Past Tense Read online

  “Mr. Greenleaf writes like a literary guerrilla…lulling his readers by laying out the messy moral questions with clarity and intelligence.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  LOOK FOR STEPHEN GREENLEAF’S OTHER JOHN MARSHALL TANNER MYSTERIES

  FLESH WOUNDS

  FALSE CONCEPTION

  Available from Pocket Books

  Acclaim for Stephen Greenleaf’s latest John Marshall Tanner mystery

  PAST TENSE

  “The twelfth John Marshall Tanner novel lives up to the tradition of excellence found in Greenleaf’s recent Flesh Wounds…. Moving and full of valuable insights.”

  —Library Journal

  “The plot is bold, the storytelling well-paced, and Greenleaf doesn’t shy away from the ending, which is a shocker.”

  —Susan Cohen, San Jose Mercury News

  Praise for previous John Marshall Tanner mysteries

  “A fascinating journey down a dark and twisty lane, deep into shadowy cold family secrets.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “The Tanner series continues to be among the most emotionally and intellectually challenging in the genre. Outstanding.”

  —Booklist

  “A logical and suspenseful tale that makes for an engrossing read. Mr. Greenleaf always gives his reader a full-blown and well-realized story.”

  —Mystery News

  More praise for the John Marshall Tanner mysteries

  “Stephen Greenleaf is terrific: a writer whose prose is not only crisp but literate and thoughtful as well. Even the scuzziest inhabitants of the meanest streets are set down on paper with wit, grace, and humanity. Flesh Wounds is a wonderful read.”

  —Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winning author of the Gideon Oliver series

  “Mr. Greenleaf delivers the incisive social observations, passionate characterizations, and fine writing that we’ve come to expect of this substantial series…. As befits an heir of Ross MacDonald, the author keeps his moral grip on what matters.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “His dialogue rings with smart authority and reverberates in the memory long after the reader has closed the book.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “The problem with author Stephen Greenleaf is that he doesn’t write often enough…. Marsh Tanner is a unique, lonely, and appealing protagonist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “John Marshall Tanner is the long-sought heir of Sam Spade, Marlowe, and Archer.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “An excellent mix of technical detail and low-life grunge.”

  —Booklist

  “Greenleaf is a pro, so the rapidly unfolding events make for an engrossing read, but more importantly, the book is as fine an exploration of the perils of genetic narcissism as you’re going to find.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Tough, meaty prose, sly twists in plot, and immediacy of action.”

  —Library Journal

  “Greenleaf’s portrayal of the wealthy Colbert family’s misguided efforts to insulate itself from the consequences of prior mistakes is unerring. He is a master of the succinct but revealing descriptive phrase.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Books by Stephen Greenleaf

  Past Tense*

  Flesh Wounds*

  False Conception*

  Southern Cross

  Blood Type

  Book Case

  Impact

  Toll Call

  Beyond Blame

  The Ditto List

  Fatal Obsession

  State’s Evidence

  Death Bed

  Grave Error

  * Published by POCKET BOOKS

  For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of 10 or more copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice-President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-6785, 8th Floor.

  For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc., 200 Old Tappan Road, Old Tappan, NJ 07675.

  The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1997 by Stephen Greenleaf

  Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by Scribner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-01947-3

  eISBN: 978-1-451-60260-9

  First Pocket Books printing February 1998

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover design by Tom McKeveny

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  For Jim Harris

  PAST TENSE

  CHAPTER

  1

  IT WAS MIDMORNING OF A CHILLY WINTER WEEKDAY. TIME was glutinous and so was I—there were things I should have been doing but I wasn’t doing them; there were places I should have been going but I was too soporific to move. Instead, I was drinking coffee and wondering if my net worth could finance a trip to somewhere sunny, somewhere like Mexico. I like Mexico, Mexico is cheap, if I were any kind of a success at all I could kiss San Francisco good-bye and spend March in Guadalajara or Guanajuato without even blinking an eye.

  I opened my checkbook. Cash on hand: $973.28; rent past due: $500.00; reliable receivables: zip. Bottom line: I make do with remembering the last trip and pray that baseball solves its labor dispute so I can abandon my boycott. I was so despondent I almost didn’t pick up the phone when it yelled at me.

  But I did, because answering phones is something I do: I don’t cheat on my taxes, I don’t sleep with other men’s wives, and I don’t hide behind technology. I’m not sure I’m the better for any of those vows, incidentally; some of the happiest people I know violate all three and then some.

  “Marsh?” The voice was raspy and unnerved: a fighter after a knockout; a drunk after a night in the tank.

  “Yeah?”

  “What the hell.”

  “What the hell what?”

  “Charley.”

  “Sleet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?”

  “You ain’t heard?”

  “I guess not.”

  “He’s been busted.”

  “Charley?”

  “Yeah.”

  I laughed because it was time for the exchange to turn funny. “Busted for what? Cornering the market on doughnuts?”

  The offer wasn’t accepted. “Murder, most likely.”

  “Murder? Charley? You’re kidding.”

  “I wish to hell I was.”

  And suddenly everything in my life wasn’t mundane and dull and unexceptional, everything was odd and electric and awful. “This is bullshit. Right? Who is this, anyway?”

  “Glen Bittles, clerk for Judge Newell. Used to be the admin officer down at Vallejo Street back in ’78, ’79. I’d see you once in a while when you’d
come to see Sleet at the cop house. Charley called me Peanut; maybe you remember.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Peanut. So what happened? Someone set Charley up on a frame?”

  “Hard to see a frame in it. He gunned some guy down this morning.”

  “What guy?”

  “Some guy in the courthouse, don’t know his name. I’m not talking City Hall, you know, ’cause that’s closed for earthquake repairs, but the temporary courtrooms they rigged up in the phone company building on Folsom. That’s where it happened.”

  “Out front, you mean. Some sort of shoot-out on the street.”

  “Naw, this was inside. Judge Meltonian’s court.”

  “Charley shot a guy in open court?”

  “Yeah. Twice, is what I heard. First one missed high; second nailed him square in the back of the head. Popped like a muskmelon, I heard; dude was dead before he hit the carpet. So much brain spattered on the bench it looked like Meltonian chucked up his lunch.”

  My heart was beating so loudly I could hardly hear Glen Bittles’s grating whisper over the troubled thumps within my ear. “What was it,” I tried again, still struggling for a benign explanation, “some nut got a weapon past the metal detector and Charley had to take him out?”

  “Naw, all he was was a defendant in a civil case. Sitting at the table with his lawyer, listening to the bullshit, and Charley ups and drills him. Court reporter took shrapnel in the shoulder—bullet must have fragmented.”

  “I don’t … Did you see this go down, Peanut? You sure someone isn’t playing with you?”

  “I wasn’t there but I know it happened. Joyce Yates told me. She was covering the case for the Chronicle.”

  “So Yates saw the whole thing?”

  “Happened right in front of her. Way she tells it, Sleet might have taken out the whole room except some guy grabbed his arm and wrestled him. By the time Charley shucked him off, he must have figured he’d done all the damage he needed to do, ’cause he tossed down his piece and dropped to the floor and waited for them to come take him.”

  “Anyone hurt besides the court reporter?”

  “Naw. Meltonian made like a rabbit and scooted back to his chambers and the lawyers dove under the table. No heroes in that bunch, right? Some paralegal turned his ankle when he jumped in the jury box, is all.”

  “Where was the clerk?”

  “Finnerty. Marjie. She stayed put. I hear she said she didn’t think Charley had a beef with her, and if he did, he’d wait till after hours and take it up with her at Cafe Vince. Marjie’s got more balls than most men, let me tell you. Cute as a cornflower; maybe you know her.”

  “I’ve seen her out there. Was a jury in the box?”

  “Naw. Motion for summary judgment. Supposed to be over by noon.”

  “Who else was there? Anyone you know?”

  “Not that I heard. Maybe some of the regulars—you know, the pension guys—but I don’t know any by name. Marjie can probably tell you, she likes those old farts. There was some other media in there, too.”

  “Why all the media?”

  “It was some sort of sex case. Sex brings out media like shit brings out flies.”

  “What kind of sex case?”

  “Who knows? Someone probably cut something off, if you know what I mean.” Peanut chuckled his way to an uneasy silence.

  There were still questions to ask, of course, but Glen Bittles wasn’t the person who could answer them, so I didn’t make an effort.

  As I clutched the phone in a sweaty hand and cast about for a plan of action, images flooded my senses. An image of Charley looming large over a fallen corpse was succeeded by a vision of Charley behind bars, being preyed upon by a gang of felons who had reason galore to wreak havoc with him. I waited for the pictures to penetrate to the regions of the brain that thin our terrors and dilute our dread, but for some reason they wouldn’t sink.

  “Where’s Charley now?” I asked.

  “Don’t know for sure. Holding cell, most likely. Hall of Justice.”

  “Has anyone talked to him? Has he got a lawyer yet?”

  “Don’t know that either. Hey. I got to get going, my jury’s coming back from break. Just wanted to let you know about Sleet, Marsh; figured you’d know why he done it.”

  “No idea.”

  “Yeah. Me neither. Well, I’ll be seeing you, Marsh.”

  “Yeah, Glen. Thanks for the call.”

  Peanut didn’t hang up. “You going down there? To see Sleet, I mean?”

  I told him I probably was.

  “Well, tell him I know whatever he did, he had a reason. I mean Charley’s a good cop. He’s not the kind of guy who … well, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Charley’s not the kind of guy who blows somebody’s brains out without a good reason.”

  I put the phone in its cradle and spent the next ten minutes trying to guess what that reason could be. When I didn’t come up with anything I could make myself believe, I applied some psychological salve to the sting of my scalded emotions.

  There are certain verities you count on: The sun will come up in the east; the Warriors won’t get a big man; traffic on the bridges will get worse; Congress will toady to big business. But the surest verity of all is that Charley Sleet wouldn’t hurt a fly unless the fly carried a virus that would wipe out the world if it was allowed to keep flying. Which meant what I’d heard from Glen Bittles was irrational and incomplete, suggestive of farce or incompetence; which made it, someway, somehow, wrong.

  Of the people I know, Charley is the least likely to take a life. It’s a revealing statement to make in his case, since, as opposed to most of us, his job presents him with the opportunity to commit homicide nearly every day. But time after time, in situations that would terrify or inflame a normal man, Charley passes on the prospect of violence and keeps his weapon holstered. Charley enforces the law with his courage and his wits.

  His personal life is similarly pacific. He’s opposed to both the death penalty and abortion, one of the few people who have consistent positions on those issues. He devotes his off-hours to counseling kids at risk; he donates more money than he can spare to homeless shelters and free clinics; he helps a buddy run a halfway house for Labrador retrievers that takes strays from the pound and finds them new owners. And suddenly this man guns someone down apropos of nothing? Not bloody likely, as the Brits would say.

  My initial impulse was to try to make sense out of the nonsense Glen Bittles described, quickly enough so the nonsense wouldn’t be regarded as truth, whether by the DA, or by the media, or by the Office of Citizen Complaints. The only way I could think of to do that was to put his conduct in context, and the only way to do that was to head for the Hall of Justice, to get a context from the horse’s mouth.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE QUICKEST WAY TO THE HALL OF JUSTICE WAS BY CAB—I got lucky and hailed one in five minutes, at the corner of Columbus and Montgomery. The cabbie groused about traffic and the new mayor and the Warriors; I stayed silent and pissed him off. When he dropped me at Sixth and Bryant, I tipped enough to make amends for my dearth of municipal animus.

  The Hall of Justice houses the city’s criminal courts. As with all such buildings, there is an aura of doom about the place, a sense that violence is near eruption, that mores and morality are checked at the door, that no one gives a damn what happens inside the building because most of its customers deserve what they get and then some. I’d spent all the hours I cared to in the place, offering testimony, serving subpoenas, shepherding witnesses, even spending some time in the jail on the sixth floor when I was cited for contempt of court back when I was a lawyer instead of a PI.

  Persons like Charley, who are under arrest and awaiting trial, used to be held in the San Francisco city jail in San Bruno, ten miles south of town. The Bruno jail is sixty years old and is under indictment from the Grand Jury, which declared it to be seismically unsafe, disgustingly unsanitary, and unfit for
human habitation even by humans accused of criminal misconduct. It teems with rats, roaches, and raw sewage. Its heat and hot water come from a boiler on the back of a truck that is parked outside the building. And it’s vastly overcrowded. To handle the surplus, the city fathers are reportedly considering putting inmates on barges, just like they do in New York.

  Since prisoners are always going back and forth from San Bruno to court, the Hall of Justice needs a place to house them till their trial is called or their hearing comes up or their public defender drops by to touch base. The sixth-floor jail I’d inhabited after my allegedly contemptuous courtroom performance was still in operation, but now there’s a brand-new jail adjacent to the hall, a glass-brick-and-stainless-steel structure that’s a model of its kind, or so they claim. Given the public mood these days, being a model jail may mean they’ve brought back the racks and screws.

  The third person I saw was a sheriff’s deputy named Gil Harrison, who’d been a jailer for twenty years. Anyone who’s been a deputy that long knows Charley Sleet and probably me as well, so he didn’t have to be told why I was there.

  “Shitty deal,” he said without preamble.

  “Yeah.” I gestured at the door to the rear of his desk. “He back there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bail been set?”

  Harrison shook his head. “Not till arraignment.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Tomorrow, unless he gets a continuance.”

  “He going down to Bruno tonight?”

  Harrison shook his head. “Not unless the arraignment’s delayed. We’ll keep him till he pleads.”

  “He seen a lawyer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Deputy public defender wanted to chat, but Charley wouldn’t see him.”

  “He made any calls?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anyone at all been in with him?”

  “Just Gutters.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Deputy that logged him in. Larry Gutters. New guy.”

  “Charley say anything to him?”

  Harrison shrugged. “He asked if anyone was hurt, I guess. In the shooting, he meant. That was about it as far as I heard. He was Mirandized and all. Not that he needed it. Charley was a cop when the only Miranda was a tap dancer.”