Sudden Exposure (15 page)

“Here.”

“All night?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you hear anything unusual, when you were in here, all evening and all night?”

“Wednesday? Why do you want to know that?”

“Just answer the question.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t need to answer any damned questions.”

“Take the towel off your head.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t have to—”

“There some reason you don’t want to expose your scalp?”

“I told you, it’s cold in here.”

“Fine. Put some clothes on, we’re going to the station.”

“Hey, I don’t have to—”

And that was when his voice cracked.

J
ED
E
STLER’S VOICE HAD
cracked just like an adolescent’s. His little peach of a mouth was shut so tight that his lips were barely visible. He was as stunned as I was.

“Take off the towel,” I repeated.

He looked at me wide-eyed, shrugged, and pulled an end. The terry cloth fell to the floor.

I stared, almost as wide-eyed as he.

Damp brown curly hair covered his head. Estler wasn’t bald. He didn’t even have a receding hairline.

A smug little grin appeared, but he said nothing.

So Estler wasn’t the bulldog-masked nudist. He hadn’t been the naked man running down past Johnson’s house or through Bryn Wiley’s rally. He could be exactly what he seemed: a perky little neighbor involved in nothing more than tending Karl Pironnen.

I didn’t believe that for a moment. “You found Bryn Wiley’s body.”

“That was her?” His grin vanished. His sharp little-kid face scrunched; he looked like he was going to cry. There was no way not to like him; but I knew better than to trust him. He was picturing the bloody pulp of her face. I could have led him away from that vision, and the memory of reaching for her phone. I didn’t.

When twenty seconds had passed, I said softly, “Tell me about it.”

He swallowed. His skin was the sweaty near-green of someone who has already thrown up.

“Jed, the phone you used? Where is it now?”

“In the car,” he said in a throaty whisper. His words were slow but each one seemed on the verge of exploding with fear.

“Her car?”

“No … Karl’s!”

“Karl’s car? The Subaru wagon in the driveway?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you put it there?”

“That’s where it was.”

“Jed, it’s Bryn Wiley’s car phone from her
car.
You used it to call the police.”

His face went gray-green. “Oh my God, you don’t think that I did that to her? What kind of man do you think—How can you—”

“Tell me what happened,” I said in a monotone.

“The phone … was already there … in Karl’s car. Ellen left it there, this morning, after she and Karl went to the bank. I saw it later. I was taking the dogs out after lunch. I checked the car for Nora’s collar. Nora wasn’t wearing it. It wasn’t on her leash. Karl had taken her when he went with Ellen this morning. But it wasn’t there.”

“The collar.”

“Yeah. But the phone was. Bryn’s phone. I was going to call Ellen to pick it up when I got back with the dogs.”

“Why didn’t you call her then? You had a phone right there.”

“I didn’t want to leave the dogs wandering around loose in the middle of Saturday afternoon. Neighbors get real uptight about the dogs. Nora’s collar was gone. I couldn’t even put her on a leash. I just wanted to give them a run and get them back in the house before anyone came down on me.”

“Why didn’t you drop the phone by Bryn’s on your walk?”

He scraped his fingers across his thigh in three quick motions; finally coming up with the end of the terry-cloth bathrobe tie. Once in hand, he began kneading it. “I couldn’t. That was the point.”

“Why?”

“Because Bryn might be there.”

“And?”

“Then Bryn would know that Ellen had been out with Karl this morning.”

“Would Bryn have cared?”

“Ellen sure thought so. That’s why she took the phone with her, so if Bryn called, Ellen could say she was at home, working. Ellen said—you know Ellen?”

I nodded.

“Ellen said Bryn wouldn’t object to her going with Karl if he needed support, that Bryn would really be pleased to help out—vicariously.”

That
I believed. I could picture Ellen’s grin as she added the zinger.

“Bryn
would
be pleased, Ellen said, if she weren’t so preoccupied with the press conference. But because dealing well with people
was,
um …”

“Not her medal sport?”

He grinned. “Yeah, that’s how Ellen might put it. Big euphemism, huh? But Ellen just said she didn’t want to put Bryn in the position of saying something she would regret later.”

I hoped Ellen hadn’t postponed sex or chocolate waiting for
later.

We Berkeleyans frown on those who condescend to their in-home employees. Fortunately for Bryn and Karl Pironnen there is no such censure of domestic weirdness. I’d seen married couples who had worked for years to develop that level of pathology.

The color was returning to Estler’s face in hesitant blotches. His hand was still working the terry-cloth tie, but not so frantically. I’d wanted him on edge, too wary to watch what he said. But now I needed more concentration from him. I let him sit a moment until he felt safer, then said, “Let’s go back to the scene outside Bryn’s house. Before you called.”

“Well, the phone—”

“No. Start at the beginning.”

“You don’t think that I—”

“Start at the beginning.”

He looked like he’d taken a misstep and fallen to the bottom of the well. Slowly he said, “I heard the shots.”

“Where were you?”

“Here. Right here. I mean I didn’t know they were shots till I saw her—omigod—face.”

“Take your time.” I would let him give me his whole story before I started pulling the errant threads out of it.

“I thought it was Sam next door, hammering or something.” His hand worked the tie harder, scraping his fingers against the rough nap. “Okay, I know that sounds dumb. Gunshots don’t sound like hammer hits. I wasn’t sure what I thought Sam was doing. It was after nine o’clock Saturday night. He has no business doing any kind of building or tearing apart at all. But whatever he’s doing he can’t be doing it that late Saturday night. It drives Karl crazy.”

“Does Karl go to bed early?” Surely not. Jed’s answer would be one test of how far out his story was.

“Who knows when Karl sleeps? He’s a first-class insomniac; he sleeps when he’s too exhausted to move. The only time he’s near normal is when he’s out backpacking with the dogs. That’s when he feels most at home. Here, in town, it’s like sleep has to creep up behind him and take him by surprise.”

“But Saturday night?”

“Saturday’s match is his hardest one. If I’d heard Sam banging away
before
nine, I would have called him, except that Karl was already on the line.”

“The modem’s on the only phone line?”

“Sure. It’s not like Karl’s got friends who call. He doesn’t do friends. He does chess. Chess is his life. Tonight Milwaukee made his move. Karl was looking forward to that all week. As soon as it came in, he started considering his counter.” He glanced up at me. “Not just the next move, but its implications for the rest of the game. All in his head. And if that game plan doesn’t work, then he tries another and another. But he’s got to keep in mind the attacks and defenses that don’t work here. He can’t be interrupted.”

Murakawa shook his head in amazement.

It
was
amazing. Also diverting. “So, Jed, you say you were here alone, and you heard the shots which you took to be an unidentified noise from next door …”

“Yeah, I flew out of here before that asshole Johnson could ruin Karl for the whole night,” he said, as if he’d missed the skepticism in my voice. But he didn’t look at me, or Murakawa, and he was shooting out words like he was desperate to smother me with the whole explanation before I could attack. “I got out the gate and there was no light under his house. So I ran up the steps—”

“On Codornices Path?”

“Yeah. I figured the noise must be coming from inside his house. I expected to see a light from the front. But when I got to the street, the house was dark. Then”—he shut his eyes and his whole body went still—“then I heard a noise. I thought it was one of the dogs giving out with a moan, but it couldn’t have been. It must have been her.”

“Her?”

He swallowed. “Bryn. I … I, uh, started over there. I started to run, I think. I don’t remember really. I think I ran. I got to the car and I reached for the door. And then I saw her, that bloody …” Sweat coated his face; his hands stopped dead on the terry-cloth tie.

I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I said, “And then you leaned across her body and reached for the phone.”

He clasped his mouth and ran for the bathroom.

This was no act. I could hear him throwing up. But that proved only that he was unnerved, not that he was a terrified murderer. I moved next to the bathroom door where I could keep an eye on him. I wasn’t ready to read him his rights; he was still free to tell us to get out, but chances were he wouldn’t.

When he finally pushed himself, wan and shaking, up from the sink, he said, “I need to get dressed. And take a shower.”

“In a minute. When we’re done. You saw Bryn in the car, then what did you do?”

He turned away, clutching the sink. “I can’t …”

“Of course you can. Pull yourself together. You’re not the one lying in the hospital, bleeding.”

“She isn’t dead?”

“She wasn’t when the ambulance roared out of here.” I repeated my initial demand to him.

For a moment I thought he was going to launch into the familiar
What kind of woman are you?
routine, but he was too drained for that. His hands clasped white against the sink. I was sure he was seeing her bloody face anew. I could see it too as the medics had loaded the gurney into the ambulance, her hair stuck in the blood. I blanked out the memory, walled off any feeling, any thought, everything but questioning Estler.

“I was sure”—his voice cracked—“she was dead. I never thought … I didn’t think at all; I guess I panicked. I turned and ran for the house, Karl’s house, I mean. But when I got to the sidewalk, Nora let out a howl. She doesn’t usually do that. I started to go to the front door to check that everything was all right. Then—it was like a sudden realization—I realized everything
wasn’t
all right, and I had better call 911. I didn’t want to tell Karl what had happened and upset him. And I remembered Bryn’s phone in his car. So I used that.”

“Is it still there?”

“What? Where? In the car? Yeah. I mean, I left it there.”

“And then? Did you go back up to the scene? To Bryn.”

“I couldn’t. I was just too undone. I stood outside Karl’s door for a few minutes until I thought I could carry on normally. Then I went in to make sure he and the dogs were okay. Karl hadn’t noticed anything. If he’d heard the shots at all, they’d passed out of his mind somewhere between the pawn and the queen. He was in the computer room—”

“Where is that?”

“On the far side of the house from Bryn’s. He didn’t even look up when I glanced in.”

“Is that normal?”

“For him, yeah, it is normal. And then—I know you’re going to ask—I took the dogs back out and walked—ran—half way to El Cerrito. Now can I get dressed?”

“When you’ve given me an answer to this: You found the body; you called it in. I have only your word the phone was in Karl’s car …”

“Ask Karl; he’ll—”

“You just admitted you saw Karl after the shooting. You had time to cook up a story then.”

“Are you crazy? Why would I shoot Bryn? She’s never done anything to me. And if I did, I’m not crazy enough to hang my alibi on someone as weird as Karl.” He pushed himself free of the sink, his body steadier than it had been half an hour ago. “If I shot her I wouldn’t have called an ambulance. The reason you shoot someone is so they die.”

“People change their minds. They make mistakes. They fire in anger.”

“Well, I didn’t. I just tried to do the right thing. And God, am I sorry I did. Now I’m going to get dressed, if that’s okay with you.”

“Go ahead,” I said considerably more offhandedly than I felt. I sat in the icy room—he’d been right about the temperature here—and tried to get a feel for what he’d said. He could be just what he seemed: the chirpy little guy flitting here and there. He could have transformed Karl Pironnen’s life. But if he’d caused improvement, it wasn’t in Pironnen’s living room, or in his social functioning.

Jed Estler made me want to smile. I hoped he was innocent. But even if he hadn’t killed Bryn Wiley, he still had left her to spend her last minutes on earth alone.

I glanced at Murakawa. He shrugged. He was right. In Prairie Village, Kansas, Karl Pironnen and Jed Estler might be considered downright strange, but here in Berkeley, they were a variation on one of a number of familiar themes. People who had eschewed goals for getting by, for hanging out, for smelling the roses. People who were fulfilled by the challenge of chess games. People who lived in single rooms because that was enough.

There was a time when I had looked at people like this, who could dispense with the extraneous, and felt admiration.

Now I thought of Pironnen’s house and flashed on Howard’s. I looked at Jed Estler’s room and saw my own. I pictured Pironnen playing one
game
after another, pretending they did more than fill his time. And me? I answered one call after another.

“Smith?”

I glanced at Murakawa. He didn’t speak again, and I wondered how much of my horror had shown on my face.

In the bathroom something dropped, water turned on and off and back on again. I could imagine Estler dervishing around in there as he grabbed clothes. Jed Estler might have no great purpose in his life, but he was the last guy to find taking care of Karl Pironnen enough. There was more going on with him than he’d admitted. Or than he was likely to admit until I knew the right questions.

I walked with Estler outside, through the level, mowed backyard to the wooden gate and onto the Codornices Staircase.