Book Case

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “What deal?”

  “A trip to Europe.”

  Christine licked her lips. “A better deal than I’ve ever made.”

  “But this one had strings. One of them was, she had to take someone with her.”

  “The soccer player.”

  “Right. Only the trip didn’t have anything to do with soccer, it had to do with sex.”

  Christine sniffed and squinted, as though I’d started speaking in another language.

  “The soccer player was pregnant,” I went on. “My hunch is, the main reason she played soccer was the hope that she would spontaneously abort. But whatever the reason, when she hurt her ankle in the Balboa game, her doctor recognized her condition right away. As doctors to rich men tend to do, he told her father about the pregnancy. And Daddy used the situation to his advantage.”

  “How?”

  “The girl had waited too long to get an abortion, so there was no alternative but to have the child, then put it up for adoption. But first things first—under the circumstances, Gillis didn’t want the pregnancy to take place under the eyes of the Sebastian people.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “The pregnant girl was his daughter. Gillis wanted her out of sight and out of mind during the last stages of her pregnancy, so she wouldn’t undercut the moral authority he saw himself as providing to Sebastian. If not the universe.”

  “What happened to the baby?” Christine asked. “Was it adopted?”

  I nodded. “Through a private placement arranged by a lawyer named Julius Messenger.”

  “Who were the new parents?”

  I met her eye. “Mr. and Mrs. Wade Linton.”

  “But …” Christine sputtered to a halt struggling to make sense of it the way I had tussled with it the night before. “Why would Gillis let his grandchild be raised by the man he was trying to get rid of?”

  “Because that was the way to shut Linton up. I’m sure Gillis had already tried to scare Linton into backing off, and buy him off as well, but it didn’t work. Then the pregnancy fell into his hands, and Gillis used it not only to get Linton to go to jail as punishment for impregnating Jane Ann, but also to persuade Linton to keep quiet about the phony records, in Linton’s own self-interest.”

  “Which was?”

  “To keep Gillis from having Messenger throw a monkey wrench into the adoption. As you probably know, there are all kinds of formalities in those things—notice requirements and releases and waivers and the like. I’m betting Messenger purposely left a few of the statutory steps defective, in case Gillis wanted the whole thing voided later on.”

  Christine thought over what I’d said. “You’re telling me Wade Linton went to jail for six years, for something he didn’t do, just so an adoption would hold up? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  I played my trump. “Not if Wade Linton was the father of the child.”

  Beyond us, Emma Drayer gasped as though I had summoned the supernatural. Her features became a tumble of doubt and debate. “That can’t be true,” she managed finally.

  “I’m afraid it is, but it can be proved if it needs to be. The biologists have got paternity down to a science these days—they run seven serologic tests and a leukocyte antigen test and afterward they can exclude ninety percent of the nonfathers.” I looked at the women in turn. “One of the reasons I’m going through all this—with Gillis and with you—is that I’m hoping it won’t need to be proved. If Gillis takes his medicine, maybe the rest of it can stay the way it is.”

  “So it really did happen,” Emma Drayer mused with pained amazement. “Wade really did molest a student. Like a fool I believed him when he told me it was a lie.”

  “It was a lie.”

  “But Wade and Jane Ann …”

  “Wade and Jane Ann fell in love. And nature took its course.”

  Emma sagged, then straightened, then moved out of the shadows toward the center of the room. “She consented? It wasn’t rape or anything?”

  I shook my head.

  The new version wasn’t much easier for her to deal with than the old, but finally she processed it. “At least I wasn’t wrong about him.” She sighed, then met my eye. “Not totally, at least.”

  Christine White was struggling. “Linton was trying to expose Gillis when he got killed, right? He was looking for more evidence, which means he wasn’t keeping quiet anymore.”

  “Right.”

  “What happened to change his mind?”

  “His wife divorced him.”

  “But what does that—?”

  “It meant he wasn’t able to live with his son even after he served his time. At that point he figured he didn’t have anything to lose, so he decided to drag the whole thing out in the open and hope he’d end up with custody of the boy when it got sorted out.”

  “And he was going to expose it through this book you were talking about?” Christine asked.

  I shook my head. “Wade Linton didn’t write that book.”

  Christine frowned. “Who did?”

  I shrugged. “If I’m lucky I’ll find out tonight.”

  Emma spoke from beneath the halo of the ceiling light. “I still don’t understand. The crime. The molestation. Did that happen or not?”

  “Not.”

  “But someone at Sebastian claimed Wade abused her. Didn’t they?”

  I nodded. “Her name was Carrie Devlin.”

  “Why did she lie about it?”

  “I’m saving the answer to that for the only person in the world who needs to know,” I said, then kissed Christine good-bye and headed for Noe Valley.

  I got there just after one. Bridget Devlin was making lunch—the air was full of toasted cheese and tomato soup. I was as welcome as a wasp.

  “Can’t you let me alone?” she begged after she opened the door. “Every time I think I’ve climbed out of it, you come along and shove me back.”

  “This is the last time. I promise.”

  She didn’t seem as cheered by the prospect as her plaint projected; lonely people never are. “Well? What is it? Carrie again, I suppose.”

  “Remember I told you she might be in trouble?”

  “At Sebastian, you mean.”

  I nodded.

  “God. I wish I’d never heard of that place.” She backed into the hallway and beckoned for me to follow. When I was sitting at the small round table with a checkered cloth on the top, she asked if I wanted some soup.

  I shook my head, then waited for her to finish eating, trying to decide how much I needed to tell her.

  “Carrie,” she reminded as she licked the mustache off her upper lip. “I hope you’re not going to claim she slept with Wade Linton like you did the last time you were here.”

  “She didn’t sleep with him,” I agreed.

  Her smile was pat. “I’m glad you’ve figured that out.”

  “But she said she did.”

  The smile turned upside down. “What are you talking about?”

  “Carrie got mixed up in a blackmail scheme while she was at Sebastian. If it comes out in court, she could face a perjury charge. And maybe worse.”

  “Who did she supposedly blackmail?”

  “Wade Linton.”

  Mrs. Devlin licked her lips again, this time out of nervousness. “Why on earth would she do that?”

  “The powers that be wanted to make sure Linton kept quiet about some skulduggery at Sebastian. They used Carrie to accomplish their purpose.”

  “Who are these creatures you keep talking about?”

  “You don’t have to know, and it’s better if you don’t. Some powerful people are going to try to keep the Sebastian story a secret. If they get a glimmer that you know more than you should, you could be in trouble. If you’re lucky, they’ll succeed in burying it. If you’re not, you’ll read it in the papers. If you do, you should get in touch with me.”

  “I’ve never been lucky,” she observed laconically. For some reason I thought of Tiny Gunderson
, the little man down the block who had Bridget’s share of luck and more.

  “You haven’t asked me why Carrie would go along with such a scheme,” I said after a minute.

  Her lips twisted. “That’s because I already know why; it was that horrid school. Carrie was completely out of her element—lonely, insecure, feeling inferior and impoverished. Of course the rich kids made relentless fun of her—what she wore, the way she looked, where she lived—she told me once they made her feel like an immigrant. And basically that’s what she was—there’s an ocean between here and Cow Hollow. She’d have done anything to get out from under that pressure. And I guess that’s what she did. Blackmail. My God.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right,” I said. “They saw a vulnerable girl with some street smarts they could use, so they made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Money was part of it, so was status—good grades, the student court, even the boyfriend was part of the deal.”

  Bridget Devlin nodded slowly. “There were so many changes that last year. I should have asked about them, but I let myself think she was just adjusting marvelously. The money was the key—she had much more of it than before, far more than her job at the mall could generate.” Her smile was disdainful of only herself. “It occurred to me that she might be stealing. Or selling drugs. But it wouldn’t have mattered what it was—I closed my eyes to all of it. I persuaded myself that even drugs were a good trade-off for what Sebastian would do for her.”

  She began to cry, deeply and convulsively. I took her hand in mine. “Motherhood’s the toughest job there is,” I said, partly because I thought it might help, partly because I believed it. “It’s a lot like umpiring—the better it’s done, the less it’s noticed.”

  She tried to grin but couldn’t manage it. “Is Carrie going to be arrested?” she mumbled between sniffs. “Should I go to Spain to be with her? Or Morocco? Or wherever the hell she is?”

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen—it depends how quickly a deal can be cut by the bad guys. But if I were you I’d tell Carrie to stay in Morocco for as long as she can.”

  “But she has to go to school. She gets her master’s next year. From Stanford. She can’t—” Bridget Devlin stopped in midsentence. “I’m doing it again, aren’t I?” she asked sheepishly.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, about herself or about the status of her daughter’s education. “Tell her to stay in Morocco,” I repeated. “Stanford will be there when she gets back.”

  I left Carrie’s mother the way I leave a lot of people—with too much on her mind. To ease my burden and maybe someone else’s, before leaving Noe Valley I stopped by Tiny Gunderson’s and bought a share of his luck myself.

  What do I do now? Become a fugitive for as long as my wits will sustain me? Confess, and guarantee my return to prison? Commit suicide?

  But perhaps that’s premature.

  I have written a book.

  I think I’ll get an agent.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 342

  31

  In the nighttime mist the neon light above the Periwinkle portals was as fluffy as goose feathers. Street people looking much like Wade Linton had looked on the day he died eddied through the area in search of sustenance. I was in need of sustenance myself, in the form of putting Bryce and the book behind me, but although I sensed I had begun the final chapter, I hesitated to go inside.

  In most of my cases, I consider it a job well done if I uncover one story—the story that has caused someone to pay me money to go out into the world and return with its message. But in this case I’d uncovered not one story but three—the real story of the academic fraud and the blackmail of Wade Linton; the story Marvin Gillis concocted to cover up his crime, using Carrie Devlin’s false accusations against Linton and her implied threat to tell her tale in open court; and the story according to Hammurabi, which was a blend of those two stories plus a large injection of imagination and surmise.

  Actually, I wasn’t certain I had the three versions entirely separated out in my mind quite yet, and maybe I never would. All I knew was that each of the stories was hazardous in its own way, potentially wounding to one or another of the people who had been ensnared by the lure of the Sebastian School. Technically, the only job that remained was for me to tell Bryce the name of Hammurabi’s creator. In fact, the larger task was to keep as much of the story to myself as I could, the way I always tried to do, to minimize the pain of revelation. I pressed the buzzer next to Periwinkle’s heavy door.

  Bryce had promised to have his wife and stepdaughter on hand for our meeting, but since neither of them was enamored with my behavior of late, I was relieved when I entered the conference room and found the entire Chatterton clan waiting for me, if not eagerly then at least demurely.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said to all concerned. “This won’t take long.”

  “Charley Sleet wants you to call him, Marsh,” Bryce interjected. “He’s still at the station. You can use the phone in the office.”

  I closed the door behind me.

  “We caught up to O’Shea,” Charley said.

  “What happened?”

  “He tried to hold us off.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Why?”

  “He had a problem with authority and violence, left over from his army days. It had to be weighing on him, what he did to Linton. He was probably afraid he’d be jailed for it.”

  “Well, we had to take him out.”

  “Dead.”

  “Yep.”

  “Damn.”

  “Looks like this thing is going to get political, too—the DA’s boys stopped by, then the captain called me in and told me to lie low on anything to do with Gillis.”

  “So do it.”

  “You sure there’s nothing I need to know?”

  “Not at this point.”

  “Some day it’s going to be a mistake to trust you, Tanner.”

  “That’ll be the day I don’t ask.”

  When I got back to the conference room, a fire was blazing bright but the Chatterton family looked as though they’d rather be freezing in Siberia than warm with me in SoMa.

  Bryce was wan and pensive. “What’s happening, Marsh? Jane Ann said the police came to her apartment, looking for Lloyd.”

  I looked at Jane Ann. “Did they find him?”

  She shook her head. “Not there.”

  “Did they take anything?”

  She shrugged. “Some of his clothes.”

  “Did they grill you?”

  “Not much. But they said they might be back.”

  “You can count on it. Did they tell you what it’s about?”

  Her shoulders rose and fell again, even words were too much trouble. “Some drug thing, probably. Lloyd’s not real discreet.”

  “It’s not about drugs, Jane Ann.” I looked at Bryce, then her mother. “The police think Lloyd had a hand in murder.”

  Margaret was the first to take the bait. “Well? Who was killed?”

  “Wade Linton.”

  Since I was groping for some final strands of truth, I was watching Jane Ann as I said the name. And she was good—her eyes widened, her hand flew to her mouth, but the groan that escaped her core was barely audible. But she couldn’t maintain the pose. Leaning forward in her chair, her arms crossed on the belly that once had been swollen with her child, she began shaking her head in a rhythmic denial. “No … no … no …”

  When her mother reached her side she tried her best to comfort her. Since there was nothing I could contribute to the effort, I looked at my friend and client, who seemed less disconsolate than disconnected. “Linton’s the teacher at Sebastian who was jailed for assaulting one of his students,” I explained easily, as though we were starting from scratch.

  Bryce nodded abstractly. “The one who wrote Hammurabi. I wonder if he has an executor who could authorize Periwinkle to publish and—”

  “Linton didn’t write the book,” I cou
ntered, angrier than I should have been that Bryce’s focus remained so steadfast. “That was just the way it was supposed to look.”

  The heat from the fire was making him sweat. “Then who did?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” I looked at Margaret and Jane Ann, still joined in a rough embrace. “I’m not sure I know. At first, I thought Jane Ann had written it.”

  The women had no reaction, but Bryce frowned. “Why would she? I mean write a book about that?”

  I phrased it carefully. “Because she knew Wade Linton was innocent. Because she wanted to change the public perception of the kind of person he was. Because she wanted to exculpate him, if only retroactively.”

  “Why would she want to do that?”

  I kept my eyes away but made certain Jane Ann could hear me. “Because she liked him, I guess; he was a good teacher. But it’s not important. Whatever the reason, I don’t think Jane Ann would have helped Linton by accusing her father of molestation unless he really did abuse her.” I looked at the object of my care, still convulsing in the arms of her mother. “Your father was mean, maybe even heartless, and he made you make a sacrifice you didn’t want to make but he didn’t molest you. Not sexually, at least. Am I right, Jane Ann?”

  Jane Ann shook her head. Her mental state was such that I had no idea if it was an answer to my question or a rejection of my message.

  From behind her daughter’s shoulder, Margaret’s eyes sought mine. “Are you saying this Linton person forced himself on my daughter?”

  As I shook my head, Jane Ann groaned with the burden of our private knowledge.

  “Then what are you saying—that Lloyd killed Linton?” There was a hint of hope in Bryce’s voice, as though he’d finally found the way to rid himself of a contagion.

  I shook my head. “He was just a puppet; the real criminal was the puppeteer.”

  Bryce frowned. “Who was?”

  I looked at Margaret. “Your ex-husband.”

  She ceased her ministrations. “Marvin?”

  I nodded. “He’ll be arrested in the morning, after he gets his affairs in order.” Then I remembered Charley’s caution. “Unless the politicians are able to shut down the investigation entirely.”