by Susan Dunlap
Berkeley syndrome had blossomed in the Sixties, and bloomed well through the Seventies. By the mid-Eighties, the syndromees were well into their forties. Eyes that had peered into blocks of stone and seen visions of beauty now needed bifocals; teeth that had chewed over the Peace and Freedom platform required gold crowns that part-time jobs would not pay for. And the penniless life with one change of jeans and a sleeping bag to unroll on some friend’s floor was no longer viable. The need of a steady income became undeniable. And so they scraped together the money, took a course in accupressure, herbalism, or massage, and prepared to be responsible adults. Rarely did massage or the like support them. Berkeley is not L.A., where hyperactive moguls need daily rubdowns. Here a weekly massage, to calm the unenlightened spirit, is a luxury. And there are not enough of those luxuries to support the number of nimble fingers in the city. I wondered if massage students like Leila Sandoval really expected to support themselves, or if the time spent in massage classes was just a more subtle show of Berkeley syndrome.
I had a vague picture of what the syndromee would look like: in her mid-forties, with shoulder-length graying hair, no makeup, or makeup so immaturely applied that none would have been preferable—all in all, a woman so laid back that life had not noticed her. And, I thought as I turned onto Telegraph, that was not a look that would stand out on the Avenue.
I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and laughed. The picture I had of Leila Sandoval was, of course, the stereotype, and only one of the many the syndromee could fit. I could as easily have pictured Murakawa, who planned to reapply to physical therapy school next year. Always next year. Or someone who had spent the last two years sleeping in a bag on Mr. Kepple’s back porch, someone who still couldn’t find the time to go out and rent a real apartment. Leila Sandoval could look too much like me for comfort.
It was nearly three in the afternoon when I parked the car near Cody’s Bookstore and started up the Avenue.
Although it was Friday, on the Avenue it looked like a Saturday. Street artists lined the three blocks between here and the Cal campus, a veritable convention of syndromees. Between their display cases and card tables and the crowds of browsers, the sidewalks were nearly impassable. Everyone who had not taken the day off to drive across San Francisco to the beach, or to go sailing on the Bay, was ambling along peering at displays of mushroom-shaped candles, beaded earrings, or a table of T-shirts with maps of Ireland, the Tarot magician, the periodic table, and “Berkeleum, atomic number 97, atomic weight 248?” Tanned summer school students in shorts mixed with former students of all ages dressed, as Pereira had once commented “as if they were going to a costume party representing their favorite year.”
The Avenue had been gentrified recently, with copy shops replacing head shops and clothing chains where the Indian import shops used to be. But some things hadn’t changed, or at least had reemerged. There were displays of necklaces made from pounded silver spoons, key rings from forks, Jockey shorts decorated with what appeared to be finger paints. And tie-dye! Tie-dyed T-shirts, dresses, shorts, tights, tablecloths. The entire length of the street could have been carpeted in the tie-dyed clothing hanging from the display racks beside it.
I was halfway across Durant when I spotted Kris Mouskavachi, rising from a squatting position where he had been talking to a woman sitting on a carpet on the sidewalk. I made my way through the crowd toward him and was within ten feet when I realized this was not Kris Mouskavachi at all, but a blond in cutoffs who could almost have been Kris. This boy was bare-chested with a tattoo of a graceful Monterey cypress that covered his entire back. He made his way purposefully through the crowd coming down Durant toward Telegraph, and walked up to a man in a yellow-banded Panama hat. As he stopped to talk to him he turned, and I had a view of his chest. The tattoo extended over his shoulders like a shawl. Close up, I realized, this boy was older, taller, and had none of the future CEO look Kris did. And the man to whom he was talking was the last person a CEO would “interface with”: Herman Ott, the private detective.
Ott’s aversion to the Establishment (police, in particular) was well known, though occasionally I had been able to squeeze some information out of him—with the same effort it might have taken to squeeze out an egg before laying time. And the lubricant of money from the discretionary fund. At this moment I owed Ott seventy dollars (it seemed I always owed him). I walked on across the street, comforted in the knowledge that no matter how much Ott wanted to nag me about his money (it was three weeks overdue; he’d already called me twice) he wasn’t about to do it on the street.
I passed within three feet of Ott. From under his Panama hat he glared. I couldn’t restrain a smug grin. I’d pay for that the next time I needed something from Ott. Herman Ott had many things, but a sense of humor was not among them.
It was near the corner there just a few feet up Durant in a shady spot that I spotted Leila Sandoval. As it turned out, both Bev Zagoya and I were right. Although the city fathers did not allow restorative treatment for bare derrières, Sandoval was indeed plying her trade here. Her sign said FOOT MASSAGE! Bare feet we did allow.
The whole foot-massage arrangement looked like something out of the Casbah. A bearded man in safari shorts and a Florida shirt sat on one of those woven plastic beach chairs with a seat just high enough to keep the flesh off the ground. Both his legs were stretched out across a cotton Oriental rug, and one foot lay enthroned on a padded stool. Sitting cross-legged, with the foot cupped in her hands, was a large woman in drawstring pants, with graying curly hair hanging down onto a black T-shirt. The back of the shirt was decorated with a white outline of the sole of a foot with a lot of white circles drawn on it, most of them filled with illegible words. It looked like an illustration for athlete’s foot. She was the woman to whom the tattooed Kris Mouskavachi clone had been talking.
Bending over her I asked, “Are you Leila Sandoval?”
She leaned closer to the foot in her lap, staring at it as a fortuneteller might at a crystal ball. “Hmm. This treatment will take another fifteen minutes. One is scheduled afterward. I can take you at four,” she said without looking up.
“Detective Smith, Berkeley Police. I need to talk to you about the eucalyptus branch—”
She laughed. Giving the foot a friendly pat, she turned to me. “Has Has-Bitched called you about that? I suppose he thinks I have power over trees. Can’t it wait, Officer?”
“And the bees,” I added.
She looked up, startled. Her face, which I had imagined in my Berkeley syndrome picture as being devoid of makeup, was a collage of colors: bright pink lipstick, black-outlined eyes with turquoise lids, and circles of rouge on either cheek. Had she been blond she could have passed for a middle-aged Kewpie doll. A nervous Kewpie.
Looking down at her, I realized that she was not a large woman, as I had first thought, but really rather small, with very well-muscled shoulders and arms, the type of shoulders and arms capable of supporting fingers that dug into feet hour after hour. Or haul her up a eucalyptus. She reminded me of a marmot, one of those little pointy-faced animals with teeth sharp enough to tear into a hound.
A couple stopped beside us, staring from me to Sandoval, to the customer in front of her. The customer looked with horror at his foot as if it were about to be held hostage.
“This is my livelihood,” Sandoval insisted to me.
The couple, now joined by another pair, murmured in support.
“If you know about Has-Bitched,” Sandoval said, pressing her advantage, “you know he’s forced me out of my house. Onto the street. This is the only place I can work.”
There was a shrill note of desperation in her voice. As I looked down at her I wondered if that fear was of me or of her uncertain future, if she had yet reached the stage of Berkeley syndrome in which she had to face the truth that foot massage—this last, desperate hedge against reality—was not going to support her, that she would have to abandon her dream for the drudgery of eight to five,
to sell the next ten to twenty years of her life so she wouldn’t have to spend the remaining ones begging for spare change.
Or, if having ordered the bees that could have endangered Bev Zagoya’s life, she expected Diamond to make the next move. Perhaps, then, she had good reason to be afraid.
The crowd was growing. In it I recognized two familiar faces, agitators of nearly professional status. It was a perfect setup for them—hot, crowded, late enough so spectators had plenty of free time.
“I only need fifteen minutes,” Sandoval said. “I can’t leave this treatment half done.” Looking down at the foot in her hands she added, “There are still toxins in his system.”
The crowd murmured.
I glanced around, hoping for a glimpse of a patrol car or one of the walking officers.
“What’s fifteen minutes?” a voice demanded. “The city of Berkeley would support that concession. Have a cup of iced coffee while you wait—on me!”
I looked at the speaker with amazement, not because of his words, but because the man who had spoken them was Herman Ott. Herman Ott speaking to a cop in public! Herman Ott offering to pay for something!—albeit in a situation where I could hardly accept.
“She’s just trying to earn a living,” Ott insisted. Ott was smiling. He was paying me back sooner than I’d expected.
The crowd had grown to nearly two dozen. I had a featured role here in what was turning into the best show on the Avenue. This was neither the time nor the place for a confrontation. Even Leila Sandoval’s having ordered the bees gave me no grounds for arrest. To her I said, “Okay, finish up.”
Ott sidled up, took my arm, and headed toward the corner. “Good save,” he muttered.
“You understand,” I muttered back, “that the price of coffee, a latte, comes out of your seventy bucks.”
“It was worth it.”
“Sandoval a client of yours?” I asked.
But that was the end of Ott’s glasnost. He dropped my arm, muttered something inaudible, and stomped off into the crowd. I was tempted to go after him, but in the long run this public show of familiarity wouldn’t do me any good either. Instead I turned and started back toward Sandoval’s blanket.
Leila Sandoval’s spot was fifteen feet away. The beach chair sat atop the Oriental rug—empty. And Leila Sandoval was gone.
The crowd of spectators had dispersed. I questioned the braided-bracelet maker on one side of Sandoval’s blanket, and the stained-glass-panel seller on the other. Both insisted they’d been occupied with their own customers. They hadn’t realized Sandoval was gone.
I ran into the nearest stores, but there was no sign of her. I was spinning my wheels here. For an Avenue regular there are plenty of bolt-holes. Like as not, Leila Sandoval was peering out of one of them watching me. Like as not, half an hour after I left she would be back on her blanket rubbing another foot. I made a show of leaving the corner, striding across the street against the light, forcing two cars to squeal to a halt. I hurried on through the slow-moving crowd to the patrol car. Sweat was dripping down my back by the time I pulled open the door and reached for the radio mike to call the dispatcher.
“Five twenty-seven,” I said, announcing my badge number. I gave him Leila Sandoval’s description. He would notify the walking officers on the Avenue. Then I drove around the block, left the car on Bowditch, walked up Durant halfway to Telegraph, cut down a driveway, and went in through the never locked back door of Herman Ott’s building.
I raced up the two flights of stairs in the old office building. The hallway formed a square with the offices-cum-apartments on the outside and old-fashioned bathrooms with separate rooms for toilet and sink on the inside. The once fashionable building had gone downhill. By the Seventies Herman Ott was the most respectable businessman here. The “offices” had been converted—informally—to cheap apartments. But in recent years things had taken an upturn. Refugee families had moved in while they adjusted to American life. Usually the apartment doors were open and the smells of coconut sauce or curry filled the hallway. Usually toddlers on bicycles raced around corners. Now the doors were shut and the hall empty. It must have been a hundred degrees in here. Panting, I ran to the end and pounded on the milk glass panel that said HERMAN OTT DETECTIVE AGENCY. No answer. I hit the O harder. Maybe that was good therapy. There was no other benefit. Briefly I considered knocking on the closed doors down the hall. But in this building Herman Ott was a hero, a man who helped his neighbors through the mystifying bureaucracies. If Ott was avoiding me, I wouldn’t have expected his neighbors to help me out.
Still fuming I walked down the stairs, telling myself that patrol would find Sandoval. At this very moment an officer would be checking her house, and walking officers would be questioning street vendors near Sandoval’s abandoned space. The best thing for me to do would be to go back to the station and wait. I had plenty of paperwork. There were thirty-seven assault cases on my desk to finish processing. Tomorrow I had a hearing for a warrant; there were still two officer’s reports I needed to round up for that. Before I got those, patrol would have Leila Sandoval waiting for me.
I thought wistfully of my lost day. I had planned to spend it with Howard, looking at a few apartments, then a swim, a bottle of wine on one of The Palace decks, maybe a dip in the hot tub if the weather cooled, and a long, lovely evening that would meander like a teasing finger into a long, lovely night.
A long, lovely fantasy.
At least, I told myself, as I headed back to the station, this day was already shot. It couldn’t get worse.
But when I got to the station, I found I’d been wrong.
7
THE BERKELEY POLICE STATION was built by the WPA during the Depression. It is a four-story rectangle. The front desk and the row of chairs on which civilians wait is on the second floor. But to get there, civilians enter through a plain stucco room on the ground floor, a room that holds nothing but a work table and a pile of public-service notices. And the fey touch of a split curving staircase, à la Gone With the Wind, hugging either wall.
I climbed to the third floor and pulled open the door of the tiny office I shared with Howard, a room that was definitely not Tara quality. The only similarity might have been the temperature. It must have been a hundred degrees in there, too. The papers in my IN box drooped limply over the sides of the box. Without looking at them I went downstairs to Files and ran the names of Leila Sandoval, Hasbrouck Diamond, and Krishna Das Mouskavachi through PIN for outstanding warrants, CORPUS for arrests. No warrants, no arrests, none for any of them.
Then, assuring myself that this day had already provided me its quotient of frustration, that it was almost over, that in an hour I could still meet Howard at the pool for lap swimming, I made my way back to the office and sat down at my desk to tackle my IN box. On top was a note from Murakawa, reminding me I’d promised to talk to Mr. Kepple about his neighbors’ complaints. So much for self-proclaimed assurances. In the pasture the spot Mr. Kepple occupied was the one all the flies buzz around. For obvious reasons. Trying to rein him in there would make a fitting end to my day.
Or so I thought until I read the next message: Inspector Doyle was in his office, waiting for me.
Our pasture fence may be barely visible most places, but where Inspector Doyle is, you can see every board and every nail.
“Go on in, Smith,” the officer outside his door said. There was a funereal quality to his voice. There was always that funereal quality. Most times it was warranted. Inspector Doyle was not known for his patience or good humor. I had seen him laugh once or twice, but neither of those times had been during this calendar year.
Inspector Doyle nodded at me as I opened his office door. His once red hair had thinned and was mixed with gray. He reminded me of an old red hound lying in the dust, the folds of his neck quivering as he panted heavy old-dog breaths and peered out under sagging eyelids to watch a small terrier prance by. Then in one motion he’d spring forward and snap his teeth around
the terrier’s neck.
On the seat to the left of the door sat Raksen, the ID tech, looking exactly like that terrier.
“I can come back when you two are done, Inspector,” I said hopefully.
But that escape wasn’t to be. “Sit down, Smith.”
I sat. And watched. I had worked under Inspector Doyle for over a year, paired with him on murder cases, sat in this chair talking strategy, called him at home when a break came, shared the satisfaction of marking a manila jacket Closed. I still couldn’t ward off his thrusts, but I had learned the rhythm of his reactions and I could see those thrusts coming.
Inspector Doyle leaned forward on his desk. Piles of papers squirted out from under his elbows. “What is it about you, Smith? What do you do to these people? I’ve got two other Homicide–Felony Assault detectives; no one’s calling complaining about them.”
I shot a glance at Raksen. His normally pale face was ashen. His fingers were white against the manila folder on his lap. He looked like a terrier Doyle had not just snapped at, but mangled, spit out, and left on the ground a week ago.
Doyle inhaled a long, labored breath. “Now what do you make of this, Raksen? Smith goes out on a simple assault call. Nothing undercover, right? The victim was stark naked at the time of the attack.”
“So he said,” Raksen muttered. I could almost see the old yellowed teeth grazing Raksen’s terrierlike neck. And yet Doyle’s rhythm was off. I had seen him go for flesh often enough, but he didn’t do it without a buildup.