I STARED INTO THE STUDEBAKER.
The body there wasn’t Ott’s.
Long strands of brown hair looped out from a red serape that covered the curled body like a shroud. A pale, long-fingered hand clung to one edge. There is a skill known as watching with your ears. Those of us who grew up in busy, urban societies learned to block out whole levels of sound. Leaves rustle, VCRs hum, people breathe nearby; we don’t notice. But if you listen…It didn’t take too much concentration to hear the forced flow of breath in the car, like the snore of a little pink pig. I tried Ott’s door handle and was not surprised to find it locked.
“Police,” I called. “Move your hands out where I can see them.”
The serape flew up. I jumped back out of immediate range. I didn’t expect him to have a weapon, but in my business you guess wrong, you die.
“Put your hands out slowly.”
Fingers, palms, and finally wrists slid into view. The serape fell back, revealing a face I’d seen on the Avenue in the last few weeks sitting against the wall selling Free Advice. “If it’s not free,” he had told me, “it’s not worth anything.” It had been a clever and harmless riff, the kind that makes Telegraph Avenue fun.
I eyed him. “Let me give you some advice,” I said, “free advice. Don’t use someone else’s car as a crash pad.”
I was ready for him to insist indignantly the car was his and, when I axed that, to declare with undiminished outrage that he had permission to sleep there and finally to announce with great righteousness that he wasn’t harming anyone and if the city of Berkeley provided beds for its citizens, he wouldn’t have to be sleeping in a backseat that was way too short for him anyway. Blame someone else, it’s the way of the nineties. But he surprised me. He said nothing and sat up.
“Now move out here slowly. Keep your hands where I can see them. Okay,” I said as he got out, “now hands spread on the car. Do you have any weapons on you?”
“Not hardly.”
“I’m going to check you, okay?” It’s a thin line here between a witness’s rights and my safety. You never know what you’ll find: a knife taped to the inner thigh so close to the groin you wonder if the suspect was planning a sex change or an uncapped hypodermic under the sock.
But he was clean. And he had a driver’s license: Charles Edward Kidd. Twenty-seven years old. Address: a trailer space number in Portland, Oregon. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I should have been relieved that it wasn’t Ott in the car, that Ott wasn’t dead. But I knew Ott. The man was a leftover from the hippie era, but when it came to his car, he was a neat freak. No papers were ever left in it, no client of questionable hygiene allowed inside, and even a passenger who passed muster would never be permitted to put parcels or; God forbid, feet on the fine leather seats. No way would Herman Ott allow Kidd to use the Studebaker as a crash pad.
If he knew.
Maybe Ott had left town. Yesterday afternoon he’d looked worried. Worried enough to call me.
“Where are your car and your trailer, Mr. Kidd?”
“Didn’t have a car. If I’d had the cash for a car, I wouldn’t have lived in a trailer. Here’s my free advice: Don’t live in what you can’t stand up in.”
I glanced questioningly at Ott’s car.
“So I don’t always follow my advice. No loss; it’s free.”
Relief blew over me. Kidd wasn’t stupid. He wouldn’t kill, maim, or abduct Herman Ott and then doze off in his car.
The radio on my shoulder crackled. I cocked my ear. I didn’t want to miss a beat call, not for what might well turn out to be a housekeeping problem. But the call was for Adam 2 on a beat in the hills.
I concentrated on Charles Edward Kidd. I’m a sucker for guys like him, not the ones who threw spit-balls in school but the ones who came out with the quips. Add to that someone who has heard the song of the open road and written his own chorus, and I can feel the wind in my hair. It makes me think of driving down Ashby Avenue, turning right onto Route 80, and having the whole country open up ahead. What’s beneath that freedom? I always want to ask guys like Kidd. Are you running away, or have you slipped your bonds to walk unfettered? Does the road rise up to meet you? And when there’s no more open road, will you regret having driven so long and far that you can never find your way home again? Or will you know things in your soul the rest of us can only dream of?
None of that feeling was I about to let Kidd see. “You’re in a lot of trouble here, you know that, right? Your only chance to make things better is to be completely straight with me.”
“And you’ll let me go?” he said, leaning back against Ott’s car as if he owned it.
“And I’ll do what I can for you.”
He laughed. “ ‘Up to twenty percent off’? That means nothing.”
“Wrong, Mr. Kidd. Nothing is what you’ve got if you don’t cooperate. Nothing plus breaking the law. Now how did you get in this car?”
He was a tall, rangy guy. He looked at me, behind me at the driveway that led between the buildings to the street, and then, without moving his head, at the six-foot cement wall between this parking area and that of the next building.
“Don’t even think about it.”
He smiled sheepishly. “Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s no big thing. I did take the keys, but it’s not like I stole this old jalopy of Ott’s. I just wanted a place to sleep, and I knew he wasn’t going to be using it.”
My throat tightened. “How’d you know that?”
“Because I saw him getting in someone else’s car.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, ’cause it was real foggy by then and I was cold and didn’t want to spend another night sleeping outside. I mean I looked at him getting into someone else’s car and bingo—lightbulb—it came to me he wasn’t going to be in his car, so—”
“What kind of car was it?”
“Brown or gray or like that. Or maybe it just looked dark. It was dusk, so I couldn’t see good.”
“But what make of car?” Please, I prayed to the gods of interrogation, don’t make him one of those dropouts who pride themselves on the ultimate un-Americanism: not knowing cars.
Idols beseeched in desperation rarely deliver. And what this one gave me was about as much as I could hope for.
“Big. Lumpy. A van, or a station wagon, or one of those four-wheel-drive things for people who’d never consider an unpaved road.”
That limited the possibilities to half the vehicles on the freeway.
The radio crackled. Again it wasn’t for me. But I’d used up the time I’d normally have spent at lunch. I had to wrap up here and get back to my beat. “Was Oct alone?”
“No. Someone was driving.”
“What did that person look like?”
“Dunno.”
“Come on, don’t start that now.”
“No, listen, this is the truth. I was across the street, and I just saw this blur of pus yellow and looked up, and there was Ott getting into the van or whatever. Well, really what I saw was mostly his butt. It was on the other side of the street—Telegraph—did I say that? Then a bus pulls by in the near lane. I’m lucky to’ve spotted him.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Ott? Yellow—”
“No, the other guy.” To say Ott was attired in yellow was akin to announcing the fog rolls in at 4:00 P.M. here or grass is brown by August. Ott wears only yellows; he shops only at the Goodwill and Salvation Army, which means he has a remarkable collection of garments other people can no longer bring themselves to wear. It’s only through knowing him that I realized how popular mustard polyester was in years gone by.
“All I saw was a sleeve. Dark. Loose, like a coat, not a sweater.”
Amazing how much they remember when they’ve just got finished swearing they couldn’t have seen anything. “So how did you come to have Ott’s car key?”
“I did some work for him.”
Ott had gofers from time to time, amicable transients not on drugs or with axes of their own to grind were his employees of choice. “The key?”
“I got it out of his file drawer.”
My breath caught; this was worse than I’d imagined. “He left his files unlocked?”
“He must have left in a hurry. ’Cause the dead bolt on his office door was off. I mean, I just walked up after I saw him. I thought about—well, never mind about that—but when I got to his office, I walked right in.”
Which meant Kidd had already helped himself to the keys to Ott’s office and his files. But I ignored that for the moment. Because the idea of compulsive, anal Herman Ott walking out of his office without locking it stopped me cold. Ott could be carted out by the paramedics and he’d stop to double lock. Only with a gun to his head…I stared at Kidd. “Why didn’t you just spend the night there?” It came out more sarcastically than I’d intended, and for a moment I assumed Kidd’s shocked expression was in reaction to that.
“I thought about it,” he said. “But, well, the place is not a palace. I mean my standards aren’t high, but—” He shuddered. “I mean the only place to sleep is on the desk, exposed like a dead fish in front of the door. If anyone burst in…”
“And so you opted for the backseat of a Studebaker?”
My skepticism could have stopped him cold. But Kidd was a Scheherazade of the transient set, and he’d probably been on his end of the questioning as long as I’d been on mine. The edge of the serape dangled by his hand, and now he ran it between his fingers. “Actually, I’m glad you’re asking. You know, he’d kill me if he thought I went to the cops, but the thing is I was really kind of worried about ol’ Herman.”
Worried didn’t half cover it. I glanced at my watch. It was past time to be heading back to my beat. Instead I called in to the dispatcher, giving her my 10-20 (destination), and asking for Leonard, the beat officer, to meet me there.
Less than five minutes later, I left the car behind Leonard’s in front of Ott’s office. Ott always hated that; he figured we were out to besmirch his reputation.
I yanked open one of the double doors to Ott’s building. The bulb in the lobby was out. The place was going downhill—again. It mirrored the socioeconomic state of the Avenue. Built in the twenties for fashionable offices, it had a double staircase, and its circular hallways had been ready to accommodate the rush of commerce. It must once have been a lovely building with its old open-grille elevator, but not so appealing that businesses stayed on Telegraph Avenue. And so began its decline. There were periods when the two-room office suites became illegal crash pads and the Ott Detective Agency was its most respectable tenant. Asian refugee families moved in, and the building improved. A gym followed on the top floor. The refugees prospered and moved on; the gym failed. Now Ott’s floor housed a hodgepodge of cottage industries. Whether the proprietors were living in their cottages was a question I was glad I didn’t have to deal with.
Ott’s office was at the far corner of the third-floor hall. I came abreast of Leonard midway up the first flight of the once-grand double staircase.
On Telegraph Avenue Leonard is as much of a fixture as Ott. Gray-haired and shambling, he looks out of place in uniform. Suspects tend to dismiss him, and they tend to be sorry when they do. As we headed up the next staircase, I started to brief him on Kidd, but before I finished a sentence, he was shaking his head as if he already knew. “Seems, Leonard, that Kidd did a little low-level watch-out work for Ott. In Kidd’s case it sounds like charity on Ott’s part as much as need.”
“Maybe Ott wasn’t such a hot judge of character with this kid. Drugs create a lot of Mr. Hydes,” Leonard said.
“You’d think Ott would know that. I’m inclined to believe Kidd, Leonard. He knew where Ott kept the car key.”
“I’d believe Ott was forced before I’d picture him giving Kidd a tour of his hiding places.”
We were rounding the landing toward the second flight of stairs. There were still tenants living illegally here, but fewer than were here a year ago, and the halls had the night-empty feeling of an office building. As we rounded the second landing and headed down Ott’s hall, I was five steps ahead of Leonard.
“Smith, what’s your rush? So Ott goes off in a car. A case could have taken him out of town. He wouldn’t much like leaving Berkeley, but it’s the logical explanation.”
“And you think he’d leave his dead bolt off?”
“That’s the reason you got me risking a heart attack? The guy hasn’t dead-bolted his door!” Leonard was panting, but still, he edged in front of me. This was his beat. “Or Kidd says he didn’t dead-bolt it.”
Before I could answer, the smell hit us: urine, shit, blood, decay.
Leonard tried the doorknob. Of course it didn’t open.
I pulled out my baton and smashed its end through the O on the OTT DETECTIVE AGENCY sign. The opaque glass held for a moment, then sprayed like white fireworks.
I reached through and opened the door.
The body was inside.