A SUMMONS FROM DOYLE. I had nothing near the touchdown I needed to face him.
And Howard waiting for a callback. Was he home, or in a bar somewhere, or halfway to Nevada by now? And still furious?
I took Macalester upstairs for booking and headed for one of the phones off the squad room. One sergeant sat behind the window, pencil in one hand, phone propped to ear. The squad room itself was empty, and the electronic hum of the copy machine, the coffee machine, the computer—the chorus of the nineties—seemed louder. An empty box on the table held the crumbs of cookies, doughnuts, scones—something sugary, something I would have liked. Something that was gone now. I picked the phone by the window, dialed, and stared down into the alley as it rang.
“Where are you?” I asked when he answered the phone.
“Modesto. With a couple of the guys I met in Fresno.”
“Modesto, home of the Brede Mortuary?” The man was a saint. A saint in a bar, from the sound of the music and laughter behind him. “I owe you.”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
I couldn’t read his voice on that. Not the normal lascivious “playful,” but nowhere near as furious as when he’d stormed out of the house hours ago. Later, indeed. “What did you find on Griffon?”
“Well, Jill,” he began, chuckling. Now I could fill in the “relationship” blanks here. This call wasn’t a statement that he had reconsidered his position re: me and the department. He just had something too good to keep to himself. “Too good” was definitely what I needed now. He said, “Seems Brede, the owner, has a brother.”
“Brede, the brother?”
“Brede, the ne’er-do-well brother, who is a mortician too.”
“It must take talent to be a failure as a mortician when your own brother owns the place.”
“Some got, some don’t got. Anyway, Brede, the brother—it didn’t take long to get him to come clean. For someone else, the maneuver might have been an effort, but well, it’s such a kick to con a con man. And Brede, the brother, is the kind of hotshot who’s got irons in every fire in town. All he needed to hear was police, and he was so busy looking over his shoulder he just about decapitated himself. I don’t know what his big-ticket scams are—selling corpses, scooping up the gold from their fillings?—but Griffon was a molehill compared to the Alps he was hiding.”
“Howard! What was our molehill up to? Was he Brother Cyril’s front man, selling Brede, the brother, the Kaldane?”
“Brede’s a seller, not a buyer.”
“Griffon was driving to the valley to buy something? From a mortuary worker?”
“You got it. Jill, you remember those tattoos he did, the ones that were supposed to shine?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems Griffon heard that tattooists from Asia created shine by mixing their ink with human fat. Theory is the body keeps rejecting the foreign fat and the rejection process creates the shine—like a layer under a scab that’s pulled off too soon.”
“Yuck.”
“And not cheap. Problem is, getting the fat. Even friends who have excess aren’t about to undergo medical procedures to spiff up their buddy’s tattoos. But corpses don’t complain.”
“So Brede sold Griffon dead fat.”
“Right. Said he offered him formaldehyde and embalming fluid too. Brede thinks Griffon’s a loon. Says he doesn’t care what Griffon pokes under his skin as long as he can turn a profit.”
“Does it work, the shine?”
“Brede doesn’t think so. But Griffon was real hot on the idea. It’d make him the king of the tattooists.”
“Outshine the competition?”
Howard groaned, but I knew he would have said it himself if he’d thought of it first.
“It would,” I said slowly, “give him the leverage to open his San Francisco shop as long as he could keep the source secret.”
Howard didn’t respond. Then he said, “By rights I should have called this in to Eggs or Jackson or Doyle. I called you at home, where I figured you’d be, since you were off the case. I’m not asking what you’re doing at the station—”
“I’m taking the “gluteus contraband in to Doyle right now. He’s waiting.” A choral groan rose in the bar there in Modesto. I wondered what game was on cable there. “Leave me a message about when you’re coming home, okay?”
“Right,” he shouted over the noise. He didn’t want to discuss that either.
The front phalanx of the rhino herd had been ambushed, they lay on their sides around Doyle’s IN box. Doyle was on the phone. He motioned me to sit. He wasn’t talking, just listening. He also wasn’t looking at me. Nor offering me the latest addition to the herd for appraisal, amusement, or in some cases silent amazement. Even in the world of ceramic rhinoceroses, his raised eyebrows had often said, there’s no accounting for taste.
But now he grunted into the receiver as if I no longer existed here.
After what seemed ages, he put down the receiver, and muttered “CHP. They picked up Brother Cyril.”
“From the APB?”
“Emissions. His van was stinking up the road from here to Albany, which is where they got him.”
“Ott?” I was holding my breath.
“Not with him. No pesticides, no Ott. Just eight punks and Cyril. Cyril ranting up a storm about justice, and vengeance being his, and Sodom, Gomorrah, and Berkeley.”
My shoulders tightened. “The pesticides aren’t in the storage lockers anymore. If Cyril doesn’t have them, where are they?” I flashed on the hotel room in the Claremont, the dead pigeons on the bloody carpet. “And Ott? What’d he do with Ott?”
“Ott! Jeez, Smith, what is it with you and Ott? I take you off the case, and where do you go? Ott’s office. I gave you an order, Smith, a direct order. You spit in my face. You’ve come to the end of your rope. You—”
The phone rang. “Yeah?…Delaware?…Yeah, right.” He glanced at me and then away. “Tell him I’ll be right down.” The phone was barely in the receiver before he was out of his chair. “The ACC headquarters on Delaware, it’s on fire. I’ll deal with you later.”
I was already racing out the door.