JACKSON HEADED OFF TO the manager’s office. I considered the onerous and probably futile project of interviewing other renters, hoping someone had seen the Kaldane making its way into the storage unit. I wondered how many of them would be scurrying to cover up questionable items in their own units. If Margo Roehner had thought about it before calling us when her unit was broken into, would she have ditched Daisy’s pig poster?
Later I would take Roger Macalester to the station for a formal statement, but I wanted to observe him here in the storage unit. He had come here voluntarily at least twice, but that was before Jackson’s comment about the toxic effects of Kaldane. I suspected Jackson knew no more of the specific effects of the pesticide than I did. Macalester didn’t realize that. He was looking decidedly twitchier than he had two minutes ago. That was to my benefit. A nervous subject is a careless subject.
Still, decency bade me open the door wider and let in the minutely fresher hall air. “Do you know for a fact Bryant was selling the stuff in Mexico?” I recalled Griffon’s hinting at that.
“Where else?”
“Did he go to Mexico often?”
“Not that I know of. But he wouldn’t advertise it, would he?”
“The smart smuggler has a valid reason for going over the border,” I said. “He’s not trying to hide his travel, just the illegal reason for it.”
“Well, our hero Bryant was better than smart. There’s no record of his trips south. I know; I checked. And that blond accountant cop, what’s her name?”
“Officer Pereira.”
“Pereira, she just went over the books. Ask her if there are any tickets to Mexico charged.”
“Bryant could have paid his own way.”
Macalester laughed—the sarcastic laugh of the unpaid employee.
I took a breath, a shallow one. That smell in here I couldn’t quite name, was it pesticide, or had I psyched myself instead of Macalester? Either way I was impatient to get out. “Bryant Hemming is a very convenient scapegoat for this smuggling. The man is dead.”
“Maybe that’s why he’s dead.”
“Maybe not. Who else had keys here? You and—”
He flinched but caught himself before responding.
“The board?”
“No. It changes too much, and there are too many flakes on it. If we gave them keys, then those keys would have been all over Telegraph. There wouldn’t have been room for me to sleep in here.”
“So who? Just Bryant and you?”
He stood, his fingers moving together and apart. It was a moment before I realized what he doing, squeezing and releasing a squishy orange ball that wasn’t there. Just as the wise smuggler wouldn’t hide his trips, Macalester would consider which holders of keys he wanted us questioning. He would put as much thought into his answer as an innocent man trying to recall facts he hadn’t expected to be asked. It meant his pensive period wasn’t telling me anything. “Who, Roger?”
“Just Bryant and me.”
“What about you, Roger? Have you been over the border?”
“Sure. And when I get tired of the staterooms on my cruises and grand tours, I opt for a change of pace and camp out here in the four-star storage unit.”
“Have…you…been…to…Mexico?”
“What do you think? Taking BART to San Francisco’s a big investment.”
I took another breath. Maybe the stench was just coming from Macalester’s attitude. “Look, Roger, you’re telling me someone was smuggling Kaldane into Mexico but no one went there. You’re too sophisticated to think you’re not a suspect. Give me a real lead to someone else.” “Give me a lead” could be translated as “I realize the interview is over. You’re free to go.”
I stepped back to let Roger pass and was so immersed in the routine of giving the scene a final survey that I almost missed his statement.
“What?”
“You wanted a lead; I’m giving it to you. I drove down here, like you said, to see what was going on. But I didn’t come up to the unit.”
“Ump.” My request had been a throwaway line. I had expected no answer; what Roger seemed to be giving me was the closest thing.
“The reason I didn’t come up here,” he insisted, looking a bit miffed, “was that I saw them downstairs, headed up here.”
“Saw who?”
“A tall, skinny guy in the shadows. I couldn’t see his face. But he stuck an arm out, and the light hit it. The arm, it was tattooed.”
“Describe the tattoo.”
He shrugged. “I just remember tattoo. I didn’t pay that much attention because”—he paused for so long I suspected he was paying me back for my dismissal a moment ago—“the guy with him was Herman Ott.”
He had my full attention now. “Ott? When did you see him here?”
“Last week. Sunday.”
“A week ago Sunday?”
“Right.”
A week before Ott disappeared he had come here to Bryant Hemming’s storage unit. “What was Ott doing with the tattooed guy?”
“Racing ahead of him, batting him away, like a canary with a tomcat on his tail.”
“Did they say anything?”
He started to shake his head and stopped abruptly, leaving his pigtail quivering as if it were the part of him eager to divulge the answer.
“Roger, Bryant is dead. It’s too late to protect him,” I said, giving him the opening to divulge in righteousness.
He took it. “Okay. Here’s what I heard. The tattooed guy said, ‘It’s okay with Hemming.’ Ott turned toward him—he was sort of running—and shouted, ‘Poison. It’s poison!’ ”
“And then what?”
“That’s it. I was at the end of the building. There was no way I could get closer without coming out into the open.”
I swallowed my disappointment. “And they’d told you what you wanted to know.”
Roger shook his head, this time slowly, pointedly, his face sagging with despair.
“Did they come out of the building carrying anything?”
“Nope.”
“How long were they inside?”
“Five minutes max.”
Ninety-nine-point-nine percent they never got into the storage unit. Copying the entry code to Storit Urself was one thing; getting the key to an individual unit another entirely.
So Ott was on to the Kaldane. If he had been a decent citizen, he would have called us. But in he trotted himself, without even the sense to stay under cover. The man was arrogant to the point of idiocy. To the point of death.
There were only two practical possibilities for the tattooed man. I tried the better of them. “Roger, was Griffon the man with Ott?”
Roger jerked his head toward me, eyes wide with confusion. It was a moment before he said, “No, of course not. Griffon doesn’t have tattoos.”
“Griffon the tattoo master is a blank canvas?” I couldn’t restrain a grin.
“Yeah. Too pure, too scared of error, above displaying anyone else’s work, take your pick. A shrink would have a field day with him, right?”
“So, Roger, was the tattooed guy one of Cyril’s guys?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t give you a name. But he had a black T-shirt and muscles so blown up they looked like water wings. And one of those little tin crosses.”
I leaned back against the wall, recalling A Fair Deal and Howard’s and my questions about it. “This last mediation was not the kind Bryant normally did or that you set up for when you had the idea. Your specialty, and Bryant’s, was mediating between aggrieved individuals and the looming bureaucracies that drive them crazy, right?”
“Exactly.”
“But this one was between Serenity and Cyril, parallel individuals. How come?”
“Bryant said it was high-profile.”
“But how did he even get the idea?”
“Griffon suggested it.”
Griffon! Did the man have his talons in every facet of this case?