Cop Out (15 page)

“Griffon, you’re not tight with the artists, are you?”

He could hardly dispute that now.

“Then why would Ott think you’d know anything about Serenity Kaetz beyond the fact that she invested?”

He shrugged.

I watched him, wondering if his condescension toward the artists was not so much world-weariness as the result of their scorn of his “art.” My gaze drifted from his long, bony face to the wall behind him, to the swords, and harpies in black and brown, blue and red, green and yellow, on pictured backs. The roses, the crucifixes, the angels blowing angry trumpets. “If you aren’t thick with the artists, why would they trust your financial judgment?” I glanced around the tiny room. “You can’t be making a fortune here.”

Now he did jump up. So fast Kovach almost made a grab for him. “Hey, don’t let this studio deceive you. I’m doing just fine. Clients come to me from Los Angeles, from Reno, from as far away as Tulsa.”

“Oh, really?” I hadn’t moved.

“Really. They see my work, they’ve got to have it. No matter if they’ve got to travel, no matter what it costs them. They’ve got to have it.”

“And what, Griffon, makes your work so special?”

“Look!” He pointed to a magazine photo of a man’s back. A tree trunk grew out of the crack of his buttocks, wove toward his right ribs, back past his spine, and ended in a branch running just below his shoulder and down his arm. On the shoulder a black panther crouched. I glanced from it to the photo next to it, a similar scene on a similar body. Artistically Griffon’s treatment wasn’t much different—but his composition seemed alive. The panther glowed.

“How do you do that?”

“Trade secret.”

“Griffon.”

“You can toss me in the can for a century, but I’m not giving up my secret. That’s my career, my life, man.”

That I’d keep for leverage. “Okay, fair enough. So you’re making good money, and clearly you’re not spending it on overhead here. Where is it? In the ACC fund?”

It was a moment before he admitted, “Yeah.”

“How much?”

“A couple thou.”

“Exactly?”

“Thirteen thousand two hundred forty-three dollars and some cents.”

“Whew!” Kovach couldn’t resist.

“Why have ACC start a fund?”

He stared down the length of his bony nose, eyeing me as if I were offal not even a vulture would take. “Liquidity, of course.”

“You invested the money in the natural place that would suit a group of artists committed to personal freedom, to artistic expression, commerce, and the sudden urge to get their money and move fast—ACC. And then I find you breaking into the office where the head of ACC was murdered. How do you explain that?”

A wise vulture would have shut his beak, abandoned his carrion. Demanded a lawyer. But Griffon said, “I wanted to get Bryant’s case file.”

I couldn’t keep a small smile from settling on my face. So Daisy Culligan had been right; Ott was investigating Bryant Hemming. “Why’d you assume Ott was interested in Bryant?”

“Why else would he be asking me about the ACC investors?”

“And what did you want to find in his file?”

“What Hemming was up to with the ACC fund.”

“You think he was siphoning it off for his own use?”

“Oh, no, not yet.”

“So why were you concerned?”

“I know people. I could read Bryant Hemming, and the book on him is he’s lost his focus. It’s like these guys who come in for a full back job here. I spend days customizing the design, choosing the symbols that resonate with them, creating balance in the sketch, harmony in the colors, picking the accent shape and that one color that’s just enough out of harmony to make the whole thing come alive. Half the time guys don’t even know what their own backs look like. Some skinny kid comes in here demanding a mural. Hell, a mural would wrap around his back and stomach three times. Or a fat guy wants a panda perched in bamboo. Well, that’s a champagne glass shape. So what you got is this delicate design coming up from his waist and spreading out over his shoulders. And to the sides of that, untouched, you got all the fat hanging off his ribs. Not a pretty sight.”

I laughed, or as close to a laugh as I could come by this hour.

But Griffon was absorbed in his diatribe. “And a whole back, even using a tattoo machine, you don’t do a whole back in an hour. It’s a long, long process. Days. By the end we’re both wiped out. And then what does the guy do? Does he go home and apply Neosporin like I tell him? Does he stay out of the sun so the colors won’t fade? No way. He brats out of here like school’s out for the summer. He shows his work at every pool in town. And then when it fades, he bitches.”

“And Bryant?” I said, pulling him back to his original point.

“Oh, right. Well, investments take maintenance too. You just can’t go to the beach and forget about them. They bleach out too.”

“Or get involved in mediation and forget them?”

He ran one of those talon fingers across the back of his other hand. Considering. Weighing.

In the silence I stared beyond him at his design on the wall, the shining black panther that looked so alive I expected him to hop off the host’s back and attack.

“ ‘Forget’ wasn’t it,” Griffon said. “Bryant got co-opted by the mediation. It took over everything, and then it sucked him dry.”

“And he
forgot
the rest?” I prompted.

“It didn’t matter.” Griffon leaned forward, tapping one of his talons on the edge of the table. “A decade ago people—not
you
, pillars-of-the-community types—assumed the only misfits who come in here were bikers. Now they figure it’s bikers, and their own teenage daughters after discreet hearts on their tits or butterflies on their butts. Truth is I could do you a full-blown psychological survey of society without ever leaving this room. Like the skinny guy after the mural. I talk them out of it, design them a panther over the shoulder. Panther’s poised on a wall of full rounded rocks. Now the guy looks in the three-way mirror and he doesn’t see his skinny ribs anymore. He’s looking at mighty rocks. He gets to thinking of himself as Rocky. He starts strutting down alleys, baiting bikers—”

“And Bryant Hemming?”

“The Mediator Who Could Solve Anything? A mediator’s supposed to be behind the scenes,
facilitating
, right? When he starts making himself the star, he’s out of control.”

“Is that what you told Ott?” I asked on a hunch.

“Yeah.”

“What did Ott say?”

He laughed. It was a quick, unpleasant sound of contempt and of triumph.

I raised an eyebrow and waited.

This time he didn’t need time to think. “This is what you’re after, right? Okay, I’ll make you a deal.”

I waited some more.

“It matters to me to stay out of jail. Leave me be, and I’ll tell you something you won’t find out from anyone but me.”

“How do I know that?”

“You’ll know when I tell you.”

I leaned back as if I were pondering his offer. I kept myself from grinning. This was just the offer I’d been planning to make myself. It was clear he knew more than he was telling me; I’d been biding my time to get enough of a handle on him to know what to deal for. “Okay, Griffon, but here are the parameters. Show me what you’ve got, and you don’t make any calls, don’t give any warnings. That clear?”

He shrugged off the warning so easily I was sure that the idea of protecting anyone else hadn’t crossed his mind. “Ott asked me about Bryant and Cyril. I told him he’d got a pair there.”

“Pair of what?”

“The two of them, they wrapped their causes around them like full body murals. The causes are the ink, see, seeps under their skin, but the skin’s still their skin. The cause is underneath, you got it? Instead of them being the canvas to advertise the cause, the cause becomes just subcutaneous color for the all-important them.”

And that blindness, I drought with a shiver, is what makes them truly dangerous. “Why was Ott asking that?”

“Ott didn’t say.”

“Did he ask anything else about Bryant?”

Griffon’s dun lips pulled up into an eerie parody of a smile. “I ought to charge you extra for this.”

“Extra? What is more than freedom?”

He gave me one of those looks that reminds me that sarcasm and philosophical inquiry are unsuitable to police interviews. “What else did Ott ask about Bryant?”

“If his trips to Mexico were just for pleasure.”

“And you told him?”

“Far as I knew.”

“How far is that?”

He laughed. “I can spit farther. But Ott didn’t ask that. Because…see, Ott’s not the same kind of inside-out fool as Cyril or Bryant. Not quite. Ott’s just too damned smug. He figures he can outsmart anyone. He forgets when it gets down to fists, he’s just one more skinny little guy.”

“Suppose Ott got into a car with Brother Cyril?”

“Then Ott figured he could outwit him. But I’ll tell you, Cyril’s shrewd. Mix that with unholy ambition, a God-given certainty you are right, and a pack of bullies, and it’ll take a lot more than one paunchy little PI to topple him.”

A cold shiver shot down my back. Griffon was dead right about Ott, about what he’d do. Ott survived on Telegraph because of his connections and because people feared and respected him. Cyril would do neither.

“And now, Griffon, the question you keep avoiding: You made your way through Ott’s office right to the gun. How did you know it was there?”

“I didn’t.”

“You were just moseying over to take in the view of the air shaft?”

“Hell, no. I was after whatever Ott had found. There was nothing in his office, was there? You saw me go through there, didn’t you? So whatever it was had to be in his emergency hideout, where he puts stuff when it’s not safe inside the office.”

His talonlike fingers were not tapping decisively as they had before but making nervous little circles. He was lying, of course, but I couldn’t figure just why or about what. For anyone else the idea of hanging valuables out his window would have been ludicrous, but I wouldn’t rule it out for Ott. Then what was Griffon adding, subtracting, substituting, subverting?

A
T 12:30
A.M. I
SAT
in front of the typewriter off the squad room pondering Griffon’s lie. A sin of commission, or more likely omission. Everyone’s got something he or she doesn’t want us to know. Mostly the desperate silence is more a sign of self-centeredness than unrevealed clues. Griffon was well enough endowed in the ego department to assume that I’d not only want to know his secrets but would broadcast them to the waiting world. He was also sly enough to withhold a valuable lead, and shifty enough to be involved.

I swayed to the siren song of Ott’s asking the purpose of Bryant Hemming’s trips to Mexico, Bryant Hemming going there to score contraband for a big Berkeley sale and Ott hot on the trail. But what would Ott expect to find in Mexico beyond the fact that he couldn’t speak Spanish? Ott’s kryptonite was his knowledge of Berkeley. Outside the city he was no Superman. If he needed information from Mexico, he’d step into a phone booth and call a Mexican counterpart. And if we suspected Bryant Hemming had tanned himself in Acapulco waiting for contraband, we’d go through our own channels.

I took my pasty white face to the typewriter and started on my reports from the day. I was desperate enough to plunk coins into the wretched coffee machine and drink the brown water without white powder and hope that it had, this once, more caffeine than a No-Doz.

“My office, Smith,” Inspector Doyle snapped.

I picked up my little stack of reports and headed through the half-lit records room with its empty desks and brown metal files that screamed “fiscal restraint.” In Berkeley not funding the police is seen as keeping the playing field level.

I rounded the corner and headed into the inspector’s outer office. Jackson and Eggs were in the inner sanctum, behind the rhinoceroses grazing along the interior windowsill. They were settled in chairs, Homicide detectives as I had once been, sitting in the Homicide inspector’s office waiting to deal with the outsider. I wasn’t quite that, but I could tell from the polite nods they offered that I wasn’t one of them anymore either.

Doyle braced himself beside his chair. “Smith, Griffon breaks into Ott’s office and goes straight for the gun and you leave him on the street?”

“It was a judgment call.” I claimed the doorway.

Jackson whistled. Eggs said nothing. I had worked homicides with each of them. I’d taught Clayton Jackson’s son to dive in the pool, and Jackson had brought me cups of Peet’s coffee to get me through Detectives’ Too-Early-in-the-Morning Meetings. He’d given me the black man’s view, and I’d swapped him the woman’s take. He and Eggs—Al Eggenburger—were the perfect partners. With the exception of sex they were in every way opposites. Jackson was burly, Eggs pencil thin. I’d virtually never seen the top of Jackson’s desk under the papers; Eggs’s was waxed. Jackson’s wall was covered in family pictures; Eggs went home to a fish tank. Yet they’d come to know and trust each other in a way that’s hard when your subconscious assumptions are so different. For a decade Eggs had ribbed Jackson as Clay mourned his football Raiders lost to L.A. In his hands Jackson’s prayers for the miracle of his team’s return to Oakland had become a department standard. “Right, Friedman,” Eggs would say, “you’ll close that case. And Jackson’s Raiders will come home to Oakland.” Eventually any dead-end case was classified as a JR.

And when, after negotiations had piqued hopes, then failed year after year, suddenly the beloved Raiders did come back to Oakland, Jackson said not a thing. He waited.

Eggs filled their office with silver and black balloons.

Jackson said nothing.

Eggs sent singing caterers to Jackson’s tailgate party.

Jackson said nothing.

Jackson was waiting.

Like Jackson, who had mourned in frustration over the years, Eggs realized there was nothing he could do.

Eggs was waiting too. He knew Jackson would choose the perfect moment to— So Eggs was watching his tail. And the rest of us were watching, waiting, eagerly. Warily.

Occasionally Eggs had pushed Jackson too hard in spots he never expected to be tender. Once or twice Jackson had pierced Eggs, mistaken his icy restraint for indifference and weeks later wondered why he was being cold-shouldered. Then they’d been glad to have me in Homicide to tell them where their knives had stuck and how to pull them out without cutting deeper. They watched out for me, translating Inspector Doyle’s grumbles, warning me when he was waving his shillelagh.