Too Close to the Edge (13 page)

I swallowed, lifted the coffee cup to take a sip, but my throat closed. “The family didn’t hold my father responsible, but he never forgave himself. He went to see John every Sunday afternoon. He never said where he was going and we knew not to ask. And when he got home it was as if he had taken on the pall of the sick room. As John got weaker over the years, it got worse. But as kids, we didn’t make those connections.” I looked out the window. Gray cars moved through the fog. “For years when I went in the water, it was all I could do to make myself stay in long enough so no one asked me why I was getting out so soon. I never let my feet leave the bottom. And then, finally, I decided I had to deal with it. I had to learn to swim. But even now, I never go in the water without thinking about Cousin John. And I never see anyone in a wheelchair without feeling that pall, and that awful fear.”

Howard put his hand over mine. “Jackson or Eggs could take this case. You could swap with them.”

I shook my head. “No. It’s just something I have to deal with. Look, I can dive off the high board at King Pool. I’m tough.”

Howard grinned, releasing my hand.

“Besides, I’ve spent all night on this case. I’m not about to plop it in Jackson’s lap.”

Wally set my dish in front of me. I reached for the mustard and ketchup. Eyeing my hand, Wally shook his head and set down the serving platter that held Howard’s breakfast.

“So now what, tough detective?” Howard asked, forking a mound of scrambled egg.

“I don’t know. Before I left her, Liz let me turn her phone machine on for her. That was very unlike her. She was anxious for me to leave. I had the impression there was something she was waiting to hear on that tape.”

“You could hardly have stayed and eavesdropped. It wasn’t like she was a suspect.”

“Howard,” I said, holding my sandwich in mid-air. “I did stop outside. I could hear the tape through the window. Guess who the call was from?”

“Got me.”

“Herman Ott.”

“Well, now there’s a pleasant prospect for you. And you, Ott’s favorite cop.”

Plunking the sandwich on the plate, I stood.

“Hey,” Wally called from the end of the counter. “You eat that.”

“Got to run.” To Howard, I said, “I have to catch Pereira before she gets to Ott herself.”

“G
ONE?
W
HERE IS SHE
?” I demanded of Pereira’s fellow beat officer.

“Doing her rounds. A bottle of milk here, two creams there.” It was an old beat officer joke.

“Did she say anything about where specifically she was going?”

“She had to make a check on some vandalism outside a dental office at the top of Solano. After that, who knows.”

“Thanks.”

My next stop was at accounting. “I requested two hundred dollars from the discretionary fund. That was three weeks ago, Mrs. Vorkey,” I said. Plump, gray-haired Mrs. Vorkey had ruled accounting when Jackson and Eggs were eyeing their first play pistols.

“I’ll check.” She pulled a ledger from her second drawer. “March twenty-fifth. Right here,” she said in a tone of crisp satisfaction, as if my question had thus been answered.

“I haven’t gotten the money,” I said. “But I can take it now,” I added, businesswoman to businesswoman.

She started to nod, then stopped. “Now wait, eh, Smith.” I suspected Mrs. Vorkey knew every employee of the department by sight, if only to avoid handing Jackson’s money to Howard, or Pereira’s to Eggs. But she never addressed one of us by name without that regal pause. To her we were only names to be filled in after “authorized by” or “disbursed to.” Without looking up, she said, “This requisition has never gotten proper authorization.”

“I put it through Inspector Doyle.”

“He has not authorized it.” She held out the form. The line over “authorizing officer” was blank.

“Why didn’t you send it back, then?” I demanded.

“Officer, it’s not the purview of the Accounting Department to question an inspector’s decision.”

“Well, then why didn’t you send it back to me? How long has it been sitting here unsigned?” I said, furious.

But Mrs. Vorkey wasn’t ruffled. “We in Accounting assume that officers will follow up their requests. It is not our function to track down requestees.”

I grabbed the authorization form and stomped out, up the stairs, and down the hall to the inspector’s office. “He in?” I asked the division secretary.

“Working on a report,” she said, which meant he would be anything but agreeable.

“I need to see him. I’m in a hurry.”

“Okay,” she said, shaking her head. Picking up the phone, she announced me. “Go on in.”

Inspector Doyle was slumped behind a desk covered with a mound of white papers, some mimeographed, some Xeroxes, some printouts, and a few just typed. Atop the pile, like the hard yolk of my fried egg sandwich, was a clump of wadded up sheets of yellow paper. The pad from which they’d been ripped was on his lap. He looked irritated and haggard. His face was almost the same color as his short, gray-laced carrot-colored hair. Behind him, the sun was beginning to singe the fog, breaking through in short-lived bursts. It showed the dirt on his window.

“So, Smith?” he demanded.

This certainly wasn’t the time to see him. “Quick item, sir,” I said. “Accounting needs a signature on this authorization. It got sent on without one.”

He nodded, taking the form.

I waited. When I’d joined the Detail, there was a rumor that Inspector Doyle had cancer. He’d lost a lot of weight. He looked tired and worried. Now four months later, he looked exactly the same, no worse, but certainly no better. The rumor mill had stalled.

His ruddy forehead wrinkled. “Sit down, Smith.”

I sat.

“I thought I had sent this back to you.”

“No.”

He shrugged. “It should never have got to Accounting.” He laid the form atop the yellow pad. With both hands he shoved the piles of white papers toward the sides of the desk, as if he were treading paper-strewn water. “The thing is, Smith,” he said, propping an elbow in the space he’d cleared, “I don’t like this type of pay-off. Informants! These guys, they spend half their time thumbing their noses at the law and the other half picking our pockets.”

It’s a bit late in the day for this kind of idealism, I thought, particularly for the head of Homicide. There had to be something behind Inspector Doyle’s reaction. “Sir, this is Herman Ott. He’d never flaunt the law in public. He’s too careful. Sometimes I wish he would; we’d have a little more to bargain with.”

His color deepened. I had taken the wrong tack.

Quickly, I said, “He did give me information I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I collared the South Side Basher because of him.”

“Still, Smith …”

“Sir, I did discuss this with you then.”

“I don’t recall any mention of two hundred dollars.”

“I didn’t know the amount then. I hadn’t done the actual bargaining.” I added, “I assumed you would expect me to check with you first.”

Grudgingly, he nodded. “I’ll look this over, Smith. It won’t do Ott any harm to wait.”

“Maybe not, but he left a message for Liz Goldenstern. It could be important. If I don’t come through with that money—money I promised him—you can imagine how much he’ll tell me.”

Inspector Doyle leaned back in his chair. His shirt hung loose. It was obviously a garment from his heavier days. “Ott talks enough when he chooses,” he grumbled.

Rats. I’d forgotten Herman Ott had testified before the police review commission last month. It was his testimony that had convinced the board to hold another week of hearings, and to call in Inspector Doyle. Ott hadn’t won his point, but his accusations had triggered the board’s request for another, more detailed report, a report Inspector Doyle had to write up, a report that had caused him to miss a three-day conference in sunny Santa Barbara.

I took a breath, trying to decide on the right tack. I said, “Sir, it’s not a question of Ott. It’s a matter of my reputation. I made a deal, and I’m not holding up my end. If I don’t pay Herman Ott, I’ll never get another thing out of him, or, when the word spreads, any other informant.”

He pressed his lips together.

“And everyone else in the department will be tainted. There will be borderline deals that won’t get made, collars we won’t get.”

With a sigh, he said, “All right, all right, Smith, you’ve made your point. You’ll have your money. But it’ll go through channels like anything else. I’m not shaking up the department for Herman Ott.”

There was no point in arguing. Muttering the minimum necessary pleasantries, I walked out. The division secretary eyed me for wounds. I shrugged. I’d won the battle, after a fashion, but lost the war. The operation had been a success, but the patient had died. I’d get my money, but by then it would be too late for it to be any use in bargaining with Herman Ott. By then it would just be payment for services rendered. Without it, I could kiss Herman Ott’s reason for calling Liz good-bye.

The only possible leverage was Pereira’s tax knowledge. To get any use of that, I’d have to catch her before she spent it all on leads to the shoe thief. After an all-nighter learning the intricacies of Form 45-whatever, Connie wasn’t going to be in a mood to share the reward. But she’d be easier to bargain with than Ott. She owed me. I glanced into the bullpen. Her desk was still empty.

But there was one more place to check for Ott’s message. Leaving word with the dispatcher to have Pereira meet me at Ott’s office at eleven
A.M.,
I signed out a car and headed for Liz Goldenstern’s phone machine.

It was just after ten
A.M.
when I passed Liz’s flat. There was a blue van in the driveway by Laurence Mayer’s cottage, a patrol car in front of the triplex, and not another parking spot on the street. I could have left the black and white in the driveway, but I didn’t want to block in Mayer’s patient. I needed to question Mayer about Liz Goldenstern’s son, but I could do that after I had listened to her tape. I drove around the corner. A yellow Volvo was pulling out, which saved me from testing just how considerate I was willing to be. Even with the walk, there was ample time to deal with everything here and still meet Pereira before she got to Herman Ott’s office.

In front of Liz’s triplex, Heling, a rookie, slumped against her patrol car seat, her eyes on Liz’s flat.

“Anything new in there?” I asked.

She raised her eyebrows and sighed deeply. “Nothing has changed since I got here”—she looked down at her watch—“two hours and twenty-six minutes ago. It’s been like staring at a photograph. If I had known police work would be this boring I’d have stayed in word processing.”

“Which
wasn’t
boring?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “I expect to be in here for forty-five minutes. Why don’t you take a break?”

“You don’t have to ask twice, Smith. See you then.”

I walked up the ramp. The breeze that had blown the palm fronds early this morning had disappeared with the fog. In the stillness, the sweet smell of freesias drifted up from the box beneath the windows. I opened the door and stood as I had yesterday afternoon when I’d pushed Liz’s chair inside. Then Liz had dominated everything. But now, with her gone, I was struck by the emptiness of the room—not a spiritual vacancy, but a lack of furnishings. The room looked like it had been cleared, repainted, and was waiting for the furniture to be brought back in. All that stood on the green wall-to-wall carpet was four floor lamps, one by each wall, and the small table under the front windows that held the phone and answering machine. Across from the door was a beige-tiled fireplace with an empty mantel. The only chairs were pushed against the waist-high partition that divided this room from the next. It took me a moment to recall that Laurence Mayer had remodeled this flat to suit Liz.

There was no furniture to maneuver around, no area rugs to get caught in her wheels, no chairs to come between her and the lamps she needed to turn on.

As I walked in, I realized that the barrenness of decoration on the floor was balanced by the profusion of color on the one full wall, by the door. A two-by-three-foot weaving in thick red and gold wools hung next to water colors: one of a fishing troller with the sun tinting the ocean swells, the other of the fog lifting off the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Beside them were posters of a Greek village at sunrise, Guadalajara on a cloudless day, and the Berkeley pier at dusk. None of the works looked valuable in itself, but their placement drew my eye from one to the next, following the warm golden lines and the clear blue of freedom. I swallowed, surveyed the room again, and moved on to the next room.

Clearly, it had been intended to be a dining room. Most houses in the Berkeley flatlands had built-in china cabinets. They varied in size, and in tastefulness. Some were of the original stained wood, with leaded glass doors to stand guard over the good Dresden. Some had been painted over to blend with the walls. Others had been “updated,” the original wood yanked out and replaced with varnished pine. But it was a rare house that had none at all. When Liz had turned the dining room into an office she had left the china cabinet—one of the leaded glass ones—but she’d had the bottom doors removed and filled the shelves behind them with phone books, municipal directories, and annual reports of public agencies. Despite the leaded glass, there was nothing homey about this room. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, and those boards were laden with schedules of committee meetings, proposals from those committees, a calendar that listed nothing for last night but the meeting she had missed, and nothing for today at all.

The only decoration, if it could be called such, was an artist’s sketch of Marina Vista. In it, the building could have passed for the Greek village. It stood a crisp white against the pale blue of the sky, the darker blue of the bay, and the fresh green of the imagined landscaping. The building looked to be six stories high, with the ramp both Brad Butz and Laurence Mayer had bragged about coiling around it. They had been right about that ramp; even in the sketch it gave the building a sense of community. I could picture the tenants joining friends on the flat portions, chatting as the sun set over the inlet. Looking at the sketch, I could see why Liz had pushed for it. I could see why she was willing to give up this desirable flat to move in there.