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  I groaned. “You know, I’d forgotten about her needing a cane. Somehow it makes her dying seem even worse. Like she didn’t get enough life, and now even what she had wasn’t up to par. What happened to her? Did she injure her leg?”

  “Dunno if it was her leg or hip or some combination. Whatever, it was from an auto accident way before I came on the force.”

  He laughed.

  I pulled loose and turned to face him. “You’re amused by car crashes? Or that there was life before the department was graced with your presence?”

  Howard pushed himself up, leaned against the wall (where a headboard might have been)—his settling-in-for-a-talk position. I wriggled up next to him.

  “I’ll bet, Jill”—the grin returned to his lantern jaw—“Madeleine wasn’t much help once she realized your canyon perp might be the same one who’s hassling meter maids.”

  “I didn’t get around to telling her that.”

  “Damn good thing.”

  “Why? Why would she care, Howard?”

  “Because, Jill, before they had blue curbs and handicapped stickers, Madeleine Riordan got her car towed so often she almost sold it. She said taking cabs would be a whole lot cheaper than supporting a car, an insurance company, and the city, too. She said she’d use the money she saved to have a life-size picture made and sent to Elgin Tiress, since he’d become accustomed to seeing her so often.”

  Elgin Tiress, vulture of the expired meter. “Or, more accurately, seeing her car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is there one citizen in all of Berkeley’s driving population that Tiress hasn’t swooped down on? For the amount I’ve paid in tickets outside the station—all from Tiress—I could get a new car.”

  He laughed. “Jill, prices have gone up a bit since you bought your bug. Maybe you could get a new driver’s seat.”

  “Maybe.”

  Howard reached over and draped his right arm over my shoulder, and with the left caught the blankets before they fell. It was a good save, but then we sat talking like this three or four nights a week, and Howard had had a fair amount of experience. “You know, Jill, I’ll really be sorry to see her go. She pulled some great saves. I would have loved to know the mind that created them.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No way. She was hardly a woman you’d invite out for a beer and shoptalk.” He brushed his chin against the top of my head. “Not like some.”

  Beer and shoptalk had sustained us during the tense year of my divorce and several increasingly tense years afterward while we both tried to avoid the dangers of an affair with the person who shared an office. We had discussed cases so long and in such minute detail we could have applied to be Department historians. Sublimation in crime! There are cases I’ll never remember without thinking about Howard’s long firm thighs.

  I leaned into his body, feeling the warmth of his skin, willing that warmth into my own. And seeing Madeleine Riordan, clutching the back of her dog. She had a house, a husband; what could have made her leave them for a place like Canyonview where she was so alone? “Howard, she kept me there tonight—because she didn’t want to be alone.”

  His hand tightened on my arm but he didn’t say anything.

  “She asked me to come back tomorrow night. I had the feeling she was deciding whether to tell me something about the hostage operation. You think?”

  He drummed a finger on my arm for a minute before saying, “She’s caused us a lot of problems over the years. She got me more than once. But she was the best at it, the subtle sting. I just … well … I hate to see her sunk so low she’d sell out for half an hour of company.”

  I nodded.

  He squeezed me to him playfully. “But one thing you can count on: if Madeleine Riordan does give you something, it’ll be damned good. You better make sure you’ve got a cell waiting. By this time tomorrow night you’ll have your perp looking out through the bars.”

  CHAPTER 6

  A GOOD START TO the week is getting up at six fifteen, having a cup of Peet’s Coffee, Viennese Blend, with Howard, and then whipping through a mile of Albany Pool water like a yellowfin heading for open seas. An average Monday begins closer to seven o’clock. A sip from Howard’s mug. Five eighths of a mile with the speed of a sea turtle in danger of becoming soup. This Monday’s entrance came at closer to seven twenty. No time for coffee. No swim. No movement faster than a clam’s. No sight of Howard at all.

  I left my car—parked illegally on the street—and raced through the front door of the station. Before I was halfway up the steps to reception, I heard a low rumble from the second floor. It sounded like the distant rumble you hear seconds before an earthquake. Before you realize what it is, the earth is shaking like crazy.

  “Behind me,” Sabek at reception said. “You’ll love it, Smith.”

  I raced through the double doors and around the corner to Records and almost smacked into Clayton Jackson, my fellow homicide detective. Jackson was at the back of half a dozen guys crowded into the hallway. He was looking ahead, grinning. When he spotted me, he stepped aside.

  I elbowed my way past Murakawa, Al “Eggs” Eggenburger, the third homicide detective, and wedged in next to Pereira before I could see the cause of the shouting and realize why the guys had been such utter gentlemen letting me move to the front. They were all enjoying the scene, but it was true no one was going to get the kick out of it I was. There, barrel chest to barrel chest, were my two least-favorite colleagues. Grayson stood, his dark shaggy eyebrows shaking, that thick droopy moustache that had been unchanged for as long as I’d known him, unable to conceal the snarl lines of that hidden mouth beneath. “The hostage negotiation, last night, in Cerrito Canyon. Maybe you heard of it?” Sarcasm dripped from Grayson’s voice. Down onto the red-tufted top of the head of Elgin Tiress.

  “Your car was outside here.” Tiress wasn’t shouting. I’d never heard him raise his whiny voice. He stood, arms crossed, stocky little body braced like a fireplug waiting to be parked in front of, or, more likely, pissed on. Either way he would win—there’d be a violation for him to ticket.

  “Of course my car was here,” Grayson shouted. “You don’t drive across Berkeley without lights and siren, not if you want to move. If I’d taken my own car, I’d still be sitting in traffic.” It was something of an exaggeration, but not so great a one it caused any of the onlookers to protest.

  “You left your car by a green curb.” Elgin Tiress’s voice was like a jabbing finger. Tiress was a head shorter than Grayson, but that voice of his was jabbing right in Grayson’s face.

  “A hostage could have died, Tiress.”

  “Green curb means twenty minutes. Your car was there three hours and fifty minutes.” Elgin Tiress was not known as Tight Ass for nothing. “You’re lucky I only gave you one ticket.”

  Grayson’s hand tightened into a fist. “Can’t you get it through your head, you … I was out on a life or death case!”

  Tiress puffed up his small, rounded chest, looked directly ahead—at Grayson’s chin—and said, “Tell it to the judge.”

  “Too big for your fucking little britches,” Grayson muttered as Tiress made—in small but rapid steps—for the door.

  The rest of us headed for the meeting room and slid into chairs just as Chief Larkin walked in. The chief attended Morning Meeting only sporadically. His presence was rarely a good sign. I figured things couldn’t get worse.

  Jackson pushed me a cup of coffee. “I don’t know if this’ll do it, bad as you’re looking, Smith,” he muttered. “It’s good, but it doesn’t resurrect.” A couple years ago I’d made a deal with Jackson’s son: swim lessons for morning coffee. Darnell was away at college now, but during the swap days Jackson had gotten hooked on Peet’s, and now he filled a thermos every morning. It was a practice I wasn’t about to question.

  Now the chief settled into his chair directly across from me, his gray suit and signature red tie looking crisper than anything in the room but his
own self. Irritably fingering a clutch of messages, he waited while the hot car list circulated, and representatives of the various details reported the last twenty-four hours’ activities: tools stolen on Parker Street, stereos on Sixty-second, Hopkins, Fairview, Sixty-seventh, and Mabel; assaults with gun, stick, feet, bottle, metal pipe, and a water balloon; commercial burglaries: telephone from an auto sales shop, fax machine from a copy shop, and from a cleaner, cash and every suede item in the store.

  Chief Larkin listened, pensively rubbing his messages between thumb and forefinger. I began to doubt the words would survive long enough for him to read them. I should have been so lucky.

  When the regular daily business was over, Larkin leaned forward and said, “The Berkeley Police force is becoming a laughingstock. It’s bad enough we have some crazy fixated on Parking Enforcement. This one loony’s running all over town stealing marking wands out of the Cushmans like they were free samples.”

  Cushmans, the little golf-cartlike vehicles Parking Enforcement used, had metal roofs and zip-up sides. Meter minders like Elgin Tiress were too busy popping out and depositing tickets to fasten the siding each time. We all knew that; no one felt called upon to remind the chief.

  Larkin went on. “He’s crashing into the Cushmans. He’s stealing them. He’s rolling one into a pile of manure, depositing another in a Dumpster—we had to get a crane to get that one back out!—and now stealing traffic tickets and helmets.”

  I’d been around long enough not to interrupt his tirade. Howard had too, but as a Vice and Substance Abuse detective he knew he wasn’t going to be mashed with the fallout from this. He said, “Helmets?”

  “Stole a helmet right out of the meter vehicle. Left the officer in violation of the law!” City governments across the state had applauded a new state law mandating helmets on motorcyclists. They’d been less pleased to discover that meter cart drivers came under the same classification. And downright distressed when informed they couldn’t send out those drivers to check on meters, much less generate new revenue when those meters expired, until the drivers were legally helmeted. “Meter maid had to borrow a helmet from a Cycle Patrol guy on vacation. Thing was so big it floated on her head. Took us a week to replace hers.” Chief Larkin’s face wasn’t the color of his blood-red tie, not yet.

  Celia Eckey from Parking Enforcement glared. She was a short, comfortably plump gray-haired woman who made you think of Mom. Usually it was Mom with cookies and milk, or Mom who wanted to hug you and make you well. There was a reason Parking Enforcement sent her to Morning Meeting rather than the more senior Elgin Tiress. Parking Enforcement was aware of the odious Tiress’s reputation.

  Eckey stood up to her full five feet three, placed both hands on hipbones, and announced, “This shit can’t go on!”

  Police officers are not shocked by much, and certainly not by common four-letter words. But from Celia Eckey no one expected more than a “Pshaw.”

  Eckey glared around the table. “We get more shit than the rest of you put together. The citizens of this town, they think we make up all these rules: If you live in Area D, you can’t park outside your house unless you pay for an Area D permit. Your parents come to visit and they can’t park there unless they get a permit. You get them a temporary permit and put it on their car and still they get a ticket because you forgot to write in the year; you’ve just got the month and day. What do you do? You scream at Parking Enforcement: ‘Hey you idiot, we all know what year this is! Do you have a quota? Do you get a bonus for stupid tickets!’ ” She fanned another glare around the table, daring anyone to take her on. I felt like a four-year-old caught with cookie dough on her hand.

  But Howard, whose charm had insulated him from normal rebuke, stretched his long arms forward. He was grinning. “So, Eckey, what do you tell him? Why do you insist on the year?”

  “We do it for little boys like you, Howard. College boys think it’s a big joke to save their temporary stickers for an entire year so they can use them again.”

  “Or sell them,” Howard said. “Remember the black market the undergrads were running with them? Good little profit maker until they made them the prize in a Homecoming Weekend lottery. The gift for someone who’s got everything, and no place to park it!”

  We, who get no more mercy than any other citizen when it comes to parking in this the tenth most crowded city in the nation, laughed. In an hour some of us would be running out to move our cars from their two-hour spots here in Preferential Parking Area C, in which we were neither the blessed residents nor commercial tenants. Organized officers like “Eggs” and Acosta worked in pairs, swapping their spots. The rest of us hunted and grumbled. And, as Eckey would have been glad to announce, bitched at Parking Enforcement. Berkeley is not a city prone to offer its public employees special privileges.

  Eckey was not laughing. “Permits are all yellowed; edges are curling with age; and these kids think we’re not going to catch on!” She shook her head. “I’d like to send every one of them to his room without supper.”

  Everyone laughed harder, and even Eckey joined in. Until Chief Larkin’s cough brought us back to business. “Eckey, how long has the perp been operating?”

  “No way to say, sir. Much harassment as we get, it’s hard to spot a new strain.” The captain started to speak but Eckey was not to be denied. “Accuse a guy of murder and he says he didn’t do it. But you stick a ticket under his wiper and you get a bunch of excuses that would shame a politician.”

  “Eckey—”

  “You ticket a Californian’s automobile; it’s the next thing to spitting in his hot tub.” Before Chief Larkin could try again, Eckey said, “We’ve seen it all, sir. And there’s no way to tell how long this perp has been doing penny-ante stuff. Eight marking wands have been stolen in the last month.

  “In the last three weeks,” Eckey went on, “we’ve had keys stolen from one vehicle, wipers from another twisted in knots, another one he stole the keys and left it parked going west on Shattuck.”

  It took everyone two beats to register that Shattuck was a north-south thoroughfare.

  “We’ve had the Cushman in the manure, the Cushman in the Dumpster, and at five to six last Friday, with five goddamned minutes to go before the weekend, Glassborough jumped back into his Cushman and landed on a bag of fresh fecal canine matter.”

  “Even the dogs are after you, huh, Eckey?”

  Eckey glared at Jackson.

  Neither Eckey nor Chief Larkin mentioned the overriding indignity to the Department. All of his acts might have been added up to a minor nuisance if the perp had committed his vile deeds in secret. He hadn’t. He’d done his damage on main streets, and worse yet, he’d alerted the media. Before Parking Enforcement arrived at the scene, a reporter from The Daily Californian was already there. Then it was the Daily Cal and the East Bay Express. Next he included KPFA radio. Then a TV station.

  Chief Larkin held up this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. A page 3 headline announced: THE BABE RUTH OF THE METER GAME. “Listen to this,” the chief began. “ ‘He tips his hat to a meter truck and before befuddled police can find him, he’s created Coq au Cart. Only in Berkeley,’ it goes on …” The chief was shaking the paper. “What it goes on to is to announce how he made monkeys of thirty officers last night by luring our Hostage Negotiation Team into Cerrito Canyon to find the kind of dummy you can order from catalogs you wouldn’t show your wife, stolen shoes, and half the city’s parking tickets!” By now Larkin’s tie looked pale in comparison to his face. He glared across at me. “The perp’s a goddamned folk hero. Our Parking Enforcement officers get enough hassles without the whole town rooting for their enemy. They can’t be citing vehicles if they’re watching their rears all day.”

  “If we don’t stop this,” Eckey insisted, “we’ll have half the citizens in Berkeley trotting off with their meters empty, hoping the perp swipes their ticket so they can look at the nightly news and say, ‘Hey, man, there’s my car!’ ”

&nb
sp; Larkin turned to the inspector. “Doyle, you were in charge of the hostage negotiation. Smith’s taking paper on it.”

  Doyle moved his head so infinitesimally that only the loose flesh under his chin nodded. “She’ll be doing the follow-up.”

  I didn’t realize I had groaned aloud until I heard the laughter around me.

  Diplomacy kept me from asking Chief Larkin who had been heading up the Parking Enforcement investigation so far. If there were no centralized command, that would reflect poorly on the Department, i.e., on the chief himself. I didn’t want to be the one to bring that oversight to his attention. But if there had been an officer in charge, formerly in charge, I didn’t want to flag his inadequacy, particularly since his attitude could mean the difference between taking over the investigation and moving forward, or starting from scratch, interviewing the same witnesses and victims, who’d be even less pleased to answer the same questions again, questions asked by a police force they would have now labeled incompetent.

  So it wasn’t till the end of the meeting that one of the guys in Traffic Detail took me aside to tell me that my predecessor on what had become known as the Traffic Control Caper was none other than Grayson.

  When I looked around for Grayson, he was stalking out of the room. And before I could call to him, Inspector Doyle came up. “Smith, how’re you doing on the hostage reports?” Doyle’s graying red hair was grayer than red. His skin was battleship gray, and the circles under his eyes charcoal. He looked like he’d been up not just as late as most of us, but the entire night, which meant that he looked slightly more exhausted than normal.