Too Close to the Edge Read online

  The sixties were over. They’d been over for close to twenty years. Most of the hippie fleet had been abandoned to junkyards. Most of the hippies had changed with the decades. Life was no longer infinite, and one day floating into the next was no longer a sign of freedom but simply meant one less day to finish what had to be done. Poverty had lost its charm. The hippies were middle-aged now. Many had gone back to school. Some were lawyers, some social workers, some even cops.

  But the woman who pulled the lever to open the bus door couldn’t have been pegged as either a lawyer or a transient. In jeans and a sweatshirt, with long dark hair parted in the middle and a pale face still mashed from sleep, she could have represented any stratum of Berkeley. She rubbed her knuckles in her eyes, then took a drag of a cigarette. “I was up late.”

  If she was looking for sympathy she’d picked the wrong person. “I’m trying to find Ian Stuart.”

  Now she grinned. But the muscles on the right side of her face still hadn’t shaken off sleep. Her cheek hung. The whole effect was of a soft doll that had been crammed in a suitcase. “You sure you’re a cop?”

  I pulled out my shield and held it out.

  She shook her head in quick snaps. “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll take your word. I can’t be bothered to put my contacts in this early,” she said, leaning back against the arm of the black Naugahyde swivel chair that served as the driver’s seat and motioning me in.

  The sixties had indeed ended. There was no smell of marijuana and incense here, or at least none strong enough to hide the stench of tobacco. There were no pillows and mats on the floor, no padded floors and walls so the most athletic of orgyists wouldn’t bruise a part he might need later. This school bus looked like a trailer park mobile home. An old plaid love seat backed against the far wall. Across from it was a dinette set with a portable typewriter on the table. Beyond that was a tiny stove and apartment-sized refrigerator under a counter so small that even Herman Ott would have winced. And on every surface was a full ashtray. In Berkeley, where city law mandates non-smoking sections in every theater and restaurant, coming across a smoker was unusual enough. I hadn’t seen this much tobacco in years.

  “You’re not dressed like a cop.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact.

  “I’m a detective. Detective Smith.”

  She stuck out a hand as she said, “Marie Denton.”

  I shook the proffered hand. “About Ian Stuart?”

  “Oh, Ian. Well, if he’s not here, he’s probably at work. At the heliport on University.”

  “And if he’s not there?”

  “Off with one of his ladies.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever one will have him.”

  “Can you give me a name, or an address, or even a description of these women?”

  She took a long drag of her cigarette, then shook her head.

  “Did his ladies include his wife?”

  “Wife?” She perked up. “That’s a new one to me. Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She laughed. “Well, there will be a lot of surprised half-soaked ladies when that word gets out.”

  “Do you have any other ideas where he might be if he’s not at the heliport?”

  “Like I said, no. But he’s probably there. The only thing he’s really interested in is helicopters. I barely know the man and he’s carried on so much about lift off and hovering that I’m sure I could fly a copter myself. He came on like he’d chosen me to share his secret—the fact that he’s trying to discover some sort of important improvement in the rotor blades. He made a big thing about not letting anyone in the village know what he was doing or where he was. As if they’d care! I mean he acted like everyone here was sitting around all day plotting to rip him off. I told him we’re not all deadbeats here, or on the needle, or transient. Some people have just had a string of bad breaks, some just don’t want to be tied down; a lot, like me, are walking our tails off trying to get jobs, any jobs.” She shrugged. “I might as well have been talking to his rotor blade.”

  “Then why was he leading the protest against Marina Vista?”

  Again she shook her head. “Got me. Got everyone. There was a lot of speculation about that last night. There’s a lot of speculation about everything here. People with endless time have endless opinions. Some of the guys figured he was on something. A couple thought maybe he knew that guy Butz from Canada. Ian’s Canadian, you know. And he sure acted like he had something personal against Butz.”

  “How so?”

  She blew out a column of smoke. It hung suspended between us. My throat was getting scratchy. “Well, hardly anyone here paid attention to him carrying on about Marina Vista. We all know this place is temporary. But a couple of times someone did pop up ready to mount a protest at City Hall. You should have seen Ian back off. He only wanted to harass Butz. Like I said, it seemed personal.” She stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray already precariously full. “Of course, one guy insisted that Ian just wanted to get some free publicity for his hot tub. You’ve seen his ads, haven’t you?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘Portable hot tub looking for driveway to park in.’ Ian’s been hoping some lady would take him and it in. Women find him attractive. Or they do until they realize what a bore he is. So, anyway, if he’s not at his beloved heliport, then your best bet is to cruise the streets till you spot the hot tub.”

  CHAPTER 17

  IF MARIE DENTON’S ASSESSMENT of Ian Stuart was accurate—his heart was in the helicopter shop and he was looking merely for a spot to stash his body at night—then no place could have been more convenient than Rainbow Village. A quarter mile east of the turn-off to the village, I found Ian Stuart’s hot tub-laden pickup parked behind a square metal building. A small plastic sign on the wall whispered “Calicopter.” Even though the shop was alone on this narrow rim of bay frontage here on the extension of University Avenue, it was such an innocuous, ill-marked building that probably ninety-five percent of Berkeleyans had no idea what went on inside.

  The southern wall of the building had been rolled back. Inside I could see a blue and white helicopter with its roof panels removed and its rotor gears exposed, like a corpse halfway through autopsy. A slight man was lowering himself to the floor, holding a three-and-a-half-foot metal tube. His hair was caught back in a ponytail, but the afternoon wind flicked the ends of the soft blond strands against his sweatshirt. Without realizing it, I had been expecting the hangar to resemble the inside of a garage, with circles of oil here and there, piles of tools that should have been put away last month, and the smell of gasoline rising all around. But the hangar had no stains, no discarded tools, and the only smell was the musty odor of low tide.

  He carried the pole across to a small enclosed room. He was shorter than I expected, a good six inches shorter than Brad Butz and probably fifty pounds lighter. His threat to Butz must have looked like something out of Laurel and Hardy.

  Still, he had disappeared. I poised my hand over my gun and waited until he put the helicopter pole down.

  “Ian Stuart?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Smith, Berkeley Police Department. I need to talk to you about your wife’s murder.”

  His eyes scrunched together. For a moment I thought I’d caught him off guard. Then he nodded and motioned me inside the enclosed room. His expression didn’t change. His nose and cheekbones were narrow and pointy. His eyes were naturally scrunched.

  “Your wife was murdered last night. You called us and then you disappeared. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Mr. Stuart. Tell me about finding Liz’s body.”

  “I didn’t find it.”

  “It! Your wife is dead less than one day and already you’re referring to her body as ‘it’!”

  He looked away, toward a wall covered with numbered circular pieces of metal—parts of tools, I guessed. “I didn’t know it was her.”

  “You called us.”

  “Au
ra found her. Aura was hysterical. Someone had to call in.”

  “What exactly did Aura tell you?” I was coming on stronger than I had intended. His dispassion had gotten to me. I decided to go with my anger.

  “She said there was a woman in the water. She was dead.”

  “And?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “She was hysterical, and that’s all she said? I don’t buy that. I’ve talked to her twice. She’s not the type of person who clams up when she’s hysterical. She’s the type who talks. She told you more than that. What?”

  “Well, she repeated a lot. She must have said the same thing four or five times. Do you want me to tell you that often?”

  “I want you to tell me exactly what she said.”

  “I can’t remember her words. She was babbling.”

  “You’re not being straight with me, Ian. Yesterday you were threatening to drown a man outside of Rainbow Village. He didn’t press charges. He could have. He still could. That’s one offense. Then, your wife is drowned on your doorstep. You disappear. And now you’re concealing information from the police. Do I have to tell you how suspicious this makes you look? Now tell me everything Aura Summerlight said to you.”

  His pale face paled further. “Okay, okay. It probably can’t make me look much worse. But you’ve got to understand my situation.”

  “First, tell me what she said.”

  “She told me there was a woman dead at the water, and there was a wheelchair overturned next to her.”

  “Didn’t you go to see if that woman was your wife?”

  He hesitated. Behind his pale skin, I could almost see the choices he was considering.

  He sighed. “It was very odd. Look, the whole thing was very odd. Aura told me she was dead.” He swallowed, and the first blush of color swept up his face. “Aura said Liz’s head was in the water. She had drowned.” He swallowed again. “Aura said she panicked. She knew Liz was dead.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “She left her head in the water.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” His voice broke.

  “Your wife was drowning and you couldn’t go a hundred yards to pull her out?”

  “She was dead. Even if she’d been alive when Aura saw her, she would have been dead by the time Aura got to me. There was nothing I could do. And I just couldn’t bring myself to go and see her like that. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. It was all I could do to make the call to you guys. I’m surprised I held myself together for that. I must have sounded shaky. If Aura hadn’t been so spun out herself, she would have noticed.”

  I sighed. Only the density of my own exhaustion kept me from reacting to this new horror of Liz’s death. “And then?” I prodded.

  “Then I got out of there.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  Again he hesitated.

  “We’ll check.”

  “Okay. I came here.”

  Had I pressed too hard? Maybe he had spent the night with one of the women friends Marie Denton had mentioned. Maybe he made the decision that for a husband in his position admitting extramarital relations was more incriminating than having no alibi at all. But there was no way to dispute his claim. For someone else spending the night here would have been cold and uncomfortable at best. But for Ian Stuart, who was used to curling up on the seat of his truck, this would be like a room at the Marriott.

  I decided on the roundabout route. “What kind of work do you do here?”

  “I’m a mechanic.”

  “Licensed?”

  “Well, no. I could pass the written test for the A and P license—”

  “A and P?”

  “Air frame and power plant license. The test would be no problem. I could have passed it years ago. But I need someone to vouch for my experience before I can sign up. That’s why I’m here.” He pulled the door of the small room shut. “Dust. I don’t want it blowing on the transmission.” He nodded at the machinery on the work bench.

  “How long have you been as assistant mechanic here?”

  His pale face reddened. “You think I’m some kind of flunky here. You think I mop the floors and carry the parts around, and maybe at the end of the day they let me hold the wrench or turn a couple of screws, don’t you? Look, Quade isn’t doing me a favor letting me work here. He’s getting license-quality work for unlicensed pay. I’m here just for the hours and because Quade lets me use the space for my own work.”

  “And that work is?”

  Without thinking he glanced behind him at the area outside the dust-free room, as if spies might be lurking behind the tail of the helicopter. “It’s a modification,” he said, nearly whispering.

  I was still considering whether to press him on the exact nature of his work, when he said, “It has to do with the drag-lift ratio. That’s basically what helicopters are all about. You’ve got to get enough lift to overcome the drag, and then you’ve got to keep it. You get into moister air, you get more drag. You go higher, you get more drag. Then you’ve got to give her more throttle to keep your lift, see? Look, come over here,” he said without pause. He hurried out toward the helicopter, still careful, despite his enthusiasm, to shut the workroom door. “See, a helicopter is really a very easy ship to run. It’s simpler than a car. You don’t have a gear stick, or a clutch, or stuff like turn signals to worry about.”

  I looked into the cockpit. Between the two seats was a dashboard that must have held fifteen gauges. “It doesn’t look that easy to me.”

  “Oh, those. Well that looks more complicated than it is. But once you get used to them you just need to check to see that everything’s all right. But look here, you don’t have a steering wheel, you just have this one stick that moves the ship forward and back—the cyclic.” He pointed to the stick that rose in front of the driver’s seat. “And this one, the collective”—he pointed to a gearstick to the left of the driver’s seat—“controls altitude. It goes up, you go up. It goes down, you drop. And this is the throttle, just like you have on a motorcycle. It works with the collective; that’s why it’s on the end of it. When you go up, you need more power, so increased collective means an increase in the throttle.”

  So far Marie Denton’s assessment was correct. The man was obsessed, and already he was boring me. “Ian—”

  “And these pedals work the tail rotor so you don’t spin out. See, whenever a copter loses power, it has a tendency to torque, so when you’re coming down, you need to adjust—”

  “Ian,” I insisted. I couldn’t tell whether he was actually pausing to listen or just catching his breath. “Tell me, briefly, what modification you are working on.”

  He frowned. “Well, I don’t know how brief I can be.”

  “Try.”

  “Well, okay, but I can’t promise you’ll understand.”

  I waited.

  “I’m experimenting with a new blade design to cut down the drag.”

  “So the ship will lift more easily and run more economically,” I said in a tone so condescending that anyone who was not so totally caught up in his project would have been taken aback. “Do you spend a lot of time working on it?”

  “Whenever I’m not doing overhauls for Quade. I don’t have time to waste. Someone else could come up with a similar modification, and then, even if mine’s better, companies aren’t going to change twice in a year.”

  I nodded. The signs of distress he’d shown talking of Liz had vanished. He seemed to have handled her death more easily than anyone I had talked to. Disguising my skepticism, I said, “It must have been difficult being here so much, when your wife was in a wheelchair and needed some care.”

  But if he noticed any undertone in the question, he gave no indication. “She had an attendant,” he said matter-of-factly. “Actually, she had a lot of attendants. Liz wasn’t the easiest person to work for. But in fairness to her, attendants aren’t always the most responsible people around. Sometimes they partied at night and overslept the
next morning and didn’t bother to get her up. Sometimes they just split without warning.”

  “Didn’t she need you then?”

  “Sure. And I came. There’s a phone here. Look, we haven’t been together for a long time. Actually, we’ve been apart more than we were together.”

  I kept silent, counting on its nervous-making quality to keep him talking.

  “We just weren’t very alike. Or at least we had different priorities. Liz knew how important my work was. She knew that when this modification works, helicopter companies will be fighting to get it. I can sell it for more money than I’ve ever seen, enough to start my own company. She understood that.” He nodded toward the standing copter. “Besides, even if I had been doing nothing but sitting on my butt, I wouldn’t have seen her much more. She was hardly ever home, and when she was she was busy at her desk, or on the phone to one of her committee members, or to Brad Butz. Christ, if it hadn’t been for Liz that Marina Vista project would never have gotten anywhere. He couldn’t have done that himself. He was just a ne’er-do-well carpenter when he latched onto Liz. He didn’t have influence with the city. They would never have considered him without Liz pushing them. And after he got the job, he didn’t understand politics like Liz did. He could never have battled all those boards and committees—he thinks too small. He’s the perfect nuts and bolts man. Of course, he doesn’t know that. He struts around like the idea for Marina Vista grew in his own prissy-faced head. Marina Vista’s going to make him hot stuff in the construction world. The whole shorefront project is a bitch. It’s going to force a hundred people with no other place to go out of Rainbow Village. Even Calicopter is going to lose its lease here. But do you think he cared? I told Liz, I said, ‘Look, this guy is using you. What are you going to get out of his million dollar project? An apartment? The honor of being manager and listening to people complain?’ ” He shook his head. “That building is going up on fill. You know what that means.”

  Fill, or filled land, was the land created at the edge of the bay from projects like the Berkeley dump. A hundred years ago San Francisco Bay had been twice its present size before man-made “land” gobbled its edges. Fill, of course, was not attached to the bedrock deep beneath, and when a sizeable earthquake came, the fill would melt back into the water it had displaced.