Sudden Exposure (9 page)

Later
, I told myself,
get Ellen later. You can’t let them bounce you back and forth too.
“How about nudists, Bryn?” I asked, recalling my speculations with Howard. “This is an out-of-the-way place for them.”

“Don’t bug me with your other cases. You want to know about Johnson?”

I gave up. “Okay, let’s talk about Sam Johnson. He opens a health club a couple blocks from yours, he buys the house next door to you. Why?”

“I have no idea. It’s like locusts eating your crop and then your children. Flood washing away—”

“I get the point! But the man had to have had some reason, even if it’s a crazy one. Which came first, the house or the health club?”

“The house. It’s been going on forever.”

“Forever?”

“Over a year. The rip-off gym’s only been open three months.” Now she was sitting up, leaning forward toward me, her eyes sparkling the way I remembered them from the Olympic interviews.

I shifted my weight on the stool, jiggling the baton and flashlight as I moved. “I know, Bryn, that you spent years preparing The Girls’ Team, but it wouldn’t necessarily take Sam that long.” I held my hand out to forestall her sarcastic comment. “Could it have taken him nine months or less?”

“The place is a storeroom of machines. In a week he could order them and take delivery.”

I nodded. “So, okay, even allowing for coming up with the idea, finding out how to convert movement into heat, getting the necessary permits, even in Berkeley that could be done in less than six months. Chances are he bought the house, then came up with the idea for the gym. So Bryn, what happened between the two of you when he moved in next door that would make him intent on hitting you where it hurt most?”

A malicious smile flickered on her lips. “I threatened him with the Blight Ordinance. The place is an eyesore. He’s doing the work himself, and is prepared to spend the rest of his life poking along at it. So I got on him. And then there were trucks all over the street, radios blaring, hammering and sawing till after midnight. So I had to get him again. He’s turning the damn place into an apartment. ‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘There are zoning ordinances.’ Does he care? Not hardly. Permits? Are you kidding? Well, maybe he gets one or two. In Berkeley, you don’t put up a trellis without going through six commissions and paying for enough permits to cover the thing in paper, and you can believe he didn’t bother with that. And why doesn’t anyone care?”

I waited for the inevitable. Citizens elsewhere may play with municipal spats but Berkeleyans have honed them to Golden Gloves caliber. Better we should have citizens slinging ordinances and suckerpunching with subpoenas, than duking it out with deer rifles … though, in this case we could be dealing with both. “Why doesn’t anyone care?”

“Because the goddamned city’s afraid to hassle with Johnson, that’s why! Everyone in City Hall knows him. If they push, he’ll sue the city and every commissioner in it. They say you can’t do that, but Johnson’s been hip high in lawsuits for a quarter of a century; he’d find a way. Guy’s made tactics his life. Our neighborhood organization files a complaint with a commission; they subpoena him, his lawyer postpones, and he doesn’t do it till the afternoon of the hearing, and half of us don’t find out till we’re there.”

That sounded like the Sam Johnson of the Persian Gulf street blockage. “He can only do that so often.”

“Yeah, but while he does, he keeps sawing and hammering, and pouring cement. So by the time the complaint is heard, it’s a moot point.”

“But some complaints are heard.”

“Right. Gets two or three postponements. When he
does
come, he manages to shift our complaint to last on the agenda. Do you know what that means? Those meetings start at eight and run
routinely
till two in the morning. The Lupicas and Croys have to go to work. The Johansens are in their eighties. By two
A.M.
we’re lucky if a pair of us are still in the room.” She gave one of those disgust-abbreviated shakes of the head, as if she couldn’t keep from reacting to behavior so egregious, but was in too great a rush to pause. “Tactics; guy’s a master.”

That was an understatement. And something she should have considered before she took him on in his own arena. “And so you decided on some tactics of your own, right?”

Ellen got the point before Bryn. Neither of them spoke.

“Bryn,” I said, “not only is it illegal to destroy property—you know that. But one small shake and that house of Johnson’s will be a pile of plaster. If someone wanders in there through the hole in the fence that you cut, they could be killed. And Bryn, their heirs will sue you for every cent you ever thought of having.”

“I didn’t do anything to his fence,” she said lamely.

“Maybe it was the eighty-year-old Johansens?” I asked, not bothering to control my sarcasm.

Bryn stared at me and matching my tone said, “And maybe it was Karl Pironnen, Johnson’s other neighbor. I took his side when the Johansens complained about his dogs barking. Ellen’s taken him to the vet and the bank. For us he’d be glad to get out the old metal shears. Of course, he’d have to have done it after dark because he’s afraid of everyone. Or maybe his dogs chewed through it. Or—”

I’d had enough. I stood up. “I’m here to end the attacks on your vehicles. But you and Sam Johnson are enjoying your little war too much to stop.”

“Hey, don’t lump me with him!”

I let a beat pass and used the time to force a calm I certainly didn’t feel. “Okay, then you be the adult. Handle the issues through the channels your taxes pay for.” I took another breath and said, “And don’t provoke Johnson with a press conference.”

“Oh no.” She jumped up to face me. “He’s done his tactics game, now I’m doing mine.”

“Bryn, you are dealing with a desperate man, who knows explosives, who thinks you are trying to take away the only property he’s ever owned, and who’s surrounded by adoring, young loose cannons who view death as a tactic.”

“Tough.”

“Bryn, you denounce him in public and you could get shot. Or they could miss you and hit a bystander.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned back. All she needed was a cigarette with ashes ready to flick. “That’s why we pay for police, to protect the bystanders.

I steeled my face and aimed for the athlete’s jugular.

“Or Bryn, more likely, a kid would be jumpy, not a good shot. He’d miss your heart. But the spine is long and there are lots of possibilities for paralysis. Why don’t you call your friend Tiff and ask her what it’s like?”

The color drained from her face. If I’d had any question about this being a low blow, that was gone. She looked terrified.

A draft sliced in the armholes of my vest that might or might not stop a bullet. The green tea smelled like long dead bracken. The color began to return to Bryn’s face. She turned at Ellen. Slowly, powerfully, she breathed in, arching forward like a wave about to break. I didn’t need a glance in Ellen’s direction to tell me she was in danger of drowning.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ellen forced out. “I don’t know what you two are talking about. You never told me about anyone called Tiff.”

But Bryn was already crashing toward her. “How could you …” She stopped, swallowed, and said, “Oh … I guess I didn’t.”

Purposely, I didn’t look at Ellen. Instead, I tucked away that desperate deception for later use. “Bryn,” I said, “think about this. One instant can change your life forever.”

Bryn stepped toward me and the wave crashed. “I don’t scare; I don’t back down. The press conference stays. You want to see if I live—and if Sam Johnson lives—be there. Saturday. Four o’clock. People’s Park.”

An anti-Johnson speech in People’s Park; she might as well have gotten a flight to Mecca to bad-mouth Mohammed.

B
Y THE TIME
I got back to the station, I was exhausted even though it was only midafternoon, and my head was throbbing. I verified that Bryn Wiley had a permit for People’s Park Saturday afternoon. The event was a looming disaster, the kind of stupid conflict born of ego that we see from Bosnia to Somalia to wherever else. And there was nothing I could do to forestall it. I took two aspirins and had dropped my quarters in the candy machine before I remembered my bet. Aspirin can do only so much; it was chocolate I needed. And sleep. And, well, chocolate!

On the way out of the lunch room I ran into Leonard escorting a drug-thin woman who couldn’t have been anywhere near as old as she looked. On her wrists the cuffs were small as they get and still looked like she could slip her hands through at will,
if
she’d had the will.

“Four eighty-four.” He sighed.

I nodded. If I hadn’t seen it so often, I wouldn’t have believed she’d had the energy to shoplift. But from the looks of her limp, stained T-shirt and chinos, she was boosting from need.

Waiting for me upstairs were three phone contacts to return—all to 484B victims who would be hoping I had better news than I did about their stolen bikes—and one message from Herman Ott I ignored. Brucker was transporting a prisoner to Santa Rita. At the best of times the station is a depressing reminder of government neglect, but this afternoon sooty windows looked black, the copy machine roared, and when I went up to our jail, the sole prisoner was a screaming drunk who managed to transpose one noun into verb, adjective, adverb, and dangling participle, and employ it for fully fifty percent of his vocabulary. He had, I felt, summed up the day.

Thursday, the team shifted back onto Swing Shift, 4
P.M.
to 2
A.M.
Brucker, a nine-to-fiver, was already gone when I got free of the team meeting. But the framed photo of Ronald Reagan and himself hung like a castleward keeping watch over Brucker’s fiefdom. Bryn Wiley’s list of contacts hadn’t materialized. I called her number and left a reminder message. At nine thirty a drunk ran into a utility pole near the Oakland line. He ended up in Highland Hospital, ten blocks in the southeast quadrant of the city ended up without power, and I spent the rest of the shift dealing with the 10-33 audibles set off by the power outage.

I vacillated on warning Sam Johnson to be cool on Saturday. He would be no more responsive than Bryn, but I couldn’t do nothing. I compromised with myself: drive by and if he was outside I’d stop. I was almost there when the dispatcher called.

“Six Adam nineteen?”

“Adam nineteen,” I said to the dispatcher.

“We’ve got a fifty-one fifty on the one thousand block of Shattuck, complaining she’s getting harassing calls from the former President.”

“Former president of what?”

“The country.”

“Which one? President, not country.”

It was a moment before the dispatcher answered. In that moment I suspected he, too, had pondered whether our caller was hallucinating Ronald Reagan nudging himself awake to give her a buzz or Richard Nixon bugging her from the Great Beyond. “RP is Candace Upton.”

When the dispatcher gets a 911 call, the caller’s number shows on the screen. “Her phone number?”

The dispatcher laughed. “When I told her you’d call, she said she’d already hung up on the President twice, and she wasn’t touching her phone again tonight.”

“Okay, I’ll swing by.”

But when I came by the Upton apartment, the lights were off. I knocked but Upton didn’t answer. Did she mistake me for one of the pushy ex-Presidents? Or had she moved on to other cosmic offenses? Chances were I’d get another chance to find out later in the week.

I drove on, occasionally aiming a side spotlight at a moving shadow, mostly just keeping the police presence on the beat.

Friday, I didn’t wake up till noon and was still tired. I went through the whole litany of breakfast hopes-doughnuts, pastries, ice cream, Snickers, before the awful truth struck me once again. If it hadn’t been for the prospect of Peet’s, I would have pulled the covers back up and stuffed them in my mouth. They’d have tasted good as anything else I could eat.

I went to the Y, did half an hour on the StairMaster, twenty minutes on the stationary bicycle, hit the pool for another half hour, and fell asleep in the sauna. Then I ate a chicken sandwich the size of Des Moines.

I got to the station early, and headed for my old office. As soon as I opened the door, I could feel bile rising in my throat. Beneath his news photo of himself and Ronald Reagan, Brucker was half sitting, half sprawled in my chair, with one of my old case files in his lap, and piles of his papers lined up on Howard’s desk where I had dreamed of laying out mine. Brucker looked up, a small smile on his tidy lips. You couldn’t say it was smug, but you wouldn’t swear it wasn’t, either. On the corner of his desk was a Hershey’s with almonds, half-eaten.

I looked down at Brucker’s square face, his boxy features. If he’d been a gingerbread man, he would have been cut entirely in right angles. The only curved thing about him was the oval of his bald pate, and that was so white it looked undercooked. “Brucker, if you were desperate for the bottom drawer, you could have called me.

“You knew I’d moved in.”

“I assumed two desks would suffice. I don’t like my belongings left on the squad room table; I don’t want my personal items on top.” There was doubtless a more diplomatic way to handle this. I didn’t bother looking for it.

“So sorry to break the etiquette.”

“Not etiquette, common courtesy.” A guy, he’d say was setting things straight; me, he’d label bitchy. The look on his face said he was tempted to do just that but caught himself.

Instead he said, “I’m going up to Sacramento tomorrow for the rest of my papers. Reports from some interesting studies.’’

Ignoring his implicit request for questions about his prestigious posting in Sacramento, I settled on the corner of Howard’s desk. “You’ve got questions about m—
the
assault cases?”

“Oh yeah, there are a lot of loose ends.”

“Right. That’s why they’re not closed, Brucker.”

He pulled open Howard’s bottom drawer, fortunately the one that was not behind my feet, and presented me with a five-inch stack. It took half an hour to go through it and neither one of us was in a better mood at the end of that time. As is so often the case, the only thing that knowing I was behaving like an ass gave me was one more thing to be annoyed about. It was ten to four when I put down the last case and headed to the door. I was going to have to throw on my uniform and I’d still be lacing my shoes at team meeting.