Sudden Exposure (11 page)

At six-thirteen I cut the engine in front of Sam Johnson’s construction site. No lights were visible from the house. Big surprise there. I made my way over the rubble and banged on the door. There was a hole where the bell used to be. In half a minute I banged again. Footsteps? Or was that just the wind? Behind the house eucalyptus trees waved their spindly leaves like finger bones from a dangling skeleton.

“Po-lice! Open up, Sam.”

He didn’t.

I could picture him holed up across town in some buddy’s room overlooking People’s Park, hefting a beer in a return salute and laughing. Still, I made my way down the cement steps of Tamalpais Walk. A rusted pipe railing ran shakily beside them. In the dusky light, moist leaves blended into the stained cement. Earthquakes and ground settling had thrown the flights of stairs forward, threatening to slide the unwary foot off each step. It was not a descent for the nervous.

To my right Johnson’s house loomed large, dark, ragged. I shone my light underneath it. “Sam, you in there?”

“Who wants to know?” he demanded.

“Police. Come here.”

Another time he would have told me what I could do with my order. Now he trotted out from under the house and stood opposite me inside the hurricane fence, looking for all the world like a brown-haired, buttoned-down kind of guy with no concern but working on his house. His yellow oxford cloth shirt was rolled to the elbow, his forearms streaked with dirt, a smudgy line across his forehead. Sam Johnson was as befouled as I’d ever seen him.

“Okay, Sam, let’s talk about this afternoon.”

“This afternoon? You want to hear about the two by eights I’m cutting? Or the cement guy I contacted to come Monday noon? Or—”

“Skip it. Who’s your nudist?”

“Officer,” he said, less smugly, more angrily than I would have expected, “I wasn’t at the diving woman’s press conference. But I heard about it. She got off easy.”

“Is that a threat, Johnson?”

“Nah, nothing’s ever a threat, is it? But if she takes it as a warning, she’s wise. Tell her—you’ll be reporting to her …”

I wouldn’t, but I didn’t feel obligated to explain that to Johnson.

“
I
wasn’t at the park today. What happened today,
I
didn’t do it.” He paused, that puckish grin of his teasing me from behind the empty metal diamonds of the fence. “You don’t create an itch then expect a guy not to scratch it—tell her that.”

“Spoken like a teenager in heat.” I sighed. “Sam, I really expected better of you.”

“Tell her,” he snapped in a voice that turned his grin hollow. He turned and strolled out of sight.

I climbed back up the slimy steps, avoiding the rusty pipe railing, thinking of what Sam Johnson could have done to Bryn had he chosen to. And pondering his uncharacteristic message. Boorish wasn’t his style. Sam Johnson was
not
Howard, but they were both star performers. On the protests he created, he’d given himself near perfect style points. And his threatening comment had wiped out all today’s style. Why would he …

I was getting into the car, repeating: “You don’t create an itch then expect a guy not to scratch it,” when I remembered my last encounter with a nudist.
The
nudist. I couldn’t swear he was the same one, but how many bald nudists could there be in Berkeley? The last time, my nudist had run up Rose Street, then down through the underbrush, through the
poison oak
!

I smiled. Howard wouldn’t give it a ten, but it’d be close. Bryn Wiley wouldn’t be smiling. She’d be scratching her arm.

In the car I called dispatch, got Pereira, Murakawa, and Leonard on channel 2 and—the first positive event of the day—we could all go code seven. “My place. Ten-four.”

“It was a master work,” I said twenty minutes later as my three colleagues opened the white containers on Howard’s dining room table. The one thing I’d been dead sure of after Bryn Wiley’s rally was that Murakawa, Pereira, and Leonard would need a banquet. I owed them. I handled banquet preparations Berkeley style, or at least my style. I called
To Go Getters
to deliver a feast gathered from four local restaurants that would accommodate Leonard’s ulcer, Paul Murakawa’s vegetarianism, and Pereira’s insistence on meat, spices, and a wide variety of tastes—all in finger food form so she could filch from carton after carton. And of course, my own Howard-enforced proscription against junk food.

If Howard had been home, he would have built a fire worthy of Celtic kings in the living room’s huge hearth. It would have crackled and snapped and sent smoke across the room. As it was, the air was clear and the normal eau de mold hidden under garlic, onion, chili, and curry. Sixteen white cardboard and plastic containers (Styrofoam is outlawed in Berkeley) sat on the big, well-scratched mahogany dining room table that had probably come new to this house in the thirties. The chairs around it had obviously dribbled in singly like the tenants and were about as compatible. In uniform, her blond hair permed but still shiny, a touch of eye shadow and mascara visible to the discerning eye, Connie Pereira looked entirely too professional to be sitting on a half-runged ladderback chair—too professional to be reaching greasy pincer fingers. Leonard, on the other hand, looked like he usually wasn’t allowed in the house.

“Bryn Wiley,” he grumbled, yanking a captain’s chair in closer to the table, “what the hell did she do a fool thing like that for?”

Pereira snared a plump lamb samosa, surveyed the other boxes, and shifted her shoulders preparatory to a cross-table lunge at the pot stickers. Inconsiderate criminals could end a code seven meal anytime; our most important dining skill was speed. “You got anything on the nudist?”

“Nothing,” I said in disgust. “But I’ll keep on it. Leonard’s putting out the word on the Avenue.”

Leonard, midway through a slice of polenta with sour cream, nodded. No fool, he carried a cloth napkin to tuck under his chin. Patrol officers pay for their own dry cleaning.

Murakawa was gnawing on a gray thing I took to be a vegetarian drumstick. It even had a faux bone in the middle and ersatz “skin” that made the whole concoction resemble something left in the morgue for a decade. Everything in his boxes looked like the last stop before composter.”

“What about the nudist, Smith? He your Bare Buns?” Pereira asked.

“If there are two bald nudists covered with poison oak, I may have a question. If not, it’s Bryn Wiley who’s got the problem—he rubbed his hand down her arm.”

“The gift that keeps giving, huh?” Pereira laughed.

“No,” Murakawa said.

“No, what?”

“Poison oak isn’t spread from person to person. You have to get it directly from the plant or, if the plant burns, from the smoke.”

“Surely, Sam Johnson would know—”

“Yeah, Smith, sure as you did.” Pereira laughed.

“Dogs,” Leonard barked. “Two weeks I was scratching, all because I rubbed a dog in Tilden Park.”

“Well there, of course,” Murakawa admitted, “the sap was still wet on the dog’s fur.”

“So if the nudist had a handful of sap?”

“Then, Jill,” Leonard said, “Sam Johnson’s got himself one helluva committed nudist. Or a guy who’s got no more sense than he has clothes. He’s already covered with itch and he’s going back for more.”

We looked at Murakawa for the nudist’s prognosis, but he was busy forking in nut and bean salad. Pereira had predicted that his calorie intake from any of these meals would be minus and eventually his teeth would be worn down to the gum. Then, she’d added, he could move to a diet of bean paste and tofu. When he finished chewing, Murakawa looked up and asked, “What about the food truck in the park?”

“Gone before we could get the crowd under control,” Leonard said.

“Didn’t you even get the license?”

“No. Don’t matter. We could bust our butts running it down, but I’ll tell you what we’ll find: rented with phony papers. You been around the Avenue as long as I have—since the trolleys ran to Oakland and they still had the telegraph lines, in case you’re asking, Murakawa …”

Murakawa, the last person to ask an intrusive question of a colleague, smiled uncomfortably, and helped himself to more fried gluten balls. Pereira shook her head.

“We all know who’s behind it,” Leonard said.

I nodded. Sam Johnson had done a great job of manipulation all the way around. When the late night news came, it would have discreet shots of the rash-red running nudist carrying his banner. As for Bryn Wiley, she would be just a comical footnote. I put down my fishburger with fried onions and mushrooms. “So, Leonard, where do you see this going from here?”

“Where could it?” Pereira demanded. “Johnson’s won.”

“Yeah, but Wiley was handing the press something afterward,” Murakawa said.

“Press release. By that time it was already outdated.” Pereira had already eyed my burger, and recognizing it as a lost cause, she shifted her eyes quickly over the gluten balls to Leonard’s remaining meat loaf.

Leonard pulled his plate in closer, looking every bit the shaggy carnivore. “If you’d asked me a couple years ago, I’da said Johnson’s one of the ‘think first’ rads. Not in it to spite his parents, if you know what I mean. He really cared about justice, or justice as he saw it, and a fair share for at least the people he was focusing on.”

“But?” I prompted.

“But since he got married, he’s changed. Maybe he’s just worn down with losing, maybe he’s sick of mediating the squabbles of the kids who
are
in the movement to spite their parents, maybe he’s sick of seeing them waste their energy to make a point no one cares about.”

“Like his own traffic clog at San Pablo and Uni?”

“Yeah. Great tactic, but the movement came out of it looking like spoiled brats, and you can believe no one caught in that traffic jam was rushing to contribute the next time Johnson needed cash or lawyers. Yeah, maybe that’s exactly what Johnson’s had enough of. You know, Smith, old rads either plug on against injustice until they drop, just doing it to do it, or they become old Republicans, or some—and I figured Johnson would be one—become statesmen. And some snap from the frustration.”

Pereira’s plate was empty. She surveyed the empty containers. “Dessert?”

“Next month,” I said.

“Some hostess you are. There’s nothing worse than dinner with no dessert.”

I was just about to agree wholeheartedly.

But of course, there was something worse. The radio crackled. “Six Adam nineteen and six Adam one.”

“Nineteen. We’re both here.”

“You’ve got a nine-one-one call on Tamalpais. Possible one eighty-seven.”

“Do you have a street number for that?” I asked, holding my breath.

“I’ll check.”

It was Bryn Wiley’s address.

One eighty-seven is homicide.

I
RAN FOR THE
car, hit the lights and siren, and got the dispatcher back before I was out of the driveway. “The one eighty-seven, who’s the victim?”

“Caller didn’t say. Call came via CHP.”

Cellular phone 911 calls go to the Highway Patrol. “Any other victims?”

“No.”

“Suspect?”

“Guy who called said: ‘A woman’s been shot,’ gave the address, and hung up.”

But CHP would have recorded the phone number. “Who’s the phone listed to?”

“A Bryn Wiley.”

“Bryn Wiley! He called on her own phone? And then hung up? How’d he sound: angry, scared?”

“He called CHP.”

“Get ’em back and find out for me. Thanks. And this scene, on Tamalpais, it’s a hillside with a lot of underbrush. I’m going to need every backup unit available.” I wove the car through the two-lane traffic on College Avenue until I could cut up to Piedmont Avenue—Fraternity Row. Two lanes there, too, but grassy islands between them. Lights and sirens should clear a street. They don’t. Drivers freeze in indecision; pedestrians stop mid-crosswalk to gawk, as if the patrol car’s in a movie and they’re the audience. I yanked the wheel right, around a Suzuki Samurai, left to skirt a clutch of students, right, onto the grass and past three double-parked vans.

Like strikes of lightning Bryn Wiley pierced my mind: Bryn holding a press conference on Sam Johnson’s turf. So stupid. But so in-your-face gutsy. And she’d come within a hair of winning the crowd. No wonder she was revered by scores of Berkeleyans—our own secular Joan of Arc.

But when she’d gotten home from the People’s Park debacle, humiliated, and had imagined Sam Johnson chortling with his friends as I had, did she crumble? Did she stand quivering as she had by the Volvo, or did she snap back with a fury ten times greater than she’d aimed at me? I had no idea what was beneath those reactions. And my guess was that she didn’t either. Maybe she was too scared to look. Maybe her campaigns were more necessary to her than she was to them. Maybe she
couldn’t
give them up.

I got lucky on the road behind campus, and cut below the Ngingma Institute, Berkeley’s bit of Tibet.

If Bryn had been shot in the park, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But in her own driveway …

Maybe the victim wasn’t Bryn. My stomach clutched. It could be Ellen. God, I didn’t want it to be Ellen.

I picked up the mike. “Adam nineteen. Control, put me priority for the ID tech.”

“Done, nineteen. Ambulance rolled from Kensington. It’s already at the scene.”

Ambulances usually wait till they’re sure of cover. Why hadn’t this one? “Any word on suspects?” Could they be behind the redwoods or on the hillside behind Bryn’s, ready to pick off the medics, or us? “Who’s supervising the scene?”

“Let me see. Grayson’s out at the Telegraph scene. Lieutenant’s … you are Smith, until Grayson gets there. On suspects, nothing.”

“Give me a radio channel and get everyone on it.”

“Channel four.”

“Thanks.”

“Ten-four.”

I pulled up on Tamalpais Road just before Acosta. The street was dark, those tree-muted streetlights merely blurs two stories up. Cars hugged the curb, parked two wheels on the sidewalk. I gazed ahead at that sharp elbow curve. Bryn’s driveway was just past the midpoint. But the redwoods across the street blocked it out.

“This is Adam nineteen. On Tamalpais half block below the curve,” I said into the mike as I pulled to the curb. “We don’t know what we’ve got here. The responsible could be anywhere. There could be more than one. Acosta and I’ll do the scope from this end.” Acosta pulled up behind me. On the radio, officers were checking in. Murakawa and Kendall would come down from the top of Tamalpais.