Free Glitsky 01 - Certain Justice, A by John Lescroart Page A

sharpened – a red anger flared. Loretta was looking for a toehold to satisfy her curiosity and he wasn't going to help her out. 'You thought you'd just call and catch up?'
    This time the hesitation was more pronounced. 'You're still mad at me? After all these years?'
    'I'm not mad at you at all, Loretta.'
    'At what I did, I mean?'
    'I'm still not sure I know what you did, or why you did it. But I can't say it's been a big deal the last, oh, couple of decades or so. I have a family ...' His voice was winding down.
    'I was sorry to hear about your wife ...'
    Glitsky's knuckles had stiffened around the telephone and he opened and closed his fingers. One of his inspectors, Carl Griffin, knocked on his doorjamb and got waved away. 'I just suddenly wanted to hear your voice, Abe. See if you were all right, how you were doing. Is that so odd?'
    No answer.
    He heard her let out a breath. 'All right, Abe. I'm sorry to have bothered you.'
    She was hanging up. He hadn't meant to cut her off. He should have...
    'Loretta!'
    But the connection was gone.
     

17
     
    Kevin Shea did not want to think about the jump he had taken to the roof next door. It looked maybe eight feet across but it felt like twenty – he would have to go back and measure it someday. If his life ever became normal again. Sure. He
really
didn't want to think about how far
down
it was. Far enough.
    Fortunately the roof was flat and, like his own, had a low ledge. After he had landed, rolling over on his bruised arm and aching ribs, he made his way back to the ledge and lay down against it in the wide shady lane made by the early-morning sun. He heard the police come up to his roof next door, the one he had just abandoned. He heard them go down again.
    After an endless ten minutes he had risked a glance over there. Okay, they were really gone. It seemed safe. Relatively.
    The door that poked up through the roof was unlocked, and Shea limped his way down the four flights of stairs, seeing no one. On Green Street the police cars had pulled out. The curb was empty. He turned right and started walking, as normally as he could, away from his building.
     
    Shea had grown up in suburban Houston, attended Rice University, majoring in economics, intending to get into some kind of management role in his father's company.
    His mother's maiden name was Janine Robitaille, of the New Orleans Robitailles. She was a statuesque southern belle who favored beehive hairdos long after they were out of style. But on her, somehow, the hairstyle never looked dated – those piles of her dark hair lifted away from the creamy cameo of her face, framing its near-flawless lines, making her always appear taller than her husband Daniel.
    His father – Daniel Shea – was half-owner, along with Fred Bronin, of Flexitech, a company that manufactured athletic accessories and supplies – batting and golf gloves, wristbands, orthopedic tensors, hard little rubber balls ('Flexits') that you held in your hand and squeezed to strengthen your grip.
    When Kevin was twenty-two and just out of college, Daniel had come home early one afternoon after an extended sales trip to find his beautiful wife Janine in bed with his best friend and partner Fred Bronin.
    Being a good ol' boy, Daniel's reaction perhaps should have been to take up the nearest gun and shoot them both, but he fooled them. Kevin's father had always had a streak of insecurity, a tendency to melancholy, and though he had raised a good family (two boys and a girl) and become, after a fashion, successful, he never quite believed in the worth of anything he accomplished, that it had any real meaning. And the double betrayal of a wife and best friend rocked him – so he turned the gun on himself instead.
    In the aftermath, the Sheas' world and everything in it fell apart. Janine and Fred Bronin did not get married and live happily ever after. They had a bitter legal and personal battle over Flexitech, which Fred eventually lost because he had a