Too Close to the Edge Page 2

  Standing in a doorway across the street was Herman Ott. With his pale skin, thin blond hair, khaki pants, and yellow sweater that covered a burgeoning belly, he looked more like a canary standing on the bottom of his cage than a private detective. I picked up my pace. Herman Ott was the last person I wanted to run into. I owed him two hundred dollars. I had put in a demand from the discretionary fund three weeks ago. It hadn’t come through. Ott had called me twice. If he didn’t get his money soon, I’d never get another word out of him. I glanced across the street. But he hadn’t moved. He might want to nag me, but he didn’t want to be seen with me, not here. I hurried on to The Latte.

  Leaning forward on the edge of a frisbee-sized table, Connie Pereira looked like one of the junior executives back for a cup of nostalgia. Her short blond hair was curled just a bit too carefully, her sweatshirt, down vest, and jeans had been cleaned too recently, and her book, Strategies in the Commodities Market, marked her as the investment maven that she was. I slid into a chair opposite her, shielded from the street by a large and well-secured potted fig tree. “So what are you after?”

  She sighed. “Running shoes.”

  “Wouldn’t shopping …”

  “Spare me. I’ve heard every joke there is about this assignment. I’ve been here all week.” She glanced around. The evening fog had begun blowing in, carrying with it the spicy tomato aroma from the take-out pizza place across the street and fetors of sweat-laden dust from the poncho of one of the drug casualties who had spent his day leaning against the wall begging for spare change. Connie shivered under the sweatshirt that must have been ample half an hour ago. The rest of the tables were empty. “There’s a running shoe thief,” she said. “He’s been snatching shoes from yoga classes and temples where the devotees leave them outside. It’s a perfect opportunity. The devotees line their shoes up on bookshelves just like a display in a store. All the thief has to do is look them over and choose what he wants. And what he wants, Jill, are the newest and most expensive running shoes.”

  “How many have been stolen?”

  “Twelve pairs.”

  “Is that all? For twelve pairs the department is authorizing a stake-out? It’d be cheaper to buy the victims new shoes.”

  A motorcyclist cut across the one-way street and rolled to a stop, facing the curb. An ancient pick-up truck screeched to a halt inches behind him. As the cyclist dismounted and dragged his bike onto the sidewalk, the pick-up’s driver, a youngish man with sandy dreadlocks halfway down his back, yelled, “Whatsamatter, you got your brains up your ass?” The cyclist flipped him the bird. On the sidewalk in front of us, students in down jackets hurried from classes, too caught up in their own discussions to notice the interchange across the street.

  Connie shook her head. “Do you know anything about running shoes?”

  “No more than I have to.”

  “Well, they are not cheap. Expensive describes some, and certainly the computerized ones. With them a runner can stagger home, dripping sweat from his cross-town miles, pull out a disk from the sole of his shoe, stick it in his computer, and be told where his weight fell during every one of those miles. For a shoe like that, it’s several hundred dollars.”

  “Shin splints don’t come cheap, huh?”

  “Jill, you’re not taking this seriously. Christ, no one all week’s taken it seriously. I sit here every afternoon freezing my tits off and one of you guys comes to laugh.”

  Now I was laughing. “Maybe you could get a disk to sit on, so you’d know where your weight had settled.”

  Before Pereira could respond, the waiter came, and I ordered a decaf latte.

  “The victims,” Connie said, “are even more outraged than I am. I’m just glad it hasn’t made the papers yet. Can you imagine?”

  I nodded. The victims would complain that the flat feet of the police were not plodding fast enough. But community groups in the less affluent, less white neighborhoods west of San Pablo Avenue would be furious that a beat officer was sipping coffee in a cafe when she ought to be tracking down drug dealers and shooing prostitutes off University Avenue.

  It was an issue made for Berkeley, one that would pit the health-conscious against the race-conscious, the yuppies against the poor, the athletic against the laid-back. It would provide a field day for every newspaper columnist in the Bay Area. It had the potential to be Dan Rather’s cute closing story.

  “So where’s your site?” I asked.

  “Shake A Leg.” She nodded toward the dance studio across the street. In front of it, three women in their mid-thirties stood, their dance shoes in bright plastic bags, their potentially imperiled running shoes still on their feet. The bookshelves that served as the temporary home for the footgear of those inside were full. One woman lifted a foot shoulder high on the wall and leaned toward it.

  “Stretching the hamstring,” Pereira said wearily. “They’re obsessed with hamstrings. Watch now—she’ll shift her leg to the side, see? Stretching adductors. Adductor muscles are always second.”

  One of the stretcher’s companions bent her knee, grabbed her foot behind her and pulled. Pereira nodded. “Quadriceps. Not so popular as hamstrings or adductors, but nothing to overlook in the leggy world of fitness.”

  “You know, Connie, Murakawa would probably pay you for this assignment. He’d love to tell you what will happen to every one of those hamstrings in twenty years.”

  For the first time Pereira smiled. She glanced at the dance studio and back to me. “I appreciate your coming, Jill. You could be home now settled peacefully into your chaise lounge with a beer.”

  “Not peacefully.”

  She shifted her head so she could see the studio out of the side of her eye.

  “Mr. Kepple, my landlord, and his hobby,” I said to her unspoken question. “He’s retired now. Peaceful moments are gone forever.”

  She looked directly toward me. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m putting off dealing with it.”

  She nodded abruptly. Not dealing with a problem, even temporarily, infuriated Pereira. She had grown up in a household of non-dealers, a father who didn’t deal with getting to work soon enough or sober enough to hold a job, a mother who shrugged her shoulders at the family’s poverty, and two brothers who, from Connie’s complaints, never dealt with anything at all. Only her fury had gotten Connie through. Over the years she’d learned to control that fury, but I could tell she was in no mood for the saga of Mr. Kepple, his irritating hobby, and my failure to set things right.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Today? Two hours. You want to know what notices are on that kiosk?”

  I glanced down the street at a four-foot diameter cylinder that was well-thatched with advertisements. When I had this beat I’d seen people posting their own notices telling of Tabla lessons from an Indian master, or term-paper typing done cheap. Now posting notices was a business in itself. New ones covered the old every few days, and more than one fight had been sparked when a budding entrepreneur saw his notice going under.

  The breeze had picked up in the few minutes I’d been here. It flicked Pereira’s blond hair into her eyes and pressed the sleeve of her sweatshirt around her arm.

  In front of us, a dark-haired man began to fold his display of Peruvian sweaters and shawls. Two men in plaid shirts stopped to grab a final look at a brown and white alpaca sweater. The shorter man stepped back and held the sweater up. His companion shook his head. But the potential buyer was not to be dissuaded so easily.

  The loud whir of a heavy wheelchair stopped abruptly; the chair rolled to a halt beside the buyer. The chair’s occupant was an elfin woman with russet-colored hair cut so short in front that it was almost straight. But the tight waves in back hung down to her shoulders. Against the pallor of her skin her eyes shone dark and angry; her full brows tightened and her sharp cheekbones seemed starker against the tight set of her jaw. She was wearing a thick blue cotton sweater,
but still she shivered.

  “Liz Goldenstern,” I muttered to Pereira. Pereira raised an eyebrow in question. I held up a hand. Later, I could tell her that Liz Goldenstern had spearheaded the campaign to force every new business on the Avenue to comply with wheelchair access regulations. More than one shopkeeper complained loud and long when he realized he would have to give up rack space to create wider aisles. And Liz’s crusade to move the street artists back a foot closer to the curb hadn’t won her friends either.

  I leaned back behind the fig tree. When I was on beat here, I’d handled enough of the demonstrations Liz ran. Liz had raised hackles, even among her supporters. She had little sympathy for excuses, and from a person with a disability she often seemed to expect greater persistence than was reasonable. I had never seen Liz leave a picket line—regardless of rain, cold, or wind—or cancel one scheduled during a rare heat spell or the Super Bowl. I had once run into her picketing outside a head shop in a downpour. Three weeks later, suffering from a cold and barely able to breathe, she was back picketing the same store, berating a man with two four-pronged canes who had deserted the line, and giving him a wink when he trudged back in.

  Now the taller man moved the alpaca sweater an arm’s length away and pondered it.

  Clearly Liz Goldenstern had had enough. “How about choosing the right look out of the pathway,” she demanded.

  The sweater-holder spun around, his mouth pulled back in anger. It didn’t take a great mind to guess what his next word was likely to be. He glanced down at Liz, hesitated, then moved aside. “No need to be a bitch about it,” he snapped as she passed.

  She backed up the chair. “You’re not doing me a favor, you know. This is a sidewalk, not a waiting room.”

  “Look, lady, I moved.”

  “Big fucking deal.”

  “You people expect the world to make way for you. Just because you screwed up your life doesn’t mean the world has to look out for you.”

  Behind them the sweater seller methodically packed his wools. Altercations on the Avenue were standard fare of the day. The shoppers who stopped to watch kept their distance as they stood, shifting from foot to foot, around the edges of the display table. Uncomfortably, they eyed the access to the street, then looked back at the combatants. A woman in a wheelchair being hassled by a guy about to lay out seventy-five dollars for a sweater seemed a natural for the underdog-conscious of Berkeley. But despite her flaccid legs and those hands that were moved from the shoulder, Liz Goldenstern was no underdog. Had an onlooker the temerity to ask her if she needed help, she would have responded, “Bullshit!”

  Even the sweater-buyer seemed to be having second thoughts. He clutched the llama-pattern to his chest. “Listen lady, I …”

  “Just move, huh?”

  He hesitated, searching for a face-saving exit line.

  “Hey, come back here, you,” a barefoot man across the street yelled. Midway down the block a thin figure in a cap ran, skirting strollers, cutting between tables of jewelry onto the street. Dangling from one hand were a pair of silver and brown running shoes.

  CHAPTER 3

  AS THE SHOE THIEF rounded the corner Pereira leapt over the cafe railing. “Get out of the way! I’m a police officer.”

  Taken by surprise, Liz Goldenstern backed her chair into Pereira’s path. Pereira veered away toward the wall. Her hand hit Liz’s arm. Liz jolted hard to the right.

  “Go on,” I yelled to Pereira. I jumped the railing, grabbed Liz’s slight body, and pulled her upright. “You okay?”

  “What do you think?” she snapped.

  Across the street Pereira was running full out. I couldn’t see the thief at all.

  “I don’t know how you are,” I said to Liz. “That’s why I’m asking. I can get medical help.”

  She moved her head experimentally. “And how many hours would that take?”

  The onlookers inched closer, their former wariness fading. A confrontation between a wheelchair activist and a cop was perfect for an evening’s diversion, and Liz was among the best at catching the crowd. There was an appealing delicacy to her face, somewhat like Brad Butz’s. But while Butz’s skin had the density of porcelain, looking at Liz was like gazing through a steamy window at the fire inside. And her eyes were where the steam escaped. They were never still. They flashed with anger, gleamed with satisfaction. The day we’d had cappuccino, I had seen them glisten, as Liz talked about a time before the accident when she had run a fishing boat for the Capellis, one of the biggest family-run fishing operations in the East Bay. One of the few women in the trade, she had also been one of even fewer women captains. It was a fog-thick February night on San Francisco Bay that she’d told me about when, gambling on rumors that the herring were running off Sausalito, she had steered without lights or radio between the fleet boats and yanked net upon net of herring up over the side of her boat until it rode so low in the water that the rip tide could have scuttled it. “In thirty-six hours the limit was gone. We had a bottle of champagne for breakfast and slept the rest of the day. And we made five thousand dollars.” As she talked I could see her braced on the stern of her boat, muscles tensed, eyes glowing as they were now. More than once, I had seen men stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk and stare at those eyes. Then their gazes would fall to her chair, and Liz’s eyes would narrow in contempt. “They like their cripples to look normal,” she’d muttered angrily then. “Like the lion with the burr in its paw. They think they could pull it out and have their own lion, grateful forever. If it were my face that was paralyzed …”

  But it wasn’t. And Liz knew how to use what she had. If she chose to make the most of this confrontation with me, I didn’t have any illusions who would end up playing the bad guy. “I’m asking you if you’ve been injured,” I said.

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe I won’t know for days.”

  “If you’re not sure, you should see a doctor now.”

  “Look, I don’t need you to tell me about my body. I’ve seen more doctors than you’ll go near in your lifetime. I can’t drop everything and camp out in emergency for hours so some intern can say mine is an unusual case and he can’t tell me if anything new is broken or shifted out of place without seeing every x-ray I’ve ever had taken, and he can’t get ahold of those for days.”

  Shoppers, street sellers, and students crowded in behind Liz. The two men she’d been arguing with had vanished. I moved closer to her and lowered my voice. “I’ll take you. They work faster for the police.”

  She raised hers in response. “Let me make it simple. No matter how long I wait, the doctors in emergency aren’t going to take the chance of committing themselves on a ‘complicated case’ like mine. They figure if they’re wrong I’ll sue.” A shade of a smile flickered at her mouth. “And I would.” She shifted her shoulders to one side, then thrust them back to the other. “And I’ll tell you another thing,” she said, “I don’t like this cowboy attitude in the police. Whatever it is you’re doing here, you’ve got no business running over people. With you guys on the loose, a block of the Avenue is like the gantlet.”

  “Okay.” The onlookers moved in.

  Berkeley Detective Harasses Paraplegic. I didn’t need that on the news. I said, “If I can’t take you to a doctor, what is it I can do for you?”

  “Nothing. Just get out of the way.” She shifted her arm forward so her fingers encircled the drive lever, clasped it, and using her whole arm pushed it forward. The chair didn’t move. She pushed again, but clearly the battery was dead.

  “Well, that’s all I need! I have to be at a meeting at seven; I don’t have time to sit here and watch the traffic roll by.”

  “I’ll call wheelchair repair,” I said, glad to be able to take some positive action. The city of Berkeley has a sort of AAA for wheelchairs.

  “Forget it. By the time they come for me and let me sit around while they diagnose the break, it’ll be too late. It’s not like dropping your car at the garage; there are no loane
rs with power chairs.” She lowered her chin and breathed in short, thick breaths. “And if they’re backed up, too bad. Every chair’s an emergency. Someone’s stuck without it.” She dipped her chin and breathed again.

  The onlookers had crowded closer. Behind them the traffic on Telegraph had slowed as passengers leaned out their windows for a better look.

  “Get back,” I shouted at the growing crowd. “Give her some air.” I glared at the nearest, a middle-aged man with a bag under his arm. He edged back into the thick of the group.

  Liz strained for each breath. In spite of the chill wind, a fine film of sweat coated her forehead and the inner edges of her cheeks. Sitting in the stilled power chair, she looked like the late-night, make-up-removed, ashen version of the peppery woman of ten minutes ago. Even her eyes were lifeless. She hunched forward, and I could hear the labored pull of her lungs. Then her breaths became softer, more regular. She hooked her upper arm around the back post of the chair and pulled her shoulders back.

  “Clear off,” I snapped at the crowd. “I’m a police officer.” This time I chose an Avenue regular as the object of my glare, a guy who had reason to move when a cop told him to. I held my gaze until he and two friends turned and ambled off. The crowd wasn’t hostile, not yet, but despite the three departees it was growing. If it got much larger it could ignite by spontaneous combustion regardless of what Liz Goldenstern or I did. And calling for a back-up could fan the flames.

  To Liz, I said, “Where do you live?”

  “Dana.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Why?”