Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  “So, Fannie, one of each?”

  “I’ll take decadence for now. But I may need to keep my strength up for the trek down the stairs.”

  The waiter brought her Kir. I ordered us both coffees.

  Strange how easy it is to forget when you want to. I was ordering two decadences before the awful truth occurred to me. This doesn’t count, I quickly assured myself. I’d made an honest mistake. I could hardly open an interview with a possible suspect by describing a stupid bet I had with my boyfriend. I was so rushed, this would be my only chance at food tonight. I’d already told the waiter … Besides, nothing served at Chez Panisse could be classified as junk food.

  Okay, so technically “junk food” meant all sweets. Even so, Howard surely would excuse this one incident.

  Sure he would! He’d discount my wolfing down the epitome of chocolate cake just as quickly as I’d overlook his repainting the dining room because a friend gave him two gallons of Paris green. I raised a hand to signal the waiter. But seeing the childlike pleasure on Fannie’s face as she contemplated the bourgeois indulgence, I couldn’t tell her she’d have to eat alone. That would undercut the bond between us. And maybe she could down both decadences. I’d let one just sit in front of me while we talked. Hell, I could look temptation in the face; I was tough. I was a cop.

  “Don’t think you’ve bought me,” Fannie said as the waiter slid the dark chocolate slices in front of us.

  “I’d assume you’d cost more than this.” I laughed. I hadn’t expected Fannie Johnson to be fun!

  She sipped the Kir, glancing at the bright oversized French posters on the wall. Her dark hair was caught at the nape of her neck like mine used to be. A satisfied smile played on her wide mouth as she leaned back in the chair, looking relaxed, healthy, and utterly at home. In that moment I could see how much she had given up for Sam Johnson. She had a good job; if she had married a man with one, drinks at Chez Panisse needn’t have been rare. And medical care: Would an insured husband have bought her two good legs and painfree nights? But I didn’t have time to speculate about that; I needed to find out her relation to Bryn Wiley, and get back to the station. “You were taken from Harmon Gym to Alta Bates hospital twelve years ago? Was that from a diving injury?”

  She forked off a hunk of cake—dark brown, gooey, big—and opened her mouth wide to get it all in. She shut her eyes as she chewed.

  It’s damned lucky for perpetuity that mankind doesn’t have to choose between sex and chocolate. Only when she had swallowed, sighed, and taken a sip of coffee did she answer me. “Look, I’m going to save you some time. You want to know about Bryn Wiley and me, right?”

  “Right.”

  “No problem. Starting at the top—I didn’t kill Bryn. Not that I haven’t thought about it. Nor that I’d be above it. And not that I couldn’t hire a hit-person.” She grinned. “Job’s become equal opportunity, and I know Bryn prides herself on creating strong women.”

  “Your motive would have been?”

  “The perennial favorite—revenge.” She forked off a hunk of cake and stuck it in her mouth, swallowing it this time before she had time to taste. “I was on the team. I had a diving scholarship. I was the only one on the team on full scholarship. Bryn Wiley carries on about how hard it was to be an adolescent recuperating for a year, to miss her high school prom and all that crap. She was lying in bed with her mother to wait on her. In college she took the easy classes, and as few of them as she could get away with. If she wanted to know about hard, she should have tried carrying a full college load plus training. My old roommates used to bitch that I didn’t do my share; by the time I moved out, two of them weren’t speaking to me. Of course, they weren’t on athletic scholarships; they didn’t really believe that I had their schedules plus four to six hours in the water or dry land training—”

  “Dry land?”

  “That’s practicing stuff like somersaults in a harness belt. And all that’s not counting the weight training or hill running I did on my own.”

  “For how long?”

  “Three and a half years.”

  “And then Bryn Wiley went to the Olympics and you were injured?”

  She took another bite of cake, got it halfway to her mouth, and stopped. “Yes. And did that make me bitter, you ask? What do you think? Ask me when my leg wakes me up in the middle of the night and I’m thankful if there’s just throbbing instead of shooting pains.”

  I nodded, taken aback by her outburst. I’d already misjudged the woman twice—first as a standard-issue radical, second as life’s witty skimmer in the expensive jacket—and now she showed me raw honesty. How many more unexpected levels did she possess? “Tell me about your injury.”

  “Smacked my back on the flexible board. Then I lost it with the dive and hit the water full out on my back. That’s what the witnesses said.”

  “Witnesses? In court?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So that’s where you got the money for The Heat Exchange and the house?”

  “Yeah.” She looked up, and another grin crossed her face. “Did Sam tell you I inherited it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s our joke. My inheritance. I wasn’t on scholarship because my family had just enough money. My parents haven’t died and left me anything; they’re still alive and angling to get a share of my settlement.”

  “The accident,” I said, “it was a month before the Olympics?”

  “During the National Trials in Hawaii—the Trials Bryn and Helena made it to. But all three of us were invited to compete, did you know that? They went, and I missed the plane and ended up in surgery, intensive care, rehab.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Damned right! Why was I diving then, after it was too late? Because I thought it would take my mind off missing the plane. Why did I miss the most important flight of my life? Because the time was wrong on the itinerary. The plane left at three fifty-six, not six fifty-six like the itinerary said. I waited, stand-by, till the last flight out, but there wasn’t a seat to be had. ‘Well,’ you’re going to say ‘how come Bryn and Helena found the error and you didn’t?’ Because the travel agent got hold of them. I had just moved; I’d given the travel agent my new number. He swears he called. I never got the call.” Her mouth opened, and she smacked in a piece of cake and swallowed so fast it stuck in her throat. Her face turned red, sweat coated her forehead. I was just about to do a Heimlich when she forced the cake down.

  She took a long drink, almost finishing the Kir, and when she looked over at me, her eyes were still moist, I couldn’t tell whether from her gagging or her subject. “I was better than Bryn. I’d already placed third and fifth in Nationals. If I had gotten that call, I’d have beaten her. She’d have been ninth. You get what that means?” she demanded. “You have to be in the top eight in three National Trials. Bryn would have missed the cut. No Olympic Trials! No Olympics! Nothing!” She took a deep breath, never releasing my eyes. “Maybe I’d have a gold medal. Maybe not. But I’d have two good legs.”

  There was nothing to say. No horror I felt could match the truth. And like a well-trained athlete, I couldn’t veer into emotional byways; I had to drive straight with the investigation. I sipped my coffee and placed the cup silently on the saucer. “Why should this convince me you didn’t shoot her?”

  She gave a laugh—the sophisticate shrugging off the question. “Because death is too easy. Too final.” She drank the last of the Kir, closing her eyes and holding the sweet liquid in her mouth, then swallowing and running her tongue over her lips. “And, Officer, I learned a lot in those months of rehab. I hated Bryn. Every time I saw her—‘the brave little girl with the scoliosis no one can even notice’—I could have shot her. In all those interviews she never once talked about me or my accident, only how the dive should be done, as if she’d have been flawless!”

  Bryn’s reaction seemed typical of any athlete’s. Fannie probably would have done no differently. I didn’t point that out.
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  “It took me a long time to figure out why Bryn Wiley couldn’t face seeing me—Helena came every day after she got back from Hawaii.”

  “Helena wasn’t going on to the Olympics?”

  Fannie just glared, but it was clear that she knew Helena hadn’t had to follow the athlete’s training anymore. Helena could afford to be sympathetic. Still glaring, she said, “I embodied Bryn Wiley’s worst nightmare: that she could lose everything and become ordinary!”

  Bull’s-eye! Bryn Wiley, after dreams of the gold medal and her picture on Wheaties boxes, how could she ever face-being ordinary? I knew the answer as clearly as Fannie did. I shivered.

  Now Fannie smiled. “See, I understand how terrified she is of losing everything. I can dangle that in front of her. Forever. Because, Officer, she’s so scared, she runs every time. She’ll never look at it. I can play her forever. And, Officer—Jill?—I love it. I am not about to give that up. And now that I own the house next door, I can go up there and watch her squirm from my very own window.” She glanced down at her empty cake plate and my untouched one. “You saving that decadence for me?”

  I pushed it across the table. I wondered how much she’d altered history to support her bitterness. Or had she created a helluva tough shell to protect an interior still too tender to touch? I guessed the latter. But as far as Bryn Wiley was concerned, the outcome would be the same. “You came up with the idea of turning that house into cheap apartments?”

  She waved off the compliment. “No, I’m not that clever. The house was Sam’s idea. He was so pleased when he spotted that place. He raced home like a little kid with a present for me. He was going to get Bryn where it hurt.

  “Sam’s a sweetie, and he’s a brilliant tactician, and I love the man. But I’m not blind. And the thing with Sam is that he’s been in the movement too long. And you and I know, Jill, that the movement hardly has a good record on women and equal rights, appalled as they’d be to admit it in public.”

  “ ‘The only position for a woman in the civil rights movement is prone,’ ” I said. “H. Rap Brown? Stokely Carmichael?” It was a quote I’d read years ago, and was waiting to hear redressed. I’m still waiting.

  “Right. Sam’s not like that. Hardly. If he were, he’d be missing a part he might have wanted to use again,” she said, digging into the new piece of cake. By now she must have consumed enough calories to support a small village. “Even so,” she said, “Sam’s obsession with the movement clouds his vision. He really wants to save the masses. He can’t understand that the masses don’t want to be saved anymore. Hell, the masses vote Republican! But Sam still sees everything as a class issue. With Bryn he figured: Endanger her expensive neighborhood and you’ve got her.”

  Bryn’s house. A place so peripheral to her soul that she didn’t object when Ellen overwhelmed her living room with the confessional bench. I laughed.

  “Right. You want to get Bryn Wiley, get her in the reputation, hit The Girls’ Team.” She grinned. “And so I have.”

  “So the whole point of The Heat Exchange is to get Bryn?”

  “Right!”

  “And you don’t care if the people on the floors underneath get no heat?”

  “We’re not living in Maine! This is California! In a two-room apartment your gas bill is never even twenty bucks!”

  “Twenty bucks means a lot to someone who doesn’t have it.”

  “My husband has given his life to the poor!”

  “And he doesn’t care about this broken promise?”

  “One in many for the poor. One in many many he’s seen.”

  I wished I had this interchange on tape! “So,” I said, “Sam’s sold out.”

  “Hey! You don’t just enforce the laws you believe in.”

  I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I don’t make the laws. Sam created The Heat Exchange scam. Sam has sold out.”

  Automatically she reached for … her fork, her plate, the coffee cup, anything. But her hands remained empty. She turned to face me, any hint of amusement gone from her face. “Jill, I’m going to be straight with you, straighter than I should be with a cop. This is off the record.”

  It pained me to say, “Not in a murder case. Nothing’s off record. But I won’t bandy your confidences around the locker room.” When she didn’t respond, I said softly, “It’s the best I can do. Honestly.”

  It was a minute before she said, “Sam and I met in the hospital rehab, after my accident. He had taken a bullet in the thigh. We were focused on rehab. And we were in love. I was a miserable patient, adjusting to a life I couldn’t stand. I wouldn’t have made it without Sam. I’d be in a wheelchair without him. To him I wasn’t working twice as hard as they said I should just so I could be a cripple, I was showing up the establishment, the doctors, the therapists, Bryn Wiley! It didn’t occur to us until later how different we were. The only things we had in common were injuries—and love. I don’t care about politics. Sam doesn’t just care; politics, the movement, is what he is. It governs who he hangs out with, the hours he keeps, it pervades every thought he has. I look at a pool and ponder if it would be good enough for a great diver; Sam demands neighborhood access. I get up to go to work, I have to step over unwashed bodies in the living room. We have no friends in common. There are only a couple of places we go where I’m not bored or annoyed or Sam doesn’t feel guilty. It’s amazing we’ve stayed together this long. But things between us got rockier and more silent. You understand?” Her eyes beseeched me to understand.

  “I do.”

  She smiled, then grinned. “I got the idea to shoot Bryn in the heart, so to speak, in The Girls’ Team. It was brilliant. Sam grabbed it. He’s the one who came up with The Heat Exchange. You know what a great tactician he is. We’re having such a good time with it, watching her squirm. Did you see what happened at her press conference? Was that a master work or what? Sam’s a genius,” she said, forking off a bit more of her second dessert.

  “I do understand,” I said slowly. “But none of this says you wouldn’t enjoy taking a brick to her Girls’ Team van or shooting her car windows.”

  Her fork banged down on the plate. “Look, have you missed everything I said? You think I’d toss this all away so I could hack at her van with a brick? You insult me!”

  I believed that—the brick attack was beneath her, and Sam would be appalled—unless that was a tactic for an even more deeply covered plan. I glanced at my watch: six ten. I had to get back to the station and get that warrant request in better shape. Keeping my voice neutral I said, “What about Ellen Waller? Did you shoot her?”

  “Ellen? Why would I … Omigod, you mean it’s Ellen who was shot?”

  “Ellen’s dead.” I let that sink in a moment, and added, “Her face was shot.”

  Fannie’s eyes widened and she pressed her jaws together hard. Any color evaporated from her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint. Now I leaned forward and repeated, “Did you shoot her?”

  “No, damn it. Why would I want to harm Ellen? I liked Ellen.”

  The last words, I liked Ellen, she said in exactly the same intonation I had said them in my mind last night. It comforted me, as if this range of fondness somehow made Ellen’s death less stark. But it didn’t help me to track her murderer any more than it had saved her from being murdered. “Who would have had reason to shoot her?”

  Slowly Fannie shook her head.

  A blond woman in a blue sari stopped midbite and stared at us from the next table.

  Lowering my voice, I said, “Think! Let me be real clear about this, Fannie. I don’t have a lead to a single suspect. Except you and Sam. And between the two of you there are enough motives to keep Homicide busy for a year. If you want us to focus elsewhere, make it your business to tell me where.”

  “I can understand why you’d think I’d have it in for Bryn. But Ellen? I wouldn’t hurt Ellen. I barely knew her. I only saw her a couple of times when she first got to town—the first times she was at Bootlaces, be
fore she ever met Bryn. Omigod! Was she shot in mistake for Bryn?”

  I glanced at the sari-clad woman, but she had returned to her food. “Why would you think Ellen would be mistaken for Bryn?”

  “Because they looked so much alike.”

  “So you didn’t only see her a couple of times months ago before she met Bryn. She didn’t resemble Bryn then. You’ve seen her since she moved in with Bryn.” But Bryn had never seen Fannie; Bryn didn’t know who Johnson’s wife was. So Pironnen was right; he had seen Ellen and Fannie together. “You visited Ellen, and later you waited outside her house for her. Tell me about it. All about it.”

  She sat back and said in a soft voice, “I’ll tell you this much, Sam and I’ve been skeet shooting—it’s one of the few sports where it doesn’t matter if your legs don’t work right. I’m a damned good shot. And if I’d planned to kill Bryn, I would have taken her out on the ten-meter board.”

  I liked Fannie, just as I liked Ellen. But I tend to go for the brats. Be quick, witty, pull for the underdog, and I’ll give you the store. Amuse me with your quirks and I’ll overlook a lot. I would have liked Fannie as a friend, but despite all she’d said, I knew two things. Number one: If I asked straight out about Ellen Waller’s missing past, Fannie wouldn’t tell me. Number two: I wouldn’t trust her at the business end of a rifle.

  I had just time to organize the warrant argument—if I left right now. I could pay the bill here and …

  But sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling, your intuition. I picked up my coffee cup, smiled at Fannie, and asked, “How did you meet Ellen Waller?”

  Chapter 18

  BY THIS TIME, IT was nearing the hour for early Sunday dinners. Two women in jeans and sweaters settled between us and the sari-clad woman. Behind me, couples sat together by marble tables and a threesome was grouped in the corner. It was twenty after six. Allowing ten minutes for travel time, I’d have to be paid and out of here in half an hour to get back in time to call the judge at all. I’d have to reorganize the warrant request as I presented it.