Guilt

After his Monday-morning breakfast meeting with John Strout, Glitsky had planned to get right on the Trang investigation – murders that didn't get solved in the first couple of days very often never did. But when he'd come back to the office, there had been another homicide. He had been on call last week, so normally this would have been someone else's problem, but this week's Inspector had called in sick and gone salmon fishing, and Glitsky appeared just as his Lieutenant, Frank Batiste, had despaired of finding an Inspector to assign.

Apparently, a fry cooker who'd been fired from a Tastee Burger in the lower Mission had returned to the scene of his humiliation and gone Postal – a new expression Glitsky loved. The ex-employee naturally killed none of the people with whom he had a gripe. He did, though, by mistake before he killed himself, end the life of a seventeen-year-old high-school student who'd stopped in for a hot chocolate. This new homicide brought Glitsky's workload to seven active cases, and put him inside and around the Tastee Burger for the rest of the day.

Now it was just before noon on Tuesday and finally he was at Mrs Trang's clean but cluttered apartment with Paul Thieu, his enthusiastic interpreter.

Victor's mother had been Glitsky's first choice of where to begin asking questions, but like so many other of his plans lately, this one hadn't panned out. He had respected the fact that she had been too distraught to talk in the immediate aftermath of her son's death. Then there had been the wake and funeral. This morning was the earliest they could get together.

The apartment was a study in lace. Every smooth surface was covered with some type of crocheted thing – a doily or hankie or tablecloth. There was lace over the back of the overstuffed couch that Glitsky and Thieu were directed to, lace over the coffee table, on the end tables under the lamps and photographs, on the television set, under the phone on the little hall table. A feeble sunlight struggled to pierce a veil of web-like lace drapery covering the front windows.

Trang's mother was petite and weathered, with flat gray hair and a shapeless tiny body, made more so by its enclosure in an oversized man's black business suit, over the shoulders of which she had thrown a crocheted white shawl. She offered them small flavorless cookies of some kind and coffee – near boiling, chicory-laced and appalling to Glitsky's taste, but Thieu sucked the first cup right up, black, and accepted a second. She sat still as a rock at the coffee table, responding to his opening expressions of regret in a patient and compliant way, without any interest. Her life, along with her son's, was apparently over.

But now, finally, he was getting to it. 'And the last time you saw your son was?'

He waited for Thieu to interpret, listened to the woman's inflection as she answered, trying to piece something in advance from sounds alone, but the tonality was too flat. Thieu nodded to Mrs Trang, then turned to him: 'She saw him the day before he was killed, but talked to him that night, that evening, after dinner sometime. She's not sure exactly what time.'

Glitsky pretended to scribble on his pad and kept his face impassive, his voice low and conversational. 'Paul, would you please just say the words she says, exactly? Don't tell me what she says. Say what she says.'

The younger man nodded, then swallowed, suitably chided. 'Sorry.'

'It's okay.' He sat forward on the couch, spoke directly to the mother. 'Mrs Trang, how did Victor seem to you the last time you saw him?'

Thieu translated. The wait. 'He was hopeful. We had a nice dinner. He tries to come over at least once a week, on Sunday, sometimes more. He…' She paused and Thieu waited. 'It saves him money to come here and eat, I think. He has taken a little while to start making money as a lawyer, and he felt that he was about to make a lot.'

'And how was he going to do that?'

'He had a client who was suing the Archdiocese, and he said they – the Archdiocese – had offered to…' Thieu listened, turned to Glitsky. 'She's apologizing to me,' he said. 'She doesn't know the jargon.'

Glitsky pointedly ignored Thieu. 'That's all right, Mrs Trang, just do your best.'

She came back to him, began talking again. Thieu picked it up: '… to settle it… before going to court. They were not going to go to court and he thought he would make a lot of money.'

'He was pretty certain of that?'

'Yes. He seemed very sure, very hopeful. But also worried.'

'What about?'

'That it wouldn't happen. That something would go wrong.' A pause. 'As it has.'

'Did he say what might go wrong? What he was worried about?'

'That this was a lot of money, and the Church might use… connections… in the court, perhaps, so that even though Victor was right, even if the law was on his side, they could stop him.'

'Did you think he meant violently?'

'No. Now, I don't know. Maybe so.'

'How much money was he talking about?'

'He didn't say exactly. Enough to pay off his loans. He thought he would move his office, get a secretary. He wanted to get me a new place.' She motioned around their cramped quarters. 'Buy me some new clothes.'

'Okay, then, how about the next night, when he called? Did he call or did you call him?'

'He called me. The attorney for the Archdiocese…'

'MarkDooher?'

'Yes, I think that was his name. He had called Victor and asked him to stay in the office to wait for a phone call, and they were going to offer more money that night.'

'Did he say when he'd gotten that first call, from Dooher?'

'I thought it was just then, just before he called me.'

Glitsky made a note on his yellow pad. There would be a phone record of the precise time.

Mrs Trang said a few more words, which Thieu related. 'It's why he stayed late.'

'Would he have called anyone else about this, to tell them, perhaps, about the possible settlement?'

'No. I wanted to call my sister and tell her and he told me to wait, that he was going to wait, too. Not to talk to anyone until it was done. He didn't want to…' Thieu frowned, trying to find the right word '… to bring it bad luck, to jinx it. He told me this.'

'But that doesn't mean the girlfriend or somebody else didn't just happen to drop by.' Thieu wanted to talk about it. Still and always.

Glitsky was driving the unmarked Plymouth back to Trang's office, trying to keep from jumping to conclusions, glad he didn't usually work with a partner. He was coming to believe that entirely too much credence was given to the round-table discussion. Sometimes – a radical idea in this bumptious age, he knew – but sometimes solitary contemplation did produce results.

'It had to be somebody he knew, right?' Thieu persisted. 'It wasn't a robbery – nothing was missing.'

'We don't know that. We don't know what was there to be missing.'

'I mean his wallet, personal effects…'

'It might have just been botched.' If Thieu wanted to play these games, Glitsky could at least make them instructive. 'Guy's in there and Trang comes back from dinner…'

'He didn't leave for dinner.' Paul had done his homework. 'The autopsy didn't find anything in his stomach.'

'So he came back for his keys or something. Or went to mail a letter. If he left, though, and came back, discovered the perp burglarizing the place, who killed him, then decided he'd better split…'

'That didn't happen,' Thieu said.

'No, I don't think so either. But it could have, which is my point. What I think is what you think – a strong male who knew him killed him.'

'Dooher?'

'Maybe, or maybe one of his clients. Maybe one of the people he was hassling for business.' Abe gave the other man a sidelong glance. 'That's what they pay us for, to find out.'