THERE WAS BRANDY IN the teak credenza. I poured it for her, and Daisy Culligan sat holding the glass, lifting it to her mouth but not drinking, as if she were too stunned to remember how to move her lips. Her eager round face seemed to have fallen, and her skin looked looser, older, pale. Tears rolled from the corners of her eyes. Instead of wiping them away, she lifted the glass with both her hands as if it were an offering to her grief, and sipped in a slow, steady rite, pausing only for that first burning swallow, till the brandy was half gone. “Bryant and I were together for nine years. I can’t believe this. Why would anyone kill him? It’s not fair. He’d come into the perfect job for him; he was doing important work, making a difference.…Dead?” She lifted the glass to her mouth again but barely swallowed.
“Bryant was on to something big,” she continued. “He was all caught up in it.” Her voice grew steadier as she spoke. “ ‘Look at these guys,’ he’d say, ‘these bombers and the ones who stalk into an office building with an AK forty-seven; they don’t care about the people they kill. What got them started years ago was a post office line that’s out the front door. It’s the pervasive sense of getting the short end of the stick and looking over to see who snatched the big end and finding that face shielded behind layers of bureaucracy. No one’s responsible; no one cares. Instead of apologizing all over the place, they’re snotty. If I could just get in there in the beginning…’ Bryant would say.”
I could hear Bryant Hemming saying that; it was essentially what he’d said Sunday night. “When did he tell you all that?”
“Pretty much every time I’ve seen him since he settled in at ACC and hired an assistant. We’ve been divorced for five years, but we don’t hate each other.” A big tear rolled down her cheek, around her mouth, off her chin, and into the brandy glass. She lifted the glass, stared into it, shrugged, and finished the brandy. “Bryant was so caught up in it that it was easier not to try to cut him off. I practiced the age-old feminine technique: smiled and nodded—you can do that quite well from rhythm of the monologue—and planned menus.” Now she did let out a laugh, a small one, cut short.
I smiled too. “Let the boys talk about themselves,” I remembered my mother used to say. “They like that.” By Bryant Hemming’s definition of his mediation client—the perpetually ignored—it was surprising we girls from that era hadn’t blown up every building in town. I said, “Why don’t I make you some tea and we’ll talk about him?”
She shifted off the chair. “I’ll do that. It would ruin my credibility to let a civilian make me tea.”
“A civilian?” I said lightly.
“No way you’d know. I’m not a big deal. But I am a cook. At the moment a low-fat cook. I used to be a low-cholesterol cook while that was in vogue.” She’d walked by me, ducked behind the circular staircase and into the kitchen alcove, a white ash and enamel affair with pans hanging, spoons and spatulas poking out of thick ceramic holders, and electric gizmos on a shelf above the counter. And three shelves of cookbooks.
There’s always a surreal quality to these postshock conversations when I am nudging the witness to talk, to ramble, to keep the channels open. Often nothing notable is said, but there have been times when the gray of the emotion-stripped rambling or purple histrionics has produced a case breaker.
“You have twice as many cookbooks as I do,” I offered. Daisy Culligan of course would have no idea what a bizarre statement that was. Mine filled two boxes in the second bedroom at Howard’s house. Gifts, all of them; every gift screaming a hope. That I would be a better wife than Nat Smith’s aunts figured he was getting; that I would grow up and eat better than my mother had any reason to assume; that Deidre and Jeff would get a better meal the next time they ate at our house. I was delighted with each gift; Howard and I love cookbooks, the more exotic the better. We sit on the sofa, eating pizza or Thai takeout, reading the recipes aloud and making up alternate descriptions for scallops persillade, vegetable pansotti, or, Howard’s favorite when he was in Vice, chanterelle tartlets.
But Daisy’s books were grease-marked and lumpy-paged from use. Beneath them now she measured leaves or bark or twigs into a tea strainer. As I had hoped, she picked up the conversational thread. “I’m the ultimate home delivery kitchen. Gourmet dishes five days a week, prepared for the individual need and palate.”
“How many clients do you have?”
“At the moment, seven. Two couples and three singles. Intense jobs, irregular schedules.”
“And you create seven different dinners each night?” I asked in amazement.
“No, no. I don’t make the meals to suit individuals; I find individuals to suit my meals. I’ve winnowed down the people till I’ve got seven with the same requirements.” She poured the boiling water into a white pot. “They all think I’m planning just for them. They think they’re getting a great deal. And in fact they are, but just not quite so special as they suppose.” I felt sure another time she would have caught my eye and grinned; now her lips just widened momentarily. “Probably they wouldn’t care; the snob value wouldn’t matter at all.”
But I could tell she didn’t believe that. And, I suspected, her little deception amused her as much as the yuppie cachet appealed to her clients.
“The great thing is I set my own hours, deliver at my convenience, and days go by when I don’t have to see a soul.” She pulled a tray from beside a cabinet, put the tea equipment on it, and walked back into the living room.
The tea tray fitted the little table exactly. From our futon chairs we were just close enough to put our cups on the table without awkward turns of arm yet far enough to talk without the sense of sitting in each other’s lap. For Daisy Culligan, I didn’t imagine there were many of those days without a soul. I added milk and sugar to my tea, took a sip, and smiled approval.
I wanted to see Bryant Hemming through her eyes and to see the coloring of those eyes I was looking through. Even then I wouldn’t perceive the truth, just a slant on it. One thing you learn in police work is that there is no truth, just opinions. You aim to round up enough of those opinions, put them in their proper places, and see where they point. I let the silence expand as I plotted logistics.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Her voice was higher, tight, as if it had squeezed out through a fear-constricted neck. “How come a good-looking, successful guy married a woman so much older than he was, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t. “Bryant was thirty-six, and you are?”
“Forty-eight.” She lifted her chin challenging me. “It wasn’t the age thing that caused our divorce. His life just changed.”
I liked Daisy Culligan, liked her ability to be comfortable in two small rooms, her delight in the prospect of startling her neighbors with the police car. Why had she accepted the ad copy of youth? If a woman like her, in the city of the Gray Panthers, capitulated so totally…I could picture her and Bryant the day they married ten or so years ago. She would have been in her late thirties, strikingly lively with long, curly red hair, the spray of lines around those eager brown eyes tentative, and succulent rounds of breast and hip. And Bryant I pictured still searching for his adult form. “Age doesn’t matter,” they must have assured everyone. But they had been wrong. “His life changed. How so?”
“He came into the job he was born for. At ACC—the Arts and Creativity Council. ACC does two things: They’ve got a money fund, and they do mediation. Bryant started out mostly managing the money.
He was lucky with that. He didn’t know much about money, and the truth is he didn’t care. But he made a couple of environmentally sound investments that panned out, and all of a sudden he was a genius. A modest genius, but enough to get himself called a savvy money manager. A savvy money fish in a very small Berkeley pond.”
“Like the biggest sailboat in the Berkeley lagoon, the kind that would be scuttled halfway across the bay?”
“ ’Fraid so. But before he got into rough water, he started mediating, and he hit his stride. He was a natural. He could always see both sides. Life was a series of terrifying choices—door number one, door number two—and the one he rejected might have held the grand prize. So suddenly he’s a real genius. He knows the mechanics of decision making intimately. He can explain a client’s position better than the client can. And do the same for his adversary. Now there are no closed door ones and door twos. Both doors are open—”
“Daisy, people never give you the whole story—”
She almost smiled. “Bryant knew that. He said he’d sabotaged himself enough by ignoring issues in his own decisions. It’s more complicated than that. But the point is, mediating freed him from indecision. It was as perfect a match as if my room here were on the cover of Clutter magazine.” She smiled weakly.
I sipped at my tea. “So, how is it that his new job undermined your marriage?”
“Once he got on TV he was hooked. Public access should lead to cable, should lead to network. He needed to dress better, drive a new car, be seen in public as the public Bryant Hemming. He probably spent more on two new suits than he had on clothes for the entirety of our marriage. How could he remain the husband of the Clutter cover girl?”
“And so he left you?”
For the first time Daisy laughed. “No, no, I saw what was happening, and my choice was to keep him forever balanced between my world and the TV world or let him go on and do something important.”
Oh, barf! I thought. Or, more graciously, You insult me! “Look, I’ve been through a divorce,” I said. “Nobility doesn’t enter into it. Things get worse and worse, but there’s a last straw.”
She fingered her cup, considering.
“Daisy, it’s not a case of being disloyal to Bryant. He’s dead. Murdered. Shot through the heart by someone who was as close to him as I am to you. I have to know what he was really like.”
There was only half an inch of tea in her cup, but she drew out the swallowing of it for half a minute, deciding where her loyalty lay: with his image or the truth. “Okay. This was a couple of years ago. We’d been divorced for three years. He already was the ‘mediator.’ I was in the process of choosing between two restaurants; I’d do the take-out menus, set up the department, run it. Both deals included my investing in the restaurant—a lot of money for someone in my circumstances.” She glanced over at me, and I nodded.
“One of Bryant’s private mediations—before he started on TV—was between one of those restaurants, Milledge’s, and a woman who had worked there setting up an operation a lot like mine. Some of her dishes were different from the menu fare, some the same. The restaurant chefs wouldn’t part with ingredients they thought they might need; if she brought stuff in and they ran out, they’d nab hers for their in-house dishes. Or they’d make entrees for the take-out orders without all the ingredients, often key ingredients, like leaving the saffron out of the saffron rice. Well, you know, customers may miss a lot, but they don’t mistake white for yellow. Actually she was lucky there; where they really screwed her were the dishes with less obvious omissions. Those the customers just figured weren’t very good because she wasn’t a very good cook. She came in pot au feu; she went out leftovers in canned gravy. The mediation was about her investment, the reputation she’d never get back. Bryant didn’t tell me about it.”
“Are you sure Bryant knew you were considering Milledge’s? Did he know you’d be investing a lot of money? That you could lose your reputation and your career—”
“And end up doing take-out meals from my own kitchen? I’d told him when I was still in the considering stages with Milledge’s. And afterward, when we had it out, he did what he always does when confronted, he threw up a smoke screen, tried to divert me, went into this big riff about his work and how vital it was and all and how he just couldn’t have revealed a client’s confidence.” She shook her head, clearly still disbelieving. “At some level he really believed in magic: Blow enough smoke, and the problem will disappear behind it. But you know, all he’d have had to do was say the restaurant was involved in mediation, not even how.…But he couldn’t, because he was the ‘Mediator.’ ” She glanced at the pot of tea, then, as if deciding the lukewarm liquid wouldn’t make any difference, put down her empty cup. “That’s when I realized I had ceased to be a part of his life. And the thing with Bryant was, the past is past.”
“And the divorce settlement?”
“That was over and done with by then. Did I grab everything south of his balls? No. I took the car, a nice new Explorer; I could live in it if things got bad. And—oh, shit!”
“What!”
“I made the ‘logical’ decision. He was twelve years younger. So instead of emptying the coffers now, I took a percentage of his income and his retirement. Double shit! I really will have to live in the car.” She grabbed the pot, refilled her cup, drank. “Look, I don’t mean to sound—I mean, I cared about him; I’m devastated he’s dead. But my own impending poverty isn’t making it any better.”
Was she saying, “His death has done me out of his retirement money, so of course I didn’t kill him,” or was the truth “I didn’t consider the consequences before I killed him”?
I didn’t want to think she had murdered Bryant. That made me assess her all the more sharply. Vengeance is a relentless motive; it can explain irrationality. She had the key to Ott’s office. If she’d got Ott out of there without him using the dead bolt…She could have done that, I realized, seduced him away. Rare as the offer of passion was in Ott’s life, if it came suddenly—passion and surprise—it could push mundane thoughts like locked doors out of Ott’s mind. Then all Daisy had to do was call Bryant.
“What was Bryant doing in Herman Ott’s office?” I asked, hoping for some shock value of my own.
But Daisy wasn’t shocked. “Oh, that one’s easy. He wanted to know what Herman Ott had found out about him.”