It was almost as an afterthought that I noticed the chocolate Labrador retriever lying on the bed beside her. Gratefully, I focused on the dog, a big-pawed, wide-faced fellow with a luxurious brown coat that clearly had been brushed today. He was watching me with the detached interest of the well loved. More than once I’d joked that in my next life I was coming back as a retriever and would spend the entire incarnation being petted. I didn’t say that now, but the memory seemed to fill my mind and block out any other thought.
I held out a hand toward the dog. He sniffed and cocked his head in acceptance.
When I looked back at Madeleine again, her cheeks had pulled in, her eyes were shut, and her teeth pressed hard together. The hand nearest me she held taut, as if refusing to give in to the pain. Only her left hand betrayed her. With it she clung to the dog’s back, pressing her fingers so hard into his fur that it nearly covered them. I expected him to yelp, but he made no sound, and no movement except to lean the side of his head into her leg.
Her hand eased. But it was a moment before the dog moved back to his original position. Frail as she was, I was amazed she’d had the strength to grab the dog so fiercely. She cleared her throat and spoke as if her throat was raw and it was an effort to force each word through that rough passage, “This is Coco. He accepts tribute, but he’s much too spoiled to acknowledge it.”
My breath caught. I would have given a lot to avoid asking, but I couldn’t, “Coco? For Arnero?”
She smiled. “Not many people get that connection.” She said it in the same neutral voice I remembered so well. There was no way to tell whether there was anything beneath her statement, or if she even recalled my connection to that one incident in Arnero’s life.
No point in pursuing it; I’d ask my questions about the canyon perp and get out. I reached across and scratched the brown retriever’s head. Briefly he looked at me, then glanced back at Madeleine Riordan. I said, “I’m Jill Smith, Homicide Detail.”
“Homicide?”
“Yes … but I’m here with the Hostage Negotiation Team. You probably know we had a situation in the canyon—”
“Did you free the hostage?” she asked in that raw voice.
“It turned out there wasn’t a hostage,” I said. “The original witness was mistaken.”
“No hostage? Then no hostage negotiation.” I could hear the wagging finger in her voice, but I wondered if that was just because I recalled it from the past. She was asking if we’d been hotdogging. It was, I recalled, a charge she’d made in the Arnero hearing.
“The perpetrator himself can be the hostage if he’s in danger of harming himself. And we had reports he had a gun.”
“So you could break into anyone’s house …”
“No. You of all people know that.” Before she could respond I said, “Look, I know you don’t want to waste your strength talking to me. We’re concerned that our perpetrator could be creating a dangerous situation down in the canyon. We need to know how he’s getting in and out of there. Have you seen anyone moving around down there?” Madeleine Riordan wasn’t one to give the police information. When the Arnero hearing ended, Arnero had turned his anger on her. I heard him threaten her, but she refused to press charges, and the next time he was arrested she defended him again. Now I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d refused to answer my questions altogether.
“I’d have to have my snout pressed against the glass to see down in the canyon.”
From anyone else I would have taken that as a slap of dismissal. But Madeleine Riordan’s dismissals didn’t veer in from the side like that. I took a chance. “And have you?”
A hint of a smile flashed and was gone. “It can be very boring here. You don’t sleep much when you’re in pain, unless you’re drugged up, and I’m not about to spend my last weeks that way. Oh, friends come, but it’s so goddamned awkward for them that I’d rather they sent cards. They stumble for words. Some of them say they know how I feel, which was bullshit even before I was dying. They couldn’t know what this is like unless they spent the hours I have learning about the rules of dying.”
“Rules?”
She was looking out the window at the dark canyon, not at me. “Rules, the lawyer’s life. We think that the law is the rule for all society. We know that there are plenty of people who break the rules, even among those who swear to uphold them,” she said with a small snort—of disgust, admission, what? Now she did look at me, her blue eyes large, demanding, shining against the pale dryness of her skin.
“They tell us if we stay in our lane we’ll be safe. So we do. You follow all the rules society insists on, you lock your doors, you cover your ankles, you don’t sleep around, you protect your sacred hymen, and what happens? You end up here wearing a piece of cloth slit up the back with your ass bare to whoever comes in. …”
She glanced at me and stopped. I hadn’t been monitoring my reaction like I do interviewing witnesses. I’d been thinking what an odd old-fashioned slant that was for Madeleine Riordan—not sleeping around. “But they haven’t made you wear a hospital gown.”
“They don’t dare. My body may be weak but I’ve still got my tongue. I’ve heard tell I can raise welts with it.” She flashed a suggestion of a smile.
“I’ve seen some.”
She motioned me to sit on the bed. Another time I would have pondered the unprecedented acceptance that her offer indicated, but now I sat and said, “So what have you seen out the window?”
She raised her hand as if to run it through her hair. I remembered that movement from the hearing, when she’d been considering whether to speak. Now she stopped the hand halfway up and let it fall back to the covers. “I haven’t observed much. You can’t see down under the trees. There are kids down there during the day, they tell me, but I never see them. Coco barked a bit the first time I was here. But he was just put out to find potential sources of attention who were ignoring him.” She gave his head a rub.
I nodded. The live oaks and the bays made a carpet twenty feet above the canyon floor. Even for someone with spyglasses it’d be a trick to see movement beneath them. Of course she hadn’t observed anything down there. I braced my hands to push myself back up and leave.
“I used to sit outside when I was here before.” Her voice was higher, more anxious. “Down there on the walk. In the summer the sun would get that far in the afternoons. I could walk down there by myself then. We didn’t have many sunny days this summer. Maybe one every three or four. I’d go out, but each time it was a little harder. You see, the body becomes the enemy. When you’re healthy, you don’t realize. It inconveniences you, it hurts you, it waits to kill you. By the time you understand it’s an object that you can’t control and they can do whatever they want with, well …” She looked up, suddenly flushing. “You watch your control growing narrower and narrower, like water circling down the drain.”
I didn’t know what to say; the chasm between us was so great, much wider than at the police review commission when we were merely defending police officer and prosecuting attorney. Now we were the living and the dispossessed. Despite the bed large enough to accommodate Coco, the woodsy prints on the wall, the deep red clearly authentic Persian rug, I was struck by her absolute poverty. When you have no future, you have no power. And if you have no control, you have nothing.
Equally, I could feel my own fear of contagion, that somehow if her hand touched mine she would grip it in a death vise and yank me with her across the Styx. It was all I could do not to pull back.
And yet I couldn’t possibly have moved.
She rubbed Coco’s head. As if reading my thoughts, she said, “I’m fortunate to have a place like this, not like the awful nursing home my mother died in. Here I can have Coco with me, and have Mike to take care of him. And”—she forced a laugh,—“even Claire.”
She was trying to keep me from leaving: me, a cop. Anything to keep out the dark that echoed pain and let fear race unchecked? Or was there something she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell me, tell the police? I swallowed hard. “Claire?”
“The woman in the other room. She really doesn’t like dogs, but she’d never say that to my face. She’s one of those traditional ladies, trained to be polite, remain pure, and never create unpleasantness. A product of the days when purity was all.” The scorn was clear in her voice. I wouldn’t have expected otherwise from a woman who had spent years representing those who marched and demonstrated, who slept in doorways on Telegraph Avenue, those who wouldn’t or couldn’t conform.
“If Claire doesn’t like dogs, why did she choose to share this cottage with you and Coco?”
“I promised to keep him out of her room.” Madeleine half smiled. “That lasted almost a day. I was sure once she knew him she’d see what a sweetheart he is.” She rubbed his head, her forefinger running down the ridge between his eyes.
“And did she?”
“She asked Mike to keep the door shut. Said she was worried about fleas. And germs, when Coco licked her hand. You know how those clean, clean ladies are.”
I smiled, recalling the horrified reaction an aunt by marriage had had to our family Great Pyrenees. At eleven months and well over a hundred pounds he’d jumped on her lap. And we, less than perfect hosts, had laughed. “What happened with Claire?”
“Coco took the door as a challenge. I went in after him one day and found Claire huddled in the far corner of her bed and Coco stretching his neck as far across the bed as it would go. It was clear it wasn’t the first time they’d come to this standoff.” She smiled, just as my family had.
“And Claire never complained?”
“She isn’t that type of woman. Besides, everyone on the staff here loves Coco. No one would take her complaints very seriously. I knew she’d come around. I sat in there with Coco every afternoon until she could pat his head without shrinking back.”
“And now she’s comfortable with him?” I asked, ready to disbelieve the answer. We pet lovers have raised self-deception to an art.
“Now she’s not in enough control to …” Her hand moved down to wrap around the big dog’s chest. She turned toward the window, but it showed nothing of the dark fog-filled canyon beyond. The glass reflected her bald head and the bony hollows of her face, and in it, I suspected, she could see herself in a few weeks no different from Claire.
I said, “About our suspect in the canyon—”
“Even when I sat outside I didn’t see anyone escaping from there.”
I stood up. Coco stretched his head toward me for a final scratch. Careful to avoid Madeleine’s hand still on his neck, I scratched behind his ears. Having satisfied himself of my place in the herd, he looked away.
“Let me think overnight,” Madeleine said slowly. “Maybe there’s something I’ll recall that will help you.”
“Fine,” I said.
“You can come back tomorrow, can’t you?”
“Yes.” My voice was barely audible.
“About this time, eight-thirty.” Desperation didn’t come through in her voice; she still had that under control.
I nodded. I wanted to reach out to her. But the moment had passed; she would have looked at me as if I were crazy. I held out my business card to her. “If you do think of anything beforehand, give me a call.”
“Do you need anything, Madeleine? Mike and I are right here.” A woman with a spray of red frizzy hair stood in the doorway.
“The detective’s just about to leave. If you can wait a minute, I’ll go to the bathroom.”
“Sure, I’ll be right here.” She moved out of the doorway, leaving only her elbow to indicate she was waiting outside.
Madeleine reached for my card. Glancing at it she nodded. “Sometimes I think I’d be better off if I let them dope me up. Maybe keeping your mind clear enough to be appalled every time you can’t maneuver in the bathroom without help isn’t such a boon.” She emitted a noise somewhere between a snort and a laugh. “But nothing’s forever.”
Now I did reach toward her hand. Automatically she lifted it as if to shake. Our hands came together at the wrong angles, intentions unclear on both sides, and ended in an awkward touch that was neither a squeeze nor a handshake.
“Till tomorrow,” she said so softly I wouldn’t have recognized the words had I not understood. But, in fact, I heard in them the request that I come back, that there was something she wanted me to know but couldn’t bring herself to say now. I could feel how much it cost her, a woman who never let herself ask an indulgence from a police officer, particularly one she’d viewed with the scorn she’d shown in the Arnero trial. I let go of her hand and left, making my way up the hillside path, wondering with each step what was so important that it had moved Madeleine Riordan to breach her own wall of reserve.
I
CIRCLED BACK TO
the top of the canyon. Traffic moved normally now. The mobile unit was gone, and all but one patrol car had coasted on to other things. The officers from that car would be interviewing people at the edge of the canyon. I hadn’t realized how long I’d spent with Madeleine Riordan. It was almost nine o’clock already. I checked in with Inspector Doyle, then headed back to the station for the Immediate Incident Debriefing. It would be a somber affair; no one wanted to spend his Sunday night reporting on his contribution to a failure. Doyle would announce I was taking paper—all the reports on the hostage operation. Maybe he’d authorize another call to witnesses and potential witnesses—every resident on the canyon rim—and an early-morning sweep through the canyon itself to see what daylight illuminated. Beyond that there wasn’t much he could do; you can’t put out an APB on an unknown perp.
The meeting ended at ten forty-five. Still wired, I headed back to my office. If I was taking paper, it wouldn’t hurt to get my own report done. Grayson would be responsible for rounding up the reports from the Tac Team. I could assign Murakawa to prod patrol for theirs. Knowing him, he’d be first in with his own. The major hassle would be checking through all those reports before they went on to Chief Larkin, the city manager, and the mayor. And, no doubt, the police review commission. With thirty officers involved, chances were some citizen would file a complaint about something. I should just be glad none of those complaints would be handled by Madeleine Riordan.