Looking for Yesterday Read Free

personal—cases in the past few years.” My half brother Darcy’s disappearance. My friend Piper’s kidnapping. Others just as intense.
    “But this one wouldn’t be personal.”
    “Not at the beginning. But when did you ever know me not to get personally involved with anything more than a routine skip trace?”
    “Never. But that’s your nature.”
    “Maybe I’m sick and tired of my nature.”
    Ted just smiled and forked up what was left of his caramel cheesecake.
    5:40 p.m.
    My nature. My goddamn nature.
    The narrow blue building was silent, except for the pattering of rain on the mansard roof above my fourth-story office and the humming of the remarkably efficient furnace. At the pier the rain would have been banging off the tin roof, the cars rumbling on the span of the Bay Bridge overhead. I’d’ve been freezing cold from the wind blowing through the dilapidated structure. And yet I missed it. Missed it in the way I missed my old MG that had broken down frequently.
    I shelved the last carton of books, then sat down in my newly reupholstered chair by the window. The chair had followed me from a tiny office under the stairs of All Souls Legal Cooperative’s Bernal Heights Victorian to a bigger office there, to the pier, and now to Sly Lane.
    Always ratty, sometimes disguised under a hand-woven throw. But the throw had worn out, a spring in the seat had started protruding, and when it came time to move here, I’d decided the otherwise comfortable chair deserved a makeover. Now it was handsome in light brown leather, and I’d ordered a hassock to go with it.
    Outside, the lights of lower Tel Hill and the Embarcadero shimmered through the raindrops on the glass; the palm trees that grew along the central greenbelt were great shadows, their trunks swaying, their fronds wind-tossed. The day’s rain was now turning into a full-blown storm.
    I told myself I should go home before it got any worse, but still I sat there. If I wasn’t back by seven, one of the young women next door—whom I paid to house- and cat-sit—would go over to take in the mail and feed Alex and Jessie. Hy was busy in Boston this week. I had no responsibilities; even my daily paperwork was done. I also had nothing I wanted to do. So I sat and let myself become mesmerized by the lights and the rain.
    And finally it came to me: I was waiting for my decision. Tell Caro Warrick I wouldn’t take her case, or tell her I would.
    Part of me resisted; I didn’t particularly like the woman, didn’t understand her need to be vindicated again. But then I remembered Bobby Foster, a young black man on San Quentin’s death row, whom I’d exonerated of the murder for which he’d been convicted. Bobby’s trial had been a gross miscarriage of justice, based on a false confession—which he’d later retracted—induced by a lack of sleep and food and by police coercion. Apparently Caro Warrick’s indictment had been another such miscarriage. Bobby had been fortunate to have out-of-state family members who would take him in after his release, so he could get an education in a place where his alleged crime was unknown. Caro hadn’t possessed that luxury. If this book with Greta Goldstein could change her life, why should I deny her my aid based on a negative first impression?
    8:15 p.m.
    Warrick lived in an apartment behind the garage of a modest pale green stucco house on Forty-Fourth Avenue, a block from the L Taraval streetcar line. A cracked concrete walkway led between the house’s right side and a newish redwood fence. Rainwater sluiced off the house’s roof and splashed onto my hat—clogged downspouts, no doubt. I followed a shaft of light to Warrick’s door. When she opened it, the odor of an aromatic candle, underscored by mildew, dilated my nostrils.
    She took my hat and raincoat, shook them out, and hung them on a hall tree. Urged me toward a sofa. After I sat she went off behind a faded blue curtain that masked a kitchenette to make us