False Conception Read online

  “Did Greta ever mention working for the Colbert clothing stores?”

  “No. Did she?”

  “Several years ago, apparently.”

  “We shopped there once, I remember. She did seem quite interested in the place, come to think of it. She wore these big dark glasses, like Garbo or someone, and she tried to go somewhere that was off limits, I remember that.”

  “Up to the eighth floor?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you know? She got furious when the elevator operator wouldn’t take us. She wanted to sneak up the fire stairs but I managed to talk her out of it.”

  “What was she going to do when she got there?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “She never mentioned Stuart Colbert? Or Millicent or Cynthia Colbert?”

  “Maybe in passing, because they were in the news or something. But no big deal.”

  “The night I was with her she mentioned some sort of business deal that was going to make her money. Did she mention it to you?”

  “Yes, but I think it fell through.”

  “Why?”

  “She flew off the handle one day, not long before she … left. ‘Nothing ever goes right for me,’ she said. ‘I’m jinxed. I’m a fly in a web and I can’t get out of it. I’ll never get out of it.’ Oh. And there was something about someone handing her another nightmare.”

  “What do you think she was talking about?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. But I know she’s been worrying about losing her job and I was afraid she’d gotten herself caught up in some kind of shady scheme and so if the police started looking for her, she’d be arrested and … anyway, that’s why I haven’t done more to find her. That’s what I tell myself, at least.” Her words trailed off into the hush of a moral dilemma.

  “Had she been threatened?” I went on. “Or followed? Or had there been odd phone calls or weird messages?”

  “No. Not that she told me.”

  “Is there anyone at work she confided in?”

  “I doubt it. There was a lot of turnover at her level. She said it was like a war zone up there—no one stayed around long enough for her to get to know them.”

  I took time to review everything Linda had told me, and when I finished, I decided to move on. “Well, thank you for talking to me.”

  “Are you really going to look for her?”

  I nodded.

  “Is it because you’re in love with her?”

  “Partly,” I said, then wondered how true it was.

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Nothing I can talk about.”

  She looked at me for several seconds. “All of a sudden you’re scaring me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt her; I’m going to help her.”

  “How can I be sure?”

  “Trust me.”

  “I don’t trust men anymore.”

  “Greta trusted me,” I pointed out.

  “No, she didn’t. If she did, you’d know where she was.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I should never have said anything. I shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

  “You’re being alarmist and that’s not going to help anybody. Is there anything else you can think of? Something she said; some strange reference she made? Anything?”

  She took time to calm down, then shook her head. “No, I … wait a minute. It was the oddest thing. One of the last times I saw her, she asked to borrow some baby clothes.”

  “Why?”

  “She wouldn’t say. But that’s not the weird part. The weird part is, I had Mrs. Hapwood let me in Greta’s apartment last week? Just to look around? And I found the little sleeper I gave her.”

  “So?”

  “It was all torn up. Ripped to shreds. It was like some animal had savaged it, a pit bull or something. It almost made me sick.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I spent ten minutes looking for a pay phone before I remembered that I had gone cellular three weeks before. When I got back to my car, I called the Central Station and asked for Charley Sleet. Even though it was Saturday, it didn’t occur to me that Charley might be off duty: Charley was never off duty.

  After lolling on hold for five minutes, I heard his grumble roll at me the way a bowling ball rolls down the gutter.

  “Charley.”

  “Marsh.”

  “Going to be around awhile?”

  “How long is that?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes, probably.” He sniffed and cleared his throat—it sounded like he used an earthmover. “You got that sound you get when you want to make unauthorized use of the police force,” he grumbled when he was finished.

  “Fingerprints, is all,” I assured him quickly. “Piece of cake.”

  “Piece of shit, is what it is. Is this something to do with your social life, like last time, or does it have to do with a criminal offense? Not that there’s much difference.”

  “It’s probably criminal, Charley.”

  The sarcasm went out of Charley’s voice in a hurry—Charley doesn’t joke about crime. “What kind of offense we talking about?”

  “That’s the problem—I don’t know.”

  “Give me some possibilities.”

  “Kidnaping, maybe. Extortion, maybe. Murder, maybe. Or maybe just a missing person.”

  Charley knew me too well. “Or maybe nothing.”

  “Preferably, nothing,” I agreed.

  He sniffed. “I suppose you need it yesterday.”

  “Today will do.”

  “Monday. Things back up on weekends.”

  “Monday is fine.”

  Twenty minutes later I was double-parked on Vallejo Street in front of the Central Station. Charley was waiting out front, because one thing Charley knows is that, with him, when I say twenty minutes I mean twenty minutes.

  With his bald head and stumpy neck and massive arms that were crossed like anchor chains on his barrel chest, he looked like the original Mr. Clean. Which wasn’t a bad description of his personal ethic, either.

  I gave him the ruler I’d lifted from Greta Hammond’s apartment. He held it the way he would hold an orchid. “Whose is this?” he asked.

  “That’s what I want to know. Female. Thirties. As far as I know, no record.”

  “So we may not have a comp.”

  “I thought maybe an employment thing. Or driver’s license.”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “If I wasn’t lucky, I’d have to do legwork.”

  He cursed my truism. “Remind me why we’re interested in the lady.”

  “Because she doesn’t seem to have a past.”

  “What you’re saying is she’s got one but you don’t know what it is.”

  “Close enough.”

  “She skipped, or what?”

  “She made a deal with some friends of mine but she seems to be backing out. They want to know why. So do I.”

  He looked at the ruler again, as though it might contain a hint in scrimshaw. “Kidnaping can be tricky,” he observed cryptically.

  “I know.”

  “If something goes wrong, the loved ones like to have someone to blame.”

  “I know, Charley.”

  “So you should go through me if that’s what it turns out to be.”

  “I will if I can.”

  His gnarled skull rumpled at my evasiveness. “Remember the last one.”

  “I remember.”

  Charley nodded to confirm that my mind was where he wanted it, which was on a kidnaping that had gone as sour as one of them can go. “Monday,” he said, waving the ruler.

  “Monday,” I agreed.

  He turned and went into the station, leaving me to remember what it felt like when we’d learned that the little girl who’d been snatched from the yard of her home in Seacliff had been buried alive before the ransom demand was called in and had suffocated before we’d found her. I hadn’t had any worse day than that, except for the day m
y friend Harry Spring had been found dead out in the valley and I’d been there when they told his wife about it.

  I stopped for coffee at Zorba’s along the way, then mounted the stairs to the office. There were several messages on my answering machine; one of them was Russell Jorgensen, announcing that he was going sailing that afternoon and asking if I wanted to join him. I laughed and erased the tape.

  I put on some coffee and watered the plants and sat down to look at the ledgers. Before long I was thinking about Greta Hammond, about where she could have gone and why she might have gone there. The more I thought about her, the less I liked the conclusions I was reaching, so I jotted some memos to some files, dictated some letters to some deadbeats, posted some expenses in the ledgers, and adjourned to my apartment up the slope of Telegraph Hill.

  After I’d fixed a lunch consisting of a cheese sandwich and six Oreos, and changed my clothes, I sat by the phone and thought about Betty Fontaine. Thinking about Betty made me think about the reasons we’d broken up, which made me think about children and my reluctance to have them and what that seemed to say about the kind of man I was.

  There was a range of ignoble possibilities, of course—selfishness, fussiness, listlessness, laziness—and they all no doubt played a part. But I wasn’t nearly as reluctant as I was scared. Partly I was scared because I had been unhappy over much of my childhood, for a host of complex reasons, and I didn’t want to inflict the disabilities that had caused or resulted from that condition on yet another generation of Tanners. But mostly I was scared of kids because over the years I’d seen too many of them in dire straits—kids shoved so far off the track they couldn’t find their way back even when people who loved them hired people like me to bring them home.

  They weren’t the children of ogres always, either; surprisingly often they were the offspring of decent people who didn’t realize until too late that their children had run afoul of the wrong crowd or the wrong drug or the wrong chromosome or, as Freud suggested, had heard the wrong word at the wrong moment sometime before the age of two. It was hard enough to see the consequences as a detached observer—fifteen-year-olds prostituting themselves, twelve-year-olds living under bridges and eating out of dumpsters, eighteen-year-olds terrorizing their grandparents to support their heroin habits—I didn’t think I could bear to watch it happen to someone I had brought into being.

  But that’s not the way it would be, I would tell myself; the sad cases are only a fraction of the whole. How can you be sure? was my riposte. What makes you entitled to certainty? went the rebuttal. And somewhere in there I realized that what I was scared of most of all was that I wouldn’t measure up, that fatherhood would be one more thing I would fail at, that it would generate yet another debacle for which I would have to take the blame.

  I was still locked in an interior tussle when the telephone rang. I’d been thinking about her so much I was certain it was Betty, responding to a telepathic summons, but it wasn’t Betty; it was Charley.

  “I caught a break,” he said.

  “At the track?”

  “At the lab. I took the ruler thing down there, and a friend of mine—Petey Karns—you know Petey?”

  “The guy with the limp and the monocle?”

  “Right.”

  “I know Petey.”

  “Anyway, Petey was in for some rush thing—another tourist mugging in the Western Addition—and he owes me a favor.”

  “Everyone on the force owes you a favor.”

  “Probably. Anyway, Petey dusted the ruler and I took it upstairs and we got a twelve-point match out of the machine.”

  “Greta Hammond. Right?”

  “I don’t know no Greta anybody. The match we got was a Clara Brennan.”

  “Who?”

  “Brennan. Clara. Caucasian female, brown on green, five-six, one twenty-five. DOB seven eight fifty-six. Last known address, Santa Ana Way in the city.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “St. Francis Wood.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t kid.”

  And all of a sudden the poor little waif from a walkup on Kirkham Street had turned into a Clara Brennan from St. Francis Wood, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, the neighborhood where Rutherford Colbert still held court, surrounded by his feuding clan.

  “What’s this about, Marsh?” Charley was saying.

  “I don’t know, Charley. I don’t know anything, obviously. So how come she was in your computer?”

  “Driver’s license. Age sixteen.”

  “Any record on her?”

  “No.” Someone said something in the background, then Charley asked me, “Is that it?”

  “For now.”

  “Good,” he repeated, then announced the going rate for cooperation. “Dinner. Chan’s. Thursday. Seven.”

  “Clement Street; seven o’clock. I’ll be there.”

  I hung up and called Russell Jorgensen. “About that sailing trip,” I said when he answered.

  “You got the message. Good. Can you come?”

  “Where and when?”

  “Yacht club in an hour.”

  “How many people are going to be there?”

  “How many do you want to be there?”

  “Just us,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 18

  I was sure I was going to throw up. I was afraid I was going to throw up. I hoped I was going to throw up. I was afraid I wouldn’t throw up.

  That’s the way it went for a while, as Russell Jorgensen’s thirty-eight-foot ketch bobbed on the bay like a champagne cork. The breeze was at eighteen knots from the west-southwest, the sails were full to bursting, the hull was canted to an alarming angle, the electronic sheets and halyards were whizzing up and down, and the water that splashed off the prow was as salty as a good margarita. My stomach journeyed from my throat to my groin and back again, and again and again, like a piston in a two-stroke engine. My head spun like a flywheel. Russell was loving every minute of it and I was hanging on for dear life.

  From time to time, he gave me something to do, usually involving ropes. On two occasions, he let me man the helm, or tend the tiller, or whatever you call it when you steer the damned thing. Like most aspects of sailing, it was harder than it looked to do right: things kept flapping that weren’t supposed to flap.

  For the most part I was left to my own devices, as Russell steered a course for Angel Island while trying to avoid the scores of other sailors who had duplicated our decision to sally forth on the bounding main. My plan had been to have a leisurely chat with the skipper about now, taking advantage of his divided attention to pierce his customary reticence. But given the exigencies of this particular form of recreation, conversation was going to have to wait until we were safely on dry land. Which, as far as I was concerned, was already overdue.

  After an hour or so, the breeze seemed to subside and we came about onto a comparatively stable tack. When everything was back in trim, Russell broke out the lunch basket and I cracked open the Anchor Steam. His idea of seagoing fare was goose pâté and a crab sandwich. My taste tends more to roast beef and coleslaw but it was a good day to eat less than my fill, so I consumed what I needed to be polite, and tried to keep it down as we took a turn toward Alcatraz.

  Half an hour later, we were nibbling chocolate truffles and relaxing in a reach downwind. I watched a particularly opulent cruiser knife its way toward the Golden Gate, then decided not to wait for shore.

  “Clara Brennan,” I blurted, apropos of nothing.

  Russell only half-heard me. “What?”

  “Clara Brennan,” I repeated.

  Russell was suddenly all ears. The sail luffed and a halyard slacked, but for the first time all day, he didn’t trim them up. “What about her?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  He was surprised and he didn’t like it—lawyers don’t like surprises because that’s when they make mistakes. “Please tell me what you’re talking ab
out,” he asked levelly.

  I waved at a woman on a passing skiff who looked even more imperiled than I was; she seemed pleased to have a sympathizer. “I need to know what Clara Brennan has to do with the Colbert case.”

  Russell rubbed spray off his face as he thought it over. “It would help if you’d explain why you think she has anything to do with it,” he said finally, still reluctant to address the question.

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t? Or won’t?”

  “Take your pick,” I said, more irritated by the moment at Russell’s dodging and weaving. It had begun to look like the foundations of the Colbert case were quicksand and, if they were, Russell had probably known it from the first. I’d thought we were closer than that, close enough that he wouldn’t try to take advantage of me, but then again this was the first time we’d ever been sailing.

  Russell tended his boat for a few more moments, then sat back down and looked toward the looming wart of Alcatraz, which somehow had come quite close. He didn’t seem to enjoy the view.

  “Is there some reason I shouldn’t know about the Brennan woman, Russell?” I asked in all innocence.

  “Not really. It’s just an unfortunate chapter in the Colbert story.”

  “How so?”

  He sighed and shook his head, as if the subject were too dreary to contemplate. “Is the Brennan name familiar to you?” he asked at last.

  “Should it be?”

  “Ethan Brennan was Clara’s father. He went to work for the Colbert stores as a stock boy when he was eighteen years old and just out of Mission High. Ten years later, he was the highest ranking officer in the company, next to Rutherford Colbert himself.”

  “How did he manage that?”

  “He was a genius.”

  “’How so?”

  “When Rutherford founded the store, it carried mens wear exclusively and was at best a marginal operation. Then Ethan Brennan came along, and put them into high-end women’s fashion, and profits eventually soared. Apparently he had an uncanny ability to pick which of the European and New York styles would catch on out here and which the local swells wouldn’t touch with a kid glove. And he was smart enough to follow up with exclusive distribution arrangements with popular designers like Balenciaga and Chanel and Schiaparelli, which meant the hot stuff was available only at Colbert’s. Plus, his personality was a perfect complement to Rutherford’s.”