Tiress puffed up his small, rounded chest, looked directly ahead—at Grayson’s chin—and said, “Tell it to the judge.”
“Too big for your fucking little britches,” Grayson muttered as Tiress made—in small but rapid steps—for the door.
The rest of us headed for the meeting room and slid into chairs just as Chief Larkin walked in. The chief attended Morning Meeting only sporadically. His presence was rarely a good sign. I figured things couldn’t get worse.
Jackson pushed me a cup of coffee. “I don’t know if this’ll do it, bad as you’re looking, Smith,” he muttered. “It’s good, but it doesn’t resurrect.” A couple years ago I’d made a deal with Jackson’s son: swim lessons for morning coffee. Darnell was away at college now, but during the swap days Jackson had gotten hooked on Peet’s, and now he filled a thermos every morning. It was a practice I wasn’t about to question.
Now the chief settled into his chair directly across from me, his gray suit and signature red tie looking crisper than anything in the room but his own self. Irritably fingering a clutch of messages, he waited while the hot car list circulated, and representatives of the various details reported the last twenty-four hours’ activities: tools stolen on Parker Street, stereos on Sixty-second, Hopkins, Fairview, Sixty-seventh, and Mabel; assaults with gun, stick, feet, bottle, metal pipe, and a water balloon; commercial burglaries: telephone from an auto sales shop, fax machine from a copy shop, and from a cleaner, cash and every suede item in the store.
Chief Larkin listened, pensively rubbing his messages between thumb and forefinger. I began to doubt the words would survive long enough for him to read them. I should have been so lucky.
When the regular daily business was over, Larkin leaned forward and said, “The Berkeley Police force is becoming a laughingstock. It’s bad enough we have some crazy fixated on Parking Enforcement. This one loony’s running all over town stealing marking wands out of the Cushmans like they were free samples.”
Cushmans, the little golf-cartlike vehicles Parking Enforcement used, had metal roofs and zip-up sides. Meter minders like Elgin Tiress were too busy popping out and depositing tickets to fasten the siding each time. We all knew that; no one felt called upon to remind the chief.
Larkin went on. “He’s crashing into the Cushmans. He’s stealing them. He’s rolling one into a pile of manure, depositing another in a Dumpster—we had to get a crane to get that one back out!—and now stealing traffic tickets and helmets.”
I’d been around long enough not to interrupt his tirade. Howard had too, but as a Vice and Substance Abuse detective he knew he wasn’t going to be mashed with the fallout from this. He said, “Helmets?”
“Stole a helmet right out of the meter vehicle. Left the officer in violation of the law!” City governments across the state had applauded a new state law mandating helmets on motorcyclists. They’d been less pleased to discover that meter cart drivers came under the same classification. And downright distressed when informed they couldn’t send out those drivers to check on meters, much less generate new revenue when those meters expired, until the drivers were legally helmeted. “Meter maid had to borrow a helmet from a Cycle Patrol guy on vacation. Thing was so big it floated on her head. Took us a week to replace hers.” Chief Larkin’s face wasn’t the color of his blood-red tie, not yet.
Celia Eckey from Parking Enforcement glared. She was a short, comfortably plump gray-haired woman who made you think of Mom. Usually it was Mom with cookies and milk, or Mom who wanted to hug you and make you well. There was a reason Parking Enforcement sent her to Morning Meeting rather than the more senior Elgin Tiress. Parking Enforcement was aware of the odious Tiress’s reputation.
Eckey stood up to her full five feet three, placed both hands on hipbones, and announced, “This shit can’t go on!”
Police officers are not shocked by much, and certainly not by common four-letter words. But from Celia Eckey no one expected more than a “Pshaw.”
Eckey glared around the table. “We get more shit than the rest of you put together. The citizens of this town, they think we make up all these rules: If you live in Area D, you can’t park outside your house unless you pay for an Area D permit. Your parents come to visit and they can’t park there unless they get a permit. You get them a temporary permit and put it on their car and still they get a ticket because you forgot to write in the year; you’ve just got the month and day. What do you do? You scream at Parking Enforcement: ‘Hey you idiot, we all know what year this is! Do you have a quota? Do you get a bonus for stupid tickets!’ ” She fanned another glare around the table, daring anyone to take her on. I felt like a four-year-old caught with cookie dough on her hand.
But Howard, whose charm had insulated him from normal rebuke, stretched his long arms forward. He was grinning. “So, Eckey, what do you tell him? Why do you insist on the year?”
“We do it for little boys like you, Howard. College boys think it’s a big joke to save their temporary stickers for an entire year so they can use them again.”
“Or sell them,” Howard said. “Remember the black market the undergrads were running with them? Good little profit maker until they made them the prize in a Homecoming Weekend lottery. The gift for someone who’s got everything, and no place to park it!”
We, who get no more mercy than any other citizen when it comes to parking in this the tenth most crowded city in the nation, laughed. In an hour some of us would be running out to move our cars from their two-hour spots here in Preferential Parking Area C, in which we were neither the blessed residents nor commercial tenants. Organized officers like “Eggs” and Acosta worked in pairs, swapping their spots. The rest of us hunted and grumbled. And, as Eckey would have been glad to announce, bitched at Parking Enforcement. Berkeley is not a city prone to offer its public employees special privileges.
Eckey was not laughing. “Permits are all yellowed; edges are curling with age; and these kids think we’re not going to catch on!” She shook her head. “I’d like to send every one of them to his room without supper.”
Everyone laughed harder, and even Eckey joined in. Until Chief Larkin’s cough brought us back to business. “Eckey, how long has the perp been operating?”
“No way to say, sir. Much harassment as we get, it’s hard to spot a new strain.” The captain started to speak but Eckey was not to be denied. “Accuse a guy of murder and he says he didn’t do it. But you stick a ticket under his wiper and you get a bunch of excuses that would shame a politician.”
“Eckey—”
“You ticket a Californian’s automobile; it’s the next thing to spitting in his hot tub.” Before Chief Larkin could try again, Eckey said, “We’ve seen it all, sir. And there’s no way to tell how long this perp has been doing penny-ante stuff. Eight marking wands have been stolen in the last month.
“In the last three weeks,” Eckey went on, “we’ve had keys stolen from one vehicle, wipers from another twisted in knots, another one he stole the keys and left it parked going west on Shattuck.”
It took everyone two beats to register that Shattuck was a north-south thoroughfare.
“We’ve had the Cushman in the manure, the Cushman in the Dumpster, and at five to six last Friday, with five goddamned minutes to go before the weekend, Glassborough jumped back into his Cushman and landed on a bag of fresh fecal canine matter.”
“Even the dogs are after you, huh, Eckey?”
Eckey glared at Jackson.
Neither Eckey nor Chief Larkin mentioned the overriding indignity to the Department. All of his acts might have been added up to a minor nuisance if the perp had committed his vile deeds in secret. He hadn’t. He’d done his damage on main streets, and worse yet, he’d alerted the media. Before Parking Enforcement arrived at the scene, a reporter from
The Daily Californian
was already there. Then it was the
Daily Cal
and the East Bay
Express.
Next he included KPFA radio. Then a TV station.
Chief Larkin held up this morning’s
San Francisco Chronicle.
A page 3 headline announced:
THE BABE RUTH OF THE METER GAME.
“Listen to this,” the chief began. “ ‘He tips his hat to a meter truck and before befuddled police can find him, he’s created Coq au Cart. Only in Berkeley,’ it goes on …” The chief was shaking the paper. “What it goes on to is to announce how he made monkeys of thirty officers last night by luring our Hostage Negotiation Team into Cerrito Canyon to find the kind of dummy you can order from catalogs you wouldn’t show your wife, stolen shoes, and half the city’s parking tickets!” By now Larkin’s tie looked pale in comparison to his face. He glared across at me. “The perp’s a goddamned folk hero. Our Parking Enforcement officers get enough hassles without the whole town rooting for their enemy. They can’t be citing vehicles if they’re watching their rears all day.”
“If we don’t stop this,” Eckey insisted, “we’ll have half the citizens in Berkeley trotting off with their meters empty, hoping the perp swipes their ticket so they can look at the nightly news and say, ‘Hey, man, there’s my car!’ ”
Larkin turned to the inspector. “Doyle, you were in charge of the hostage negotiation. Smith’s taking paper on it.”
Doyle moved his head so infinitesimally that only the loose flesh under his chin nodded. “She’ll be doing the follow-up.”
I didn’t realize I had groaned aloud until I heard the laughter around me.
Diplomacy kept me from asking Chief Larkin who had been heading up the Parking Enforcement investigation so far. If there were no centralized command, that would reflect poorly on the Department, i.e., on the chief himself. I didn’t want to be the one to bring that oversight to his attention. But if there had been an officer in charge,
formerly
in charge, I didn’t want to flag his inadequacy, particularly since his attitude could mean the difference between taking over the investigation and moving forward, or starting from scratch, interviewing the same witnesses and victims, who’d be even less pleased to answer the same questions again, questions asked by a police force they would have now labeled incompetent.
So it wasn’t till the end of the meeting that one of the guys in Traffic Detail took me aside to tell me that my predecessor on what had become known as the Traffic Control Caper was none other than Grayson.
When I looked around for Grayson, he was stalking out of the room. And before I could call to him, Inspector Doyle came up. “Smith, how’re you doing on the hostage reports?” Doyle’s graying red hair was grayer than red. His skin was battleship gray, and the circles under his eyes charcoal. He looked like he’d been up not just as late as most of us, but the entire night, which meant that he looked slightly more exhausted than normal.
“The hostage reports,” I said, giving myself time. “They’re not all in.”
Doyle nodded. He’d been around long enough to know “not all in” meant “not
any
in.” “City manager wants ’em on his desk first thing tomorrow. Get ’em to me by the end of the day.”
“This afternoon? The assignment didn’t end till after midnight! Guys had to be back here at quarter to eight this morning. When does the city manager think they had time to dictate or type their reports? Is the C.M. out of touch with reality?”
“He’s manager of
Berkeley,
Smith. That’s pretty much an oxymoron.”
I didn’t want to laugh, but I did. Indeed, what could possess a sane individual to take a job managing 120,000 people who resent rules? “Right, Inspector, for job frustration, city manager’s right up there with meter maid.”
“But a damned sight better paid.” We both nodded at that. Howard, who’d come up behind Doyle, nodded, too. Doyle went on, “The C.M. is going to be keeping close tabs on this meter maid business. Him, the mayor, the media. You know, Smith, that this is exactly the type of ‘only in Berkeley’ article they just love to run in
The New York Times.
”
“Look at the bright side, Jill,” Howard said. “Your family’ll get to see your name in the paper.” My parents had moved to Florida, but I still had cousins and aunts and uncles in Jersey to read about my tripping over a mound of parking tickets. Wisely, Howard moved on before I could comment.
“For now, Smith,” Doyle said, “just get me the hostage reports before you leave.”
“Right.” No one would have thought about a report yet. An operation like that one where everyone comes up feeling dumb is the hardest to get paper on. Guys just want to forget it. The second to last thing they want to do is resurrect the event so they can make a report. The last thing they want is to type it from their handwritten—their angry, pinched, nearly illegible handwritten—copy. The power of the officer in charge was reduced to begging, cajoling, and threatening. At the best of times none of the thirty participants would even begin writing till I made the first round to nag them.
It was after noon before I’d nabbed twenty-six of them and given them the bad news that not only would they have to do their reports now, but they’d have to type them up themselves. No way could two clerks handle all of them. Of the remaining three officers, one was Doyle, one was off today, and the last, Grayson, was in Contra Costa County to the north picking up a prisoner, who, it seemed to me, could have been escorted here by a CoCo County officer. I went back to my office to assemble my own report. When this day started, I’d thought the worst part would be seeing Madeleine Riordan again. Now that was looking pretty good.
On the computer I called up Michael Wennerhaver on Records Management System and was a bit surprised to find he’d had no contacts at all with us. No detains, no complains. Likewise Madeleine Riordan. My first thought was to be surprised she hadn’t been arrested in any of the more recent Peoples’ Park demonstrations. Then I recalled her limp. No complains either. I would have pegged Riordan for a woman who’d call us when someone blocked her driveway or left his dog tied out in the sun. But maybe when the urge to call us had arisen, she’d thought of her picture on our dartboard, realized the kind of service a complaint from her would get, and put down the phone.
So, Officer Smith, what cosmic view must a citizen hold before you feel the need to protect him? During which moments is his life important enough to merit your attention?
Apparently there’d been no moments in recent years she’d found a citizen sufficiently in need of our attention.