‘If that was it, it’s not first-degree murder. It’s definitely not capital murder.’
Frannie hugged herself closer to Hardy. ‘I feel sorry for the woman. I’d hate to have you going after me.’
‘I did go after you.’
‘See?’ She beamed at him. That’s what I mean.‘
25
There were things about the job Glitsky would never love. One of them was the reality of subpoenas and arrests.
The way you got people where you wanted them was to go out to their houses early in the A.M. and knock on their doors. Astoundingly, nobody expected to get arrested in the morning. So it was the best time to make an arrest.
But he’d been out last night on this drive-by again. They had received a tip – probably from a rival gang, but you took your leads where you could – that the shooter’s car, with a cache of weapons in the trunk, was in a warehouse out in the Fillmore.
So Glitsky and a couple of stake-out officers had gone down there, letting the warm evening dissipate into a bitter, foggy cold as they sat drinking tea and eating pretzels in his unmarked car, and waited for someone to come and open the warehouse. Which had happened.
And they found the guns. Tonight’s suspect, coked out of his mind and scared to death, had admitted that he’d driven the car, but they’d forced him, man, and he hadn’t done any shooting. That was Tremaine Wilson. He was the shooter. Wilson. This witness, unlike Devon Latrice Wortherington, could actually put Wilson in the car with a gun in his hand, and if he didn’t go sideways, which he probably would when he straightened out, Glitsky might be able to make a case against Wilson.
So now, four hours of sleep later, the dark not yet completely gone and the fog just as cold as when he’d left it, Glitsky found himself once again in the projects. The path to the door was a cracked cement strip that bisected a littered and well-packed rectangle of earth that might as well have been concrete except for the stalk of a tree that had made it to about one foot before someone whacked it off. Now the bare twig struggling out of the ground, maybe an inch thick, struck Glitsky as an example of what happened to anything that dared to try to grow up here.
As always, they were going to try to do it neat and quick. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Just in case, though, three uniformed officers had gone to cover the back door of the duplex. Glitsky had two other guys, guns out, behind him on the walkway and another team in the street, out of their car and using it for cover on the not impossible chance that the frameless picture window would suddenly explode in gunfire.
It seemed a miracle that one of the streetlights still worked. The half-life of a streetlight in any of the projects could be measured in minutes after nightfall before some sharpshooter put it out. In the light from this one it was easy to make out the closed drapes in the front window. The screen door hung open, framed by a riot of graffiti.
Glitsky looked at his watch. The back entrance should be covered by now. He turned around and gestured at the guys huddled behind the car out in the street. They gave him the thumbs up – the place was, in theory, secured.
Now there was no fog and no cold and no darkness. There was only his pounding heart and dry mouth – it happened every time – and the door to be knocked on. Three light taps. He had his gun out and heard shuffling inside. The rattle of chains and he was looking at a four-year-old boy, shirt off, feet in his pyjama bottoms, rubbing his eyes with sleep.
‘Who’s ’at?‘
A woman’s voice behind him, and the boy backed away, leaving the door open. Glitsky didn’t like the boy between him and his perp. He’d seen guys – strung out on drugs or not – take their own children hostage, their wives, mothers, anybody who happened to be around.
Glitsky didn’t wait. He had a warrant and Tremaine Wilson was wanted for special-circumstances murder. Tremaine wasn’t going to be getting himself any slick lawyer to bust him out on the technicality of illegal entry. The boy had opened the door – that was going to have to do.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped between the boy and his mother. ‘Police,’ he said so she’d be clear it wasn’t just another gang hit. ‘Where’s Tremaine?’
One of the guys behind him hit the lights and a bare overhead came on. The woman was probably twenty. She had a swollen lower lip, short cowlicked hair, giant frightened eyes. She’d been sleeping in a man’s plaid shirt that didn’t quite make it down to her hips. She made no effort to cover herself below, but stood blinking in the light, separated from her boy by this tall black man with a gun. She made up her mind quickly, pointing down a hallway and moving to clutch her son as soon as Glitsky stepped aside.
The door to the room was open. The light from the hallway didn’t make it back this far. One of Glitsky’s men had stayed behind with the woman and her child, so Glitsky and his remaining backup moved quickly down the hallway. The sergeant went through the open door, his partner crouched in the dark hall, gun pointed in.
There might have been a bed, but he couldn’t see it. He flicked on the light – another bare overhead. There it was – the bed – against the other wall, the only furniture besides a Salvation Army dresser. The man stirred in the bed, pulled the thin blanket over him. ‘C’mon, shit,’ he said, ‘get that light.’
Glitsky was at the bedside, pulling the sheet all the way down and off the bed, at the same time putting the barrel of his gun against the man’s temple. Wilson, naked except for a pair of red bikini underpants, blinked in the harsh light.
‘Don’t blink any harder, Tremaine,’ Glitsky said, ‘this thing might go off. You’re under arrest.’
Glitsky’s partner had his cuffs out, was flipping Wilson over, snapping them in place. Glitsky went to the doorway and turned the light on and off, the signal that everything was all right. He heard the cops from outside come to the door. He went out to the front room, where the woman sat on the floor in the corner, holding her son. He lowered himself onto the green vinyl couch, letting his adrenaline subside.
The domicile looked the same as all the others – no rug, no pictures on the walls, stains here and there, a lingering odor of grease, musk, marijuana. Holes in the drywall.
Tremaine Wilson, untied shoes and no socks, pants and shirt thrown on, was led out. At least it had been an easy arrest. Small favors.
Now, nine o’clock, Tremaine booked, Glitsky was at the Marina and he was cold. July 1, and cold again. The past few days of warmth were already a dim memory. He thought maybe he ought to start keeping a log of certain dates, maybe the first of every month. He could see it, year after year, a microcosm of San Francisco’s cute little boutique microclimate: January 1 – cold. February 1 -cold. March, April, May – cold and windy. June and July – foggy and guess what. August 1 – chilly, possibility of fog. September and October – nice, not warm, but not cold. November, December – see January, etc.
José was out doing something with one of the lunatics who was taking a yacht out this morning onto the choppy Bay. Glitsky stood over a portable electric heater behind the counter, wondering what he was supposed to be doing here.
When he’d gotten back to his desk from booking, there had been a message to call Pullios. He found out she was taking the Nash murder to the grand jury, top secret, and he should clear his calendar because he – Glitsky – was going to appear tomorrow as a witness before the grand jury and explain that he arrested May Shinn because he was sure she was trying to flee the jurisdiction to avoid her inevitable trial for murder. And by the way, did he think he could take another shot at a few witnesses before tomorrow and see if he could dig up any more evidence?
Sure, he’d told her, no problem. Always here to help. Except, what witnesses? The case was pretty characterized by lack of witnesses. The only true interrogation he’d written up was the night guard at the Marina, Tom Waddell, and that, he thought, hadn’t provided squat in the way of convictable testimony.