Too Close to the Edge (2 page)

I sighed. “Mr. Butz, we’re trying to get a report of your assault. You’re not helping much.”

He glared at Murakawa, then at me. “Why don’t you ask those bums in there? Believe me, every one of them knows.” Clearly, Butz’s years with the New York City welfare department hadn’t made him a bleeding heart.

“We’ll deal with them. But now we’re asking you,” I said. I had intended to maintain a matter-of-fact tone, but I could hear the edge to my voice.

Apparently Brad Butz heard it, too. He took a half step back. “Okay,” he said, “he may have been blond. I think I saw some long blond hairs flying around. He came at me like some crazed Viking. Look, you don’t stop to take notes when a maniac is telling you he’ll hold your head under the water until your lungs fill like wine sacks.”

“Blond,” I repeated. “Now as to height. You’re, what, Mr. Butz, about five ten or eleven?”

He flushed, redder than Grandma’s doll had ever been. “You’re asking because he was smaller than me, aren’t you? You think I should have taken the jerk on, right? What kind of department are you running here?”

“Mr. Butz, I’m asking you how tall you are. That’s all. Look, it’s not even eight-thirty in the morning. I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet. You probably haven’t either, right?”

He gave a grudging nod.

“Then let’s finish this report as quickly as we can. We’ve all got things to do.” I tried to catch his eyes, to cement the agreement, but he shook his head.

“Forget it,” he snapped.

“You don’t want to press charges?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Just forget the whole thing.” He turned and stalked toward a blue pick-up truck, his halo of brown hair quivering with each step. “If you want to find him,” he yelled, “look for a pick-up with a hot tub on the back. Jerk thinks he’s a Casanova. He’s looking for some fool-woman’s driveway to park it in. Plans to park himself in her bed. You just look for a truck with a red tub on it.”

As he pulled off, Murakawa muttered, “Lousy posture, too. He’s going to have a kyphosis in another ten years.”

“Serves him right,” I said. “Quote him as much as you can when you write this up. By the time we get back to the station, he’ll be in City Hall bitching about us. And, Murakawa, round up the guy with the red hot tub.”

B
Y THE END OF
shift I had gone out on three more assaults, real felony-assaults, two with guns and one with a thirty-two-ounce can of mango pulp. I had dictated all three, along with my report on the Brad Butz incident, in the latter restraining my urge to comment that only in a city with Berkeley’s commitment to the underdog could a man with so little work experience, imagination, or tact as Brad Butz be awarded a major contract. As for Butz’s alleged assailant and his red hot tub, neither had been found. Perhaps the woman of his dreams had a more secluded driveway than most.

Normally, I would have headed for the Albany pool to swim off the day’s tensions with Seth Howard, my office mate and closest friend. But Howard had disappeared at the end of shift. He’d been gone a lot lately. And there’d been a note in my IN box from Connie Pereira: “Jill, I’ll be on stake-out at The Latte.” She didn’t ask me to join her. She didn’t have to. We’d both endured the tedium of stake-outs, planted on small, hard chairs hour after hour, never being able to look openly at the target, never daring let up the tense rhythm of: glance at, glance away, look down, breathe. Hours were spent staring at a book (without reading a word) and reminding yourself to turn the page every few minutes, to move the coffee cup around the table, not to take too big a sip and risk getting too full to run or letting the cup fall empty. And if a civilian friend spotted you and stopped to chat, the ante went up as you tried to carry on a normal conversation without breaking into the rhythm of surveillance. The only real respite was offered by another cop.

But friendship wasn’t the only reason I was willing to postpone my laps in the pool. The Latte was a sidewalk cafe on Telegraph Avenue, my old beat. One of the few things I regretted when I was promoted to Homicide was leaving the Avenue.

When I had had the Telegraph beat, I had congratulated myself on how easily I fitted into the long-hair-and-frayed-jeans atmosphere of the area. Telegraph Avenue deadended at the University campus. There, in the early sixties, the Free Speech Movement had inaugurated the era of protests that changed the nation. The Avenue was still the spiritual center of the Berkeley counterculture, but in recent years the head shops had been replaced by computer stores, used clothing shops by designer outlets, and marginal health food restaurants that sold tan food had given way to chocolate chip cookie and pizza chains. But the bookstores remained—Cody’s for new, Shakespeare’s for used, Moe’s for both, and Shambala for virtually anything ever printed about eastern religion or the occult. It didn’t take much to draw me back there. And the added hook that Connie Pereira had used was her lack of explanation. She was a beat officer, but Telegraph wasn’t her beat. What was she staking out that was important enough to call her off her own beat?

I parked three blocks away from The Latte. At five o’clock Monday afternoon, Telegraph Avenue swarmed with students from the University of California, hurrying in the chill of an April evening. The sun that had given the illusion of spring this afternoon was ready to set now, and when it sunk down behind the Pacific, it would leave no protection from the damp mists of night. I pulled my tweed jacket tighter around me, wishing I had had a sweater instead of just a cotton turtleneck under it. Street artists were just beginning to pack up their hand-tooled belts and tuck away their tarot cards. Former students eyed the remaining sidewalk displays, fingering tie-dyed T-shirts and picture jasper rings, as if this touch of the past could transport them back from civil service jobs or those endless hours in brokerage firms soothing fearful investors, back from lives suddenly so ordinary. As I strolled past Shambala, a turbaned Sikh wandered in, but the Moonies, the Rajneeshis, the Hari Krishnas who had once been as prevalent as marijuana along the Avenue were a rare sight now. A block beyond, men and women in heavy power wheelchairs drove into the Center for Independent Living to look for a new attendant, an apartment with a ramp, or a job.

Standing in a doorway across the street was Herman Ott. With his pale skin, thin blond hair, khaki pants, and yellow sweater that covered a burgeoning belly, he looked more like a canary standing on the bottom of his cage than a private detective. I picked up my pace. Herman Ott was the last person I wanted to run into. I owed him two hundred dollars. I had put in a demand from the discretionary fund three weeks ago. It hadn’t come through. Ott had called me twice. If he didn’t get his money soon, I’d never get another word out of him. I glanced across the street. But he hadn’t moved. He might want to nag me, but he didn’t want to be seen with me, not here. I hurried on to The Latte.

Leaning forward on the edge of a frisbee-sized table, Connie Pereira looked like one of the junior executives back for a cup of nostalgia. Her short blond hair was curled just a bit too carefully, her sweatshirt, down vest, and jeans had been cleaned too recently, and her book,
Strategies in the Commodities Market,
marked her as the investment maven that she was. I slid into a chair opposite her, shielded from the street by a large and well-secured potted fig tree. “So what are you after?”

She sighed. “Running shoes.”

“Wouldn’t shopping …”

“Spare me. I’ve heard every joke there is about this assignment. I’ve been here all week.” She glanced around. The evening fog had begun blowing in, carrying with it the spicy tomato aroma from the take-out pizza place across the street and fetors of sweat-laden dust from the poncho of one of the drug casualties who had spent his day leaning against the wall begging for spare change. Connie shivered under the sweatshirt that must have been ample half an hour ago. The rest of the tables were empty. “There’s a running shoe thief,” she said. “He’s been snatching shoes from yoga classes and temples where the devotees leave them outside. It’s a perfect opportunity. The devotees line their shoes up on bookshelves just like a display in a store. All the thief has to do is look them over and choose what he wants. And what he wants, Jill, are the newest and most expensive running shoes.”

“How many have been stolen?”

“Twelve pairs.”

“Is that all? For twelve pairs the department is authorizing a stake-out? It’d be cheaper to buy the victims new shoes.”

A motorcyclist cut across the one-way street and rolled to a stop, facing the curb. An ancient pick-up truck screeched to a halt inches behind him. As the cyclist dismounted and dragged his bike onto the sidewalk, the pick-up’s driver, a youngish man with sandy dreadlocks halfway down his back, yelled, “Whatsamatter, you got your brains up your ass?” The cyclist flipped him the bird. On the sidewalk in front of us, students in down jackets hurried from classes, too caught up in their own discussions to notice the interchange across the street.

Connie shook her head. “Do you know anything about running shoes?”

“No more than I have to.”

“Well, they are not cheap. Expensive describes some, and certainly the computerized ones. With them a runner can stagger home, dripping sweat from his cross-town miles, pull out a disk from the sole of his shoe, stick it in his computer, and be told where his weight fell during every one of those miles. For a shoe like that, it’s several hundred dollars.”

“Shin splints don’t come cheap, huh?”

“Jill, you’re not taking this seriously. Christ, no one all week’s taken it seriously. I sit here every afternoon freezing my tits off and one of you guys comes to laugh.”

Now I
was
laughing. “Maybe you could get a disk to sit on, so you’d know where your weight had settled.”

Before Pereira could respond, the waiter came, and I ordered a decaf latte.

“The victims,” Connie said, “are even more outraged than I am. I’m just glad it hasn’t made the papers yet. Can you imagine?”

I nodded. The victims would complain that the flat feet of the police were not plodding fast enough. But community groups in the less affluent, less white neighborhoods west of San Pablo Avenue would be furious that a beat officer was sipping coffee in a cafe when she ought to be tracking down drug dealers and shooing prostitutes off University Avenue.

It was an issue made for Berkeley, one that would pit the health-conscious against the race-conscious, the yuppies against the poor, the athletic against the laid-back. It would provide a field day for every newspaper columnist in the Bay Area. It had the potential to be Dan Rather’s cute closing story.

“So where’s your site?” I asked.

“Shake A Leg.” She nodded toward the dance studio across the street. In front of it, three women in their mid-thirties stood, their dance shoes in bright plastic bags, their potentially imperiled running shoes still on their feet. The bookshelves that served as the temporary home for the footgear of those inside were full. One woman lifted a foot shoulder high on the wall and leaned toward it.

“Stretching the hamstring,” Pereira said wearily. “They’re obsessed with hamstrings. Watch now—she’ll shift her leg to the side, see? Stretching adductors. Adductor muscles are always second.”

One of the stretcher’s companions bent her knee, grabbed her foot behind her and pulled. Pereira nodded. “Quadriceps. Not so popular as hamstrings or adductors, but nothing to overlook in the leggy world of fitness.”

“You know, Connie, Murakawa would probably pay you for this assignment. He’d love to tell you what will happen to every one of those hamstrings in twenty years.”

For the first time Pereira smiled. She glanced at the dance studio and back to me. “I appreciate your coming, Jill. You could be home now settled peacefully into your chaise lounge with a beer.”

“Not peacefully.”

She shifted her head so she could see the studio out of the side of her eye.

“Mr. Kepple, my landlord, and his hobby,” I said to her unspoken question. “He’s retired now. Peaceful moments are gone forever.”

She looked directly toward me. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m putting off dealing with it.”

She nodded abruptly. Not dealing with a problem, even temporarily, infuriated Pereira. She had grown up in a household of non-dealers, a father who didn’t deal with getting to work soon enough or sober enough to hold a job, a mother who shrugged her shoulders at the family’s poverty, and two brothers who, from Connie’s complaints, never dealt with anything at all. Only her fury had gotten Connie through. Over the years she’d learned to control that fury, but I could tell she was in no mood for the saga of Mr. Kepple, his irritating hobby, and my failure to set things right.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Today? Two hours. You want to know what notices are on that kiosk?”

I glanced down the street at a four-foot diameter cylinder that was well-thatched with advertisements. When I had this beat I’d seen people posting their own notices telling of Tabla lessons from an Indian master, or term-paper typing done cheap. Now posting notices was a business in itself. New ones covered the old every few days, and more than one fight had been sparked when a budding entrepreneur saw his notice going under.

The breeze had picked up in the few minutes I’d been here. It flicked Pereira’s blond hair into her eyes and pressed the sleeve of her sweatshirt around her arm.

In front of us, a dark-haired man began to fold his display of Peruvian sweaters and shawls. Two men in plaid shirts stopped to grab a final look at a brown and white alpaca sweater. The shorter man stepped back and held the sweater up. His companion shook his head. But the potential buyer was not to be dissuaded so easily.

The loud whir of a heavy wheelchair stopped abruptly; the chair rolled to a halt beside the buyer. The chair’s occupant was an elfin woman with russet-colored hair cut so short in front that it was almost straight. But the tight waves in back hung down to her shoulders. Against the pallor of her skin her eyes shone dark and angry; her full brows tightened and her sharp cheekbones seemed starker against the tight set of her jaw. She was wearing a thick blue cotton sweater, but still she shivered.