Too Close to the Edge Page 7

  At 5:30 A.M. it was still nighttime dark. Down the block a husky man headed for his car. He glanced toward the patrol car but didn’t break his stride.

  The house Brad Butz lived in was a single-story, twenty-five-foot square. The tiny, red cement porch had shifted away from the house, leaving an inch-wide gap between it and the door. Cracks meandered down the stucco facade. Most California houses had cracks in one or two walls—“from the house settling” people said. “From the earth moving” would have been more accurate. The Hayward Fault ran beneath the Berkeley hills, and tributaries from it—fault traces—some visible, some not, threaded their way under the city, shifting and growing with each new quake, so that a new fault map was out of date as soon as the earth moved again. Most fissures were small, most damage manageable. The average homeowner grumbled and repaired. But Brad Butz’s house gave new meaning to “deferred maintenance.”

  I rang the bell and listened to its trill inside. No footsteps followed it. Was Butz not home, either? What was I dealing with here, a herd of vampires who wouldn’t be home till dawn?

  I rang again.

  “Okay, okay. Keep your pants on,” Butz grumbled from the rear of the small dwelling. His Bronx accent was thicker than it had been yesterday morning, as if his sinuses were still stopped up with sleep. He stomped toward the door. I caught a glimpse of a T-shirt and jeans in the window to my left. Then Butz yanked open the door and stood with one hand on it and the other on the frame.

  His wiry dark hair stood out like a rumpled brown tiara pushed far back on his head. Still flushed from sleep, his skin looked more porcelain than it had yesterday. As he stared at me, his blue eyes narrowed, and any resemblance to a pleasant doll-like expression vanished.

  “You’re the cop, right?” he demanded.

  “Detective Smith.”

  “Christ, it’s the middle of the night. You got my vandal, right? Well, it’s about time. It shouldn’t have taken the Berkeley Police Department all day and all night. You shoulda had him by noon. I’ll tell you, lady—”

  “Detective.”

  “Detective,” he said, in mock respect, “if you hadn’t nabbed him by morning I was ready to make a few calls.”

  I decided to ignore the whole vandalism issue. “I’m in Homicide. A woman was murdered last night. Can I come in?”

  “Murdered? Who? How?” He flicked on the light switch and stepped back to let me into the ten-by-twelve room that occupied the left corner of the house. The walls were papered in a faded floral design; the overstuffed sofa was surrounded by mahogany end tables with turquoise speckled lamps from the fifties. It looked like a room someone’s great-aunt had died in. And it looked like she hadn’t cleaned it for months before her demise. Dustballs crowded around the feet of the coffee table—the small pine table looked like it was floating on a cloud. Or it would have been, had it not been weighed down by a pile of newspapers, three beer cans, and a pizza box that hung precariously over the edge. The room still smelled of beer and tomato sauce.

  I sat on the chair, leaving him to settle on the sofa opposite me where I could see his reactions. “The woman was killed at the waterfront, at the Marina Vista site.”

  “Can you believe that? Now they’re murdering people at my site!” He shook his head slowly; his wiry hair flapped like stalks of corn in the wind. Leaning forward, he pushed the pizza box back onto the table. “But why? Why at my project? Jesus, I don’t have enough trouble, without them killing each other there. I’ve had delays up the wazoo. First off, I had a blow-up trying to get a use permit from the building department. Then there was the BCDC, the Bay Conservation Development Commission, carrying on about not permitting residential development on the waterfront. The laws are a lot stricter for apartments than hotels. You don’t want to know how long it took dealing with them. You don’t want to know about the variances from zoning I needed to get. Then there were questions about the environmental impact report. For that I had to get back to the guy who wrote the report to begin with, and he was in Guadalajara for three weeks. I wanted to set a date with QuakeChek, the place that runs the computer checks on a structure’s ability to ride out the big one, but everything else was so screwed up.… I couldn’t come to terms with the electrician I wanted—he wasn’t about to commit his men to a schedule that had been changed as many times as mine. Then the union wage went up. And now this! Jesus, it was bad enough when the city was hassling me. Now it’s complete strangers. At least suicides have the decency to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge where they’re supposed to. Who was this woman, anyway?”

  I sat silent a moment, amazed at the totality of Butz’s self-absorption. It wasn’t so much that he was too literal to have any imagination—the rap on him at the station—there was no room left in his head for thoughts not centered on himself. I said, “The murdered woman was Liz Goldenstern.”

  His eyes snapped open. His mouth dropped. He sat staring for a full half minute. “Liz? You can’t be right.”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Butz.”

  “But Liz, God, she’s in a wheelchair. What would she be doing down there? The road isn’t even paved, for Chrissakes.”

  I wasn’t surprised he knew Liz Goldenstern. As the contractor for Marina Vista, it would have been odd had he not run across her. I was only surprised by the seeming genuineness of his dismay. I said, “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

  “Liz. She’s dead? But how? She was speaking at the Landscape Development Subcommittee tonight. I called her at ten. She didn’t answer. I figured she was still there. Those things can run half the night. Everyone wants his say, and no one wants to cut it short. Liz was way down the agenda. She knew it could run late … but dead!” He stared at me, still wide-eyed, with that glazed look that people have on the subways. Finally, he said, “How? How did she die?”

  “She drowned.”

  “But she was in a chair. She didn’t swim.”

  “She was murdered.”

  “In the water? Some bastard drowned her?” He grabbed one of the beer cans with his thick hands and twisted the aluminum until it cracked. His incongruously delicate eyes scrunched together in grief, or possibly fear. Staring at the can, he smashed it down on the pizza box. The table bounced; the box jolted to the right and hung precariously on the edge of the table. The mutilated beer can rolled ninety degrees; the box tipped and dropped off the table, flinging the can against the wall.

  “How well did you know Liz Goldenstern?” I asked.

  “She got me the Marina Vista contract.”

  “Liz Goldenstern?” I had only seen Liz in an adversary position. “How did she do that?”

  “Marina Vista will be apartments for people with physical impairments, right?” he asked rhetorically. “The city wanted a consultant who knew what those people would need.”

  “Liz was that consultant?” She would be a likely choice. It was not a new policy in the establishment to draw in a leader of the demonstrators. And Berkeley was quicker than most to see the value of dissenting views and weave them into city policy. “But why did she choose you?”

  He glared at me. “Why not?”

  I sighed. “Look Mr. Butz, I don’t know about your background, or your work experience. The only time I’ve seen you was yesterday morning, when you were upset.” I let hang the implication that no one would hire Butz as he had presented himself then.

  “Yeah, sure,” he muttered, squeezing one of the remaining beer cans. If my implication had gotten through to him, it hadn’t motivated him to make himself more cooperative.

  So much for subtlety. “This is a murder case. While you sit here pouting, the killer is covering his tracks. If you care that Liz was murdered, then stop wasting time and answer my questions.”

  He hauled back with the beer can. For a moment I thought he was going to hurl it at me. Then he caught himself. He set it down gently. “Okay, okay. You want my past, huh? Well, I came here from New York. From 183rd Street and Fordham Avenue to be exact. But yo
u could have guessed that, right?”

  I nodded, wondering vaguely if that comment was another example of egocentricity or if he had picked up on the remnants of my own accent.

  He didn’t smile, but for the first time his glower lightened. “I came out here seven or eight years ago. I thought I’d see the country. You know what I mean? Half of Berkeley could say the same. I had been working for Social Security back there, assessing disability applications. I wasn’t about to do that again. There are only so many times you can tell a guy with sciatic pain so bad he can’t sit down that Social Security doesn’t believe him. Social Security wants hard proof of back injuries and a lot of times there isn’t any. X-rays don’t show anything … but the guy’s still in agony. If his doctor isn’t willing to go to bat for him, and sometimes even if he is, it’s too bad. It’s a real bummer all around.”

  “So you left New York,” I prompted.

  “Got one of those you-drive cars, headed west, and lived until my money ran out. Then I did carpentry for a few years. And when the work ran out, I got General Assistance. One thing about working for Social Security, it teaches you how to deal with bureaucracies. And, actually, I was lucky. I wasn’t planning on a free ride, particularly not on two hundred fifty dollars a month, which is what G.A. was paying then. But just when my first check came through, the city was starting an apprenticeship program to train its destitute, like me. Some guys trained as electricians, some women as plumbers. I had enough experience and the brains to take the test, so I became a licensed contractor.”

  “How did you know Liz?” I asked, steering him back to my question.

  “I built her ramp.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a contracting job.”

  “Hardly,” he said. “It was before I was in the program, while I was working as a carpenter.”

  “How did you hear about the job?”

  He sighed. Reluctantly, he said, “Well, I’d been seeing her landlord, the shrink, just a couple times, just to deal with the stress from that job at Social Security and the stress of being marginally employed. I just needed someone to listen a while, till I could straighten out my head.”

  “And Marina Vista?”

  “They were looking for a contractor. Liz remembered me—a graduate of their own program. It would have been hard for them to turn me down.”

  I glanced around the room. The nylon curtains were flung up over the rod. There was an internal order to the room, albeit an old and shabby one. The only things that didn’t fit here were Brad Butz and his food. “How long have you lived here?”

  He glared at me, then down at the floor. Spotting the fallen pizza box he kicked it. “Listen lady, just because you’ve got a house up in the hills, don’t be looking down your nose at me, calling me a slob. I didn’t invite you in here.”

  Where did that defensiveness come from? He certainly hadn’t seen any sign of slumming from me. Compared to the remodeled porch I lived in, Brad Butz’s house was a mansion. Making a point to keep my voice calm, I repeated, “Mr. Butz, how long have you lived here?”

  Again he hesitated. But unlike the moment when he held the beer can poised, this time his eyes were half closed in thought. He shrugged. “Well, I’ll admit it, this place is a dump. The landlord’s been on me for months. When I moved in here I agreed to fix the place up in lieu of rent. I was barely in when I got the call about Marina Vista. So I put off the work here. That was almost two years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you move out?”

  “I can’t. It’s like the company store. If I broke the lease I’d have to pay up all the back rent. Two years’ rent is a lot of money. I got some cash up front for the preliminary work on the project, but most of that has gone straight out to subcontractors, and lawyers. I tried to talk Bonner out of it, he’s the owner. He told me he’d take me to court. And that kind of publicity I can’t afford. If I had Bonner accusing me of being a deadbeat, people would forget I was a graduate of the city apprenticeship program, and remember I was on G.A. before, so they’d figure I really was a deadbeat. There’s no way I can get out of this hole until I revamp the entire house.”

  I nodded. “Well, at least it’s small.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Mr. Butz,” I said, “I’m going to have to ask you where you were last night.”

  He stared. “Hey, you don’t think that I killed Liz? I just told you how Liz helped me. We were in this together. When Marina Vista was done, Liz was going to manage the place. She’d already picked out her apartment. I couldn’t have gotten the job without her. I couldn’t have done the plans without her. She’s the one who got the shrink to back up my plans to have a pool and an exercise room. She’s the one who okayed the spiral ramp outside so the tenants could have some outdoor movement.

  “Look, I’ve worked with sick people a long time. A chance to do something important like build Marina Vista is a once in a lifetime thing. You talk to anyone in a chair. Access is so hard, they have to live anywhere where there aren’t steps to keep them out. They don’t choose; they take what they can get and consider themselves lucky. No one thinks of them when they build high-rises with views of the city. Marina Vista is a breakthrough, for them and for me. And I owe it to Liz.”

  He certainly sounded concerned, committed, knowledgeable. He sounded, in fact, like he had made this protestation, or one similar, before. I waited a moment, letting the silence bracket his declaration. “In a murder investigation we ask everyone where they were,” I said. Then I smiled and added, “You worked in a bureaucracy; you understand these things.”

  He nodded, still glowering. But it was a companionable glower. “It’s hardly worth your asking. You know how the day started. It didn’t get any better. I spent most of it trying to get someone reliable to lay the foundation. I wanted Bill Milligan, he’s the best, but, of course, he was booked for months. The next guy I called … well, I’ll spare you the details. I spent the afternoon trying to work out a reasonable date for completion, so I could get QuakeChek out here, and make sure I could get Green Growing Things, the only landscapers who seem to be able to guarantee anything like what’s in the architect’s drawings. I’ll tell you if even one tree in the sketch is missing, there’ll be someone raising Cain. But the way things are going there were so many possible hang-ups—like there’s talk of a carpenters’ strike—that I couldn’t swear to any date. So, the afternoon was pretty much a waste. After that I was too pissed off to do anything useful. I got a pizza and a six pack and rented a movie. I wanted to be home anyway. Liz was supposed to call me after the meeting. She … God, I figured the meeting had run over and she was too bushed to bother. But, that’s not it, is it? When did she die?”

  “Before midnight.”

  We both sat silent for a moment. “Mr. Butz, this meeting. What would Liz be likely to wear to it?”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean?”

  “She said something about not just throwing on a dress.”

  “I’ve never seen Liz in a dress.”

  “What about a wool jacket?”

  “Maybe. Liz was particular about her appearance when she went before these committees. She was always prepared, and part of that preparation was being dressed for the part. When she was out on the line, that was one thing, but when she spoke at a committee she was dressed for success.”

  Her body lying in the morgue was clothed in the same jeans and sweater she’d worn this afternoon.

  “Mr. Butz, can you think of anyone who would want to kill Liz?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Liz has raised some dander. Ask the Telegraph merchants. But you don’t kill to avoid widening your aisles. And anyway, that campaign is long gone.”

  “What about Marina Vista?”

  “I thought of that. It was her big campaign this last year. But there’s never been anyone opposed to it, except that jerk at Rainbow Village. You want Liz’s killer, get on him. You’ve got him in your own jail, for chrissakes.”
<
br />   “No, we don’t, Mr. Butz. We found his truck, but not him. What else can you tell me about where to find him?”

  He jumped up. “What’s the point of telling you anything? With police work like that I might as well rip out my own signs. No wonder helpless women get drowned.”

  I stood to face him. “Mr. Butz—”

  “Look, I’ve got friends in City Hall. One call from me and they’ll get action on this.”

  “Fine, then we’re after the same thing. Call whoever you think can help, but in the meantime, tell me what you know about the blond guy at Rainbow Village.”

  “I already did. Yesterday.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, making no attempt to cover my sarcasm. “Who else would benefit from Liz’s death? Who’s next in line to manage Marina Vista?”

  “I don’t know. That never came up.”

  “What about the apartment she has now? With access being such a problem, that place must be quite a prize.”

  “It is. I did the renovation inside, and I had a free hand. Liz’s landlord told me to do whatever it took to make over the place for her.”

  “Isn’t that pretty unusual?”

  He shrugged. “The guy’s a shrink. He does a lot of counseling for people with disabilities. It’s probably good P.R. for him.”

  “And he’s the shrink who consulted on Marina Vista?”

  “So?”

  “What’s his name?”

  Again Butz hesitated.

  “Are you interested in helping or not?” I said, disgusted.