Back in those days Dylan’s time in prison hadn’t seemed to weigh so heavily on everyone. Not even to a cop like Harlen. They’d all known each other when Dylan and Maya had been in college, Harlen the older brother, not yet a cop. Sometimes they all smoked dope together, had some laughs. Then Dylan had done something truly dumb, and got caught. But he’d paid for it, and now he was working with Maya, doing a great job. Harlen never considered that he’d go back to crime. Why would he? He didn’t need it.
So he’d bought the guns, the Glocks. Harlen hadn’t even known or cared about the ballistics quirk-that fired bullets from this model couldn’t usually be traced back to a particular gun-until he’d heard about it at trial.
Harlen’s office wasn’t large, and most of it was filled with the old-fashioned desk and free-standing bookshelves that lined the wall to his right. To his left the view out his large windows across Van Ness included a glorious stretch of San Francisco’s somewhat grandiose architecture-the Opera House, Performing Arts Center, and War Memorial. Behind him a framed rogues gallery of himself posing with various other politicians and celebrities-his aunt Kathy, of course, Bill and Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, Robin Williams, Dusty Baker in his Giants uniform-offered mute but compelling testimony to his own popularity and success.
Harlen had made it, in a somewhat tortuous route, and in the most cutthroat of fields, almost to the very top. At least to the city’s top-and after that, who knew how far he could go? He’d been a supervisor now for seven years, after starting out as a clerk in Kathy’s office just out of college about seven years before that. Through his aunt Kathy’s tutelage and influence he’d joined the PD as a uniformed patrolman, and rose quickly, finally making it all the way to homicide for a few months before finally quitting and jumping over to the political side, starting with the low rungs of community activist work-soup kitchen and homeless shelter service on the one hand; victims’ rights advocacy, a natural with his police background, on the other. Mix in a couple of stints on various visible boards-the National Kidney Foundation, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library-and a term on the school board, and then Kathy moved up to mayor and he ran for and won her seat on the Board of Supervisors.
And now here he was, gun in hand, wondering if it was all going to end.
The immediate problem was Cheryl Zolotny. No, Biehl now. Sweet sweet girl, and hot hot hot when she’d been younger. In fact, she was still more than easy to look at, and in other circumstances he might have found himself falling into those bedroom eyes-eyes that he’d once known well-over lunch.
But not today.
Today her testimony about all those years ago with Maya simply had made Harlen realize how at risk he still was. This was a woman who’d not only known him, she’d done drugs with him. And so, okay, it had only been marijuana. Lately, and in spite of his long-term support of the medical marijuana laws and parlors in the city, he’d come to appreciate how much trouble a little pot could get people into.
If only Dylan hadn’t been wearing that backpack…
But he had.
And now Cheryl, from out of nowhere, had suddenly returned full-blown into the picture. Not that she was, so far as he knew, out to get him in trouble in any way. In fact, at lunch she’d been nothing if not inviting, even downright flirtatious, in spite of her marital status. Making noises about how flattered she was that he-a very important man now, in his exalted position-that he even remembered her from back when they’d fooled around a little, when she’d been just a kid.
But what if she talked to somebody, some reporter, anybody really? There was nothing more true about Harlen’s business than the fact that you couldn’t hide. He took it as a truism as universal as Murphy’s Law that a politician with a damaging secret somewhere out in the ozone was a finished politician. It would come out-the fact that he’d known Levon too. Hung with him.
He kept asking himself, so what? So what?
And the simple answer was that he didn’t know the consequences-from petty to profound-if the people already hounding him about these forfeiture issues got any more to chew on. No matter what, he thought, it would mean more headlines, and not the good kind. It was one thing to help a poor black kid get a job at ACT after a stretch in prison, but quite another to have partied with him and his doper friends and your own murder-suspect, dope-dealing sister. And even if it wasn’t a career-breaking matter to the general public, it would be to Kathy.
It could finish him.
And Cheryl knew all about it. And, yes, she’d told him that of course if it was important to him, she’d keep all that old stuff to herself. But what if…?
What if?
He looked down at the gun in his hand. What did he think he was doing with that? Had he come down here thinking that his career, his life, was really so close to over, that perhaps he was really going to kill himself? What about Jeannette and the kids? What would they do without him?
He had to relax. After all, nothing had happened yet. Maybe nothing ever would. And Cheryl had promised him that she’d keep it between them forever. Just like their other secrets from when they’d dated. She’d never betray him. She understood everything he’d told her and agreed that it was important.
Super important, she’d actually said. And the insipid, Valley girl adjective had brought back one of the other realities about Cheryl the ex-cheerleader. She had been hot hot hot, no doubt, but also dumb, dumb, dumb. Super dumb.
Was she too dumb to understand what she knew? Or should he try to contact her again? Set up an appointment.
Make it clearer.
Robert Tripp, in his scrubs, came out of the bathroom, peeled off his surgical gloves, and dropped them into the trash can in Jansey’s kitchen. “I think I got it all.” He started running the water in the sink, soaping up his hands. “But that was not a pretty job.”
“Thank you,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table, a glass of wine in front of her. “I owe you. I just couldn’t handle that tonight.”
Tripp turned. “What if I wouldn’t have been here?”
“I would have quarantined the bathroom and forbidden flushing until I could call the plumber.”
“You could always do it yourself.”
She made a face. “I do a lot of good-mother stuff, Robert. I really do. But putting my hands in that-”
Tripp held up his hands. “Gloves, then soap. Does wonders.”
“Did he use the whole roll, you think?”
“Most of it. Looked like it, anyway.”
“Yuck. I’m sorry. But yuck.”
“Lucky you got me.” He dried his hands and came to sit down across from her. “But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?”
She drank off about half her glass and shook her head. “It’s been a tough day, if you want to know. Tough all the way. I look at Maya sitting there across from me, and she looks so harmless, really, so pathetic almost. I think she’d been crying before she came into court. Then I feel like such a beast, somehow.”
He reached across and put his hand over hers. “She did it, hon. I thought we were pretty clear about that. No matter what she looks like.”
“I know. I know. But there’s just all this other stuff.”