Cop Out (24 page)

“Daisy,” I said, counting on the seduction of communal speculation, “think about Bryant. Suddenly he’s forced to face those pesky financial problems he’d pushed out of his mind. Suddenly he finds himself sitting in his nice new Jeep, in his new clothes, planning to go to his new important job, and here’s this nuisance of a financial problem getting enough attention that he can’t go on telling himself that no one will notice. He’s got to deal with it. Either he has to get money to pay back ACC…” I dangled the implicit question before her.

She stood. “Look, I’ve really got to go.”

“Of course,” I said. “I don’t want to keep you if you’re uncomfortable.”

“No, no, it’s not that,” she said so awkwardly that she might have had a flashing
L
for “liar” on her forehead. She shot a glance behind her at the courtyard and then back at me. “Bryant couldn’t have gotten a loan; he was maxed out with the Jeep and all.”

I nodded thanks. It wasn’t sharing the kind of purple secret that cements a female friendship, merely a pale pink offering, but it made me feel better about my place in town, about Daisy. And it was one of those pieces that lock together two big clusters of the puzzle.

Bryant could hardly borrow the money to pay back ACC, not without spotlighting his financial shenanigans there. So faced with that conundrum, what would he do? What he always did, create a diversion, the Big Mediation. For that he needed to bribe Cyril. But bribes take money. Money was the thing he didn’t have. If he’d had money, he wouldn’t have needed to bribe Cyril.

I chewed the last bite of scone. Maybe Bryant promised Cyril. Promised and didn’t follow through. Maybe then Cyril moved Bryant to the Promised Land.

But why in Ott’s office? And was the bribe, or the pyramid, the reason that Ott was investigating Bryant?

I walked to my car and moved it across the street to the Claremont and headed into the lobby.

T
HE LOBBY OF THE
Claremont Hotel is one of those areas more akin to a beautifully landscaped freeway than a room. Visitors in suits, jeans, dashikis stride purposefully toward waiting limos, passing turbaned guests heading for the decks and views of the gardens, tennis courts, and San Francisco Bay or sweatsuited guests rushing to the spa. The registration area seems no more than a little-used rest stop along the lush freeway, one that the Jaguars and Lexuses would speed by before they realized it. I glanced at the four-foot sprays of flowers, the sumptuous chairs. In this freeway Ott would be the broken-down jalopy spewing steam in the break-down lane.

Was I crazy to think of Ott staying here?

I checked the Claremont register. Ott wouldn’t use his own name, of course, but he was an arrogant man, and it would amuse him to register as Andre Lamb, or N. der Cover.

I described Ott to the manager. In the dark suit he had been wearing Sunday, Ott would stand out here among the trendy business travelers and the healthy spa crowd. Had the hotel been in another city, the staff would have recalled Ott with disdain. In the dining room he would have resembled a small-town cousin exiled by his hosts to a hotel. But here he could as easily have been a Cal professor, a rich ex-hippie costumed for a lark, any of half the guys in town thumbing their noses at the thought of a dress code.

Neither the manager nor the dining room staff recalled Ott. Maybe I had been wrong about him. Maybe the Alexander Herman Ott who had had his chauffeur drive him to the airport in New York would fit right into the gracious life at the Claremont.

Or maybe he had holed up and lived on room service, the gracious equivalent of his habitual hot plate meals in his office. For one dinner he’d be paying what he spent on a week of hot plate specials. And how would he deal with the room service waiters? In egalitarian Berkeley people do have house cleaners. Here the problem is not overlooking Social Security payments; it’s admitting you have a servant, not that that term is used, ever, for any service. The best of people are torn between being bourgeois or dirty. And to have a waiter bring food to your bedroom, put down the flower-decorated tray, and ceremoniously lift the lid from the entrée…I’d have given a lot to see Ott’s reaction. “Do you have a guest who holed up in his room for days?”

“Officer, we don’t monitor our guests’ behavior.”

“Could you check the room service orders?”

“For every single guest!”

“Did any of the waiters report odd behavior—”

“Officer, please. The staff here is used to odd behavior. Our room service waiters have delivered to nudity, orgy, and regurgitation.”

I glanced around the lobby at a pair of tanned tennis players, a couple of tan-suited M.B.A.’s, a sprinkling of disheartened tourists in sweaters over summer dresses. To the clerk I said, “Keep an eye out. My guy is short, sallow, middle-aged, and may be wearing the kind of black suit an undertaker would use only for burial. He’s—”

“Black suit?”

“Right,” I said, drawn by his sudden attention. “He’ll seem uncomfortable here, definitely out of place. He’s got”—I raked my memory for any accoutrement Ott might have, nothing I knew of had been missing from his office—“well, he had a small silvery pin, about an inch high, a cross that comes to a point at the bottom.”

“Like a sword? The cross, it’s like a sword?” he asked excitedly.

“Right. Is he here?”

“You mean Reverend Ballinger?”

I was nearly holding my breath. “Does the reverend fit the description?”

“To a T. Or make that a cross.”

“Is he alone?”

“He booked a single, but he has had company.” He leaned toward me, then seemed to reconsider the indiscretion about to escape his lips.

“A lot of company?” I offered. “Young, rough-looking men?”

He nodded.

“His room number?”

Again he hesitated.

I lowered my voice. “You know I’m going to get it. Save me time, huh?”

“Two forty-nine.”

“Don’t warn him.”

He looked abashed, but not as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

“What do these rooms go for?” I asked almost as an afterthought.

“Hundred sixty-five for the hill view, hundred ninety-five with view of the Bay.”

“Does that include use of the spa?”

“Oh, no, those services are extra. But the reverend does have access to the fitness center and our two Olympic-size pools.”

“And room two forty-nine? Is that a hill or Bay view room?”

“Hill.”

At least he’d shown some economy.

I took the stairs, rounded the corner, and stopped by those room number arrows that always take twice as long as you expect to decipher. Two forty-nine was at the end of the corridor.

From beside the door I knocked. Surely Ott wouldn’t run his normal door-answering routine here, making me pound and holler till the neighbors noticed. I knocked again, but what greeted me was the familiar Ottian silence.

I knocked a third time. “Housekeeping.” Ott, friend of the proletariat, would think twice before inconveniencing the maid.

Or so I thought.

“Please. Housekeeping,” I squeaked. I had honed a certain skill at accents in my years of dealing with Ott. “Please, I will be in trouble.…Big trouble,” I added. Olympian trouble, I could have said for all the difference it would have made to him.

Maybe Ott was out. Out to skulk in his normal terrain. I pounded a fourth time and waited. Perhaps he was sprawled on a better chair than he was used to in this room far above his element, looking out at the magnificent view of the East Bay hills. But where would he even get the money? Inherited from the mother whose funeral he boycotted? Or…

There were too many ors and question marks. I opted for a note on hotel paper.

It wasn’t till I bent down to slide it under the door that I noticed the smell coming from inside the room.

T
HE HOTEL WOULD SEND
a senior staff member right up with a key to the room, I was assured. He’d be there in a minute.

Minutes stretch to years at times like these.

I had plenty of time to decide the smell oozing from under the door to the room “Reverend Ballinger” occupied was that all too familiar combination of blood and putrefaction. There were a dozen possible scenarios leading to this room: Ott had killed Hemming and now himself; Ott inadvertently had assisted the murderer and couldn’t live with himself afterward; Ott was terrified of the murderer, had tried to hide out, and failed. It may not be Ott in there, I reminded myself every few seconds. Maybe Reverend Ballinger had a heart attack. Long enough ago to account for that smell?

From my cell phone I called the dispatcher for backup.

Inside the room the phone rang and rang till its demand echoed in my head.

A group of inadequately clad tourists exited a room halfway down the hall and headed for the elevator. They didn’t notice me. Only the maid would have come to the end of the hall here. With the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, she’d put off entering. Still, it was hard to believe that in a hotel of this caliber a body could lie unnoticed till it smelled.

The staff man arrived, knocked, called, gave up, and, muttering a plea about discretion, moved as far from the lock as possible to do the final deed. Once the door was unlocked, I had to give it the final shove to open it. It moved only a foot. The smell was overwhelming. I gagged and turned away, then forced myself back. Holding my breath, I peered in. The room was dark, curtains drawn tight.

“Flashlight?” I asked the staff man.

“No.”

I wished I were in uniform with everything I could need hanging off me. I moved farther to the side, pushed the door harder. It gave an inch, then stuck, as if it had run into something.

I pushed again. It gave another inch. “Where’s the light switch?”

One hand over his nose, he pointed inside the door.

I shifted to the other side of the doorway, stuck my hand inside and flicked on the light.

Blood was all over the rug, on the walls, on the bedspreads. Candles had burned to stubs. And spread thick on the rug were pigeons. Pigeons with their heads cut off.

Sacrificial birds.

Birds like Ott.

I jammed my lips together to keep from gagging. Behind me and down the hall the elevator door opened, spitting out two patrol officers. I swallowed hard and motioned them to wait outside. “Maybe all we’ve got is dead birds. But there’s plenty of blood.”

I started in along the wall, just as I’d done in Ott’s office, here moving right, into the bathroom, then along the walls, poking under the bed, snapping open the closet doors. I’d been right: no corpses that hadn’t once flown.

“What went on in here, Smith?” White asked.

I shook my head. “Could be ritual, could be slaughter for pleasure.” One thing I was sure of: Ott hadn’t set up this scene. If he had walked in on it, he was in more danger than he’d anticipated.

I called in for Inspector Doyle. He’d notify the watch commander. In half an hour one of the watch sergeants arrived at the same rime as Raksen, the lab tech.

It was Raksen who spotted the crumpled paper under one of the pigeons. Torn from a small plain white pad, the word was almost unreadable under the blood. “Zeise,” it said.

“Save it. It’s important, Raksen.”

Raksen grimaced in insult—as if he
wouldn’t
preserve evidence?—but I didn’t stop to salve his feelings. I took leave of the sergeant and raced downstairs to the hotel registration desk. The same clerk was still on duty.

“When Reverend Ballinger checked in, was he looking for another minister?”

“How’d you know? But he asked before he checked in.”

“He was pretty insistent, huh?”

“I told him we can’t give out information about our guests. I must have told him six times.”

“And then he checked in. And hung around in the lobby?” On the lookout for Cyril or his followers.

The clerk nodded.

“When did you last see Reverend Ballinger?”

“About an hour ago. Right before you got here. Maybe fifteen minutes before.”

“What was he doing?”

“Walking out with his men.”

“Was he in front of them, beside them, what?”

“Right in the middle, like they were bodyguards. They were all around him.”

“Did you hear where they were going?”

He shook his head. “They didn’t speak at all. They just escorted the reverend out.”

I stood stunned. My face must have gone stone gray.

“Ma’am, are you okay?”

“What? Yeah, sure,” I lied. Herman Ott had been here fifteen minutes before I arrived. Brother Cyril’s boys had marched him out of here while I’d been across the street with Daisy drinking a latte.

Ott, you stupid, arrogant bastard, you think about telling me what you’re up to, change your mind, and get tossed in the frying pan with Ranger Zeise at Muir Beach. When you get yourself out of that frying pan, you’re so sure you can outsmart Cyril, you can’t get back to Berkeley fast enough to throw yourself into the fire and burn yourself to a crisp.

Or maybe you just sold out.

I knew that wasn’t true. The “Zeise” note told me that. The odds of my convincing Inspector Doyle of that were about the same as Ott’s living out the week.

When I got back to Doyle’s office, Clay Jackson was sitting on a folding chair. His elbows were jammed into his knees. His dark face was compacted into a scowl. Had they been able to move, every ceramic rhino in the office would have turned tail and run. Eggs had stationed himself at the far corner of the inspector’s desk from his partner. Inspector Doyle was leaning back in his leather chair. His skin hung from his face as if it had just been pasted to his bones. I wondered when he had last slept.

“Gone!” Jackson snarled. “Damn Cyril. Asshole strolls through the lobby and out the Claremont like he’s Jesus on Palm Sunday. Then he vanishes—‘gone’ like he’s been risen up to heaven.”

I glanced at Eggs, ready for him to look down his long, bony nose at Jackson, shake his head, and say, “Your theological history is a little spotty, Brother Jackson. Haven’t you forgotten there was a week between Palm Sunday and Easter?” But Eggs’s face was a carving of disgust.