Too Close to the Edge Page 14

  “It’s one thing for commercial buildings to go up here. People don’t sleep in them. That’s why the regulations aren’t so stiff for them. But apartments … I can’t believe the city is allowing an apartment building to go up there, particularly one for people with disabilities,” Ian said. “It’s crazy. In a quake, those people won’t have a chance. But then, the city wouldn’t have okayed it if it hadn’t been for Liz’s lobbying. She was always off at some committee or speaking in front of some board or other.” He sounded like any spouse would have. I could remember my own ex-husband complaining when I worked Night Watch.

  I took a breath, trying to decide how to phrase my question. Stuart was clearly fascinated with motion. He hadn’t given any indication of being adaptable to a life without it. I wondered if the pressures of Liz’s accident, and the changes that her paralysis had brought—the physical inconveniences, the sexual limitations, all the things that were no longer possible—had been more than he was able or willing to adjust to. “You said you didn’t live with Liz long. When were you married, and exactly how long did you live together?”

  “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. And you don’t just move out, not when it’s out to sleep in your truck. You do it gradually.”

  “When did you get married?”

  “I can’t remember the exact date.”

  “Ian, I can check. It’ll just take my time, and my patience.”

  “Okay, okay. Three years ago.”

  “Three years!”

  “Right. It was after her accident. She was already in the chair when I married her. That’s what you were wondering about, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Now what I’m wondering is why you moved out.”

  His eyes were half closed. I knew he was weighing his possible responses, but this time I didn’t press him.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you the truth, but I can’t have it go any further.”

  “This is a murder investigation. You’d better be straight with me.”

  He shrugged. “The truth is that we never really lived together. It was a marriage of convenience. Liz did me a favor.”

  My buzzer beeped. “What kind of favor?”

  His scrunched features pushed closer together. “Well, I needed a wife.”

  The buzzer went off again.

  “I have to go. If you don’t tell me what you’re leading up to now, I’m going to have to take you with me to the station.”

  He shrank back, his thin chest hollowing. “Can I get some immunity?”

  “Don’t talk immunity. I’ve just explained your choices.”

  “Officer, I don’t—”

  “Okay, get your coat.” I stepped toward him.

  “No, wait. Okay. I’m a Canadian. I needed a green card to work here. I needed to be someplace like this, where there’s variation in the weather. Canada’s too cold. You can’t test a rudder design in weather like that. I had to be here.”

  “Liz married you so you could stay in the country and work on your invention?”

  He nodded.

  “What did she get out of it?” Obviously, not the pleasure of his company.

  “I told you, she did me a favor. She said she didn’t get much chance to do things for other people.”

  I sighed. “Get in the car.”

  “But you said—”

  The Liz I knew would never have made a deal like that. “You’re lying. I don’t have time to coddle you. You’ve just halved your choice.” I herded him to the car and opened the rear door. He protested again, and when I closed the door after him, it took all my self control not to slam it.

  For this, I thought, I’ve been up thirty-two hours!

  “Officer, this isn’t fair.”

  “Hey, keep it down. You had your chance.” I started the engine and, while it warmed, called in to the dispatcher.

  “Smith?” he said, “Contact Heling. She says she’s got something you’ll be real pleased with.”

  CHAPTER 18

  WITH A BURST OF adrenaline I drove back to the station, Ian Stuart complaining the entire way. The Liz Goldenstern I knew, the fisherwoman who had plucked the young Capelli out of the bay, might be pleased to help someone out, but I was willing to bet that that someone would have a more compelling need than Ian Stuart. Or if not a dire need, at least an appealing personality. I could see why they had never lived together. From what Marie Denton had said, which Stuart had unintentionally confirmed, he would have been willing to park his truck wherever he could find a bed to park himself. The fewer obligations the better. Living with Liz, as long as there was an attendant to do the work, would have been perfect. Living with him would have driven Liz crazy.

  I stopped the car by the station and turned to him. “I’m going to give you one more chance, Ian.”

  For the first time he was silent.

  “Tell me about Liz’s son.”

  His narrow-set eyes scrunched. “I told you it wasn’t that type of relationship. How many times do I—”

  “Not your son. Liz’s son.”

  His eyes grew even narrower; they seemed ready to squeeze the bridge of his nose off his face. Shaking his head, he said, “Liz didn’t have children.”

  “How do you know? It doesn’t sound like you were around any more than you had to be.”

  “Still, I was her husband. I’d know that.”

  “There are witnesses who saw her son coming to see her.”

  Continuing to shake his head, he said, “If Liz had had a kid, don’t you think that kid would have been around? Liz would have seen to that.”

  Silently, I admitted he had a point. To him, I said, “Not good enough,” and headed him into the station. I’d have another go at him after he’d spent a few hours in one of the few rooms in Berkeley he found unacceptable. But booking takes time—the forms, the fingerprinting, the computer checks of the Corpus file, even the receipt for belongings. No one step takes long, but altogether you never book a suspect in less than half an hour.

  It was nearly four o’clock when I got to Liz Goldenstern’s flat. Leaving the black and white double-parked, I ran in.

  I expected Heling, whose shift had ended an hour ago, to be fuming, but she greeted me with a grin.

  “Smith,” Heling said, “you remember you told me to go over this place? Well, I figured I had hours,” she added with a meaningful glance at me. “So I went through every drawer, every closet, every shelf, every—”

  “Heling!”

  Her grin widened. “You know those bags people hang over the back of their wheelchairs? The ones they put books or groceries or whatever in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Liz Goldenstern’s wasn’t on her chair when you discovered it, right?”

  I recalled the chair on its side in the dirt. There was no bag in my picture. “No.”

  “Well I found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Under the desk in her office, back by the wall.”

  “And?” I hadn’t realized Heling had this theatrical ability to turn a simple statement into Masterpiece Theater.

  “Guess what was in it.”

  “Heling, I’ve found Liz dead. I’ve been up all night. Now what is it?”

  “Running shoes,” she said triumphantly. “Size 9-B, New Balances. New.”

  “Whew!”

  “And that’s not all, Smith. That was just the beginning, in a way. After I found those—actually that was pretty soon—I really went over this place inch by inch. And guess what else I found?”

  “A buyer’s list?”

  Her face fell. “Well, no. Not that. But something pretty interesting,” she added, regrouping. “In the back of the bedside table drawer, in an envelope, all by itself,” she said, slowing her delivery with each phrase, “I found four hundred fifty dollars.”

  “Nine pairs of the stolen shoes were from Racer’s Edge. Fifty per pair. And these shoes were waiting to be traded for another fifty, eh?”

  “Jill, it’s so litt
le. I can’t believe what people will risk jail for.”

  “Yeah. Of course, the proceeds from this would have been split two ways—half for the mastermind and half for whoever did the actual stealing. A hundred per pair sounds about all the market would bear.”

  Heling nodded.

  “It’s nice that four fifty’s still here. Have you notified Coleman, or Pereira?”

  “Coleman’s sick. And for all I knew Pereira is in Timbuktu. I left a message for her hours ago.”

  I smiled. After all day with Herman Ott’s taxes, Timbuktu would be an appealing prospect for Pereira.

  “But that’s not all, Smith,” she insisted. “Guess what else was in that envelope.”

  “Other than a signed confession, I can’t imagine.”

  “Check it out.” Heling thrust the envelope toward me.

  I plucked out the bills, all crisp fifties. A slip of paper fell on the floor. Picking it up, I read, “New Balance—9-B. Dusty Wilson. 4–13. It’s even got his phone number. How considerate. I’d say, Heling, that Pereira owes you one.”

  “Great. I haven’t started my taxes yet.”

  “Maybe not that big a one. In the meantime, have someone from Day Watch relieve you. We’ll get someone to the hospital to pick up Aura Summerlight when they release her. She was the attendant here. Let’s see what her connection was in this operation.”

  “She didn’t have any.” The words tumbled out of Heling’s mouth. “I mean, I’ve given this a lot of thought. And it had to be Liz’s scheme. I mean, look where the shoes were—in Liz’s bag. Common sense says Liz put them there. If Aura had stashed them here in the flat she would have put them on a top shelf, someplace where Liz wouldn’t come across them. That bag is the last place she’d put them. And the bag was hidden in one of the few places she wouldn’t look. And the money … well, my first guess is that she’d have spent it. She must have needed it. But even if she didn’t spend it, she wouldn’t hide it in the bedside table where Liz would find it. The bedside table is one spot where Liz would keep things she needed, and where her attendants would have no reason to go. It’s the logical place for Liz to stash the money.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “I figure, Smith, that Liz just got sick of pushy runners thinking everyone should get out of their way, and she came up with this plan. It doesn’t look like she really needed the money, but who knows. Maybe she just wanted to get even.”

  If Laurence Mayer had been buying her this building and paying her attendant and the Capellis were underwriting her vacations, Liz shouldn’t have needed money. “Okay, when you dictate it, include every inch of your investigation of the flat. But keep to the facts. Don’t interpret. And make copies, six of them.”

  I had seen Pereira at five A.M. stake-outs, and after half-hour chases, but I had never seen her look this gray and worn out. She was hunched over Herman Ott’s desk. What had been a shambles of papers this morning was now four tidy piles. What had been a fashionable hairdo then looked like a haystack now. From the other room came rhythmic snores that were audible from the staircase. In all the time I had been coming here, pounding on Ott’s door in the middle of the night, I had never heard a snore. I had assumed Ott was a light and very wary sleeper. Today’s performance could only be a show of trust in Pereira to protect him.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  Pereira did a double take. “Jill, I didn’t even hear you come in. I think my hearing’s gone. Ott must be doing eighty decibels in there. I know my vision is permanently impaired. Jill, I just can’t see how this man runs a detective agency. I can’t see how he runs anything. His records. Jeez. Look at these revolting scraps of paper. I know I’m going to get hepatitis from touching them, and probably black lung from breathing the air above them. Half of them don’t have dates, or addresses. The mileage! I can’t believe it. It took me all morning just to get them into the right piles. I didn’t get to the forty-five sixty-two till half an hour ago. I can’t believe it.”

  In the next room Herman Ott snored on.

  “Listen to him,” Pereira continued. “It’s like going down into the Sea Lion Caves.”

  “How much longer will the taxes take you?”

  She leaned back in the chair. “I don’t know, an hour, the rest of my life, who can say?”

  “Well, how would you like to take a break—”

  “Oh, I can’t, not with—”

  “And solve the shoe thief case!”

  Resurrection must be a startling event, but hardly more so than the rejuvenation of Connie Pereira. In an instant she turned from a tax-hag back to the infuriated sidewalk-kicker who had just lost her thief. I explained Heling’s find. “It’s hard to believe that Liz was behind this,” I said slowly.

  “Jill, you’ve let yourself get too close to her, or her memory. Look at the set-up. She did the books in a running shoe store. She could find out who’d bought what shoe. She could be on the Avenue when she chose. The thieves could steal the shoes and slip them in her bag. No one would suspect her because she was a cripple.”

  I had to admit that that irony would have appealed to Liz.

  “It’s perfect.”

  I nodded, slowly. “She even had a college-age son who could introduce her to his larcenous friends. No wonder we haven’t heard from him. Still,” I said, “I just can’t see her …”

  “A little Robin Hooding? Or at least taking from the rich. No one with two-hundred-dollar running shoes can’t afford to replace them.”

  “Maybe the adventure appealed to her. She used to fish. She must have missed the excitement.” I leaned back against the wall. What Pereira said made sense. What Heling had said made sense. Why couldn’t I accept the conclusions they reached so easily? It wasn’t a question of breaking the law. Liz had done that in demonstrations. But then there had been a good cause; these thefts were different. They weren’t socially motivated—they were done for greed, or spite. “Connie, can you see Liz Goldenstern setting up these thefts for spite?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m thinking of her as a Noble Savage. Maybe I’m so caught up in my outrage about the way she was killed that I’ve lost sight of her as more than a body to fill her chair.”

  Pereira nodded. “It’s safe to say that being disabled isn’t likely to make you a nicer person.”

  “Maybe you become more patient, of necessity, though Liz didn’t show any signs of that.” But I knew there was more to my discomfort than that. Paralysis was still a subject I didn’t want to think about. If I were forced to consider it, I wanted there to be a silver lining, even if that lining were only patience. But I was too tired to deal with that. “Maybe Liz just enjoyed the thefts,” I said. “Anyway, shall we give Dusty Wilson a call about his New Balance 9-B’s?”

  Pereira shoved the phone toward me. “What if he’s already talked to Liz? He’ll recognize a different voice.”

  “I thought of that. I’m prepared to handle it if he did, or if he didn’t. This is known as the Howard Method Three, Dilettante Crook Division, perfected when we cracked that Hindu art ring that had statues of Shiva flying around town like Archangels.” I dialed. “Dusty Wilson?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got your New Bal—Hey, you’re not Dusty Wilson.”

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “You sure?”

  “ ’Course I’m sure.”

  “You sound … well …”

  “Listen, you sound a little odd, too. It must be the connection.”

  I held up a thumb. Pereira pursed her lips and nodded approval. “Okay. Well, your shoes are ready,” I said to Wilson. Had Liz worked out the pick-up arrangement with him or would she have waited until now? If there was nothing set, there was no problem, but if Liz had arranged a spot, then we needed to know where.

  “What time should I come?” he asked.

  “Half an hour.”

  “Right.”

  “Repeat the address.”


  I could hear his swift intake of breath. “How do I know—”

  “I’ve had problems with this. One guy forgot the pick-up place. Someone else swiped the shoes. I don’t go to all this trouble to donate shoes to passersby. I want to know you’ll be there.”

  “I’m not a moron.”

  “Forget the whole thing.”

  “Okay, okay. Twenty-seven eighty-six Channing. Good enough?”

  CHAPTER 19

  DWARFED BY APARTMENT BUILDINGS, 2786 Channing Way sat three blocks above Telegraph Avenue. On another street it would have been recognized as a sizable brown shingle house. On another street, its weed-tossed lawn would have caused comment. But here, amidst the dormitories and fraternity houses, it was understood that lawns occupied space more properly covered with decks, deck chairs, and kegs of beer. All three were in evidence.

  After a stop at her patrol car to change shoes, fix her hair, and notify the beat officer of our plan, Pereira had settled herself at the bus stop on College Avenue, half a block east of the house. Seeing her in her suit and running shoes, ten out of ten people would have said she was a businesswoman on her way home. Once Dusty Wilson started toward the Channing Way door, she would move in. Pereira might have had a few hours sleep last night, but neither of us was in sprint condition.

  At nearly five o’clock, the wind off the bay blew fitfully, bringing with it a covering of fog. Cars raced down Channing, ready to join the rush hour clog on all Berkeley’s main streets. A motor scooter sashayed from lane to lane, its engine ripping through the equilibrium of urban noise. A trail of exhaust fumes hung in its wake. I glanced up the driveway, noting that there was no step up to the side door. Easy access for a wheelchair there. Carrying the New Balance 9-B’s in a brown grocery bag, I climbed to the deck and rang the bell. In five minutes Wilson would be here to get them.

  The door opened. The boy who looked out had shaggy dark hair, jeans, sweatshirt. He was the boy who had called to Liz Goldenstern when I was at her door. I remembered her telling him pointedly, “The officer is helping me.” But if he was Liz’s son, he resembled his father.