Time Expired (25 page)

He looked blankly at me.

“What did she enjoy doing?”

“Oh. She was meticulous about her work. A lot of times I’d come home from evening hours and she’d be sitting up at her computer, or on the phone with someone connected with her cases.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. She never talked about them.”

Not if she got that type of response, I guessed. “Did she ever mention the name Herman Ott?”

“No.”

“Delia McElhenny? Claire Wellington? Michael Wennerhaver?”

“No.”

I closed the pad. I wasn’t going to need notes to remember this interview. “What do you inherit from your wife?”

“That’s rather a personal—”

“I can contact her lawyer; that will just delay me. Or you can assist the investigation of your wife’s murder and tell me now.”

Again he ran his finger along the edge of the tray, watching its progress. Not once had he come near making eye contact. I wondered if that level of personal recognition was within his range. “The bequest,” he said slowly, “isn’t to me, it’s to the clinic here. And being married doesn’t matter. She told me about the bequest after I saved Coco. She was so impressed with that and with my inroads in endodontics she wanted to make it possible for me to teach others—”

“But she was willing to have you wait to do that teaching till after her death?”

He looked up and nodded slowly. “She had to live.”

“But you will benefit from her death.”

“I suppose. But my point is, she made the will before we married. Before we thought about marrying. There was nothing personal in it.”

All the fury I’d been holding back erupted. “Of course, there was nothing personal. Your wife was dying and you didn’t even bother to drive directly home from your conference, much less stay home to spend the weekend with her!” My voice echoed off the metal tray. I was too close to this case; I was losing it entirely. “No wonder she left you to go and die somewhere where she at least had her dog for company!”

His chestnut hair was quivering. Then I realized his whole body was shaking. He stared hard at the tray, peering down as if into a crystal ball. “I couldn’t stop her.” His voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear. “You think I wasn’t much of a husband. I wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do, not with her. I tried, really, I tried, but I couldn’t reach her. Even when she got the diagnosis, knew she was going to die, and I lay next to her in bed, holding her against me, I knew it didn’t do anything except make clear to both of us how ultimately alone we were.” For the first time he looked at me, his eyes big, brown, wet. “I didn’t have to go to this conference. I wasn’t on the schedule. Hardly anyone came to my lecture. But I couldn’t stay here, not when I knew she was dying and she’d chosen to move back with people she laughed at instead of having to stay with me.” He wiped at his face with his fist, but he was too late. A tear hit the metal tray. Instead of spreading out and evaporating, it rolled to the side, and then down the trough that his finger had traversed, becoming smaller and smaller till it ceased to exist.

I’d let my own assumptions blind me; I’d speared into his grief for no excusable reason. I felt awful. For the second time in this case I felt compelled to say: “I’m sorry.”

He wiped his eyes again and looked up, a wavering smile on his thin lips. “I thought being a cop meant never having to say you’re sorry.”

“We should be so perfect.” That wasn’t the slant he’d meant, I knew that, but my answer seemed to satisfy him. Again I was aware of the low, frightened, lonely whines from the dogs in the cages. I could imagine Madeleine and Timms, edging around each other, he too awkward, too wary to pierce the hard wall covering her emotions, and she? Was being in control so vital to her that she was too stiff and guarded to feel the warmth of any touch? Was she like the dogs in the cages, desperately wanting to be comforted, but unlike them, not knowing how to even moan?

Or was I still pasting the face I’d drawn over hers? If there was one thing I should have learned from this investigation, it was that no one really knew Madeleine Riordan, least of all me. I shut my eyes and swallowed hard against the utter emptiness of the face I’d drawn. I hoped I was wrong, but this time I doubted I was. “I’m going to have to ask you about Madeleine’s decision to go back to Canyonview. What happened prior to that?”

Timms wadded up the tissue and tossed it in the waste can. “Claire, from Canyonview. She called the house. Right before Madeleine left.”

“Claire called the day Madeleine left?”

“No, I wasn’t home then. When she told me she was going, I stalked out and called the conference director to get him to squeeze me in. So her call from the Wellington woman would have had to be the day before.”

“What did Claire Wellington say?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t usually answer Madeleine’s phone, but I was walking by and she was across the room, so I picked it up.”

“Did you hear her conversation?”

“No, I wouldn’t have intruded.”

“But you argued about the call?”

He shook his head. “No. I couldn’t. When she told me she was leaving, I felt like I’d been sucked down the drain. I just walked out.”

“You didn’t try to tell her how you felt?”

His long fingers squeezed against the metal tray. “With Madeleine it wouldn’t have mattered, not if there was something she had to do. Doing the right thing, that always came first. People were forever second.” He glared up at me, daring me to disagree.

But I wouldn’t have. I wondered if Madeleine had had any inkling how devastating that dismissive way of life was. Had the possibility that Timms would be hurt even entered the equation? I doubted it. I was willing to bet she wouldn’t have hurt him intentionally; she’d simply have assumed he understood the importance of whatever need she was responding to. Checking against Michael’s statement, I asked, “Did you drive her back to Canyonview?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and it was a moment before he got out the word: “No.”

“Why not?” I said softly.

“She didn’t need me.” His shoulders hunched forward and his narrow face drew into the hollow they made. He looked like a Saluki cowering in the corner. But his voice was angry, like he’d been slapped. “She had some guy come drive her in her car. Some sleazy guy in a stained yellow sweater. The kind of guy she wouldn’t have let near the sofa.”

All the tension of the day exploded; I had to bite my lip hard to keep from guffawing. It would have been unprofessional, and there was no way I could explain it well enough for Herbert Timms to understand. But the picture of Herman Ott filtered through his respectable, upper-middle-class mind was just about more than I could handle. I asked for a description, just to be sure. And as he gave me his picture of Ott, my amusement faded. Ott could have told me about that drive. He hadn’t. That didn’t surprise me. I tucked that bit of information away; later I’d see what it could lever out of Ott.

I questioned Timms about calls from friends, or business associates, or anyone, but for all he knew of his wife’s social world he might have spent the last year locked in his veterinary clinic. I had the sense that he loved her much as he might his dog: he could hold him close and scratch behind his ears, but he wouldn’t ask him for a recount of the day’s events. I asked about motives. He had no idea why she was killed. “Dr. Timms, you lived with her for two years. What did she do with her time besides work?”

“Well, she watched football. She was a big 49ers fan. She knew every play, and she could call them before the quarterback did.”

“She guessed what they were going to run on every down?” I demanded. Sportscasters who’ve boned up all week can’t do that.

“Well, no, sometimes the coaches made the wrong calls.”

Now I did laugh. That sounded like the Madeleine Riordan I’d known.

Timms stared at me. Slowly, he smiled. “She was a very intelligent woman. Not being in charge drove her crazy. You wouldn’t believe what she put up with from her clients; she didn’t care, as long as she called the shots. Even after all these years, it infuriated her to have to lean on a cane.”

I recalled Coco Arnero threatening her, and her still keeping him on as a client. So she could plan his next hearing? “She didn’t choose to just watch the football games, she was sort of a backseat coach?”

“She even bid on the KQED-TV auction last year when the prize was a day with the quarterback coach.”

Neither one of us commented on how such a day might have altered the 49ers’ season.

I might have misjudged Herbert Timms before, but I was clear on Madeleine Riordan now. I thought of the long gray tube Coco had been carrying and its double down on the platform in the canyon. Madeleine Riordan was connected to the parking perp, all right. And unless that relationship was entirely out of character for her, she wasn’t merely an amused observer to his escapades.

The Madeleine Timms described was the woman like Howard; she would never have been content to sit and listen to someone else’s sting.

I could picture her sitting outside on the path at Canyonview, next to the bushes that concealed the parking perp. She had been on the sidelines, all right, and not as a favored fan; she’d have acted as coach. She would have been no more able than Howard to resist the urge to plan the incidents.

Madeleine didn’t condone violence. Even during the antiwar demonstrations she’d refused to drive bomb-makers. I thought back to Eckey and the purple dye. For a woman who wanted to make Parking Enforcement look ridiculous, that sting was perfect. No danger, just ridicule. Even the most patient of Parking Enforcement personnel would be outraged. Eckey was. And the meter minders citizens hated, the Elgin Tiresses who stood in wait for meters to click onto
EXPIRED,
who puffed up like bantams when citizens accused them of quotas, they’d be the laughingstocks of the city. I was willing to bet if Madeleine had a regret, it was that her last play was wasted on Eckey.

It sounded like a crass reason to leave a husband. But it wasn’t just a game, it was one last clutch at life.

I
T WAS ONE THING
to be sure Madeleine Riordan had orchestrated the parking enforcement capers, quite another to prove it. Her husband, Herbert Timms, denied it: “My wife was a lawyer; her life’s work was upholding the law.” But after he had uttered those uninspired words, a tiny smile pricked at the corners of his mouth. And that little fleck of impish pleasure showed me what Madeleine had seen in him. Alas, I also believed he was being truthful—not that Madeleine hadn’t been the culprit, but that he didn’t know she was. She wouldn’t have told him.

I couldn’t imagine being involved in a caper I enjoyed as much as Madeleine must have this one, and not telling Howard—not planning it together sitting cross-legged on the king-size bed, our knees nearly touching, an open box of pizza within reach, both of us interrupting with
What abouts
and
Why don’t wes
one on top of another, our voices getting louder, hands clapping with glee, until we found the perfect plan, flung our arms around each other, and in all probability kicked the pizza box off onto the floor. That, more than the actual event, would have been the fun of the capers: the planning, the closeness.

But Madeleine had been a solitary woman. For her the strategy, the execution, the panache of the caper would have been reward enough. And since the success of the caper would have reminded her of the fact she never questioned—that she was more clever than anyone else involved—there would be hardly anyone worth sharing the success with. Still, the temptation to savor—to gloat—must have been overwhelming.

But if Madeleine had confided in anyone—who? Someone clever, ingenious, and who relished a victory over the forces of law and bureaucracy as much as she did. She’d choose a friend of long enough standing to assure trust. I was willing to bet that person was Herman Ott. Ott could have told me that, too. Ott had his standards. But so did I. I added this latest debit to his balance sheet. He was running well in the red, but I wasn’t ready to cash in yet.

I could picture Madeleine sitting in her room at Canyonview creating the later—the clever—parking capers. She was a lawyer, a systematic, organized woman. A list maker. A woman who wrote down pros and cons before coming to a decision. She was from the world of legal pads.

There had to be written plans for the capers.

But Pereira had searched her room and found nothing.

I started the car. That did not mean there were no plans. We simply hadn’t looked in the right place.

I would have given a lot to head right back to Canyonview, but Inspector Doyle could still be there. If so, I might convince him there was an overriding reason why I wasn’t back at the station per his orders poring over the files on the parking perp—that I was hot on the trail of the one item that would tie the parking pranks to Madeleine’s murder.
If
he was willing to listen at all.

I had two options. Number one: Take the chance of a furious Doyle co-opting my search, making off with the booty, and dispatching me back to files. Number two: Stop on Solano Avenue at Noah’s for a lox schmear on a sesame bagel and walk down to Peet’s for coffee, and give Doyle time to finish up at Canyonview.

I ate.

It was just after one
P.M.
when I walked down to the companionway. Murakawa was sitting next to the door of Claire’s room.

“How is she?” I asked.

Pushing his lanky body up, he said, “Nothing’s changed. She hasn’t come out of the sedation. It’s been a long time since last night, too long for a woman in her condition to be out without her doctor checking on her. I told Delia to notify him.”

Delia must have been delighted to discover this new layer of medical authority. “And did she?”

“Got the answering service. I told her that wasn’t good enough, that they’d have to call the emergency number.”

“Didn’t Delia know that?”

Murakawa nodded. “Yeah, she said they were tracking him down.”

“So no one’s been in there this morning, or in Madeleine’s room.”