"Yes. What's that?"
"I think you're going to help the police solve this case, Rajan. In fact, I know it."
"And why is that? I would never tell. What reason would I have to say anything?"
"I'll bet you can figure that out, Rajan. The answer is that you won't need to say anything. But the great irony is that after tonight, after you kill yourself, everyone will know not only that you killed all those patients-all those poor patients who were costing me thousands of dollars a day-but that you also killed Tim Markham and his family."
"You can take the money back." Rajan's voiced echoed in the tiny space. "A gun! There's no need to use a gun!"
Ross pushed his chair back and started to stand up.
Don't move! Police! Drop the gun!" Glitsky came out of the darkness and was in the doorway to the bedroom, his weapon extended in both hands before him. "Drop it!"
Ross froze for an instant, turned his head, then slowly lowered his hands to the table. He dropped the gun the last inch to the wood, where it landed with a hollow clunk.
"All right, now, knock it to the floor. All the way."
Ross's eyes never left the weapon that was on him. He still had his hands where he'd let go of the gun over the table and he reached his right hand back as if to swat it onto the floor.
Glitsky saw his move and perhaps misreading it, perhaps lowering his guard for an instant, he let the angle of his own weapon drop a half inch.
Ross moved like the strike of a snake. He grabbed at the briefcase and with a vicious lunge, threw it across the tight space at Glitsky, who fired-a tremendous explosion in the small room-and blew the briefcase open as it hit him, knocking the gun from his hand, spilling the stacks of money onto the floor. Plaster from the back wall rained onto the Formica countertop.
Another explosion and more plaster.
"Don't you move!" Ross had his own gun back in his hands and had fired it at the floor where Glitsky had reached for his own. "Get up, then kick it over here! Now!"
Rajan was huddled in the corner by the refrigerator. Ross glanced over at him and told him to get up, too, then motioned for Glitsky to move out of the doorway to the bedroom and into the kitchen itself. The medical director was breathing heavily, but his eyes were clear and focused. He held a gun in each hand now. His mouth arced in a tight half smile. "You guys stung me," he said. "I'm impressed. Especially you, Rajan, good work." But then the mouth turned into a line of bitter resolve. "But I see what's going to happen here now. You! Cop! You came here to arrest Mr. Bhutan and he decided that he wasn't going without a fight, so it looks like there's going to be a shootout here after all. And sadly, neither of you are going to survive."
Still stuck where he'd been all along, standing behind the wall in the darkened bedroom, Hardy had no choice. There was no way he could predict when Ross might take the first shot at one of the two of them. He had to move first and fast.
The light switches were next to the door and he was right there. He reached up and flicked the switch down, plunging the apartment into total darkness.
And, it seemed, immediately into deafening sound, as well. He dropped to the floor and counted four shots in an impossible succession, running together almost as one within the first heartbeat. Then the sickening and unmistakable crunch of a body ramming into another one and taking the wind out-"Hnnh!"-slamming it back into something immovable, and accompanied by the crash of more breakage. Another explosive shot, then a further struggle before a final crash, a hollow thumping sound, and Glitsky's voice, almost unrecognizable, but clearly his, yelling: "Lights, Diz, lights!"
Which he hit just in time for the front door to slam open and Bracco's form to appear in it, gun drawn, hands extended. Turning the light off, and then on, was the signal they'd worked out for reinforcement. Then Bracco was all the way inside the room, Fisk behind him, with his weapon out, as well. Hardy leaned in adrenaline exhaustion against the frame of the doorway into the bedroom.
Rajan Bhutan was still huddled in his corner, crying softly, his head down on his knees. Glitsky, a gun in each hand, had gotten to his feet and was standing unsteadily over the prostrate figure of Malachi Ross, who was bleeding from the nose and mouth.
Turning, Glitsky handed both the weapons, butt end first, to Bracco.
Then he took an awkward half step backward, and stumbled, seeming to lose his balance.
Hardy took a step toward him.
"Abe, are you-"
Glitsky turned to him and opened his mouth to speak, but a trickle of blood was all that came out, tracing the line of his scar before he fell again to the floor.
37
CityTalk
by Jeffrey Elliot
THE TRAGIC DEATH OF THE CHIEF of the San Francisco Homicide Department, Lieutenant Abraham Glitsky, marks a bitter last chapter in the saga of the Parnassus Medical Group and its efforts to remain solvent at no matter what cost to its subscribers and constituency. Glitsky, 53, had been a cop with the city for his entire working life of thirty years. In all that time, half of it spent in the homicide detail, he worked almost ceaselessly in the city's underbelly, interrogating often hostile witnesses, arresting desperate murderers who would not hesitate to kill again. His professional world was filled with violence, drugs, and disregard for civility and even for life. Yet the greatest boast of this deeply humble man was that he had never drawn his gun in anger.
Last night, for the first time, he had to. And it killed him.
He was not working with what the police facetiously call a no-humans-involved case, where everyone involved whether as witness or suspect already has a substantial criminal record. In fact, his killer was a classic white-collar businessman who had been the subject of a recent column in this space-the CEO of Parnassus Health, Dr. Malachi Ross. Glitsky's investigation, which had begun with the death of Tim Markham, Ross's predecessor, in the ICU of Portola Hospital, had grown to encompass the murders of Markham's family, and then, most unexpectedly, numerous other terminally ill patients over the course of a year or more at Portola. Dr. Ross now sits in jail, allegedly the murderer of all of these people, and of Lieutenant Glitsky.
Glitsky was a personal friend of this reporter. He did not drink or swear. He liked football, music, and reading. He had a dry sense of humor and an acerbic wit informed by a wide-ranging intelligence. Beneath a carefully cultivated, somewhat intimidating persona, he was the soul of compassion to the friends and families of victims, a firm yet flexible boss to his colleagues in homicide, and a paragon of honesty and fair-dealing within the legal community. Half-Jewish and half-black, he was well aware of the sting of discrimination, yet it did not color his judgments nor his commitment to due process. He treated everyone the same: fairly. He was justly proud of the way he did his job. He will be sorely missed.
He is survived by his father, Nat; his three sons, Isaac, Jacob, and Orel; his wife, Treya Ghent; and his stepdaughter, Lorraine. Funeral services are-
The phone jarred Elliot from his words.
His weary eyes scanned back a few graphs, realizing that it wasn't nearly enough. It didn't capture the way Glitsky was, the essence of him, the force he'd been to those who had known him. He looked at his watch-it was nearly one in the morning. He had another hour until he had to submit this copy instead of the other column he'd written this afternoon. Maybe he could pull the file for an anecdote or two, maybe a picture if they had one of him with something resembling a smile-highly unlikely, he knew-anyway, something to humanize him more. The telephone rang a second time-not picking up wouldn't help, wouldn't change anything one way or the other.