by Susan Dunlap
“So what law did she break, Ott?” I said, my breath quickening.
“Her car was parked in red zones.”
“Ott!” He wasn’t lying, but he sure wasn’t admitting to the truth.
“She had an old Triumph, a TR-3, I think.” Ott was probably the only private detective in the continental United States who had to look up makes of cars in a book. “She loved it. She bought it after her accident and had it modified so she could drive. It was a dumb indulgence; there were times she could barely get in and out. ‘Sports cars don’t have cane racks,’ that’s what she said. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it up.”
“Was it a statement of freedom?”
Ott looked away and nodded. It was a moment before he said, “The car wasn’t in good shape. Rust. Couple of different colors of paint. One of a kind. And, Smith, it was in red zones—different ones—Friday and Saturday.”
“This Friday and Saturday, the days before she died?”
“Right.”
“Surely she was in no shape to drive then.”
“Of course not. I didn’t say she drove.”
“Then who did?”
But that question Ott was not about to answer. He sat in his lemon plaid shirt, his scruffy ecru vest, pressed back in his chair like a sick canary huddling at the back of his cage. Madeleine was an old friend, or as close to a friend as Ott had. “Ott, here’s an easy question for you. Would Madeleine have let her dog run freely down into the canyon?”
The corners of Ott’s mouth twitched, as if trying to laugh. “Madeleine was a no-nonsense woman, except when it came to that dog. She had her blind spots—”
“Like she loved him too much to take the chance of judging him? Or finding something wrong?”
Ott nodded and hurried on, “She never let him go where he might get wet, or step on a burr, or … The dog lived better than a lot of her clients.”
In fact, I thought, he lived a good deal better than Herman Ott. I pulled my jacket tighter around me. I was about to admit I’d gotten as much out of Ott as I could, when I realized that he had not shifted into his normal end-of-visit etiquette: telling me to get out. There was something more he was willing to let me extract, not because he wanted me to know, but in response to something he owed his own code, or Madeleine. “Ott, just what was your debt to Madeleine?”
“No debt.”
I stood up. “Can we skip the semantic games? You owed her something. Or maybe you promised her something. Ah, yes,” I said watching the tiny signs of acknowledgment on his face. “Okay, you promised her something you couldn’t deliver. I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, well, it’s too late,” he said in a voice so low I had to lean in to hear. “It’s been too late for years.”
“It’s not too late to help find her killer.”
“Killer?” He started forward out of the chair then sank back, clearly deflated by the realization that he, Herman Ott of the Ott Detective Agency, had not even considered the possibility of murder.
Before he could regroup, I made an offer that even I found appalling. Detective to detective, we’d both understand it; but between two people who cared about a woman who had died, it stank. “Tell me what you promised her and I’ll tell you how she died.”
Ott didn’t lift his head. “After the accident, Madeleine was in the hospital up in Washington state for nearly a year. Down here her mother had a stroke. She ended up in a nursing home, a place in Contra Costa County where they were so busy not letting patients go to the bathroom alone that they didn’t bother to check that they took their medication. Just left the pills on the trays for the ones with brain damage to stick in their pockets or toss under the bed. The old woman’s condition was fragile. When Madeleine called, she couldn’t let on that she was injured; she had to wait for her own pain medication to wear off enough so she could call, and then she had to make excuses about why she wasn’t visiting. But as she started getting better she realized her mother was sounding worse. She was worried. So she called me.” He stopped speaking but he didn’t move.
I waited.
He lifted the top sheet of newsprint and began tearing at it. “I was working on a case, my first big one. I needed the money. Hell, it was more than that, I needed to prove I could break the case.” His right hand jerked; the paper tore free. “By the time I got to the nursing home, Madeleine’s mother was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, careful not to look at him.
“Madeleine never blamed me. She said her mother died because no one noticed.”
Because no one noticed.
Her words from the Coco Arnero hearing seemed to come out of my mouth by their own volition: “Or, during which moments is his life important enough to merit your attention?” It kept coming back to that.
CHAPTER 17
I WISHED I COULD have gotten Ott to tell me what law Madeleine had really broken. Parking in red zones, or letting someone else park your car in red zones, is hardly a memorable crime in Ott’s book. Clearly Ott wanted to lead me along the path to the unnamed driver. But was that path a shortcut to the killer or a just a torturous loop to nothing?
I was so stunned by his long-nurtured guilt and by his uncharacteristic decision to tell me about it that I left without the rest of my pepperoni-and-onion pizza.
Now, as I walked from Howard’s nearly empty fridge into the living room, I regretted that oversight. It was small recompense to think Ott would have a better than normal breakfast off it.
“I’m comforting myself with that,” I told Howard now, “and with remembering how cold and congealed it was.”
“Noble of you, and tasteful,” he said, settling back on the sofa in his living room. “I would have saved you some of my pizza—I could have, I’m a lot bigger than Jason.” Jason was second to Howard on the tenants’ list, and second to none in food consumption. So far the only item I’d found to be safe in the kitchen was chicken hearts, if raw. Anything else he took to his room to consume in silence. Jason was a student of one of our numerous local gurus, one who focused on Spiritual Consumption. He chewed each bite thirty times, noted the variety of tastes and textures and internal reactions thereto, and recorded all in his spiritual journal. I was willing to bet that was one diary that wouldn’t be a hot property for publication. “At least it’s kept him out of the living room,” I said curling my feet under me on the sofa. I leaned back against the worn fabric in the corner. The whole sofa reminded me of the edge of Claire’s chair where Coco had rubbed. “I just don’t know where I am with this case.”
Howard nodded, opened a beer, and stretched his legs, intertwining his feet with mine. The room smelled of sandlewood and garlic, suggesting that Jason had carried his incense to the kitchen and had a go at spiritual munching there before retiring to the holy table in his room.
I told Howard about Madeleine’s accident. “I can picture her before that, Howard, whipping around corners on her bicycle, cutting in and out, gauging her chances in quarter inches. And I can see her as I knew her, walking with the cane. It was always like she really didn’t need that cane, like she’d grabbed it walking out the door, just in case.”
“She would have liked to hear that. It’s a real testimony to how well she planned.”
“How so?” I asked. Vice and Substance Abuse deals with a more righteously indignant clientele than other details, so Howard had faced Madeleine Riordan in more hearings than most. Still, I was taken aback by the familiar way he spoke of her. I couldn’t recall his ever mentioning her before.
Howard felt around the floor for his beer can, leaned back against the sofa end, and rested the can on one knee. He seemed to have forgotten to drink. “A couple of times we were in hearings that dragged on till midnight. Five to twelve Madeleine’s doing her thing like she’s the head lion in the cage. Quarter after, we’re leaving and she’s wincing with every step. And hurrying off so no one sees. After that I kept an eye on her.”
“What did you see?”
“She always parked near the door, or the ramp, or the elevator. She saved her strength. She”—he ran a finger slowly down the wet side of the aluminum can—“planned everything. All the stuff we just do, she had to plan.”
“So she could look like she was just doing it,” I said, finishing his thought. “Never a chance to ride free.” I wiggled my foot in tighter between his. No one would have called Howard and Madeleine soul mates, but the lines of similarity they did have were etched very deep. Suddenly I felt intrusive, as if his knowledge was privileged and I was asking him to break faith exposing it to an outsider, even me. “Howard, she spent a year convalescing. Do you think she changed so much that the woman who cut between cars was entirely gone? I know she liked mapping strategy, being the architect of the sting, but would planning her legal cases have been enough?”
“Not for me, it wouldn’t. But no one’s ever accused me of being too mature.”
I laughed. I couldn’t imagine Howard as an adult; his recklessness, his spur-of-the-moment decisions, his uncontrolled glee in victory were his charm. If he lost those, I didn’t know if there’d be enough left of Howard to still be Howard. Maybe the Madeleine Riordan who emerged from the hospital was only vague kin to the one who’d entered. I sighed. “Lots of college quarterbacks wake up twenty years later in Barca Loungers happily drinking beer and second-guessing NFL plays. They accept the facts of life. Maybe Madeleine did, too.” But even as I spoke my words sounded false.
Howard just shook his head.
“But, Howard, the fact is Madeleine did decide to come back to Canyonview. Either to get away from something or to get to something. Either to put distance between herself and Herbert Timms or because something drew her back to the canyon. And the only things going were Victor Champion standing in his window taking pictures, and there was our perp moving around down in the canyon.” I pushed myself up and braced a leg on the arm of the sofa. “Dammit, I can’t find Timms. I don’t know whether Madeleine was on the sidelines there in Canyonview cheering on our parking perp. But the woman had spyglasses; she had to be using them for something. Lend me your binoculars.”
“Why?”
“Because tomorrow I’m dressing in red top to bottom and heading down into the canyon. I’ll put Pereira in Madeleine’s room with the binoculars and we’ll find out just what Madeleine could see.”
“Jill,” Howard began then stopped. He wanted to object—his mouth was still taut with the gulped-back words, his fingers were poised around the ball of admonitions. Even his legs were tensed, ready to leap up and insist on his point. He was dying to tell me to be careful, but he knew better. I grinned, walked over, and kissed those tense lips. I could tell it didn’t give him the same satisfaction as that warm pleasure of holding forth to a lover “for his/her own good,” but it seemed to come in a creditable second. In our time together Howard and I had come to relish talking about cases; we’d also learned the pleasures of stopping talking.
But later, before he went to sleep, Howard propped himself up on an elbow and demanded, “How’re you going to handle Doyle when you present this plan to him tomorrow morning?”
I grinned. “The way any sensible officer does. Tell him afterward, when I’ve got the booty.”
Howard chuckled. “And if there’s no booty down there in the gully of skunk and poison oak?”
“Then I’ll take the time-honored bureaucratic route. I’ll bury the whole operation in the middle of some report he doesn’t have time to read.”
Having come to that managerial decision, I slept fitfully till the alarm went off at six, zombied up and headed to the pool to stretch those muscles I’d devoted the last six hours to tensing.
When I got to the station, the entrance was thick with the press, and the jail was thick with night visitors. Three In Custody reports awaited me and it took me every second before Detectives’ Morning Meeting to round up the paper on them for the D.A.’s liaison.
As soon as the meeting ended—before Doyle finished with “Eggs” and had time to contemplate me—I co-opted Pereira, because I could count on her to keep mum if this operation failed, and headed for Canyonview.
I pulled into the space where I’d been last night, behind an old orange Triumph—Madeleine Riordan’s beloved old Triumph Herman Ott had described. The temptation to go over it was strong, but it was wiser to put it off. As long as I ignored it, it still seemed to be a secret.
Pereira and I moved on around the house. Claire’s door was closed. I could hear low voices in her room. I didn’t knock, but moved quietly across the companionway. Coco was sitting on the sunny steps. Beside him, her long red wiry curls fluttering in the breeze, was Delia.
Life doesn’t offer many opportunities for sneak attack; they shouldn’t be squandered. I went with a hunch. As she turned I said, “Madeleine didn’t know you were driving her Triumph.”
Another woman might have gasped. Delia’s jaw jutted forward. “I had to pick up some things for her, didn’t I?”
Pereira moved around behind her. I said, “Driving a person’s car without her permission is a felony.”
“It’s not like she’s going to press charges, is it?”
“She doesn’t have to.”
“Look, she owed me that. She ruined my life.”
I crossed my arms and stared down at her, restraining the urge to look pointedly around the grounds in this very desirable neighborhood in which she was sitting idle in the sun at midday.
“Well, if it hadn’t been for the Minton Hall demonstrations, my whole life would have been different. I’d have a good job and some guy to support me … and …”
“And?”
“And I wouldn’t be working my tail off watching over the dying.” She jumped up with an uncharacteristic burst of energy and stomped up the steps.
I was tempted to stop her—I don’t like to let witnesses decide when an interview is over—but I couldn’t be bothered keeping her here just for principle.
Pereira shook her head. “Blame Madeleine, blame the meter maids?”
I nodded. Delia certainly had not ruled herself out of those adolescent pranks. She had ample time to cruise around town looking for piles of fresh manure or Dumpsters in which to deposit a stolen Cushman cart. And who knew the canyon better than Delia who’d grown up here? But could she have killed Madeleine? That wasn’t so easy a call. Maybe I’d find a connection in the canyon.
This operation wasn’t exactly by the book. But if you want to follow the rules till the game is over and you die, you opt for a career as a clerk, not a cop. You become a cop to be the one who enforces the rules—on others. And you demand answers, speed on the freeways, and step over the barricades that say “No Admittance.”
“You look like you escaped from a science fiction movie,” Pereira whispered. The restraint Howard had shown last night had ended with the dawn. This morning he had clucked around the room loading me up with enough equipment to head a survivalist organization. I carried one of the pokers with which work-furlough guys spear litter in the park and a backpack to haul my expected loot. And I had on hiking boots for traction, jeans, jacket, turtleneck, gloves, and sunscreen so thick that my face cracked when I talked. The last I’d wash off as soon as I got back to the station and hope to protect myself from the most persistent danger of the canyon—poison oak.
The companionway steps ended at a horizontal dirt path. Pereira and I followed it to my left under Madeleine’s window and almost to the property line. There, camouflaged between two bushes, was a steep, narrow trail down into what looked like a trapdoor of leaves.
“Stay here,” I whispered to Pereira.
I poked the spear into the ground and started down the steep incline, batting branches out of the way. The spear caught exposed roots; hanging on, I slid and nearly wrenched my shoulder pulling the implement loose. The bright sun flickered through the thick thatch of leaves, making the shadows darker and the underbrush fuzzy. My heels ground into the hard earth a
s I half walked, half slid down the path, and even when the trail leveled, I couldn’t hear anything above the crunch of my boots and the rustling in the underbrush. There were rats and snakes, salamanders and slugs down here, but I was sure they’d find me more appalling than I them. If the parking perp were other than Delia, he could be sitting within three yards of me and I wouldn’t know. Like the newts and slugs, he’d be keeping very still.
After the heavy fog of the previous days the canyon resembled a well-used coffee filter with wet grounds clinging to both sides. The musty smell of damp leaves and dirt mixed with the fresh scent of eucalyptus. The gurgle of water startled me; I was almost in the creek when I heard it. Fording the creek might have been a nightmare some other year, but drought has its benefits.
“I’m just crossing the stream,” I said softly into the handheld mike. I’d given Pereira a quick verbal sketch of the canyon floor. If she had to come to bail me out at least she’d have some idea where to come.
“Right,” Pereira answered.
On the far side I moved onto a foot-wide path, a veritable freeway of the canyon, and turned right, heading back toward the Arlington from which I had entered two days ago. Above me, birds fluttered, or maybe it was deer swishing their tails as they decimated rosebushes higher up on the canyon wall.
The path twisted, following the creek, and rose till it reached an easy ridge, from which I could see the remains of the old quarry office where the perp had been headquartered, twenty feet ahead. The cement floor was the size of a one-car garage set between the canyon wall and the path. The surface looked more like rubble than floor, so deep were the cracks from decades of earthquakes. If an earthquake came now, I thought, I would become a permanent part of the California landscape.
The canyon floor was so narrow, the walls so steep that while one side of the cement slab was three feet higher than the path, the other cut into the hillside. The overhang where we’d found the collection of parking tickets had been created by an old aluminum door, probably from a shed, propped on twenty-four-inch cement blocks. The earth had been meandering down on top of it for decades.