Shorts - Sinister Shorts (3 page)

They turned right on Oxford Street and then left on Haste, cruising up the south side of the campus. As they waited for the light at Telegraph, a sharp pain lanced Fleck's stomach. His heart pounded, and his eyes blurred. He said nothing to Charisse, who watched with pity as a ragged human shape slowly pushed a shopping cart across the intersection.

Fleck had seen the early-morning scene before too many times. Dizzy and angry to be back, somehow he kept driving, parking on Durant near the Greek Theatre two blocks from the stadium. “Just give me a minute,” he said, angling his head back. In a moment he was half-asleep.

“John?”

“Yeah.” He roused himself with difficulty. They got out and he locked up.

Charisse leaned down, tightened her laces, said, “We should have brought a water bottle.”

“There's safe water at the top. A spring.”

“Okay. You're not going to bring that thing, are you?”

He was strapping on his shoulder holster. He looked at it, and at her. A couple of girls bounced past them, jogging toward the trail, chattering. An old man threw a soggy-looking tennis ball across the tall dewy grass by the fence. His dog sniffed around eagerly, nose down in the wetness.

“I mean, it'll show, and scare people. And you said the trail's been open a month, with no problems.”

“A precaution,” he mumbled. His eyes had blurred momentarily. He wondered what was wrong with him.

“Put it away, please, John.”

Reluctantly, he took the gun and holster and opened the car door, reaching for the glove compartment. Charisse started up the trail, and he followed a moment later, slinging the big telephoto-lens camera case around his neck.

The Long Walk, a dirt trail about five feet wide, wound along the side of the stadium. A jogger pounded past them on the trail, his ponytail flying. They fell in behind a middle-aged couple leaning on walking sticks, arguing in German.

“Just a hike,” Charisse said again, squeezing his hand. Now that he was moving, Fleck felt better. The temperature must already be over eighty degrees. In March, when Julie Mattei died, it must have been much cooler.

The trail began to climb and they left the athletic field behind. They passed a few people, and more passed them. Some of them said hi; most ignored them. Representatives of the Berkeley social hodgepodge, graybeards, couples with dogs, and loners hiked the path. Fleck didn't need to read minds to picture the broad fields they ranged: the sane, the crazy, the mild, the wild.

They all thought they were safe, but they were all walking the death beat every minute of their lives, and he'd given up trying to save them.

Julie, just like these young women looking so arrogant and confident this morning, had walked past this clump of manzanita three months ago, directly into the path of a truck. No. He shook his head to clear it. That was the kid in Atlanta, the one with a loving mom standing by to change his history.

Charisse looked out of place in tailored shorts and pristine white shoes rising above the dust. He must, too. These hills attracted white, except for a group of Asian boys they passed, sitting on rocks loading their cameras, and one other black girl who passed them with a wave, tall and broad-shouldered as a basketball player. They watched the girl's muscular calves disappear around the curve.

The walkers thinned out after the first mile. Fleck and Charisse walked along a ridge, the golden underbrush on their left climbing the hillside, poison oak the only green, fresh and glistening everywhere. They passed more stands of sharp-branched manzanita. Now and then they got into culverts and flats where looming eucalyptus trees cast shapes across the path, their acorns littering the ground, releasing a dry pungency that made his stomach churn.

He was sweating. The sun reflected off the ground and speared his eyes under the sunglasses. So Altschuler and Julie had an affair. Fleck wondered if that started before or after she helped break up his own marriage.

Charisse stopped and reached out to pick a solitary purple flower on the slope. Fleck pulled her back, said, “Drop it.”

“Why?” She held on stubbornly.

“The whole hillside's infested. Poison oak. Don't touch any of the plants.”

“Hoo, boy.” She withdrew her hand, rubbing it on her pants. “Do you think the senior partner killed her?”

“Altschuler? No.” She didn't ask why, just sat down on a rock and looked at him with interest.

“How about the guy who called you? Bell.”

He said nothing.

“You said the firm was small. Bell had to know her.”

“I walked into his office one night after hours. Just opened the door. It was like a TV comedy skit. He had her over the desk. She pulled her skirt down and turned her back to me. He never mentioned it after that. He never mentioned it to the police, either.” Fleck had sat down beside her. “Damn, I am thirsty.”

Charisse said, “It was one of them.”

Fleck said, “No,” again.

“How can you be so sure?” She looked exasperated.

He turned away. “I've done it for so many years. Pete Altschuler, he's a city boy. He wouldn't climb up here to do it. Too worried about his health.”

“He could have hired a hit man. A hit man in hiking boots.” She smiled, inviting him to join her, but he wasn't in the mood.

“He's not that ruthless,” Fleck said as she got up, smoothing her shorts. “He cared for her.”

They wound around another corner, through another dry canyon. The sun blazed down. Fleck stumbled and would have fallen if she had not caught hold of his arm.

“John, you're sick. Shouldn't we go down?” Charisse said.

“I'll take a rest on top. You were right about the water bottle.”

She let go of him, gave him a playful shove. “Okay, Macho Man,” she said. “Why not Bell?”

“He might get her fired. He might poison her. He might even shoot her,” Fleck said. “But he'd never get actual blood on his hands.”

“But he was hiding the fact he was seeing her!”

“They all hide everything. It's second nature for lawyers.”

“Then who did it?”

Voices carried down the hillside. Three kids, two girls and a boy, descended around the switchback ahead. They were all dressed alike, in jeans torn out at the knees and tank tops, hair tied back with bandannas. “Hot today,” the boy offered as he walked by. His nose was peeling under his enigmatic shades. A buck knife sheathed in leather looped through his belt. The girls passed by without a word.

“Nobody murders another person for no reason,” Charisse went on. “It's just that the reason isn't obvious-like if it's not money, or power, or revenge-everything else gets lumped under general craziness.”

He trudged forward, irritated, watching his big feet move up a steep place, step by step.

“For instance, a woman kills her child for what seems like no reason. She's been neglected her whole life, and this is the only way anybody will pay her any attention. So they say she's nuts. They put her in an asylum, but she had her reasons, didn't she?”

“I'm talking about a random crime, not somebody's baby,” Fleck said.

“Or think about it. A man goes into his old office with an assault rifle and starts shooting. It's terrible. He didn't even know some of the people he killed. But he could explain it, John. He'd call it a payback. The people represented something to him, something he had to kill.”

“Some reasons can't be called reasons.” His tongue felt thick in his mouth, and he wasn't even sure she'd heard him. He didn't want to talk anymore. He just wanted to get up the hill.

They had been climbing hard. After a long time, long enough for Fleck to remember everything about his life in California, his wife's face, Julie's, all the dead faces he had looked into all those years, wanting to say I'm sorry, I'm so sorry I failed you, they came to an area where the Oakland fire had passed through. The dirt turned black, and all around them stood skinned-looking fire-seared trees. Across the canyon, on top of the next hill over, distant but clear, they saw bare burned land, a stone chimney still standing guard in the middle of nothing at all.

Fleck said, “Suppose a man's wife leaves him. He blames the woman he was sleeping with… is that a reason to kill her? Shouldn't that man have blamed himself?”

Charisse didn't answer. She was watching a tarantula skitter across the path, hairy legs moving much faster than they should. She pointed, excited, her hand with the long nails and sparkling rings incongruous in the dirt and heat and stillness. Fleck kicked dirt after the spider. “This is what I think,” he went on, repressing the moan the pain in his stomach had started. “Julie Mattei hiked up into someone's hate zone. If she hadn't shown up, the next walker would have been killed. Simple as that.”

“I don't believe it,” Charisse said. “They have their reasons.” She left it at that.

Another rest. The pain had settled in his gut, cramping him, making him stop and bend over now and then till the worst of it passed. Charisse was tired, too; she had slowed down and she walked with a slight limp. No one had passed them for some time. He was burning with thirst.

This walk was acting on him, replacing the forgetting with awful, fresh memory. Why had he returned?

“John, did your work make you start to think that life is senseless, too? Random and meaningless like you keep talking about?” She went on without waiting for an answer. “Because if it is, then you could do anything to another human being. I mean, what kind of morality would be left?”

“There you go,” he said quietly, so quietly she didn't even hear him.

“Just think of her up here, on an overcast day. A spring day, everything blooming… she was thinking about making love the night before, maybe. Or about chicken tarragon for dinner. Then, like this”-she snapped her fingers-“she's gone.”

He had stopped to catch his breath and wipe the sweat off his face. Gnats floated around their heads. “If they get too bad, walk with your hands raised above your head for a while,” he said. “They circle the highest point.”

“Did you ever meet her?” When he didn't answer, she wiped her forehead and repeated the question.

“We went out a few times,” Fleck said. The trail had narrowed between two boulders. They were hidden there. You could bury something here easily, he thought. An earthquake right now would bury them together.

If his words had surprised her, she didn't show it. “When did you move to Atlanta?”

Fleck ignored the question. “Doesn't this place scare you, Charisse? A woman died here and all.”

Now it was her turn to remain silent.

“I wish you hadn't come today,” he said. She stepped back, her spine pressing against the rock.

“You moved to Atlanta at the end of March. Right after Julie Mattei was killed,” she said, her voice low.

“That's right. And you've only known me for two weeks, that's right, too.” His head swam; he licked his dry lips. The camera case banging against his chest had been beating him up rhythmically with each step. “You look a little like Julie,” he said to her. “She was a glamorpuss like you.”

He was leaning over her, both hands against the rock above her head. Charisse said levelly, “You're trying to scare me. Why?”

Some tension in him went back into hiding at her words. He moved back from her and said, “You're too trusting.”

“Don't play games like that, John. I'm not like you. I'm not afraid of the world like you.”

“You should be,” he said. They went on, back into another patch of blinding sun.

“We're almost there,” he said. “Up another quarter mile, past that stand of pine.”

Charisse had stopped again. “What?” he said, then remembered he'd told her that morning he'd never been on The Long Walk. “I forgot,” he said. “That's all. I did hike this trail once, a long time ago. Come on, Charisse, don't look at me like that.”

“I'm going-back down the trail.”

“No,” Fleck said. “It's dangerous.” He grabbed her arm, as much to support himself as to restrain her. They stood there on the dusty path in the hard sun. “C'mon. We'll get some water, then we'll go straight down.”

She tried to shake him off. He held on.

“Let go of me, John.”

She started back down the trail. He took her arm again and turned her around. “No, I'm not letting you go,” he said. “We're going to get some water, then we can go back. I'm sorry if I scared you,” he was saying to her as he half-pushed her ahead of him up the trail. Silent, tearful, and exhausted, Charisse went along, which was fortunate since the immense pain that had lodged in his gut had fragmented and he could barely control his legs. Into a buzzing black shade they climbed, unable to see ahead through the psychedelic play of light and shadows beneath the canopy of leaves.

One more steep incline. The hillside turned rocky. Off to the right, beyond the scarred hillsides, he could now see the whole bay, a vast glittering silver lagoon dotted with boats, ringed by sunlit cities, the four great bridges connecting the peninsula and the headlands of Marin and the East Bay, San Francisco on the horizon partially veiled in its mountain range of white fog, the city of Oakland spread along the water, just below their feet. It all looked so pretty from far away.

One more thick stand of eucalyptus, and the trail abruptly delivered them out onto a flat sweep of granite. On the other side, about a hundred yards ahead, Fleck made out a rock wall, what looked like a depression. The Cave. Where the spring would be, inside and out of sight. On the right, another cliff fell away into miles of air.

“That's it,” he said, pointing. “Water.” Just saying the word made him feel better. He must have heatstroke, plus whatever else was gnawing away inside him.

Ducking down to enter, he nudged Charisse ahead. The dark blinded him; the coolness immediately started him shaking.

The Cave was a small rock room, lit only by the blazing open arch where they had entered. As his eyes adjusted, he saw Charisse in the corner, her whole head under the spring, her hands splashing up clear water, drinking greedily while it flowed over her head and neck.

Another shadow in the dark, an older man, drank water out of a tin cup, watching Charisse. Fleck put his hand against the wall and blinked several times. Some of the faintness went away. The man was a white biker type, tall and brawny, with a heavy gnarled walking stick. He stepped aside into indistinct shadows when he saw Fleck. Charisse came up for air, saw Fleck, and moved back.