Cop Out (12 page)

Herman Ott, the equal opportunity irritant. It amused me that he’d infuriated Macalester as much as he had any cop. But finding him was like hunting for a skunk; no one cared where he went, just that he went, “You know Ott, right? Then you know he wouldn’t politely accept refusal and walk away. Is there anyone else he’d have asked?”

“Friends, you mean? Bryant was too busy for a social life.”

“Any business associates?”

“Me.”

“Could Ott have gotten in here without you knowing?”

His mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

Touché. “But signs? Things out of place?”

“No.”

“Is there anywhere else he would have checked?”

“Bryant’s apartment maybe. He could have tried the storage locker, but he’d only have found junk and not much of that.”

“Where is the unit?”

“Storit Urself, down on—”

“I know the place.”

“Yeah, it’s good. The third-floor units are like cheap—very cheap—apartments, no outside door, so spur-of-the-moment thieves don’t notice they’re there.”

“What”—I was holding my breath—“is the unit number?” And I nearly whistled when he said, “Three-oh-seven.”

I had been standing right beneath 307 this afternoon. Margo Roehner’s locker was 207.

C
OINCIDENCES HAPPEN, BUT THEY’RE
not highly thought of in police work.

I headed up the station stairs, through the squad room—almost empty at this time of night—through the old records room to the inspector’s office. During the day his clerk guarded Doyle’s peace of mind the way Raksen did his crime scenes. But now I strolled through the empty outer office and tapped on his glass right above the
INSPECTOR FRANCIS DOYLE
sign.

Doyle wasn’t asleep; he just looked that way, head back on the headrest of the faux leather director’s chair Mrs. Doyle had given him in celebration of his fifth cancer-free year. For her that milestone had been the day the lights came back on. He, a pessimist in the finest Hibernian tradition, had looked me in the eye and said, “You think those cells wear calendar watches?” He hadn’t said that to her, though, or that the expensive chair embarrassed him. That day was the first time he had said the word
cancer
aloud.

As he recognized me now, his blue eyes widened momentarily in anticipation, then narrowed as if to block the disappointment before he could see it. “So, Smith, you nosed out Ott?”

“If he were that easy to find, he’d have been dead years ago.” I perched on the edge of a padded metal chair and rested an arm on his desk, careful to avoid the three ceramic rhinoceroses that’d made it to this side of his IN box.

When the inspector was hospitalized, it was rumored he liked rhinos. In lieu of yet more flowers or the no longer acceptable candy, relieved visitors arrived with rhinos. Now the herd in Doyle’s office outnumbered those in most African countries. It covered the top of his metal bookcase, spread onto his windowsill, trailed across the ledge of his interior windows, and, when not carefully supervised, made beachheads on his desk. I never did discover whether the original rumor was true.

I plucked a blue rhino off IN box patrol and massaged its midsection as I relayed Ott’s interest in the mysterious Bill Lewin and Daisy Culligan’s pronouncement about Ott’s investigating Bryant. “Roger Macalester confirmed it, grudgingly. But Daisy was too caught up in pique and Roger in principle to find out why.”

“Berkeley,” Doyle muttered.

“But here’s the interesting thing. Bryant Hemming’s organization ACC has a storage locker right above Margo Roehner’s, and Roehner’s was burglarized today. And, Inspector, Roehner is on the ACC board.”

“The reward she gets for service, huh? We’ll”—he glanced at a list on the desk—“
I
’ll get to her.”

“Any word from the ME’s office? Time of death?”

He emitted something between a hoot and a laugh. “Sunday night, after he left the television studio, before you found him.”

“Bullet?”

“Nine-millimeter.”

“What about Ott’s office? What did the search turn up?”

“You’ve seen that rat’s nest.” He shook his head, sending carroty strands onto his forehead. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the man could have a litter of piglets living in there, and no one’d notice. I’m surprised the place doesn’t smell.”

I laughed. “Maybe it’s anaerobic. What about the neighbors in Ott’s building? They must have heard the shot.”

“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Anywhere other than Telegraph, any place but that catchall building Ott’s in. First two families didn’t speak English, and we had to wake up Clifton to figure out what language they were speaking. We’ve got a Hmong interpreter scheduled for the morning. Next batch of tenants was so busy flushing we were on the verge of going for a warrant. When they said they didn’t see anyone odd in the halls, they’re probably telling the truth;
they
probably haven’t seen
anything
for months. And God knows what would be odd to them. Other units appeared to be empty. Maybe some of those offices really are used just for business again. Anyway, Smith, the upshot is that we know not a da—blessed thing.”

“What about his files? Not the ones with no names in his desk, the records in the file cabinets—”

“All six of those manila folders? The rest of the file drawers are crammed with books. Taxes, penal codes. Guy’s got a whole room of bookcases, you’d think—”

“Those six files, did they—”

“Code.”

“What?”

“They’re all in some kind of code. Gibberish. I know you like Ott, and I don’t think the better of you for it, but he’s got to be fodder for the bin. Code! You know it’s not like he’s got a computer in that rat’s nest of his to do the encoding. He had to do it by hand, letter by letter. Has the man nothing at all to do with his time?”

I’d wondered what Ott’s hobbies were. I’d wondered what had moved him to look into computers. “There’s got to be a key.”

“Well, he’s your friend. Maybe you can find out. I suppose we could send the files to the feds for decoding, but Smith, you know it’s only going to make us a laughingstock.”

“Give me a couple days to find Ott—”

“A couple days! Tight as manpower is, if you don’t have Ott in here by this time tomorrow, you’ll be back on patrol.”

“Tracking down Ott in Berkeley is like playing against the game master. One day isn’t—”

“Out of my hands, Smith.”

There are two times to keep your mouth shut, the old joke goes: when you’re angry and when you’re swimming. And there’s a third: when you’re facing a done deal. I got Doyle’s okay to check out Ott’s office and left. Another time I might have stopped to change out of my clunky uniform. Now I paused only long enough to call Howard at home and say I’d be late, real late. I didn’t have time to tell him more. I was racing not only against the murder case clock that ticks away the value of evidence and heat of leads but against the threat of the FBI. Ott had cooperated with me on a number of cases. I had given him slack. I’d taken chances for him. I had kept secrets for him, the kinds of secrets an FBI operative would never understand.

Ott knew how to cover his ass. It would be like him to document my cooperation in the files he was sure were safe. If I planned to survive in the department, and have Ott survive, I needed to find him, and fast.

C
ARY
K
OVACH WAS ALONE
, guarding the scene, at Ott’s office. The rest of the building’s units were dark. Here a dead body was clearly nothing to lose sleep over. From the look of Kovach, slouched on a hard chair, he felt the same. But he could hardly complain. He was warm, indoors, and on dog watch losing sleep was his job.

“I’m Smith, here to check out the scene.”

He wriggled to straighten his ursine form in the chair. Like all of Ott’s furniture, it looked inadequate to its task. “Inspector had five guys going over the place. Plus Raksen. Raksen got called to another scene or he’d still be here.”

“He’d be here till the Second Coming if he could.”

Kovach grinned. “Yeah, I got that feeling. Anyway, if there’s anything left, you’re welcome to it.”

“Thanks,” I said with a sarcastic laugh, and started past him.

“Smith?”

“Yes?”

“You okay here alone for five minutes?”

I patted my holster. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

Kovach pushed himself up.

Guarding the scene and surveillance: They’ve got the same drawback. “Use the John at the university, Kovach; it’ll be worth the extra ten minutes. I speak from experience.” When you’re on patrol for eight to ten hours, bathrooms are a big issue. Clean is good, and ones where you won’t be caught with your pants down (and your gun belt hanging out of reach on the door) are better. The hospitals, the UC patrol station are the best. A minute or two of banter with the UC guys would break up Kovach’s long, isolated night.

Ott’s rooms had been aired while the crime scene team picked and packed, and the smell of death clung only in cracks and corners. I closed and locked the door, and the little breeze treated me to a whiff of urine and decay.

As Kovach intimated, anything worth finding in Ott’s office would already be gone. The files I had noted earlier—the flowerpot case in the folders with no name, for one—was at the station with Ott’s coded case notes. I made fast work of the desk and file drawers, looked under and around the furniture. I’d been here often enough, perched on that desk to demand, to goad, to beg, that anything out of the ordinary now would have struck me. It didn’t. I moved on to the bedroom.

In crime scenes, housekeeping standards are rarely improved by police searches. Herman Ott’s bedroom was the exception. The room normally looked as if it had just been tossed; now it merely might have been the apartment of someone about to slap town. No longer was the floor awash with homogeneous clutter; when planning to cross to the window now, I didn’t think of it as fording. Ott’s belongings now were in individual piles: bedclothes here, clothing there, newspapers by the outside wall, magazines piled precariously against the hall door, miscellaneous items in a cardboard box next to his chair.

Never before had I seen his once-overstuffed chair uncovered. It was akin to running across an aging floozy the morning after, when her eyes were puffy, her corset discarded, her skin sagging in unseemly places, and her sunflower print bathrobe threadbare and with two springs poking out. When Daisy Culligan admitted she’d slept with Ott, I’d wondered why. Now my question was how. Or more to the point, where?

Gingerly I sat on the edge of the chair and surveyed Ott’s jutting bookcase. Shelves of political periodicals, books on Berkeley, a few volumes on organic farming, and two on pesticides. Had Ott nurtured a secret garden? Perhaps the crop of choice in Northern California? I brushed that thought away. A plot of marijuana was far too dangerous for a man in his position, particularly when supply was so easy to come by. Perhaps he’d been one of the flower growers in the fleeting era when locals tried to cultivate People’s Park. But I couldn’t picture Herman Ott with a spade in hand. He was hardly an early bird. Or a bird of the wild. No, Herman Ott was meant to perch right in here and merely look awry at the methods of California’s biggest industry, agriculture. The one time I had shown up here with an apple, Ott had sneered: “We’re so cocky insisting on toxic standards for our fruit and vegetables. And then come winter, what do we think we’re eating? Artichokes from Argentina, peaches from Peru, and who knows what from Mexico, where they dump their shit in the rivers.”

I had of course responded by biting into the apple, but it wasn’t the tastiest snack I’d ever had.

On the bottom shelf, under what looked to be another haphazard pile of newspapers, I found the last thing I would have expected, a sturdy gift box from Wanamaker’s department store. Wanamaker’s? Those stores had been only on the East Coast, and they’d been closed for years. Not that Ott was one to throw out a box merely for age.

The box was ordinary compared with what was inside. It held a small picture album—one shot per page, black paper, corner keepers for the black-and-white photos. An album of pictures a mother culled from the family book, made especially for a child.

It had never occurred to me that Ott had a mother. It was hard to imagine him ever having lived with a family or in anything other than these two rooms. At best I could see him sitting by an inadequate hearth, reading the picture book version of
Political Injustice for the Young Reader
.

The album held twenty pages, two sides each, but there were only three pictures. There were holders for others, holders as crisp and unmarred as the day they had been pasted in. Ott must have pulled the photos out. A wave of sadness came over me, not so much for the memories torn out of his life as for those he couldn’t bring himself to part with. So easy to destroy in fury, but to halt angry hands before the righteous pleasure of shredding, to wall off part of your heart from your principles…And then to sit in this shabby room, not moving lest the chair springs poke into your butt, and break into that wall for just a peek…

Just a peek, because if you open too big a hole, your whole heart will fall out…and the world will tramp on it. I turned away as if I’d come in on him naked.

The first shot, on the first page, was of a plain blond woman of about twenty, in a skirted bathing suit, sitting next to a hamper under a beach umbrella. It could have been taken on any East Coast beach to which families carted more than their ancestors had loaded on to the
Niña
,
Pinta
, or
Santa María
. Ott’s mother, I had to guess. It pleased me that she wasn’t a pretty woman, one who would have been distressed at the sight of the round, sallow child Ott must have been.

I turned the page, and then about ten more to get to a shot of what must have been Ott’s extended family. Blonds of all ages. It took me several minutes squinting over the picture to find Ott himself. I checked all the other boys twice again before admitting that the eight-year-old on the left had to be Herman. If so, Mrs. Ott could have been beautiful and things would have been all right. The boy with Ott’s eyes, and that familiar little smirk on his lips, was a knockout. Eyes that I had seen only narrowed in anger were open wide in pleasure. A smile stretched his mouth wider than I could have imagined it going. His hair had been full and wavy and glowed in the sun like white gold. And most surprising, he had his arms around the shoulders of the two children next to him, and theirs encircled his back.