Cop Out (29 page)

The ACC locker, I realized with a start, was the bribe. Bryant had let Brother Cyril hide his Kaldane shipments in the locker. In return Cyril had accepted the mediation decision. Cyril had given up his place on Telegraph, which was just a cover for the drug running anyway. Jeez, the man must have spent his days in his expensive hotel room laughing.

It was so easy to imagine Daisy or any of the ACC members killing Bryant Hemming. If Ott hadn’t been on his way to Muir Beach when Hemming was shot, I would almost have included him. I slotted him in as the killer as I ran through the scene in my head.

Bryant Hemming was a head taller than Ott, fifty pounds heavier, and in better shape than Ott had been any time since his high school football picture. But it’d be Ott glaring at Hemming like a lion at a weasel, Ott demanding confession, restitution, the naming of names.

And Hemming? He’d be wheeling, dealing, trying to haggle and charm. When none of it worked, he’d do what he always did: assume the problem would go away.

Ott would pull out the nine-millimeter and click off the safety.

Hemming would laugh, a little forced but still arrogant. “Ott, you’re not going to kill me.”

“This is fraud, grand theft, endangering the public safety, Bryant. When your new backers in Washington hear about this—”

Hemming would shrug. “Ott, Ott. Given the choice of you or me, who do you think they’ll believe?”

Maybe they’d have gone another round or two, with Ott deigning to mention the law or the prospective testimony of the ACC members and Hemming laughing at the picture of Serenity Kaetz or Roger Macalester facing men in five-hundred-dollar suits; or Daisy, the aggrieved ex-wife, still whining about missing the knock of opportunity two years ago; or Margo ranting about emergency rooms with half her face hanging flaccid; or Griffon.…Here Hemming would have thrown up his hands. “Move out of the way, Ott. I have a plane to catch.”

And Ott—or Daisy, Margo, Griffon, Roger, Serenity?—would have shot him. Hemming would have fallen back through the doorway, landing as we’d found him on the bedroom floor. The killer would have stood, stunned, for minutes till the outrage and frustration dissipated enough to realize he was a murderer.

“I didn’t intend to kill him,” he’d say later. “Bryant drove me to it.” Maybe he’d be embarrassed at that cliché defense. But the irony was he’d be right. Bryant Hemming had pushed the people who trusted him and lied and finagled, and when they tried to nail him down, he evaporated. He had in fact become the personification of the bureaucracies he railed against.

I savored the moment. No longer was I worried about noises outside; instead, I felt the tacit protection of this shabby, dark, uninviting building.

I leaned back heavily in Ott’s mustard desk chair. Strips of tape that covered the tears and cracks in the Naugahyde cut into my arms. I shifted, but there was no decent way to sit in this chair. I almost laughed. Of course this seat was awful. For Ott, it would have been improper to have his chair be better than the miserable wooden seats he offered his visitors.

It was cold in here, a stale cold that preserved the smell of Ott’s bitter green tea, of dust and the limp salty crackers he kept beside his little fridge, the reek of dirt and sweat that settled in the coats of his unwashed clients, the remnants of urine, excrement, blood, and decay that were Bryant Hemming’s epitaph.

Understanding the motive brought me no closer to the killer or to Ott. But when I knew how Ott left the office here, I’d have them both.

What would have so unnerved him as to make him forget to lock his dead bolt? The combination of the mine disaster article and the rare chance to see a yellow-billed loon? Was that enough to discombobulate Herman Ott? Maybe.

I thought I heard the building door open. I cocked an ear toward the hall, straining to note the distant pat of feet on the stairs. Still quiet.

Think! Herman Ott was on Brother Cyril’s tail. Cyril had to be on Ott’s. Ott hated to “give” anything to the police, but if he’d gotten evidence of Brother Cyril running pesticides, he would have wrapped it in ribbons for us and announced it to the newspapers, TV reporters, anyone who would listen.

Cyril would be on guard, jabbing back, threatening him. And Ott was too savvy to dismiss the threats of a man who figures he represents the Almighty. Suddenly Ott gets an offer to disappear. He can spend the night at Muir Beach, then creep back into Berkeley and attack Brother Cyril from behind. A golden opportunity. But he’s got to move fast if he’s going to get to Muir Beach by dusk. He doesn’t, after all, want to miss the rare loon.

How long had Ott planned to stay away? Had he hung around Muir Beach waiting for his driver to come get him? That driver was all of a sudden a murderer and had more pressing problems than ferrying Ott home. Still, Ott wasn’t miles from civilization. From Muir Beach he could have walked fifty yards to a house and asked to use the phone. Maybe then he saw the newspaper coverage of the murder or heard Jason Figueroa’s report on TV.

I smiled. Once Ott heard that, he’d have stayed hidden on principle, the principle of not helping the cops. And the certainty that he could solve the case before the Berkeley police did.

He’d be right, because of course he knew who had driven him to Muir Beach.

And that person was someone he wasn’t so eager to turn over to us.

Footsteps? I leaned forward, listened. Were those feet moving up the stairs? I switched off the light, moved into the bedroom, and kept my eye on the door.

I stood behind the bookcase as I had before. But now I felt as if a cold hand had clasped the back of my waist. If Kovach came through the office door, I was stuck. No excuse. No escape. I felt like Bryant Hemming as he backed through the doorway into here and realized there was no way out.

The door handle turned.

I held my breath. This was no casual nocturnal visitor. Ott’s associates couldn’t be that quiet.

The door opened slowly.

He looked around, then walked over to the file cabinet and pulled open the drawer. “Police!” I said. “Hold it right there!” He didn’t hold it. He ran.

“S
TOP WHERE YOU ARE
,” I yelled after him into the hall. He kept moving down the corridor, feet slipping on the slick floor as he rounded the corner. By the time I reached the stairs he was running up. Logic would have told him to race down and out of the building and onto the street where everyone would be his friend and no one would be anxious to tell the cop where he’d gone. But panic has its own rules. When you’re going all out, you’re too frantic to trust yourself step after downward step. Instinctively you go up with the stairs in front of you where you can see them, push off if you have to. Adrenaline takes care of the climb.

At the top he banged forward into the wall, bounced off and onto the dark, narrow flight of stairs to the roof.

My breath was coming in gasps. I pushed off the wall and up into the rickety staircase, moving by instinct in the sudden blackness. Above, the door opened, the dim light of night outlining him as he flung himself forward.

I caught the door before it slammed, skidded through the opening, stopped dead, and listened. If he’d been a pro at this, he’d have been still too. Or already over the edge onto the next roof. He was neither. He was running across the gravel.

“Hold it where you are, Roger,” I shouted as I raced after him.

He leaped for the rim. With a final burst of speed I grabbed him and brought him down.

I put him in the holding room downstairs in the station. Macalester glanced around the tiny room, settled himself on the pine bench, glowering at the thick metal rings to which we clasp the handcuffs. The elevator doors—the jail express—made up one wall. The room had that dingy finality of an old downtown train terminal filled with people anxious to get out.

Macalester’s denim jacket was sweat-damp, and his ponytail lay like a dead eel on his back. Another old plaid flannel shirt poked out under his jacket.

I reran in fast forward my mental tape of an outraged Ott shooting Bryant, this time slotting Roger into the Ott role. No problem there. His motive put Ott’s in the shade. Could he have had a key to Ott’s office? With the number circulating on the Avenue, he’d have been embarrassed not to. “You were in Ott’s office. What were you looking for?”

“I wasn’t—”

“Roger! Do you want me to list the laws you’ve broken? This is your last chance here with me. And I am completely out of patience.” When I booked him, I would have to admit I had been waiting in Herman Ott’s office. I needed Roger to provide me with a touchdown. Otherwise my suspension loomed large.

“Roger, let’s cut to the chase. You were looking for something in Ott’s office. Here’s your choice: You can tell me what you were after and leave me satisfied or you can stonewall, piss me off, and have the entire Homicide team combing through your life.” I paused, watching his opaque brown eyes flicker from side to side as if looking for a way out, “Getting an answer now will also put me in a much better mood. You’ll appreciate that later.”

He screwed up his elfin face, puckered his lips, then shrugged. “Okay.”

“You were searching for?”

“Copies Ott made from the foundation books.”

“The same books Officer Pereira went over?”

“Yeah.”

I was tempted to point out that if there had been an irregularity, Pereira would have found it, “Why?”

“Ott caught the entry; I figured you might.”

“Entry?”

Again his eyes flickered back and forth. It was too late to back out now; the best he could hope for would be to shoot me down a wrong path.

“Entry?” I insisted.

“It was just a lunch,” he muttered, suddenly enshrouded in second thoughts.

A lunch!
I wanted to shout.
You don’t kill over a lunch!
Why was he worried about something as inconsequential as a lunch anyway? A lunch paid for by ACC. Unless it was at a spot where he shouldn’t have been, doing business he shouldn’t have been doing. “The meal at Chez Panisse,” I said.

He cringed. “I took two friends. The whole thing came to over a hundred dollars. I don’t know what came over me to charge it to ACC. I just didn’t want it to get out, I’ll look like such a—”

“Liar?”

“Hey, I’m confessing. What more do you want?”

“The truth. Roger, you are a miserable liar. All you’re doing now is ticking me off. You and your friends are not the lunch at Chez Panisse set. I’ll bet you’ve never even been there,” I baited.

“Sure I have. Upstairs. You want to know what it’s like? Want me to describe the two gigantic flower sprays, one just off to the right of the stair landing, the other on the bar? Want to know where we sat? In the back room beyond the booths or in the front room between the bar and the sleeping porch? Want to know what the bathroom is like?”

I waved off the offer. A description of the men’s room wasn’t going to do me much good. In any case, he’d said enough. “I believe you—”

He smiled smugly.

“—that you’ve been there. Not that you’ve been there with friends.” It wouldn’t have occurred to him to go with friends or to charge it to the foundation.

But clearly he
had
been there. He
had
charged it to ACC. If the meal wasn’t with two friends, who was it with? “When was this lunch?”

“I don’t—”

“Roger!”

“Last week.”

It took me only a moment to recall what had happened in the world of ACC since then and whom Roger Macalester would legitimately take to lunch at Chez Panisse. “So, it was you, Roger, not Bryant, who negotiated with the conservative investors.”

“Yeah,” he said, hanging his head. “But like Bryant said, if they wanted to invest their money in our projects, all the better for us.” He looked so relieved I could barely keep myself from laughing. He was so caught up in this cover-up that he’d clearly forgotten he’d taken their money not for investment purposes but to pour down the bottomless chute of the pyramid.

That I would ignore for the moment, in favor of the bombshell he was hiding. “You paid for the lunch. So, Roger, the conservatives weren’t courting you, as you made out. They weren’t begging; you weren’t deigning to take their money and accepting it as contributions to the investments ACC supported. You were going after right-wing money for ACC.”

I was braced for a flurry of righteous denials, the waving of outraged arms, flailing his twenty years of card-carrying leftism at me. Roger Macalester just grinned.

I glanced around the small dark anteroom. It was the best Roger Macalester would see for a while.

His fleecing of right-wing contributors for the ACC pyramid was fraud. He’d do time (a small price to pay for a guy already spending his nights in a storage locker). And he’d come out a cult hero on the Avenue.

Once he started telling me about luring the smug and greedy with promises of profit and social acceptance, he could barely move his lips fast enough. It was opening night of a performance he would give again and again at every coffeehouse on the Avenue for years to come. The man was elated.

I was not. I didn’t know how much of what he said was true. But one thing I was sure of: if Herman Ott had uncovered that scam he would never have considered turning in Roger Macalester to us. “Ott knew, didn’t he?”

Roger nodded.

“Roger,” I said, sure of the answer already, “what should make me think you did not shoot Bryant?”

“Kill him? Why would I kill him? Things were bad before he died, but once he left town and I was in charge, I could have salvaged ACC. The new contributors, that’s what that was all about. I would have gotten our members’ money back. Everything would have been okay. It all would have worked out if fucking Bryant hadn’t gone and got himself killed. God, it’s just like him.”

“Smith.” One of the dispatchers stuck his head in the door. “I’m doing you a favor, on my break.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“You’ve got a message from Howard. And Doyle’s in his office. He wants to see you.”

A
SUMMONS FROM
D
OYLE
. I had nothing near the touchdown I needed to face him.