Time Expired (17 page)

“I’m Detective Smith,” I said.

“About Madeleine’s passing,” she said in a quivering voice. She offered me one of those inappropriate smiles that dot formal female conversation.
Pay no attention to me
, they say. As the smile faded I could make out the edges of something beneath it. But I couldn’t make out what.

“Yes.” A flowered stuffed chair sat behind a paisley print screen by the foot of the bed. This had to be the chair Madeleine had been sitting in when Champion caught her expression of outrage. I pulled it up next to the bed, and wondered with a shiver if Victor Champion was now snapping pictures of me. Like Madeleine, would I become his possession in his darkroom? I glanced down at the chair leg. The fabric above the left leg was brown with rubbed-in dirt. It was the only less-than-immaculate spot in the room. I could picture Madeleine sitting here, holding Coco against the chair, him rubbing impatiently. The edge of the screen, too, was marked. At least some of the time, she must have kept Coco behind it. And Madeleine, had she enjoyed her power? Had she really tormented Claire? While she held Coco behind the screen, had she dangled the threat of bringing him closer, close enough to lick a hand Claire couldn’t get up to wash? Or had Madeleine, like most dog owners, just not been able to believe that anyone could
not
love her pet?

I decided to play the interview as if Claire and Madeleine had been friends. Sitting in the chair, I said to Claire, “Madeleine’s death must be a terrible loss for you.”

She looked directly at me. Her eyes were hazel and surrounded by so many lacy lines her skin looked in danger of tearing if she blinked. “I saw my parents die when I was young. And my brother twenty years ago, and then my sister five years ago. I nursed her for a year. I was retired then.” She spoke with that whine some people get with age, as if all the softness of their voices have dried out. She breathed in with difficulty. Emphysema? Automatically I glanced at the cigarettes. “Death’s faster than you think,” she said speaking more strongly. “They’re sitting in bed watching the morning quiz show one day and that night you hear the death rattle.” She switched on the smile again, fencing me out of whatever was beneath it. If by this time there was anything down there.

“When did you last see Madeleine?” I asked, trying to keep my tone conversational.

Her gaze drifted down to the smudge on the chair and back up to me. She pulled the edges of her bed jacket together and stared at me, her eyes moving back and forth nervously. “Too close.”

Was the event of Madeleine’s death too close to talk about? Or did she mean me? I pulled the chair back, but her brow didn’t relax, and her eyes kept moving. I could almost smell her fear mixed with the chalky sweet odor of her powder.

She glared at the smudge, and whispered, “He was too close.”

“Coco?”

“His breath smelled.” She wrinkled her nose, and lacy lines around her eyes deepened to furrows of fear. “He came right up to me. He touched me.” Her shoulders pulled in together, her head down toward them so I could barely see her neck. Her voice was just audible as she whispered, “I couldn’t keep him away.”

“And Madeleine knew how you felt?”

She nodded tightly. “She sat right there where you are.”

“And did she understand?” As soon as the words were out I heard the ridiculousness of the question. If Claire had looked like this, no one could fail to understand. Even Madeleine. If Claire had been a client of hers, Madeleine would have been outraged at this torment. What odd cut-off valve did Madeleine have in her mind? Madeleine had been unparalleled at defending the rights of street people, of protesters, of the defenseless; surely she should have been able to relate to Claire. Was Claire too bourgeois for her to care about? Or had she, the dog lover, simply seen Claire’s reaction as misguided, and been sure that exposure to Coco’s charms would loosen her up? “When you told Madeleine how you felt, did she keep him away?”

Without releasing her bed jacket she wrapped her arms tighter across her breasts, pulling the pink quilted fabric so taut I was sure it would rip. The words croaked from her throat. “She couldn’t. He sniffed her out.” Her watery eyes shifted to the doorway and back to me, and she laughed that little ladylike giggle.

Something scraped the window. Claire jolted, then laughed, a shrill nervous sound. I laughed, uneasily too, noting the palm frond as it took another swing. Had Madeleine steeled herself time after time as the frond scratched? I’d have to take another look at Champion’s pictures.

The door blew open a few inches with the gust. I turned, noting the latch on the inside, a latch Claire couldn’t walk to. And catching a glance of the cigarettes, it occurred to me that the unlockable door was a necessity. Delia, Michael, and even Madeleine had to have been able to make sure Claire hadn’t dropped a butt to smolder on the bedding. Still, anybody could have walked in. From the street, making their way quietly around the main house. Or up from the canyon. If Madeleine had sat in my chair partially behind the screen long enough to fill Claire with this kind of fear of Coco, what had she seen? Had Madeleine noticed something in the canyon? Maybe something she mentioned to Claire, or even pointed out to Claire. As upset as Claire was, I figured I’d better start with the most obvious. “Did you see the hostage operation down in the canyon Sunday night?”

“Hostage?” She released her arms from their armoring position. “He wasn’t a hostage. He was hiding out. We didn’t want him there.”

“Did you see him?” I asked, feeling the adrenaline rush you always get when a tack pays off.

“No, I didn’t see him,” she insisted, her voice firm now, angry. Her watery eyes looked more solid and she glared at me as if to say: any idiot should know that. It was a look I might have expected from Madeleine Riordan. “The students were out front screaming. They pulled at the chancellor’s fence, trying to tear it down. Nice young ladies—they had been before—screaming like peasants! It was disgusting! Appalling! The parents were horrified. They never forgave us.
Us
as if we started it. They should have blamed
him.
But he escaped. Ran out of the country. Over the border to Canada. A draft dodger! Left the mess he made and skedaddled!”

It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the Minton Hall demonstration and the
he
was Cisco, the draft resister who escaped. I said, “I was asking about Sunday night, in the canyon, here. We had a police operation.”

“Police? The police came. Or was it the sheriff? They herded all the girls back into their rooms—”

“Miss Wellington, that was twenty years ago. I’m asking you about day before yesterday.”

Her eyes seemed to unfocus as she stared at me. A blotchy flush spread from around them over her cheeks. “Was I in the past?” she asked in a small, fearful voice.

“Yes.”

“Weren’t we talking about the past?”

“No,” I said gently. “I was asking about this last weekend.”

The blotches deepened. She clutched a wad of the pink flowered cover. “They say I do that, wander into the past. I remember those days. It’s this time—now—that drifts.” She reached toward her bedside table, clumsily pulling open the drawer. What she drew out was a cloth-covered book, the kind with empty pages. I thought she would hand it to me, but she kept it in her lap, pressing it between her hand and her solar plexis. “I write things down so I can remember. I date each entry. I have to remember, you understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Only crazy people don’t remember. They think I’m crazy here. I remember but they don’t believe me.”

“What do you remember?” I said softly.

“You. You’re a policewoman. You’ve come to see Madeleine.”

I took a long breath, willing the pressure around my eyes to ease, the tense lines around my eyes not to mirror hers. “And do you remember Madeleine sitting in here, with her dog?”

“That awful animal,” she said with a shudder.

“Why did Madeleine bring the dog in here?”

The lines around her eyes eased. Her eyes blanked. I wondered if the kind of speculation I’d asked was beyond her ability now. “Because I couldn’t ask her to remove it.”

“Why not?”

She released the red-and-green book and adjusted the lace collar of her bed jacket. “Well, my dear, you seem a nicely brought up young lady. You know you can’t be rude to a guest you’ve asked to come. It was up to me to maintain the proper standards of deportment. Good manners do work, dear. The last few times she didn’t bring him.”

I had no idea how long this flash of temporal lucidity would last, or in fact, how lucid it was. Was she speaking about this week or thirty years ago? I’d have to judge that later. “You asked Madeleine to come here. What did you talk about?”

She raised a finger. “Now I did tell you, my dear. You weren’t listening, were you? They don’t listen to me. They think I’m too old, too dizzy to bother with. They’ve all packed me away like a summer carpet.”

I swallowed, unable to think of a reply. Her analogy was too accurate. I remembered my grandmother talking about taking up the summer carpets, getting them out of the way of the winter ones. Then I’d hated those dry, brittle, hemp rugs that signaled my visits to her. And when they were packed away—when I’d be going away back to my family—I’d been overjoyed. I had the same feeling with Claire. I desperately wanted to be done with her, and I’d been here only half an hour. How much more routinely would Delia or Michael dismiss her, particularly knowing that her memory was so ephemeral that she probably wouldn’t remember being waved aside?

I swallowed again and made one last stab. “Did Madeleine talk about the meter maid’s carts? Someone’s been after them. Did she mention that?”

“The meter maids?” Claire laughed. “It’s the best game in town. That’s what Madeleine says. She has spyglasses. You ask her.”

“I can’t ask her,” I said slowly, wishing I could avoid reminding her about Madeleine. Murder investigations don’t allow that option. “She died yesterday.”

Claire shrank back into her ball. She stared over my head. Every part of her was shaking, her hands, her head, her whole body. The tape recorder clicked off; the click resounded like a gunshot in the silence. “Ask Madeleine,” Claire insisted, her voice barely audible. “You’ll see. She laughs. You ask her.”

I moved toward her, reaching a hand to comfort, but she pulled away, wrapping her arms tighter around her. “You ask her.”

I pressed the call button. Then I reached for the cigarettes, lit one, and held it out to her. For a moment I was afraid she’d refuse something that had been between alien lips, but she didn’t hesitate. I sat back tasting the acrid taste, and waiting until she stopped shaking. What had Madeleine Riordan felt sitting here? Had she seen her own future, when her disease destroyed her nerves and muscles and sapped her strength and she could no longer walk? When people dismissed her words? Had the sight of Claire been too frightening to allow it to be real to her?

If so, why would she have come in here—unless she forced herself, refusing to let herself take the easy way out? But I didn’t know Madeleine well enough to draw that conclusion. No one I’d talked to had. I wished I could get hold of her husband.

When Claire stubbed out the cigarette, I realized something. Sitting here, watching her suffering, I, too, had blanked her out and concentrated on other things. I glanced at my watch, relieved that it was nearly time to meet Eckey. Eckey wouldn’t care a whit about Claire, but I was willing to bet she’d be surprised at the picture of Madeleine Riordan sitting by her canyon window staring through spyglasses, possibly down at Eckey’s parking perp.

“S
HE WAS WATCHING THAT
pain in the ass down in the canyon?” Eckey demanded. Eckey was still outlined in purple. But now that she was red with outrage the purple didn’t stand out as much. “She had him in view and didn’t report it!”

May have
had him in view, I could have corrected. Wisely, I didn’t.

Eckey paced heavy-footedly to the end of the tiny aisle between Howard’s and my desks in our minuscule office. Eckey’s movement required mincing steps which on anyone an inch bigger than she would have looked ridiculous. As it was, purple-marked Eckey could have passed for an enraged grape stomper. “Madeleine Riordan,” she snorted. “Well, that says it all!”

“Had a few run-ins with her?” I asked when she’d made her way back from the small slatted window to the door. She turned and stood, her foot tapping, engine idling, waiting to burn rubber.

“Run-ins! You wouldn’t believe the idiots she defended. I’ll tell you, Smith, you get the cream of the crop in Homicide. And you”—she turned to Howard, who had just wandered in—“even in Vice and Substance Abuse you get a saner group than the fools we see any day of the week. At least your guys got enough sense to want to make a living. Ours—”

“Eckey,” Howard said edging around her fast-idling form. “I deal with the scum of the scum. I have to bring these folk in. You, Eckey, deal with doctors and lawyers.”

“Humph! Some doctors. Can’t imagine these dudes making any sickness better. They’re too busy saying ‘Not my fault! Can’t blame me!’ ”

Howard plopped into his chair and stretched his legs across the aisle. Howard is six feet six, most of that legs. In order to stretch them out in this office he’s got to sit at a forty-five-degree angle that lands his feet beyond the edge of my desk—just where Eckey was standing. He started to stretch but thought better of it as Eckey glared down at him and continued to rant, “Give you an example. Guy’s expired.”

“You mean his meter,” Howard put in.

Eckey was not amused. “On his Mazda. So I ticket him. He’s got no complaint, right?”

“Well—”

“Wrong, Howard. He’s got plenty of complaint. He comes racing out of the bakery screaming like a banshee. Don’t I know it’s Veterans Day?”

“And you said?” Howard was getting into the rhythm here. There were few things Howard liked better than a good sting story.

“I didn’t
say
anything. I nodded. You got to be a psychiatrist in my job, Howard. There’s a reason shrinks make eighty bucks an hour saying nothing more than ‘Mmm.’ If they kept their mouths shut all the way and just nodded, they’d probably make a hundred.”