Time Expired

by Susan Dunlap

  “Yeah, I was a Minton Girl. If you saw my freshman picture, you wouldn’t recognize me. But everything changed after we had the Minton Hall demonstration.” Anyone else would have leaned forward eagerly, but Delia settled lower in the chair. If memories of the watershed event in her life couldn’t animate her, I suspected nothing would. “You probably don’t even remember hearing of it. But at Minton it was like the line between B.C. and A.D.”

  “Actually, I do know about it.” It had been well before I’d come to California. When Delia was in high school, I’d have been carrying a little plastic shovel and bucket and making sand castles on the Jersey shore. But it doesn’t do to be a Berkeley detective without knowing the city’s history. The Minton Hall demonstration was a very minor part of it—an antiwar demonstration, it followed the even less likely event of a group of Minton girls hiding the state government’s most sought-after antiwar planner in the Hall. Cisco, the guy was called. A faculty committee called the governor’s office. The state police arrived. Students surrounded the building. The standoff lasted less than an hour, but it was enough time for Cisco to escape. “Were you one of the collaborators?”

  “I wish I had been. But I didn’t even know about it until the cops got there. In fairness, even if I’d had the opportunity, I didn’t care enough about the war to be bothered. It wasn’t till I saw a friend get clubbed that things changed for me. Until then I thought government was there to protect me.” For the first time she looked me right in the eye. “I’ve never made that mistake again.”

  “And Claire?”

  “She was on the faculty committee.”

  “Is that the reason why she and Madeleine were at odds—different basic outlooks?”

  Delia slumped back in the chair. “It’s just an example of it. I’m fond of Claire; she’s a sweet woman. When she was a girl, being a teacher was about as assertive as a woman could get. But she taught in a very protected environment; she never had to take a chance. Every decision she’s made has been for the status quo. I mean, if she hadn’t been the English Chair, I could easily have seen her with flour on her hands and an apron around her waist all day. Except that she’s much too timid and prudish to ever have married, much less gotten naked with anyone, man or woman. It’s all she can do to let me help her bathe. And even then she’s so modest it takes me twice as long as it should. But that’s the way she was brought up.”

  “I’ll need to talk to her.”

  “Not tonight,” she said emphatically. “Madeleine’s death really shook her up. I gave her a sedative. I mean, she took it; I just suggested it, like anyone would.”

  I almost laughed. Either Delia was abnormally wary of being sued, or the line that allowed her to run a no-fault non-nursing home was entirely too narrow to walk. I could understand her position here. I could see Michael’s, and maybe the rest of the residents, but for someone like Madeleine coming back here just made no sense at all. “Delia, Madeleine moved here when she was apparently well enough to stay home, right?”

  Delia nodded.

  “She had no visitors, right?”

  Again she nodded.

  “But she did spend time sitting in Claire’s room with Coco. If she wasn’t talking about her plans or her fears, if she didn’t even like Claire, why was she sitting in there?”

  For the first time Delia smiled, the kind of smile I would have hated to see on my own caretaker. “She was torturing Claire. You see, Claire hates dogs.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I LEANED BACK IN Delia’s beanbag chair, shifting my butt to make the beans rewedge themselves enough to provide a decent seat. Delia was smiling, presumably at the thought of Madeleine Riordan sitting with Coco at the end of Claire’s bed evening after evening torturing the old woman. I wriggled the concept around like beans in the chair, but it didn’t fit. Not for Madeleine. Even with her cane, Madeleine Riordan was a woman always on the move, if not physically, at least mentally poised to jump. She wasn’t one to sit silently hour after hour bullying a woman when she could have gotten the same effect with one swat of her tongue. Fatal disease may make some people less vindictive. If they’re still out to get their neighbor, it doesn’t change their M.O.

  The passive-aggressive approach Delia described was in fact more suited to Delia. But there was something beneath Delia’s comment. I didn’t know whether it would reveal a layer of Madeleine or of Delia herself. Careful to conceal my excitement, I asked, “Delia, what would make you think Madeleine was that angry?”

  Delia wrapped a lock of wiry red hair around her finger absently observing the process. “I’ve seen her, talking about her cancer. She was furious.”

  “Furious at?”

  She leaned toward me. “Medicine. People’s carelessness. The laws of the universe. See, the thing was that she’d been real responsible about taking care of herself, going to checkups, doing self-exams, getting mammograms. She had a mammogram one year. ‘Everything looks fine,’ they said. ‘Come back in a year.’ And when she went back—almost a year to the date—they found not only a tumor, but cancer that had spread all the hell over. Inoperable.”

  “Oh shit!” I swallowed, turning away from Delia. There was a draft from under the door; it chilled my ankles. I couldn’t imagine what Madeleine must have felt—I didn’t want to probe deep enough, personally enough into the possibility of death ambushing me to experience the dread, anger, the rock-bottom fear she must have had—but fury seemed a reasonable reaction to me. When I turned back to Delia, her skin was pale, her face taut, and she was unconsciously holding her shoulders high and tight—probably mirroring me. Our eyes met briefly and in that moment I could feel the balance between us shift from authority-and-subject to two women sharing a small stab of grief and a pile of fear. We both swallowed. I took a breath, gratefully refocused on the steps of the interview, and asked, “Did Madeleine blame her doctor?”

  “Her doctor, the lab, the government. She said the country spends more research money looking for a cure for baldness than breast cancer.” Delia settled back again, but the tension didn’t leave her body. Her shoulders poked into the barrel cushion and her arms hit her thighs at an awkward angle. “Maybe meditation would have helped. I know people who’ve had tumors shrink. But Madeleine couldn’t get beyond her anger.”

  If anything could blast apart Madeleine’s facade of control, discovering she’d been ambushed by cancer should have triggered it. I could picture Madeleine laying into the woman who took the mammogram, the technicians who read it, and the doctor responsible for it all. I could imagine her biting off the heads of well-meaning friends. My only surprise was that she tolerated having a sort-of landlady like Delia who blamed her for not overcoming her illness. Everything is in your mind; therefore, everything is your fault. Therefore, it won’t happen to me. “Tell me about her anger. Was it spurts of fury or a low-burning rage, the kind that’s always there threatening to burst into flame but never really does? Was she still angry the day before she died?”

  “Smoldering, that’s exactly it,” Delia said, clearly surprised. “She could have taken my head off any minute. Like my mother, always ready to tell me I was doing it wrong, or not doing it enough.”

  “So even when she wasn’t saying anything, her presence carried with it unspoken condemnation?”

  Delia jolted forward. It was the most animated I’d seen her. “Yeah. How’d you know? There was no chance of doing anything well enough; the only question was how much of a mess I’d make, how late I’d be with it, how …” She shrugged. “I just gave up.”

  I didn’t tell her that I’d had a grandmother just like that. But I’d been luckier than Delia. I’d spent only my summers with my grandmother. Every June my parents would drop me off with dutiful instructions to be good. Grandma would shake her head and settle in to tighten up the slack they had allowed during the winter. Each summer was worse than the last; each winter I swore no one could make me go back again. I’ll never know whether I would have held out the year I w
as eleven; before school was over, while I was still swearing, my grandmother had a stroke. I only saw her once more, in the nursing home, and then I was sure every one of her complaints, every fetid smell, every moan and howl down the hall, was my fault.

  I knew how Delia felt, but if she expected sympathy, I was the wrong person to tell she’d defeated her bully by giving up.

  I couldn’t resist saying: “Maybe she could do things better.” With Delia the possibility didn’t seem out of reach.

  “I’m sure she thought she could.” Delia shrugged, pushed forward, and rested her tie-dyed forearms lower on her tie-dyed thighs. “We had it out eventually. The way I saw things, she corrected everything I did. But for every correction she made there were probably twenty she bit back. She was almost choking on things she didn’t say. In her eyes, she should have been sainted for restraint.”

  I laughed, uncomfortably; Delia’s method of handling the household tyrant had some advantages. “Was Madeleine like that—a dormant volcano that could blow any time?”

  “Blow and smother you in lava without even noticing.”

  “All that suppressed passion,” I murmured. “Contained, boiled down till the taste burns your tongue.” I thought of Howard when he’d worked undercover, gone for weeks at a time, and of the nights he came back, and the days before those nights, days when no matter what I was doing I could almost feel the ridges of his chest, the hardness of his body against mine. And when he finally got back … But what did Madeleine do with her passion? Delia, of course, wouldn’t know. Instead, I asked, “So, Delia, then what is it that brought Madeleine back to Canyonview?”

  Delia didn’t know that either. I rephrased the question twice, but if she had any notions she didn’t put them into words. Earlier I would have attributed her lack of response to laziness; but Delia McElhenny was more than a woman so laid-back she’d flattened into nothing; she was a careful observer; she carried a grudge like a raw egg in a spoon race; and she’d been savvy enough to arrange to live in a very desirable Berkeley neighborhood and let other people support her. If something or someone threatened her life here, I suspected she wouldn’t “just give up.”

  I left her with the usual warnings and walked back down the companionway between Madeleine’s and Claire’s rooms and stared into the almost total darkness, wondering about Madeleine. That contained passion of hers was, of course, her strength. No one who had been seared by comments, her prevolcanic sparks, was likely to wait around for the major eruption. But what was at the core of it?

  I had the feeling that I was dealing not so much with a case of a murderer stalking in and killing her as one where her very being drew her murderer to her. And if I could find the core of that being, I’d find the killer.

  I sighed. It’d be a damned sight easier to track down a murderer than to uncover the secrets of Madeleine Riordan’s soul!

  Turning back, I knocked softly on Claire’s door. Heling opened it. The woman in the bed was asleep. I put my finger to my mouth; Heling walked back to her seat at the foot of the bed, half hidden behind a Chinese screen, and sat. I wondered if that was how Madeleine had spent her time in here, except that Madeleine would have been holding Coco. Tormenting Claire because of a thirty-year-old political difference? Hardly.

  The room was about two thirds the size of Madeleine’s. Whereas Madeleine’s had the sense of tasteful efficiency, with its framed Sierra Club posters, small red carpet, and straight-backed chair, Claire’s room reminded me of a guest room in the home of a relative you don’t visit often. Doilies, ceramic figurines ever in danger of breaking, ruffled white curtains. The sheets were decorated with tiny flowers, and the blanket was baby yellow. The woman in the bed looked like the dictionary illustration of “maiden aunt.”

  Whatever compelled Madeleine to return to Canyonview, I just couldn’t believe it was in this frivolous room.

  Nodding to Heling, I walked back across the companionway. In contrast to Claire’s doilies and dust ruffles, Madeleine’s room seemed refreshingly stark and even her method of death sensible, convenient, no fluff—make use of what’s available, slap it over her face.

  Grayson was sitting in her Shaker chair, checklist on his lap. Grayson! Damn! I’d suspected he’d be the scene supervisor here; still, what rotten luck. Or was it just bad karma? I was almost sorry I’d exercised that last touch of spite leaving his Hostage Negotiation report listed as late. Almost.

  I glanced at Madeleine’s bed and smiled. Madeleine would have left that report listed late, too.

  But Madeleine wouldn’t have had to wonder every time a call was delayed or report late for the rest of this case if it was Grayson getting his own back.

  Briefly, and with remarkable care on both sides, Grayson and I conferred. Neither of us mentioned the Hostage Negotiation report. “Pereira scanned the deceased’s checkbook and address book. Nada. We can’t contact Riordan’s husband, Dr. Timms. Patrol went by the house, no one there. Neighbors don’t know anything—no big fights, no hurried exits.”

  “Damn! What’s with the guy? His wife’s dying; he’s not here and he’s not home. Where is he?”

  “We’ll find him. Husbands of murder victims don’t stay gone.” Grayson shrugged off my frustration.

  I took a breath. I’d be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction of hearing me snap at him. “What about the neighbors here?” The backup units should have finished their rounds by now.

  “Zilch.”

  “Big surprise.”

  Grayson leaned back against the slats of his chair and took his time resting an ankle on the opposite knee. “So, Detective, you finished the room search? Seen everything you had to?” For the first time his voice was animated. He was leading me—somewhere.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You’re ready to sign off on it, so to speak?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t check under the bed, then?” His moustache twitched as if batting back a smile.

  I muttered, “No.”

  “Then you must have missed these.” Grayson dangled a pair of binoculars.

  I took them from him and silently moved to the window and let up the shade, partly to look out, and not in small part to have my back to him until I got over the worst of my humiliation. How could I have overlooked them? And to have Grayson of all people find them! By tomorrow morning this tale would be all over the station!

  But there was nothing I could do about that now. I adjusted the binoculars and looked into the canyon. It was too dark to see down. Rectangles of light from houses across the canyon blurred through filmy fans of oak or eucalyptus leaves. I moved the binoculars slowly counterclockwise, till I was nearly facing the bay, till the lights in the distance were too far to be more than an abstract pattern in black and gray. Then I refocused on the window directly across the canyon.

  Why had Madeleine come back here when she could have stayed home with her husband, the absent veterinarian? What made the lava boil? Or freeze? When I turned back to Grayson, I was smiling. “There is only one window visible across the canyon.” Maybe the answer wouldn’t be there, but what was there was a telescope pointing at Madeleine’s window.

  CHAPTER 11

  MADELEINE RIORDAN HAD LEFT her home and husband to live in a single room among people who, with the probable exception of Michael Wennerhaver, she either didn’t care about or actively disliked. The one significant thing she’d brought with her was her husband’s binoculars.

  I didn’t picture her returning to Canyonview to watch birds.

  With binoculars Madeleine Riordan might have been able to peer into the canyon, into the lair of our parking pest. Had she seen something there she was considering telling me about? Had she needed time to decide whether to take that unnatural step? She would have hesitated to call us, her old adversaries. If you spend years embroiled in citizens’ complaints, you end up viewing the police as a passel of bullies who exist only to threaten and maim. And a crime has to be dire indeed before you’d p
ass them another club or bit of information. Harassing meter maids hardly fell into the dire category.

  Again the thought jabbed me: did she just need someone to talk to? Could she have been so lonely she’d abandon her principles for the sake of an hour’s visit? Or had she been stringing me along? Two days ago I would have accepted “stringing along” without question, just another antipolice maneuver in Madeleine Riordan’s life. But the imminence of death reveals layers people didn’t know they had, didn’t want to know.

  Or maybe the answer to my questions lay behind the telescope lens across the canyon.

  The far-side canyon is Kensington, in Contra Costa County. The affluent city is unincorporated, as its road pavement makes clear. (Of course, judging things on that basis, one would assume much of Berkeley was unclaimed by any governing body.) I called the dispatcher and left word with him to notify the Kensington police that I was heading over the line. Inspector Doyle would have been in touch about the hostage operation last night. The county line runs east-west through the canyon. When we went down there last night, we had no idea on which side of the line we’d find the action. And even after we had found the stash of tickets, we didn’t know which jurisdiction they were actually in nor were we likely to, without a whole lot more trouble than any of us wanted to go to. But the meter pranks were our case, the meter prankster our perp; with its tiny police force, Kensington would be glad to merely assist.

  I drove up to the Kensington shops and cut back to the rustic road that skirted the canyon. The Berkeley side of the canyon had streetlights, parking problems, and living room windows that faced onto the street. But here in Kensington, thick trees blocked out the sky. There were few streetlights, few blurs of light in street-side windows. I could have been in the mountains winding through roads made from pony express routes. Kensington homes perched like bobcats scanning the canyon for their prey.