Past Tense

by Stephen Greenleaf

  When I asked him about it, he swore sarcastically. “The woman makes her living telling people to leave their husbands, quit their jobs, call the cops on their fathers, and cut themselves off from their families. In other words, she pisses people off. When people get pissed off, some of them piss back; she’s lucky no one’s planted a bomb.”

  The word summoned images of Oklahoma City, the way it would for anyone. I put them out of my mind, though not without difficulty. I asked Jamette if he’d come up with a list of suspects.

  “How could I? She wouldn’t give me her client roster. She wouldn’t give me shit,” he expanded grumpily.

  “Sounds like she’s not all that worried about it.”

  “She’s worried enough to hire private security to watch the place all night. Worried enough to pay five large for a home alarm system and a bunch of yard lights at the house on Baker Street. Worried enough to get a permit to carry a piece.”

  Suddenly I took the situation more seriously. “What kind of threats were they? How were they delivered?”

  “Phone, is all I know.”

  “Traceable?”

  “Booth by Union Square. Hundred people a day use that thing. When it’s working.”

  “No leads at all?”

  “Plenty. But they’re all inside her head.” Jamette paused, then went on. “You ask me, I think she knows who did it. Know something else? I think she wants him to make a try for her. I think she wants to take him out.”

  “Personally? With her weapon?”

  “With whatever. Last time I talked to her she was real relaxed about it. I think she’s ready to waste his ass.”

  When I tried to imagine who that someone might be, the only name I could come up with was Kirby Allison of the Corrected Memory Institute.

  “How long ago was the last threat?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Where do things stand now?”

  “I call her once in a while to let her know I’m still on it, but what I’m really doing is waiting for it to happen again.”

  “You mean you want him to try to make good.”

  “Hey. Don’t act like I’m some sort of sadist here; I got nothing else to work with. She knows it but she won’t do nothing about it. She calls it ethics; I call it dumb-ass. But what can I do? No court’s gonna order her to talk to me, that’s for sure. So is that it, Tanner?” he concluded gruffly. “I got some statements to take.”

  “What does the guy want Derwinski to do?”

  “Hard to say. Says he’s going to kill her. Perforate her privates.”

  “For something she’s already done?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “This the first time something like this has happened to her?”

  “Says it happens all the time. But this is the first one she took serious.”

  “Charley Sleet involved in any way?”

  “You mean as Investigating Officer? Naw. We’re working this out of Northside; Charley only comes out here to play cards.” He paused. “Wait a minute. I got a bell ringing all of a sudden. This is the shrink who was in court that day. Right? When Charley took out the civilian.”

  “She’s the one,” I agreed. “Know any connection?”

  “Naw. Me and Sleet weren’t all that tight, tell you the truth. I think he thought I was dirty.”

  “Are you?”

  “Fuck you. I’m so clean you could use my piss as perfume.”

  I laughed. “Any chance Charley was the one who threatened the Derwinski woman?”

  “Doesn’t sound like him, but what do I know? Damnedest guys turn out to be psychos.”

  “Anyone in Northside have anything cogent to say when they heard Charley got busted?”

  “Cogent, huh? Not really. Someone said he was glad when any Internal Affairs guy went down, but Sleet ain’t been IA for a long time.”

  “Any word why Charley quit the department?”

  “Naw. These days you don’t shit on the guys that quit, you pity the fucks who stay on. Most of the guys been talking about the Walters case anyhow.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Clifton Walters. Shield that got smacked in the plaza last week.”

  “What’s the word on it?”

  “Official word is that the department is devoting all its resources to finding the perp. Unofficial word is that Walters was a rogue with a crack habit and the department is better without him. Me, I don’t see it that way.”

  “How do you see it?”

  “He got set up. Someone he trusted lured him down there, then blew him away when he wasn’t looking.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Could be anyone. Walters worked the streets for thirty years. Had a lot of friends; had a lot of enemies.”

  I thanked Jamette for his time and left a message with him to have Hilton call me when he got in. My next call was to the Chronicle. Joyce Yates, the Chron’s longtime courthouse reporter, came on the line a minute later.

  “Yates.”

  “Joyce, this is Marsh Tanner. Maybe you remember me from the Arundel case.”

  “The PI Yeah. How you doing?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Still pissed that I didn’t get a shot at O.J.”

  “Literally or figuratively?”

  She laughed. “Both. What can I do for you, Marsh?”

  “Talk about Charley Sleet.”

  “Yeah. Jesus. That was one for my memoirs, let me tell you.”

  “He do or say anything at all that gave a hint of why the hell he did it, Joyce?”

  “Naw. Didn’t say … wait. He said, ‘Two for one.’ That’s what it was. See, I noticed him when he stood up. He got this weird smile on his face and said, ‘Two for one.’ Then he pulled his weapon and started shooting. I didn’t have a chance to do shit.” She paused. “At least that’s what I tell myself.” Her guilt sizzled through the line like a power surge.

  “Two for one what?” I asked.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Anything else? Anything at all?”

  “Sorry, Marsh. I hope to hell he gets out of this, but right now it’s hard to see how. On the other hand, there’s O.J.”

  I’d had more than my fill of O.J. “Did you dig into that recovered memory case very deeply, Joyce?”

  “Not really. Just there to see how it turned out, basically. There’s lots of action on that front these days. A bit of a reaction has set in, what with the case up in Napa and some TV documentary stuff that made some of these therapists look like quacks. My editor thought we should monitor the active cases in the area and report how they went.”

  “How do you think this one was going?”

  “Looked to me like the judge was leaning toward the defense.”

  I thanked Joyce for the information and punched up Jake Hattie’s number.

  “I’m getting nowhere with this thing, Jake,” I confessed when the lawyer came on the line. “I can’t link Charley to anything that was going down in that courtroom.”

  “Neither can I,” Jake said, without his usual gusto.

  “You got any brilliant suggestions what I should do next?”

  “Not really. Guess I’ll have to employ the last resort.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jury nullification.”

  “You mean like Johnnie Cochran did in—”

  “Hell, I was getting my juries to ignore the law when Johnnie was just a bulge in his daddy’s pants.”

  “I’d still like you to lean on your client if you get the chance. It would help a lot to know what Charley thought he was doing in there.”

  Jake laughed. “That’s going to be tough to do.”

  “Why?”

  “He won’t see me. Has the boys at the door primed to keep me out.”

  “What about his right to counsel?”

  “At this point it looks a lot like he’s waiving it.”

  “This is life and death, Jake, goddamnit. You need to take it m
ore seriously.”

  “It’s his life and his death, Tanner. I’m taking them as seriously as he’ll let me.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  IN SOME CASES, THE SCENE OF THE CRIME IS EVERYTHING—physical evidence both tells the tale and provides proof for conviction. Since I don’t do forensics, at such times my job is peripheral. The crime lab provides the who; at most I can sometimes provide the why.

  In other cases, the crime scene is irrelevant—the only thing it has to offer is the fact of death. When I work such a case on behalf of a suspect, part of the job is to come up with everything necessary for the conviction of someone else—motive, means, and opportunity that link that other someone to the homicide. In many cases, none of those elements can be found at the place where the killing occurred.

  There is a third kind of crime, however, where the crime scene yields nothing solid—no prints, no hair, no fibers, no DNA, no blood—but it nevertheless contains something useful. That something is often insubstantial—an aura, an ether, a nimbus, an invisible indication of what transpired that lingers in the atmosphere and transmits a host of messages that become distinct only if you prepare yourself to receive them. I’m normally without mystical inclinations, but I’ve seen more than one case in which the crime scene told all without really telling anything.

  I got to the Pacific Bell building that had been converted into a courthouse just before five. The directory informed me that Judge Meltonian held forth on the sixth floor. The elevator got me there nonstop.

  Most of the rooms were empty of judge and jury, including the one Glen Bittles attended in his capacity as clerk. Luckily, Peanut was still behind his desk in the well of the court, reassembling some documentary evidence the attorneys had laid waste to earlier in the day.

  When he saw me in the doorway, he waved. I joined him at his station below the bench. “I was wondering if you could tell me where Charley was when it happened,” I said.

  “Sure. How’s he doing?” Glen asked as he led me to Department 5 down the hall, a smaller chamber than the one we’d just been in, its makeshift furnishings clean and bright and functional but lacking the faded grandeur of the decrepit City Hall. The ambience was more fitting for a church social than a court of law.

  “Haven’t talked to him,” I said.

  “He’s clamming up, huh?”

  “So far. At least with me.”

  Glen muttered a curse at Charley’s nonsense, then pointed to a chair at the rear of the courtroom just to the left of the center aisle. “Way I heard it, Sleet was sitting about here. This chair or that one, I’m not sure. Then all of a sudden he stood up, pulled his piece and fired, and fired again, then wrestled with some guy nobody knows, then tossed the piece on the floor and lay down by that bookcase and waited for them to come get him.”

  “How about the other seats? Were they full?”

  “Pretty near, from what I understand. Can’t swear every single chair had an ass in it, though.”

  “Where was Leonard Wints?”

  Peanut pointed to the defense table. “Andy Potter was sitting closest to the aisle, I think; Wints was in the middle and a paralegal or some such was on the other side.”

  “How about the plaintiff? Where was she?”

  He pointed to a chair at the table that was nearest the jury. “The Cartson woman was next to her. Just the two of them.”

  “How about Danielle Derwinski? The expert for the plaintiff? Any idea where she was sitting?”

  Peanut shook his head. “Don’t know anything about her.” He looked at his watch. “You need anything else, Marsh? I got to run for my bus. I miss this one, the next is full of people babbling about the fucking Internet.”

  I thanked Glen for his time and he left the room in a hurry. After a lengthy survey of the surroundings, I sat in a chair in the jury box and closed my eyes and imagined the scene as Peanut had described it.

  I could see it easily enough, the players and their roles in the drama. What I couldn’t accommodate was the mind of Charley Sleet. What I couldn’t come close to was a rationale that let him believe that what he was doing was right. The man had devoted his life to law enforcement, to following the rules, to going by the book even to the extent of investigating malfeasance by his fellow cops. Now he’d become a vigilante. As his best friend, I should have some idea of why it had happened, but I didn’t have a clue.

  I opened my eyes and surveyed the room once more, then went through the bar of the court and inspected more closely. What I was looking for were bullet holes. What I found was a single perforation in the wall above and to the left of the witness stand at slightly above eye level. When I sighted from there to the chair where Charley had supposedly been sitting, the ghost of Andy Potter seemed to get in the way.

  I tapped on the door behind the bench that sported a sign that read CHAMBERS. After a second knock, a voice told me to come in.

  As I’d hoped, the voice belonged to Marjie Finnerty, Judge Meltonian’s clerk. She was sitting behind a name-plate and a computer at a desk in a tiny anteroom that had formerly been a broom closet, looking alternately at the screen and a law book. Stacks of legal papers surrounded her the way a doughnut surrounds a hole.

  Her hair was brown and tousled, her eyes brown and slightly fuzzy, her features pleasant but taxed, as though her weekend guests had overstayed their welcome. She was more attractive than she knew, I guessed, always surprised at the amorous attentions of men. Her beige dress was plain and serviceable, brightened only by a gold pin at her collar. The pin was in the shape of a trout. I bet Charley had given it to her—he used to give fish stuff to Flora all the time.

  She raised a brow and scratched her nose. “Judge Meltonian is unavailable. Court resumes at 9 A.M.”

  “I’m a friend of Charley Sleet’s,” I said. “I’d like to talk with you about him.”

  She touched her pin. “What makes you think I—?”

  “How explicit do you want me to be?”

  She examined me more closely. The fog floated off her eyes, to be replaced by the gleam of a wary intelligence. “You’re Marsh Tanner.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s nice to meet you finally.”

  “Same here.”

  “Charley talks about you all the time.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  She colored. “Why do you think I know anything you don’t already know about this?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  I smiled my sweetest smile and for some reason it infuriated her. “Is your hunch going to get him out of it? Is your hunch going to bring Leonard Wints back to life? Is your hunch going to tell me why Charley did such an asinine thing?” I could have roasted marshmallows on her cheeks.

  “None of the above,” I said affably. “Maybe we could go somewhere and talk.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got to get these orders in limine to the judge before he leaves.” She glanced at the door to her left. “That’s soundproof, if you’re worried about privacy,” she added, then punched some keystrokes with a hint of martyrdom, as if working late were par for the course and she was getting tired of it.

  She rubbed her cheek and then apologized. “Fm sorry. You’re here to help him. I know that. I thought of calling you myself but I knew you’d get involved anyway. Charley admires you more than anyone he knows, I think.”

  “That’s nice to hear. The feeling is mutual.”

  I took a seat and crossed my legs. “You and Charley were lovers, right? I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I think we need to move quickly on this.”

  She met my look defiantly. “What makes you think we were in a relationship?”

  “His redial button and his answering machine.”

  Her eyes widened. “You searched his house?”

  I became equally self-righteous. “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “To find out why the hell this happened.”

  “And did you?”

  Alth
ough the question was sarcastic, my answer was candid. “Not even close. I was hoping you could enlighten me.”

  She debated a moment, then sighed. “I would if I could but I can’t.”

  “No ideas at all?”

  She shook her head.

  “Have you heard from Charley since he got arrested?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  I experienced a rush of jealousy that I hadn’t been granted a similar indulgence. “What did he say?”

  “Just that he was all right. And was sorry for what he’d done. And …”

  “What?”

  She blinked at a tear, then dabbed it with a Kleenex. “That I should forget about him and get on with my life.”

  “Do you plan to do that?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Did he give you any hint at all why he thought the world should be rid of Leonard Wints?”

  She shook her head, then yielded to her anxieties. “I don’t know what to do, do you? I mean they can’t just let this go. There’s been too much heat about police brutality in this city already. They’ll put Charley away forever just to show they’re taking steps to address the situation, even though Charley is the least violent man I’ve ever known.”

  “Until two days ago,” I corrected. “Did he say anything at the time of the shooting that might indicate what he was thinking?”

  “I’ve gone over it and over it, but there’s nothing. Actually, I thought he was there to see me,” she added miserably. “I was hoping he’d take me to lunch.”

  “How about the Wints case?”

  She blinked. “What about it?”

  “You must have read the files and maybe even the depositions.”

  She nodded. “But I can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Judge Meltonian is very strict about the privacy of litigants.”

  “This is a lawsuit. The files are part of the public record. Litigants surrender their privacy when they decide to go to court.”

  “But there’s a gag order in the Wints case. I’d be fired in a minute if he knew I’d said anything to you.”

  “I’m not trying to get you fired, Marjie. But until I find a link between Charley and Wints, I can’t help Jake Hattie mount a defense.”