HOW DO YOU KNOW Herman Ott was investigating Bryant?” I asked. “Did Bryant tell you?”
“Hardly. Herman’s not that obvious.” Daisy set her cup down with a clack. “Well, maybe he is. He called Roger Macalester, Bryant’s assistant.”
“And assumed he wouldn’t tell Bryant?” Now there was a pregnant assumption.
“He could have. Roger’s an old lefty. Herm could have pressured him, or guilted him, or had something on him from fifteen years ago. You know Herm.”
I nodded. If Roger Macalester had been on the leftist scene, Ott would know his secrets and feel morally impelled to use them for his own investigation. Its subject could have been Bryant Hemming. Peering at the underbelly of the establishment guy: Now that screamed Ott.
Where would he get his data? That too was an easy one. Bryant Hemming may have been an Oxford cloth and jeans with pressed seams kind of guy, but the people he mediated between were not. Serenity Kaetz wouldn’t get near an iron if her life depended on it, and if Brother Cyril saw an iron, he’d mistake it for a doorstop. Or a weapon.
But right here in front of me sat the crème de la crème of detectives’ sources, the subject’s ex-wife, the disgruntled employee of the marital world. And she was Ott’s old friend. “Let’s see if this will help us find Herman. Who was he investigating Bryant for?” I asked as Daisy Culligan refilled our teacups.
“You know Herman,” she said, tossing off my question, “he’d die before he’d reveal a client’s name.”
“Right, but you know Herman too.” I sipped the tea. “And I’ll bet you’d be curious, and you’d make it your business to find out.” I took another sip. “Do overestimate you?”
Daisy laughed. “You got me dead center. Here’s what happened: Herman stopped by. Odd enough in itself. He hadn’t called about Bolinas in almost a year. Other than that I never heard from him. Oh, I’d pass him on Telegraph now and then, once every few months, but it wasn’t like we ran into each other at fund-raisers or ‘did lunch.’ I saw Roger Macalester at Chez Panisse last week, and I thought the world had come to an end, but if I’d seen Ott at someplace like that…” Her expression brought up the ludicrous picture of Herman Ott wearing one of his yellow polyester shirts, ordering the vegetables feuilleté with nasturtium butter at Chez Panisse. And the idea of Ott at a fundraiser was unthinkable. I knew Ott as well as anyone, and I had no idea what cause would elicit his money, much less his presence, or even what he did with his free time.
“But then,” Daisy went on, “he up and calls and invites himself over. Sits right in that chair where you are. Drinks tea. Complains that the Darjeeling Fancy I offered him wasn’t Darjeeling Extra Fancy Selimbong. Then he asks what I’ve been doing since we last saw each other.” She put down her tea cup and leaned forward. “Now, I am not a fool. And in all that time analyzing the soaps with him, I learned how Herman’s mind worked. (A) He wouldn’t care what I’d been up to, and (B) he’d already know. ‘So, Herm,’ I say, ‘you’re investigating Bryant, right?’ Well, you’d think I’d poked him in the stomach.”
I could picture Ott flapping around as if he’d been pushed off his perch. The humiliation. I wished I could have been there to see it. “Blindsided,” he had said smugly and more than once, “is what happens to sloppy detectives.” “What did he do?”
The rougy tint of glee vanished from Daisy’s face, and the skin around her eyes quivered as if unsure what expression to settle in. “He was so stunned he just sat there, like an animal caught in the headlights. Then he walked out.”
Just as he had with me at the Claremont. “And you let him! How could you do that! Before you knew what he was looking for? Before you’d asked him why?” What kind of woman are you?
“That’s the price of ‘going with your feelings’ and all that garbage. Afterward, of course, I got to where you are now. Then I scurried around trying to find out why Herm would be after Bryant. I called Margo Roehner—she’s on the ACC board—she hadn’t heard anything. Roger, at the office, was useless. I even tried the newspaper morgue.” She shook her head. “Nada.”
“You could have called Ott back.” It was an accusation. I forced a smile.
“No, I couldn’t. I’d stopped going with my feelings, but I couldn’t bring myself to go against them, not that much. It would have galled me.”
“So you called Bryant?”
“Before the restaurant perfidy I would have. But I thought: Fine, let Herman Ott stir up the dust around him. A little fuss wouldn’t hurt Bryant. I figured I’d call Roger in a week, find out what’d happened, and we’d have a good laugh.”
“And?”
“The week won’t be up for another day.”
I asked about Bill “Lewin.” But Daisy just looked at me as if I were a loon. “Daisy, do you have any idea where Ott could have gone? Of his own volition or not? He got into a vehicle with someone Sunday night.”
“Well, my van’s out front. You can check it.” Slowly she shook her head. “I can’t imagine Herm leaving Berkeley. Where would he go? What would he do if he couldn’t work?”
She’d hit that on the mark. If Herman Ott was free, he was still on the case. He’d know Bryant Hemming was dead and he’d be after him all the more. Assuming of course, that Daisy had been straight with me and Bryant’s assistant had been straight with her, and Ott had been investigating Bryant.
I walked down to the patrol car, pausing to flash my light in the Dining with Daisy van. Then I called Inspector Doyle to find out who had interviewed Bryant Hemming’s assistant and where I could find Macalester now.
Who was this guy who had got Ott to reveal himself and, having done that, alerted not his boss but his boss’s ex-wife?