today are part of a pattern that the city's known about and been tolerating for years. If you know some names, I'd love to hear them."
Holiday nodded thoughtfully. "I could get some, maybe a lot," he said. "They're out there, I'll tell you that." His eyes narrowed. "You know Nick's his nephew, don't you? Wade's."
"Panos's? So his own uncle fired him?"
"Moved him out of harm's way is more like it. Now he's working for the Diamond Center."
"And you're keeping tabs on him?"
"We've been known to sit at a table together. Poker."
"Which as your lawyer I must remind you is illegal. You beat him?"
A shrug. "I don't play to lose."
The Wednesday night game had been going on for years now in the back room of Sam Silverman's pawnshop on O'Farrell, a block from Union Square. There were maybe twenty regulars. You reserved your chair by noon Tuesday and Silverman held it to six players on any one night. Nobody pretended that it was casual entertainment among friends. Table stakes makes easy enemies, especially when the buy-in is a thousand dollars. Twenty white chips at ten bucks each, fifteen reds at twenty, and ten blues at fifty made four or five small piles that could go away in a hurry. Sometimes in one hand.
With his neat bourbon in a heavy bar glass, John Holiday sat in the first chair, to Silverman's left, and two chairs beyond him Nick Sephia now smoldered. He'd come in late an hour ago and had taken a seat between his regular companions, Wade's little brother, Roy Panos, and another Diamond Center employee named Julio Rez. The other two players at the table tonight were Fred Waring, a mid-forties black stockbroker, and Mel Fischer, who used to own four Nosh Shop locations around downtown, but was now retired.
At thirty or so, Sephia was the youngest player there. He was also, by far, the biggest-six-three, maybe 220, all of it muscle. While Silverman took the young Greek's money and counted out his chips, Sephia carefully hung the coat of his exquisitely tailored light green suit over the back of his chair. The blood was up in his face, the color in his cheeks raw beef, the scowl a fixture. He'd shaved that morning but his jawline was already blue with shadow. After he sat, he snugged his gold silk tie up under his Adam's apple, rage flowing off him in an aura.
The usual banter dried up. After a few hands during which no one said a word, Roy Panos pushed a cigar over in front of the late arrival. Holiday sipped his bourbon. Eventually Silverman, maybe hoping to ease the tension, called a bathroom break for himself, and Sephia lit up, blowing the smoke out through his nose. Waring and Fischer stood to stretch and pour themselves drinks. Holiday, quietly enjoying Sephia's pain, had a good idea of what was bothering him. Maybe the whiskey was affecting his judgment-it often did-but he couldn't resist. "Bad day, Nick?"
Sephia took a minute deciding whether he was going to talk about it. Finally, he shook his head in disgust. "Fucking lawyers. I spent half the day in court."
"Why? What'd you do?"
"What'd / do?" He blew smoke angrily. "I didn't do dick."
Roy Panos helped him with the explanation. "They suppressed his evidence on some hooker he brought in for dope a couple of months ago. Said he planted it on her."
"So?" Holiday was all sweet reason. "If you didn't, what's the problem?"
Sephia's dark eyes went to slits, his temper ready to flare at any indication that Holiday was having fun at his expense, but he saw no sign of it. "Guy made me look like a fucking liar, is the problem. Like I'm supposed to remember exactly what I did with this one whore? She's got junk in her purse; another one's got it in her handbag. Who gives a shit where it was? Or how it got there? It's there, she's guilty, end of story. Am I right?"
"Fuckin' A." Julio Rez, a medium-built Latino, spoke without any accent. All wires and nerves, he'd probably been a good base stealer in his youth. He'd lost the lower half of his left ear somewhere, but it didn't bother him enough to try to cover it with his hair, which was cropped short. "She goes down."
"But not today. Today they let her go." Panos spoke to Holiday. "They suppress the dope, there's no case."
"Were you down at court, too?"
Panos shook his head. "No, but Wade was. My brother? He is pissed off."
"Not at me, I hope," Sephia said.
Panos patted him on the arm. "No, no. The lawyers. Bastards."
"Why would your brother be mad at Nick?" Holiday sipped again at his tumbler of bourbon.
"He was working for him at the time, that's why. It makes Wade look bad. I mean, Nick's doing patrol for Christ sake. He busts a hooker, she ought to stay busted at least. Now maybe they start looking at the rest of the shop."
"Judge reamed my ass," Sephia said. "This prick lawyer-he had the judge talking perjury, being snotty on the record. 'I find the arresting officer's testimony not credible as to the circumstances surrounding the arrest.' Yeah, well, Mr. Hardy, you can bite me."
Holiday feigned surprise. "Hardy's my lawyer's name. Dismas Hardy?"
Now Sephia's glare was full on. "The fuck I know? But whatever it is, I see him again, he's going to wish I didn't."
"So he must have convinced them you did plant her?"
Rez shot a quick glance at Sephia. But Sephia held Holiday's eyes for a long beat, as though he was figuring something out. "She wasn't paying," he finally said, his voice filled with a calm menace. "Wade wanted her out of the beat. Most of the time that's intensive care. I figured I was doing the bitch a favor."
Dismas Hardy's wife, Frannie, cocked her head in surprise. They'd just sat down at a small Spanish place on Clement, not far from their house on Thirty-fourth Avenue. "You're not having wine?" she asked.
"Not tonight."
"Nothing to drink at all?"
"Just water. Water's good."
"You feel all right?"
"Fine. Sometimes I don't feel like drinking, that's all."
"Oh, that's right. I remember there was that time right after Vincent was born." Their son, Vincent, was now thirteen. She reached her hand across the table and put it over one of his. "Did you hurt yourself last night?"
Half a grin flickered then died out. "I didn't think so at the time. I'm out of shape pounding myself with alcohol."
Frannie squeezed his hand. "Out of shape could be a good thing, you know." But she softened her tone. "How was John?"
"Entertaining, charming, drunk. The usual. Though he came by the office this morning fresh as a daisy. He must have been pouring his drinks in the flowerpots."
"So what time did you finally get in?"
"One-ish? That's a guess. You were asleep, though. I think."
"Aren't you glad you decided to take a cab when you went out?"
"Thrilled. I guess I must have taken a cab back home then, huh?"
"If John didn't drive you."
Hardy pressed two fingers into his temple. "No. I think we can rule that out."
A look of concern. "You really don't remember?"
"No. I remember. I didn't even think I'd hurt myself until this morning when that moose in my mouth wouldn't stop kicking at my brains." He shrugged. "But you know, with John…"
"Maybe you don't have to keep up with him."
"That's what they all say. But then you do."
The waiter came by with a basket of freshly baked bread, some olives, a hard pungent cheese. Frannie ordered her usual Chardonnay. As advertised, Hardy stayed with water. They kept holding hands over the table. The waiter vanished and Hardy picked up where they'd been. "He's more fun than a lot of people," he said, "and more interesting than almost everybody except you."
"What a sweet thing to say. And so sincere." She squeezed his hand. "I don't have a problem with him. Really. Or with you. I don't know if I understand the attraction-if you were a woman, okay-but I don't like to see you hurting."
"I'm not so wild about it either. But you hang out with John Holiday, there's a chance you'll drink too much sometimes. And in spite of all this, by the way, today wasn't a total loss. Maybe I should have a drink, after all. Celebrate."
"What?"
"You know that motion to suppress…"
He told her about his afternoon in the courtroom, getting Nick Sephia's evidence kicked out, which led to Aretha LaBonte's case being dismissed. "Not that it's going to change her life in any meaningful way. She's probably back on the street even as we speak, although if she's smart she's not working one of Wade Panos's beats. But it was nice to serve notice that this stuff isn't flying anymore. When it was over, David even had a little moment of actual drama right there in the Hall of Justice."
The curmudgeonly and unkempt seventy-seven-year-old legal powerhouse that was David Freeman wouldn't give Wade Panos or his hired thug Nick Sephia the satisfaction. Further, he did not believe in revealing pain or weakness under any conditions, but most especially in a professional settling. So even Dismas Hardy, who'd been there, wasn't aware of how badly he'd been hurt. How badly he still hurt. At first, he even tried to fake it with Roake. On her sixth full day of automatic redial, she had finally succeeded in getting dinner reservations for them both at the legendarily swank restaurant, Gary Danko. Freeman wasn't going to whine and ruin the special night she'd so painstakingly orchestrated. So after the successful hearing and the little problem he'd had with Sephia and Panos, he'd forgone any celebration with Hardy and instead had beelined home from the Hall of Justice, hailing a cab as soon as he was out of sight around the corner. In his apartment, he popped a handful of aspirin with a hefty shot of Calvados. Then he ran a hot bath and soaked in it before dragging himself into bed, where he slept for three and a half hours until his alarm jarred his aching body into a disoriented awareness.
It cost him a half hour, laboring mightily through the pain, to get himself dressed. Freeman held fast to a lifelong core belief that juries didn't trust nice clothes, and so of the seven business suits he owned, six were brown and straight off the rack. But the last one was a khaki Canali that Roake had bought him last Christmas. He was wearing that one tonight, with a red silk tie over a rich, ivory, custom-made shirt. His scuffed cordovan wingtips were the only sign of the usual Freeman.
By the time Roake had come by to pick him up at seven o'clock, he had steeled himself and thought he was ready. But then she surprised him, or perhaps his flashy clothes surprised her. In any event, she hung back in the doorway and whistled appreciatively, frankly admiring him for a moment, then took a little skip forward and threw her arms around him, squeezing hard.
A cry escaped before he could stop it.
"What is it? David? Are you all right? What's the matter?"
He was righting for control, his jaw set, brow contracted, blowing quick, short little breaths from his mouth.
Now, two hours later, he awoke again from his third brief doze. He was back in bed, in his pajamas, and Roake was sitting at his side, holding his hand. "You really ought to see a doctor," she said.
But he shook his head. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And nothing's broke."
"But you're hurt."
He started to shrug, then grimaced. "Tomorrow I'll be dancing. You wait." He put a hand to his neck and turned his head slowly from side to side a couple of times, then stopped and fixed her with a sheepish gaze. "I feel like such a fool."
"What for? You didn't ask for this."
"No. But I knew who I was dealing with. I should have been prepared. In the old days, I would have been."
"Prepared for Nick Sephia to knock you over?"
The old man, looking every year of his age, nodded wearily. "They set me up."
"How did they do that?"
"Child's play with a trusting soul like myself." He sighed in disgust. "I'd already had a few words with the elder Mr. Panos after Dismas beat the hell out of Sephia on the stand."
"What in the world prompted you to do that?"
"Hubris, plain and simple." Another sigh. "I couldn't resist the opportunity to crow a little, though I thought I'd done it subtly enough in the guise of giving him a friendly warning of what was coming."
Roake allowed a small smile. "Hence your nickname, Mr. Subtle."
"In any event, it didn't fool him much. So afterwards a bunch of their guys-Dick Kroll's there, too. You know Dick? Sephia's lawyer? And Panos and one of Nick's pals I'd seen in court with him before, some greaser. Anyway, all these guys are having some kind of powwow out in the hall. So Wade sees me come out with Hardy and motions to me over Nick's shoulder. Come on over."
"And you went?"
"What was I gonna do? I tell Diz to wait and give me a minute. I'm thinking no doubt I put the fear of God in Wade and he's talked to Kroll and decided to cave and try to cut some kind of deal right there."
"That hubris thing again."
Freeman raised his shoulders an inch, acknowledging the truth. "Occupational hazard if you happen to be cursed with genius. Anyway, it's here to stay." Another shrug. "So I'm like two steps away when Nick the Prick suddenly whirls around-whoops, late for a bus-and next thing I know I'm flat on my keister, stretched out on the goddamn floor, and there's Nick leaning over me, all 'Sorry, old man, didn't see you.' " Finally, his eyes got some real fire back into them. "Sorry my ass. Wade gave him some kind of sign and he turned on cue. That was his warning back at me-fuck with me and you'll get hurt." He went to straighten up in the bed, but his bones fought him and won. He gave it up, falling back into his pillow.
Roake put her hand on his chest, brought it up to stroke his cheek. "You guys," she said gently. Then, in a minute, "It could have been an accident, after all, couldn't it?"
"No. No chance."
"So now you need to get back at them, is that it?"
He nodded. "In the words of Ol' Blue Eyes, I'll do it my way, but bet your ass I will." Reading her reaction, he added, "That's the only message they hear."
"And how about you? Which one do you hear?"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I mean, you warn them, they attack you, now it's your turn again, and it all escalates, until somebody really gets hurt. Maybe it doesn't always have to be that way."
"With some people, maybe it does. What else do you do when they're pulling shit like today? You fight back, is what."
Roake had her hands back in her lap. "Then you're both still fighting. And what's that prove?"
"When somebody wins, it ends. And I intend to win."
"And that's what it's all about, is it? Who wins?"
"Yep." Defiantly. "What else?" he asked. "What else is there?"
Roake sat with it for a beat. She blew out in frustration. Finally, she looked down at him and stood up. "How very male of you."
"There's worse ways to be, Gina. What else do you want?"
She looked down at him. "I want you to be smart. Don't get drawn into playing their games. This doesn't have to continue being personal, especially if they believe in doing things like today, in actually hurting people. That's all I'm saying. File your papers, keep out of it, and let the law do its work."
"That's exactly my intention. What else would I do?" Freeman patted the bed. "Come, sit back down. I'm not self-destructive, you know. I'm not going to fight anybody physically."
Roake lowered herself down next to him again. "That's what I thought you were saying." She took his gnarled hand in both of hers.
"No, no, no. I'm talking what I do. The law. That'll beat up on 'em good enough. But I will tell you one other thing."
"What's that?"
"Whatever else it might look like, it's going to be personal."
Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, once the powerful head of San Francisco's homicide detail, was half-black and half-Jewish, and in his job he'd groomed himself to exude a threatening mixture of efficient competence and quiet menace. His infrequent smiles would even more rarely get all the way to his piercing blue eyes. A Semitic hatchet of a nose protruded over a generous mouth, rendered unforgettable by the thick scar that bisected both lips.
Now this fearsome figure stood framed in the doorway to his duplex. He wore neither shoes nor socks and his bare legs showed at the bottom of a dirty kitchen apron. He'd draped a diaper over his right shoulder. It was streaked- recently-with the oranges and greens and off-browns of strained baby food. He held his ten-month-old daughter Rachel in the crook of his left arm. She had somehow wriggled out of one of her pink baby booties, and just as Glitsky opened the door, she'd hooked it over his ear.
"Where's a camera when you really need one?" Hardy asked.
Frannie stepped forward. "Here, Abe. Let me hold her."
In what had become a largely unacknowledged weekly ritual, the Hardys' Wednesday Date Night was ending here again. Since Rachel's birth, Frannie couldn't seem to get enough of holding her. She was turning forty soon and their children were both teenagers. Maybe she and Dismas should have another baby. There was still time. Just. If Dismas wanted one, too. Which he did like he wanted cancer.
He couldn't decide if the visits to hold Rachel were a good thing because it satisfied Frannie's need to hold a baby, or a bad thing because it made her want one of her own even more, but either way, they'd been coming by now regularly enough that there was usually some kind of dessert waiting for them when they got there.
Glitsky shrugged the baby over to Frannie, immediately grabbed at the bootie.
"You ought to leave it," Hardy begged. "It's so you. And that pink goes just perfect with the puke on the diaper."
Glitsky glanced down at his shoulder. "That's not puke. Puke is eaten, regurgitated, expelled matter. This"-he touched the diaper-"is simply food that didn't quite get to the mouth."
"Guys! Guys!" Frannie whisked the diaper over to her own shoulder. She slipped the booty over Rachel's foot, then fixed each of the guys with a look. "Fascinating though these distinctions are, maybe we could leave them just for a minute."
She turned into the living room. Hardy, behind her, didn't want to let the topic go. He could score some valuable points here. "You know, Fran, if you really want another baby, you've got to be ready to deal with puke."
"I can deal with it fine," she said over her shoulder. "I just don't want to talk about it, much less conjugate it."
Hardy took the cue. "I puke, you puke, he she or it pukes…"
Suddenly Treya came around the comer from the kitchen. "Who wants another baby?"
Ten minutes later, they were arranged-coffee for the Hardys, tea for the Glitskys-around the large square table that took up nearly all the space in the tiny kitchen. Rachel was dozing, ready to be laid down in her crib, although neither Frannie nor Treya seemed inclined to move in that direction. The treat tonight was a plate of homemade macaroon cookies, still hot from the oven, all coconut and stick-to-the-teeth sweetness. "These," Hardy said to Treya after his first bite, "are incredible. I didn't know normal people could make macaroons."
"Abe can. Not that he's a normal person exactly."
"Or even approximately," Hardy said. "But if he can make these things, maybe there's still some use for him."
"You're both too kind." Glitsky turned to Hardy. "So where did you think they came from? Macaroons."
"I thought they dropped straight out of heaven, like manna in the desert. In fact, I always imagined that manna had kind of a macaroon flavor. Didn't any of you guys? I'm serious." His face lit up with an idea. "Hey, Manna Macaroons. That wouldn't be a bad brand name. We could market them like Mrs. Fields. Abe's Manna Macaroons. We could all get rich…"
Frannie spoke. "Somebody please stop him."
Glitsky jumped in. "It's a good idea, Diz, but I couldn't do it anyway. I'm going back to work next week. Monday."
Treya gave him a wary look. "You hope."
"All right," he conceded, "I hope."
"Why wouldn't you be?" Hardy asked. "How long's it been, anyway?"
"On Monday, it'll have been thirteen months, two weeks and three days."
"Roughly," Treya added pointedly. "Not that he's been counting."
Glitsky was coming off a bad year, one that had begun with a point-blank gunshot wound to his abdomen. For the first month or so after the initial cleanup, he'd been recovering according to schedule-getting around in a wheelchair, taking things easy-when the first of several medical complications had developed. A secondary infection that finally got diagnosed as peritonitis put him back in the hospital, where he then developed pneumonia. The double whammy had nearly killed him for a second time, and left him weakened and depleted through Rachel's birth last August until late in the fall. Then, suddenly the initial wound itself wouldn't completely heal. It wasn't until February of this year that he'd even been walking regularly at all, and a couple of months after that before he began trying to get back into shape. At the end of May, his doctors finally declared him fit to return to work, but Glitsky's bosses had told him that homicide's interim head-the lieutenant who'd taken Glitsky's place-would need to be reassigned and there wasn't an immediately suitable job befitting his rank and experience.
So Glitsky had waited some more.
Now they were in July and evidently something had finally materialized, but obviously with a wrinkle. "So what's to hope about getting back on Monday?" Hardy asked. "How could it not happen? You walk in, say hi to your troops, go back to your desk and break out the peanuts."
The lieutenant's desk in homicide was famous for its unending stash of goobers in the shell.
Glitsky made a face.
"Apparently," Treya said, "it's not that simple."
Hardy finished a macaroon, sipped some coffee. "What?" he asked. "Somebody from the office saw you in the apron? I bet that's it. We can sue them for discrimination. You should be allowed to wear an apron if you want."
"Dismas, shut up," Frannie said. "What, Abe?"
"Well, the PD will of course welcome me back, but maybe at a different job."
"What job?" Hardy asked. "Maybe they're promoting you."
"I didn't get that impression. They're talking payroll."
"Head of payroll's a sergeant," Hardy said. "Isn't he?"
"Used to be anyway." Glitsky hesitated. "Seems there's been some concern that I was excessively close to my work in homicide."
"Evidently this is a bad thing," Treya added.
"As opposed to what?" Frannie asked. "Bored with it?"
"You haven't even gone to work for a year," Hardy said. "How does that put you excessively close to it?"
Glitsky nodded. "I raised some of the same points myself."
"And?" Hardy asked.
"And in the past few years, as we all know, my daughter was killed, I had a heart attack, and I got shot in the line of duty."
"One of which actually happened because of the job." Treya was frowning deeply. "He also got married and had a baby, as if there's some connection there, too."
Glitsky shrugged. "It's just an excuse. It's really because my extended disability made them put a new guy in homicide for the duration…"
"Gerson, right?" Hardy said.
"That's him. They probably told him it was his permanent gig when they moved him up. And now that I've had the bad grace to get better, they're embarrassed."
"So transfer him," Hardy said. "What does the union say?"
"They say Gerson's been doing okay so far, and it wouldn't be fair to transfer him before he's even really gotten his feet wet. It might look bad for him later. Whereas I've already proved myself."
"And so as a reward, they're moving you out?" Frannie asked. "And down?"
"Not down," Treya said. "He's going to be lieutenant of payroll."
"I don't even know where payroll is," Glitsky said, "much less what they do."
"That's perfect," Hardy said. "You wouldn't want too many people working at jobs they know about."
"God forbid," Glitsky said. "And the great thing, as they so graciously explained to me, is that this is not a punishment. It's an opportunity to improve my resume. I spend maybe a year in payroll; then they promote me to captain at one of the stations. Couple of years there, next thing you know I'm a deputy chief."
"His lifelong dream," Treya added with heavy sarcasm.
Hardy knew what Treya meant. Glitsky had worked fourteen years in the department before he got to inspector sergeant at homicide, and then another eight before they promoted him to lieutenant of the detail. Abe didn't crave varied administrative experience. He wanted to catch murderers.
"Have you talked to Batiste?" Hardy asked. This was Frank Batiste, recently promoted to deputy chief. For many years, as Captain of Inspectors, he had been Glitsky's mentor within the department. "Maybe he could throw some juice."
But Glitsky shook his head. "Who do you think I talked to?"
Hardy frowned. "I thought he was your guy."
"Well…" Glitsky made a face.
Treya knew that her husband wasn't comfortable complaining about a colleague, so she helped him with it. "It seems like Frank's going through some changes himself."
"Like what?" Frannie asked.
"It's not Frank," Glitsky said. He wasn't going to let people bad-mouth another cop, even if there might be something behind it. "He's stuck, too. His wife hasn't sold a house in a year. They got kids in college. Times are not sweet."
"So he makes them bad for you, too? What's that about?"
Again, Glitsky wouldn't rise. "I can't really blame him, Diz. He can't afford to lose his own job to make me happy."
"That wouldn't happen," Treya argued. "He's too connected."
"People might have said the same thing about me last year," Glitsky said. "It's a different world down there lately." He shrugged. "Frank got the word from above; then he got to be the messenger. If he didn't want to deliver it, they'd find somebody else, and then he's not a team player anymore. He had no choice."
But Treya shook her head. "He didn't have to tell you good cops don't go where they choose, they go where they're ordered. That doesn't sound like a friend."
"I could hear me telling one of my troops the same thing." Clearly uncomfortable with the discussion, Glitsky looked around the table. "As for being friends, Frank's my superior officer. He's doing his job."
"So you're really going to payroll?" Frannie asked. "I can't really see you crunching numbers all day long."
The edge of Glitsky's mouth turned up. "I'm sure there'll be lots of hidden satisfactions. In any event, I'll find out on Monday."
"You got a backup plan?" Hardy asked.
Glitsky looked at Treya, tried a smile that didn't quite work. "We've got a new baby," he said. "What else am I going to do?"