It was truly a different world here than anywhere else in the greater Bay Area, all the more magical because of its proximity to the kitschy tourist mecca of Sausalito, the tony, crowded anthill of yuppies that was Mill Valley. On this side of Tamalpais, clapboard main streets with a half dozen century-old buildings called themselves towns. The single sign of life would be twenty Harleys parked outside the only saloon-there was always a saloon. Along the road, they passed handmade signs nailed to ancient oaks advertising live chickens, pigs, sheep. Fresh eggs and milk every few miles.
Most of it looked slightly gone to seed, and Glitsky had been up here many times when, with the near-constant year-round fog and wind, it had seemed almost uninhabi-table, a true wasteland. Today, in the warm sunlight-it would hit eighty degrees at the beach before they headed back home-the ramshackle and run-down landscape suddenly struck him as deliberate. Lots of hippies from the sixties and drop-and burnouts from the seventies and eighties had settled out here and they didn't want it to change. They didn't want new cars and faux-mansions, but a slower pace, tolerant neighbors, privacy. Most of the time, Glitsky scoffed at that lifestyle-those people didn't have a clue, they weren't living in the real world.
But today at the beach he was watching what he would have normally called a cliche´ of an aging hippy. A man about his own age, early fifties, was weaving some spring flowers into his little girl's hair. Glitsky found himself almost envying him, the simplicity of this life. The woman with him-the girl's mother?-was another cliche´. Her hair fell loose halfway down her back. She had let it go gray. She fingerpicked an acoustic guitar and would sing snippets of Joni Mitchell as the words occurred to her. It was possible, Glitsky the cop thought, that they were both stoned. But possibly not. Possibly they were blissed out on the day, very much like he and Treya.
"A chocolate chip cookie for your thoughts." She sat next to him, blocking the sun from his face.
He was stretched out on his side on their blanket in the warm sand. "Cookie first." He popped it whole into his mouth and chewed it up. "Thank you."
"Now thoughts," she said. "That was the deal."
"You don't want to hear my thoughts. They're scary."
"You're having scary thoughts here?"
"I like it here. I'm almost completely happy. That's scary."
"Comfort and happiness are scary?"
"They don't last. You don't want to get used to them."
"No, God forbid that." She reached a hand out and rubbed it over his arm. "Forgetting, of course, that you and I have had a pretty decent run together these past few months."
He put a hand over hers. "I haven't forgotten that for a second. I didn't mean us."
"Good. Because I'm planning on making this last a while."
"A while would be good. I'd vote for that."
"At least, say, another nineteen years."
"What's ninet…?" Glitsky stopped and squinted a question up at her.
"Nineteen years." She spoke with an undertone of grave concern. With an age difference of nineteen years between them, the question of whether they should have their own child someday had nearly split them up before they'd gotten engaged. Glitsky had already done what he called "the kid thing" three times. He was finished with all that, he'd informed her.
It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, but Treya told him if that were the case, they had to stop seeing each other. She wasn't going to use the issue in a power play to get or keep him. If parenthood wasn't something he wanted to go through again, she understood completely. He was still a fine man and she loved him, but she knew who she was, what she wanted.
For some time Glitsky had lived with her decision, and his own. Then one day he woke up and realized that he had changed his mind. Her presence in his life was more important than anything else. He could not lose her-nothing could make that happen.
But now that once-distant someday had arrived, and Treya was biting her lip with the tension of whether or not her husband would accept the reality. "I don't think children have as good a chance if they're raised in a home where the parents aren't comfortable and happy, so I think we really ought to keep that going at least until the baby's out of the house and on its own. Don't you?" Trying to smile, she gripped his hand tightly in both of hers and met his eyes. "I was going to tell you last night when we got home, but then your inspectors were there, and by the time they left it was so late…" Her tremulous voice wound down to a stop.
He stared back at her for a long beat, his expression softening by degrees into something akin to wonder. "Why do you think it took us so long?" He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them. "It sure wasn't for lack of trying."
21
Four hours later, Glitsky was sitting on his kitchen counter, trying to maintain a professional tone when he felt like screaming. He was talking on the wall phone to one of the deputy sheriffs from San Francisco General Hospital. The deputy had called homicide about this lady who'd been arrested and brought to the hospital earlier in the day with a broken ankle and a concussion. She couldn't seem to stop talking about her husband being the murderer in the family, so why was she the one who was in jail? The deputy figured that if anything about this woman involved murder, he ought to bring it to somebody's attention. But when he'd called homicide, nobody had any idea what he was talking about, so they gave him Glitsky's home number.
"What do you mean, they arrested her? They didn't arrest him?"
"The husband? No, sir. Not that I can tell. They didn't bring him here, but maybe he wasn't hurt." When healthy people got arrested in the city, they went to the jail behind the Hall of Justice. If they needed medical care of any kind, SFGH had a guarded lockup wing, and that's where her arresting officers had taken Ann Kensing.
In ten minutes, Glitsky had tracked down the home numbers for both of these guys, and one of them-Officer Rick Page-had the bad luck to answer the phone. Even over the wire and without benefit of his terrible face, Glitsky's tone of voice, rank, and position conspired to reduce the young cop to a state of panic. He ran his words together staccato fashion, repeating half of what he was trying to say. "It was, it was a nine-one-one DD, domestic disturbance. When we got there, we got there and the woman was on the ground, surrounded by her kids. Her children."
"And the man?"
"Well, he, he was bleeding from his face, pretty bad where she cut, cut him."
"Cut him? With what, a knife?"
"No. Fingernails. Scratched, I meant scratched him, not cut. On his face. He was up some outside stairs when we got to the scene. Me and Jerry-my partner?-we pulled up and both drew down on him."
"On him?"
"Yes, sir."
"But then you arrested her? Even though she was the one more badly hurt, is that right? How did that happen?" Glitsky's anger and frustration were still fresh, but he had calmed enough to realize that he wasn't getting what he needed from Officer Page. He toned his voice down a notch or two. "You can slow down a little, Officer. Just tell me what happened."
"Yes, sir. First, he's-the guy, Kensing-we checked back with the dispatcher when he told us and it was true, he's the one who called in the nine-one-one. He was locked out of his house and was worried his wife was going to hurt his kids. He said he needed help."