Too Close to the Edge (11 page)

I pounded again.

A tall, sleekly muscled woman with corn-blond straight hair strode toward the door. I recognized her from pictures in the papers when she won the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco two years ago. Her skin was already tan, even though the rains had been heavy and seemingly constant for the past three months. In red and gray striped nylon running shorts and a T-shirt that said “Racer’s Edge,” she looked as warm as I felt in my wool jacket. Her red headband wasn’t even stained from sweat. “I’m Detective Smith.” I held out my shield.

She shook her head. “Not another theft?” She pulled the door opened. “Come talk in back, where people from the street cannot see. Even at seven-thirty in the morning, they will bang on the door if they see me.” Greta’s delivery had that pleasant lyric quality of Scandinavian speech. And there was just enough hesitancy in her word choice to suggest a lack of sureness with the idiom.

She strode past racks of running shorts, shiny lightweight suits, lycra pants, displays of weighted armbands, innersoles, disks offering computerized running programs, and an array of glossy books that must have contained the entirety of collected knowledge on putting one foot before the other. From the shelf beneath the cash register, she drew a manila envelope and plucked out a receipt. “We have to keep these copies from the charge cards. The woman who helps my bookkeeper alphabetizes them for me. But in the year I’ve managed this store, this is the first time I have ever looked at one after the sale. I just stuff them in an envelope for her. Here, you will want to see this. It is good for a detective to be after this craven thief.” She extended the receipt.

I glanced at it but didn’t take it from her. “He lost his New Balances,” she went on. “He bought them only last week. Eric Parosco,” she read from the attached credit card receipt. “He was very distressed. He tried on”—she glanced at the opposite wall—“half of my stock.” There must have been sixty running shoes, each on an individual little shelf. “He was very particular about minimizing his pronation. But you see he didn’t want a straight shoe; he liked the curve-lasted shoes. I told him they don’t give the same protection from pronation, but”—she flung her hands to the side—“it is very difficult with these people. They think they know what they want. But they want five or six things that are not compatible, and they want them with green racing stripes.” She laughed, showing strong straight teeth. She had pale blue eyes, but her mouth was too wide for her chiseled nose, and when she laughed it overwhelmed the upper half of her face. “Come with me to the back. I must start my training soon. Now is my time to have coffee. The caffeine will make my body burn the fat—more efficient.”

She led me into the storeroom. Shoe boxes filled the walls and shelves floor to ceiling. It looked like a library of shoes. By the rear door was a scarred wooden table that held the coffee pot, a cup, and a computer. The file cabinet was next to it.

Taking a swallow from the cup, she held out her hand as an invitation for me to sit. “It is better for me to continue to stand now,” she added.

The chair looked very appealing. I figured I’d better continue to stand, too. “Miss Tennerud,” I said, “what I’ve come to ask you about is last night. Would you tell me what you were doing from, say, six o’clock till this morning?”

“Ah, that is a bit personal.” She laughed in the same way Laurence Mayer had smiled. “Why is it you ask me this?”

“A woman has been killed.”

“No. You don’t think that I …”

“No. But knowing where you were might help us to assess some of the other factors.”

Her pale blue eyes narrowed and that wide mouth drooped. “I will tell you what I can. I don’t want trouble. I am not a citizen here. I want to cooperate. I need my green card.”

I was tempted to assure her that we were not here to threaten her immigration status, but that, I decided, could wait until she had cooperated. “What were you doing at six?”

“I closed up at five-thirty. Then I totaled the receipts and closed the cash register. The bookkeeper comes in the afternoons. I have to have everything ready. When I finished it was then about six. My boyfriend was already here. He walks over here when he is through with his patients and waits in the back where he is sure none of them will see him. He has no car, you see. Sometimes if he has a late patient I go to his place and listen to his stereo until he’s done. I have a key. But last night he came here. Then we went out for pasta and came back to my apartment. Do you want me to go on?”

“Who is your boyfriend?” I asked for the record.

“Larry Mayer. He is a psychologist here in Berkeley. He will tell you I was with him.”

“He has, Miss Tennerud.”

“Then why—”

“We need to double check.”

“He is very reliable. I refer to him my customers who complain they should be running better than they are. Not just to him, though he is the best. He has counseled top-seeded runners, and tennis players—you would recognize their names—and even some of your football stars. I am not saying this just because I love him, you know,” she grinned, that appealing wide-mouthed smile I had seen in the ads for Racer’s Edge. “It is my job to help customers with their training questions. I tell them of the sports clinics, to see if they have a physical problem, and of the sports physiologists. You can’t run seriously without a physiologist to test you and tell you how to maximize your training. I myself was running too fast in my practice. I was wasting energy, courting injury, when I could have run a whole minute slower each mile and had the same benefit. Many people think the physiologists are a great expense, but for a serious runner …” She shrugged. “For the beginners, I tell them of yoga classes to stretch in, and podiatrists.”

“How did you meet Laurence Mayer?”

“He was at a local marathon I was running a few months ago. It was the last one I ran. Too many marathons is not good. To win the Olympics after running fewer than five marathons is common. You have to save your body for the ones that count.”

“With the big purses.”

She smiled. “Of course.”

“But you’re running the Bay to Breakers in San Francisco next month.” There was no great monetary reward for that seven-mile race. One year first prize had been two tickets to Paris and the
use
of a BMW.

“Yes, yes. It is not wise. Where I come from we don’t train in winter. In Norway, you can’t. But that is good. The muscles need to rest, the tears and strains have time to heal. But here we can run every day. It is not so good. I tell my boss this. But he wants a famous runner managing his store, not a ‘has-been’ whose last win was fourteen months ago.” She shrugged. “So I train.”

“Good luck.”

“Thanks. I’m training well, but I can use luck, regardless of what Larry says.”

“You said you met Larry at a race,” I prodded. That didn’t sound like the pastime of a man who had given up his obsession with winning.

“He told me he had seen me run before. He thought he could help me clear my mind. He said a mind stuffed with unproductive complexes is like a windbreak holding you back.” She laughed. “I told him I do not have complexes, but he could take me to dinner.”

That didn’t sound like the psychologist whose life had been changed.

“But I have referred others to Larry, and he has helped me too,” she added. “I have no complexes, but I am not good with the books. He sent me his bookkeeper. She comes for an hour, three days a week.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to have her for three hours at a time?”

“For me, yes. But she is in a wheelchair. I think this schedule is less tiring for her. Even with the computer—”

“What is her name?” I asked, suspecting the answer.

“Liz Goldenstern.”

The picture of Liz pressing two fingers together to take hold of the reporter’s card flashed in my mind. It hadn’t been the thumb and forefinger but the first two fingers. I wouldn’t have thought Liz could operate a computer. I would have been wrong. I wondered how much I had underestimated her. “What exactly did she do?”

Greta flushed under her tan. “I have to tell you I don’t know. The owners of the store told me I needed to have someone to do the books and prepare for the taxes. She did that. But what is involved, that I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I cannot clutter my mind with the little tasks of shopkeeping. I have my training.”

“But she came three days a week?” I insisted.

“Monday, Wednesday, Friday. From four to five.”

“And she was here yesterday?” She must have been going home from here when Pereira ran into her.

“Yes. Today she is off. But tomorrow she will be here if you need to talk with her.”

“I’m afraid she won’t,” I said. “She is the woman who has been killed.”

Greta gasped. Her small features scrunched in together and tears dripped from her eyes. Intermingling her sobs with great sniffles, she cried like a child. “It is so sad. Life was so hard for her. Everything was hard. I tried to make this as easy as I could. I told her to come the hours she wanted. It was fine if the woman who took care of her came here with her. She didn’t come often. Only a few times she stopped to talk with Liz. But that was fine. I was paying Liz by the hour, but it was fine if she had visitors here. I told her it was fine if her son stopped to see her here. It was no problem, the attendant was there.”

“Liz had a son?”

“Yes. I think he is at university. He didn’t come often either. Maybe two or three times.”

“What was his name?”

She shook her head “That I don’t know.” Running a hand across her eyes, she glanced at her watch. I looked down at my own. Detectives’ Morning Meeting would start in twenty minutes.

“What does he look like?”

“He is a student,” she said in the off-hand manner used to describe sneakers.

“Tall, short, blond, brunette …” I prodded.

She sighed. “He was not here long, not often. But I will tell you what I can remember. He has average height. Hair some shade of brown. He could jog, but never run well. He is too wide in the hip.”

“Do you mean he’s fat?”

“No, not that,” she exclaimed with horror. “The bones of his legs are set wide. I know these things. In school I studied not only business and sports management, but physiology. That is why I can advise runners now. But this boy, he hasn’t the body for long distances.” She shrugged. “Some don’t.”

I wondered how Liz Goldenstern had managed to keep her temper when Greta assessed the lesser mortals. I wondered
why
Liz had bothered, or if indeed she had. I said, “How did you know this boy was Liz’s son?”

“Let me see. How did I? Ah yes, it was the first time he came here. He was not so confident then. He didn’t walk straight through to the back like he does now. Then he stood by the cash register. He looked like he needed help. But when I asked him he said no, he didn’t want to buy shoes. He needed to see the woman in the back. ‘Liz?’ I asked him. He nodded his head. I asked him if he was a friend of hers. He didn’t look like he would be a friend. He was much younger, you see.” Greta smiled impishly. “I was curious. But he said, no, he wasn’t a friend. She was his mom. Then the attendant rushed in, and I stopped her and asked her to take the boy with her into the back.”

“Miss Tennerud, what kind of employee was Liz Goldenstern? Was she easy to work with?”

She hesitated, long enough for that to be my answer. “A store like this, it must have been difficult for her to see. It would have been unkind to flaunt my muscles. She needed to concentrate on her work. So I left her alone. That’s why I don’t know more about the boy.”

I moved to the door. “Can you think of anyone who would want to kill Liz Goldenstern? Did she say she was afraid? Did anyone come in here and make her uneasy?”

“My customers are not back here. They don’t know when she is. No one visited her but those two, unless they came in by the back when I was out front. But I am in and out of the back. They would have had to come in like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“Think, Miss Tennerud. This is important.”

She shook her head again. “Perhaps with her son she was not on the best of terms. But that is common with children that age, is it not?”

Children that age must have been about five years younger than Greta. “What gave you that idea? Did she say something to you? Or did you overhear something?”

“No, no. It was not her. It was him. He left quickly each time. He had the long face.”

I
T WAS ALREADY TWENTY
to eight as I raced back to the station. Detectives’ Morning Meeting started in five minutes.

In many ways we are more liberal than other police departments, more “Berkeley” than “Police.” But maybe because of the laid-back atmosphere of the town, in which arriving on time takes second place to finishing an incisive conversation or appreciating the first daffodil of spring, running in late to Morning Meeting is viewed much the same as leaving the keys in the ignition of your patrol car. In my few months as a detective, I had been late for two meetings and missed one entirely. Inspector Doyle, the head of Homicide Detail, had called me in each time.

As the traffic light turned from amber to red, I stepped harder on the gas and hurried on past the high school, blowing my horn at a covey of ambling adolescents who had stopped to argue in the crosswalk.

With a burst of bravado I circled in front of the station. Parking was at a premium. It was not unknown to find the only available spot five or six blocks away. As I passed the station, and the full curb opposite, Howard slowed his Land Rover and pointed to the garage he rented from a woman across the street. “Take it,” he called.

I could have asked why he could do without it—he could no more miss Morning Meeting than I. Howard and I had started on patrol together, walked the same beat. We had worked on many of the same cases and stuck our necks out way too far for each other on more than one occasion. And when I had gotten the prestigious promotion to Homicide, and he only to Vice and Substance Abuse, he had swallowed his disappointment. There was little I wouldn’t do for Howard, or he for me. But giving up a parking spot was beyond the limits of even our friendship.