Past Tense

by Stephen Greenleaf

  For my part, I was pretty much a mess—as I’d hurried to change after talking with Clay, I discovered that nothing that looked decent was clean: I’d made do with Levi’s and a plaid shirt that had been draped over a chair for a week. I don’t think Danielle was charmed by my low-rent Ralph Lauren, maybe because our waiter was better dressed than I was, which he’d noted long before he got to the table and had adjusted his manner accordingly.

  “What’s this about a rampage?” Danielle asked when the waiter had gone off to get drinks. There was the slightest sag of boredom in her face, as though I were a backward child whose deficiencies needed to be indulged but not engaged.

  “If I’m right, Charley Sleet has killed at least three men in the past three weeks, and for all I know there could be a dozen more.”

  My recital of the Book of the Dead finally got her full attention. “You’re joking, I hope.”

  “I don’t joke about cold-blooded murder served in boxed sets of three.”

  The waiter returned, paying lots of deference to Danielle and none at all to me. After she took a sip of Chardonnay, she smiled at him and nodded. He left without asking me how I felt about the scotch. I felt the way I always feel, that one wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Have you found out why he killed Leonard Wints?” she asked when the jerk was out of earshot.

  I sipped deep before I answered. “Wints was killed by accident, it looks like.”

  “How could it have been an accident? He was shot in the back of the head.”

  “I think Charley was aiming at someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll let you know when I’m sure.” I paused for effect. “It’s not impossible it was you, you know.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Are you Armenian by any chance?”

  “Not a drop.”

  “Good.”

  She shook her head with exasperation—I was still the wayward child. “But what does Armenia have to do with anything?”

  I shrugged. “Ethnic animosities, historic conflicts, simmering resentments,” I mumbled, “just like in the Balkans.” Maybe I wasn’t going to need another scotch after all.

  “You said there were three,” Danielle murmured after a moment. “Who were the others?”

  “There’s a cop named Walters,” I said. “He died because his dereliction of duty resulted in the death of Charley’s first partner. That one happened thirty years ago. Then there’s the guy in the jailhouse—the late Mr. Lumpley. Charley killed him because he’d been stealing from the children’s project. And from what you said, I think he’d also been abusing his daughter, which gave Charley another reason to take him out.”

  “What did I say to make you think that?”

  “That you’re trying to keep Tafoya from becoming as screwed up as Jillian Wints.”

  She met my look but didn’t say anything.

  “One interesting aspect of this is that you’re connected to two out of three of them,” I chided. “Chapter nine in your memoirs, no doubt.”

  She shrugged absently. I got even madder. When the waiter came by again, I ordered a double. While I was waiting, I did what I usually do to fill time, I asked some questions.

  “What did you do, approach Charley about using some muscle on Lumpley once Tafoya told you about her problems with Stepdaddy?”

  Danielle shook her head. “Quite the contrary. Mr. Sleet was the one who first determined that Tafoya was being abused, based on his contacts with her at the center.” She smiled. “He has rather amazing powers of deduction, doesn’t he?”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Anyway, he knew I’d been doing volunteer work down there for a couple of years, and that I knew Tafoya at least slightly, so he told me about what seemed to be going on in her home. I took Tafoya on as a formal patient after the initial interview, on a pro bono basis, of course. Mr. Sleet maintained his interest in her, needless to say, and I kept him apprised of her progress.”

  “Apparently his interest encompassed getting himself thrown in jail so he could murder Tafoya’s abuser.”

  “You don’t know that for certain, do you?”

  “If you mean can I prove it, no. If you mean do I know it beyond a reasonable doubt, then yes. Why didn’t you tell me about you and Charley the first time I came to your office?”

  She lifted a brow. “What was there to tell?”

  “That you knew him and worked with him and respected him. And would help get him out of trouble by giving me an explanation for his behavior.”

  She was shaking her head before I finished. “But that wasn’t what you wanted from me. What you wanted was to know why on earth Charley killed Leonard Wints and I had no idea what the reason was. Because, apparently, there was none, since suddenly you’re calling it an accident.”

  “But you pretended not to know him at all.”

  “I thought that was the best way to preserve my patients’ confidentiality. Frankly, I was less worried about Jillian Wints than about Tafoya Burris. If word got around in her peer group that she was having sex with her stepfather, it would have been devastating. She is so young, and so lovely, and so vulnerable psychologically, it might have destroyed her entire personality structure if the fact of abuse became public.”

  “Charley knew all this about her, I presume. How vulnerable she was and everything.”

  She nodded. “To some extent. Not from me, necessarily—I don’t think I told him much that he didn’t already know.”

  “My take is that he killed Lumpley to stop the abuse but also to keep him from talking about it, so Tafoya wouldn’t be shamed by the secret.”

  “That sounds plausible.”

  The waiter delivered a second round of drinks. He looked at Danielle like he wanted to take her home and show her off to Mom. He looked at me like he wanted to dip me in disinfectant.

  When he was gone again, I met her gaze. “I need to know if there are any other Tafoyas out there.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean do you know any other people for whom Charley might become an avenging angel? Is there anyone else who’s likely to be on his hit list?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Not that I know of. My God. This all seems so—”

  “Medieval?” I offered.

  She sighed at the vernacular. “That’s as good a term as any in this case.”

  “So there’s no other child to whom Charley was as close as he was to Tafoya?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t think so. I mean there were others who needed help, of course, but their problems were more … diffuse than Tafoya’s. He would have had to erase the entire socioeconomic structure of the city to eliminate their problems. I think that task is beyond even the redoubtable Mr. Sleet.”

  “Don’t be too sure.” I waited for her to meet my gaze. “I need some help with this, Ms. Derwinski.”

  She met my look and held it. “I believe our interests are joint in this matter. Up to a point, at least. I liked him, too, you know.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “Next subject. Has he been in touch with you in the past few days?”

  “No.”

  “Not even to ask how Tafoya’s doing?”

  “No. No messages. Not anything.”

  “Swear to God?”

  She smiled.

  “Which means I’m still stymied in terms of finding Charley. So I need to talk to Tafoya.”

  Danielle stopped swirling her wine. “Why?”

  “To find out if she’s seen him.”

  “I can’t let you do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you ask about Charley, she’ll know you know about the abuse.”

  “No, she won’t. She’ll just know I know she and Charley were friends.”

  “And she’ll assume Charley told you about her and her stepfather and she’ll be mortified. I doubt very much that she can help you anyway.”

 
“Charley wouldn’t have killed Lumpley without being sure that Tafoya would be better off afterward.”

  “Even if he talked to her, it doesn’t mean she knows where he is.”

  “No, but she’s the only lead I’ve got.”

  She put her glass back on the table. “Then you’d better get another.”

  “I thought you said you liked him.”

  “I do. But I have other responsibilities.”

  “Shit.”

  I slumped in my chair, tired, depressed, and defeated. The ice in my scotch was minuscule and melted; the blood in my veins was watery and anemic; the cells in my brain were scorched and short-circuited. The waiter glided by without stopping. I looked at him, then I looked at the room. “Assholes,” I muttered.

  “What are you doing? Why are you acting this way?”

  “Maybe because I’m pissed off.”

  “At me?”

  I waved a hand. “At all of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  Somehow I’d gotten drunk. Somehow I’d become the child Danielle had assessed me as. Somehow I didn’t care enough about anything to refrain from answering her question.

  “Because all of you have friends and I don’t have one anymore. Because all of you have lovers and I don’t have one of those anymore either. Because all of you have money and I never had any of that. And because I’m tired of the whole fucking thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “Charley. You. Me. Mostly I’m tired of me. I’m sick to hell of me.”

  Danielle nodded morosely. “I know how that feels. Believe me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  When she was certain my ugly outburst was spent, she reached out and patted me on the hand. “I know it’s upsetting, but it’s obviously something that he felt he had to do.”

  “But why? He’s become a serial killer, for Christ’s sake. What would make him do that?”

  “How old is he?”

  “Fifty-six.”

  “Maybe it’s early-onset dementia. Maybe the past has laid claim to the present and is making him relive old horrors and react as if they just happened.”

  “Did you see any signs of dementia when you talked with him about Tafoya?”

  “No, but I wasn’t looking.”

  “Well, I didn’t see any either. And I think I would have.”

  “Then maybe it’s post-traumatic stress. Cops see so much evil they feel like they’re drowning in it sometimes, that it’s taking over their lives. Maybe he felt compelled to do something dramatic about the situation, to rid the city of monsters the system hadn’t been able to eradicate.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I’m sure that might be true of lots of guys and even lots of cops, but I don’t think it’s true of Charley.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because Charley’s the least stressed person I know. He likes his job; he loves the streets; he gets high on helping people; and he doesn’t fear or despise a single soul, not even the worst of the slime that he deals with. The only thing that would stress him out is if they told him he couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “He resigned from the force, remember?”

  I rubbed my face with my hand. It felt rough and prickly, like an old stump from an old tree, useless and maimed and discarded. “I don’t know what to do,” I said through my fingers. “It doesn’t make sense. None of it.”

  “But it does in a way. His victims weren’t random, they were people who had done horrible things to him or to someone he loved.”

  “But I’ve done wrong, and my friends have done wrong, hell, even you’ve probably made a mistake once or twice. Does that mean we ought to be taken out and shot?”

  She grasped my hand. “But we haven’t caused the deaths of innocent people.”

  My stomach knotted in defense against my memory. “Speak for yourself,” I said. My hand retreated to my lap.

  She drained her drink and stood up. “When’s the last time you had a home-cooked meal?”

  “Nineteen sixty-four, give or take.”

  She extended her hand. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “My place. I’m going to fix you some dinner. We’ll stop at the store on the way.”

  I looked at my watch. “I don’t think I can—”

  “Sure you can,” she said. “I don’t take no for an answer. Not about anything.”

  CHAPTER

  26

  I RARELY SHOP FOR FOOD WITH SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT they’re doing. My own needs are pretty much taken care of at the frozen-food case, the bread shelf, and the cookie aisle. The rest of the store is essentially a mystery; I’ve always assumed they throw most of it away or give it to charity before it rots.

  But Danielle knew what she was doing. After we agreed on Italian as the governing ethnicity and pasta as an acceptable entree, she went to work. Garlic and basil, olives and olive oil—what does that “extra virgin” business mean anyway? A baguette of bread and three kinds of cheese, only one of which I’d ever heard of. A bag of uncooked pasta out of a bin, in the shape of stars and bow ties, that cost three times as much as the rotelle I buy in a box. Lettuce that was called radicchio and arugula, bread crumbs that were called croutons, and little red and green things whose names I didn’t catch but which looked slightly slimy. And two bottles of Chianti Classico to the tune of forty bucks. The total came to almost a C note and she wouldn’t let me pay for any of it.

  Her house was on Baker Street, a small but perfectly rendered Victorian a couple of blocks west of the Alta Plaza, its colors on loan from the Mexican flag. One of my first clients had lived near there once; I’d ended up shooting her husband in a vain effort to keep him from shooting her. She did lots of damage in the world before she was through, but lots of damage had been done to her before that.

  Danielle waited till I found parking up the street, then unlocked the door and led me to the front parlor. The furnishings were more modern than period, with woods and fabrics that matched the stains of the floors and the wainscoting. The art was glossy geometry and shiny Cibachrome, to neither my taste nor my bank balance. The mantel was masked in colorful tiles and ceramics, the floor was bleached fir with lots of throw rugs to protect it, the windows were draped in folds of beige and white checks. The atmosphere was more cordial than cozy—I was invited to stay, but not for too long.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “Thank you. It was my ex-husband’s before we married. He traded it for my share of his pension plan.”

  “Good deal for you.”

  “Not really. His stocks have done far better than the real estate market.”

  “You can’t live in a stock certificate.”

  “No, but you can trade it for something that’s suitable. But I’ve grown to like the place, actually. Needless to say, I’ve removed all of Mark’s traces except for his Jacuzzi. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable while I throw this together? There’s liquor in the cabinet in the corner.”

  “Can I help?”

  She blinked. “Do you cook?”

  “Instant pudding and Minute rice.”

  “Then how could you help?”

  “Sharpen the knives, open the cans, chop up the carrots. On second thought, maybe not the carrots.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have a tendency to cut myself.”

  She laughed. “Come on. All you have to do is open the wine and keep me company.”

  We repaired to the kitchen. It was huge and airy and expensively remodeled, with a refrigerator the size of a barn, a butcher block the size of a hay bale, a stove the size of a truck bed, and pans the color of old coins. I opened the Chianti and poured it into stemware with heads as thin as paper.

  Our toast was silent and oddly serious; for a fleeting instant, it felt like a requiem for Charley Sleet. But then she got to work. Boiling, chopping, pressing, stirring, slicing, grating—she let me help with t
he last part and my hands smelled of cheese for three days. It took an hour to get it ready and twenty minutes to devour. The disparity between effort and effect is one of the reasons I don’t cook.

  Along the way, I asked some questions about the preparation process, but Danielle clearly wasn’t in the mood for cook chat. The stand-off continued through the main course—she only relented over decaf espresso and some store-bought tiramisu.

  “Full?” she asked ten minutes after I’d achieved that very state of grace.

  “Quite. It was great.”

  “So you’re in a better mood?”

  “Much.”

  “Good.”

  “Thank you for making the effort.”

  “I enjoyed it, as a matter of fact. I never go to that much trouble just for myself.”

  “Me neither.” I smiled to show I was joking—I couldn’t have come up with a meal like that if Bill and Hillary had showed up, hats in hand, begging for sustenance.

  “You probably don’t have to cook,” she said. “You look like the kind of guy women make hot dishes for.”

  “On occasion. But this was a cut above tuna casserole.” I sipped some Chianti. “I appreciate being included. I don’t imagine you spend many evenings alone.”

  “Almost all of them, actually.”

  “I—m surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re attractive, smart, successful—everything a man’s supposed to want in a woman.”

  “That’s what they say they want. What they seem to end up with is a woman with round heels and big breasts whom they can coerce and intimidate and enslave.”

  “Who says?”

  “My patients.”

  “Maybe their experience isn’t the norm.”

  “I think it is, as a matter of fact. But on the personal level, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not looking for a man at the moment.”

  “Why not?”

  She threw my words back at me, along with an impish grin. “I’m attractive, smart, and successful. And content to leave things just the way they are.”

  “I don’t believe you.”