Time Expired

by Susan Dunlap

  I rolled my chair closer and covered his hand with mine, weaving my fingers in between his. “Howard, Madeleine had something she loved doing right till the end—the adrenaline of the caper. You of all people understand that. Maybe that was more important than another visitor.” She’d made it clear it was more desirable than her husband.

  Howard nodded, a bit too quickly to have given my thought real consideration. He’d swallowed the comfort whole. Looking back at Madeleine’s instructions, he said, “Ah. So Tiress writes his three tickets, then he climbs back into the Cushman, plops his broad ass on the seat, and settles just long enough to become affixed.” The grin returned to his face. “Then he comes to the fourth meter, starts to get out, but his pants stay on the seat!”

  I could see first the confusion, then the outrage on Elgin Tiress’s perpetually enraged face. I could hear the rough sound of the rip. “And the beauty of it is, he’s still close enough to give the park regulars a clear view of his drawers.”

  “Right, and, Jill, you know what a grapevine they’ve got on the Avenue. Old Elgin would never write another ticket anywhere near Telegraph without street people, students, craftsmen, and half the shoppers pointing and laughing. They wouldn’t be calling him Tight Ass anymore. Bare Ass! Madeleine Riordan, I salute you. It’s not just a sting, it’s a sting in perpetuity!”

  Again, I felt a pang of sadness for what she had missed. And for the way she had walled in her life, and all she had kept out.

  As if reading my mind, Howard said, “She was a hard woman to know, but if you could get through that crust of hers, there was a nugget of something great.” He shrugged. “Or at least that’d be my guess.”

  My phone rang. “Oh, damn, Howard. I forgot about Doyle.” I grinned at Madeleine’s plans. “At least this’ll cool his pique.” The phone rang again. “Homicide Detail, Smith.”

  “Smith.” It was the dispatcher. “Haste and Telegraph. Another parking enforcement assault.”

  I held up a finger to Howard and laughed. To the dispatcher I said, “Don’t you mean Haste and Bowditch?”

  “Nope, Telegraph. Peoples’ Park Annex. And don’t be laughing when you get there, Smith. Eckey’s not laughing.”

  CHAPTER 21

  PEOPLES’ PARK IS THE most famous two-point-six acres in Berkeley. Since 1968 when the University of California prepared to build a high-rise dormitory there, protests and riots have kept the park in the public eye. The three quarters of a block between Telegraph and Bowditch was home to flower children in the sixties and seventies, the homeless in the eighties, and homeless and drug dealers in the nineties. Through it all the university regents have never forsaken their quest to build something on this only clear spot of land around Telegraph.

  When the latest riots let up, the park sported a volleyball court. The park dwellers had evictions. Some of them moved across the street to what was dubbed Peoples’ Park Annex, a tent city on the razed rubble of a transient hotel at the corner of Telegraph Avenue. Compared to the Annex, Peoples’ Park had been like Grosse Pointe, with the discipline of West Point. Annex tents sagged in stagnant water, and the occupants juggled fights, drugs, and the complaints of the absentee owner. By the time they were evicted from the Annex, too, they had few supporters left. The lot returned to rubble. All that was left to remind people of the interlude was a tall black spike fence.

  As I neared the scene, I noted the Cushman protruding from that fence.

  I’d been to enough parking enforcement capers to expect to look for a meter minder gritting teeth and scrubbing face, feet, or any part between, to see reporters taking notes, television cameras whirring, and a crowd of Berkeleyans laughing their heads off. Here, on Telegraph, I would have expected a circus. Instead, the thirty or so civilians were almost outnumbered by sworn officers, Parking Enforcement personnel, and guys from Advanced Life Support. The onlookers stood nearly silent staring down at a spot ten feet beyond the Cushman.

  I pushed through them. The A.L.S. medics were kneeling next to a blue-uniformed body. I moved closer, though I already knew the body would be Eckey’s. She lay still, eyes closed. Bruises marked her forehead and circled her eyes. I glanced at her arms: her sleeves were ripped, her skin cut and bleeding. Her hands were too bloody to tell whether the bruises came from an accident or were defensive wounds. A faint residue of purple was still visible in the creases beside her mouth, giving her skin a bluish tinge. She lay on the broken cement; water had collected in the cracks beside her head and tendrils of brown hair hung into the mud. I wanted to pull them free, dry them off, make Eckey not look like a corpse in the gutter. I swallowed hard and looked down to see if her ribs were moving. They were. She was still breathing.

  I rested a hand on the shoulder of the nearest medic, a guy whose white turban suggested he was either a Sikh or a follower of one of our Hindu gurus. “What’s the prognosis?”

  Before he could speak, Eckey opened her eyes and muttered, “Shitty.”

  “Shh!” the medic snapped. Clearly it was not his first suggestion along this line. “Either you lie still, shut your eyes, like I told you, or I empty this whole syringe into your vein and you don’t need to think about what you’re going to say till a week from Wednesday.”

  I laughed, mostly from relief, and gave the medic’s shoulder a pat. “Having Eckey as a patient is going to burn off any bad karma you’ve got from your last three lives.”

  He shook his turbaned head.

  I’d been so focused on Eckey it was like all my other senses had shut down. Now suddenly, I smelled the musty mixture of blood and dirt that surrounded Eckey. On Telegraph Avenue brakes squealed and the staccato beat of rap music indicated a drive-by gawker had rolled down the window for a better look. Behind me one of the patrol officers asked for a name and address, voices speculated on “Crash?” “Brakes?” and “One ticket too many?” A whiff of strong coffee floated past. There is no disaster too great for Berkeleyans to observe with a latte.

  I moved around to the other side of Eckey, standing where she could see me. Her neck was immobilized in a foam collar.

  “What’re you staring at, Smith?” she growled.

  “You.”

  “Whadaya mean, me?”

  A smile crept back onto my face. “You, Eckey, you look different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I’ve never seen you with your mouth shut.”

  “Can you save the banter till after the Emergency Room,” the medic said, clearly disgusted.

  “Just two questions.”

  “Okay, but we’re ready to move her.”

  “No way!” Eckey snapped. “You don’t touch me till I say so. Now, what do you need, Smith?”

  I squatted down next to her. “What happened?”

  “Brakes failed.”

  “Do they go often?”

  “Never like that. I’ve had to pump up brakes before. But we’re not traveling the freeways in these carts, you know; we’ve got plenty of time to pull over. I never heard of anyone injured ’cause of brakes. I—”

  “Keep your head down!” The medic pressed his hand on her forehead. Her head hadn’t been quite off the ground, but Eckey’s intention had been clear. And from the look of his tight jaw and pressed lips, he wasn’t burning off karma, he was adding more.

  To one of the patrol officers, I said, “Get Raksen here. I want the entire cart gone over, plus the scene. And Misco, from Traffic Investigation. The Cushman doesn’t move till he’s eyeballed it. He and Raksen can fight for firsts.”

  “They’re on their way, Smith.”

  Leonard, the beat officer, was making his way around the edges of the crowd. Three patrol officers were taking names and addresses, beginning the tedious task of interviewing everyone who’d seen anything. But Leonard would get more just ambling around picking up a word here, an observation there. He’d know which of the park regulars had been in residence today, who else’s presence was noteworthy, whose absence a red flag.

  The m
edics slid a support under Eckey, lifted her onto the gurney, and started rolling it toward the ambulance. I moved along behind her head. “My other question, Eckey. This route today, this wasn’t your regular assignment, was it?”

  “How’d you know?” she demanded as the medic pressed her head back into the gurney.

  “Tiress’s?”

  “Yeah. Goddamned lucky bastard. I’ll tell you, Smith, much as that pain in the ass screeches around stirring up messes for the rest of us, if this had happened to him, I wouldn’t be crying.”

  “I’m sure, Eckey,” I said as the medics started to close the doors, “that you’ll let him know that.”

  The door clicked shut. I caught the medic’s arm. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you.” He rounded the truck’s corner and ran for the driver’s seat.

  “Bat outa hell,” I heard someone say behind me. I turned to see Leonard standing next to a guy with matted brown hair, a Peruvian army blanket, and thong sandals. The guy was one of the park regulars. “She coulda killed someone flying down the street like that. This is a city of laws, man. What’s the point of having laws, if you cops don’t follow them? Tell me that, man?”

  Patrol had divided the civilians into three groups and had thinned the herd by half. I checked with them, but no one they’d interviewed yet had seen more than the Cushman crashing into the fence.

  The Cushman was still affixed there, but now feet protruded from its underside. I recognized the short, bejeaned legs. “Misco,” I called. I didn’t expect him to roll out. He didn’t.

  “Yeah, who’s that?”

  “Smith. Can you tell what happened?”

  “Oh, yeah. Nothing fancy. Brake line’s been cut. Just sliced through like any high school kid could do,” he said in disgust.

  Misco could, and too often did, recapitulate tales of crunched doors, broken grilles, bent fenders from careless left-hand turns, ignored red lights, and full-circle turns in intersections (the Bay Area’s improvement on the old U-turn). Traffic Investigation’s work was regular and routine. So when Misco got something as exotic as sabotage, it made his day. From a saboteur he expected quality work, and he was downright offended when he didn’t get it.

  “How long would it take to cut the lines, Misco?”

  “Good pair of clippers? Ten seconds.”

  “Suppose you weren’t real familiar with the innards of the Cushman?”

  Misco stared blankly. To him unfamiliarity under the hood was a concept as foreign as was elbow grease to Delia McElhenny. “Minute or two, I suppose. But, Smith, brake lines are brake lines. Any idiot can cut ’em.”

  “Thanks, Misco. Get me your report as soon as you can.”

  “No problem. Won’t be more’n half a page.”

  Raksen was prowling between the crowd and the Cushman, head down.

  “Anything of note?” I asked.

  “No skid marks. The dispersion of glass fragments suggests the vehicle was moving at a good clip.”

  I gazed more closely at the hood. It was serrated and pressed half a foot in between the metal fence posts. The windshield was totally gone, and the steering wheel had been jerked off its column. My shoulders drew in tight, and I could feel the flush of anger in my face. Eckey could have been killed.

  To the nearest patrol officer, I said, “Take charge here. I’ll be back.” I headed across Haste, walking uphill past the old stage in the park, the free box where a jumble of coats and sweaters lay for the taking. The university had installed its volleyball court, but the aura of Peoples’ Park had merely settled around it. Groups of three or four guys sprawled on the lawn; singles stood nervously next to their grocery carts that held their worldly goods. One leaned on the cart, his ancient raincoat hanging open to reveal a T-shirt advertising Les Misérables.

  Howard stood next to a parking meter seventy-five feet from the far corner; his lantern jaw was tense. There was no hint of the merriment that normally brightened his eyes. “Exactly like Madeleine planned, Jill. This meter here and the three farther up have their slots blocked.” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe Madeleine would orchestrate something like this.”

  “I can’t either. And, Howard,” I said with sudden conviction, “I don’t think she did.”

  He tilted his head questioningly.

  I lowered my voice. “We’d be a lot better off if this were her plan. Then it would just be a matter that you and I let ourselves be fooled. But Madeleine didn’t come up with Eckey’s crash. She planned exactly what we saw on her paper. Then she died. And whoever’s been doing the capers doesn’t have her sense of farce or of decency.”

  “Yeah, this was no caper. We’re talking felony assault.”

  I nodded. “At this rate, sooner or later someone’s going to be killed.”

  “Eckey?”

  “No, this wasn’t planned for Eckey. Telegraph was supposed to be Tiress’s route today.”

  “And the goddamned lazy perp can’t even take the time to drive around and see who’s in the Cushman.”

  “We’re dealing with more anger than skill,” I said.

  “Even so, you’d think any perp working on a sting like this would take the time to drive around town and find out where Tiress is. Tight Ass wouldn’t be hard to find; it’s not like he keeps a low profile.”

  “Right. It’s odd that Madeleine would have put up with such sloppiness.”

  Howard nodded slowly in agreement, but he offered no explanation.

  I glanced toward the onlookers still moseying across Haste Street for a closer look. “Next time our perp could run a Cushman over Eckey, or Tiress, or some two-year-old in the road.” I turned and stalked across Telegraph Avenue.

  Herman Ott had a big red debit with me. It was time he paid up.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE AROMA FROM THE pizza shop next to Ott’s building didn’t make me hungry, it made me mad—at how little I’d gotten for that revolting pizza I’d taken Ott the other night. And I’d left the twerp half of my decent pepperoni and onion for breakfast!

  I raced in past the defunct elevator and took that long double staircase two steps at a time. I was panting when I got to the third floor, rounded the corner, and headed down the south hallway so fast that I had to jump over a toddler and his collection of orange plastic gizmos. I skidded to a stop by Ott’s door and banged on the glass.

  No answer. Of course, no answer.

  “Ott, open up! I mean it. I don’t care who hears this, you understand. You get this door unlocked—”

  The door flew open. Never had Ott opened up before the third threat. I was still panting; I didn’t bother to hide it. I strode in, took one look at the tidy piles of papers on his desk and with a sweep of an arm, brushed the lot onto the floor.

  “Jesus, Smith, what the—” He jumped to the floor like a canary off his perch and flapped around after the papers.

  “You lied to me, Ott!”

  “I … don’t … lie.”

  “The hell you don’t. There’s lying in words and lying in silence. Silence is the coward’s way.”

  He scooped up the last sheet and held it protectively against his chartreuse acrylic turtleneck. “You barge in here making up rules, then you carry on like I should follow them. Well, Smith, I’m not a cop; I don’t play by your rules.”

  I plopped myself on his desk. He always hated that. “You make a big thing about your ethics. The last of the old-time Berkeley idealists. The holdout from the sixties who hasn’t been co-opted by the system. Sure!” He started to speak but I kept going. “Madeleine Riordan was your friend, the woman you owed a debt to. Someone pushed a pillow on her face; she gasped for air. Picture that, Ott. What a helpless, terrifying death for a woman who was brave enough to throw herself out of a car for the Cause.” Ott stood up, clutching his cache of papers with both hands. I should have stopped there, but I was too angry. “Even her mother didn’t die like that, Ott.” I didn’t have to add that
Ott had done nothing to make things easier for her mother; that he hadn’t gotten around to checking up on her when Madeleine asked. “Her mother’s death was a prize compared to her own.”

  Ott said nothing. He shifted the papers into a pile and tapped the edges on his desk. His silence infuriated me more than anything he could have said.

  I looked directly into his small pale eyes. “You drove her there, to Canyonview. Why?”

  “Her husband’s car was in the shop.”

  That took me aback. Timms had talked about walking out when he realized Madeleine was leaving. It hadn’t occurred to me he’d meant it literally. But it made no difference here. “Why did she ask you?”

  Ott shifted onto one foot. It was an odd habit he had, dangling the second foot a couple inches off the ground like a bird on wet grass. I’d only seen it three or four times, but it always meant he was balancing almost equally distasteful options.

  The spicy aroma of peanut and pepper sauce sifted in under the door to mix with the vague scent of coffee too long in the cup. I pulled my jacket tighter around me. The sweat I’d worked up running up here was icy now. If this building had been in New York, the heat would have shut off at ten P.M. In this one it had ceased in 1952.