Cop Out (26 page)

He flinched. “I thought you were only interested in murder!”

“Do you? Ride without a helmet?”

“Of course not. But what do you need to know for?”

Jackson had stopped sorting and stood, legs apart, arms crossed.

“Where is your helmet? It wasn’t on the cycle downstairs.”

“I left—I didn’t—”

“It’s with your personal things, isn’t it?”

He didn’t answer in words, but his slumped shoulders and quick glance toward the door shouted: Sleeping bag and box of clothes out back.

“As I said, Roger, we’re interested in the murder; we’re not housing police. We don’t care that you’ve been living in here.”

“I’m not now,” he insisted. He must have looked just the same when he was five, backed into a corner, arms hugged tight against his ribs.

“Where are you living?”

“A motel.”

“That’s a big step up.” And an expensive one. “How come?”

“Bryant. He gave me the money. It was temporary. He was going to let me stay in his place after he left. Till his lease ran out.”

“Why that generosity? All of a sudden?”

Macalester hesitated, mentally fingering a lie, tossing it away. “The big shots from Washington. Bryant didn’t want them to think his assistant was a street person. Looks bad when you trust your organization to someone you pay so little, particularly if you haven’t paid him in months. Temptation’s too great.”

“And was it?” Jackson’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere. Macalester had forgotten he was around.

“No. Honestly. No,” he sputtered.

“Tell me true.”

“Really.” If Macalester could have disappeared in the corner crack, he’d have been gone.

“Are you sure,” I asked, “that Bryant got you out of here because he was afraid of the Washington guys? Maybe he had something in here he didn’t want you to see?”

“I don’t—”

“Think.”

“Well, I guess, maybe. I mean the motel money, it did come out of nowhere. It’s not like I asked. I’d never have thought of asking, much less asking Bryant.”

“So he just offered. When?”

“Saturday.”

“Saturday,” Jackson repeated. He didn’t say aloud, “the day Brother Cyril arrived in town.”

I looked at Macalester, standing now away from the wall, looking like the guy who ran the office at ACC, like himself again. I smiled. “Roger, you are not naive. You didn’t believe Bryant about the Washington threat, did you?”

He allowed a little smile.

“And you had a key for here. You’d made yourself a copy, right? Any sensible person would.”

Still smiling, he nodded.

“And so you came back here—didn’t you?—to see what Bryant had here. How could you
not
check it out?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?”

His smile bloomed and died. “I figured it must be something bad, maybe illegal, but not…Kaldane.”

Jackson whistled.

“Kaldane?” I asked.

“Kaldane,” Jackson said, “is a pesticide. It’s so toxic it’s illegal to transport it in a private vehicle.” He stared at Macalester. “Lucky for you you had that motel room. You spent time in here with that poison, who knows what of your parts would never have fun again?”

Macalester glared at Jackson. “Very funny. And chauvinistic. What about the Mexicans whose fields this stuff lands in? What’ll happen to them? Did Bryant think about that? They’re not going to be asking for mediation when their children are deformed, so what did he care? Just steal the toxins up here, sell them for a fortune down there where they don’t have the EPA watching out, where they don’t care if they maim their field-workers and let the runoff poison their water supply. And what about us, Officer, when we get our fine vegetables from Mexico, what do you think we’ll be eating?” His face was white with rage. I could imagine this discovery pushing him over the edge and him squeezing Bryant’s neck till his bones broke. I wouldn’t have blamed him.

Roger had talked about Bryant’s destroying ACC. Few things would do it faster in Berkeley than the news that Bryant was smuggling toxic chemicals to Mexico. People across the political spectrum would be disgusted. Nixon might have been rehabilitated, but a man who foisted poison on unsuspecting field-workers and into the mouths of his neighbors’ children—never.

J
ACKSON HEADED OFF TO
the manager’s office. I considered the onerous and probably futile project of interviewing other renters, hoping someone had seen the Kaldane making its way into the storage unit. I wondered how many of them would be scurrying to cover up questionable items in their own units. If Margo Roehner had thought about it before calling us when her unit was broken into, would she have ditched Daisy’s pig poster?

Later I would take Roger Macalester to the station for a formal statement, but I wanted to observe him here in the storage unit. He had come here voluntarily at least twice, but that was before Jackson’s comment about the toxic effects of Kaldane. I suspected Jackson knew no more of the specific effects of the pesticide than I did. Macalester didn’t realize that. He was looking decidedly twitchier than he had two minutes ago. That was to my benefit. A nervous subject is a careless subject.

Still, decency bade me open the door wider and let in the minutely fresher hall air. “Do you know for a fact Bryant was selling the stuff in Mexico?” I recalled Griffon’s hinting at that.

“Where else?”

“Did he go to Mexico often?”

“Not that I know of. But he wouldn’t advertise it, would he?”

“The smart smuggler has a valid reason for going over the border,” I said. “He’s not trying to hide his travel, just the illegal reason for it.”

“Well, our hero Bryant was better than smart. There’s no record of his trips south. I know; I checked. And that blond accountant cop, what’s her name?”

“Officer Pereira.”

“Pereira, she just went over the books. Ask her if there are any tickets to Mexico charged.”

“Bryant could have paid his own way.”

Macalester laughed—the sarcastic laugh of the unpaid employee.

I took a breath, a shallow one. That smell in here I couldn’t quite name, was it pesticide, or had I psyched myself instead of Macalester? Either way I was impatient to get out. “Bryant Hemming is a very convenient scapegoat for this smuggling. The man is dead.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s dead.”

“Maybe not. Who else had keys here? You and—”

He flinched but caught himself before responding.

“The board?”

“No. It changes too much, and there are too many flakes on it. If we gave them keys, then those keys would have been all over Telegraph. There wouldn’t have been room for me to sleep in here.”

“So who? Just Bryant and you?”

He stood, his fingers moving together and apart. It was a moment before I realized what he doing, squeezing and releasing a squishy orange ball that wasn’t there. Just as the wise smuggler wouldn’t hide his trips, Macalester would consider which holders of keys he wanted us questioning. He would put as much thought into his answer as an innocent man trying to recall facts he hadn’t expected to be asked. It meant his pensive period wasn’t telling me anything. “Who, Roger?”

“Just Bryant and me.”

“What about you, Roger? Have you been over the border?”

“Sure. And when I get tired of the staterooms on my cruises and grand tours, I opt for a change of pace and camp out here in the four-star storage unit.”

“Have…you…been…to…Mexico?”

“What do you think? Taking BART to San Francisco’s a big investment.”

I took another breath. Maybe the stench was just coming from Macalester’s attitude. “Look, Roger, you’re telling me someone was smuggling Kaldane into Mexico but no one went there. You’re too sophisticated to think you’re not a suspect. Give me a real lead to someone else.” “Give me a lead” could be translated as “I realize the interview is over. You’re free to go.”

I stepped back to let Roger pass and was so immersed in the routine of giving the scene a final survey that I almost missed his statement.

“What?”

“You wanted a lead; I’m giving it to you. I drove down here, like you said, to see what was going on. But I didn’t come up to the unit.”

“Ump.” My request had been a throwaway line. I had expected no answer; what Roger seemed to be giving me was the closest thing.

“The reason I didn’t come up here,” he insisted, looking a bit miffed, “was that I saw them downstairs, headed up here.”

“Saw who?”

“A tall, skinny guy in the shadows. I couldn’t see his face. But he stuck an arm out, and the light hit it. The arm, it was tattooed.”

“Describe the tattoo.”

He shrugged. “I just remember tattoo. I didn’t pay that much attention because”—he paused for so long I suspected he was paying me back for my dismissal a moment ago—“the guy with him was Herman Ott.”

He had my full attention now. “Ott? When did you see him here?”

“Last week. Sunday.”

“A week ago Sunday?”

“Right.”

A week before Ott disappeared he had come here to Bryant Hemming’s storage unit. “What was Ott doing with the tattooed guy?”

“Racing ahead of him, batting him away, like a canary with a tomcat on his tail.”

“Did they say anything?”

He started to shake his head and stopped abruptly, leaving his pigtail quivering as if it were the part of him eager to divulge the answer.

“Roger, Bryant is dead. It’s too late to protect him,” I said, giving him the opening to divulge in righteousness.

He took it. “Okay. Here’s what I heard. The tattooed guy said, ‘It’s okay with Hemming.’ Ott turned toward him—he was sort of running—and shouted, ‘Poison. It’s poison!’ ”

“And then what?”

“That’s it. I was at the end of the building. There was no way I could get closer without coming out into the open.”

I swallowed my disappointment. “And they’d told you what you wanted to know.”

Roger shook his head, this time slowly, pointedly, his face sagging with despair.

“Did they come out of the building carrying anything?”

“Nope.”

“How long were they inside?”

“Five minutes max.”

Ninety-nine-point-nine percent they never got into the storage unit. Copying the entry code to Storit Urself was one thing; getting the key to an individual unit another entirely.

So Ott was on to the Kaldane. If he had been a decent citizen, he would have called us. But in he trotted himself, without even the sense to stay under cover. The man was arrogant to the point of idiocy. To the point of death.

There were only two practical possibilities for the tattooed man. I tried the better of them. “Roger, was Griffon the man with Ott?”

Roger jerked his head toward me, eyes wide with confusion. It was a moment before he said, “No, of course not. Griffon doesn’t have tattoos.”

“Griffon the tattoo master is a blank canvas?” I couldn’t restrain a grin.

“Yeah. Too pure, too scared of error, above displaying anyone else’s work, take your pick. A shrink would have a field day with him, right?”

“So, Roger, was the tattooed guy one of Cyril’s guys?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t give you a name. But he had a black T-shirt and muscles so blown up they looked like water wings. And one of those little tin crosses.”

I leaned back against the wall, recalling
A Fair Deal
and Howard’s and my questions about it. “This last mediation was not the kind Bryant normally did or that you set up for when you had the idea. Your specialty, and Bryant’s, was mediating between aggrieved individuals and the looming bureaucracies that drive them crazy, right?”

“Exactly.”

“But this one was between Serenity and Cyril, parallel individuals. How come?”

“Bryant said it was high-profile.”

“But how did he even get the idea?”

“Griffon suggested it.”

Griffon! Did the man have his talons in every facet of this case?

J
ACKSON WAS OUTSIDE THE
manager’s office nodding as the manager spoke. From the looks of the two of them, Jackson was downwind of a rant. He put out a hand and was beside my car before I’d stopped it. “I’ll be rolling in a minute. Back to do the paper on this.” He lowered his voice. “Anything more from Macalester?”

“Says it was Griffon who suggested the mediation with Cyril.”

“For a dude who just wanted to stash his cash in ACC, he raises a lot of questions.”

“Just what I thought. First he’s searching Ott’s office, then he’s telling me to check on Hemming’s trips to Mexico, and now this, telling Hemming to mediate Cyril and Serenity. What’s with him? I’m going to swing by his place on the way back to the station.”

“Hey, Smith, Doyle said—”

“I’m just tying up a loose end from here.”

His brow lowered. “Do what you want. You’re going to anyway. But don’t pull my name into it.” He turned and walked back to the manager before I could answer.

The Chartreuse Caracara was not open for business. I knocked, identified myself, and knocked again. Griffon probably never would have opened the door if he hadn’t forgotten he was wearing leather-heeled shoes. And if I hadn’t had years of experience listening for sounds witnesses didn’t want me to hear, I might have missed that soft tapping on his floor.

“Griffon, we have an agreement!” I called through the metal door. Cooling my heels in the putrid alley wasn’t making me a more cheerful servant of the people.

The door opened about five inches. The crack revealed Griffon’s long, emaciated form. As before, he was dressed in a white turtleneck. I glanced at his wrists. No tattoos emerged from beneath the sleeves, but there was a subtle outlining along the veins on his talonlike hands. Behind him the wall of hearts and claws and skulls and dragons seemed to mock his plain white attire.

“How come you’re not tattooed, Griffon?”

“Styles change. I can’t afford to be passé.”

I flashed on the 1950s furniture in one of the furnished houses I had lived in as a teenager. The dated blond wood had been an indictment of my father’s irresponsibility, my mother’s passivity, my own need for the right answer that was anywhere but in that room. “What about your clients? They’re out of style all over their bodies.”