Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  I hesitated, knowing I had no choice but unwilling to admit it. Losing a suspect is hardly a headline event. But it galled me to lose this one when I was so close. Particularly him. I’d hear about this plenty when I got back to the station. Guys on patrol would be lined up with comments. My ribs would be sore from the poking.

  But I couldn’t ignore a possibly injured citizen in the van. I sighed, coming around to the driver’s side of the van. “Are you okay?”

  “No I am not okay! What the hell do you think you’re doing, banging into me!” She was out of the van and glaring at me before she seemed to notice my uniform. “Oh, you’re the cop. Well, it’s damned well about time you got here.”

  Bryn Wiley, our own prima donna athlete!

  “Wait a minute here!” I snapped at her. “You almost killed a man just now. You backed into the middle of a police chase—”

  “Look, I’m Bryn Wiley and—”

  “Right. And I’d expect more awareness from a woman used to diving off the high board.” But I wouldn’t expect a bit more from you, I could have added. “The guy you almost hit, you saw him in your mirror, right? Did you recognize him?”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “Answer the question, please.”

  Her sharp features were drawn into a fist of a face. It was the expression she’d had when I’d finished taking her statement four days earlier. But now her blue eyes flickered with amusement. “The guy behind my van,” she said, grinning, “was he au naturel ?”

  I shrugged, vainly trying to cover all those emotions a police officer is not supposed to show when dealing with one of the city’s prominent citizens. Motioning Bryn Wiley to pull her van back in the driveway, I called the dispatcher with the disposition on my chase, made sure there was no need to rush back to Rose Walk or the station, and arranged for Patrol to bring my car here. Already two backup cars were converging from the ends of Tamalpais. As I waved them off, I could hear the dispatcher notifying the others they could disregard her initial call.

  The nudist, of course, was long gone. No point grumbling about him, or the whole burlesque of a chase. Not when I had a real problem: Bryn Wiley.

  She was going to be trouble. The only question was how much.

  Chapter 2

  BRYN WILEY WAS AS close to a hero as you get in Berkeley. Normally we shepherd our passions into justice, the environment, and politically abstruse causes. Sports random is a quirk at best tolerated by your friends. You can get away with attending the occasional Warriors or A’s game, or your first love, the Cal Bears. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, or are sheepish about your déclassé obsession.

  But with Bryn Wiley all rules had been broken. The days she had dived in the Olympics twelve years ago, the police could have put an OUT TO LUNCH sign on the station door. No one in town was far enough from their televisions to assault, batter, or break and enter. Bryn Wiley was an Olympian, Berkeley-style. She had come within an inch of being tossed out of Cal for leading demonstrations against sexual inequity in funding college sports. She was hardly a favorite with the Olympic Committee; by the time she reached the Games, they’d already given her two warnings. But when she heard the announcer mention the men’s team and the girls’ team, she headed straight for a microphone and became the focus of every reporter there. She shrugged off those warnings; she never minced her words or worried about their fallout.

  They don’t call them men’s teams and girls’ teams anymore.

  Bryn Wiley didn’t bring back a medal, but more endearing in Berkeley, she came home with her principles unfurled.

  Back in the Olympics she hadn’t been one of the well-tanned Californians whose skin boasts of hours spent in the pool year-round. Her hair was not blond but chestnut brown, her face almost delicate, and her body lean rather than muscular, and there was always an air of potential fragility about her. It may have come from her scoliosis, as the commentators suggested every time she climbed to the diving platform. The curvature of the spine was in her lower back, almost invisible even to the cameras that focused on her buttocks at every opportunity. “Up-nostril Close and too damned Personal,” Bryn had commented afterward. But she hadn’t denied the accompanying story of an early coach of hers who had insisted on a regimen of breaststroke and jogging that overstressed her back and sacroiliac joint and laid her up for a year. Sheepishly she had admitted how hard it had been at fourteen not to know if the spikes of pain down her leg or the numbness in her foot would ever heal, and then to worry that every training lap she’d run, every dive, would bring them back. She had never been to a high school dance or football game; she had only studied and trained. And still it had been a miracle, the commentators concluded, that she had made it to the Olympics.

  When the interviews were over, she had walked to the end of the high platform, turned, and balanced on her toes with her heels poised in air frighteningly far above the water. Without pause she had dived back, creating a stunning arch of somersaults and twists, then snapped her body blade-straight and cut into the water without a splash. She’d climbed out of the water, her face aglow with triumph. A photographer had captured her expression an instant later, revealing how very much she had been willing to risk for her principles.

  Later, she had lent her fame to the quest for safe exercise, insisting that no one should have to go through what she did. She was always, in the news, volunteering at swimming programs, pushing for water therapy classes and subsidized access of the poor to municipal pools, focusing on, as she put it, the “fitness of body, fitness of life.” Or as others put it, promoting her own fitness center: The Girls’ Team.

  In the twelve years since the Olympics, her chestnut hair and startlingly blue eyes had become a familiar sight on television and at city events. I’d admired the smooth, confident way she moved. I wondered if all those years of training had given her such control over her body that no movement was random. Cloaked in her commitment, bejeweled by her fame, she faced the cameras with aplomb.

  But tonight the woman who stood at the door was no exemplar of poise. She paused, hands on hips, and glared at me. “I called you two hours ago!”

  “Forty-five minutes at most. But let’s not take any more of your time than we have to now.”

  Ignoring my comment, she insisted, “I’ve been cooling my heels for a hundred and twenty minutes.”

  I only wished I’d been cooling anything. Sweat was still running down my forehead. My undershirt was soaked through and the protective vest had created its own private steam room around my breasts. I made a show of opening my notebook. “About your vehicle …?”

  “Vehicles. Plural. First my van, now my car windows! I expect you to—Look here.” She strode over to her blue Volvo wagon.

  I walked down to the dirt driveway and around the damaged car. There were three holes in the driver’s window and two in what was left in the passenger’s. Shattered glass lay on the floor and the seat, and on the ground beyond the passenger side, decorating the gray-brown leaves like Christmas tinsel. I pulled my flashlight free and shone the light around the floor, between the seats, inside the other door. No bullet. I checked the ground outside. No bullet or casing; but in such a woodsy area they could be anywhere. “Did you hear shots? Anything that could have been shots? When did you last see the car intact?”

  She stared mutely at the bullet holes. Her jaw quivered and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But the tough don’t cry; they bark. When she turned back to me, it was with fangs bared. “Last time, with the van, you did this same thing—a cursory glance, a couple useless questions. If you’d had your lab analyze the brick, you could have—”

  “This isn’t the O. J. trial.” Bricks are too porous for prints.

  “Is lab service in Berkeley reserved for the rich?”

  “Rich?” I said, glancing pointedly at her house here in the hills. In Berkeley, wealth is not so much a sign of accomplishment as a suggestion you’ve sold out—politically or spiritually.<
br />
  She winced. “I’m hardly rich.”

  Wiley was five years younger than I and owned a house in the hills. More to the point, she had never deviated from her goal. If I’d done that, instead of opting to stay in Homicide because I was so sure I was making a difference, I’d have taken the sergeant’s test and been rotated back to patrol as a sergeant, not bumped from Homicide by a guy with better connections. As it was, I’d gotten tossed back here as a patrol officer responding to calls from a woman with better connections.

  “Let’s discuss this in the light,” I said, motioning her toward her house.

  It was a Mediterranean villa with a living room windowed on three sides, a house meant to bask in the sun and open its portals to the warm breezes of evening. Here, it might as well have been in a cave. Branch upon redwood branch thatched a dark ceiling over it, and the steep, wooded hillside behind clasped the damp to its back.

  By the time I had breached the threshold, Bryn was halfway across the living room, a cathedral-ceilinged rectangle of hard surfaces, cold colors, and the bitter smell of Japanese green tea. How perfect for the diver who had never given herself slack. There was no warming fireplace—it must have been removed—and in its place was the skeleton of a confessional booth. Paint gone, wood bare, outer walls missing. But the center seat where a priest had sat was intact. So was the left side grating through which sins had been whispered, and the kneeling bench awaiting guilty knees. On its right flank the kneeler was gone, replaced by a seat with a provocative statue of the Hindu god, Shiva, clasping his voluptuous consort. It was quite the display of kitsch. I had to restrain myself from chuckling.

  My face must have betrayed me, for Bryn looked at me and smiled. “That was my reaction. Ellen swore the thing would make the room—”

  “Ellen?”

  “Ellen Waller, my cousin. She works for me. I can’t afford anyone else,” she said pointedly. “Anyway, Ellen insisted this thing was the perfect accent piece, a touch of devil-may-care. I’m a diver, what do I know about decorating, right? But a huge piece like that in a living room this size: it’s like dropping a pound of curry in your stew!” She shook her head. “Ellen spotted it at the flea market. She stripped off five coats of paint and spent a week sawing away walls and sanding posts. So what could I do? I could hardly call out the Goodwill. Besides, they probably don’t have a big market for used confessionals.” She grinned and caught my eye, inviting me to laugh with her, her recent outburst forgotten.

  I’d seen her do this push-pull with fans. It was amazingly effective. The pull of her intimacy was so great that when she pushed them away, they weren’t insulted, but just tried harder.

  She glanced at the empty priest’s seat. But instead of grabbing a cushion and settling there, she raked strewn newspaper sections off the sofa till there was space and sat, motioning me to the other couch.

  I propped myself on one of the padded sofa arms so my gun and flashlight and baton could hang freely. “So,” I said, “do you have any idea who shot at your car?”

  “Not an idea. I know. The asshole opened up the great con job of the century two blocks away from The Girls’ Team. You know The Girls’ Team.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “It’s a block below Telegraph, built on the parking lot next to the Berkeley City Club, right?”

  “Over the parking lot. I saved all but two parking spots when I built there, so I wouldn’t harm the neighborhood. I planted trees around the building, full-grown and damned expensive trees. The deck has window boxes with flowers growing all year. I went out of my way to create the best health club in town. My StairMasters are the safest, my Exercycles have seats tilted to preserve the riders’ lumbar curves. I’ve got cold dunking pools to use after workouts, a sauna, a snack bar with healthy food and Peet’s Coffee. I’ve put my entire self into the Team.”

  I couldn’t help but be impressed. Bryn Wiley had that effect. She could be a pain in the ass, but there was no doubting her commitment. “So,” I said, “what is this con job of the century a block away?”

  “The name ‘Heat Exchange’ mean anything to you?” She spat out the words. Any resemblance to the shaken victim I’d met outside was gone.

  “Tell me.”

  “The biggest fraud on the Avenue.”

  That was saying a fair amount.

  “Sam Johnson—you do know him?” Her hands curled into fists—tight, symmetrical weapons on arms poised to strike.

  “Of course.”

  “He’s opened a so-called health club!”

  “What?” Sam Johnson was the least likely individual to operate a health club. I couldn’t imagine him even having stepped inside one. Johnson was an old-time radical. If he saw a StairMaster, he’d probably take those endless steps to nowhere as a metaphor on capitalism. “Sam Johnson?”

  “Yeah. Even when I realized the place was right on the Avenue, two blocks from the Team, and a whole lot more convenient for people coming from Cal, I still laughed. Who would waste their money on a fitness center run by a man who … who—”

  “Thinks a Nautilus machine is something for mollusks?” I said.

  “Yeah”—she grinned at me—“exactly. But when I heard about that ripoff, fraudulent, self-delusionary sham—At first I couldn’t believe it was real. Then I realized just how much trouble I was in. The guy really knows Berkeley.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, you haven’t heard about The Heat Exchange’s gimmick? Well, here it is: Deep in their hearts, old lefties think working out is hedonistic, yuppie, politically incorrect. But they don’t want their butts to sag, right? To the rescue comes Sam Johnson, saying: ‘Pin up your ponytail, wear your “U.S. Out of Wherever” T-shirt proudly, and pedal your ass off on The Heat Exchange’s stationary bike, because—ta-da!—the friction you create can be converted into heat and that heat will cut the utility bills of the deserving poor who live on the floors below. Then you can feel downright smug about yourself.’ It’s just too good to be true, right?”

  It sounded good to me.

  “And it would be good. If it worked. But if the poor get one erg of energy from that club, I’ll eat my foot. And in the meantime, Johnson, who knows not a whit about exercise, will be injuring people right and left.” She was leaning toward me, her pale, angular face aglow with conviction, those startlingly blue eyes of hers open wide. This was no act.

  I almost felt cruel saying, “Wait a minute. Why won’t the energy conversion work?”

  “Because the machines you use in a fitness center don’t create energy, they consume it. Take the treadmill: You don’t move the belt as you walk, the belt goes electrically and you race to keep up with it. You can get a manual treadmill, but it’s a pain to operate. Johnson’s got both. Which do you think his people are going to use?”

  “But the Exercycles, you do pedal those.”

  “Right, if you just pedal like you would on a bike riding on an endless straightaway. But should you use the hill program, or any one that changes the level of intensity—and that’s the only thing that makes the Exercycle tolerable, believe me—every change within that program takes a jolt of electricity. And you know he’s not telling club members ‘only the hard, boring machines help the poor.’”

  “Still, if someone wanted to—”

  “Sure, you could use the bare-bones equipment. But, even the most noble-spirited person isn’t going to pedal full out on a machine that doesn’t tell you how you’re doing. You’re going to slow down without even realizing it.” She nodded in agreement with herself. “Look, what Sam Johnson has created is the perfect vehicle to fool yourself. If wanting created change, no one would even have pimples.”

  I smiled. “So why not get a disgruntled customer to subpoena Johnson’s electric bills?”

  “He’s too smart to give guarantees. He’ll say if there’s no excess electricity, people aren’t working hard enough.” She shrugged as if to say the implications were obvious.

  But the corollaries
weren’t clear at all. “Bryn, if he’s doing so well, why is he battering your vehicles?”

  She let out a sigh of disgust. “Because I am the only one screaming ‘The emperor has no clothes.’”

  In the dining room, a board creaked. I turned just in time to see a woman eye me nervously and scurry into the kitchen. She looked eerily like Bryn Wiley. “Who is that?”

  “What?” Bryn glanced quickly toward the dining room, and then back at me. “Ellen.”

  “Your cousin?”

  She nodded.

  There was a remarkable resemblance: similar height, similar coloring, that same suggestion of fragility. But in Cousin Ellen it was more pronounced, as if she were the child who got fed second. Or maybe she just looked older. Her hair seemed duller than Bryn’s shiny chestnut, her sharp features taut not with outrage but nervousness. “She lives here?”

  “Like I said, Ellen works for me.”

  I nodded. “And she lives in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she hear the shots? Would you get her?”

  She sat a moment, as if she suspected I’d staged the diversion to derail her complaint. Then she jolted up and walked into the kitchen.

  The sofa arm wasn’t meant for a chair; I shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position. I glanced around the colorless room, looking for any personal item. A white-on-white glassed collage hung behind the sofa. But there were no photos of Bryn with diving greats, no shots of her twisting high above the water, no awards or trophies. Not even a snapshot of her cutting the ribbon for The Girls’ Team. An amazing lack of self-congratulation. On my office wall in Homicide I used to keep news articles about every case I closed. When leads dried up in new cases, and the pressure of too many felony assault cases got to me, I’d look at those yellowed news stories and remember the relatives who no longer wondered, the dead whose death hadn’t been forgotten.

  In a moment Bryn was back. “Ellen’s gone.”

  “Gone? Gone where?”