Too Close to the Edge by Susan Dunlap

store. The department added extra foot patrols. And Howard and his buddies in Vice and Substance Abuse worked overtime.
    At 5:30 A.M. it was still nighttime dark. Down the block a husky man headed for his car. He glanced toward the patrol car but didn’t break his stride.
    The house Brad Butz lived in was a single-story, twenty-five-foot square. The tiny, red cement porch had shifted away from the house, leaving an inch-wide gap between it and the door. Cracks meandered down the stucco facade. Most California houses had cracks in one or two walls—“from the house settling” people said. “From the earth moving” would have been more accurate. The Hayward Fault ran beneath the Berkeley hills, and tributaries from it—fault traces—some visible, some not, threaded their way under the city, shifting and growing with each new quake, so that a new fault map was out of date as soon as the earth moved again. Most fissures were small, most damage manageable. The average homeowner grumbled and repaired. But Brad Butz’s house gave new meaning to “deferred maintenance.”
    I rang the bell and listened to its trill inside. No footsteps followed it. Was Butz not home, either? What was I dealing with here, a herd of vampires who wouldn’t be home till dawn?
    I rang again.
    “Okay, okay. Keep your pants on,” Butz grumbled from the rear of the small dwelling. His Bronx accent was thicker than it had been yesterday morning, as if his sinuses were still stopped up with sleep. He stomped toward the door. I caught a glimpse of a T-shirt and jeans in the window to my left. Then Butz yanked open the door and stood with one hand on it and the other on the frame.
    His wiry dark hair stood out like a rumpled brown tiara pushed far back on his head. Still flushed from sleep, his skin looked more porcelain than it had yesterday. As he stared at me, his blue eyes narrowed, and any resemblance to a pleasant doll-like expression vanished.
    “You’re the cop, right?” he demanded.
    “Detective Smith.”
    “Christ, it’s the middle of the night. You got my vandal, right? Well, it’s about time. It shouldn’t have taken the Berkeley Police Department all day and all night. You shoulda had him by noon. I’ll tell you, lady—”
    “Detective.”
    “De tec tive,” he said, in mock respect, “if you hadn’t nabbed him by morning I was ready to make a few calls.”
    I decided to ignore the whole vandalism issue. “I’m in Homicide. A woman was murdered last night. Can I come in?”
    “Murdered? Who? How?” He flicked on the light switch and stepped back to let me into the ten-by-twelve room that occupied the left corner of the house. The walls were papered in a faded floral design; the overstuffed sofa was surrounded by mahogany end tables with turquoise speckled lamps from the fifties. It looked like a room someone’s great-aunt had died in. And it looked like she hadn’t cleaned it for months before her demise. Dustballs crowded around the feet of the coffee table—the small pine table looked like it was floating on a cloud. Or it would have been, had it not been weighed down by a pile of newspapers, three beer cans, and a pizza box that hung precariously over the edge. The room still smelled of beer and tomato sauce.
    I sat on the chair, leaving him to settle on the sofa opposite me where I could see his reactions. “The woman was killed at the waterfront, at the Marina Vista site.”
    “Can you believe that? Now they’re murdering people at my site!” He shook his head slowly; his wiry hair flapped like stalks of corn in the wind. Leaning forward, he pushed the pizza box back onto the table. “But why? Why at my project? Jesus, I don’t have enough trouble, without them killing each other there. I’ve had delays up the wazoo. First off, I had a blow-up trying to get a use permit from the building department. Then there was the BCDC, the Bay Conservation Development Commission, carrying on about not permitting