Cop Out (27 page)

“It’s not their craft,” he said, talons wrapped tighter around the edge of the door. “Is this what brought you out here in such a huff?”

“Your not answering my knock created the huff. Mind if I come in?”

“We can talk like this.”

He was within his rights. But I started segment scans of the room, looking for anything I hadn’t seen before, like cartons, cases, or bags that might contain Kaldane or drag marks on the floor where they’d been pulled away from the door. “You suggested to Bryant that he mediate between Brother Cyril and Serenity Kaetz. Why?”

“Publicity.” His shoulder dropped; I hadn’t realized how tense he’d been before. Before he figured I wasn’t after whatever he didn’t want me to find.

“How did you know Brother Cyril would be willing?”

“Worth a try.”

“Had you dealt with him before?”

“Him, no. I’ve done a couple of his guys’ backs. But before you ask, we didn’t talk about him. Didn’t talk, period. So if you’re looking for info on Cyril, I don’t have any.”

“
Au contraire
.” I turned and left. I didn’t mention the drag marks on the floor or the box he had forgotten to drag out of sight. The one that remained at the start of the marks had stenciled on the side: “Brede Mortuary, Modesto, Cal.”

I wrote my report in the car, whipped into the station to drop it in Jackson’s IN box, and raced out without running into Doyle. No point in dealing with his outrage prematurely. I was already back in patrol. What more could he do to me? Suspend me? No point in…

I stopped for pizza on the way home. It had been another of those days when I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten.

Howard was in the bedroom, sitting cross-legged against the headboard of the California king. He had been hiking in Tilden Park with a friend and two black Labs. He was still in shorts though it was much too cold now; mud spattered his calves; his sweatshirt was smeared with brown lines of questionable origin, his normally bouncy red curls were sweat-matted, and his freckled face had that outdoors glow. He leaned over, stuffed my pillow against the headboard for me, and grinned as I settled in.

As if nothing had happened.

“You find Ott?” he asked, so easily I wondered if he had forgotten our tense talk of yesterday or just chosen to believe things had worked out. Whichever, I hadn’t seen him this relaxed in days.

As Howard guided the first hot, dripping pizza slice (pepperoni, anchovy, Greek olive, and feta cheese) to his mouth like a veteran driver backing an eighteen-wheeler into the loading dock, I eased into recounting the events of my day: Serenity Kaetz telling me about Daisy and Margo; Pereira discovering Bryant Hemming’s little pyramid scheme at ACC; board member Margo’s ignorance of it and her anxiety to get me out of the house so she could get her grant forms in the mail and make Patient Defenders a formidable force. When I came to Daisy Culligan’s tat with her friend’s hairdresser, Howard nearly choked.

“Irreverent cop anchovied to death?” I said over his guffaws. “He went laughing, I’ll tell them.”

He plopped the pizza back in the box, downed a swallow of beer, and nodded happily. “Daisy’s such a pro. No low blows, no dirty tricks. She’s got an eye for the ridiculous, and she goes with it,” he said admiringly. “If the victims complain, they look like poor sports—”

“Which they are.”

Howard grinned. “Right. And lucky for Daisy because keeping secrets isn’t her long suit. She’s blown one or two great revenges that way.”

“Too bad! I’ll bet by now half of Berkeley has laughed about Damon, the hairdresser.” I pulled a pizza slice free and chewed slowly. Howard stretched out his long legs, and when he spotted me watching, he wiggled his flipperlike feet at me. I took another bite of pizza, hating to let go of this moment. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about my scene with Doyle, that I’d been tossed off the case. What I said was, “I suppose you heard about Ott and Brother Cyril at the Claremont with the dead pigeons.”

Howard nodded. No smile when it came to Herman Ott. “So where is Ott now? Off with Cyril?”

“Looks like it. They had him surrounded when he left.” Before he could comment on Ott, I launched into the scene at the Chartreuse Caracara and Griffon. “So there he was, gargoyling the door, hiding cartons from Brede Mortuary, Modesto, C-A.”

The pizza was on its way to Howard’s mouth. He stopped it halfway. “Mortuary? There’s nothing he ought to be getting from them. Mortuaries, Jill, taketh away; they do not giveth.”

“Or selleth. You think he was decorating the dead?”

“Hands-on practice, and you can bury your mistakes?” Grinning, Howard thrust his palms into the mattress and swung himself up straighter. He barely noticed the pizza box rock precariously in reaction. We had sat here so often eating pizza, hashing over cases, fingering each other’s minds. In the last six months alone we’d had gone through three bedspreads.

“I checked with Monterey PD. They’ve had reports of missing Kaldane. So Cyril brings the Kaldane here to the storage locker. Griffon hears a rumor about something dangerous in the ACC locker, breaks into Margo’s locker by mistake—”

“Or maybe it’s Griffon who’s got the Modesto connection.” He stuck the crust in his mouth and chewed. “Know a guy. Vice. Loan to Fresno.”

Translated to empty-mouthed English, that meant when Howard had been on loan to the Fresno Vice Squad, he’d met a guy on loan from Modesto. He could ask him to contact Brede Mortuary. “No. This is too tricky to bring in somebody from outside. I’ll drive down first thing tomorrow.”

“What about Ott?”

So much for avoiding that issue. “I’m off the Ott hunt. Doyle’s sending me back to patrol.”

Howard didn’t speak. He just stared.

“Doyle says it’s because I fulfilled my mission, so to speak. I did find Ott at the Claremont, even if he got away before I got there.”

“But?”

“The real reason? He says I’m too close to Ott.”

“Too close.” His mouth barely moved. His voice was so low I wasn’t sure I’d heard the words.

I hadn’t let myself register the import of those words, not till I saw it drawn on Howard’s taut face. Too close to him, too far from us. Someone we can’t trust—officially. Anyone who heard about my removal, who heard “too close” would know better than to trust me.

“Did he say it in private?” Howard grasped at the hope.

“In a meeting with Eggs and Jackson.”

“Oh.” He reached over to wrap his arm around my shoulders. It hung suspended awkwardly because of the distance.

It felt like a stranger’s arm, on a stranger’s shoulder. On the shoulder of a woman who would never again sit downstairs in a room filled with cops, eating six different kinds of take-out, griping about the old patrol cars with the seat backs that ride at forty-five-degree angles, about drug dealers who slither out of town to their mansions to the south, about the city council, and the protesters. About Ott.

Later, when I remembered this moment, I was surprised the air didn’t feel cold or hot. But the truth is it just felt thick, stiff, unmoving, like the eye of a hurricane, the still point before the fury takes the opposite direction.

Then the air moved again. I leaped forward over thoughts and mournings I’d come back to later. “It’s okay. The police ‘family’ doesn’t matter to me like it does to you.”

“Jill, it’ll blow over.” His fingers dug into my shoulder. “You’ve got friends who’ll go to the wall for you.”

“I can’t ask them to do that.”

“They won’t wait to—”

“No, Howard. Listen. The truth is the idea of police family doesn’t comfort me; it binds me.”

His eyes glistened.

Why had I come home? Why hadn’t I just taken myself somewhere where I wouldn’t hurt him? I might as well have said
he
didn’t matter. I scrunched over next to him and pressed my head against his shoulder for a moment. When I started to speak, I wasn’t looking at him but straight ahead, at the green walls and white trim he had painted in this house he loved filling with the “family” he’d made for himself. Desperately I tried to explain. “Howard, lots of people go to a job, have work friends, and come home. We’ve got other friends.”

“Just friends,” he murmured. “Not family.” He swallowed and swallowed again before he went on. “This house, it’s the only place I’ve ever been home. This is my city; it matters to me to take care of it. The force, it is family. Family”—the word squeaked out—“where they can’t just walk away.”

They could walk away, of course. Just as I could. Suddenly the old urge burned within me; I yearned to jump up, run to the car, make a right on Ashby and another right on Route 80. To drive into the dark and unknown. To leap onto the magic carpet just as Howard’s mother had time and again.

I looked over at Howard, his face now pale. We were using the same words but speaking different languages.

“Why don’t you just find her—your mother?” The words were out of my mouth before I realized it. “Finding people is our business. Why don’t you initiate a search?”

“Based on what?” He pulled back as if attacked. “I know nothing about her. No Social Security number—”

“Surely, she must have one by now.”

“Surely? With Selena there was no ‘surely,’ not about anything.”

“But—”

He rammed his fists into the bed and shoved himself away. I tossed the pizza box to the floor.

“Let me tell you about Selena, Jill, and then you’ll know
surely
. When I was eight or so, she took me to sign up for summer camp. The camp woman insisted she needed Selena’s Social Security number on the application form. Selena laughed. ‘Oh, that. I forgot that years ago,’ she said. The woman wasn’t amused. And she wasn’t going to let me go to camp. So Selena said she’d ‘search her files in her home office’—this from a woman who used her cardboard moving boxes for tables. When we got outside, she took me for an ice cream and assured me I’d get to camp. Then she went back and filled in the blank with a Social Security number.”

“Maybe you could—”

“No, Jill. She made up the number. She’d had to ask the kid at the ice cream counter how many digits were in a Social Security number.”

“Still, we could notify other departments. They could keep an eye out for—”

“For who? I don’t know what name she goes by. Selena Bly is only one of the names she used when I was a kid. Selena Howard was another. Who knows how many she’s created since? I can’t swear to her birth date. Jill, it’s like—it’s like I made her up.” His voice was as raw as the wound he’d reopened.

I wanted to reach out to him, but I knew I couldn’t comfort him now. I was too suspect. “Why—”

“Why do I care? Damn good question. She doesn’t— No, don’t tell me she does. You don’t know; neither do I. Maybe…This is how I remember her. From one day, a summer Thursday. She was wearing a light blue dress with big blowzy red flowers. I’d spotted it in a secondhand store window because the flowers and the vine reminded me of a horror movie we’d just seen. It was big on her, but we both loved the horror dress. Her arms were freckled—”

“Like yours.”

He started, then looked down at his arms and nodded vacantly as if the connection hadn’t occurred to him. “But in that dress they looked tan and strong, like Jane in an old Tarzan movie. Like she was so strong she could grab me and swing off on a vine into a magic land only she could see.” He was still looking down. “Then she would open it up so I could see it too, and I’d be…”

Safe?

“…home.” He swallowed. “With her a trip to the grocery was an adventure, looking for peas was a game, the people in the checkout line concealed nefarious secrets we made up on the way home.”

“It must have been like living with a fairy on a magic carpet—”

“When I was a little kid, yeah. By the time I was ten it was living with someone who thought she was a fairy, and I had to watch out so no one pulled her magic carpet out from under her and left her to crash onto the road in front of a truck.”

“Oh, Howard.” I clambered up and pulled him against me, wishing I were big enough to wrap around all of him. He shuddered, and I pressed harder against his body. His breaths came fast and shaky, and I tried to calm them with my own. I ached for the little boy he was. I wanted to squeeze out the years of dread and loneliness, to give him a base so secure and strong nothing could hoist or push or drag it away.

But that base was the police family, and I was the one yanking it away.

It seemed like an eon before I could force myself to speak. “Howard, do what you have to, but make it clear to the department that you have no connection to my case; I’m in this on my own. Let everyone know you have no part of Herman Ott. You warned me to be a team player—”

“You don’t need to buy the team ethic. You just need to win the game for them.” His fingers wound through mine. “It’s hard to complain about a guy who’s holding the ball in the end zone.”

Forestalling comment, Howard insisted, “Brede Mortuary. You were figuring Griffon was taking the Kaldane there.” There was a false buoyancy to his voice. “What about Bryant’s trips to Mexico? Now you’re saying he was
not
smuggling the Kaldane to Mexico?”

“It was a reasonable possibility.” My own voice sounded distant, as if I were listening to a stranger playing a role. But, at least, I was still in the play with Howard. “You can make a bundle selling pesticides down there. Even ones that are banned here can go for a bunch of pesos on their black market. Running outlawed pesticides to the San Joaquin Valley is not the same gold mine, but it’s a damned sight easier. No border searches to worry about, no one wondering why you’ve come and gone so often.”

“If you spend every weekend in Modesto, people may wonder about you, but they’re not suspecting illicit or illegal pleasures.” Howard summoned up a grin. “Griffon’s hardly too honorable to run toxins, but why should he take the chance?”

“So he can finance his upscale tattoo parlor on Union Square.”

“San Francisco’s Union Square?” Howard whistled. “Now that’s taking a giant step up.”

“Indeed. It would be a risky and expensive move, but it could catapult him into next year’s ‘in’ thing. He could turn out to be one rich needle man.” I let my hand rest on Howard’s thigh as it had a thousand times, felt the familiar warmth of his arm against mine. In a minute I’d think about how I’d be getting to Modesto tomorrow, how I’d handle the Brede Mortuary, but not yet. I’d always been a planner with my eye half a mile ahead, weeks into the future. Now, suddenly, I wanted to remember this moment, to feel not only Howard’s warmth, but the bedspread beneath us, the air cold against my untouched side—