False Conception Read online

  All I really had to do was run a check on the Hammond woman, after all. If I dropped out, someone would take my place, and even if I gave her my imprimatur, I was hardly the ultimate arbiter—at most I would second a decision already reached by the Colberts. So my participation was preliminary; the trials and triumphs of parenting—the feeding and nurturing, the caring and forgiving—the rest was up to others. Just my cup of tea, in other words: when the tough stuff gets started, the stuff that makes the world go round, I make a hasty exit.

  Cursing such psychic maneuverings, I fixed myself a drink and diverted myself with three chapters of the new Jon Hassler novel. Two hours and three drinks later, I drove off to pick up my date.

  I’ve been seeing Betty Fontaine for more than two years. It’s the second time around for us—the first, some dozen years back, had foundered on my reluctance to make a long-term commitment and Betty’s reactive rush into the arms of an ostensibly more willing mate. The aftermath had been a brief and unfortunate marriage for her and a series of mostly unmemorable couplings for me.

  When I’d had occasion to consult her on a case that involved some sexual shenanigans at an exclusive private school, we’d started seeing each other again. Now, the issues that had been nettlesome the first time around were poking their thorny canes up through the soil once again. So far, what we seemed to be doing was stepping carefully around them while pretending not to notice that if we were going to make real progress, we needed to come to terms with such obstacles. But neither of us was inclined to be that sensible.

  Betty was an administrator at Jefferson, the largest public high school in the city: First Assistant Vice Principal was her official moniker. She was what amounted to the attendance cop and the job was so frustrating and dispiriting that she resisted it mightily in her head, yet couldn’t bring herself to withdraw her heart from the dozens of kids that she cared about. Betty hoped to get out of the front office and back to the classroom next term, but since she’d been hoping that for five years, it didn’t seem a likely prospect.

  High school is hazardous duty these days, not far removed from guerrilla warfare for students and teachers alike, so when Betty and I got together I tried to lighten her mood and lessen her stress. But it wasn’t always possible, and I wasn’t always in shape to make the effort, because I go to war once in a while myself.

  Two minutes after we’d taken our usual booth in our usual trattoria, I asked what was bothering her. She looked up from the menu and tried to look jaded. “I’m still not sure what I think about veal. Animal rights and all that.”

  Betty brushed her hair away from her face and dug out her glasses to decipher the menu more closely. Her lanky, often awkward, body was ensconced in a “school suit,” as she called it, a beige linen jacket worn over a white silk blouse and above a pair of brown twill slacks with an ink spot in the shape of a strawberry high on the left thigh. The sleeves of the jacket were pushed to her elbows and the spectacles on her nose had slipped toward its tip. Most of the time Betty looked like the schoolmarm she was, and I liked the look as much as I liked the physical and intellectual endowments that it packaged.

  “Don’t kid a kidder, First Assistant Vice Principal Fontaine,” I chided. “Something’s on your mind besides the ethical underpinnings of scaloppine.”

  She paused long enough for me to decide the subject was closed, then blurted a single word. “Geranium.”

  She wasn’t referring to a plant, she was referring to a student: Geranium Jackson—a junior from Hunters Point. Betty was in the third year of a love/hate relationship with the girl, whose IQ was as august as her domestic environment was woeful.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Given the realities for kids in the inner city, where suicide and homicide are leading causes of death I’d expected worse. “How long?”

  “Too long.” She elaborated: “Four months.”

  “Who’s the daddy?”

  “A gangsta. Cool Brutha B—head of the Army Street Angolans. I know three other girls at Jeff he’s impregnated, and that’s without asking. But being pregnant isn’t what bothers me.”

  I looked at her. “Not AIDS, I hope.”

  Betty shook her head quickly. “No, thank God. She’s tested negative so far, at least. But Geranium obviously didn’t protect herself, even though she knows Brutha B has stuck his Johnson in half the girls in school, including some who turn tricks on weekends to earn money for clothes, which means … well, you know what it means. So the worst part is’ Geranium got pregnant on purpose.”

  “’You can’t be sure of that, can you?”

  “She carries condoms, Marsh. I’ve seen them in her purse. Hell, I’ve even bought them for her And I know she’s made other guys use them—wear a hat, she calls it. But not this time. Which means she’s given up.”

  “On what?”

  “On having a normal life.”

  “Is she dropping out of school?”

  “Not yet, thank God, but only because we’ve got a parenting skills program she wants to complete. But I know Geranium—she’s so damned conscientious, once she has that baby in her lap she’ll spend so much time with it, her grades will go straight down the toilet Our new principal doesn’t cut kids much slack—it won’t take much of a drop for him to flunk her out.”

  “Can’t you keep her in line? With her grades, I mean?”

  “I’ve been trying for three years, Marsh. Not just with grades, but with life. You see how successful I’ve been.”

  I laughed and Betty misunderstood its source, “It’s not funny,” she scolded. “Geranium Jackson could have gone a long way in the world. When I was tutoring in Basic English, she wrote a story about the first day she was bused to Jefferson from Hunters Point that was so timid and hopeful and poignant it brought tears to my eyes—she made it sound as though aliens had come down and whisked her off to Pluto, and I’m sure that’s how she saw it. And now she’s sliding down the ghetto sewer—first the baby then AFDC, the projects, food stamps, and some stud who beats her up ’cause he’s got no other way to prove his manhood. God. She’s smart enough to know how awful it is, and how much further she could have gone if she’d given herself a chance, so sooner or later she 11 hate herself even more than she does already. And who knows what will happen then.”

  “Maybe she’ll keep things together for the child,” I offered easily, careful not to rile her further.

  “It’s hard enough for any black girl to make it these days, what with the recession on top of parental neglect and racism, but for girls in Geranium’s position it’s almost impossible. People will punish her for what they perceive to be promiscuity.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that so I didn’t say anything. “I wasn’t laughing at Geranium,” I explained instead. “I was laughing because you’re seeing pregnancy as a curse, and a couple I heard about today would consider it divine intervention.”

  I explained the outlines of the Colberts’ case without naming names.

  “Takes all kinds,” Betty said when I was finished. “What’s the closest you ever came to becoming a father, Marsh?”

  “The discussions you and I had ten years ago.”

  Her lip curled and her eyes faded to vacuous blots. “Ah, yes. The merits and demerits of bringing a child into this cold cruel world. We were so fucking rational and mature, and look where it got us.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Nowhere.”

  Her look dared me to offer a more promising location. “Sounds like the alarm on your biological clock just went off,” I said instead.

  “Happens once a day, whether I heed it or not,” she answered sourly.

  “What do you plan to do about it?”

  She shrugged. “Same thing I’ve always done I imagine.”

  “If nothing else you can act unilaterally if you want to right? I mean, sing parenting is an option, isn’t it?”

  She gave me a look t
hat made me wish I’d kept quiet, then questioned me with her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

  “Same as last time, you mean.”

  “I suppose so.”

  My ambivalence incensed her. “You’re so damned casual about it. I suppose it’s because men don’t have biological clocks. That’s why it’s never been urgent for you.”

  “The average sperm count of the American male has dropped 50 percent in this century,” I said, repeating a statistic I’d learned that afternoon. “That’s a biological clock of some sort.”

  “A biological hourglass, maybe. It’s certainly not a siren like mine.”

  I shrugged. “Nature isn’t equitable.”

  “The word you’re looking for is fair. Nature isn’t fair. Nothing for women is fair. I—” She cut off her philippic and sighed. “Sorry. The thing with Geranium makes me feel like I’ve lost a child myself. It makes me covet a new one, as some sort of demographic replacement.”

  I let her anguish dwindle before I responded. “I’m willing to discuss it, Betty.”

  Her laugh was brief and dubious. “We haven’t even talked about us that much. Not in any way that’s constructive. We’ve just been … skating along.”

  “Skating’s a smooth way to travel.”

  “For a while, maybe, but then you get used to it, and when the road gets rough, you fall on your butt.”

  I smiled at our circumlocution. “Are we going to get into this, or what?”

  “Get into which?”

  “Us. Kids. Whatever.”

  “I’m pretty much always ready to get into it.”

  “That’s not true,” I said with surprising heat. “You want to at first, but whenever we start to discuss it, you throw up your hands in frustration the first time we get to where we need to talk about compromise. For example, you’re around schoolkids all day. You’d think you’d know whether you want one of your own by now.”

  Her anger swelled red and round like a blood blister. “That’s not fair and you know it—other people’s kids are different from your own kids And I don’t give up, I just … postpone.”

  “You’ve been postponing for twenty years, Betty.”

  “I suppose you haven’t,” she countered roughly. “I mean, it’s not like you’re a beacon in the wilderness in this thing. Every time I hint that I might want to make it legal, and have a church wedding and a honeymoon in Greece and come back here and start a family, you start talking about how set in your ways you are. And how many times marriage screws up a relationship.”

  I shrugged. “A kid might make a difference.”

  “We couldn’t stand it by ourselves, but maybe if we had a child m the house we could tolerate each other? Does that sound like something two sane people should do? Use a child as a tranquilizer?”

  “No. But that’s not what I meant.”

  She smiled artificially, the pain in her eyes and heart as palpable as the smell of garlic that seeped to us from the kitchen. “Back to postponement,” she concluded ruefully. “So what else is on your mind Mr. Tanner?”

  “Cannelloni,” I said, and stayed still while she slugged my shoulder.

  CHAPTER 4

  She rounded the corner at five forty-five, and from the moment I laid eyes on her, I was certain she was the woman I wanted. Walking with brisk assurance, smiling at the acquaintances she encountered, carrying in one hand a plastic bag that bulged with cans and boxes and sprouted a sprig of celery, and in the other a thin red sweater, she ambled down the street with far more buoyancy than I’d ever felt at the end of a working day, looking eager to move on to the next one. I don’t know what sort of aura she radiated normally, but the prospect of serving as a surrogate mother to the Colberts’ nascent child certainly didn’t seem to depress her. If I could have harnessed the euphoric sheen that enlivened her ample eyes, I could have powered my apartment for weeks.

  Athletic, even brawny, she was garbed in white synthetics from her high stiff collar to her silent soft-soled shoes: on her, the uniform looked less clinical than expedient. Her straight brown hair was cut short around the base of her neck and pinked in a jagged hem across her forehead. She was strong in the arms and square in the shoulders, broad in the hips and thighs, full in the neck and breast. In terms of physics and physique, therefore, the Colberts had selected a Madonna from the templates of Raphael and Titian.

  As Greta Hammond neared my vantage point I could take a closer inventory. Her round face was sunny and scrubbed, simply and attractively maintained with a mole near her upper lip that punctuated the half-smile that seemed an indelible clue to her mood. Her green eyes were active and almost astonished her her full and discreetly tinted, her cheeks just this side of chubby. Her mouth moved as if she were engaged in unilateral conversation, but eventually I realized she was singing to herself, striding in time to an internal drumbeat and laughing at forgotten lyrics and her several slips off-key. If she suffered any illness or was under a cloud of stress, the signs were not apparent, unless it was symptomatic that one of the boxes in her bag was full of sugar doughnuts.

  Without breaking stride, she walked to the building I’d had under surveillance for the past two hours, fished in her purse for her keys, unlocked a narrow metal box and gathered up her mail, then disappeared through the entrance. The door that eased shut at her back had a single round window in its upper center and was festooned with a sign that read FOR RENT.

  I’d been waiting since four o’clock, parked at the end of her block in front of the Cambridge Market watching a series of N Judah streetcars lumber by on the next street, on their way to and from the ends of the city. To maintain my sanity, I’d read the Hassler novel in fits and starts while keeping most of my eye on the sidewalk. To keep from nodding off I was sipping tepid coffee from a thermos, eating Oreos from a brandnew bag, and taking a series of deep breaths whenever I felt my eyelids sag. A stakeout is to a detective what changing diapers must be to a parent: elemental and essential, but not often electrifying, or even very pleasant.

  I’d spent the better part of the day determining whether Greta Hammond had ever run afoul of the law The first thing that morning, Charley Sleet, my best friend, had run her through the cop computer and told me he’d come up empty. I wasn’t sure it I was pleased by the news or not—if Greta was a felon, or even a major misdemeanant, I wouldn’t have to concern myself with the caliber of my endorsement or worry about its consequences.

  But she was square with the cops and with the DMV as well—not even an outstanding parking ticket The credit bureau showed a dispute over some charges at the Emporium a few years back—apparently she’d returned some merchandise but the store hadn’t credited her properly—but it was worked out in the end and that was it as far as uncivilized behavior was concerned. She wasn’t delinquent with her taxes, hadn’t sued or been sued for a civil offense or even an unlawful detainer. In fact, the dispute over the returned goods was the only record I could find of her—her name didn’t appear in the courthouse other than on the voting lists.

  After my trip through the municipal records, I’d performed one other task of relevance just before assuming the stakeout. It was an exercise I’d been able to avoid over the course of my career, a humiliation of the sort that makes you swear you’ll quit your job before submitting to it, a nadir I’d hoped I’d never descend to. But under the pressure of time and the weight of a baby’s welfare, it had been the quickest way I could think of to accumulate the data I needed.

  The cans were green and plastic, numbered to match the apartments, grouped in the alley in back of the building behind a waist-high wooden fence. They weren’t horribly fetid, as garbage cans go, or even outrageously slimy, but they weren’t fruit cups, either.

  I’d cruised the alley to check them out, decided the location was too exposed to do the work on-site, and circled the block again. This time I stopped next to the corral of green cans, grabbed the one I wanted, and tossed it in the trunk of my car
. Escaping unobserved as far as I could tell, I took Ninth Avenue to the innards of Golden Gate Park, drove twenty yards down a seemingly secluded lane, then examined my booty more closely.

  She shopped for foodstuffs at Cala Foods and for sundries at Reliable Drugs. She had a checking account at the medical center credit union; she had a Visa card and a Chevron card; she contributed to both Special Olympics and KQED. She got catalogs from Talbots and REI and was on the mailing list of NARL. She had bills from the usual utilities and coupons from the usual merchants. I moved on to the mundane.

  She ate lots of soup—Progresso and Healthy Choice and Andersen’s Split Pea. She liked strawberry ice cream, onion bagels, English muffins, and Cracklin’ Bran. She drank 7-Up and Crystal Light and snacked on vanilla wafers. Over the last few days she had consumed a chicken, a banana, a potato, and a pear, and another item whose entrails I couldn’t decipher because they had started to decompose. She owned a Hoover that had needed a new bag—I considered opening the old one, but you have to draw a line somewhere.

  On a more lofty plane, she read the Chronicle, Newsweek, and Mirabella, and drank Fetzer fumé blanc. She had received something in the mail packed in Styrofoam and bubble wrap, and a greeting card from someone with a return address on Hickory Avenue in San Bruno. She had tossed away come-ons from a record club and a credit card company without even opening the envelopes.

  That was it as far as what she had. What she didn’t have was a store of empty Seagram’s bottles or Marlboro boxes or hypodermic syringes or Zig Zag wrappers or crack pipes or Darvon bottles or glue tubes, a void of harmful substances that would make the Colberts happy. Her only indulgences seemed to be the wine and ice cream and cookies, which put her excesses roughly on a par with my own. I doubt she would regard it as an achievement.