Sudden Exposure (27 page)

He stood up, clasping the desiccated piece of fruit so hard I was afraid it would break in his hand. Anyone else would have thrown me out of the room. But he only closed me out of himself. His tense stare told me I had stomped on his trust. And the next time he was tempted to trust, he would be more cautious for having made a mistake with me.

All I could do was leave him alone in the room. “I’ll find my own way down,” I offered as I left.

The dogs circled me at a distance as I made my way down the stairs. At the door they stood three abreast behind me. I walked slowly to my car.

Mary Ellen Nash.

She’d been deep enough in the antiwar movement to rob a bank, or at least to be the driver (and back then, radicals wouldn’t have let a woman do anything more than that). She had to know Sam Johnson, or at least know of him. But she probably hadn’t suspected he was Fannie’s husband. No wonder she’d steered clear of Fannie after that revelation.

Mary Ellen—
Ellen
—had altered her appearance to attract Bryn Wiley’s attention, to get access to Karl Pironnen. Bryn was a fluke. If Bryn hadn’t existed, perhaps Ellen would have managed to get Jed’s job, or have gotten access to Karl through Jed and Rent-a-Freak. Ellen Waller was a determined woman; somehow she’d have made her way into Dan Pironnen’s room.

And once she’d accomplished her reconciliation with Karl, once she completed her penance, who did that unsettle? Did it free her to goad Bryn about her past? Or during all those years underground, had she learned things about Sam Johnson he and Fannie had no intention of revealing?

T
HERE WERE BODIES ON
Howard’s couch when I made my way through the barely lit living room. The tenants had come home to roost for another week. I was so exhausted I just trudged upstairs and flopped into bed.

And lay there for what seemed an hour but was probably only fifteen minutes, my arms and legs turned to cement, my mind abuzz with thoughts of the case. At ten to two I turned the light on, picked up the phone, and dialed the Fresno Police Department.

By the time Howard called back, I had gone down to the kitchen—startling the sofa contingent into a flurry of gasps and a flutter of cloth—started water for hot cocoa, caught myself, and poured a glass of merlot instead, and settled back under the covers.

“Jill?”

“Ah. You. I just passed the scene on the sofa. It was like when your Maserati’s been in the shop so long a clunker spewing fumes begins to look like a great ride. You’ve been gone too long. And your junk food bet is driving me to drink.” I could picture the grin settling on Howard’s face. He’d be in plain clothes, jeans and maybe the forest green turtleneck I’d given him for his birthday. He did look fine in jeans. His brown bomber jacket would be hanging over the back of his chair.

He’d be slouched in the chair, his long legs stretched out in front. Maybe he’d be wearing a billed cap, and beneath it, those red curls of his would peek out.

“Miss you, too. Think of you in the wild Fresnan nights.”

“How are those wild nights?”

Howard laughed. “I’ll tell you, you don’t need to worry about overestimating the intelligence of the local drug dealer. I targeted this guy, Lyle. Lyle fancies himself quite the slick operator. He’s suspicious. So what does he do when I drive up to make my buy? He says to me, ‘Hey, man, you a cop?’ Like I’m going to pull out my badge, confess, and skulk away!”

“He’s leaning in your van, right? You’re getting this all on camera?”

“Yeah. Got him full face. So I say, ‘Forget it. You insult me, I’m outa here.’ I shift into first. Lyle reconsiders. He didn’t really mean it, he says, ‘but like I gotta be careful, you know, man?’ “

“ ‘You gotta solve your problems before you deal with me,’ I say. So we go back and forth and I end up telling him I’m not dealing with him, not here, not on this street corner. We’ve been here too long, and now I’ve got my own suspicions that maybe
he’s
the narc setting
me
up. So then what do you think he does, Jill?”

“What?”

“He tells me to meet him in an hour—at his apartment! I mean, at that point I really did wonder if ol’ Lyle was a narc and we’d gotten our lines crossed with the feds. But no, Lyle was just a dummy. A brain may be a terrible thing to waste, but Lyle’s in no danger.”

I laughed. God, it was good to hear Howard enjoying himself. I took a swallow of wine and slid over toward Howard’s side of the bed. Suddenly I ached for his skin against my skin, the ruffle of the soft hairs on his chest, the mustache stubble that scraped my mouth when he kissed me—and rasped against my finger when I ran it across there afterward to remind him he might have shaved before. (Once he’d brought a windup razor to bed.) I yearned to feel his long arms pressing me against him, to feel so intensely that I lost myself in the sensation, and for a wonderful moment I just existed beyond the separation of thoughts.

Some lovers smoke; we talk shop, the nicotine of the cop world. I snuggled against Howard’s pillow, with telephone in hand, half pretending I wasn’t alone. Pretending Ellen Waller would not be merely a footnote to a failed bank robbery in which a bystander happened to die.

“So how’s your one eighty-seven, Jill?”

“Hit the wall.”

“Umm?”

“I can’t remember how much I told you about the case—Bryn Wiley and her lookalike, Ellen Waller, who she said was her cousin but turned out to be a stranger. She shared a general physical similarity with Bryn, and she dyed and styled her hair and bought clothes to look like her. She did all that not to get closer to Bryn, but to get into Bryn’s house, so she could get nearer to Karl Pironnen, the hermit with the dogs. Wait, Howard, there’s more. She was the driver in the Golden State S and L robbery twenty-five years ago and the guy who jumped out of the way when the robbers ran for the car—the guy who stumbled off the curb and died—was Pironnen’s brother.”

“And she
wanted
to get closer to Pironnen? Sounds like she’s a match for my man Lyle.” Howard chuckled.

If he’d been there, he’d have been draping his arm over my shoulder, pulling me against him.

I would be struggling not to lose my train of thought—which, in fact, I was from the
thought
of what might have been distracting me. “Ellen was really committed, Howard. Before she glommed on to Bryn, she had buddied up to Fannie Johnson, who, she assumed, was married to some klutz trying to rehab his decrepit house on Tamalpais. I don’t know just how Ellen was intending to get an entrée from Sam Johnson—”

“This Ellen is hiding out from an antiwar heist and maybe a felony murder rap, and she decides to cozy up to Sam Johnson’s wife? Lyle may be too bright for her.”

“Johnson’s a very common name. Probably Fannie never mentioned his first name. Anyway, once Ellen realized who he was, she dropped Fannie pronto. But the point is, Howard, that she did all of this so she could get to Pironnen and tell him she’s sorry. The woman even saved the desiccated orange his brother dropped when he fell; she gave it to Pironnen.”

Howard chortled. “God, I miss Berkeley!”

“Okay, sure, it sounds ridiculous. But if you’d seen Pironnen … His brother’s room is a shrine. It’s all the guy’s got, Howard. Sorry. I don’t mean to drive you down Eccentricity Road, then ticket you for laughing. Anyway, that’s where I am: I finally discover who Ellen Waller-Jane Doe is. She’s a fugitive with reason to be worried about a felony murder rap. It’s a gray area, with him not being touched but stumbling and hitting his head. One of the robbers died before he ever got picked up and the other went up for a double murder one before they connected him to the Golden State case. So the case never really figured in a trial. But the possibility of felony murder was enough to keep Ellen under cover for a quarter of a century. She spent her whole adult life hiding out.”

“Sad.” For Howard, who cherished home and stability, the idea of being on the run was hell. If he were here now he’d be glancing around the room—his room—at the walls he’d lovingly covered with three coats of forest green, and the trim so white it shone. Unconsciously, he’d pull the comforter higher up on his bare chest, and cup his hand around my arm. I’d rest a hand on his thigh, trail my fingers up the soft inner flesh …

I took another sip of the merlot. “But here’s the thing, Howard. So she gets to Pironnen. She apologizes. He says he’s not into revenge; he doesn’t care about the criminal justice system. She’s confessed, she’s absolved, she’s ready to go on with her life. And then,
then
, she gets killed. Before, when she had this big secret, I could’ve understood her getting killed—or killing. But now her cupboard’s empty. She’s got nothing to protect. No one’s got reason to kill her. And she’s gone.”

“No one?”

“Unless now that she’s pure, she’s after someone else’s secret. Or unless the shot really was meant for Bryn.”

“You ran a background on Ellen with her real identity?”

“Yeah. Then I made a few calls. You want to guess?”

“Catholic school?”

“Good try. Well,
average
try, what with the confessional bench and all. But she was the only child of ‘free thinkers.’ Parents were artists of sorts, but with money—”

“Landed eccentrics? As opposed to … fifty-one fifties.”

“Right. The Nashes lived in the same town for a couple of generations. They were the accepted educated eccentrics, you know, sort of in the British sense?”

“Umm. Lived in the ancestral manse, behind their name trees.”

“Name trees?” That was something we didn’t have in Jersey.

“A tree their parents planted when they were born. You know—in their name? I went to school with a guy, Tim, who had a name tree. It was like losing a friend when it fell down in a storm.”

I smiled. At gut level, I would never really understand Howard’s need for his house and the normalcy it represented, but its hold on him was almost mythic. And for Ellen, whose family must have had its own eccentric brand of normalcy, albeit different from the community, the lure of being normal
and
accepted by the community must have grown with each year she spent hiding out. And now she’d made peace. With no one committed to pursuing her (the statute of limitations on the S and L heist had run out long ago and no one had filed a warrant for her before that) chances were she could have gotten off with little or no time for the felony murder, and gone on to live openly in say, Normal, Pennsylvania. “Howard,” I said, “there’s got to be something I’m missing.”

“Ahhh. Need some possibilities, huh? Well, you’ve come to the right man. Me, I like the Rent-a-Freak angle. Maybe they really freaked someone out. Or Fannie and Sam, maybe they took offense at her snub. Or in all those years in the underground she’d heard something about Sam, and they panicked at the idea of her passing it on to Bryn.”

“Like?”

“Like Sam was involved in a murder of his own. Or maybe the key is in a slip Fannie made, like there was something fishy about the title to the house, or their mortgage, or well … something. I’ll tell you, Jill, if I’d put as much work into my house as Sam has, and then someone I hated tried to take it away from me …”

I laughed. “Howard, you have put in that much work.” But it sent a chill down my back. After all, the person who could take Howard’s house away was me. I pulled the comforter—
his
comforter—up to my neck, leaving it loose over my left shoulder like it was when he was next to me. “So when’ll you be home?”

“Might be the end of the week. More likely as early as Tuesday.”

“Tuesday,” I said, brightening. “I’ll keep your side of the bed warm.”

“So, Jill,” he said before I could hang up, “how is life without chocolate?”

“About like sex with your hands in your pockets—your
back
pockets.”

M
ONDAY MORNING WAS THE
beginning of a typical Berkeley day. The wind off the Bay flowed through the branches of the jacaranda, rustling leaves against my window. Above it the Pacific fog sat thin and dull. I had slept fitfully again, waking up every hour or so to worry about how few hours I had left on this case. Now, at 7
A.M.
I was up too early for what I needed to do. The only thing I could manage at that hour was the warrant request. And I wasn’t about to tackle that without a trip to Peet’s. By seven thirty I was sipping an alto doppio latte and was halfway through an oatmeal scone from the Walnut Square Bakery when it occurred to me that I hadn’t bemoaned the lack of a chocolate doughnut. I chewed slowly, tasting the nutty accent of the oatmeal, the sweet of the raisins, the vague saltiness. Were my taste buds reincarnating into
healthy
buds? If this kept up, I’d be ordering tofu in public.

I got another latte, drove to the station, and spent an hour on the report. Herman Ott hadn’t returned my call. Big surprise.

I dialed Raksen in the lab. “Any word from the FBI on the fingerprints from Bryn Wiley’s car?”

Raksen, a man not given to humor about his work, laughed. “Smith, you know what your chances are of getting word back in a day and a half from the feebies?”

I didn’t ask. “Call me.”

I had barely pushed the Off button when the phone rang again.

“Smith?” It was Inspector Doyle.

“Morning.”

“How’s it going?”

I summarized my interview with Fannie Johnson, told him about the lead on the nudist and Rent-a-Freak, not mentioning Ott’s name but emphasizing that the information was from a personal source. Even though I hadn’t come up with Jed Estler, I explained, Karl Pironnen had admitted that Estler had worked not alone but with Ellen Waller. “And Inspector, you probably know by now that Ellen Waller was actually Mary Ellen Nash, the Golden State S and L driver.”

“Good work, Smith.”

“Thanks. So, I stay on the case?”

“That’s what I was calling about.”

I knew that tone. I was holding my breath.

“Brucker’s got a confession on his two forty-five.”

Assault with a deadly weapon.

“He’s finishing up the essentials now. He’ll be ready for the Wiley case after lunch.”