Book Case

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “You must not be a dad,” she decided finally, “otherwise you’d be watching your pride and joy run up and down the field.”

  “I’m sure I would,” I agreed. “But my pride and joy wouldn’t be playing soccer.”

  She raised a brow. “Why not?”

  “I’m of the baseball generation. We view any activity that forbids the use of your hands as counter-evolutionary.”

  She waited to see if my entendre was double; I wasn’t sure I knew myself.

  When I didn’t drool or leer, she shrugged. “Guys and their spectator sports. I will never understand it till the day I die.” She looked down at her laundry, then back at me, as though debating which of us would offer a more enduring stimulus. “So what are you if you’re not a dad?”

  Time was wasting, so I cut to the quick. “I’m a private eye.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said, but didn’t seem as surprised as most at my most common confession. “And people say nothing’s happening out here in the Sunset.” She tried to suppress a laugh but succeeded only partially. “So what did she do? Assassinate one of the parents?”

  I shook my head. “She taught at the Sebastian School.”

  She frowned. “I know that’s a chore, but is it a crime?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “So why is it important?”

  I unbuttoned my jacket. “Could I come in and sit down? My feet don’t like being used like this.”

  She looked down at my Rockports. “How are they supposed to be used?”

  “To get me from the couch to the refrigerator.”

  I had finally earned a smile. “You should join a club; my trainer could firm you up in no time.”

  “I’m already in a club.”

  “Yeah? Which one?”

  “The Fruit-of-the-Month. So how about it? Have you got a stool I can rent for ten minutes?”

  For some reason, the request finally activated the protective devices woman have to use these days in order to keep from becoming crime statistics. “Have you got a license of some sort?”

  I showed it to her.

  “Tanner,” she read off the license. “I’ve heard of you, I think. In fact, I think my firm uses you from time to time.”

  “What firm is that?”

  “Gillis and Hookstratten.”

  I nodded. “I know it well. So you and Emma work at the same place.”

  “Cozy, right?”

  “What are you, a paralegal?”

  Her curse was generic and justified. “I happen to be a lawyer—they’re starting to let a few of us do that nowadays, I guess you hadn’t heard. It’s a controlled experiment; they’re hoping it’ll be as big as Retin-A.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and meant it, having endured enough lampoons of my own profession to willfully inflict them on others.

  “I won’t say it’s all right, because it isn’t,” she countered. “But at least you didn’t assume I was a secretary.”

  I seized the opening gladly. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being a secretary.”

  “Of course not.” She colored, then matched my grin. “Some of my best friends are secretaries.” She gestured toward the apartment at her back. “Come on in. I’d make coffee, but I’ve got to get these in the Maytag as soon as it’s free.”

  “All I need is a chair,” I said, so she found me one.

  “Maybe I should know your name,” I said as we both got comfortable, sitting across from each other in a colorful room that contained enough flowers to suggest a maternity ward or a mortuary.

  “Christine White.”

  “And you live here with Ms. Drayer?”

  She nodded. “We were sorority sisters at Oregon. We kept in touch, and when we both ended up in the city, we decided to see if two could live cheaper than one plus one. Then she got a job at Gill and Hook, and when I decided to leave the city attorney’s office, she convinced them to take me on.”

  “What time does Emma get back from soccering?”

  She looked at a watch the size of a jar lid. “Could be anytime, but it might be hours. I just remembered—sometimes she plays referee after she plays coach.” She curled her legs beneath her, making interesting bulges and attractive creases. “So what does Gill and Hook have you do for the good of the cause?”

  I shrugged. “Mostly the messy stuff.”

  “You mean litigation.”

  I nodded. “That’s usually where the mud gets thrown. How about you?”

  “Trusts and estates. The only things thrown at me are crutches and safe-deposit keys.”

  “I have to confess I always thought probate would get pretty boring pretty fast.”

  Christine White stretched her back like a cat and luxuriated in the crushed velour. Her contortions allowed me to believe that our relationship might be moving to a different plane. When I checked, I discovered that I hoped so.

  “It would be boring if they didn’t give me a hundred and twenty thousand a year to keep it interesting,” she commented with the offhand tone that is always meant to convey its opposite. “If I keep a lid on expenses, and if my defined benefit plan is any good, I’ll have enough to retire by the time I’m fifty.”

  “A real comet, huh? Slave night and day for twenty years, then flame out.”

  She seemed unembarrassed by the metaphorization of her life plan. “That’s about it.”

  “How long have you been at it?”

  “Eleven years. How long have you been a detective?”

  “Fifteen. What will you do when you retire?”

  She met my look. “I’m going to run around the world.”

  I looked to be sure I heard right. “Literally, you mean.”

  “You’re damned right.”

  “I want to do some traveling, too, someday. Maybe we’ll run into each other. I’ll be the one in the rickshaw.”

  She regarded me with a lawyer’s eye. “Since you come so highly recommended, I might have some use for you myself.”

  “Tracking down a missing heir?”

  She shook her head. “Dinner. Tonight. At Speedo. I made a reservation for a business thing, but the client cancelled.” She reddened. “Actually, the client died. In my business they have a tendency to do that.” She couldn’t suppress a laugh and I couldn’t keep myself from joining her. In the right company, death easily becomes hilarious.

  “So how about it?” she asked when we had finished.

  I hesitated, then shook my head.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have anything to wear.”

  She frowned. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”

  I nodded. “But you already used mine up.”

  She crossed her arms again, this time to keep from throwing something. “Can’t come to grips with the modern woman, huh, Mr. Private Detective?”

  I matched her obstinacy. “I can if I want to.”

  “What would make you want to?”

  “A modern woman who lets a man be old-fashioned.”

  She looked at me for what seemed like an hour, then grew self-conscious and eyed the basket of laundry that lay like a sixth continent between us. “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get a red wine stain out of a white blouse, would you?” she asked, suddenly blasé, looking out the window at a stretch of houses that seemed like cookies cut from the same cutter.

  “Cotton?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Stretch it over a bowl, put salt on the stain, and pour boiling water on it from a height of three feet.”

  Her eyes ballooned. “You’re kidding, right?”

  I shook my head. “Not unless my grandmother was. And she didn’t seem the type.”

  “Your grandmother drank wine?”

  “She made it.”

  “Napa?”

  “Council Bluffs.”

  “Out of what? Corn?”

  “Apricots and Concord grapes.”

  “Was it any good?”

  “It was back
in 1957,” I said. “But then so were Chevrolets.”

  Just then there was a knock at the door. Before Christine had a chance to move, it was opened by a young man wearing red Jockey shorts and nothing else. “Yo, Crissy. Go for it, babe.”

  The young man disappeared. Crissy looked at me. “That’s my cue. Once a month Roger washes everything he owns,” she added when she saw my look.

  She reached for her laundry basket with her foot. “Good luck getting Emma to give you the straight dope on the Hell Hole.”

  “What’s that?”

  She pulled the basket to her and put it on her lap. “It’s what she used to call that school.”

  “Why?”

  “She had some problems down there.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know—first she was winning all her games and getting raises and taking kids to soccer camps in Europe with all expenses paid, then all of a sudden she got canned. Actually, I think it started with the Balboa game.”

  “What happened?”

  “Balboa played rough. One of the Sebastian sweethearts got a tooth knocked out and another broke an ankle, so the headmaster ordered Emma not to schedule any more matches with the public schools, except with Lowell, of course. Emma refused, so she got fired. And that’s all I know about Emma and Sebastian.”

  Christine White picked up the laundry basket, stood up and waited for me to join her, then headed for the door. When I offered to carry her load, she shook her head. “The modern woman, remember?”

  She reached for the doorknob but I opened it for her. “The throwback, remember?”

  We smiled at each other. “Sorry about dinner,” I went on, “but I have a thing about spending more on a meal than I spend on rent. Maybe we could do something next week. Somewhere in North Beach.”

  She raised a brow. “You know where to reach me if it still seems like a good idea the next time you’re hungry.” Then she lowered it. “But I don’t do anyone’s laundry except my own.”

  My task is literally death-defying. All I have to do to prove that I was framed is survive incarceration among men who are stunningly able and eerily willing to kill me, then persuade a person who may well be equally in fear of her life to tell someone—anyone—the truth.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 156

  11

  The soccer fields were at the far end of Golden Gate Park, nestled between the windmills, only a high hedge away from the Great Highway in one direction and the sewage treatment plant in another. Luckily for the kids who were swarming over the fields like ants on their way to a second bite of bologna, the summer fog had remained in its offshore bed that morning—the sun gave the grasses the gleam of shredded emeralds and made the eager athletes glow like diminutive golden gods.

  I guessed the age of the participants as immediately preteen, and guessed the adult observers along the sidelines to be their hyperactive parents. From the fringe of the middle field, I tried to figure out which of the women cheering the kids on might be Emma Drayer, but I soon gave up such Holmesian speculation and reverted to type.

  My fifth interrogatee was an excitable young man who thrilled at every kick the Blue Team let fly, whether it struck the elusive ball or not. After a portly youngster missed an easy header, then dispatched the ball beyond the boundary in mostly melodramatic frustration, the man calmed down long enough for me to ask if he knew where I could find Emma Drayer, or if he knew which team was called the Toe Jammers.

  After taking a moment to consider my right to question him, the man pointed in the direction of a stout and resolute young woman whose cleated shoes, knee socks, and satin shorts were topped by the vertical stripes of a referee’s blouse. “Tell her the Jammers play too rough,” the man muttered when I thanked him for the information. “Tell her to teach those little bastards some sportsmanship.”

  I successfully suppressed a laugh.

  When the teams had assembled for the inbounds pass, the referee started to hand the ball to one of the players in red, then suddenly drew back and blew a blast on her whistle. “Listen up,” she shouted. “Red team, come to attention. Come on, Red, move! That’s it. Now, Blue team, do the same. Quickly! Good. Now. Both teams. Look at your feet!”

  In an instant, all heads were bowed, as though Emma Drayer were not a referee but an archangel just in with instructions.

  “Okay, troops,” she continued, “if you need to tie your shoes … tie your shoes!” She crossed her arms and waited. “Quickly, teamers, quickly. Good. Okay, straighten up. Red ball, in bounds.” The ball was handed over, the whistle blew, and again the game was on—shoes tied tightly, worshippers and worshipped both earthly once again.

  The final score was eighteen to thirteen, an exuberant if not a skillful contest. When each team had given a pro forma cheer for its opponent and congratulated or consoled itself, the players trooped off, leaving me to wait while the referee supervised the collection of the balls and the removal of the goal nets. I lay in wait for her as she came off the field, but before she got close enough for me to introduce myself she was waylaid by the man I had questioned earlier.

  His gripe seemed to be that his pride and joy should have been awarded a free kick somewhere along the line. The referee’s response—“That wasn’t a foul, that was a fuckup”—seemed to take care of the matter as far as she was concerned.

  When she reached my side I interrupted the man’s rebuttal. “Ms. Drayer? My name’s Tanner. I wonder if I could talk to you for a minute.”

  The disgruntled dad looked me over. He was a foot shorter and a decade younger than I was, two characteristics that often encourage their possessors to take a chance on fisticuffs, but this one decided not to risk it. After leaving us, he skulked to the side of the biggish boy who had booted the ball out of bounds and began berating him in the manner he had used on the referee.

  Emma Drayer watched him for a moment, then muttered, “Prick,” to no one in particular. “I love these guys who never had the guts to take the field themselves but try to make their kid another Pelé.” She looked me over as we continued toward the parking lot. “If you’ve got a complaint about the way I worked the game, take it up with the league.”

  “I don’t waste complaints on games.”

  That slowed her down, though not to a stop. “You have a child on the Toe Jammers?” she asked as she brushed a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose.

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t think I’d seen you at the organizational meetings. So what do you want to talk about?”

  “The Sebastian School,” I said as we reached the edge of the lot.

  That stopped her cold. Her face, formerly flushed and full from its exertions and exhortations, tightened into a knot of caution. “Why would you think I know anything about the Sebastian School?”

  “Because you used to teach there.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Coach, then.”

  She hesitated. “What if I did?”

  I looked at the set of stripes around her torso. “You’re acting like I’m accusing you of being an ex con, Ms. Drayer.”

  She looked for a clue to my purpose, then looked past me to see if anyone was poised to overhear. “Are you a cop?” she asked carefully.

  I shook my head.

  “If you’re not a cop, I don’t have to answer your questions.”

  The statement seemed more hopeful than constitutionally secure. “True enough,” I said, “except that when people don’t want to talk to me about subjects that seem innocuous, I tend to get interested in why that is.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve been a private detective for fifteen years. One of the reasons I’ve lasted that long is that when I get interested in a question, I poke around until I find the answer.”

  “Haven’t you worked for the firm before? Gillis and Hookstratten?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought the name was familiar. You work for Ken Boiling.”

/>   “Right.”

  She hugged herself as though the fog had just tumbled out of bed and rolled on top of us. “Are you investigating the school? Is that it? Has the state board brought charges against it?”

  I tried to disguise my ignorance as pretext. “Why do you suppose the state would do that?”

  She looked at me closely. Although I tried my best to fool her, she reached the right conclusion. “Shit. You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into, do you?”

  She started to walk off, but I grabbed her arm. “I know enough to ask more questions.”

  She shook her head and pulled away. “I don’t have anything to say on the subject of the Sebastian School.”

  “I’ve got a feeling this thing is going to get complicated, Ms. Drayer. Which means I’ll get back to you. Which means the next time we meet it might not be in the middle of a pretty park and out of earshot of anyone who matters.”

  She wrinkled her brow and considered her options. “We can’t talk here,” she said finally.

  “There are some places on Clement we can—”

  She shook her head. “Too many people I know shop Clement. The Zims’ on California Street. I’ll meet you in fifteen minutes. If you beat me there, order me a waffle.” She caught my look. “I coach because I like to help kids be kids, not because I want to live forever.”

  I hesitated. “I guess this is where I should give you a warning.”

  She stiffened. “What kind of warning?”

  “If you don’t show up at Zim’s, I’ll come after you, Ms. Drayer.” I waited until I knew she knew I was serious. “But only after I’ve eaten your waffle.”

  She turned on a cleated heel and walked toward the cluster of vehicles still parked in the tiny lot. Hers was a dented and dusty Econoline, with a bumper sticker that said MY OTHER CAR IS A CAR. As she drove away I noted the license number in my book, then got in my dented and dusty Buick, drove east on Kennedy Drive, and took Thirty-sixth Avenue north to California.

  I lived for an eternity on a diet of self-pity. Then I went to jail. Finally possessed of grounds, I no longer made use of them.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 133

  12

  A Spanish omelette and a Belgian waffle were languishing in front of me when Emma Drayer slipped into the other side of the booth. She’d found a place to splash water on her face and exchange her stripes for a sweatshirt, and elapsed time and the costume change had made her more confident of her ability to parry whatever my thrust might be, so much so that I mentally kicked myself. I’d had her on the ropes and let her off—a bad idea in both boxing and interrogation.