Cop Out (7 page)

“What?”

“Prices. And we’ve all got those too.”

“Are you saying you can be bought, Leonard?”

“Oh, yeah. Just not cheap. I go for more than anyone on Telegraph or in Berkeley’s gonna pay for a beat cop pushing fifty. A lot more.”

“And me? You’re saying I’d sell out too?”

“Maybe not for money.” He turned toward me, his brown eyes sharp. “Would you sell out if it meant Howard’s life? Or for principle? Maybe that’s your Achilles’ heel, Smith. Yeah, if you sold your soul, it would be to defend a principle or a right. A small price to pay to lose your reputation if it meant preserving freedom in Berkeley, right?”

I laughed uncomfortably. “A little melodramatic, Leonard. Burning at stakes and witch dunking have been passé for centuries.”

“But you admit I’m right, Smith?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. And if I’ve got my price, and you’ve got yours, and we’ve sworn to uphold the law, of course Herman Ott has his.”

Suddenly the smell of death seemed stronger, murkier, and unavoidable. I looked past Bryant Hemming’s body into the cluttered room in which Herman Ott had lived for at least twenty years. “If Ott sold out, he’d be living better.” Before the protest was out of my mouth, I knew the answer.

“Ott wouldn’t have sold out for money. My guess is it would be for something even we wouldn’t think of. But the bottom line is it doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. Ott’s missing, and there’s a corpse in his office. Let me give you some advice, Smith. You’re a friend of Ott’s; it’s not to your credit, but there it is. If you’re any kind of friend, you’ll get him to turn himself in before the coroner’s got Hemming’s body out of here.”

I shook my head. “If I knew where Ott was, I wouldn’t be here tonight.”

Leonard shrugged.

Leonard was right: Ott needed to be found. I glanced around the office. In a couple of minutes the room would be packed and I’d be in the hall. Carefully I opened Ott’s desk drawer and, using the eraser end of a pencil, shifted the papers in there. But there was no calendar, no address book. I tried the side drawers. The top one held a copy of the California penal code. The middle one was devoted to INS regulations. The bottom file drawer must have had twenty manila folders.

“How typical of Ott!”

“What?” Leonard had opened the door a crack and appeared to be peering out; at least his nose was to the crack.

“Not one folder’s got a name. They’re all numbered.”

“Is there a master list?”

“In his head.” I lifted a file out. Inside were sheets of lined paper, filled with notes in Ott’s tiny scrawl. I flipped from page to page. “Lots of short reports. Years apart. Here’s one on the resale of stolen T-shirts from a vendor’s table on the Avenue and another on vandalism to display tables. Doesn’t look like there’s anything major, but there’s no name or address on the file.”

“Must be a regular customer.”

I nodded, replacing the file. “And Ott’d know how to reach him.”

I plucked another file. “Pot thefts.”

Leonard laughed. “Ott is hard up. Even we give marijuana low priority.”

“No, not drugs. Flowerpots. And some land of chemicals, missing along with the pots. And no name or address.”

Outside, footsteps resounded on the stairs.

Leonard moved back, opened the door. The draft wafted under Ott’s big desk and tossed an eight-by-eleven sheet, a printout of a newspaper article, onto my foot. I scanned the sheet. There was no header, nothing to suggest which newspaper had been copied.

Historical Review Subject Chosen: Famous Mine Case Disinterred. Mediation to be tried this time.

At a meeting of the Historical Society last Thursday board members J. Reynolds Remington, Martin A. Burbacher, Christian Jensen III, Devlin P. O’Malley, Dr. Thomas Ashford Everett, Eldridge Everett, Cornelius E. Whipple, and Kyle Lovington Jones reviewed the records of suitable local cases for the third annual historical review to be presented this next spring in the community meeting hall at City Hall. It was decided that the

Presumably the article continued on a following page, but that was a page I didn’t have. I bent, eyed Ott’s floor in all directions. It offered no other sheet.

“Looks like Hemming brought it himself,” I said.

But Leonard’s attention was already on the hallway.

I turned the sheet over. Blank. I read it again and wondered why the printer couldn’t have started at the top of the page so the entire article fitted on it. So much for the benefits of technology.

“Smith!”

I glanced up at Inspector Doyle, my old boss from Homicide Detail.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Smith! I guess it’s no surprise to find you here in Herman Ott’s office. So the little rat finally bought it, huh?”

“No, not Ott, Inspector. Bryant Hemming.”

“In Ott’s office? Where’s Ott?”

I shrugged. “Out. No sign of him.”

Doyle sighed. “Isn’t it just like the little rat? Leaves a corpse in his office, hightails out, and holes up. And how many man-hours’ll he eat up till we dig him out?”

“Aren’t you talking ‘scenario before evidence’ here?”

He didn’t answer, a tacit yes. “Well, Smith, you can go on back to patrol.”

That would have been the safe thing to do, the smart career move. I glanced at Ott’s desk, seeing not its clean surface but remnants of the sparrings he and I had had over the years, many I’d lost, some I’d won, but none I’d left without baring bits of Ott he wouldn’t otherwise have exposed. Encounters like Sunday afternoon’s that had bared the “thing” Ott couldn’t bring himself to reveal. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, wouldn’t—or couldn’t—return my calls, and now a man was dead in his office. I didn’t know whether my words came from outrage at Ott, or worry, or just plain foolhardiness. “Inspector, no one knows Ott as well as I do.”

“You saying you can find him, Smith?” Before I could answer, he said, “Well, then, you go ahead.”

I
GOT
I
NSPECTOR’S
D
OYLE’S
okay to get back into Ott’s office after Raksen, the ID tech, had finished. Ott had been in this office since he left college a quarter of a century ago. The walls here had to be a fingerprint archive of the Berkeley left. When he walked in here, Raksen would be in heaven. He would dust every surface; left unleashed, he would turn the office and its contents black.

But print dust was the least of Ott’s problems. I made my way out into the hallway, through a knot of off-duty officers. The garden-variety murder scene is no great draw, but one in the office of the biggest pain-in-the-ass private eye in town is box-office magic. I had just hit the street when I spotted Jason Figueroa leaping from the door of a press van. It said a lot that he had beaten print reporters, particularly the undergraduate from the
Daily Californian
who probably lived in a dorm a couple of blocks away. I moved on before Figueroa spotted me.

In an hour a medical examiner would have eye-balled Hemming and given Inspector Doyle a rough estimate of the time of death. Ott’s stuffy office, in a building in which the heat had been turned off for the summer in 1954, provided as controlled conditions you’re likely to find outside. The medical examiner would have no trouble giving us the murderer’s window of opportunity. And when he did, I needed to know if Ott had still been here in Berkeley to look through it. Or if he’d clambered into that dark sedan before then.

I needed Charles Edward Kidd to be a lot more specific than he’d been before. I headed to Ott’s car again; perhaps Kidd figured that having found him there once, I would cross it off my list. But, alas, he wasn’t that naive. I called in to the university police with a description of Kidd. The campus, with its hillocks and knolls, stream banks and undersides of bridges, its outside stairwells and protected spaces between shrubs and building walls, provided a myriad of lurking spots. I drove on around People’s Park, the focus of decades of demonstrations. It was empty now; the nocturnal curfew prevailed, and it would take a more savvy lurker than Kidd to hide in there. I tried the familiar spots, behind shops, apartments, churches. No Kidd.

I tried to see through his eyes. I think better in proximity to liquid. The shower’s best, but on the go, a latte’s a close second. I got the latte from the Med and stood outside, with the wind fingering my short hair, the fog slipping its icy mitten around my neck. Kidd was bright; he prided himself on originality. He was brash, impatient; he’d make enemies. No wonder he wasn’t in the normal hiding places. He’d already chosen one unusual sleeping spot tonight, found because of his insider knowledge of Ott. What else, where else—

I gulped another mouthful of coffee, put a lid on the latte, swung back into the car, and beelined up Telegraph to the street below Ott’s building. If you can’t drive with a full cup of hot coffee, you’ve got no business being a cop. I pulled up, took another swallow, and called the dispatcher.

“This is Adam sixteen. My ten-twenty’s Channing below Tele. I’m headed into the alley behind the Tele buildings.”

“Ten-four.”

“Ten-four.”

In the thirty yards between Telegraph and the alley I spotted two guys scrunched up in dim doorways; one who might have been eighteen looked, in sleep, as if he should have a teddy bear in the curl of his arm. By the alley a man sat against the building, a damp paper cup ever ready for spare change, his foot moving slowly to the beat of that different drummer who still tapped out the drug beat of decades gone by.

A pedestrian would have dismissed the alley altogether, assuming it was no more than a path to the garbage cans. I would have overlooked it myself if I hadn’t chased more than one suspect down its narrow path.

I pulled out my flashlight, a hefty metal cylinder fourteen inches long. At least one officer had defended himself with one—and got suspended for a month without pay for improper use of equipment.

I recalled Leonard’s assessment of the alley: “Getting through here’s like crawling through someone’s intestines.” Had he been talking sudden sharp turns or garbage? If I’d asked, the answer would have been: Both. I aimed my light down and watched for rats. And tried to close my nose against the stink of urine. Twenty feet in I passed two nameless, numberless metal doors—business back doors, sealed tightly against break-ins. The scrapes on them indicated there had been some serious tries. Rats.

Another ten feet, and the alley angled left. The corner was thick with garbage, a compost of garlic, tomato sauce, and urine. A dash of stomach acid, and it could indeed have been an intestine.

The alley turned again, revealing a third metal door with a yellow sign above it, and once more till it ended abruptly at a brick wall. Instinctively I stepped back and flashed the light down. The stench here was less intense, the garbage had been swept away, and huddled in the corner of this poor man’s cul-de-sac was Charles Edward Kidd.

He looked up, his face knotted in annoyance. Not anger, or the fear we often see, but the look of a smart guy who’s lost a game he thought he’d won.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, brushing off his serape as he eased to his feet. “How’d you find me?”

I looked up at the windows two floors above us. “I’ve been in Ott’s office too.” But if I hadn’t been a police officer, I’d never have bothered looking out Ott’s dirt-mottled windows. I had, of course, and noted that the hole outside appeared to be an air shaft. Kidd had gone to some effort to discover otherwise. A good little observer, he.

“I need to talk to you.” I added, “I’ll take you to the station.” His step was jauntier than mine as I followed him out of the alley. He didn’t mind sleeping in garbage, he seemed to be saying. But
I
minded for him. I cringed at the thought of his taking this misstep into the quicksand of street life, so easy to sink into, so very hard to yank himself out of. I knew the odds, but still, I didn’t want to believe that the open road led to this.

The first thing Kidd spotted in the squad room was the box of bagels left over from a class. “Those bagels over there…bribe me.”

“I’m hoping you’ll give me more information than a stale bagel will buy. But help yourself.”

I seated him by the table where he would see officers rushing through, hear the copy machine’s hum, smell the coffee brewing—the reminders of the normal life that could once again be his. I had run Kidd’s name and birth date through files earlier and been surprised to find no mention of him. Very surprised. Now I poured a cup of coffee for him and one for myself and sat around the end of the table with him. “You saw Herman Ott getting into a dark car last night. What time was that?”

“Almost dusk.” He opened his mouth like a baby bird and stuffed a prodigious portion of bagel inside.

Almost
dusk? Was that different from the
dusk
he’d indicated earlier? “But at what time?”

He shook his head in answer to my question.

“Think. What time?”

Still chewing, he pointed to his empty wrist. Finally he swallowed and said, “I don’t do hours and minutes.”

I gave up. “Well, we’ll start from go, then. I know you want to help Herman Ott. Maybe you know more than you realize. How long were you working for him?”

He sipped at the weak coffee, scowled, and put the cup down. It made me think better of him. Hands still clasped on the cup like a crystal ball, he said, “ ’Bout three weeks with Herman. But it was hardly full-time. He’d spot me on the street and say there was some errand he wanted me to run.”

“Where did he send you?”

“Out for food. To pick up the
Daily Cat
, and the
Express
, and once
The New York Times
. The post office a buncha times. Sounds like nothing, but lemme tell you, you can kill a lot of time in line in the PO. It’s not like they put on an extra clerk if it’s busy.”

“Did you notice the names on Ott’s letters or packages?”

“Computer companies mostly. Herman’s thinking of going on-line. He’s not a man to go into a venture unprepared. When those catalogs start coming in, he’ll have to move out his desk to make room.”