Past Tense Page 5

  I stayed put. “Whether your client was or wasn’t abused is not my concern, Ms. Cartson. My concern is why Charley Sleet would care about it one way or the other. Care enough to blow someone’s brains out.”

  She looked at her watch. “I really do have a place I need to be.”

  “And I really do have a best friend who’s been jailed on a charge of murder.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Since in my view Mr. Sleet did the world a favor, I suppose I’d like to be of help. But I have nothing at all to give you.”

  “Give me permission to speak with your client.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Why not? What’s she got to hide?”

  “She’s not hiding, she’s recovering. At this point her best course is to establish herself as an independent and healthy person, then put the past out of her mind and move on.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She had it out of her mind until the therapist put it back in.”

  I’d made the statement in hopes of sparking a revealing outburst, but Mindy Cartson just growled with annoyance. “Who are you to challenge Julian’s experience? Did your father assault you sexually? Were you a prisoner of a man’s desires when you were only eight years old? Of course not. Men don’t have that problem.”

  It wasn’t quite true but I wasn’t there to debate perversion. “I’m not belittling child abuse,” I said again, then glanced at the baby. “And I don’t need to prove that it didn’t happen in order to help my friend. You can sue to your heart’s content as far as I’m concerned. But it would help me to talk to Ms. Wints.”

  “She’s going to be out of the country for a while.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Traveling. Relaxing. Getting her focus back.”

  “Can she afford to do that?”

  “She can now.”

  “How so?”

  “Through oversight or design, Jillian Wints is her father’s primary heir. He was a wealthy man. As soon as probate is complete, she will finally get what’s coming to her.”

  I waited till her eyes met mine. “Unless she hired Charley to bump him off.”

  It knocked her off balance. Her eyes scrambled across my face like insects. “Do you have any reason to believe that’s the case?”

  “No, but I’m going to look into it. And I’m more likely to get it right if your client cooperates.”

  She hesitated. “If you go public with talk about my client aiding and abetting Mr. Sleet, I’ll recommend a suit for slander.”

  “Just let me talk to your client, Ms. Cartson. Not about her father, not about her childhood, just about Charley.”

  She looked at me for a long time. “I’ll let you know,” she said.

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  The baby made a noise with a rattle. Mindy Cartson walked to the playpen and reached down and tickled it on its tummy. The baby smiled happily, waved the rattle once more, and drooled. When I asked what she called it, she told me her name was Flannery.

  I guess that meant it was a girl. A girl with a brilliant talent and a complex measure of good and evil. Probably a lot like her mom.

  CHAPTER

  7

  EVEN THOUGH I’D KNOWN ANDY POTTER FOR FIFTEEN YEARS, I had to use Jake Hattie’s name to get through to Andy’s secretary. She said her boss would see me as soon as he could, which turned out to be at six that evening. That left me with several hours to kill; I decided to kill them looking for motive.

  Charley Sleet lived high within the curves and curls of Upper Market Street, in a small house tacked to a steep cliff with a tiny yard out front and a terraced garden that fell off the back of the lot the way water falls off Yosemite. The garden had been lovely when Charley’s wife, Flora, was alive, but although Charley had labored for several years to maintain it in her memory, it had eventually gone to seed. It was still a good place to drink beer, though, and howl at the moon and swear at the fates and watch the fog tumble over Twin Peaks and shade the summer in swaths of gray bunting.

  I parked out front but stayed in the car, impaled on the horns of a dilemma. There might be things in that house that could help me: hints of Charley’s purposes, hints of a link to the dead man, hints of his secretive girlfriend, hints of a mental illness that was still my best explanation of what had transpired in the courtroom. On the other hand, it was Charley’s house. His home; his castle; a private preserve that even the Constitution says can’t be searched without cause. So I sat in my car and brooded, wondering if I’d forgive myself if I passed on the opportunity to gather knowledge, wondering if Charley would forgive me if I took advantage of it, wondering what the cops would do when and if they discovered I’d been there before them, assuming they got around to searching the place at all. Predictably, I placed my own peace of mind above both Charley’s and the police department’s.

  There used to be a key in the mailbox. Since there wasn’t one now, I assumed Charley had removed it, perhaps anticipating my snooping and forestalling it. Or maybe he’d given it to the girlfriend. I was left with a variety of possibilities for effecting abnormal entry, all of them arguably felonious. The one I chose to employ was to break out a rear window and unhook the sash, then slither into Charley’s back bedroom the way an eel slithers into a reef.

  It’s odd being in someone’s house when they’re not there. You feel slimy and skulduggerous. You feel nervous that they’ll return unexpectedly and catch you at something nefarious, even if the someone is in jail. You also feel excited by the prospect of learning something you didn’t know before, something akin to what they would learn from your house if the roles were reversed. I began the effort gingerly, as though the secrets I was about to unearth came shielded within a curse in the manner of the treasures of King Tut, but within a few minutes I was going full speed, curse and Constitution be damned.

  Since I was already in the bedroom, I started there. It was an oddly formal little room, still decorated more to Flora’s taste than Charley’s: The spread on the bed was chintz, the paper on the walls was floral, the rug on the floor was pink. The bed was an old four-poster that had belonged to Flora’s mother, the dresser was from maple that had been carved to match. As I rummaged through its drawers, I caught my reflection in the dresser mirror. I wasn’t charmed by the image.

  You couldn’t call Charley a neat person, in fact you might call him a slob, but he was neater than the bedroom implied. Clothes were scattered everywhere—bed, floor, chair backs, even draped over the lampshade and mirror. A three-foot pile of socks and underwear smoldering in the corner indicated a trip to the laundry was prudent. The jumble of shoes on the floor of the closet looked like the stock-in-trade of some charity. I ran some possibilities through my mind before deciding that the scene was more likely a slovenly symptom of bachelorhood than the product of a hasty search by person or persons unknown.

  I was headed for the kitchen when an idea made me detour to the closet. Charley isn’t a clotheshorse by any means, but he has a few favorite garments and one of them is a camel sport coat. He wears it twice a week in every month but October. But it wasn’t there. At the cleaner’s, possibly, but his canvas hunting coat wasn’t there either, and the blue cotton pajamas that usually hung on a hook on the closet door were missing as well.

  Another idea popped up and I looked in the night table next to the bed. The 9 mm Ruger that Charley kept handy for prowlers was missing, as was the 16 gauge Remington pump he kept in the closet for pheasant season. Which caused me to amend my initial decision. What I concluded at this point was that the mess in the bedroom was purposeful, most likely Charley’s attempt to disguise beneath a blizzard of chaos what was missing from his personal effects.

  A clue to where the clothes and the weapons had gone were the shoes—not the shoes that were there but the ones that were not. What was there were dress shoes, the brown ones Charley wore to work and the black ones he wore to chur
ch and to funerals. What weren’t there were the scuffed and oiled Red Wings he wore when he went hunting and the stained and stretched moose-hide moccasins he wore when he was lounging around the house after hours. I sat on the bed and thought about it. What I decided was that upon his release from prison, Charley was intending to go to ground somewhere out of town and that the somewhere was most likely rural and rustic and remote. The question was: Why wasn’t he out there already? Why had he been determined to stay in jail if what he planned was to hide out? I moved on to the kitchen with only a faint hope of finding an answer.

  In contrast to the bedroom, the kitchen was as ordered as usual. Order in the kitchen was usual because Charley never cooked anything except an occasional Sunday morning pancake or Friday evening steak, taking the rest of his meals on the run whenever there was a break in his workday. But there was evidence of a contemplated odyssey in the kitchen as well: The cupboards were bare of the kinds of prepared and preserved and prepackaged foodstuffs that are the staples of men like Charley and me.

  My taste runs to sugar and Charley’s runs to salt. He always has several boxes of Better Cheddars on hand, with Triscuits and Wheat Thins on standby in case his hunger turns heavy. Pretzels were also a favorite, but there were none of them around either. And no beer in the fridge or booze in the cabinet except for the gin and vermouth he kept for the nights he was host to the poker game and a martini drinker like Clay Oerter came by. It seemed that Charley was planning to lie as low as possible, even from the clerk at the grocery.

  The living room was Charley’s primary domain. The rest of the house existed for essentials—sleep, eat, bathe, brush; the living room was where he lived and languished, the only part of the house that bore Charley’s peculiar stamp. And a peculiar stamp it was.

  For one thing, the walls were grass green enamel because that was his favorite color and enamel was easy to wash free of the smells of smoke and fried foods. For another, the lights in the lamps were red, because the glow they gave off reminded Charley of Christmas. For still another, the rug wasn’t a rug, it was a sheet of clear plastic, so he didn’t have to worry about staining the carpet beneath it, which was the last thing Flora had bought before she died. There were probably weirder things around as well, but most of me hoped I wouldn’t come across them.

  The furnishings were a brown leather chesterfield and matching chair that Charley had bought from a lawyer who’d used the proceeds from a contingent killing in a PI case to remodel his office and move it north of Market. The chair and chesterfield formed a rectangle with the fireplace on one end and the TV on the other. The bookcases on opposite walls contained biographies of political figures, technical works on crime scene investigation and interrogation methods, and pulp novels about cops and spies and private eyes: Charley’s a big fan of Charles McCarry and Jim Thompson. The stereo system housed an eclectic collection dominated by black blues and military marches and Bach cantatas. The wall decorations were a print by Charles Russell, a knotty assemblage of rope and yarn done by the wife of a rookie cop Charley had dragged out of a firefight some years back, and a framed photograph of Charley in his blues shaking hands with Joseph Alioto during the years when Joe was mayor and Charley was his driver—Charley had worshipped Alioto and vice versa. But for my purposes, only the desk looked promising.

  It had been ransacked much like the bedroom, with papers pulled from drawers, then perused, then discarded if outdated or irrelevant to some secret purpose. I collected what I could find and sat on the couch and looked through them. It would have been nice to find love letters from the girlfriend or hate mail from the dead guy or a forwarding address to the prospective hideout, but all I found besides promotional trash was a Chronicle clipping that had been crumpled and tossed in the wastebasket.

  The clipping concerned the arrest of a counselor at a place called the Tenderloin Children’s Project, which was a community services agency funded by city and federal sources that focused on problems of inner-city kids. The man’s name was Lumpley. The charge was misappropriation of funds, with additional charges hinted at. The clipping was dated two weeks previously; Lumpley was being held on fifty thousand dollars’ bail.

  The name of the agency was familiar—I was pretty sure it was one of the places where Charley spent his off-duty time, doing what he could to help out. I imagine the prospect of official corruption especially pissed him off when the ultimate victims were kids. Nasty, but apparently irrelevant.

  I folded the clipping and put it in my pocket and made a final tour of the house. What I was looking for was Charley’s lockbox, the small fireproof case where he kept his important papers—deed, car title, marriage certificate, department commendations, and the like. Normally, he kept it under the bed, but now it wasn’t there. The medication that lowered both his blood pressure and his sex drive wasn’t in the bathroom cabinet either. I sat on the couch to think.

  Charley had admitted his guilt in court and had apparently prepared for a lengthy absence in the event he was ever set free, but there was no piece of proof in the house that connected him to Leonard Wints, the man he had killed some twenty-four hours earlier. If my guess was correct, and he had in fact made plans to flee, it began to seem crucial that he remain where he was, even though where he was was in jail. And then I had a revelation.

  Charley had done something crazy in that courtroom. If he wasn’t crazy himself, the only person I knew who might have caused such conduct, other than maybe the new girlfriend, was Charley’s dead wife, Flora. Maybe the evidence I was looking for wasn’t connected to Charley, maybe it was something of Flora’s. So I went back through the house looking for places that Flora might have used to hide secrets, then remembered that the house wasn’t where she would hide them; the garden was.

  I found them in the form of a small stack of photographs, bound with a rubber band, protected with plastic wrap, and stuffed in a rusted watering can in the potting shed that was rotting away at the low edge of the lot. Most of the pictures were self-explanatory—an impossibly young Charley and an impossibly beautiful Flora on their wedding day and their honeymoon in Hawaii; Flora in Golden Gate Park with an older couple I assumed to be her parents; a handsome Charley in his blues, arm in arm with a buddy at graduation from the police academy; Flora and a woman I didn’t recognize; and Charley and the first Governor Brown, Charley and McCovey, Charley and Montana, Charley and Mel Belli. Fine so far, but two pictures were inexplicable. They were both of an infant, a newborn really, prone on a tiny blanket, sleeping and peaceful and bald.

  Charley and Flora hadn’t had kids, that much I knew. Or did I? What if they’d had one and given it up for adoption? What if their baby had evolved into Jillian Wints? What if they’d kept track of her over the years and when he’d read about the trial Charley had avenged his long-lost daughter in a fit of outrage at what had been done to her? Certain that I was finally on track, I put the pictures in my pocket and headed for the door.

  When I passed the table with the telephone on it, I pressed the redial button on his receiver. It rang four times, then activated a machine:

  “This is Marjie Finnerty. I’m not at home right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll call you back tout de suite. Thanks.”

  Marjie Finnerty was Judge Meltonian’s clerk, the woman who’d held her ground when Charley had opened fire and everyone else was ducking for cover. That Charley had placed his final call to her home made it likely that she was the woman Charley had squired to Kuleto’s, where he’d been caught in flagrante romantico by Ruthie Spring.

  When I checked Charley’s own machine, there was a single message in a woman’s voice, saying “Hi” in a tone implying intimacy and enticement. I didn’t need a voice print to know that it was an exact match to the one I’d just summoned with the redial button.

  CHAPTER

  8

  I GRABBED SOME BREAD AND CHILI AT MACARTHUR PARK, then headed into the steel-and-glass forest of downtown.

  Andy Potter’s off
ice was on the fourteenth floor of the Alcoa building, where he was a senior partner in the firm of Geer, Goldberg & Potter, Attorneys and Counselors-at-Law. The last I checked, Andy had more than fifty partners and almost a hundred associates helping him fight the good fight or at least the remunerative one. When he’d entered law school at Stanford, Andy had wanted to be a civil liberties attorney. The only liberties he worked for now were those of major capitalists, who had far too many of them already as far as I was concerned. I began to think more fondly of Mindy Cartson.

  I’d gotten to know Andy in my first big case, which involved a client of his named Roland Nelson, who was the head of an advocacy organization called the Institute for Consumer Awareness. Nelson turned out to have a lurid past. Lots of things happened to him and to the rest of us before it all got straightened out, including the murder of Harry Spring, my friend and mentor, out in a valley town called Oxtail. I’d worked for Andy a few times since, but because his practice is more corporate than criminal, I don’t get a call very often. Andy is one of the few blue-suit types I can abide, however—he doesn’t think the be-all and end-all of the nation’s soul should be pledged to business profits—so we stay in touch and meet for drinks and go to a game once in a while. Among the things I intended to ask was how he happened to end up in Superior Court representing a purported child molester.

  We shook hands crisply. Andy was five-eight and stout, with a creaseless, guileless face that looked somewhat like Gene Autry’s back when Gene had owned quarter horses and not baseball players. Andy had gone through a quick divorce, then married a lawyer who worked in the firm, and the last time I talked to him he’d declared himself fat and happy. So I was happy for him.

  “I tried to call you after it happened,” he said with apology in his voice. “But there was no answer and I didn’t want to leave that kind of message. You know?”