Strawberry Sunday

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “I almost didn’t come,” she said after a third pass at her drink.

  “I wouldn’t have blamed you. It was presumptuous of me to ask.”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that with the police investigation and all, I realized this might compromise my position at some point. Give me a conflict of interest of some kind.”

  “I doubt if it will come up, actually.”

  “Just in case, can we keep this our little secret?”

  “Sure.”

  Pause.

  “So how’s the work going? Down here, I mean?”

  “Slowly.”

  “Is it really a murder case?”

  “Yep.”

  “Has there been an arrest?”

  “Not even close.”

  “No suspects?”

  “Several. But they’re mostly big agricultural wigs who are untouchable in this part of the state unless they’re caught with a corpse and a smoking gun and their name scrawled in blood on the wall.”

  “Are you giving up?”

  “I don’t give up.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Pause.

  “Have you changed your mind about contributing to our investigation?” she asked.

  “Is that some kind of quid pro quo?”

  “For what?”

  “For this.”

  “It probably should be, but no. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Forget I said anything.”

  Pause for the food and a second margarita.

  “So tell me about yourself, Ms. Coppelia,” I said when I realized it was my turn to move the boulder.

  “My life story in a hundred words or less?”

  “Take two.”

  “Let’s see. Born and raised in Santa Barbara. Father a lawyer; mother a realtor.”

  “Which has to mean you were rich, given it was Santa Barbara.”

  “Not rich, not in Santa Barbara terms, at least. But comfortable.”

  “House on the beach?”

  “Near.”

  “Private school?”

  “Public.”

  “BMW in high school?”

  “What are you, some sort of sociologist?”

  “Just revisiting some stereotypes.”

  “So I’m a stereotype now?”

  “The fact that you’re here means you’re far from it. But maybe back then. Just a little.”

  “If it pleases you to think so, be my guest.”

  “Sorry. So you followed in Daddy’s footsteps.”

  “Eventually.”

  “Do I sense some past indiscretions?”

  “I went though a rebellious phase, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Tell me what makes for rebellion down Santa Barbara way.”

  “What on earth have you got against Santa Barbara?”

  “Nothing I don’t have against Sausalito.”

  “Whatever that means. I did some drugs, did some sex, did some living off the land till I ended up in a Portuguese jail on a trumped-up charge involving prostitution and hashish. That straightened me out real quick, let me tell you.”

  “Pretty hard time in those foreign jails.”

  “Until Daddy pulled strings and got me out. Thank God he went to Harvard along with half the foreign service.”

  “Then?”

  “UCSB. Major in art history. Law school at Hastings. Clerked a year in Nevada, then went with the D. A.’s office nine years ago.”

  “Your indiscretions in Portugal didn’t keep you from taking the bar on character grounds?”

  “Not after Daddy talked to the right people. It seems moral turpitude is an elastic concept.”

  Pause.

  “How about the men in your life?”

  “Now? None that matter in terms other than friendship or office politics. Before? Too many to count. Well, not that many, since I did in fact count them one night, but a lot if the measure is carnal knowledge.”

  “How about if the measure is transcendant devotion?”

  “Once.”

  “Who?”

  “Guy I met in Europe; a Swede who was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen on two feet and for some reason God gave him a brain to go with it. It must have been some kind of willpower test, which of course I failed. Plus he was funny, and he truly loved women. That was his expertise, in fact—Sven knew more about women than women do.”

  “But?”

  “Turned out he was gay. Or said he was, at least. But not before I made a fool of myself for a month and a half.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “You bet I was. And that must have been lots more than a hundred words. So how about you? This first date business is tit for tat, in case you haven’t done it for a while.”

  “Me? Let’s see. Age forty-nine. Iowa; Army; Vietnam. College; law school; law practice; private investigation. Parents dead; three siblings still in the Midwest. No marriages; one engagement. No money; one less friend now that Charley Sleet is dead. Watch a lot of TV, read a lot of books, go to a lot of ball games. Bottom line—bloodied but unbowed, and no sexually transmitted diseases.”

  “That wasn’t even close to a hundred words.”

  “My life has been a very short story.”

  “Somehow I doubt it.”

  “Maybe a genre novel. But definitely not a best-seller.”

  “You seem at ease with women. Plus you’re well preserved and kind of cute. Why only one serious relationship?”

  “All my relationships are serious.”

  “But none of them worked out.”

  “Not enough to take a vow.”

  “Are you sorry about that?”

  “Yes, in general. No, in any of the particulars.”

  “Have you given up the hunt?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. What kinds of books do you read?”

  “Novels, mostly.”

  “What kind of novels? Detective stories?”

  “Not since I’ve been a detective.”

  “Lawyer novels?”

  “Not since I’ve been a lawyer. How about you?”

  “For recreation? I read mostly women, like Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman, some biography as well. And I hike and bike and take pictures of birds. And go to Tahoe to gamble every six months.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Why?”

  “It gives me the illusion that I’m still rebelling against something, I think.”

  Pause.

  “You like your job, Ms. Coppelia?” I asked.

  “Most of the time.”

  “Going to leave the government for private practice some day?”

  “I hope not.”

  “You can’t get rich being an A.D.A.”

  “I don’t need to get rich. I forgot to mention that Daddy died three years back. Despite our differences, he had a nice trust fund set up for me; the monthly stipend is embarrassingly large.”

  “Quite a guy, your daddy.”

  “I hated his guts.”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s not the word for it.”

  “Should we talk about that for a while?”

  “Not yet, we shouldn’t,” she said, and finished her chile relleno and drained her margarita.

  I looked at her empty plate. “What now? Dessert? Movie? A nightcap somewhere? A tour of my sumptuous room?”

  “Does your motel have those Pay per View types of movies?”

  “I think so.”

  “What’s playing?”

  “No idea.”

  “But probably something.”

  “There’s always something,” I said. “Usually starring Schwarzenegger.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  While I was settling the bill at the register, a young man came in the front door, obviously looking for something or someone. When he got to the cashier, he stopped. “You know who owns that gray Buick out in the lot?”

  “That would be me,” I told him.

&nbs
p; His grin was broadly wry and genuinely amazed. “You better get out there, mister.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone just dumped it over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He scratched the tip of his nose as words tumbled from his mouth like clowns. “Some guys drive up in a truck, one of those flatbed jobs that tilts back and makes a ramp? Then one of them gets in your car and drives it onto the incline, only with two wheels on and two off, which turns it over. Not an accident, but on purpose. Then he climbs out of the car, gets back in the truck, and they drive off like they did that kind of thing every day of the week. Damnedest thing I ever seen. Figured they were shooting a movie. They do that around here sometimes, except there weren’t any cameras or trailers or groupies out there,” he added, as though I’d already accused him of fibbing.

  Jill was standing next to me, mouth agape or close to it. “What on earth?” she said.

  I put a hand on her arm. “I’d better check it out. Stay here till I get back.”

  I went outside and looked. The truck and the two guys were gone, but the Buick was just as the kid said it would be, resting at a thirty-degree angle on its roof and hood, as helpless as a turtle flipped on its back, its wheels raised toward the sky like the hooves of a long-dead horse. The windshield was cracked, the front edge of the roof was caved in six inches, and the hood was dented in front from the weight of the engine, but otherwise nothing seemed different except for the paper flapping beneath the windshield wiper.

  I bent down and pulled it free. It was a map of Northern California, torn from a road atlas and annotated. A Magic Marker circled Salinas and San Francisco and a big black arrow pointed from the former to the latter. I guess the message was that I was supposed to go home, the way the crow flies if possible. I went back inside the restaurant.

  “Did they really flip your car?” Jill asked, the strings of a smile tugging her lips.

  I nodded. “We’re going to need a wrecker,” I told her. “Then maybe a cab.” I asked the cashier for a phone book.

  “Are they still out there?” Jill asked as I was looking up the number.

  “No.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “They want me to go back where I came from.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “I don’t know. Probably one of the Gelbrides.”

  “Those signs I see all over? Some kind of farms or something?”

  “That’s them.”

  “You make enemies pretty fast, Mr. Tanner. Tough ones, too, it sounds like.”

  I closed the phone book and looked at her. “I think you should go back to the city tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “It could be dangerous to hang around with me.”

  She smiled. “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay I’ll consider it.”

  The wrecker guy was certain he could do what I needed, which was to roll the car back onto its wheels, so certain I suspected he had done it before. It took him twenty minutes to get there and another thirty to get the job done with minimal damage to the rest of the car—all I had to do was shove when he had one side of the vehicle up on the hook and gave me the word to push. The next thing I knew it had flopped down onto its wheels, bouncing like a housebound child eager to go out and play.

  Since I wasn’t a member of AAA, the wrecker guy charged me a fortune. I got behind the wheel, slouched down in the seat to keep from bumping my head, and drove around the lot. Despite how it looked, the Buick ran as well as before or maybe better, but the top of my skull wanted to poke through the roof and the view through the windshield was fractured. I waved for the driver to go, then joined Jill at the door.

  I’d spent the dead time telling her about Rita Lombardi and what she had done and why I was there. When I’d finished, she’d looked at me with a higher degree of concern. “You’re a stranger in a strange land, it sounds like.”

  “To coin a phrase.”

  “Why don’t you leave it up to the police?”

  “For the same reason you shouldn’t leave the Triad up to the SFPD.”

  When I reached the door I asked a question. “Are you going back to the city tonight?”

  She crossed her arms and scowled. “I wouldn’t have been a prosecutor for nine years if I turned tail whenever someone tossed a threat at me.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Actually, I find danger to be something of an aphrodisiac.”

  “Do you now?”

  She poked me on the arm. “But at the moment I’m in the mood for more talk.”

  “Talk is a woman’s favorite foreplay, someone told me once.”

  “Talk is a woman’s favorite anything except new shoes,” Jill countered. “Where can we find a cold beer?”

  We went into the night and scrunched into the front of my caved-in car, looking more than a little ridiculous and feeling giddy and heedless as a result. We found a bar downtown, another in the Latino section, and a third in a mall so far north I wasn’t sure I could find my way back to the motel.

  By the time I did, I’d learned more about Jill’s family in Southern California, and more than I wanted to know about her life as a single woman footloose in San Francisco—Jill was candid to a fault. She was bold, brave, and brash in her professional life as well, as proved by the fact that she was getting ready to take on the entire San Francisco police department in the aftermath of the death of my friend, Charley Sleet.

  She was already feeling the heat from foe and friend alike, from everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to the Navy League to the PBA. But with the backing of her boss, a maverick former defense attorney elected two years earlier on a reformist ticket, she was determined to proceed to indictment and conviction via the institution of the Grand Jury. The first hearing was scheduled for the end of the month. Though I expected another entreaty that I join the fray in the form of turning state’s evidence, all she seemed to expect was that I wished her well.

  We got out of the car and regarded the motel, a boxy structure with a few halfhearted efforts at a federal design tacked on as cheap upgrades, the roar of traffic on Highway 101 a precursor of insomnia directly at its back. “Maybe we should drive to Carmel,” I said. “This isn’t all that romantic.”

  “It has a bed and a bathroom, doesn’t it?”

  “One of each.”

  “Then that’s all the romance we need. We’re not teenagers, after all.”

  “All teenagers need is a backseat.”

  We detoured past her car—a trim little Altima—to pick up her bag, then went up to the room by the side entrance so we wouldn’t have to deal with the desk clerk. When we got to the room, she inspected it cursorily and nodded. “I’ve stayed in worse. The D.A.’s per diem barely covers a Motel 6.”

  “There’s one across the street if you want to reminisce.”

  “This will be fine, thank you very much. I don’t suppose you have the makings of a nightcap on hand.”

  Flushed with her decision to spend the night and relieved that it hadn’t taken abject pleading to achieve, I held up a bottle of Ballantine’s. “Don’t leave home without it.”

  “A light one, please. Ice, no water.”

  I picked up the empty ice bucket. “Be back in a minute.”

  “Take three,” she said, and grabbed her bag and went into the bathroom and shut the door.

  I tucked the bucket under my arm and headed down the hall, my feet barely touching the carpet, my heart butting against my chest like a psychotic in a padded room. I started to fill the bucket right away, then decided Jill meant me to take her literally, so I lingered near the vending machine, examining the selections. It’s amazing what you can get out of a machine these days—this one included toothpaste and shampoo and cherry-flavored mouth-wash, as well as a dozen candy bars I’d never heard of before—whatever happened to Butterfinger and Clark bars?

  My watch was getting worn out from being looked at so often
. When my three minutes were up, I filled the bucket with a noisy crash of cubes, then returned to the room at the pace of a forced march, my heart doing enough calisthenics to suggest a tantrum. As I walked down the hall I tried not to overestimate what might lie in wait for me. It would be wonderful or awful, if past experience was any guide, and edgy and awkward until I was sure which direction it would take. I tapped on the door and entered the room.

  Jill was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I was sure she’d fled, coming to some prim version of her senses, but then I heard water running in the bathroom. My own senses stuck on autopilot, I went to the basin, unwrapped the glasses, added ice and then booze, took a look, then gave one of them a bit of a boost.

  As I was finishing the calibrations I heard a rustle at my back, slick and smooth, like a skater on fresh ice. I looked in the mirror. What I saw made me pivot so I could appreciate the image directly, rather than on the rebound.

  Jill had changed from her travel clothes into a negligee—a black, floor-length number cut low at the bust and cinched tight at the waist, sexy but subtle, simple yet tantalizing. She met my look as squarely as a head-on collision.

  “These moments can be awkward sometimes,” she said, her voice throaty and resolute. “So I thought I’d make things easier.” She turned in a dancer’s pirouette. “You like?”

  “Very much. But I’m afraid my silk pajamas are still at the cleaners.”

  “You’ve never owned silk pajamas in your life.”

  “True.”

  “But that’s okay. Men look better in their birthday suits anyway.”

  I looked at the bulge around my middle. “You’ve been consorting with a better class of people.” I held up the glasses. “Do we drink first? Or get right to the cuddling?”

  “Drink please,” she said.

  I handed her a sweaty highball, then took the other for myself. She looked at hers and then mine. “This one is stronger,” she said. “Are you trying to get me loaded? The negligee was to make it clear that wouldn’t be necessary.”