Rundown

by Michael Cadnum

  In another frantic command post of my psyche I was aware than we were putting the campus behind us, traveling fast, the chrome of the window frame flashing off and on with the car’s emergency blinkers.

  We pulled off Martin Luther King, Jr., Way into the parking lot of a place that resembled a bargain-rate motel, an aluminum-framed, prefabricated assembly of offices, the city police department.

  Chapter 3

  Each cop wore a crisp khaki short-sleeved shirt and a toy-store badge, a bright nickel star, Berkeley Police in black.

  They wore their handguns high on their hips, where it would be hard to get at the weapons without making an effort. A solicitous sergeant took down the number of my dad’s cell phone, jotted my address, and made a solemn, silent oh of surprise when I spelled my last name, the one he had no doubt heard on the radio and seen in the gourmet section of the supermarket, my dad’s idealized signature, Terry Thayer, on bottles of salad dressing.

  Then they parked me in a side chair, after I said I didn’t need to “talk to someone right away,” meaning, I gathered, a counselor.

  The police department hummed like a bank five minutes before closing, and I took some comfort in the fact that my case was not causing armed men and women to rush out into the night.

  I was getting used to this, telling myself I had done fairly well, when I sensed someone close to me, leaning over me. I gave one of those you-startled-me laughs.

  She gave me a down-turned smile of apology. “I’m Detective Margate,” she said, “with the Sex Crimes Detail.” She indicated a doorway in the distance with a movement of her head.

  She led me into a small office with a window, a view of night sky and parking lot.

  A man stood up as I entered, closing a folder, moving newspaper off a comfy-looking padded chair on wheels. She said, “This is Detective Ronert.”

  Detective Ronert smiled, kind, nonthreatening, plainly well schooled at victim psychology. He moved the chair into the corner.

  “How are you feeling, Jennifer?” Detective Margate was asking. “Can we get you a glass of water?”

  We kept quiet while Detective Ronert left, and I sat in the chair, putting my elbows on the padded arms. I liked being here in the corner, a wall on either side of me.

  He came back with an incredibly small paper cup with pleats in it. All three of us waited while I drank the water, one mouthful. Detective Margate was a tall woman with dark, short hair and black eyebrows that gave her a piercing look, like a bird that kills small animals.

  “We’re here to help you through this,” said Detective Margate, giving me a straight smile this time, no apology. “In any way we can.”

  “I want to go home.”

  She could turn the smile on, and turn it off. “We’ll just ask you a couple of questions,” she said. She touched the side of my neck gently, where a thorn slash stung. “What are these?”

  “Blackberry bushes,” I said. I meant that the marks were the effect of blackberry thorns in violent contact with my skin, but something about Detective Margate made my brain freeze.

  “Does your hand hurt?” she asked.

  The side of my hand was already sunrise-blue; I bruise easily. “Not very much.”

  “Can you open your fingers?”

  I opened my hand, shut it.

  She wiggled her fingers, a duchess giving a silent ’bye for now. She wore a dark chocolate-brown tweed jacket with blue houndstooth checks, a white blouse, and a dark navy blue skirt, the same sort of plainclothes look nuns wore when they used to drop by my dad’s restaurant for his yearly donation of gourmet fare. I wiggled my fingers back at her.

  She held out a forefinger, and I sat still, puzzled, while she pressed a knuckle against the cutoff sleeve of my sweatshirt. An ant trickled down off the cloth under her hand.

  She leveled her bird-of-prey eyes at me. “Tell me what happened, Jennifer.”

  I watched the ant hesitating on the whorl of her pale knuckle. “Nothing happened.”

  She was about to ask, so I added quickly, “Nothing sexual.”

  “Let’s start with what he did do,” she said, then she lifted the ant to her lips, and blew, gently, the ant hanging on, but crumpling with effort, losing the fight. The ant vanished.

  “He barely touched me,” I said.

  Detective Margate was writing on a sheet of paper on a clipboard, the white pen making a whisper across the page. She glanced up, and her dark brown eyes bore into me. “Where?”

  I lifted my shoulder meaningfully, let it fall. “We need the camera,” she told Detective Ronert. “Did he touch you anywhere else?”

  “I want to go home,” I said, “and forget it happened.” Detective Ronert fumbled in a black canvas bag, unzipping compartments, prying off a lens cap.

  Detective Margate’s voice was soft without being gentle, a woman used to giving orders without having to repeat herself. “It’s very important, Jennifer, that you tell us if he touched you in any intimate part of your body.”

  “He touched me on my shoulder. He grabbed me,” I corrected myself.

  She nodded reassuringly, but I could hear the questions stacking up. For a crazy instant I thought I might be in trouble for protecting myself from an assailant. “He caught me from behind, I turned around and hit him, and then he pushed me into the bushes.”

  I’m built, as Dad would say. I’m not fat, but I’m not slender. If I stop running for a couple of days I tend to put on four pounds. You could see the detective imagining me giving this criminal a fist to the face. And believing it.

  She wrote for a few moments. “Was he wearing gloves?” she asked.

  My mind did a racing data search, recalling what I knew about the series of attacks up and down Alameda County. “Leather gloves,” I said. “Tight fitting.”

  She handed me a sheet, nice and crisp, not staple-punished and bent out of shape from being wrapped around a redwood tree. It was a police-artist composite, one of those ovals that look like a face without resembling a human. One of the victims had seen her attacker before he tugged the dark knit head-covering down over his features, AGE 25–35, WEIGHT 140–150, a white male, skinny for his height.

  The shame of what I was doing shook me—swept through me, a physical force that rattled the paper in my hands. Women had been brutalized by this assailant, and here I was, turning his crime into a trashy piece of theater.

  But even as this feeling silenced me I could tell that to an observer, even an experienced one, my feelings could be misjudged.

  “Let me see if I’m picturing this correctly,” she said, offering me her all-pro, easy-on smile. “The perpetrator runs after you, puts his hand on you. Like this?” She acted out a slow-motion charade, a mummy trying out for football, her right arm outstretched. “He seized your shoulder, you wheeled, and—”

  “Hit him,” I said, my voice nearly silent.

  I should not have used the phrase hit him twice. It sounded insistent.

  But the detective made a noncop remark. “You should be able to go out running without someone assaulting you.” She was speaking as a citizen, as a woman, although you could tell that a rape from a notorious attacker would have been important, getting her name in the news. As it was, my incident was not very important, and maybe some disappointment peppered the detective’s relief.

  “I was lucky.”

  “You were lucky, but you were still the victim of assault with intent. Did you observe anything about his person that you could identify?”

  “Scars?”

  “The color of his eyes, a limp. Anything about his carriage—the way he stood and moved.”

  I knew what carriage meant; I was a tiny bit irritated. Also, I was afraid I was going to let her down. I offered, “He said something.”

  “What?”

  Jesus, what did he say?

  I hated myself for ad-libbing. I cleared my throat, really wanting that water now. “I could barely hear him.”

  “What did he say?”
>
  “He said, ‘Wait a minute.’”

  Detective Ronert held a Pentax camera up to his face, and the flash caught me looking. I blinked. He was one of those men who can’t help getting a little fat; he probably starved himself, ate nothing but celery for lunch. He had a thick neck and pink face, his whole person buoyant, the hair on his head thin on top. He squinted, snapped another shot, the entire room flash-frozen.

  “Do you think you could recognize his voice,” said Detective Margate, “if you heard it again?”

  I felt my mind hunt the possible answers, weighing the strength of each. If I said no, how much would it weaken my story? Maybe I wanted my story to collapse. This was as good a time as any to blurt the truth.

  I said, “I might.”

  “Get a picture of these,” said Detective Margate, running her finger over a prize set of scratches on my forearm. “And here,” she said, pointing to my bra strap.

  Both detectives examined my shoulder, and I tried to let my mind wander far away from this, the camera focusing on a bruise. The camera whined between snaps, the automatic flash leaving violet smears on my vision.

  Chapter 4

  My dad hurried toward the office wearing a tux, his long silk opera scarf trailing, about to fall free. My mother was close behind, in her new William Calvert evening dress, gray so dark it was same-as-black. Her blond hair had that artfully swept-back look she pays for on Maiden Lane, her hair consultant as fussy as a surgeon.

  Both my parents had a taut, pale look, afraid of bad news, and I quailed inside, not feeling the way I had expected at all.

  I took his hands. I told him I was all right, emphasizing the words, giving them the right weight, the right eye contact, and he walked me a few steps away from the chair, reading my eyes, like someone guiding me out for the last dance.

  “I just want to go home and pretend this never happened,” I said, partly because it was becoming more and more true, and partly because it was the most normal thing I could think of saying.

  He closed his eyes, too shaken to give voice to his “Thank God,” the words just visible on his lips.

  My mother began to put her hand on my shoulder, but then ended up with an airy, half embrace, holding back, and then stepping all the way back, ashen. I couldn’t keep myself from flinching when I thought she would touch me where I hurt. She currently worked as an industrial psychologist. She ran a company that designed Silicon Valley job application questionnaires, catching industrial spies and sexual harassers before their names made the payroll.

  I had not expected to feel what I did then. These are my parents, I wanted to tell the detectives. These two beautiful people.

  My father introduced himself to the detectives and asked to be briefed. My mother walked around the office, corner to corner, her golden hair upswept and kept in place by magic. Detective Margate ran her right hand down the front of her tweed jacket. When her fingers reached the garment’s hem, they gave a gentle tug.

  My dad has this effect on people. You see him in ads, billboards, television, Wildhorse Ranch, Bloody Russian, Primo Virgin Vinaigrette, his gaze looking out at the shopper, half smile half don’t-disappoint-me twinkle.

  Detective Ronert offered to get my parents some coffee, “Although it really isn’t fit to drink.”

  “Coffee would be delightful,” said my mother. If you didn’t know her well you would think she was used to this, standing in a police station dressed like a movie star. She did quick turns around the office, her heels making neat clip-clops. She was a woman of hidden tensions, even after years of therapy and a steady diet of beta blockers. She had studied to be an opera singer years ago, but stage fright had stopped her career.

  Detective Margate reprised my account of the crime, referring to a form on her desk, stopping to correct the spelling of a word.

  Ronert returned with two cups of coffee in white porcelain cups emblazoned with the Berkeley police insignia, a yellow star framed by the silhouette of a badge. I had to wonder if there were Berkeley police T-shirts and paper plates, for parties with a crime-fighting theme. He left the cups on the desk; no one touched them.

  We all listened to Detective Margate. When she was done she arranged some papers on her desk, and my mother ran her hands up and down her arms, like she was cold.

  “We’re hoping Jennifer can help us,” said the detective.

  “How?” asked my mother.

  “She’s the only witness to have heard his voice,” said Detective Margate.

  “I don’t want my daughter being caught up in this,” said my mother.

  She didn’t mean simply that she wanted to undo any crime that had occurred, erase it from our collective memory. She meant this place, these two detectives, these off-green walls.

  Something passed between the two women. Detective Ronert said, “We think tonight’s attacker is the same individual. The same perpetrator as the others. He might well still be hiding in the hills.”

  Detective Margate said, “We’ll have dozens of officers out there, beating the brush. Park rangers, too. This might be the night we catch him.”

  “Of course my family will cooperate in every way,” my father said. “If we can help catch this guy—” My father hates to get emotional. He glanced around the room, taking a deep breath.

  With something like kindness in her voice, Detective Margate said that she tried his recipe for persimmon pudding last New Year’s Eve. “It was wonderful!” she said.

  “You use the whole nutmeg, the entire nut, grated, you can’t miss,” my father said, adjusting the black bow tie, flexing his shoulders, relieved at the change of subject. “You use too much sugar you lose the taste of the fruit.” His eyes lit up, and the passion came over him as he spoke, the way he could talk to an airline ticket clerk about mangoes, or run into someone walking his dachshund and end up talking about where to buy the best veal.

  Dad’s Fine Food Five had started on KSFO a few years before as a stopgap, a way to keep him busy and pull in some dollars after his restaurant burned down. The five minutes once a week had turned into eight minutes every day but weekends. Then Kraft Foods bought his line of salad dressings, which he had started as a hobby tax write-off, four employees in a cinder-block kitchen in Napa. Now he was planning the pilot for a network TV show, and he was on the phone with his tax lawyer every day.

  “Did you ever try my crema fritta?” he asked.

  You could see Detective Margate wondering if she should tell a polite lie. “No, not yet.”

  “Or my chilled grape pudding—”

  My mother put a hand on the crook of his arm.

  But I loved listening to him. And I was suddenly hungry sitting there, eager to be home and having some of those lamb chops in white wine we had in the fridge, unless Bernice had decided the egg and lemon sauce would not bear reheating.

  “Before you go I need you to sign this,” said Detective Margate.

  “What is it?” asked Dad, taking it from her hand. He held it at arm’s length, reading. “Incident report.” He tried making the name of the form sound funny, on safer ground when he could sound ironic.

  He looks like the pictures you see of Napoleon, a fleshy, luminous face and a gaze that tends to be inward, considering. While Napoleon was probably thinking, “The artillery is aiming too high,” Dad was usually thinking something like, “Chef should take it easy on the oregano.”

  I signed my name, realizing as I penned the letters that my signature was a passable copy of my dad’s registered-trademark signature, the one a corporation had just bought. So I finished signing my name with a flourish, something new, Jennifer Thayer underscored by a diagonal line.

  I had been gripping the Bic too hard. I put it down and flexed my fingers.

  Then I made a mistake.

  My face went blank. It wasn’t the shaken, nerveless face of a victim, but something else—the look of a self-conscious actress, unsure of her role.

  “I’m making an appointment for you, Jenn
ifer,” said Detective Margate, in a tone of voice I had not heard since my father arrived. “With one of our victim’s services counselors.”

  “We can take care of our daughter,” said my mother.

  The detective said, “This is an investigation we’re conducting.” After an emphatic silence, she added, “And we want the best for Jennifer.”

  Even women make the mistake of thinking that if a person is good looking she can be easily deceived. My mother looks good, and she gets what she wants. She has fired a string of personal secretaries, and when she used to complain about a less than perfect score on Cass’s English test, the teacher always changed the grade. It’s easy for me to imagine her name on an opera poster, ELIZABETH ESHELMANN, MEZZO-SOPRANO.

  My father steered me away from the desk, nudged me without touching, his aura pushing my aura.

  We stood outside the detective’s office and tried to hear what Mom was saying to the police.

  Chapter 5

  In the back seat of the car my mother changed, lost her erect posture and slumped like a boneless thing. Her hand flopped outward, squeezed nothing, found mine.

  “That’s the one,” she said, when I made a tiny intake of air.

  The hand I hit him with, she meant.

  I made one of those noises people use to affirm a statement, a small sound, not a word.

  “Jesus, I’m proud of you, Jennifer,” she said. “For fighting like that.”

  Freeway lights glided by, Dad guiding the brand-new Lincoln at the speed limit.

  This was all new to us, including our neighborhood, a domain of ivy-covered gothic four-stories, tucked up against the Berkeley/Oakland city line. It was a few blocks of Jaguars and front-garden fountains, and the biggest fortress in the neighborhood had come on the market the same week Dad quit the radio show.