Cop Out (4 page)

Now he said, “Those preachers with their tiny missions always had their fangs out for us. Sometimes they’d come after me to join the youth group or the choir, but it was my mother they wanted.”

“Physically?” I’d seen an old picture of her. She’d been tall like Howard, with his high cheekbones, blue eyes, and red, curly hair. In the photo she wore a gauzy dress that flowed as if she’d been floating free on the zephyrs. “Or did they envy her freedom?”

Howard flinched at the word. I ached to take it back, to keep from reminding him that the freedom she desired was also freedom from him. He swallowed and said, “They envied it, sure; they lusted to capture her and keep her like—like a pigeon in a cage.”

I put my hand on his arm and felt the muscles tense. “Pigeon?”

“In the Bible they kept pigeons in cages.”

“So they could never fly off?”

“So they were there for sacrifices.”

Before I could ask more, he shoved himself off the bed and headed into the bathroom. He ran the shower long after the water had to have gone cold.

Patrol teams work four ten-hour days. That’s the price of three free days: three from 4:00
P.M.
to 2:00
A.M.
and one from 10:00
A.M.
to 8:00
P.M
.

I got to the station at twenty to ten on Monday morning. Dressing in uniform takes a while, particularly in winter, when it’s good to have a few layers on under the bulletproof vest. November’s tricky, and today was going to be only a thermal T-shirt day, but still, adjusting the Velcro so the vest protects but doesn’t fit like something out of
Gone with the Wind
takes time. So do the lace-up ankle boots, the leather belt, the equipment belt over it with the baton and flashlight. I don’t wear much makeup—I’m from
Berkeley
after all—but I do like a little shadow over the eyelids, a touch of rouge, a couple of swipes of lipstick when I’m going on patrol. Most times on duty I’m working to cut the tension, to ease the fear of witnesses, to calm the suspects. The blue uniform screams authority. A little bit of makeup reminds people the officer in blue is a person too.

I climbed up to the second floor, checked my mailbox—nothing new—and my voice mail, hoping for a message from Herman Ott. There wasn’t one. Howard and I hadn’t mentioned Ott again last night. Nor had he called. Today I’d have to deal with him; have to make a bigger deal than the issue merited just to remind him what the pecking order was. But that would come after my beat assignments. For the moment I was assigned to Howard’s team, not the best of arrangements at the best of times. Even with a sergeant as well liked as Howard, it’s hard for a patrol officer stuck with chasing teenagers off Telegraph not to wonder if the sergeant gave the better beat to his girlfriend. Howard bent over backward to be fair, and I ended up covering the beats with armed truants, drug deals, and endless ringing alarms.

The team meeting was in the second-floor squad room, an almost windowless square, the architectural equivalent of Russia perpetually seeking access to the sea. In our case the saltwater ports were occupied by the chiefs office suite, the sergeants’ office, a meeting room, and telephone and typing rooms. The squad room had been left a Vladivostok of a window by the back of the building. If a photo of the room, with its old plastic wood-grain tables and gray plastic chairs and cardboard boxes of forms in the center were to be captioned “Moscow 1950,” no one would question it.

Howard assigned those of us who were floaters to beats; mine today would be 16 between the freeway and San Pablo Avenue, an area of light industry, the chichi Fourth Street shops, the sari shops and Indian restaurants on University Avenue, and the tip of Aquatic Park. He passed around the hot car list and held up a flyer from Pasadena; someone had stolen the equipment from a marching briefcase brigade in the Doo DA Parade (Pasadena’s alternative to the Rose Bowl Parade). “Pasadena assumes anyone who lifted twenty-five fake briefcases with trapdoors would naturally be headed here.”

By ten-thirty I had checked out a radio, snatched one of the pew patrol cars, and was driving to a burglarized self-storage unit off the frontage road to Route 80. Berkeley is the tenth most congested city in the nation, but down between the Southern Pacific tracks and the freeway, some streets are patch-paved or not paved at all, dry grass waves, and barren stucco rectangles sit atop hard clay soil looking as if the wind could blow them on to San Joaquin or Salt Lake. Storit Urself was half a block filled with four-story prefab cubes. Inside, narrow cement-floored halls ran past plywood doors five feet apart. There was no natural light, nothing to distinguish one hall from the next. Like a cut-rate mausoleum.

Perhaps it was the sight of the complainant, Margo Roehner, planted in front of 207, that sparked the thought of sarcophagi. She looked like one of those Chinese tomb warriors, single-mindedly defending the emperor in life and petrification. She was small, trim, brown in hair, eyes, and clothes, but the overwhelming impression she gave was square. Square face, square shoulders, and she was facing me square on, foot tapping impatiently. “I’ve got a grant application that has to be in the mail by Wednesday night. I’ve got the roofers at home finishing up. Yesterday they dropped some sort of tool and knocked off my suet feeder that the red-breasted nuthatches just started using. I don’t want them to leave before I check things. I have two new coordinators I hired last week who have to be trained. And that’s on top of my regular work; I’m on call eighteen hours a day.”

I pulled out a pad. “So what’s missing from here?”

“Nothing’s gone, probably. There’s nothing here but files, and now they’re all over the floor. Nobody’d need them but me. And look! Useless! I don’t have time— But you expect a report anyway, right?” She shot me an accusing glance, seemed to think better of that, and aimed her hostility at the mélange of papers inside the storage unit. If we had been anywhere more spacious than this dark, narrow hall, she’d have paced. As it was, she tapped her finger on her wrist next to her watch.

“What kind of papers?” I asked, glancing into the five-by-nine plywood cubicle.

“Medical. Printouts of disease progress, what symptoms you can expect, what your doctor should be doing for you, how soon, what steps to take if he isn’t.”

“Are you a doctor?”

“Hardly.” Her mouth quirked, as if she’d considered a laugh but thought better of it. “I’m the head of Patient Defenders.”

I restrained a smile. If she was the
patient
Defender, what did the Impatient Defender do, grab for the throat?

Margo Roehner certainly wasn’t smiling. “Life is too short for levity,” I could imagine her saying. She nicked a glance at her watch, stopped her finger tapping momentarily, and then, with a puff of breath—the sigh of the rushed—said, “I see you haven’t heard of us. Means you haven’t needed us—yet.”

“And us is?”

“Look, you get sick, you go into your HMO like a lamb to pen or slaughter, as they wish. When you get a diagnosis, you don’t know if it’s the right diagnosis, much less what competent treatment is.

“Look, if their choices are, treat you aggressively and expensively and cure you in a week or send you home to suffer for a month and then get well on your own, what do you think they’re going to do? Right. Doctors are pressured to cut costs. You have a doctor who orders ‘aggressive and expensive,’ he’s taking money out of not only his own pocket but the rest of the white pants around him. I grew up with money, until my father married his trophy wife”—she shrugged off that misfortune—“so I know what good medical care can be. But now, with HMOs, it’s not all malice; a lot of times it’s ignorance. Or sloth.”

“How—”

“How’d I get into this? I had a sharp metallic taste—” She waved off her words with a brusque flip of the hand. “I don’t have time—
Briefly
, I had a medical problem. My doctor decided it was nothing serious, gave me a palliative, didn’t answer my calls, referred me to a department that didn’t handle the condition. Bottom line was she couldn’t be bothered.”

“But you’re okay now?”

She smiled.

I didn’t look away, but I wanted to.

She held my gaze. “You’re better than most. It’s only a crooked smile now, not the grotesque sneer pulled halfway across one cheek, as it was in the beginning. People don’t gasp anymore. But then I’ve trained myself never to smile.”

“If the HMO—”

“If my doctor had treated me right away, would it have averted the paralysis? I’ll never know. What help I got is from time and friends.”

If her father hadn’t remarried and she’d still had his money, would she still have a working face? Surely she had wondered that. What had she been like before? Had this stolid little warrior grinned over shared secrets, laughed explosively, smiled at a lover? I shivered, peeking into the black void where humor is the enemy and slamming the door to it so quickly Margo herself would have been impressed.

My face must have betrayed me. Margo Roehner cringed—but only momentarily—then plunged on. “Everyone doesn’t have knowledgeable friends, but everyone can have Patient Defenders. We’re there—free of charge because when you’re too sick to fight, you’re too sick to decide whether a defender is a sensible expense. We go with you to emergency or urgent care, and we stay as long as needed. When we go home, we’re on call. Medical care’s real ‘life or death’; you make the wrong decision, you wait and see, and you can die. I could tell you stories.”

God forbid
.

“I’ll tell you, they don’t send
my
clients home ‘to see how things go.’ ” Another woman might have smiled in satisfaction. True to her word, she didn’t. Her lips merely pursed together and even in that motion pulled crookedly to the right.

Again I didn’t look away. Nor did I run for a mirror to check that my own face was still normal, though I was desperate for that reassurance. “This,” I said, motioning toward the mess of papers in the storage unit, “will it affect your work?”

“It’ll cost me time, time I don’t have. If I don’t get the grant application finished—I gave them our bank statement and signed the papers yesterday. Their money will pay the salaries of my new coordinators. Then we’ll be organized enough so we’ll never have to turn down a sick person.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone would break into your locker here?”

“None. It’s insane. It’s going to take me hours to clean up. And all this paper wasted!”

Wasted paper, indeed. Within her warrior’s breast beat the heart of a Berkeleyan. I almost grinned, but before my face moved, I found myself shuddering, as if like Margo Roehner, I had a finite number of smiles in this life and I needed to husband them so they would last as long as my face.

I stepped inside the storage unit, a sort of San Quentin for possessions. Papers were strewn two feet deep, boxes tossed helter-skelter. Nothing here that anyone but a doctor, Defender, or masochist would choose to read. Except for the poster on top of the rubble.

I laughed. Relief swept over me. I walked outside holding the plastic-wrapped picture of a pig in a raincoat flashing his round belly. “Eye on the Future” was the caption. There was something at once smug and silly about the porcine expression. Some viewers would howl, some sneer, but Margo Roehner could do neither, and the poster seemed an added slap in the face to her. “Is this yours?”

“Oh, that. It belongs to a friend.”

“
That’s what they all say
,” I would have said to someone who could smile in return. Normally it’s a waste of time to take prints in a place with this much coming and going, for a case with no loss but the door lock. But somebody was looking for something. Maybe in the wrong unit. Prints from the door couldn’t hurt, I told myself. Maybe I just didn’t want to divert this woman’s angry focus from doctors to cops. I called the dispatcher, got a case number and time, and put the storage unit on the list for the ID tech. “If you hear anything about other break-ins or suspicious activity here, call me.” I wrote the case number on my card, gave it to her, and walked back to my car to write up the report and wonder if I’d done anything more than create more wasted paper.

The second call was from Aquatic Park. The university rowing team was harassing a water-skier. Or a motorboat and water-skier were trying to capsize the rowers. Take your pick. I could have used Bryant Hemming on that territorial dispute. Tempers were not cooled by the proximity to the pond. Both sides were anxious to press charges. It was only when I told them they’d all have to come to the station and give me their statements one by one that they moved their dispute to the higher ground.

Next up was a fender bender at Fourth and Hearst. It took me twenty minutes and three reinterpretations from a woman in a blue van and a man in a red Miata to conclude that the woman, driving south on the busy block of Fourth Street, spotted a rare and wonderful parking spot on the opposite side of the boutique-jammed street. She knew it was illegal to hang a U, she insisted righteously, so she made a circle turn in the intersection.
Assuming the chance to block four lanes of traffic instead of two makes it legal?
Then she cut sharply into the prized spot. And crashed into the red Miata that was backing in at full clip, because, the driver insisted with equal righteousness, he was late for the back class at the Yoga Studio.
It’ll be even more valuable to you now
. The comments you have to choke down when you’re a cop could feed you for a year.

At one o’clock I called the dispatcher. “Adam sixteen here. Can I go code seven?”

“Wait a bit, sixteen. We’ve already got three units on lunch break. And you’ve got to go on a welfare check on Alston Way. Regina Wilson. Her son called from New York. She hasn’t answered her phone in two days.”

I found Mrs. Wilson on her bathroom floor. More than two hours passed as I called the medics, called her son, talked to her neighbors, hunting for a friend who could stay with her till her son arrived. Failing to find one, I thought fondly of Margo Roehner and Patient Defenders and ended up going to the hospital myself.