Free Blood Ties by Nicholas Guild Page A

addenda to otherwise exemplary fitness reports.
    Roland slid his arms into the sleeves of his uniform coat and locked the car. Now he had to make a ticklish decision. All the way from Treasure Island, where, even after the naval base had been decommissioned, the Navy still maintained a nondescript field office, he had been weighing his choices, but now he had to come down one way or the other. He was here to make a complaint, yet he had no jurisdiction in the matter and he had no desire to antagonize the SFPD.
    God knows he didn’t want to be here, but Tregear had phoned him at home at seven-fifteen that morning and insisted.
    â€œTake care of it, Hal,” he had said. “I have enough grief with you guys. I don’t need SF Homicide added in. I don’t know what they want with me, but you get them off my back.”
    And, since Tregear himself had all kinds of ways of punishing innocent lieutenant commanders up for promotion, Roland had decided the discreet and sensible thing to do was to have a word with the local law. He was less afraid of them.
    So whom should he talk to? Where would that word do the least harm and still satisfy Tregear?
    How would he, Hal Roland, USN, feel if the SFPD came to him on similar business? The natural thing for them to do would be to see the shift commander, the man in charge. But if then the shift commander came and unloaded it all on him, he would resent that. If there was a problem with one of the Shore Patrolmen, it was more diplomatic to take it up with the man’s immediate superior.
    So the smart thing to do, the tactful and career-protecting thing, was to proceed laterally and drop in on the offending officer’s lieutenant.
    Homicide was on the third floor.
    You got off the elevator and you walked down a corridor that was like the Steinhart Aquarium. There were rooms on either side, like fish tanks, into which you could peer through huge plate glass windows—even at this hour of the morning there were people in there, hopeless-looking and stranded, stuck to their chairs like mollusks to a rock.
    The duty room was a larger, less tidy version of the one on Treasure Island, furnished more or less at random with desks and metal chairs, a few computer terminals and a coffeemaker on its own wooden table near the door to the lieutenant’s office. It had to be the lieutenant’s office because that was what was written on the door— LIEUTENANT .
    â€œIs he free?” Roland asked, pointing to the door and addressing his question to any one of the five men who happened to be lounging around the room. They looked him over, or rather his uniform, as if he had arrived in a space suit. “Is he in his office?”
    â€œYeah, he’s in there. Do you have an appointment?”
    â€œAre you his social secretary?”
    The man leaned back in his chair and allowed himself a few syllables of good-natured laughter. He was in his forties, bald with a small black mustache that ran over his upper lip like a caterpillar. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his shirt, which was rolled up over thick forearms, was a pale mint green. There was nothing on his desk except a telephone, a newspaper and a black straw hat with a wide, colorful band. The man could have been a bartender or a racing tout as easily as a cop. Roland didn’t like him.
    â€œYeah, Captain. I’m his social secretary. Go on in. He’ll be glad to see you.”
    With a wave of his arm he dismissed Roland from existence.
    Roland tapped twice on the frosted glass and opened the door.
    â€œAnd who might you be?”
    Roland took his identity card from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the desk. The lieutenant picked it up and read it carefully, glanced at the back, which was blank, and put it back down. He didn’t return it. He kept it right there on his blotter, as if he were considering adding it to his collection.
    Then he looked up at Roland, then back down at the