"Understood."
With more than just a bad taste in his mouth, Hardy went into the bathroom in the hallway outside Jackman's office. There he leaned over one of the sinks for a few seconds, his head hanging as though from a thread. Then he turned on the cold water and threw several handfulls into his face. Drying off with a paper towel from the roll, he suddenly stopped and stood studying his face in the mirror for a long moment. The conversation with Jackman had netted him and his firm fifty thousand dollars, and though he told himself that it was a decent deal all around, his body was telling him something else. His head was light, his heart pounded. A wave of nausea made him hang his head again. When the dizziness passed, he ran his palms over his face, trying to recognize the person he was staring at. Would Clarence ever forgive him, he asked himself. Would he forgive himself? Could he continue to live like this?
I have no choice, he told himself. Don't confuse a job with a vocation. This is a job. You do it. You get paid for it. That's what it's about. It's not about you. It's not personal. Don't lose that focus. If it gets personal, you lose.
When he got his breathing and the rest of his body under some degree of control, he rode the elevator up one floor. Looking in at the suites of administrative offices that opened onto the lobby, he noticed with some surprise that the reception area was empty. He stood inside the double doors for a moment, making sure no one was guarding the entrance, then reached behind the waist-high wooden door by the reception desk and pressed the button that admitted visitors to the inner sanctum. In a few steps, silently, he'd passed through the outer office, then the conference room. Neither of the deputy chiefs was in their adjacent offices.
The room to his left was Glitsky's office. Far from the norm at the Hall, his office was expansive, nearly as large as Hardy's own, and almost as well furnished. Windows along the Bryant Street wall provided lots of natural light.
The bookshelves behind his desk testified to Glitsky's love of books. A knowledge junkie, he stocked hundreds of paperback novels, a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an abridged, although still enormous, Oxford English Dictionary. There was a shelf of history, another of forensics, criminology, the Compendium of Drug Therapy and other medical references. One whole section was devoted to Patrick O'Brian's seafaring books, Glitsky's ongoing passion now for the past few years, and the other highly esoteric reference books that accompanied these novels-Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, Harbors and High Seas, A Sea of Words, a biography of Thomas Cochrane, who'd been O'Brian's inspiration for Jack Aubrey.
On these shelves, too, were a number of personal artifacts- a football signed by all of his college teammates at San Jose State; pictures of him and his sons on most if not all of the Pop Warner teams he'd coached; his old patrolman's hat; a menorah (Glitsky was half Jewish and half African-American); lots of police-themed bric-a-brac from citations he'd been awarded, classes and conferences he'd attended, decorations and medals he'd acquired. The walls were covered with even more citations, including Police Officer of the Year in 1987, plaques, diplomas, the (premature) obituary that Jeff Elliot had written about him after he'd been shot. There were also two family photos- one about twelve years old featuring his then-young boys and his wife Flo before she'd died; the other taken only last December with Treya and their baby Rachel, Treya's twenty-year-old daughter, Raney, and his three now-grown young men- Isaac, Jacob and Orel.
In Glitsky's new position, he spent a good portion of every day going to meetings, holding press conferences to manage the spin on police issues, representing the Chief at various functions. Hardy assumed he'd been at such a meeting this morning, and saw no reason not to take advantage of his friend's absence to inject a little lightness into his afternoon. He walked behind the desk and opened the top left drawer, which as he knew was filled with peanuts in the shell.
Quickly, looking up lest one of the gatekeepers bust him, he pulled the drawer all the way out and set it on the desk. He then took out the right-hand drawer- pens, Post-it pads, business cards, paper clips- and inserted it into the left-hand slot. When the peanuts were in on the wrong side, he checked his handiwork and saw that lo, it was good.
Glitsky the control freak would go into fits.
Hardy made it out of the administrative offices without running into a human being. When he got back on the elevator going down, his good humor had mostly returned, and he was whistling to himself.
3
Hardy pulled his convertible into the garage of the Freeman Building, underneath the law offices of Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake. When Freeman had died, he had left the building that bore his name to his fiancee, Gina Roake, and the firm's business to Hardy, and they'd formed a new firm, keeping Freeman's name in it, immediately and almost without discussion. The arrangement had somehow seemed foreordained. Now, with the top down, Hardy parked in the primo spot next to the elevator that was reserved for the managing partner. For a moment, he sat listening to the terrific interplay of guitar, bouzouki, mandolin, violin and vocals of Nickel Creek's "Sweet Afton," a song from the CD his daughter Rebecca had recommended.
It did his heart good to know that this old poem by Robert Burns had somehow attained a kind of limited hipness again. It was a mostly acoustic country group, after all, melodic and musical, so it didn't exactly rule the airwaves, but his daughter and her teenage friends loved it for a' that. Here alone was reason to have hope and faith in the next generation, he thought. It wasn't all rap and crap.
He set the brake, took off his sunglasses, and pushed the button that got the roof back up in under six seconds, a little more than the time it took the car to hit sixty on the open road. In another minute, he exited the elevator into the main lobby on the second floor and was gratified to hear the steady thrum of activity. It was nearly ten a.m. and most of the fourteen associates had already been here since at least eight o'clock, on their way to billing at least eight hours of their time, as they did every day at $150 an hour.
From where he stood, Hardy could see three associates meeting with some clients in the Solarium, the firm's large, glass-enclosed conference room. Directly in front of him at the receptionist's workstation, Phyllis seemed to be answering five calls at once. The hallway to his right bustled with mail delivery and some other associates talking with their secretaries or paralegals. The Xerox machines were humming in the background.
Hardy crossed the space in front of him and poked his head into the office of Norma Towne, his office manager, a humorless woman of uncertain vintage who had conceived an affection of sorts for him, in spite of his tendency to crack wise. She pulled her eyes from her computer long enough to give him a little wave, to ask if he needed anything.
"An oil well would be nice," he said, "if you've got a spare. Everything okay here?"
It was, and he proceeded to his own office. In the past year, he'd moved down to the main floor from the one above, bequeathing his old office to his new partner, Wes Farrell. As managing partner, Hardy felt he ought to have more of a presence in the day-to-day workings of the firm, and he'd ensconced himself in a room directly next to David Freeman's old office.
A year ago, Hardy's current work space had enclosed a four-desk paralegal station, the stationery room and the semi-warehouse where the firm had kept the old, physical files. Now, with a couple of interior walls removed and twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of interior decorating, it was a large, airy and imposing executive suite. He had his own wall of law books, several somber original oils suitably framed, a sink and large wet bar, and two seating areas with Persian throw rugs, like the one in front of his custom cherry desk. He did bring the dartboard down from upstairs, but now it hid behind a pair of cherry cabinet doors- the only hint of its presence was the thirty-inch slat of dark teak set into the oak hardwood floor exactly seven feet, nine and one-quarter inches from the face of the dartboard. Similar cabinet doors also hid his entertainment center, audio system and huge television set.