Time Expired (31 page)

Police work has given me ample experience listening to perpetual “victims.” In the eyes of much of our clientele, the tilt of the earth’s axis was away from them, all of life was an uphill climb, and nothing was ever their fault. In Champion’s eyes, the towing and impounding of his mother’s/his car would have been acts of a vengeful god. I said, “So, you got some tickets with your mother’s car.”

“Some!” he exclaimed, all signs of humor gone from his face. “What kind of idiot created twenty-minute parking zones? Who can do business in twenty minutes? Hell, you spend longer than that in the grocery express line. I saw that asshole Tiress. He’d spot my car and if there was five minutes on the meter he’d circle around the block and come back—and just wait for that big red
EXPIRED
to pop up. He was like a lion who smells a dying wildebeest. He kept coming back to nip me till I dropped.”

“And so—?” Eight-fifteen.

“I was riding along Shattuck one day and I spotted the wand.” He leaned back and grinned, triumphantly.

Before he could bask, I tightened my grip on his choke collar and pulled. “And after that Madeleine took over the planning?”

“Right,” he said, unabashed.

I stared. I’d expected sputtering protests, territorial protections. I’d assumed the Cushman capers were the trophies on his shelf, but if he didn’t care about admitting Madeleine planned them, then where was the payoff for him? Had it been merely getting Tiress?

Eight-seventeen. “So the capers were all aimed at Tiress?”

“Yeah, but Madeleine decided it was better to spread them around. Less obvious. Madeleine was a great planner. There was a fine art to her plans. She told me she was brighter than the guys she worked with, brighter than the doggy dentist.” He shrugged. “She was right. She probably told people she was brighter than me, and she’d have been right about that, too.”

“But—” I prompted. Now I saw what he’d gotten from Madeleine that made these admissions unimportant to him. He’d played for higher stakes, for the only thing she had left to give. I had suspected she had taken
the
thing of value from him. Wrong. He took it from her.

A satisfied smile settled on his face. “Madeleine was as hooked as I was on the capers. She needed me more than I needed her.”

I could feel my skin tightening. I was right; and the thought of his bullying made me furious. “For that you made her leave her curtains open.”

I hadn’t controlled my voice. Or my face. Champion stared at me, the skin by his eyes creased in confusion. Behind him Nguyen had a similar expression.
What are you angry about?
their expressions demanded. Champion said, “It wasn’t like she was undressed. That wasn’t part of the bargain. You saw the pictures, they weren’t smut. She was just sitting there, doing whatever she would have been if I’d ridden over there to visit her. What’s the matter?”

My throat had clenched closed. I closed my eyes and swallowed until I was sure I could speak clearly. Then I looked Victor Champion in the eye and said, “If you’d gone there, she would have had the option of saying No. Victor, it is demeaning to have someone watch you as if you were a bear at the zoo.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

I tried again. Somehow it seemed important that he understand how ultimate his theft was. “She had so little left—Coco, of course, and the knowledge that Michael would become a doctor who really cared about people like her mother. But every day she lost more control of her body. All she had left were her privacy and the meter maid pranks that provided her escape from an unrelentingly grim reality. Her privacy and her escape, Victor. And you forced her to choose between them. You forced her to sell you her privacy.”

Champion gave no response. It didn’t surprise me. But what did was that Madeleine Riordan had had to choose between privacy—control—and escape and that she had opted for the latter. Madeleine, the planner. Had she changed so much? But no; I saw her after she made her choice. She hadn’t changed; she still controlled what she could. Then, why did she allow herself to be put in the position where she was killed? Dammit, I could feel the answer, just out of reach. It was already eight twenty. I took a deep breath and forced myself to say calmly, “Pion, it is a very unusual thing for two law-abiding strangers to join together in a basically useless and illegal activity. If the capers had been planned by old friends who’d decided their lives were dull and they needed a fling, it would be more understandable. Or two teenagers who were strangers wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. But you and Madeleine are a very unlikely combination.”

Champion smiled, a more relaxed, warmer look than the grins he’d had earlier. His eyes were a little dreamy and I had the sense that he was picturing Madeleine. “Maybe it was because I’d already seen her through the lens; I felt like I knew her. I wanted to know her. That meant something.” He stopped utterly still as if holding that “something” to himself a last time. Then he focused on me. “If you think the capers were out of character for Madeleine, it just means you didn’t know her. She loved it. She loved poring over the plans. She’d do that till I was just about out of my gourd. I mean, I just wanted to get in, do it, get out, and stick my wand on the wall.”

I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.

“But Madeleine, she had to consider the terrain, think about who would be at the scene, what the traffic patterns would be, what about the meter maid rotation, where could I leave my bike, would it be a slow news day. I mean, I had the feeling if there hadn’t been enough variables, she would have made them up,” he said, flinging his hands to the sides. “And then when it was over, she wanted to know moment by moment, not just did I drive the Cushman into the Dumpster, but who was around, was there much traffic, how far did the cart sink in the Dumpster, what happened when I climbed out. To make her happy, I would have been talking about the caper longer than it took to do it.”

I thought about Madeleine in the seventies planning the runs across the border. Champion’s description of her wasn’t surprising. But I didn’t let on to him. “Despite those differences, you two got along.”

“Yeah, she loved the thrill of it. She told me once that it was like being on vacation, not just going someplace and being Madeleine Riordan there, but signing into the hotel with a made-up name, speaking French, picking up men, being someone with no similarity to Madeleine Riordan, and knowing that when she came home that vacation person would simply disappear.”

“She did that?”

Champion shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she made it up. She did say she’d had the same giddy feeling the few times she’d had more to drink than she could handle, and that now, in her condition when she’d really like to do that she couldn’t.”

“And the capers were the only thing that gave her that freedom now.”

“Right,” he muttered. For the first time he looked like he glimpsed what he had threatened to deny her.

“She showed you the plans for gluing Tiress’s pants to the Cushman seat, she talked about her ideas of the Aquatic Lake run, but she never gave you the plans. Why?”

“I didn’t need them,” he said, but he’d let a beat too much pass before dredging up that rationale. “I made that clear to her.”

“You disagreed, didn’t you? Her plans were capers, yours were vendettas. She wasn’t going to be a part of someone getting hurt, was she?” That was my Madeleine.

“All of a sudden she got so finicky about a little danger,” he said giving his head a little angry shake. His gray ponytail wavered in response. In that moment he looked nowhere near fifty years old, in fact much younger than I could imagine Timms or Michael ever appearing. “No one was going to get killed. It was only the meter maids who were in the way. And if we didn’t take chances we’d never hit that asshole Tiress where it mattered.”

For Champion it was a personal vendetta; for Madeleine Tiress was merely an annoyance allowed to flourish by a system that had to be changed. She would have enjoyed seeing Tiress get justice, but for her, it was the parking enforcement regulations that mattered. For her the principle always superseded the individual—except when the individuals were her mother or her dog. “You disagreed, and Madeleine was ready to pull out, right?”

“She thought she was indispensable. But I managed without her,” he said defiantly. “I …”

He was on the verge of telling me something. I prodded, “You had her plans. She’d scoped out the scene at Haste and Telegraph. She’d given you the name of the glue. You cannibalized her plan for Aquatic Lake.”

“So?”

“So, Pion, you haven’t done anything on your own more than grab a wand a meter maid left in her cart. Hardly world-class creativity. Madeleine was the planner, the woman who managed all the details. Without her these pranks would just trail off, no newspaper coverage, no applause. You might as well not do them at all.”

He opened his mouth. I almost had him. But he caught himself before the words came out.

I leaned forward, locking his eyes with mine. “You couldn’t plan anything. You know and Madeleine knew it! Didn’t she?”

“No, dammit! I showed her. She could have seen the best caper of the whole operation if she’d only looked out her window. I gave her a whole goddamned hostage operation right here in the canyon. All she needed to do was point her binoculars, and she would have seen a maneuver that would have amazed even the colonel.” He looked so distraught anyone who hadn’t spent hours wild-goosing in the canyon and more hours making and tracking down reports would have felt sorry for the man. And as outraged as I was, I felt a twinge of pity for the fifty-year-old still trying to impress his father, trying to impress Madeleine, and maybe offering her a gift of entertainment. A very small and exceedingly short-lived twinge. “And the explosion yesterday, why did you set that up?”

“I didn’t! Hey, not me. Why would I do that? Madeleine was already dead.” He was halfway out of his chair. “And besides, an explosion wasn’t something she’d have liked. I mean, hell, she didn’t even watch the hostage thing.”

“We found a parking enforcement wand down there.”

“
I
didn’t put it there. It must have been one of Madeleine’s. I gave her two, one for the dog, and one for her. She kept hers in the bushes at the top of the path. You check; it must be gone now.”

I believed him. There was no reason for him to set the explosion, and much more for someone wanting to keep the focus in the canyon on the meter maid perp. “Why didn’t Madeleine see the hostage operation? Didn’t you call her?”

“I tried, but she was over in goddamn Claire’s room. I didn’t have the number there. I must have called Madeleine’s room ten times, let the phone ring half an hour. She never budged, just kept sitting there staring at Claire.”

“And that’s when you took the picture of her?” Sitting in the chair at the end of Claire’s bed, with the screen next to her. Or was it in front of her?

“Yeah. You think she was angry; it was nothing to how I felt.”

“And when she came back to her room, did you talk to her then?” I asked with growing excitement.

“Yeah,” he snapped, giving me a clear picture of the tone of that conversation.

“What did she say?”

“I don’t remember,” he muttered to his knees.

“You remember. What?”

Silence.

“It’s too late to play dumb. You are in a lot of trouble. You’ve broken enough laws to keep a court tied up for months. Grand theft, auto theft, felony assault, and depending on the extent of Tiress’s injuries, attempted murder.”

He looked up, startled.

“We’re not talking county jail here.”

“Hey, I—”

“But,” I said, “how a judge looks at this will depend a whole lot on how he or she perceives your character. How much
I
tell them you’ve cooperated. Get it?”

It took only a moment for him to take in the picture and nod his acquiescence.

“Now, tell me what she said.”

The startled look returned in watered-down form. He wondered why I was concentrating on that, but he was in no position to ask. He rubbed his right hand between the fingers of his left, moving from palm to little finger as if preparing to count the topics he divulged. “Well, we argued. She couldn’t appreciate the canyon operation. Christ, I did it for her! You’d think she would have cared! But no. She hadn’t even noticed it, and when I told her, it was as if she wasn’t even paying attention. She carried on about violence and danger to innocent people. And”—he shifted to the ring finger—“she went on about my betraying her trust. And the thing about not letting people decide which moments of life are important.”

My breath caught. Madeleine’s statement from the Coco Arnero hearing: “We can’t have people choosing which moments of our lives are important enough to deserve respect.” She had brought it up to me and to Champion. “This was when she was talking about the meter capers?” I demanded. These weren’t the reactions I’d expected. She should have been accusing Champion of grabbing power, or being too unreliable to follow directions, of blunting the point of the caper, or more likely
missing
the point. She should have used terms of indignation, anger, desperation. “Betraying a trust” was a reflective phrase, one used more in disappointment than anger.

“I don’t know what she was talking about. She wasn’t making sense. It was like she was thinking about something else.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her about other things. Since she came back to Canyonview, it was hard to talk to her at all; she was in Claire’s room all the time. When she was at Canyonview before she never bothered with Claire. Now, after she got so finicky, all of a sudden, she’s over in Claire’s room in the afternoon and back there again this time of night. I couldn’t call her till she got back to her own room. And that’d be ten o’clock at night.”

“And that was when she talked about betrayal and which moments of life people deem worthy of consideration?”

“Yeah. I get up early. At ten at night I don’t want to be figuring out puzzles.”

I shook my head. “Champion, you peer in on a dying woman. You telephone her at ten
P.M.
And then you have the nerve to complain that her conversation was unsatisfactory.”