by Susan Dunlap
“The thing is that if you can’t be alone, this is the best possible place. I mean, other places talk about homelike atmospheres, call themselves family. But here we really are. I know. The residents can be here a long time. So I get to know them, like family.” He laughed. “Better than family. Claire,” he said nodding toward the back of the building, “is just like one of my teachers when I was a kid. It’s nice here.”
“Who all lives here, besides you and Claire?”
“Edgar and James. But there’s no point in bothering them. They’re both very old and on medication.”
“Who else?”
“Stan, but he can’t talk. He’s recovering from surgery. And the fourth room upstairs is empty.”
I sighed. For all the use I was getting from this place, they might have had the windows bricked up. “Michael, I’m looking for a suspect who was in the canyon. Who could still be in the canyon. I only need to know if anyone saw him go down or come back up.”
Michael’s pursed mouth relaxed. “Sorry. None of them is in any condition to be looking out the window.”
“What about Claire?”
“I pull her blinds after dinner when I give her her night pill. She doesn’t like the idea of anyone looking in at her; she’s very old school, proper. Only Madeleine leaves her blinds up.”
“Madeleine?” I added her name to the growing list, feeling like I was dealing with the stationary equivalent to the Toonerville Trolley. “So Madeleine is likely to be awake and looking out her window. Which way does it face?”
“She’s not strong. She doesn’t have the energy to be dealing with people like you.”
“It’s not an interrogation,” I snapped. “We’re only asking for help. I’d think you would be concerned about who’s running through your canyon.”
“Well …”
“Or is it you who have some problem with the police?”
When he didn’t answer I pulled out my pad again. “Give me your full name and your birth date.”
“Hey, what is this?” His voice rose.
“Shh. I know you don’t want to wake the guests. Middle name? Date of birth?”
“Mike?” a female voice called on an intercom. The voice was shaky, but still one that you’d ignore at your peril.
As I took down the information from Mike’s driver’s license, he leaned over the intercom. “Just a question about the search in the canyon, Madeleine.”
“Madeleine … ?” I asked when he turned back to me.
“Madeleine Riordan.”
“The lawyer?”
“Right.”
Madeleine Riordan, the lawyer. No wonder Michael was behaving like a guard dog. No wonder he thought my presence would disturb her. If history was any indicator, having a police officer trot into her room would elicit scathing sarcasm. To the unwary she had invariably seemed like a quiet, attractive, lawyer dressed in a better-than-Berkeley suit. The unwary one settled in the courtroom and forgot about her. Then, in one of those voices so low that everyone stops and listens, she’d skewer you.
There was a time when Madeleine Riordan’s picture had made it to the dart board in the station men’s locker room. It had only been up there half an hour when Chief Larkin heard about it and pulled it down. But the word I got was that it was so full of holes by then that there was next to nothing left.
She knew about the dart board—everyone knew. If her house were burglarized, we would, of course, send out a patrol officer, but not before we all had a good long laugh. She could have figured that out, too.
My first thought was that the feeling of disdain was mutual. But I realized that although I had known Madeleine Riordan well enough to pass a word in the courthouse or comment on the hors d’oeuvres at a bailiff’s farewell party, I really had no idea at all what was beneath her thick dark hair, behind those better-than-Berkeley suits.
But one thing I did know was that when she had needed investigative help for a client, she chose Herman Ott, the most antipolice private eye in town. And that connection alone was sufficient to remind me I’d have to do some fast talking to convince Madeleine Riordan that our suspect was less desirable than we were.
CHAPTER 4
“MADELEINE’S OUT BACK,” MICHAEL said.
“Out back?” I almost asked: Just how nontraditional a not-nursing home is this? Did the halt, lame, and elderly wait to meet their Maker in tents?
“She and Claire are in the cottage suites—two rooms connected by a companionway. I’ll call and see if she can see you.”
“No, you’ll call and tell her I’m on my way.”
His mouth pursed, and he seemed to consider a moment before saying, “Very well, I’ll tell her. But I should warn you it won’t put her in the best of moods.”
I nodded. I understood only too well.
Madeleine Riordan was with a law firm that did a fair amount of pro bono work. The cases that paid the rent were routine civil matters. It was her pro bono work that brought her into contact with us, at trials, and most annoying to us, at police review commission hearings. I don’t know exactly what she’d done to other officers—they tended to be closed-mouthed about their encounters with her. I suspect their encounters were like mine, and mine I never mentioned freely. Mine, the Coco Arnero case.
I could still see Arnero sitting by Madeleine Riordan at the next table, in a ratty chocolate sweater with a silver chain around his neck, his thin, straggly mane a contrast to her thick, shiny auburn hair. Arnero had protested during one of the Peoples’ Park demonstrations that had erupted every couple years since the 1969 riots. The demonstrations were usually in response to the university’s attempts to construct dorms, parking lots, or sports facilities in the park, the only open space near Telegraph Avenue. Pro-park people faced off against BPD, or in more serious cases, a line of BPD interspersed with the university force and the county sheriff’s department BPD had called in. Some years bottles were thrown and wooden bullets shot; other years it was just passive resistance and a line of patrol standing guard.
The Arnero incident came after a rocks-and-wooden-bullets day. Protesters were chanting, screaming. Bursts from our radios cut the air; brakes squealed, sirens whined ever closer. Camera flashes stung our eyes. Reporters were yelling. Officers shouted at onlookers to clear the area. The whole place smelled of dirt and sweat and fear. I’d been on the force less than a year; in riot gear, shoulder to shoulder with the sheriff’s deputies less than an hour. Until the first rock hit, my sympathies had been all with the demonstrators. Officer of the peace. But rocks can dent objectivity. The commander repeated the order to disperse. A yard in front of me Coco Arnero plopped himself down, cross-legged in the street, smiling. A deputy sheriff swung his baton and shoved it into Arnero’s stomach. Arnero doubled over. The deputy hit him in the back. Arnero screamed in pain but didn’t move. Behind me the commander yelled at us, “Don’t break the line.” The deputy stepped back. Arnero’s friend dragged him away.
That experience made me question my career. How much violence—how many batons, how many rocks—was I willing to accept to be an officer of the peace? Was I too “Berkeley” to be a police officer? If so, was I writing off the whole profession, deciding it wasn’t possible to both uphold the law and treat our citizens decently? It was as close as I’ve come to quitting.
Weeks later, when I got the notice of the fair-hearing complaint, I wasn’t surprised. I expected the hearing to be for show. Whatever qualms I had about the incident, they weren’t that I had broken the law.
The hearing was in a shabby upstairs room in some city building—I’ve blocked out just which one. My then-husband and some of his university colleagues were in the audience. The night was warm for Berkeley; I was sweating under my uniform. Madeleine Riordan presented Arnero’s complaint—that the Berkeley Police Department, and I in particular, should have recognized and respected the ground rules of passive resistance, arrested Arnero when he sat down in the street as the unspoken covenant of passive
resistance decrees, and failing that, at least protected him from the assault of the county sheriff’s deputies, the deputies whom BPD had called to the scene. I struggled to keep my face impassive, to reveal neither my own qualms nor the comfort I found in Berkeleyans’ expecting their police department to adhere to a more humane standard than the norm. Sweat was running down my back, but outwardly I looked as controlled as Madeleine Riordan. Or I did until Arnero said, “I can’t describe any reaction to that billy club hitting me. In situations of conflict like that I make a habit of leaving my body.”
All my tension bubbled over. I laughed.
But Madeleine Riordan wasn’t smiling. “Officer Smith?” she asked with no inflection whatsoever. I remember that distinctly. It was as if no human voice were connected to her words, as if an elemental omniscience were questioning my reaction.
I said, “It just seems excessive that Mr. Arnero would expect the police to be guarding his body when he isn’t even in residence.”
There was laughter in the room. It came like clumps of clouds from various places. Madeleine Riordan let the laughter subside completely, let the silence sit two beats, and then said, again without any inflection: “So, Officer Smith, what cosmic view must a citizen hold before you feel the need to protect him?”
The laughter that had comforted me turned to questioning murmurs.
“Or,” she added almost as an afterthought, “during which moments is his life important enough to deserve respect?”
It was a rhetorical question, and I was thankful for that. I had no answer.
Arnero’s complaint failed, as I knew it would. I left the hearing room feeling like I’d been hit harder than Arnero. Maybe it was because I was so young, so new to the force; whatever the reason, Riordan’s question kept poking, at the time leaving me awash in questions about my career and my values. I never again judged a suspect quite so automatically. Maybe Madeleine Riordan’s poke made me a better person. But it didn’t make me like her.
Now Michael Wennerhaver walked back from the phone. “To get to Madeleine’s cottage you have to go outside and around the house,” he said grudgingly. Pulling open the front door, he added, “And just because Madeleine looks okay and she can get around by herself, don’t assume she’s strong. She’s just come back from a bout of chemo that would have knocked a lesser woman on her ear.”
“You mean she was in the hospital?”
“No, she was here when she had it, then home awhile. She’s only been back a couple days.”
She had gotten married a couple years ago. At the station, there had been ribald speculation about Madeleine and the groom. Allusions to a wrecking ball and demolished structure were among the more gracious. “Is she still married?”
Michael shrugged, then added, “Yeah.”
“And she left her husband to come here?”
“Yes,” he snapped and headed outside before I could ask more. He didn’t comment that the state of her marriage was none of my business, but he could have and been correct.
I followed him out into the fog. It had thinned a bit while I’d been inside, and going around the side of the house and down the walk wasn’t difficult despite how steep the path became in the last fifteen feet between the back of the house and the cottage.
We stepped onto the companionway between the rooms. “I need to tell Claire what we’re doing here,” Michael said, then knocked and pushed open the door to his right. A door, I noted, that was not locked. Many things are casual in Berkeley, but this arrangement was asking for trouble.
I stood shivering in the wind, wondering if Madeleine Riordan still recalled the Coco Arnero incident, or if it had been just one of many similar ones in her career, if there were too many abashed cops for her to recall one from another.
The times I’d passed her since—she, on the way to a trial or hearing—she’d been dressed in those suits that were just a bit better than normal Berkeley garb (much as was Michael’s attire). She looked as if she’d taken time from more lucrative work to deal with this case, because, her whole demeanor said, this particular offense was so egregious. I remember one of those times thinking that she could have been pretty—and maybe she was when her eyes and mouth weren’t tense with indignation—but she had chosen to override any decorativeness that would have undermined the seriousness of her commitment. Her eyes were a dark no-nonsense blue. And her thick brown hair had one streak of gray, a touch of legitimacy, even back then, nearly ten years ago. But it also shone in the light like a child’s hair. I was looking at her hair just before she “got” me in the hearing, absently wondering if it was possible for thick brown hair to have such a shine naturally, or if Madeleine Riordan’s hair revealed a soupçon of vanity, if there was more beneath her stiff demeanor than I had assumed.
Michael walked back out onto the companionway and knocked on Madeleine Riordan’s door.
“Send her in, Mike.”
Michael was halfway in the door when she said, “You don’t need to stay.” Her voice was softer than my remembered version, but the words were a dismissal nevertheless. He paused as if to say something, then took a quick step back. It took him only a moment to regain control of his face, but in that time it screamed how much he hated being dismissed.
I stepped inside and shut the door. The room was homey in an impersonal way: framed Sierra Club prints, overstuffed chair, lamp and table by the solid wall where no window looked toward the basement of the main house. TV, VCR at the foot of the bed. The piney smell of floor polish mixed with a musky odor of tracked dirt, and dog. I observed all the things professionally looking first this way then that. I was nearly beside her when I looked at Madeleine Riordan.
I didn’t gasp, but it took all my control not to.
She was gaunt, icy pale, and her hair was gone. Her face seemed tiny in the ashen expanse of her scalp. She wasn’t wearing an institutional nightgown with the opening in the back that leaves patients cold and exposed and reminds them they are at the mercy of whoever sneaks up behind. The one she had on must have been her own—a nightshirt with a Far Side cartoon. But somehow that shocked me more. I just caught myself before saying that it wouldn’t have occurred to me that she had a sense of humor.
I don’t know what I expected—I guess the woman with the shining brown hair in the better-than-Berkeley suit pointing to exhibit A, insisting on justice. Had I walked in and found her naked, I could have dealt with that. I shower in the Albany pool. I see naked bodies every morning. But to walk in and find her bald … I should have been prepared. But I wasn’t. Nothing makes a woman so naked as a dry, uncovered scalp. So utterly vulnerable.
Awkwardly I met her gaze. Madeleine Riordan was smiling, or, more accurately, silently laughing at my discomfort. She didn’t appear uncomfortable under her bald scalp.
It was almost as an afterthought that I noticed the chocolate Labrador retriever lying on the bed beside her. Gratefully, I focused on the dog, a big-pawed, wide-faced fellow with a luxurious brown coat that clearly had been brushed today. He was watching me with the detached interest of the well loved. More than once I’d joked that in my next life I was coming back as a retriever and would spend the entire incarnation being petted. I didn’t say that now, but the memory seemed to fill my mind and block out any other thought.
I held out a hand toward the dog. He sniffed and cocked his head in acceptance.
When I looked back at Madeleine again, her cheeks had pulled in, her eyes were shut, and her teeth pressed hard together. The hand nearest me she held taut, as if refusing to give in to the pain. Only her left hand betrayed her. With it she clung to the dog’s back, pressing her fingers so hard into his fur that it nearly covered them. I expected him to yelp, but he made no sound, and no movement except to lean the side of his head into her leg.
Her hand eased. But it was a moment before the dog moved back to his original position. Frail as she was, I was amazed she’d had the strength to grab the dog so fiercely. She cleared her throat and spoke a
s if her throat was raw and it was an effort to force each word through that rough passage, “This is Coco. He accepts tribute, but he’s much too spoiled to acknowledge it.”
My breath caught. I would have given a lot to avoid asking, but I couldn’t, “Coco? For Arnero?”
She smiled. “Not many people get that connection.” She said it in the same neutral voice I remembered so well. There was no way to tell whether there was anything beneath her statement, or if she even recalled my connection to that one incident in Arnero’s life.
No point in pursuing it; I’d ask my questions about the canyon perp and get out. I reached across and scratched the brown retriever’s head. Briefly he looked at me, then glanced back at Madeleine Riordan. I said, “I’m Jill Smith, Homicide Detail.”
“Homicide?”
“Yes … but I’m here with the Hostage Negotiation Team. You probably know we had a situation in the canyon—”
“Did you free the hostage?” she asked in that raw voice.
“It turned out there wasn’t a hostage,” I said. “The original witness was mistaken.”
“No hostage? Then no hostage negotiation.” I could hear the wagging finger in her voice, but I wondered if that was just because I recalled it from the past. She was asking if we’d been hotdogging. It was, I recalled, a charge she’d made in the Arnero hearing.
“The perpetrator himself can be the hostage if he’s in danger of harming himself. And we had reports he had a gun.”
“So you could break into anyone’s house …”
“No. You of all people know that.” Before she could respond I said, “Look, I know you don’t want to waste your strength talking to me. We’re concerned that our perpetrator could be creating a dangerous situation down in the canyon. We need to know how he’s getting in and out of there. Have you seen anyone moving around down there?” Madeleine Riordan wasn’t one to give the police information. When the Arnero hearing ended, Arnero had turned his anger on her. I heard him threaten her, but she refused to press charges, and the next time he was arrested she defended him again. Now I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d refused to answer my questions altogether.