Past Tense Read online

  She pivoted on the pillow and looked out across the bay. “Shall I be frank?”

  “Please do.”

  “I keep in touch when I need money. Leonard keeps in touch when he wants me to do something to curb some aspect of Jillian’s behavior.”

  “What kind of behavior was that?”

  “Hysterical rages; depressive funks; desperate alliances with men who exploit her for money then quickly discard her. My daughter has been a trial in almost every respect you can imagine, Mr. Tanner.”

  That seemed like possible evidence of abuse to me, but as Mindy Cartson had pointed out, what did I know about it? “How long have you been divorced?” I asked.

  “Ten years.”

  “And how often did your husband want you to do something about Jillian?”

  “At least once a month.”

  I couldn’t keep from asking. “Even though you’re remaining neutral, do you think Jillian’s claims have merit?”

  She swiveled away from the window toward me. Her arms crossed above her stunted breasts and her hands made fists that lolled like mollusks upon her narrow thighs. “You mean did I marry a sex pervert and live with him for twenty years while he was violating the flesh of my flesh? No, Mr. Tanner. I don’t believe that happened.”

  “But you weren’t going to testify for him.”

  “Only because I had nothing to say. On the one hand, I never saw anything improper take place. On the other, Jillian is profoundly disturbed. I can’t swear that nothing untoward occurred during the time she lived under our roof, although I doubt very much that it was sexual. In the circumstances, it seemed wise to remain above the fray.”

  I smiled. “That’s nice work if you can get it. But sometimes a subpoena gets in the way.”

  She unhooked her feet and drew her heels against the backs of her thighs so she could rest her chin on her knees. “What I don’t understand is why you’re here. There’s no mystery about who killed Leonard, surely. The papers say all kinds of people saw your colleague shoot him.”

  I flipped a page in my notebook. “We do have a strong case, but Mr. Sleet isn’t talking and we haven’t come up with an explanation of why he did what he did. The DA likes to give his jury a reason, particularly if the suspect pleads not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  Her eyes widened. “Is is that what he’s doing? Claiming he was insane?”

  “Not yet, but it’s still a possibility. We’re hoping you can tell us that Lieutenant Sleet had reason to be angry with your ex-husband. Something that would make it look more like vengeance than madness.”

  She looked at me for several seconds. “Do you know Officer Sleet, Mr. Tanner?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Is he a friend?”

  “If he was a friend, I’d have been taken off the case. What can you tell me, Mrs. Wints?”

  “Nothing.”

  Like the small sloop that was bobbing out in the bay, I jibed in another direction. I leaned forward and asked the only question I could think of that might yield the glimmerings of a motive, and maybe even an excuse. “Was Jillian your husband’s biological daughter?”

  She frowned. “You mean was she adopted?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. Of course not. She was his. Ours.”

  I put away the notebook. “This is important, Mrs. Wints. It will be to everyone’s advantage for you to be absolutely candid. Is there any question of paternity at all? Could Charley Sleet be the father of your child?”

  “You mean did I … was I … ?” She looked around the room, her nose wrinkled as though she smelled something burning. When her eyes returned to mine, they were as bright as the sea in the sun. “Just because I pursue an unconventional spirituality does not mean I’m promiscuous. I was faithful to my husband in every minute of our marriage. Although at his insistence the vows we took were Christian, I honored them as though they flowed from my own belief system.”

  “And what system is that?”

  She hugged herself tightly, as though the truths in her life were all served cold, then wriggled farther into the pillow. “It’s a system of my own devising. Since I doubt very much that it’s relevant to your inquiry, and since I don’t sense any real interest in the subject on your part, I’d rather not go into it.”

  “Suit yourself,” I said. “Was your husband as faithful to you as you were to him?”

  “No.”

  “Did it bother you?”

  “Of course it did.”

  “How did you deal with it?”

  “I spent as much of his money as I could, I overindulged in every way I could imagine until I gained eighty pounds, and when that didn’t erase my shame and humiliation, I divorced him and renounced worldly goods.” She slid her hands along her flanks. “Meditation is so much more satisfying than sex. I don’t know why more people don’t pursue it.”

  Like a lot of other faiths, this one seemed to have essentially pathetic origins. “Why did you wait so long to divorce your husband?” I asked.

  “Because I thought the girls needed a father.”

  “Then why did you do it at all?”

  “Because their father stopped loving them not long after he stopped loving me.”

  “Why did he stop loving them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him?”

  “By that time, words had become weapons—every time he spoke to me, it hurt. After a while, I couldn’t endure it any longer.” Her eyes glazed and her lips thinned. “Jillian says it began when she was eight. Can you imagine? Having sex with an eight-year-old child? There are people in the world who do, I know, but what kind of mind would … ?” She couldn’t finish the sentence and I didn’t want her to.

  “Can you tell me what role Charley Sleet played in all this?” I asked when her anguish had cooled.

  She blinked and looked at me. “I know of none.”

  “You never heard his name before the shooting?”

  “No.”

  “Back before your divorce, did you or your family have any dealings with the police at all?”

  “I don’t think so. Why would we?”

  “Domestic disturbance. Burglary. Lost dog. People call cops for lots of reasons.”

  “I don’t recall any such event.”

  “Were your daughters ever in trouble with the law?”

  “They were disciplined at school on occasion, but nothing that involved the police.” She unhooked her legs and stood up. “Wouldn’t you have a record of this, Mr. Tanner? If you really are a policeman?”

  I shrugged it off. “Sometimes an officer investigates a complaint but decides not to write up a report. Mr. Sleet, in particular, was prone to informal suggestion rather than official sanction. And juvenile records are often sealed, as you know.”

  “Well, if any of that happened, I wasn’t aware of it.”

  I stood up and faced her. This time I tried a grin and a nudge. “You can tell me, Mrs. Wints. Weren’t you and Charley Sleet lovers?”

  Not for the first time, my charm was ineffective; her lips folded in firm rebuke. “The circumstances are crude enough without you making them more so. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

  I fished in my pocket for the snapshots of the infant on the blanket I’d found in Charley’s garden and held one out to her. “Isn’t this Jillian?”

  She glanced at it and shook her head. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “A mother knows her child, Mr. Tanner. You can’t be much of a policeman if you don’t even know that.”

  Her voice was thick with disgust. She stood by the door till I used it.

  CHAPTER

  10

  I GRABBED A BITE AT A PLACE IN NORTH BEACH THAT Charley and I had never frequented, so my mind could stay oriented toward the future instead of lolling in the past. But a half hour of pondering didn’t get me much beyond the dead ends I’d encountered so far, so before heading home I stopped at City Light
s to browse in the groves of psychology. After being amazed by the number of titles on the subject of childhood sexual abuse, I bought a couple that focused on the area of interest, which was the recovery of repressed memories of such trauma, then trudged up the hill to my apartment.

  Before delving into the evening’s research, I called the Wints’s other daughter, Sandy. When she came on the line, I told her who I was and what I did for a living.

  “This isn’t about the malpractice case, is it?”

  I suppressed a laugh at the glimpse of a private terror. “No, this is about your father.”

  “Oh. That. What about him?”

  “I’m looking for information on the man who killed him.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can learn why it happened.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Because someone is paying me to.”

  “Who?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Well, I’m not talking. Not to you, not to Jillian, not to her lawyer, not to anyone. The idea that my father was having sex with my sister is so … well, let’s just say I’m not talking.”

  “What about Mr. Sleet?”

  “What about him?”

  “How is he connected to your family?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “I’ve been told you and Jillian were adopted.”

  Her laugh was brutal. “Whoever told you that is full of shit. God. Can anyone say anything in this world and get away with it? Next we’ll be lepers, I suppose.”

  “Then have you heard Mr. Sleet’s name in any connection at all?”

  “The man murdered my father. Isn’t that connection enough for you?”

  She hung up with a bang. I fixed a fresh drink and returned to my chair and asked the question I’d asked Wally Briscoe over omelettes that morning: Had Charley seemed different of late? The more I thought about it, the more I realized I hadn’t seen him much lately. He’d canceled a couple of lunch dates, skipped the last two poker sessions, and begged off a weekend jaunt to San Jose to watch hockey. As far as I could recall, for at least two months, roughly since Christmas, my conversations with Charley had been confined to the phone.

  His excuse was always work, of course. Since crime is the only phenomenon as inexhaustible as Charley’s energies, and since at that point I hadn’t known there was a woman who might compromise his devotion to his job, work always seemed a good excuse. But now I wondered. Was it my imagination, or did Charley seem less immersed in the world the last time I saw him? Could he, in fact, have fallen in love and become happy without my realizing it? If that was what had happened to him, and I hoped it had, the engine of the transformation would seem to be one Marjie Finnerty. I called her again but got the message I’d gotten when I’d called from Charley’s house, courtesy of the redial button.

  I fixed another drink and retired to my books, both of which were devoted to the phenomenon of the recovered memory of childhood sexual abuse. One was pro, the other con. One cited case after case of tormented young women who suffered a range of afflictions—depression to bulimia to frigidity and worse—and who experienced a sudden surge of repressed memory in response to a seemingly benign stimulus. Over time, these women would narrate, in increasingly vivid detail, incidents of sexual and psychic abuse, usually committed by a member of their family, most often by their father. Once brought to light and reacted to with appropriate outrage—once the youthful feelings of pain and shame and confusion were allowed to be expressed—the women reported a lightening of burdens that had hobbled them for years, and progress toward inner peace. The sheer quantity of incident and anecdote collected by the authors made it difficult to doubt that such transformations had occurred, and in large numbers.

  The antithesis, offered by people of equally lofty credentials and experience, claimed that the mind didn’t work that way. These writers assert that the phenomenon of repression of traumatic memory lacks scientific support, that such experiences are not buried in the brain only to emerge years later with perfect accuracy in the way the believers claim. Rather, a continuing pattern of abuse is usually recalled from the date it occurs, and over time its particulars are blurred and altered, often in significant particulars, just as less inflammatory and more recent memories are.

  In contrast to the unreserved acceptance of their patients’ claims by the pro-abuse counselors, the skeptics point to the phenomenon of false memory, in which wholly fanciful recollections have been created by suggestion in experimental settings, in both adults and children. The implication was that suggestions by therapists who look for abuse and expect to find it, and push their patients until they start speaking in those terms, can create entirely fantastic recollections that lack foundation in fact. In extreme cases, the prodding of therapists has led people to spin out increasingly bizarre descriptions of events that could not have occurred—satanic rituals of gang rape and human sacrifice, for example. Since such bizarre memories almost always lack empirical evidence to support them—scars of abuse are absent even when the claim is of ritual sexual torment—the contras find no support for the claim that a recovered memory of sexual abuse can surface years after the trauma took place.

  What was amazing to me was that expert opinion could differ so widely on such an important issue. At one extreme were therapists who found sexual abuse at the root of every claim of dysfunction that walked through their door. At the other were those who argued that recovered memories of abuse long after the fact are never accurate, no matter the suffering of the victim or the relief of symptoms after the recollection is voiced. In the middle were those who said that it didn’t matter—if a patient believes she was abused and if in the process of discussing “recovered memories” she experiences therapeutic improvement, what difference does it make if the memories are real or false?

  As with most controversies, the dispute has moved to the courts, where the tide seemed to have turned against the women who claimed to be victims. In Napa, one accused father won a malpractice verdict of half a million dollars against the therapist whom he charged had created memories of abuse in his daughter that were false. The case that brought the phenomenon to public attention in the first place—a woman who accused her father of murdering her childhood friend when she was eight years old, based on a recovered memory of the incident—was reversed by a federal court because the jury wasn’t told that all of the facts recalled by the daughter, based on a purportedly recovered memory, had been available in media reports of the crime.

  On the other hand, provable cases of incest and abuse, cases that have been all too well remembered over a period of many years and are supported by both physical evidence and witnesses, have reached epidemic proportions, suggesting that at least some of the recovered memory cases must surely be based on fact. But apparently no one can agree on how to tell the difference between true and false in this heated atmosphere. The dilemma has existed from at least the time of Freud, who initially felt that women’s hysterical neuroses arose from childhood instances of incestual seduction, then changed to a theory that women only wished for such relations to have occurred, an amendment that many women now regard as treason.

  By the time I finished reading, I wasn’t much further along than when I started when it came to deciding what had really happened to Jillian Wints. But whatever the validity of her claim, I didn’t see how it could relate to my friend unless Charley Sleet, and not Leonard Wints, was her father, something that her mother and sister quite adamantly denied. It was time to talk to Jillian.

  The first thing in the morning, I drove to the Greenwich Street address that Andy Potter had given me. Jillian’s apartment was on the top floor of a converted town house. There was music coming from inside—something airy and monotonous and New Age—but the shades were drawn and the windows were closed and no one came to the door when I knocked. When I dialed her number on my cell phone, a phone company robot told me the number had been disconnected.

  Nex
t I drove by the bookstore on Laguna and asked if Jillian was expected at work any time that day. A man who was hairless except for his beard told me she was on extended medical leave. Blocked at every turn, I opted to call on the widow.

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE WINTS HOUSE WAS ON COMMONWEALTH AVENUE NEAR the Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator in a tranquil section of the city known as Jordan Park. It was a large boxy structure, with wide wood trim, beige stucco walls, a deeply shaded porch beneath the two front dormers, and a garage to the side in the back. The lawn was immaculately tended, with an ornamental plum in one corner and a sculpted shrub in the other. Only the black drape above the door reminded me to be sorry for intruding like this.

  Which is exactly what I said when the widow answered my ring. She was wearing a simple gray dress and sensible black shoes and the hair on her head was wound as tight as her nerves. Her eyes were dyed to match her outfit but they were clear and inquiring, not clouded with grief. She seemed aristocratic by nature, not by affectation, with strong bloodlines and good manners that held up even in trying times. I liked it that she was brave enough to talk to a stranger two days after her husband had been murdered.

  She stuck out a hand when I introduced myself. “I’m Catherine Wints.” Her hand was the first sign of stress—despite her apparent savoir faire, I’d felt warmer flesh on fish.

  When I repeated my apology for intruding, she waved it away and glanced back toward the house. “Please. It’s a relief to have an excuse to be out of there for a while. May we sit over on the glider? For some reason, my family doesn’t feel I should be seen at a time like this.” She smiled gamely, and perhaps a little flirtatiously. “If you tell me something that will make me cry, I’ll have to go back inside. I don’t want to upset the neighbors.”

  “I’ll try not to do that,” I said truthfully.

  She met my eye and smiled. “It may be easier than you think.”

  She led me to an old-fashioned glider, covered with a flowered oilcloth and a tattered blanket, hidden behind a web of wisteria lying in wait for spring. We sat side by side and began to rock, ever so slowly, ever so pleasantly. The breeze rattled the vines and the smell of baking bread slid out of the house and joined us. It was cool and quiet and peaceful; even the squeak in the glider’s joints was musical.