Too Close to the Edge (24 page)

“It’s not my job to question clients,” he said. But his usual caustic tone was missing.

I walked back to his desk. Yesterday afternoon it had resembled the bedroom. Now it was back to normal, completely orderly, a desk where any needed item could be found in less time than it took to pronounce its name. It epitomized the Ott Detective Agency. Shoving aside a yellow legal pad, I sat on the cleared spot. “This is what I’m giving you, Ott. Brad Butz followed all the steps to get his building permit, including getting a soils engineer’s report. Those engineers take soil samples every twenty feet or so. If two samples are the same they assume what’s between them is the same. Their reports stipulate that. If the soils engineer’s report had shown evidence of an earthquake trace, Butz would never have gotten a building permit. So we can assume it didn’t. If the soils engineer didn’t find a fissure, why would Butz think there was one, and why would he wait till after the building was up to contact QuakeChek?”

It only took him a moment to reach the same conclusion I had. “He knew there was a trace because he’d worked for QuakeChek, a trace new enough so it wasn’t on the map. The trace wouldn’t be right under the building, but it’d be near enough to make the city decide not to risk housing people with disabilities there.”

“Exactly.” I waited till he nodded. Herman Ott’s personal code of ethics could be a pain in the ass, but one of its positive points was that he stood by his commitments. And that nod, we both knew, was his agreement to come in on this. He owed Liz Goldenstern that much.

“Fucking bastard!” he muttered. “Butz was a small time, barely licensed contractor. He didn’t have connections in the city. Liz made him the Marina Vista contractor. Without Liz there would have been no Marina Vista. Without Liz there would have been no variance. He could never have gotten it himself. He used her to get a variance for a building he planned to have declared uninhabitable.”

“And she realized that, or at least she suspected it strongly enough to call you about QuakeChek.”

“Jesus. When she found out about this, she must have been furious. I wouldn’t want to have been Butz when she got to him.”

“Or vice versa, as it turns out.” I propped my feet on the edge of his waste basket.

He shrugged. His gold and mustard collar scrunched against his plump shoulders. “She could have turned him in, of course, but it wasn’t her style. Racing down to the site and giving him hell; that was Liz.”

“Maybe. Liz certainly had a temper. If she had heard this like you have, she probably would have taken off after him. But she had had enough time to formulate her suspicions. If she hadn’t been fairly sure beforehand, she wouldn’t have called you. So when you told her about QuakeChek you were just confirming what she already suspected. She’d had time to cool down and think clearly. She’d had enough time to call Butz at the site and make sure he’d be there. And she’d had time to consider what it all meant, which is what we have to do.” I hoisted myself atop the desk.

“Mmm.” Ott pulled his chair from behind the desk, set it to face me, and plopped down in it. A lemon-colored sweater fell off the back. “He needed the variance just to get the building up. It’s not only the sole dwelling down there but it’s the only building over two stories. Then when the building was up …”

“He planned to spring the QuakeChek report.”

Ott leaned forward in his chair. “And the city would renege on the deal. I’ve seen these boards, Smith. The same five or six citizens who patted themselves on the back for okaying the variance to begin with would be hollering that they were the ones who were protecting the disabled now. There’d be enough righteous indignation to fill in the rest of the bay.”

“And if Brad Butz realized that, Liz had to, too.” I sighed. “But once the city canceled the variance, what Butz would be left with would be an empty building.”

“An empty, six-story building on the waterfront.”

“The question is, why go through that elaborate deception? What does he want that building for?” I waited for the answer to arise, but it didn’t, not to either of us. “Let’s shelve that for the moment. Let’s posit that he planned to turn it into a warehouse.”

“Why a warehouse?”

“Well, anything but apartments. The restrictions for commercial use aren’t so strict as for dwellings. Ian Stuart wanted it to be a heliport.”

“That’s a little more like it. The thing is, Smith, that building is one of a kind. He could do a lot better than a warehouse.”

I was beginning to be sorry I’d mentioned warehouses and annoyed that Ott stubbornly insisted on following this sidetrack.

Pushing off with his feet, he rolled the chair back against the wall, running over the sweater on the way. “This is a complicated, dangerous scheme you’re suggesting Butz hatched. He’d have to have had a goal that made it worth his while. He’d have to have planned to put something in that building that paid a helluva lot more than the prospective tenants and whatever government grants would come with them. But with a building on the waterfront, the only one of its kind that shouldn’t be hard.”

“It won’t overlook the bay, remember. It’ll look out on the inlet and the city. For the next year or so the main sight from there will be the construction sites for those sports stores and playing fields…. Jesus, Ott, do you know what the plans of Marina Vista include?”

He made a “come” motion with his hand.

“The first two floors will have a weight room and a basketball court—supposedly for chair sports—a dining hall, a big swimming pool, and, an outdoor ramp that winds around the whole building. What does that sound like to you?”

“A waterfront spa.”

“Exactly. He wouldn’t have needed a variance for that. A spa would fit right into the city’s waterfront plan. Even if he had to reinforce the structure and the foundation, it would be a small price to pay for Berkeley’s only waterfront spa.” I jumped up. “I suppose there’s no point in telling you not to follow me. But stay far enough out of my way so you don’t create a loophole for Butz when we take him to trial.”

I
N THE CAR
I called the dispatcher for back-up, who would preferably be Murakawa. I waited until I got off Telegraph to turn on the pulser lights. While I’d been hashing things out with Herman Ott, the fog had thickened to a rainy mist, heavy enough to coat the windshield but not thick enough to smooth the path of the wiper blades. Even on low they squeaked with each arc.

The mist thinned the traffic—foot and vehicle—on Telegraph. I turned left and headed around the campus to University Avenue, slowing behind a Mazda driver looking for a parking space he was unlikely to find, then switching lanes, only to jam on the brakes as a trucker decided to turn left. I wondered about Brad Butz and the plans for Marina Vista. Had he intended from the beginning to build a spa? Had the idea come to him when he saw the soils engineer’s report and realized it didn’t mention the earthquake trace he knew was nearby? Or having known where the trace was, had he realized beforehand that there would be no evidence of it in the engineer’s report?

The light at Martin Luther King Jr. Way turned from amber to red. I turned on the siren, cut around the Volkswagen in front of me and stepped on the gas, barely missing a beige Chevrolet making an illegal left turn against the light. Who were the backers for Marina Vista? (I’d have to have Murakawa check in City Hall.) They, of course, would be in for a hefty profit, having gotten the benefits of government incentives for building housing for people with disabilities—if we couldn’t prove they’d conspired with Butz from the beginning. How did Butz find them?

I crossed San Pablo Avenue and kept on going west past tiny Indian cafes, sari shops, delis, and corner bars. Recalling Brad Butz as I had first seen him—standing irate at the Marina Vista site, denouncing Ian Stuart, screaming at me—I couldn’t picture him calmly putting together such an ambitious, such a risky plan as this one. I couldn’t picture him feeling out the backers and risking his career, if not his freedom with each carefully phrased question. That suggested a subtlety that Butz wasn’t likely to attain, not in this life, anyway.

I pushed that consideration aside. I certainly could see Liz Goldenstern discovering Butz’s betrayal. I could see her dropping everything and driving the Capelli van—much as I was maneuvering the patrol car now, weaving in and out, hitting the horn, teed off with every dawdling vehicle. I could see her arriving at Marina Vista, pulling into the parking space where she knew she had room to get out, lowering herself on the rear platform, and pressing the chair forward toward Marina Vista at full speed. It must have been dusk when she came up to the shack.

But why, I wondered as I headed onto the freeway overpass, had she gotten out of the truck at all? She had no more mobility in the chair. As events proved, she was only making herself more vulnerable. When she planned to confront Brad Butz, wouldn’t she have been better off physically, and psychologically, to stay in the truck and yell down at him from the window? So why had she chosen to park the truck by the docks and get out? To catch him off guard? Chairs aren’t as noisy as vans, but they’re also not vehicles for stealth. The small advantage the lesser sound might have given her would have been overcome by the time she spent coming up the unpaved road, completely visible to anyone in the shack. The only way to avoid that would have been to go along the path on the ridge, on the landscaped area that used to be the dump, and from there look down on Butz. That would explain how that twig caught in her sleeve. But why did she go up there?

As I headed up the back of the neck of the marina, past the squat aluminum Calicopter building, any euphemism of mist ceased. The rain struck hard against the windshield. Gusts of wind and the undulating pavement made the patrol car seem like a tiny fishing boat in a Pacific storm.

It would have been more sensible for Liz to stay in her van. Liz was no fool. She might once have been an impulsive fisherwoman, but she’d spent long enough in her chair to learn patience and planning. The Liz Goldenstern I had seen orchestrate demonstrations, the woman who had shepherded Marina Vista through the mazes of city bureaucracy, didn’t fling herself thoughtlessly into the fray.

But she chose to get out of the van. Why? I turned left along the chin of the marina, past the field where the tennis boutiques and playing fields would be. To my left, the bare masts of the sailboats thrashed fitfully. In front of them was the empty space where the Capelli van had been. I passed the Marriott Inn and came to the end of the pavement where the macadam path veered behind the hedge of bushes up along the crest of the hillock. Walking, a man or woman would be spotted there with no trouble. But in a chair, only Liz’s head would have topped the bushes. Not expecting her, there would have been no reason for Butz to notice her dark hair moving in front of the dusky sky. And she would have been too far away for him to hear the chair.

Of course, she also would have been too far away to chew him out, or hear any excuses he might have made. She would have been too far away to hear, period. Up there was not a place to listen; it was a place to watch. It was not a spot she would have chosen if she wanted to know what Butz was saying; it was the place to see who Butz was saying it to. It was the place Liz chose because she wanted to know who was in this scheme with Butz.

It was after dusk when she got here. Brad Butz could have been home by then, he could have stopped off somewhere for a drink, he could have been anywhere. As I had told Herman Ott, Liz would not have driven down here without calling first. But if she called, she could hardly have planned on surprising him. Unless she told him she was coming later.

What was it she had said when I was pushing her chair? “It would be nice to have someone around again, someone I could count on to do things I need.” Then she’d laughed ironically. “Of course, the problem with malleable people,” she’d said, “is that what attracts you, attracts a lot of other people. You’re not the only one who can manipulate them.” That afternoon she had been waiting for Herman Ott’s call. She’d been thinking about Brad Butz. She’d been wondering how much he’d been manipulated, and by whom. And when she called him and told him she’d be down to talk to him about QuakeChek, she knew he would panic and call whomever he’d worked the scheme with. And that’s who she wanted to see.

The Marina Vista site was empty now except for the construction shack and Butz’s white panel truck parked behind it. The rain dribbled down over the sign he had put in this morning. Beyond, Rainbow Village looked less rainbowlike than ever. I pulled the car up next to the shack, took my gun out of my purse, and strode the three steps to the shack door. Butz wasn’t visible inside.

“Butz,” I called. “Open up.”

Nothing.

“Butz, this is the police. There’s no point putting me off. Open this door.”

The rain hit my hair and dripped down my neck. Butz didn’t answer. I reached for the door and yanked it open.

Brad Butz lay on the floor, his china blue eyes opened wide in horror, his cheeks rosier than ever against his death-pale skin. On his white shirt was a ring of blood, which spread from a bright red hole to a brick-brown rim four inches away.

He was dead. But he hadn’t been dead more than a couple minutes.

S
HUTTING THE SHACK DOOR
, I hurried back to the car and called the dispatcher. “Five twenty-seven,” I said, giving him my badge number. “I’m at the construction shack for Marina Vista, by Rainbow Village. I’ve got a D.O.A. in there. Get me an ambulance, code three”—(red lights and siren going)—”the beat officer, the Watch Commander, and the I.D. Tech. And have Murakawa or whoever’s nearest here block off University Avenue west of the freeway. I don’t want anyone entering or leaving the marina.”

Judging from Brad Butz’s wound, he hadn’t been dead long enough for his killer to get to the freeway or the frontage road before I arrived. Once I crossed the freeway, I hadn’t seen another car moving. There was a scabbily-paved road at the front of the neck of the marina. It had been used mainly for access to the dump. But now it was blocked off. University was the only way out. Which meant that the killer was still down here. Somewhere. Hiding in Rainbow Village or behind the hedge on the ridge, under the landscaping of the waterfront park, in one of the junk boats in the inlet. Or in the men’s or lady’s room at the Marriott, cleaning off any signs of conflict. Maybe the killer had escaped untainted, in which case he or she could be in the Marriott bar having a brandy or headed to one of the other bars along the waterfront. It was a search that would take a lot of manpower.