Gage leaned forward in his chair and rested his forearms on the desk.
“I don’t understand why you have such outrage for Charlie,” Tansy said. “If it’s because of Moki, don’t. I made my peace with what happened long before we ever met.”
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” Gage said. “And with Charlie dead, we never will.”
Tansy shrugged. “Then maybe I’ve made my peace with never knowing. And… and I couldn’t bring myself to put Moki through another trial. Doctors and psychologists testing and tormenting him again. He’d suffered enough. He may not recognize me anymore, but he still feels the pain of being treated like an object.”
She paused again, her eyes losing focus. Gage followed her mind back ten years. Moki Amaro, beaten, not by thugs but by Hummer-riding drunk rich kids from Pacific Heights raised on gangster rap and delusions of turf. More than just beaten. Brutalized because he was a brown-skinned boy in hand-me-down sweats jogging through their upscale neighborhood. The four seventeen-year-olds had claimed self-defense. The lone prosecution witness, a city trash collector, fled the day before trial, and the judge dismissed the case. The person last seen by neighbors walking up the witness’s front steps: a man who the prosecutor suspected was Charlie Palmer, but which he could never prove.
Tansy blinked and her eyes once again focused on Gage. He knew where the conversation was headed so he took the lead.
“In the end,” Gage said, “it wasn’t about any particular thing Charlie did, it was about everything he did. What he was. He had no respect for the truth, even as a cop. That’s why he was the favorite of every politician caught with his hands in a lobbyist’s pocket or in the pants of some young staffer. His so-called investigations were nothing more than blackmailing people into silence or suborning perjury-and that’s what I believe he did to you and Moki. If the truth had come out, those kids would’ve gone to jail, their parents would be paying for his care, and you’d still have a nursing career.”
Gage didn’t have to finish his thought: If it hadn’t been for Charlie’s crimes, Gage never would’ve met Tansy. A couple of years after the beating, Gage’s father asked him to travel to the Rio Yaqui valley in Mexico to find out whether insecticide poisoning might account for the cancers of many of his immigrant Yaqui patients and the birth defects and learning disabilities of their children. Gage convinced a farmworker to help him steal samples from the fields and warehouses and smuggle them back into the U.S. A lab analysis revealed that the corporations farming the Yaqui land were using toxaphene, a compound of six hundred and seventy chemicals that had been dumped in Mexico after they were banned in the U.S.
The truth came too late for the man who’d helped him. Gage received a letter from his widow a month after he’d died of toxaphene poisoning. She wrote asking for help, not for herself, but for her niece, Tansy, who’d graduated from nursing school in San Francisco just before Moki had been attacked. Gage sought her out and after talking with her and with the prosecutor, he was convinced Charlie was behind the collapse of the prosecution of the kids who’d destroyed Moki’s life.
There was no one in San Francisco other than Charlie who could have done it so perfectly.
Gage repaid the debt his father and his patients owed Tansy’s uncle and tried to compensate for Charlie’s crime by offering her a job that allowed her to both work and care for her disabled son. He even let her bring Moki into the office on days when she couldn’t find a nurse’s aide to stay with him at home.
But it was too late to reopen the case, even if Tansy had been willing, because the prosecutor’s race against the statute of limitations had already been lost.
“And that’s what Charlie did to a thousand other people.” Gage jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Pacific Heights where Moki had been assaulted. “Those kids grew up knowing their parents could buy their way out of anything by hiring somebody like Charlie Palmer.”
Tansy fixed her eyes on Gage. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“When you hired me, I heard you left police work to study philosophy at Cal. I figured you’d be somebody who talked in theoretical concepts, whether for real or just to impress people.” She grinned. “I had enough of that in the 1980s when graduate students would come out to the reservation thinking they could squat down with an old Deer Singer and he’d spit out their dissertations for them.” She giggled, her face brightening. “There we were, in the middle of the godforsaken desert, trying to build cinder-block houses, and all they’d want to talk about was deconstruction.”
Gage shrugged as if to say academics sometimes got lost in their jargon.
Tansy caught his meaning, but shook her head. Her grin faded.
“For you, it was never about abstract ideas, justice with a capital J and truth with a capital T. I’ve watched you. Everyone thinks you live in your head”-she tapped her chest-“but this is where you live. You understand heartache. That’s what moves you. I’ve been told that’s what the old people used to say about your father, and everything I’ve seen since I started working here shows me you’re your father’s son. I even can see it in Faith’s eyes when she looks at you now.”
She lowered her hand and fell silent. After a few seconds she nodded as though she’d found the just right words to express her thoughts, and said, “I’m thinking it probably would’ve been better if you’d been born a Yaqui.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because of the way your mind works. It’s just like how we approach the world. It’s even in our language. In English you say, ‘I see the earth.’ The emphasis is on the person seeing, the filtering through the mind. In Yaqui we say, Inepo bwia vitchu, I earth see. The emphasis is on us facing the thing as it exists in the world. It makes us a humble people.”
Gage was quick to respond. “Too humble.”
As a child, Gage had watched Yaquis traveling through Nogales from Mexico on their annual Easter migration, wondering whether they were like the Bedouins he was reading about in Lawrence of Arabia, except unarmed and nearly defeated, run out of Mexico by a government attempting to break their will and harassed by immigration agents and police at the border. They were only safe when they arrived at a patch of desert a six-year-old Apache schoolmate of Gage’s once called a resignation, instead of a reservation. Gage remembered driving up to Tucson from Nogales with his father in the 1960s, when he went to stand with Yaquis at city council meetings protesting real estate developers encroaching Old Pascua village, a collection of dusty one-room shacks and shotgun brick houses founded by refugees fleeing Mexican government persecution.
“But we survived,” Tansy said.
“Maybe the tribe should’ve gotten a cut from the Carlos Castaneda books,” Gage said, finally offering a smile back. “And made some money selling tickets to watch him and that Yaqui shaman turn into crows and fly around the Sedona vortexes.”
“Carlos who? I don’t recall such a person dropping by, as a man or a bird. And the only vortex any Yaqui ever saw was a dust devil.”
Gage shook his head in mock sadness.
“Lots of new age folks in San Francisco will be really disappointed to learn that.”
“Not from me. When I see them heading my way, I pretend I’m a Navajo.”
Chapter 11
Gage had been the only one at the San Francisco Police Department who knew why they all called him Spike.
Homicide Lieutenant Humberto Pacheco, too short to play volleyball when he and Gage were growing up together, and now looking more like a mallet than a nail, lumbered through the entrance of the Fiesta Brava Taqueria on Mission Street a little after 1:30 P.M. Tan sports coat, brown pants, pale yellow shirt, and a blue tie painted with tiny footballs. He didn’t pause to survey the interior of the storefront restaurant before heading toward a table in the far corner where Gage already sat. The rest of the tables were empty, the lunch crowd having already moved on.