Cop Out

by Susan Dunlap

  He was still standing over me fear-stiff. I longed to pull him down to me, to hold him so tight there was no room between us for emptiness or terror. To make the problem go away.

  But the problem was me.

  I struggled to sound uncompromising, to keep my voice from breaking. “Howard, stay out of it. There’s enough swirling around me; I can’t deal with dragging you into it too.”

  “No choice.” He eased down next to me. “Jill, you’ve got to—”

  “I’ve got to find Ott. And that probably means tracking down Brother Cyril and maybe Bryant Hemming’s killer.”

  “Jesus, have you heard anything I said? Hunt the killer, and you’re going to be tramping on toes. The toes of everyone in the department, if there are any you haven’t already trampled.”

  On the table the peanuty smell of satay mocked us, too sweet, too oily. Howard spooned rice onto plates, satay over the top. It was cold, of course, the way the room was cold, the way I was cold, down to my marrow. I longed to shift a couple of inches closer to Howard and feel his warmth, but I couldn’t move.

  He waited another moment, shook his head slowly, and forked a shrimp. “So, Jill, you’ve got the word out on the Avenue?” It was the kind of question, shoptalk, that had gotten us through tension and crisis year after year. No one dived into a case like Howard, tossing out strategies, catching twists, loving the game of it. The question was one he would have asked anytime, but now there was no life to it, as if he had been called into a game he knew was already lost.

  But I grabbed it. “Hardly. If Ott’s hiding out, no one’s going to convince him he would be better off in a cell. If he’s shackled and chained, it’s not like I’m offering a reward.” I fingered my chopsticks. “And if he shot Bryant—right, I can’t rule out the possibility—it’s the same difference. No one’s going to lead me to Ott. I’m going to have to figure him out like an acrostic puzzle and just hope I don’t have to substitute every letter in the alphabet before I find the answer.”

  Howard trapped a pile of rice between his chopsticks. “I’ve given this a bit of thought.” He lifted the sauce-coated mass to his mouth and chewed. “Why were you at Ott’s office today? It’s not on your beat. So why were you there to find Hemming’s body at all?”

  “Because,” I said, “Kidd was sleeping in Ott’s Studebaker.”

  “And why did you discover him? I’m ignoring the fact that you skirted your superior officer to do it,” he said, brushing off what would normally have been a serious issue between us.

  “I checked the car because Ott hadn’t called me back Sunday afternoon, like he swore he would—”

  “—when he called you to his command performance Sunday afternoon. So, what did he want then?”

  Slowly I bit down on a prawn, through the taut skin into the yielding, defenseless flesh. I was remembering that brief, infuriating confrontation with Ott Sunday afternoon. “No clue. He told me zip. Only thing I can be sure of is he was on to—or after—something important enough that he was willing to bargain with me.”

  “But between the time Ott called you and you got to him, something happened to make him decide—”

  “—he could do without me.” I plucked another prawn from the sauce and poised it an inch from my mouth. “It wasn’t that he was threatened; then he wouldn’t have shown up at all. But he was there, on time, in costume. He wasn’t going to give, but—”

  “Yeah, Jill, he wasn’t burning his bridge with you either. In case he needed to make use of you later.”

  “So graciously put. Ott wasn’t swept into someone else’s game; he was on to something. A lead. Something so explosive he didn’t need me. What, dammit?”

  We both continued to eat, pretending to ignore the wall of difference that pushed between us like an overbearing guest. We took swallows of beer. Howard moved the serving bowls to the floor, slid his white-socked feet on the coffee table like two great sails on an outrigger canoe, and said, “Let’s try a different angle—Hemming himself. You always like this one, Jill: What did the man do to bring this heinous crime upon himself?”

  I forced a tepid smile. Howard did know me. I acknowledged random shootings, houses broken into for no better reason than beer, coke, or dare, but with each case the stupidity struck me afresh. I clutched to the tenet of cause and effect, as if each victory over chaos was an affirmation that life was ultimately controllable. As if a woman whose husband had meticulously planned her shooting were less dead than if she’d been hit by a ricochet. It almost pleased me to find the victim had taunted, slighted, cheated her eventual killer, that all the strands curled back into the center of the ball. “What,” I mused, “was so vital to Hemming that he would stop at Ott’s office on his way to the airport? To see Ott, he’d have been assuming. What was there that Ott had discovered or Hemming thought Ott had discovered or might be on the way to discovering?” Our plates empty, we just sat.

  It was Howard who said, “Hemming’s a big event guy. Do you remember what bounced him into mediating big time to begin with?”

  I shook my head.

  “The post office! Hemming’s in the main branch. He takes a number; he’s standing against the wall, balancing a boxed urn on its way to Pacific Beach. He’s worrying if he’ll get to the window before his meter expires when all of a sudden the clerk calls number seventy-seven and Harold Mackey walks up to the window with a ticking package he says is a bomb. Bryant drops the urn, and while everyone’s staring openmouthed, he asks Mackey what he wants, like it’s an everyday question. Mackey, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, hasn’t thought that far. He’s pissed; what he wants is trouble. It may be a bomb that’s ticking. There’s no time for negotiating back and forth. Bryant gets the postmaster down and says to Mackey, ‘You’re the guy who pays the postage, and you want to be treated with respect, right? With all these people in line here the postal service can hire an extra clerk to staff the window; if they keep you waiting, they can pay your parking ticket.’ Then he eyes the postmaster. What’s the guy to do in the face of a bomb and a roomful of citizens, all in Mackey’s corner?”

  “Surely that deal didn’t hold?”

  “Not the parking tickets. They’d have to charge a buck a stamp to cover that. But they did add an extra clerk. Harold Mackey gave up his package, which turned out to be a real bomb. One of the postal customers was a newspaper columnist. Next edition Bryant Hemming’s front-page news. A month later he’s on A Fair Deal.”

  I nodded, a silent “That’s nice.”

  “Bryant’s first three mediations on A Fair Deal were bombs—no pun intended. But that didn’t matter. The post office triumph gave him time to get the game right. So now Bryant’s heading to the big show in Washington, where the stakes are huge and the pitfalls bottomless. He needs to come riding in off a triumph.”

  I nodded again, a silent “aha!”

  “So the Serenity Kaetz-Brother Cyril deal was vital to Hemming.”

  “And the reason the deal worked at all,” I said slowly, “was that Brother Cyril caved in.”

  “And how did ol’ Bryant convince the godly brother to turn the other cheek? We talking threat or bribe?”

  “And if we’ve figured this out, of course Ott did too. Of course Bryant would be panicked that Ott would go public. Of course he wouldn’t dare ignore a summons supposedly from Ott no matter how inconvenient.”

  I called Jackson’s beeper, waited for him to get back to me, and relayed Howard’s theory. I don’t know where Jackson was calling from, but it was a place he didn’t mind laughing in. “That’s one fast blessing for the money, Smith.”

  Howard was already upstairs when I got off the phone. The shoptalk was done, and the chasm still hung between us. Taking a step into its bottomless black terrified Howard even more than it did me, but he didn’t have the generations of avoidance techniques that my family had provided. I could dally a few minutes and he’d be asleep or at least in bed with his eyes shut. I took my time tossing out the satay
cartons and washing the few plates—a mere shrug to my family’s tradition of scouring pots, scalding china, and polishing silver in a crisis—before I went upstairs, but when I opened the door, Howard was sitting against the headboard. “I’ll tell you the oddest thing I came across today,” I said before he could speak. “Break-in at a self-storage locker right under ACC’s unit. Renter’s Margo Roehner.” Hoping for a sign of recognition, I glanced at Howard. But I would have been surprised—amazed—if she’d been known to a former Vice and Substance Abuse detective. “She’s got this locker filled with medical records and files and stuff even the thief wouldn’t touch. And in the back of the locker, what do I find? A backed poster of a flashing pig.”

  “Flashing, naked?”

  “Raincoat open.”

  “Takes all kinds.” He was warming to this safe topic.

  “This kind—Margo Roehner—is on the board of ACC.”

  I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. When I emerged, he was lying on his side, and I couldn’t decipher his expression. As I slipped between the sheets, I said, “Bryant Hemming’s ex-wife, Daisy Culligan, delivers dinners—”

  Howard muttered something. Then he pulled me to him with a desperation of love and fear and helplessness. I clutched him, squeezing him so tightly I could feel each of his ribs, pressing our mouths together until the passion wiped out grief and hope and thought.

  We didn’t speak again. It wasn’t till he was gone the next morning that I remembered those mutterings and realized he had said, “Maybe the pig poster was Daisy’s.”

  CHAPTER 21

  I WOKE UP BEFORE the alarm. It had been one of those nights when I slept like a stone and woke exhausted, as if my inert body had been the gridiron for the Super Bowl. The room was the disheartening fog gray that masks the dawn in Berkeley. Something had happened, something deep-gut bad, but I was still too close to sleep to translate that feeling into language. I nestled against Howard. Automatically he cupped himself around me. I felt the comfortingly familiar ridges of his ribs and hipbones, the warmth of his flesh; I let my eyes shut against the day and curled myself into the sweet sanctuary.

  He had the day off, and when the alarm rang, I caught it mid-ring and in fifteen minutes I was in my car on my way to the Y. It wasn’t till I was sitting in the sauna, post-swim, an hour later that I recalled the last thing Howard had said the night before: “Maybe the pig poster was Daisy’s.” Not “Culligan’s.” “Daisy’s.” So, he knew Daisy Culligan. Or at least he knew of her.

  Professionally?

  In Vice and Substance Abuse Detail?

  Daisy with a stash wasn’t hard to imagine, even doing a line of coke, though it seemed beyond her budget. But if she came to Howard’s attention for narcotics, she would have been on the departmental files. Her only listed contact with the department was as a witness to a doctor’s tirade when he discovered his car surrounded by a castle wall of cement blocks. The caller, whose driveway he had parked across, returned to find him strewing blocks as far as a tiny ophthalmologist can toss.

  As I recalled that, I smiled. The story had made the papers. The doctor demanded we arrest the woman, insisted her alibi—she was in traffic court—was faked, and ended up with orders to stack his blocks neatly on the curb and a ticket for blocking her driveway.

  The only odd thing about it, which I had overlooked at the time, was the presence of Daisy Culligan.

  I wouldn’t bet my life on why Howard was familiar with her. But wager a month’s salary? Easy.

  I dressed in record time—green turtleneck and slacks, gray tweed jacket—and called Howard on my cell phone before I realized our home phone would still be turned off. I could have driven back to the house, but I was in front of the station, and there was an empty parking spot. I pulled in, telling myself that it was a sign, that I could call Howard later, that he’d stayed up late for me and needed to sleep. I didn’t admit that seeing him face-to-face would force both of us to bring up last night or pointedly to ignore it. Besides, I didn’t need Howard to enlighten me about Daisy Culligan; she could do that herself.

  From the station I dialed Daisy.

  “Dining with Daisy! I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you’ll—”

  “Call Officer Jill Smith.” I left my number. No explanation. I was more likely to get answers from her face than her words. I needed surprise on my side.

  I checked my mail slot and voice mail, vainly hoping for word from Laura Goldman in Pittsburgh. For the hell of it, I dialed Ott’s number.

  “Ott. Go ’head.” None of this “So sorry to have missed your call” for Ott.

  I didn’t leave a message. Even if Ott had wandered in from the dead or the lam and picked up the phone, he of course wouldn’t have given me any answers.

  So, who would?

  Before I could tackle that question, my pager went off. I picked up the phone and dialed Pittsburgh.

  “Goldman?”

  “You miss me, Smith?”

  “You bet. What’ve you got?”

  “On your Ott?”

  “Right.”

  “You said he’s a counterculture guy? A denizen of a scabrous dwelling? A defender of the underdog? A termite-infested pillar of antiestablishment?”

  “Right, Goldman. Ott’s so antiestablishment I’m surprised he accepts payment in American money, even when it’s offered, which isn’t often. His clothes come only from secondhand stores. He buys day-old doughnuts on Fridays and eats from the box all week.”

  A fuzzy sound came from the phone.

  “Goldman?”

  She was laughing.

  “Goldman!”

  “Well, Smith, like I told you, your Ott vanished after he graduated from high school. I still don’t know why. Officially no one does. And, Smith, no one but Esther Jakobs’s granddaughter would have been able to get Sister Joseph Martha, formerly Mary Martha Macray of the Herman housemaid corps, to admit what she heard from her niece, who took her place in the Herman household thirty years ago. My grandmother was her best friend. Nana started there as a young girl right off the boat. It was a scandalous thing for a proper Jewish girl to do, living in the house of Gentiles, but that’s another story. I’ll tell you about her someday.

  “Anyway, here’s what Sister Joseph Martha’s niece heard. The Hermans and the Otts were both very controlled families. Voices were never raised. Nana said for years she assumed that WASP vocal cords had atrophied over the centuries and just didn’t have the range of normal people’s. But this one day something threw your Ott’s family into a fury. Your Ott—Alexander—and his father screamed at each other. Blows were exchanged. It ended with Alexander shouting that he would never set eyes on his father again. In fact he couldn’t stand being in the same country, on the same continent with his father. He stormed out of the house, took nothing with him, and had the chauffeur drive him to the airport. He was last seen at the Iberia Airlines counter.”

  A righteously angry young Herman Ott stomping off to Spain? I could picture that. A quarter of a century ago escape to Europe would have fitted a young radical. Still, something wasn’t right.

  It sounded as if Goldman were smothering a chuckle.

  “Iberia Airlines? Goldman, did they fly out of Pittsburgh that long ago?”

  “Nope.” She hooted. “Your Ott was a real silver-spoon radical. He stomped out of the mansion and had the chauffeur drive him to the Iberia gate—at Kennedy!”

  I howled. I could hardly wait to tell Howard. In fact the only person who wouldn’t be amused by this story would be Herman Ott. Clearly he’d never possessed a sense of humor. When I got myself under control, I said, “Do you have any idea what caused the fight?”

  “None. But I’m on it, Smith. When I know, you’ll know.”

  “Thanks.” After I’d hung up, I was left wondering if I had anything more valuable than an amusing anecdote. If Ott had friends in Spain, or Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, or Copenhagen, what did that tell me? It only made the
net I’d need larger. It told me nothing new about him now. Certainly it shed no light on where Ott might be. He had been gone too long. All my moves were into dead ends. I needed to uncover an entirely new route.

  I left a message for Jackson: “Anything on Cyril? Call me with anything.”

  Then I headed to Ott’s office. It would amuse him to skirt us and hide out there.

  It wasn’t till I was pulling up outside on Telegraph that it struck me that it might amuse the killer to deposit another body in Ott’s office. Ott’s.

  CHAPTER 22

  TELEGRAPH AVENUE AT 9:00 A.M. on Wednesday was the asphalt and storefront equivalent of the morning after. The pizza plates and bagel bags that ricocheted from curb to curb in the night lay in soggy heaps where puddles ambushed them. Crushed paper bags and abandoned bottles marked dress shop portals; snowy hillocks of paper napkins stood firm by the doors of restaurants serving samosas, lamb kabobs, and vegetable mu shu. Those doors wouldn’t be open for nearly two hours. And it would be nearly that long before the sidewalk vendors began setting up. Craftspeople don’t choose their trade because they’re enamored of the nine to five.

  Nothing had changed in Ott’s office: no bodies live or dead. I circled Telegraph and environs once, keeping an eye out for Ott’s cronies, but the truth was I had been everywhere, talked to everyone who could connect me with him. I wasn’t going to find him by charging straight on this way. I wasn’t going to find him unless I figured out who had lured him out of his office; that meant tracking down who had killed Bryant Hemming there. Or, as Howard would put it, by stepping on toes.

  Serenity Kaetz’s address was up nearly to Grizzly Peak Boulevard at the crest of the Berkeley Hills. Real estate values elevate with the land. But there are enough building eccentricities in Berkeley that Serenity Kaetz’s address didn’t surprise me. She might be renting a tiny room in a 1920s stone and stucco mansion, much like Daisy Culligan. She could be staying in a cliff-hanger whose pylons hadn’t been driven deeply enough into the steep ground to reach bedrock, renting cheaply from the owners unable to face the unpalatable alternatives of living there: death or financial destruction. Serenity might own a pastel stucco box that sat above its element. She could have bought a wooden craftsman’s bungalow twenty years ago, before property costs rose higher than the hills themselves. Or she could be hanging out in a tree.