Beyond Blame

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Come on, Price. Is she home now? What time does she go to bed? Is there a private phone line in her room?”

  Price frowned and started to cross the street. I reached out a hand to stop him. “Please, sir,” he insisted. “I must hurry to my bus. Please.”

  I had to let him go. He hurried away as though I were diseased. If boorishness is infectious, then I guess that’s what I was.

  I trudged back to my car, trying to decide what I knew if I knew anything at all. As I was walking across the driveway, the gate swung open and Howard Gable almost ran me down in his Accord. When he saw who it was, he grinned mischievously. I stood my ground and waved him to a stop. He rolled down the window and I asked him what was going on.

  “What makes you think anything’s going on, Tanner?”

  “Your presence. I doubt that you’re here to collect for the United Way.”

  Gable closed his eyes, then sighed. At the corner of his mouth a muscle began to twitch. “Okay. Since you’re still stumbling around over here, you might as well know, so you can keep an eye out. The kid’s missing.”

  “Lisa?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Any idea where she went?”

  Gable shrugged. “From what I hear she travels with a tough crowd. Street kids, most of them. Runaways. We’ll find her in Berkeley sooner or later, in some crash pad, or maybe sleeping in People’s Park or in line at the Food Project. I just hope it’s soon enough.”

  “Soon enough for what? Why are you in on this, anyway? She hasn’t even been gone twenty-four hours.”

  Gable eyed me thoughtfully, as though debating my credentials once again. “You could help me out on this if you would.”

  “How?”

  “Help me find her.”

  “Why should I?”

  “You’re working for the Renzels, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, the girl’s my case.” Gable seemed to shudder at the thought.

  “You mean she told you her father killed her mother?”

  “Yep. Hey. Don’t look at me like that. She knew things about the scene she’d only know if she saw it all go down.” Gable paused and raised his brows. “Still think our case is thin?”

  I smiled. “It is if you don’t find her.”

  “Don’t I know it. And I need her by tomorrow morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Arraignment. I need her to tell Judge Wu why her old man shouldn’t be released on bail.” Gable hardened his eyes, gave me another precative stare. “So if you stumble across the Usser girl tonight, your very next move is to call me. I better not hear that you could have helped me out on this and didn’t, Tanner. I better not hear that at all.” Gable’s teeth ground audibly.

  I avoided a cooperative response by asking a question. “What made her take off? Or maybe the question should be what made her move in with the Ussers in the first place? From what I hear, she’s been running pretty wild lately.”

  Gable swore. “I think she may have set me up. When she showed up at my office to rat on her old man, I asked where she could go after we made the arrest. She mentioned the Ussers, so I had a black-and-white drop her off. Hell, I didn’t know how wild she was. Not then I didn’t. I thought I was doing everyone a favor.”

  “What happened?”

  “She ripped them off this afternoon.”

  “She stole things?”

  Gable nodded. “Usser claims the take was worth thousands, but he’s a blowhard. Whatever, the girl cleaned out all her own stuff and the family jewels as well and hit the streets. Happened about four. What triggered it was old man Usser finding out his granddaughter was the chief witness against his pride and joy. I guess he went over my head, to the chief trial deputy, maybe to the D.A. himself. Anyway, when he learned what Lisa had told us about the murder, he called me up and said he wanted the girl taken away, given to the Youth Authority or whoever, said he wasn’t about to shelter someone who had accused his son of murder, even if she happened to be his own flesh and blood. My guess is the girl overheard the conversation, and bye-bye. I imagine she’s heard stories about the Youth Authority from some of her street buddies. Some of them might even have been true. Well, out of my way, Tanner. I got work to do.”

  Gable spun his tires and roared away. I went back to my car and started the engine, then let it idle. Lisa was suddenly the key, to my job as well as Gable’s. The cops would be looking for her soon, and once they found her she’d be stashed away where I couldn’t get at her. I had only once chance to beat them. Not by trying to penetrate the Berkeley street scene, as Gable had suggested, a scene I knew little about, but by returning to the scene of the crime. I put the car in gear.

  By the time I was back in Berkeley it was almost dark. Lawrence Usser’s house loomed like a thunderhead in the gray flannel sky as I eased my way up Hillside Lane. There was but a single light in the block, a stamp of gold on the side of Phyllis Misteen’s blue cantina, marking her vigil for her absent daughter. The other cantina was dark, the poetry reader doubtlessly asleep, her dreams tormented by the fiendish schemes of a coven of librarians.

  I got out of the car and went up the Usser steps. The night was quiet and cool, the house unfriendly and reluctant. I listened at the door and heard nothing. I peeked in a window and saw only shape and shadow, all of it immobile, as dark as deep despair. I waited for an idea to form, but they were out of season.

  My thoughtless mind and I were walking down the steps when I heard a bump, a muffled thud somewhere at my back, somewhere in the house. I trotted back to the porch and tried the door, but it was locked. Forced entry would require noise, and noise might bring the cops. I walked around to the back yard and went up the steps to the rear porch. I reached needlessly for the knob—the door was already open. I listened at an ominously heavy nothing, then went inside, making more noise than I wanted to.

  I moved quickly through the kitchen to the main hallway, then listened again but heard only the slumbering wheezes of the old house and my own old body. I inhaled, then moved forward on a carpet of threadbare caution.

  Halfway to the front of the house it occurred to me that the intruder could be someone much more menacing than the teenage Lisa Usser. Without my bidding, my right hand drifted to the pocket where I used to keep my gun. The pocket was empty, for a variety of reasons, none of which seemed sufficient. I made myself advance into the musty mildew of the hallway.

  I’d found nothing by the time I reached the front stairs. If Lisa was in there with me, she was likely in her room. I started up, causing the treads to creak and my heart to skip. I saw her in my mind. By now she would know someone was coming. There was a gun in her father’s dresser. I hoped she didn’t know about it. I hoped if she did know she would decide not to use it. I hoped if she decided to use it she looked before she opened fire.

  It seemed to take a year to reach her room. I approached cautiously, then stood in the doorway, my senses as alert as I could make them. Nothing sounded, nothing moved, nothing retrieved or returned my quivering vibrations. I went into the room and chanced turning on the light.

  I flicked the switch and got a quick impression that nothing had changed from my visit earlier in the day. Then I heard the clattering sounds of footsteps from the floor below. There were two sets of them, at least, and they both broke into a run as I trotted down the steps in quick pursuit.

  The rear door slammed open. I heard my quarry fleeing out the back as I reached the first floor and turned to dash after them. I surged toward a run, but my right foot struck the milk can beside the staircase and I went down in a heap of tin and umbrellas.

  By the time I was on my feet again and had reached the back yard there was only time to hear the rapid rustle of the rear hedge and to see, in a pale veil of moonlight, a young girl, as frightened and as skittish as a faun, waiting her turn to crawl through the leafy green escape hatch. She heard me on the stairs, and for a moment she looked back at me in an open gasp of terror,
mouth open, eyes so dark it seemed someone had removed them. I started for her. She ducked and disappeared. By the time I reached the hedge Lisa Usser and her companions had vanished, leaving me panting and alone.

  I hurried around to the front of the house, got in my car and drove through the neighboring streets as rapidly as I could. I circled as many blocks as I could find, but the area was a scrambled maze of one-way alleys and dead-end lanes and I saw nothing suspicious, nothing that seemed to flee me, nothing to pursue. I drove back to the Usser house and went inside.

  If any of the neighbors were inclined to do such things, the police must have already been called, so I sacrificed caution for speed, flipped on lights as I went and searched the house for reasons Lisa might have gone there after running away from her grandparents.

  Lisa’s room seemed only as disturbed as I had left it. Her parents’ room was likewise untouched, the other second-floor areas similarly unremarkable. I trotted down the stairs. The living room bore what smelled like the musk of unwashed bodies, and I guessed that was where they had hidden while I tiptoed past them like a late-night drunk. I found nothing out of place until I reached the den.

  I had almost given up before I noticed it, and I wouldn’t have noticed it even then if I hadn’t spent the past six months debating whether or not to buy myself a video recorder. Usser had one, camera and all, and I’d noticed earlier that day that one of the prerecorded tapes in his collection was Reds. It’s my favorite film of the past few years, which was why I noticed it was missing.

  I looked on the floor, behind the credenza, anywhere else that it might have accidentally strayed, but it was nowhere to be found. Which meant that either Bart Kinn had returned and taken it after I’d left him that morning, or Lisa and her friends had broken into the house just to steal that tape. When I couldn’t think of a reason for either action, I left the Usser house behind and headed for my appointment with the professor’s right-hand girl.

  SIXTEEN

  The address Krista Hellgren had given me was on Warring Street, which turned out to be only a couple of blocks down the hill from the Ussers’. It was a large brown-shingle structure as well, but it had been subdivided into multiple pouches of student housing and was suffering as a result. There was a dumpster in the drive, for no apparent reason. The ivy that obliterated the lawn gave off the smell of urine. A FOR SALE sign had been tacked below a window on the second floor. It looked like it had been there for a long time. The fraternity house next door emitted noises that had already become annoying by the time I got out of my car.

  She had told me apartment 6. The bank of mailboxes included that number but gave no hint of where it was. I went into the building, climbed two flights of stairs, heard the muffled murmur of conversation behind one door and the flighty gallop of a flute behind another, but the apartment numbers only went to four. I retreated, then followed the path to the rear of the house.

  The trail ended at a paved patio in back of the main building. It in turn was flanked by two smaller buildings, cabins bearing numbers 5 and 6. They were shingled to match the big house in front, and looked snug and romantic. Their roofs were matted with pine needles; their chimneys emitted silver threads of smoke. The frat-house frenzy that still despoiled the air was the only indication that I was not in some Sierra glade.

  I made my way through the patio furnishings—a plastic recliner positioned to catch the sun, an empty easel, an exercise bicycle, a claw-footed bathtub that could be used for anything from cooling off to brewing beer—and knocked on the door to number 6. The knocker on the door was in the shape of lovers kissing. I allowed them two platonic pecks, then heard a scraping sound from inside the cabin. The door opened seconds later.

  Her long gray gown was quilted and cut square above her breasts. Her hair was pinned on top of her head in a golden orb that exposed an elegant neck and sculpted shoulders and ears as delicate as blossoms. A gold heart dangled to the apex of her cleavage; a single pearl dripped below each lobe. The kitchen at her back, though spotless and precise, seemed grossly utilitarian compared to the woman who leased it.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “Come in, please.”

  “Thank you.”

  I followed her through the kitchen into the living room which was on two levels, the lower containing cane and canvas furniture arranged before a fireplace, the upper containing a desk and bookshelves and other accoutrements of an office that were partially shielded by a free-standing, folding screen.

  There was a small blaze in the fireplace. There was Mozart on the stereo. The air was noticeably warm and carried whiffs of baking bread. I grew suddenly suspicious that Krista Hellgren had entered my head and extracted all my passions and was turning them against me. She asked if I would like some wine.

  “Sure.”

  “I have a zinfandel and a white Bordeaux. Or brandy, if you prefer. Or I can make some Irish coffee.”

  “I’ll try the brandy.”

  “Cheese?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Crackers?”

  “No. Nothing. But please help yourself.”

  She smiled as though no one had ever offered her that opportunity before, then excused herself. As she went off to the kitchen I noticed that her feet were bare. Given the scrubbed formality of the scene, that hint of sweet lubricity was an erotic, narcotic rush.

  I watched the flames play tag among the split-birch logs until Krista returned and handed me a small snifter. Pretending, I swirled, inspected, sniffed and thanked her.

  She asked me to sit down. I chose the butterfly chair beside the fire, so I could inspect Ms. Hellgren without a flickering distraction.

  She took a seat on the couch along the wall opposite me and curled her legs up under her. As she leaned forward to place her wineglass on the floor, her bodice dropped forward to reveal the surge of flawless breasts. I was as aroused as I had ever been outside a bedroom, but my checkered history with women led me to wonder if she was displaying herself for reasons ulterior to ardor.

  “Do you do this every night?” I asked, gesturing at the wine, the fire, the gown.

  “Not every night, but sometimes. Life gets so … homely over at the law school, I like to remind myself that there are pleasures beyond a well-crafted opinion by Learned Hand or a welcome statute from the legislature. Is the brandy all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s not expensive.”

  “Neither am I.”

  Her smile was an extravagant reward for my nonsense. “Would you prefer some other music?” she asked.

  “The flute quartets are as good as music gets.”

  “You know Mozart.”

  “A little.”

  “Have you seen the film? Amadeus?”

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s flawed, but it gives an important hint of the vulnerability of genius, I believe.”

  From the pained look in her eyes I was certain she was talking about a genius more contemporary than Mozart. “Can I get you anything at all?” she asked me.

  “No. It’s all perfect. You don’t need a roommate do you?”

  I sent my little joke to her on the back of a grin, but she sobered instead, looked momentarily stricken. I guessed she had entertained the professor in just this way on more than one occasion, had fantasized that he might become a permanent fixture, and the thought that he might never be in a position to enjoy her hospitality again was unbearable to her.

  “You are investigating Ms. Renzel’s death,” she said, suddenly bloodless, the academic.

  I felt my fancy cool, and was only half happy that it had. I confirmed her statement of my mission.

  “But how can I help you? I only met her a few times. When Lawrence had parties for the law review staff.”

  “Do you think the professor killed her?”

  Firelight mottled her face, created shadows of frown or fear. She crossed her arms and pressed her breasts until they swelled above her
bodice. “No. Of course I don’t believe he killed her.”

  “Why not?”

  She let her arms fall away from her chest, her hands fall to her lap. “Because his life has been devoted to saving lives, not taking them. And because killing someone is stupid, and Lawrence Usser is not stupid, he is quite the opposite. And because, in spite of his uncommon lifestyle, he loved his wife. More important than that, he admired her and the work she was doing at the crisis center. He would never, ever kill her. No matter what she might have done to him.”

  She looked at me so intensely that I imagined my soul was stained a bleak and matching blue. If Usser was ever tried for murder, Krista Hellgren was a walking, talking rope with which Jake Hattie could hang his jury.

  “It sounds as though you think his wife did do something to him,” I said.

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. Lawrence wouldn’t say. But he was very hurt by it, whatever it was.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Not long before Ms. Renzel died. Two weeks, perhaps. No more than a month.”

  “What exactly did he say about it? Can you remember?”

  She closed her eyes and began to sway, as though her efforts were self-hypnotic. “We were here. Relaxing, the way you and I are now. He had several glasses of wine, more than usual. He said something like, ‘If only she hadn’t done it. I guess I should have known she would, but she promised me. She swore she would never do it. Now she’s ruined everything. Marriage. Family. It may never be the same again. God, I don’t know if I can live with that. I really don’t.’” Krista opened her eyes. “That’s all I can remember. It was as if he was talking to himself.”

  “So what do you think it was? Sex? His wife had a fling with someone?”

  “It sounds that way, doesn’t it? But I don’t know. Really. And I’d prefer not to guess.”

  “Sounds like the professor observed a double standard.”

  Krista shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”