by Susan Dunlap
Using the tissue, I pulled open the bedside table drawer. Inside was a mirror, a bottle of Visine, hand lotion, several closed small plastic containers I didn’t touch, and one book—a copy of Final Exit, a book on suicide. The book didn’t surprise me. If I had found Madeleine dead by her own hand, I wouldn’t have been taken aback. I would have assumed she’d decided to forgo another month of pain and boredom and loneliness. God, why hadn’t she, instead of dying like this?
The door opened. Raksen, the lab tech, waited for me to give him the okay to come in. Behind him were the woman with the wild red hair I’d seen here last night and the young man who’d been at the desk, Michael Wennerhaver.
“What’s going on?” Michael demanded, trying to skirt around Raksen. I moved into the doorway. The woman grabbed my arm, “You can’t—”
“Madeleine’s dead.”
“She can’t be dead!” she said. “She was walking around this afternoon. She ate dinner at five. Liver and bacon. Bacon, for chrissakes. You don’t eat bacon and die.”
“What is your connection with Madeleine?” I asked her.
“I’m Delia McElhenny. I own Canyonview.”
Michael’s eyes were wide open. I wondered if he was in shock. His hands dangled at his sides and he seemed to have lost connection with his body.
Inside the room the dog growled.
To Raksen I said, “I haven’t finished there. But the dog’s on the bed next to the deceased.”
He nodded and took a step toward the door.
“Raksen, the dead woman is Madeleine Riordan.” A stranger wouldn’t have caught Raksen’s reaction. His face froze an instant, just long enough to tell me he had known Madeleine. I’d ask him about it later. Now my concern was the dog on the bed. We had to get him out of there. But there could be particles or fibers adhering to Coco’s stomach or legs, evidence of the killer that had fallen on the bed. Raksen would know that. He wouldn’t let Coco go without a vacuuming worthy of spring cleaning.
But Raksen couldn’t do it by himself. Someone would need to hold Coco for him. Me? I couldn’t leave the two witnesses alone. Raksen’s helper would have to be one of the staff here whom Coco would trust. Michael?
But as soon as I turned to him, he let out a sob. “How can it …” Struggling for control, he rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. It was a move utterly out of place. Michael, in his freshly laundered oxford-cloth shirt and jeans, looked like he would perish before letting cloth near mucous membrane. He grabbed my arm. “She can’t be dead. She just can’t.”
“I’m afraid—”
“Why her? How could she die? It’s not fair. It’s just not fair!”
The woman put a hand on his arm, causing him to release mine. “Mike, you know she didn’t have long, only a month or two at best.”
“She didn’t have to die now. Not now!” He smashed his fists against his legs.
The woman shook her head. In a soft voice, she said, “Look, Mike, I know you’re going to miss her. She’s done a lot for you.”
Coco wasn’t going to stay on the bed indefinitely. When he moved, he could be dispersing the possible evidence on his fur anywhere in the room, to say nothing of tromping, slurping on, or knocking over other evidence. I was just about to ask Raksen to put in another call for patrol assistance when Connie Pereira and Paul Murakawa came down the path.
As if cured by the surplus of possible help, Michael now seemed together enough to handle the dog. But in case that was too optimistic a prognosis, I sent Murakawa in with him and Raksen. Pereira and I moved a couple steps off the companionway while I briefed her. The woman, dressed in what looked like tie-dyed long johns, stood still, her long red hair skimming on the night wind like a kite.
The door opened. Michael emerged, pulling Coco by the collar. And when the door shut, the dog flung himself against it, and let out a high piercing whine.
That whine cut through me. I scrunched my shoulders and hardened my ears against it. In Homicide we get training and plenty of advice on how to toughen up at the sight of dead people; but with moaning dogs we’re on our own.
The dog quieted, the dog named for Coco Arnero. I thought back to the Arnero hearing. Even if I hadn’t lobbed up the ball for her to spike, Madeleine still would have won the match. All she and Arnero wanted was an airing of his position, a hearing that would garner enough press coverage, create sufficient citizen pressure to make BPD think twice before calling in outside forces and ceding control to them. The Department had a videotape of the baton incident. Madeleine had uncovered three more. She’d come up with five witnesses, every one of them more believable than Arnero. One was a law professor visiting from Santa Cruz. At the end of the hearing, had I not been left stunned by her retort, her research would have left me speechless. I’ve seen my share of review commission hearings since, but none planned out and stage-managed like that.
How had a woman so competent, so in control allowed herself to be murdered? How had she let herself be as helpless as the deflated dummy in the canyon? I should have been able to accept her murder. Eighteen or twenty people are murdered every year in Berkeley. But there was no indication of theft, nothing to suggest the break-in that could so easily have taken place through her unlocked door. I couldn’t believe that she just happened to be killed, not right before a Homicide detective is due to arrive.
Before she scheduled a Homicide detective’s arrival! Could she have stage-managed the timing of her own murder so I would find her body? With anyone else I would have dismissed the idea as ridiculous. But Madeleine Riordan … she knew how quickly a trail gets cold. Had she somehow arranged to give me a jump start? Or was I merely imagining I was a key player, psyching myself up to focus on the case and escape “if I’d only come earlier”?
I walked back into the room. Raksen was poised at the foot of the bed, Nikon aimed. The flash went off.
The light made Madeleine—the body—look bluer, frailer.
“You finished with the bed, Raksen?”
“Just a couple more.”
I hadn’t even hoped for a yes. Raksen never wanted to admit he had enough shots. But my question hurried him along.
When he turned to the bedside table, I pulled the cover down to check the body for wounds, bruises, any other suspicious marks. Her legs were thin, but on the right one the skin hung from the bone with barely a sign of muscle. I recalled seeing her leaning lightly on the cane with her right hand. Lightly, which meant she had had muscle tone back in those days in court. But now it looked like the disease had sucked the life out of the weakest limb first. I was surprised she’d been able to walk at all yesterday.
Not she, the body! But it was too late. I’d lost the distance. And as I pulled up her nightshirt to check for marks, I flushed with the full sense of violation I would have had if she had been alive. As many bodies as I have investigated, never before had I felt so strongly the continuum between life and death. It was too soon for Madeleine Riordan to become merely an object of investigation. I had come to talk to her; how could she be …
Gently I replaced her clothes and covers. I looked at Madeleine’s back, not expecting to find anything, and was not surprised. Then I laid her down and called the dispatcher to notify the coroner.
As Raksen worked, I checked the closet—nothing but a couple pairs of sweats, and a single dress. I went over the room again. And when the coroner arrived, I stepped outside and stood staring into the canyon, thinking of the woman I had visited last night, who’d told me how awkward it was to talk to friends. Now I saw her as I’d seen her then, taut from a spasm of pain, her fingers digging with all her strength into the dog’s coat for support, for comfort.
And I thought of someone coming in through that unlocked door and smothering her with her own pillow, and I could imagine her fear, her fury fighting back with arms too weak to do more than prolong her fear—no, not fear, to prolong her outrage.
Suddenly I laughed. “Bullshit!” she would have said at the arrogance of my t
hinking I knew what she felt. I swallowed hard, trying to force down emotions and deal just with the investigation. I pictured her body as a Homicide officer does. And the question that left me was, Why? She was going to die in a month or so. She had a book on suicide in her drawer, so chances were she might have killed herself sooner. All her killer had to do was wait. Why had she/he bothered to kill her now? Just like Michael Wennerhaver had demanded: Why now?
And if Madeleine had called me here because she suspected she would be killed—if I was not making that up out of the cloth of my own need—I would never know. But I would damned well find her killer.
CHAPTER 8
FROM THE PATROL CAR I called the dispatcher. He had informed the Evening Watch commander, Lieutenant Davis. Doyle was on his way to the station. He would coordinate the investigation from there, dealing with the hospital, and the coroner once he finished here. Soon we’d have enough manpower to secure the scene around Madeleine’s room, do preliminary interviews with witnesses, and canvass the neighbors, and a scene supervisor to keep track of it all.
I hurried back down around the house to the cottage companionway. Pereira was standing with Michael and the frizzle-haired woman, Delia McElhenny. Raksen was inside Madeleine’s room setting up his camera stand. “Take one shot of the window to the canyon, Raksen, then pull the shade back down. We don’t want to have everyone on the far rim calling the Kensington station.”
Outside, on the companionway, Michael’s pager buzzed. A red light came on at the edge of the roof.
Michael looked from the light to the closed door beside him. “Claire! God, she must be terrified.”
Delia caught his arm. “You stay with Coco. I’ll see to Claire.”
“No. She’ll be expecting me. She’ll be—”
“Michael,” Delia said with authority, “I can handle this.”
Clearly, he had no choice. “Make sure she knows that I’ll still be around for her. I’ll be in and out of her room every time she needs something.”
She squeezed his arm before releasing it. “Of course, Mike. I’m sure she knows that, but she’ll be comforted to hear it anyway.” She knocked perfunctorily, opened the door, and walked inside. I motioned Pereira in after her. In delicate situations like that we don’t like to intrude, but we’re not about to leave two witnesses alone together before we’ve interviewed them.
I remembered Madeleine mentioning Claire, scornfully describing her as “one of those traditional ladies, trained to be polite, remain pure, and never create unpleasantness. A product of the days when purity was all.” No doubt Claire would be frightened. Anyone would in her position, alone in a nursing home, never knowing when staff would come in, or in her case never sure when a large dog would bound in. She was completely dependent on the staff for her care. And now they had let a younger, more vibrant woman die. I wondered what Delia would tell her. There had to be a standard line; it was a situation nursing home personnel faced all the time. And at least here, the dead woman hadn’t breathed her last in the next bed as would have been the case in many places.
The door to Claire’s room shut. Michael released the dog’s collar and brushed the dog hairs off his freshly pressed jeans. That compulsive neatness (or what those of us familiar with dogs think of as compulsive behavior in the undoggy) was something I would have expected of Madeleine Riordan. Before I’d seen her with Coco sprawled on her bed, I would have pictured her living in cold beige rooms, furnished with hard chairs and not many of them, and all of it spotlessly clean. Sterile. I would never have imagined her opening her door to a carrier of fleas and loose hairs.
To Michael I said, “The residents can call you anywhere on the grounds here?”
He nodded.
“Then let’s use your room to talk in.” Before he could protest, I added, “It’ll be quicker for you to get back here in case Claire needs you.” And I would get a clearer picture of him as he reacted to his own place while he talked to me—and a better sense if there was anything hidden in there.
He unlocked a burglar’s special—one of those doors with the glass on top—by the path and led me into a basement room. It might once have been a tool space or wine cellar for one-glass-with-dinner people. Mostly what it looked like was a college dorm room. I cataloged it in my mind as if I were taking notes. Narrow bed covered by green plaid spread next to the inside wall. Reading light over pillow. Bookshelf high on the wall over the bed—an invitation to maiming in earthquake country. Three drawer dresser with peeling black paint against back wall; on it were statues of the Virgin Mary in flowing robes and Parvati, consort to the Hindu god Siva, in belly dancer garb and stance.
“An unusual pairing,” I said to Michael.
A smirk crept onto his face. “The old nuns at St. Sadists gave me the Mary when I graduated, because I’d been such a good boy, which meant because they’d taught me to cower and grovel so well. Parvati I got on my own.”
“Because they’d be so appalled?”
Michael giggled. “They’d flip their habits if they knew their prize boy ever thought of women like that.”
I continued my survey. Next to the dresser stood a slanted wire bookcase with shaving kit, change, hair dryer on top. And a bottle of prescription medication, for poison oak. Beyond that was a desk with a pile of textlike books on the nearest side. The six-by-twelve cell ended with a wooden door in the far wall, with a latch locked.
“What’s in there?” I asked lightly, turning the desk chair around to sit down.
“Bathroom. I share it with Delia.”
“You keep the bathroom door locked?”
He shrugged. “Delia’s an old hippie. Her view of private property is hazy.” He winced, and I had the feeling the line he’d just given me was one he’d used before when describing Delia to his friends, and that it had flashed on him it wouldn’t get as good a reaction from the police. “It’s not that she’d steal anything important, but if I left the door open I could never count on having a pencil or”—he shuddered—“even my toothbrush.” He was wearing those five-dollar Chinese black cotton shoes with the thin rubber soles. He sat on the bed and wiggled his feet to slip off the shoes. They stuck. His round face scrunched into a look of exasperation as he bent and yanked them off, then pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged. There was an awkwardness about his movements, as if he were still an adolescent who hadn’t adjusted to his latest spurt of growth. I looked at his hands but there was no sign of poison oak.
“Michael,” I asked, “were you close to Madeleine?”
He leaned forward and absently pulled the bedspread up around his socked toes. I was expecting him to answer “Yes.” He had told me he cared about all the patients here and in the nursing homes he’d worked before. But I wasn’t prepared for him to stare down at the bunched bedspread, press his knuckles into the fabric, and mutter, “I don’t know how I’m going to get along without her. She—” His voice caught. He swallowed. “Sorry. It’s just that Madeleine is the first person who thought I was something special, someone with a future. She was my sponsor.”
I waited, letting him talk at his own pace. The room was cold. He had a space heater next to the desk. It didn’t look like it would do much.
He let go of the bedspread and leaned back against the wall that doubled as headboard. “You’ve probably heard about the Professional Coalition Scholarship?”
I had, vaguely, but I decided to let him explain.
“It’s a full scholarship to graduate school. The Professional Coalition—they have a hundred members in Berkeley, each one of them has a different profession—and they give this scholarship each year. Madeleine”—he shut his eyes and took a deep breath—“Madeleine nominated me. She shepherded my application through the whole process. She told them how I had worked at nursing homes all through college, even when I could have gotten better-paying jobs. How I did it because I cared that someone should be there for people who don’t have anyone else. She convinced them it was something special, tha
t I was special, and that I would make a difference as a doctor.”
“How many candidates were there?” I wondered just how big a commitment this shepherding of Madeleine’s had been.
“A lot. I was astonished when I won. I mean some of the guys were really good. Madeleine really went out on a limb for me. I don’t know what all she did, but I do know that she said that medicine has lost the sense of what it should be. Doctors are too interested in exotic research or just plain wealth.” He looked up at me, a watery smile playing on his face. “She said if your dog is old and in pain you can get the vet to come out and put him to sleep; you can hold his head in your lap while he slips away. ‘You’ll never get anything that humane yourself,’ she said. I guess they believed her; her husband is a vet.”
Madeleine was one to know; she hadn’t gotten that kind of treatment from her husband, the vet. I made a mental note to tell Doyle before he interviewed him. He’d need to find out what exactly made Madeleine leave home and come here to die.
“She told them,” Michael continued, “that they owed it to their friends, their children, their country to support a decent student who wanted to be a caring doctor.” He shrugged. “She convinced them. So I start medical school next semester.”
“Her death won’t affect that?”
He glared at me. “Of course it will. My triumph would have been hers. She would have cared about my courses. Discussed them with me. I could have shared everything. She’s the only person who ever really thought I was worth something. Now there’s no one to care. Oh, I’ll go on to school. I owe her that. And, well, I’ve worked really hard for this chance. Even if I’d had the money, which I no way did, I don’t know that any school would have accepted me without her influence. She was the key … to everything.” He swallowed. “Everything.”