The First Law Read online

  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 myse
lf."

  "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 résumé. 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?"

  2

  It was a Thursday evening in early November. Daylight Saving Time had ended on the previous weekend, and consequently it was full night by six o'clock. It was darker even than it might have been because the streetlights on O'Farrell Street between Stockton and Powell had not come on—perhaps they hadn't been set back for the time change.

  A fifteen-knot wind was biting and blowing up from off the Bay, pushing before it the occasional large drop of what was to be the first real rainstorm of the season. Although Sam Silverman's pawnshop was located only one block south of the always-congested Union Square neighborhood, tonight—with the awful weather and deep blackness—the street out front was all but deserted.

  Silverman had already locked the front door and pulled both sides of the antitheft bars on their tracks. Now all he had to do when he was ready to leave was to unlock the door again for a moment, step outside, and pull the bars so that he could padlock them together. He stood at the door inside an extra second and frowned—that hour of lost daylight always depressed him for the first week or so.

  Sighing, he turned and walked back through the center aisle of his shop, reaching out and touching the treasures of other people's lives against which he'd loaned them money—guitars and saxophones and drum kits, silverware, cutlery, fine porcelain china sets, doll collections, televisions, radios, microwave ovens. Much of it bought new in a spirit of hope for the future, now most of it abandoned forever, secondhand junk without a trace of dream left in it.

  At the back counter, he stopped again, struck by the display. Jewelry was by far his biggest stock item, and the watches and rings, the necklaces and earrings, though lovely, tonight seemed to hold even more pathos than the other goods. These were mostly gifts—at one time they'd been the carefully chosen expressions of love, of vows taken and lives shared. Now they were locked under the glass in a pawnshop, to be sold for a fraction of their cost, with all the human value in them lost to time and need.

  He shook his head to rid himself of these somber thoughts. The start of winter always did this to him, and he'd be damned if he'd give in to it. Maybe he was getting that sickness where you got sad all the time when the weather sucked. But no. He'd lived in San Francisco his whole life, and God knew there had been enough opportunity that he would have caught it before now.

  It was just the early darkness.

  He glanced back at the front door and saw himself reflected in the glass—a small, somewhat stooped, decently dressed old Jewish man. It was black out there. Time passed during which he didn't move a muscle. When he heard the wind gust, then fade, and drops of rain just beginning to sound slowly onto the skylight overhead, he started, coming suddenly back to where he was. He looked up at the source of the noise—the skylight, covered with bars, was just a dark hole in the ceiling.

  The thought crossed his mind that he wished he'd kept up his contract with Wade Panos. It would be nice on a miserable night like tonight to have one of his big and armed assistant patrol specials walk with him the two blocks around the corner to the night deposit box at Bank of America. But he and Sadie had gone over it and decided they couldn't justify the prices anymore, especially since Wade was raising them again.

  While it was somewhat comforting to have the private patrol watching out for you—especially on your walks to the bank—it wasn't as though this part of the city was a magnet for violent crime anymore. Nothing like it used to be. The shop hadn't even had a window broken in over twenty years. No, the Patrol Special was a luxury he really didn't need and couldn't afford anymore. And it wasn't as though the city police didn't patrol here, too. Maybe just not as often.

  Still, though, he considered calling the station and requesting an officer to walk over to the bank with him. But even if they could spare anyone, he'd have to wait here another hour or so. Maybe he just shouldn't do the errand tonight. But Thursday, after the poker game, was always his deposit night. And last night he'd made one of his biggest hauls.

  He flicked on the small night-light in the jewelry cabinet.

  Enough with maudlin. He'd better get finished here or he'd get soaked on the way to the bank. He considered that maybe this should be the year he and Sadie pack up and buy a condo like the ones they'd looked at last summer in Palm Springs. Maybe even Scottsdale.

  Although when they'd gone there in the summer a few years back, it had been way too hot. And leaving his friends here, and his synagogue—did they really want to do that? What did he think he was going to do in Palm Springs without the company of Nat Glitsky, a brother to him all these years? And Nat, with a new baby grand-child, wasn't going anywhere. Sam loved Sadie, but she was a reader—a very solitary and passionate reader—not a games person. Nat, on the other hand, loved all kinds of games—backgammon, dominoes, Scrabble, anything to do with cards. They had tournaments, for God's
sake, with trophies. No, Sam didn't really want to move. He just wanted the days to be longer again.

  "Fart-knocker," he said aloud to himself, shaking his head. In the back room, he went to a knee, worked the combination, swung open the door to the safe. Lifting out the old maroon leather pouch, he was struck again by the thickness of it. He unzipped the top and ran his thumb over the top edges of the bills, nearly twenty-two thousand dollars in all, more than two months' worth of the shop's earnings, even if he included what he made on his poker fees. It would be the largest deposit he'd made in years.

  He zipped it back up and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket. A last check of the shop, then he grabbed his fedora off the hat rack, pushing it down hard over his crown against the wind he'd encounter when he got outside.

  He turned out the lights and retraced his steps down the center aisle. Stopping a last time, he looked both ways up the street and saw nothing suspicious.

  He reached for the door and pulled it open.

  The plan was a simple one. Speed and efficiency. They wore heavy coats, latex gloves, and ski masks to thwart identification. None of them was to say one word before they knocked Silverman out.

  The old man was holding his hat down securely on his head with one hand, pulling the door to behind him when the three men came out of hiding in the doorways on either side of his shop windows and, pulling their masks down over their faces, fell upon him. The biggest guy got the door while the other two grabbed him by the arms, covered his mouth, and manhandled him inside and back up the aisle.

  In the back room, they turned the light on. But the old man had gotten his mouth free and was starting to make noise now, yelling at them, maybe getting up the nerve to give them some kind of fight, as though he had any kind of chance. But delay would mean a hassle.

  And since hassle wasn't part of the plan, the big man pulled a revolver from his pocket. The old geezer was actually making a decent show of resistance, struggling, manipulating his shoulders from side to side, grunting and swearing with the exertion. Because of all the lateral movement, the first swing with the gun glanced off the side of the man's head, but it was enough to stop him, stunned by the blow.