by Susan Dunlap
“You don’t have family?”
He squeezed his eyes shut; he looked like an adolescent fighting the last vestige of childhood and yet desperately wanting to hang on to it. “They’re back east. They couldn’t help me through college, much less medical school. I’ve always had to work. Even if you’re not taking a full load of classes, it’s not easy to spend four nights a week on duty in a nursing home and make respectable grades.” He glared at me through watery eyes.
I nodded slowly, using the time to look at him. He was average height, not heavy, but not ever likely to be too thin. His dark hair was parted in the middle, blown back around round cheeks and a full-lipped mouth. There was nothing in his appearance at all similar to tall, slender Madeleine Riordan. I could recall seeing Madeleine a few years ago when she was thinner than normal, when her cheekbones looked like they’d break her skin. Michael Wennerhaver would never have a visible cheekbone. But his tone, or was it his mannerisms, or his choice of words; something about him was just like Madeleine. I wondered if that similarity was what had first attracted her to his potential: a bit of herself for posterity? The son she’d never had? Or had Michael unconsciously mimicked his mentor? Whichever, the bond between them seemed to have been strong enough that she might have revealed her intentions, her fears, whatever made her too dangerous to live. His first reaction to her death was to cry out: “Why now?”
“Michael, did Madeleine ever talk about fearing death?”
“She wouldn’t have done it.” His face reddened. “She wouldn’t kill herself. Not now! Not without talking to me! She’s the only person who’s cared about me in years. She wouldn’t do this to me!” He yanked the bedspread up and wiped it roughly across his eyes. He was sobbing now.
There was nothing I could do. Grief takes its own time. I recalled Michael when I’d first seen him last night, when he was trying to keep me away from Madeleine. Now, knowing her, having heard him, I could understand his fierce protectiveness. Still, it was interesting that he had assumed suicide.
It made me wonder about her husband, the veterinarian. “Did she talk about her husband?”
“You mean problems with him? No. I mean he didn’t even bother to bring her here this time. She got someone to drive her over. Her husband hasn’t been to see her once. It’s like she was a dog he sent to the kennel! No, worse—at least you take your dog there yourself. He didn’t even bother to do that.”
“So maybe there were problems.”
He laughed, a high, awkward croak. “Was she so depressed about him that she killed herself?” he asked mockingly.
“Maybe he wanted her out of the way?”
“Well, she was. She was here.”
“Why didn’t he visit her?” I insisted.
“Because he’s an asshole.” He swallowed and said, “Actually, I never met the guy, and Madeleine didn’t talk about him, so who knows?”
“Well, did she have any other visitors?”
“None I saw.”
I was getting nothing. I’d have to bait the hook. Leaning forward I said, “So in a sense, Michael, you were her closest friend?”
“I guess.”
“This isn’t going to be public knowledge for a while, and I have to ask you not to tell anybody, anybody.” I waited till he nodded solemnly as do all but the most jaded witnesses at that invitation into the inner circle. “Madeleine may have been murdered. And we have to treat this like a murder investigation. So, Michael, what could lead to her being killed?”
He fingered the bedspread, slowly shaking his head.
I could have kicked him. Or myself. When that inner circle gambit fails, it bombs. I thought of Madeleine sitting in Claire’s room, holding Coco. “Michael, Madeleine spent a lot of time sitting with Claire. Maybe she talked to Claire about something threatening her?”
Michael’s eyes widened as if I had suggested something horrifying, or at least, indecent. I had to struggle to keep a straight face. He looked away, and wiped his eyes, this time with his hand rather than the bedspread. The process took longer than it had to—he was camouflaging his reaction. The Michael who’d told me he’d worried whether Claire would make it through the night was not likely to admit he was appalled at the idea of Madeleine’s confiding in her. He looked up. “Sorry. I don’t know what Madeleine talked to Claire about, of course.”
I noted that he viewed their conversations as one-way affairs. “But, do you think she would have confided her concerns to Claire?”
Now he looked directly at me. “No. The only thing she talked about that upset her was her mother. Her mother died in a nursing home. Not a place like this, but one of those places that smell of urine, where you hear people down the hall wailing all night.”
People we assume will never be ourselves. “Did that make Madeleine afraid?”
“No. Not afraid. Guilty, even though she had no reason to be. She couldn’t help. It was right after her car accident. She was in the hospital herself. There was nothing she could do.”
Nothing she could do. Like Madeleine’s husband, I thought, only his distance was by choice. Maybe. I stood up, and used the moment to check out the bookshelf over the bed. Medical books, anatomy, physiology, some ologies I couldn’t place, the type of words you wouldn’t want to hear from your own doctor. On top of Gray’s Anatomy, Biochemistry II, and several ringed notebooks was a pile of magazines. I smiled. “So not all hard work here, huh?”
He looked up at the magazines and blushed. “Oh, them. They’re just stuff I’ve taken from some of the old guys’ rooms after they died.”
I didn’t respond.
“No, it’s true. I mean their children don’t want to think the patriarch, the man who bounced them on his knee, was reading Playboy, or Hustler, or Western Gun Digest.”
I said nothing.
“Look, most adult children assume their old parents have no interest in sex. Like everything dries up when they come here. But getting old doesn’t make you impotent. Our residents remember what it was like. They have fantasies. Sometimes we even have romances here. That’s great for them. They love it.”
I turned back to the dresser and picked up the poison oak medication. “The canyon’s a bad spot for someone allergic to poison oak.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Do you go down there much?”
“No. I’m very allergic.”
I let my question lie between us a moment, then asked, “How do you feel about meter maids?”
He stared at me a moment. I couldn’t tell whether he was really baffled or just putting on a good act. Then he adjusted his face into a smile that wouldn’t have fooled anyone and said, “Actually, I’m grateful to them, or at least to the guy who’s after them. One of the men upstairs says he paid so many tickets if he doesn’t write checks to the city he feels like his week is wasted. He can’t wait to read about the latest meter maid stunt, and talk it over with everyone. They all just love it. Starts them thinking about what they’d like to do. Thinking about new things, planning; it’s good for them. I just hope the stunts keep up till baseball season starts again.”
Meter maid assaults as an extra nine innings for shut-ins; I figured I wouldn’t mention that to Eckey. I gave Michael the usual warnings. I’d have Murakawa take his official statement tomorrow. Maybe a man would get a different angle from him. There was something Michael Wennerhaver was hiding. Lots of witnesses hide things that have nothing to do with the investigation, things we don’t care about at all but to them are scarlet A’s. Michael probably would have given a lot to keep me from coming across the girlie and gun publications. But what interested me was the poison oak medication. He could, of course, become infected in the yard, or if he touched wet sap on the dog’s fur. But if he went into the canyon regularly …
I didn’t see him setting up meter maids to provide a diversion for the old residents. But loners like Michael Wennerhaver raise suspicions. A loner who resented the narrowness of his life was just the type for our perp. And the old man upstairs wi
th all those parking tickets, did he still drive? Or did someone get those tickets for him?
CHAPTER 9
WHEN I STEPPED BACK outside into the yard between the main house and the cottage where Madeleine Riordan died, I wondered why I’d bothered telling Raksen to pull Madeleine’s shade back down. To avoid drawing attention? Fat chance of that. Lights were clipped on every protruding surface around the backyard and over the path. The place looked like a movie set. Patrol officers were hunched over, eyeing the steep ground for signs of an intruder none of us expected them to find. Too many feet had run down the path and onto the companionway. The best we could hope for would be to find an item the killer dropped—preferably something like a driver’s license.
Michael Wennerhaver took one look, hurried down the path, and knocked on Claire’s door. He was halfway in before Heling, who had replaced Pereira in there, cautioned him.
Inspector Doyle would be at the station by now, coordinating background checks, talking to the doctor, going over the notes from the preliminary interviews, and taking witnesses’ final statements.
Murakawa was on the companionway. Today he was back on patrol, just another patrol officer. But something of the bond between us from last night’s hostage operation still held. I wondered if he had seen Madeleine Riordan’s body and if he, too, had thought of the deflated dummy in the canyon. If so, he didn’t let on. I gave him a summary of my interview with Wennerhaver. “You can take him to the station,” I said. “And tell Doyle Riordan’s husband didn’t bring her to Canyonview. According to Wennerhaver, someone else brought her, and the husband hasn’t visited.”
Murakawa nodded. Anyone who didn’t know him so well would have missed the slight judgmental pursing of the lips.
“Where is the woman in the sunburst suit?”
“Basement door at the far side of the main house. Right up there.” He pointed to a light just beyond the corner.
Pereira met me at the door, with her notes from Delia McElhenny’s preliminary statement in hand. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her. “To begin with,” Pereira said with an undercurrent of disgust in her voice, “she’s not even a nurse. She’s picked up some knowledge—well, who wouldn’t, running a place like this for five years—but no degree. Says she purposely avoided it—as if nursing degrees arrived at the door like Jehovah’s Witnesses and you have to be on the lookout so you don’t open up.” Pereira, who had gone to school in a district that has since been taken over financially by the state, who’d worked her way to a B.S. in economics, had little patience for … well, the truth was, Pereira had little patience, period. Michael Wennerhaver was more sanguine about his hardships than she, but then Michael was headed to medical school, and Connie Pereira might never make it into the elevated realms of finance that so fascinated her. “Seems, Smith, that she owns the place. Seems she inherited it from her parents. Seems,” she said, disdain dripping from her words, “she’s forty-eight years old and still living in the room she took over when she was fifteen, and probably wearing the same clothes.”
I nodded. Suddenly, tie-dyed dresses, skirts, tights, and shirts were for sale all along Telegraph Avenue. Twenty-plus years after it had faded into the sartorial purgatory of bell-bottoms and micro-miniskirts, tie-dye burst into bloom, like plants on a burned-out hillside. What had rekindled the dormant seeds of tie-dye, no one seemed to know. Or what kept the shopkeepers and street vendors displaying it. Despite its massive availability, Delia McElhenny was one of the few people I’d seen actually wearing it.
“Seems like,” Pereira went on, “what she’s most concerned about with this homicide is liability.”
“By which she means financial liability?”
“Right. Not that she has an alibi for the last few hours. Of course she’s got no idea who went in or out of Riordan’s room, even though lifting her head to look out her window could have shown her. She admits she was around all day. Doing what, you might ask, since she provides none of the care? A little cooking. ‘Mostly hanging out’—that’s a quote.”
I stifled a laugh. In the Pereirian lexicon hanging out was about as acceptable a use for time as shopping for tie-dye.
“The woman has raised irresponsibility to an art form, Smith. Not only does she keep herself too ignorant to provide any care for her people here, but she’s even had the cottage windows walled up on this side so she won’t know what’s going on in their rooms. And the contract the residents sign—they’re part owners as long as they live—”
“Like residential term insurance?”
“Sort of. It’s all legal, I’m sure. Residents can do whatever they want in their rooms—hire a nurse, or refuse medical care—it’s no business of Delia’s. And when they croak, she resells the room.”
“Any incentive to help them along faster?”
“I assume you want me to check. She must get something, and the way she lives, even a little would help. But the thing is, Smith, you could offer her title to the entire city of Berkeley and it wouldn’t get her moving! Even so, she doesn’t gain much. Basically what she’s got here is the dying making her house payment and supplying her enough to live on if she doesn’t have any fancy plans, which, of course, she’s too lazy to come up with.”
“So, Connie,” I said, reaching for the door, “you think she’ll still be awake when I get in there?”
“It could take a trained detective to tell.”
I stood for a moment, mentally stepping back from Pereira’s view of McElhenny. Chances were I would concur with Pereira—she was a good judge of character. She sized up a suspect with the care she gave a stock option or a pork belly future. It was only after she’d made her judgment that she dumped the pork bellies in the pigsty and carried on about the stench.
I knocked on Delia McElhenny’s door and walked in.
The room was perfect for the woman Pereira had described; it could have suited any teenager in the sixties. The double bed was jammed against an inside wall and covered with a Madras plaid bedspread that must have spent the past thirty years bleeding out its colors. Now it was a dull orange. On the white block panel walls were splatterings of fingerprints and an Everly Brothers poster so old I was surprised the paper survived. The cement floor (painted black) held an orange rya rug. Delia McElhenny looked up from one of those barrel chairs that were popular only long enough to remind people that barrels are best used to transport liquids.
I introduced myself, decided against a swinging hammock chair in favor of a beanbag, and sat. “Why would Madeleine Riordan have been killed?”
I’d hoped to startle a response, but clearly in the world of the slothlike I was up against a pro. She gave a small shrug. “Got me. I don’t even know why she came back here. If she was going to die, why couldn’t she have done it in her own house?”
I realized, with a start, that I was the one who was surprised. Despite Pereira’s characterization of McElhenny, I recalled Delia from the firm but gentle way she handled Michael outside Madeleine’s room. At some level, I had been prepared to see beneath Pereira’s description to find a sensitive, mature woman. But Delia wasn’t letting me. Her reaction to Madeleine’s death here was a complaint, seemingly aimed at the powers that be. But it was one thing to which Delia McElhenny had allotted thought. “Why did she come back here?”
She merely shrugged.
“She was here before this time? When?”
Delia ran a hand through her long wiry red hair, pulling a clump loose from the band that held it. The red, blue, green, purple, and yellow tie-dye she was wearing appeared to be pajamas, but might, in fact, have been her all-occasion wear. “Madeleine bought her room in July. She stayed here through a ten-week bout of chemo, then she went home.”
“If you don’t offer anything she couldn’t arrange at home, why didn’t she stay at home?”
“Got me,” she said sliding down in the chair.
“No, Delia,” I snapped, “not good enough. There has to be some reason people spend a
lot of money to live here. You run this place; what’s the draw?”
A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. It seemed a great effort. A myriad of sun wrinkles around her unadorned eyes suggested a long and close acquaintance with the out-of-doors. For someone with more muscle tone I would have guessed long hours spent cycling or hiking; however, from the look of her, her idea of serious exercise was turning over on a beach towel. But then laid-back and well-preserved are terms rarely used in the same sentence. “A number of residents come here to take control of their lives, and to avoid all the family psychological baggage that gets unpacked when someone’s dying.”
That sounded like a quote from an oft-given spiel. “But Madeleine—?”
“Who knows? She wasn’t profligate with her confidences.”
I smiled. Sluglike Delia would have driven her crazy. “Maybe she confided in Claire. She spent a lot of time in Claire’s room, right?” The question had worked with Michael; it was worth a try here.
She laughed.
“Why not?” I demanded, exasperated.
But if Delia noted my tone, she showed no reaction. Probably she’d seen exasperation so frequently she assumed it was the norm of conversation. She leaned back, running her fingers through the ends of her red curls and then letting the hair wrap around the fingers. “Madeleine would never have confided in Claire.”
“Why not, Delia?”
“Well, the thing is it’s probably just political. In the social sense, I mean, rather than political political. I mean, Claire is pretty old school. She was a teacher at Minton before I got to school. She’s not one to shake things up.”
“You went to Minton?” I should have kept the amazement out of my voice. I failed. Minton was a conservative private girls’ high school. Minton girls married doctors, or became corporate lawyers or interior decorators. Minton girls did not spend their lives in basements or run ersatz nursing homes where they might have to listen to patients and, when the staff didn’t show up, handle bodily secretions. Minton girls didn’t acknowledge the existence of bodily secretions. And above all, they didn’t look like Delia McElhenny.