Cop Out (18 page)

“Flashing, naked?”

“Raincoat open.”

“Takes all kinds.” He was warming to this safe topic.

“This kind—Margo Roehner—is on the board of ACC.”

I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. When I emerged, he was lying on his side, and I couldn’t decipher his expression. As I slipped between the sheets, I said, “Bryant Hemming’s ex-wife, Daisy Culligan, delivers dinners—”

Howard muttered something. Then he pulled me to him with a desperation of love and fear and helplessness. I clutched him, squeezing him so tightly I could feel each of his ribs, pressing our mouths together until the passion wiped out grief and hope and thought.

We didn’t speak again. It wasn’t till he was gone the next morning that I remembered those mutterings and realized he had said, “Maybe the pig poster was Daisy’s.”

I
WOKE UP BEFORE
the alarm. It had been one of those nights when I slept like a stone and woke exhausted, as if my inert body had been the gridiron for the Super Bowl. The room was the disheartening fog gray that masks the dawn in Berkeley. Something had happened, something deep-gut bad, but I was still too close to sleep to translate that feeling into language. I nestled against Howard. Automatically he cupped himself around me. I felt the comfortingly familiar ridges of his ribs and hipbones, the warmth of his flesh; I let my eyes shut against the day and curled myself into the sweet sanctuary.

He had the day off, and when the alarm rang, I caught it mid-ring and in fifteen minutes I was in my car on my way to the Y. It wasn’t till I was sitting in the sauna, post-swim, an hour later that I recalled the last thing Howard had said the night before: “Maybe the pig poster was Daisy’s.” Not “Culligan’s.” “Daisy’s.” So, he knew Daisy Culligan. Or at least he knew of her.

Professionally?

In Vice and Substance Abuse Detail?

Daisy with a stash wasn’t hard to imagine, even doing a line of coke, though it seemed beyond her budget. But if she came to Howard’s attention for narcotics, she would have been on the departmental files. Her only listed contact with the department was as a witness to a doctor’s tirade when he discovered his car surrounded by a castle wall of cement blocks. The caller, whose driveway he had parked across, returned to find him strewing blocks as far as a tiny ophthalmologist can toss.

As I recalled that, I smiled. The story had made the papers. The doctor demanded we arrest the woman, insisted her alibi—she was in traffic court—was faked, and ended up with orders to stack his blocks neatly on the curb and a ticket for blocking her driveway.

The only odd thing about it, which I had overlooked at the time, was the presence of Daisy Culligan.

I wouldn’t bet my life on why Howard was familiar with her. But wager a month’s salary? Easy.

I dressed in record time—green turtleneck and slacks, gray tweed jacket—and called Howard on my cell phone before I realized our home phone would still be turned off. I could have driven back to the house, but I was in front of the station, and there was an empty parking spot. I pulled in, telling myself that it was a sign, that I could call Howard later, that he’d stayed up late for me and needed to sleep. I didn’t admit that seeing him face-to-face would force both of us to bring up last night or pointedly to ignore it. Besides, I didn’t need Howard to enlighten me about Daisy Culligan; she could do that herself.

From the station I dialed Daisy.

“Dining with Daisy! I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you’ll—”

“Call Officer Jill Smith.” I left my number. No explanation. I was more likely to get answers from her face than her words. I needed surprise on my side.

I checked my mail slot and voice mail, vainly hoping for word from Laura Goldman in Pittsburgh. For the hell of it, I dialed Ott’s number.

“Ott. Go ’head.” None of this “
So sorry to have missed your call
” for Ott.

I didn’t leave a message. Even if Ott had wandered in from the dead or the lam and picked up the phone, he of course wouldn’t have given me any answers.

So, who would?

Before I could tackle that question, my pager went off. I picked up the phone and dialed Pittsburgh.

“Goldman?”

“You miss me, Smith?”

“You bet. What’ve you got?”

“On your Ott?”

“Right.”

“You said he’s a counterculture guy? A denizen of a scabrous dwelling? A defender of the underdog? A termite-infested pillar of antiestablishment?”

“Right, Goldman. Ott’s so antiestablishment I’m surprised he accepts payment in American money, even when it’s offered, which isn’t often. His clothes come only from secondhand stores. He buys day-old doughnuts on Fridays and eats from the box all week.”

A fuzzy sound came from the phone.

“Goldman?”

She was laughing.

“Goldman!”

“Well, Smith, like I told you, your Ott vanished after he graduated from high school. I still don’t know why. Officially no one does. And, Smith, no one but Esther Jakobs’s granddaughter would have been able to get Sister Joseph Martha, formerly Mary Martha Macray of the Herman housemaid corps, to admit what she heard from her niece, who took her place in the Herman household thirty years ago. My grandmother was her best friend. Nana started there as a young girl right off the boat. It was a scandalous thing for a proper Jewish girl to do, living in the house of Gentiles, but that’s another story. I’ll tell you about her someday.

“Anyway, here’s what Sister Joseph Martha’s niece heard. The Hermans and the Otts were both very controlled families. Voices were never raised. Nana said for years she assumed that WASP vocal cords had atrophied over the centuries and just didn’t have the range of normal people’s. But this one day something threw your Ott’s family into a fury. Your Ott—Alexander—and his father screamed at each other. Blows were exchanged. It ended with Alexander shouting that he would never set eyes on his father again. In fact he couldn’t stand being in the same country, on the same continent with his father. He stormed out of the house, took nothing with him, and had the chauffeur drive him to the airport. He was last seen at the Iberia Airlines counter.”

A righteously angry young Herman Ott stomping off to Spain? I could picture that. A quarter of a century ago escape to Europe would have fitted a young radical. Still, something wasn’t right.

It sounded as if Goldman were smothering a chuckle.

“Iberia Airlines? Goldman, did they fly out of Pittsburgh that long ago?”

“Nope.” She hooted. “Your Ott was a real silver-spoon radical. He stomped out of the mansion and had the chauffeur drive him to the Iberia gate—at Kennedy!”

I howled. I could hardly wait to tell Howard. In fact the only person who wouldn’t be amused by this story would be Herman Ott. Clearly he’d
never
possessed a sense of humor. When I got myself under control, I said, “Do you have any idea what caused the fight?”

“None. But I’m on it, Smith. When I know, you’ll know.”

“Thanks.” After I’d hung up, I was left wondering if I had anything more valuable than an amusing anecdote. If Ott had friends in Spain, or Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, or Copenhagen, what did that tell me? It only made the net I’d need larger. It told me nothing new about him now. Certainly it shed no light on where Ott might be. He had been gone too long. All my moves were into dead ends. I needed to uncover an entirely new route.

I left a message for Jackson: “Anything on Cyril? Call me with
anything
.”

Then I headed to Ott’s office. It would amuse him to skirt us and hide out there.

It wasn’t till I was pulling up outside on Telegraph that it struck me that it might amuse the killer to deposit another body in Ott’s office. Ott’s.

T
ELEGRAPH
A
VENUE AT 9:00
A.M. on Wednesday was the asphalt and storefront equivalent of the morning after. The pizza plates and bagel bags that ricocheted from curb to curb in the night lay in soggy heaps where puddles ambushed them. Crushed paper bags and abandoned bottles marked dress shop portals; snowy hillocks of paper napkins stood firm by the doors of restaurants serving samosas, lamb kabobs, and vegetable mu shu. Those doors wouldn’t be open for nearly two hours. And it would be nearly that long before the sidewalk vendors began setting up. Craftspeople don’t choose their trade because they’re enamored of the nine to five.

Nothing had changed in Ott’s office: no bodies live or dead. I circled Telegraph and environs once, keeping an eye out for Ott’s cronies, but the truth was I had been everywhere, talked to everyone who could connect me with him. I wasn’t going to find him by charging straight on this way. I wasn’t going to find him unless I figured out who had lured him out of his office; that meant tracking down who had killed Bryant Hemming there. Or, as Howard would put it, by stepping on toes.

Serenity Kaetz’s address was up nearly to Grizzly Peak Boulevard at the crest of the Berkeley Hills. Real estate values elevate with the land. But there are enough building eccentricities in Berkeley that Serenity Kaetz’s address didn’t surprise me. She might be renting a tiny room in a 1920s stone and stucco mansion, much like Daisy Culligan. She could be staying in a cliff-hanger whose pylons hadn’t been driven deeply enough into the steep ground to reach bedrock, renting cheaply from the owners unable to face the unpalatable alternatives of living there: death or financial destruction. Serenity might own a pastel stucco box that sat above its element. She could have bought a wooden craftsman’s bungalow twenty years ago, before property costs rose higher than the hills themselves. Or she could be hanging out in a tree.

In fact she had moved into the garage of what appeared to be a small, woodsy cottage but that ran two more levels down the hillside in the back, creating one of those bleacher-seat houses in which every room has a view of redwoods, live oaks, the Bay and Bay Bridge, or San Francisco beyond. It was her heavily mortgaged house. Rented out, she told me, to pay for her art. And it was her garage.

“I gave myself three years,” she said, turning off a soldering iron and pushing an irregular sheet of metal back from the edge of her workbench. The unconverted garage was just that. Stucco walls, pull-up door in front, exit door on the side. Room for one car or a five-foot-five-inch woman in caramel denim overalls over maroon sweatshirt, a sleeping bag rolled in one corner, canvas camp bed frame folded next to it, two suitcases under the workbench, and Peg-Boards displaying delicate copper crane necklaces, intricately entwined brass cuffs, earrings of silver irises, multimetal lotuses, and flowers and birds I couldn’t have named. The peacock ear cuffs with brass feathers that wound upward to reach to the top of the ears would be perfect with my short hair. I had to restrain myself from asking their price. Maybe
after
the case was closed.

She shoved a clump of her wild brown curls behind her shoulder, where there was no chance it would stay, then pulled one stool up to the workbench and motioned me to the other, the one with a back. “Sit. You want tea? I’ve got an immersion heater,” she said in just the same Bronx voice, with the same “I should come back from the deli with half the bag empty?” tone, my great-uncle’s Mrs. Bronfmann had had.

“I’m fine. But how do
you
eat here?”

“Well, when I rented, I chose stockbrokers. The West Coast market opens at six
A.M.,
to coincide with Wall Street. So Don and Betty are on their way to San Francisco at five-fifteen. Then I’ve got all day to use the kitchen and bathroom. They know that, it’s part of the agreement, but I make a point of leaving things just—and I mean exactly—as I found them, so Don and Betty can forget I’m ever there.”

“What about weekends?”

“They ski; they sail; they’ve got time-shares at Tahoe and Bodega. They’re money people; their pleasures are money sports.” She put out a hand to stop the protest that hadn’t quite formed in my mind. “I don’t mean to put them down. They work like
crazy
. When they drag in here at four, they need the hot tub. Me, I merely love it, but them, they need it. On their weekends they need to go fast and hard and sweat out all that stress.” A grin crept onto her dark cherub face, rouging her cheeks and making her brown eyes sparkle. “What about the weekends they’re home, you’re going to ask, right? If I know beforehand, I cook beforehand. I’ve got an ice chest. On the Avenue I can get a deal on the fruit that hasn’t moved at the end of the day. If not, it’s take-out, but I’ll tell you, Jill—that’s your name, right, Jill?—it gnaws at me to blow money like that. Like I’m eating a sheet of copper, or an extra day and a half I could give myself here, before I have to go crawling to the house door and ask if there are any flunky jobs at the stock exchange. Those weeks I don’t get a decent number in the lottery and I can’t even get a space to sell my jewelry, I work for one of the out-of-town vendors, but it doesn’t pay shit. I’d be better off back here pounding the metal or cruising the galleries seeing what I can do when I get the cash for stones and fine tools. Where I can sell when I get a name. I’m an artist, but like I always say, that doesn’t mean I’m not a businesswoman. You don’t pay attention to business, you end up making jewelry for the unemployment line.”

I liked this take-a-chance life of hers. She was older than I, probably forty-five or so, and she could still afford to blow a few years? Of course she didn’t have nearly ten years invested in a pension.…My throat tightened. “Invested in a pension” had been my father’s condemnation for my friends’ fathers in the towns we moved in and out of when I was a child. I envied those girls their continuity of friends, but I despised their fathers chained like front yard dogs. When I was a high school senior, Dad gave up on the pot of gold at the end of the leprechaun’s rainbow and got a government job. He’s still at it. I’ve never asked him to tell me exactly what he does; I cared too much to hear the roteness of it; and he’s never mentioned pension. By the time I am his age I could be living well off my pension. I’ve made the smart choice. He never mentioned that; I think he cared too much.