Cop Out (28 page)

Howard glanced at his watch. “And you saw Griffon, what, two hours ago? Before you went back and met with Doyle?”

“No, after.”

“What do you mean
after
?” The life was gone from his voice.

“I had the meeting with Doyle. He agreed I should go to the storage locker with Jackson, and sign off the case after.”

“
Before
you went to Griffon’s? You were officially taken off the case and you went ahead to Griffon’s anyway?” He grabbed my arms and stared me in the face. “Jesus Christ, Jill, what’s the matter with you? You’re not just tossing your career away: you’re throwing it in Doyle’s face. I can’t believe you.” He stared at me for another long moment, picked up his wallet, and walked out the door.

I heard his truck start up, a low, distant rumble. It was only then that I realized how truly alone I was.

F
IGHTS WITH
H
OWARD WERE AWFUL.
Some people righteously insist you have to “get it all out,” be good at battle, glory in topping your lover, stripping him bare of defenses. For them that must be like racing first across the finish line. For me, there aren’t winners, just losers walled in separately by animosity too volatile to touch.

Fights were bad, but the worst was having Howard stalk out. And being left here. I wanted to stalk out, to slam door, to burn rubber.…

But you feel like a jerk stalking alone. Instead I called Laura Goldman. It was eight o’clock. Eleven in Pittsburgh. I tried the station. She’d been gone for hours.

If she’d come up with something on Ott, she’d have notified me. All I would get for disturbing her at this hour was grief.

She might be in bed.

If so, she wouldn’t have far to reach. I dialed.

“You’ve reached eight-nine-two—”

“Goldman! Answer the phone!”

The recording ended.

“Goldman, Jill Smith here. It’s important. Look, if you’re just not answering…I’ll call back, even later. Or the fire department, I’ll ring them up and say I’m your neighbor and there’s smoke coming from your kitchen again and I know that you’re a rotten cook and maybe there’s nothing the matter but—”

“Okay, okay, Smith. God, why didn’t I ask for a single room at that convention? How could I know they would pair me with a nocturnal lunatic?”

“Sorry. But it really is important.”

“And nothing in my life is of consequence?”

“Goldman, I roomed with you. I know how much time you spend snoring away. I could keep you up for a month and you’d still be ahead of the game.”

“Ah, the authority on healthful living. Next thing you’ll be reorganizing my diet. ‘I know how many vegetables you eat, Goldman. You could eat just chocolate for days and still be ahead.’ Well, Smith, did it ever occur to you I might not be sleeping? I could be entertaining. The drought in my sex life that rivaled my grandmother’s buddy Sister Joseph Martha might have been coming to an end. And just at the moment fireworks were to explode and I was reminded I was the hottest stuff west of the Susquehanna, what do I hear? ‘Goldman! Answer the phone.’ ”

“If he loves you, he’ll get it up again.” “So crass, Smith. And may you have a romantic night too.”

“Small chance. Howard’s…out. So, Goldman—”

“Okay. I was going to call you in the morning.” She yawned theatrically. “Now I’m sitting up. So, you remember I told you there was a huge fight between Alexander—your Herman Ott—and his father that ended with Alexander stomping out—”

“To the Iberia Airlines gate at Kennedy Airport. Do you know what caused the crisis?”

“Hang on.” Goldman was never one to condense a good story. “You’ll recall your Ott came from the union of Herman Steel and Ott Mining. His father was Ott Mining. I checked the papers for mine disasters, but there was nothing about the Ott mines. So I went on to other things. Leads petered out like veins in a mine.”

“Goldman!”

“Here’s my mistake.” Goldman’s voice was tight, her tone suddenly somber. I realized she hadn’t been so much playing with me as stalling. “I’d forgotten that earlier Otts had bought up mines from outsiders. So they owned small mines as far away as Kentucky. Far enough away that cave-ins wouldn’t make the local papers. Mines small enough that disasters wouldn’t be reported beyond
their
local papers. The cave-in in question occurred outside Wheeling, West Virginia. The shaft that collapsed was reinforced with beams made of a steel alloy instead of wood. It was an experiment that could have revolutionized mining. Could have saved some of the steel mills that were going under, including Herman Steel. Instead it killed thirteen men.”

“Omigod! Why? Surely steel is stronger than wood.”

“Maybe. But when the ceiling in a mine begins to collapse, the wood beams give way slowly, and, Smith, you can hear them creaking. When steel goes, it’s silent—no warning. Those miners were crushed where they stood.”

“Oh, God!” No wonder Herman Ott couldn’t stay home, in the family mansion built on corpses.

“Smith, that’s not the whole thing. The reason behind the cave-in never came out in the papers.”

“You got it through the Sister Joseph Martha connection?”

“Right. Distantly. I’ll spare you the trail. But the story is that Alexander’s father was hot to use the steel. The plan was within governmental safety standards at the time. The Otts of course were more familiar with the properties of their steel and their alloys than the government was. Alexander’s father wasn’t sure this alloy was right. He was going to test the beams in a played-out mine. You know, simulate the type of stress you’d get in a working mine. He was working on the plans, but apparently he got sidetracked by a new business venture. Or by a new mistress. Whichever, the steel beams were sent to a working mine, and Ott senior was too distracted to notice. Until the men were dead.”

It was a moment before I said, “And ostensibly nothing changed for the Otts of Pittsburgh?”

“It was just another mine disaster. A risk of the business.”

“Thanks, Goldman.”

“Sure. If I come up with anything else, I’ll let you know. Don’t call me, Smith, I’ll call you.”

“Right,” I said, almost too subdued to answer. “Sorry about the hour. Just one more thing. Was that mine case considered by the local Historical Review Society?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Crack detective work. And because I found a printout of a newspaper article from the Internet on Ott’s floor the day of the murder.”

“And that means?”

“That you’re not the only one who discovered the mine tragedy. Someone brought it to Ott’s attention.”

“How?”

“That’s the jackpot question.” Slowly I put down the receiver. I was picturing the scene just as Inspector Doyle would. Bryant Hemming stalking into Ott’s office, newspaper in hand, threatening to expose Ott as the child of bloodsuckers. Ott would have remembered his father tossing aside the lives of his workers for the sake of his career or his loins. Ott, who had investigated some facet of ACC, who had been to the storage unit, would have looked at Bryant Hemming with disgust. He’d have seen a man who’d just tossed aside ACC, endangered the small savings people had invested there, and was on the road to undermining the mediation project because of his connection with the Kaldane. Ott would have looked at Bryant Hemming and seen his father.

In that state even I could picture Ott shooting Hemming.

But if he didn’t shoot Bryant Hemming? How did he react when he saw the article that pulled the rug out from under his life?

Anyone else would have kicked in the door, slammed the phone into the wall, screamed till his throat closed. Herman Ott walked out of his office and left the dead bolt off.

If Bryant Hemming didn’t bring the article, who did? Who set out to unhinge Ott, drove him off, and used his office to kill Bryant Hemming?

I raced out of the house, slammed my VW into reverse, squealed the wheels, drove to Ashby Avenue, and turned right. For the first time this evening I felt free. It wasn’t as if I’d keep on and make another right onto Route 80, but it was movement. The pain and fury were still back in the bedroom, and I was doing something.

Going to the last place I had a legitimate reason to be.

A
T NIGHT SHOPS ARE
closed on Telegraph Avenue, their gratings down over windows, that all too often have been smashed in riots. Cars find more inviting thoroughfares. Doorways are littered with guys who inhaled or injected away their brains in the sixties or seventies or eighties or the new homeless, “downsized” onto the street. In the entrance to Ott’s building one of them nested, head covered against the cold night wind.

Behind me an engine picked up speed. I reached for the building door, stopped, glanced warily behind me. For the first time in years I was relieved to find the vehicle coming was not a patrol car.

I turned back toward the building where I had no business being. Disobeying an order is grounds for suspension. If Kovach or one of the other guys discovered me when he swung by for a check on Ott’s office, Inspector Doyle could not ignore it. He’d have to suspend me.

Suspended from the department
. The thought was like a slap in the face, the sting all too real. I stood with my hand on the door. I hadn’t crossed the line yet; I could turn around, drive home, take a bath, sleep, wake, and report for patrol. Nothing would be changed.

A mitt of fog rubbed cold across the back of my neck.

I opened the door and walked across the threshold and pulled the door after me. It closed with a bang.

The door had been unlocked. It always was. Who would the owners of this building bother keeping out? Paper detritus banked the corners of the lobby. My steps reverberated like drumrolls on the stairs and the landing as I made my way around the second-floor to the next flight of stairs and Ott’s office. Of course no one in any of the offices-cum-illegal living units opened a door to check me out. The Una-bomber could have been typing his manifesto on the landing and residents would have stepped over him and never remembered his face.

The crime scene tape was gone from Ott’s office.

I squatted to peer under the door. Dark. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and waited. “Police!”

No reply. I reached inside, switched on the light, and repeated the call. Silence. My gun was in my fanny pack, but I didn’t draw it out. Both rooms were empty, but the startlingly, un-Ottian tidiness in the bedroom after our search had dissipated. The floor wasn’t covered shin-high in a homogeneous swirl of clothes, magazines, and God knows what, as it had been when Ott was in residence, but clothes were in pillow-size clumps on the floor, interspersed with a couple of take-out plates and beer cans. What amazed me was not that any of Ott’s cohorts or clients had come in after we’d left, but that the place wasn’t wall-to-wall snorers right now. Everyone on Telegraph knew Ott was gone, and despite its numerous drawbacks, as a crash pad Ott’s office was superior to a doorway on the Avenue.

In the hallway a door banged. I froze. Another door shut. One of the tenants using the bathroom across the hall. My hunched shoulders dropped.

Nothing to worry about
this time
. But I didn’t have forever in here.

I stood in front of Ott’s scarred wooden desk as I had so often, picturing his office as it had been then, as it would have been right before the murderer walked in. Had Ott been expecting him? I pictured Ott inside here while his entry ritual unfolded. During the minutes I habitually spent pounding at his door had he been shoving papers into his desk helter-skelter, or was he normally so organized that he had had just one sheet to refile and then spent the next few minutes sitting back in his patched Naugahyde executive chair enjoying my performance outside?

I started rifling through Ott’s desk. His files of course were at the station now. But it took only the ill-folded copy of the
Express
that had been stuffed into the side drawer to give me the answer. Ott
had
been surprised.

So the killer walks in unexpected, flashes the mine disaster article in his face, and then invites Ott to go birding? Not quite.

I moved around the office, going through the file cabinets once more. I squinted out the sooty window into the black air shaft and glanced at the holder where the gun had been stashed. I came up with nothing I hadn’t noted Monday—because his files weren’t here.

I had written down the cases in those files, the one he had kept without identifying names: a report of vandalism on the street sellers’ display tables, a T-shirt theft, the flowerpot theft—I stopped. Stolen flowerpots
and
chemicals. Ott had been investigating stolen agricultural chemicals! Pesticides.

I sat in his decrepit chair. I had had things backward. I’d assumed that someone hired Ott to investigate Bryant and that led him to Brother Cyril. But it had been the other way around. Ott’s starting point had been the pesticides. Someone—probably totally unconnected to this case—had hired Ott to investigate pesticides stolen in Berkeley. That would have led Ott to find out where they were being transported for sale and to discover Brother Cyril going there—to Modesto. Then Ott convinced one of Cyril’s followers to take him to the storage unit.

Outside, a door slammed. My breath caught. I sat dead still, listening to the footsteps coming closer till another door squeaked open and banged shut. Then I realized I was breathing again.

Ott had checked the locker a week ago. Did that mean Cyril moved a new shipment every week? Why not? Why would he stop a good business with one shipment?

I pictured Brother Cyril, the milquetoast of a man. Now it was clear what kept his thuglike disciples loyal: the tried-and-true promise of salvation, cash. With a weekly run of Kaldane, there would be ample money for everyone. Cyril had stayed in the Claremont, but the disciples probably had their own castles elsewhere. No wonder we’d never found a communal hideout.

And we hadn’t wondered what they had been up to in Berkeley, as we normally would have, because we figured we knew: They were creating a hassle on Telegraph.