Sudden Exposure (5 page)

Under the house, I could hear a pair of feet slam to the ground. “Stop where you are!” a male voice shouted. “I’ve got a gun!”

I
DROPPED TO THE
ground. Murakawa ducked behind a wheelbarrow—concealment, maybe, but hardly protection. I pulled out my automatic, slipped my finger into ready position, and belly-crawled till I was behind two rows of paint cans. Hardly protection, either. “Police! We have the house surrounded. Put your hands on top of your head! Walk out now!”

Silence.

“Lights!”

All three of us sprayed our beams. Murakawa and Howard’s were trained on the ground, and mine was aimed higher, in the hope of temporarily blinding the suspect. It hit hair, wiry brown hair. The rest of the suspect was hidden behind a work bench piled with cans.

“Hands in the air! Now! Move it!”

“Cops?”

“Correct. Berkeley Police.”

“What the hell are you doing here? Goddamn, fucking pigs.”

I recognized that voice. Not some unknown nudist, but Sam Johnson, Bryn Wiley’s chief suspected assailant! Hiding under her next-door neighbor’s house! I couldn’t believe it! Was he huddled in there
with
the nudist? Or was this the subterranean shooting post from which he’d taken out Bryn Wiley’s car windows?

“Who’s in there with you, Sam?”

“No one’s here. No one’s got business to be here. Least of all you pigs.”

Sam Johnson, notorious Berkeley anarchist, had been a regular at the People’s Park demonstrations over the years. Now his hands moved resignedly over his head, and he walked slowly—regulation slowly—out in front of the can-piled workbench.

Johnson looked like hope gone sour. He was only forty-five or so, but they’d been hard years. Deep lines furrowed his brow and creased his cheeks. Barely taller than my five feet six, he had the sunken-chested physique of one who would rather suffocate than enter a health club. Spiritually he was an unregenerate radical. Sartorially, he resembled an aging Young Republican, in yellow oxford cloth shirt, green crew neck sweater, and, his one concession to the movement, jeans. And of course, loafers. Even in the dirt under the house the man was wearing loafers. In his way Sam Johnson was the anarchist of the anarchists.

By now the front of my uniform was smeared with dirt and smelled of soot and some mixture of oil-based chemicals, but Sam Johnson looked like he’d just stepped out of an alumni meeting.

There was a time when I would have second-guessed his plans, but now, looking at his drooping shoulders, the nervous movement of his eyes, I wondered how he felt knowing that his decades of work “against oppression” hadn’t made that much of a difference. Did it leave him weary, angry, bitter, or desperate?

I couldn’t recall a protest in which I
hadn’t
seen Johnson leading, speaking, acting as marshal. Now I remembered his recent epithet: pigs. Pigs, indeed! “Sam, you’re dating yourself. No one calls us pigs anymore.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“You first, Sam.” Put back together, this house would sell for close to four hundred thousand dollars. A rich man’s house to the likes of Sam Johnson. Had he just decided to “liberate” some of the owner’s possessions? To share the wealth? Underwrite the counterculture weapons budget? Or was there something specific in there he was after? Until now there had been a light touch to Johnson’s forays against us. “Sam, I’ve known you for years now. You’ve made a religion of trespassing on public property. You’ve broken the law for your causes countless times. But you’ve never broken into someone’s house! What are you doing here?”

“This is my house.”

“What?” Howard got that statement of amazement out before I did.

“I own the goddamn place, cops!”

Johnson could be lying, but he’d had too much practice to concoct a story like that. Had his slogan changed from “Power to the People!” to “Joy to the Gentry!”? I couldn’t keep myself from choking back a laugh. Murakawa had to take over and talk Johnson out into the open and make sure his “gun” was no more than a threat.

I pat-searched Johnson. “If you own this house, why are you lurking in the basement?”

“Not in the basement. Upstairs. Hatch door.”

“Why were you
dropping
into the basement, then?”

“To catch ’er.”

“Catch who?”

“She’s got a hole in the fence the size of Nebraska.”

“Slow down. Who are you accusing?”

“Her,” he spat out, jabbing his finger eastward. “The damned diver.”

“Bryn Wiley! Why would Bryn Wiley cut your fence and beam?”

“Poachers. She lures ’em in. Lets ’em know what’s to steal. I’ve had crap all over the place, tools broken, tools boosted. Place stinks of piss.”

I didn’t doubt Johnson had done his share of drugs. But nothing prior to this suggested he’d snapped loose his synapses, or that they had reconnected to create this land of idiosyncratic path of thought. Or maybe both he and Bryn Wiley had spent too much time in their health clubs pedaling to nowhere.

I took a breath and said slowly, “Why, Sam? Why would a respected woman, famous even, with her own house, bother to sabotage yours? Yours, which is already half falling down the hill.”

He glared toward Bryn Wiley’s house. “They all think I’m ruining their neighborhood. They’re always bitching: I’m not working fast enough. I’ve got too many workmen; I’m clogging the street. I’ve got too few workers; I’m leaving the house an eyesore. If they had their way, I’d spend all my time getting permits. But her”—he let out a snort of disgust—”she just can’t let things alone.”

Strategy and blame, they were two things Sam was good at. It didn’t surprise me he was barging ahead on his remodel, permits—and neighbors—be damned. Or that he castigated them for objecting at all. What
did
interest me was his not mentioning the health club war. “Are you ruining the neighborhood?”

“Sure, that’s what you’d think. You cops want the whole city to be single-family mansions.”

“This isn’t exactly a tenement, Sam.” Before he could comment, I said, “Show me proof of ownership.”

That order would have left most law-abiding homeowners grumbling about papers in the bank vault. But Sam Johnson’s reaction was that of one who had spent years looking for flaws and loopholes in police procedures. It delighted him to show us up. “It’s upstairs. Come on.”

We followed him to a ladder that led to a staircase. Through a hall and up another flight of stairs, and we found ourselves in a back-facing living room level with the street. All things considered, I was surprised Johnson was still allowed inside the building. But of course, nothing as inconsequential as an official notice would keep him out.

The room we were in now clearly was his center of operations. It held one of those huge, heavy, scarred wooden desks assembled in the forties and likely to last another half century. There were a bunch of chairs of similar vintage, and a gut-popped sofa that would do well to make it through the night. And most amazing of all was the bookcase holding weighty tomes on military campaigns, strategy, and heroes from the Caesars to H. Norman Schwarzkopf—all right over his bed! Was the man such an anarchist he ignored even the laws of nature?

From the desk, Sam pulled bank papers and held them out as if he were challenging me to a duel.

Which, of course, he was.

Responding in kind, I read them more carefully than was necessary. “Four hundred six thousand dollars?” I said, amazed.

“It’s damaged,” said Howard, who longed for the day when he could afford the brown shingle he lived in.

“Sam,
you
paid over four hundred thousand dollars for a house?”

He shrugged, clearly uncomfortable for the first instant since we’d found him. Another time I would have laughed. “Must be quite a surprise to your friends in the movement. How did you come up with that kind of money?”

He shrugged. “Wife.”

“You have a wife! With money?” There’s a lid for every pot, they say. But who would have thought Johnson’s pot would be filled with gold? Still, a wife might be a stabilizing factor.

“My wife inherited money.”

Not just a wife, but an heiress. “She inherited enough to buy a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house?”

Johnson shifted his body so he faced the dark windows instead of me. “It’s a long-term loan and I’m doing the work here myself. Me and my friends.”

Which meant the lot would be torn up for years to come. With the prospect of years of hammering and sanding, Dumpsters and deliveries, it was no wonder the neighbors were furious. And Johnson’s friends, who were neither likely to respect property rights nor show up for work on time, whose goals were to overthrow or undermine the system, weren’t going to endear themselves to anyone on the block. At the rate Johnson was working, maybe he and his wife
could
keep the operation afloat if they hadn’t used their entire windfall for the down payment. “But the down payment, Sam. Twenty percent is over eighty thousand dollars. Your wife could spare that kind of money?”

“Not all of it.”

“Where’d the rest come from?”

“I got support.”

“Support? You mean for your work? Your work in the movement?” Behind Johnson, Howard and Murakawa were struggling to keep straight faces, but this kind of bridge burning made me edgier yet about Johnson. “Sam, someone gave tens of thousands of dollars to you as an anarchist and you used it so you and your wife can live in the hills?”

“I’m not going to be the only one living here,” he insisted, lamely, but not nearly so lamely as I’d expected. “The city’s always squawking about lack of rentals. I’m giving them more.”

“You’re turning this building into low-cost housing? A shelter for the homeless?” I asked, sure that couldn’t be true. Berkeley is a compassionate city, whose citizens agonize over the plight of the homeless. People are concerned. But if Sam had even considered opening a shelter for the homeless up here in the hills, the neighbors would have had a lawyer here to outflank him before he could get H. Norman off the shelf.

“Yeah. So? You got a problem with that?” Now he was in his element.

I turned to Murakawa, and nodded at him to go and pass the word to Levine and Sapolu. This was hardly a five-officer operation anymore.

“Sam, how long have you been here tonight?”

“An hour.”

“Did anyone run through here?”

“You got a description?”

“Naked.”

Johnson laughed, a sound not of humor but of victory. “You lost a bare ass? I wouldn’t turn him in to you on principle, if I had him, which I don’t. I got enough problems with crazies sleeping here, without this becoming a nudist’s dressing room. But look, why don’t you ask
her
?”

The hated
her.
“Bryn Wiley?”

“Yeah, maybe she’s recruiting the sartorially challenged to camp out here, too.”

“Sam, are you saying that Bryn Wiley is harassing you?”

“Is English your second language?”

“And what are you doing about it?”

“I’m telling you.”

I let a beat pass and looked him straight in the eye. “Since when is your method of handling confrontation calling the police?”

He didn’t answer. He picked up the bank papers and busied himself folding them and returning them to the desk.

“Do you own a gun?”

“Why? Was Wiley shot?”

“Answer the question.”

“Yeah, and I’ve got a permit. But before you start celebrating, I haven’t been carrying it around in my pocket. It’s a rifle. For hunting, you know. The American Way.”

“A rifle,” I said, tensing. “Where is it?”

“Where? In the Great American Place!” He jerked his head toward the dining room. I walked through the doorway and looked toward the mantel.

There it was, needing nothing more than a moose head to complete the picture.

“Take it with you,” Johnson insisted. “Have your lab guy go over it. I haven’t fired it in a year, but listen, don’t take my word for it. Spend the taxpayers’ money finding out.” His trim little beard quivered.

“You’ve got plenty of bricks,” Howard said before Johnson could gloat too long.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Where were you last Friday night?” I demanded.

“A week ago? Who the hell knows?”

“Think.”

“Why?”

“Because that is when someone bashed in the logo of The Girls’ Team van.”

Johnson put down the papers and looked up. For the first time the man was smiling, albeit not pleasantly. “So that’s what’s got a bee up her ass. Someone’s after her van, huh? Hitting her right in the logo.”

“She said you’re deceiving your customers. Yanking them in by their bleeding hearts.”

I expected a roar of protest. But Sam Johnson looked me in the eye and said, “I haven’t shot at her; I haven’t come at her with bricks. But let me tell you, the woman’s a fucking pain in the ass. You can believe I’m not the only one she’s ticked off. And if she doesn’t stop sabotaging my fence here, I won’t say I’ll take matters into my own hands—the law frowns on that—but if someone wants to know where she is, wants to sit in my house and take a look around the neighborhood, I’m not going to stop him.”

F
EELING LIKE A PLAYGROUND
monitor, I headed back to Bryn Wiley’s to get her explanation of the hole in Sam Johnson’s fence. The Girls’ Team van was gone, and so, apparently, were Bryn and her cousin. “They must really have the inside scoop on the city,” I said to Howard as we walked back to our cars. “I’d give a lot to find a place to get a doughnut and a cup of Peet’s at this hour.”

“Hang on,” he said, giving my stomach a pat. “There’s pepperoni pizza in the fridge at home.”

“
If
the tenants haven’t scarfed it down.”

“I’ll pick up a carton of ice cream before you get there.”

I squeezed his hand, still perched on my stomach. “The way to my heart.”

People think of Berkeley as a town that doesn’t close, with jazz slithering under the doors of off-hours clubs, Cal students partying, Avenue crazies honing their routines till the sun comes up. And California Cuisine for the asking anytime night or day.