Time Expired

by Susan Dunlap

  I swallowed, unable to think of a reply. Her analogy was too accurate. I remembered my grandmother talking about taking up the summer carpets, getting them out of the way of the winter ones. Then I’d hated those dry, brittle, hemp rugs that signaled my visits to her. And when they were packed away—when I’d be going away back to my family—I’d been overjoyed. I had the same feeling with Claire. I desperately wanted to be done with her, and I’d been here only half an hour. How much more routinely would Delia or Michael dismiss her, particularly knowing that her memory was so ephemeral that she probably wouldn’t remember being waved aside?

  I swallowed again and made one last stab. “Did Madeleine talk about the meter maid’s carts? Someone’s been after them. Did she mention that?”

  “The meter maids?” Claire laughed. “It’s the best game in town. That’s what Madeleine says. She has spyglasses. You ask her.”

  “I can’t ask her,” I said slowly, wishing I could avoid reminding her about Madeleine. Murder investigations don’t allow that option. “She died yesterday.”

  Claire shrank back into her ball. She stared over my head. Every part of her was shaking, her hands, her head, her whole body. The tape recorder clicked off; the click resounded like a gunshot in the silence. “Ask Madeleine,” Claire insisted, her voice barely audible. “You’ll see. She laughs. You ask her.”

  I moved toward her, reaching a hand to comfort, but she pulled away, wrapping her arms tighter around her. “You ask her.”

  I pressed the call button. Then I reached for the cigarettes, lit one, and held it out to her. For a moment I was afraid she’d refuse something that had been between alien lips, but she didn’t hesitate. I sat back tasting the acrid taste, and waiting until she stopped shaking. What had Madeleine Riordan felt sitting here? Had she seen her own future, when her disease destroyed her nerves and muscles and sapped her strength and she could no longer walk? When people dismissed her words? Had the sight of Claire been too frightening to allow it to be real to her?

  If so, why would she have come in here—unless she forced herself, refusing to let herself take the easy way out? But I didn’t know Madeleine well enough to draw that conclusion. No one I’d talked to had. I wished I could get hold of her husband.

  When Claire stubbed out the cigarette, I realized something. Sitting here, watching her suffering, I, too, had blanked her out and concentrated on other things. I glanced at my watch, relieved that it was nearly time to meet Eckey. Eckey wouldn’t care a whit about Claire, but I was willing to bet she’d be surprised at the picture of Madeleine Riordan sitting by her canyon window staring through spyglasses, possibly down at Eckey’s parking perp.

  CHAPTER 14

  “SHE WAS WATCHING THAT pain in the ass down in the canyon?” Eckey demanded. Eckey was still outlined in purple. But now that she was red with outrage the purple didn’t stand out as much. “She had him in view and didn’t report it!”

  May have had him in view, I could have corrected. Wisely, I didn’t.

  Eckey paced heavy-footedly to the end of the tiny aisle between Howard’s and my desks in our minuscule office. Eckey’s movement required mincing steps which on anyone an inch bigger than she would have looked ridiculous. As it was, purple-marked Eckey could have passed for an enraged grape stomper. “Madeleine Riordan,” she snorted. “Well, that says it all!”

  “Had a few run-ins with her?” I asked when she’d made her way back from the small slatted window to the door. She turned and stood, her foot tapping, engine idling, waiting to burn rubber.

  “Run-ins! You wouldn’t believe the idiots she defended. I’ll tell you, Smith, you get the cream of the crop in Homicide. And you”—she turned to Howard, who had just wandered in—“even in Vice and Substance Abuse you get a saner group than the fools we see any day of the week. At least your guys got enough sense to want to make a living. Ours—”

  “Eckey,” Howard said edging around her fast-idling form. “I deal with the scum of the scum. I have to bring these folk in. You, Eckey, deal with doctors and lawyers.”

  “Humph! Some doctors. Can’t imagine these dudes making any sickness better. They’re too busy saying ‘Not my fault! Can’t blame me!’ ”

  Howard plopped into his chair and stretched his legs across the aisle. Howard is six feet six, most of that legs. In order to stretch them out in this office he’s got to sit at a forty-five-degree angle that lands his feet beyond the edge of my desk—just where Eckey was standing. He started to stretch but thought better of it as Eckey glared down at him and continued to rant, “Give you an example. Guy’s expired.”

  “You mean his meter,” Howard put in.

  Eckey was not amused. “On his Mazda. So I ticket him. He’s got no complaint, right?”

  “Well—”

  “Wrong, Howard. He’s got plenty of complaint. He comes racing out of the bakery screaming like a banshee. Don’t I know it’s Veterans Day?”

  “And you said?” Howard was getting into the rhythm here. There were few things Howard liked better than a good sting story.

  “I didn’t say anything. I nodded. You got to be a psychiatrist in my job, Howard. There’s a reason shrinks make eighty bucks an hour saying nothing more than ‘Mmm.’ If they kept their mouths shut all the way and just nodded, they’d probably make a hundred.”

  Howard nodded silently and put out an upturned hand.

  Ignoring that, Eckey went on: “ ‘You can’t ticket me on Veterans Day,’ he screams. They only scream, Howard. Never talk, only scream. Like they think the city advertises for Parking Enforcement personnel in the hearing-impaired column.”

  Howard’s mouth opened. I’d lived with him long enough to know he was about to suggest that the impairment the perp had in mind may not have been merely hearing. Wisely, he let his mouth close.

  “So I give him the regulation spiel that if he has questions he can call the complaints number.”

  Now I nodded. If there was a law of karma, I hated to think what vile crimes the person who spent eight hours a day handling parking complaints had committed in a previous life.

  Howard pushed his chair toward the windows, preparatory to drawing his feet in and swinging them under his desk. He was too gracious to comment that as sting stories go, Eckey’s had been a bust. None matched his, but—

  “That’s not all!” Eckey insisted. “You might think so. Any sane person would guess that would be the end. God knows it should have been.” She glared down at Howard. “But not in Parking Enforcement. No siree. No way. Half an hour later I’m driving along Shattuck Avenue and the Mazda comes racing up behind me, screeches to a stop, and the fool comes bansheeing out of his car. Leaves the Mazda right in the lane. ‘Veterans Day!’ he yells at the top of his lungs.”

  I put a finger to my lips before Howard could open his.

  “ ‘Veterans Day is a holiday!’ He looks down at me like a dragon. He’s breathing fire. ‘I called the city, just like you told me. Do you know what the fucking city said?’ He’s screaming and flapping his arms like a dodo bird.” Banshees were mythical, but dodoes were extinct; things were getting worse. And Eckey was flapping her own arms, a decidedly injury-inviting operation in this office. “Cars are braking in the other lane to watch him. I mean this guy’s got Shattuck Avenue stopped in both directions, Howard.”

  “So you nod?”

  I got my finger back in front my mouth before he could refer back to the psychiatric techniques.

  “I do the next best thing. I repeat his question: ‘The city said?’ ”

  “ ‘The goddamn fucking city didn’t say anything,’ he yells to the masses, ‘because the goddamn fucking city is closed today. BECAUSE VETERANS DAY IS A HOLIDAY!’ ”

  Howard had a serious lapse of control. He guffawed. In for a lamb, in for a sheep; I gave up and laughed, too. Eckey has a good sense of humor. I’ve seen it. But in her bailiwick some things are beyond levity.

  “Do you know what kind of position that puts me in? You’re l
aughing, sure. The city didn’t set you up and leave you out to dry, and hang spinning in the wind,” she snarled, mixing and mangling metaphors like a master chef. “It was all I could do to get out of there with my cart in one piece.”

  Now I nodded. “I assume the city heard from you.”

  “Yeah, they did when they got back from their day off. Heard from me, heard from him. And probably a hundred other irate parkers. But my point is, any sane person would realize that I am a single mother trying to feed my kids. I’ve got a high school education and I’m damned lucky to have a job with medical and dental and retirement. But I don’t make the parking regulations.” She stopped and took a long breath. “Now you would think a doctor would understand that, wouldn’t you?”

  Howard might have dug himself in deeper than he already had with his untimely laugh—they had their own stories about doctors in Vice and Substance Abuse. But before he had the chance I returned to my original question and said, “So, Eckey, I take it from this that you knew Madeleine Riordan.”

  “She’s past tense?” Eckey didn’t look sorry. She’d only have seen Riordan in the company of guys like the Veterans Day dragon.

  “Died Monday. In a nursing home on Cerrito Canyon. The point is, Eckey, she had binoculars and she might have been watching the guy who’s been hassling all of you in Parking Enforcement.”

  “Like I said, it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Why so?”

  “You sleep with donkeys, you’re going to wake up braying.

  I had the feeling she’d done some swift editing on that one. I said, “Could you be more specific, about Riordan?”

  She leaned back against the wall and scrunched her purple-lined eyes in thought. “I never trusted the woman. Too cool. She came into the hearings like I wish my kid did with her algebra problems. Like there were no people involved, just rules. And the rules are, no matter what the screamers say, no matter what they throw at you—and I don’t carry Wash ’n Dris for nothing—no matter, Parking Enforcement personnel must never respond to rudeness.” She shook her head. “Woman had no heart.”

  I pictured Madeleine sitting in that figurine-filled room with Claire. Was she another figurine, sleek and cold to the touch, and hollow in the middle? “Coldness doesn’t suggest she’d have been watching the perp.”

  “She was cold, but every now and then she’d catch the hearing commissioner’s eye and she’d almost laugh. And those times, Smith, were—Let me give you an example. She represented my Veterans Day asshole.”

  That surprised me. Madeleine Riordan had represented the oppressed, the chronic poor so used to being shoved aside they didn’t think to complain, the yellers of “Wolf!” who this time really had seen bared teeth, the guys on the Avenue too disoriented to fight for fair treatment. Coco Arnero. Pretty much I envisioned immaculate Madeleine Riordan representing anyone she’d be uncomfortable having in her own home. The Veterans Day guy sounded too upscale for her. “What was his complaint about you?”

  “Well you might ask. You’d think it’d be me bitching about the city. Or him bitching about the city. And he’d have done that if she’d let him. But she was too smart. She kept his lips buttoned. That was the only good thing. Drove him crazy not to be able to say anything. I looked over at her once and I’ll swear to you, Smith, I think she enjoyed that as much as I did. It almost made me think better of her.”

  “Almost?”

  “Almost, until she started on me. First the woman made me out to be an idiot too lazy to read the municipal holiday schedule. Then, with barely a pause for the transition, she paints me as so cowardly that I sent the fool off on a wild-goose chase so I wouldn’t have to come up with an explanation of how a holiday cannot be a holiday. She understood my position, she told the commissioner. But it wasn’t her position to decide whether the city had created this circus because one hand simply didn’t know what the other was doing, or from barefaced greed, because they were making such a killing on their meters they didn’t want to miss a day. Well, I’ll tell you, Smith, that set off the whole room. Everyone in town’s got an opinion on parking meters.”

  “Right.” Everyone on the force has heard those opinions. On most issues in Berkeley there are as many views as there are speakers, and as many people to tell you the rest of them don’t know what they’re talking about. But come to parking and the citizenry speaks with a single mind, a mind glad to explain that years ago the city fathers decided to combat traffic. “Keep the car out of the city!” the starry-eyed patriarchs proclaimed. “Teach the masses to take the bus! Make it more costly to drive, much more costly to park. Cut pollution, save the air!” Parking meters grew like oaks. Nickels, dimes, and quarters fell like acorns. And soon the city fathers were squirreling those coins away as if they’d seen glaciers on the horizon. Did mass transit improve? Not noticeably. But the city coffers were another issue, and by now, the single mind insisted, the city was making a fortune off its drivers!

  Eckey braced her hands on her hips. “So, Smith, she’s got the whole room united. She’s kept the fool so quiet that he’s become a pawn to represent them. All this with a matter-of-fact presentation and the garnish of sarcasm. It was a performance like you’d see at Berkeley Rep. And when she told the commissioner that after her client had endured the lunacy of the city the least he could expect was not to get the runaround from Parking Enforcement, the audience actually applauded.” She threw up her hands. “So, I ask you, what chance did I have?”

  “Snowball’s,” Howard grumbled. The type of situation Eckey faced would have driven him crazy. Even the thought made him want to smash walls. He pushed himself up, motioned her to his chair, and strode out. Eckey eyed his chair but remained standing.

  “So what are you saying, Eckey? I mean, how do you connect Madeleine Riordan with the buggy basher?”

  She shrugged. “Just nothing I’d put past that woman.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?” I hadn’t said, “That’s it?!” but perhaps I could have controlled my sarcasm. If I had, maybe Eckey wouldn’t have left in a huff, with a parting comment that mimicked my own offending tone. “Well, Smith, you’re certainly the right person to be investigating Madeleine Riordan. Won’t be a stretch for you to think like her.”

  I sat back, stung at first. It took me a while to realize that however Eckey may have intended her comment, I wasn’t entirely insulted. And her observation opened an avenue that could lead behind the closed gates of Madeleine Riordan’s being.

  I let my eyes close and tried to feel what it would be like to have been Madeleine. With some people that’s easy, they’re so like me. With others, like Pereira, it’s as if her body is divided into ten front-to-back sectors and I could slip as comfortably into half of them as I could into her clothes. The other half are too small, the wrong colors, or styles that look good on her but make me feel pretentious.

  With Madeleine Riordan there were probably only one or two sectors I felt at ease in. But I could tell from how my body felt when I used that tone of sarcasm that there was a match there. Some similarity of view, of feeling, something too deep to draw right out.

  I laughed. If this is the way I was conducting a homicide investigation, maybe I’d been in Berkeley too long.

  I called Raksen for an update, but it was too soon for the compulsive lab tech to part with any drop of undistilled information.

  Dr. Timms, Madeleine’s husband, was still not home. Was it time to consider an APB on him? Not yet, but if he didn’t show by tomorrow, it would be another story. In the meantime, I left instructions for Pereira to find out who Timms had spent time with at his conference in Carmel and interview them. Murakawa I’d have canvass Timms’s neighbors at home. In a murder the spouse is always a prime suspect, and the absent Dr. Herbert Timms was making himself more suspect by the hour.

  I finished my reports on the scene, but I couldn’t shake the idea of seeing things as Madeleine had. She hadn’t orchestrated her death; few carry power that far
. But I had the feeling of her still holding the strings to the investigation, posthumously manipulating the suspects and me. If I could just see things through her eyes … I could never let on to anyone what I was doing. Woman’s intuition? Or should I square my shoulders, adopt a manly voice, and call it playing a hunch?

  I shivered. Either way I was going to have to do the one thing I wanted to avoid—get inside Madeleine Riordan’s skin and feel what she felt as she lay dying above the canyon.

  CHAPTER 15

  IT WAS A DESPERATION move, this business of getting into Madeleine Riordan’s skin. I didn’t really believe I would learn anything. I didn’t think you could slip into another person’s being. In the Bay Area there are plenty of classes in that type of thing. We’ve got a whole catalog of counterculture classes and services, from channeling for beauty (inner and outer) to crystal healing to an astro-hypnosis dating network. A directory comes out monthly. One month Howard and I had gone to a workshop in which we sat cross-legged knee to knee and matched our rhythm of breathing. I’d felt a certain closeness during the exercise, but it had been hard to say whether that came from the breathing, or the incense and candlelight, or, more likely, the seductive pressure of his knees against mine. The next class, we’d decided, would be massage.

  What would happen now, I was sure, was that I would sit in the dark in Madeleine’s room until Delia or Michael came in and said, “What, are you still here?” and then I’d snap myself together, make some official-sounding comment, and slink away.

  Nothing would come of it. In any case I didn’t want to do it. The idea of sliding into the hidden sectors of Madeleine’s being made me so uncomfortable I could barely stand the thought. For that reason I couldn’t let myself not try.

  I grabbed the last doughnut (a chocolate-coated vanilla creme) from the box at reception, deposited a dollar, and headed for my car. Whatever Madeleine Riordan might have been, she hadn’t mentioned hungry. It was Howard’s night to bring home food. Chances were that meant pizza. A couple pieces should survive till I rolled in. One of the joys of living with another cop was he never expected me home for dinner or to call when I wasn’t.