by Susan Dunlap
CHAPTER 12
I PUSHED ASIDE A windbreaker and sat on one of Victor Champion’s canvas chairs. It was every bit as uncomfortable as I’d expected, as if its entire purpose of existence was to pinch the skin between it and my sitting bones. But when Champion settled, not on his sitting bones but lounging on the flat plate of his sacrum, it was clearer to me why he found these hard surfaces tolerable. He wasn’t nearly so tall as Howard, but the long sprawl of leg was the same. Before he could respond to my question about Madeleine Riordan, I said, “I owe you an apology.”
He looked up from under his come-to-bed eyelids, surprised. “Is this an official apology, Officer?”
“As official as you’re going to get. Jumping to conclusions isn’t just unfair to you, it’s real bad police procedure. So, I’m sorry.”
He hesitated so long before offering a slight nod that I wondered if he realized my apology had been partly a ploy. I may have misjudged him; a detective is judging all the time, reconsidering constantly, like a computer justifying the margins every time a new phrase is thrown in. Normally I would add “Champion as Peeping Tom” and wait to reform the picture of Champion around it. I wouldn’t make a final judgment till the case was closed. I’d keep my professional distance. With the Riordan case, I had a hunch that if I kept to the rules and played from a safe distance, I wouldn’t skim the surface.
Or, perhaps Champion hesitated because my suspicion had touched a sore spot. Perhaps these photos of his weren’t quite so innocent as they seemed. Or maybe they were, but others he’d hidden weren’t. “So, tell me how you know Madeleine?”
“I don’t.”
“Your work betrays you.”
He smiled, not that lopsided grin but a soft expression that encompassed his whole face and wiped away the residue of resentment. “Well, I didn’t know her when I took the first roll. But after I developed it, I decided I’d better go over and get her okay.”
The truth? Perhaps. Or had Madeleine with her binoculars spotted him and called him over? “When was that?”
“The end of last week.”
I sighed. “Pion, again your work betrays you. You’ve cut to the marrow with those portraits. You’ve seen her as her colleagues never have. You’re a superb artist, but, dammit, you’re not good enough to have intuited her on a day’s acquaintance.”
He laughed, sending a lock of gray hair over his wide forehead. “God, the blarney. I love it,” he said, pulling himself up straighter in the chair. “Okay, you’ve found me out. But only by a month. It was the middle of last month. I saw her sitting out. In a wonderful pose. And I just decided on the spur of the moment to bike over. I wanted to photograph her close up but she refused. She said it would make her too self-conscious.”
“You didn’t think of that? The woman had just lost all her hair!”
“But she looked wonderful. I told her that.”
The man was an idiot-savant.
“I told her she was beautiful, magnificent. And she is. The way she moved, even with the cane, it was like a stream over old worn rocks. She’s changed since last month. Thinner, more contrast between bones and flesh. But she’s even more beautiful. Her soul shows through now.”
I hadn’t told him she was dead. I felt a pang of guilt, but the way things were going I suspected he’d say something in the next minute to make me forget it. “But you did photograph her.”
“She said it was okay if I did it from a distance, so she didn’t know. And if she didn’t want me to, she’d pull the shade.”
Was that part of Madeleine: it’s okay if you don’t get close enough to touch me? “And did she? Pull the shade?”
“No. But she left a week after that. I was devastated. All those nothing prints you just saw, they were from that one week before she left. Most of the good ones I didn’t get till she came back. I almost tracked down where she lived and went there.”
“Almost?”
“No, this is the truth. Maybe I would have, but I got an emergency bolting job. By the time I finished, I decided to wait for Madeleine to come back.”
Nothing Champion had told me suggested that level of patience. “You knew she’d be back?”
“Yes, but not so soon. She’d had some kind of awful treatment and gotten over the bad effects. I assumed she’d get a longer respite than just a couple weeks.”
“Did she move to Canyonview again because she’d gotten worse?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
I looked at the three portraits again: her smiling at Coco; outraged; and at peace. Anew I felt amazed that in the nearly ten years I had known of Madeleine Riordan I had never seen anything to suggest this depth of feeling. The pungent smell of sandlewood incense blew past and was gone. Like the glimpses of her, I thought. The glimpses she had never shown us. Irrationally, I felt angry. Then I thought of Champion resenting Madeleine’s going home; I had a little more sympathy for his self-focus. “When did you shoot these?”
He picked up the smiling picture. “That was the day before she left. It was the only decent one of that batch.”
I looked at it again, trying to see beneath her skull to the emotions she hadn’t shown us. Was she ecstatic at the prospect of going home? Did she think she had a second chance at life? Slowly I put the photo down and picked up the second. “And this one, where she looks so peaceful?”
“Friday, the day she came back.”
“Ah, good.” As much as the next person, I knew the emotional steps the dying take, from denial, through bargaining with the cosmos, to acceptance. I was glad she had made it to the end. “And how long before that was the other one taken?” I said, lifting the photograph with the palm frond and the look of outrage.
“That one was on Saturday night. About seven thirty.”
“After the peaceful picture? It was the last one?”
“Yeah. Then she pulled the shades.”
If she had followed the normal steps and reached the calm that made death acceptable, was that calm we all hoped would protect us from the terrors of death so shallow it could be destroyed by rage? And what could have been so compelling to have given rise to that rage? “What was she so angry about?”
“I don’t know.” He dropped into the chair again and looked down the length of that spatulate nose of his the way he might at a print that hadn’t come up right in the developer. “Just why are you asking me all this? What’s going on?”
I put up a hand. “Bear with me a minute. Let’s look at what happened. Madeleine came back when?”
“Friday.”
The hostage operation had been on Sunday, and this evening, when she died, Monday. “What made her come back?”
He didn’t answer.
“Did she come to be with you?”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t with her. She didn’t even know when I was taking her pictures. And then she shut me out of that.”
“But you know her so well,” I insisted. “You must have an idea.”
His eyes half closed. He wanted to come up with something, I could tell. But in the end he said, “What it comes down to is, she lost her nerve. She had it a long time. You can see it in those portraits, the nerve to live, to do things to the utmost. But I guess dying caught up with her.” He shrugged. “I guess you really can’t blame her.”
But I could tell by the sag of his body, the little catch in his voice, the way the skin on his cheeks seemed to sink in, deflated, that he did blame her. He cared more about the woman in his portraits than I had imagined anyone caring for Madeleine Riordan. “Okay, why she came back might not be the issue. What happened after she got there?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“I’m asking you.”
He slumped lower in the chair. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. It probably wasn’t anything that would make sense to anyone else. Talk to her.”
“I can’t, not now,” I said slowly. “She’s dead.”
His eyes opened wide and his face seemed to sink ba
ck as if the air had been let out of his head. Then he jumped up. “You’ve known this all along. You’ve sat here, not telling me she was dead, letting me talk about her, and all the time she was dead.” He stalked across the room and yanked open the door. “You just get out of here.”
I didn’t move. “When you level with me. Anything that would make sense to anyone else. So it’s something. And Victor,” I said deliberately using the name his parents must have used, “you know what it was. Now you tell me.”
“You lied to me before that.”
“Victor, this is not a contest—the person with the most blame loses.” Purposely I didn’t look him in the eye. But I watched for some small movement—an easing of the jaw, a stretching of the hand—something to indicate he accepted the truce. No sign came. He was too much of a brat to be pushed; if I backed him into a corner, he’d just put his fingers in his ears and stick out his tongue. There was no way but to give him more information than I wanted—the inner-circle lure. I leaned forward. “I’m going to tell you something we’re not going to make public. Can I count on you to keep it to yourself?”
His thin lips tensed, drawing that spatulate nose closer. He was sharper than Delia McElhenny. He knew I was playing him; he yearned to tell me just where I could put my information, but that would mean his doing without it, and from the look of him he wasn’t quite ready to make that sacrifice.
To prod him I said, “I’m asking because I need your help.”
He waited just long enough not to appear eager. “Okay. Really there’s no one I’d tell anyway—unless I run into a skunk under one of the houses I’m working on.”
“My assignment is to Homicide Detail. Madeleine didn’t die of cancer. Madeleine was murdered.”
He drew in breath sharply. He hadn’t put two and two together, or at least it didn’t add up to wondering why I was asking about Madeleine’s death. It’s not uncommon for people to be too startled by the arrival of the police to run a secondary line of thought; and we’re pleased about that. He swallowed. “How did she die?”
“Asphyxia.”
“Somebody strangled her!”
“No, not that violent. I’m afraid that’s all I can say. It’s already more than we’ll make public. Now, you, what is it you haven’t told me?”
He got up and paced across the room, snatching up a shirt and tossing it on his fragile-looking coatrack. He picked up the angry picture and stared at it. “Okay, Madeleine wouldn’t have told me if she didn’t want it known. And maybe it doesn’t mean anything anyway.”
I waited, hoping he wouldn’t just fade away in the miasma of anythings, anywheres, and anyhows.
“Like I said, I’d never seen Madeleine look like this, like she had one last—I didn’t know it was the last then—moment of fury. I’d watched her for days and never seen anything remotely like that. I was amazed. I waited till she got back to her room and called her.”
“Where was she when the picture was taken?”
“Claire’s room.”
“She was looking at Claire?”
“Facing the bed.”
“How long did you have to wait before she got to her own room.”
“Forever,” he said with a huge sigh. He looked again at the photo but I had the sense he wasn’t seeing it anymore, but rather feeling the frustration of his wait Saturday night. “Actually it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. Maybe less. I just can’t say.”
“That’s okay for now. So what happened when you called her?”
“Well, her light went on. She pulled the shade. If she hadn’t … but she did. I just couldn’t be left hanging. And after all if she was that angry, she probably needed someone to talk to.”
I smiled. “She snapped at you for calling, huh?”
His thin lips twisted into a smile of their own. “Boor was her term.”
“So what had made her so angry?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t know. I can only tell you what she said, and it didn’t answer questions for me. I could hardly make out what she was saying. Like her words were bubbling up through water. Or sludge. Or whatever image you want of despair. Anger almost smothered in despair. Like it was all she could do to get the words out.”
I was holding my breath.
“She said, ‘We can’t have people choosing which moments of our lives are important enough to deserve respect.’ ”
I gasped. That was essentially the question she had asked me at the Coco Arnero hearing: “During which moments is his life important enough to deserve your respect?”
Was that why she had asked me to come back tonight? Was the reason she had been killed enmeshed in the Arnero hearing? Or was it now in me?
“Did she say anything else?”
“No. That’s all. She hung up. I don’t know another thing. Except that she’s dead, and now I will never get the one picture that brings it all together.”
I asked him to come down to the station in the morning and dictate a statement. Then I walked out and up those hundred earthen steps.
Was Victor Champion in love with Madeleine? In his fashion. But I couldn’t imagine him killing her unless he were promised access to her embalmed body and could photograph it till it was shoved into the crematorium chute.
I might scoff, but from across the canyon with his telephoto lens he had managed to see more deeply into Madeleine than I had in years of work acquaintance. In his pictures he had captured a hint of what I’d hoped Madeleine would show me tonight.
I realized as I reached the Arlington that I was not just disappointed about that; I was annoyed.
And I was insulted. That surprised me. It wasn’t as if I’d ever had a nonbusiness contact with Riordan. But investigating was my job, my profession. How could someone like Champion have seen more than I? And how could Madeleine Riordan have allowed him to see what she had hidden from everyone else? Why had she?
And perhaps most infuriating was the fact that I still didn’t know why she had decided to move back to Canyonview and what there had caused that look of outrage in Champion’s picture. Maybe she had told him, but if so it was in a code he couldn’t decipher in his pictures, and he certainly couldn’t pass on to me.
I checked in with Inspector Doyle just long enough to agree we’d get together in the morning.
When I got home Howard was already asleep. I took a long bath, then slid in beside his warm sleeping body. I didn’t wake him, but just lay listening to the comforting sound of his breath and wondering what could be so compelling as to make me elect to spend the last months of my life without him.
CHAPTER 13
THE BIG NEWS OF the morning was Doyle’s vain attempt to contact Madeleine Riordan’s husband, one Dr. Herbert Timms, D.V.M. According to his service Timms was at a conference in Carmel, three or so hours south of here. They didn’t know where he was staying. And after three calls last night and two this morning the only thing Doyle was certain of was that Timms was not answering his phone here. With a smile of relief, he passed the number on to me. I headed back to my office to tackle some of the accumulated paperwork and the numerous necessary calls.
8:30—To Timms. No answer.
8:33—To his service. No new info there.
8:35—To coroner’s office. Got Matthew Harrison who said Madeleine Riordan had been taken first for autopsy. He’d check with the pathologist on cause and time of death and get back to me.
8:40—To Raksen. No fascinating fibers, pertinent prints.
8:45—To Timms. No answer.
9:00—To Timms, still gone.
9:10—From Harrison. Madeleine had indeed been smothered. They’d found particles from the pillowcase in her nostrils. The time of death would not have been more than two hours before I found her. Not before seven P.M.
At nine fifteen the dispatcher called. “Smith, you got a fracas at Walnut and Vine, Walnut Square.” The meter maid perp had escalated.
A crowd of about thirty clustered on the sidewalk, righ
t outside the original Peet’s Coffee & Tea, the coffee cups in hand. Dogs meandered; one guy was posting signs for a weekend benefit-protest march (a leftist variation on the walkathon—protesters gather pledges for their participation in the march—one dollar per mile or hour. If they’re arrested peacefully, the pledge doubles). Behind him a mauve-turbaned street person demanded spare change. The sky was blue, the air still warm—a perfect day for Berkeleyans to enjoy theater al fresco. The crowd stared at a venerable beige Mercedes and beyond at Parking Enforcement Officer Celia Eckey.
Eckey was purple. Literally. Purple from her formerly gray hair to her previously merely tanned fingers. Purple coated the right side of her Parking Enforcement vehicle and a swatch of street. Eckey smiled, but I knew her well enough to realize that was only because she was talking to the reporter for KRON news. “Some variety of explosive matter.” She pointed to a sagging black rubber container affixed to the one-o’clock-to-three-o’clock portion of a Mercedes sedan tire.
“And it blew up in your face when you tried to mark the tire?” the newscaster prompted. Behind him a covey of print reporters crowded in, notepads in hands.
“It’s water soluble.” Eckey was masterful at defusing a situation. She’d had plenty of practice. “If spit were champagne,” she’d said one day, wiping her face, “I could open a vineyard.”
“And here you have it,” the newscaster said to his camera, “another entry in the Parking Pranks Parade. Brings to mind the clown with pie-in-the-face gags, doesn’t it? Coming to you from—where else?—Berkeley, this is Gary Frellis.”
Murakawa was standing behind the Mercedes tire guarding the most essential part of the scene till Raksen arrived. We hadn’t gotten a fingerprint off the parking vehicle when the perp released the brake, nor from the stolen helmet when it was finally recovered. I didn’t have much hope now, but at least Raksen might find something from the explosive bag.
“I don’t suppose you think the Mercedes’s owner is the perp, Eckey?”
