Past Tense

by Stephen Greenleaf

“Why are we here, Mr. Tanner?” she asked after she licked the taste of Campari off her lips.

  “I’m here to find out whether my friend Charley Sleet wants to kill you.” I made it sound as if I was there to chat about snack foods and laundry products.

  I’d hoped to jar something loose but she didn’t bat an eye. “Who says he does?”

  “He does. Sort of.”

  She raised a brow. “By which you mean …?”

  “That he wasn’t avenging Julian Wints. I think he was gunning for someone else.”

  “Me?”

  “I don’t know, but you seem a likely target.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you wreak so much havoc in the world.”

  Her smile was easy and arch. “Is that what they call it these days?”

  “Who?”

  “The CMI. I would have thought they’d dredge up a stronger term,”

  I smiled. “That’s not from them; that’s from me.”

  “So they’ve persuaded you I’m the Antichrist? Or at least the Great Emasculator?”

  “They haven’t persuaded me of anything except that there’s lots of pain connected with this recovered memory business. I was holding a little girl in my lap yesterday and it occurred to me that someday someone might call it child molesting. I didn’t like thinking about what my life would be like if someone ever did that.”

  “Were you molesting her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that doesn’t seem to be the issue anymore. What really happened doesn’t count. What counts is what some therapist assumes has happened.”

  She shook her head. “What the patient feels has happened.”

  “If you feel it, it must be true?”

  “What other explanation is there?”

  I harked back to my reading. “Transference. False or implanted memories. Hypnotic suggestion. Invented explanations to give the therapist what she wants.”

  “But why would someone invent such a thing if it wasn’t true?”

  “Because they want someone to blame for their misery. Because they’ve been told men are evil. Because sex is so scary it’s an easy answer for everything. And on the therapists’ side, because if you create the problem, you control the cure.”

  Her smile was as icy and imperious as she could render it. “Or could it be because sexual abuse of children is rampant in all cultures of the world and will continue to be until its victims unite and fight back? You want women to suffer in silence, Mr. Tanner, the way they have always suffered. You want to deny them the right to compensation from their victimizers for the wounds inflicted on them.”

  “Don’t misunderstand, Ms. Derwinski. I only want to deny compensation if the memories are fake and the dads haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “But the memories aren’t fake.”

  “What about the people who say there’s no scientific proof that the repression of trauma ever occurs?”

  “Those people are simply wrong. In one recent study, a researcher looked back at the hospital records of abused children—children who had suffered actual physical abuse when they were young and had been medically treated for it at the time. Then she asked these people as adults what they remembered about the abuse. A large percentage of them didn’t remember it at all. The entire experience had been repressed, in some cases even the fact of hospitalization itself. An experience that was fully documented in hospital records was entirely absent from memory of a significant number of the subjects. What more proof do you need?”

  “But what about the therapists who want the world to believe that every single patient that walks in their door has suffered from sexual abuse.”

  She raised a sculpted brow. “And you’re qualified to say they haven’t?”

  I remained the devil’s advocate. “Yes, I am.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Probabilities and logic.”

  “How probable is it that the leader of the CMI himself was arrested twice for abusing his daughters? Two arrests; one conviction on a plea of nolo contendere. But he doesn’t nolo now, does he? He claims such allegations are the result of a conspiracy hatched by witches like me.”

  I’d been knocked off track but it seemed advisable to stay there. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “To what?”

  “You and Charley.”

  “If he was trying to kill me, as you suggest, I can’t tell you why.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “What do you know about the Tenderloin Children’s Project?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing pertinent to this discussion, I’m afraid.”

  “Does the project have anything to do with the Wints case?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  I laughed at the dead ends I was accumulating. “He’s out of jail, you know,” I said finally.

  “Who?”

  “Charley.”

  For the first time, she seemed nonplussed. A bead of sweat was a bright new gem at the curve of her thorax.

  “It’s not impossible that he’ll try again to do whatever he was trying to do in the courtroom. Charley’s nothing if not persistent.”

  She shrugged, then adjusted her bodice. “Are you offering to be my bodyguard, Mr. Tanner?”

  “It wouldn’t be the worst move you could make.”

  Her smile was vague and indecipherable. “I have a feeling it might be.”

  I took it as a compliment but I didn’t know what to do with it. “So what are those sexual deviancy evaluations you mentioned?” I blurted to fill the silence.

  She blinked at the shift in focus. “What?”

  “That’s what you told me you’d be discussing with your dinner companion. I take it there’s some sort of test that tells if you’re a pervert or not.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “So what do you think about them?”

  “I feel they identify important proclivities; Jed, my dinner companion, feels the science is so soft and the risk of a false positive so great that they should be discontinued. I’ve got some new data I’m going to spring on him in an effort to change his mind. Why do you ask?”

  “Just making conversation. For the record, I agree with Jed. No one should be called a pervert on the basis of a test.”

  “Have you ever taken one?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know anything at all about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why are you opening your mouth on the subject?”

  “This is America. I’ve got a right to be ignorant about anything. If you don’t believe me, just listen to KSFO.”

  She shook her head with mellow exasperation and settled back in the seat. We sipped our drinks and flirted with our eyes for a time; at least that’s what I hoped we were doing. Maybe we were just being bored.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” she said after a minute.

  “Okay. Let’s talk about us.”

  “Us? When did we become ‘us’?”

  “I was wondering if we could work on it. See each other on a personal level sometime.”

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “You know damned well why I’d want to do that. Among other things, it’s what the dress is for, isn’t it?”

  “You flatter yourself, Mr. Tanner.”

  “Do I?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Then I apologize. What is it for?”

  “The dress?”

  I nodded.

  “One thing it’s for is to show you and Jed and the CMI that I’m not against fun, or sex, or men, or any of the other phobias you might assign as motives to mislead my patients about their pasts. Which means what it’s really about is getting people like you to take me seriously when I tell you that Julian Wints was sexually abused by her father to the point that she will be emotionally impaired for the rest of h
er life, no matter what therapist she sees.”

  “I’ll take you seriously on that score if you take me seriously when I tell you that Charley Sleet may be trying to kill you. If that’s what he wants to do, that’s what he will do, unless you give me enough information to stop him.”

  “How will information help? Wouldn’t hiring you to protect me work better?”

  “I can’t protect you from Charley.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s better than I am and he’s better than anyone else is, too. Which means if he wants to take you out, he will. All I can do is convince him not to try. And the only way I can do that is to know why he wants to.”

  “I see.”

  I looked at her. “You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  “Who he was trying to kill.”

  “I don’t know if I do or not,” she said, then hugged herself for warmth, then looked at her watch, then abandoned me for her date in the restaurant beyond the door in the rear of the room.

  CHAPTER

  20

  THEY WERE THERE BY EIGHT-TEN, PRETTY MUCH A RECORD ON the promptness meter.

  Clay arrived first, dressed immaculately as usual, as eager as an agent, also as usual. Poker night is some sort of sacrament for Clay, although I’m not sure quite why; I think it has something to do with his wife. Then came Al Goldsberry, the forensic pathologist. Al isn’t aging well—he’s too thin, too toothsome, too bald, and too weary. He plays cards with less and less enthusiasm with fewer and fewer grams of his intellect, which means he’s a loser almost every time these days—I expect him to drop out before long. And finally came Tommy Milano. Tommy is short and fat as befits the owner of an Italian eatery, and he’s the newest addition to the group. His restaurant is out in the avenues, which means it’s too far away for the rest of us to frequent very often, which we wouldn’t anyway because it’s not that good. But we like Tommy because Tommy likes life and because Tommy brings the wine and the bread and the pasta.

  Usually there’s lots of sparring before we get down to the cards, riffs and variations on several standard themes: Tommy is accused of poisoning countless customers with his sauces, Al is accused of doing autopsies on live people and practicing necrophilia, Clay is accused of bilking widows and orphans and trading on inside information, I’m accused of alcoholism and keyhole peeping. And Charley is accused of graft and brutality. Since we’ve gotten better and better at the gibes, more and more blood gets drawn, not always in good humor. But tonight the rapier wits remained in their scabbards because the mood in the room was more fit for a wake than a roast.

  We gathered our food and drink and took our usual seats at my dining-room table. After they directed some silent sentiments toward Charley’s empty chair, they turned their eyes toward me. I made sure everyone was up to speed on the case, including the fact of Charley’s jailbreak and the ensuing manhunt by the cops, then gave them a summary of who I’d talked to and what I’d learned to date, which amounted to half a dozen dead ends. Then I showed them the snapshots I’d retrieved from Flora’s watering can. They went from hand to hand like a smokeless narcotic, provoking smiles and murmurs and remembrances, but nothing more concrete.

  By the time I was done, everyone was shaking his head with frustration or muttering a helpless curse. “Cops’ll gun him down, you watch,” Tommy muttered. “He’s got the goods on too many of them. Told me once he didn’t know a single man on the force who hadn’t committed a felony. They been wanting a way to get rid of him.”

  “Charley’d eat a round himself before he’d let them take him,” Clay murmured, the hard-boiled jargon oddly brutal in the mouth of such a placid man.

  Al looked my way. “So what do we do, Marsh? Is there a chance to get him out of this? I mean realistically?”

  I avoided the question by saying that was up to Jake Hattie to estimate. “Jake needs input on three issues,” I continued, to turn them from moaning and groaning toward recollection and speculation. “First, what was Charley trying to accomplish in that courtroom, and maybe in the jail? Second, assuming he had some sort of grudge to settle, why would a guy who worked with the system for thirty years all of a sudden become a vigilante? And third, where the hell is he? Let’s take the last one first,” I said when no one took up the slack. “Where’s he gone?”

  “The fishing cabin,” Tommy said quickly.

  I nodded. “I thought of that, too. We need to check it out. Can anyone run up to Rio Vista this week and look it over?”

  After some hesitation, Clay and Al raised their hands. “This is a bad time for me,” Tommy murmured in expiation. “My chef quit on me Saturday.”

  “Chef,” Al repeated darkly. “That’s the guy who makes the meatballs in his armpits, right?”

  “Fuck you and the corpse you rode in on,” Tommy replied. “Asshole didn’t like my recipe for marinara. Can you believe it?”

  We could but we didn’t say so.

  “What do I do if he’s up there?” Clay asked me, to get us back on track.

  “Call me and let me know. Keep him in sight till I get there.”

  “And then?”

  I shrugged. “I try to talk him in off the ledge.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to come?”

  I had no answer that was comforting. “We let him jump, I guess.”

  Clay lowered his eyes and made crumbs out of a hunk of French bread. “Without telling the cops where he is?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that’s a crime, isn’t it? Accessory after the fact or something?”

  “Aiding and abetting a fugitive, too, I imagine. So what? This is Charley we’re talking about.”

  I didn’t give Clay a chance to rebut my rhetoric or question how Charley would be better off if all of his friends were in jail. “Where else could he be?”

  No one offered a suggestion. I wondered if they really didn’t have any or if they had suddenly turned leery because I was so cavalier about Clay’s concerns. I decided it didn’t matter.

  “Anyone know anyplace else Charley hung out, especially out in the country?”

  “Why the country?” Al asked.

  “Because he seems to have taken his hunting clothes with him.”

  “To do what?”

  “Hunker down, I’d say. Live off the land and stuff.”

  “He hunted pheasant out by Modesto,” Tommy offered.

  “He shot a deer up by Quincy once,” Al added.

  I laughed. “And he was so upset about it he sold his deer rifle the next day. Anything else on his whereabouts?”

  All of a sudden I got a tidal wave:

  “He liked the lodge at Yosemite.”

  “He took Flora to Carmel every Easter.”

  “He went duck hunting up in Oregon once.”

  “He bought a car from a guy in Tracy.”

  “On Halloween he bought pumpkins for the Tenderloin kids over at Half Moon Bay.”

  I finally perked up. “What kids are those?”

  “Down at that center,” Al Goldsberry said. “The place on Ellis Street, near Glide Memorial. The Tenderloin Children’s Project, it’s called. Charley spent a lot of time there. I went with him a couple of times to give physical exams to some kids he thought were being abused.”

  “Were they?”

  “I think one of them was. At least I told Charley it was possible.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He said he’d take care of it.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to report something like that?”

  “Yeah, but Charley asked me not to.”

  At one time or another we had all bent the rules for Charley because he had bent the rules for us.

  “What was the kid’s name?” I asked.

  Al hesitated.

  “Come on, goddamnit.”

  “Tafoya.”

  “What?”

  “Tafoya Burns. Why?”

  “Nothing.”


  But it wasn’t nothing, it was the first real link I’d found between Charley’s personal life and what had gone down in the courtroom. The clipping in Charley’s house described misdeeds at the children’s project, plus I was sure Tafoya Burris was the young woman who had entered Danielle Derwinski’s office just as I’d been leaving and had been greeted as a prodigal by the receptionist. The name couldn’t have been a coincidence.

  I asked Al who was in charge of things down at the children’s center.

  “The one I met was a guy named Morrison. Hank Morrison. Heavy dude. Seemed to run the show.”

  “I’ll follow up on that one,” I said. “Anything else on where he might be?”

  No one offered anything.

  “Then let’s move on. Under the heading of why the hell did he do what he did, if no one has any thoughts I’m going to need some legwork.” I looked at Al. “You’re the man for the job.”

  “Fine with me. What job is it?”

  “I want you to check all the hospitals in the city.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know if they have any record on our boy.”

  “You think he’s in a hospital?” Tommy asked.

  “Not now probably, but recently maybe.”

  “What makes you think so?” Al asked.

  “Nothing specific, but he’s been acting crazy and I’ve been thinking maybe some sort of medication got to him—Prozac, Halcion, something like that. Or maybe something is really wrong with him, something that fucked up his head. Like a stroke.”

  Everyone in the room seemed jolted by the prospect of a defect in Charley’s massive physique. If Charley’s body could go bad, anyone’s body could go bad.

  Al was the first to speak. “I’ll get on it right away, Marsh. It’ll take a while to cover them all, but I’ll try to get some help with it.”

  “Did he ever say anything to you along medical lines, Al? Ask for a free diagnosis?”

  He shook his head. “Not since the time we talked vasectomies. But that was years ago.”

  “Charley had a vasectomy?”

  “I don’t know if he went through with it, but he sure as hell asked me about it. That was the first time we met, I think. He had some questions on a tox report on a murder victim and after we went over the drug numbers he started asking me about getting clipped.”