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covering the beats with armed truants, drug deals, and endless ringing alarms.
    The team meeting was in the second-floor squad room, an almost windowless square, the architectural equivalent of Russia perpetually seeking access to the sea. In our case the saltwater ports were occupied by the chiefs office suite, the sergeants’ office, a meeting room, and telephone and typing rooms. The squad room had been left a Vladivostok of a window by the back of the building. If a photo of the room, with its old plastic wood-grain tables and gray plastic chairs and cardboard boxes of forms in the center were to be captioned “Moscow 1950,” no one would question it.
    Howard assigned those of us who were floaters to beats; mine today would be 16 between the freeway and San Pablo Avenue, an area of light industry, the chichi Fourth Street shops, the sari shops and Indian restaurants on University Avenue, and the tip of Aquatic Park. He passed around the hot car list and held up a flyer from Pasadena; someone had stolen the equipment from a marching briefcase brigade in the Doo DA Parade (Pasadena’s alternative to the Rose Bowl Parade). “Pasadena assumes anyone who lifted twenty-five fake briefcases with trapdoors would naturally be headed here.”
    By ten-thirty I had checked out a radio, snatched one of the pew patrol cars, and was driving to a burglarized self-storage unit off the frontage road to Route 80. Berkeley is the tenth most congested city in the nation, but down between the Southern Pacific tracks and the freeway, some streets are patch-paved or not paved at all, dry grass waves, and barren stucco rectangles sit atop hard clay soil looking as if the wind could blow them on to San Joaquin or Salt Lake. Storit Urself was half a block filled with four-story prefab cubes. Inside, narrow cement-floored halls ran past plywood doors five feet apart. There was no natural light, nothing to distinguish one hall from the next. Like a cut-rate mausoleum.
    Perhaps it was the sight of the complainant, Margo Roehner, planted in front of 207, that sparked the thought of sarcophagi. She looked like one of those Chinese tomb warriors, single-mindedly defending the emperor in life and petrification. She was small, trim, brown in hair, eyes, and clothes, but the overwhelming impression she gave was square. Square face, square shoulders, and she was facing me square on, foot tapping impatiently. “I’ve got a grant application that has to be in the mail by Wednesday night. I’ve got the roofers at home finishing up. Yesterday they dropped some sort of tool and knocked off my suet feeder that the red-breasted nuthatches just started using. I don’t want them to leave before I check things. I have two new coordinators I hired last week who have to be trained. And that’s on top of my regular work; I’m on call eighteen hours a day.”
    I pulled out a pad. “So what’s missing from here?”
    “Nothing’s gone, probably. There’s nothing here but files, and now they’re all over the floor. Nobody’d need them but me. And look! Useless! I don’t have time— But you expect a report anyway, right?” She shot me an accusing glance, seemed to think better of that, and aimed her hostility at the mélange of papers inside the storage unit. If we had been anywhere more spacious than this dark, narrow hall, she’d have paced. As it was, she tapped her finger on her wrist next to her watch.
    “What kind of papers?” I asked, glancing into the five-by-nine plywood cubicle.
    “Medical. Printouts of disease progress, what symptoms you can expect, what your doctor should be doing for you, how soon, what steps to take if he isn’t.”
    “Are you a doctor?”
    “Hardly.” Her mouth quirked, as if she’d considered a laugh but thought better of it. “I’m the head of Patient Defenders.”
    I restrained a smile. If she was the patient Defender, what did the Impatient Defender do, grab for the throat?
    Margo Roehner certainly wasn’t