“Right,” Murakawa said a bit too quickly, as if I’d questioned his competence.
Lowering my voice, I said, “I think I’m on to something. Down at the end of the path.” I made my way down the dirt and board steps and along the path. The bushes at the end seemed thinner now in the midday sunlight. I checked the path near them, not expecting chair leg or runner marks to have survived some number of days’ wear plus the scrapings of any number of feet. But there was one round hole that could have come from a chair leg being pressed into uneven ground to level it. Bending closer, I could see another. It took me only a minute to separate the branches of the jade plant and, using a handkerchief to shield it, extricate an 8-by-11 metal box, one of those flat, fire-resistant boxes in which people keep their papers. It was locked. I carried it back to the companionway, and before he could ask about it, said to Murakawa, “Locked. But I have the feeling it will open itself in my office. Let me know when you’ve seen the doctor. Stay here till you do. We need a clear handle on Claire’s condition.”
“You want me to call you when the doctor gets here?”
“No, you ask him. Get his opinion of how lucid she was last week, yesterday, and what’s going on now. You speak his language; he’ll give you clear information.” I walked across the companionway. “Oh, and when you see Delia and Michael, find out exactly the last time they took Madeleine down to sit by the jade plant.”
I hurried around the house to the patrol car and made it back to the station in record time. Howard was at his desk when I walked into our tiny office. It was midday-bright outside, but in here it could have been a bear cave in January. The overhead light was on, as it was every day. And Howard, facing his desk, had his chair a foot out into the aisle to allow room for his legs. He looked like a parent at back-to-school night. He also took up half the aisle.
“You’re bringing a gift?” he said swiveling around to face me and the metal box.
“Actually, yes. You’ll enjoy this.” I put the box in the middle of my desk. “Unless I am way off base, this was Madeleine Riordan’s.”
Howard looked at the flimsy home-safe box in disgust. “I’d have credited Madeleine with better judgment. I hope she didn’t put anything she wanted to keep to herself in there.”
“My guess is she didn’t have much choice. She was most concerned about weather—the box was outside—and she had to use whatever she already had at home. Thus, this.”
“What’s Madeleine’s contraband?”
“Papers.”
He looked more closely at the silvery box. “Locked, huh?”
“Right. And the fact that she felt compelled to lock it, and to hide it outside, makes a good case that even in a posh place like Canyonview a patient can’t count on anything in her room going unnoticed, or untouched.” I cringed at the thought of orderly, controlled Madeleine Riordan living with the knowledge that nothing was private. It was degrading for a woman nearly half a century old to have to hide her papers like a teenager locking her diary.
Howard was already fingering a ring of keys. I reached out a hand. Howard grinned.
Still careful to preserve any fingerprints, I inserted the first key. It worked. Opening the box, I lifted out a crumpled and restraightened sheet of yellow paper and glanced at the drawing of a car wheel with what appeared to be a flaccid wart at the two o’clock position. “Eckey will be interested to see the ingredients in her purple makeup,” I said, handing the sheet to Howard.
The yellow paper was just what I’d expected, and it confirmed my hunch that Madeleine had been the parking enforcement pranks planner. We would check the writing against hers, of course, but there was no question in my mind. I reopened the box. The second sheet was unrumpled, wedged into the bottom of the box the way papers get if undisturbed. I realized I was holding my breath. This was the paper that interested me. The first sheet—plans for a caper already done—had been handled, wadded, and straightened, but this one looked untouched. Leaving it as it was in the box, I read it, and ended up laughing.
“What?” Howard insisted.
“Tiress better watch out.”
Howard was veritably rubbing his hands together. I could see why he was the one cop who had really liked Madeleine Riordan. And more to the point, I could see what he’d liked about her. I found myself almost relieved that the two of them hadn’t known each other better. The stings they could have come up with together! “So she was out to get old Tight Ass? What’d she have in mind for him?”
I wished Madeleine could have been here to see Howard’s reaction. Even by her stringent standards, praise from Howard would have been a trophy worth keeping. I pulled my chair free of the desk, slid it toward the window, and sat. “You know, Howard, the more I find out about this woman, the sorrier I am I didn’t know her. This caper she’s worked up here is a masterwork. First of all she sets the scene at Haste and Bowditch, at the top of Peoples’ Park, by the spot under the trees where the regulars hang out.”
“The regulars, who view Tight Ass like the city’s contribution to street farce.”
“Then she has her minion block the slots on four parking meters on Haste—three together and the fourth three spaces down. Look here, Howard, the woman is so thorough she’s even listed that the slot blocks need to be three eighths of an inch in from the outside surface of the meter.”
Howard nodded approvingly, his curly red hair flapping in response to the enthusiastic assent. “So the blocks won’t be visible to the people who parked in those spaces.”
“Three meters so it will give her minion at least four minutes to do his dirty work.”
“And the park regulars will keep Tiress focused on his tickets or on them.”
“And while old Elgin is writing away?” I quizzed, shielding the sheet, and waiting for Howard’s inspiration, as if this were the Super Bowl of Sting.
Howard leaned back. “Well, she’s already chained the Cushman to a phone pole, stolen the marker sticks, sprayed purple paint …” He began pulling at his already long, prominent chin. “Tire theft? Dangerous, but … In four minutes New York thieves could take apart the whole Cushman. Of course, not silently.”
“Nope. Nothing so destructive. In every one of the capers she had a light tone. In this one, her minion paints the Cushman seat with glue.” I pointed to the bottom of the sheet. “Here’s the recipe for the glue.”
Howard clapped his hands together. “Stick Fast! I haven’t seen that stuff since I was a kid! I always knew Madeleine had potential, but I never suspected. She had such a good act. God himself wouldn’t have figured her for this.” He shook his head. “I am so sorry she’s dead.” His shoulders slumped forward, and the hands that had clapped together pressed into his thighs. “You know, I never even visited her after I heard she was sick.” He stared down at them. “I don’t do well in hospitals and places like that.” Places people go to die, he meant, but he didn’t say that. “It’s real hard for me; I get there and I can’t think of anything to say, and I feel like an ass talking about myself, but I don’t want to ask her how she is, or hear her answer, or, God forbid, have to respond to it. I feel like a heel talking about the future, and a jerk if I just stand there saying nothing … It’s all I can do to send a card.” He swallowed. “I didn’t even do that. But if I’d known all this about her, I would have. For all the difference that makes now.”
I rolled my chair closer and covered his hand with mine, weaving my fingers in between his. “Howard, Madeleine had something she loved doing right till the end—the adrenaline of the caper. You of all people understand that. Maybe that was more important than another visitor.” She’d made it clear it was more desirable than her husband.
Howard nodded, a bit too quickly to have given my thought real consideration. He’d swallowed the comfort whole. Looking back at Madeleine’s instructions, he said, “Ah. So Tiress writes his three tickets, then he climbs back into the Cushman, plops his broad ass on the seat, and settles just long enough to become affixed.” The grin returned to his face. “Then he comes to the fourth meter, starts to get out, but his pants stay on the seat!”
I could see first the confusion, then the outrage on Elgin Tiress’s perpetually enraged face. I could hear the rough sound of the rip. “And the beauty of it is, he’s still close enough to give the park regulars a clear view of his drawers.”
“Right, and, Jill, you know what a grapevine they’ve got on the Avenue. Old Elgin would never write another ticket anywhere near Telegraph without street people, students, craftsmen, and half the shoppers pointing and laughing. They wouldn’t be calling him Tight Ass anymore. Bare Ass! Madeleine Riordan, I salute you. It’s not just a sting, it’s a sting in perpetuity!”
Again, I felt a pang of sadness for what she had missed. And for the way she had walled in her life, and all she had kept out.
As if reading my mind, Howard said, “She was a hard woman to know, but if you could get through that crust of hers, there was a nugget of something great.” He shrugged. “Or at least that’d be my guess.”
My phone rang. “Oh, damn, Howard. I forgot about Doyle.” I grinned at Madeleine’s plans. “At least this’ll cool his pique.” The phone rang again. “Homicide Detail, Smith.”
“Smith.” It was the dispatcher. “Haste and Telegraph. Another parking enforcement assault.”
I held up a finger to Howard and laughed. To the dispatcher I said, “Don’t you mean Haste and Bowditch?”
“Nope, Telegraph. Peoples’ Park Annex. And don’t be laughing when you get there, Smith. Eckey’s not laughing.”
P
EOPLES’ PARK IS THE
most famous two-point-six acres in Berkeley. Since 1968 when the University of California prepared to build a high-rise dormitory there, protests and riots have kept the park in the public eye. The three quarters of a block between Telegraph and Bowditch was home to flower children in the sixties and seventies, the homeless in the eighties, and homeless and drug dealers in the nineties. Through it all the university regents have never forsaken their quest to build
something
on this only clear spot of land around Telegraph.
When the latest riots let up, the park sported a volleyball court. The park dwellers had evictions. Some of them moved across the street to what was dubbed Peoples’ Park Annex, a tent city on the razed rubble of a transient hotel at the corner of Telegraph Avenue. Compared to the Annex, Peoples’ Park had been like Grosse Pointe, with the discipline of West Point. Annex tents sagged in stagnant water, and the occupants juggled fights, drugs, and the complaints of the absentee owner. By the time they were evicted from the Annex, too, they had few supporters left. The lot returned to rubble. All that was left to remind people of the interlude was a tall black spike fence.
As I neared the scene, I noted the Cushman protruding from that fence.
I’d been to enough parking enforcement capers to expect to look for a meter minder gritting teeth and scrubbing face, feet, or any part between, to see reporters taking notes, television cameras whirring, and a crowd of Berkeleyans laughing their heads off. Here, on Telegraph, I would have expected a circus. Instead, the thirty or so civilians were almost outnumbered by sworn officers, Parking Enforcement personnel, and guys from Advanced Life Support. The onlookers stood nearly silent staring down at a spot ten feet beyond the Cushman.
I pushed through them. The A.L.S. medics were kneeling next to a blue-uniformed body. I moved closer, though I already knew the body would be Eckey’s. She lay still, eyes closed. Bruises marked her forehead and circled her eyes. I glanced at her arms: her sleeves were ripped, her skin cut and bleeding. Her hands were too bloody to tell whether the bruises came from an accident or were defensive wounds. A faint residue of purple was still visible in the creases beside her mouth, giving her skin a bluish tinge. She lay on the broken cement; water had collected in the cracks beside her head and tendrils of brown hair hung into the mud. I wanted to pull them free, dry them off, make Eckey not look like a corpse in the gutter. I swallowed hard and looked down to see if her ribs were moving. They were. She was still breathing.
I rested a hand on the shoulder of the nearest medic, a guy whose white turban suggested he was either a Sikh or a follower of one of our Hindu gurus. “What’s the prognosis?”
Before he could speak, Eckey opened her eyes and muttered, “Shitty.”
“Shh!” the medic snapped. Clearly it was not his first suggestion along this line. “Either you lie still, shut your eyes, like I told you, or I empty this whole syringe into your vein and you don’t need to think about what you’re going to say till a week from Wednesday.”
I laughed, mostly from relief, and gave the medic’s shoulder a pat. “Having Eckey as a patient is going to burn off any bad karma you’ve got from your last three lives.”
He shook his turbaned head.
I’d been so focused on Eckey it was like all my other senses had shut down. Now suddenly, I smelled the musty mixture of blood and dirt that surrounded Eckey. On Telegraph Avenue brakes squealed and the staccato beat of rap music indicated a drive-by gawker had rolled down the window for a better look. Behind me one of the patrol officers asked for a name and address, voices speculated on “Crash?” “Brakes?” and “One ticket too many?” A whiff of strong coffee floated past. There is no disaster too great for Berkeleyans to observe with a
latte.
I moved around to the other side of Eckey, standing where she could see me. Her neck was immobilized in a foam collar.
“What’re you staring at, Smith?” she growled.
“You.”
“Whadaya mean, me?”
A smile crept back onto my face. “You, Eckey, you look different.”
“Different how?”
“I’ve never seen you with your mouth shut.”
“Can you save the banter till after the Emergency Room,” the medic said, clearly disgusted.
“Just two questions.”
“Okay, but we’re ready to move her.”
“No way!” Eckey snapped. “You don’t touch me till I say so. Now, what do you need, Smith?”
I squatted down next to her. “What happened?”
“Brakes failed.”