Too Close to the Edge (7 page)

There was a theory in the psychic circles that contended the name you are called shapes your character because it is a symbol of you and, more prosaically, because you hear it more frequently than most words. Advocates chose to be called qualities they wished to embody. The aura of summer light was such a clear and hopeful image. It seemed to mock the very ungracefulness of this woman’s slumping body. As if to balance her own blandness, she wore a fringed black Punjabi cape embroidered with huge red roses. Even slumped as she was, the thin wool didn’t disguise her thick shoulders and full breasts. She had that type of narrow-hipped figure that carries its fat around the middle without losing the slimness of the ankles.

I stepped between the blue-jeaned couple and looked down at Aura Summerlight. My body blocked the sporadic red light from the patrol car pulsers. The ground on either side of her blinked red, but she remained in darkness. I said, “I know this evening has been a shock. I don’t want to keep you any longer than I have to. Where can we talk?”

“Lady, she can—”

“Ms. Summerlight?” I said, cutting off the speaker, a crew-cut man in a red plaid wool jacket. He shrugged. It was obvious he had objected only for form’s sake.

Aura Summerlight stood. Now I could make out her scrunched features: the short sharp nose, the tight thin mouth, the sharp cheekbones, and the dark eyes that were sunk so far in they seemed, in the dim light, to be empty hollows. “You can … come to my truck.” She walked to the gate. The wind lifted the flags above it, snapping the cloth back against itself. It blew Aura Summerlight’s hair across her mouth, but she made no move to push it away. She walked on, hurriedly, but making surprisingly little progress, as if she were on a moving sidewalk going the wrong way. Beside her, I found myself taking longer, slower steps, controlling my urge to grab her arm and run to wherever her truck was parked to find out why Liz Goldenstern had been killed.

We passed the purple school bus. “University of Life” it declared in gold letters on the side. An old Buick, one of the ones with the three holes on the sides, had settled next to it. The light from the bus windows showed the rust on the Buick’s door. We passed a Ford wagon in not much better shape, two Volkswagen vans, and a pickup from the late sixties—new for this lot—with a tarp over a wide load on the back.

Another time I might have taken her to my own car, but not now, not with the lights from the nearby patrol cars and the staccato squeals from their radios to intimidate her.

“Here,” she said, indicating a white Chevy pickup that looked only slightly better than average. Behind it she had created a clear plastic lean-to from the fence to two poles. A hibachi, charcoal, lighter fluid, and two buckets huddled under it. In the wind, one of the plastic sides flapped against the fence, striking the metal fitfully, creating the type of irregular noise that would drive the average person crazy. But here, no one seemed to mind.

Aura Summerlight climbed into the cab. I opened the other door and waited while she lifted paper bags, four of them, from the floor and fitted them behind the seat. I could smell the onions in one. She pulled a box of tissues across the seat toward her and shifted a cup with an immersion heater back farther onto the dashboard.

“How did you come to discover the body?” I asked.

She clutched the steering wheel, as if she were battling rush hour on the Bay Bridge, staring tensely ahead with the look of one prepared to cut off lane hoppers. I wondered if she had chosen to use the cab because it was more convenient to sit in or because she wouldn’t have to face me when she talked. “You see, I was walking. I came home late. Most days I’m here by sunset; the buses don’t run much at night.” The words rushed out. “But, well, I don’t know, I got hung up. I had things to do in town, you see. I got here late. Well, the thing is, you see, I was bummed out. A guy I worked for owes me money, fifty dollars. Fifty dollars may not seem like much to you, but I need that money, and, dammit, he owes me, and he’s weaseling out. So I went by his place and I waited. I waited a long time. And when he finally came, it was dark, but I saw him at the corner, and he saw me, and he beat it, and I ran after him, but he was too fast. I lost him. I was so damned mad. I was going to go back to his place and wait some more. He had to come home. But he has money—he could go to a bar and have a few drinks. He could wait me out. So I figured I’d better come on home, but by then the buses don’t run so regular, and I was hungry, and I went into one of those pizza places and bought myself a slice. I hadn’t eaten anything since I left here this morning, and I was hungry. There was a line, and then I couldn’t find all the change I thought I had, and it took me a while, and the little bitch behind the counter was getting all huffy as if she didn’t believe I really had the dollar fifty-five cents. A dollar fifty-five cents for one slice! But I was starved. I mean, I get like panicked when I’m that hungry. I can’t think straight. So I had to have it. And then by the time I got back to the bus stop, the bus had gone and I had to wait another hour.” She was squeezing the steering wheel. Sweat covered her forehead. I couldn’t tell whether her nervous rush of words was a normal reaction to the shocks of the day or a screen of words to shield me out.

“But you finally got here,” I prompted.

“And then Marie in the bus over there was having a party. You could hear it halfway to the marina. I knew I couldn’t face people. I was too bummed out. I just walked along the water. Christ, I almost fell over the wheelchair.”

“And then?”

“It was awful. Her head was in the water, just her head. The water was only up around her shoulders. And she was dead.”

I waited a moment; she stared straight ahead, silently. “What did you do then?”

“That was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and there’s been plenty bad in my life.” She grabbed a big plastic purse and began rummaging through it.

“Ms. Summerlight, what did you do when you saw the body?”

“I knew she was dead. I’ve seen dead people before. When I was a kid a boy drowned in the river behind the school. It was at lunch time. One of the teachers jumped in and pulled him out, but he was dead. We all saw him. I know what dead people look like. I knew this woman was dead. So I ran up here and got Ian to call the co—the police.”

Suddenly the musty closeness of the cab filled my nose and throat. “Didn’t you lift her head out of the water?”

She squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “I don’t remember. I must have. I just remember … standing in the water. I was holding her, by the shoulders. She was dead. I knew she was dead.”

“Did you try artificial respiration?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember … anything … but holding her. The next thing, I was here, and telling Ian. You can ask him if you don’t believe me. He’ll tell you.”

“How did the body get back to the ground?” Murakawa had found Liz’s face and shoulders in the water.

“I don’t know. I told you.”

If she dropped Liz back into the bay, it was no wonder she blocked that out of her mind. I said, “What time was this?”

“Time? I don’t know.”

“Okay.” The dispatcher would have a record of the call. “Did you see anyone near the body when you were walking toward it?”

“No. I told you I wanted to be by myself.”

“Anyone who looked like they were walking or running away?”

“No.”

“Hiding behind something? Doing anything odd? Take your time. Try to see the area like it was before you came across the body.”

She pulled her fingers off the steering wheel, arched them, then crossed her arms over the wheel. The cape hung like a red-flowered tent. “No.”

I couldn’t decide about her lack of emotion. Was she in shock? People lived in Rainbow Village for a number of reasons. Mental problems was one. Aura Summerlight looked like she was on the edge, psychologically. She might well not have noticed anything unusual near Liz’s body. There might have been nothing to notice, or there might have been plenty she was too preoccupied to see.

“You said you know why she was killed.”

She continued to gaze through the windshield. “I don’t know, like God told me, but it sure makes sense. Like he said, when something bad happens down here who gets the blame? Us here in the village, that’s who. You cops, you’re going to be on us now, right?”

“He?” I asked, assuming she didn’t mean God.

“Anything that makes us in the village look bad, makes it easier for the guy who’s going to put up that high-rise, right? He’s been bugging the city to get us out. See where he was tonight.”

“Like who said?” I insisted. “Who told you that?”

For the first time she looked at me, her dark eyes wide. I had the sense of having broken through the face she had chosen, however consciously or unconsciously, to show me. “Ian,” she said so softly I had to strain to hear.

“Who is Ian?”

“Ian Stuart. He lives here, in the pick-up by the fence, the one with the hot tub on the back.”

“Is he blond?”

She nodded stiffly. She was shrinking back behind her facade. I could have tried to reassure her, but I didn’t have time. Murakawa could get her statement. I needed to finish with her and find Ian Stuart, the blond man with the hot tub, the “maniac” who, only this morning, had threatened to hold Brad Butz’s head under water until he drowned.

“Where is his truck?”

“His truck?” She shrank back against the door. “Across by the fence. It’s the one with the tarp on the back.”

T
HE BLOND “MANIAC”
I
AN
Stuart was not in his truck, certainly not in his drained hot tub, and nowhere else in Rainbow Village. According to two witnesses, he had stalked back inside the village after his fracas with Brad Butz that morning and harangued his neighbors long enough to disperse all but those who hoped for a ride downtown. His truck was one of the few in running order. When the intent of his audience became clear, he had stalked off. “We could have taken his truck and driven right past him into town,” a white-haired man in a pea jacket had laughed. “He got the key stuck in the ignition. We all knew that. He changed the door lock. Guess he never heard of broken windows.” He laughed again.

It was after three in the morning. Canvassing Rainbow Village, the cocktail lounges, the Marriott, and the marina, as well as checking through the newly landscaped park that skirted the bay, had taken hours, even with more patrol officers than the Watch Commander wanted to release. The only people we had turned up were two men in sleeping bags settled in under the junipers, and they had been rousted out enough times before to be considered regulars.

I walked back to the water’s edge and stood just outside the cordon. The tide was lower. If Liz Goldenstern had landed in the same spot now she would have been alive. If she had come here later … I could feel myself being pulled into the “if only’s” that I had seen relatives and friends of victims do so often. I’d watched them leap into those brief respites of delusion where, for a moment, the dead daughter or cousin had never driven off or the husband hadn’t gone looking for the guy who owed him money. For that moment he had never left, he was still sitting on the sofa—I had seen the widow turn to touch him and stare uncomprehendingly at the empty seat beside her.

I looked out across the inlet. The junk boat seemed larger now in low tide. Beyond the freeway the muted white street lights on University, Solano, and San Pablo Avenues blended into lines, and traffic lights blinked red and amber in the early morning hours. The city looked like a giant pinball machine. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders, but the damp of the bay had penetrated and I only felt wetter.

“Smith?” Murakawa’s thick hair flopped over his forehead. He had that wired, purposeful look of a beat officer handling his first murder case. “I finished with the last of the witnesses.”

“And?”

“It’s a bust. Would you believe, no one saw the dead woman arrive here. No one saw her murdered. No one saw anything suspicious.”

“That must be some kind of record. You ask any twenty people in Berkeley if they saw anything unusual, and you can count on half of them coming up with something.”

“Not these folk,” he said in disgust. “Of course, you’ve got to consider the sources, Smith. The first bunch are tourists. They think everything in Berkeley’s bizarre. Nothing stands out. And in Rainbow Village, anyone who’s been here over a month has seen drug busts, freak outs, and fights. To them, ‘out of the ordinary’ is the way things are. They wouldn’t think to tell us if a flying saucer landed.”

“Well, we have names and addresses. We can have another go around if we need to. Run them through files, all of them. Do Aura Summerlight and Ian Stuart first. And have someone check with the Center for Independent Living. See what Liz was involved with there besides getting her chair fixed. Find out if she’s got a lawyer. Check her finances. The works.”

“When do you need that?”

“The file checks now. But by eight-thirty will be okay. For C.I.L. we’ll have to wait for business hours.” A gust of wind slapped a clump of hair against my cheek. Irritably, I pushed it back behind my ear. Liz’s body was gone. Her chair had been moved into a van, but the gouges the wheels made as it turned over still scarred the shore. To Murakawa, I said, “What could Liz Goldenstern have been doing here?”

Murakawa shook his head.

“And how did she get here?”

He glanced across the inlet to the freeway. “I wondered that too. But you know, in spite of motor neuron lesions, people with spinal cord injuries can navigate in power chairs surprisingly well. Most of us don’t realize how much potential each muscle has, and how much variety there is in the effects of the injuries. After some injuries, patients have some feeling in their trunk and extremities, but no control of movement. In other cases the spinal cord is diffusely injured and some nerve tracts still function, so there’s only weakness, not paralysis. With the Brown-Sequard syndrome, for instance, one side of the spinal cord is functional and the other isn’t. And there’s the anterior spinal artery syndrome, where only the posterior third of the cord functions. And—”