“Bathroom. I share it with Delia.”
“You keep the bathroom door locked?”
He shrugged. “Delia’s an old hippie. Her view of private property is hazy.” He winced, and I had the feeling the line he’d just given me was one he’d used before when describing Delia to his friends, and that it had flashed on him it wouldn’t get as good a reaction from the police. “It’s not that she’d
steal
anything important, but if I left the door open I could never count on having a pencil or”—he shuddered—“even my toothbrush.” He was wearing those five-dollar Chinese black cotton shoes with the thin rubber soles. He sat on the bed and wiggled his feet to slip off the shoes. They stuck. His round face scrunched into a look of exasperation as he bent and yanked them off, then pulled his legs up to sit cross-legged. There was an awkwardness about his movements, as if he were still an adolescent who hadn’t adjusted to his latest spurt of growth. I looked at his hands but there was no sign of poison oak.
“Michael,” I asked, “were you close to Madeleine?”
He leaned forward and absently pulled the bedspread up around his socked toes. I was expecting him to answer “Yes.” He had told me he cared about all the patients here and in the nursing homes he’d worked before. But I wasn’t prepared for him to stare down at the bunched bedspread, press his knuckles into the fabric, and mutter, “I don’t know how I’m going to get along without her. She—” His voice caught. He swallowed. “Sorry. It’s just that Madeleine is the first person who thought I was something special, someone with a future. She was my sponsor.”
I waited, letting him talk at his own pace. The room was cold. He had a space heater next to the desk. It didn’t look like it would do much.
He let go of the bedspread and leaned back against the wall that doubled as headboard. “You’ve probably heard about the Professional Coalition Scholarship?”
I had, vaguely, but I decided to let him explain.
“It’s a full scholarship to graduate school. The Professional Coalition—they have a hundred members in Berkeley, each one of them has a different profession—and they give this scholarship each year. Madeleine”—he shut his eyes and took a deep breath—“Madeleine nominated me. She shepherded my application through the whole process. She told them how I had worked at nursing homes all through college, even when I could have gotten better-paying jobs. How I did it because I cared that someone should be there for people who don’t have anyone else. She convinced them it was something special, that
I
was special, and that I would make a difference as a doctor.”
“How many candidates were there?” I wondered just how big a commitment this shepherding of Madeleine’s had been.
“A lot. I was astonished when I won. I mean some of the guys were really good. Madeleine really went out on a limb for me. I don’t know what all she did, but I do know that she said that medicine has lost the sense of what it should be. Doctors are too interested in exotic research or just plain wealth.” He looked up at me, a watery smile playing on his face. “She said if your dog is old and in pain you can get the vet to come out and put him to sleep; you can hold his head in your lap while he slips away. ‘You’ll never get anything that humane yourself,’ she said. I guess they believed her; her husband is a vet.”
Madeleine was one to know;
she
hadn’t gotten that kind of treatment from her husband, the vet. I made a mental note to tell Doyle before he interviewed him. He’d need to find out what exactly made Madeleine leave home and come here to die.
“She told them,” Michael continued, “that they owed it to their friends, their children, their country to support a decent student who wanted to be a caring doctor.” He shrugged. “She convinced them. So I start medical school next semester.”
“Her death won’t affect that?”
He glared at me. “Of course it will. My triumph would have been hers. She would have cared about my courses. Discussed them with me. I could have shared everything. She’s the only person who ever really thought I was worth something. Now there’s no one to care. Oh, I’ll go on to school. I owe her that. And, well, I’ve worked really hard for this chance. Even if I’d had the money, which I no way did, I don’t know that any school would have accepted me without her influence. She was the key … to everything.” He swallowed. “Everything.”
“You don’t have family?”
He squeezed his eyes shut; he looked like an adolescent fighting the last vestige of childhood and yet desperately wanting to hang on to it. “They’re back east. They couldn’t help me through college, much less medical school. I’ve always had to work. Even if you’re not taking a full load of classes, it’s not easy to spend four nights a week on duty in a nursing home and make respectable grades.” He glared at me through watery eyes.
I nodded slowly, using the time to look at him. He was average height, not heavy, but not ever likely to be too thin. His dark hair was parted in the middle, blown back around round cheeks and a full-lipped mouth. There was nothing in his appearance at all similar to tall, slender Madeleine Riordan. I could recall seeing Madeleine a few years ago when she was thinner than normal, when her cheekbones looked like they’d break her skin. Michael Wennerhaver would never have a visible cheekbone. But his tone, or was it his mannerisms, or his choice of words; something about him was just like Madeleine. I wondered if that similarity was what had first attracted her to his potential: a bit of herself for posterity? The son she’d never had? Or had Michael unconsciously mimicked his mentor? Whichever, the bond between them seemed to have been strong enough that she might have revealed her intentions, her fears, whatever made her too dangerous to live. His first reaction to her death was to cry out: “Why now?”
“Michael, did Madeleine ever talk about fearing death?”
“She wouldn’t have done it.” His face reddened. “She wouldn’t kill herself. Not now! Not without talking to me! She’s the only person who’s cared about me in years. She wouldn’t do this to me!” He yanked the bedspread up and wiped it roughly across his eyes. He was sobbing now.
There was nothing I could do. Grief takes its own time. I recalled Michael when I’d first seen him last night, when he was trying to keep me away from Madeleine. Now, knowing her, having heard him, I could understand his fierce protectiveness. Still, it was interesting that he had assumed suicide.
It made me wonder about her husband, the veterinarian. “Did she talk about her husband?”
“You mean problems with him? No. I mean he didn’t even bother to bring her here this time. She got someone to drive her over. Her husband hasn’t been to see her once. It’s like she was a dog he sent to the kennel! No, worse—at least you take your dog there yourself. He didn’t even bother to do that.”
“So maybe there were problems.”
He laughed, a high, awkward croak. “Was she so depressed about him that she killed herself?” he asked mockingly.
“Maybe he wanted her out of the way?”
“Well, she was. She was here.”
“Why didn’t he visit her?” I insisted.
“Because he’s an asshole.” He swallowed and said, “Actually, I never met the guy, and Madeleine didn’t talk about him, so who knows?”
“Well, did she have any other visitors?”
“None I saw.”
I was getting nothing. I’d have to bait the hook. Leaning forward I said, “So in a sense, Michael, you were her closest friend?”
“I guess.”
“This isn’t going to be public knowledge for a while, and I have to ask you not to tell anybody,
anybody.
” I waited till he nodded solemnly as do all but the most jaded witnesses at that invitation into the inner circle. “Madeleine may have been murdered. And we have to treat this like a murder investigation. So, Michael, what could lead to her being killed?”
He fingered the bedspread, slowly shaking his head.
I could have kicked him. Or myself. When that inner circle gambit fails, it bombs. I thought of Madeleine sitting in Claire’s room, holding Coco. “Michael, Madeleine spent a lot of time sitting with Claire. Maybe she talked to Claire about something threatening her?”
Michael’s eyes widened as if I had suggested something horrifying, or at least, indecent. I had to struggle to keep a straight face. He looked away, and wiped his eyes, this time with his hand rather than the bedspread. The process took longer than it had to—he was camouflaging his reaction. The Michael who’d told me he’d worried whether Claire would make it through the night was not likely to admit he was appalled at the idea of Madeleine’s confiding in her. He looked up. “Sorry. I don’t know what Madeleine talked to Claire about, of course.”
I noted that he viewed their conversations as one-way affairs. “But, do you
think
she would have confided her concerns to Claire?”
Now he looked directly at me. “No. The only thing she talked about that upset her was her mother. Her mother died in a nursing home. Not a place like this, but one of those places that smell of urine, where you hear people down the hall wailing all night.”
People we assume will never be ourselves. “Did that make Madeleine afraid?”
“No. Not afraid. Guilty, even though she had no reason to be. She couldn’t help. It was right after her car accident. She was in the hospital herself. There was nothing she could do.”
Nothing she could do. Like Madeleine’s husband, I thought, only his distance was by choice. Maybe. I stood up, and used the moment to check out the bookshelf over the bed. Medical books, anatomy, physiology, some ologies I couldn’t place, the type of words you wouldn’t want to hear from your own doctor. On top of Gray’s
Anatomy, Biochemistry II,
and several ringed notebooks was a pile of magazines. I smiled. “So not all hard work here, huh?”
He looked up at the magazines and blushed. “Oh, them. They’re just stuff I’ve taken from some of the old guys’ rooms after they died.”
I didn’t respond.
“No, it’s true. I mean their children don’t want to think the patriarch, the man who bounced them on his knee, was reading
Playboy,
or
Hustler,
or
Western Gun Digest.
”
I said nothing.
“Look, most adult children assume their old parents have no interest in sex. Like everything dries up when they come here. But getting old doesn’t make you impotent. Our residents remember what it was like. They have fantasies. Sometimes we even have romances here. That’s great for them. They love it.”
I turned back to the dresser and picked up the poison oak medication. “The canyon’s a bad spot for someone allergic to poison oak.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Do you go down there much?”
“No. I’m very allergic.”
I let my question lie between us a moment, then asked, “How do you feel about meter maids?”
He stared at me a moment. I couldn’t tell whether he was really baffled or just putting on a good act. Then he adjusted his face into a smile that wouldn’t have fooled anyone and said, “Actually, I’m grateful to them, or at least to the guy who’s after them. One of the men upstairs says he paid so many tickets if he doesn’t write checks to the city he feels like his week is wasted. He can’t wait to read about the latest meter maid stunt, and talk it over with everyone. They all just love it. Starts them thinking about what they’d like to do. Thinking about new things, planning; it’s good for them. I just hope the stunts keep up till baseball season starts again.”
Meter maid assaults as an extra nine innings for shut-ins; I figured I wouldn’t mention that to Eckey. I gave Michael the usual warnings. I’d have Murakawa take his official statement tomorrow. Maybe a man would get a different angle from him. There was something Michael Wennerhaver was hiding. Lots of witnesses hide things that have nothing to do with the investigation, things we don’t care about at all but to them are scarlet
A
’s. Michael probably would have given a lot to keep me from coming across the girlie and gun publications. But what interested me was the poison oak medication. He could, of course, become infected in the yard, or if he touched wet sap on the dog’s fur. But if he went into the canyon regularly …
I didn’t see him setting up meter maids to provide a diversion for the old residents. But loners like Michael Wennerhaver raise suspicions. A loner who resented the narrowness of his life was just the type for our perp. And the old man upstairs with all those parking tickets, did he still drive? Or did someone get those tickets for him?
W
HEN
I
STEPPED BACK
outside into the yard between the main house and the cottage where Madeleine Riordan died, I wondered why I’d bothered telling Raksen to pull Madeleine’s shade back down. To avoid drawing attention? Fat chance of that. Lights were clipped on every protruding surface around the backyard and over the path. The place looked like a movie set. Patrol officers were hunched over, eyeing the steep ground for signs of an intruder none of us expected them to find. Too many feet had run down the path and onto the companionway. The best we could hope for would be to find an item the killer dropped—preferably something like a driver’s license.
Michael Wennerhaver took one look, hurried down the path, and knocked on Claire’s door. He was halfway in before Heling, who had replaced Pereira in there, cautioned him.
Inspector Doyle would be at the station by now, coordinating background checks, talking to the doctor, going over the notes from the preliminary interviews, and taking witnesses’ final statements.
Murakawa was on the companionway. Today he was back on patrol, just another patrol officer. But something of the bond between us from last night’s hostage operation still held. I wondered if he had seen Madeleine Riordan’s body and if he, too, had thought of the deflated dummy in the canyon. If so, he didn’t let on. I gave him a summary of my interview with Wennerhaver. “You can take him to the station,” I said. “And tell Doyle Riordan’s husband didn’t bring her to Canyonview. According to Wennerhaver, someone else brought her, and the husband hasn’t visited.”
Murakawa nodded. Anyone who didn’t know him so well would have missed the slight judgmental pursing of the lips.