Cop Out (10 page)

She shifted off the chair. “I’ll do that. It would ruin my credibility to let a civilian make me tea.”

“A civilian?” I said lightly.

“No way you’d know. I’m not a big deal. But I
am
a cook. At the moment a low-fat cook. I used to be a low-cholesterol cook while that was in vogue.” She’d walked by me, ducked behind the circular staircase and into the kitchen alcove, a white ash and enamel affair with pans hanging, spoons and spatulas poking out of thick ceramic holders, and electric gizmos on a shelf above the counter. And three shelves of cookbooks.

There’s always a surreal quality to these postshock conversations when I am nudging the witness to talk, to ramble, to keep the channels open. Often nothing notable is said, but there have been times when the gray of the emotion-stripped rambling or purple histrionics has produced a case breaker.

“You have twice as many cookbooks as I do,” I offered. Daisy Culligan of course would have no idea what a bizarre statement that was. Mine filled two boxes in the second bedroom at Howard’s house. Gifts, all of them; every gift screaming a hope. That I would be a better wife than Nat Smith’s aunts figured he was getting; that I would grow up and eat better than my mother had any reason to assume; that Deidre and Jeff would get a better meal the next time they ate at our house. I was delighted with each gift; Howard and I love cookbooks, the more exotic the better. We sit on the sofa, eating pizza or Thai takeout, reading the recipes aloud and making up alternate descriptions for scallops persillade, vegetable pansotti, or, Howard’s favorite when he was in Vice, chanterelle tartlets.

But Daisy’s books were grease-marked and lumpy-paged from use. Beneath them now she measured leaves or bark or twigs into a tea strainer. As I had hoped, she picked up the conversational thread. “I’m the ultimate home delivery kitchen. Gourmet dishes five days a week, prepared for the individual need and palate.”

“How many clients do you have?”

“At the moment, seven. Two couples and three singles. Intense jobs, irregular schedules.”

“And you create seven different dinners each night?” I asked in amazement.

“No, no. I don’t make the meals to suit individuals; I find individuals to suit my meals. I’ve winnowed down the people till I’ve got seven with the same requirements.” She poured the boiling water into a white pot. “They all
think
I’m planning just for them. They think they’re getting a great deal. And in fact they are, but just not quite so special as they suppose.” I felt sure another time she would have caught my eye and grinned; now her lips just widened momentarily. “Probably they wouldn’t care; the snob value wouldn’t matter at all.”

But I could tell she didn’t believe that. And, I suspected, her little deception amused her as much as the yuppie cachet appealed to her clients.

“The great thing is I set my own hours, deliver at my convenience, and days go by when I don’t have to see a soul.” She pulled a tray from beside a cabinet, put the tea equipment on it, and walked back into the living room.

The tea tray fitted the little table exactly. From our futon chairs we were just close enough to put our cups on the table without awkward turns of arm yet far enough to talk without the sense of sitting in each other’s lap. For Daisy Culligan, I didn’t imagine there were many of those days without a soul. I added milk and sugar to my tea, took a sip, and smiled approval.

I wanted to see Bryant Hemming through her eyes and to see the coloring of those eyes I was looking through. Even then I wouldn’t perceive the truth, just a slant on it. One thing you learn in police work is that there is no truth, just opinions. You aim to round up enough of those opinions, put them in their proper places, and see where they point. I let the silence expand as I plotted logistics.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Her voice was higher, tight, as if it had squeezed out through a fear-constricted neck. “How come a good-looking, successful guy married a woman so much older than he was, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t. “Bryant was thirty-six, and you are?”

“Forty-eight.” She lifted her chin challenging me. “It wasn’t the age thing that caused our divorce. His life just changed.”

I liked Daisy Culligan, liked her ability to be comfortable in two small rooms, her delight in the prospect of startling her neighbors with the police car. Why had she accepted the ad copy of youth? If a woman like her, in the city of the Gray Panthers, capitulated so totally…I could picture her and Bryant the day they married ten or so years ago. She would have been in her late thirties, strikingly lively with long, curly red hair, the spray of lines around those eager brown eyes tentative, and succulent rounds of breast and hip. And Bryant I pictured still searching for his adult form. “Age doesn’t matter,” they must have assured everyone. But they had been wrong. “His life changed. How so?”

“He came into the job he was born for. At ACC—the Arts and Creativity Council. ACC does two things: They’ve got a money fund, and they do mediation. Bryant started out mostly managing the money.

He was lucky with that. He didn’t know much about money, and the truth is he didn’t care. But he made a couple of environmentally sound investments that panned out, and all of a sudden he was a genius. A modest genius, but enough to get himself called a savvy money manager. A savvy money fish in a very small Berkeley pond.”

“Like the biggest sailboat in the Berkeley lagoon, the kind that would be scuttled halfway across the bay?”

“ ’Fraid so. But before he got into rough water, he started mediating, and he hit his stride. He was a natural. He could always see both sides. Life was a series of terrifying choices—door number one, door number two—and the one he rejected might have held the grand prize. So suddenly he’s a real genius. He knows the mechanics of decision making intimately. He can explain a client’s position better than the client can. And do the same for his adversary. Now there are no closed door ones and door twos. Both doors are open—”

“Daisy, people never give you the whole story—”

She almost smiled. “Bryant knew that. He said he’d sabotaged himself enough by ignoring issues in his own decisions. It’s more complicated than that. But the point is, mediating freed him from indecision. It was as perfect a match as if my room here were on the cover of
Clutter
magazine.” She smiled weakly.

I sipped at my tea. “So, how is it that his new job undermined your marriage?”

“Once he got on TV he was hooked. Public access should lead to cable, should lead to network. He needed to dress better, drive a new car, be seen in public as the public Bryant Hemming. He probably spent more on two new suits than he had on clothes for the entirety of our marriage. How could he remain the husband of the
Clutter
cover girl?”

“And so he left you?”

For the first time Daisy laughed. “No, no, I saw what was happening, and my choice was to keep him forever balanced between my world and the TV world or let him go on and do something important.”

Oh
,
barf!
I thought. Or, more graciously,
You insult me!
“Look, I’ve been through a divorce,” I said. “Nobility doesn’t enter into it. Things get worse and worse, but there’s a last straw.”

She fingered her cup, considering.

“Daisy, it’s not a case of being disloyal to Bryant. He’s dead. Murdered. Shot through the heart by someone who was as close to him as I am to you. I have to know what he was really like.”

There was only half an inch of tea in her cup, but she drew out the swallowing of it for half a minute, deciding where her loyalty lay: with his image or the truth. “Okay. This was a couple of years ago. We’d been divorced for three years. He already was the ‘mediator.’ I was in the process of choosing between two restaurants; I’d do the take-out menus, set up the department, run it. Both deals included my investing in the restaurant—a lot of money for someone in my circumstances.” She glanced over at me, and I nodded.

“One of Bryant’s private mediations—before he started on TV—was between one of those restaurants, Milledge’s, and a woman who had worked there setting up an operation a lot like mine. Some of her dishes were different from the menu fare, some the same. The restaurant chefs wouldn’t part with ingredients they thought they might need; if she brought stuff in and they ran out, they’d nab hers for their in-house dishes. Or they’d make entrees for the take-out orders without all the ingredients, often
key
ingredients, like leaving the saffron out of the saffron rice. Well, you know, customers may miss a lot, but they don’t mistake white for yellow. Actually she was lucky there; where they really screwed her were the dishes with less obvious omissions. Those the customers just figured weren’t very good because she wasn’t a very good cook. She came in pot au feu; she went out leftovers in canned gravy. The mediation was about her investment, the reputation she’d never get back. Bryant didn’t tell me about it.”

“Are you sure Bryant knew you were considering Milledge’s? Did he know you’d be investing a lot of money? That you could lose your reputation and your career—”

“And end up doing take-out meals from my own kitchen? I’d told him when I was still in the considering stages with Milledge’s. And afterward, when we had it out, he did what he always does when confronted, he threw up a smoke screen, tried to divert me, went into this big riff about his work and how vital it was and all and how he just couldn’t have revealed a client’s confidence.” She shook her head, clearly still disbelieving. “At some level he really believed in magic: Blow enough smoke, and the problem will disappear behind it. But you know, all he’d have had to do was say the restaurant was involved in mediation, not even how.…But he couldn’t, because he was the ‘Mediator.’ ” She glanced at the pot of tea, then, as if deciding the lukewarm liquid wouldn’t make any difference, put down her empty cup. “That’s when I realized I had ceased to be a part of his life. And the thing with Bryant was, the past is past.”

“And the divorce settlement?”

“That was over and done with by then. Did I grab everything south of his balls? No. I took the car, a nice new Explorer; I could live in it if things got bad. And—oh, shit!”

“What!”

“I made the ‘logical’ decision. He was twelve years younger. So instead of emptying the coffers now, I took a percentage of his income and his retirement. Double shit! I really will have to live in the car.” She grabbed the pot, refilled her cup, drank. “Look, I don’t mean to sound—I mean, I cared about him; I’m devastated he’s dead. But my own impending poverty isn’t making it any better.”

Was she saying, “His death has done me out of his retirement money, so of course
I
didn’t kill him,” or was the truth “I didn’t consider the consequences before I killed him”?

I didn’t want to think she had murdered Bryant. That made me assess her all the more sharply. Vengeance is a relentless motive; it can explain irrationality. She had the key to Ott’s office. If she’d got Ott out of there without him using the dead bolt…She could have done that, I realized, seduced him away. Rare as the offer of passion was in Ott’s life, if it came suddenly—passion
and
surprise—it could push mundane thoughts like locked doors out of Ott’s mind. Then all Daisy had to do was call Bryant.

“What was Bryant doing in Herman Ott’s office?” I asked, hoping for some shock value of my own.

But Daisy wasn’t shocked. “Oh, that one’s easy. He wanted to know what Herman Ott had found out about him.”

H
OW DO YOU KNOW
Herman Ott was investigating Bryant?” I asked. “Did Bryant tell you?”

“Hardly. Herman’s not that obvious.” Daisy set her cup down with a clack. “Well, maybe he is. He called Roger Macalester, Bryant’s assistant.”

“And assumed he wouldn’t tell Bryant?” Now there was a pregnant assumption.

“He could have. Roger’s an old lefty. Herm could have pressured him, or guilted him, or had something on him from fifteen years ago. You know Herm.”

I nodded. If Roger Macalester had been on the leftist scene, Ott would know his secrets and feel morally impelled to use them for his own investigation. Its subject could have been Bryant Hemming. Peering at the underbelly of the establishment guy: Now that screamed Ott.

Where would he get his data? That too was an easy one. Bryant Hemming may have been an Oxford cloth and jeans with pressed seams kind of guy, but the people he mediated between were not. Serenity Kaetz wouldn’t get near an iron if her life depended on it, and if Brother Cyril saw an iron, he’d mistake it for a doorstop. Or a weapon.

But right here in front of me sat the crème de la crème of detectives’ sources, the subject’s ex-wife, the disgruntled employee of the marital world. And she was Ott’s old friend. “Let’s see if this will help us find Herman. Who was he investigating Bryant for?” I asked as Daisy Culligan refilled our teacups.

“You know Herman,” she said, tossing off my question, “he’d die before he’d reveal a client’s name.”

“Right, but you know Herman too.” I sipped the tea. “And I’ll bet you’d be curious, and you’d make it your business to find out.” I took another sip. “Do overestimate you?”

Daisy laughed. “You got me dead center. Here’s what happened: Herman stopped by. Odd enough in itself. He hadn’t called about Bolinas in almost a year. Other than that I never heard from him. Oh, I’d pass him on Telegraph now and then, once every few months, but it wasn’t like we ran into each other at fund-raisers or ‘did lunch.’ I saw Roger Macalester at Chez Panisse last week, and I thought the world had come to an end, but if I’d seen Ott at someplace like that…” Her expression brought up the ludicrous picture of Herman Ott wearing one of his yellow polyester shirts, ordering the vegetables feuilleté with nasturtium butter at Chez Panisse. And the idea of Ott at a fundraiser was unthinkable. I knew Ott as well as anyone, and I had no idea what cause would elicit his money, much less his presence, or even what he did with his free time.

“But then,” Daisy went on, “he up and calls and invites himself over. Sits right in that chair where you are. Drinks tea. Complains that the Darjeeling Fancy I offered him wasn’t Darjeeling Extra Fancy Selimbong. Then he asks what I’ve been doing since we last saw each other.” She put down her tea cup and leaned forward. “Now, I am not a fool. And in all that time analyzing the soaps with him, I learned how Herman’s mind worked. (A) He wouldn’t care what I’d been up to, and (B) he’d already know. ‘So, Herm,’ I say, ‘you’re investigating Bryant, right?’ Well, you’d think I’d poked him in the stomach.”