Free Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A by John Lescroart

that racism was all around him – the enlightened white workers here in the Hall always referring to black people as
Canadians
, the black parents at his boys' schools who wouldn't let their kids play with white children.
    On the surface everything was working. People were generally polite, proper, friendly. Now the thing that had become unfashionable – and in San Francisco the worst crime was to be unhip – was acknowledging the depth of the problem. Race? Please, didn't we do all that in the sixties? Better to pretend it wasn't really there. Certainly it wasn't an issue in San Francisco. Everybody accepted everybody else nowadays. This was the nineties. We solved all that stuff years ago. Get real.
    And then, one sunny summer evening, a black man named Arthur Wade gets lynched.
    And that brought him to the last cause of his ice crunching – the one person who was calling the infection systemic, Philip Mohandas, was abandoning any hope for understanding because he was taking it too damn far. There were so many other things, constructive things, he could do. He could be responsible. He could call for some restraint. Dialogue.
    Instead, because Mohandas knew that nobody was going to arrest an African-American leader in the coming days for what amounted to sticks and stones, he would be
excused for
not doing the right thing. He had cause, he was a victim of his own rage. Old-fashioned laws didn't matter if you had a good enough reason. Ask the Menendez boys.
    What most got to Glitsky was when the leaders who claimed to represent all the black people caved in to that temptation and then those failures were cited by white people as a justification – hell, the white side of Glitsky even felt it himself – for distrusting legitimate black motives and aspirations.
    And now Mohandas was clearly breaking the law, openly calling for vigilantism, being allowed – even encouraged – to rant and vent to his heart's content. And his presence and rhetoric were raising the odds.
    Glitsky felt it made no sense to let him inflame the situation but no one seemed to be inclined to try and stop it. Glitsky thought he wouldn't mind a shot at it – he had a few ideas that might get Mohandas's attention – but it wasn't his job. His job was homicide. All this other political crap was just that – crap.
    But such sensible thoughts weren't doing his mood any good. He continued to crunch his ice, his eyes fixed ahead of him.
    The telephone rang in his office. His receptionist being the same person who guarded his door – nobody – he picked the phone up with a more than usually unpleasant, 'Glitsky. Homicide.'
    A pause, an almost inaudible sigh. 'Abe Glitsky.' He might have imagined it, but there was a sense of relief in the words, as though at great personal expense she'd broken through some psychic barrier. He recognized the voice instantly.
    'Loretta...?'
    'One word and you sound exactly the same.'
    Glitsky, adrenaline still running, answered her words. 'No,' he said, 'I'm pretty different. You'd be surprised.' It sounded more hostile than he felt but the words were out, unchecked, and maybe some truth ...
    'Well, of course.' That deep throaty laugh. 'We're all different, Abe, we've all changed. But we're all still the same, too, deep down.'
    This was as strange an opening as he could have imagined, bantering with his ex-lover who was now a United States senator as though they'd seen each other, perhaps intimately, a couple of days before.
    Grabbing the styrofoam cup, a quarter inch of ice water, he drank it for time to get his bearings, then asked what he could do for her. This, he figured, had to be about Elaine.
    'I was just in the mayor's office,' she said. 'When he mentioned ... I mean, there aren't many Abe Glitskys ...'
    'I'm in the phone book, Loretta, always have been.' She seemed to hesitate, then went on as though he hadn't responded. 'But when Conrad brought you up... he said you were a lieutenant.'
    Suddenly Glitsky's edge