Free Time Expired by Susan Dunlap Page B

manure, the Cushman in the Dumpster, and at five to six last Friday, with five goddamned minutes to go before the weekend, Glassborough jumped back into his Cushman and landed on a bag of fresh fecal canine matter.”
    “Even the dogs are after you, huh, Eckey?”
    Eckey glared at Jackson.
    Neither Eckey nor Chief Larkin mentioned the overriding indignity to the Department. All of his acts might have been added up to a minor nuisance if the perp had committed his vile deeds in secret. He hadn’t. He’d done his damage on main streets, and worse yet, he’d alerted the media. Before Parking Enforcement arrived at the scene, a reporter from The Daily Californian was already there. Then it was the Daily Cal and the East Bay Express. Next he included KPFA radio. Then a TV station.
    Chief Larkin held up this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. A page 3 headline announced: THE BABE RUTH OF THE METER GAME. “Listen to this,” the chief began. “ ‘He tips his hat to a meter truck and before befuddled police can find him, he’s created Coq au Cart. Only in Berkeley,’ it goes on …” The chief was shaking the paper. “What it goes on to is to announce how he made monkeys of thirty officers last night by luring our Hostage Negotiation Team into Cerrito Canyon to find the kind of dummy you can order from catalogs you wouldn’t show your wife, stolen shoes, and half the city’s parking tickets!” By now Larkin’s tie looked pale in comparison to his face. He glared across at me. “The perp’s a goddamned folk hero. Our Parking Enforcement officers get enough hassles without the whole town rooting for their enemy. They can’t be citing vehicles if they’re watching their rears all day.”
    “If we don’t stop this,” Eckey insisted, “we’ll have half the citizens in Berkeley trotting off with their meters empty, hoping the perp swipes their ticket so they can look at the nightly news and say, ‘Hey, man, there’s my car!’ ”
    Larkin turned to the inspector. “Doyle, you were in charge of the hostage negotiation. Smith’s taking paper on it.”
    Doyle moved his head so infinitesimally that only the loose flesh under his chin nodded. “She’ll be doing the follow-up.”
    I didn’t realize I had groaned aloud until I heard the laughter around me.
    Diplomacy kept me from asking Chief Larkin who had been heading up the Parking Enforcement investigation so far. If there were no centralized command, that would reflect poorly on the Department, i.e., on the chief himself. I didn’t want to be the one to bring that oversight to his attention. But if there had been an officer in charge, formerly in charge, I didn’t want to flag his inadequacy, particularly since his attitude could mean the difference between taking over the investigation and moving forward, or starting from scratch, interviewing the same witnesses and victims, who’d be even less pleased to answer the same questions again, questions asked by a police force they would have now labeled incompetent.
    So it wasn’t till the end of the meeting that one of the guys in Traffic Detail took me aside to tell me that my predecessor on what had become known as the Traffic Control Caper was none other than Grayson.
    When I looked around for Grayson, he was stalking out of the room. And before I could call to him, Inspector Doyle came up. “Smith, how’re you doing on the hostage reports?” Doyle’s graying red hair was grayer than red. His skin was battleship gray, and the circles under his eyes charcoal. He looked like he’d been up not just as late as most of us, but the entire night, which meant that he looked slightly more exhausted than normal.
    “The hostage reports,” I said, giving myself time. “They’re not all in.”
    Doyle nodded. He’d been around long enough to know “not all in” meant “not any in.” “City manager wants ’em on his desk first thing tomorrow. Get ’em to me by the end of the day.”
    “This afternoon?