Too Close to the Edge Read online

  “Did you try artificial respiration?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember … anything … but holding her. The next thing, I was here, and telling Ian. You can ask him if you don’t believe me. He’ll tell you.”

  “How did the body get back to the ground?” Murakawa had found Liz’s face and shoulders in the water.

  “I don’t know. I told you.”

  If she dropped Liz back into the bay, it was no wonder she blocked that out of her mind. I said, “What time was this?”

  “Time? I don’t know.”

  “Okay.” The dispatcher would have a record of the call. “Did you see anyone near the body when you were walking toward it?”

  “No. I told you I wanted to be by myself.”

  “Anyone who looked like they were walking or running away?”

  “No.”

  “Hiding behind something? Doing anything odd? Take your time. Try to see the area like it was before you came across the body.”

  She pulled her fingers off the steering wheel, arched them, then crossed her arms over the wheel. The cape hung like a red-flowered tent. “No.”

  I couldn’t decide about her lack of emotion. Was she in shock? People lived in Rainbow Village for a number of reasons. Mental problems was one. Aura Summerlight looked like she was on the edge, psychologically. She might well not have noticed anything unusual near Liz’s body. There might have been nothing to notice, or there might have been plenty she was too preoccupied to see.

  “You said you know why she was killed.”

  She continued to gaze through the windshield. “I don’t know, like God told me, but it sure makes sense. Like he said, when something bad happens down here who gets the blame? Us here in the village, that’s who. You cops, you’re going to be on us now, right?”

  “He?” I asked, assuming she didn’t mean God.

  “Anything that makes us in the village look bad, makes it easier for the guy who’s going to put up that high-rise, right? He’s been bugging the city to get us out. See where he was tonight.”

  “Like who said?” I insisted. “Who told you that?”

  For the first time she looked at me, her dark eyes wide. I had the sense of having broken through the face she had chosen, however consciously or unconsciously, to show me. “Ian,” she said so softly I had to strain to hear.

  “Who is Ian?”

  “Ian Stuart. He lives here, in the pick-up by the fence, the one with the hot tub on the back.”

  “Is he blond?”

  She nodded stiffly. She was shrinking back behind her facade. I could have tried to reassure her, but I didn’t have time. Murakawa could get her statement. I needed to finish with her and find Ian Stuart, the blond man with the hot tub, the “maniac” who, only this morning, had threatened to hold Brad Butz’s head under water until he drowned.

  “Where is his truck?”

  “His truck?” She shrank back against the door. “Across by the fence. It’s the one with the tarp on the back.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BLOND “MANIAC” IAN Stuart was not in his truck, certainly not in his drained hot tub, and nowhere else in Rainbow Village. According to two witnesses, he had stalked back inside the village after his fracas with Brad Butz that morning and harangued his neighbors long enough to disperse all but those who hoped for a ride downtown. His truck was one of the few in running order. When the intent of his audience became clear, he had stalked off. “We could have taken his truck and driven right past him into town,” a white-haired man in a pea jacket had laughed. “He got the key stuck in the ignition. We all knew that. He changed the door lock. Guess he never heard of broken windows.” He laughed again.

  It was after three in the morning. Canvassing Rainbow Village, the cocktail lounges, the Marriott, and the marina, as well as checking through the newly landscaped park that skirted the bay, had taken hours, even with more patrol officers than the Watch Commander wanted to release. The only people we had turned up were two men in sleeping bags settled in under the junipers, and they had been rousted out enough times before to be considered regulars.

  I walked back to the water’s edge and stood just outside the cordon. The tide was lower. If Liz Goldenstern had landed in the same spot now she would have been alive. If she had come here later … I could feel myself being pulled into the “if only’s” that I had seen relatives and friends of victims do so often. I’d watched them leap into those brief respites of delusion where, for a moment, the dead daughter or cousin had never driven off or the husband hadn’t gone looking for the guy who owed him money. For that moment he had never left, he was still sitting on the sofa—I had seen the widow turn to touch him and stare uncomprehendingly at the empty seat beside her.

  I looked out across the inlet. The junk boat seemed larger now in low tide. Beyond the freeway the muted white street lights on University, Solano, and San Pablo Avenues blended into lines, and traffic lights blinked red and amber in the early morning hours. The city looked like a giant pinball machine. I pulled my jacket tighter around my shoulders, but the damp of the bay had penetrated and I only felt wetter.

  “Smith?” Murakawa’s thick hair flopped over his forehead. He had that wired, purposeful look of a beat officer handling his first murder case. “I finished with the last of the witnesses.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a bust. Would you believe, no one saw the dead woman arrive here. No one saw her murdered. No one saw anything suspicious.”

  “That must be some kind of record. You ask any twenty people in Berkeley if they saw anything unusual, and you can count on half of them coming up with something.”

  “Not these folk,” he said in disgust. “Of course, you’ve got to consider the sources, Smith. The first bunch are tourists. They think everything in Berkeley’s bizarre. Nothing stands out. And in Rainbow Village, anyone who’s been here over a month has seen drug busts, freak outs, and fights. To them, ‘out of the ordinary’ is the way things are. They wouldn’t think to tell us if a flying saucer landed.”

  “Well, we have names and addresses. We can have another go around if we need to. Run them through files, all of them. Do Aura Summerlight and Ian Stuart first. And have someone check with the Center for Independent Living. See what Liz was involved with there besides getting her chair fixed. Find out if she’s got a lawyer. Check her finances. The works.”

  “When do you need that?”

  “The file checks now. But by eight-thirty will be okay. For C.I.L. we’ll have to wait for business hours.” A gust of wind slapped a clump of hair against my cheek. Irritably, I pushed it back behind my ear. Liz’s body was gone. Her chair had been moved into a van, but the gouges the wheels made as it turned over still scarred the shore. To Murakawa, I said, “What could Liz Goldenstern have been doing here?”

  Murakawa shook his head.

  “And how did she get here?”

  He glanced across the inlet to the freeway. “I wondered that too. But you know, in spite of motor neuron lesions, people with spinal cord injuries can navigate in power chairs surprisingly well. Most of us don’t realize how much potential each muscle has, and how much variety there is in the effects of the injuries. After some injuries, patients have some feeling in their trunk and extremities, but no control of movement. In other cases the spinal cord is diffusely injured and some nerve tracts still function, so there’s only weakness, not paralysis. With the Brown-Sequard syndrome, for instance, one side of the spinal cord is functional and the other isn’t. And there’s the anterior spinal artery syndrome, where only the posterior third of the cord functions. And—”

  “Liz was as capable as they come,” I snapped. Some time I might need to know these physiological possibilities, but now they only made the cruelty of Liz’s murder seem all the greater.

  Murakawa hesitated. It was his first murder; he wasn’t used to overlooking the short fuses that were as much a part of investigations as paperwork. “Telegraph is two miles over
the freeway. That’s a long way to come in a power chair, in the cold.”

  “It wasn’t that cold five or six hours ago, Paul.”

  “But Smith, people with spinal injuries don’t have good circulation. They feel the cold a lot more than the rest of us.”

  I recalled Liz Goldenstern picketing the Caliban Café during last winter’s rain. Had she had better circulation than Murakawa thought? Or for her had the iciness of the hours on the line been just one more thing to endure? Compared to those hours, the forty-five minutes it would have taken to drive to the marina in her chair would have been a snap.

  Murakawa leaned toward me with excitement. “She wouldn’t have had to come on University, if she didn’t want to be noticed. She could have taken side streets all the way to the overpass.”

  I nodded slowly. “It’s possible, but not likely.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no sidewalk on the freeway overpass. Even with a tail light of sorts on her chair, she’d have had a fifty-fifty chance of being killed.” I stopped abruptly.

  Murakawa finished the thought. “Whatever made her come here must have been worth taking that chance.”

  We both looked toward the freeway lights. “Or maybe someone brought her here to kill her,” I said. The ambulance crew had agreed that the settling of the blood in her face and body made it one in a thousand she had died anywhere but where we found her.

  “The killer would have needed a truck or van, some vehicle big enough to handle a power chair, something with a ramp to drive it up. Those chairs aren’t light.”

  That I knew only too well. “We’re going to have to find that vehicle and the driver.”

  Murakawa nodded slowly. I had never heard him complain about overwork, no matter how much time was demanded—unless he thought it was bureaucratic nonsense. And even then he had more patience than most. Maybe because he didn’t see himself doing it for the next thirty years of his life. Murakawa’s future lay not with dead bodies but with ones who could still be helped. “So you want us to go over every vehicle here?”

  “Every one this side of the freeway. Call me if you find anything. Leave word if you don’t. And you can take some comfort in the fact that you’re not doing the worst of the jobs.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “I’m going to Liz Goldenstern’s house. If she had a friend living with her, I’m going to wake them up and tell them she’s dead.”

  I parked in the driveway of Liz Goldenstern’s triplex and walked up the redwood ramp to the two doors in front. In the early morning stillness, my footsteps resounded on the boards.

  Liz hadn’t said she lived with anyone. In the brief time I had been in her apartment, I had seen no sign of another tenant. There was no light now, no reason to assume anyone would be inside. But I pushed the buzzer and waited. From within the living room came the shrill demand of the buzzer. It wasn’t a sound the average person could sleep through.

  In the yard the fronds of a foot palm tree scraped against each other. Here, two miles from the bay, the air was drier. On Liz Goldenstern’s protected entryway the night seemed almost warm. I rang the bell again, not expecting a response. None followed.

  With a mixture of relief and irritation, I turned and pressed the buzzer of the upstairs unit. Perhaps there would be no next of kin to break the news to. When I started as a patrol officer I had assumed the time would come when I’d handle those scenes dispassionately, murmuring a few comforting phrases, then moving on to the necessary questions. I’d wised up over the years. Still, each time I knocked on the door of an unsuspecting relative or lover, I knew this would not be the time it didn’t get to me. I pushed the buzzer again, waited, then knocked four times, loud—the police knock.

  Five minutes later, I conceded no one was home there either.

  I walked down the ramp, across the yard, and along the driveway. The back yard couldn’t have been more than ten feet deep and twenty-five feet wide. The cement driveway had been expanded and consumed half of it so that this side of the rear cottage looked out solely on cement.

  I climbed the two steps to the third unit of the main building and pressed the buzzer. There was no answer.

  And none at the cottage. Where were these people at four-thirty in the morning?

  After telling a patrol officer, who was settled across the street, to call in and find out who these other tenants were and what we had on them, I headed back to the station. I could have run the checks myself, but they weren’t first priority. For this guy, who had nothing to do but sit in a dark car for the next two and a half hours and watch an empty building, any task was a boon.

  Dillingham, the Night Watch desk man, glanced up as I climbed the stairs. “Smith? I thought you’d been promoted to nine to five.”

  “Seven-forty-five to four-fifteen.”

  “So? Did you just drop by to raid our donut box again?” He grinned. He knew my reputation for junk food consumption from my stint on Night Watch. Then Dillingham had threatened me with dire intestinal consequences. “Only wine improves with age,” he’d muttered, each time I’d grabbed another chocolate old fashioned on my way home. “Are you going to will your intestines to Roto Rooter, Smith?” That one he’d saved for a larger audience.

  “What have you got in that box?” I asked now.

  He glanced beneath the desk, wrinkling his nose. “Three plain, a couple old fashioned, one with pink glop, two with white glop, and those colored things that look like confetti. And Smith, we still have two jellies.”

  I extricated a dollar. “Hand them over.”

  “This stuff will kill you.”

  “You’re wrong, Dillingham. It might do you in, but I keep up my immunities. My stomach thrives on donuts the way yours does tofu.”

  Paper towel in hand, I walked down the hall to my office. The sugary smell of the donuts, which Dillingham had once described as “reek of bubblegum and plastic,” reminded me that I had had only half a pint of ice cream for dinner. I might not have reached the level of professionalism where despair didn’t faze me, but I had missed plenty of meals racing around after suspects who didn’t observe the standard lunch and dinner hours. Now I ate when the chance came, regardless of the circumstances. But I had also learned, the hard way, the dangers of eating a jelly donut while walking. I plopped in my chair and stuffed a sugary edge in my mouth.

  When I finished the first donut, I checked my IN box. No word from the coroner as to time of death. And no message from Murakawa at all. I dialed the coroner’s office.

  “Coroner’s Department,” a gravelly voice said.

  “Matthew? How’re things down there?”

  “Quiet.” He chuckled softly. It was an old joke. He’d been saying it as long as anyone in the department could recall.

  “This is Jill Smith, in Homicide.”

  “I know your voice, Smith. How many times did you call me about your last body? But that’s okay. There’s no one else to talk to here.”

  “Well, a couple more hours and you can be up on the fire trail.” Matthew Harrison was an avid hiker. He cherished his daylight hours. To him, the time after dark was dead time anyway. And the morgue was as good a place as any to kill it. In the quiet he could catch a catnap or two at his desk. “Is Dr. Eastman still there?”

  “It’s five in the morning. He went home hours ago.”

  “Rats. Well, what’s the status on the body you brought in tonight? The name’s Liz Goldenstern.”

  “Hang on.”

  I took a bite of the second donut. It didn’t taste as good.

  “Scheduled for the morning.”

  Wonderful! The pathologist’s report wouldn’t come back for three to five days, no matter how desperately I needed it. And the pathologist wouldn’t even begin until morning. “What about time of death?”

  “Won’t know till morning, Smith.”

  “Didn’t Eastman do anything?”

  “He was busy. You’re not our only customer, you know.”

/>   “He must have taken the body temperature.”

  “No record of it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get around to dictating. Maybe he left the notes in his office.” I held my breath. There had to be some record of the entry exam. If I were forced to track down Eastman tomorrow, it could take all day. The coroner doesn’t spend his time sitting by the phone.

  “Hang on.” It was several minutes before he said, “Smith?”

  “Yes?”

  “We took delivery at eleven thirty-eight. Body temp was ninety-five point four.”

  Body temperature drops about 1.5 degrees an hour. In the cold, Liz’s could have fallen faster. “Dead two hours?”

  “Give or take.”

  “Thanks, Matthew. For that you deserve to see a deer on your walk.”

  I finished the donut and got the address for Brad Butz the builder, the man who had stood to gain by any commotion near Rainbow Village. I wasn’t ready to give Aura Summerlight’s conclusion too much credence. But Butz had been furious with his blond maniac yesterday morning, and nothing about him suggested he was one to turn the other cheek. He was the type to spend the day stewing about his stolen sign, down a six pack, and by nine o’clock be hunting Ian Stuart, right by the spot where Liz Goldenstern had died.

  Butz would hardly be pleased to have me drag him out of bed at this hour. If he hadn’t already called his City Hall friends about the morning’s fracas, he’d probably be on the horn as soon as I left. It was a chance I’d have to take.

  CHAPTER 9

  I WOULD HAVE ASSUMED that the contractor for a project the size of Marina Vista would live high in the hills, in a house he had designed and built himself, with a glass wall that overlooked the bay, cathedral ceilings, or one of those kitchens filled with gadgets I couldn’t guess the use for. But for Brad Butz, this southwest Berkeley address didn’t surprise me. What I knew of this area was mostly from my office mate, Seth Howard. In recent months the Oakland police and the Contra Costa County sheriff, to the north, had run a startlingly successful series of drug raids in Oakland, Richmond, and the city of San Pablo. They had caught a number of the big guys. The ones they’d missed had taken the warning and moved their operations. Not all of them had landed in South Berkeley, but enough. And together with the lower echelon dealers, who figured the sheriff’s success had emptied slots for them to move up to, they had created a war zone in this small area. On California Street gunmen fired from speeding cars in mid-afternoon. Residents thought twice before walking to the store. The department added extra foot patrols. And Howard and his buddies in Vice and Substance Abuse worked overtime.