Book Case

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “So?”

  “Carrie was attractive—I saw her picture in the yearbook. And you and her father were evidently having some troubles—when was the divorce, by the way?”

  “August of ’eighty-one.”

  “So Carrie could have been searching for a new father figure, subconsciously at least.”

  Her sneer was reminiscent of Lloyd’s. “I didn’t know you were also a psychiatrist, Mr. Tanner. What an interesting combination, the Shamus and the Shrink. Someone should write a book about you.”

  I didn’t let either the sarcasm or the irony slow me down. “It adds up, Mrs. Devlin. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “And I’m saying you’re wrong.”

  “Do you mind if I talk to her?”

  “She’s in Spain.”

  “By phone, I mean.”

  “No. I won’t have you”—her glare slid into a smug rebuff. “She’s traveling, so you can’t. She’s in Morocco—she won’t be back in Madrid till December.”

  “She’s on a graduate fellowship?”

  “Yes.”

  “What department?”

  “International Policy Studies. It’s a very exclusive program. She’d had French at Sebastian, so she spent her junior year at Stanford in Paris, and now she’s learning Spanish. She’s already been offered a position with the State Department, but she’s not sure she’s going to take it.” The pride of a parent was evident, the peculiar pride that suggested refusing a job offer from the government was more exalted than accepting one.

  I was sorry to bring her back to earth. “Did Carrie ever mention Wade Linton after she graduated from Sebastian?”

  “No.”

  “They never corresponded while he was in jail?”

  “Why would they?”

  “Did the Sebastian people ever contact you about Linton?”

  “No.”

  “How about the District Attorney? Did that office ever speak to you about him?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because if my information is correct, Linton was indicted for a felony against your child. The DA should have talked to you about it. If it happened.”

  “He didn’t because it didn’t.”

  The possibility that she was right confused me. I stood up and strolled about the room, looking at Bridget Devlin’s obsessive intensification of reality, trying to solve the mystery of Wade Linton’s similarly large preoccupation. “Would you do me a favor?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “Write me a note, addressed to the registrar at Stanford, authorizing me to see Carrie’s college records. We’d have to get it notarized, but I can dig up someone and get back here in an hour or so. I can draft it for you if you like, it won’t take—”

  “No.”

  I looked at her until I had her full attention. “Wade Linton is dead, Mrs. Devlin.”

  She frowned, not comprehending. “What did you say?”

  “Wade Linton is dead. He was murdered earlier tonight.”

  Tears made her eyes as bright and varicolored as the enamels on the studio door. “But I thought he was out of jail, that the bad times were behind him.”

  “I’m sure he thought that, too.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either. But that note to Stanford could help change that.”

  She shook her head wearily. “What difference does it make if he’s dead?”

  “It could tell me why he died.”

  “What gives you the right to know that?”

  “I was a fan,” I said, surprising both of us. I hurried to keep from explaining. “I should warn you that the police are going to want to talk to your ex-husband. And probably to you as well.”

  “Why on earth would they want to talk to Danny?”

  “There’s a possibility Linton had a grudge against him. Or vice versa.”

  We were drifting away from the world as she knew it and she grasped for safety. “Am I crazy or are you? Wade and Danny barely knew each other. And why would they want to talk to me?”

  I answered her question with one of my own. “How would your husband react if he thought Wade Linton had molested Carrie?”

  She puckered with distaste. “He’d take communion and declare it the will of God.”

  I looked away, reluctant to take the next step. “Was one of the reasons for your divorce your suspicion that your husband might have made improper advances on your daughter?”

  She stood and confronted me, as animated as she’d ever been. “You bastard. What right do you have to come in here making suggestions about Carrie that are untrue, then saying something like that? I divorced Danny for damned good reasons, but he doesn’t deserve to be called a child molester. My God. You think you can say anything, don’t you? Just let your mouth run until someone fesses up to something. Well, not in this house, mister. Get the hell out of here, Mr.… whatever your name is. Now.”

  “I’m sorry if you’re offended, Mrs. Devlin,” I said, a trifle timidly. “But a man’s been killed and it may not be over yet. I had to—”

  “Just leave,” she interrupted, a tear in her eye, her lips stretched tight across her teeth.

  I decided there was no reason not to. “I’d appreciate that authorization for Stanford,” I said when we reached the door. “It could answer a lot of questions.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t do that without Carrie’s permission.”

  “But she’s unavailable.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  I turned to go, then stopped. “Two more things.”

  “What?”

  “Did Carrie play soccer? On the Sebastian team?”

  She shook her head. “She never did anything at Sebastian, except punish people on the student court.”

  “But she did have a boyfriend.”

  Bridget Devlin nodded. “Her senior year she went with a boy named Lloyd. He was very strange and very rich. He dumped her the night of the Winter Ball.”

  “It’s not the killing that’s hard,” my cell mate told me one morning. “If you’ve got a reason and a weapon, killing’s as easy as wiping your ass. The problem is, as soon as he’s dead you see your life isn’t all that different, so you start thinking maybe it wasn’t important after all, that maybe you fucked up.”

  “Not me,” I told him.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 301

  27

  It was close enough to midnight to make calling someone a breach of etiquette, but my work wasn’t done and it doesn’t traffic a lot in etiquette anyway.

  “Do you know what time it is?” Emma Drayer complained when she answered.

  “This is Tanner. I need to talk to you. Christine, also. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Tomorrow, Tanner.”

  She was about to hang up. “I found Linton,” I said quickly.

  Her breath sizzled. “Where?”

  “The park.”

  “What park?”

  “Golden Gate.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “He was camping out.”

  She was skeptical. “You’re telling me Wade Linton’s been living in the park?”

  “Yes.”

  “Since he got out of prison?”

  “Mostly. Except when he was back in jail for trespassing.”

  She hesitated again, working with the picture I’d just painted. “He graduated from Princeton, you know.”

  The non sequitur was so startling I made a wisecrack: “Which means he probably wasn’t as good at camping as the rest of the guys.”

  Emma errupted. “How can you joke about this? Homelessness is horrible. And Wade is one of them? I can’t believe it. What does he eat? Where does he sleep?”

  “I imagine he ate what he could scavenge from the dumpster behind the Eighth Avenue Safeway—my cop friend tells me it’s a veritable cornucopia. And he slept in the back of a buried Datsun.”

  Her focus was on my attitude and not my inform
ation. “What’s wrong with you? How can you make light of him like that?”

  “I’m not making light of him, I’m making light of the rest of us.”

  Though insufficient, the justification seemed to mollify her. “Well, what did he say? How is he? Did he mention my name? When can I see him?”

  Despite the cascade of questions, I was reluctant to issue truth through the telephone. “I’m coming over,” I said. “We’ll talk when I get there.”

  But she wouldn’t let it go. “Did he say anything about me when you saw him? Just tell me that.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. He was a little jumpy. But the thing is, Emma, he’s—”

  “Why wouldn’t he be jumpy, for God’s sake? Framed for something he didn’t do, jailed for no reason, living like an animal, it just—”

  “I agree,” I concurred quickly. “I’m just saying I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then tell me how I can reach him.”

  “It’s not that simple. I—”

  “Please. I have to talk to him.”

  I hesitated, then opted for assistance. “Is your roommate there?”

  Emma’s tone turned brittle. “That’s really why you called, isn’t it?”

  “The reason I called was to ask if I could come talk to you. Both of you.” When she didn’t resist, I went on. “So how’s Christine?”

  “Fine.”

  “She still awake?”

  “We keep different schedules—she has her alone time in the morning; I have mine at night.”

  “Tell her I’m a morning person, too; we have something in common.”

  Emma Drayer paused, then found a new inflection, one that implied a reassessment. “She seemed to have a good time the other night.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “Only because she usually gets all contrite and remorseful after those types of things.”

  “What types of things?”

  “You know—one-night stands.”

  “If it’s only one night, it’ll be her choice, not mine.”

  “I think I’ll tell her that.”

  I grabbed at the opening. “Why don’t I come over and tell her myself?”

  She stiffened. “No. Now that your love life is taken care of, we can both get some sleep. But I’ll be at your office first thing in the morning and I won’t leave till you tell me about Wade.”

  “It can’t wait that long, Emma.”

  “It’ll have to.”

  I took in enough air to do my damage. “Linton was killed tonight.”

  “I … He’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry.”

  Her gasp became a reedy wail. “He can’t be. You just said—”

  “I was trying to postpone things till I could give you the news in person.”

  “Oh, my God.” The sobs accumulated into a chorus of thick grief. “After all these years. After I waited and waited for another letter, for something, anything, that would—”

  “There are things I need to know,” I interrupted, cruelly, under the rationale that she needed a diversion. “Wake up your roommate. Make some coffee. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Did you hear me? Go get Christine. Let her help you through this.”

  “How did he die? He didn’t starve, did he? I mean, if he starved, that means he didn’t even think enough of me to—”

  “He was beaten to death.”

  She paused. “Robbed, you mean?”

  “He was caught breaking into the school. If I let them, the police will call it a justifiable homicide.”

  “Is that what it was?”

  “I don’t think so. Can I come over? Please?”

  Emma was so silent it was impossible to know what she was thinking. Then I heard noises in the background. What I hoped was that Christine had been awakened by her roommate’s outburst and had gotten up to find out what was going on. I listened for a minute more. In the middle of a murmur of what sounded like condolence, I hung up the phone and drove across the city.

  The air was cold and damp; in its gritty gleam the world had become as icy as my self-regard. When Emma opened the door she seconded the motion. “If you were lying about Wade, I’ll kill you.”

  I shook my head. “They found him a few hours ago.”

  “At Sebastian?”

  I nodded.

  “God. All he went through at that fucking school, and now that.”

  “Misery is not evenly distributed. I first noticed it when I was nine. It’s why I stopped going to church.”

  She stepped back to let me in. The single lamp was low, but there was enough light for me to see Christine White standing in the kitchen with her back to me, wearing yellow pajamas and matching fuzzy slippers, pouring hot water over freshly ground beans. When she heard my voice she turned my way and tried to smile. Under the circumstances, it was the most intimate moment I’d shared with a woman in years.

  I waited for Christine to distribute the coffee before I launched my spiel. “First of all,” I looked at Emma, “I want you to give Christine a dollar.”

  “What are you talking about.”

  “Just do as I ask, please.”

  Eventually she walked to the counter and dug in her purse. “All I’ve got is a five.”

  “Give it to her.”

  She glowered, but crossed the room and held out the bill. “Here.”

  Christine took it, then looked for instructions. “What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Take it to the office tomorrow and put it in the trust account.”

  “Why?”

  “Because now you’re Emma’s lawyer.”

  Christine blinked. “Why does she need a lawyer?”

  I looked to my left. “Emma knows. Don’t you?”

  Emma didn’t move.

  I looked back at Christine. “What her lawyer needs to do at this point is advise Emma not to talk to anyone about anything having to do with the Sebastian School. Anyone but me, that is.”

  “Why?”

  I looked at Emma. “Do you believe I know what happened?”

  She bowed her head.

  “Maybe it will help if I make some findings of fact.”

  Emma stayed silent. “Will someone please tell me what this is all about?” her roommate asked, but it was one of the few meetings in history when a lawyer wasn’t in charge.

  I kept my eyes on Emma. “It was supposed to be about abusive sex, but that wasn’t exactly it, was it? What it was about was a baby.”

  Emma’s smile turned as soft as Christine’s silly slippers.

  “Alfred,” I said. “From ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.’” I looked at Christine. “That’s a poem by T. S. Eliot.”

  She stuck out her tongue. “I had a liberal arts education; I know who Prufrock is. What I don’t know is where this is going or whether I’m supposed to do anything about it.”

  When I looked at Emma again, she was looking back at me. “How did you know about his name?”

  “Alfred told me. I talked to him yesterday.”

  “Truly?”

  I nodded.

  “I’d love to see him.” She blinked. “You must be good at what you do.”

  “Good enough to learn more than I want to know, sometimes. He prefers Al, by the way. And he didn’t understand the poem when his mother read it to him.” I paused for effect. “But of course she’s not his mother.”

  Emma glanced at her roommate. “I think he’s right—I’d better keep quiet and I’d better have a lawyer. Can you do it?”

  Christine shrugged. “For now, I guess. But if you’re seriously in trouble—criminal trouble—I should bring in someone else.”

  Emma looked at me. “Is that all you have?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t see how you could know everything if you didn’t talk to Wade.”

  “As yo
u said, I’m good at what I do.”

  She sat there, frozen in time and consequence, until her roommate went to her side and took her hand.

  “The key to it all, of course,” I went on with a touch of pride, “is that Al wasn’t the Lintons’ natural child.” I looked again at Emma. “Have you got any more money?”

  Her grin was weak and mordant. “This is the most expensive conversation I’ve had since I was audited.” Nevertheless, she dug in her purse until she found a coin.

  “Give it to me.”

  She held out a palm; I plucked up the coin and stuffed it in my pocket. “Now I’m your lawyer, too. So when you tell me Al Linton was adopted, no one can pry the inducement to talk.”

  Emma didn’t respond to the implicit invitation.

  “I can find out elsewhere, you know. I can hound the boy’s birth mother until she relents and tells me about it, or I can work on Mr. Messenger. All lawyers have skeletons in their past; it won’t take long for me to dig up Messenger’s and trade it for what I need.”

  “He was adopted,” Emma confirmed grudgingly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, you know,” Christine chimed in uneasily.

  “You don’t have to.”

  I turned back to Emma. “I want you to know that I wasn’t hired to bring this out—the reason I got into the Sebastian stuff was essentially trivial. If it wasn’t for what happened to Linton, I’d probably leave it alone. But Linton’s dead; I have to find out whether I’m responsible for that and the only way I can is to find out why he died.” A tear traveled down her cheek. “From what I know now, I don’t think you’ll be prosecuted, but if you’re vulnerable in ways I don’t realize, you should tell your lawyer about them.”

  Emma walked to the window and looked into the gloom and glisten of the night. “I’ve been hurt so much already, the rest of it won’t make any difference.”

  She was talking about time and love and unrequited aspects of them both, talking about the past, which meant there was nothing I could do to make it other than it was.

  I looked at Christine. “I’d like you to invite your boss to meet me in your office at noon tomorrow.”

  “Which boss?—I’ve got a dozen of them.”

  “Gillis.”

  She frowned. “What do you want with him?”