Time Expired (27 page)

“Do they go often?”

“Never like that. I’ve had to pump up brakes before. But we’re not traveling the freeways in these carts, you know; we’ve got plenty of time to pull over. I never heard of anyone injured ’cause of brakes. I—”

“Keep your head down!” The medic pressed his hand on her forehead. Her head hadn’t been quite off the ground, but Eckey’s intention had been clear. And from the look of his tight jaw and pressed lips, he wasn’t burning off karma, he was adding more.

To one of the patrol officers, I said, “Get Raksen here. I want the entire cart gone over, plus the scene. And Misco, from Traffic Investigation. The Cushman doesn’t move till he’s eyeballed it. He and Raksen can fight for firsts.”

“They’re on their way, Smith.”

Leonard, the beat officer, was making his way around the edges of the crowd. Three patrol officers were taking names and addresses, beginning the tedious task of interviewing everyone who’d seen anything. But Leonard would get more just ambling around picking up a word here, an observation there. He’d know which of the park regulars had been in residence today, who else’s presence was noteworthy, whose absence a red flag.

The medics slid a support under Eckey, lifted her onto the gurney, and started rolling it toward the ambulance. I moved along behind her head. “My other question, Eckey. This route today, this wasn’t your regular assignment, was it?”

“How’d you know?” she demanded as the medic pressed her head back into the gurney.

“Tiress’s?”

“Yeah. Goddamned lucky bastard. I’ll tell you, Smith, much as that pain in the ass screeches around stirring up messes for the rest of us, if this had happened to him, I wouldn’t be crying.”

“I’m sure, Eckey,” I said as the medics started to close the doors, “that you’ll let him know that.”

The door clicked shut. I caught the medic’s arm. “She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, no thanks to you.” He rounded the truck’s corner and ran for the driver’s seat.

“Bat outa hell,” I heard someone say behind me. I turned to see Leonard standing next to a guy with matted brown hair, a Peruvian army blanket, and thong sandals. The guy was one of the park regulars. “She coulda killed someone flying down the street like that. This is a city of laws, man. What’s the point of having laws, if you cops don’t follow them? Tell me that, man?”

Patrol had divided the civilians into three groups and had thinned the herd by half. I checked with them, but no one they’d interviewed yet had seen more than the Cushman crashing into the fence.

The Cushman was still affixed there, but now feet protruded from its underside. I recognized the short, bejeaned legs. “Misco,” I called. I didn’t expect him to roll out. He didn’t.

“Yeah, who’s that?”

“Smith. Can you tell what happened?”

“Oh, yeah. Nothing fancy. Brake line’s been cut. Just sliced through like any high school kid could do,” he said in disgust.

Misco could, and too often did, recapitulate tales of crunched doors, broken grilles, bent fenders from careless left-hand turns, ignored red lights, and full-circle turns in intersections (the Bay Area’s improvement on the old U-turn). Traffic Investigation’s work was regular and routine. So when Misco got something as exotic as sabotage, it made his day. From a saboteur he expected quality work, and he was downright offended when he didn’t get it.

“How long would it take to cut the lines, Misco?”

“Good pair of clippers? Ten seconds.”

“Suppose you weren’t real familiar with the innards of the Cushman?”

Misco stared blankly. To him unfamiliarity under the hood was a concept as foreign as was elbow grease to Delia McElhenny. “Minute or two, I suppose. But, Smith, brake lines are brake lines. Any idiot can cut ’em.”

“Thanks, Misco. Get me your report as soon as you can.”

“No problem. Won’t be more’n half a page.”

Raksen was prowling between the crowd and the Cushman, head down.

“Anything of note?” I asked.

“No skid marks. The dispersion of glass fragments suggests the vehicle was moving at a good clip.”

I gazed more closely at the hood. It was serrated and pressed half a foot in between the metal fence posts. The windshield was totally gone, and the steering wheel had been jerked off its column. My shoulders drew in tight, and I could feel the flush of anger in my face. Eckey could have been killed.

To the nearest patrol officer, I said, “Take charge here. I’ll be back.” I headed across Haste, walking uphill past the old stage in the park, the free box where a jumble of coats and sweaters lay for the taking. The university had installed its volleyball court, but the aura of Peoples’ Park had merely settled around it. Groups of three or four guys sprawled on the lawn; singles stood nervously next to their grocery carts that held their worldly goods. One leaned on the cart, his ancient raincoat hanging open to reveal a T-shirt advertising
Les Misérables.

Howard stood next to a parking meter seventy-five feet from the far corner; his lantern jaw was tense. There was no hint of the merriment that normally brightened his eyes. “Exactly like Madeleine planned, Jill. This meter here and the three farther up have their slots blocked.” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe Madeleine would orchestrate something like this.”

“I can’t either. And, Howard,” I said with sudden conviction, “I don’t think she did.”

He tilted his head questioningly.

I lowered my voice. “We’d be a lot better off if this were her plan. Then it would just be a matter that you and I let ourselves be fooled. But Madeleine didn’t come up with Eckey’s crash. She planned exactly what we saw on her paper. Then she died. And whoever’s been doing the capers doesn’t have her sense of farce or of decency.”

“Yeah, this was no caper. We’re talking felony assault.”

I nodded. “At this rate, sooner or later someone’s going to be killed.”

“Eckey?”

“No, this wasn’t planned for Eckey. Telegraph was supposed to be Tiress’s route today.”

“And the goddamned lazy perp can’t even take the time to drive around and see who’s in the Cushman.”

“We’re dealing with more anger than skill,” I said.

“Even so, you’d think any perp working on a sting like this would take the time to drive around town and find out where Tiress is. Tight Ass wouldn’t be hard to find; it’s not like he keeps a low profile.”

“Right. It’s odd that Madeleine would have put up with such sloppiness.”

Howard nodded slowly in agreement, but he offered no explanation.

I glanced toward the onlookers still moseying across Haste Street for a closer look. “Next time our perp could run a Cushman
over
Eckey, or Tiress, or some two-year-old in the road.” I turned and stalked across Telegraph Avenue.

Herman Ott had a big red debit with me. It was time he paid up.

T
HE AROMA FROM THE
pizza shop next to Ott’s building didn’t make me hungry, it made me mad—at how little I’d gotten for that revolting pizza I’d taken Ott the other night. And I’d left the twerp half of my decent pepperoni and onion for breakfast!

I raced in past the defunct elevator and took that long double staircase two steps at a time. I was panting when I got to the third floor, rounded the corner, and headed down the south hallway so fast that I had to jump over a toddler and his collection of orange plastic gizmos. I skidded to a stop by Ott’s door and banged on the glass.

No answer. Of course, no answer.

“Ott, open up! I mean it. I don’t care who hears this, you understand. You get this door unlocked—”

The door flew open. Never had Ott opened up before the third threat. I was still panting; I didn’t bother to hide it. I strode in, took one look at the tidy piles of papers on his desk and with a sweep of an arm, brushed the lot onto the floor.

“Jesus, Smith, what the—” He jumped to the floor like a canary off his perch and flapped around after the papers.

“You lied to me, Ott!”

“I … don’t … lie.”

“The hell you don’t. There’s lying in words and lying in silence. Silence is the coward’s way.”

He scooped up the last sheet and held it protectively against his chartreuse acrylic turtleneck. “You barge in here making up rules, then you carry on like I should follow them. Well, Smith, I’m not a cop; I don’t play by your rules.”

I plopped myself on his desk. He always hated that. “You make a big thing about your ethics. The last of the old-time Berkeley idealists. The holdout from the sixties who hasn’t been co-opted by the system. Sure!” He started to speak but I kept going. “Madeleine Riordan was your friend, the woman you owed a debt to. Someone pushed a pillow on her face; she gasped for air. Picture that, Ott. What a helpless, terrifying death for a woman who was brave enough to throw herself out of a car for the Cause.” Ott stood up, clutching his cache of papers with both hands. I should have stopped there, but I was too angry. “Even her mother didn’t die like that, Ott.” I didn’t have to add that Ott had done nothing to make things easier for her mother; that he hadn’t gotten around to checking up on her when Madeleine asked. “Her mother’s death was a prize compared to her own.”

Ott said nothing. He shifted the papers into a pile and tapped the edges on his desk. His silence infuriated me more than anything he could have said.

I looked directly into his small pale eyes. “You drove her there, to Canyonview. Why?”

“Her husband’s car was in the shop.”

That took me aback. Timms had talked about walking out when he realized Madeleine was leaving. It hadn’t occurred to me he’d meant it literally. But it made no difference here. “Why did she ask you?”

Ott shifted onto one foot. It was an odd habit he had, dangling the second foot a couple inches off the ground like a bird on wet grass. I’d only seen it three or four times, but it always meant he was balancing almost equally distasteful options.

The spicy aroma of peanut and pepper sauce sifted in under the door to mix with the vague scent of coffee too long in the cup. I pulled my jacket tighter around me. The sweat I’d worked up running up here was icy now. If this building had been in New York, the heat would have shut off at ten
P.M.
In this one it had ceased in 1952.

Ott put the second foot down, opened his desk drawer, plopped the papers in, and sank back in his ripped tan chair. His pale cheeks were sunken, his thin, limp yellow hair almost invisible against the chair; his whole body slumped like a chicken ready for the pot. It was as close to defeat as I’d ever seen Ott. “I’ll save you the steps, Smith,” he said with none of his normal verve. “Madeleine asked me to drive her back to Canyonview because we were old friends. But I don’t know why she decided on the move. I didn’t ask.” He looked up at me, his pale face revealing nothing. “And that’s the real reason she chose me. She knew I wouldn’t ask.”

I stared at him, amazed. Herman Ott was far and away the nosiest man on Telegraph Avenue, if not the entire city of Berkeley. Or maybe the world. “The only reason you wouldn’t ask is because you already knew.”

“No.”

“No—what?”

“She knew I wouldn’t ask, Smith, because I suspected that it had something to do with the memory of her mother in that nursing home and I didn’t want to bring up that any more than she did.”

Madeleine’s mother’s poor care was hardly Ott’s fault, but nothing would truly convince him of that. After twenty-five years it still haunted him, as he clearly assumed it haunted Madeleine. We all see life through our tinted glasses. Ott was being totally honest, painfully so. But, by my calculations, the tint in his glasses was off-color; he was wrong. A nicer person would have told him that—a nicer person without a killer to find. Instead, I went with his theory. “Madeleine’s mother died in a nursing home because of poor care. No one got poor care at Canyonview. And the only older woman there was Claire, whom Madeleine didn’t even like.”

Ott shrugged. “Maybe Madeleine was the mother this time. I don’t know, Smith. I didn’t ask. And I didn’t try to find out.”

I gave a slight nod. His commitment to Madeleine meant that if she didn’t want him to know, he would make sure the hidden knowledge didn’t find him.

“But mother-daughter things go two ways,” he added.

“You mean Delia? You think Madeleine had some sort of maternal feeling about
Delia
?” The concept of protective feelings about the whiny eternal adolescent was more than I could imagine.

“Like I said, I don’t know.” It was as helpless as I’d ever seen him. He looked as if a pot was full of boiling water and he’d just agreed to be dropped in.

I almost took pity on him, but I caught myself before I threw away my advantage totally. “Ott, Madeleine’s mother had nothing to do with her decision to go back.”

His pale eyes widened. He looked at me hopefully, desperately, as if he’d spotted my hand on the burner knob under the pot.

I dangled the possibility of turning off the flame. “You’ll be totally honest with me? Nothing held back?”

He leaned forward tentatively, wondering: was it possible he could really climb back out of the pot? Another time I would have delighted in my potential victory. Now I held my breath.

Finally he said, “On this issue alone.”

“On Madeleine and anything concerning her death,
including
the meter maid pranks.”

“What?”

I slammed my hand on his desk. “Either you’re completely honest, or you get nothing from me. And you can go to your grave wondering if driving Madeleine to Canyonview set her up to be killed—if you cared more for your ethics than for your friend.”

Ott jolted back as if I’d taken his head and shoved it down back into the hot water. I was too angry to be concerned. Eckey could have been killed. But Ott didn’t care about Eckey, and my being pissed off would only amuse him. I took a breath to calm myself and focused on what would get to him: “Madeleine masterminded the meter maid pranks. Now someone is using her notes, perverting her plans, making her elegant pranks into violent and banal assaults.”

Very slowly he nodded. “Mockeries,” he muttered. “Okay.