Sudden Exposure Read online

  “Well, come rescue Howard’s papers before he finds them cast out in a box with his boxer shorts on top.”

  I added the last two sentences to the report, deposited it in the team tray for the sergeant to approve and headed downstairs to the tiny office that Howard and I had shared only last week. Then I had kidded him about his upcoming position as patrol sergeant. While he’d race around to check on 415s and car stops in the night, I would take over his old desk and cover it with reports, forms, graphs, and notes and have every item of every homicide case at hand. It would be Homicide in Heaven, I’d told him. If heaven were an eight by twelve institutional green room with one window that never admitted sun. The office was barely big enough for one person. Presumably it would suit Brucker. He’d probably already hung the framed news photo of himself shaking Ronald Reagan’s hand. The accompanying article proclaimed that private citizen Reagan had stopped in Sacramento to encourage the troops. The picture, the talk of the station, would make a change from the notices and memos Howard and I were so familiar with.

  We had had our desks facing opposite walls; when he’d rolled his desk chair out, I’d had to slide mine in. And when we’d both turned around to talk, we’d shifted in choreographed moves perfected after a number of minor crashes. If he’d stretched out his long, long legs—the man is six foot six after all—he’d had to angle them toward the far corner of my desk. It had taken months to get the routine down. We’d both grumbled about the tiny space. But after a week on patrol with not even a desk of my own, I really missed it. I pushed open the door.

  It stuck halfway. I braced my palm against it and shoved.

  The light came on.

  “Surprise!” Connie called out.

  “Welcome to the Wacky World of Patrol,” Paul Murakawa said, grinning. Leonard was there, and Acosta. And of course, Howard, all squeezed into the tiny room.

  “We were going to get you a box of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, but, well, you know, stuff’s not too fresh this hour of night. So …” Pereira passed me a can of Calistoga water, orange flavored.

  “So how’s it going, Smith?” Leonard, the old man of patrol, who had been on the Telegraph Avenue beat longer than I’d been with the department, had commandeered my old desk chair. I boosted myself onto my old desk—Brucker’s now—next to Paul Murakawa. Connie Pereira had taken “her” seat on the end of Howard’s desk, kicked open the bottom drawer, and propped her feet there. She patted the spot next to her for Acosta, and, I noted, he wasted no time taking it.

  A smile settled on my face as I looked at my friends. Hanging around the station after a ten-hour shift was a sizable gift on their parts. And, I thought looking at them, in this case a gift from the best-looking guys in patrol. Tall, sleek, Mercurio Acosta looked like he should be holding a French cigarette between his fingers. Paul Murakawa, at thirty-two, still abashedly brushed a swatch of thick black hair off his forehead before he spoke and would probably always look like the all-American kid. Howard had his head of red curls, his lantern chin, and his “something’s up” grin, and Leonard …well, Leonard wasn’t going to be doing beefcake calendars, but he was still in with the best in my book.

  “I suppose Howard”—I nodded at him as he pulled out his chair and stretched his legs at the required angle—“told you about Sam Johnson, the nouveau entrepreneur.”

  Leonard shook his shaggy head. The man looked like the oldest bear in the circus. The joke around the station was the department should get him a funny hat and transfer him to bike patrol. “I wondered what happened to Sam. Haven’t seen him on the Avenue in months. He even skipped the last People’s Park confront. To tell the truth, I almost miss the guy.”

  “Loses the pizzazz without him?” Acosta asked, wiping off the top of his can before he drank.

  Leonard nodded, but before he could go on, Howard leaned back in his chair and said, “Do you remember the Persian Gulf protest on San Pablo?”

  Leonard nodded—no department-related maneuver escaped him. But Acosta frowned questioningly. That was enough for Howard.

  “The Persian Gulf protest was vintage Sam Johnson. I’ve got to hand it to him, pain in the ass that it was. He gets fifty of his disciples to sit down in the intersection of San Pablo and University. Twenty after five on a Friday afternoon. Traffic’s pouring off the freeway, all four lanes of both streets are full. Calls are flooding the station like every driver in town’s got a cellular phone—and this was back when every driver didn’t. I go flying out of here, get in the car code three.”

  Pereira thrust one hand on top of her head for the light and the other in front of her mouth, more of a bull horn than a siren, but no one quibbled.

  “I get to University and it’s stopped dead. Up here, a mile from the site. It hasn’t been five minutes since the first call! I drive on the grass divider as far as I can then I just give up, leave the car, and run the rest of the way. “Course when I get to San Pablo, Johnson’s crew is long gone. Traffic jam lasted another two hours.”

  “But you knew it was Johnson,” Murakawa put in.

  “Oh, yeah. It had his touch. But what could I do? Blocking an intersection is a traffic infraction. Believe me, citizens who’ve just spent hours sitting in their cars aren’t anxious to sign a citizen’s arrest form so they can repeat the experience in municipal court.”

  “When the press guys asked Sam why he’d felt free to inconvenience half of Berkeley,” Leonard said, “he did the tried-and-true thing—he blamed George Bush!”

  We had all heard the story before, but we laughed anyway.

  Pereira and Acosta smiled and drank as if their Calistoga cans were operated by one switch. But Leonard held his thoughtfully. “Yeah, Sam Johnson really believes he’s … well, not making a better world as much as hacking away at the bad one. But the thing is”—now he was talking to me—“what you see is not what you get with him. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis.”

  “What are you telling me, Leonard?”

  “To be careful, Smith. Sam could have gone over to the good life, but maybe not. Maybe he’s got one last, desperate move in mind. And if he does, it’ll be a beaut. Don’t get lulled by Howard’s prank tales. Or Johnson’s Puckish charm. The man’s like an IRA terrorist. One minute he’s buying you a pint and filling your ears with blarney about freedom for the masses. But after he’s charmed you—just like that—he’ll step outside and blow up your car.” He let that sink in, then added, “Johnson’s got dangerous connections. No proof, but we know he’s been involved in sabotage, a fire bombing that left one woman with scars all over her leg. He started in the last of the Vietnam era working the follow-up protest to the Golden State Savings holdup, the one where one of the customers died after falling off the curb.”

  I nodded. “But he wasn’t involved.”

  “Nah. The two robbers—Wilson ‘Red Fist’ Wright and Timothy Anderson—got caught outside. The driver—Mary Lou, Mary Jane, Mary Something Nash—had the smarts to pull into traffic and disappear. But Johnson didn’t have anything to do with it, because if he had, the operation wouldn’t have been such an amateur deal. It would have gone off with style. The point is, Smith, Johnson’s been around this stuff and, well …” He trailed off, suddenly realizing he’d made the point twice before. “The guy’s like Howard, but he’s not Howard.”

  Pereira came to his rescue. “You guys see the box of Smith’s stuff plunked in the middle of the squad room table? How could you miss it, huh? Brucker’s to thank for that. Couldn’t wait another moment to fill all the drawers here. He’s like a two-timed wife tossing the lech’s clothes on the porch.”

  Acosta shook his head.

  “What the hell was—”

  I cut Howard off. “It’s no big deal. Still, I can’t let that kind of disrespect ride.” Acosta, Pereira, and Howard nodded. “I’ll call him on it.” After a moment the trio nodded again.

  But Leonard just sat.

  “Leonard?”

  “I don’t want to tell you
to let things slide, Smith. But Brucker …” He looked toward the door and then shrugged as if he’d just remembered it was nearly three in the morning and there wasn’t likely to be anyone in this end of the building but us. “Be careful with Brucker. He’s a good cop, does his job, pulls his weight, but the thing is you always get the feeling he’s holding something back. He’s an okay guy and you end up talking to him, not watching what you say, and then six months later what you said comes up against you. By then it could have come by four different routes. Maybe Brucker had nothing to do with it. But you wonder.”

  Acosta nodded. “The guy’s got a way of getting what he wants. That post in Sacramento, that was a plum, part of the esteemed research team doing a standard study on serial killers.”

  “Brucker’d worked Homicide but he didn’t know more than Eggs or Jackson,” Howard said. “But Eggs and Jackson didn’t apply.”

  “I heard them bitching about it afterwards,” I said. “By the time they heard about the job, Brucker was in Sacramento. Not that either of them seriously wanted it.”

  “But they wouldn’t have gotten it.” Murakawa said it softly, and with such uncharacteristic bitterness that it took a moment for the words to register. I realized then that he hadn’t spoken at all before. Now he leaned forward, brushing at the hair on his forehead twice even though it hadn’t had time to fall back down between swipes. “I never mentioned this to you, Smith, but when Brucker applied for the Homicide slot, I put my name in, too. This was before the slot you got came up. Before the leave I took. But then I really wanted the Homicide job. I figured I had a good chance, until the interview with Inspector Doyle. The first thing Doyle asked me was how interested I was in chiropractic school.”

  I nodded.

  “No, Smith. Then, I wasn’t talking about chiropractics. Then I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone but Brucker, and that was just because he found a folder in my car. I wasn’t even seriously considering it then. And maybe my plans weren’t the deciding factor.”

  “Brucker told him?”

  “Brucker denied it. Maybe he didn’t.” But everything about Murakawa’s posture said Brucker did. “And of course, after that I did think seriously about chiropractic school, and I did go on leave and take enough science labs to find out I didn’t want to be a doctor. So I can’t make much of a case, right?”

  “Still …” I said.

  Murakawa shrugged and brushed at his hair. “I’m not asking for sympathy. Things happen. It’s just, well, I wanted you to know.”

  “Right,” I said, leaning back against Brucker’s wall. “I guess I’d better stop worrying about getting myself back into Homicide, and get used to Patrol.” But I could feel my throat tightening. Howard rested his hand on my thigh and gave it a rub.

  “Next time the sergeant’s test comes up …” Murakawa’s voice trailed off.

  I didn’t comment on how many years that would be. “Look, forget I said anything. I made my decision, and I’m okay with it.”

  “You’ve got a three-day weekend,” Pereira said. “That’s the joy of Patrol. Why don’t you guys go to Tahoe?”

  Howard shifted uncomfortably. “Can’t.”

  “Why not?” Connie insisted. Connie had been in this office so often, perched on Howard’s desk, scarfing down half my doughnut, finishing the coffee I’d intended to finish myself, that she’d assumed squatters rights in both our lives.

  “The downstairs tenant moved out. I’ve got to spackle his walls and repaint before I can rent his room.”

  “Howard,” Connie continued, “it’s not your house. You’re just a tenant there. You slave over that place like it was the family mansion.”

  Connie’s words could have been mine, had been mine more times than I was comfortably remembering.

  But it was harder for Howard to deal with them from her. I rested my head against the wall.

  “Someday the house will be mine and—”

  “Yeah, sure, if the landlord is dumb enough to sell when he’s got a tenant handling the shit work and spending all his free time increasing his investment.”

  “Connie, I just—”

  “Howard, you are obsessed. You’re so obsessed you can’t even take a break to enjoy your free weekend.”

  As one Leonard, Acosta, and Murakawa shrank back; things were getting too domestic for them. I was beginning to feel protective of Howard myself, but I could hardly jump in on his side when everything Pereira was saying she’d heard from me.

  “Anyway,” Howard said, “I can’t go to Tahoe because I’m going on loan to Fresno next week.”

  But Pereira was not to be deterred. “And how are you planning to spend your last days here with your live-in lover?”

  I expected Howard to tell her that wasn’t for her virgin ears. But clearly he’d had enough. “Connie, whatever you think, the room needs to be painted, and done before I go.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then—”

  “Howard, you are obsessed.”

  Howard looked at me.

  There are moments in life when Truth flashes clear and bright. This was one of them. “Howard,” I said, “do you remember that fifty-one fifty call you got when you were first on patrol years ago, the guy who had kept every newspaper he’d ever gotten stacked in his house so he’d never lose a fact of his life?”

  Howard tapped his finger on my thigh. He was considering the argument more seriously than I had expected. I was impressed. I was just about to tell him so when I spotted the hint of a smile. He turned to me as if we were alone in the office. “Jill, I realize you don’t understand. It makes you uncomfortable to have your name on the house lease. You’d rather cut off your foot than actually own a home. You can’t even bring yourself to think what it’s like to feel as I do about this place.” There was no resentment in his words; they were just statements of fact. But statements that were clearly leading somewhere. “You once made a point of showing me how difficult it is for someone to really understand a situation he never wants to face.”

  I nodded. Leonard, Murakawa, Acosta, and even Pereira didn’t know what he was referring to, but none of them interrupted. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d wanted Howard to realize what it was like to be a woman confined by society’s proscriptions—don’t walk alone after dark; don’t wear seductive clothes; never stop in a bar alone; always, always be careful—because if you break these rules and lure some man to attack you, it will be your fault. I’d engineered a sting of my own so that he, the six-foot-six cop, used to walking where he wanted with gun and baton could really feel bound by the walls inside which women have lived. I’d shown him, but the manipulation of that sting had left him with a debt unpaid. Now he was calling it in. I had no choice but to say, “Okay.”

  “You want to know what it’s like to give up something I care about as much as this house?” he said.

  I didn’t, of course. Murakawa and the rest of them really didn’t want to know. I could see Connie Pereira behind Howard and her expression said she would have given up almost anything just to get out of the room. “Okay.”

  Howard lifted his hand off my leg. “I’ll stop working on the house for the rest of the month, Jill, if you will make a similar commitment.”

  I’d have been better off dealing with Sam Johnson. Not for nothing was Howard known as the king of sting. On the spur of the moment he could come up with great gotchas. Given a week’s preparation time, he created cons worthy of Hollywood. He had had over a year to lick his wounds from my sting, to recall how easily he’d fallen in with it, to grasp vainly for the signs he should have seen, the things he should have done, to take to heart how the sting had changed things between us. To plot his revenge. With a year’s prep time Howard could make the Trojan horse look like a lawn flamingo. I squeaked out, “Just what kind of commitment do you want me to make?”

  “Give up junk food.”

  “Junk food?” Relief washed over me. Howard was letting me off easy. It would be no big d
eal to adjust my food intake for the rest of the month. Food was not a big item in my life. I ate what I could grab. So I’d grab something different.

  “Starting now.”

  “Okay.” Ridiculously easy, but I wasn’t about to argue. I leaned down and gave Howard a kiss. “Okay, leave your work clothes in the closet. Tahoe, here we come. Hey, we could even drive partway tonight. I’m getting a second wind, how about you? I can make us a thermos of coffee. And there’s still some pizza in the fridge, right? We can eat that—”

  Howard grinned. “I don’t think so.”

  Chapter 6

  AFTER FORTY, THEY SAY, dimmed light is a boon. In the case of Howard’s house, that was an understatement. The neighbors to the south had already complained about the sagging porch off the corner bedroom that looked like the top of an antique canopy bed. At least they didn’t have to worry about a noisy neighbor sitting out there at night listening to the A’s game. (The last tenant who had used that balcony was a large man who did, in fact, sunbathe with the A’s. He went through the floor one bright afternoon, sort of a pop fly unto himself.)

  We had had a call from the neighbor to the north about the decrepit garage, and one from the guy across the street about the condition of the wood shake roof. But we already knew the shingles were thin, old, cracked, and separated. We had discovered that during the previous rainy season.

  The six-bedroom house had many flaws. But at night, in the softening glow of the moon, it stood dark and appealing under the graceful umbrella of the jacaranda tree in front, crowned by the evergreen in the back.

  At 3:30 A.M. the tenants—an increasingly motley array Howard had been forced to accept for need of rent—were most likely asleep, or at least in their rooms. Howard and I had decided to leave for Tahoe in the morning. Now all I could think of was food. I headed inside.

  So I wouldn’t have pizza. Like as not, the remains of last night’s pepperoni and black olive had been devoured hours ago when the night was young and the tenants prowling. But just yesterday I’d bought a gallon of chocolate marzipan ice cream, the kind with swaths of dark chocolate cutting the sweetness of the almond paste. I’d hidden it behind the ice trays. Some of that was bound to be left.