Cop Out (23 page)

“It
is
my life. You wouldn’t believe the need. People broadsided by illness. It can come out of nowhere. You’re dizzy, you’re weak, terrified, you don’t know what’s going on, and you’ve got to make the most important decisions of your life. And hassle your HMO.” She looked directly at me, no hint of the palliative smile women are prone to. But then she wouldn’t. She was the woman who had trained herself not to smile when her face had been paralyzed. “That’s when you have to have a defender—”

“We’ll be brief. There’s a question about ACC’s books. Did a private investigator named Herman Ott try to question you about it?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

She sighed irritably. “I haven’t answered the phone all week. These grant forms, they’ve got to be in the mail today. I’ve got two new employees who have to be paid. I had to stop everything Monday morning and hassle Roger to get my money out of ACC and into my own account—”

Pereira stared at her. “There are laws—”

“Sue me. Look, I don’t want to sound callous about Bryant, but he couldn’t have died at a more inconvenient time. I’m not going to let his death endanger hundreds of people who need Patient Defenders.”

“Couldn’t you have waited a week?” Pereira pushed.

“A week? Have you dealt with government? A month, more like it. People are dying.”

“And if you miss the deadline and don’t get your grant?”

“We can’t go on. Not without paid staff, people you can count on when you end up in the emergency room at two
A.M.
Christmas Eve.” Her lips moved in an odd, minimal way.

I wondered if she meant that to be a grimace and didn’t realize that the residue of her facial paralysis had turned it into a meaningless movement of flesh.

“As I said, I’m really pressed—” She let out what in another person would have been a long, harried sigh, but that in her case was cut short because everything about her screamed, “I’m in a hurry.”

Pereira was not impressed. “So,” she said in a voice most people save for pets who’ve relieved themselves on the antique quilt, “how often did you check over the ACC books?”

“ACC?” Her tone mirrored Pereira’s. “Please. If I don’t get these forms all in order—”

“Should we take that as ‘never’?”

“Hardly. When I came on to the board, before I made my investment, I went over those books. They weren’t something I’d have taken home to Daddy, but they were legit. I told Bryant to get a good accountant, and I assume he did.”

Pereira was unmoved. “And that was when?”’

“About a year after Bryant founded it. I’d say three years ago.”

“Have you checked them since?”

Margo Roehner looked around the room slowly, theatrically. “As I said, I’m pressed for time. So if you don’t mind…” She reached for the doorknob just as the doorbell rang.

M
ARGO
R
OEHNER DIDN’T GROAN
when she opened the door to Daisy Culligan, but only self-control kept her from it. If I’d dropped in on a friend and been greeted with shoulders hunched in frustration and a mouth crimped into the beginning of “Oh, no, not you too,” I’d have been out of there before she could start spewing excuses.

“I’m really rushed,” Margo said, unnecessarily. “I’ve got to get the grant papers…And the police are still here. They’re just leaving.”

Daisy patted Margo’s shoulder. “So you’re saying you don’t want to go for coffee, huh?”

“Daisy! Every HMO is cutting back; they’re tossing patients out of hospitals, giving outpatients appointments so short the doctors can barely figure out who they are, much less what complications they’ve got. Emergency rooms are zoos. I don’t have time—”

“You want me to vamoose? Maybe take the cops with me?” Daisy shot me a grin.

It goes against my grain to leave a witness who wants me gone. But we’d asked what we came to ask. I wasn’t going to get any closer to Herman Ott here. And I did have questions for Daisy Culligan, the woman who had driven Ott to the beach regularly always before dusk or sunrise. I could have taken her to the station, but she was like Howard, the King of Sting. They’re delicate flowers on long, winding stems that get their nourishment not from the solid soil but from the air in which they sway and weave and bob when it suits them. Uprooted and plunked in pots, they shrink down and petrify. And they certainly don’t answer questions.

But on a bench outside Peet’s with latte in hand, they’re likely to diffuse the seeds of their brilliance to the winds. And the cops.

“Peet’s?”

“You’re on.”

Pereira called in for the beat officer to drive her to her car, and I headed the few blocks to Peet’s. Daisy had a head start, but I still got on the coffee line before her. That’s the advantage of driving—and parking—a patrol car.

I chose the one secluded bench at the edge of the courtyard. Ahead was Domingo Street, beyond were the tennis courts of the Claremont Hotel, and behind them was the great white shingle hotel itself, which holds court over this tony section of Berkeley like Queen Victoria keeping watch on her subjects. In the firestorm of 1991 in which twenty-five people died in the hills above, we all watched for hours as the fire jumped and scrambled down toward the Claremont, anxious for that one delicious bite that would fuel it for a leap onto the rest of the city below. Houses behind it burned, leaving nothing but foundation slabs and barbecues. But the Claremont had been saved. It had become a symbol of Berkeley’s survival. Now the sun shone off its turrets and shingles, its porches and porticoes. I sipped my latte, ate the scone that was lunch, and thought how odd it was that my last visit to the grand old lady had been in the company of the last person I would have expected to find on the grounds, Herman Ott.

In the last place I’d have expected to find him.

My breath caught. Herman Ott in the Claremont?

I glanced over at the coffee line at Daisy Culligan and back at the hotel.

Could Ott be hiding in the Claremont? Why would he? If he was back in Berkeley lying low, it would be so he could keep after whatever he was after before he’d gone to the beach.

Yet—I was barely breathing—the Claremont was the last place we’d look for him. It was a spot neither his enemies nor his subjects would consider.

I was off the bench and looking for a spot to pour out my coffee when good sense slapped me. A witness in the hand is worth a bunch of hunches in the bush. Or the hotel. Daisy was coming toward me. If Ott were undercover in the Claremont, he’d still be there in fifteen minutes. Daisy, on the other hand, would not be sitting next to me, drinking a latte machiato, and sighing in pleasure.

“Daisy, you’ve had time to ponder those trips to Bolinas with Herman. What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s an hour’s drive. Even Herman wouldn’t call you for a ride and then sit in your car like a stone.”

“Are you sure you know Herman?” She raised her machiato to her lips. I knew from experience it would still be too hot to drink, but Daisy kept the cup at her mouth, pretending to drink. Then she devoted a minute to dabbing the foam off her lips.

“Daisy, Herman—”

“Look, I said I don’t know anything more.” She lifted the cup, and this time she did drink. The coffee was still too hot. She pressed her lips together to keep from spitting it out.

I watched, holding my own latte in abeyance and wondering what it was that had turned chatty Daisy Culligan so suddenly taciturn. I tried another tack. Looking her in the eye, I said, “I heard about Damon, the hairdresser.”

“Oh.” I could almost see her changing mental gears and doing it with relief. In the new gear wariness battled pride, but it was an uneven skirmish. She pushed her curly gray hair off her face and grinned. “It was a nice tat, wasn’t it?”

“Tat? You call your revenges tats?”

“Revenge is too mean a word. I’m not the Mafia. I’m just trying to bring a bit of balance into the universe. Life is so unfair. We’ve got such a bully culture, all these Goliaths stomping around so busy beating their chests they trample the Davids. And then the only thing they regret then is that their feet hurt. What I do is provide the occasional pebble for the occasional David. Or Davida.” She looked me in the eye. “After all we women are the ones who get stepped on most. Tit for tat.” She grinned.

I was amazed she was so open about her avocation. I sipped my latte, turning the paper cup so the coffee washed the foam and chocolate to the top, and watched Daisy out of the corner of my eye. “And what was the pebble you aimed at Bryant?”

“I didn’t—”

I shook my head. “He wrecked your career because he was too self-absorbed to tell you the restaurateur screwed your predecessor. How much time, money, reputation did he cost you? You didn’t sue him. He didn’t bankroll you in your own café. You’re living in two rooms, nice ones, but so small you have to use your stairs as a file cabinet.” I sighed and indulged in another head shake. “You’ve got a grievance that makes the woman with the canceled hair appointments a piker. You are the Joe Montana of revenge. You could throw a Super Bowl-winning touchdown, and you’re asking me to believe you just took a sack?”

She laughed.

“Was the tat Roger Macalester?”

“Roger?” She bobbled the paper cup. “I should be insulted. Roger? I did Bryant a favor sending him a guy with integrity who could also keep the office running. I did it for ACC. It galled me to take the chance of bailing out Bryant. I mean, I was married to the man. I knew he’d make a mess of ACC given the time. He had a great facade, but he was so self-absorbed he forgot anyone else existed. But Roger had years of credibility with the left; he’s utterly committed to the idea of mediation. Roger was a gift.”

I took that with a grain of salt. “So what
was
your tat then?”

“Why are you so sure…” She paused, took a long drink of coffee, and said, “Okay. You’re right. What Bryant did to me was like sacking the quarterback. And I couldn’t stay there on the ground after he ripped the ball out of my hands.” She leaned in toward me in a posture I’d come to recognize as the Howardian Personification of Smug. “It was a delicate operation. If I planned a tat that was too endangering or too public, it could backfire. The ex-wife’s always the first suspect, right?”

“Indeed.”

“If Bryant got stung by any joke, a number of people would think of me.”

People like Howard, she meant. The ones whose opinion truly mattered. “You had your reputation to consider.”

“Exactly. And my own satisfaction. The tat had to be perfect. I mean it would be tacky to keep shooting off one try after another.”

“You had your reputation—”

“So I kept in touch with Bryant and waited for inspiration. I’d been married to him long enough to know his moods, and I could tell he was getting more and more worried. I asked him what was the matter, but he just did what he always did: created a diversion. At one time I would have steered him back to the topic, but it’s an effort and more than I’m willing to put into an
ex
-husband. So I asked myself, ‘Why is he worried?’ Here the guy’s dressed in spiffy suits, driving a fancy new Jeep; he’s a TV star of sorts. His mediations are going great. What’s to worry about? Knowing Bryant and the procrastination method of bookkeeping, I figured it’s got to be money. I concluded ACC needed money—no stroke of genius there. So”—she smiled, sipped, smiled again—“I called a couple of friends who had money in the ACC fund and got them to telephone Bryant and say they were thinking of making another, much bigger investment; they were anxious to; they’d heard such good things about the fund. But they were hesitating, not because of the fund but because of him, because”—she could barely control her grin—“they had heard he let down his own ex-wife, and now they weren’t sure they could trust him.” She pulled her thigh up onto the bench and turned so she could sit facing me.

“Now I’m going to prove to you how law-abiding a tatter I am. I didn’t have my people tape their phone calls, so I only heard about Bryant squirming and wheedling secondhand. Still, it was lovely. That week I made my Dinners by Daisy clients meals they are still talking about.”

“And Bryant, what did he do?”

“Just what I’d have expected, said he’d get back to the ‘investors.’ ”

“And did he?”

For the first time an interior cloud darkened her eyes. “He died.”

“When did your friends make these calls?”

“Three weeks ago. I mean, it wasn’t like they called Sunday and Bryant was so distraught he raced up to Herman’s office and shot himself.”

I glanced up at the Claremont. “Did you tell Herman about this tat?”

“No. I don’t know.” She gulped down the rest of her machiato. “No, I’m sure.”

“Honestly sure?”

“Yes.” She stood.

“We’re talking murder,” I said, standing, facing her. “Herman’s in enough trouble already without you lying about what he knows. I’m keeping an open mind about Herman. And when you, his friend, speak, I need to be able to believe you. Did you tell him about the tat?”

“No, really, I didn’t.”

I sighed. Of course I couldn’t believe her. She could swear six more times, and I’d still be suspicious. I glanced back at the Claremont and said to Daisy, “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“The flasher pig poster in Margo’s storage locker, it’s yours, right?”

It was a moment before she relaxed enough to laugh. “God, I’d forgotten all about that. Margo kept it? She carried on so when I asked her to stick it in her storage. I was a middle-aged adolescent, she proclaimed. I could be using my time to help people instead of—another silent skirmish ended in a shrug and a grin—“instead of taping it to the ceiling over the couch where a porcine husband of a client was known to philander. I understand it made quite an impression on the young woman beneath him.”

I couldn’t resist laughing too.

“Officer, I assume the pig’s not part of your case?”

“Even the burglars didn’t want it,” I said.

Daisy shrugged, then looked questioningly at me.

I liked Daisy. What she was, how she lived were parts of what I loved about Berkeley. She was a real “Berkeley” type. Enough so that she’d harbor suspicion of the police. Even though she seemed to like me, even to trust me personally, she was edgy. Maybe it was just the political implications of being seen chatting with a cop. More than once, when I’d run into my friend Amy somewhere while I was in uniform, one of her friends had come up to her to ask if she was all right. Was I hassling her? had been the tacit question. “How can you be friends with a cop?” her friends had demanded later. “And they’ve never quite trusted me again,” Amy told me.