Cop Out (6 page)

“What was he wearing?”

“Ott? Yellow—”

“No, the other guy.” To say Ott was attired in yellow was akin to announcing the fog rolls in at 4:00
P.M.
here or grass is brown by August. Ott wears only yellows; he shops only at the Goodwill and Salvation Army, which means he has a remarkable collection of garments other people can no longer bring themselves to wear. It’s only through knowing him that I realized how popular mustard polyester was in years gone by.

“All I saw was a sleeve. Dark. Loose, like a coat, not a sweater.”

Amazing how much they remember when they’ve just got finished swearing they couldn’t have seen anything. “So how did you come to have Ott’s car key?”

“I did some work for him.”

Ott had gofers from time to time, amicable transients not on drugs or with axes of their own to grind were his employees of choice. “The key?”

“I got it out of his file drawer.”

My breath caught; this was worse than I’d imagined. “He left his files unlocked?”

“He must have left in a hurry. ’Cause the dead bolt on his office door was off. I mean, I just walked up after I saw him. I thought about—well, never mind about that—but when I got to his office, I walked right in.”

Which meant Kidd had already helped himself to the keys to Ott’s office and his files. But I ignored that for the moment. Because the idea of compulsive, anal Herman Ott walking out of his office without locking it stopped me cold. Ott could be carted out by the paramedics and he’d stop to double lock. Only with a gun to his head…I stared at Kidd. “Why didn’t you just spend the night there?” It came out more sarcastically than I’d intended, and for a moment I assumed Kidd’s shocked expression was in reaction to that.

“I thought about it,” he said. “But, well, the place is not a palace. I mean my standards aren’t high, but—” He shuddered. “I mean the only place to sleep is on the desk, exposed like a dead fish in front of the door. If anyone burst in…”

“And so you opted for the backseat of a Studebaker?”

My skepticism could have stopped him cold. But Kidd was a Scheherazade of the transient set, and he’d probably been on his end of the questioning as long as I’d been on mine. The edge of the serape dangled by his hand, and now he ran it between his fingers. “Actually, I’m glad you’re asking. You know, he’d kill me if he thought I went to the cops, but the thing is I was really kind of worried about ol’ Herman.”

Worried didn’t half cover it. I glanced at my watch. It was past time to be heading back to my beat. Instead I called in to the dispatcher, giving her my 10-20 (destination), and asking for Leonard, the beat officer, to meet me there.

Less than five minutes later, I left the car behind Leonard’s in front of Ott’s office. Ott always hated that; he figured we were out to besmirch his reputation.

I yanked open one of the double doors to Ott’s building. The bulb in the lobby was out. The place was going downhill—again. It mirrored the socioeconomic state of the Avenue. Built in the twenties for fashionable offices, it had a double staircase, and its circular hallways had been ready to accommodate the rush of commerce. It must once have been a lovely building with its old open-grille elevator, but not so appealing that businesses stayed on Telegraph Avenue. And so began its decline. There were periods when the two-room office suites became illegal crash pads and the Ott Detective Agency was its most respectable tenant. Asian refugee families moved in, and the building improved. A gym followed on the top floor. The refugees prospered and moved on; the gym failed. Now Ott’s floor housed a hodgepodge of cottage industries. Whether the proprietors were living in their cottages was a question I was glad I didn’t have to deal with.

Ott’s office was at the far corner of the third-floor hall. I came abreast of Leonard midway up the first flight of the once-grand double staircase.

On Telegraph Avenue Leonard is as much of a fixture as Ott. Gray-haired and shambling, he looks out of place in uniform. Suspects tend to dismiss him, and they tend to be sorry when they do. As we headed up the next staircase, I started to brief him on Kidd, but before I finished a sentence, he was shaking his head as if he already knew. “Seems, Leonard, that Kidd did a little low-level watch-out work for Ott. In Kidd’s case it sounds like charity on Ott’s part as much as need.”

“Maybe Ott wasn’t such a hot judge of character with this kid. Drugs create a lot of Mr. Hydes,” Leonard said.

“You’d think Ott would know that. I’m inclined to believe Kidd, Leonard. He knew where Ott kept the car key.”

“I’d believe Ott was forced before I’d picture him giving Kidd a tour of his hiding places.”

We were rounding the landing toward the second flight of stairs. There were still tenants living illegally here, but fewer than were here a year ago, and the halls had the night-empty feeling of an office building. As we rounded the second landing and headed down Ott’s hall, I was five steps ahead of Leonard.

“Smith, what’s your rush? So Ott goes off in a car. A case could have taken him out of town. He wouldn’t much like leaving Berkeley, but it’s the logical explanation.”

“And you think he’d leave his dead bolt off?”

“
That’s
the reason you got me risking a heart attack? The guy hasn’t dead-bolted his door!” Leonard was panting, but still, he edged in front of me. This was his beat. “Or Kidd
says
he didn’t dead-bolt it.”

Before I could answer, the smell hit us: urine, shit, blood, decay.

Leonard tried the doorknob. Of course it didn’t open.

I pulled out my baton and smashed its end through the O on the
OTT DETECTIVE AGENCY
sign. The opaque glass held for a moment, then sprayed like white fireworks.

I reached through and opened the door.

The body was inside.

I
DON’T KNOW WHETHER
I was more relieved or shocked. The body lying dead in the doorway between Herman Ott’s office and back room was not Herman Ott. It was Bryant Hemming. And he’d been dead awhile. There was what appeared to be an entry wound in his chest.

I didn’t let myself think of Bryant Hemming alive—not now.

Automatically Leonard and I moved back into the hall, and Leonard called in a DBF (dead body found). Chances were the killer was long gone, but you can’t be sure. I didn’t want my headstone to say: “Dumb Cop Assumed Everything Was Fine.”

“I’ll lead,” I said. “I know the layout.”

Leonard nodded and covered me as I moved back into the two-room suite. The nauseating smell of death struck me again; I blocked out all speculative thoughts of it, and of my reaction to it, and concentrated on the search. I surveyed Ott’s office: no closet, three tall file cabinets, big old wooden desk with chairs on either side. I edged around the office, keeping my back to the wall, till I could see under the desk. Nothing. Not even dust balls.

“Window?” Leonard said.

“Faces the air shaft. Probably hasn’t been opened since V-E Day. Hasn’t been washed since the Great War.”

I had to step over the body to get into the other room, Ott’s bedroom. “Doesn’t have a closet.”

“Jeez, Smith, it
is
a closet.”

What it looked like was the box at the bottom of the laundry chute. Clothes, and blankets, and towels, cloth items I couldn’t classify formed a compost on the floor. Bookcases, overflowing with newspapers, magazines, cups, dishes, and paper bags, covered three walls, and one floor-to-ceiling bookcase jutted in the room next to the sprung lounge chair in which I assumed Ott slept. (Or maybe he just nested in the clutter on the floor.) Under the window was a hot plate, and under it a cabinet holding tea, sugar, instant coffee, and three boxes of caramel wafers. “The room’s okay, Leonard. It’s emp—unpeopled.”

I took a shallow breath and looked down at Bryant Hemming.

Bryant Hemming was a collage of the colors of death, all shaded with sepia as if to remind us that he was already part of the past. The chest wound was just to the left of his sternum, a shot right into the heart. Blood was caked around it, but not much. His heart would have stopped immediately, pulsing no more blood back out of the hole.

“Jeez, Smith, he looks like he’s doing some kind of relaxation technique, straight out on his back like that,” Leonard said.

Death had swollen Hemming’s features into a cruel parody of the eager face that had glowed as he had mediated the hardest case of the year. But still, there was something about his half-open mouth, the angry creases between the brows that death hadn’t eased. “He looks not so much frightened as, well, offended.”

“ ‘How could this be happening to a good guy like me,’ huh, Smith?”

I nodded. It was a reasonable question. One that Homicide Detail would be asking a lot. I edged around Hemming back into the office room and wrote down our time of arrival on the scene. In a few minutes Ott’s little office would be jammed with personnel: scene supervisor, Homicide detectives, ID tech, and later, when we were through with the body, the coroner. We’d be knocking on doors on every floor in the building, rousting the tenants who didn’t officially live here, who would be more worried about covering their housing violations than a neighbor’s demise. Maybe I’d be interviewing them; more likely I’d be here answering questions.

Leonard moved to the wall of the office, as far from the corpse as space allowed. “So whadda you think, Smith? Hemming was here in the office, he cops to it that the bad guy’s gonna shoot him, and he starts backing into the bedroom?”

“Bad choice,” I said, realizing it was something of an understatement. “Why not head for the hallway?”

“Maybe he didn’t know the bedroom wasn’t gonna let him escape. Maybe he figures he can get inside and slam the door. Maybe he sees the door out to the hallway, figures it’s like a back door and he can zip out. Or maybe he panics and doesn’t think.” Leonard was a big proponent of “the average crook is not bright” theory. And “the small-time crook is not bright big time.”

“Hemming was on his TV show Sunday, and, Leonard, the guy relished going headfirst into conflict. He’s a big guy. I don’t see him panicking or backing away. His flaw would be being too sure he could deal with any problem.”

“You don’t mediate with a murderer.”

“Yeah, but maybe the other guy wasn’t a murderer then, not till it was too late for Hemming. If Hemming had talked him down, what a great story he’d have to take to Washington. Think of the triumph.”

“Or, Smith,” Leonard said without missing a beat, “Hemming could have been in the bedroom when the killer walked in and startled him.”

“Why would he be in there? Anything could be living under that clutter. Could be so many generations of mice they see themselves as the landed gentry.”

Leonard peered into the room, looking for an answer. But it was Hemming’s feet that gave it to me. “Leonard, I’ve seen Ott walk across that room. He shuffled, because even he couldn’t be sure what was at the bottom of his clutter—a sticky remnant of yesterday’s lunch or a slick magazine that could send him flying. And by the time Ott made it from hot plate to chair, he looked like he’d been trudging through seaweed. Bryant Hemming could never have made it through that morass unflagged, certainly not if he were moving in panic.”

Leonard moved back to the far side of Ott’s desk. It was useless; there was no way to get away from the sight of Bryant Hemming’s body, much less the smell of it, in this small office. Leonard glanced longingly at the bare desk but didn’t take the chance of sitting on it. A shiny surface like that was a natural for prints. If the killer were one of Ott’s clients, he might have balanced his butt on the edge of the desk and put a hand back onto the wood to push himself up. I’d done it plenty of times myself, mostly because it infuriated Ott. Maybe Bryant Hemming himself had perched there. But why? “Leonard, did Bryant Hemming even know Herman Ott?”

Leonard stood peering out the dirt-caked window, as if the air shaft held the answer, as if he could see the air shaft. “Bad luck, bad judgment, take your pick. Maybe Hemming was too cocky to keep an eye on Ott.” His acid tone could have etched the glass. He made no move to turn toward me even when I didn’t answer.

I’d forgotten—or momentarily chosen to forget—how much everyone else on the force hated Ott.

“Chances are they shared clients.” An olive branch he was offering me.

I snapped it up. “Of course! Serenity Kaetz and Brother Cyril. Either one could be Ott’s client. But why would Bryant Hemming come here? The man was just about to leave for a whole new life in Washington. He said on the news that he was flying out Sunday night. He’d barely have time to swing by here on the way to the airport. If he had one stop to make, why Herman Ott?”

“If that stop was voluntary, Smith.”

I looked back at Hemming. In death he was bearlike; he’d been a big guy, a guy in good shape. “It would have taken a sizable person to force him. Or a weapon. But that still leaves the question why here. Why would anyone abduct him and bring him to Herman Ott’s office?”

“Because, Smith,” Leonard said with the kind of sigh I’d heard him use with particularly zonked-out suspects, “Herman Ott had something on him. Ott called him here. And Ott killed him.”

I stared at Leonard. He knew the Avenue scene better than anyone. Merchants confided in him, old rads remembered him from college. He’d been on Beat 6 so long that he blended into the walls transients sat against as they begged for spare change. Leonard was honest, fair, and committed to Telegraph and making it an avenue everyone could enjoy. He was, in his way, the departmental equivalent of Ott. Maybe that was the problem. But while there was a certain respect between the two men, they didn’t like each other, and as if looking into the depths of their own souls and the secrets they’d managed to conceal, they didn’t trust each other. “Leonard, you don’t think—”

“Yeah, I think, Smith. Ott makes a big thing about his code of ethics. Gets on his high horse about not talking with us, using us, lying to us, setting us up and being so damned righteous about it he’s lucky no one’s taken
him
out in here. Well, okay, I don’t like it, but I understand it. We’ve all got codes. But you know what the other side of those codes is?”