“Where is the woman in the sunburst suit?”
“Basement door at the far side of the main house. Right up there.” He pointed to a light just beyond the corner.
Pereira met me at the door, with her notes from Delia McElhenny’s preliminary statement in hand. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her. “To begin with,” Pereira said with an undercurrent of disgust in her voice, “she’s not even a nurse. She’s picked up some knowledge—well, who wouldn’t, running a place like this for five years—but no degree. Says she purposely avoided it—as if nursing degrees arrived at the door like Jehovah’s Witnesses and you have to be on the lookout so you don’t open up.” Pereira, who had gone to school in a district that has since been taken over financially by the state, who’d worked her way to a B.S. in economics, had little patience for … well, the truth was, Pereira had little patience, period. Michael Wennerhaver was more sanguine about his hardships than she, but then Michael was headed to medical school, and Connie Pereira might never make it into the elevated realms of finance that so fascinated her. “Seems, Smith, that she owns the place. Seems she inherited it from her parents. Seems,” she said, disdain dripping from her words, “she’s forty-eight years old and still living in the room she took over when she was fifteen, and probably wearing the same clothes.”
I nodded. Suddenly, tie-dyed dresses, skirts, tights, and shirts were for sale all along Telegraph Avenue. Twenty-plus years after it had faded into the sartorial purgatory of bell-bottoms and micro-miniskirts, tie-dye burst into bloom, like plants on a burned-out hillside. What had re
kindled the dormant seeds of tie-dye, no one seemed to know. Or what kept the shopkeepers and street vendors displaying it. Despite its massive availability, Delia McElhenny was one of the few people I’d seen actually wearing it.
“Seems like,” Pereira went on, “what she’s most concerned about with this homicide is liability.”
“By which she means financial liability?”
“Right. Not that she has an alibi for the last few hours. Of course she’s got no idea who went in or out of Riordan’s room, even though lifting her head to look out her window could have shown her. She admits she was around all day. Doing what, you might ask, since she provides none of the care? A little cooking. ‘Mostly hanging out’—that’s a quote.”
I stifled a laugh. In the Pereirian lexicon hanging out was about as acceptable a use for time as shopping for tie-dye.
“The woman has raised irresponsibility to an art form, Smith. Not only does she keep herself too ignorant to provide any care for her people here, but she’s even had the cottage windows walled up on this side so she won’t know what’s going on in their rooms. And the contract the residents sign—they’re part owners as long as they live—”
“Like residential term insurance?”
“Sort of. It’s all legal, I’m sure. Residents can do whatever they want in their rooms—hire a nurse, or refuse medical care—it’s no business of Delia’s. And when they croak, she resells the room.”
“Any incentive to help them along faster?”
“I assume you want me to check. She must get something, and the way she lives, even a little would help. But the thing is, Smith, you could offer her title to the entire city of Berkeley and it wouldn’t get her moving! Even so, she doesn’t gain much. Basically what she’s got here is the dying making her house payment and supplying her enough to live on if she doesn’t have any fancy plans, which, of course, she’s too lazy to come up with.”
“So, Connie,” I said, reaching for the door, “you think she’ll still be awake when I get in there?”
“It could take a trained detective to tell.”
I stood for a moment, mentally stepping back from Pereira’s view of McElhenny. Chances were I would concur with Pereira—she was a good judge of character. She sized up a suspect with the care she gave a stock option or a pork belly future. It was only after she’d made her judgment that she dumped the pork bellies in the pigsty and carried on about the stench.
I knocked on Delia McElhenny’s door and walked in.
The room was perfect for the woman Pereira had described; it could have suited any teenager in the sixties. The double bed was jammed against an inside wall and covered with a Madras plaid bedspread that must have spent the past thirty years bleeding out its colors. Now it was a dull orange. On the white block panel walls were splatterings of fingerprints and an Everly Brothers poster so old I was surprised the paper survived. The cement floor (painted black) held an orange rya rug. Delia McElhenny looked up from one of those barrel chairs that were popular only long enough to remind people that barrels are best used to transport liquids.
I introduced myself, decided against a swinging hammock chair in favor of a beanbag, and sat. “Why would Madeleine Riordan have been killed?”
I’d hoped to startle a response, but clearly in the world of the slothlike I was up against a pro. She gave a small shrug. “Got me. I don’t even know why she came back here. If she was going to die, why couldn’t she have done it in her own house?”
I realized, with a start, that I was the one who was surprised. Despite Pereira’s characterization of McElhenny, I recalled Delia from the firm but gentle way she handled Michael outside Madeleine’s room. At some level, I had been prepared to see beneath Pereira’s description to find a sensitive, mature woman. But Delia wasn’t letting me. Her reaction to Madeleine’s death here was a complaint, seemingly aimed at the powers that be. But it was one thing to which Delia McElhenny had allotted thought. “Why
did
she come back here?”
She merely shrugged.
“She was here before this time? When?”
Delia ran a hand through her long wiry red hair, pulling a clump loose from the band that held it. The red, blue, green, purple, and yellow tie-dye she was wearing appeared to be pajamas, but might, in fact, have been her all-occasion wear. “Madeleine bought her room in July. She stayed here through a ten-week bout of chemo, then she went home.”
“If you don’t offer anything she couldn’t arrange at home, why didn’t she stay at home?”
“Got me,” she said sliding down in the chair.
“No, Delia,” I snapped, “not good enough. There has to be some reason people spend a lot of money to live here. You run this place; what’s the draw?”
A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. It seemed a great effort. A myriad of sun wrinkles around her unadorned eyes suggested a long and close acquaintance with the out-of-doors. For someone with more muscle tone I would have guessed long hours spent cycling or hiking; however, from the look of her, her idea of serious exercise was turning over on a beach towel. But then
laid-back
and
well-preserved
are terms rarely used in the same sentence. “A number of residents come here to take control of their lives, and to avoid all the family psychological baggage that gets unpacked when someone’s dying.”
That sounded like a quote from an oft-given spiel. “But Madeleine—?”
“Who knows? She wasn’t profligate with her confidences.”
I smiled. Sluglike Delia would have driven her crazy. “Maybe she confided in Claire. She spent a lot of time in Claire’s room, right?” The question had worked with Michael; it was worth a try here.
She laughed.
“Why not?” I demanded, exasperated.
But if Delia noted my tone, she showed no reaction. Probably she’d seen exasperation so frequently she assumed it was the norm of conversation. She leaned back, running her fingers through the ends of her red curls and then letting the hair wrap around the fingers. “Madeleine would never have confided in Claire.”
“Why not, Delia?”
“Well, the thing is it’s probably just political. In the social sense, I mean, rather than political political. I mean, Claire is pretty old school. She was a teacher at Minton before I got to school. She’s not one to shake things up.”
“You went to Minton?” I should have kept the amazement out of my voice. I failed. Minton was a conservative private girls’ high school. Minton girls married doctors, or became corporate lawyers or interior decorators. Minton girls did not spend their lives in basements or run ersatz nursing homes where they might have to listen to patients and, when the staff didn’t show up, handle bodily secretions. Minton girls didn’t acknowledge the existence of bodily secretions. And above all, they didn’t look like Delia McElhenny.
“Yeah, I was a Minton Girl. If you saw my freshman picture, you wouldn’t recognize me. But everything changed after we had the Minton Hall demonstration.” Anyone else would have leaned forward eagerly, but Delia settled lower in the chair. If memories of the watershed event in her life couldn’t animate her, I suspected nothing would. “You probably don’t even remember hearing of it. But at Minton it was like the line between
B.C.
and
A.D.”
“Actually, I do know about it.” It had been well before I’d come to California. When Delia was in high school, I’d have been carrying a little plastic shovel and bucket and making sand castles on the Jersey shore. But it doesn’t do to be a Berkeley detective without knowing the city’s history. The Minton Hall demonstration was a very minor part of it—an antiwar demonstration, it followed the even less likely event of a group of Minton girls hiding the state government’s most sought-after antiwar planner in the Hall. Cisco, the guy was called. A faculty committee called the governor’s office. The state police arrived. Students surrounded the building. The standoff lasted less than an hour, but it was enough time for Cisco to escape. “Were you one of the collaborators?”
“I wish I had been. But I didn’t even know about it until the cops got there. In fairness, even if I’d had the opportunity, I didn’t care enough about the war to be bothered. It wasn’t till I saw a friend get clubbed that things changed for me. Until then I thought government was there to protect me.” For the first time she looked me right in the eye. “I’ve never made that mistake again.”
“And Claire?”
“She was on the faculty committee.”
“Is that the reason why she and Madeleine were at odds—different basic outlooks?”
Delia slumped back in the chair. “It’s just an example of it. I’m fond of Claire; she’s a sweet woman. When she was a girl, being a teacher was about as assertive as a woman could get. But she taught in a very protected environment; she never had to take a chance. Every decision she’s made has been for the status quo. I mean, if she hadn’t been the English Chair, I could easily have seen her with flour on her hands and an apron around her waist all day. Except that she’s much too timid and prudish to ever have married, much less gotten naked with anyone, man or woman. It’s all she can do to let me help her bathe. And even then she’s so modest it takes me twice as long as it should. But that’s the way she was brought up.”
“I’ll need to talk to her.”
“Not tonight,” she said emphatically. “Madeleine’s death really shook her up. I gave her a sedative. I mean, she took it; I just suggested it, like anyone would.”
I almost laughed. Either Delia was abnormally wary of being sued, or the line that allowed her to run a no-fault non-nursing home was entirely too narrow to walk. I could understand her position here. I could see Michael’s, and maybe the rest of the residents, but for someone like Madeleine coming back here just made no sense at all. “Delia, Madeleine moved here when she was apparently well enough to stay home, right?”
Delia nodded.
“She had no visitors, right?”
Again she nodded.
“But she did spend time sitting in Claire’s room with Coco. If she wasn’t talking about her plans or her fears, if she didn’t even like Claire, why was she sitting in there?”
For the first time Delia smiled, the kind of smile I would have hated to see on my own caretaker. “She was torturing Claire. You see, Claire hates dogs.”
I
LEANED BACK IN
Delia’s beanbag chair, shifting my butt to make the beans rewedge themselves enough to provide a decent seat. Delia was smiling, presumably at the thought of Madeleine Riordan sitting with Coco at the end of Claire’s bed evening after evening torturing the old woman. I wriggled the concept around like beans in the chair, but it didn’t fit. Not for Madeleine. Even with her cane, Madeleine Riordan was a woman always on the move, if not physically, at least mentally poised to jump. She wasn’t one to sit silently hour after hour bullying a woman when she could have gotten the same effect with one swat of her tongue. Fatal disease may make some people less vindictive. If they’re still out to get their neighbor, it doesn’t change their M.O.
The passive-aggressive approach Delia described was in fact more suited to Delia. But there was something beneath Delia’s comment. I didn’t know whether it would reveal a layer of Madeleine or of Delia herself. Careful to conceal my excitement, I asked, “Delia, what would make you think Madeleine was that angry?”
Delia wrapped a lock of wiry red hair around her finger absently observing the process. “I’ve seen her, talking about her cancer. She was furious.”
“Furious at?”
She leaned toward me. “Medicine. People’s carelessness. The laws of the universe. See, the thing was that she’d been real responsible about taking care of herself, going to checkups, doing self-exams, getting mammograms. She had a mammogram one year. ‘Everything looks fine,’ they said. ‘Come back in a year.’ And when she went back—almost a year to the date—they found not only a tumor, but cancer that had spread all the hell over. Inoperable.”
“Oh shit!” I swallowed, turning away from Delia. There was a draft from under the door; it chilled my ankles. I couldn’t imagine what Madeleine must have felt—I didn’t want to probe deep enough, personally enough into the possibility of death ambushing me to experience the dread, anger, the rock-bottom fear she must have had—but fury seemed a reasonable reaction to me. When I turned back to Delia, her skin was pale, her face taut, and she was unconsciously holding her shoulders high and tight—probably mirroring me. Our eyes met briefly and in that moment I could feel the balance between us shift from authority-and-subject to two women sharing a small stab of grief and a pile of fear. We both swallowed. I took a breath, gratefully refocused on the steps of the interview, and asked, “Did Madeleine blame her doctor?”