That was like arriving at the Pearly Gates and asking about the oysters. “Why?”
She went on as if she’d only half heard me. “It wasn’t like she was just asking to let me talk—you know, that condescending ‘let it all out.’ She really did want to know.”
Without moving head or wrist, I glanced at my watch. Six thirty-five. I had fifteen minutes at the outside. “What did you tell her?”
Fannie leaned forward and said softly, deliberately, “That I was so shocked when I found out, I blew my dive and ended up in the hospital. That I’ve thought of Bryn Wiley with every crooked step I take. And that nothing would give me more pleasure than to take away the thing that matters most to her.”
I must have been visibly jolted by the force of her almost whispered words.
She laughed. “That’s how Ellen reacted, too. Even more so than you. But of course, I hadn’t told her about Sam and me and all. And she was a bit snookered. She kept asking me if there was anything that Bryn could do to dissipate my anger—not that Bryn was offering to do
anything
.”
“Maybe Bryn was agonizing over you. Maybe she told Ellen that.”
“Hardly.”
“Maybe Ellen was afraid you were going to run Bryn out of business.”
A smile crossed her square face. “I’d like to think that. Ellen didn’t intend to, but she did let me know that Bryn’s got every cent tied up in her gym. It’s her shrine.” She scooped up the last piece of cake.
I wondered if she always ate with this much gusto or if discussing Bryn Wiley and her potential misfortunes had stimulated her gastric juices. “But the prognosis of The Girls’ Team wasn’t Ellen’s worry. Did she say why she was so concerned?”
“You don’t ask when you’re both drinking. And we’d killed the bottle of wine by then. Big emotions are normal then. It didn’t seem strange. And Ellen, if you’d known her …” Fannie laughed again, but this time it was a friend’s laugh. “The whole thing ended so ridiculously. I’m leaving and we’re still talking, and suddenly I realize she has no idea I’m married to the guy next door. Well, why would she? I never go to that house. Sam doesn’t bother with Bootlaces. And Johnson’s one of the most common names in the country. Right up there with”—she grinned at me—“Smith. So she walks over to Sam’s house with me. We’re standing at the top of that staircase and Ellen’s still going on, all earnest-like, about how the past is over and done with no matter what the consequences and isn’t it better—for me—to just put it behind me and go on. All that kind of crap. And out of nowhere this big black dog comes bounding across the lawn next door, circles into the open gate at Sam’s place, into the mud, then bounds back and leaps up on Ellen and plops her on the lawn. Her new white shirt is covered in mud and grass. Ellen was agape. She looked like a cartoon character lying there. You could watch her fury rising. I just stood there until her whole face was red and then I said ‘So Ellen, you going to put the past behind you with this hound?’ ”
“What’d she say?”
Fannie smiled again. “It took her a minute, and I won’t put money on it being spontaneous or sincere, but she said, ‘Yeah, the past is past. You have to put it behind you and let it be dead. Dead is dead; forget it.’ Then she got up and kissed the dog on the snout.” She puckered her lips and kissed the air. “And the owner, a weird old guy, just stared, like she was coming on to his dog.”
“And did you ever see her again?”
The smile faded from Fannie’s face. “No. I called a couple of times. Once I got her and she made excuses. I asked her if she’d told Bryn about me and if Bryn had ordered her not to talk to me. She said no. But I didn’t believe her.”
“What did you think?”
“That she needed her job.”
Maybe Fannie Johnson was right. Maybe Ellen Waller hadn’t courted her and dropped her because Fannie bored her, or because she only wanted to show off her new digs. Maybe Bryn was the culprit. Maybe, but it was too easy an answer. I signaled the waiter.
Fannie leaned back now, her eyes half closed. She breathed in softly, slowly, as if inhaling the nectar of a rose. If I had been gazing at her across the room, I would have assumed Chez Panisse was a regular stop on the way home from a matinee or before a reading at Black Oak Books. Or that she lived a few blocks up the hill in a fine Maybeck house.
I looked at the empty dessert plates on our table. Fannie had finished every morsel possible to carry from dish to mouth. I didn’t doubt that she had cared about Ellen Waller, or been hurt by Ellen’s rejection. But not enough to put her off her food. Fannie had already shown me more levels of herself than I had suspected. I believed she loved Sam Johnson, and that she hated Bryn. I could understand both. But damn it, she hated Bryn too much. It wasn’t Bryn’s fault that the travel agent had screwed up, and that she had missed her plane. Sam and Fannie were both intelligent people. Why didn’t they see that they’d gone way overboard on this one? It wasn’t like Sam to scapegoat. It made me sad to think of them clinging to this vindictiveness because they were afraid that without it they’d have nothing to hold on to.
I tossed a ten and a twenty on the table, told Fannie I had to run, and ran.
“T
HE JUDGE SAID NO.”
“How did you let him do that? Geez, Smith.” Inspector Doyle sighed mightily into the receiver. I’d probably pulled him away from dinner. Or more likely sleep. But his sigh was for more than missing fried fish or forty winks. “ ’S bad, Smith.”
I leaned in toward the wall. In patrol there are no private phones. There was no one here in the report room but the dusty typewriters and me. Still I felt like I was broadcasting my failure. We’d already searched the house. We couldn’t keep going in because we don’t approve of the furnishings. “He said I could try him tomorrow.”
I could hear Doyle’s breath hitting the receiver. “What about Bryn Wiley?”
“The sticking point, Inspector, was that she disappeared. ‘Do you have any evidence she was kidnapped?’ That’s what the judge wanted to know. Well, of course, we don’t have evidence. As far as I know, she just got sick of things at Ott’s office—”
“She was staying with Herman Ott?” Something metal clattered to the floor. A fork Doyle had dropped in amazement?
“Ott supported her efforts to close down Sam Johnson’s gym. He was driving her around delivering press releases after her rally fell apart Saturday night. She couldn’t stay in her own house after the murder. At least in Ott’s office she had protection.”
“Protection? Penicillin is what what she’d be needing there, Smith.”
“Whatever,” I said, feeling oddly defensive of Ott. “The point is she walked out. And when the judge heard that, he said we can’t just be bursting into a citizen’s house because she stepped out for the day.”
“Did you tell him she was an essential witness who’d withheld evidence?”
“Of course. And that Ellen Waller, on whom we cannot find one particle of ID, lived there, too. And I reminded him that the murder took place in the driveway. And still he said no.”
Doyle sighed deeper, longer. The whoosh of it drowned out the whining voice coming from the television in his living room. Doyle doesn’t sigh often. He sighed when the 49ers lost the playoff game in the bitter cold of the Jersey Meadowlands, and when he heard his daughter was planning to marry an unemployed poet, and when his doctor told him he’d never be able to eat spicy foods again. Or so I’d heard. “Smith …” He sighed again.
I realized I was holding my breath.
“Smith, when you’re working a judge, it’s not just one case you’re thinking about. It’s the whole strategy. Like a marriage …” I could picture his ruddy face stiffening, reddening slightly. He was only in his fifties, but he seemed of an older generation, a benign but uncompromising generation. It had taken him well over a year to adjust to having me in Homicide, and when he did accept me, he hedged by taking me under his wing as he would a daughter. And as with his real daughter, who had married outside the appropriate category of employment, he didn’t quite approve of my “in lieu of marriage” arrangement with Howard. But living together had been common in the Bay Area for thirty years. He couldn’t complain. Normally, he avoided the whole topic with me.
“I
was
married, Inspector. I’ve seen the connubial strategy fail and succeed.”
Ignoring the reference to Howard, he focused on my ex-husband. “And did you have fights before you separated?”
“Yes.”
“Escalating fights?”
“Yes.”
“Fights where you said things not because they were true, but just so you’d win?”
I laughed. “I tossed a pan of runny eggs on his master’s thesis. He stormed out of the house. And by that time, Inspector, I wasn’t living there anymore; it was
his
house.”
I expected Doyle to laugh. He didn’t. “So you know where you made your mistake, Smith?”
“Yeah, marrying him.”
“Maybe. But I’ll tell you something. The place you made your mistake was in allowing the first argument to take place. Once you admitted your standards, your observations, your evidence could be questioned—”
“Whoa! Are we talking marriage here, or dealing with Judge Redmon?”
“When you tell the judge you need a search warrant, you’re saying you are the authority on what is required in this investigation. You’re not asking him, you’re telling him. You’re saying you wouldn’t be there if this search were not only essential but justifiable. Once you let him turn you down, Smith, he starts questioning your observations, your actions, your need. He goes over everything with the idea that there is some error he ought to be finding, that he’s on that bench to protect the citizens from
us.
And every request for every warrant after that is harder. We’ve got to get a dozen through him before we’re back to where we were before.”
I took a breath. Judges who checked every line, who were finicky about errors, and who defended the rights of the individual were the kind Berkeleyans voted in; ones
I
voted for. Admittedly, when the shoe was on
my
foot … “Inspector, when I have more supporting evidence—”
“No point. Brucker will be here tomorrow. We’ll go with a fresh start.”
“Wait a minute!” I swallowed to keep the panic out of my voice. “There was nothing wrong with my request. If you give this to Brucker, you’re telling the judge that I’m incompetent. When he thinks of this case down the road, he won’t remember that he opted for more evidence, he’ll remember that he denied my petition and approved one by the guy who replaced me! I’ll never get another warrant through!”
I heard three exhalations of breath through the receiver, each one an eternity. During the first of those long silences I could imagine the scuttlebutt throughout the station: even Doyle didn’t support her. During the second, my jaw tightened, and my hands squeezed into fists. Then Doyle said, “Okay, Smith. I’ll sign you on in Homicide for one more day. If you have evidence to take to Redmon tomorrow, fine. But Tuesday, the case is Brucker’s, you got that?”
“I’ve got it,” I said with a sigh of my own. It was the best I could do. Brucker was a decent officer, but he had never marched in a demonstration in college, he’d never set foot in Cody’s or Black Oak Books, and he drank coffee from a 7-Eleven when Peet’s was three blocks away. For him Berkeley was just a town to be policed. Brucker would have been happy if the sidewalks where street artists sold their tie-dye and stained glass were paved over, and the Avenue turned into a four-lane road with timed lights and limited access. Brucker would work his butt off to make Berkeley crime-free; and if he had to turn it into a mall town to do it, no problem. Then he would race back to Sacramento and the criminal justice fast track.
Sam Johnson and Herman Ott would have swallowed their tongues before admitting anything to Brucker. And he’d never understand Bryn Wiley and why to Berkeleyans she was an idol. With Fannie Johnson he wouldn’t have gotten inside the screen door.
And if I didn’t get this case closed tomorrow, none of that would matter. While Brucker was trying to find the right path past all those closed doors, Bryn Wiley could be killed.
I only had tomorrow.
Herman Ott, however, had no time at all. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t called me. I’d told him
I
would call him. I could do that. But when you have to lay on pressure, it’s best to be on hand to do it.
T
ELEGRAPH
A
VENUE ON A
Sunday night looks like Berkeley’s answer to Pompeii. The craftsmen whose leather belts, pressed glass panels, silver rings, and snake bracelets had filled the street in the morning are gone. But the paper plates and empty coffee cups, the bits of pizza crust and discarded packets of sugar, the crumpled smoothie containers and wadded napkins would be an anthropologist’s dream. He’d find a lost tarot card, a crystal that would not bring long life or heal the bark of the tree it had fallen against. He’d dust carefully around the edges of a rough hand-thrown mug with a whiskered face on one side. And he could wrap it all in newsprint ads for adult school classes—dealing with fear of swimming, driving, or cooking for company.
Yellow streetlights gave the littered sidewalks the look of an old photograph. On Sunday night, Cal students, dejected about Monday’s imminent arrival, were in the dorms or even the library, high school kids from towns over the hills had abandoned the cool life till next weekend, shoppers were home with their bounty, and even the beggars for spare change had taken their quarters and dollars to the store. Or to the dealers. As Howard would be glad to remind me, it takes only ten bucks for a dealer to spit out a rock of coke.
Even the staircase in Herman Ott’s building was empty. I charged up, panting by the time I reached the third floor, and knocked on Ott’s door. I paused for a second, knocked again. Ott never answers the first time.
“Who?”
“Smith. Open up!”
The door creaked open and I strode in.
“Hey, whatsamatter, Smith? I said I’d talk to you. No need to burst in here like some TV drug squad.”
“You could have told me Ellen Waller engineered her meeting with Bryn Wiley at Bootlaces.”