“IT’S HARD FOR THEM to complain when you make the winning touchdown,” Howard had proclaimed. True on the gridiron, perhaps, but not with the Berkeley Police Department. Inspector Doyle arrived to read Margo her rights and take an official statement.
“I’ll need your report, Smith, before…”
“Before?”
“Before I sign you out on suspension.”
By the time I finished the paper on the case and left the report in Doyle’s IN box, it was nearing dawn. Doyle must have come back to the station from Margo Roehner’s house, but I hadn’t seen him.
I walked out into the charcoal gray morning. The fog was damp on my face, the air deceptively still as it is before the winds of morning gear up. All thumbs, I fiddled with the zipper on my jacket. Birds squeaked and chirped, whistled and squawked—a clamor that’s charming when you’re standing at the window with your lover’s arm around you and a cup of coffee in your hand. Now I felt as if those birds were squabbling for space on my shoulder, eager to snap their talons on my ear, hang from my hair, and run their claws down the blackboard of my eardrum.
It was a suitable mood in which to visit Herman Ott.
Ott owed me. He could start paying off with a flock of answers.
I drove to Alta Bates, thinking that a room here would provide the best day’s accommodations Herman Ott had had since he left Pittsburgh. I hoped he was on one of the upper floors so I could pause by the picture windows and watch the rising sun begin its daily quest to pierce the fog. If I spent enough time with Ott, I could stop at the window on my way out and see patches of bright blue bay rippling in the fresh sunlight, the San Francisco skyscrapers glistening as if they were dew-covered, the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge hooking the last shred of fog. If Ott had any sense, he’d aim to stand there too.
But he didn’t, of course. And I never got to the fourth floor. Ott had already checked himself out.
The man owed me! I slammed out of the hospital, strode furiously to my car, raced through the thick gray dawn to Telegraph, left my car in a red zone in front of Ott’s office, and stalked into the building. God damn him. I took the stairs two steps at a time, only sorry I didn’t have an ax with me to trash his office.
But I was too late. Ott’s friends or enemies had already done a number on the place. Clothes and newspaper, books, a pizza box, paper cups and crushed malt liquor cans and empty bottles of rotgut covered the floor. A tornado could have mistaken it for a trailer. But for the liquor detritus, the chaos in the bedroom might merely have meant Ott had moved back in. It was his office that shouted the truth.
Never had I seen a file drawer left open, papers piled on the desk, as much as a dust ball on the floor. Even after we had searched the files and the lab tech left a film of print dust on every surface, the room was still tidy. Now file cabinets were toppled, desk drawers yanked open, and Ott’s mustard-colored Naugahyde chair had been slashed in the few places where it wasn’t already taped together.
On the seat was a dead pigeon.
I found Ott curled up in a yellow wad on the backseat of Emma, the Studebaker. He probably hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. Exhausted, probably. I banged loud on the window.
Limp blond strands were matted to his forehead. His round, sallow cheeks were wrinkled from sleep. As his hazel eyes opened, his thin lips automatically curled.
Before he could greet me with his customary snarl, I said, “You owe me big time!”
He closed his eyes.
I banged the window so hard I thought it would break. “So, Ott, your friends—the Angels of Righteousness—trashed your office. What are you going to do, call the police?”
His eyes snapped open, and he was halfway to sitting up before he realized how much he’d given away.
So he hadn’t seen it. He’d just anticipated the danger.
“God damn it, Ott, if you had just told me about Cyril and the pesticide when you called me up to the Claremont—”
He mumbled something through the closed window.
“What?” I shouted, giving the window another bang.
He rolled it down an inch. “Couldn’t,” he mumbled.
“You couldn’t?” I screamed. “Why the hell couldn’t you?” Behind me in the apartment building a window opened. A guy shouted. I ignored him. “Why, Ott?”
“Because, Smith, I wasn’t going to leave you that bombshell.”
“Leave…” I could have wrung the rest of the explanation from him, but I knew him too well to bother. I shook my head. “It’s like Leonard said, we’ve all got our price. Ott, I thought yours was protecting your people. I was wrong, huh? You knew about the toxins. You weren’t about to tell the police at a time when you wouldn’t be around to monitor us as we investigated. And you couldn’t do that Sunday night, could you? Because between the time you called me and the time you got to the Claremont, Margo Roehner told you about the yellow-billed loon sighting.”
Ott’s lips pursed so tight he looked as if he’d swallowed his mouth. “Get out!” he growled, overlooking the fact that I was already out.
I went on. “And so you spent a night in the sand looking for the yellow-billed loon. And where is that loon? That loon, Ott, is where it always is: in Alaska.”
Ott’s face flushed pink. He shoved himself up higher on the seat and leaned toward me. “Get…”
“Ott, I took a lot of shit because I believed in you. No one else even entertained the idea that you might be innocent. Because of me, you are sitting in your own car instead of on a jail slab!”
He gave an odd little bouncy movement with his low sloped shoulder—his version of a shrug—and said the last thing I expected from him. “You’re right.” Then, as if the admission amazed him as much as it did me, he added, “You’re not a cop anymore; what is it you want from me?”
I stood there at the carport, staring blankly into the Studebaker. It didn’t surprise me that Ott knew I’d been suspended. It just shocked me to hear the words, to realize that I was no longer a police officer.
“Nothing, Ott. There’s nothing you can give me.” I turned and walked back to my Volkswagen bug and sat in the driver’s seat, feeling the closeness of the little car, the silence without the dispatcher’s voice sending out patrol officers, tracking chases, without the little give-and-take of those in the know. Suddenly I longed to banter with Eggs and Jackson, to watch Inspector Doyle shepherd his rhino herd to the side of his desk. I longed for Pereira to gobble down the rest of my scone before I had decided I was full. I longed for Howard. Oh, god, Howard.
A whirling cold emptiness expanded within me.
It would have been easy to “get” Ott, with a comment about his chauffeured ride to Kennedy Airport or a comment on his father. But like him, I have principles. I will never mention the Hermans and the Otts of Pittsburgh, nor think of him without picturing the smiling little running back on the Monongahela Mongeese team.
And I will never ask Daisy Culligan if it was Herman Ott who suggested her clever tat against Bryant Hemming. He merely wanted to know what was in the ACC books he couldn’t get at. Even Ott couldn’t have foreseen that it would lead to Bryant Hemming’s murder and Margo Roehner’s destruction.
The fog had thinned to that gauzy gray that makes the hills look Japanese and promises hidden spots of beauty and silence. I drove slowly west toward Howard’s house; I was almost to Ashby Avenue before I shifted out of second. The sky was the same murky battleship color that pales the orange and vermilion leaves. It wasn’t till I saw the looming brown shingle and the empty driveway that I realized I wasn’t ready to see Howard.
I drove on to Ashby Avenue and stopped at the corner. I could turn right and right again at the freeway, as Charles Edward Kidd would have done if he’d owned a car. As my great-uncle Jack’s neighbor Mrs. Bronfmann had done that day when she’d climbed onto the crosstown bus and the Spanish exchange student had caught her eye. As Howard’s mother had whenever hope or terror or maybe whim had teased her forward.
I’ve thought of the contrast between Howard’s mother and mine. My mother spent her life clutching on to the small acorn of security she could find in each new house and town to which her dreamer of a husband led her, putting her best foot forward toward the neighbors as if this house or job would be the one that would take root. She clung to her hope against the sea of fact and fear and common sense that surrounded her. Howard’s mother floated above it all. When I’d last visited my parents in their retirement apartment in Florida, their days were filled with golf and bridge, their nights thick with the fear that inflation would make their payments too steep. My mother cashes the checks I send, but I doubt she spends them. And Howard’s mother, Selena Bly, is she worse off? I sometimes wonder when they land in their final places if there will be a hairsbreadth of difference between them.
I turned right, up Ashby, away from the freeway. Spikes of sun pierced the fog and glistened off the Claremont Hotel’s white turret. I hung a left and wound up into the hills till I came to a pullout on Grizzly Peak. I opened the door of my familiar little car, stepped out, and looked down at Berkeley from a different angle.