The Oath (43 page)

CityTalk

by Jeffrey Elliot

 

T
HE 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.

He grabbed at it—Hardy.

“What’s the word?” he asked.

On the following Tuesday morning, Hardy sat in the Police Commissioner’s Hearing Room, kitty-corner from Marlene Ash’s place at the podium. He raised his head and saw the clouds scudding by outside and thought them somehow fitting. It was going to be a cold spring, probably a cold summer. He was going to take a sabbatical for a couple of months after the school year ended, rent an RV with Frannie and the kids, drive all the way to Alaska and back, camping. He was going to fish and hike and take some time, because you never knew how much you were going to have. Things could end abruptly. He needed to think about that, to do something about it.

“I’m sorry. What was the question again?”

“The events that led to Lieutenant Glitsky’s presence at Mr. Bhutan’s apartment.”

“Okay.” He spoke directly to the grand jurors assembled before him. “As I’ve said and as Ms. Ash has explained, I’d been working independently but in a parallel arrangement with the district attorney on elements of the Portola homicides. I had obtained access to some documents that Mr. Markham had written, and following up on those, asked Lieutenant Glitsky to join me. In the course of the morning, we spoke to Mike Andreotti, the administrator at Portola, and then the Parnassus corporate counsel, Patrick Foley.

“Lieutenant Glitsky thought we had enough information to obtain a search warrant for Dr. Ross’s house—specifically, he wanted to confiscate his clothing and deliver it to the police lab to check for trace amounts of Mrs. Markham’s blood, which—as I understand it—allegedly did turn up on one of his suits. But Glitsky was unable to obtain a warrant with the information we had.

“At that time, Lieutenant Glitsky returned to his duties as chief of homicide. He couldn’t lawfully pursue Dr. Ross without more. I was on my own for the rest of the day. During our talk with Mr. Andreotti, I had conceived the notion that Dr. Ross may also have been at Portola and had a hand in the homicides on what we’d been calling Dr. Kensing’s list—terminal patients who had unexpectedly died there in the past year or so. Another suspect for those homicides was a nurse at Portola named Rajan Bhutan. Mr. Bhutan appeared to have been the only person with opportunities for these multiple deaths, and with a reason to have killed them—euthanasia. His wife died several years ago after a long illness, and inspectors had noted that for a nurse he appeared suspiciously oversensitive to suffering. The police had interviewed Bhutan, but the lieutenant and I agreed that I should do another interview. Perhaps I would be less threatening since I was not a police officer.

“In any event, I asked Glitsky if I could talk to him and he gave me his permission and Mr. Bhutan’s home address and phone number. I went to Bhutan’s house after work. As I hoped, he finally voiced suspicions about Dr. Ross. He also admitted to a very great fear that the police would try to blame him for the murders. It became clear that Dr. Ross had been at Portola quite frequently, and at least on several other dates when the homicides were suspected to have occurred.

“At that point, I thought it might be worthwhile to try and force Dr. Ross’s hand. Because of some other information we’d gathered, I suspected he had large amounts of cash on hand at his house. I enlisted Mr. Bhutan’s aid to pretend to blackmail him, to see if we could lure him out and make him come to us.”

Reliving it, Hardy now hung his head, ran a hand over his brow. “In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I should have simply tape-recorded Mr. Bhutan’s original phone call, which would probably have been enough for Judge Chomorro to sign a search warrant. But I didn’t do that. Instead, Mr. Bhutan made the call. When it seemed to work, I called Lieutenant Glitsky, who arrived there with Inspectors Bracco and Fisk within about a half hour.

“I want to add that both Lieutenant Glitsky and the other inspectors were upset with and vehemently opposed to my plan. The lieutenant actually predicted that Dr. Ross, if guilty, would become unpredictable and violent. He was very unwilling to involve a nonprofessional such as Mr. Bhutan in such a situation. Nevertheless, since events had already been set in motion, and since Mr. Bhutan was not only willing but eager to participate, we went ahead. There seemed no way to halt events without ruining whatever chance remained to force Ross’s hand.

“So Lieutenant Glitsky and I waited in the darkened bedroom, just off the kitchen, while Inspectors Bracco and Fisk were stationed in their car around the corner with instructions to come running when the lights went on and off.”

He shrugged miserably. “The plan seemed reasonable and not excessively risky. But I did not contemplate that Dr. Ross would act so quickly. In fact, had Mr. Bhutan not found a way to mention the gun out loud without giving away our presence, and had Lieutenant Glitsky not acted so quickly, though at great cost to himself, Mr. Bhutan might have been killed.”

A week later, after hours, coming out of a client conference in the solarium in Freeman’s office, Hardy was surprised by the appearance of Harlen Fisk, waiting in an awkward stance by Phyllis’s receptionist station. The chubby, fresh-faced inspector looked not much older than twenty. He seemed uncomfortable, nearly starting at the sight of Hardy, then bustling over to shake his hand.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he said, after they’d gone up to Hardy’s office, “that I’m going to be leaving the department. I’m really not cut out to be a cop, not the way Darrel is anyway, or the lieutenant. I don’t know if you heard, but Darrel’s starting over, in a uniform again, with motorcycles. My aunt’s offered to find me something in her office, but I’m not going to go that way. People seem to resent it somehow.”

“That’s a good call,” Hardy said.

“Anyway, I’ve got some friends with venture capital and they think I’d be valuable to them in some way. I’d like to give something like that a go. Be in business for myself. Be myself, in fact. You know what I mean.”

Hardy, with no idea in the world why Fisk was telling him any of this, answered with a neutral smile. “Always a good idea. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Well, you know,” Fisk sighed, “I had hoped that I’d be able to find something on the car that killed Mr. Markham. I know people always were laughing at me, but I really thought for sure there’d be some connection, and I’d show them. But you were the one person who took me seriously, who listened, took a look at my Dodge Dart list, even asked for a copy. I just wanted to let you know I appreciated it.”

The kid was going to be a great politician, Hardy thought. Every connection was a chance to make a friend, make an impression, trade a favor. “I thought it might lead somewhere itself, Harlen.”

“Well, that’s the last thing. I wanted you to know that it didn’t. I checked out every one of the twenty-three cars in the city. There were really only twenty. Three were nowhere to be found. I just thought you’d want to know how it ended.”

“I appreciate it,” Hardy said. “Your new company needs a lawyer, look me up.”

“You do business law, too?”

“Sometimes. I’m not proud.”

“Okay, well…” Fisk stuck out his hand. “Nice to have worked with you.” At the door, he turned back one more time. “Nobody blames you, you know. In case you thought they did.”

The trail led Hardy to one of the housing projects, apartment house boxes in the Western Addition—three-story blocks of concrete and stucco, once bright and now the color of piss where the graffiti didn’t cover it. As he expected, nobody knew nothin’.

But he knew that 1921 Elsi Court, apartment 2D, was the last known address for Luz Lopez, who had been the registered owner of one of Fisk’s missing three Dodge Darts. Finally, he convinced one of the neighbor women that he wasn’t a cop, that he was in fact with the insurance company and was trying to locate Luz so that he could send her some money. About her child.

She had moved away, the neighbor didn’t know where. One morning, maybe three weeks ago, she had just left early and never come back. Though the neighbor thought she had worked at the Osaka Hotel for years. Maybe they had a forwarding address for her.

The car? Yes, it was green. The bumper sticker said, “FINATA.”

Hardy did some research on the Net. FINATA had been an agricultural reform movement in El Salvador, where ten percent of the population owned ninety percent of the land. About ten years before, FINATA had been a radical government plan for redistributing the wealth in that country, but its supporters had mostly been killed or driven out.

She’d come here with her son, he reasoned. And then Parnassus had killed him. Markham, as the spokesman for the company, had taken the public responsibility for the boy’s death, though Hardy knew it had been Ross.

But to Luz Lopez, Markham had killed her boy.

Powerless, poverty-stricken, and alien, she probably felt she had no recourse to the law. The law would never touch such a powerful man. But she could avenge her baby’s death herself. She could run over the greedy, unfeeling, uncaring, smiling bastard.

It was four o’clock, a Saturday afternoon, the second day of June. Outside, the sun shone brightly and a cold north wind blew, but it was warm inside the Shamrock, where Hardy was hosting a private party. The bar was packed to capacity with city workers, cops, lawyers, judges, reporters, assorted well-wishers and their children.

They’d pulled in sawhorses from the back and laid plywood across them to make a long table down the center of the room. There were going to be a few minutes of presents and testimonials, then no agenda except to enjoy. The two guys in wheelchairs were at the head of the table, back by the sofas. Jeff Elliot’s was the first gift and he banged on his glass to get the place quieted down. McGuire turned off the jukebox right in the middle of the song Hardy had bought for the occasion—it was the only disco song on the box, Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.”

“I think this is only appropriate,” Elliot said, handing the flat package across the table.

“What is this?” Glitsky asked.

“It’s the page proof of the ‘CityTalk’ column I was in the middle of writing when it looked good that you were going to die. It’s a pack of lies.”

“I wasn’t ever going to die. I was just resting. It was a fatiguing case.”

“Well, you had a lot of us fooled then.”

At the shouted requests, Glitsky held the framed page up for the amusement of the crowd and everyone broke into applause.

Hardy, Frannie, and Treya sat around the far end of the table. “The wheelchair is a bit much, don’t you think?” Hardy asked. “He was walking fine yesterday at your place.”

“He’s not supposed to exert himself for another few weeks,” Frannie said.