THE CHARTREUSE CARACARA WAS half a block off Telegraph behind one of the metal doors in the alley I’d sloshed through only two hours ago. There was no alley name posted at the street, no looming likeness of a caracara with an arrow pointing potential customers back to the tattoo parlor. But Griffon was the silent, mysterious kind of man who draws attention the way, well, carrion draws caracaras.
Two hours ago the alley was dark, slimy, and fetid. Now it was merely dim, slimy, and fetid, the heightened illumination coming from the kind of wrought-iron outside light that might have graced a tract house in the suburbs. Here it shone on the Chartreuse Caracara sign above. Chartreuse is a color of many possibilities. I had never seen a caracara. But the puke yellow vulture on the sign didn’t speak well of either. On the other hand, it suited the setting.
I’d been in these alley rooms before, on 911 calls to check out doors that hadn’t opened in days, buddies friends were so worried about they were willing to call the police. I’d come with a crowbar, into airless rooms with filthy, grate-covered windows that allowed neither light nor escape.
Now I knocked, covered the essentials, and walked inside. Kovach was waiting with Griffon.
Griffon’s place was bigger than most—an eight-by-twenty-foot room, kitchen/bath at one end. And it was like something out of a different world. Clean, to begin with. The beige linoleum shone, and the smell was not the familiar eau de body fluids of the alley but Clorox. The place reeked of it. It was almost more offensive than the smells outside. The room was a shoe box, long enough to accommodate a Formica table between two kitchen chairs and a sleeping bag. Beyond the archway were toilet, sink, and hot plate, and between them a drawing board. Presumably the toilet seat doubled in purpose as the artist’s chair.
But it was the walls that stopped me dead. Every inch was adorned with plastic-covered sheets of tattoo sketches. Hearts: round happy hearts, hearts bearing bannered names, hearts broken as if by lightning, and, filling two entire sheets, Jesus and his sacred heart. Skulls, snakes, wolf claws, bear claws, bird claws. And dragons, mythical, Chinese restaurant varieties, and purple polka dots. There were photos of single scenes spanning men’s entire backs, women’s breasts, scenes that covered the wearers like a T-shirt (some short-sleeved, some long). The tattooed models were posing; they were strolling; they were standing as if waiting for a bus. As if their engraved epidermises were not colored skin but clothes. I wondered if the ink had seeped into their brains and colored their perceptions till they no longer recalled the reason for clothing. It’s one thing to have sag and flab under sweatsuits, quite another to display the result of too many desserts beneath the Last Supper. Particularly when the table shape has stretched from rectangular to oval.
But if Griffon saw any oddity in the displays, he gave no indication. Griffon had to be a business name chosen to accompany the vulturous shop name, but it suited his predatory appearance. Dressed all in white now, he looked like a vulture in crane’s clothing. Hair tousled, stuffing the hem of a long-sleeved white turtleneck into his jeans, he glowered down the length of his long, beaked nose. He had the tight mouth of one who’d never stretched it in laughter. Even his hands were talonlike, I noticed as I sat in one of the kitchen chairs, tacitly forcing him to take the other and rest an arm on the Formica table. The veins were marked with the black lines I’d spotted in Ott’s office. I decided against asking him to remove the drills and bits on the table. With the bottle of tongue depressors on the table, the whole setup could have belonged to a disbarred dentist.
He lifted a white-clad arm and tapped one nail on the table.
“So what do you want to know about ol’ Herman? He’s no killer, man, you can believe that. You here for a character ref? From a member of the Chamber of Commerce?” he said in a gravelly voice.
Good try. “You break and enter into a murder scene; then you flee the scene and try to avoid arrest”—I glanced at Kovach, and he nodded that he already had covered this ground—“the only question you should be asking now is, ‘How can I help you, Officer?’ Your one hope is me; you got that?”
He nodded quickly, unconditionally. It made me suspicious.
“Your real name?”
“Griffon. It’s legal.” He pulled out his driver’s license.
I copied down his birth date and the street address here. “What were you looking for in Herman Ott’s office an hour ago?”
“Herman asked me to take a look.”
“Puh-lease.”
“No, really, he called. Said he was worried about you cops and all, and he needed to know if the place was a shambles.”
Shambles was the place’s natural state. Now I wondered if Griffon had ever been in Ott’s office before tonight. “Go on,” I said, but I could tell by the way he sucked in his already sunken cheeks that he knew we both understood he was spouting fiction.
Still, he gave it one more try. “Herman needed a report on his files and his books and all.”
“And about his gun?”
Griffon’s face didn’t move. He just sat, his arm taut on the table between us, fingers snaking around a tube of Vaseline. “That’s it. I’m not answering any more questions.”
He was within his rights. If I planned to arrest him, I’d have to Mirandize him. But arrest leaves no room for maneuvering, for the suspect or for us. I wanted to forestall that every bit as much as Griffon did. “You broke into a crime scene. I was there; I saw you. The easiest thing for me to do is arrest you…unless…you give me some reason not to. You understand? But if you don’t want to talk, we can go on down to the station and the jailer can book you.”
Griffon didn’t move. Behind him Kovach shifted his feet, scraping one sole across the linoleum.
“So, Griffon?”
“Okay, okay. What do you want?”
“Where is Ott?”
“If you’re going to ask the impossible, there’s no point. Ott and I aren’t close.”
“Yet inside his office you walked right over to the murder weapon.”
“What? Murder? Hey, man, I wouldn’t—”
I held up a hand.
He stared at the wall behind me, perhaps asking guidance from a purple wizard or strength from a snarling red tiger, perhaps just staring. When he spoke, I couldn’t tell if he was giving up or just trying out a new riff. “Okay, why don’t you tell me what you need to know.”
“When did you talk to Ott last?” I asked, hoping it had been after Kidd had seen him hauling ass into the mysterious car.
But he said, “Last Thursday.”
Too early. “What about?”
“This and that.”
“Griffon!”
“Okay, he needed some background for an investigation he was doing.”
“On?”
“The Tele scene.”
“Enough!” I stood up. “You can play your game in a holding cell.” Ott had been on Telegraph forever; he was the authority.
“No, honestly. Shocked me too.” Griffon hadn’t budged from his chair, but his talons were wrapped tightly around the edge of the Formica table, as if he’d known his story was unbelievable and expected Kovach and me to drag him out.
So unbelievable suddenly I believed it. “Why? What exactly did Ott ask?”
“Background on Serenity Kaetz, Brother Cyril, anyone else who had over five hundred dollars in the ACC money fund.”
“But, Griffon, why did Ott ask you?”
“Because,” he said, exasperated, “I’ve got more money sense than the local ‘artistes.’ If they spent the time they bellyache learning their business…But then they wouldn’t be starving artists, would they? When I heard Bryant was starting a money fund for artists, I was the first investor.”
“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?