Rundown

by Michael Cadnum

  Sometimes I start to watch what is happening in the distance, if a documentary or the plot of a movie is too violent. Off at the edge of the screen there is usually a tree full of long-necked cranes, or a blurry, bovine shape just standing there. In the goriest gangster movie, in the forefront you might see extras ducking for cover in their thirties overcoats, but at the same time, beyond everything, a finch that doesn’t belong in the movie, or real wind fluttering a leaf.

  I had slept a couple of hours, the cheap sleep you get on an airliner, my mouth hanging open, head full of thoughts. My hand was stiff and sore. I laced on my running shoes, the left one stained with a kiss of blackberry. It would not smear, and spit wouldn’t make it rub off.

  My left foot tends to overpronate, rolling in too much with every step. It isn’t a serious problem except that my left shoe starts to lean in a little when it’s flat on the floor. I burn through shoes, and I try all the brands, every major company. I wear a dual-density midsole in my left shoe, taking it to a sport-tech store to be redesigned before I do any serious running.

  I wrap white adhesive tape around the aglets, the plastic tip of the shoelaces. Otherwise the aglet often splits after about a week of nipping the street. The laces get that frayed look, which I hate. Miss Friday, the track coach at Lloyd-Fairhill School, says the thicker the sole the more likely you are to develop tendon trouble, especially shin-splints. I suspect Friday is one of those coaches who would like to see athletes run marathons barefooted.

  Predawn hush greeted me, five A.M., a few neighbors out jogging with their dogs and hefty neighbors running off those calories from fat. This is a safe place to run, and I make it even more safe by keeping to the streets with plenty of light and doing most of my miles at the junior high quarter-mile loop about a mile away, a nice crushed brick track that glows in the rising dawn.

  I kept stopping to look back, car-poolers picking up passengers with briefcases, ready for the long drive to Silicon Valley. The sky was the color of dark steel, and sometimes this early you can look at things more easily than you can at full noon; there is less glare. But there were more shadows down each street than I had ever noticed before, more dark, lightless shafts behind the sycamores. What could have been a commuter wiping the dew off his sports car looked like a figure crouching at the starting blocks, getting set to race after me.

  Dad had his postworkout glow, after three miles on his machine in the exercise room. He had a white towel around his neck and wore one of his old, premegabucks sweatsuits, baggy gray cotton.

  He snapped his cell phone shut and tossed it onto the coffee table. “I’m furious,” he said. He sounded calm, but I knew better. “I finally got hold of Cassandra.”

  “How is she?” I asked, dropping into the sectional sofa, fat white pillows with an ivory pattern, duck bills, or—once you were informed—lotus leaves.

  “She’s pissed I woke her up. She says she is sorry to hear about your ‘incident,’ and she’s coming home tonight about ten, as planned.”

  “There’s nothing she can do,” I said. It was fine with me if I put off seeing Cass until the wedding.

  I knew that Cass and Danny, her fiancé, were sharing our cabin, romping all over the master bedroom. Danny was supposed to be in San Diego, playing golf with his dad, a retired VIP with the state department. Cass was supposed to be working on her tan with a couple of girlfriends. My parents would not have died if they knew the truth, but this pretense spared everyone having to think about Danny and Cass giving the heirloom bird’s-eye maple bed a workout.

  “We have to change the flowers,” he said. “I woke up last night with the realization that yellow roses are all wrong.”

  “Roses,” I said, one of Mom’s techniques, repeating a key word and letting the client vent. There was something Cass had told me about Dad, but I didn’t know how to begin to ask.

  “Dr. Theobald has beautiful white hair. We need blue-white hybrid roses to match his coloring.” Dr. Theobald—pronounced Tibuld—is a Unitarian minister, about ninety years old, who met my father at one of the Season of Hope fund-raisers. My father is about as religious as a doorstop, but when he learned that the old gentleman was dean of the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, my parents had begun inviting the him to the occasional party. The clergyman turned out to be a real gem, with a voice like a wildlife movie narrator. If he said, “This chardonnay is delicious,” it was like the earth itself had opened up and complimented the hostess.

  “That’s dozens of long-stemmed roses,” I said, “for those wicker thingies—”

  “So why not get on the phone to the florist and tell him I want the Jessica Friedlander Brodie hybrid or the April Thursday long-stems. And there’s a couple other of ideas on my tape recorder. I have to be in L.A. all day, wringing someone’s neck.”

  “Whose?”

  “They’re planning to give the set for my show the ‘trattoria look.’ Chianti in straw, and hanging Italian sausages, and maybe some fake plastic grapes.” It was only a series of pilots, sample shows. Cass and I half hoped no network would actually buy the series. Dad was getting up too many nights, eating sourdough and Stilton, almond butter and water crackers, lasagna, leg of lamb—whatever he could get his hands on.

  “Whose neck?”

  “What happens when I do sushi?” he said, ignoring my question. “Or when I talk about the First Thanksgiving, with Little Sicily all over the place? I don’t want you to go running until the sun comes up.”

  “I is up.”

  “Run on the machine, that’s what it’s for. How are you feeling?”

  I said I felt good.

  “Look at that printout I got off the Web,” he said. “That stuff’s supposed to be better than Mace.”

  A page on the rosewood coffee table depicted a spray can with arms and legs. It was standing triumphant, biceps bulging, over a prone male body. Karate in a Can.

  “You wear it clipped to your shirt. Someone messes with you, you knock him flat.”

  “Maybe you should just buy me a shotgun,” I said.

  Dad gave me the look he uses on headwaiters who say the table isn’t quite ready.

  Dad had to take a twelve-gauge out of the hands of a liquor-wired neighbor a couple of years before, a pensioned freeway construction exec with bladder cancer. The chief of police wrote him a letter saying Dad was the “kind of citizen Oakland needs.” For months afterward the pop of a motor scooter made Dad go white.

  I had forgotten, or maybe remembered without knowing it. Dad had even taken the novel Shogun to Goodwill because it reminded him of the Remington pump-action our fellow citizen had leveled at Dad’s face.

  “Come with me,” he said. “Fly down to L.A. for the day. You can meet my producer.”

  “What’s he like?” I asked, choosing my words carefully.

  “‘What’s he like,’” he echoed, with a chuckle. “She’s very knowledgeable.” Dad respected knowledge, believed in it.

  “Really.” This was more Cass’s intonation than Mom’s, icy charm, keep away from children and pets.

  “You could load those files into my laptop for me on the plane, sit by the pool, run spell-check though my notes.”

  I had to feel a little compassion for my father. Dad moved the knockout spray ad to a safe place, under a century-old crystal ashtray. We used it as a paperweight; both my dad’s parents have emphysema. He thought I was going to spend the day in L.A. watching him tell people maybe the Italian restaurant look was a good idea after all.

  Doors slammed in far away places, Dad getting ready for the airport.

  Chapter 9

  Bernice is a tall, correct woman with black hair, a touch of gray at the temples. Dad said she had a “troubled personal history.” She was of Dad’s many projects, people he knows and helps. We had not met her at all until several weeks ago, but she knew from the start that I couldn’t stand the wrinkly skin that forms on hot chocolate. At first Mom would have rather let some of the rooms remain dusty than have t
his female general marching up and down the stairs. But something about Bernice pleased even my mother. Bernice seemed to have known us for years.

  Her name was pronounced in a slightly unusual way: Burn-us, with the accent on the first syllable, not Burr-niece. The only person who always won a smile from Bernice was me, and it was a little embarrassing how much she clammed up around Cassandra. I was very self-conscious about seeing Bernice this morning, sure that my parents had filled her in on the Incident. So I was surprised when I slipped into the kitchen and got her usual “good morning,” smile, no extra concern.

  She makes wonderful bread, pouring ingredients into the bread machine, wheat germ, handfuls of oats, sage honey, bran, never measuring. And out of the machine come loaves of heaven. I had a slice of her toast, with the smallest possible touch of her apricot preserves, taking my time, not wanting to tell her.

  Mom came down from the bedroom, dressed for work, a boardroom pinstripe and a strawberry sherbet scarf. She said, “Bernice, I need a word with you.”

  Bernice returned pale and drawn, taller than ever.

  She looked away from me, sifting flour, like I wasn’t there, as Mom bustled in, poured herself a tidy half cup of coffee, added some nonfat milk, and drank it off, all without a change of expression. My mother looked years older this morning, her hair just about recovered, her eye makeup perfect, if you like that sort of thing. She couldn’t hide the parentheses around her mouth, the fine wrinkles, or the waves of weary tension that flowed out of her like cold weather.

  Mom gave me an embrace, dangerously close to damaging her makeup. “I’ll call you from the office. Put that new little phone in your backpack. And turn the ringer on, so you can hear it.”

  In the morning light there was no talk of me seeing a psychiatrist, as there had been no mention of bodyguards.

  Then I was alone with Bernice.

  Bernice was not acting the way I expected. I had imagined a hug of concern, a promise of tiramisu or crème caramel, and a long talk about capital punishment, which she believed was the foundation of a sane society.

  I didn’t expect this silence.

  “It’s a sickening thing,” she said after a very long time.

  “Bernice, I’m all right.”

  “You think you are.”

  “Nothing much happened—he just barely touched me.”

  Bernice was sifting way more flour than she needed, soft billows of unbleached white drifting across the marble pastry slab.

  I made a shrug, which was wasted; she wasn’t looking. My shoulder was stiff.

  After a silence she said, “Jennifer, this will haunt you.”

  Detective Margate called just after nine.

  She said that she needed to talk. The sounds of the police station were audible in the background, phones trilling, muted voices. She had left her office door open, maybe to give me the full effect. “As soon as it’s convenient,” she said.

  I said that I would be happy to help.

  Chapter 10

  It was an unmarked car, coffee-ice-cream brown, a whiplash antenna above the gas cap.

  Detective Ronert sat in the back seat, busy with a ballpoint pen and a clipboard. He said good morning and asked me how I was doing.

  I told him I was okay, and he looked at me searchingly, as though he hoped this was true. I kept looking back at him, asking him about the paperwork he had to do, even though it gave me a crick in my neck. He explained that detecting crime was all record keeping. “If we draw our weapons we have to account for each shot.”

  “What happens if there’s a shoot-out?” I asked.

  He said, “We have to draw a yellow circle around every little hole.”

  “Seat belt,” said Detective Margate.

  I worked at getting the buckle to fasten, and at last Margate had to reach over and do it for me, smelling faintly of soap.

  She drove about fifteen miles an hour, eyeing a dog-minder across the street, a muscular man walking four dogs at once, the little dust mop planting a turd in the gutter. Our new neighborhood was replete with child-care experts pushing strollers jammed with four toddlers at once, not to mention the corps of tree surgeons and gardeners who started bright and early, nipping and tucking.

  Detective Margate took a great deal of interest in the way the dog-man pulled on an oversize plastic glove and knelt, gathering the poop into a Baggie.

  “I guess he likes animals,” I said.

  “Or else he really needs a job.” Detective Margate sped up. “It reminds me of what we do,” she said.

  I thought that she meant all of us living creatures, excreting solid waste.

  “Police, I mean,” she said. “Detectives.”

  “Ask her about the drag and drop,” said Ronert.

  “We need to find out how far the attacker dragged you,” she said. “And where he let you go.”

  “He didn’t drag me anywhere.”

  “Not even a couple of meters?” she asked.

  Meters, I noted, not yards. I told her I didn’t think so.

  “The FBI might still be interested,” said Ronert from the back seat. “If it’s anything like attempted kidnapping.”

  “Kidnapping,” said Detective Margate, with gently mocking good humor. “Detective Ronert toured the FBI when he was a kid.”

  “It’s only a little farther,” I cautioned her, as the detective whisked through an intersection.

  She pulled over to the curb under a eucalyptus that was tagged with a bright green sticker. The roots had buckled the sidewalk, sections of concrete sticking up like playing cards. Someone had probably stumbled and sued the city. The tree was marked for destruction.

  “When you were jogging last evening,” the detective began. “Before the attack—” She set the parking brake and eased the gears into neutral. I had done well in driver’s education, but my favorite part of any driving experience was turning off the ignition and getting out of the car. Dad said I’d get a Fiat when I graduated.

  “I was running,” I corrected her. I run or I walk; jogging is for people who lack determination.

  “When you were running you might have seen a car parked, up by the botanical gardens.”

  “Maybe,” I said, meaning: maybe not.

  “Because the perp must have driven up the canyon and pulled off the road.”

  “Okay,” I said, meaning: I’m listening.

  “It’s all no parking. Unless you saw a car with its hazard lights on, someone with a flat tire or a stall.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You sound sure,” said the voice from the back seat.

  I craned my neck to look at Detective Ronert, his sympathetic face stuck in the farthest possible corner of the back.

  I said, “I can’t remember a particular vehicle.”

  “That late in the day all the botanical garden staff is gone,” she said. “So any car in the parking lot—” She glanced into her side mirror, and a bicyclist flashed by, pumping hard down College Avenue.

  “So,” she continued, after watching the cyclist’s butt disappear down the street. “Were there any cars parked there?”

  “There could have been,” I said.

  “But you can’t remember?” she asked.

  I made an I’m-trying frown.

  “Because failure to recall the run-up to a crime is very common, and these back-canceled impressions are what we need to uncover.”

  What would I have been able to recall, I asked myself.

  “The point is—we have some tire tread,” the detective was saying. “There was a car that parked just beyond the gardens, up behind a pine tree, like someone trying to hide. If you saw a vehicle secluded during your run—”

  “You can match the tread to the car,” I prompted, like the smartest kid in class.

  “We did already, it was a Volvo, not new. They’re very easy to identify, all those European tires. But the car could have parked there any time within the last couple of days. We can’t search for all th
e ten-year-old Volvos.”

  “Ten-year-old tires would be pretty worn out.”

  “They were.”

  I made myself look like someone searching her memory. Then I offered a helpless smile.

  “All the other attacks have been in more urban areas. San Jose State University, the Hayward BART station, the old Montgomery Ward building.” She left some silence between statements, like someone who never had to rush. “How far up the canyon did you jog, Jennifer?”

  “All the way up to the Lawrence Hall of Science.” This was untrue, but my voice betrayed nothing. Besides, I could run tougher hills than that.

  “So you passed that funny-looking pine tree, with the twisted branches.”

  “I can’t remember a particular tree.” But then, like a poker player turning over a card, I saw it clearly in my mind, the tree she was talking about. I had seen it as I surveyed the canyon in recent weeks, a stunted Monterey pine. “The one like this, arms all over the place.”

  Detective Margate made a smile by pressing her lips together. “We can forget about the Volvo, right?”

  I made the kind of exaggerated sigh Dad gives when Cass drives him crazy.

  Detective Margate took her time, shifting into drive, releasing the parking brake. “We need you to help us, Jennifer. And we need your parents to consent.”

  “I’d love to help. The trouble is, Mom hates police shrinks.”

  The car accelerated, and we began passing cars in the slow lane. “I was in Strawberry Canyon until well after midnight last night and studied that path up and down the slope. I just don’t see our perpetrator hiding in the poison oak.”

  “You’re going to send me to a doctor who’ll get me to remember.” I watched the store fronts drift by.

  “It’ll help us immeasurably,” she said.

  “He’ll stick a needle into me.”

  “That’s not how Dr. Pierce works,” she said, in a tone of great kindness, like the world’s best nurse. “He uses memory regression. The other victims have cooperated. If nothing else works, he uses hypnosis.”