Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  Fannie Johnson glanced at the spray of dried leaves and maroon flowers at the end of the bar. She fingered the black frog on her red martinet’s jacket. I had to keep myself from hurrying her. She sighed deeply and said, “I don’t know when I first saw Ellen. I wouldn’t have noticed her. She was just another woman at Bootlaces.”

  “The re-entry center?”

  “Right. I’m on the board. I decided to stop bitching about protesters who were doing nothing but protesting and do something constructive, like help get people back on their feet.”

  “And Ellen?”

  “When I first saw her at Bootlaces, I didn’t realize she was one of the clients. She was better dressed than most of the board members.”

  In Berkeley that’s not akin to saying she’d patronized a Paris couturier. Maybe she wore corduroy slacks instead of jeans.

  “Then she was helping me send invitations for the Bryn Wiley event—the first one, the one Bryn didn’t show for. We were chatting …”

  “About?”

  “The normal new acquaintance stuff. Why we were there. You know.”

  “So why were you there?”

  “Because my house was full of strange men and Sam was up on Tamalpais rebuilding. But I didn’t tell her all the details; I just said my husband was renovating a house on Tamalpais.” She gave a small shrug. “I thought at the time how upper-middle-class I sounded. Who’d have guessed? I could have been married to a stockbroker.”

  “And what did Ellen say?”

  “She was there to network into a job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “Gardening, secretarial, housework, that kind of thing.”

  Paid-under-the-table work, with no official references, no social security number, nothing reported to the IRS. Underground work. “Did you refer her to anything?”

  “She didn’t have a degree. Besides, the government hasn’t been hiring for a decade; they’re too busy downsizing, saving money for the high-bracket taxpayers. The rich love laying off workers, then bitching about paying unemployment. If they could lay ’em off and sell ’em by the pound, they would.” She took a bite of cake, larger than those before. “Anyway, she didn’t seem like someone who’d have trouble finding work. I figured she’d just go to a temp agency.”

  I raised an eyebrow, waiting for the “but.”

  “I was surprised when I saw her at the dinner Bryn missed. I figured she’d have been gone by then. But there she was. The next time was at the dinner Bryn did deign to honor. Ellen was wearing a leotard and jeans, her hair was shorter, and it was chestnut just like Bryn’s.”

  “Did she ever tell you why she did that?”

  “I could see. Bryn had barely been in the room for five minutes when she spotted Ellen. Ellen didn’t approach her; she came to Ellen. Next thing I knew Ellen was living at Bryn’s.”

  Now we were getting to the meat. “How did that next contact come about?”

  Fannie wedged her finger in the loop of the frog, then looked down as if trying to get it loose.

  “You called her,” I suggested. “When you heard she was living at Bryn Wiley’s, you saw a chance to find out about Bryn and The Girls’ Team, right? You figured you’d make use of Bryn’s unsuspecting companion.”

  She pulled loose of the frog and looked up, smug. “No. You’re wrong. Maybe this surprises you, but she called me and suggested lunch.”

  It did more than surprise me. “Why? What did she want?”

  “Lunch. You don’t have to have an ulterior motive to go to lunch. Maybe when friends call you, your first question is why? Normal people don’t think that.”

  But there was something in her voice that undercut her explanation.

  “She did want something, though, didn’t she?”

  Slowly, she said, “Yes.” Her voice was sorter, fuzzy, her focus on the big French circus poster on the wall. I had the feeling I had asked a question which she had posed to herself many times and still hadn’t answered. When she started to talk, it was as if it were as much for her own benefit as mine. “She invited me to the house. Bryn was at her cabin for the weekend. Ellen told me that; later I realized she’d been reassuring me.”

  “Luring you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. She didn’t know about Bryn and me, not then. It wouldn’t have occurred to her how much I’d have given for an hour alone in that house. At first I thought she was just showing off her new life. She’d bought flowers, made two big bouquets. A poor family could have eaten for a week off what she paid for them. Lunch was crab salad. And wine. And a fruit torte. She was going to eat in that macabre living room. But I’ll tell you the place gave me the creeps. You seen it? That confession booth thing there with the ogling Shiva.” She gave her head a shake. “I told Ellen that if Bryn wanted to sit in there and contemplate confessing her sins, that was fine with me, but the place took my appetite away. I mean all it needed was pictures of martyrs at the stake.”

  Why had Ellen insisted on that confessional? Was she pressuring Bryn to confess? Confess what? And why would Ellen have cared at all? “So you ate in the dining room?”

  “It was bad enough in the dining room, with that thing looming in the next room. Even drinking wine and eating strawberry kiwi torte didn’t lift the gloom. It just made it a little eerie, like a friar would pad through any minute, refill my glass, and remind me that life is fleeting but damnation eternal. Says something about Bryn, doesn’t it, that it never penetrated.”

  “Why would she connect it with herself?”

  Fannie looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then said lamely, “It was in her living room! Anyway, when Ellen and I had almost finished the wine, she asked me to tell her about the Nationals.”

  “What specifically?” I leaned forward, trying not to look too eager. “You mean how things happened?”

  “No, she seemed to have an idea about that—not entirely accurate, I might add. She admitted Bryn had told her some. Some she’d found out at the library. Some she’d guessed. I’m not sure how much of each, because that didn’t interest her. What she wanted to know was how I felt about it then, and over the years, and now.”

  That was like arriving at the Pearly Gates and asking about the oysters. “Why?”

  She went on as if she’d only half heard me. “It wasn’t like she was just asking to let me talk—you know, that condescending ‘let it all out.’ She really did want to know.”

  Without moving head or wrist, I glanced at my watch. Six thirty-five. I had fifteen minutes at the outside. “What did you tell her?”

  Fannie leaned forward and said softly, deliberately, “That I was so shocked when I found out, I blew my dive and ended up in the hospital. That I’ve thought of Bryn Wiley with every crooked step I take. And that nothing would give me more pleasure than to take away the thing that matters most to her.”

  I must have been visibly jolted by the force of her almost whispered words.

  She laughed. “That’s how Ellen reacted, too. Even more so than you. But of course, I hadn’t told her about Sam and me and all. And she was a bit snookered. She kept asking me if there was anything that Bryn could do to dissipate my anger—not that Bryn was offering to do anything.”

  “Maybe Bryn was agonizing over you. Maybe she told Ellen that.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Maybe Ellen was afraid you were going to run Bryn out of business.”

  A smile crossed her square face. “I’d like to think that. Ellen didn’t intend to, but she did let me know that Bryn’s got every cent tied up in her gym. It’s her shrine.” She scooped up the last piece of cake.

  I wondered if she always ate with this much gusto or if discussing Bryn Wiley and her potential misfortunes had stimulated her gastric juices. “But the prognosis of The Girls’ Team wasn’t Ellen’s worry. Did she say why she was so concerned?”

  “You don’t ask when you’re both drinking. And we’d killed the bottle of wine by then. Big emotions are normal then.
It didn’t seem strange. And Ellen, if you’d known her …” Fannie laughed again, but this time it was a friend’s laugh. “The whole thing ended so ridiculously. I’m leaving and we’re still talking, and suddenly I realize she has no idea I’m married to the guy next door. Well, why would she? I never go to that house. Sam doesn’t bother with Bootlaces. And Johnson’s one of the most common names in the country. Right up there with”—she grinned at me—“Smith. So she walks over to Sam’s house with me. We’re standing at the top of that staircase and Ellen’s still going on, all earnest-like, about how the past is over and done with no matter what the consequences and isn’t it better—for me—to just put it behind me and go on. All that kind of crap. And out of nowhere this big black dog comes bounding across the lawn next door, circles into the open gate at Sam’s place, into the mud, then bounds back and leaps up on Ellen and plops her on the lawn. Her new white shirt is covered in mud and grass. Ellen was agape. She looked like a cartoon character lying there. You could watch her fury rising. I just stood there until her whole face was red and then I said ‘So Ellen, you going to put the past behind you with this hound?’ ”

  “What’d she say?”

  Fannie smiled again. “It took her a minute, and I won’t put money on it being spontaneous or sincere, but she said, ‘Yeah, the past is past. You have to put it behind you and let it be dead. Dead is dead; forget it.’ Then she got up and kissed the dog on the snout.” She puckered her lips and kissed the air. “And the owner, a weird old guy, just stared, like she was coming on to his dog.”

  “And did you ever see her again?”

  The smile faded from Fannie’s face. “No. I called a couple of times. Once I got her and she made excuses. I asked her if she’d told Bryn about me and if Bryn had ordered her not to talk to me. She said no. But I didn’t believe her.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That she needed her job.”

  Maybe Fannie Johnson was right. Maybe Ellen Waller hadn’t courted her and dropped her because Fannie bored her, or because she only wanted to show off her new digs. Maybe Bryn was the culprit. Maybe, but it was too easy an answer. I signaled the waiter.

  Fannie leaned back now, her eyes half closed. She breathed in softly, slowly, as if inhaling the nectar of a rose. If I had been gazing at her across the room, I would have assumed Chez Panisse was a regular stop on the way home from a matinee or before a reading at Black Oak Books. Or that she lived a few blocks up the hill in a fine Maybeck house.

  I looked at the empty dessert plates on our table. Fannie had finished every morsel possible to carry from dish to mouth. I didn’t doubt that she had cared about Ellen Waller, or been hurt by Ellen’s rejection. But not enough to put her off her food. Fannie had already shown me more levels of herself than I had suspected. I believed she loved Sam Johnson, and that she hated Bryn. I could understand both. But damn it, she hated Bryn too much. It wasn’t Bryn’s fault that the travel agent had screwed up, and that she had missed her plane. Sam and Fannie were both intelligent people. Why didn’t they see that they’d gone way overboard on this one? It wasn’t like Sam to scapegoat. It made me sad to think of them clinging to this vindictiveness because they were afraid that without it they’d have nothing to hold on to.

  I tossed a ten and a twenty on the table, told Fannie I had to run, and ran.

  Chapter 19

  “THE JUDGE SAID NO.”

  “How did you let him do that? Geez, Smith.” Inspector Doyle sighed mightily into the receiver. I’d probably pulled him away from dinner. Or more likely sleep. But his sigh was for more than missing fried fish or forty winks. “ ’S bad, Smith.”

  I leaned in toward the wall. In patrol there are no private phones. There was no one here in the report room but the dusty typewriters and me. Still I felt like I was broadcasting my failure. We’d already searched the house. We couldn’t keep going in because we don’t approve of the furnishings. “He said I could try him tomorrow.”

  I could hear Doyle’s breath hitting the receiver. “What about Bryn Wiley?”

  “The sticking point, Inspector, was that she disappeared. ‘Do you have any evidence she was kidnapped?’ That’s what the judge wanted to know. Well, of course, we don’t have evidence. As far as I know, she just got sick of things at Ott’s office—”

  “She was staying with Herman Ott?” Something metal clattered to the floor. A fork Doyle had dropped in amazement?

  “Ott supported her efforts to close down Sam Johnson’s gym. He was driving her around delivering press releases after her rally fell apart Saturday night. She couldn’t stay in her own house after the murder. At least in Ott’s office she had protection.”

  “Protection? Penicillin is what what she’d be needing there, Smith.”

  “Whatever,” I said, feeling oddly defensive of Ott. “The point is she walked out. And when the judge heard that, he said we can’t just be bursting into a citizen’s house because she stepped out for the day.”

  “Did you tell him she was an essential witness who’d withheld evidence?”

  “Of course. And that Ellen Waller, on whom we cannot find one particle of ID, lived there, too. And I reminded him that the murder took place in the driveway. And still he said no.”

  Doyle sighed deeper, longer. The whoosh of it drowned out the whining voice coming from the television in his living room. Doyle doesn’t sigh often. He sighed when the 49ers lost the playoff game in the bitter cold of the Jersey Meadowlands, and when he heard his daughter was planning to marry an unemployed poet, and when his doctor told him he’d never be able to eat spicy foods again. Or so I’d heard. “Smith …” He sighed again.

  I realized I was holding my breath.

  “Smith, when you’re working a judge, it’s not just one case you’re thinking about. It’s the whole strategy. Like a marriage …” I could picture his ruddy face stiffening, reddening slightly. He was only in his fifties, but he seemed of an older generation, a benign but uncompromising generation. It had taken him well over a year to adjust to having me in Homicide, and when he did accept me, he hedged by taking me under his wing as he would a daughter. And as with his real daughter, who had married outside the appropriate category of employment, he didn’t quite approve of my “in lieu of marriage” arrangement with Howard. But living together had been common in the Bay Area for thirty years. He couldn’t complain. Normally, he avoided the whole topic with me.

  “I was married, Inspector. I’ve seen the connubial strategy fail and succeed.”

  Ignoring the reference to Howard, he focused on my ex-husband. “And did you have fights before you separated?”

  “Yes.”

  “Escalating fights?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fights where you said things not because they were true, but just so you’d win?”

  I laughed. “I tossed a pan of runny eggs on his master’s thesis. He stormed out of the house. And by that time, Inspector, I wasn’t living there anymore; it was his house.”

  I expected Doyle to laugh. He didn’t. “So you know where you made your mistake, Smith?”

  “Yeah, marrying him.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll tell you something. The place you made your mistake was in allowing the first argument to take place. Once you admitted your standards, your observations, your evidence could be questioned—”

  “Whoa! Are we talking marriage here, or dealing with Judge Redmon?”

  “When you tell the judge you need a search warrant, you’re saying you are the authority on what is required in this investigation. You’re not asking him, you’re telling him. You’re saying you wouldn’t be there if this search were not only essential but justifiable. Once you let him turn you down, Smith, he starts questioning your observations, your actions, your need. He goes over everything with the idea that there is some error he ought to be finding, that he’s on that bench to protect the citizens from us. And every request for every warrant after that is harder. We’ve got to get a dozen
through him before we’re back to where we were before.”

  I took a breath. Judges who checked every line, who were finicky about errors, and who defended the rights of the individual were the kind Berkeleyans voted in; ones I voted for. Admittedly, when the shoe was on my foot … “Inspector, when I have more supporting evidence—”

  “No point. Brucker will be here tomorrow. We’ll go with a fresh start.”

  “Wait a minute!” I swallowed to keep the panic out of my voice. “There was nothing wrong with my request. If you give this to Brucker, you’re telling the judge that I’m incompetent. When he thinks of this case down the road, he won’t remember that he opted for more evidence, he’ll remember that he denied my petition and approved one by the guy who replaced me! I’ll never get another warrant through!”

  I heard three exhalations of breath through the receiver, each one an eternity. During the first of those long silences I could imagine the scuttlebutt throughout the station: even Doyle didn’t support her. During the second, my jaw tightened, and my hands squeezed into fists. Then Doyle said, “Okay, Smith. I’ll sign you on in Homicide for one more day. If you have evidence to take to Redmon tomorrow, fine. But Tuesday, the case is Brucker’s, you got that?”

  “I’ve got it,” I said with a sigh of my own. It was the best I could do. Brucker was a decent officer, but he had never marched in a demonstration in college, he’d never set foot in Cody’s or Black Oak Books, and he drank coffee from a 7-Eleven when Peet’s was three blocks away. For him Berkeley was just a town to be policed. Brucker would have been happy if the sidewalks where street artists sold their tie-dye and stained glass were paved over, and the Avenue turned into a four-lane road with timed lights and limited access. Brucker would work his butt off to make Berkeley crime-free; and if he had to turn it into a mall town to do it, no problem. Then he would race back to Sacramento and the criminal justice fast track.

  Sam Johnson and Herman Ott would have swallowed their tongues before admitting anything to Brucker. And he’d never understand Bryn Wiley and why to Berkeleyans she was an idol. With Fannie Johnson he wouldn’t have gotten inside the screen door.