Sudden Exposure (22 page)

“Sam’s a sweetie, and he’s a brilliant tactician, and I love the man. But I’m not blind. And the thing with Sam is that he’s been in the movement too long. And you and I know, Jill, that the movement hardly has a good record on women and equal rights, appalled as they’d be to admit it in public.”

“ ‘The only position for a woman in the civil rights movement is prone,’ ” I said. “H. Rap Brown? Stokely Carmichael?” It was a quote I’d read years ago, and was waiting to hear redressed. I’m still waiting.

“Right. Sam’s not like that. Hardly. If he were, he’d be missing a part he might have wanted to use again,” she said, digging into the new piece of cake. By now she must have consumed enough calories to support a small village. “Even so,” she said, “Sam’s obsession with the movement clouds his vision. He really wants to save the masses. He can’t understand that the masses don’t want to be saved anymore. Hell, the masses vote Republican! But Sam still sees everything as a class issue. With Bryn he figured: Endanger her expensive neighborhood and you’ve got her.”

Bryn’s house. A place so peripheral to her soul that she didn’t object when Ellen overwhelmed her living room with the confessional bench. I laughed.

“Right. You want to get Bryn Wiley, get her in the reputation, hit The Girls’ Team.” She grinned. “And so I have.”

“So the whole point of The Heat Exchange is to get Bryn?”

“Right!”

“And you don’t care if the people on the floors underneath get no heat?”

“We’re not living in Maine! This is California! In a two-room apartment your gas bill is never even twenty bucks!”

“Twenty bucks means a lot to someone who doesn’t have it.”

“My husband has given his life to the poor!”

“And he doesn’t care about this broken promise?”

“One in many for the poor. One in many many he’s seen.”

I wished I had this interchange on tape! “So,” I said, “Sam’s sold out.”

“Hey! You don’t just enforce the laws you believe in.”

I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I don’t make the laws. Sam created The Heat Exchange scam. Sam has sold out.”

Automatically she reached for … her fork, her plate, the coffee cup, anything. But her hands remained empty. She turned to face me, any hint of amusement gone from her face. “Jill, I’m going to be straight with you, straighter than I should be with a cop. This is off the record.”

It pained me to say, “Not in a murder case. Nothing’s off record. But I won’t bandy your confidences around the locker room.” When she didn’t respond, I said softly, “It’s the best I can do. Honestly.”

It was a minute before she said, “Sam and I met in the hospital rehab, after my accident. He had taken a bullet in the thigh. We were focused on rehab. And we were in love. I was a miserable patient, adjusting to a life I couldn’t stand. I wouldn’t have made it without Sam. I’d be in a wheelchair without him. To him I wasn’t working twice as hard as they said I should just so I could be a cripple, I was showing up the establishment, the doctors, the therapists, Bryn Wiley! It didn’t occur to us until later how different we were. The only things we had in common were injuries—and love. I don’t care about politics. Sam doesn’t just care; politics, the movement, is what he is. It governs who he hangs out with, the hours he keeps, it pervades every thought he has. I look at a pool and ponder if it would be good enough for a great diver; Sam demands neighborhood access. I get up to go to work, I have to step over unwashed bodies in the living room. We have no friends in common. There are only a couple of places we go where I’m not bored or annoyed or Sam doesn’t feel guilty. It’s amazing we’ve stayed together this long. But things between us got rockier and more silent. You understand?” Her eyes beseeched me to understand.

“I do.”

She smiled, then grinned. “I got the idea to shoot Bryn in the heart, so to speak, in The Girls’ Team. It was brilliant. Sam grabbed it. He’s the one who came up with The Heat Exchange. You know what a great tactician he is. We’re having such a good time with it, watching her squirm. Did you see what happened at her press conference? Was that a master work or what? Sam’s a genius,” she said, forking off a bit more of her second dessert.

“I do understand,” I said slowly. “But none of this says you wouldn’t enjoy taking a brick to her Girls’ Team van or shooting her car windows.”

Her fork banged down on the plate. “Look, have you missed everything I said? You think I’d toss this all away so I could hack at her van with a brick? You insult me!”

I believed that—the brick attack was beneath her, and Sam would be appalled—unless that was a tactic for an even more deeply covered plan. I glanced at my watch: six ten. I had to get back to the station and get that warrant request in better shape. Keeping my voice neutral I said, “What about Ellen Waller? Did you shoot her?”

“Ellen? Why would I … Omigod, you mean it’s Ellen who was shot?”

“Ellen’s dead.” I let that sink in a moment, and added, “Her face was shot.”

Fannie’s eyes widened and she pressed her jaws together hard. Any color evaporated from her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint. Now I leaned forward and repeated, “Did you shoot her?”

“No, damn it. Why would I want to harm Ellen? I liked Ellen.”

The last words,
I liked Ellen,
she said in exactly the same intonation I had said them in my mind last night. It comforted me, as if this range of fondness somehow made Ellen’s death less stark. But it didn’t help me to track her murderer any more than it had saved her from being murdered. “Who would have had reason to shoot her?”

Slowly Fannie shook her head.

A blond woman in a blue sari stopped midbite and stared at us from the next table.

Lowering my voice, I said, “Think! Let me be real clear about this, Fannie. I don’t have a lead to a single suspect. Except you and Sam. And between the two of you there are enough motives to keep Homicide busy for a year. If you want us to focus elsewhere, make it your business to tell me where.”

“I can understand why you’d think I’d have it in for Bryn. But Ellen? I wouldn’t hurt Ellen. I barely knew her. I only saw her a couple of times when she first got to town—the first times she was at Bootlaces, before she ever met Bryn. Omigod! Was she shot in mistake for Bryn?”

I glanced at the sari-clad woman, but she had returned to her food. “Why would you think Ellen would be mistaken for Bryn?”

“Because they looked so much alike.”

“So you didn’t only see her a couple of times months ago
before
she met Bryn. She didn’t resemble Bryn then. You’ve seen her since she moved in with Bryn.” But Bryn had never seen Fannie; Bryn didn’t know who Johnson’s wife was. So Pironnen was right; he had seen Ellen and Fannie together. “You visited Ellen, and later you waited outside her house for her. Tell me about it.
All
about it.”

She sat back and said in a soft voice, “I’ll tell you this much, Sam and I’ve been skeet shooting—it’s one of the few sports where it doesn’t matter if your legs don’t work right. I’m a damned good shot. And if I’d planned to kill Bryn, I would have taken her out on the ten-meter board.”

I liked Fannie, just as I liked Ellen. But I tend to go for the brats. Be quick, witty, pull for the underdog, and I’ll give you the store. Amuse me with your quirks and I’ll overlook a lot. I would have liked Fannie as a friend, but despite all she’d said, I knew two things. Number one: If I asked straight out about Ellen Waller’s missing past, Fannie wouldn’t tell me. Number two: I wouldn’t trust her at the business end of a rifle.

I had just time to organize the warrant argument—if I left right now. I could pay the bill here and …

But sometimes you have to go with your gut feeling, your intuition. I picked up my coffee cup, smiled at Fannie, and asked, “How did you meet Ellen Waller?”

B
Y THIS TIME, IT
was nearing the hour for early Sunday dinners. Two women in jeans and sweaters settled between us and the sari-clad woman. Behind me, couples sat together by marble tables and a threesome was grouped in the corner. It was twenty after six. Allowing ten minutes for travel time, I’d have to be paid and out of here in half an hour to get back in time to call the judge at all. I’d have to reorganize the warrant request as I presented it.

Fannie Johnson glanced at the spray of dried leaves and maroon flowers at the end of the bar. She fingered the black frog on her red martinet’s jacket. I had to keep myself from hurrying her. She sighed deeply and said, “I don’t know when I first saw Ellen. I wouldn’t have noticed her. She was just another woman at Bootlaces.”

“The re-entry center?”

“Right. I’m on the board. I decided to stop bitching about protesters who were doing nothing but protesting and do something constructive, like help get people back on their feet.”

“And Ellen?”

“When I first saw her at Bootlaces, I didn’t realize she was one of the clients. She was better dressed than most of the board members.”

In Berkeley that’s not akin to saying she’d patronized a Paris couturier. Maybe she wore corduroy slacks instead of jeans.

“Then she was helping me send invitations for the Bryn Wiley event—the first one, the one Bryn didn’t show for. We were chatting …”

“About?”

“The normal new acquaintance stuff. Why we were there. You know.”

“So why were you there?”

“Because my house was full of strange men and Sam was up on Tamalpais rebuilding. But I didn’t tell her all the details; I just said my husband was renovating a house on Tamalpais.” She gave a small shrug. “I thought at the time how upper-middle-class I sounded. Who’d have guessed? I could have been married to a stockbroker.”

“And what did Ellen say?”

“She was there to network into a job.”

“What kind of job?”

“Gardening, secretarial, housework, that kind of thing.”

Paid-under-the-table work, with no official references, no social security number, nothing reported to the IRS. Underground work. “Did you refer her to anything?”

“She didn’t have a degree. Besides, the government hasn’t been hiring for a decade; they’re too busy downsizing, saving money for the high-bracket taxpayers. The rich love laying off workers, then bitching about paying unemployment. If they could lay ’em off and sell ’em by the pound, they would.” She took a bite of cake, larger than those before. “Anyway, she didn’t seem like someone who’d have trouble finding work. I figured she’d just go to a temp agency.”

I raised an eyebrow, waiting for the “but.”

“I was surprised when I saw her at the dinner Bryn missed. I figured she’d have been gone by then. But there she was. The next time was at the dinner Bryn did deign to honor. Ellen was wearing a leotard and jeans, her hair was shorter, and it was chestnut just like Bryn’s.”

“Did she ever tell you why she did that?”

“I could see. Bryn had barely been in the room for five minutes when she spotted Ellen. Ellen didn’t approach her; she came to Ellen. Next thing I knew Ellen was living at Bryn’s.”

Now we were getting to the meat. “How did that next contact come about?”

Fannie wedged her finger in the loop of the frog, then looked down as if trying to get it loose.

“You called her,” I suggested. “When you heard she was living at Bryn Wiley’s, you saw a chance to find out about Bryn and The Girls’ Team, right? You figured you’d make use of Bryn’s unsuspecting companion.”

She pulled loose of the frog and looked up, smug. “No. You’re wrong. Maybe this surprises you, but she called me and suggested lunch.”

It did more than surprise me. “Why? What did she want?”

“Lunch. You don’t have to have an ulterior motive to go to lunch. Maybe when friends call
you
, your first question is why? Normal people don’t think that.”

But there was something in her voice that undercut her explanation.

“She did want something, though, didn’t she?”

Slowly, she said, “Yes.” Her voice was sorter, fuzzy, her focus on the big French circus poster on the wall. I had the feeling I had asked a question which she had posed to herself many times and still hadn’t answered. When she started to talk, it was as if it were as much for her own benefit as mine. “She invited me to the house. Bryn was at her cabin for the weekend. Ellen told me that; later I realized she’d been reassuring me.”

“Luring you?”

“No, I don’t think so. She didn’t know about Bryn and me, not then. It wouldn’t have occurred to her how much I’d have given for an hour alone in that house. At first I thought she was just showing off her new life. She’d bought flowers, made two big bouquets. A poor family could have eaten for a week off what she paid for them. Lunch was crab salad. And wine. And a fruit torte. She was going to eat in that macabre living room. But I’ll tell you the place gave me the creeps. You seen it? That confession booth thing there with the ogling Shiva.” She gave her head a shake. “I told Ellen that if Bryn wanted to sit in there and contemplate confessing her sins, that was fine with me, but the place took my appetite away. I mean all it needed was pictures of martyrs at the stake.”

Why had Ellen insisted on that confessional? Was she pressuring Bryn to confess? Confess what? And why would Ellen have cared at all? “So you ate in the dining room?”

“It was bad enough in the dining room, with that thing looming in the next room. Even drinking wine and eating strawberry kiwi torte didn’t lift the gloom. It just made it a little eerie, like a friar would pad through any minute, refill my glass, and remind me that life is fleeting but damnation eternal. Says something about Bryn, doesn’t it, that it never penetrated.”

“Why would she connect it with herself?”

Fannie looked at me out of the corner of her eye, then said lamely, “It was in her living room! Anyway, when Ellen and I had almost finished the wine, she asked me to tell her about the Nationals.”

“What specifically?” I leaned forward, trying not to look too eager. “You mean how things happened?”

“No, she seemed to have an idea about that—not entirely accurate, I might add. She admitted Bryn had told her some. Some she’d found out at the library. Some she’d guessed. I’m not sure how much of each, because that didn’t interest her. What she wanted to know was how I felt about it then, and over the years, and now.”