Past Tense Read online

  “You’re working for Jake?”

  “I’m working for Charley. So is Jake. So are a lot of people who cared about him. Except you, apparently.”

  It was mean and unfair, a product of my panic. Justifiably, she lashed back. “I care about him so much I can’t eat or sleep or breathe. I care about him so much I fell to my knees when he called and begged him to let me come see him.”

  She lapsed into convulsive sobs. Her arms hugged her chest; her head dropped so low that her tears spattered the pages of the Pacific Reporter. The computer gurgled periodically, in a vain effort to divert attention from her suffering.

  “What else did he say?” I asked softly.

  “He told me to leave it alone, that if I loved him I’d keep quiet and forget I ever knew him. As if anyone could forget Charley.” The impossibility of obeying his command made her chuckle.

  She wiped her tears away as best she could, then blotted them off the law book and finally looked up at me. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I feel like crying myself.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  We stayed silent for a time, then I made a final plea. “Look at it this way for a minute. Charley isn’t acting rationally; he wouldn’t have done what he did if he was thinking straight. Which means telling you there’s nothing to be done, to let it be and forget him, isn’t rational either. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “To start with, how did you and Charley meet?”

  She blinked to quash a lingering tear. “He was in court on some domestic violence thing. You know how it goes, we got behind and he kept having to come back day after day, and we started talking, and laughing, and having a good time, and finally I asked him to take me to dinner.”

  “You asked him?”

  She nodded. “I made it sort of a joke, you know, but I knew that if I didn’t make the first move there wouldn’t be a move. So that’s how it started.”

  “And how far did it go?”

  She frowned. “Do you want the spicy details?”

  “I want to know if he loved you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if he loved you, you’re the one to convince him to help us get him out of this thing.”

  “He does love me, I think. He said he did, at least. And he acted like he did.” Her voice fell to a whisper and her eyes softened like chocolate in the sun. “He’s very gentle for a big man. And very kind. And very needy. I was surprised how much he seemed to need me, once he believed I truly cared about him.”

  “Charley’s been lonely for a long time.”

  She nodded. “Since his wife died. I know. He talks about her as though she’s sewing in the next room.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Not now. Maybe later it will. If there is a later.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “That’s a song title, isn’t it? Gershwin, I think. About four months.”

  “Were you making plans? Talking about marriage and a life together?”

  “Sort of. I think mostly it was him trying to see if I had a problem sleeping with him without a ring on my finger. I didn’t,” she added quickly. “Have a problem, I mean.”

  “The fact that he’d fallen in love makes it all the more inexplicable that he put himself in jeopardy like this.”

  She nodded. “That’s why I was so stunned when it happened. I just thought: Why are you ruining things for us?”

  I paused and looked at her. “Can you help me at all, Marjie?”

  “With the case files?”

  I nodded.

  She shook her head. “But there’s nothing there. I went through every piece of paper to see if he was mentioned.”

  “And he wasn’t.”

  “No. Not even in the depositions.”

  As if he’d been eavesdropping, the door opened and Judge Meltonian stood gazing down upon us like a disapproving chaperon. He was barely forty, tall and thin, slickly groomed and egoistically imposing, looking every bit the skilled trial lawyer that he’d been before going on the bench two years back. “I need those orders, Marjie.”

  “Sorry, Judge,” she said, then turned to me and shrugged.

  I stood up. “Did he say anything about me?” I asked.

  She nodded. “He said to tell you not to worry. He said to tell you to give up the boycott and go down to Arizona next spring and enjoy yourself.” She smiled with fondness at the memory of the conversation. “I haven’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.”

  “He was talking about baseball,” the judge told her with a kindly smile.

  I regarded it as an opening, so I introduced myself and we shook hands. “I’m here about Charley Sleet,” I said.

  Meltonian nodded. “An unfortunate situation. And apparently inexplicable.”

  “I agree. Unless you have some ideas on the subject?”

  The judge shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I’m just glad no one else was badly injured.”

  “Who was on the stand when it happened? Do you remember?”

  “We hadn’t gotten to the plaintiff’s testimony yet. The movant had rested and the plaintiff had asked for a judgment on the record. I was just about to rule when the shots were fired.” He looked at Marjie. “If I’m going to make that play, I need those orders.”

  I made a last pitch to Marjie myself. “We need to talk some more. I need to know everything Charley said and did in the past month.”

  She nodded vaguely and began to type. The judge slid back to his chambers without bidding me good-bye. On the way out of the building, I began to wonder if I had journeyed to another planet, where cause and effect were inoperative, where every act was random and inexplicable, where everything was upside down. What I wondered, at bottom, was whether what Charley had wanted was simply to get himself locked away in jail where no one could get at him, where the world would be the size of a sandbox.

  CHAPTER

  17

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY CAR, I LOOKED AT MY WATCH. There was still time to catch Eleanor before her bedtime. I drove west on Fell Street faster than the law allowed.

  Eleanor is my daughter. At least I think she’s my daughter. Her biological mother is a woman I’ve spoken to on only three occasions, two of them when she was purportedly serving as a surrogate mother carrying the child of a wealthy couple named Colbert who couldn’t conceive by normal means. For reasons grounded in her personal history with the future father, the surrogate decided to abort the Colberts’ implanted embryo and replace it with one produced by the two of us, my part of the production being entirely unwitting.

  At least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. The little girl who showed up nine months later is being raised by the contracting couple as if the surrogate contract had been fulfilled and the implant had proceeded to term. They don’t know about the abortion or my probable relationship to the child. Although I’m not on the scene in an active capacity, I regard Eleanor as my offspring and I monitor her progress as best I can. To the Colberts, I’m a godfather manqué who stops by once or twice a week to check on his charge. In reality, I’m a more than middle-aged man who never expected to have a child of his own and is awestruck by the windfall that has graced him.

  When I found out that the surrogate had made me a parent without my consent, I had no idea how to react. Based on some unnerving experiences with other people’s children over the years, I didn’t expect to feel much more than dutiful toward the infant, and perhaps not even that, since I had not planned to conceive a child and in fact had protected against conception, which had occurred only because the surrogate had sabotaged the method of birth control I’d employed. I expected my reaction to be tepid going on cool, and I was as wrong as I’d been when I’d predicted that Clinton would make a great President.

  From the moment I first held Eleanor in my arms, I was a slave to her
—bewitched, enchanted, and enthralled. Watching her evolve from an awkward lump of pink putty to a grinning, grasping, impish infant became the major miracle in my life. Every time I saw her, she was someone new. Every time I saw her, I hated to leave her all the more. Every time I saw her, I kicked myself for not doing it the right way years ago, with a wife and a marriage and a house and a dog and a baby I could hug whenever I got the urge to.

  Usually I drop by when Daddy isn’t home. Daddy is Stuart Colbert, a women’s clothing magnate, scion of a notorious San Francisco family, the man the surrogate replaced with me. Stuart and I don’t despise each other, quite, but we don’t have much to say to each other either, once we quit talking about the weather.

  Mommy is different. Mommy is Millicent, and for the most part Fm happy that Eleanor is in her charge. Because the Colberts are rich, Millicent doesn’t go off to work every morning and she has help with the soiled sheets and dirty diapers. I’m not sure I approve of that, actually, but she’s a good and earnest mother and I’m glad she’s around most of the time tending to our daughter’s business, so I keep my irrelevant mouth shut. Millicent also makes use of a nanny on the days when she golfs or plays cards or dines with society swells in the company of her sullen husband. I know I don’t approve of that, but I’m not in a position to say so. A dozen years from now, we’ll probably be engaged in open warfare over the rules and rights of parenthood, but for now, it seems as good as it can get, given the circumstances.

  The Colbert house is in St. Francis Wood, a tony section of the city out near the ocean, straight up the hill from Stern Grove. The best thing about the tony sections of town is that there’s always a place to park. The worst thing about them is they make you ashamed of your car.

  Millicent was glad to see me and I was glad to see her. She was tall and slim and attractive and more exuberant by a factor of five from the first time I’d seen her, when her hopes for a child had seemed doomed. Now that things had worked out, she was a bundle of energy and enthusiasm; I was invariably cheered when I stopped by the house and gratified that I had been granted what amounted to an open invitation.

  Because Millicent knew my interest in Eleanor was real and deep and lasting, she kept track of things for me; every time I came calling, she brought me up to date. True to form, after I rang the bell she let me in with a gush of greeting, then launched the next chapter of Eleanor’s slim biography—what she’d done and eaten and worn and said since my last visit, which had been six days before.

  “She said a complete sentence yesterday,” Millicent concluded. “Really. She said, “You my ball.’”

  “‘You my ball.’ Byronic. Definitely. She’ll be a lyric poet.”

  Millicent slugged me on the arm. “Don’t make fun.”

  “I’m not making fun, I’m having fun.”

  “Good.” She took hold of my sleeve and dragged me toward the nursery.

  Eleanor was sitting on the floor in the center of a colorful patchwork quilt, clutching a fuzzy pink bunny, wearing the little blue flight suit I’d bought for her when I was up in Seattle on my last case. I’d also gotten her the bunny, on the occasion of her six-month birthday. I felt ten feet tall, as Millicent knew I would. I liked her for setting the stage for me.

  When Eleanor saw me, she smiled, I think, and dropped the bunny and reached out her hand. I gave her a finger to squeeze, then sat beside her on the quilt and picked her up and perched her on my knee and said the stuff you say when you want a child to like you. That I was actually talking baby talk at this stage of my life was a never-ending wonder.

  We played with the bunny and then with a ball. Then we stacked foam-rubber blocks and then she unwrapped the present I’d brought—a green rubber frog that made a noise like a burp when you squeezed it. Then I lay on my back on the quilt and put Eleanor on my tummy and poked and tickled and nuzzled and kissed her while she drooled all over my shirt.

  I was having a wonderful time until it occurred to me that at some point it would become wrong. At some point putting her in my lap, or letting her flop on my belly, or tickling her ribs and itching her nose and playing piggy with her toes will be inappropriate and even harmful, at least in the view of some.

  How was I supposed to know when that time had come? How was I supposed to know when touching could turn criminal? How was I to protect myself and how was I to protect Eleanor? And what if I made a mistake or was misinterpreted? What if someday someone like Danielle Derwinski convinced Eleanor to bring a criminal charge against me, asserting I was her childhood abuser?

  I shuddered so hard that Eleanor froze for an instant, as if some atavistic memory had given her a precocious glimpse of future struggles with the opposite sex. In the dark grotto carved by such thoughts, I wondered yet again if Julian Wints had ever had a friend or a father named Sleet, because if someone ever did to Eleanor what Leonard Wints had allegedly done to Julian, I would blow his head off, too.

  A moment later, Eleanor found a stuffed dinosaur that was far more fascinating than I was, and Millicent and I repaired to the tea table and drank coffee and talked about our common passion. At such times I wonder if Millicent is far wiser than she appears, if she knows the genes within her daughter come from me and the surrogate and not from her and her husband. To her credit, I don’t think it would matter. When I kissed them both good-bye twenty minutes later, I was back to being glad to be alive despite what Charley Sleet was putting me through.

  I stopped for dinner at a hole-in-the-wall in China-town, then headed up to my apartment looking forward to some peace and quiet, my mind more on Eleanor than Charley. I was on my third drink and my second sitcom when the phone rang.

  “Marsh?”

  “Charley?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ. Where the hell are you?”

  “Jail.”

  “I hope you’re going to tell me you’re ready to let us bail you out of there.”

  “Forget about it.” His tone was the one he used whenever a suspect got an inkling to resist arrest.

  “So how are you?” I asked him, as though there was nothing in the air but plans for the weekend.

  “Fine.”

  “Great. What can I do for you? A news summary, maybe, since you’ve been out of touch? The Warriors dropped one to the Lakers tonight—Sprewell got twenty-eight. Weather will be clear and cool with periods of rain. Newt still wants to take from the poor and give to the rich and Clinton seems to want to let him. They call it welfare reform. Sort of like calling cancer health-care reform.”

  “Give it up, Marsh.”

  “The news flash?”

  “Looking for ammunition for Jake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there isn’t any.”

  I shut my eyes and turned off the light and sat in the room in the dark. Somewhere near Charley, a truck roared by. Somewhere near me, a car alarm went off.

  “We’ve been friends a long time, Charley.”

  “True.”

  “I’ve done you some favors over the years.”

  “Not as many as went the other way.”

  “But still.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is, I think that gives me a line of credit.”

  “Maybe. A short one.”

  “I’m drawing on it, Charley.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me why you shot him.”

  “So you can run to Hattie and he can start up some phony media campaign about how I’m being railroaded by the department and the system is being used for political purposes and the rest of his usual tap dance.”

  “Are you being railroaded, Charley?”

  “Hell no.”

  “So you shot him.”

  “Does anyone say otherwise?”

  “Not that I can find.”

  “Good.”

  “Come on, Charley. Let me in on the game. This thing is fucking with my mind—I keep wondering what I missed and why I missed it. I keep findi
ng stuff out about you that I didn’t know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Marjie.”

  He laughed without humor. “She told me you dropped by.”

  “She’s upset, Charley. She loves you and she knows you’re in trouble and she’s upset because you’re setting yourself up for a fall.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You can let me help you get out of this thing.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t deserve to get out of it.”

  “Why not?”

  He paused. Another truck went by. This time a woman laughed, raucously and loudly.

  “You son of a bitch,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Where the fuck are you?”

  “I told you.”

  “Bullshit. They’ve got lots of things down in Bruno but they don’t have truck stops and sassy women. Where are you really?”

  “Never mind,” he said, then paused for so long I thought he’d hung up. When he spoke again, his tone was grim and incriminating. “This is all you get. What I was doing didn’t have anything to do with the Wints girl. All that abuse shit. It wasn’t about that.”

  “Then what was it about?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sure it does. I been busting my butt trying to find a link between you and Wints.”

  “So what?”

  “I didn’t find one.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “So it occurred to me that maybe you killed the wrong man.”

  Charley’s laugh was harsh and arrogant, the way he laughed when he collected a big pot at poker. “Doesn’t matter,” he said again.

  “It does if you’re still trying to get it right,” I said, but I was talking to a dial tone.

  Five minutes later, I tracked down Jake Hattie. “I was just about to call you,” he said before I could say anything.

  “I figured as much,” I said. “How’d you convince him?”

  “Convince him to do what?”

  “Accept bail.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “The hell you didn’t. He’s out of jail, Jake. He just called me.”