Cop Out (30 page)

And Howard waiting for a callback. Was he home, or in a bar somewhere, or halfway to Nevada by now? And still furious?

I took Macalester upstairs for booking and headed for one of the phones off the squad room. One sergeant sat behind the window, pencil in one hand, phone propped to ear. The squad room itself was empty, and the electronic hum of the copy machine, the coffee machine, the computer—the chorus of the nineties—seemed louder. An empty box on the table held the crumbs of cookies, doughnuts, scones—something sugary, something I would have liked. Something that was gone now. I picked the phone by the window, dialed, and stared down into the alley as it rang.

“Where are you?” I asked when he answered the phone.

“Modesto. With a couple of the guys I met in Fresno.”

“Modesto, home of the Brede Mortuary?” The man was a saint. A saint in a bar, from the sound of the music and laughter behind him. “I owe you.”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

I couldn’t read his voice on that. Not the normal lascivious “playful,” but nowhere near as furious as when he’d stormed out of the house hours ago. Later, indeed. “What did you find on Griffon?”

“Well, Jill,” he began, chuckling. Now I could fill in the “relationship” blanks here. This call wasn’t a statement that he had reconsidered his position re: me and the department. He just had something too good to keep to himself. “Too good” was definitely what I needed now. He said, “Seems Brede, the owner, has a brother.”

“Brede, the brother?”

“Brede, the ne’er-do-well brother, who is a mortician too.”

“It must take talent to be a failure as a mortician when your own brother owns the place.”

“Some got, some don’t got. Anyway, Brede, the brother—it didn’t take long to get him to come clean. For someone else, the maneuver might have been an effort, but well, it’s such a kick to con a con man. And Brede, the brother, is the kind of hotshot who’s got irons in every fire in town. All he needed to hear was police, and he was so busy looking over his shoulder he just about decapitated himself. I don’t know what his big-ticket scams are—selling corpses, scooping up the gold from their fillings?—but Griffon was a molehill compared to the Alps he was hiding.”

“Howard! What was our molehill up to? Was he Brother Cyril’s front man, selling Brede, the brother, the Kaldane?”

“Brede’s a seller, not a buyer.”

“Griffon was driving to the valley to buy something? From a mortuary worker?”

“You got it. Jill, you remember those tattoos he did, the ones that were supposed to shine?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems Griffon heard that tattooists from Asia created shine by mixing their ink with human fat. Theory is the body keeps rejecting the foreign fat and the rejection process creates the shine—like a layer under a scab that’s pulled off too soon.”

“Yuck.”

“And not cheap. Problem is, getting the fat. Even friends who have excess aren’t about to undergo medical procedures to spiff up their buddy’s tattoos. But corpses don’t complain.”

“So Brede sold Griffon dead fat.”

“Right. Said he offered him formaldehyde and embalming fluid too. Brede thinks Griffon’s a loon. Says he doesn’t care what Griffon pokes under his skin as long as he can turn a profit.”

“Does it work, the shine?”

“Brede doesn’t think so. But Griffon was real hot on the idea. It’d make him the king of the tattooists.”

“Outshine the competition?”

Howard groaned, but I knew he would have said it himself if he’d thought of it first.

“It would,” I said slowly, “give him the leverage to open his San Francisco shop as long as he could keep the source secret.”

Howard didn’t respond. Then he said, “By rights I should have called this in to Eggs or Jackson or Doyle. I called you at home, where I figured you’d be, since you were off the case. I’m not asking what you’re doing at the station—”

“I’m taking the “gluteus contraband in to Doyle right now. He’s waiting.” A choral groan rose in the bar there in Modesto. I wondered what game was on cable there. “Leave me a message about when you’re coming home, okay?”

“Right,” he shouted over the noise. He didn’t want to discuss that either.

The front phalanx of the rhino herd had been ambushed, they lay on their sides around Doyle’s IN box. Doyle was on the phone. He motioned me to sit. He wasn’t talking, just listening. He also wasn’t looking at me. Nor offering me the latest addition to the herd for appraisal, amusement, or in some cases silent amazement. Even in the world of ceramic rhinoceroses, his raised eyebrows had often said, there’s no accounting for taste.

But now he grunted into the receiver as if I no longer existed here.

After what seemed ages, he put down the receiver, and muttered “CHP. They picked up Brother Cyril.”

“From the APB?”

“Emissions. His van was stinking up the road from here to Albany, which is where they got him.”

“Ott?” I was holding my breath.

“Not with him. No pesticides, no Ott. Just eight punks and Cyril. Cyril ranting up a storm about justice, and vengeance being his, and Sodom, Gomorrah, and Berkeley.”

My shoulders tightened. “The pesticides aren’t in the storage lockers anymore. If Cyril doesn’t have them, where are they?” I flashed on the hotel room in the Claremont, the dead pigeons on the bloody carpet. “And Ott? What’d he do with Ott?”

“Ott! Jeez, Smith, what is it with you and Ott? I take you off the case, and where do you go? Ott’s office. I gave you an order, Smith, a direct order. You spit in my face. You’ve come to the end of your rope. You—”

The phone rang. “Yeah?…Delaware?…Yeah, right.” He glanced at me and then away. “Tell him I’ll be right down.” The phone was barely in the receiver before he was out of his chair. “The ACC headquarters on Delaware, it’s on fire. I’ll deal with you later.”

I was already racing out the door.

T
HE OLD WOODEN WATER
tower that housed ACC was burning like kindling. Flames shot through the first-floor siding and out the first-floor windows. One fire engine was parked on Delaware Street looking oddly anachronistic in front of the nineteenth-century buildings. A second stood around the corner on Fifth Street. Firemen had emptied the houses that abutted the windmill. The residents stood on the wood-plank sidewalk across Delaware Street, the blinking red lights from the patrol car alternately revealing their panic and blacking it out.

I raced through the fire lines. “Hey, lady, get back!”

“Police!” I yelled, leaping over a pulsing hose. I spotted Eggs and Jackson standing behind the fire lines, nodded, and kept moving.

Steam rose from the building, like the backlash of water tossed in an overheated frying pan. Firefighters guided and hung on to their hoses, as if control bounced from one to the other. Water poured into the house, and the house spit it out.

There was no ladder to the second floor.

I looked around frantically for Doyle. “The second floor,” I yelled above the jumble of the water and machinery, the engines and brakes of incoming cars. “Have they checked up there?”

“Not yet.”

“That’d be where Cyril would stash the pesticides, where he’d leave Ott. No one goes up there.”

“Ladder.” He pointed to the left as firefighters steered it through the courtyard path. In a minute the front of the building was obscured by a wall of water. Then the ladder went up, the firefighter went up, and another minute later she came out with Ott. “Clear the street.”

I walked in step with the paramedics. Somehow I expected Ott to look as sooty as the building walls, but as the paramedics shifted him onto a gurney, he was paler than I’d ever seen him.

“Ott,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you’re going to be—”

“Who did this to you, Ott?” Inspector Doyle demanded. Eggs was behind him.

“Pesticides,” he croaked. “The room’s full of them.” He swallowed, squeezed his eyes shut a couple times to clear the soot. “Toxins,” he forced out, “enough to bankroll…agribusiness for…a month.”

“Eggs,” Doyle said. But Eggs was already halfway to the fire captain. To Ott, Doyle repeated, “Who did this to you?”

Ott’s eyelids flickered. His lips moved slightly, then stopped.

“CHP’s got Cyril. You’re in no danger,” Doyle assured him. “Tell us who did this?”

Ott’s eyes opened, then narrowed. His hazel eyes flickered to the left and back. He was thinking. Dammit, the man was scheming.

“Ott!” I wanted to shake him. “I saw the hotel room and the decapitated pigeons.”

“Cyril.” Ott swallowed hard. He focused not on me but on Doyle. “Cyril’s got twenty, maybe more guys. Some armed.” He swallowed harder, as if calling up his last drop of internal moisture. “Semiautomatics. Converted. The back of his van, it’s an arsenal.” He pressed his lips, worked his throat till I thought he might choke. “He
believes
…pipeline to…” His eyes flickered upward. Then he reached a hand toward Doyle. “Battling cops, it’s how he gets his followers.”

Doyle moved back, already half turned to move on the information.

I bent closer to Ott. “What about Bryant Hemming? Did Cyril kill him?”

Ott’s eyes closed.

“Enough,” the paramedic said. “We’ve got to move this man.”

I kept pace with the gurney. “Ott, who took you to Muir Beach?”

Ott groaned and turned his face away.

I leaned closer. “Ott, you were dealing with a better-natured killer than a pain in the ass like you deserve. If he’d had any sense, he would have just tied you up and stuffed you in the attic overnight.”

Ott’s eyes flickered. I could tell it pained him to leave me the last word.

The paramedics lifted up the gurney and slid him into the ambulance.

“You believe all that, Smith? You, the expert on Ott,” Doyle said as the ambulance pulled off.

“Everything he said, Inspector. But—”

“Clear the street. Come on, move it! This stuffs poison,” the fire captain yelled.

“Smith,” Doyle said as we moved back, “you found Ott. Ott—maybe the smoke got to him—but he was helpful. If that stuff blows up, or the smoke’s toxic, he’ll have saved people.” We were next to my VW. Doyle leaned against it. His mouth twitched as Ott’s had done, and when he looked over at me, I could tell he was forcing himself. “Smith, you came within a hair of being suspended. In my office I was going to…This saved you.”

My breath caught. I hadn’t allowed myself to speculate on that other issue he hadn’t gotten to.

“Do the paperwork later. Go home, sit on your laurels. That’s an order.”

“But, Inspector—”

“An order! Smith, you don’t have any leeway. Go.”

I climbed into the bug and drove away from the fire. Ott had been helpful, all right. Too helpful. Ott, who would normally gag before
giving
us anything, was using his last bit of spit to croak out what he knew. He had focused our attention on Brother Cyril, but he’d never actually said Cyril was Bryant Hemming’s killer. When that question came up, the chatty Ott was suddenly too weak to speak.

I turned left on University, heading up between Indian restaurants, groceries, sari shops. Of course I believed Ott. He wasn’t stupid enough to lie. No reason to lie for Brother Cyril.

The light at San Pablo turned red. I jammed on the brake. I wasn’t watching the road.

We’d given Ott a free play with Cyril. By the time Ott told us about Cyril’s weapons and threats, we had already told him Cyril was in custody. As for the pesticides, the firefighter who rescued him had seen them. So Ott had given us zip.

Then why had he bothered with that performance, the smoke screen at the fire scene? For someone he cared enough about to protect, I guessed. For someone he respected. For the person who understood the lure of the yellow-billed loon, the person who had driven him to Muir Beach and killed Bryant Hemming. If mere murder were insufficient reason for Ott to turn in the killer, I’d have thought using his office and luring Bryant there because Bryant couldn’t afford to ignore Ott would have infuriated him. But not enough to call us.

I knew that, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was off the case. I didn’t have a touchdown, but I’d gotten close enough to the goal line to grab some credit—if I didn’t blow it now.

Once Howard and I had vied for who would someday occupy the chiefs office. Now I was almost out the door.

If I cared about my job, I would go home.

Doyle would still be at ACC. I hung a U.

D
ELAWARE
S
TREET WAS BLACK.
Soot shrouded the Victorian houses and shops. On the patrol cars and fire engines, pulser lights burst on and off, turning one area after another the color of dead meat.

Doyle was gone. I must have passed him on University after I made my U-turn.

I hung another U and headed back to the station. I’d have ten seconds to convince Doyle. Once he got his mouth open, that “later” he’d threatened me with would have arrived, and he would be talking only suspension.

It was after midnight, the roads were nearly empty. The wind swatted the VW like a giant going after a fly. I clutched the wheel. There had been times, driving across the Bay Bridge, when I’d had to brace my arms and elbows to keep from being blown into the next lane. Tonight wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t late enough in the year for that. In December or January, maybe. Still, now, to my left in the middle of University Avenue the wind yanked baby trees almost out of their soft dirt mounds.

I ached to be speeding in a patrol car, lights and sirens clearing my way. There was no reason for the killer to wait now, and common sense told me Bryant Hemming’s wouldn’t be the last violent death. Even the few minutes it would take to convince Doyle could be too long.

Damn Bryant Hemming. If he hadn’t disregarded his ex-wife’s career, if he had been a whit less righteous, if he’d even hinted she should look twice at the restaurant owner’s record, Hemming would be alive now and his biggest problem would be deciding at which Washington café to make a reservation.

But he had brushed aside any concern for Daisy. And her particular revenge on Bryant—her tat—set off alarms in the minds of the people she recruited to make her calls. They had been put into the position of declaring to Bryant that they didn’t believe they would get their money back. After that they couldn’t help asking themselves if it could be true.
If he undermined his ex-wife so matter-of-factly
, they’d have wondered,
how can I trust him with my money, my future?