I shuddered at my thought, then reminded myself that had I said it aloud in her room, Riordan would have laughed. Maybe.
I sat staring at my notes. In a minute, or maybe it was ten minutes, I realized that I wasn’t looking at the pad. I was running my fingers through my hair, absently tugging; at a level way below thought I was reassuring myself it wasn’t I who was dying.
I closed my pad, got up, walked to the clerk’s desk, and left a request for background checks on Michael Wennerhaver and on Madeleine Riordan. Then I drove home. If the rest of the guys involved were having as much trouble getting down their reports as I was, it’d be a long time before the mayor saw anything on this operation.
Down here in the flatlands, the fog had closed in. We don’t get many like this. Most of our fogs are Pacific fogs—thin gray roofs that block out the sun. But tonight’s was a land fog, the type they have back east, that separates each individual, encases him in an icy gray capsule, and creates a treacherous illusion of soft edges.
Howard’s house was an elderly brown shingle on Hillegass Avenue a mile south of Peoples’ Park. In that mile Berkeley changes from the off-campus lair of students, sidewalk vendors, and street people begging for change that hasn’t been spare in over a decade to a neighborhood of comfortable Victorians shaded by tall oaks and magnolias. Many of the homes have been repainted or reshingled, the yards landscaped. Almost all of them are in better condition than Howard’s.
Howard has to keep five tenants, including me, to pay the rent. He tries to fix up the house. But his manual dexterity just isn’t in the hammer-and-nail department. Since I moved in we’ve argued about the house, and what Howard terms his interest and I call his fixation with it. I felt so claustrophobic I almost moved back out. But fears don’t come from outside the skin. And I’m too much of an adrenaline junkie to care much about where I live; home is only a place to eat food from white bags and plastic containers, and wait for my pager to go off. And to snuggle into the familiar ridges and hollows of Howard’s long, sinewy body. A bond connects us, like the vibration of cello strings beneath all the other sounds of the orchestra. It’s not just knowing about unreliable hours, investigations that bulldoze plans, auto chases that rev you up like nothing else; it’s laughing at the same thing, in the same key, that shows me I’m not alone. Not like Madeleine Riordan. For that, for now, I can put up with an irritating violin or piccolo in the orchestra.
The violin that grates on my nerves is Howard’s never-ending sanding, painting, dismantling sinks and showers. The piccolos are the array of tenants necessary for the rent. There’s almost always a tenant in the living room anxious to talk, or more like it, complain about the piccolos, the violin, or me. Or I come home to a fire in the fireplace and grunts and sucking sounds coming from the sofa. But tonight the whole house was dark. And, I noticed when I walked in, cold. The place never gets warm. It can be 80 degrees outside and it’s still sweater weather in here. And Berkeley sees 80 degrees maybe two days a year. Oboes.
I made my way through the living room, up the stairs to the balcony, and around to Howard’s door. I could hear the ebb and flow of his breath. It comforted me, that reassurance of life, the communal rhythm I could slip into. I took off my clothes and left them on the floor. The cold air seared my skin. I needed a steaming bath. I’d never go to sleep shivering like this. My arms were shaking against my sides. I pressed my hands against my legs but I couldn’t stop the shaking. And somehow I couldn’t deal with the linear procedure of running the tub water, climbing in, washing …
Howard and I don’t wake each other up when we come in late. We’d never get enough sleep if we did. But tonight I climbed into bed and pressed my icy body against his, feeling the warmth of his skin against mine. It didn’t cut the cold of my own flesh. I wrapped my arms around his back and pressed my face into the notch of his neck and felt him breathe, and felt myself breathing. And when he was awake enough to respond, he ran his lips across my cheek to my mouth. I opened my mouth and felt his tongue pushing in and I sucked hard, going with it till the passion blotted out my thoughts, blocked the awareness of his breathing, and mine, and ours, till I wasn’t even reminding myself that I was alive.
“You’re still shivering,” Howard said afterward.
“Don’t take it personally,” I said, laughing.
“Wrong! Shows how little you know about men.”
“Oh, no, not the California State Authority on Testostoral Behavior again. I—”
“See, Jill, what you don’t realize is about St. Peter and fooling around.”
“Howard, even I know enough about religion to be sure St. Peter didn’t, at all.”
“Perhaps not,” he said dismissingly. Nothing so organized as religion had entered Howard’s childhood. “But all guys understand what the saint is talking about when he asks at the pearly gates, ‘How did you do?’ And you, Jill, could be responsible for damnation.”
“At least you’ll be warm.” My tone of voice was off. I’d wanted to keep up the banter, to talk a little and let him go back to sleep. Six o’clock comes early, a lot earlier than the sun in November.
“Jeez, you’re really freezing.” He wrapped his arms tighter around me, but that only made my shivering more noticeable.
“What happened?”
I chose to answer that on the more superficial level. “We got down to the canyon floor and the asshole was gone.” Howard, of course, would have heard about the hostage operation; he’d want all the details. Normally I loved that. Getting into the meat of each other’s cases was almost as important as laughing in the same key. I could handle the details of the operation tonight. The deeper level I didn’t know that I could put into words. But I would talk to Howard for the same reason Madeleine Riordan kept me with her. I shivered again and desperately wished I could brace my cold feet against Madeleine’s desolation and push myself away. Instead I heard myself saying, “You know Madeleine Riordan?”
Howard laughed. “No wonder you’re shivering if you’ve had a run-in with her.”
“She’s dying,” I said before he could add something he’d feel awkward about later. “Her window overlooks the canyon. I was hunting for a witness. It happened she was it. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to remember me from the Coco Arnero trial.”
“Jill, that was nearly ten years ago. She’s punctured half the force since then.”
I gave his hand a squeeze.
Howard intertwined his fingers with mine. “I’ll bet you, Jill, there’s not one guy in the department who’s escaped her. They wouldn’t care if she weren’t so good at getting them.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be comforting me, not praising my erstwhile oppressor.”
“Oops. Well, for what comfort it is, every guy I talked to, when they were willing to talk, said he came out of a hearing with her feeling like he’d been led down the garden path and knocked cold with a daisy. Never saw it coming; couldn’t believe it afterward. They’d say they were walking down from the stand shaking their heads and the judge and jury were still laughing. Make you feel better?” he asked, circling his arms around my ribs and pulling me back against his chest. “And the worse of it was they couldn’t say anything to a woman who was limping off with a cane.”
I groaned. “You know, I’d forgotten about her needing a cane. Somehow it makes her dying seem even worse. Like she didn’t get enough life, and now even what she had wasn’t up to par. What happened to her? Did she injure her leg?”
“Dunno if it was her leg or hip or some combination. Whatever, it was from an auto accident way before I came on the force.”
He laughed.
I pulled loose and turned to face him. “You’re amused by car crashes? Or that there was life before the department was graced with your presence?”
Howard pushed himself up, leaned against the wall (where a headboard might have been)—his settling-in-for-a-talk position. I wriggled up next to him.
“I’ll bet, Jill”—the grin returned to his lantern jaw—“Madeleine wasn’t much help once she realized your canyon perp might be the same one who’s hassling meter maids.”
“I didn’t get around to telling her that.”
“Damn good thing.”
“Why? Why would she care, Howard?”
“Because, Jill, before they had blue curbs and handicapped stickers, Madeleine Riordan got her car towed so often she almost sold it. She said taking cabs would be a whole lot cheaper than supporting a car, an insurance company, and the city, too. She said she’d use the money she saved to have a life-size picture made and sent to Elgin Tiress, since he’d become accustomed to seeing her so often.”
Elgin Tiress, vulture of the expired meter.
“Or, more accurately, seeing her car?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there one citizen in all of Berkeley’s driving population that Tiress hasn’t swooped down on? For the amount I’ve paid in tickets outside the station—all from Tiress—I could get a new car.”
He laughed. “Jill, prices have gone up a bit since you bought your bug. Maybe you could get a new driver’s seat.”
“Maybe.”
Howard reached over and draped his right arm over my shoulder, and with the left caught the blankets before they fell. It was a good save, but then we sat talking like this three or four nights a week, and Howard had had a fair amount of experience. “You know, Jill, I’ll really be sorry to see her go. She pulled some great saves. I would have loved to know the mind that created them.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No way. She was hardly a woman you’d invite out for a beer and shoptalk.” He brushed his chin against the top of my head. “Not like some.”
Beer and shoptalk had sustained us during the tense year of my divorce and several increasingly tense years afterward while we both tried to avoid the dangers of an affair with the person who shared an office. We had discussed cases so long and in such minute detail we could have applied to be Department historians. Sublimation in crime! There are cases I’ll never remember without thinking about Howard’s long firm thighs.
I leaned into his body, feeling the warmth of his skin, willing that warmth into my own. And seeing Madeleine Riordan, clutching the back of her dog. She had a house, a husband; what could have made her leave them for a place like Canyonview where she was so alone? “Howard, she kept me there tonight—because she didn’t want to be alone.”
His hand tightened on my arm but he didn’t say anything.
“She asked me to come back tomorrow night. I had the feeling she was deciding whether to tell me something about the hostage operation. You think?”
He drummed a finger on my arm for a minute before saying, “She’s caused us a lot of problems over the years. She got me more than once. But she was the best at it, the subtle sting. I just … well … I hate to see her sunk so low she’d sell out for half an hour of company.”
I nodded.
He squeezed me to him playfully. “But one thing you can count on: if Madeleine Riordan does give you something, it’ll be damned good. You better make sure you’ve got a cell waiting. By this time tomorrow night you’ll have your perp looking out through the bars.”
A
GOOD START TO
the week is getting up at six fifteen, having a cup of Peet’s Coffee, Viennese Blend, with Howard, and then whipping through a mile of Albany Pool water like a yellowfin heading for open seas. An average Monday begins closer to seven o’clock. A sip from Howard’s mug. Five eighths of a mile with the speed of a sea turtle in danger of becoming soup. This Monday’s entrance came at closer to seven twenty. No time for coffee. No swim. No movement faster than a clam’s. No sight of Howard at all.
I left my car—parked illegally on the street—and raced through the front door of the station. Before I was halfway up the steps to reception, I heard a low rumble from the second floor. It sounded like the distant rumble you hear seconds before an earthquake. Before you realize what it is, the earth is shaking like crazy.
“Behind me,” Sabek at reception said. “You’ll love it, Smith.”
I raced through the double doors and around the corner to Records and almost smacked into Clayton Jackson, my fellow homicide detective. Jackson was at the back of half a dozen guys crowded into the hallway. He was looking ahead, grinning. When he spotted me, he stepped aside.
I elbowed my way past Murakawa, Al “Eggs” Eggenburger, the third homicide detective, and wedged in next to Pereira before I could see the cause of the shouting and realize why the guys had been such utter gentlemen letting me move to the front. They were all enjoying the scene, but it was true no one was going to get the kick out of it I was. There, barrel chest to barrel chest, were my two least-favorite colleagues. Grayson stood, his dark shaggy eyebrows shaking, that thick droopy moustache that had been unchanged for as long as I’d known him, unable to conceal the snarl lines of that hidden mouth beneath. “The hostage negotiation, last night, in Cerrito Canyon. Maybe you heard of it?” Sarcasm dripped from Grayson’s voice. Down onto the red-tufted top of the head of Elgin Tiress.
“Your car was outside here.” Tiress wasn’t shouting. I’d never heard him raise his whiny voice. He stood, arms crossed, stocky little body braced like a fireplug waiting to be parked in front of, or, more likely, pissed on. Either way he would win—there’d be a violation for him to ticket.
“Of course my car was here,” Grayson shouted. “You don’t drive across Berkeley without lights and siren, not if you want to move. If I’d taken my own car, I’d still be sitting in traffic.” It was something of an exaggeration, but not so great a one it caused any of the onlookers to protest.
“You left your car by a green curb.” Elgin Tiress’s voice was like a jabbing finger. Tiress was a head shorter than Grayson, but that voice of his was jabbing right in Grayson’s face.
“A hostage could have died, Tiress.”
“Green curb means twenty minutes. Your car was there three hours and fifty minutes.” Elgin Tiress was not known as Tight Ass for nothing. “You’re lucky I only gave you one ticket.”
Grayson’s hand tightened into a fist. “Can’t you get it through your head, you … I was out on a life or death case!”