Too Close to the Edge (6 page)

Where was he? He should be getting ready for bed. He had to be tired. He had been up at six, trimming the hedge with his electric clippers. I rapped on the door again, but I knew it would do no good. Leaving the television on was Mr. Kepple’s idea of burglar-proofing. While I had been finishing up the reports on the Brad Butz incident this afternoon, Mr. Kepple doubtless had been napping, and now he was off at the junior college, entranced with windbreaks or ground covers.

I stomped down the steps, rescued my Bittersweet Orange, and walked carefully on around back.

My flat, originally the back porch of Mr. Kepple’s house, ran the full forty-foot width. The interior wall had aluminum siding, one of Mr. Kepple’s earlier aesthetic inspirations, and the three outer ones had jalousie windows that leaked every time it rained. Mr. Kepple had installed them himself thirty years ago, when the idea of building a porch had struck him. Then there had been a Mrs. Kepple who, doubtless, had complained about their failings as a shield from the elements. But her words must have fallen on the same deaf ear I frequently encountered. And, knowing what I did of my landlord, I felt sure he had never lighted long enough on the porch to consider its discomforts. For him the porch would have been solely a boundary to his back garden. Eventually, Mrs. Kepple (and her complaints) died, and he had eyed his jalousied boundary one day and seen the possibility of it bringing in money for fertilizer, and mulch, and a self-turning compost box with drawers that slid out individually. So, with the addition of indoor-outdoor carpet, a bath and a kitchen, Mr. Kepple had created my flat. He assured me, it would someday have a view of one of the loveliest gardens in Berkeley. I could sit with the jalousies open and see the gardenias in the spring, the lilies in summer, the holly berries at Christmas. In the warm spring afternoons I could sunbathe on his proposed deck.

But now, two years later, the deck was still in the planning stages and the back garden a patch of dirt. Each year Mr. Kepple showed me his garden plans, where the gardenia would be, the shady spot suitable for cineraria, the full sun for the roses. Weekly the sketches changed. Sometimes six packs of baby plants appeared on trays along the edges of the yard. Once or twice the plants made it into the soil, only to be yanked out days later when the master plan changed.

I pushed the door open and stalked across the ten feet of indoor-outdoor carpet to the kitchen. Briefly I considered scooping the ice cream into a dish. Who was I kidding? I grabbed a spoon from the pile of stainless in the sink, rinsed it off, and dug into the carton. I had lived in this flat since my divorce—almost two years. The jalousie windows still functioned more like screens than glass. In winter they let in the cold and the rain. And in summer, half the time I kept them closed to cut the smell of manure or the sound of the electric hedge clipper.

I had to decide what I was going to do about Mr. Kepple, and about this flat. I couldn’t go on being jolted awake at dawn and putting off coming home until after dusk to avoid a forty-five minute monolog on the clay content in the soil. Mr. Kepple was an old man. His garden was his life. My disinterest was a slap in his face. And disinterest was the mildest emotion I felt about the pile of dirt outside my door. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I just wanted to live like a normal person. But that would never happen here. I’d been through it all before. I just didn’t want to face the obvious conclusion.

I took another shower to wash the dirt off my arms and the chlorine out of my hair and finished half the pint of ice cream.

It was just after ten when the dispatcher called. “Smith?”

“Yes.”

“Homicide by the inlet, next to Rainbow Village.”

T
HE NIGHT WAS DAMP
with fog. My car windows were steamed on the inside, but I didn’t stop to wipe them. I cleared a rectangle with the side of my hand and drove down Cedar to San Pablo Avenue, running yellow lights, picturing Brad Butz with his thick, dark hair fluttering over that bruise he had complained about this morning. Did he have more than a bruise now? Or was it his assailant who now lay dead on that unpaved road next to the dump? Or was it a Rainbow Villager? Or had the body of someone unconnected with the waterfront community been dumped there?

I crossed the freeway and took the access road beside it, turning right on Virginia Street, skirting the inlet, and driving beside the chins of the marina where the sports boutiques and playing fields would be. The road was rough and unlit. The musty smell of low tide rushed in through the window. In the middle of the inlet the half-sunken hull of a junk ship jutted black against the fog. And the headlights of the patrol car and the ambulance sent white cotton-candy cones across the water into the oblivion of the fog. The red pulsers blinked on and off, turning Rainbow Village an unnatural pink. That acre of sagging vehicles looked like a neon mirage.

I pulled up next to the patrol car. A gusty cold wind blew in from the bay, carrying with it the fresher smell of salt water. By the entrance to Rainbow Village two homemade flags flapped. Both of the patrol officers protecting the scene had their collars turned up. Behind them a crowd of maybe seventy-five people had divided itself into three groups. The nearest and by far the largest section was predominantly tourists from the Inn, dressed for a casual dinner by the bay—men in sports jackets, women with vacation skirts pressed tightly around the backs of their legs and light jackets pulled around arms they couldn’t protect from the wind. A few still clutched wine glasses.

Next to them, a dozen men and three women in fishing gear stood, several hunched against the night, hands in pockets, gazing straight ahead; several others smoked. For them death was not an abstraction. It lurked in the ocean waters every time they headed out into the vast predawn blackness of the Pacific. It hid behind a freak wave, or in a storm that rose with fatal suddenness, tossing forty-foot crafts, obliterating the shore. They stood silent, fearful, waiting. This close to the docks, the dead person could be one of their own.

A knot of Rainbow Villagers clustered by the hurricane fence, as if that wall would protect them from danger or suspicion. Those villagers who had been around for a while had seen death here. And the transients knew well enough what it was to be undesirable, expendable, the obvious suspect of affront to “regular society.”

The tourists divided their attention between the activity at the shoreline and the spectacle of the wary villagers.

I moved on past them toward the three men at the water’s edge. The headlights threw their shadows—long, emaciated forms jerking spastically on the ripples of the water.

Murakawa, the beat officer, turned toward me. He was assigned to Morning Watch, seven
A.M.
to three
P.M.;
he had covered for a friend on Day Watch; and now it was nearly midnight, but he didn’t look tired. “Drowning. No I.D.”

The medics moved back and I saw the chair—the wheelchair—lying on its side.

I took a breath, then moved closer. Next to it, laid on a tarpaulin, was the body. It was Liz Goldenstern.

I turned away and swallowed hard. The nauseatingly thick ice cream welled in my throat. I swallowed again. I had seen my share of bodies, but those had belonged to strangers, not to a woman I had just pushed home.

I closed my eyes and swallowed once more, then forcing myself to turn back and look down at Liz. The piercing white of the headlights struck her face, sending a dark triangle of shadow from her nose onto the forehead. Those dark eyes that had flashed with her anger and glowed in triumph when an Avenue merchant capitulated were coated with mud and brine. Her April-pale skin was colorless except for a brown oval beside her nose where the blood had settled after death. Her mouth, which I’d seen so often set determinedly, hung open. Death had so distorted her face that it looked not like Liz but a relative of hers, a relative I didn’t need to care about.

But there was no flaccidity in her fingers; the skin was taut and the first two fingers were pressed together harder than I’d thought her damaged body would allow.

“Drowned,” Murakawa said. “The chair was tipped; it must have catapulted her.”

I stared down at her swollen face, then back at her hands.

“Couldn’t have been more than a foot of water,” he said. “The bank drops off pretty sharply here. When the witness found her only her head and shoulders were submerged. Her hands were on the shore, above the water level.”

I gasped, turned away, and clasped my mouth to keep from retching. I squeezed my eyes shut against the thought of Liz, but the image behind the lids was that green-walled staircase leading to the bedroom of my father’s cousin, who would be lying mashed under a pile of stiff gray blankets … waiting for us. By my feet, the water from the inlet lapped against the shore. I tightened my throat and stood staring across the dirt, which was alternating brown and pink, to the black of the inlet, picturing Liz as her body slapped down into the water, knocking the air out of her lungs. I could see her scrambling to pull herself up with arms that wouldn’t work. I could see her gasping, feel her terror as her nose and mouth filled with water.

Anyone but Liz could have pulled herself out of the water without so much as swallowing a mouthful.

“What makes you think it’s homicide?” I asked Murakawa.

The glare of the headlights sharpened his cheekbones to raw edges under his eyes. As he looked down at Liz’s body, he was as pale as she. And when he spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. “The belt. She wore a seat belt to hold her in. They have those on wheelchairs. If you lack tone in your gluteals, your hamstrings, and your erector spinae muscles in the back there’s nothing to keep you from falling forward. The degree and effects of paralysis vary a great deal depending on where the injury occurred and how it affected the spine. There are cases …” He stopped abruptly.

I put a hand on his arm. “Is this your first homicide?”

“Does it show that much?”

“Of course it shows. What kind of person wouldn’t be churned up seeing her like this?” I looked back down at Liz. The bay wind plucked at the dark curls that were still stuck to her face. The thick blue wool sweater that had protected her from the afternoon chill lay heavy against her breasts. It had dried just enough to give off the stench of wet wool and brackish water.

I took Murakawa’s flashlight and bent down to check her face for marks, her hair and clothes for alien fibers. I pointed to a twig caught in her left sleeve. Murakawa nodded.

“The belt,” he said when I stood up. “It was cut. The edges are still sharp.”

I didn’t need to be told that, had the belt been buckled, Liz would have fallen well short of the water. “It’s not just that she’s dead,” I said as much to myself as to Murakawa. “Liz Goldenstern must have been some woman before the accident put her in that chair. Later, she made herself some woman, in spite of not having legs, arms, or even fingers she could use well. She was ready to take on any comer.” I shook my head. “This way of killing her—it’s such an insult.”

“I guess that’s what murder is,” he said.

I shrugged.

“You want shots of the chair?” It was the I. D. Tech. He would do the photography, dust for prints, take the molds, and preserve the samples. Behind him, by the Marina Vista construction shack, the press officer conferred with Lieutenant Collins, the Night Watch Commander. Three reporters stood a few feet away, one checking a camera, the others sidling in toward the press officer.

I turned away from Liz, from “the body.” To the I.D. Tech, I said, “Take the chair, the body, and the shore twenty feet in either direction. Get what prints you can from the chair and molds of all the footprints within five feet of it. And make sure you label that twig that’s caught on her sleeve.”

“Smith,” Murakawa said, “I checked the twig. It looks like it’s from the hedge up on the ridge.”

“Get a sample up there,” I said to the I.D. Tech.

“Right,” the tech muttered.

I asked Murakawa, “Have you called for additional back-up? We’re going to need to talk to everyone in that crowd. I need two people to watch the rear of Rainbow Village.” I looked at the acre of vehicles. There were probably thirty or more in it. “And four or five to go door to door in there. And a couple more to check at the Marriott, the docks, and the rest of the lounges down here. If there’s anyone where he shouldn’t be, or acting out of line, I want him held till I can get there.”

“Back-ups are on the way. I’ll call in and make sure they’re adequate.”

“Have someone go over the hedge. See if you can find the spot this twig is from. Maybe more of it broke off.”

“Right.”

“Where’s the person who found her?”

“Over there, sitting on the box by the fence, the woman in the black cape. She says she knows why she was killed.”

“T
HIS IS
A
URA
S
UMMERLIGHT
, a.k.a. Penelope Lynn Garrett,” Murakawa said with only the slightest suggestion of a sigh as he pronounced her self-appointed name. To twenty-four-year-old Murakawa, the sixties was an ancient oddity, characterized by old-hat political action and slovenly dress. Anachronisms like Aura Summerlight baffled him. “She discovered the body.”

Half the Rainbow Villagers who had been standing by the fence watching our activity at the water’s edge moved off when we started toward them. The remaining ten edged in protectively to Aura Summerlight.

I glanced at the group. There was no one member who could be taken as representative of all. Two men in their early twenties wore cheap, shiny polyester pants and jackets, garments that would betray them after the first wash. Next to them was an older man, for whom the next wash was well overdue. A woman in a balding, black fur coat, with the lining hanging from both sleeves and the hem, stood next to a couple in jeans, denim jackets, and cowboy boots. Aura Summerlight sat slumped against the fence. The filtered light from the windows of a purple school bus behind the fence skimmed her limp, light-brown hair.