Time Expired

by Susan Dunlap

  For Champion it was a personal vendetta; for Madeleine Tiress was merely an annoyance allowed to flourish by a system that had to be changed. She would have enjoyed seeing Tiress get justice, but for her, it was the parking enforcement regulations that mattered. For her the principle always superseded the individual—except when the individuals were her mother or her dog. “You disagreed, and Madeleine was ready to pull out, right?”

  “She thought she was indispensable. But I managed without her,” he said defiantly. “I …”

  He was on the verge of telling me something. I prodded, “You had her plans. She’d scoped out the scene at Haste and Telegraph. She’d given you the name of the glue. You cannibalized her plan for Aquatic Lake.”

  “So?”

  “So, Pion, you haven’t done anything on your own more than grab a wand a meter maid left in her cart. Hardly world-class creativity. Madeleine was the planner, the woman who managed all the details. Without her these pranks would just trail off, no newspaper coverage, no applause. You might as well not do them at all.”

  He opened his mouth. I almost had him. But he caught himself before the words came out.

  I leaned forward, locking his eyes with mine. “You couldn’t plan anything. You know and Madeleine knew it! Didn’t she?”

  “No, dammit! I showed her. She could have seen the best caper of the whole operation if she’d only looked out her window. I gave her a whole goddamned hostage operation right here in the canyon. All she needed to do was point her binoculars, and she would have seen a maneuver that would have amazed even the colonel.” He looked so distraught anyone who hadn’t spent hours wild-goosing in the canyon and more hours making and tracking down reports would have felt sorry for the man. And as outraged as I was, I felt a twinge of pity for the fifty-year-old still trying to impress his father, trying to impress Madeleine, and maybe offering her a gift of entertainment. A very small and exceedingly short-lived twinge. “And the explosion yesterday, why did you set that up?”

  “I didn’t! Hey, not me. Why would I do that? Madeleine was already dead.” He was halfway out of his chair. “And besides, an explosion wasn’t something she’d have liked. I mean, hell, she didn’t even watch the hostage thing.”

  “We found a parking enforcement wand down there.”

  “I didn’t put it there. It must have been one of Madeleine’s. I gave her two, one for the dog, and one for her. She kept hers in the bushes at the top of the path. You check; it must be gone now.”

  I believed him. There was no reason for him to set the explosion, and much more for someone wanting to keep the focus in the canyon on the meter maid perp. “Why didn’t Madeleine see the hostage operation? Didn’t you call her?”

  “I tried, but she was over in goddamn Claire’s room. I didn’t have the number there. I must have called Madeleine’s room ten times, let the phone ring half an hour. She never budged, just kept sitting there staring at Claire.”

  “And that’s when you took the picture of her?” Sitting in the chair at the end of Claire’s bed, with the screen next to her. Or was it in front of her?

  “Yeah. You think she was angry; it was nothing to how I felt.”

  “And when she came back to her room, did you talk to her then?” I asked with growing excitement.

  “Yeah,” he snapped, giving me a clear picture of the tone of that conversation.

  “What did she say?”

  “I don’t remember,” he muttered to his knees.

  “You remember. What?”

  Silence.

  “It’s too late to play dumb. You are in a lot of trouble. You’ve broken enough laws to keep a court tied up for months. Grand theft, auto theft, felony assault, and depending on the extent of Tiress’s injuries, attempted murder.”

  He looked up, startled.

  “We’re not talking county jail here.”

  “Hey, I—”

  “But,” I said, “how a judge looks at this will depend a whole lot on how he or she perceives your character. How much I tell them you’ve cooperated. Get it?”

  It took only a moment for him to take in the picture and nod his acquiescence.

  “Now, tell me what she said.”

  The startled look returned in watered-down form. He wondered why I was concentrating on that, but he was in no position to ask. He rubbed his right hand between the fingers of his left, moving from palm to little finger as if preparing to count the topics he divulged. “Well, we argued. She couldn’t appreciate the canyon operation. Christ, I did it for her! You’d think she would have cared! But no. She hadn’t even noticed it, and when I told her, it was as if she wasn’t even paying attention. She carried on about violence and danger to innocent people. And”—he shifted to the ring finger—“she went on about my betraying her trust. And the thing about not letting people decide which moments of life are important.”

  My breath caught. Madeleine’s statement from the Coco Arnero hearing: “We can’t have people choosing which moments of our lives are important enough to deserve respect.” She had brought it up to me and to Champion. “This was when she was talking about the meter capers?” I demanded. These weren’t the reactions I’d expected. She should have been accusing Champion of grabbing power, or being too unreliable to follow directions, of blunting the point of the caper, or more likely missing the point. She should have used terms of indignation, anger, desperation. “Betraying a trust” was a reflective phrase, one used more in disappointment than anger.

  “I don’t know what she was talking about. She wasn’t making sense. It was like she was thinking about something else.”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her about other things. Since she came back to Canyonview, it was hard to talk to her at all; she was in Claire’s room all the time. When she was at Canyonview before she never bothered with Claire. Now, after she got so finicky, all of a sudden, she’s over in Claire’s room in the afternoon and back there again this time of night. I couldn’t call her till she got back to her own room. And that’d be ten o’clock at night.”

  “And that was when she talked about betrayal and which moments of life people deem worthy of consideration?”

  “Yeah. I get up early. At ten at night I don’t want to be figuring out puzzles.”

  I shook my head. “Champion, you peer in on a dying woman. You telephone her at ten P.M. And then you have the nerve to complain that her conversation was unsatisfactory.”

  He started to speak, but I put my hand up. “She was sitting in Claire’s room at the end of the bed. Did she mention the screen?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “Was she sitting next to it, or behind it? Think.”

  He stood up and walked to the table and picked up the photo and stared, shaking his head, and put it down. The photo didn’t answer my question. It hadn’t Monday, it wouldn’t now. “Pion, think about what she said.”

  He sank back into his chair, let his eyes close. It was a full minute before he shook his head. “She never mentioned the screen. There’s no reason she would. The only time we talked about her being in Claire’s … I was pissed off about it. She laughed and said I could get in line behind that dog of hers. She said she had to close him in her own room because she could never keep him quiet enough. Just his breathing was too loud.”

  The only reason Madeleine would have needed—not quiet, but silence—was so someone wouldn’t know she was there—behind the screen.

  Eight twenty-six. I left Champion with Nguyen and Patterson, and ran up the dirt stairs. By the time I got to the top I’d tripped twice, skinned both arms, and was panting so hard I could barely call out to Williams to come with me.

  I kept one hand on the horn, and drove like crazy through the fog toward the Arlington Code 2 (lights flashing). It wasn’t till I was nearly to Canyonview that I turned off the flasher.

  Madeleine had been behind the screen in Claire’s room at this hour two nights running. I could a
lready be too late.

  CHAPTER 26

  “MADELEINE?” CLAIRE TURNED HER head slowly toward the door as I crept in. I moved past the head of the bed, next to the door, and stopped beside her where she could see me better. I didn’t think she’d been asleep; she looked as if she had been given medication that left her eyes floating in their sockets. Or she was drifting out of time as she had been occasionally yesterday. I expected her to recognize me now, but she said nothing more. Was she so spacey that she really thought I was Madeleine? Dark hair, medium height, chiseled features—Madeleine and I were the same general type. But no one would mistake me for her. And the Madeleine Claire had seen lately had lost all her hair.

  The dry flowery scent of Claire’s powder mixed unevenly with the acrid smell of the old cigarettes and ash in the tray on the bedside table. The shade was pulled over the canyon window, as it had been last night. It fluttered dangerously close to the side of the bed. But it didn’t pierce Claire’s wall of opacity. She lay, with that unfocused look, the yellow covers pulled up so high on her neck that the sheet pressed up against her chin and throat. Yesterday she sat up in her pink quilted bed jacket.

  Her makeup still looked fresh well into the evening. Tonight there was no sign she or Delia had bothered with it at all. Her skin was terribly pale. The hazel of her eyes washed out into the white. Under the covers her arms were wrapped around her thin chest. She looked like an old, brittle paper marionette that could be crumpled by a touch.

  “Was I in the past?” she’d asked when I was here before. “I write things down so I can remember.” But she hadn’t remembered me. If she had asked now, I would have told her who I was. She didn’t.

  With anyone else I would have asked permission or at least given an explanation. Without comment I took her tape recorder off the bedside table, set it on Record, and said, “I’m recording what is said here. Present are Claire Wellington, resident, and Jill Smith, detective, Berkeley Police.” Then I slipped the machine under the bed. If this maneuver was one Claire did remember, I just hoped she didn’t blurt out a comment about it later. “Claire,” I said, fingering the screen by the foot of the bed. “I’m going to sit here behind the screen. Don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

  “Like Madeleine,” she said in a quivery voice. I hoped it was loud enough for the tape to pick it up.

  “Did Madeleine ask you not to tell anyone she was back there?”

  She rolled her head toward the window. “When she came without him.”

  “Without Coco? Without her dog?” That was what Champion had said, too.

  Claire wrinkled her nose. “Awful animal.” She shrunk back on the bed. “He touched me.”

  “You’re not talking about Coco now, are you?”

  But Claire gave no answer. She didn’t look like she was asleep, but she wasn’t here any longer either.

  I stood utterly still, listening for footsteps, as Madeleine must have Saturday night, as Claire must have night after night. I didn’t know how much time I had to question Claire—maybe forever. Maybe killing Madeleine had frightened him off. I could be too late. Madeleine was dead; Claire was no witness at all. All he had to do was keep his cool now and he’d be home free. But if he did come, and he spotted me, I’d never get him. I listened harder, willing distant footfalls to resound through the rustle of leaves, the whir of the night wind. Still nothing. I moved closer to Claire and asked, “Who touched you?”

  Claire stared vaguely at the window shade. From her fuzzy focal point she might have been looking out into the canyon, or at memories of the Minton Hall demonstrations, or at nothing more than the skin on the inside of her eyelids.

  Eight forty-five. It was all I could do to keep from pacing, wondering if I’d come too late. If the tape would run out. Or if there would be nothing to record on it because nothing at all would happen tonight. It would be so easy for him to just wait a few days, till the police presence was gone from the canyon. Then he could walk back in here and take up where he stopped.

  The stuffed chair was still behind the screen. I pushed it a few inches toward the window so its empty seat would be visible from the doorway. Even if it had been totally hidden, I couldn’t have made myself sit in it.

  I moved behind the big three-panel screen to a spot where I could peer through a crack—at the room that looked too pink, too mockingly ruffly, but now with just one “ceramic statue” waiting to be destroyed. I stood, where Madeleine had sat when Champion took that enraged picture. Madeleine the planner—how could she have planned so poorly? Why hadn’t she just called us like any other citizen would have?

  But Madeleine Riordan wasn’t just any citizen; she was the lawyer whose picture on the locker room wall was full of dart holes. She knew about that picture, and what the force thought of her. If she had reported what she’d seen from behind this screen, her fear would have been that a patrol officer would answer her call, but maybe he’d stop to laugh about her on the way here; maybe he’d drag out the investigation for months, insisting with a snicker that he wanted to be sure Madeleine wouldn’t haul him before the review commission. Maybe he wouldn’t even believe her. Even if we responded pronto, she couldn’t shepherd the investigation through. By the time it came to court, she knew she’d be dead. She needed a witness—a witness with authority—someone who would care the way she did. Or, if not the same way, at least one who would care at all.

  Madeleine was not a great judge of character (even she would have to admit that now), but she’d been right on the mark picking me for her witness. Madeleine’s murder had grabbed me by the throat; I didn’t know why; but I wouldn’t draw a free breath till I had her killer. Standing behind the screen, I felt my face coated with sweat. I was breathing in nervous gasps and I couldn’t believe the noise of my breath wouldn’t expose me. How had Madeleine managed to stay hidden back here?

  Claire lay utterly still, eyes unfocused. The covers above her breasts barely moved, but the roar of her breath rivaled the ocean. Or did it just sound that way to me? I forced myself to listen to the noises outside—a car door slamming, a dog barking in the distance, branches snapping back and forth—then judge Claire’s volume. No, quiet as her breath was, I could still hear it, as Madeleine must have. As Claire must have heard Madeleine’s. And as he must have heard it, too. Of course, he had. That was what Claire had been alluding to yesterday when she’d said, “He sniffed her out. Not Coco.”

  I’d made a mistake they warn you of in training—never assume. It’s not the hunches you decide to go with that get you in trouble; it’s the assumptions that are so integral a part of you you never question them at all. That’s what I’d done here.

  “He was too close,” Claire had whispered to me yesterday.

  I had watched her shrink back fearfully, thought of my old Great Pyrenees, and lumped Claire’s complaints with those of my dog-fearing aunt.

  “He touched me,” she had said. “I couldn’t keep him away.”

  I’d assumed she was talking about Coco. I’d asked if Madeleine knew.

  “She sat right there where you are,” Claire had said. But even Madeleine couldn’t keep him away. He had come when she wasn’t there. When she was at home, living with Herbert Timms. The reason Madeleine had left there, come back to Canyonview before she physically had to, was because Claire called. Claire must have said to her what she told me: “I can’t keep him out.”

  There was a scratch on the window. I jumped. It was just the palm branch, that same palm branch that framed Champion’s picture of Madeleine staring in outrage—the outrage that led to her telling Champion about not letting anyone choose the moments of life that are worthy of consideration. Claire had put it differently: “They think I’m too old, too dizzy to bother with. They’ve all packed me away like a summer carpet.” They—Delia, Michael, and even Madeleine—had laughed at Claire’s prissiness, the modesty as outdated as summer carpets. We’d dismissed her as ridiculous. We had tossed her out, too. Discarded these moments of her l
ife.

  I recalled Coco Arnero and his demand that the police guard his body when he was out of it. Madeleine hadn’t dismissed him.

  And now, watching Claire clutching her arms to her breasts—I realized that Madeleine had not rolled her up and stuck her in the attic like a summer carpet.

  Madeleine didn’t like Claire, but she would have protected Claire and the rest of the “dizzy” ladies whose “worthy” moments of life were long past. Maybe it was her way of telling her mother she was sorry she hadn’t gotten anyone to her bedside in time to help; maybe it was atonement; maybe defending the principle of fairness was enough in itself.

  The palm frond scraped again, louder. I thought of the explosion; it was such a clever diversion from this crime in here. The frond scraped once more. This time it sounded different. This time it wasn’t the frond at all, but footsteps on the path.

  I couldn’t stay behind the screen where Madeleine had been—had been found! There was nowhere else but the bathroom. I slid behind the door, and with my left hand on the knob, held it half open so I could see through the crack. It was a terrible spot, but I had no choice. If he needed anything from in here, he’d smack the door into my ribs. Then he’d smile and walk free. There wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do.

  The outside door opened—no easing open warily, not that much care was needed. He pushed it open proprietorially.

  “Ready for bed, Claire,” Michael said. His voice sounded utterly normal. A smile spread across his wide flat cheeks. In fresh oxford-cloth shirt, clean jeans, his short, dark hair newly combed, he looked like the attractive young doctor all the old patients love. Anyone would have wondered why Claire was cringing.

  I had glanced in here the night I’d come to sit in Madeleine’s room. Claire had that same look then. I’d taken it for embarrassment at Michael’s abruptness to me. I had dismissed it as an old woman’s foolish aberration, the teacher’s reaction to a student’s poor manners.