Not Exactly a Brahmin (7 page)

“I know you can. It’s just a question of when. You don’t
have
a client now. I can go through legal procedures. I can waste a lot of time. I’m serious about this. In case you’ve missed it, it’s midnight, I’m soaking wet, and I’m not willing to wait around while you play hard to get.”

“I’m within my rights.”

“For the moment. There’ll come a time, soon, that you’ll be withholding evidence.”

“I’ll wait.”

I leaned back against the doorjamb. He was still standing beside his massive desk. “Look, I know Palmerston was your client. He’s not going to be coming back for your report; he’s not going to care what you’ve told me.”

His pale, narrow mouth hardened.

“And Ott, he’s not going to pay you.”

“His heirs—”

“I’ve talked to his heir. His heir doesn’t know anything about this.” His mouth opened slightly. I could see I’d gotten to him. “Now it’s possible, Ott, that we’ll use your information when we go to trial. It’s possible that the DA will need some background on Palmerston’s killer. He has to hire someone—”

“I don’t work for the DA.”

Damn. I should have remembered that. “We have a discretionary fund. We may need to buy some of your work. You can deal with us or not deal at all. No one else is going to want it.”

His pale brown eyes were set deep. Now the lids half closed over them as he considered. “What are you offering?”

“Tell me what you have and I’ll put in a request.”

“Not good enough.”

“You’ve got my word that I’ll make the request for what you’re info’s worth. It’s the best you’re going to get. I’ve only been on this case since this afternoon; it’s not even officially a homicide yet. You wait another day, and I’ll have a lead on this Shareholders Five from someone else.”

He laughed. “Who else? The research is mine.”

“The information is about someone, five someones. Given a few days I’ll come across them. It just saves time for you to tell me.”

He let the lids droop over his eyes again. I glanced at the map of Berkeley on the wall beside his desk, at the phone directories stacked atop the file cabinets, at the smudged yellow sweater.

“Okay,” he said, “but if you don’t come through—”

“I’ll come through. I know the rules as well as you do. Now what did Ralph Palmerston want?”

He leaned against the desk. “Palmerston made an appointment about a month ago. He asked me to check out some people.”

“How many?”

He hesitated. “Five.”

“Who were they?”

Again, he hesitated. “He only gave me one name.”

“Why would he tell you to investigate five people and then give you the name of only one of them?”

“Maybe he wanted to see what I could find out before he committed any more money for the others.” A hint of a smile showed on his tight mouth. “I’m not the type of businessman Palmerston is used to dealing with. He probably wanted to make sure I wouldn’t take his money and run.”

“Why
did
he come to you?”

“I’ll give you my guess. I mean, I didn’t ask him. If he wants to give me his business, and his money, who am I to complain? So what I figured was he chose someone he’d never run into anywhere else, someone he wouldn’t have to worry about his lawyer hiring or his friends using for their divorces.”

I glanced around the run-down office. Ott’s assessment made sense. This was certainly not a place anyone else of Palmerston’s standing would be likely to come.

“What was the name he did give you?”

“Officer—”

“Spare me, will you? Just the name.”

His narrow lips pressed together. I could see that it was an effort for him to tell the police anything significant. “Adam Thede,” he said.

“Adam Thede?”

“You said just the name.”

“How long do you think it will take me to run a make on him? You could save me the trouble. Tell me what is common knowledge.”

“He owns Sunny Sides Up, the natural foods breakfast place here on the avenue.”

“What did Palmerston want to know about him?” Thede wouldn’t serve wine, not at breakfast, not during the week, and most breakfast places on Telegraph were closed weekends.

“I’m going to tell you straight, Officer, exactly what Palmerston told me. He needed to know what was important to Thede. He said he wanted to do something for him, a surprise, and he wanted to know enough to make that surprise count.”

“Were they friends, Palmerston and Thede?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Well, what did you find out?”

Ott looked down. For the first time I sensed the man was embarrassed. “Nothing Palmerston couldn’t have discovered himself. Thede runs a high-quality health food breakfast place. He advertises that all his ingredients are fresh, that all are organically grown. Sunny Sides Up is his baby. So, I told Palmerston that his gift should be something connected with that.”

“And what was it?”

“When are you putting in that request?”

“First thing in the morning.”

He was about to protest.

“For Christ’s sake, Ott, it’s after midnight. The department’s efficient, but we don’t process vouchers in the middle of the night.”

He nodded. “When I gave Palmerston my first report, he had me run a check on all Thede’s suppliers to make sure they didn’t smuggle in a bag of pesticide for their tomatoes or buy commercial lettuce and pass it off as organic.”

“Were they on the up-and-up?”

“What do you think? Thede was probably making out better than most. About ninety percent were organic.”

“So you told Palmerston that?”

“Gave him a list of suppliers, and a twenty-page report.”

“I’ll need a copy.”

“You’ll have to get it from him, his heirs, or whoever.”

“Do you expect me to believe that you didn’t keep a copy?”

Again, he looked embarrassed. Clearly, his business practices were as integral to him as Palmerston’s standards of courtesy were to him. “Any other time you’d be right, but Palmerston insisted on both copies.” He shrugged. “He paid.”

“And the gift? What was he going to do with the information you got him?”

“I don’t ask questions I don’t get paid for.”

He also didn’t answer questions he didn’t get paid for, and he made it clear that whatever I was requesting from the discretionary fund paid for what he had already told me, no more. Still, for dredging facts out of Herman Ott, this wasn’t a bad showing.

I made my way down the dark staircase to my car. The streets were empty now, the rain lighter. In ten minutes I was pulling up in front of the Kepple house.

My apartment was in back. For close to fifty years it had been the back porch of the house until, in a flash of frugality, Mr. Kepple had seen a way to underwrite his retirement. With the addition of a few plumbing fixtures and a ten-by-forty strip of indoor-outdoor carpet, he had converted it into an apartment. Three walls were jalousie windows, the fourth the white aluminum siding that had been one of Mr. Kepple’s earlier inspirations.

For me, after months of coming home to scathing arguments with Nat, now my ex-husband, moving into Mr. Kepple’s creation was a perfect escape. It was so unorthodox, so unmarried. I put my clothes in the closet and my sleeping bag on the floor and called it home.

Pereira, who, with Howard, had heard all the ever-new outrages of my separation and divorce, had planned a house-warming party for me. She was waiting until I got settled, until the apartment was decorated. A year later, she was still waiting. I had bought a white wicker table and a chaise lounge, but the place still looked like a porch. Slowly, it had become clear that this was not because Nat had kept the sofa and coffee table. It was, as Pereira had said with a shudder, because this was a home suited to someone who drove my car.

I pulled the jalousied door open and turned on the light.

“Damn.” Under all the windows, the rain had flowed in. The indoor-outdoor carpet looked like the bottom of a lily pond. It squished when I stepped on it.

I reached for the phone. Mr. Kepple had assured me that jalousie windows were as good in rain as plate glass. Perhaps. Perhaps ones that he hadn’t installed himself would have been. But plate glass wouldn’t have turned my apartment into a place more suited to otters than people.

I put down the phone. I was too tired to deal with Mr. Kepple tonight.

Picking up my sleeping bag, I carried it into the kitchen and spread it out on the floor.

I was just drifting off to sleep when I remembered that I’d never gotten the pint of ice cream I’d planned to have for dinner.

S
EVEN-FORTY A.M. FOUND
me running to cross Martin Luther King Junior Way before the light turned red. Detectives’ Morning Meeting was at seven forty-five. I didn’t need my well-known reputation for tardiness to move up to Detective Division with me. The parking spot I’d managed to ace a Honda out of was two blocks east of King Way and one to the south, nearly at the Berkeley library.

As I rounded the corner near the station door, I almost smacked into Howard.

“Going out for track?” he asked.

After four blocks I was too breathless to answer. Howard, sauntering across from his garage, looked perfectly at ease.

When I regained my breath, I said, “I’m on my first murder case.” Even to myself I sounded adolescently smug.

“Since when? I left with you yesterday and you didn’t have a case then.”

We walked in the main doors and headed up the stairs. “After I dropped you off, I was going to the ice cream shop—”

Howard shook his head. “Only you would be on your way for junk food and find a case.” My proclivity for doughnuts, chocolate bars, and ice cream was also well known. “I assume you’ll tell me about it after the meeting.”

All of Detective Division was seated around the table. Howard and I slid into the remaining two chairs. The guys who had gotten there earlier had coffee from the machine; those who were really on top of things had thermoses. I envied both groups. Having forced myself up at quarter to seven, I hadn’t had time for either.

The meeting was brief. The captain summarized the reports that had been on his desk, including mine, Pereira’s from the scene of the crash (which Lieutenant Davis had sent to Homicide Detail when he transferred the case), Misco’s, and Swenson’s, the beat officer who had verified that Lois Palmerston had had dinner with Carol Grogan. Other than Swenson’s, none told me anything I didn’t know.

When Howard and I got back to our office, Pereira was already there. And she had coffee. In spite of our different assignments, when Howard and I were promoted there had been only one empty office. It had belonged to the community relations officer (before he and his assignment’s retirement). He’d complained about what a small, dark hole it was the entire time he had occupied it. Wedging two of us in it didn’t make it any more comfortable.

Howard sat in his chair, rolling it back toward the window that was more a symbol than a conveyor of light or air. Small, none too clean, and on the west side of the building, the office got sunlight only from three-thirty till dusk, and then it was so piercing that we closed the blinds. Now the window was like a featureless gray picture on the wall.

I dropped into my own chair, rolling it back against the inside wall. It was a system Howard and I had worked out the second day we shared the office. With the length of Howard’s legs, having our backs at the far corners of the floor space was the only way we could both have foot room. When we sat at our desks, facing opposite walls, there was no way we could both back up at once.

Pereira settled atop Howard’s desk and pulled out the lower drawer for her feet.

I filled them both in on my interviews. “And you,” I said to Pereira, “what did you find out for all your hard work in the bar with Paul Lucas?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing!”

“It’s not that I didn’t find out anything. I discovered that there was nothing to find out. Ralph Palmerston was a rich man with no more than peripheral contact with the business world—Chamber of Commerce, social functions, charities—that sort of thing. It took Paul quite a while to place him at all, and for Paul, that’s saying something.”

I sighed. “Somebody went to a lot of trouble to kill this man, and as far as I can find out, there’s no reason at all, unless his wife wanted to inherit. He was even going out of his way to do something nice for the guy who owns Sunny Sides Up, the health food breakfast place. He was planning a Halloween surprise.”

“What about the wife?” Howard said. “Palmerston was older. He was going blind. Maybe she didn’t want to be burdened with him and realized that this was her last chance to kill him. If his condition was deteriorating, he wouldn’t be driving when he got home from their trip.”

“There are easier ways.”

“But, Jill, this way she has an alibi.”

“Not really,” I said. “The friend she had dinner with left her alone while she went to pick up her kids from day care. She could have called Palmerston then.”

“Wouldn’t he have recognized her voice?” Pereira asked. “He was going blind, not deaf.”

“Maybe she disguised it. I don’t know. Let’s let that wait.” I took a swallow of coffee. “The really suspicious thing is that the car was in perfect shape when it left the garage. From the time they say Palmerston left and Lois says he got home, he couldn’t have stopped. So the car was nowhere but in his own garage between the servicing and his death. Lois Palmerston says there was no one there but she and Ralph.”

“Maybe someone came in from the outside,” Pereira suggested.

“The garage door locks.”

“Locks can be tampered with,” Howard put in.

“It’s an automatic door opener. She used it when she got home. The garage door had no marks on it. No one forced his way in.”

“How about others means of entry?”

“None, except the door from the kitchen.”

In unison we picked up our cups and drank.

I said, “It points to Lois Palmerston. She had the opportunity and the motive and could have had the means. It’s just that, well, I can’t picture her dealing with anything as grubby as a car engine.”

Howard laughed. “How fortunate for you to have such genteel suspects. In my cases, brake fluid would be like ambrosia. I think I’ve had enough of drug dealers and their foul relations. Even my big dealer, Leon Evans, with his college education and grand tour of the Far East—he’s still slime.” He stood up, suddenly grinning. “By the way, Jill, have you guessed what my costume is yet?”