"That wasn't my office. I-"
Chomorro held up a warning hand. "I don't care. Probable cause, Lieutenant. Do these words ring a bell? I don't sign a search warrant, which I might remind you is a tremendous invasion upon the rights of any citizen, unless there is probable cause, which means some real evidence that they were at least in the same time zone in which the crime was committed when it was committed, and left something behind that might prove it."
Glitsky swallowed his pride. "That's what we hope to find with a warrant, Your Honor."
"But you've got to have at least some before you can look for more. Those are the rules, and you know them as well as I do. And if you don't"-Chomorro turned a lightning bolt of a finger toward Hardy-"I'll lay odds your defense attorney friend here is intimately familiar with every single picky little rule of criminal procedure, and I'm sure he'd be glad to bring you up to date. To say nothing of the fact that the named party on this affidavit isn't some schmo with no rights and no lawyer, but the chief executive officer of one of this city's main contractors. You are way off base here, Lieutenant, even asking."
"Your Honor." Against the odds, Hardy thought he would try to help. "Dr. Ross is the answer to the most basic question in a murder investigation: cui bono. Not only does he take over Mr. Markham's salary and position-"
Chomorro didn't quite explode, but close. "Don't you presume to lecture me on the law, Mr. Hardy or, in this example, some mystery writer's fantasy of what murder cases are all about. I know all about cui bono, and if you're to the point where you believe that a smattering of legal Latin is going to pass for evidence in this jurisdiction, you'd be well advised to get in another line of work. Am I making myself clear? To you both?" He was frankly glaring now, at the end of any semblance of patience. "Find more or no warrant! And that's final!"
I wish he wasn't a judge." Somehow, magically, the peanuts had reappeared in Glitsky's desk drawer, and Hardy had a small pile of shells going. "I'd kill him dead."
"Don't let him being a judge stop you. It's no worse killing a judge than any other citizen. If your mind's set on it, I say go for it. I'm the head of homicide, after all. I bet I could lose most of the evidence. No, we've done that when we haven't even been trying. Imagine if we worked at it-I could lose all of it. And you heard His Honor-no evidence, no warrant. I might not even get to arrest you, although I'd hate to miss that part. Maybe I could arrest you, then have to release you for lack of evidence."
Hardy cracked another shell, popped the nut. "That's the longest consecutive bunch of words you've ever strung together."
"When I was in high school, I did the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech in Julius Caesar. That was way more words."
"But you didn't make them up. There's a difference."
Glitsky shrugged. "Not that much. You'd be surprised."
"You were Mark Antony?"
Another shrug. "It was a liberal school. Then next year, we did Othello, and they wouldn't let me do him because he was black."
"Did you point out to them that you were black, too?"
"I thought they might have seen it on their own. But I guess not."
"So you were discriminated against?"
"Must have been. It couldn't have been just somebody else was better for the part."
"Bite your tongue. If you didn't get the part and you were black, then that's why. Go no further. The truth shall set you free. How long have you lived in San Francisco anyway, that I've still got to tell you the rules? I bet even after all this time, you could sue somebody for pain and suffering and get rich. I could write up the papers for you and maybe I could get rich, too. You would have been a great Othello, I bet."
"Freshman year, I didn't get Shylock either, and I'm half-Jewish."
Hardy clucked. "No wonder you became a cop. To fight injustice."
"Well," Glitsky deadpanned, "it was either that or girls liked the uniform."
"Your school did a lot of Shakespeare."
Glitsky slowly savored a peanut. "It was a different era," he said. "The old days."
35
Rajan Bhutan gripped the telephone receiver as if his life depended upon it. He sat at the small square table in his kitchen that he used for eating and reading, for his jigsaw puzzles and bridge games. This evening, the tabletop was bare except for a drinking glass that he'd filled with tap water against the thirst that he knew would threaten to choke off his words when he began to speak.
Since Chatterjee had died, he had been continually downsizing, winnowing out the superficialities most people lived with and even felt they needed. Now the simplicity of his life was monastic.
The two-room studio apartment in which he lived was at the intersection of Cole and Frederick, within walking distance of Portola. It consisted of a tiny, dark bedroom and a slightly larger-though no one would call it large-kitchen. The only entrance to the unit was a single door without an entryway of any kind. The framing itself was flush to the stucco outside and all but invisible. Painted a cracked and peeling red, and seemingly stuck willy-nilly onto the side of the four-story apartment building, the door itself might have been the trompe l'oeil work of a talented artist with a sense of humor. Because of the slope of the street, most of the studio itself was actually below street level, and this made the place perennially cold, dark, and damp.
Rajan didn't mind.
Rent control would keep the place under seven hundred dollars for at least several more years. He had a hot plate for cooking his rice and one-pot curries. The plumbing was actually quite good. There was regular hot water in the kitchen sink and in the walk-in shower. The toilet flushed. The half refrigerator stuffed under the Formica countertop on the windowless front wall held enough vegetables to last a week, sometimes more. A portable space heater helped in the mornings.
Now, as the first ring sounded through the phone, he raised his head to the one window, covered with a yellowing muslin cloth. Outside, it wouldn't be dark for another hour or more, but the shade cast by his own building had already cloaked the block in dusk. A couple walked by, laughing, and he could make out the silhouettes of their legs as they passed-at this point, the bottom of the window was no more than twenty inches above the sidewalk.
The muscles around his mouth twitched, either with nerves or with something like the sense memory of what smiling had been like. A tiny movement on the Formica counter drew his gaze there-a cockroach crossing the chessboard. For a year now, he'd been enjoying the same game, conducted by mail with Chatterjee's father in Delhi. He thought in another two moves-maybe less than a month-he could force a stalemate, when for a long while it looked as though he'd be checkmated. He believed that a stalemate was far preferable to a defeat-those who disagreed with him, he felt, missed the point.
The phone rang again. He ran his other hand over the various grains of the table, which was his one indulgence. He had always loved woods-he and Chatterjee had done their apartment mostly in teak from the Scandinavian factory stores. Cheap and durable, he had loved the lightness, the feel of it, the grain. They used a sandalwood oil rub that he could still smell sometimes when he meditated.
But he had changed now over the years and this table was something altogether different-it was a game table of some mixed dark hardwoods laid in a herringbone fashion. Each place had a drawer built into the right-hand corner, which players could pull out and rest drinks upon. He hosted his bridge group every four weeks, and the other three men admired the sturdy, utilitarian, practical design.