by Susan Dunlap
“Nah. Too easy. Flaunt’s just a regular.”
“Flaunt?”
“Three FLT two something something. Damn, I don’t usually get so pissed off I lose a plate. Three FLT two eight … Damn! Flaunt’s a big one for letting his meter run out and hopping in his car just in time to pull out before we get to him. We know the vehicle’s been sitting there illegal for an hour.” She glared at me. “It’s a game to him, Smith. Then he drives around the corner and sits reading his paper until we get through here and move on.”
“Why don’t you turn the corner and collar him?”
“I circle the block, yeah. But I never get the bastard. I come back; he’s waiting. He lopes up and tosses another dime in the meter and gives me a big, fat grin. Tiress has nabbed him, but not me. Smith, the man’s got more time than sense.”
I nodded. Eckey spent her weekends at some kind of retreats that she claimed helped to keep her centered. She was the most diplomatic parking enforcement officer we had. But clearly Flaunt was responsible for a serious centrifugal relapse.
Eckey braced her right hand on her purple hip. “I ask you, what does the fool do that pays him enough to keep a Mercedes and gives him nothing more to do than spend his mornings sitting around watching for us? Whatever it is, it’s some kind of job I want.”
The reporters ambled back to their own vehicles—double-parked. The coffee crowd was dispersing into small discussion groups, doubtless to consider the fine points of the incident. Raksen pulled up behind the Mercedes and bent over the offending tire.
“Hey, what the hell … !” A tall, sandy-haired man in his late forties ran toward Raksen, waving both arms. The crowd turned toward him.
There are crowds and crowds. On Telegraph Avenue, with its mixture of students and street people, tourists and drug dealers, there’s always the danger of violence. But north Berkeley boasts a more mellow citizenry. This crowd was older; they’d seen it all before. And from the look of them they’d particularly seen this guy before. They were watching him, but they were smiling.
I dug in the glove compartment and handed Eckey a package of towelettes. “In case you’d like to freshen up.”
She ripped one open and started on her purple face. I’d thought she would climb into the car for her ablutions, but she was too intent on watching the scene.
I ambled over to it.
“Can’t have my car here all day!” the tall one screamed. I glanced back at Eckey. She grinned and mouthed “Flaunt.” “We won’t be any longer than necessary,” Murakawa told him.
Flaunt stepped toward Murakawa, who was nearly six feet. Flaunt towered over him.
“It’s already longer than necessary. I’ve got an appointment on the other side of town in fifteen minutes.” He looked down at Murakawa. “You guys put up so many traffic lights in this town you can’t get across it in less than a quarter of an hour.”
Eckey edged closer. She’d done a wipe and a promise on her face. Her skin was only slightly blue, the lines around her eyes bluer, and the creases beside her nose and mouth still purple. She looked like a caricature. I decided not to bring that to her attention.
Flaunt pulled keys from his pocket and waved them in Murakawa’s face. “I’ve got to leave—right now.”
Behind Flaunt, Eckey made “draw it out” motions to Murakawa.
Slowly Murakawa said, “Lower your keys and give me your reasoning, sir.” Murakawa’s dark brown hair flopped over his forehead. His wide-set eyes looked relaxed. But there was no compromise in his voice.
“I’m giving a workshop. I am the leader.”
“The leader,” Murakawa repeated straightfaced. Behind Flaunt, Eckey rolled her eyes.
“Take Responsibility for Your Life,” he announced.
Eckey’s eyes shot wide open. She let out a gurgle I took to be an unsuccessfully swallowed guffaw. But Flaunt was too busy staring at Murakawa to notice. The coffee drinkers eyed one another knowingly and started up the street. Clearly Flaunt did not hide his workshop under a barrel.
Behind me a tow truck rolled to a stop.
“What’s that?” Flaunt demanded. “Hey, you’re not going to tow away my car because one of your meter maids got sprayed by it. I had nothing to do with that.”
Eckey stepped around him. “We’re not saying you did, sir.” She was eye to eye with his bottom shirt button.
“Then, lady, you can’t tow it for that!”
She let a beat pass. “We’re not. Not for that. But our records indicate you have five outstanding parking warrants.”
“So?”
She tried to maintain cool composure, but the heat of victory won out and a smile crept back onto her face. “After five warrants”—she tilted her head up and looked Flaunt in the eye—“we tow.”
Tow truck drivers have the dexterity of jewelers and the speed of thieves. Flaunt was still screaming as the Mercedes lurched away behind the truck. Thirty seconds later he jumped in a cab (I suspected Eckey of calling it but didn’t ask). The last I saw of Flaunt he was leaning over the seat pointing at the Mercedes and shouting at the cab driver words I took to be “Follow that car!”
Raksen would do his number on the car, tire, and bag. I didn’t hold out hope for that. In any case, he wouldn’t be done for an hour or so.
We canvassed the crowd. No one admitted seeing the perp affix the explosive bag on Flaunt’s tire. At that time Flaunt himself had been inside Peet’s, boring a postal employee with recollections of his workshop.
No one in Berkeley was going to expose the parking perp. Everyone but Parking Enforcement loved him. The Robin Hood of the expired meter. Even I had mixed emotions. If the perp kept poking meter minders long enough, eventually he’d jab Elgin Tiress. That was one puncture I’d sure hate to miss. But the perp had staged the hostage negotiation fiasco and made fools of the entire team. I wasn’t about to let him get away with that. And I couldn’t shake the notion that the hostage setup in the canyon was connected to Madeleine Riordan’s death.
I stopped back at the station, made another try at Herbert Timms, D.V.M., and got no answer. Dammit, where was the man? Then I grabbed lunch—a chocolate shower sundae at Ortmann’s—and drove on to Canyonview to meet the woman Madeleine had spent her time tormenting.
This was one of those days when the fog never clears. Looking into the canyon, I could see where the common allusion to soup had arisen. The canyon looked like a huge tureen, and the fog in it, one of those chowders that had been thick and warm and wonderful the night before. Too good to have merely one bowl. Sufficiently heavy to weigh on you all night, viscous enough to have rolled as you did and when you lay on your side to pull your overstretched stomach down toward the bed. In the morning when you opened the fridge door looking for ice water to pour over the Alka-Seltzer, you would see that tureen holding a dirty beige congealed mass with wrinkled edges of mushroom and wizened celery slices. Or in the case of Cerrito Canyon, live oak branches.
At Canyonview I spotted Delia McElhenny through the front window of the main building. She was stalking across the room carrying a basket, and looking like one of the Furies. If this was her normal state, what caused the lethargy of last night? With Delia McElhenny I’d need a lot more data to make any final judgment. I kept moving around the side of the building to the rear cottage.
The light skimmed the surface of the canyon fog, reinforcing the image of congealed soup. Under my gaze the rubbery surface seemed to give way and the live oak branches shivered in the quickening wind. I could picture Madeleine Riordan sitting alone in her room, in the dark, staring down into the canyon. Seeing something someone assumed was safe from peering eyes. At the same time, across the canyon, Victor Champion would have been peering back at her.
I glanced at Claire’s door. From what little I knew of her, I didn’t picture her broaching the darkness, but perhaps one of those days while Madeleine sat next to her holding Coco just far enough away, Madeleine had talked about what she had seen. If, indeed, she had eve
r seen anything.
I knocked on Claire’s door. It was a moment before a shrill voice said, “Come in.”
I stepped inside. Again the feeling that struck me was of a guest room in the home of a distant relative, one of those aunts or older cousins who referred to me as Louisa’s daughter and never mentioned what I did for a living, or, more damning yet, where I did it. It was a room too pink, too ruffly, with too many ceramic statues waiting to be broken.
Claire fitted in perfectly. It took me a moment to realize that of course she would. It was her room; she owned it, she’d have decorated it. The foot-high ceramic dancing lady with real lace ruffles had probably come from her bedroom at home.
The head of the bed was beside the door. Claire lay against the raised pillow. Her gray hair was pinned up in a roll in the back. There was a softness to her features—none stood out on her still delicately made-up face. Despite being alone she wore a pink brocade bed jacket, and I wasn’t surprised to note its lace collar. Nor was I surprised to see the unfinished letter she’d put on the bedside table. Or the tape recorder softly playing Beethoven. What did startle me was the unlit cigarette next to it. In Berkeley adult smokers are rare as Republicans. The smell of old smoke mixed uncomfortably with powder and lilac perfume.
“I’m Detective Smith,” I said.
“About Madeleine’s passing,” she said in a quivering voice. She offered me one of those inappropriate smiles that dot formal female conversation. Pay no attention to me, they say. As the smile faded I could make out the edges of something beneath it. But I couldn’t make out what.
“Yes.” A flowered stuffed chair sat behind a paisley print screen by the foot of the bed. This had to be the chair Madeleine had been sitting in when Champion caught her expression of outrage. I pulled it up next to the bed, and wondered with a shiver if Victor Champion was now snapping pictures of me. Like Madeleine, would I become his possession in his darkroom? I glanced down at the chair leg. The fabric above the left leg was brown with rubbed-in dirt. It was the only less-than-immaculate spot in the room. I could picture Madeleine sitting here, holding Coco against the chair, him rubbing impatiently. The edge of the screen, too, was marked. At least some of the time, she must have kept Coco behind it. And Madeleine, had she enjoyed her power? Had she really tormented Claire? While she held Coco behind the screen, had she dangled the threat of bringing him closer, close enough to lick a hand Claire couldn’t get up to wash? Or had Madeleine, like most dog owners, just not been able to believe that anyone could not love her pet?
I decided to play the interview as if Claire and Madeleine had been friends. Sitting in the chair, I said to Claire, “Madeleine’s death must be a terrible loss for you.”
She looked directly at me. Her eyes were hazel and surrounded by so many lacy lines her skin looked in danger of tearing if she blinked. “I saw my parents die when I was young. And my brother twenty years ago, and then my sister five years ago. I nursed her for a year. I was retired then.” She spoke with that whine some people get with age, as if all the softness of their voices have dried out. She breathed in with difficulty. Emphysema? Automatically I glanced at the cigarettes. “Death’s faster than you think,” she said speaking more strongly. “They’re sitting in bed watching the morning quiz show one day and that night you hear the death rattle.” She switched on the smile again, fencing me out of whatever was beneath it. If by this time there was anything down there.
“When did you last see Madeleine?” I asked, trying to keep my tone conversational.
Her gaze drifted down to the smudge on the chair and back up to me. She pulled the edges of her bed jacket together and stared at me, her eyes moving back and forth nervously. “Too close.”
Was the event of Madeleine’s death too close to talk about? Or did she mean me? I pulled the chair back, but her brow didn’t relax, and her eyes kept moving. I could almost smell her fear mixed with the chalky sweet odor of her powder.
She glared at the smudge, and whispered, “He was too close.”
“Coco?”
“His breath smelled.” She wrinkled her nose, and lacy lines around her eyes deepened to furrows of fear. “He came right up to me. He touched me.” Her shoulders pulled in together, her head down toward them so I could barely see her neck. Her voice was just audible as she whispered, “I couldn’t keep him away.”
“And Madeleine knew how you felt?”
She nodded tightly. “She sat right there where you are.”
“And did she understand?” As soon as the words were out I heard the ridiculousness of the question. If Claire had looked like this, no one could fail to understand. Even Madeleine. If Claire had been a client of hers, Madeleine would have been outraged at this torment. What odd cut-off valve did Madeleine have in her mind? Madeleine had been unparalleled at defending the rights of street people, of protesters, of the defenseless; surely she should have been able to relate to Claire. Was Claire too bourgeois for her to care about? Or had she, the dog lover, simply seen Claire’s reaction as misguided, and been sure that exposure to Coco’s charms would loosen her up? “When you told Madeleine how you felt, did she keep him away?”
Without releasing her bed jacket she wrapped her arms tighter across her breasts, pulling the pink quilted fabric so taut I was sure it would rip. The words croaked from her throat. “She couldn’t. He sniffed her out.” Her watery eyes shifted to the doorway and back to me, and she laughed that little ladylike giggle.
Something scraped the window. Claire jolted, then laughed, a shrill nervous sound. I laughed, uneasily too, noting the palm frond as it took another swing. Had Madeleine steeled herself time after time as the frond scratched? I’d have to take another look at Champion’s pictures.
The door blew open a few inches with the gust. I turned, noting the latch on the inside, a latch Claire couldn’t walk to. And catching a glance of the cigarettes, it occurred to me that the unlockable door was a necessity. Delia, Michael, and even Madeleine had to have been able to make sure Claire hadn’t dropped a butt to smolder on the bedding. Still, anybody could have walked in. From the street, making their way quietly around the main house. Or up from the canyon. If Madeleine had sat in my chair partially behind the screen long enough to fill Claire with this kind of fear of Coco, what had she seen? Had Madeleine noticed something in the canyon? Maybe something she mentioned to Claire, or even pointed out to Claire. As upset as Claire was, I figured I’d better start with the most obvious. “Did you see the hostage operation down in the canyon Sunday night?”
“Hostage?” She released her arms from their armoring position. “He wasn’t a hostage. He was hiding out. We didn’t want him there.”
“Did you see him?” I asked, feeling the adrenaline rush you always get when a tack pays off.
“No, I didn’t see him,” she insisted, her voice firm now, angry. Her watery eyes looked more solid and she glared at me as if to say: any idiot should know that. It was a look I might have expected from Madeleine Riordan. “The students were out front screaming. They pulled at the chancellor’s fence, trying to tear it down. Nice young ladies—they had been before—screaming like peasants! It was disgusting! Appalling! The parents were horrified. They never forgave us. Us as if we started it. They should have blamed him. But he escaped. Ran out of the country. Over the border to Canada. A draft dodger! Left the mess he made and skedaddled!”
It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the Minton Hall demonstration and the he was Cisco, the draft resister who escaped. I said, “I was asking about Sunday night, in the canyon, here. We had a police operation.”
“Police? The police came. Or was it the sheriff? They herded all the girls back into their rooms—”
“Miss Wellington, that was twenty years ago. I’m asking you about day before yesterday.”
Her eyes seemed to unfocus as she stared at me. A blotchy flush spread from around them over her cheeks. “Was I in the past?” she asked in a small, fearful voice.
/> “Yes.”
“Weren’t we talking about the past?”
“No,” I said gently. “I was asking about this last weekend.”
The blotches deepened. She clutched a wad of the pink flowered cover. “They say I do that, wander into the past. I remember those days. It’s this time—now—that drifts.” She reached toward her bedside table, clumsily pulling open the drawer. What she drew out was a cloth-covered book, the kind with empty pages. I thought she would hand it to me, but she kept it in her lap, pressing it between her hand and her solar plexis. “I write things down so I can remember. I date each entry. I have to remember, you understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“Only crazy people don’t remember. They think I’m crazy here. I remember but they don’t believe me.”
“What do you remember?” I said softly.
“You. You’re a policewoman. You’ve come to see Madeleine.”
I took a long breath, willing the pressure around my eyes to ease, the tense lines around my eyes not to mirror hers. “And do you remember Madeleine sitting in here, with her dog?”
“That awful animal,” she said with a shudder.
“Why did Madeleine bring the dog in here?”
The lines around her eyes eased. Her eyes blanked. I wondered if the kind of speculation I’d asked was beyond her ability now. “Because I couldn’t ask her to remove it.”
“Why not?”
She released the red-and-green book and adjusted the lace collar of her bed jacket. “Well, my dear, you seem a nicely brought up young lady. You know you can’t be rude to a guest you’ve asked to come. It was up to me to maintain the proper standards of deportment. Good manners do work, dear. The last few times she didn’t bring him.”
I had no idea how long this flash of temporal lucidity would last, or in fact, how lucid it was. Was she speaking about this week or thirty years ago? I’d have to judge that later. “You asked Madeleine to come here. What did you talk about?”
She raised a finger. “Now I did tell you, my dear. You weren’t listening, were you? They don’t listen to me. They think I’m too old, too dizzy to bother with. They’ve all packed me away like a summer carpet.”