Pennines on a Dead Woman's Eyes

by Marcia Muller

  In that moment I understood that we knew each other as fully as was necessary. There might be blanks and empty spaces in both our lives that we chose not to fill in, but what counted was the essence of a person, and almost from the first we’d instinctively grasped that.

  On the way to Oakland I stopped at my office and destroyed the file labeled “Ripinsky, Heino.”

  PART TWO – THE PREDATORS

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Flames flickering against rough stone, Hy warming his back as he sat on the raised hearth. Shifting light leaving his hawk-nosed face in shadow, playing on the dark blond hair that curled over the collar of his wool shirt.

  I crossed the room, stepping over our joined sleeping bags, and handed him the beer I’d fetched from the ice chest. Then I placed my own on the rough pine floor and sat beside him, my thigh pressing against his.

  “You’ve been awful quiet the last few days, McCone,” he said. “Come to any conclusions yet?”

  “Some, but nothing major.”

  He nodded, didn’t press me.

  We’d flown in the Citabria to a landing strip at the northern Inyo County town of Big Pine. There we had picked up supplies and a rental Jeep and driven along Death Valley Road into the Great Whites, to this two-room cabin belonging to one of the many nameless, faceless friends who owed Hy favors. We’d done all the things he’d said we would, and more. I’d learned to listen to the silence. This was our last night here; tomorrow—Wednesday—we’d fly to Oakland, and Hy would continue on an unexplained mission to San Diego.

  “What about you?” I asked. “Are you ready to tell me why you’re making this trip to my hometown?”

  “I’ve got to talk to an old buddy about a business proposition he’s made me.”

  “What kind of proposition?”

  “I’ll tell you about it if it works out.”

  “Something to do with the foundation?” Watch it, I warned myself; you’re getting too inquisitive.

  Surprisingly, he grinned, teeth flashing white under his droopy mustache. “No, you nosy person. To tell the truth, environmental work’s kind of paled for me. Not the cause—the work itself. That foundation directorship my late wife so generously set up for me doesn’t take half my time. As for the rest of it . . . maybe I’m just tired of getting busted to save the trees. The trees’ll get saved sooner or later, but some kid with a good fund-raising apparatus and a PR firm, not by an old jailbird like me.”

  The word “old” didn’t fit him, but “jailbird” certainly did. I’d never known anyone who had done more jail time for more noble causes than Hy. “Sounds to me like you’re getting restless.”

  “That I am.” He glanced at me, frowned, then put his hand under my chin and tipped my face up toward his. “Look, McCone, I feel a change coming on. It’s a good change, and a lot of it’s due to you. But I’ve never been much of a talker, at least about myself, so don’t rush me, okay?”

  I let the subject drop. He’d tell me what he wanted me to know in his own good time, and in his own way.

  The silence that fell was comfortable. Wind baffled around the stone chimney behind us. I shrank deeper into the luxurious warmth of my down jacket, conscious of the heat of Hy’s thigh through my jeans. Minutes ticked by before he said, “You never called that cop back.”

  I’d phoned Bart Wallace from Big Pine, to let him know I’d be incommunicado for a few days. Friday afternoon Hy and I had driven back into town for more supplies and spent the evening eating, drinking, and dancing at a country-and-western bar, but I’d made no effort to check in with the inspector. “No point in it. He wouldn’t have gotten anything conclusive from the coroner’s office or the lab yet, and the higher-ups had advised him to tread very lightly as far as the Stameroff angle is concerned. Treading lightly gets you nowhere with a bastard like that.”

  “So what’re you going to do? Let them cover it up, like they did thirty-six year ago?”

  The question annoyed me. He should have known by then that I’d never been a quitter. This trip—my flight from the city and the case—was merely a respite. And part of the reason I hadn’t called Wallace again was that I’d been playing for time, hoping that one nagging piece of information would shake itself free from the mass of useless data that we all carry in some remote corner of our minds. Something had been wrong about Lis’s murder scene. Something . . . but I just couldn’t grasp it.

  Because of my irritation, my voice sounded sharp when I replied, “You’re jumping to a conclusion, Hy. Stameroff may be just a concerned and overprotective father.”

  He didn’t react to my tone, merely said, “You know you don’t believe that. Sure as hell he’s covering something up, and take it from me, McCone, cover-ups are bad shit.”

  I looked at him with interest, hoping he’d go on. We all knew cover-ups were bad, but Hy had spoken with a vehemence that was obviously born of bitter personal experience. He saw my expression, however, and his own became closed, guarded.

  “Well,” I said after a moment, “cover-up or not, it isn’t my case anymore.”

  Hy pulled at his beer, looking thoughtful. “What is it with you, McCone? You’re not afraid—not of the good Justice Stameroff or the scumbag with the spray paint. You’re pissed off, but you’re not afraid you’ll lose control; you’ve faced that fear twice now, and you know you won’t step over the line. So why the resistance? You could still research the old case for the Historical Tribunal. Nobody can stop you from doing that.”

  I moved away from his side, swiveled on the hearth and looked into the flames. Cobalt, emerald, amethyst, blood red—pulling hypnotically at me in the same way my dream visions of the events of June 22, 1956, had . . .

  “McCone?”

  “I hear what you’re telling me.”

  “And?”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  He nodded, satisfied. After a bit he said, “Those pennies on the dead woman’s eyes—the symbolism’s pretty obvious.” I’d filled him in on the cases, past and present, in bits and pieces over the last five days.

  “Closing one’s eyes to something,” I said. “A statement about the victim: she should have closed her eyes to whatever it was that got her killed. Or maybe a warning to somebody else.”

  “But why lead pennies? Not easy to come by, even then. Lead: a very reactive metal, highly toxic. And then there’s the symbolism again: heavy, gray, inert.”

  “Those war-issue pennies weren’t actually lead. They were zinc-coated steel. Only minted one year, nineteen forty-three.”

  Unlike Jack, Hy seemed to find nothing odd about my having such a fact at my command. “Wonder how many people know that, thought? Zinc—not much symbolism there, other than the association with the color white. Steel—an alloy, man-made—symbolizes strength. The eleventh wedding anniversary of marriage, and my mother used to carry on about how there had been no steel in her second marriage, though; it lasted till death did them part.”

  Again I glanced at him with interest. Hy had a way of imparting bits and pieces of his life—fragments that didn’t quite add up—and intriguing me all the more.

  “Lead’s chemical designation is Pb,” he went on, “atomic number eighty-two. Zinc’s is Zn. thirty. Nothing in that, I guess.”

  Now I just plain stared. “Since when do you know so much about chemistry?”

  “Oh, I looked into it some, once. You can’t help but have a nodding acquaintance with mineralogy, what with all the mining that goes on in my part of the state.”

  I shook my head. The wide range of Hy’s interests never failed to amaze me. So far I’d learned that he was a western history and fiction buff; could fly and repair an airplane; had mastered the diplomatic process of fund-raising for environmental causes but also possessed a confrontational style that I’d once heard described as a cross between that of Genghis Khan and the kamikaze pilots. In addition, he could speak with authority on folk medicine, animal husbandry, native American art, meteorology, and antique
firearms—and do so in four languages. Now it appeared that he’d not only read the table of chemical elements but memorized it.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Hell, McCone, why do you think I learned that stuff? Struck me as a good way to get women.” In more serious tones he added, “You know, to a collector those coins might be considered fake, since they weren’t made of copper.”

  “But they were minted by the government.”

  “I mean, to a purist. Collectors can be weird, you know.”

  “Do I ever.” Hy was a purist where his western fiction collection was concerned. He’d once told me that he didn’t consider a book to be a complete first edition unless the dust jacket was the exact same one it had worn when it left the warehouse.

  “So,” he went on, “the coins could be taken to represent a falseness. And here’s one more piece of symbolism for you; in the Old West, they put coins over a dead person’s eyes because of a superstition that a corpse with open eyes was looking for the next one to die.”

  “Interesting, but like all the other symbols, what does it mean in terms of this particular case?

  “Damned if I know. You ever think of this: maybe the coins weren’t all that central. In focusing on them, the cops might’ve overlooked something else.”

  I had thought of that. “You mean the ring. And the missing finger.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, explain the meaning of that.”

  “Well, if the Benedict woman actually killed McKittridge, it would be obvious; remove the ring, the husband’s gift to her, by hacking off the ring finger, where the wedding ring would go.” Hy drained his beer and smiled at me. “But why spoil our night here by getting into that kind of gore? Frankly, I feel more interested in physical acts than in symbolic ones.”

  “Do you, now?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  As I moved closer to him, he pitched his empty bottle toward the trash bag. It missed and shattered with a loud pop. We both started, then laughed.

  “Gun-shy.” Hy whispered as he pulled me down onto our sleeping bags.

  Sometime toward morning I woke, twisted in the padded flannel, Hy’s arm heavy across my breasts. Woke from a dream of gunfire in which I was both the pursuer and the pursued. And knew instantly what had bothered me about Lis Benedict’s murder scene.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The next morning I said goodbye to Hy on the tarmac at Oakland Airport’s North Field. He planned, he said, to refuel and fly on to San Diego. Inside the terminal I found a pay phone and called Bart Wallace.

  “Where’ve you been?” he demanded. “I thought you were going to check in with me again.”

  “I said, I’d try. Where I was they don’t have phone booths on every corner—in fact, they don’t have corners.”

  “Then you had no business being there.” Bart was a confirmed urban dweller; he’d once confided to me that even houseplants made him twitchy. “There’re a couple of details I want to check with you,” he added. “I’ve got a statement ready for you to sign, plus the results of the lab work on the graffiti on your house. Besides, I was worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  Wallace didn’t reply. In the background I could hear a woman’s voice. Bart said, “I’ll be ready in three minutes,” then came back on the line. “Sharon? You got any time to talk this morning?”

  “Yes. I can get there—”

  “Better make it someplace else. How about Judy Benedict’s house around eleven? There’re a couple of things I want to look at before we take the seal off.”

  “Good, I’ll see you then.” There were a couple of things I wanted to look at, too.

  Before I went to Bernal Heights, I swung by my own neighborhood to check on my house. The ugly red words on the shingles looked garish in the morning sun, but otherwise everything seemed in good order. Ralph and Alice greeted me at the front door, yowling indignantly for their breakfast. “Nice to be considered nothing more than an adjunct to a can opener.” I told them sourly.

  I went back to the kitchen, opened some of the gummy stuff they favored, and soothed the savage beasts. There was a note on the counter from Ted, saying he’d stayed over on the weekend and received only one late-night call full of heavy breathing—which, I thought, could have been made by any of the twisted, lonely souls in our city’s population. The note also said that somebody had phoned about re-shingling the façade and would send a written estimate.

  I played the tape on my answering machine, found nothing of consequence, then called All Souls. Jack was in court, but I spoke with Rae. One of her Mission district informants had told her that Tony Nueva had left town abruptly on Friday. That was interesting since I’d seldom known Tony to leave the Mission, much less the city. Perhaps Buck, the manager of the video arcade, would know something about this sudden trip: I’d pay him a visit later.

  Wallace’s unmarked car was pulling into the driveway when I parked opposite Judy’s house. As I crossed the street, he and a woman got out. The woman was about my height—five six—with a honey tan complexion and dark brown ringlets cropped close to her head. Her features were strong and handsome, her movements brisk, her elegantly tailored jacket and slim-legged pants deceptively functional.

  “Sharon, meet my partner,” Wallace said. “Adah Joslyn, Sharon McCone.”

  I’d read about Adah Joslyn in the paper, but hadn’t realized she was teamed with Wallace. She’d been an inspector only a few years before transferring to the elite homicide detail—a promotion that greatly furthered our chief’s aim to move women and minorities throughout the department until its composition reflected that of the community as a whole. In Joslyn, the public affairs had found—and exploited for all they could—a virtual gold mine; not only was she a woman, half black, and relatively young, but she was also half Jewish.

  We shook hands, appraising each other, said simultaneously, “I’ve heard of you,” and burst out laughing.

  “Thought you two might get on,” Wallace commented. He mounted the steps of the house, where a yellow plastic police-line strip stretched across the door, removed it, and fiddled with a bunch of keys.

  “Where’s Judy Benedict staying?” I asked as Joslyn and I followed.

  “Her office at the theater downtown. Bart says she’s still really torn up over her mother’s death. Makes it difficult to get information out of her. And of course the father’s still hovering around, being overprotective.”

  “Overprotective or—”

  Wallace said, “Save it for later, after I’ve shown Adah the scene. She just came back from vacation this morning, hasn’t even gone over the reports yet.

  It was cold inside the little house; the parlor curtains were drawn, shrouding the room and the hallway in darkness. Wallace led us to the dining area where Lis had died. The only alteration since the night of the murder was a sheet of plywood nailed over the broken glass door.

  Wallace began pointing out details of the scene to Joslyn. I watched for a bit, then said, “I’ll be right back,” and went down the hall and out the front door. The boundary fence was flush against the house on its right, but a path ran along at the left. I followed it, found it ended at an unlocked gate that opened onto the deck outside the glass door. As I retraced my steps, I checked out the side of the house; there were no windows overlooking the path, and a storage shed protruded next to the dining area. I thumped the wall; the house seemed solidly built and well insulated.

  When I went back into the dining area, Wallace was pointing out a spot on the wall where a section of paneling had been removed. “Stray bullet went in here.”

  “Two shots were fired?” I asked.

  They both looked surprised, as if they’d forgotten I was there. “Right,” Wallace said. “Benedict was only shot once, but her hands tested positive for nitrate. We figure she fired a wild shot before the killer took the gun away and used it on her.”

  “Interesting.” I lo
oked around, spotted the TV on the breakfast bar. “Can I try an experiment?”

  “What?”

  “I want to turn the TV up as loud as it’ll go for a few minutes.”

  Wallace gave me a puzzled look but said, “Go ahead.”

  I did, then hurried back outside. At no point along the path could I clearly hear the sound. Wallace and Joslyn had their hands over their ears when I returned. As soon as she saw me, Adah hit the off button.

  “Jesus,” she said, “did you have to tune in on that Pillsbury Doughboy commercial?”

  I grinned. “He’s on my list, too—along with the Snuggle Bear, Mrs. Butterworth, and both Orville and his grandson.”

  Wallace frowned, obviously not a man who took serious offense at TV commercials. “What the hell was all that about?”

  “You mean turning on the TV? I wanted to find out if I could hear it outside. I could, but just barely.”

  “So?”

  “This house is well insulated for sound. A gunshot would be louder than the TV, of course, but someone next door would probably have dismissed it as a car backfiring.”

  “But the neighbor was definite about hearing a shot. Remember, the glass door was broken: that made it audible.”

  I asked, “Have you ever broken a door like that?”

  Both Wallace and Joslyn shook their heads.

  “Has either of you ever worked Burglary?”

  “No,” they replied.

  “Well, when I was remodeling my house, I had an office from Burglary come out and advise me on how to protect myself against break-ins. And you know what he told me? When one of those glass doors shatters, it sounds exactly like a gunshot.”

  They looked at each other, then back at me. “And?” Joslyn prompted.

  “I think the shot the neighbor heard—when was that?”

  “Six-fifteen.”

  “The shot she head at six fifteen was actually the door breaking.”

  “Then why didn’t she hear two short shortly afterward? With the door broken—”