Past Tense

by Stephen Greenleaf

  It took me a while to track Wally down. When I did, he agreed to meet for an early lunch. Since he was working the Marina that morning, we rendezvoused at Judy’s.

  Wally was late. Cops are always late, even to most emergencies, which I suppose is why he didn’t apologize when he got there and I didn’t mention the slur.

  I stood and shook his hand. He was a round man with a round face and a round body; even his nose and chin and earlobes were spherical. His hand felt like a water balloon when we shook, squishy and formless and silly. Sometime since the last doubleheader we’d attended, Wally had slipped past his prime. He probably thought the same of me.

  When the waitress came, we ordered coffee and omelettes. “Hell of a thing,” Wally began, singing the most popular tune on the hit parade.

  “Yeah.”

  “He hire you to help Hattie get him off?”

  I shook my head. “I’m on my own. Me and a few of his friends.”

  “Yeah. Friends. Charley always had lots of friends.” He made it sound like having lots of lice.

  “I’m wondering what might have made him do it,” I began.

  “Me, too,” Wally said.

  “You got nothing on it at all?”

  Wally shook his head. “I asked around. No one knows nothing about this Wints guy.”

  “Then let’s back up. Why’d Charley quit the force?”

  Wally shook his head again. “Came out of nowhere. He walks into Chief Daniels’s office last Thursday, plunks down his piece and his shield, and tells Daniels he’s through.”

  “No reason?”

  “No reason. None of the guys knew till he’d cleaned out his locker and was gone for good.”

  “What was he working on?”

  “Nothing special that I could find out. I mean when you called, I figured you’d ask me, but I got to say there was nothing big on the board. Fact is, some of the guys told me Charley seemed to be slacking off lately.”

  “Charley? Slacking off?”

  Wally smiled. “I know. Sounds crazy. Maybe they meant he was only working nine to nine instead of nine to midnight.”

  “Slacking off how?”

  “Not around the station that much. Not putting up many numbers. Not the primary on anything hot. Not even second-guessing the rest of the squad, the way he always did.”

  “Any reason for that they could see?”

  “Not that I could find.”

  “Did the Wints trial have anything to do with an active police matter?”

  Wally waited for the waitress to deliver the omelettes, then sampled the fare before he answered. “There’s no open file in that name, so I’d say it wasn’t. Unless it was a special project; then I wouldn’t be able to get at it.”

  “You mean a sting of some kind?”

  “Or a task force project. Or a covert operation. Or an IAD investigation.”

  “If it was a special project, Charley wouldn’t know about it either, would he?”

  Wally shook his head. “Charley knew everything. I think he’s got the place bugged.” His laugh was brisk and uneasy; his brow bore a film of sweat. I wondered if Wally had fears he was the object of a special project himself.

  “Charley might have been in on it,” he added around a bite of Denver omelette after picking out the peppers. “The special project, I mean.”

  “If he was, would anyone else know about it?”

  “Hell, no. No one down the chain of command, I mean. With Charley, information only traveled one way—in, not out.” He looked up from the omelette. “Except you. I never could figure why he fed you so much of our product. I never saw what was in it for him.”

  “Maybe justice,” I said, and watched while Wally shook his head and swore.

  “Fucking peppers. Only ones who think it’s about justice are the civilians.”

  “If it’s not about justice, then what is it about?” I asked, just to keep things rolling or maybe just to give time for my omelette to cool.

  Wally swallowed. “Control.”

  “How so?”

  “Our job is to put enough of the swill away to keep control of the places that count. The rest of it is just politics. Some days politics says bust the whores; some days it says bust the dopers; some days the homeless; some days the street artists. Don’t matter to us what we do, as long as we got the time and talent to keep control of what counts.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Where we live and where we work. The rest of it don’t mean shit.”

  I let his essay evaporate before it did any more damage to my ideals. “Was Charley into anything political recently? Did politics tell him to bust anyone in particular?”

  Wally thought through another bite of omelette, then shook his head. “Don’t think so. Like I said, the guys claim he was dogging it for some reason.”

  “How about in the department in general? Any rumors of something heavy going down in Internal Affairs?”

  Wally put down his fork. “Only thing with priority as far as I know is that cop killing in Herman Plaza last week. But that’s not IA, that’s just a priority homicide—double shifts and the usual red-ball bullshit when one of the blue goes down. But I’m just a second grade in the North Station. I’d be the last to know about IAD or anything else that was sensitive.”

  I switched focus. “Have you seen Charley much lately? Personally, I mean.”

  “Only a few times in the last year—dinner at Capp’s a couple of months ago; lunch in the Mission some months before that. Why?”

  “Was he acting differently? Nervous? Frightened? Anything?”

  “Shit. Only time I ever seen Sleet frightened was when his wife was sick, and that was because he was afraid he couldn’t live without her. For a while, I thought he was right.”

  I knew what he was talking about. After Charley’s wife, Flora, had died, he’d crawled into a bourbon bottle for a year, incommunicado and inconsolable, as bereft as anyone I’d ever seen. But he’d climbed out, eventually, on his own, as usual, without the aid of psychotherapy or 12 Steps or even my friendship. Until now, I’d never felt as helpless as I had back in those days, watching him founder, knowing he wouldn’t let me help him, hoping that he’d come around before it killed him or cost him his job, which in Charley’s case would have been more fatal than cirrhosis.

  “I hear he’s got a girlfriend,” I said abruptly, hoping to jar something loose.

  “You mean that whore he visits down on Turk Street?”

  I didn’t know about the whore, but she didn’t fit with Ruthie’s peek at Kuleto’s. “Someone new.”

  “Don’t know anything about it. I hope so, for his sake. A good woman can turn it all around.”

  It sounded like Wally had gotten lucky himself.

  I finished my coffee and looked up. “Is there anything at all you can tell me about this, Wally?”

  He shook his head. “I thought about it a lot, and you know I owe him, but I don’t know what the hell would have made him do something like that. I mean if he wanted to take someone out, there’s cleaner ways to do it, and Charley knew them all.”

  “Jake says it would help if we knew someone down at Bruno who had a mad-on for Charley in a big way. Might convince the judge to set bail.”

  Wally nodded. “I’ll check it out.”

  “And ask around some more. Especially the guys at the Central Station.”

  “Sure. Doubt if I get any answers, though. Lots of the guys got a grin when they heard Charley quit the department. Not all, but lots.”

  “Before this is over, I’m going to cram that grin down their fucking throats.” My vehemence caused the woman at the next table to shake her head. I didn’t blame her. Given the circumstances, the threat sounded juvenile even to me.

  CHAPTER

  6

  IF YOU WANT TO FIND A LAWYER WHO DOESN’T WANT TO BE found, you’ve got to catch him in his nest. In this case, it was a she, not a he, and her nest wasn’t a Financial District high-rise w
ith a view to the end of the earth, it was in a nicely refurbished Victorian on Webster Street a block north of Union, with a view of St. Vincent de Paul.

  If you need biographical information on a lawyer, you turn to Martindale-Hubble, the national legal directory. My set is a year out of date, since I get it gratis from my friend Russell Jorgensen when his firm receives the new edition, but in this case obsolescence didn’t matter—Mindy Cartson was listed in the San Francisco section.

  The entry told me that she was thirty-six, she’d gone to Mills, then on to Golden Gate, she’d been an editor of the law review and an intern at the Justice Department, then clerked a year for a federal district judge. She specialized in personal injuries and employment discrimination claims, with some domestic relations work on the side. She’d coauthored a CEB book on termination damages and was a member of a bar committee on discovery reforms. Based on her Martindale entry and her office address, I guessed she was one of the few who’d actually become the kind of lawyer they had planned to be on the day they entered law school.

  The carved wooden sign on the door at the top of the stairs that carried me up from the sidewalk listed Mindy Cartson, Attorney-at-Law, a Professional Corporation, along with four other attorneys whose form of business association was unclear—I guessed they were sole practitioners who shared space and staff. The other occupants of the building included a massage therapist, a baseball card trader, and a swimsuit boutique. I was tempted to stop in and see if I could afford an original Duke Snider now that the Duke was a self-confessed tax evader, but somehow I knew I still couldn’t.

  A receptionist was waiting at a desk just inside the door. When I told her I was there to see Ms. Cartson, she asked if I had an appointment.

  I shook my head. “I was hoping she’d see me as a walkin since my situation is so … horrible.”

  She gave me the once-over, then wrinkled her nose with skepticism—she’d seen horrible before; I wasn’t it.

  “What exactly is your situation, Mr. …?”

  “Tanner. And it’s not me, it’s my wife. She’s weeks away from graduating from pharmacy school at Stanford and she got run down by a pizza guy three nights ago. They say she’ll live, but she won’t …” I swore. “They ought to do something about those maniacs,” I snarled in a nasty conclusion.

  It was about as low as I’d ever sunk; I had to keep Charley in the forefront of my mind in order to throttle an apology. For her part, the receptionist didn’t fully believe me, but she couldn’t afford to turn me away given the potential magnitude of my pseudo wife’s pseudo damages, so she gestured toward a director’s chair near the window. “Please have a seat. I’ll see if Ms. Cartson has time for you.” She walked through a door and yanked it closed behind her.

  Time doubled back on itself as though craning a second draft. I listened to a secretary type digits onto a disk; I listened to a printer laser forth a page; I listened to a fax print out an electric message—Mindy was doing well enough to afford the latest toys. In my day, all it took to practice law was a Correcting Selectric and a Xerox machine on lease.

  The receptionist came back wearing the dubious frown she’d left with. “She only has ten minutes. If she feels you have a cause of action, you’ll have to remain for an intake interview.”

  I told her that would be fine. She asked me to follow her. We went through the door and down the hall. “Mindy, this is Mr. Tanner. He’s promised to be brief.”

  The receptionist looked at me one last time to make sure I had the message, then made space for me to enter her boss’s domain. “Ten minutes,” she repeated at my back; I think the reminder was as much for Mindy as for me.

  The office was small and neat and unpretentious, with the usual files and law books and computer terminals on the desk and tables, the usual diplomas and admission certificates on the walls, the usual discount Danish furniture arranged around the room. What was unusual was the playpen in the corner with a baby in it. The baby was gurgling and tugging on its toes. I assumed it wasn’t a client.

  I smiled. “I’ve got one of those myself,” I said, then wished I hadn’t. “Sort of.”

  Mindy Cartson frowned. “How do you ‘sort of’ have a baby?”

  “I have one, but I’m not raising it.”

  “Divorce?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a long story.”

  “It would have to be. But I only have time for one story this afternoon and I’d like it to be the one about your wife, the pharmacy student.”

  “I don’t have a wife,” I said.

  “But you told Jackie—”

  “I lied. I’m here because my best friend is in trouble.”

  She frowned, then ruffled through some papers on the desk before gathering them into a pile; at best I had half her attention. “I don’t have time for surrogate clients, I’m afraid. If your friend needs legal advice, have him make an appointment. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” She stood up and waited for me to depart, after a glance to see that the baby was well.

  Ms. Cartson was blond and cutish; a little too plump, a little too pug-nosed, a little too pugnacious, but cute all the same. Her hair was short and shaggy, her face full and frank, her body fluffy and marbled and Gapped in tan blouse, white cardigan, and gray slacks. If she’d been a boy, she’d have played outside linebacker. High school, not college or pro.

  Since she still seemed piqued by my confession, I hurried ahead with my story. “My name is Marsh Tanner. I’m a—”

  She looked away from the baby and back at me. “Private detective.”

  I was surprised. “Right.”

  “You get some nice press from time to time.”

  “Not enough to get me a table at Masa’s.”

  “Can you afford a table at Masa’s?”

  I shook my head.

  She smiled. “Neither can I, especially now that you’re not bringing me a pharmacist who’s been disabled by a deep pocket.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  She shrugged. “I’ll survive. What can I do for you? Some slimy divorce involving this friend of yours, I suppose. What’s his name?”

  Before I could set her straight, she dropped the papers she was holding and looked at me more intently. “Wait a minute. You’re here about Leonard Wints. The cop in the courtroom—you two work together sometimes.”

  I nodded. “Like I said. My best friend is in trouble.”

  Her expression hardened and her voice took on a sarcastic edge. “So you’re here to do what? Offer some sort of service to my client? Some inside info on the murderer? Selling your pal for a piece of silver?”

  “I said he was my friend, Ms. Cartson. I’m here to find out how Charley Sleet is connected to the Wints case.”

  “So you can get him off, I presume.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “At least you’re honest about it.” She turned back to her chair and sat down. “Even if I knew of a connection, why should I tell you?”

  “Because there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. It can’t prejudice your client for me to find out why Charley killed her father. From what I understand of her lawsuit, it puts your client and Charley on the same side.”

  “You don’t know that the murder has anything to do with my client.”

  “You’re right. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “There’s no connection at all?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you ask the Wints girl about it?”

  “Not specifically. And she’s not a girl, she’s a woman. She was as stunned as anyone by what happened. If she knew this Sleet person, I’m sure she would have said something.”

  “I’d like to talk to her.”

  She shook her head. “She’s in seclusion.”

  “Why?”

  “Her father was murdered.”

  “She was suing him for everything he had. Seclusion seems an odd response.”

  She shrugged. “He was nevertheless her father. Emotions
are complex in cases such as this.”

  “Cases such as what, exactly?”

  She hesitated, then relented. “It’s a matter of record at this point, I suppose. We allege that Leonard Wints engaged in a pattern of abusive sexual relations with his daughter Jillian over a period of several years when Jillian was a child, a course of conduct so repellent that Jillian repressed all knowledge of it until she was guided out of the darkness by her therapist.”

  “Recovered memory.”

  “Yes.” She caught my look. “I take it you’re one of those who’ve read some biased and simplistic research on the subject and have decided that daddies never abuse their daughters no matter what the little darlings say.”

  I shook my head. “I know sexual abuse exists, but I have to admit I get skeptical when the first one to suggest abuse is a therapist with an agenda and when the absence of memory of the event is considered proof of the fact it occurred. The last part gets to sound a little too much like Alice in Wonderland.”

  Mindy Cartson reddened. “This is not that sort of case, not that it’s any of your business. No one has an agenda in this matter except a desire to reclaim a badly damaged life. I think you should leave now, Mr. Tanner. I don’t think it’s in the best interest of my client for me to discuss this any further with you.”

  I smiled my most maddening smile. “You’re a little defensive, aren’t you, Counselor?”

  Her face mottled with rage. “I’m not defensive at all. I believe something as vile as incest is often suppressed, both consciously and unconsciously, by the victim, and I am certain that my client did in fact suffer from such mistreatment. If necessary for full recompense, we will pursue our action against her father’s estate.” She walked to my side of the desk. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other matters to attend to.”