Too Close to the Edge Read online

  The ship hovered. With one hand on the cyclic, the other on the collective, and a foot on either of the pedals, Laurence Mayer stared blurry-eyed. I jammed the ends of the seatbelt together.

  “What did Liz have on you, Mayer?” I yelled over the wind.

  His hands shifted the controls automatically. The ship held its place. The rain beat in through both door slots, but he seemed oblivious to it. He seemed to be considering his options. I was certainly considering mine. The longer I could keep him talking, the better mine were.

  “When I hit her, I did more than the decent thing. I didn’t stop to think of anything but the horror I had caused her. I was a fool. If I’d only had a lawyer, someone to tell me to keep my damn mouth shut. The insurance would have paid. Maybe I would have spent weekends in jail, but they wouldn’t have demanded my life.”

  “You gave up your flat, your car, your sports practice. You gave her the building; you paid her attendant. When you changed your mind, she wouldn’t let you out of it, would she?”

  “Bitch. I’m working my tail off all winter, listening to patients, living in a room over the garage, and do you know where she was? She, and her attendant, went to Mexico for two weeks!” Suddenly he laughed. “But those two weeks were the best I’ve had in years, since the accident. She wasn’t there, reminding me every time I looked out my door, every time I walked to the street.” He shook his head. “At first I thought I’d never forget. But I could have. I could have if it hadn’t been for her.”

  “And then Brad Butz and Marina Vista gave you a chance to get even. Brad Butz had been your patient. He told you about the earthquake fissure, didn’t he?”

  He smiled. “Butz was a fool. Marina Vista was his big chance. I pushed Liz to back him so we could keep control over the construction. Then, after his bid was accepted, he stops in to visit at QuakeChek and decides to go over their maps. He finds the earthquake trace. And he comes running to me—what should he do—tell the city? It took a lot of talking, convincing him we could turn it into a spa, reassuring him that if he kept his mouth shut about his untimely discovery, the trace would be viewed as an act of God, and he’d be a hero for finding it. That and the promise of some fast cash. But he came around.”

  “And the shoe thefts, were they an added slap? Petty crimes that would lead back to her? A little irony, that people would blame a cripple for stealing running shoes?”

  The ship lurched. Automatically he played the foot pedals. Then, as if he’d suddenly realized he was piloting again, he pushed the cyclic forward. The ship accelerated. The rain hit in from the front of the door slots, slapping my face. It slapped his too, but he leaned forward, his eyes sharpened under the film, like the eyes of an arcade player.

  “Mayer, put the ship down before you get us killed.”

  He laughed. “What, and go to jail? Back to jail? She’s had me in jail for four years. I’m free now, and I’m staying free.”

  “Mayer, there’s no escape.”

  “There’s escape,” he yelled. “I’m making my escape. She had me paralyzed. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe any more.”

  “You could have left.”

  “I had a practice here.”

  “You could have started one somewhere else.”

  He turned and glared at me. “Don’t you hear what I’m saying? She wouldn’t let go. She would have hunted me down. She had a detective. She would have found me. Don’t you understand? You can’t hang out a shingle and say you’ll guide people through their problems when you’ve got a cripple screaming that you’re a drunk. Not when I was fool enough to put it in writing.” He pulled the collective and twisted the throttle at the same time. The ship turned to the right, toward the bay. He pushed the cyclic and we moved forward. In another minute we’d be over the deep water, where a falling body would never be noticed, where a dying body could be washed out to sea, where better swimmers than I, under lots better conditions, had drowned.

  I grabbed for the collective, but Mayer shoved me back. Reaching down under his seat he came up with the crowbar and swung it at my head. I blocked it, catching the end. His knee hit the collective; the ship dipped to my side, throwing me back, snapping my stomach against the seat belt. My head hung out through the open door, hair whipping in the wind. He wrenched the bar from my hands. The seat belt bit into my stomach; my legs flailed inside the cockpit.

  I kicked at his face. He swung the bar. I grabbed the end and held on. The ship bounced like an amusement park ride. He smacked his free hand into my stomach and shoved me back. I gasped for breath. The belt slipped to my hips. I grabbed for the sides of the door, but my hands slipped in the rain. Pulling on the crowbar, I hung on, panting, my stomach aching with each breath. Making myself breathe deeply, I pulled on the crowbar to hoist myself back in. Mayer let go. I fell back.

  He reached for the seat belt. I slammed the crowbar against his arm. He screamed, came at me, pushing under my armpits. The belt slipped to my thighs. The ship lurched. I thought I could see the bay not far below. I hooked my feet under his seat, pulled myself up and smashed the crowbar down on his groin.

  He let out a yelp and buckled forward.

  I grabbed the doorway and yanked myself in.

  The ship was flailing in circles. All around was rain and wind and gray. Below was the inlet. The faded vehicles of Rainbow Village looked like model miniatures. And all of it weaved like the drunken view through Mayer’s eyes.

  I reached across him for the collective. With more strength than I’d expected, he pushed me away.

  “Mayer, pull yourself together. Get this ship down. You’re going to get us both killed.”

  “So what?” he gasped. “If I die, fine.” He jammed the collective forward. The ship dropped.

  My stomach lurched. The blue-brown of the inlet was coming up. “Mayer,” I yelled, “you won’t die. You’ll crash. It’ll snap your spine just like Liz’s. Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?”

  The color drained from his face.

  “Do you want to see your leg muscles waste away?” I yelled. “Do you want to lie in bed every morning and wait till someone comes so you can take a shit?”

  He didn’t move.

  “Do you want to wait for that person to shove a suppository up your ass?”

  I saw the terror in his eyes. I had him. It was a terror we shared. When I reached across him for the collective he didn’t move. I eased it back. The descent slowed, but the ship waffled. “Work the pedals,” I yelled.

  Automatically, he played one against the other.

  I pressed the collective toward center. The ship steadied some. Then I twisted the throttle and lowered the collective. The ship moved down. Beneath I could see the junk ships in the inlet; I could make out the windows in the patrol cars. I could see a tall guy in a uniform with dark hair blowing—Murakawa, and next to him Howard. And next to him the yellow blob of Herman Ott. I could …

  Suddenly Mayer yanked up the collective, smacking his shoulder into my face. The ship jerked up. With all my strength I pushed it down. The engine died.

  The ship hovered. Below, I could make out the fear on Howard’s face. We floated downward, like a balloon. Soft, cushioned.

  The jarring impact of the crash was a shock.

  CHAPTER 29

  IN THE DISTANCE I COULD hear a low moan. Beneath the Plexiglas bubble of the helicopter, the blue-brown water came up fast, slapping me, and the wave broke over Cousin John’s head as it slammed into the sandbar. I stared out through his eyes. I tried to wiggle his toes, to stretch his fingers. Nothing moved. His body lay leaden. I opened his mouth to scream, but the sound that came out was more like a moan.

  “Jill.”

  I could feel a hand on my arm. My eyes opened. I stared at the strange beige wall that wasn’t sand, at Howard, and then my eyes closed.

  I don’t know how many times I did that, running through that awful dream, waking up to find Howard, or Pereira, or Murakawa—but mostly
Howard—and falling back to sleep. When I woke for real a nurse told me it was Monday. I had been in the hospital nearly two days. My whole body ached, every joint, my head, neck, even my feet throbbed. I flexed my fingers and felt the pain. I wiggled my toes, paused, and wiggled them again to feel the pain once more. Tears of relief rolled down my cheeks.

  It was late in the morning when I woke again, flexed and wiggled again, sighed again with relief.

  Murakawa was sitting in the chair beside my bed. For once his skin looked gray and his eyes had none of their usual sharpness.

  “I guess I’ll live, huh?” I said.

  “Don’t worry, Smith, you’re tough. I’ve talked to the doctor. I’ve seen your x-rays. You didn’t even break anything. Most people in a crash like that would have snapped a femur or a tibia or crushed their ilium. But you’re fine.”

  “I don’t feel fine,” I said, ungraciously. “It hurts every time I breathe.”

  “Ah, bruised sternum. That’s common in an accident like yours, where you didn’t have a shoulder harness.” Murakawa glanced hungrily at my chart at the foot of the bed. “You’ve probably got a whiplash, and bruised your abdominal muscles and your transverse colon. And there’s always the danger of knee damage in an accident like this. The lateral collateral ligaments could—”

  “Enough, Murakawa. I can figure out myself what all I’ve bruised. But as long as it’s not permanent, it’s okay. Pain I can stand, admittedly not without complaint, but …” I started to shrug, but my neck hurt too much. “How’s Laurence Mayer?”

  “Not so hot. He did break a humerus and cracked the ribs at T-eight and nine. He’s sedated, but he’s not too out-of-it to talk. I made sure he knew his rights. He didn’t want a lawyer. He just wanted to talk.”

  I glanced past Murakawa to the window. The fog was just lifting. The room, I noticed, with relief, was private. No snoring roommates like Aura Summerlight had. “Did Mayer admit to the murders?”

  “He babbled about everything. He said how clever he was to come up with the scheme to turn Marina Vista into a spa, when all Butz could do was panic. He carried on about the two backers he found, the sports guys with the shady reputations, and how they put up sixty per cent of the funds. Seems the lure of good press from helping the handicapped wasn’t so great as the promise of a big return on their investment. He kept saying that they’d take care of him and of Butz, that they knew how to treat friends. He kept telling me what a jerk Ian Stuart was and that when Liz was complaining about him, and how his obsession with helicopters made him totally unreliable for anything else, she told him about Stuart’s ignition key being stuck in place and Stuart thinking he could protect his truck by locking the door. I must have heard that story five times.

  “And Brad Butz, Mayer kept calling him wishy-washy, and a fool, and saying how easy he was to push around. But when he started on Liz Goldenstern, he was really vicious. You’d have thought she maimed him, rather than the other way around. Oh, Mayer admitted killing her—he stood and watched her struggle as she drowned. To hear him tell it, he was perfectly justified because she ruined his life. And Butz, well according to Mayer, killing him was just a business necessity. He didn’t even enjoy that, though he didn’t seem like he minded it either. According to him, he was just doing what he had to.”

  “He promised her too much when he hit her, and when she wouldn’t let him out of it, he felt more and more abused.”

  Murakawa nodded. “I’ve known guys like that. I had a friend whose mechanic took his car for a test drive and totaled it. He felt awful. He promised to find her another car just like hers—it was a sixty-eight Volvo—you can’t get them like that anymore. He spent the first week looking all over the area. The second week he was waiting for replies. And after a month, he wouldn’t return her phone calls. Of course, that’s hardly the same as drowning Liz Goldenstern,” Murakawa added awkwardly.

  I nodded.

  “But you know, Jill, one thing I kept wondering about was Brad Butz. I mean here he was Liz’s lover, and they’re working together planning for Marina Vista, and all of a sudden he discovers the earthquake fissure. Well, why didn’t he tell her, instead of going to Mayer?”

  I sighed. “My guess—and I’d stake a lot on this one—is that he didn’t want her to think he was worse than malleable, that he was incompetent, too. If he’d told her, she would have said ‘Maybe you didn’t know about this earthquake trace, but you knew QuakeChek had those maps all along, why didn’t you check there sooner? Why did you let me spend all this time on a project that can’t be built?’ He would have hoped that Mayer, his former shrink, would be more understanding, and would find him a way out, like he had in therapy.”

  “Well, even if a judge throws out Mayer’s confession, we’ve still got him cold. We got warrants and went through his flat, and safe deposit box. We’ve got a copy of his confession to Liz that he was drunk when he hit her. And we found papers giving him ten percent of Marina Vista as a sort of finder’s fee. They’re signed by his two backers, who, it seems, put up sixty percent of the Marina Vista money.”

  “So we’re in good shape. What about the shoe thefts? Did he admit to masterminding them?”

  He shook his head. “I thought Greta Tennerud was behind those.”

  I turned halfway onto my side, creating a new line of pain. “I did too, for a while. But the case against her never quite held water. It would have been such an elaborate scheme just to raise the store’s profits a few hundred dollars. And there was no assurance the extra sales would have been credited to her. When the victims replaced their shoes, they wouldn’t have needed her expertise. They could deal with any sales clerk.”

  He nodded.

  “You know, Paul, I was suspicious of Greta having access to Laurence’s keys. But it worked the other way around. It was Laurence who made use of Greta. He waited in the back room of Racer’s Edge for Greta to finish work. While he was there there was nothing to stop him picking up the charge card copies from that day—Greta waited until the end of the day to stuff them in the manila envelope. The day’s receipts were there, so he could get the name from the credit card and the shoe size from the receipt.”

  “But why, Jill?” Connie Pereira came up beside Murakawa. She held up a bunch of tulips.

  “Thanks.”

  “Thank me later. Now go on about Mayer and the shoe thefts.”

  “Because he realized that sooner or later the ring would get broken and the trail would lead back to Aura Summerlight. Aura’s a transient. If she’d had an hour’s notice, she’d have been gone. It was only because she was overwhelmed by Liz’s murder that she didn’t spend her four fifty getting her truck in running order and head back to Santa Fe.”

  “But why would Mayer want to set her up?” Connie asked.

  “To undermine Liz, and to set her up. He’s a bright guy. He knew we’d conclude that Aura didn’t orchestrate the thefts. Once we’d passed on her, the trail would have pointed to Liz. Maybe we’d never have gotten proof, but we would have hassled her. And even if we dropped the case for lack of evidence, the stigma would be there. The people on those city boards and committees she dealt with, they’d wonder if she really was a thief.”

  “But wasn’t he afraid Aura Summerlight would have ratted on him? … Oh,” Murakawa said, as the answer occurred to him. “Who would believe her against him, huh?”

  “And if she felt pressured, she would have left. He could have given her money for a plane ticket.”

  Pereira nodded, knowingly. Looking down at the tulips in her hand, she said, “Let me get these in water.” She pulled the rolling bed table around. “Okay if I add them to these daffodils?”

  “Sure.” I said. “Who brought those? I don’t remember anyone with them.”

  “Jill, your friends have been in and out of here ever since you arrived. It’s been nearly two days since the accident. Howard didn’t even go home to sleep.”

  “Are the daffodils from him?”

 
; Connie plucked a note from the styrofoam container.

  “Read,” I said.

  “There’s no name. It just says ‘from a friend of a friend.’ Who’s that?”

  I smiled. “A secret admirer.”

  “Come on.”

  “No,” I said. “You see me with unsightly bruises, with my hair matted to my head. Murakawa’s been speculating about the prognosis of bones and ligaments I didn’t know I had. I’m entitled to a few secrets.”

  A nurse walked in and planted herself at the foot of the bed. Smiling at Murakawa and Pereira, she said, “So you’re back again. I’m glad she’s awake this time.” To me, she added, “You’ve got good friends here.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to throw you two out now. It’s time to scrub her down.”

  “Okay,” Pereira said, “but, Jill, make the most of this rest. You’ve got a lot of paperwork waiting when you get back to the station.”

  “When do you think that’ll be?” I asked, aiming the question at the nurse.

  But it was Murakawa who said, “A couple of weeks anyway. Maybe more.”

  “Inspector Doyle said he’d send someone out to get your statements on both cases. You can believe they’ll be here before a couple of weeks!” Pereira added, as they left.

  When I woke the next time, the light was on. The sky outside the window was darkening. Howard was sprawled in the chair next to the bed, his eyes half-closed, his chin nearly on his chest.

  “Howard, how long have you been here?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. What time is it, five? How many hours is that? But I haven’t been here all the time. I had a trap set at University and San Pablo this afternoon. Took me a month and a half to get it set.”

  I smiled. My cheeks hurt. “And you thought you should be there to snap it, huh?”

  “I figured you’d understand.”

  I smiled again, carefully. “Yeah.”

  He put his hand over mine. His jaw tightened. “You know, Jill, when that copter came down, I could see you through the glass. I don’t ever want to see something like that again.”