Past Tense Page 3

  Ruthie had been a combat nurse and a sheriff’s deputy and a Texan before she’d married Harry, and she and Charley could trade war stories for hours if you kept the liquor coming and refereed the low blows. For a time, I thought she and Charley might get romantic after Charley’s wife died, but Charley dawdled for so long that Ruthie hooked up with a rich guy.

  “Ruthie? Marsh.”

  “Hey, hey, Sugar Bear.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not worth spit since I heard about Sleet. What the hell happened in there, Marsh? That gnarly old bastard finally lose his marbles?”

  “He shot someone, Ruthie. That’s all I know.”

  “Hell, even I know that much and I ain’t been out of the house. The news lady said it was some kind of sex case.”

  “They say anything more than that about it?”

  “One of those child abuse things. You know, the kind they only remember later on. I think Daddy screwed me twenty years ago, even though it slipped my mind until now, and I want a million dollars to erase the pain I must have felt even though I didn’t know I was feeling it.”

  Life made even less sense than before. “That was the trial Charley was watching? A sex abuse thing?” I didn’t try to disguise my amazement.

  “That’s what they said. Charley drilled the dirty daddy right there in open court.”

  “What was Daddy’s name?”

  “Don’t remember. Damn. Alzheimer’s kicking in for sure. My goddamn brain won’t hold on to anything longer than a frog’s fart these days. I got to mark the calendar to remind myself that Conway and me are still fucking.”

  I sidestepped Ruthie’s sex life. “What did this abuse case have to do with Charley? Did they say?”

  “That seems to be an open question. Thought you might have ideas on the subject yourself.”

  “Not a one.”

  “Well, the only thing I know about Charley’s love life is he’s got himself a new squaw.”

  Finally, a revelation. “How do you know?”

  “He let something slip one night when Conway and I ran into him at Kuleto’s.”

  “Charley was at Kuleto’s?” It was as unlikely as Willie Brown afoot at Taco Bell.

  “Proof of the point, I’d call it. Wouldn’t tell me who he was waiting for and Conway whisked me off to Slim’s so fast I didn’t get a chance to pump him. Conway can’t get enough of that rockabilly.” Ruthie paused for breath. “What are you going to do, Marsh?”

  “Everything I can, Ruthie.”

  “I know that much. But what, exactly?”

  “Get him a lawyer. Check out this sex thing. Find the connection and try to come up with a defense that would excuse the shooting. I think Jake will represent him for free if Charley will let him.”

  Ruthie’s voice grew weighty. “You know if you need anything, all you have to do is ask, Sugar Bear.”

  “I know that, Ruthie.”

  “Money. Legwork. Anything.”

  “Thanks. I may have to take you up on the money part if bail’s higher than we think.”

  “Don’t even hesitate. Conway’s still got a pile. I’ve spent all I can on everything I can think of and he’s still got more than Midas. Once you get rich, it’s hard as hell to get poor, provided you stay out of Texas.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  I DIDN’T GET MUCH DONE THE REST OF THE DAY AND I DIDN’T get much sleep all night. I talked a lot on the phone to people who knew even less about the situation than I did and fended off newshounds fishing for dirt or worse, but mostly I thought about Charley. About what he’d done in the courtroom, about what could have brought him to that murderous point, about where he was now and what might be happening to him down there, about how to get him out of it. But mostly what I thought about was what Charley had meant to me over the years; mostly what I did was remember.

  Charley and I do things together. We go to ball games, we play poker, we drink beer at the Bohemian Cigar Store, we bet on sports and politics and other vagaries of human behavior, we eat lunch at Chan’s on Clement and Capp’s in North Beach, but mostly we just hang out. On a thousand nights in a hundred places we’ve sat side by side on barstools, mourning lost loves, reliving lost youth, casting our triumphs in grandeur and our failures in pathos, chasing our whiskey with our dreams and our disappointments, lending aid and comfort to each other with and without the use of words.

  Silence is a large part of what friendship is all about for men like Charley and me, the ability to feel so comfortable in someone’s presence that there’s no pressure to expend effort on conversation until there’s something you really need to say. Charley could stay silent for hours, then mutter a single curse, and more often than not I would know the precise object of his ire whether or not he decided to expand on the subject.

  Our friendship had a professional dimension as well. I don’t think I could have made much of a living without Charley Sleet. The access to police data he has provided, the leads from the crime computer and the tips and hints and nudges that let me leapfrog ahead of the official investigation so I could get what I needed before the cops shut down the best sources, have been essential to my livelihood. We joke about the dinners I buy him in return for such favors, but Charley would do what he could for me even if I didn’t pay for his pasta and wontons once in a while. He’d do it because we’re buddies.

  For a long time, I’d felt guilty because most of the favors had run one way, and now that I finally had a chance to even the score, Charley wasn’t letting me. He was avoiding me and everyone else, as far as I knew, an attitude that in Charley’s situation could literally be fatal. He had done something crazy and was still doing it—compounding the problem, threatening to make it insoluble. He was making me mad when he wasn’t making me frightened. I spent the early morning hours the way I’d spent the night before, trying to imagine how all that could have happened to him, but by the time it was time for his arraignment I hadn’t come close to an answer.

  They brought Charley into Department 9 with six others, in handcuffs and waist chains and the orange jumpsuit they issue to miscreants. He looked straight ahead as he waited to take his seat in the jury box, then looked at his lap after he did so, avoiding me, avoiding the prosecutor, avoiding the world whose precepts he had so blatantly violated.

  His huge bald head glowed like a golden orb of religious significance. His chest swelled like a cast-iron breastplate that could deflect a ballistic missile. Only the bulge of stress at the hinge of his jaw and the curve to his usually ramrod spine suggested the strain he was under and the storms that beset him, both from within and without.

  Jake Hattie was seated in the front row, impeccably attired in charcoal flannel, surrounded by similarly suited acolytes, attracting stares and whispers. The guy next to me murmured, “If he’s got Hattie on board, he’s either real guilty or real innocent.” Somewhere behind me someone said, “Only way he affords Jake is if he was on the pad.” It was difficult to keep my hands at my sides and my butt on the bench; what I wanted more than anything was to punch someone.

  The judge entered the room twenty minutes behind schedule. I’d hoped she would extend Charley the courtesy of calling him first and that’s what she did, although probably for Jake’s sake more than Charley’s.

  Charley stood when his name was called, his eyes polished pyrites in the caves of his skull, as blinkless and as fixed as twin rivets. Jake stood, too, but stayed behind the rail.

  “Is defendant represented by counsel?” the judge intoned after flipping briefly through the slim file.

  “No,” Charley growled.

  “I have that privilege, Your Honor,” Jake announced simultaneously.

  “Don’t need him,” Charley spat, moving only his lips.

  “Have you engaged another attorney, Mr. Sleet?”

  Charley shook his head. “Don’t need one.”

  The judge frowned, then sighed, then patted her hairdo, then looked back and forth betwee
n the two men, trying to decide what to do.

  “I’m not a fan of pro se representation, especially in criminal matters,” she said finally. “From what I saw of the Ferguson case in New York, I’m more convinced than ever that the option should not be available regardless of the defendant’s insistence on acting as his own attorney. However, I don’t need to decide that issue this morning. You’re willing to serve as Mr. Sleet’s lawyer in these circumstances, Mr. Hattie?”

  Jake bowed at the waist. “I am with pleasure, Your Honor.”

  “Fine. Mr. Sleet, for purposes of the arraignment and until further order of court, Mr. Hattie is appointed to serve you as counsel. Is the defendant prepared to enter a plea, Mr. Hattie?”

  “Guilty,” Charley blurted from between clenched teeth. The crowd buzzed; Jake shook his head; I stood halfway out of my seat before remembering that there was nothing productive I could do short of stuffing a gag in my friend’s big mouth.

  “The defendant is not guilty of the offenses charged, Your Honor,” Jake intoned. “I ask that such a plea be entered.”

  Charley glowered; Jake preened; I was sweating like a pig in August. The judge was clearly uncomfortable and was just as clearly going to punt. “I’m entering a plea of not guilty on your behalf, Mr. Sleet,” she said finally. “At some time in the future a court may entertain a motion for a change of plea, but for now I’m preserving all your rights.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Jake said.

  “Do you waive time and reading the indictment?”

  “We do, Your Honor.”

  “Fine.” The judge turned to the prosecutor. “What are your thoughts on bail, Ms. Willoughby?”

  A young woman stepped forward, tall, thin-lipped, short-skirted, clutching a stack of files to her chest. I wondered if she had any idea how unique the case she was about to engage was, or how magnificent the man she would be trying to imprison had been over the course of his life in the city’s fractious streets.

  “The people ask that bail be denied and that the defendant remain incarcerated pending trial,” she declared officiously. “The charge is murder, Your Honor. Without provocation. Of a prominent person in this community.”

  “Mr. Hattie?”

  Jake waded through the bar of the court and regarded the prosecutor with scorn. “I could easily usurp a month of the court’s valuable time parading before it a host of witnesses to Lieutenant Sleet’s matchless character. He is a much honored officer in the San Francisco police force, he is a donor of both time and money to a host of charitable causes, he has in past years served as the mayor’s personal security officer and the community relations officer for the entire department. Had Ms. Willoughby spent as many years as I have in these courts, she would know that there is not the slightest risk that Detective Sleet will fail to appear for his—”

  “I’m aware of Mr. Sleet’s service to the department and the community, Mr. Hattie.”

  “I was certain you would be, Your Honor. May I make one additional point?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Jail for any police officer, and particularly one as efficient and effective as Lieutenant Sleet has been, is much more than incarceration, it is a state of perpetual peril in a condition of cruel and unusual punishment. The cells surrounding Mr. Sleet’s will bulge with felons placed there as the result of his skill and perseverance; the common areas will boil with cries for vengeance; the dining halls will echo with threats to his person. There is a far larger likelihood that he will not appear at trial if he is not released, because he may not survive till then. Literally. I know the court would not want a tragedy of that magnitude to be visited upon—”

  “I’m not a cop,” Charley blurted.

  The courtroom froze; Jake’s mouth stood agape; the judge frowned in confusion. “What did you say, Mr. Sleet?”

  “I’m not in the PD anymore. Turned in my shield last Thursday.”

  I was shocked into bewilderment, but Jake was nothing if not nifty. “His present circumstance does not at all curtail the dangers that his past duties present to him, Your Honor. There remain many men in the city jail because Mr. Sleet has put them there. Their thirst for retribution will not be dampened by Mr. Sleet’s recent resignation, if in fact that proves to be the case. I ask bail of no more than fifty thousand.”

  The prosecutor started to interrupt but the judge waved her off. “I have sympathy for your position, Mr. Hattie, whatever Mr. Sleet’s employment status. On the other hand, I am not unmindful of the crime with which he is charged, the manner in which it was committed, and the strictures placed on me by recent amendments to the state constitution. Bail is denied.”

  “But, Your Honor—”

  The judge shook her head and banged her gavel.

  Charley smiled in triumph, then looked at Jake and then at me and muttered what I assumed was a curse. I stood up and tried to signal him with my hands and eyes—sympathy, encouragement, comradeship, something—but the message was garbled and in any event Charley was unreceptive. He shuffled out the door without acknowledging anyone or anything, his only expression a baleful glare that left no doubt that he preferred the roaches and rats of San Bruno to the company of the rest of us.

  I waited for Jake in the hall. It took him so long to get there, I figured he must have been trying to talk some sense to his client.

  “So?” I said when he strode toward me down the corridor, as cocky and crisp as a bantam rooster, his retinue nowhere in evidence.

  “The guy’s a zombie,” Jake said, after making sure no one was within earshot. “Won’t talk; won’t listen; won’t say what happened or why.”

  “Is there any chance at all to spring him?”

  “I’ll make a motion to reconsider the bail ruling, but right now it’s got no chance. I need facts.”

  “What kind of facts?”

  “Find me a prisoner down at Bruno who threatened to kill him. Name and number. Fast.”

  I told Jake I’d do what I could. “So how’s he seem?” I went on. “You know. In the head.”

  “He seems different.”

  “How so?”

  “Distant. Uninterested. Fatalistic. Nihilistic.”

  “Even about himself?”

  “Especially about himself. Something’s happened to him, Marsh; something that’s made him sociopathic. He doesn’t give a shit; not about anything. You got any idea what it was that did it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Love life? Cop life? Anything at all gone south for him lately?”

  “No idea. Except I heard he got a new girlfriend.”

  “Check it out. Maybe she dumped him. Maybe she left him for the guy he shot.”

  I nodded. “What else?”

  Jake swore. “You’re the investigator. You tell me.”

  “I find out exactly how Charley was connected to the guy in the courtroom.”

  Jake nodded. “I can help with that one.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out a yellow pad and consulted it. “My people did some digging in the clerk’s office. The case was Wints v. Wints. Julian Wints was suing her father, Leonard, for sexually abusing her some twenty years back. Recovered memory thing. Asking five million plus. The case was in court on the father’s motion for summary judgment.”

  “Who are the lawyers?”

  “For plaintiff—Mindy Cartson. Andy Potter has the defense.”

  “Andy. Good. I know Andy.”

  “Me, too. He’s a stickler for the rules sometimes, but there shouldn’t be a problem in this case.”

  “Why not?”

  Jake adjusted his hairpiece. “His client’s dead. Most of the rules don’t apply anymore.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE OFFICE, I STARTED MAKING CALLS. Andy Potter was out and so was Mindy Cartson—I guessed their absence was more tactical than geographic. Joyce Yates wasn’t at her desk at the Chronicle either. It seemed too soon to try to reach a member of the Wints family, since the
y were burying the victim that morning, so I was left with a source of information that was most likely both delicate and reluctant—the San Francisco Police Department.

  Police people in general are closemouthed. Part of their reticence is legitimate, since with the advent of drug lords and gang-bangers and skinheads, policing has become a form of guerrilla warfare in which assaults and ambushes are carefully staged, complicated coordination is required, and success often depends on secrecy. Lives are at stake; literally.

  Less commendably, some cops’ silence is grounded in a sense that if people knew how they really conducted their business, they would be jailed on the spot. They’re not as right about that as they used to be, but even in the nation’s new compassionless climate, some police practices would shock the collective conscience if they received a public airing. For proof, consult the tapes of Mark Fuhrman. Some of the practices of pilots and politicians would shock the conscience, too, of course, which is why those people keep secrets as well.

  Because I was a civilian, not a cop, I was starting out with one strike against me as far as the department was concerned. And since the beneficiary of my inquiry was Charley Sleet, the count was 0 and 2. That’s because Charley is a maverick and always has been. He works mostly alone, mostly on special assignment from the chief’s office or the DA, frequently undercover, and often in cooperation with Internal Affairs while investigating some form of his colleagues’ corruption.

  Although beloved on the streets of the Tenderloin and respected in the projects of the Western Addition, Charley has never been popular in the precinct. He knows too much, his skills are too refined, his ethic is too empathic and absolute, for him to fit with most of his fellows. What I needed to find was an exception to the prevailing wisdom, in the form of someone who owed Charley his life.

  The colleague Charley mentioned most often, which was nonetheless infrequently, was a detective named Wally Briscoe. I’d met Wally a time or two—he’d joined us at Candlestick on occasion, which Charley endured even though Wally was a Dodger fan—and he seemed a genuine friend. He and Charley had worked the Taraval station early on in their careers, then pulled a tour in the Mission. It made them like combat buddies, Charley had told me one time, since most of their peers had either died or quit the force. What Wally had told me once, when Charley was out of earshot, was that Charley had disarmed a Filipino drug lord who was about to blow Wally into the bay one night, and Wally had felt beholden ever since.