by Susan Dunlap
Pironnen nodded and walked over to the love seat, hung up a navy blazer that had been sprawled over a corner, and sat down.
When I hesitated, he said, “It’s not a shrine. I didn’t leave it as it was the day Dan died. That’s not the day I want to remember. You can sit here; it’s still just furniture.”
I sat next to him on the love seat. But of course, it wasn’t just any room, it was a shrine.
Pironnen picked up a Penn State T-shirt that Dan could have dropped on the floor there last night, or two and a half decades ago. He held it between thumb and fingers with exquisite care. Touching without touching. “I come in here to be with Dan. To bring him alive from my memory. I left the room unchanged for a year after he died. One day I realized that nothing I saw made me feel anything anymore. So, I put away the clothes Dan left out. I cleaned the place up. Then I tossed a sweater he wore a lot on the sofa, and changed the book he was reading. In a few days I changed things again, just like he’d have done.” He wasn’t looking at me—he was staring into infinity—but I could read in the tenseness of his face how essential it was to him that I truly understand what he was maintaining here.
“Like he might come in any moment?” I waited until he nodded, then asked, “What do you think of in here?”
“Think of? Nothing. Sometimes incidents I’d forgotten for thirty years pop up. But mostly nothing. I just feel like …”
“I know.” He meant how the house feels different when someone else is home. Even if I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed reading the paper on one of those fogged-in gray mornings, if Howard is downstairs spackling, the air is charged. And with Pironnen’s brother, the outgoing one, the one who made Karl brave enough to go to the chess tournaments—that charge would be stronger, hold longer, and its light would cut through the gray of his reclusive brother’s soul.
Pironnen continued to look out into space. “When Dan died, it was such a shock. He was the younger brother. I never thought he’d die. He was so good at things, made friends so easily, he bought this house as easily as he’d pick up a newspaper. Life was the Southern Pacific tracks and he was the San Francisco Zephyr. But he did die. And then”—he swallowed—“he was gone. He ceased to exist. He wasn’t married. His friends had other friends.”
I nodded. Pironnen didn’t react, but I sensed that he felt me listening.
“Dan only exists in here now. If it weren’t for this room, he wouldn’t exist at all.” Pironnen turned to face me. “The neighbors think I’ve gone wacko here alone with the dogs all these years. They cross the street when they see me. Some try to chat, and then they’re sure I’m crazy. I never had much chat, even when Dan was alive. He was the talker. I just followed along. Now I can’t. But I’m not crazy.”
“No.”
“Dan was twenty-five when he died. Made no mark, as they say, anywhere. If I forget him”—he looked up, his face white with intensity, hands quivering on Dan’s T-shirt—“he’ll be rubbed out, erased. Nothing left of those years but an old hermit in a dirty house with dogs.”
I wanted to contradict him, comfort him, tell him no one exhales without affecting everyone who breathes. But that was all too amorphous even for me, and any view of life and death I had would be an insult to a man who had spent the last twenty years of his life as keeper of the flame.
I waited until he dropped his gaze and shifted his legs, then said, “After Dan died, what did you do?”
“Nothing. Literally. It was like I was wrapped in rolls of cotton. I couldn’t move. Everything was awkward, hard, worthless.” A sad smile flickered and died. “They say I was depressed. Depressed is so much better than I was. I didn’t tell them that. I just filled the prescriptions I was given, took the medication home, and flushed it down the toilet.”
“But you’re not still wrapped in cotton. What happened?” Even as I spoke, I suspected the answer.
“I saw Adam’s picture in the paper.”
Adam. I smiled. “What kind of dog was he?”
“A mutt. They would have gassed him the next day.”
The door to Dan’s room was open, but the dogs hadn’t followed us in. They came from a different era in Pironnen’s life, and they seemed to know it. I sat there, feeling like I’d been transported back twenty years in time. Outside, the fog had grown dense and blocked the view from the windows. Like Pironnen had been blocked after his brother’s death. When Dan died, he died.
Or perhaps he merely ceased contributing the way he had before. I said, “You keep alive someone you loved by honoring his memory. You save animals who would be killed for no reason and you give them lives most dogs would envy. And you play a mean game of chess. You could do worse.”
He didn’t say anything, just rested his hands on the old cloth of the T-shirt.
I had thought before that I understood Jed Estler’s protectiveness. Now I realized that I’d just skimmed the surface. Being allowed into this room was like stepping into Karl Pironnen’s soul. I shrank back from it as if it were a gift I couldn’t swear to honor, and I felt a wave of fear for him. He never should have trusted me, never should have allowed a virtual stranger to touch his soul. Perhaps he had been so isolated that he couldn’t judge people, and so mistook the facade of interest for trustworthiness. I looked around the room and felt the same eerie sense I had felt standing before Bryn Wiley’s confessional bench. “Karl,” I said softly, “have you brought anyone else here?”
He nodded.
“Ellen?”
“Yes.”
On a hunch I said, “You don’t feel guilty about Ellen, do you?”
“No!” he snapped, flinging the T-shirt away.
I must have jumped. He stared directly at me, insisting, “They’re not the same. If I had been a normal man, Dan would have been home and I would have been at the bank like I should have been. But I never asked Ellen to take me places. She insisted, like it mattered to her.”
I made my face blank, so it wouldn’t reveal my reaction. The confessional bench was the one thing Ellen had chosen and forced into Bryn’s house. Maybe Bryn was not the intended penitent. Maybe Ellen had been quietly obsessed with making amends for something in that hidden life of hers. Was part of her penance the trips to the vet and the bank with a dusty hermit and his dogs?
“Karl,” I said, realizing the import of my question, “did you invite Ellen up here like you did with me? Or did she ask you to bring her here?”
The air seemed stiller than ever. It was almost as if the air of the past hardened around him, not permitting him to answer. “I mentioned I had Dan’s things. She asked … three times … before I let her in.”
I could almost see her genuflecting at the door and kneeling before the shrine of the room. Dan’s room. Dan who had died in the Golden State robbery. The driver of the getaway car was Mary Something Nash. Mary Ellen Nash. “And she confessed?”
His body tightened. Now the air seemed to explode with the energy Karl had spent two decades holding in. “She said she was sorry. She said they shouldn’t have picked Golden State Savings. They didn’t mean for anyone to die; they couldn’t know Dan would step wrong off the curb and crack his skull. She would never have done it if she had known he would die. She said she had regretted it every day since. There was never a day she didn’t think of Dan. She gave me this.” He picked up the dried black ball.
“What is it?”
“An orange. Dan’s. He was holding it. It flew out of his hand when he fell. She had the car door open, waiting. It landed in the car.”
“And she saved it all these years?” I said, amazed.
He nodded. I could tell the gesture seemed not at all bizarre to him. It was the only offering worthy of the shrine. Suddenly I felt the enormity of Pironnen’s loss with Ellen’s death. The only person who had shared the intensity of his obsession was dead. The chance to talk about Dan to someone who cared was snatched away. The promise of bringing Dan to life anew had been killed, shot down.
“Coming face
to face with a woman involved in Dan’s death; did you want to kill her?” I asked, careful not to change the tone of my voice.
He shook his head. “Revenge is a fool’s game. I’m a chess player; I know that. I don’t want the case all over the papers again, photographers taking my picture, asking about Dan, asking about her. Every time I’d turn on the news, they’d be interviewing her. I don’t want that. What I want is what I have here.”
I knew the answer to the next question before I spoke, but I had to ask. “Did you think of turning her in? The law—”
“The law! Society! Justice? Why should I care about all that? Dan never mattered to them. The columnist back then referred to Dan as ‘just some poor schmuck in the wrong place.’ He didn’t even call him by name.”
He stood up, clasping the desiccated piece of fruit so hard I was afraid it would break in his hand. Anyone else would have thrown me out of the room. But he only closed me out of himself. His tense stare told me I had stomped on his trust. And the next time he was tempted to trust, he would be more cautious for having made a mistake with me.
All I could do was leave him alone in the room. “I’ll find my own way down,” I offered as I left.
The dogs circled me at a distance as I made my way down the stairs. At the door they stood three abreast behind me. I walked slowly to my car.
Mary Ellen Nash.
She’d been deep enough in the antiwar movement to rob a bank, or at least to be the driver (and back then, radicals wouldn’t have let a woman do anything more than that). She had to know Sam Johnson, or at least know of him. But she probably hadn’t suspected he was Fannie’s husband. No wonder she’d steered clear of Fannie after that revelation.
Mary Ellen—Ellen—had altered her appearance to attract Bryn Wiley’s attention, to get access to Karl Pironnen. Bryn was a fluke. If Bryn hadn’t existed, perhaps Ellen would have managed to get Jed’s job, or have gotten access to Karl through Jed and Rent-a-Freak. Ellen Waller was a determined woman; somehow she’d have made her way into Dan Pironnen’s room.
And once she’d accomplished her reconciliation with Karl, once she completed her penance, who did that unsettle? Did it free her to goad Bryn about her past? Or during all those years underground, had she learned things about Sam Johnson he and Fannie had no intention of revealing?
Chapter 22
THERE WERE BODIES ON Howard’s couch when I made my way through the barely lit living room. The tenants had come home to roost for another week. I was so exhausted I just trudged upstairs and flopped into bed.
And lay there for what seemed an hour but was probably only fifteen minutes, my arms and legs turned to cement, my mind abuzz with thoughts of the case. At ten to two I turned the light on, picked up the phone, and dialed the Fresno Police Department.
By the time Howard called back, I had gone down to the kitchen—startling the sofa contingent into a flurry of gasps and a flutter of cloth—started water for hot cocoa, caught myself, and poured a glass of merlot instead, and settled back under the covers.
“Jill?”
“Ah. You. I just passed the scene on the sofa. It was like when your Maserati’s been in the shop so long a clunker spewing fumes begins to look like a great ride. You’ve been gone too long. And your junk food bet is driving me to drink.” I could picture the grin settling on Howard’s face. He’d be in plain clothes, jeans and maybe the forest green turtleneck I’d given him for his birthday. He did look fine in jeans. His brown bomber jacket would be hanging over the back of his chair.
He’d be slouched in the chair, his long legs stretched out in front. Maybe he’d be wearing a billed cap, and beneath it, those red curls of his would peek out.
“Miss you, too. Think of you in the wild Fresnan nights.”
“How are those wild nights?”
Howard laughed. “I’ll tell you, you don’t need to worry about overestimating the intelligence of the local drug dealer. I targeted this guy, Lyle. Lyle fancies himself quite the slick operator. He’s suspicious. So what does he do when I drive up to make my buy? He says to me, ‘Hey, man, you a cop?’ Like I’m going to pull out my badge, confess, and skulk away!”
“He’s leaning in your van, right? You’re getting this all on camera?”
“Yeah. Got him full face. So I say, ‘Forget it. You insult me, I’m outa here.’ I shift into first. Lyle reconsiders. He didn’t really mean it, he says, ‘but like I gotta be careful, you know, man?’ “
“ ‘You gotta solve your problems before you deal with me,’ I say. So we go back and forth and I end up telling him I’m not dealing with him, not here, not on this street corner. We’ve been here too long, and now I’ve got my own suspicions that maybe he’s the narc setting me up. So then what do you think he does, Jill?”
“What?”
“He tells me to meet him in an hour—at his apartment! I mean, at that point I really did wonder if ol’ Lyle was a narc and we’d gotten our lines crossed with the feds. But no, Lyle was just a dummy. A brain may be a terrible thing to waste, but Lyle’s in no danger.”
I laughed. God, it was good to hear Howard enjoying himself. I took a swallow of wine and slid over toward Howard’s side of the bed. Suddenly I ached for his skin against my skin, the ruffle of the soft hairs on his chest, the mustache stubble that scraped my mouth when he kissed me—and rasped against my finger when I ran it across there afterward to remind him he might have shaved before. (Once he’d brought a windup razor to bed.) I yearned to feel his long arms pressing me against him, to feel so intensely that I lost myself in the sensation, and for a wonderful moment I just existed beyond the separation of thoughts.
Some lovers smoke; we talk shop, the nicotine of the cop world. I snuggled against Howard’s pillow, with telephone in hand, half pretending I wasn’t alone. Pretending Ellen Waller would not be merely a footnote to a failed bank robbery in which a bystander happened to die.
“So how’s your one eighty-seven, Jill?”
“Hit the wall.”
“Umm?”
“I can’t remember how much I told you about the case—Bryn Wiley and her lookalike, Ellen Waller, who she said was her cousin but turned out to be a stranger. She shared a general physical similarity with Bryn, and she dyed and styled her hair and bought clothes to look like her. She did all that not to get closer to Bryn, but to get into Bryn’s house, so she could get nearer to Karl Pironnen, the hermit with the dogs. Wait, Howard, there’s more. She was the driver in the Golden State S and L robbery twenty-five years ago and the guy who jumped out of the way when the robbers ran for the car—the guy who stumbled off the curb and died—was Pironnen’s brother.”
“And she wanted to get closer to Pironnen? Sounds like she’s a match for my man Lyle.” Howard chuckled.
If he’d been there, he’d have been draping his arm over my shoulder, pulling me against him.
I would be struggling not to lose my train of thought—which, in fact, I was from the thought of what might have been distracting me. “Ellen was really committed, Howard. Before she glommed on to Bryn, she had buddied up to Fannie Johnson, who, she assumed, was married to some klutz trying to rehab his decrepit house on Tamalpais. I don’t know just how Ellen was intending to get an entrée from Sam Johnson—”
“This Ellen is hiding out from an antiwar heist and maybe a felony murder rap, and she decides to cozy up to Sam Johnson’s wife? Lyle may be too bright for her.”
“Johnson’s a very common name. Probably Fannie never mentioned his first name. Anyway, once Ellen realized who he was, she dropped Fannie pronto. But the point is, Howard, that she did all of this so she could get to Pironnen and tell him she’s sorry. The woman even saved the desiccated orange his brother dropped when he fell; she gave it to Pironnen.”
Howard chortled. “God, I miss Berkeley!”
“Okay, sure, it sounds ridiculous. But if you’d seen Pironnen … His brother’s room is a shrine. It’s all the guy’s got, Howard. Sorry. I don’t mean to d
rive you down Eccentricity Road, then ticket you for laughing. Anyway, that’s where I am: I finally discover who Ellen Waller-Jane Doe is. She’s a fugitive with reason to be worried about a felony murder rap. It’s a gray area, with him not being touched but stumbling and hitting his head. One of the robbers died before he ever got picked up and the other went up for a double murder one before they connected him to the Golden State case. So the case never really figured in a trial. But the possibility of felony murder was enough to keep Ellen under cover for a quarter of a century. She spent her whole adult life hiding out.”
“Sad.” For Howard, who cherished home and stability, the idea of being on the run was hell. If he were here now he’d be glancing around the room—his room—at the walls he’d lovingly covered with three coats of forest green, and the trim so white it shone. Unconsciously, he’d pull the comforter higher up on his bare chest, and cup his hand around my arm. I’d rest a hand on his thigh, trail my fingers up the soft inner flesh …
I took another sip of the merlot. “But here’s the thing, Howard. So she gets to Pironnen. She apologizes. He says he’s not into revenge; he doesn’t care about the criminal justice system. She’s confessed, she’s absolved, she’s ready to go on with her life. And then, then, she gets killed. Before, when she had this big secret, I could’ve understood her getting killed—or killing. But now her cupboard’s empty. She’s got nothing to protect. No one’s got reason to kill her. And she’s gone.”
“No one?”
“Unless now that she’s pure, she’s after someone else’s secret. Or unless the shot really was meant for Bryn.”
“You ran a background on Ellen with her real identity?”
“Yeah. Then I made a few calls. You want to guess?”