Too Close to the Edge (21 page)

“What is it, Jill?”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen Liz drive.”

“So?”

“So, Howard, knowing what you do of Liz, can you imagine her choosing
not
to drive?”

He shook his head. “But she’d still need something to drive. You checked with the D.M.V. Nothing’s registered. So, like I told you, Jill, you should have made this your freebee from Herman Ott.”

“It was.” I stood up. “Herman Ott laid it in my lap.” I headed out the door. Grabbing the last piece of toast, Howard followed. As I reached the corner, Wally yelled from the doorway, “Whose tab?”

“Mine,” we called together.

“No, Howard,” I said. “My discovery, my tab.” I held up my hand to Wally as I raced across the street.

“The damned thing is,” I said as I crossed the freeway to the marina, “the van’s been sitting under our noses the whole time. I had Murakawa go over every vehicle down here. It took him and his buddies four hours, and it’s been right here.”

One of the things that kept Howard and me friends was the ability to let the grumbler berate himself—without attempting to mitigate or join in. So now Howard sat silently, his knees pressed against the handle above the glove compartment of my Volkswagen, his hair grazing the roof with each bump in the road.

I passed the helicopter shop and turned right toward the docks. “The night of the accident when Mayer hit her, Liz had just gotten out of the company truck. The company,” I said, pulling in by the boats, “was the Capellis. The truck was their van. Murakawa checked for any vehicle that didn’t belong here.”

“And that one,” Howard said, unfolding himself from the car, “is here every day. Right down there.” He pointed to a spot at the end of the lot.

I ran. When I reached the window of the van, Howard was already peering in. “Just as you said, Jill, she drove it like a wheelchair.”

It took only a few minutes to discover the Capellis weren’t around. Six forty-five was the crack of dawn for me, but for a commercial fisherman it was midday. Another task for Murakawa.

Walking back to my car, Howard said, “So Liz drove herself here Thursday night. Why?”

“And more to the point, if she was coming to meet someone at Marina Vista, why didn’t she drive there? Why did she park here, a quarter of a mile away?”

H
OWARD COULD HAVE RIDDEN
with me to the county hospital, but there’s a limit to friendship. And while driving to Oakland at seven in the morning to spend twenty minutes waiting in the lobby of the county hospital when I interrogated a patient may not have strained it, doing that on a Saturday morning, when he only came into work to get some sleep, would be worthy of a hernia. But Howard was too caught up in the question of why Liz Goldenstern drove to the marina Thursday night to let go easily. He was still offering theories when I dropped him at the station, where he could make use of my sleeping bag.

I had, at odd moments, wondered what it would be like sharing my bed with Howard. I’d never thought it would be like this.

I headed for the county hospital and Aura Summerlight.

No one looks her best in one-size-fits-all. And when the garment is a faded blue gown that has been washed, bleached, and sanitized every day for half a year, it can’t help but make the wearer look as if the bleach has seeped inward from the gown. When I had first seen Aura Summerlight she had looked like a bright but rather shabby Ghost of Christmas Past. At Liz’s flat yesterday, her face had revealed just what her life was. Now, under the limp sheets in a crowded four-bed room in the county hospital, she looked haunting, like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

The chatter from a morning news-talk show flowed irregularly from a television suspended over a bed across the room. Beside Aura, a gray head was crumpled into the pillow. Each breath came with painful wheezes.

“How are you?” I asked Aura, already knowing the answer.

“Okay. They’re going to release me this morning.”

“Officer Coleman will come for you.”

She paled, nearly fading into the sheets.

“We caught the boys last night. We know about the shoe theft ring.”

She started to protest, but I held up a hand. “Now what I want you to tell me is what part Liz played.”

Her eyes closed. Under the lids I could see the eyeballs shift to the right and back to center as she considered her choice of answer. When her eyes opened, I caught her gaze. “You’re not only up for theft, but conspiracy. And if any of those boys is a minor …” I let that threat hang. “You don’t have much to bargain with, but you can buy yourself some good will by giving me the truth, now.”

Slowly, she said, “Liz wasn’t involved.”

“What about the boy who came to see you at Racer’s Edge?”

“It was the easiest place to pass him the information. Liz was too busy to notice.”

I recalled Liz at her door, warning Blaine Morris I was a cop. “But she
did
know, didn’t she?”

“No.”

I braced my hands on the bed table. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Okay,” she sighed. “She figured it out.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t mention it till that day.”

“The day she died?”

The volume rose on the television. The jingle for Florida orange juice spread through the room. Aura nodded weakly. “She said she couldn’t have my petty crimes—that’s what she called it—going on in her house. She said if word got out it would smear her and Marina Vista. She said she had worked her butt off for Marina Vista—that was true, she had—and she wasn’t going to let anyone screw it up. So she fired me. She said she was sorry. I was the best attendant she’d had. We were friends, in a way. But she said she had no choice.”

“But you called her to say you weren’t coming that evening. Why would she have assumed you were?”

“We agreed I’d stay on till the end of the week.”

“That’s very civilized,” I said with more sarcasm than I’d intended.

The gray-haired woman turned over, grimaced, and pulled the sheet over her ears. The public address system called for Dr. Something, then repeated the call, further garbling the name.

“She needed time to find someone else. I needed the money.”

“You had four hundred and fifty dollars in an envelope. The few dollars you’d earn for the rest of the week wouldn’t have made you stay.”

Aura seemed to sink further into the pillow. “I wasn’t surprised she caught on. I wasn’t surprised she fired me. But she could have turned me in to you guys. And she didn’t do that.”

I sighed. Prosecuting her seemed like the final slap. She was like an old dog that’s been kicked around so long it cowers at any approach. I could see her accepting Liz Goldenstern’s dismissal as her due. What I couldn’t see was her setting up the scam. “Liz is dead. There’s nothing to be gained in protecting her.”

Aura’s eyes widened. “I told you the truth. She didn’t know. Ask the boys, they’ll tell you. You’ll believe them.”

“We found the shoes in Liz’s bag, the one she has on her chair. You could have hidden those anywhere, on a top shelf where she’d never find them. Why did you keep them in her bag?”

“I didn’t, usually. I never would have put them there if I hadn’t been so rushed. I always kept them in the kitchen cupboard. But that night I didn’t have time.”

“What about the money? If it was yours, why didn’t you take it with you?”

“I couldn’t keep that kind of money in the village. How could I know who would come in at night? Lots of stuff gets stolen. Besides, I was saving to get myself a place. That’s why I kept the money in fifty-dollar bills, so I wouldn’t be spending it on beer and pizza.”

“But why did you put it in the bedside table? It’s one of the few places Liz would have looked.”

“I didn’t usually. I always kept it in the cupboard, where I had the shoes.”

“Then why didn’t you put it there Thursday night?” I asked, attempting to mask my exasperation.

“I didn’t have time. I—”

“Okay, Aura,” a surprisingly cheerful nurse said, as she reached for the curtain ready to pull it around the bed. “We just need to do one or two things.”

“Can you do someone else first?” I said, trying to sound somewhere near that pleasant. “This is police business. It’ll only take a minute.”

She hesitated, then said, “I guess. But I only have so much leeway.”

“Thanks.”

To Aura, I said, “Why didn’t you have time to put the money and the shoes in the cupboard?”

“I heard the key in the door. I was standing in the bedroom, looking at the money. I did that a lot when Liz wasn’t there. The bell rang. I froze. Then I heard him call out ‘Liz?’ ”

“Who?”

“The Marina Vista guy. Brad. I didn’t have time to stop in the kitchen and fiddle with the cabinets. I stuck the shoes the first place I saw—her bag—stuffed the money in the drawer, tossed the bag under the desk, and ran out the back.”

“Didn’t you expect Liz to look in that drawer when she got home?”

Aura shook her head. “I panicked. When I got outside, and I had time to think, I figured if I came early in the morning before she got up, I could get to it first.”

“But wouldn’t she have opened the drawer at night?” Bedside tables weren’t called night stands for no reason.

“No. She knew I wouldn’t be there, so she would have had someone from the meeting help her to bed. She hated to do that, impose. When she did, she was as quick as possible. She wouldn’t have asked for anything extra. She didn’t take sleeping pills or anything.”

I braced my arms on her table. “So you heard Brad Butz at the door. You panicked, and ran. Why didn’t you just wait till he went away?”

Her pale eyebrows narrowed in unbelief. “I’m no fool. I know what a temper he has. I heard them arguing.”

“When? That day?” I asked, straining to contain my excitement.

“No. They’d argued all along. Liz wasn’t the easiest person to work for. And him!” She laughed weakly. “It wasn’t a match made in heaven. But the fights—him yelling and her icy cold—they were about a week ago. But then they stopped. Everything wasn’t lovey-dovey like before, but they weren’t fighting. It was … you married?”

“Not any more.”

She nodded knowingly, “Then you’ll understand. It was like nothing had been settled but they didn’t want to go into it. You know what I mean?”

“Yes.” I’d lived in that state for nearly a year before I moved out. “But, Aura, if you only heard him call out one word—‘Liz?’—how can you be sure it was Brad Butz? Do you recognize his voice that easily?”

“It wasn’t his voice. It wasn’t that clear. I heard his key go into the lock. I heard him jiggle it, like he always did. You have to pull back on the key to make it work. He never could remember that. He always jiggled it. The more he jiggled it the madder he got. I knew what he’d be like. That’s why I didn’t just wait for him to leave. I knew he had a key.”

When a suspect emerges as the victim’s lover, it makes him worth another look. When he’s been overheard fighting with the victim, and has kept that a secret, he moves to the front of the pack. For me to drive to confront Brad Butz, a patrol car was in order. I stopped at the station to sign one out and headed to Butz’s house.

His truck wasn’t there, and five minutes at the door told me he wasn’t either. I drove on to Marina Vista.

The sun sliced through the fog only long enough to stun my eyes; then the gray-beige sky sucked it back in. The musty smell of low tide seemed to penetrate with the morning dampness as I drove past the gray metal Calicopter building for the second time that morning and made the turn to Rainbow Village, passing the grassy field, the future sites of sports boutiques and soccer clinics. Rainbow Village seemed to sag and pale under the weight of the fog. Even the Rainbow sign looked like it had been out in the sun—sun we hadn’t seen much of since November—too long.

Some of the residents might have been awake, but none was outside to see Brad Butz fitting a new Marina Vista sign into the pole holes.

“Mr. Butz,” I called.

With one hand on the heavy redwood sign, he spun toward me, planting himself with the same belligerent stance he had assumed Thursday morning before Liz was murdered, when he was fuming about his stolen sign. Ever since Aura Summerlight’s revelation about Liz and Butz, I had wondered what she saw in him. Whatever it was, it certainly was not visible to the untutored eye.

I stood a moment staring at his doll-like face. I remembered Liz telling me that she’d thought it would be nice to have someone around she could count on, someone malleable. Was Brad Butz malleable? No one in our department had found him so. But for Liz? She’d picked him as the contractor for Marina Vista. Knowing Liz, she wouldn’t have chosen someone from whom she expected an argument. Since I had questioned him after the murder I had wondered why Liz went to the trouble of backing him for the job. It wasn’t for his experience. Was it because they were already lovers?

“Now what?” Butz demanded.

“You didn’t tell me you and Liz Goldenstern were lovers.”

He glared at me. “You find that hard to believe? Does it surprise you to know that people in chairs have lovers? Liz had some undamaged portion of her spine. She had some feeling, some control. It’s different person to person. Being in a chair doesn’t make someone helpless. All relationships aren’t based on dexterity, you know.”

“Spare me the lecture,” I snapped. “If you cared about finding Liz’s killer you would have been straight with me yesterday. Were you still lovers when she died?”

“Yes, we were still lovers. We had the project and we had each other. Just because I don’t go hanging my feelings out for the world to finger doesn’t mean I’m not broken up by Liz’s death.”

“What were you fighting about?”

“Huh?” I could tell from his expression that he hadn’t been quick enough to assimilate my knowing about the fights. He was playing for time to create his story.

“You had big fights. What about?”

He sighed. “What do you think?”

“You tell me.”

“That jerk of a husband of hers. You knew Liz was married, didn’t you? To that jerk in there.” He glared at Rainbow Village.

I nodded, but Butz barely noticed.