Past Tense Read online

  “When was this?”

  “Long time ago. Twenty years, maybe. Maybe more.”

  It seemed relevant, somehow, the talk about sterilization, but I didn’t know quite why.

  “The subject of children brings me to the next item on the list, which is the baby in the snapshot. When I found the thing, I got a feeling the baby was Charley’s and that that’s what this has been about in some way. I can’t prove it’s true, but that’s what I think. Any ideas?”

  No one said anything.

  “Anyone ever hear Charley hint that he’d been a father way back when?”

  Everyone shook their heads.

  “Charley loved kids,” Clay said finally. “He’s been involved with them in a major way ever since I’ve known him. My brokerage firm funded a T-ball team one summer Charley coached in the PAL.”

  “That cuts against him putting the baby up for adoption,” Al pointed out.

  “Did I miss something? What does adoption have to do with it?” Tommy asked.

  “I thought it might explain things if Julian Wints is Charley’s daughter.”

  Tommy shook his head. “He’d never do that. Put a kid up for adoption. Neither would Flora.”

  “Plus, he told you it didn’t have anything to do with the Wints girl,” Clay reminded.

  “Which might mean that it did and he’s trying to shove me off the track. Charley’s not above a fib when it serves larger purposes.”

  I took out a sheet of paper and read the names I’d written on it. “Andy Potter says these people were in the courtroom that day. Anyone know any of them?”

  “Meltonian used to come in the restaurant once in a while,” Tommy said. “Had a sister lived out my way, I think. Haven’t seen him in years, though.”

  Al and Clay exchanged wry smiles. I could taste Tommy’s marinara sauce until I took another sip of beer.

  “And Andy, of course,” Al said. Andy played poker with us on occasion.

  “Anyone know of any trouble between Andy and Charley?” I asked. “Andy was supposed to drop by tonight but I guess he had other plans.”

  Everyone shook their head.

  “Marjie Finnerty and Charley were lovers,” I said. “Been hot and heavy for four months. She’s Meltonian’s clerk.”

  That one brought another round of murmurs and at least one trill of satisfaction.

  “Maybe she dumped him,” Clay said. “Or maybe she just made him crazy. A woman could drive the greatest guy in the world insane.”

  There came Clay and his wife again. What the hell was going on with them?

  “I didn’t think there’d ever be anyone for Charley but Flora,” Tommy said softly.

  “Me neither,” Al agreed.

  “Speaking of Flora,” I said, “I seem to remember a sister.”

  “Right,” Tommy said. “Charley brought her to the restaurant one night. Long time ago, though.”

  “Remember her name?”

  “Ellen. No. Emily, I think. Emily …” Tommy’s brow wrinkled at the effort to dredge up a surname.

  “Fulton,” Al said. “At least that was Flora’s maiden name. Flora Fulton.”

  “What a wonderful woman,” Clay said. “Poker’s never been the same since she quit making those brownies. No offense,” he added sheepishly, after a brief glance at Tommy’s scowl.

  “Anyone know where the sister lives?”

  “I think Concord,” Al said. “Charley talked about going out there once. He hated his brother-in-law, I remember.”

  “Right,” Tommy said. “Gus in the discount carpet business. A suede shoe guy. Hookley was his name. That must be the sister’s name, too. Emily Hookley.”

  “Anything on anyone else in the room? Cartson the lawyer? The judge? The court reporter? The Chronicle woman? Anyone?”

  No one had anything to say.

  “Think about it for a while,” I said.

  We finished our food and our drinks in silence broken only by laments about the Niners and curses at the cops. Then Clay reminded us of the time Charley had won a huge pot with a ten high. And then came the deluge—Charley and his clothes, Charley and his bleeding heart, Charley and his courage, Charley and his wife, Charley and his job. Everyone had an anecdote; everyone paid a tribute. But by the time the guys had left, memory had been superseded by reality and I was haunted by the possibility that I would never see Charley again, at least not outside the silks and satins of a coffin.

  CHAPTER

  21

  THREE MEN WERE RECUMBENT ON THE SIDEWALK, UNCONSCIOUS for reasons that appeared to range from intoxication to assault and battery. Two women were dressed in high heels and short shorts and tube tops, shivering from the assault of winter, offering their puffy bodies to any man who tarried near their corner. Every second building had been abandoned by both owner and tenant, only to be reclaimed by squatters doing and dealing dope and transients looking for a roof for a night and willing to trespass to get one. The bar in the middle of the block looked like it specialized in absinthe; the shop on the corner offered both pornography and ice cream. And at the center of it all was the Tenderloin Children’s Project, proving that no part of a city is too abandoned for parents to bring kids into it.

  If a child is raised in such an environment, by the time it reaches the age of twelve it knows that it has grown up in a sewer: They don’t have Tenderloins on Sesame Street. With realization comes outrage—someone’s going to pay and that someone is often an innocent party, appearing in the wrong place at the wrong time and behaving in a way that suggests a lack of respect, which is the only thing of value the kid has to protect. Institutions like the Tenderloin Children’s Project exist to channel that outrage toward something productive, toward achievement, not destruction. It’s an uphill battle, of course, which was the kind of fight Charley Sleet specialized in.

  It was Saturday morning; I expected the place to be teeming with kids and it was. Most of them were Asian and most of them were gathered around a computer in the far corner of the main room, listening to a young Asian man talk about chat rooms and news groups and web pages. I smiled to myself. Conservatives have done away with affirmative action at the state’s premier university on the assumption that too many slots were going to unqualified minorities. If they truly do go to a merit system at Cal, eighty percent of the school will be Asian and most of the unqualified applicants will have both white skins and irate parents.

  Another group of children, older and more ethnically diverse than the computer kids, was lined up against a wall being shown movements of self-defense by a young man wearing black pajamas and displaying flashy martial moves. Still another cluster, numbering only six, sat in pairs on the floor playing chess on warped and tattered boards. In another corner, a sullen teenager in baggy pants and a hooded Raiders jacket was washing gang graffiti off the walls, probably as punishment for some similar transgression.

  The discipline in the room was impressive—no one could be heard but the instructors and the faint thumps of rap music chugging through the sound system—but the facility itself was pathetic. There was barely enough space to accommodate effective instruction and the lack of rudimentary amenities was striking—except for the computer tables, there wasn’t any furniture in sight. The paneled walls were warped and stained, the linoleum floor was curled and scabbed, the acoustical ceiling was soft and sagging, suggestive of a porous roof. Still, the majority of kids were smiling and more than a few seemed rapturous.

  At first I saw no one resembling Hank Morrison, the guy Al Goldsberry had talked to at Charley’s behest, but in the next minute a man emerged from a room in the back and stood in the center of the floor, arms crossed and eyes active, in the manner of an overseer. I went up to him and told him my name and said I was looking for a man named Morrison.

  “I’m him,” he said, with a perfect pitch of indifference. His eyes continued their inspection; his arms stayed crossed on his chest.

  He was big and buff, dressed in Levi’s and a fad
ed Giants T-shirt, his pecs and biceps stretching the black cotton fabric to its limits, his black eyes and sharp jaw both fearless and friendly, essential attributes for anyone dealing effectively with kids. His bearing suggested that the only thing that would command a hundred percent of his attention was a knife fight.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked after taking stock of me and maintaining his distance.

  There were several paths to take and I chose the wrong one. “I’m here to see Tafoya Burris.”

  He raised a brow and looked at me. “You a cop?” He paused. “No, you’re not a cop.”

  “Why does it matter?”

  He shrugged and stayed silent.

  “Tafoya might have some information I could use,” I said.

  “Information about what?”

  I smiled. “That’s between me and her at this point.”

  He made an elaborate search of the room. “Funny, but I don’t see the ‘her’ part of that combination.”

  I opted not to fence with him. “She comes to the center, right?”

  He shrugged. “She plays chess sometimes.”

  “With Charley Sleet sometimes?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “So where can I find her?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “She doesn’t come in on Saturdays?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “So where can I find her?” I repeated.

  Morrison unhooked his thick arms and looked at me with unbridled disdain. “Look. Most people who come looking for these kids don’t want to do them good, they want to do them harm. Abuse them physically or sexually; exploit them economically; use them as weapons in a domestic dispute; get them to rat on their peers or their parents. I get real used to not saying much about them.”

  “I can understand that. But I’m a friend of Charley’s.”

  “So you say.”

  “I’m friend enough to know he’s in trouble.”

  He shrugged. “So I heard.”

  “I’m trying to do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Find out why he became a killer, for one thing.”

  “And you think that’s going to make a difference?”

  “It might.”

  “Might not, too. If reasons counted, wouldn’t be a black man behind bars in this city.”

  I didn’t have time to debate the theory and practice of punishment or the genesis and culture of crime. “Charley spent some time here lately,” I said, before Morrison could wander off.

  “A lot of time,” he corrected.

  “Working with kids.”

  He nodded. “Working with kids.”

  “The trial in the courtroom involved a kid. Or at least what happened to a woman when she was a kid.”

  “Did it?”

  “The woman’s name is Julian Wints. Know her?”

  Morrison looked down his nose at me. “She live down here in the ‘Loin?”

  I shook my head. “Jordan Park and the Marina.”

  He laughed. “Don’t get many kids from those places.”

  I finally lost my cool. “Look, Morrison, was Charley doing good down here or not?”

  “He was okay.”

  “Then why don’t you cut me some slack and help get him out of trouble?”

  “I got to make sure that don’t mean someone else gets in trouble.”

  “Someone like Tafoya, you mean.”

  He shrugged. “Whoever.” His gaze focused on someone across the room. “Hey, Juwanna. That better not be a box cutter in your pants. I find a cutter, you be barred for a month.”

  Juwanna shook her head but edged toward the door all the same, and finally disappeared in a rush.

  “She’s a good kid,” Morrison said. “Too bad it takes more than that.”

  “What else does it take?”

  He looked toward the sagging ceiling. “A miracle. We done now?”

  It took some doing but I made my voice conciliatory. “Here’s all I know. I know Charley was friends with Tafoya and I know he was concerned enough about her to ask his friend Dr. Goldsberry to take a look at her to see if she was being abused. Goldsberry told him it was a possibility. A few days later, Charley went off his rocker in a case that involved another victim of sexual abuse. I’m trying to find the connection. You got a problem with that?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Okay, then tell me where Tafoya lives.”

  He shook his head. “We don’t give out that kind of information. Project policy. They find out I talk, I lose my job.”

  Morrison seemed both adamant and sincere; I began to back off.

  “Then tell me this. The psychologist in the courtroom the day Charley shot Leonard Wints seems to be the same psychologist who’s been treating Tafoya Burris.”

  “Which means?”

  “I don’t know what it means. It’s one of the things I’m trying to find out.”

  “Then why don’t you talk to the psychologist?”

  “I have. She won’t tell me anything either.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your time down here, because Tafoya isn’t going to be—”

  He looked past me toward the front door. “Speak of the devil,” he said.

  I turned to look. Danielle Derwinski was walking toward us at the pace of a drum majorette, wearing a blue twill jumpsuit with a zipper down the front and white sneakers that squeaked as she walked. She was so fiercely focused that she didn’t recognize me.

  “Hank, what’s this about Tafoya?” she began, panting from the pace of her entrance. “I hear the police took her—”

  When she’d finally absorbed who I was, she stopped. “You.”

  “And you.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you?”

  “I work here.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since they opened the doors; I volunteer at the center every other Saturday. Since I’ve never seen you down here before, I assume you’re here on business.”

  I matched her attitude as best I could. “That’s right. And my business tells me you lied to me, Danielle. You lied about not knowing Charley, you lied about not knowing of a connection between him and the Wints case, you lied—”

  She held up a hand to stop me. “Spare me the righteous whine.” She shook her head in exasperation. “If I ever meet a truly grown-up male, I’ll kiss his feet and buy him a magnum of champagne.”

  “And if I ever meet a shrink who doesn’t need therapy more than her patients, I’ll kiss her ass and buy her a bottle of scotch. Unblended.”

  Hank Morrison was laughing at our face-off. “I see you two have met. Love at first sight, it looks like.”

  Danielle dismissed me with a look of irritation. “We need to talk,” she said to Morrison.

  “They took her out of here this morning.”

  “Where to?”

  “The station, I guess. Or maybe the morgue.”

  “Surely they wouldn’t make her—”

  “I hope not,” he said. “But you never know. Cops’ll do anything.”

  “Who’s in the morgue?” I interjected.

  Morrison looked at Derwinski, and Derwinski looked at me. “None of your business.”

  “If it has to do with Tafoya, I think it is my business.”

  She hesitated, then shrugged. “The guy in the morgue is Tafoya’s stepfather.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “The usual in this part of town,” Morrison said.

  “Murder? Or OD?”

  “Murder.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Do they think Tafoya did it?”

  Morrison laughed sardonically. “They know Tafoya didn’t do it.”

  “Then why did they want her?”

  “Just routine, they said. Jacking her around, is what it was. Like always.”

  I looked at Derwinski. “Was her stepfather the one who abused her?”
/>
  She started to say something, then stopped. “I can’t get into that.”

  A lightbulb went on in my skull and I started to sweat. “Where did this murder happen? Why are they sure Tafoya didn’t do it?”

  Morrison looked at Derwinski, and Derwinski stayed silent.

  “Come on. This could be important.”

  “It happened in jail,” Morrison blurted finally. “That’s how they know. Bastard used to work here. Got busted for stealing funds from the project and got himself killed in the slammer.”

  “His name isn’t Burris, it’s Lumpley, right?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  I shook my head. “He was killed at San Bruno, right?”

  Morrison shrugged.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit what?”

  “I think Charley killed him.”

  “What?” The word came in a chorus of two.

  “Charley got out of jail yesterday. After he was gone, they found a stiff in the shower. I’m betting it was Tafoya’s stepfather.”

  Morrison shook his head. “He’s in it for real now. One he might skate on, but two? They got him good this time.”

  I didn’t say as much, but I was afraid I agreed with him.

  CHAPTER

  22

  A MAN YELLING OUT OF A BACK ROOM CALLED MORRISON TO the telephone. After he left, I turned to Danielle. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “I’m going to the station to find Tafoya.”

  “Why?”

  Her nose wrinkled with irritation. “So I can keep her from ending up like Julian Wints. Then I’m booked with kids down here till noon. Then I need to run errands.” She furled a brow and spoke with reluctance. “We could meet this evening, I suppose. For a short time.”

  “Where and when?”

  She named a bar on Fillmore Street and the hour of eight o’clock. She wasn’t happy but I didn’t care. Time was running out. Something important was coming to an end, something rare and irreplaceable was about to evaporate unless I put a stop to it and right now I had no stopper. If my company was distasteful to Danielle, so be it. She was still the best lead I had into the heart and mind of Charley Sleet.

  I did some errands myself for a couple of hours—buying groceries, getting gas, carrying some clothes to the cleaner’s—then went to the office and used the phone to track down Wally Briscoe.