Time Expired (28 page)

Your game, Smith. But, listen, you tell a single soul about this …”

“No problem. As far as the world is concerned, anything that comes up here is just the result of my own brilliant hunches.” I settled in his client chair. “The reason Madeleine went back to Canyonview was to control the meter maid pranks, nothing to do with memories of her mother—unless I’m way off base.”

Ott leaned forward resting his chartreuse-clad arms on the desk. He wanted to believe me, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to. That made me distinctly uneasy; he’s rarely wrong. “Who was Madeleine’s operative in the meter maid pranks?”

“Don’t know. I’ll save you time, Smith. She never admitted she was behind the pranks. We talked after each one. I applauded their panache. She never demurred. We understood, but nothing was ever spoken. So I don’t know another thing.”

We understood, but nothing was ever spoken:
how utterly Madeleine. “Well, we know she had someone carrying out her plans. Did she go back to Canyonview because the prankster was already in the canyon when she got there the first time and she wanted to be nearer to him? Or did she go back to get away from him?”

Color returned to Ott’s face. “You think the guy who pulled off these pranks was Herbert Timms?” He was not just startled, he was offended. He looked remarkably like Michael Wennerhaver when I’d suggested Madeleine might have confided in Claire things that she hadn’t told him, her protégé.

“I can’t picture Timms snatching parking enforcement wands,” I said. “But a week ago there were a lot of things I now know about Madeleine Riordan that I could no way have imagined. I’m not closing any doors. She had the plans for the capers with her at Canyonview.”

Ott straightened up. “Maybe Timms found out what she was doing. I wouldn’t put it past the little wimp to threaten her. She could have gone back to the canyon to protect her helper—”

“And to save the scheme.”

“He came after her for the plans. She told him he could sputter all he wanted. The wimp grabbed the pillow …”

I nodded. Smothering was the act of a very repressed, very angry person. I couldn’t picture Herbert Timms as the meter maid prankster, but I could see him murdering his wife. “That would explain why Madeleine chose to go spend so much time with Claire when she got back to Canyonview. Claire was a woman she could barely tolerate, but so what? She was a barrier to Timms so Madeleine didn’t have him coming in and bothering her about the caper plans, wheedling, threatening, whatever. Claire is the kind of repressed, frightened woman who’d been trained to accept the status quo, like the timid aunt you tolerate but don’t visit a minute longer than you have to. Still, for Madeleine, sitting with her would have been better than being alone and having to deal with Timms.”

Ott nodded slowly, and with a fair amount of skepticism.

“Okay, so that’s just a theory, but it still leaves the question of who helped in the parking pranks.”

He started to protest, then seemed to recall his agreement. It might have been to guide me into a convenient byway, but Ott said, “I’m going to save you a lot of time, Smith. Madeleine would never have used Timms in the parking pranks. She wouldn’t have exposed him to the possibility of arrest, particularly when she knew she wouldn’t be around to save him.”

“You could make that case for Michael Wennerhaver. She wouldn’t have made such an investment in his career, backing him for the scholarship and all, just to let him get arrested.”

Ott, of course, knew about Michael. He’d know about Champion and the photographs, Claire and Delia and Minton Hall. He probably knew I hadn’t unpacked my boxes at Howards and if there would be any empty seats at Berkeley Rep tonight. He nodded. “Madeleine would never have put her own amusement above what was right.”

“Her own or anyone else’s. But, Ott, why would she particularly care about Timms being arrested? Because of his work?”

Ott glared, like I was the village idiot. “Smith, he has custody of Coco. She would never have died and left the possibility of Coco’s keeper being jailed.”

“And of Coco being without care. Of course not.” Herbert Timms already felt cast aside; I hoped he never came upon this line of thought. I leaned back against the sharp slats of the chair. Timms could have driven to Berkeley and back to his conference in Carmel in seven hours and three hundred or so miles. If he’d been the parking perp, he’d have had to drive back to stick the purple powder on Flaunt’s tire. If he killed Madeleine, he’d have had to make it in the night before. Ott had said Timms’s car was in the shop Thursday. The shop would have an odometer reading. It’d be easy to check how many miles had been recorded since. Rolling back the odometer in new cars with all their electronic gear is not the simple thing it was twenty years ago. I didn’t cross Timms off entirely, but I let him slide down the list below Michael, and Delia, Champion, and even the extreme long shot, Claire Wellington. For an angry person holding a pillow over the face of a weak and startled victim is not so hard to do. It could be managed from a wheelchair.

My pager went off. I pressed the reset button. “Ott, the last meter maid incident happened right across the street …” My normal words would have been, “I can’t believe you don’t know any more about it.” In light of our agreement, I said, “What else can you tell me about it?”

He swallowed, clearly regretting the breadth of his indebtedness. “Look, Smith, none of the Avenue regulars is involved. And I’ll tell you one more thing, since I’m being so totally honest. You remember that picture of Madeleine on the locker room wall down in your police department? The picture used for a dart board?”

I nodded, hardly surprised Ott had heard about it.

“Madeleine knew. Just in case you’re tempted to delude yourself. Madeleine knew exactly what you guys thought of her.”

I gulped. “She talked about it?”

“Oh, yeah. She laughed about one bureaucracy screwing another. She said if she were burglarized, her insurance company had better be prepared to pay off for everything she owned.”

Normally the idea of besting the cops moved Ott as close to laughter as he came. But there was no glee in his expression now. I wondered if he understood how violated and enraged Madeleine must have felt—any woman would have felt—knowing her likeness was posted for ridicule on a men’s locker room wall. I didn’t want to ask.

My pager went off again. With relief I said, “Can I use your phone?”

He shrugged and walked into the hall.

When I got the dispatcher, I gave him my badge number. “Five twenty-seven.”

“Smith, you got another Cushman incident. Bancroft and Bolivar Drive.”

It took me a minute to recall where Bolivar Drive was. “By the lake at Aquatic Park.”

“Not
by
the lake at Aquatic Park, Smith.
In
the lake at Aquatic Park.”

I
SQUEALED THE CAR
to a stop by the wooden fence of a deserted chemical plant. A fire truck, three patrol cars, two Cushmans, and two unmarkeds sat at all angles by the edge of Aquatic Lake, a narrow strip of water between the freeway and industrial west Berkeley. The sirens had stopped but flashers streaked the gray dusk and echoed blue … yellow … red … yellow on the water. Staccato bursts of radios cut the air. Beyond Aquatic Lake, lights on the freeway blinked through the manzanita and junipers. Farther west the last stripes of sun seared the rippling water of the bay and the red glowing ball was settling into a bank of fog behind the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Pacific wind iced my ears and snapped my jacket against my ribs. It unfurled Howard’s loose red curls. Live oaks and junipers cringed away from the wind. Macadam paths snaked around man-made knolls and empty poles that once held
PAR COURSE
signs that had been trashed and not replaced. The signs that had been maintained warned:
LOCK YOUR CAR
and
DON’T LEAVE VALUABLES IN YOUR CAR.
Even early Sunday mornings, when bicyclists and dog walkers felt safe, the most common sight here was big American cars with lone men waiting behind the wheels.

If Nefarious Activity were looking for a place to picnic, Aquatic Park would be it.

Over the radio the dispatcher’s voice came from three cars: “Four three nine call in. Repeat, Officer Four Three Nine call in.”

Pulling my jacket tighter around me, I hurried past the patrol cars and across the few yards of lawn. The grass ended abruptly: no beach, just land chopped off and lake begun. And four yards into the lake the orange reflector triangle on the rear bumper of the Cushman protruded, inches above the wind-tossed water. I checked for the Cushman’s driver, but there was no body lying on the lawn, no medics bending over. Instinctively I looked back at the sunken vehicle. Surely, the driver wouldn’t still be in there. But, of course, he wouldn’t, not with no one out there working on it. I grabbed the nearest patrol officer. “What’s the story, Heling? The prognosis? Who was driving?”

“Elgin Tiress.”

“Ah,” I said, relieved. If the perp was after the most offensive guy in Parking Enforcement, he’d gotten him. The game would be over. He had won. Once again Parking Enforcement would worry about nothing worse than post-ticket tantrums. For us it would be worse though. With no new incidents we’d just be wandering down colder and colder trails. It said something about Tiress, or me, that I had contemplated all the logistic effects of his accident before wondering about him. “How is he?”

“Concussion. Arm and a leg that looked pretty bad. Ambulance was two blocks away when they took the call. They’ve probably got him in Emergency by now. His head went through the windshield.”

Scrunching my shoulders up around my ears, I looked at the icy water slapping against the Cushman. “Tiress must have had that Cushman floored.”

She nodded. “Tiress didn’t say much. He was pretty out of it. But he did say ‘stuck.’ Said he started from Sixth Street and once he pressed the gas pedal down it never left the floor.”

Automatically I looked east toward Sixth Street, six blocks away. In all that time why hadn’t he gotten the cart stopped?

Had he panicked? There was a certain justice in that picture. And if I, a fellow law enforcement officer, thought so, I could imagine the pleasure the parking perp would have taken in the image of Tiress’s pallid triangular face flushed in fear. Tiress would have been started down a gentle grade, picked up speed, barreling through stop signs, shooting along the sleepy south Berkeley industrial streets and across the deep-rutted Santa Fe tracks, and down the suddenly steep grade to the lake. By then he’d had been moving fast enough to fling the Cushman four yards in.

“He was lucky he wasn’t killed,” I said.

“You could have said that before he stepped into the Cushman today,” Heling put in. “You got all these new businesses down here, all these cars. Around here, Smith, a man’d rather discover a parking spot than a new gene splice. There are scientists running tests that have to be checked at three minutes after the hour or the experiment goes bust. You’ve got cutthroat computer companies with guys scared shitless of being late. You’ve got vehicles parked in front of anything that’s not breathing. Tiress loved it. You know what they called him down here, Smith?”

“Besides Tight Ass?”

“The Hyena—and not because they’d discovered a sense of humor.”

“No one ever accused Tiress of humor, Heling.”

Heling adjusted her breath and continued undaunted. “Down here Tiress didn’t have to bother waiting for meters to run out. Down here, it’s just picking off the weak and dying.” Heling paused and waited till she caught my eye. “And you know, Smith, that’s Tight Ass’s specialty.”

Like many of us, Heling had considered herself Tiress’s specialty at one point. She’d been late so often she started leaving her car in a loading zone while she checked in. In the two weeks she tried that maneuver, it cost her a hundred sixty dollars.

It was then that the beauty of this caper struck me. The perp hadn’t had to count on Tiress panicking. He’d only made use of what there was in abundance here: parked cars. Or more to the point, not a free yard of curb space. Usually the lack of parking here infuriated only drivers. But today, it spelled disaster for Tiress, barreling along trying to spot a dozen yards of bare curb to scrape his wheels against, finding instead only the cars he so loved to ticket. I only wished I could have seen it. I also wished I’d gotten here a whole lot sooner. Tiress’s frantic flight was one scene the parking perp wouldn’t have missed. But by now our perp would be home sipping Chablis and chuckling over his memories.

Still, if he watched Tiress’s cart go into the lake, he might have left a footprint or some other lead to his identity. Someone might have seen his car idling too long, or trailing behind Tiress. “Heling, cordon off the street beyond the Santa Fe tracks to the east and beyond that wooden building to the north.”

She groaned, turned up her uniform collar, and trudged toward one of the other patrol officers.

From beyond that wooden building a vehicle that looked like the issue of an affair between a tow truck and a whooping crane moved awkwardly toward the lake, then veered to the shoreline. Feet planted on shore, it stuck its metal beak yards over the water and within feet of the fallen Cushman. In any other part of town we’d have had a hundred people watching. Here, with the small factories closed for the day, the drug dealers not yet open for trade, the air too cold and windy for the sensible Berkeleyan, we’d attracted only a couple and their stroller-bound child.

It took the mongrel crane forty-five minutes to extricate the Cushman, battered, muddy, and with something resembling bullrushes sticking out the front where the windshield used to be. Misco found the cut in the brake line in less time than it had taken the perp to make it. And Raksen was poised to point out the glue under the gas pedal. “There’s glue and glue, Smith,” he said. “Paper glue and airplane glue. I’m not talking model airplanes, I mean the stuff they use in seven-forty-sevens. I can’t be sure, and don’t quote me, but I’d bet that if Tiress had eased his foot off the pedal after the first push he’d have been okay. But, clearly he didn’t.”