Cop Out (11 page)

I could picture Ott flapping around as if he’d been pushed off his perch. The humiliation. I wished I could have been there to see it. “Blindsided,” he had said smugly and more than once, “is what happens to sloppy detectives.” “What did he do?”

The rougy tint of glee vanished from Daisy’s face, and the skin around her eyes quivered as if unsure what expression to settle in. “He was so stunned he just sat there, like an animal caught in the headlights. Then he walked out.”

Just as he had with me at the Claremont. “And you let him! How could you do that! Before you knew what he was looking for? Before you’d asked him why?”
What kind of woman are you?

“That’s the price of ‘going with your feelings’ and all that garbage. Afterward, of course, I got to where you are now. Then I scurried around trying to find out why Herm would be after Bryant. I called Margo Roehner—she’s on the ACC board—she hadn’t heard anything. Roger, at the office, was useless. I even tried the newspaper morgue.” She shook her head. “
Nada
.”

“You could have called Ott back.” It was an accusation. I forced a smile.

“No, I couldn’t. I’d stopped going with my feelings, but I couldn’t bring myself to go against them, not that much. It would have galled me.”

“So you called Bryant?”

“Before the restaurant perfidy I would have. But I thought: Fine, let Herman Ott stir up the dust around him. A little fuss wouldn’t hurt Bryant. I figured I’d call Roger in a week, find out what’d happened, and we’d have a good laugh.”

“And?”

“The week won’t be up for another day.”

I asked about Bill “Lewin.” But Daisy just looked at me as if I were a loon. “Daisy, do you have any idea where Ott could have gone? Of his own volition or not? He got into a vehicle with someone Sunday night.”

“Well, my van’s out front. You can check it.” Slowly she shook her head. “I can’t imagine Herm leaving Berkeley. Where would he go? What would he do if he couldn’t work?”

She’d hit that on the mark. If Herman Ott was free, he was still on the case. He’d know Bryant Hemming was dead and he’d be after him all the more. Assuming of course, that Daisy had been straight with me and Bryant’s assistant had been straight with her, and Ott had been investigating Bryant.

I walked down to the patrol car, pausing to flash my light in the Dining with Daisy van. Then I called Inspector Doyle to find out who had interviewed Bryant Hemming’s assistant and where I could find Macalester now.

Who was this guy who had got Ott to reveal himself and, having done that, alerted not his boss but his boss’s ex-wife?

A
L “
E
GGS”
E
GGENBURGER, FROM
homicide had already interviewed Roger Macalester. He’d found him at Bryant Hemming’s Arts and Creativity Council offices, and now at 9:00
P.M
. Macalester was still there, busily ignoring the ringing phone.

The Delaware Street Historical District was an odd place for the Arts and Creativity Council. The block of post-Civil War cottages and storefronts was odd in general. Painted and landscaped and set behind wooden sidewalks and numbered parking slots, it was chained off at night from the low-income area around it. People lived in the houses, businesses and nonprofits occupied the storefronts, but the street had none of the chumminess of a neighborhood or the browsability of tony Fourth Street a mere block away. Had the charming block been up by the Gourmet Ghetto, it would have been prized, but down here it sat like a movie set waiting for shooting to begin.

The oddest of the buildings on Delaware Street was the one that housed the Arts and Creativity Council. Behind a mini manicured park a plain old wood water tower twenty feet square loomed at the edge of the light post’s range.
Distressed wood
would be a euphemism here. No street access, no water, just two slant-walled rooms atop each other. On three sides houses were ten feet away. Maybe the development had been built around it.

The top half of the Dutch door opened before I could knock. A short, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties eyed my uniform with a look of weary annoyance that suggested I was on a par with the nagging phone. “You already sent someone, a Detective Eggenburger.”

“I’d like to ask you about something different. I did try to call first.”

“Yeah, well,” he said as if that explained everything, and glared at the phone as it went silent, then started ringing anew. “Our members.”

“Calling in condolences?”

“Calling to see if their money’s gonna be tied up. Talk to the bank, I told the first couple of them. But if you know Bryant’s dead, I could have added, the bank’ll know it by morning and the account’s in Bryant’s name, so it’ll be frozen harder than the stones in StoneWash Denims, one of our new members.” A compression of cheek that could have been a grin or a grimace passed over his face. Perhaps he was embarrassed to be associated with the ecologically objectionable stonewashing.

“Okay if I come in?” I asked.

He gave that shrug that translated to “What choice do I have?” and stood squeezing a small, squishy yellow ball in one hand, all the time looking not at the ball or at me but beyond me at the sky as if expecting a celestial explanation for why Bryant’s death was plaguing him.

“You’re here late, Mr. Macalester.”

“I just came down here to do a search on the Net. The Internet,” he said, glancing inside. “Then your buddy showed up. Then the phone started. I shoulda stayed gone.” In another city I would have said that a guy in torn overalls and a Grateful Dead T-shirt had been pulled away from his leisure time, but here it was an even guess that this was what he wore to the city council when ACC was angling for support. He had the look of one of those guys who have spent their wiry youths downing deep-fry and beer and were just beginning to see the result above their belts. His hairline had receded, and a little curly pigtail trailed in back as if his hair had seeped down from his crown and he’d barely caught it before it fell off his head entirely. The little-boy hairdo suited his elfin face, and my guess was that he was a social grumbler whose preferred response to complaint was the offer of a beer.

“Does anyone else work here, Mr. Macalester?” He glanced back at the tiny structure. “If they did, we’d have trampled them by now. It’s all Bryant and I could do to be here together. I’m only part-time. But even so, if he was pitching a project downstairs, I was a prisoner in the tower.” As if he realized for the first time he was blocking the doorway, he jolted back and nodded me inside.

Papers were strewn haphazardly, mixed with manila folders, computer diskettes, compact disks, pens, pencils, a cordless phone, and more squishy balls in primary colors. The slanted rough wood walls were hung with watercolors and prints. A clear plastic desk had been custom-made; it fitted against all four walls, barely leaving room for entry and the second-floor stairs. With the window on each side the effect was of entering a fast-food kiosk.

I wished now I’d changed out of uniform and faced Macalester in less threatening garb. What did Ott ask you about? I wanted to say, but I knew better than to charge head-on with that. With a guy like Macalester, I needed to give him time to see me as a person rather than a uniform. “What are the balls for?” I asked, picking up a purple number.

“Digital motility. Or at least that’s the rationale. Bryant wanted to protect against carpal tunnel syndrome and the rest of those wrist things. The balls also give clients something to do with their hands.”

And watching those actions would have given Bryant Hemming a good read on his clients’ levels of anxiety. I wondered if he’d thrown Brother Cyril a ball before he decided he could safely mediate him off Telegraph.

Macalester lobbed the ball against a bare wall. “But this’s the real therapy. How do you think Bryant kept his calm dealing with some of the assholes calling about their investments? On the phone, I mean. He didn’t toss them off while they were sitting here.”

“Investments? I know Bryant and ACC are involved in mediating, but what is this investment part, and why are your people so anxious about their money?” The phone had stopped for now, and it occurred to me I had only Roger’s assumption for who was calling.

“When Bryant founded it, the Arts and Creativity Council could have been called the Starving Artists’ Bitch and Beer Society. He did some classes on promotion, arts and the law, and the artist and the big buck. That’s the one that clicked. So he formed the artists’ fund, an investment group for small—very small—investors. He invested only in socially responsible funds approved by our board, and if you don’t think those meetings need a mediator, between, say, Edgar, the candlemaker, who refuses to support electricity because of the danger of power lines, and…Well, we don’t invest in cattle or alfalfa because they’re water-intensive, nothing in Japan, whale abuse; Norway, baby seals; France, nuclear tests; Asia, child labor; Central America…” He shook his head. “Finally Margo Roehner decreed nothing outside the country, not that that’s stopped the arguments.”

“Margo Roehner?” Daisy Culligan had mentioned her as a board member, but it wasn’t till now that she struck me as an odd choice. “Is she an artist?”

“Was before she got into her medical thing. But she is a Roehner; her family had money once, long enough for her to learn to tell a stock from a bond, which makes her the Adam Smith of our board. The rest of us on the board are more like the Addams Family.” He squeezed the little yellow ball till it gave what sounded like a screech. He grinned. “Maybe I’ve been left alone here too long.”

“Be careful your yellow friend there doesn’t organize his fellows and beat you silly.” I leaned back against the counter. This strange, ratty water tower was to the nattily refurbished Victorians around it as Roger Macalester was to Bryant Hemming. I couldn’t imagine Bryant Hemming sitting in here, much less choosing the place. Or Macalester, for that matter. Herman Ott was the only one who would slide right in. I wanted to ask about Ott, but again I forced myself to wait as Macalester was forcing himself not to call my hand. I needed a clear picture of Macalester before I could judge his relationship to Ott. “How long have you been with ACC?”

“Not quite three years. I tried mediating on my own, but I, well, it’s hard to take seriously a guy who looks worse than you do.” He shrugged. “I knew mediating the day-to-day abuses would make all the difference, tried to establish it for years, but you’ve got to have a certain
je ne sais quoi
to mediate, and I, alas, am
quoi-less
. I was in despair—just south of Reno. Just kidding.” His voice had risen half an octave. “Well, you can see why I didn’t make it as a mediator. Doesn’t do…to laugh…at…” He turned away and covered his face, trying to control his face, trying hard to swallow his emotion. “Sorry,” he kept saying from behind his hands. “Sorry. I just can’t believe he’s dead. Sorry. Shot. Murdered? How? He could have made the mediation work. He was a natural. He could have taken my idea and run with it, made it important. Like Jimmy Carter.”

“
Your
idea?”

“Yeah, I was sort of the Cassandra of the mediation world. I could foresee clients’ disasters and the solutions, but nobody cared until Bryant.”

And the concept made Bryant famous. Famous enough to move on to Washington and take Roger’s idea with him. When you let another guy fly away with your baby, you want to believe he’s taking it to a better home. “You trusted Bryant that much?”

Slowly he let his hands down. His face was blotchy but already fading back to its pale norm. He turned toward me, as if to show me his bared face. It didn’t look elfin now, still too subdued, but there was something so likable about him I almost missed his hand squeezing a yellow ball so hard it shook. “Bryant was a genius at presentation. He took the idea and ran. And when he went on TV, suddenly everything dazzled. We got new investors, even conservatives—a brouha
ha
over that one—but the board finally agreed if the guys on the right put their money where
our
mouth is, all the better. Now businesses see ACC as a way to ingratiate themselves with the community and make a buck at the same time.” His lips twitched, and this time a definite elfin grin flashed. “They’re the ones who grabbed the phone as soon as they saw the news. Our original members won’t connect Bryant’s death with their money until they need it. They’re used to waiting; they’d have to be after dealing with Bryant.”

“Did Bryant withhold their money?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mean that. He was just, well, focused on other things, and he’d forget about stuff that didn’t interest him, like the classes ACC used to have. He dropped those to concentrate on the mediation. He would have dropped the money fund too, but he couldn’t do that. So he let it limp along. People got their money, but sometimes they had to call him a couple of times. They understood that. It’s the new guys who expected more.”

“Is that what Herman Ott was asking about?”

“Ott? No.”

I could tell from his expression I hadn’t slid that question in quite as smoothly as I’d hoped. “Mr. Macalester, Herman Ott was investigating Bryant. What did he ask you about him?”

“I didn’t—”

“Daisy told me you did.”

He sailed the ball against the wall, a swooping arc of defeat. “Yeah, okay. Ott called me. I know Ott, respect the guy, but sheesh, Bryant’s my boss; I can’t be inviting Ott over to peruse the office.”

“What specifically was he after?”

Macalester pushed himself up on the desk. “You want to know what I think? He was fishing.”

“But why?”

He shrugged.

“Look, I’m going to be straight with you,” I said. “Ott’s missing. I can’t picture him shooting Bryant. It worries me that he’s been gone for over twenty-four hours. You say you know Ott; then you know how strange that is. I need to find him, and I’ll tell you, I have not a clue. Except that he was investigating Bryant. Now if I knew what his focus—”

“I…don’t…know. Ott didn’t favor me with his purpose. Maybe if he hadn’t been so condescending—like whatever he thought Bryant had done, he figured I was up to my eyeballs too—maybe I’d have helped him. I told him to go screw himself.” He paused and stared me in the eye. “Maybe that’s what he’s gone and done.”