Too Close to the Edge (8 page)

“Liz was as capable as they come,” I snapped. Some time I might need to know these physiological possibilities, but now they only made the cruelty of Liz’s murder seem all the greater.

Murakawa hesitated. It was his first murder; he wasn’t used to overlooking the short fuses that were as much a part of investigations as paperwork. “Telegraph is two miles over the freeway. That’s a long way to come in a power chair, in the cold.”

“It wasn’t that cold five or six hours ago, Paul.”

“But Smith, people with spinal injuries don’t have good circulation. They feel the cold a lot more than the rest of us.”

I recalled Liz Goldenstern picketing the Caliban Café during last winter’s rain. Had she had better circulation than Murakawa thought? Or for her had the iciness of the hours on the line been just one more thing to endure? Compared to those hours, the forty-five minutes it would have taken to drive to the marina in her chair would have been a snap.

Murakawa leaned toward me with excitement. “She wouldn’t have had to come on University, if she didn’t want to be noticed. She could have taken side streets all the way to the overpass.”

I nodded slowly. “It’s possible, but not likely.”

“Why not?”

“There’s no sidewalk on the freeway overpass. Even with a tail light of sorts on her chair, she’d have had a fifty-fifty chance of being killed.” I stopped abruptly.

Murakawa finished the thought. “Whatever made her come here must have been worth taking that chance.”

We both looked toward the freeway lights. “Or maybe someone brought her here to kill her,” I said. The ambulance crew had agreed that the settling of the blood in her face and body made it one in a thousand she had died anywhere but where we found her.

“The killer would have needed a truck or van, some vehicle big enough to handle a power chair, something with a ramp to drive it up. Those chairs aren’t light.”

That I knew only too well. “We’re going to have to find that vehicle and the driver.”

Murakawa nodded slowly. I had never heard him complain about overwork, no matter how much time was demanded—unless he thought it was bureaucratic nonsense. And even then he had more patience than most. Maybe because he didn’t see himself doing it for the next thirty years of his life. Murakawa’s future lay not with dead bodies but with ones who could still be helped. “So you want us to go over every vehicle here?”

“Every one this side of the freeway. Call me if you find anything. Leave word if you don’t. And you can take some comfort in the fact that you’re not doing the worst of the jobs.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’m going to Liz Goldenstern’s house. If she had a friend living with her, I’m going to wake them up and tell them she’s dead.”

I parked in the driveway of Liz Goldenstern’s triplex and walked up the redwood ramp to the two doors in front. In the early morning stillness, my footsteps resounded on the boards.

Liz hadn’t said she lived with anyone. In the brief time I had been in her apartment, I had seen no sign of another tenant. There was no light now, no reason to assume anyone would be inside. But I pushed the buzzer and waited. From within the living room came the shrill demand of the buzzer. It wasn’t a sound the average person could sleep through.

In the yard the fronds of a foot palm tree scraped against each other. Here, two miles from the bay, the air was drier. On Liz Goldenstern’s protected entryway the night seemed almost warm. I rang the bell again, not expecting a response. None followed.

With a mixture of relief and irritation, I turned and pressed the buzzer of the upstairs unit. Perhaps there would be no next of kin to break the news to. When I started as a patrol officer I had assumed the time would come when I’d handle those scenes dispassionately, murmuring a few comforting phrases, then moving on to the necessary questions. I’d wised up over the years. Still, each time I knocked on the door of an unsuspecting relative or lover, I knew this would not be the time it didn’t get to me. I pushed the buzzer again, waited, then knocked four times, loud—the police knock.

Five minutes later, I conceded no one was home there either.

I walked down the ramp, across the yard, and along the driveway. The back yard couldn’t have been more than ten feet deep and twenty-five feet wide. The cement driveway had been expanded and consumed half of it so that this side of the rear cottage looked out solely on cement.

I climbed the two steps to the third unit of the main building and pressed the buzzer. There was no answer.

And none at the cottage. Where were these people at four-thirty in the morning?

After telling a patrol officer, who was settled across the street, to call in and find out who these other tenants were and what we had on them, I headed back to the station. I could have run the checks myself, but they weren’t first priority. For this guy, who had nothing to do but sit in a dark car for the next two and a half hours and watch an empty building, any task was a boon.

Dillingham, the Night Watch desk man, glanced up as I climbed the stairs. “Smith? I thought you’d been promoted to nine to five.”

“Seven-forty-five to four-fifteen.”

“So? Did you just drop by to raid our donut box again?” He grinned. He knew my reputation for junk food consumption from my stint on Night Watch. Then Dillingham had threatened me with dire intestinal consequences. “Only wine improves with age,” he’d muttered, each time I’d grabbed another chocolate old fashioned on my way home. “Are you going to will your intestines to Roto Rooter, Smith?” That one he’d saved for a larger audience.

“What have you got in that box?” I asked now.

He glanced beneath the desk, wrinkling his nose. “Three plain, a couple old fashioned, one with pink glop, two with white glop, and those colored things that look like confetti. And Smith, we still have two jellies.”

I extricated a dollar. “Hand them over.”

“This stuff will kill you.”

“You’re wrong, Dillingham. It might do you in, but I keep up my immunities. My stomach thrives on donuts the way yours does tofu.”

Paper towel in hand, I walked down the hall to my office. The sugary smell of the donuts, which Dillingham had once described as “reek of bubblegum and plastic,” reminded me that I had had only half a pint of ice cream for dinner. I might not have reached the level of professionalism where despair didn’t faze me, but I had missed plenty of meals racing around after suspects who didn’t observe the standard lunch and dinner hours. Now I ate when the chance came, regardless of the circumstances. But I had also learned, the hard way, the dangers of eating a jelly donut while walking. I plopped in my chair and stuffed a sugary edge in my mouth.

When I finished the first donut, I checked my IN box. No word from the coroner as to time of death. And no message from Murakawa at all. I dialed the coroner’s office.

“Coroner’s Department,” a gravelly voice said.

“Matthew? How’re things down there?”

“Quiet.” He chuckled softly. It was an old joke. He’d been saying it as long as anyone in the department could recall.

“This is Jill Smith, in Homicide.”

“I know your voice, Smith. How many times did you call me about your last body? But that’s okay. There’s no one else to talk to here.”

“Well, a couple more hours and you can be up on the fire trail.” Matthew Harrison was an avid hiker. He cherished his daylight hours. To him, the time after dark was dead time anyway. And the morgue was as good a place as any to kill it. In the quiet he could catch a catnap or two at his desk. “Is Dr. Eastman still there?”

“It’s five in the morning. He went home hours ago.”

“Rats. Well, what’s the status on the body you brought in tonight? The name’s Liz Goldenstern.”

“Hang on.”

I took a bite of the second donut. It didn’t taste as good.

“Scheduled for the morning.”

Wonderful! The pathologist’s report wouldn’t come back for three to five days, no matter how desperately I needed it. And the pathologist wouldn’t even begin until morning. “What about time of death?”

“Won’t know till morning, Smith.”

“Didn’t Eastman do anything?”

“He was busy. You’re not our only customer, you know.”

“He must have taken the body temperature.”

“No record of it.”

“Maybe he didn’t get around to dictating. Maybe he left the notes in his office.” I held my breath. There had to be some record of the entry exam. If I were forced to track down Eastman tomorrow, it could take all day. The coroner doesn’t spend his time sitting by the phone.

“Hang on.” It was several minutes before he said, “Smith?”

“Yes?”

“We took delivery at eleven thirty-eight. Body temp was ninety-five point four.”

Body temperature drops about 1.5 degrees an hour. In the cold, Liz’s could have fallen faster. “Dead two hours?”

“Give or take.”

“Thanks, Matthew. For that you deserve to see a deer on your walk.”

I finished the donut and got the address for Brad Butz the builder, the man who had stood to gain by any commotion near Rainbow Village. I wasn’t ready to give Aura Summerlight’s conclusion too much credence. But Butz had been furious with his blond maniac yesterday morning, and nothing about him suggested he was one to turn the other cheek. He was the type to spend the day stewing about his stolen sign, down a six pack, and by nine o’clock be hunting Ian Stuart, right by the spot where Liz Goldenstern had died.

Butz would hardly be pleased to have me drag him out of bed at this hour. If he hadn’t already called his City Hall friends about the morning’s fracas, he’d probably be on the horn as soon as I left. It was a chance I’d have to take.

I
WOULD HAVE ASSUMED
that the contractor for a project the size of Marina Vista would live high in the hills, in a house he had designed and built himself, with a glass wall that overlooked the bay, cathedral ceilings, or one of those kitchens filled with gadgets I couldn’t guess the use for. But for Brad Butz, this southwest Berkeley address didn’t surprise me. What I knew of this area was mostly from my office mate, Seth Howard. In recent months the Oakland police and the Contra Costa County sheriff, to the north, had run a startlingly successful series of drug raids in Oakland, Richmond, and the city of San Pablo. They had caught a number of the big guys. The ones they’d missed had taken the warning and moved their operations. Not all of them had landed in South Berkeley, but enough. And together with the lower echelon dealers, who figured the sheriff’s success had emptied slots for them to move up to, they had created a war zone in this small area. On California Street gunmen fired from speeding cars in mid-afternoon. Residents thought twice before walking to the store. The department added extra foot patrols. And Howard and his buddies in Vice and Substance Abuse worked overtime.

At 5:30
A.M.
it was still nighttime dark. Down the block a husky man headed for his car. He glanced toward the patrol car but didn’t break his stride.

The house Brad Butz lived in was a single-story, twenty-five-foot square. The tiny, red cement porch had shifted away from the house, leaving an inch-wide gap between it and the door. Cracks meandered down the stucco facade. Most California houses had cracks in one or two walls—“from the house settling” people said. “From the earth moving” would have been more accurate. The Hayward Fault ran beneath the Berkeley hills, and tributaries from it—fault traces—some visible, some not, threaded their way under the city, shifting and growing with each new quake, so that a new fault map was out of date as soon as the earth moved again. Most fissures were small, most damage manageable. The average homeowner grumbled and repaired. But Brad Butz’s house gave new meaning to “deferred maintenance.”

I rang the bell and listened to its trill inside. No footsteps followed it. Was Butz not home, either? What was I dealing with here, a herd of vampires who wouldn’t be home till dawn?

I rang again.

“Okay, okay. Keep your pants on,” Butz grumbled from the rear of the small dwelling. His Bronx accent was thicker than it had been yesterday morning, as if his sinuses were still stopped up with sleep. He stomped toward the door. I caught a glimpse of a T-shirt and jeans in the window to my left. Then Butz yanked open the door and stood with one hand on it and the other on the frame.

His wiry dark hair stood out like a rumpled brown tiara pushed far back on his head. Still flushed from sleep, his skin looked more porcelain than it had yesterday. As he stared at me, his blue eyes narrowed, and any resemblance to a pleasant doll-like expression vanished.

“You’re the cop, right?” he demanded.

“Detective Smith.”

“Christ, it’s the middle of the night. You got my vandal, right? Well, it’s about time. It shouldn’t have taken the Berkeley Police Department all day and all night. You shoulda had him by noon. I’ll tell you, lady—”

“Detective.”

“De
tec
tive,” he said, in mock respect, “if you hadn’t nabbed him by morning I was ready to make a few calls.”

I decided to ignore the whole vandalism issue. “I’m in Homicide. A woman was murdered last night. Can I come in?”

“Murdered? Who? How?” He flicked on the light switch and stepped back to let me into the ten-by-twelve room that occupied the left corner of the house. The walls were papered in a faded floral design; the overstuffed sofa was surrounded by mahogany end tables with turquoise speckled lamps from the fifties. It looked like a room someone’s great-aunt had died in. And it looked like she hadn’t cleaned it for months before her demise. Dustballs crowded around the feet of the coffee table—the small pine table looked like it was floating on a cloud. Or it would have been, had it not been weighed down by a pile of newspapers, three beer cans, and a pizza box that hung precariously over the edge. The room still smelled of beer and tomato sauce.

I sat on the chair, leaving him to settle on the sofa opposite me where I could see his reactions. “The woman was killed at the waterfront, at the Marina Vista site.”

“Can you believe that? Now they’re murdering people at my site!” He shook his head slowly; his wiry hair flapped like stalks of corn in the wind. Leaning forward, he pushed the pizza box back onto the table. “But why? Why at my project? Jesus, I don’t have enough trouble, without them killing each other there. I’ve had delays up the wazoo. First off, I had a blow-up trying to get a use permit from the building department. Then there was the BCDC, the Bay Conservation Development Commission, carrying on about not permitting residential development on the waterfront. The laws are a lot stricter for apartments than hotels. You don’t want to know how long it took dealing with them. You don’t want to know about the variances from zoning I needed to get. Then there were questions about the environmental impact report. For that I had to get back to the guy who wrote the report to begin with, and he was in Guadalajara for three weeks. I wanted to set a date with QuakeChek, the place that runs the computer checks on a structure’s ability to ride out the big one, but everything else was so screwed up.… I couldn’t come to terms with the electrician I wanted—
he
wasn’t about to commit his men to a schedule that had been changed as many times as mine. Then the union wage went up. And now this! Jesus, it was bad enough when the city was hassling me. Now it’s complete strangers. At least suicides have the decency to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge where they’re supposed to. Who was this woman, anyway?”