Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  I made an unfamiliar right turn toward the fruit and vegetable section. Surely I had been here before; I couldn’t believe … But it didn’t look familiar. All that green stuff. All those weird fruits they didn’t have in Jersey when I was growing up, fruits with spikes, fruits with fur, fruits in colors you don’t eat.

  Behind the pile of fruits was a dazed woman with short dark hair sticking out on the sides. It took a moment to realize there was a mirror behind the fruit and the woman I was looking at was me. The hair wasn’t right, the face was shaped wrong, and even the expression looked funny. The face in the mirror’s was a stranger’s.’

  It shocked me more than I would have expected. I turned away quickly, from the face, and the cold, empty feeling it brought up, grabbed a couple of bananas, and ran to the checkout line.

  The case! Think about the case. Even if Brucker had checked the 911 tape, I silently informed the gum and candy display, he wouldn’t have made the connection to Jed Estler, because he wouldn’t have had the Rent-a-Freak card to begin with, because Brucker was the last person on the face of Berkeley that Herman Ott would confide in!

  I wouldn’t confide in Brucker. If the case were transferred to Eggs or Jackson, I’d have no problem telling them I got my lead from “a source they weren’t privy to.” They’d know who I meant, but they would also know not to ask more. And if they kidded me about the unnamed Ott, it would be with a smile at the eccentricities of our city. Brucker … his ideal Berkeley would be as aesthetically appealing as the county autopsy room—all metal so it can be hosed down. He’d love to spray away bacteria like Herman Ott.

  By the time I was in the car and turning onto Tamalpais, I realized I was almost glad it was Brucker to whom the case would be transferred. I’d never be able to work up this much indignation for Eggs or Jackson. I could imagine calling Howard about it in the morning. Howard would agree in spades. He’d be more furious than I was. He’d …

  In fact, maybe I wouldn’t call Howard. I might forget this, but Howard would hold it like a heavy rock in his stomach. It’s one thing to get over a slight to yourself, but it’s so much harder to forgive a dismissal of someone you love.

  I parked in front of Sam Johnson’s house and called the dispatcher to let her know—1097—I’d arrived at the scene. Then I walked back to Bryn Wiley’s. The dining room light that had been on last night was still on. Mail stuck out of the box at the foot of the steps. Otherwise nothing had changed. Patrol had checked it every couple of hours. I rang the bell without expecting an answer and stood listening to its echo, picturing the sound ricocheting off the walls and through the skeleton of the confessional bench. It was nine thirty; chances were if she was coming back there tonight, she’d already be inside.

  Slowly I walked down the steps, across the damp dirt driveway where Ellen had been shot. It made sense that she would have been mistaken for Bryn here. And yet … I wondered.

  The fog had rolled in and the streetlights lit it from underneath. It hung like a high flaccid tent over Bryn Wiley’s empty house, Johnson’s forbidding shell, the black stand of redwoods across the street, and Karl Pironnen’s dirt-dimmed windows next door. Was Johnson here? He could be creeping around the crawl space or asleep on the cot under, his shelf of military strategy texts in that back living room. Or setting up the next great—final—move in the game he and Fannie lusted over?

  I was tempted to check out the house. But there were no new questions for Sam Johnson. And I had so little time left. Still, as I walked down the cement staircase, noting once again the damp slippery leaves on its steep, shallow, irregular steps, I checked Johnson’s window for flickers of light within. If Sam was in there, he was hiding his light under a bushel.

  I pulled my tweed jacket tighter around me. For the first time since I’d been transferred from plain clothes and back, I wished I was wearing a uniform. Or at least, that I had my big flashlight to shine on the steps as I made my way down. The night wind gusted up the stairs, ruffling my short hair, flicking the collar of the cotton turtleneck that was now too light. Goose bumps covered my arms and the cold wrapped around my spine. In the dark I was virtually feeling along the wood fence for the door. It would be embarrassing to go out on disability from splinters.

  The door, when I found it, was one of those that opened by pulling a string you have to feel around for on the back. But when I opened it, it was like going from midnight to noon. The wind stopped within the walls of the protected yard. Jed Estler’s manicured lawn stood perkily in the beams from crossing lights. The white plastic lawn chair looked like he might bound out any minute, lather himself in suntan lotion, and plop on it. I could imagine him sprawled there, reflector to face, beer at hand, as he hatched the various scenarios for Rent-a-Freak, a minor league middle-of-the-road Sam Johnson.

  Or could I? The truth was I could imagine myself creating the hit-and-run farces. I could see myself living Estler’s life in the small white Sheetrocked room, with the very part-time job of caring for Karl Pironnen and the dogs, knowing that he could move on anytime, that the road unfurled before him and this was merely a rest stop. It was one of the Berkeley archetypes, where the season is forever spring, the year forever the one after college.

  Inside his room the lights were off. No muted sound of music or TV chatter came through the door. Without much hope I knocked. It had been only last night that I’d stood inside there watching him move around like a windup toy, bitch about the cold in his little Sheetrocked room, and demand “Omigod, you don’t think that I did that to her?” And when I’d ordered him to take the towel off his head, had he known I’d figured him for the bald nudist? Had he laughed himself silly after I left?

  Estler seemed too flighty to concentrate on anything, or anyone. But he’d quoted Karl Pironnen word for word: “If you throw the pebble, you should feel the splash,” and he hadn’t laughed about that. As with Sam and Fannie, there seemed to be a bond between the two utterly different characters. Jed might move on, but I doubted it would be with the ease of scuttling a temp job. Jed earned only his rent, so his responsibilities to Karl couldn’t be much more than dog walking and runs to the grocery. Certainly not cleaning! That was about all that seemed feasible for the antsy kid who had changed position on the bed three times in as many sentences.

  I couldn’t imagine how he’d pulled himself together to organize Rent-a-Freak. The events, sure, but getting the business cards printed, distributing them, coordinating the actors with the events; Jed Estler wouldn’t make it through the second event.

  But it was definitely his voice on the machine. I knocked again. No answer.

  I wrote Call me as soon as you get in on my card, added my beeper number, and stuck the card in his door. Then I made my way through the sea of grass beside the house to the front. It wasn’t so unusual, the arrangement Karl Pironnen and Jed Estler had; two men marking time at different eras of their lives. Going nowhere, Brucker would say. But in Berkeleyese, they were just doing their thing.

  Maybe contrasting myself with Brucker had nudged me into the more-Berkeley-than-cop mode. I emerged from the underbrush into the front yard and spotted Ocean, the shepherd-springer mix. His thick gray and brown fur was flecked with leaves and twigs and bits of grass, and he ran a zigzagged trail of all-consuming smells. I gave his rump a rub as he bustled past, and grinned at Karl Pironnen as Nora, the Dane-setter, trotted up and waited for a scratch. “The queen, huh?”

  A smile played on his thin lips. “She’s got all the moves.”

  It took me a moment to make the connection between the regal aloofness of the tall, sleek black dog to the chess piece. “And Pablo, he’s your protector, huh?”

  Pironnen patted the nondescript brown dog who stood so close to his owner’s baggy brown chinos he could have been part of the fabric.

  “I’ve heard some rescued dogs seem to understand what you’ve saved them from. And they never get over their gratitude.”

  Pironnen smiled, pulling the pi dog against his
leg and scratching his side. “He knows he’ll always be safe with me.”

  I gave the gray dog another scratch and stood a moment watching tall, lean, gray-haired Karl Pironnen bending over the shivering Pablo. Pablo would probably quiver nervously for the rest of his life, even if he could keep Pironnen in view every minute. I pushed away the question of what trauma had left him that way. I dealt enough with people’s misery; I didn’t have to imagine dogs’. As Karl Pironnen stood up, I could almost see his resemblance to his pet, down to the sharp features and the oh-so-hesitant trust.

  I followed the other dogs to the door. “I’m Jill Smith,” I said. “From last night.”

  He opened the door and let the dogs jostle in.

  “Is Jed around? Could he be inside?”

  “Could be.” Holding the door, he looked at me questioningly. Pironnen was a relic of a more gracious era. Inside, I’d be his guest. He wouldn’t want to be rude. Brucker wouldn’t understand that either. To him Karl Pironnen would be just another Berkeley weirdo.

  But, I thought as I walked into the hair-carpeted room, understanding Pironnen cut two ways. I could see how Jed Estler felt defensive about him. I was feeling a bit protective myself.

  The dogs circled around the downstairs room stirring up enough dust and dirt for the Indianapolis 500. “Jed’s not here. If he was upstairs, they’d be up there checking in with him.”

  Quickly I asked, “Is he out on one of the Rent-a-Freak things?”

  If Pironnen was surprised I knew about Rent-a-Freak, he gave no sign. “Could be.”

  I smiled. “I’ll bet he has a ball planning them.”

  But that was beyond his sphere of interest. Without the dogs in reach, he’d stiffened back into himself. I followed him into the kitchen and stood while he poured kibble into three bowls and topped it with scoops of tuna, dripping the oil over the kibble. The dogs crowded around him, stretching their heads up toward the counter. He nudged them away as he lowered the bowls to the floor and ordered affectionately, and utterly ineffectively, “Back off, you pigs!”

  It always amazes me how mealtime bares the souls of animals. The fear of loss overwhelms every moment of camaraderie among dogs who’ve lived their lives together. They can’t trust “their” person to protect them. Once activated, the salivary glands seem to draw them beneath the level of civilization back to the wild.

  Pironnen carried the nearly empty kibble bag across the kitchen and glanced into the pantry before putting it down. “Should have more.” It was as close to a grumble as I could imagine him coming.

  “Organization’s not Jed’s strong suit,” I said.

  “I’ll have to remind him. Dogs don’t wait for breakfast.” He shook a kettle coated with fur and grease and, finding it full, turned on the burner under it. “You want tea?”

  “That’d be nice.” Great, actually. In interviews, you get ten times more from a man who is taking tea with you.

  As he extricated two mugs, stained brown inside, I didn’t allow myself to think about bacteria. Nor did I look too closely at the wooden chair before I sat. “Jed doesn’t do the day-to-day work for Rent-a-Freak, does he? I mean the mailings and billings and dull stuff like that.”

  “Umm.”

  “I just can’t picture him, well, staying still long enough to keep a financial log, or thinking to call and remind the players the day before they had to go on. Can you?” I was hedging so much to blend into his consciousness I was almost not asking at all.

  “Oh no, she did that.”

  “She?”

  “Ellen.”

  “Of course.” I smiled, warmed with an unexpected flush of relief. It pleased me to think that Ellen’s life wasn’t all sneaking around to ingratiate herself with Bryn. I liked the picture of Ellen and Jed sitting cross-legged on either end of his bed downstairs hatching guerrilla theater. I could see Jed jumping off the bed to pace around and plopping himself back on, while Ellen sat with that wry grin on her wide mouth, flicking in ideas like water droplets to sizzle on a fire. And if Rent-a-Freak made any money, running it would be the perfect job for a fugitive—no social security number, no taxes withheld, in fact no one but Jed to know she was involved at all. “Did Ellen tell you about that on your drives to the vet or the bank?” I asked as Pironnen sat down and slid a cup across to me.

  “No.”

  You can’t win them all. “What did she talk about?” I lifted the cup of plain black tea and forced myself to sip.

  He held his cup near his mouth, breathing in the fragrant steam, then slowly, carefully, as if each movement were a project in itself, he brought it to his lips and took one quick slurp. The dogs had finished eating and lay on the floor around him; Pablo, the protective one, was stationed between his master and me. Pironnen reached down and gave each one an affectionate scratch.

  I almost had to bite my lip to keep from repeating my question, embellishing it with suggestions. I took another sip of tea, using it to wash down a hair that had gotten in my mouth.

  “Ellen talked about being invisible,” he said as if there had been no gap of time since I’d asked.

  I looked away to cover my excitement. “Why invisible?”

  “She knew I wouldn’t be frightened; I’d understand. If I could be really invisible, I would. Saves hassle.”

  “You’ve gotten it pretty close.”

  He nodded.

  “But Ellen didn’t choose to become invisible, did she?”

  “No. She had to. Hard, she said. Moving every three or four months, more if people are nosy. No forwarding address, ever. Friends she missed, she’d never see again. She said”—he lifted the cup and took a quicker drink—“her parents must think she died. And of course, she did.”

  “You mean years ago.”

  He looked up at me and nodded as if I’d gotten the point. “She lost herself in one of the moves.”

  I nodded back, imagining Ellen Waller’s life, abandoning cities and friends, changing identities every couple of months, answering to a new name, ever alert so she didn’t miss that name when it was called, so she didn’t draw attention to herself. She’d have been alone in strange cities, unable even to swim if she was a swimmer, or to work out if she had belonged to a gym before; she must have known those were the places detectives on her trail would target. She’d have looked in the mirror and seen clothes that weren’t “her,” her hair a different color or an unfamiliar style. And the more she felt at home in a place, the more she clicked with a friend, the more tantalizing she found a lover, the harder it would have been to move on. She must have learned that lesson over and over. She’d come home from the kind of manual job she could get without references, with muscles she’d never given a thought to, now aching. And after a while those muscles would toughen, they’d pull more firmly on her bones, they’d alter her stance, broaden her shoulders, shift the hang of her arms. Her body would change. And whoever Ellen Waller had been would indeed have been lost in the moves.

  My chest felt cold and empty. My hand stiffened on the tea mug. I don’t know that I could have moved it even if I had wanted to.

  Moments passed, and then suddenly, I realized the chair slats were biting into my back, my feet were pressed against the floor, the mug was burning my fingers. “Ellen must have really trusted you to reveal herself.”

  Pironnen wasn’t moving; he was watching me like a scientist observing the contents of a petri dish. I had that odd sense that he could see my thoughts—you do with some people on the edge—and that he knew I had experienced a flash of what Ellen had lived. Or in a way, what he had lived.

  “Come,” he said, standing up.

  I followed him through the swinging door that led from the kitchen to the entry hall. The dogs threaded between us, Nora, the setter, bounding eagerly to the front door. When Pironnen started up the stairs, Pablo, the pi dog, moved in behind, keeping me at a distance, as if giving his owner time to reconsider. I wondered how long it had been since Pironnen had taken anyone other tha
n Jed Estler to the second floor. Nora bounded past me, kicking up dust and hair. Behind Pironnen’s back I covered my nose.

  The house was a cube and the top of the staircase emerged in the middle of the south side. Across the dark wood landing was the bathroom, probably original to the house, pre-Depression. At the rear of the house, two stained oak doors stood open to two small rooms. One was a bedroom with a single bed, with the sheets and blankets pulled up over the pillow, closer to madeup than I would have guessed for Pironnen. The other must once have been an office—file cabinet, desk with phone, and now nothing else but the ubiquitous dust and hair. The floor was covered with three amoebalike dog beds. The life the rooms revealed was bare of luxuries, or interest. It was what I would have expected.

  I noted all this in quick glances. Pironnen walked to the front, to the entrance to the master bedroom. The door was closed. He waited until I was beside him, stared down at me with that same wary expression, as if reassessing his decision, then he turned the knob and let the door swing open.

  The room wasn’t clean—nothing could be clean here—but otherwise it looked like a normal room in a normal house. It was easily twice the size of either of the others, extending across the entire front of the house. A double bed—just box springs and mattress—held a faded red and blue plaid spread. The paperback book jackets, too, had faded, witness to the movement of the sun from season to season, year to year. Between the windows was a stereo and tape deck, and at the far end sat a Danish modern love seat, a scratched oak coffee table holding an opened envelope, a knobby black orb the size of a half dollar, and a rumpled Penn State T-shirt. It could have been the room of any guy a year or two out of college. “Your brother’s room?”