"Right. Which he will."
"Shouldn't that be 'has'?"
"Tomorrow. That's 'will.' Beyond that, I'm talking only a few days' grace."
"Grace?"
"Courtesy. Whatever word you want."
Brandt leveled his gaze at her. "The word I want is 'now,' Amy. Anything beyond now- meaning tomorrow at the hearing, first thing, he admits- anything else makes me nervous as hell."
"Why?"
"You're kidding, right?" He stood up abruptly, coming out from behind his desk. "Excuse me," he said, squeezing past her, looking both ways down the hallway.
"What are you doing?"
His voice was quiet yet urgent. "I'm making sure nobody's out here to hear us, that's what." He turned and faced her. "You ask me why I'm nervous if we get delayed? Do you remember anything about last night?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
He lowered his voice still further. "It means that when I walked into the Balboa last night and saw you sitting at the bar, you were a woman I had wanted to get to know for a long time. The case we were both handling was settled, so we wouldn't be squaring off in court anymore. We could do whatever we wanted. Now you're telling me it might not be settled? And you knew this last night? And still you let us go ahead?"
"It wasn't just me, if you remember, Jason."
"No, it wasn't. But you're the one who knew we might not be finished in court. If what happened with you and me gets out at all, and/or if this thing with Bartlett gets delayed, it's my ass. Don't you realize that? It's my job. And you knew it all along?"
The strength of Brandt's reaction caught Wu off guard. "No, but if I did, could you blame me, after how you treated me in court…"
He stared at her in shock. "I don't believe this. You're telling me you set me up on purpose? What's next? You blackmail me for your silence about us?"
"Come on, Jason. You're overreacting. It wasn't like that."
Brandt said aloud to himself, "I've got to call Boscacci. I'm out of this right now." Then he looked at her with a new flash of insight. "But if I do that, then you win, too, don't you? You get your delay. You knew this going in, didn't you? You've just been playing me."
"No, that's not true. I…"
But he wasn't going to be listening to any more excuses. In a fury, he put a finger to her face. "Don't you dare try and sell me on what's true or not, not after last night. You may have gotten me, okay, you win one. But that's the last time, I swear to God. The last fucking time."
He stepped back into his office and closed the door in her face.
8
Glitsky had meetings all morning.
The first was the bureau lieutenants' meeting, held in Department 19, a courtroom on the second floor of the Hall of Justice that happened to be dark for the day. Since there were thirty-two lieutenants within the Investigations Bureau and each was expected to present a short report on highlights in their respective bureaus since last week's meeting, this one tended to run long.
Glitsky sat up at the judge's bench, and after his initial remarks reiterating his stand in favor of quantifiable progress in police duties- arrests made, citations issued, investigations instigated, victim assistance and follow-up, and so on- for almost two full hours he listened and took notes on everything from the auto detail and home burglaries to homicide and hate crimes, from arson and the general work detail to bomb investigations and the gang task force, from narcotics and vice to sexual assault, domestic violence and psychiatric liaison.
All of this was numbing and tedious and, Glitsky suspected, not really necessary in the long run. He thought that within a few more months, he'd be able to let these meetings slide, once he had clearly delivered the message to his bureau chiefs that investigators needed to make arrests, take bad people off the street. That was the basic job. Patrolmen in uniform made the vast majority of arrests. Inspectors followed up to put the finishing touches on these cases. But the real inspectors' job was to solve cases. To assemble evidence and make arrests based on investigating crimes when no arrest at the scene was possible.
The new policy was showing signs of bearing some fruit, but nine of his bureaus had not made one arrest in the past week. There was still work to be done. Nevertheless, there had been a total of eighty-four arrests in that same period, up from seventy-eight the week before. This, he supposed, could be construed as progress, but mostly the cynical part of him believed it would turn out to be simply the manipulation of numbers, or cleaning out old, solved cases that they hadn't gotten around to filing yet. Speeding up the pipeline a little to rig the stats.
After the meeting, he stayed behind a moment with Lanier of homicide, passing along the Post-its with the names of Elizabeth Cary's brothers. Lanier might particularly want to have one of his inspectors on the case, Pat Belou or Lincoln Russell, check out Ted Reed, the crazy brother who lived down at Lake Elsinore. If he'd been in San Francisco last week, it might turn out to be something.
By ten-fifteen, he was up in Chief Batiste's office for a meeting of the Benefits Board, where he listened for another hour to the city's director of human resources talk in excruciating detail about the latest proposed improvements to the police department's pension and retirement plans, and its health and life insurance benefits. Like, what should be the deductible on sex-change operations? Like, should alcoholism automatically be presumed to be a job-related illness, entitling the officer to a full disability retirement for on-the-job injury?
At eleven-thirty, he was driven to the mayor's office. Smiling was a form of torture for Glitsky, but for most of another hour, that's all he did, while photographers took his picture with other local VIPs and the members of a Russian delegation here to explore business opportunities in the City by the Bay. As far as he could tell, there was no other reason for him to be present except that the mayor apparently believed that the Russians tended to be impressed by the presence of high-ranking, beribboned officers in uniform.
His driver, Sergeant Tony Paganucci, nagged him about getting some lunch. Wasn't he supposed to try and meet up with his wife and Clarence Jackman and some other folks at Lou the Greek's? But Glitsky had run out of time. He absolutely had to be back at the Hall of Justice for a one o'clock press conference, and that was in twenty-five minutes.
Paganucci dropped him behind the Coroner's Office. Glitsky came into the Hall through the back door. Taking the stairs two at a time for his only exercise of the day, rather than the elevators where someone would want to talk to him about something, he breezed through the outer office unmolested.
In the office adjacent to his own, the deputy chief of administration, Bryce Jake Longoria, a white-haired, soft-spoken patrician, was in uniform sitting at his desk, working at his computer. Glitsky stopped in the doorway until Longoria looked up, smiled, gestured at his monitor. "Just trying to get some real work done, squeeze it in during lunchtime."
"I hear you. I'd try the same strategy if I had enough time to boot up my computer, which I don't." Glitsky took a step into the room. "But I do have a quick question for you if you can spare a minute."
"One. Shoot."
"Say you know the name of somebody who served on a jury fifteen, maybe twenty years ago. Do you know if there's any database you could access to identify the case?"
Longoria pondered a moment. "You don't know the date, or the name of the defendant?"
"No. Just that it was a murder trial, and they found the guy guilty."
A dry chuckle. "Well, if it was during the Pratt administration, you could just go and manually look up every one. There couldn't have been more than three or four, maybe less."
"Unfortunately, I think it was way back before her. Maybe late seven-ties, early eighties."
Longoria clucked. "The Golden Years." He took another moment, then shook his head. "They may still have the physical records downstairs"- the cavernous basement of the Hall, larger than a Costco, that held many millions of documents, shelf after shelf after shelf, floor to twelve-foot ceiling, from cases stretching back to the city's earlier days-"but first you'd have to find them by going through every one individually."