by Susan Dunlap
The backup units would be waiting at the Kensington Circle. The dispatcher would notify the CoCo County sheriff that I’d be conducting an operation in Kensington. I headed out to the lot for a patrol car.
Sometimes you drive up into the hills and emerge out of the fog. Not tonight. At Kensington Circle above Cerrito Canyon the fog was thicker than at ground level. I slowed the car; I was outdriving the headlights. The lamps on the street poles gave off fake-looking vanilla glows that disappeared long before they fell to the street. It was the worst possible night to confront a suspect like Victor Champion. If I spooked him, he could hop on his bicycle and disappear in two seconds.
Backup—two cars, one bike, total of four patrol officers—was waiting at the Circle. I assigned Nguyen, Stovall, and Patterson to surround Champion’s house. The fourth, Megan Williams, the hotshot of bike patrol, would stay near the cars, handy to the radio and the top of the stairs, and to her bike. If we needed her, it meant we’d blown it and we were in trouble.
On the canyon rim road, we parked facing opposite directions—the better to chase if we had to. Though it was only seven fifteen, it was dark as midnight. If there were lights in living room windows, they were hidden behind drapes and the fog. No cars pulled up; no dogs barked; no cats scurried across the deserted road. We started carefully down the hundred stairs to Champion’s. The dirt steps, covered with dead leaves and pine needles, were almost invisible in the fog, and their irregular wooden braces threatened to catch my heel and send me headfirst into the canyon. As I made my way down between the houses, the air became clearer, but when I descended beyond them, the fog closed around me like a thick knitted scarf pulled over my face. The light from my flash barely made it to the step below. I stopped and whispered to Patterson, “Champion’s back door is at the east side. When we get to the bottom of the stairs, you go west, all the way around the building till you see it. Keep an eye on the windows, too. Living room window doesn’t open, but there’s a kitchen and bathroom.”
“No bedroom?”
“That’s on the far side of the companionway. If he gets that far, Stovall and Nguyen will see him.” I waited a moment and said, “Any other questions? Okay, no talk beyond here.”
As I moved down, the fog thickened as if its very weight was condensing the layers below. I turned off the flash—not a great loss—and felt with my feet for the edge of the stairs. Fog coated my face, iced my skin. Every few yards the smell changed, odors stronger in the night: dirt, wet fur, bay tree, skunk. I could barely hear Nguyen, Stovall, and Patterson behind me. Champion’s house couldn’t have been more than ten feet below, but it was entirely hidden. No light pierced the fog. Champion was lucky we were police officers. Anyone could have come down here, slit his throat, and tiptoed back up. And Claire Wellington across the canyon, how easily could she be raped, killed? Sitting in the main building, Delia and Michael would never notice. Like Madeleine’s, Claire’s room didn’t even have a window on that side. It was a dangerous, stupid arrangement, crimes just inviting perpetrators: Come, pillage, slaughter! It’s easy! It’s safe! It’s confidential!
Suddenly Champion’s house was three feet away. I stopped and held my arms out to warn Nguyen and Stovall. Walking across the companionway would announce our numbers. Patterson I motioned around the house. Stovall and Nguyen backed up a step. I counted to three hundred—enough time for Patterson to get all the way around the building to the kitchen door—then walked normally down the last steps, onto the companionway, and knocked on the living room door. It was 7:20 P.M. Under my jacket I was sweating. I listened for music, or a radio. Champion didn’t seem the television type. The only sounds were of faint rustling—Nguyen, or possum, or deer. Maybe Champion wasn’t the home type. He could be down at the meter cart garage sabotaging every Cushman in the city. I pounded on the door, four times, the police knock. “Pion! Open up!”
It took a third pounding before I heard footsteps, then the familiar voice and familiar words. “Keep your shirt on, I was in the darkroom.”
When he opened the door his hair was still wet, his clothes fresh, like he’d just showered. Dumping Elgin Tiress in Aquatic Lake was just the thing to work up a sweat. Looking at me, he shifted expression: annoyance to surprise to wariness. Was he worried I would expose him as the caper artist or as a murderer?
CHAPTER 25
YOU DON’T MIND IF I come in out of the cold?” I said, before Champion could consider whether to let me into his living room.
“Yeah, fine.”
I still wasn’t sure how I’d play him; I had to get a confession about the meter pranks, but I couldn’t lose him before he told me about Madeleine. I hurried into the living room. A burst of warm air hit me and I caught the vague smell of photographic chemicals. Only two small lamps lit the room, but the place seemed glowing bright. Piles of clothes were still splattered around the floor and over the canvas chairs. On the wall by the door, the coatrack was bare. There, painted the same white as the wall, it seemed only to underline Champion’s poor housekeeping.
Looking at that arrangement of the meter wands I said, “You deserve applause for hiding your trophies on display.”
Champion hesitated. I could almost see the gears of his mind clicking one after another. Should he accept my praise? Could he deny his guilt? Should he? Now that Madeleine was dead, who would applaud his cleverness? He’d cut Eckey’s brake line, made his escape on a bicycle—and there was no one to tell.
“You are responsible for the parking enforcement capers,” I said matter-of-factly. “Tell me about them.” Deliberately I stayed out of his path to the door. If he tried to bolt, I’d stop him. But if he succeeded, I wanted him to head out this door, not through the kitchen into the dark canyon, past just Patterson. Champion knew the canyon; we didn’t. If he got out there, we might as well give him bus fare.
“So, Pion,” I said, smiling. “You finally got Tiress. Did you know that?”
He tried to control his mouth but a little smile crept on.
“There’s no point denying it. Sit down. Tell me about the purple paint, the glue.”
His small smile stayed in place. So did mine.
“You should have seen the crowd around the Cushman when the meter maid smacked that bag and the paint exploded in her face. Everyone in Peet’s raced out for a look.”
He pressed his lips together hard, but he wasn’t good at controlling his face. He knew I was jerking him around, but I was giving him a payoff he’d get nowhere else. He was tempted, really tempted, I could tell that. But he still wasn’t talking. I had to get a confession. Without a confession I had nothing. That imaginary choke collar around his neck was dangling too damned loose; I couldn’t get a grip on the chain.
“Pion,” I said, trying to keep the tension from my voice, “when it’s all over, we’ll show you the reports.”
He hesitated.
I let go of the smile. And pulled the chain. “Look, we know you pulled those capers. We’ve got the proof right here on your wall. Either you tell me about them now and we get this cleared up by tomorrow morning in time for you to greet the press—the Hero of the Parking Meter—or, Pion, we take you in and we keep up the investigation. We tell the press we have a suspect, but we don’t think the case is closed. We just let the public interest dribble away. Either way we get you; it’s just a question of whether you want to be a hero or an afterthought. Which will it be?”
His face stayed absolutely still for so long that I wondered if he’d stopped breathing. Then he shrugged, padded across the room and sprawled in one of those miserable canvas chairs. He was grinning ear to ear.
I remembered when I first interviewed him, thinking there was a reason flattery existed. Victor Champion wasn’t about to do without it.
I opened the door, called Nguyen in, and pointed to a chair out of Champion’s line of sight where I hoped he’d soon be out of Champion’s mind.
I read Champion his rights. He seemed to think that was a joke. He could t
hink whatever he liked, even that this warning referred mainly to the parking enforcement assaults rather than Madeleine Riordan’s murder. I could have come on strong here, or taken Champion to the station and leaned on him there, but with him the light flattering approach worked so well. A lot of guys on the force had a hard time with that one, but women, trained to it from childhood, can run it without blinking. I used to choke at the thought of it, but now it pleases me in a perverse way to make use of the tool of the underclass. “Pion,” I said, “the escalation was so slow, so subtle we don’t even know when you started picking off the Cushmans.”
He allowed a small smile of acknowledgment to settle on his angular face as he leaned back in his canvas chair, rested ankle on knee, and lifted a hand to illustrate his story. Moving him as quickly as possible, I led him through the mechanics of the assaults: swooping down on his ten-speed to snatch marking wands left in Cushmans as meter maids wrote out tickets, the release of a brake uphill of a newly delivered pile of manure, the theft of a Cushman and the drive up a ramp into a Dumpster. (According to Champion the hard part of that maneuver had been “borrowing” the portable ramp from a construction project down the street and returning it unseen.) He took full credit for every one of the assaults down to the Aquatic Park incident, glorying in the tidbits of meter maid frustration and humiliation I passed on to him. To hear Champion tell it, he was a sort of pop-psych Robin Hood of oppressed motorists, stealing esteem from the ticket-giving oppressors and bestowing it on the downtrodden drivers. Not once did he mention Madeleine’s contribution.
It was already eight twelve. Madeleine had wanted me to come at eight-thirty. Tonight I would be over there at eight-thirty. I had to move Champion faster. “What set you off to begin with? Lots of people see parking wands, but no one else snatched them up.”
“Assholes ruined my career.”
I let my eyes open wide. “How so?”
He propped his forearms on his legs and gave a great, disgusted sigh. “You can’t cart your photographs around to galleries on a bicycle, not if they’re printed poster-size and mounted. One good wind and you’re sailing into the next block. Or you’ve been blown off the bike, onto your ass and them, and your still life looks like ‘After the Earthquake.’ ”
Police work has given me ample experience listening to perpetual “victims.” In the eyes of much of our clientele, the tilt of the earth’s axis was away from them, all of life was an uphill climb, and nothing was ever their fault. In Champion’s eyes, the towing and impounding of his mother’s/his car would have been acts of a vengeful god. I said, “So, you got some tickets with your mother’s car.”
“Some!” he exclaimed, all signs of humor gone from his face. “What kind of idiot created twenty-minute parking zones? Who can do business in twenty minutes? Hell, you spend longer than that in the grocery express line. I saw that asshole Tiress. He’d spot my car and if there was five minutes on the meter he’d circle around the block and come back—and just wait for that big red EXPIRED to pop up. He was like a lion who smells a dying wildebeest. He kept coming back to nip me till I dropped.”
“And so—?” Eight-fifteen.
“I was riding along Shattuck one day and I spotted the wand.” He leaned back and grinned, triumphantly.
Before he could bask, I tightened my grip on his choke collar and pulled. “And after that Madeleine took over the planning?”
“Right,” he said, unabashed.
I stared. I’d expected sputtering protests, territorial protections. I’d assumed the Cushman capers were the trophies on his shelf, but if he didn’t care about admitting Madeleine planned them, then where was the payoff for him? Had it been merely getting Tiress?
Eight-seventeen. “So the capers were all aimed at Tiress?”
“Yeah, but Madeleine decided it was better to spread them around. Less obvious. Madeleine was a great planner. There was a fine art to her plans. She told me she was brighter than the guys she worked with, brighter than the doggy dentist.” He shrugged. “She was right. She probably told people she was brighter than me, and she’d have been right about that, too.”
“But—” I prompted. Now I saw what he’d gotten from Madeleine that made these admissions unimportant to him. He’d played for higher stakes, for the only thing she had left to give. I had suspected she had taken the thing of value from him. Wrong. He took it from her.
A satisfied smile settled on his face. “Madeleine was as hooked as I was on the capers. She needed me more than I needed her.”
I could feel my skin tightening. I was right; and the thought of his bullying made me furious. “For that you made her leave her curtains open.”
I hadn’t controlled my voice. Or my face. Champion stared at me, the skin by his eyes creased in confusion. Behind him Nguyen had a similar expression. What are you angry about? their expressions demanded. Champion said, “It wasn’t like she was undressed. That wasn’t part of the bargain. You saw the pictures, they weren’t smut. She was just sitting there, doing whatever she would have been if I’d ridden over there to visit her. What’s the matter?”
My throat had clenched closed. I closed my eyes and swallowed until I was sure I could speak clearly. Then I looked Victor Champion in the eye and said, “If you’d gone there, she would have had the option of saying No. Victor, it is demeaning to have someone watch you as if you were a bear at the zoo.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
I tried again. Somehow it seemed important that he understand how ultimate his theft was. “She had so little left—Coco, of course, and the knowledge that Michael would become a doctor who really cared about people like her mother. But every day she lost more control of her body. All she had left were her privacy and the meter maid pranks that provided her escape from an unrelentingly grim reality. Her privacy and her escape, Victor. And you forced her to choose between them. You forced her to sell you her privacy.”
Champion gave no response. It didn’t surprise me. But what did was that Madeleine Riordan had had to choose between privacy—control—and escape and that she had opted for the latter. Madeleine, the planner. Had she changed so much? But no; I saw her after she made her choice. She hadn’t changed; she still controlled what she could. Then, why did she allow herself to be put in the position where she was killed? Dammit, I could feel the answer, just out of reach. It was already eight twenty. I took a deep breath and forced myself to say calmly, “Pion, it is a very unusual thing for two law-abiding strangers to join together in a basically useless and illegal activity. If the capers had been planned by old friends who’d decided their lives were dull and they needed a fling, it would be more understandable. Or two teenagers who were strangers wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. But you and Madeleine are a very unlikely combination.”
Champion smiled, a more relaxed, warmer look than the grins he’d had earlier. His eyes were a little dreamy and I had the sense that he was picturing Madeleine. “Maybe it was because I’d already seen her through the lens; I felt like I knew her. I wanted to know her. That meant something.” He stopped utterly still as if holding that “something” to himself a last time. Then he focused on me. “If you think the capers were out of character for Madeleine, it just means you didn’t know her. She loved it. She loved poring over the plans. She’d do that till I was just about out of my gourd. I mean, I just wanted to get in, do it, get out, and stick my wand on the wall.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.
“But Madeleine, she had to consider the terrain, think about who would be at the scene, what the traffic patterns would be, what about the meter maid rotation, where could I leave my bike, would it be a slow news day. I mean, I had the feeling if there hadn’t been enough variables, she would have made them up,” he said, flinging his hands to the sides. “And then when it was over, she wanted to know moment by moment, not just did I drive the Cushman into the Dumpster, but who was around, was there much traffic, how far did the cart sink in the Dumpst
er, what happened when I climbed out. To make her happy, I would have been talking about the caper longer than it took to do it.”
I thought about Madeleine in the seventies planning the runs across the border. Champion’s description of her wasn’t surprising. But I didn’t let on to him. “Despite those differences, you two got along.”
“Yeah, she loved the thrill of it. She told me once that it was like being on vacation, not just going someplace and being Madeleine Riordan there, but signing into the hotel with a made-up name, speaking French, picking up men, being someone with no similarity to Madeleine Riordan, and knowing that when she came home that vacation person would simply disappear.”
“She did that?”
Champion shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she made it up. She did say she’d had the same giddy feeling the few times she’d had more to drink than she could handle, and that now, in her condition when she’d really like to do that she couldn’t.”
“And the capers were the only thing that gave her that freedom now.”
“Right,” he muttered. For the first time he looked like he glimpsed what he had threatened to deny her.
“She showed you the plans for gluing Tiress’s pants to the Cushman seat, she talked about her ideas of the Aquatic Lake run, but she never gave you the plans. Why?”
“I didn’t need them,” he said, but he’d let a beat too much pass before dredging up that rationale. “I made that clear to her.”
“You disagreed, didn’t you? Her plans were capers, yours were vendettas. She wasn’t going to be a part of someone getting hurt, was she?” That was my Madeleine.
“All of a sudden she got so finicky about a little danger,” he said giving his head a little angry shake. His gray ponytail wavered in response. In that moment he looked nowhere near fifty years old, in fact much younger than I could imagine Timms or Michael ever appearing. “No one was going to get killed. It was only the meter maids who were in the way. And if we didn’t take chances we’d never hit that asshole Tiress where it mattered.”