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."