by Susan Dunlap
The wind scraped leaves across the sidewalk. Usually at this time of night it pushes fog in from the ocean, backs it into canyons, and shoves it up against the hills. But maybe even the weather gods tire of gray. Tonight they were sweeping out the Bay Area, blowing hard enough to scoot the fog up over the hills to die above Concord, Pleasant Hill, Dublin. The night sky was navy blue instead of its normal dark smudgy gray, and so clear it seemed to be made of crystal. I drove up the Arlington, an alligator’s back of a road, narrow and curved with cars parked across the gutters and onto the sidewalk and still leaving barely enough room to twist past at the 40 mph everyone goes. To my left, way below, the yellow lights of Richmond and El Cerrito glistened like gold breastplates. I had to drag my eyes back to the road, yanking the wheel sharply into a bumpy abrupt curve. With the radio off the car seemed like a being of its own, its big engine breathing like a long-distance runner, the constancy of it tickling my ears and coating the walls and windows and creating a capsule around me that sealed me off from the rest of life.
I passed Victor Champion pedaling his bike slowly up the steep street before I recognized him. And if he’d had any reaction to seeing a Berkeley Police car, it hadn’t been to move closer to the curb.
I turned down San Antonio, letting myself pause momentarily to stare down across the bay at the string of lights drooping from the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. All those golden lights down there, it looked like the New Year’s Eve party of the century. Like I could walk anywhere and be welcomed in. Up here the streetlights behind papery tan leaves created a world of rice paper broken only by drooping dark fronds of short palm trees. Warm creamy rectangles hinted at the life within the houses along the canyon, protected behind curtains I’d never broach. A raccoon skittered across the street, between the houses, doubtless down into the canyon to join the deer and skunks and field mice.
I pulled up in front of Canyonview and rang the bell.
The speaker crackled a moment before Delia asked, “Who is it?” She didn’t add “intruding at this hour, creating more work for me,” but her tone carried the message.
“Detective Smith. I’ll be in Madeleine’s room for a while. Don’t bother to come to the door.” I realized I was as pleased to avoid her as she was me. I needed to keep the capsule feeling.
I made my way around the house and onto the companionway and stood listening to the voice of the canyon, the beat of the cicadas, the unexplained rustling from below. The last person I wanted to see was Claire, but I couldn’t head into Madeleine’s room and leave her helpless next door wondering what was going on in there. I knocked and in a moment Michael opened the door. He had that same protective look he’d had when I first came to question Madeleine. “Claire’s just ready to go to sleep. Can you wait till morning?”
Behind him the head of Claire’s bed had been cranked down so it was only a bit higher than the foot. She looked at me from those watery hazel eyes, and I had the impression that she was about to apologize for Michael’s abruptness but decided against it. Michael, after all, wasn’t her student. His poor manners didn’t reflect on her.
“I just wanted to let you know I’d be in Madeleine’s room for a while. So you didn’t hear noises and wonder.”
Michael’s face flushed, he nodded a bit too vigorously, and murmured, “Thanks for letting Claire know.”
I walked across the companionway. Madeleine’s door was unlocked. I pushed it in slowly, expecting the room to be cold. It wasn’t. The sick, I reminded myself, don’t have the circulation for cold. In all the commotion no one must have thought to adjust the thermostat. The air felt steamy, and as soon as I closed the door, I had that uncomfortable feeling of too many clothes but not having layered so any could be removed.
Madeleine’s things were still here. The binoculars were on the bedside table. I picked them up and turned off the light, then moved to the window and sat back against the bed. No, that wasn’t good enough. In Champion’s pictures Madeleine had been sitting cross-legged. I lifted myself up onto the bed and crossed my legs. My skin was clammy and I could feel the muscles of my shoulders, my back, my stomach tightening, pulling back, hiding from that exposure, all happening exquisitely slowly so I got the full slap of each step. And then I saw her again, in my mind, as I had when I’d first walked in here Sunday night: gaunt, icy pale, her hair gone, her face tiny in the ashen expanse of her scalp. And that so-out-of-place Far Side nightshirt that hung on her bony shoulders. I could feel the shock I had hidden staring at Coco and the gray rod he’d been carrying. My chest was shaking now with that swirling cold emptiness like the kind you get from breathing in too much smoke.
My hand tightened on the binoculars. With relief I put them to my eyes. I was here to get a sense of what Madeleine had experienced. I didn’t need to relive what I had felt.
The canyon was dark, darker than night for city eyes. No streetlights or flash of headlights to outline forms long enough to set them in memory. I stared down and after a minute I could make out shades of dark, but nothing more. Had there been a light down there, though, it would have stood out like the moon. Even the flicker of a cigarette lighter or the flame of a candle. And if I had seen that, the canyon was varied enough that I’d be able to place the spot and look at it in the light of day. So what? If Madeleine had seen something she certainly was in no shape to clamber down the canyon side. What would she have done if she’d seen a candle flame? That one was easy. No one would hesitate dealing with fire in a canyon after the Oakland hills fire. If Madeleine had spotted a flame she’d have had the fire department here in a minute.
But what if she’d seen a flashlight beam? Would she have sat here in the dark like I was, staring down, collecting pieces of the puzzle as she had done when questioning clients, making a reasonable case? Would it have been a game to her, taking what she was given, waiting for nightfall to see what new clues came her way, trying to figure out what was going on down there? According to Claire, Madeleine called the parking enforcement bashings the best game in town. Did she realize activity in the canyon might be part of that? If so, it didn’t take a detective to know whom she’d be rooting for. Would she have sat here night after night watching for a clue to his next move? The uphill wall of her room was windowless; no one would have known her light was out. The perp in the canyon depositing his cache of traffic tickets like a squirrel in autumn, would he have been an outlet for her? A connection of sorts as she sat in this isolated room waiting to die?
The cold poured through my body. Slowly I lowered the binoculars. I ached to turn the light on, but I forced myself to stay put, not to escape the fear that she couldn’t.
It must have been minutes sitting motionless before sensations congealed into thoughts. I’d known when I decided to come here that there was something I couldn’t face and yet couldn’t allow myself not to face. I’d seen the surface of Madeleine’s life. But, as she had said, you can’t know in half an hour the depths that it’s taken another months to reach. Depths of fear, despair, sorrow? Depths.
I dive at the pool. Maybe ten feet. Fifteen max. The first five feet are fine, but get beneath that and the pressure squeezes my eardrums. Usually I come up, not because it hurts but because I’m afraid it will pop my ears. Because I’m afraid. I hadn’t wanted to get too deep into Madeleine’s consciousness. I was afraid it would pop something and whatever that something is, I’d never get it back the way it had been.
For Madeleine anything in the canyon would have been an escape. But if what was going on down there was merely the perp and his parking tickets, as diversions went that would have had a short run. After seeing that scenario a few nights most people would either have called in patrol, or shut their blinds and turned on the TV.
But Madeleine hadn’t been “most people” before she was dying. Most people don’t spend weeks interviewing witnesses for a case like the Arnero complaint, stitching together an event at three o’clock Tuesday afternoon with a sighting of Arnero Wednesday morning, wit
h a memory of him when he’d been an anthropology graduate at Cal. Ninety-nine of a hundred people would call the case a waste of time, and the remaining one wouldn’t believe he could make the case.
I could see Madeleine determined to find out what went on in the canyon. But Madeleine was not known for patience. They say you learn it when you’re forced to. There were a lot of things different about Madeleine Sunday. But patience was not one of them. She wouldn’t just watch and wait. Not when her time was short.
But what would she have done? Would she have dispatched Delia into the depths? I almost laughed. The picture of laid-back Delia in her tie-dye lumbering down the hillside was too ludicrous. No, Michael, her protégé, would have been her choice. Whether or not he wanted to go, he’d have been obligated. Or Coco; maybe she’d have sent him with a note.
No! She couldn’t be sure what was in the canyon. She’d never take that kind of chance with the one creature she loved. And Michael, she’d invested a lot in him. Would she ask him to go down there unawares? He who was very allergic to poison oak?
I hoisted myself farther back on the bed and sat against the headboard as Madeleine had done, my legs extended. The mattress was softer at this end, like sand. I could feel it pushing against me as it had her. Imprisoning.
I remembered Coco lying next to her, her hand clutching his fur, him burrowing in against her leg. She’d needed that contact. I hadn’t put it into thought at the time, but it had been clear that if it had been physically possible she would have wrapped the dog around her till he cocooned her from … from death?
No, it wouldn’t have been death, not for someone like Madeleine Riordan.
When I’d avoided coming here I had expected to sit on her bed and be filled with the black fear of death closing in. But I wasn’t. What I felt was worse, an icy, unmovable sense of loneliness that filled my entire body. If I’d been Madeleine I’d have burrowed into the bed, clung to the dog, and grabbed onto whatever I could with the diversion in the canyon to keep that loneliness from freezing me before I died.
The ebb of my breath resounded against the walls. Outside the night wind battered live oak leaves, scraping sharp points of one against the shiny surface of the next, the wounds unnoted.
I slid off Madeleine’s bed and spent a minute straightening out the covers, as I would if I were a guest, just visiting, not living here. And then I took the first sure step I had in this case. I felt certain—police certain (i.e., not too certain to double-check)—that Madeleine would not have sent Michael or Coco down into the canyon. She would call the man she had always chosen to handle her investigations: Herman Ott.
But getting Ott to admit that would be a lot harder than my coming to this room.
I opened the door and nearly smacked into Michael.
“I wanted to catch you before you left,” Michael whispered.
“Were you waiting here?” It unnerved me that I hadn’t heard him outside the door.
He pulled the door shut and motioned toward the main house. It wasn’t until we’d taken a few steps that he said, “I just needed to make sure you understood how fragile Claire is. Madeleine’s death’s been tough for her. She won’t show it. Some of these old ones, particularly the ones who’ve lived alone, they’re real good at keeping things to themselves. The way they act, you don’t think they feel anything at all. But they do; it’s just that the feeling is buried so deep you have to dig it out.” The moon shone down on his glossy hair and muscled shoulders. He looked sleek, and agile, and young: all the qualities Claire no longer had. I wondered what she felt like seeing him each day. As if responding to my unasked question, he said, “Claire’s state changes day to day. Good days and bad days, like a lot of the old folks. She’s given to fantasies. Maybe they’re what get her through the bad ones.” He stared at me, waiting for a nod of understanding.
I got his point, but police training is too ingrained for me to allow myself to be swept along. Refocusing his view, I said, “Fantasies concerning Madeleine?”
“Sometimes she carries on like Madeleine’s her best friend, her protector, and then the next day she’ll mix her up with one of the characters from her afternoon soap operas, and she’ll think Madeleine is saving her from one of the soap opera crises.” He shook his head. “Sad. And”—he swallowed—“well, it was real hard on Madeleine.” He swallowed again and seemed to be waiting for me to acknowledge Madeleine’s plight. Or was it Claire’s? Or his? When I nodded, he said, “Living a long time isn’t free. They pay for those extra years, don’t you think?”
I decided to ignore that unpleasant possibility. We were at the front stoop now. Hoping to take him by surprise, I said, “Michael, what was Madeleine looking at in the canyon?”
“When?”
“When she was using the binoculars.”
He turned away. “I don’t know,” he mumbled unconvincingly.
“But you’ve got an idea, don’t you?”
“Well …”
“What do you think she was looking at?”
“Well, there are houses on the other side, partway down in the canyon. Guys leave their shades up. They figure no one’s going to be staring in their windows but the deer.”
“What was Madeleine looking at in those houses?” I insisted.
“I don’ … I don’t know,” he stammered. “I didn’t ask. It was her business. If she was staring into guys’ bedrooms, it was none of my business. She had few enough pleasures. It wasn’t like her husband ever stayed with her, you know.”
There were plenty of questions about Herbert Timms. But for the moment I pushed them aside. “Did she ever ask you to go down into the canyon?”
“No. Why would … oh, you mean to check out the guy you guys were after. Ah, you figure she was watching him, huh?” he smiled, clearly relieved. “Yeah, I could see Madeleine handling a case like that, a guy half the police force came after. Oh, yeah,” he said with a bit more glee than I found appealing.
“But she didn’t take you into her confidence about it.” I waited to see if the jibe worked. It didn’t. Michael Wennerhaver barely missed a beat before muttering, “No.”
I would have given a lot to know what went through his mind in that missed beat. But all I could conclude now was that in the arena of self-control he was indeed Madeleine Riordan’s protégé.
I walked on around the house looking up at the office window in time to catch sight of Delia McElhenny slouched in a chair staring at my car. I quickened my pace; even police cars get ripped off. But the car was intact. When I glanced back at the house, Delia was gone.
I could have gone back to the station to dictate reports of the day’s interviews while they were still fresh. They might be fresh; I certainly wasn’t. I longed for my bathtub, water to the rim, almond-scented bath oil. Soaking would be wonderful. But guilt would dilute the pleasure. We pay for more than extra years. And besides, I was hungry.
I decided on a compromise. Food for the stomach; food for the search. Pizza and Ott.
CHAPTER 16
IT WAS THE EASIEST entry I’d ever made into the Ott Detective Agency.
It’s not everyone who can arrange to have the best pizza in town delivered in tandem with their own arrival. But we at the Department provide a good and steady business for a number of pizzerias. At midnight—just about the time when franchise managers are asking themselves why they waste money staying open late—a second dinner begins sounding pretty good to the guys on Evening Watch. Ott’s office is on the third floor of a building that’s been a walk-up since the elevator broke sometime in the sixties. In the past I have knocked on his opaque glass door, pizza in hand, and convinced him to open up. More recently I’ve knocked but he hasn’t opened. I was damned if he’d win tonight.
Herman Ott, a man who has survived as a private detective since before the demise of that elevator, could not afford to be a fool. A knock and a boy’s voice calling out: “Pizza!” did not encourage him to open his door; it made him suspicious.
I could tell he was right behind the glass, sniffing the aroma of oregano, garlic, anchovies. Ott adores anchovies.
“It’s from Jill Smith,” the boy called. I’d given him a script. I know Ott so well by now that I could almost have had the boy read the answers without my hearing Ott’s questions. But for safety’s sake the boy was to check with me before he spoke. Now Ott would be thinking: Smith? She doesn’t owe me anything. Maybe it’s not from Smith. Or if it is there’s a catch. Which, of course, there was. Take it away, he’d almost say. Almost, but not quite. For Ott, passing up a free meal was like a canary turning up his beak at a tray of suet.
The delivery boy eyed me. I nodded.
“It’s got double cheese.”
Ott’s idea of pizza was suet on dough. If he’d had his way each slice would hold so much cheese that only a weight lifter could get it to his mouth. Herman Ott with barbells was a picture few could have imagined. Even on the warmest days Ott’s arms were usually covered by the long sleeves of a yellow, brown, or beige shirt. I had seen them bare once—it had been 100 degrees out that day and closer to 120 degrees in his office with its windows that opened on the air shaft. That day his ensemble had included Bermuda shorts with gold, rust, and chocolate stripes; his V-necked ecru T-shirt exposed an appalling amount of his blond-tufted chest and bony arms with the loosest skin I’d ever seen on an adult male.
I nodded again to the delivery boy.
“Double anchovies,” he called.
I could swear I heard breathing behind the door. Ott couldn’t resist anchovies. I’d seen him going after them, swooping down into that sea of yellow cheese like a giant canary of prey. I pointed to the paper.