Time Expired (22 page)

“Not for me, it wouldn’t. But no one’s ever accused me of being too mature.”

I laughed. I couldn’t imagine Howard as an adult; his recklessness, his spur-of-the-moment decisions, his uncontrolled glee in victory were his charm. If he lost those, I didn’t know if there’d be enough left of Howard to still be Howard. Maybe the Madeleine Riordan who emerged from the hospital was only vague kin to the one who’d entered. I sighed. “Lots of college quarterbacks wake up twenty years later in Barca Loungers happily drinking beer and second-guessing NFL plays. They accept the facts of life. Maybe Madeleine did, too.” But even as I spoke my words sounded false.

Howard just shook his head.

“But, Howard, the fact is Madeleine did decide to come back to Canyonview. Either to get away from something or to get
to
something. Either to put distance between herself and Herbert Timms or because something drew her back to the canyon. And the only things going were Victor Champion standing in his window taking pictures, and there was our perp moving around down in the canyon.” I pushed myself up and braced a leg on the arm of the sofa. “Dammit, I can’t find Timms. I don’t know whether Madeleine was on the sidelines there in Canyonview cheering on our parking perp. But the woman had spyglasses; she had to be using them for something. Lend me your binoculars.”

“Why?”

“Because tomorrow I’m dressing in red top to bottom and heading down into the canyon. I’ll put Pereira in Madeleine’s room with the binoculars and we’ll find out just what Madeleine could see.”

“Jill,” Howard began then stopped. He wanted to object—his mouth was still taut with the gulped-back words, his fingers were poised around the ball of admonitions. Even his legs were tensed, ready to leap up and insist on his point. He was dying to tell me to be careful, but he knew better. I grinned, walked over, and kissed those tense lips. I could tell it didn’t give him the same satisfaction as that warm pleasure of holding forth to a lover “for his/her own good,” but it seemed to come in a creditable second. In our time together Howard and I had come to relish talking about cases; we’d also learned the pleasures of stopping talking.

But later, before he went to sleep, Howard propped himself up on an elbow and demanded, “How’re you going to handle Doyle when you present this plan to him tomorrow morning?”

I grinned. “The way any sensible officer does. Tell him afterward, when I’ve got the booty.”

Howard chuckled. “And if there’s no booty down there in the gully of skunk and poison oak?”

“Then I’ll take the time-honored bureaucratic route. I’ll bury the whole operation in the middle of some report he doesn’t have time to read.”

Having come to that managerial decision, I slept fitfully till the alarm went off at six, zombied up and headed to the pool to stretch those muscles I’d devoted the last six hours to tensing.

When I got to the station, the entrance was thick with the press, and the jail was thick with night visitors. Three In Custody reports awaited me and it took me every second before Detectives’ Morning Meeting to round up the paper on them for the D.A.’s liaison.

As soon as the meeting ended—before Doyle finished with “Eggs” and had time to contemplate me—I co-opted Pereira, because I could count on her to keep mum if this operation failed, and headed for Canyonview.

I pulled into the space where I’d been last night, behind an old orange Triumph—Madeleine Riordan’s beloved old Triumph Herman Ott had described. The temptation to go over it was strong, but it was wiser to put it off. As long as I ignored it, it still
seemed
to be a secret.

Pereira and I moved on around the house. Claire’s door was closed. I could hear low voices in her room. I didn’t knock, but moved quietly across the companionway. Coco was sitting on the sunny steps. Beside him, her long red wiry curls fluttering in the breeze, was Delia.

Life doesn’t offer many opportunities for sneak attack; they shouldn’t be squandered. I went with a hunch. As she turned I said, “Madeleine didn’t know you were driving her Triumph.”

Another woman might have gasped. Delia’s jaw jutted forward. “I had to pick up some things for her, didn’t I?”

Pereira moved around behind her. I said, “Driving a person’s car without her permission is a felony.”

“It’s not like she’s going to press charges, is it?”

“She doesn’t have to.”

“Look, she owed me that. She ruined my life.”

I crossed my arms and stared down at her, restraining the urge to look pointedly around the grounds in this very desirable neighborhood in which she was sitting idle in the sun at midday.

“Well, if it hadn’t been for the Minton Hall demonstrations, my whole life would have been different. I’d have a good job and some guy to support me … and …”

“And?”

“And I wouldn’t be working my tail off watching over the dying.” She jumped up with an uncharacteristic burst of energy and stomped up the steps.

I was tempted to stop her—I don’t like to let witnesses decide when an interview is over—but I couldn’t be bothered keeping her here just for principle.

Pereira shook her head. “Blame Madeleine, blame the meter maids?”

I nodded. Delia certainly had not ruled herself out of those adolescent pranks. She had ample time to cruise around town looking for piles of fresh manure or Dumpsters in which to deposit a stolen Cushman cart. And who knew the canyon better than Delia who’d grown up here? But could she have killed Madeleine? That wasn’t so easy a call. Maybe I’d find a connection in the canyon.

This operation wasn’t exactly by the book. But if you want to follow the rules till the game is over and you die, you opt for a career as a clerk, not a cop. You become a cop to be the one who enforces the rules—on others. And you demand answers, speed on the freeways, and step over the barricades that say “No Admittance.”

“You look like you escaped from a science fiction movie,” Pereira whispered. The restraint Howard had shown last night had ended with the dawn. This morning he had clucked around the room loading me up with enough equipment to head a survivalist organization. I carried one of the pokers with which work-furlough guys spear litter in the park and a backpack to haul my expected loot. And I had on hiking boots for traction, jeans, jacket, turtleneck, gloves, and sunscreen so thick that my face cracked when I talked. The last I’d wash off as soon as I got back to the station and hope to protect myself from the most persistent danger of the canyon—poison oak.

The companionway steps ended at a horizontal dirt path. Pereira and I followed it to my left under Madeleine’s window and almost to the property line. There, camouflaged between two bushes, was a steep, narrow trail down into what looked like a trapdoor of leaves.

“Stay here,” I whispered to Pereira.

I poked the spear into the ground and started down the steep incline, batting branches out of the way. The spear caught exposed roots; hanging on, I slid and nearly wrenched my shoulder pulling the implement loose. The bright sun flickered through the thick thatch of leaves, making the shadows darker and the underbrush fuzzy. My heels ground into the hard earth as I half walked, half slid down the path, and even when the trail leveled, I couldn’t hear anything above the crunch of my boots and the rustling in the underbrush. There were rats and snakes, salamanders and slugs down here, but I was sure they’d find me more appalling than I them. If the parking perp were other than Delia, he could be sitting within three yards of me and I wouldn’t know. Like the newts and slugs, he’d be keeping very still.

After the heavy fog of the previous days the canyon resembled a well-used coffee filter with wet grounds clinging to both sides. The musty smell of damp leaves and dirt mixed with the fresh scent of eucalyptus. The gurgle of water startled me; I was almost in the creek when I heard it. Fording the creek might have been a nightmare some other year, but drought has its benefits.

“I’m just crossing the stream,” I said softly into the handheld mike. I’d given Pereira a quick verbal sketch of the canyon floor. If she had to come to bail me out at least she’d have some idea where to come.

“Right,” Pereira answered.

On the far side I moved onto a foot-wide path, a veritable freeway of the canyon, and turned right, heading back toward the Arlington from which I had entered two days ago. Above me, birds fluttered, or maybe it was deer swishing their tails as they decimated rosebushes higher up on the canyon wall.

The path twisted, following the creek, and rose till it reached an easy ridge, from which I could see the remains of the old quarry office where the perp had been headquartered, twenty feet ahead. The cement floor was the size of a one-car garage set between the canyon wall and the path. The surface looked more like rubble than floor, so deep were the cracks from decades of earthquakes. If an earthquake came now, I thought, I would become a permanent part of the California landscape.

The canyon floor was so narrow, the walls so steep that while one side of the cement slab was three feet higher than the path, the other cut into the hillside. The overhang where we’d found the collection of parking tickets had been created by an old aluminum door, probably from a shed, propped on twenty-four-inch cement blocks. The earth had been meandering down on top of it for decades.

“I’m at the quarry office.”

“Can you see anything?”

I extricated binoculars from the backpack and looked up through the leaves, rotating the lenses till I could make out the branches beyond the oak tree overhead. “Only more trees. But I’m still on the ground by the quarry office. The perp would have been on the flooring.” Ignoring the steps on the far side that I’d used Sunday night, I hoisted myself onto the cement and took another look.

“Can you spot me, Connie?”

“Nope. Walk around a little.”

The rustling stopped. No leaf moved. The air was heavy and stale, as if it had sunk down here millennia ago when the canyon was formed. In the silence, the stream sounded like the Mississippi. I peered up through the leaves trying to make out Madeleine’s window, to see Pereira looking back. But all I could see was more leaves.

I began to pace back and forth across the platform, moving like a lawn mower. “You see anything, Connie?”

“No … No … No …Wait, a spot of red. Maybe your shoulder.”

I stooped. “How about now?”

“No.”

“Damn, I’ve been over the whole floor.”

“Maybe she saw something on the path?”

“Or swinging through the trees,” I said in disgust. I could have the whole Department down here dressed in fox-hunt red, and if Pereira weren’t looking at exactly the right spot, she’d miss the lot of them. “Try it from Madeleine’s window. Call me when you’re in place and I’ll do the dance all over again. I’m going to give this platform one more search through while you’re moving.”

“Right.”

If there was anything here we’d missed, it had to be under the metal overhang. And we’d gone at that thoroughly enough to come up with 187 parking tickets. Considering the likely outcome of this expedition, I was just relieved I hadn’t used any more manpower on it. I eased myself across the floor, lay in front of the overhang, and peered into the dark. Nothing obvious. I pulled the flashlight out of my pack and shone the light. No more tickets—thank God!—no paper of any kind, not even a paper bag with discarded food. But there was a couple of inches of gray, plastic-looking gray, wedged in the back corner. With the point of the poker I scraped along the top. I expected the dirt to be years hard, but it gave way surprisingly easily, revealing six inches of thin tubing.

It took five minutes of scraping and then jabbing to free the cylinder. It looked like just another long gray dowel, until I spotted the leather loop that goes around the meter maid’s wrist on one end and the hole for the chalk at the other. A parking enforcement wand!

I sat up, staring at it. Coco had been carrying a gray dowel Monday night! His stick hadn’t had the telltale leather loop. I’d been too far away to notice a chalk hole that would have told me it was a parking enforcement wand. But it had to be. And it had to be somewhere up around Madeleine’s room.

I called Pereira. “Madeleine Riordan’s dog stayed close by. We didn’t find the dowel in her room. Check the grounds nearby.”

“Patrol hound at your service, Smith.”

In four minutes Pereira said, “Got it! Dog might be a great retriever, but he’s not much of a concealer.”

“Are you sure it’s a parking enforcement wand?”

“Oh, yeah. Chalk hole, ends of the leather strap—looks like the dog chewed off the rest. And if you want to go for a dental check, there are teeth marks all over it.”

“Great!” Neither one of us said it over the airwaves, but I knew Pereira was thinking the same thing I was: Madeleine Riordan never let Coco roam down in the canyon, yet the dog had a parking wand! So Madeleine had been connected with the parking pranks!

And she wasn’t merely watching the maneuvers of the parking perp, rooting for him as she might for Jerry Rice. She wasn’t a fan in the stands. She was on the sidelines, near enough to accept the ball after he’d crossed the goal line.

I sat rubbing my gloved hand along the length of the wand, thinking of Madeleine sitting outside her room on that lower path. If she’d been near the bushes, she could have sat, unseen from Claire’s window. And the perp could have sat right next to her at the top of the vertical path, hidden by the bushes from Michael or Delia or anyone who wandered down the companionway stairs. He could have sat there and regaled her with the thrills of his escapades. A transfusion of adrenaline?

But adrenaline doesn’t transfuse. Only a diluted form trickles to the observer. But maybe she took what she could get. The thought should have comforted me; it didn’t, at all.

I pushed myself up, realizing that Madeleine Riordan hadn’t been as resourceless as I had pictured her.

I undid my backpack, unzipped the top, and stuck the wand in it. It protruded. I shifted it to the side. The end caught on the backpack seam. Grabbing it with my glove, I pulled. The glove pulled half off my hand and the pack slipped. I grabbed for it, missed, and ended up batting it in the air. The pack flew forward and landed hard on the step.