As a Favor (5 page)

I walked back into Anne’s apartment. Howard was coming from the kitchen. “Nothing in the backyard but weeds and ivy,” he called, “and enough of them to keep Berkeley in compost till Christmas.”

“Okay, lock it up.”

Pereira headed toward the rear door.

With Howard, I started out the front. “Listen, I don’t think—”

“What?” he yelled over the roar of the chant tape.

“About the case, you’d better—”

“Damn!” Howard ran to the curb.

“What is it?”

“My tail lights. The reflectors are gone. How am I going to explain this one?” Howard slumped against the car. “And the damned thing is that I set it up myself.”

I put a hand on his arm, but he seemed unaware of it.

From the building the chant seemed to mock Howard: tail-lights-gone, tail-lights-gone.

Now I couldn’t ask Howard to take the Spaulding case. He had enough with the thefts, and if he didn’t catch the thief, he wouldn’t be driving around to handle anything. The words of the chant seemed to change, to aim themselves at me: ques-tion-Nat, ques-tion-Nat.

L
EAVING
A
NNE
S
PAULDING’S OTHER
neighbors to Pereira, I rushed through the necessary procedures of getting a case number; dictating; running checks on Anne Spaulding and Ermentine Brown, the name I had found in Spaulding’s wallet—checks that turned up nothing. I called the lab, on the unlikely chance that they were ahead of schedule, but their answer was as always: even for a Rush, their report on whether the bloodstains on the linen dress matched the samples taken from Anne’s living room would reach me in no sooner than two or three days.

I dialed Nat’s house, let the phone ring eight times. Nat didn’t answer. It was nearly ten. He had said he’d be home by nine.

I slammed the receiver down. First he’d lied, and now he couldn’t be bothered to stay home and find out what I’d discovered about Anne. In fact, if it had been so important to him, he could have walked over to Anne’s while I was there; he’d said he was calling from a phone booth nearby. But he probably hadn’t wanted to run into anyone who might have recognized him. And now most likely he was avoiding me.

I took a long, deep breath. I suspected I was going to be a lot angrier with Nat before this case ended.

There was almost an hour left on my shift. Everything in the case was on hold. I decided to check the only outside interest Anne’s life had suggested: the wheelchair theater.

I drove west toward the freeway. Theater on Wheels was in that section of south Berkeley where small shingle houses gave way to factories and the low cement block buildings of exterminators or computer consultants. Residential fingers had stretched forth into the industrial area or industrial digits into the housing, so that it was not unusual to find three or four rundown post-Victorians between a shoe factory and a chemistry lab. During the day this area, with its scarred pavements and sidewalkless yards, reminded me of the rural South. But at night the stark streetlights emphasized the darkness around them, the factories loomed larger in their emptiness and the little houses looked very vulnerable.

I wondered if the residents were pleased when one block of warehouses had been converted into artists’ studios, crafts workshops, and the Theater on Wheels.

Theater on Wheels was in the middle of the block. Its stucco exterior had been painted English red and above the door hung a carved wooden sign identifying it. Beside the door a billboard advertised Ionesco’s
Rhinoceros
, scheduled to open Friday.

The teasing half-light of closed shops shone from the artists’ studios. Otherwise at ten-fifteen the street was as dark as any other nearby.

The theater too looked dark, but I tried the door anyway and was surprised to find it open.

Inside it was larger than I would have guessed, about the size of three classrooms. The stage occupied the far third.

It was easy to picture the building as it had been a few years back. Except for the addition of the stage, the theatrical lights suspended in seeming disarray from the ceiling, and the green velvet curtain, little had been changed. The English-red walls were still factory-like and the rows of folding chairs gave the room an air of transience. I had the feeling that as soon as I left, workmen would rush in, fold up the chairs, and replace them with forty silk-screen machines.

I looked back at the stage. On it sat a lone man, his wheelchair facing away from me, his head bent down as if he were reading something on his lap.

As I approached, he turned the chair sharply, wheeled to center stage, stopped abruptly and waited.

“I’m Officer Smith, Berkeley Police.”

He eyed my uniform and, mocking my cadence, said, “I’m Skip Weston, Theater Manager. And male lead in
Rhinoceros
.”

“Do you know Anne Spaulding?”

“Of course.” He turned the chair toward the ramp at the side of the stage and I accepted his unspoken invitation to climb up.

Even at a distance his dark eyes had been piercing, as if they had absorbed the life from his legs. But close up they seemed to pulse, checking nervously to each side.

His body was marked by the contrasts common to paraplegics—the bony knobs that lay where useful legs had been, the muscled upper torso, and, in Weston’s case, a long, pallid face that might have suited a medieval monk.

“Anne Spaulding,” he said, “was supposed to be here right now. There was a rehearsal scheduled tonight. I had to send everyone home. We open in three days.” He glanced accusingly at the empty stage.

“And Anne didn’t come at all?”

“No. No message, nothing.” He stared at me again, and it was as if the significance of my presence struck him for the first time. “What’s happened to her?”

“We don’t know. She’s missing.”

“Missing?” His appraising tone suggested “missing” wouldn’t have been his first guess.

I waited for him to commit himself.

“What do you mean, ‘missing?’ ” No commitment here.

“She’s gone. Her belongings are still in her apartment.”

“And what do you think happened?” He inched the chair forward.

“I told you, we don’t know. What do
you
think?”

Now the chair moved across the stage and back—pacing. “Very unlike Anne.”

“How so?”

“Missing is untidy. Anne, if anything, was organized, reliable, on top of things—yes, that’s it, on top.” He moved the chair quickly back and forth. “For instance, when Anne started with us two years ago, she had had some theater experience, in school, probably, but not much more than anyone else.”

“She’s an actress, then?”

“No, no. She’s not chair-bound—that’s the rule here—you can walk, or you can act, not both. Otherwise, we’d lose our grant. Stupid, isn’t it? Damned hard to choreograph.” He smiled, an expression out-of-synch with his tone. “There have been times, when six people were moving on stage, that it looked like the running of the bulls at Pamplona.”

“So Anne just did your artwork?”

Now he laughed aloud.

I pulled out the yellow paper I’d found in Anne’s apartment. Handing it to Weston, I said, “I found this preliminary sketch for the playbill in Anne’s apartment.”

Weston laughed harder. The light aluminum chair beneath him rocked precariously and I restrained the urge to reach for the armrests.

“Officer,” Weston said, attempting to control himself, “this isn’t a preliminary. This was Anne’s final effort.” He held out the sheet. “She’s a talented woman. There’s virtually nothing she doesn’t know about—footlights, border-lights, floods, floorplans, props. She’s done publicity, make-up, ticketing, you name it. What she didn’t know she made it her business to learn.” Again, he controlled the urge to laugh. “But, damn, she is one lousy, hopeless artist. Look at this. Even the printing looks like a third-grade project. And the sketch—it’s closer to an amoeba than a rhinoceros.” As he looked he gave up and laughed again. “In the end even Anne had to admit defeat.”

There was an element of satisfaction in his final comment that made me ask, “Was that hard for her?”

“Damn it. It’s hard for everyone. You must have led a very easy life if you don’t know that.”

I took a breath. “Was it harder for her than the average? I mean, do you think defeat was unusual for Anne?”

He closed his eyes a moment as if he were channeling the power behind them. “I think,” he said slowly, “it is one of the main things that separated her from us. Defeat was foreign to her. To us it’s always lurking. Some of us fight it sporadically, some often, but defeat is always waiting.”

“Defeat is always waiting for all of us,” I said. “It’s just in some cases the places it’s hiding are less obvious.”

He shrugged. Apparently he wasn’t interested in my philosophizing.

I looked around for a chair. But, of course, there was none. All the actors brought their own. Leaning on the corner of a table, I said, “Tell me, what kind of person is Anne Spaulding?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t you been here long?”

He rolled the chair across the stage, turned and headed back, his uneven movements giving a thoughtful gait to his pacing. “Two years. I came right after Anne started working with the group.”

“Two years, and you don’t know her?”

He rolled to the far side of the stage and stopped. Facing me, he said, “I know what Anne Spaulding chose to display for us. But this is theater; we deal in facades.”

“Was Anne good?”

“As a director? Yes. She had a particularly good sense of those nuances, phrases, movements that add a convincing touch. And she wasn’t above learning—from everyone. She found out what each of us specialized in and then she followed us around, hovered over us, literally, until she knew as much as we did. Make-up is my thing, and by now there’s nothing I do that Anne couldn’t match—or nearly match.”

“And did you find her attractive? I mean, men have.”

He rolled, stopping less than a foot in front of me. “Perhaps Anne put on a different act for other men. You must realize, Officer, that when you are paralyzed, people tend to think of you as less than a man.”

The bitterness of his words hung in the empty theater. I swallowed and it sounded to me as if the swallow echoed against the walls. “Did Anne have any enemies?”

“If you mean did we resent her more than the rest of ambulatory humanity—no. As a matter of fact, her distance, her lack of desire to help, was good. We cripples are
helped
enough.”

“Well, then did she have any special friends?” What Weston said fit the woman who’d inhabited Anne’s apartment, with the woman who’d lived beneath Sri Fallon—it fit, but it left the person behind all that organization and control unilluminated.

“She was friendly with Donn Day.” He paused and when I didn’t react, said, “Don’t you know ‘Donn Day, the Artist’? Donn—that’s D-o-n
-n—
would be very put out. I’m sure he feels his fame had descended even to the ranks of constables.”

I laughed. “That low, huh? What kind of friends were Anne and Donn Day?”

Weston sidled the chair next to me. “Anne, as Anne, seemed interested in his work, curious about him, the artist Donn, as Donn, was on the make.”

“Successful?”

“Who knows? But my guess is that Donn would have been much more likely to face defeat than Anne.”

I glanced down at the notes I’d made. The name Donn Day sounded familiar, but I couldn’t think why. Maybe I was more cultured than Weston thought. I asked, “What would you speculate happened to Anne? She’s probably been gone since last night.”

“That’s a long time to go for a walk.”

“So?”

“Well,” he said, rolling the chair back and forth in time with his phrasing, “I’d consider foul play, to put it in theatrical terms. I’d say kidnapping”—he stopped the chair—“or murder.”

“Suspects?”

“None.”

“Motive?”

“Again, a blank.” He looked up, assessing me again. “But if you’d like to probe further, I’ll take you out for a drink.”

It was an offer that every woman cop I’d met had had, one that only the naive took as flattering. “If I do, I’ll let you know.”

I walked down the steps from the stage.

“I’ll be around,” Weston said, his actor’s voice at once softly intimate, but carrying easily as I neared the back of the theater. “You may not recognize me, but I’ll be around.”

I
WOKE UP GROGGY
Wednesday morning. My landlord, Mr. Keppel, was trimming the hedge. In this north Berkeley neighborhood of small, tidy houses with small, tidy yards, it was not an unusual thing to be doing at ten-thirty. But that didn’t make it any less annoying.

I hadn’t slept well. Normally in an investigation like this I would have gone back to the station, waited for Howard, and talked. But last night I checked out before he could catch me. I didn’t want to discuss this one, didn’t want to explain Nat’s considerable involvement in it, and didn’t want Howard to offer to take it.

I had been tempted to go by Nat’s house—he lived near me—but I wanted the control the phone would give. So I waited till I got home and tried his number. At quarter to twelve he was still out, or he’d turned off the phone bell. In either case, this investigation, which had been so important to him at six-thirty, had certainly lost its urgency by midnight. And I had gone to sleep with the intention of getting an early start and cornering him at work.

I sat up now, pulling the top of the sleeping bag around my shoulders. Even on sunny mornings this room was cold.

I had been dreaming of Theater on Wheels. In the dream, it was still a factory filled with machines, machines making the whining sound of Mr. Keppel’s mower. Now, staring down the length of the porch which the ever-economic Mr. Keppel had made into an apartment by putting indoor-outdoor carpet over the cement flooring, I could see why the previous incarnation of Theater on Wheels occurred to me. Indeed my “apartment” still was more porch-like than homey. Ten feet wide, it ran the width of the house, maybe forty feet. The interior wall was covered with white shingles and the three exterior ones with jalousies that opened into the backyard. Access to the yard for early spring sunbathing (a passion to anyone who grew up in the snow-covered East) was far and away the apartment’s best feature.