Cop Out (9 page)

The houses on either side of the path were as close as Berkeley comes to mansions—old, rambling places with big windows, huge trees, and sloping, landscaped lawns dotted with boulders. Howard and I had walked over here a week ago on our day off, lattes in one hand, sesame bagels in the other. We had made our way up the large stones that served as steps, discussing what we’d save if we tripped—coffee, bagel, or butt. Even in daylight the speculation hadn’t been entirely frivolous, and now, illumined only by the lawn lanterns and my flashlight, the weaving path was treacherous.

I was halfway up when I spotted a plump gray-haired woman in sweatshirt and jeans. “Over here. Watch your step. Right in here,” she said, leading me to an open door with her flashlight.

I smiled with relief. Ott’s friend Daisy Culligan was no matron of the moneyed establishment. The house could have had six bedrooms, a study, an au pair suite, but the space that Daisy Culligan occupied must have been the maid’s quarters. A nine-by-twelve rug would nearly have covered the floor here if she had had one, but she didn’t. No rug, nor much else. It was a room consciously intended to be bare. But as is the case with small living spaces, intentions had been shoved out by the clutter of necessity. Daisy Culligan had papers stacked on each step of the circular staircase as if it were an ascending file drawer. The white futon chairs in front of the fireplace held mail, days of it. Next to one old
New Yorker
magazines were stacked as high as the seat. The little teak table between the chairs, which must have been meant to hold a cup or two, sported one of those sandbox miniatures of Japanese Zen gardens given so the person who has everything can pretend to deal with nothingness.

“A gift,” she said. “From a friend here in town. So it’ll be a while before I can pack it off to the Goodwill.” She scooped up the mail, deposited it on the
New Yorkers
. “Sit.”

I shifted my flashlight hanging from the back of my belt and sat on the chair. “Herman Ott blushed when someone walked in on your call,” I said, feeling a pang of betrayal of Ott.

“Did he now?” She plopped onto the other chair, pulled her round legs up to cross under her. She was not quite fat, but all comfortable circles—round eyes, ruddy cheeks, long, wiry gray curls, substantial breasts, and a gentle mound of stomach. She smiled like the Mona Lisa. “Herman Ott?”

“I’ve never seen Ott blush.”

“And you’re wondering why he’d get all worked up over an old broad like me, huh? Is there fire under the snow and all that crap?” She was watching me, ready to judge my reaction, still smiling.

It wasn’t Daisy, it was Ott I couldn’t imagine in the sack. But there was no professionally acceptable way to say that. I matched her smile. “Why did you call him?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Because he’s missing. And his office door was unlocked.” Or so Charles Kidd contended.

Her smile vanished, and I could tell from her expression she understood how dire a picture I’d painted. “I’ve known Herm since college; he was an undergraduate—”

“He was an undergraduate for a decade.”

“I see you do know him. Yeah, Herm avoided graduation longer than cholesterol’s been a villain. I was a teaching assistant around the time he realized that a degree in poli sci and philosophy wasn’t going to lead to the kind of work that interested him.”

“Which department were you in? Poli sci or Philosophy?”

She laughed. “Social work. It’s gotten me where I am today.”

I cocked an eyebrow.

“Self-employed, thank God.” She picked up the tiny Japanese rake that belonged to the Zen garden and dragged it across the box, leaving deep gouges in the sand. “The welfare department destroys you. Occasionally you help someone, but mostly you fill out forms to justify your job, your superiors’ jobs, and—” She’d caught the rake on the box edge. The whole thing clattered to the floor, spraying our feet with sand. “Shit. So much for the calming effect of that little gift. Well, I guess time hasn’t cooled my passions enough.”

I could see why Ott liked her. “So what was your connection to Ott?”

The smile returned to her round face. “We watched the soaps together. I should have known what it meant about us then. I loved to see all those problems that I didn’t have to do anything about. And Herman, he liked to guess the deep, dark secrets. Every Friday after the show we’d go to Larry Blake’s on the Avenue, have a burger, and Herman would make a guess at the cliffhanger. Who was the father of Tiffany’s baby? Why was Lance hospitalized with no visitors allowed? A dread disease or a sex change? Mondays we’d see how he did. Tuesday we’d switch to a different soap, so I’d have new problems to not deal with, and the trends of the show wouldn’t become too obvious for Herman.”

I laughed, joining her. A bourgeois indulgence from the past, was that the cause of Ott’s blush? “Is that all?”

“Surely it isn’t material to your investigation now whether I slept with Herman a quarter century ago.”

Probably it wasn’t. I certainly couldn’t make a case for pressing her. But, dammit, this was like not coming back for the Monday soap. I let the silence sit like a demanding pet. Daisy Culligan merely smiled; as a social worker she must have played this game too. Finally I asked, “Have you kept in touch all along?”

“No. Herman disappeared for a few years.”

“Disappeared? When?”

“Right after he left college.”

Ott had never bothered to graduate. He’d just dwindled away. “Where’d he go?”

“No one knows. No one, believe me. I tried to find out when he came back. If he’d had a secret like that in our soap days, I could have teased it out of him. But whatever he did those three years changed him. Or maybe he just got older. Whatever, he wasn’t a cute little waif of a guy anymore. He was in the beginning stages of what he is now.”

I picked up the fallen rake and fingered the tongs. “Where do you
think
he went?”

“That question intrigued me for years. I didn’t meet with Herman, but you know how Berkeley is; you’ve always got more than one path of connection to a person. So I heard about him. Sometimes he was mentioned in the papers. A few-people remembered him from before. But no one knows about that absence. I’ve done the sensible thing; I’ve given up. If you’re smart, you will too.”

“Sorry, I can’t make that kind of promise. But tell me what other connection you have to Ott.”

She opened and shut her lips, little fish pouts. Then she bounced up and headed up the circular stairs.

I took it as an invitation to follow. The room upstairs was half the size of the first, its floor covered with abandoned bedclothes and street clothes. Herman Ott could have been hidden under the mounds. “I see you and Herman have the same theory of housekeeping.”

She shrugged awkwardly as people do when admitting a failing.

“When did you last see Ott’s office?” I pressed.

She turned toward me. “Okay, okay. So maybe I did have a little thing with Herman. It was years ago, and it was no big thing then.”

“Did he give you a key?”

“What! Look, that was over twenty years ago. What possible difference—”

“I’m not here to cause you problems, Ms. Culligan. I just need to find Herman. And to get an idea how many copies of his keys are floating around. Three or three hundred?”

She moved around me and down the stairs and stood waiting at the bottom, hands on rounded hips. “He gave me a key, but what’s the big deal? Herman Ott’s well-being is hardly a top police priority. Yet it’s after midnight, and here you are sniffing out his past.” She moved toward the chairs, then changed her mind and stood looking out the window into the dark. “What’s going on with Herman? Is he suspected of some crime?”

I considered my options and went with my read of her: She really wanted to help Herman. I motioned her back to the chairs and, when we’d both sat, said, “I have to ask you not to talk about this interview until we find Herman.” When she nodded, I went on. “A man’s body was found in Herman Ott’s office.”

“Really?” She was on the edge of her chair, waiting for the cliffhanger.

“I know Herman Ott. I respect him. I wouldn’t say this to his face, but I care about him.”

She smiled knowingly.

“But when there’s a dead body in your office and you’ve disappeared, neither option is good. I don’t see Herman Ott killing a man and walking away from his life here.” But apparently he had disappeared before. I could tell from Daisy Culligan’s face she was thinking the same thing. “A much more likely scenario is: He walked in on the killer, and the killer forced him into a vehicle and—”

“And killed him.”

“We don’t know,” I said, looking her in the eye. My chest was tight, my voice constricted; it was no act I was giving her. I swallowed hard. “Help me.”

She sat pulling her stubby fingers over the back of her other hand. Her nails were clipped short, washed clean. She was swaying a bit and behind her, her shadowy reflection in the dark window wove side to side. “I didn’t see him for years. Then early one Sunday morning a few years ago, I ran into him at Bolinas.”

“On the beach?”

“The garage in town. His car—you know that old Studebaker—had broken down. So I gave him a lift back. After that every six months or so we’d go to Bolinas.”

“What did you do together there?”

“Nothing
together
. I’d walk on the beach. Herman hated the ocean. Too harsh, too absolute. For him it was the marshes. He just liked walking there. I think it was because it was so utterly different from the rest of his life—no sidewalks, no crime, no political issues, just grass and birds, and, well, marsh. Afterward we’d meet at the garage and drive back. That’s it.”

“Did he talk about it?”

“No.”

I could tell from the way she said it that the marsh was one of Ott’s “denied” subjects. “Did you have the sense he was meeting someone?”

“No.”

“Did he bring anything with him he didn’t have when he went home, or vice versa?” It was a long shot. If Ott had been after anything in the marsh, most likely it was information. If he’d paid for it, his wallet wouldn’t be so much thinner as to garner notice.

She shook her head.

“How were these events arranged? Did you call him or he you?”

“He called, always. That does sound suspicious, doesn’t it? And now that I think about it, there was a certain urgency when we drove out there. He always had to get there before sunrise or before dusk. And”—she reached out as if to hold my attention—“most times when we drove back, he was quiet, relaxed, tired, like he’d been up all night.”

Knowing Ott, he probably had been.

“But a couple of times he was elated.”

“Do you have any idea why?”

“None.” She seemed to sink. The cushion, balanced over the edge of the one underneath, sagged. Daisy shifted back on the chair and refolded her legs. “I’d forgotten all that. There may be more I know. Ask me more. Tell me about the murder. Who’s dead?”

“Okay, first tell me about the key. Do you still have it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe packed away somewhere with everything else from 1970.”

“When Herman gave it to you, did it seem like something special—”

“You mean, like ‘I’ll break my rule and make a copy just for you?’ Hardly. It was more like we did with cars back then, like ‘Sure, take my car; just make sure you put gas in it before you bring it back. Here’re the keys.’ Romance wasn’t…well, it wasn’t Herm.”

I nodded. I couldn’t imagine otherwise.

“The murder,” she prodded. “Come on, I’m dying to know who was killed.”

“Bryant Hemming, the man who—”

“Oh, my God! Bryant?”

“You know him?”

“He’s my ex-husband.”

T
HERE WAS BRANDY IN
the teak credenza. I poured it for her, and Daisy Culligan sat holding the glass, lifting it to her mouth but not drinking, as if she were too stunned to remember how to move her lips. Her eager round face seemed to have fallen, and her skin looked looser, older, pale. Tears rolled from the corners of her eyes. Instead of wiping them away, she lifted the glass with both her hands as if it were an offering to her grief, and sipped in a slow, steady rite, pausing only for that first burning swallow, till the brandy was half gone. “Bryant and I were together for nine years. I can’t believe this. Why would anyone kill him? It’s not fair. He’d come into the perfect job for him; he was doing important work, making a difference.…Dead?” She lifted the glass to her mouth again but barely swallowed.

“Bryant was on to something big,” she continued. “He was all caught up in it.” Her voice grew steadier as she spoke. “ ‘Look at these guys,’ he’d say, ‘these bombers and the ones who stalk into an office building with an AK forty-seven; they don’t care about the people they kill. What got them started years ago was a post office line that’s out the front door. It’s the pervasive sense of getting the short end of the stick and looking over to see who snatched the big end and finding that face shielded behind layers of bureaucracy. No one’s responsible; no one cares. Instead of apologizing all over the place, they’re snotty. If I could just get in there in the beginning…’ Bryant would say.”

I could hear Bryant Hemming saying that; it was essentially what he’d said Sunday night. “When did he tell you all that?”

“Pretty much every time I’ve seen him since he settled in at ACC and hired an assistant. We’ve been divorced for five years, but we don’t hate each other.” A big tear rolled down her cheek, around her mouth, off her chin, and into the brandy glass. She lifted the glass, stared into it, shrugged, and finished the brandy. “Bryant was so caught up in it that it was easier not to try to cut him off. I practiced the age-old feminine technique: smiled and nodded—you can do that quite well from rhythm of the monologue—and planned menus.” Now she did let out a laugh, a small one, cut short.

I smiled too. “Let the boys talk about themselves,” I remembered my mother used to say. “They like that.” By Bryant Hemming’s definition of his mediation client—the perpetually ignored—it was surprising we girls from that era hadn’t blown up every building in town. I said, “Why don’t I make you some tea and we’ll talk about him?”