Too Close to the Edge Page 18

  “You were her lover, and her business partner. Ian Stuart said—”

  “Ian Stuart! Jesus, how can you believe anything that guy comes out with? Let me tell you about him and his great concern for the tenants in Marina Vista. He didn’t want this building here. Do you know what he wanted in its place?”

  “What?”

  “A heliport!”

  If Howard thought Butz and Mayer were looking out for Number One, he should hear about Ian Stuart. And knowing Stuart, the heliport he had in mind would be one with his own planned helicopter company as its major tenant.

  Butz looked back over the inlet, his color normal again, a smug half-smile on his face.

  “One more thing,” I said. “What were you doing at Liz’s flat Thursday evening?”

  His smile vanished. “I wasn’t there.”

  “You have a key, right?”

  “Sure. Liz gave it to me.”

  “A witness heard you opening the door.”

  “I’m not the only one with a key.”

  CHAPTER 24

  I CALLED THE DISPATCHER from Marina Vista and had him relay my message to Murakawa.

  Murakawa was waiting in the Spenger’s Fish Grotto parking lot when I pulled in. Rolling down the window, I told him about Brad Butz and his protestations about QuakeChek. “He assured me they’d go over the building before the first tenant moved in. See what you can find out. Brad Butz told me he couldn’t set a date with them yet. But find out what he did do. And see exactly how they’re going to come up with this assurance. No one but mystics promise to protect people, much less buildings, in the big one.”

  “Do you think Butz killed her, Smith?” Murakawa asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to have gained anything by her death.”

  “Yeah, but the crime, the passion of it. Suggests a lover. I’ve given this a lot of thought. I could see him going into a rage and hurling her in the water.” He leaned further out the window toward me.

  “But Paul, the killer cut her seat belt. That’s not something that could be done in one angry swat. He’d have to have been virtually nose to nose with her as he loosened it enough to get the knife under it. Then, after it was cut, he’d have stood up and pushed the chair over. It’s too slow a sequence of actions for passion. Passion is slap-slap-you’re-dead.”

  Murakawa nodded. “I should have thought of that.”

  “You will the next time. What did you come up with on your checks of Laurence Mayer and Greta Tennerud?”

  “Nothing on her, except a red Triumph, two years old, registered in her name. As for him, there are two D.U.I.’s four years ago, and then the reckless driving when he hit Goldenstern.”

  “Just reckless driving? Not under the influence?”

  “Not according to the D.M.V. files. And he doesn’t show on any of the other files for that.”

  “But he told me he was drunk when he hit her.”

  Murakawa shook his head. “I guess he didn’t tell the arresting officer.”

  “I’m surprised he admitted it at all, then.”

  Laurence Mayer pulled open the door to his earthbound cottage. In gray sweat pants and a striped rugby shirt, he looked prepared for a long relaxed weekend. His curly gray hair was dry now. If he had run and showered this morning, it had been well before now.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?” he asked, as he might have of a new patient.

  “A few more questions.”

  “Come in, then. I’ve just made a pot of coffee. You’ll have a cup?”

  The thick, inviting aroma floated through the doorway. “Thanks.”

  He led the way through the barren white waiting room to the tiny kitchen. “It’s New Orleans blend,” he said, as he poured the coffee.

  From Community Kitchens, I noted. One of the many catalogs I had on my dining table pile.

  “Cream?”

  “Lots.”

  When it was ready, I followed him up the circular metal stairs to his airy studio and settled on the sofa facing the French doors. A plate, with abandoned flakes of croissants, sat on the coffee table. I smiled. “I would have pictured a runner breakfasting on steak and herb tea.”

  Mayer laughed. “Heresy! Tomorrow I’m planning a ten-k run. So today I’m doing what’s called carb loading—croissants for breakfast, pasta for dinner. And before I start the race I’ll have some coffee. The caffeine will burn fat more effectively.”

  I nodded. “Was this part of your suggestions when you were counseling athletes?”

  “No, it wasn’t in fashion then. I don’t keep up on the trends now, but Greta does. She’s superb at guiding her customers, from footwear to diet to training schedules. In Norway, sports management programs like the one she was in cover all aspects of sports: body, mind, varieties of training, clothing, facilities, everything. Very thorough.”

  I sipped the coffee, savoring the first decent cup since Jackson’s thermos. “Dr. Mayer,” I said, “the motor vehicle department records of your accident, when you hit Liz, doesn’t mention drunk driving …”

  “And you wonder why. I’ve been expecting this.” He took a swallow of coffee. “A little deception, I’m afraid, and a lot of luck. It’s ironic how luck finds the least deserving, isn’t it?” He held the cup between both hands on his lap. Looking out the French doors at the foggy sky beyond, he said, “My luck was that I hit Liz right across the street from Herrick Hospital. I had barely gotten out of my car before the hospital crew was rushing her into emergency. I went along with them. I was so horrified at what I had done that I didn’t think of anything but her, certainly not waiting for an officer to take an accident report. In emergency there was a lot of flurry, coming and going. If anyone realized I was the one who hit Liz, they forgot it. By the time anyone spoke to me, they assumed I was a friend, a very upset friend. I waited while they took the x-rays and did the preliminary tests. I was terribly upset; I drank a lot of coffee, peed a lot. Maybe it was that, or the adrenaline in my system, or maybe just the amount of time that had elapsed before the officer found me. But by the time he gave me the breath test, I passed. He could have gotten me for leaving the scene of the accident, of course.”

  “I guess he realized you weren’t making a run for it.”

  Mayer shook his head. “I was too stunned.”

  “Is that why you promised Liz you’d never drive again?”

  “Right. I was stunned. I would have promised her anything if it made her feel better.”

  I took another drink of coffee. “But you do drive now, don’t you?” I asked, reasonable woman to reasonable man.

  With a quick nod, he said, “I don’t own a car. It’s very inconvenient for me. But I did promise Liz. I promised her a lot of things a good lawyer would have advised me against. As I said, the emotion of that time overcame any sense of personal protection, much less the ability to conceive what things would be like three years from then. The not driving was important to Liz. With time, she would have relaxed about it. But a few months ago, I finally decided that commitment was ridiculous. Liz had made a decent life for herself. There was no crisis anymore. There was nothing to be gained by my making Greta do all the driving whenever we took a trip. I haven’t had a drink since the accident. I doubt I’ll ever feel comfortable drinking again. I’m a better risk than half of the drivers on the road.”

  “Still, you didn’t buy a car?”

  “That would have been rubbing it in Liz’s face. I didn’t want to make a big thing of this. This way, just using Greta’s car at those times, I could accommodate my own feelings without irritating Liz.”

  That was the best rationalization for sneaking I’d heard in a long time, but if he realized that, he gave no indication. I finished the coffee. Standing to go, I said, “Where do you keep your keys for the tenants’ flats?”

  He finished his own coffee. “On a hook in the kitchen, why?”

  “Someone used a key to get into Liz’s flat Thursday night.”

/>   “Well, it wasn’t my key. It’s still there. You can see when you go down, if you want. I kept Liz’s key for her own safety. If she’d had to call me, she wouldn’t have been able to get to the door.” He stood up and started down the stairs. “As for keys to the other flats, my son’s and his friends’, those I keep for my own safety.”

  He insisted I see Liz’s key, though its presence this morning proved or disproved nothing. It only showed that Greta Tennerud could have picked it up and put it back, with or without Mayer noticing.

  In the car, I headed toward Racer’s Edge.

  Traffic moved more easily on Telegraph today. On Saturdays, without classes at Cal to draw students out of bed, life starts later. Now, at ten forty-five in the morning, the two lanes for traffic seemed quite adequate. The few people on the sidewalk hurried purposefully through the unbroken fog, anxious to get to their destinations and out of the unexpected cold. Only the most dedicated of street artists were setting up their tables or spreading their blankets. It was one of those days when the fog wouldn’t lift at all. The gray layer that normally covered the sky was thin, like a blanket of fiberglass “snow” we spread out under the Christmas tree as children, snow that had been packed away and dragged back out each December for a decade. But today’s fog was loaded with dingy lumpy clouds, like the pillows on a bachelor uncle’s bed.

  They told me at Racer’s Edge that Greta Tennerud was out training, running up one of the longest, steepest streets in Berkeley to Tilden Park, through the eucalyptus-covered roads in the park, to the town of Orinda ten miles beyond. If I didn’t spot her on the road, I could try the Bay Area Rapid Transit station in Orinda. She’d be taking BART home.

  But I was lucky. I spotted her easing past a pair of chatty weekend joggers whose conversation was more animated than their gait. As she moved out in front of them, Greta Tennerud looked like a representative of a different species, running with long, smooth strides on her long, lean-muscled legs. Her pale blond hair wafted out away from her tanned face and red sweat band. In red striped nylon shorts and a tank top that said “Racer’s Edge,” she was so superb an advertisement for running, and for the running shoe store, I found it hard to imagine her boss letting her go if she didn’t win the Bay to Breakers race. But from the intense look on her face, it was easy to see she believed he would.

  I waved her over.

  “Can’t stop,” she called, coming alongside the window.

  “I have to talk to you now. It’ll only take a few minutes,” I said, braking the car.

  Without appearing to shift her tempo, she ran in place beside the window. “No, no. If I stop, I have to start all over again. I need the distance. Besides, I am monitoring my stride. Like most runners I advise in the store, I have a little”—she held her thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart—“pronation to work out.” She gave an amused, conspiratorial smile.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I got out of the car. I was sorry. She was hard not to like, to root for. “This is business.”

  Her clear blue eyes narrowed in a scowl. “Excuse me, but my training, this is business, too.”

  “A murder investigation comes first. I have to talk to you now.”

  She let her feet settle on the road for a moment. “I am not a citizen here. I have no choice.”

  “You wouldn’t have a choice even if you were,” I said, for what it was worth. “Do you have a key to Liz Goldenstern’s flat?”

  “No,” she said, beginning to run in place again. “There would be no reason.”

  “But you do know where Laurence Mayer keeps his keys to the flats, don’t you?”

  She hesitated.

  “They’re in plain sight. It would be odd if you didn’t,” I offered.

  There was a long pause before she said, “You mean the ring in the kitchen? That I saw, but I didn’t know what they were for.”

  I took her explanation with a grain of salt. I was about to thank her for her time when the odd omission of this conversation struck me. Even though the apprehension of the shoe thief had been reported tongue-in-cheek, it had made the front page of every local newspaper and, as far as I knew, was featured on the ten and eleven o’clock news last night. One reporter had interviewed Pereira live when she left the station. Greta Tennerud, who had been central to the case, should have been eager to hear every detail about it. I said, “Have you seen the news this morning, or last night?”

  “Yes? Ah, our thief. That is fine work. My boss will be pleased.” Her voice sounded strained. It was not the delivery of a relieved party.

  “We’ve spent all night questioning the boys involved.”

  “The lady who cleaned house for them, she was the mastermind?” Greta raised her eyebrows in an attempt at amusement.

  I nodded. “Tell me about the sales slips at Racer’s Edge. What is written on them?”

  “Their purchases: shoes, shorts, socks, whatever.”

  “The make of shoe?”

  “Officer Coleman and Officer Pereira asked me these same questions.”

  “I know. It’s a nuisance to answer them again. Did the sales slip list the make of shoe?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the size?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the customer’s name?”

  She shook her head. “No, there was no need for that. We used the sales slips to keep records for reordering, not for payment records.”

  “Aura Summerlight was just a pawn, wasn’t she? You let her keep half the money. But it was you who set up the shoe thefts.”

  Under her tan, the color drained from her face, leaving the appearance of a gray mask. “No,” she said in a small, unconvincing voice.

  I took out the card and read her her rights. She reached for the car to steady herself. I said, “Liz Goldenstern worked with the sales slips. As for the checks or credit card receipts, the checks went to the bank the same day you got them, right?”

  She nodded warily.

  “And the credit card slips you stuck in a manila envelope each day. It wasn’t till the end of the month that they got filed, right?”

  “Yes. Liz’s friend, the mastermind, she did that.”

  “She alphabetized the credit card slips.”

  “Yes. Only she saw them all together. At first I couldn’t believe she had staged the robberies.” Greta was shaking her head in dismay, or what she expected me to take for dismay. “She said she stopped in to find out when Liz wanted her at her house. But she was always there when Liz was working on the sales slips and she had the credit card copies, with the names and addresses on them. I saw how she could have done it.”

  “But she didn’t get the credit card receipts till the end of the month. By that time ninety percent of the shoes would be too worn to steal. In order to orchestrate the thefts she would have needed them the same day. She didn’t have that chance. Liz Goldenstern certainly didn’t. She didn’t see the credit card receipts at all. Only you had that opportunity.”

  She tried to feign shock, but the muscles around her eyes and mouth were too taut with wariness to move quickly. The look of fear merely intensified. “No, no. Why would I do that? I am an alien here. If I break the law, you will deport me. I will be sent back in disgrace, to those long, long winters. I would be a fool to do that for nine pairs of shoes.”

  “You would indeed, if that were your reason. But when a runner has expensive shoes stolen, he doesn’t go barefoot, he buys another pair. He buys them from the store he got them from before. Nine of the pairs of shoes stolen came from your store. So, the thefts mean that you sold nine more pairs. If they’d gone on, you would have sold more. Nine pairs at two hundred dollars a pair makes a difference in the store receipts. It’s enough to show the boss that your being there is worth the money.”

  She shook her head. “If I win Boston, I’ll make seventy-five thousand. Why would I jeopardize everything?”

  “Because without a job, a job that only you can fill, you lose your green card.
You’d have to go back to Norway.”

  I loaded Greta into the car and called the dispatcher to alert Coleman I was bringing her in.

  Coleman met me at the station and claimed Greta Tennerud. I walked on to my office and opened the door to find Murakawa standing in front of the small dark window, tapping his foot.

  “Jeez, Smith,” he said, “I thought you’d driven by way of San Francisco.”

  “It’s only been fifteen minutes since I called in.”

  “Really?” He glanced at the clock. “Well, maybe so. But when you hear what I have to tell you you’ll know why it seemed like eternity.”

  I swung my chair around and sat. But Murakawa continued to stand, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “After I left you I came back here and called QuakeChek. I was all set to ask them how they evaluated the buildings for earthquake resistance.”

  I nodded.

  “But when I called, the woman who answered said they don’t give out information on the phone.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  Murakawa tapped a finger. “Just what I thought. So I told her I was a police officer. It didn’t make any difference.”

  I groaned. Surely we wouldn’t have to hassle getting a court order for this.

  “I could have argued, but I thought the simplest way to handle things was just to go down there. So, I did. And guess what they said, Smith?”

  “No idea.”

  “They said they do computer checks for earthquake safety.”

  I knew that.

  “Not just on the buildings, like you said, but on the plans and their own soil engineer’s report, and the latest earthquake data. They know every tributary and trace in Berkeley, whether it’s growing and how fast. Seismic engineers are finding new traces all the time. QuakeChek has records of new traces that won’t show up on the fault maps till the next revisions, a couple of years from now. When I asked them if their data is more current than the city’s, they laughed. They said the most competent building department in the world couldn’t keep up with every shift in every fault, much less the new traces—most of them aren’t visible from above—the city has to go by the fault map, and by the time that’s printed it’s probably already out of date.”