by Susan Dunlap
I sat on the bench sipping my latte (doppio alto = double everything), thankful I hadn’t been forced to sacrifice that, too. Wooden benches get hard quick, and I found myself remembering Bryn sitting on hers with her feet crossed and her ankles pressing into the wood. She hadn’t gone near that bench before Ellen died. Ellen had been a woman who wanted to straighten out the wrinkles in life, to make nice, or at least make up for what had not been so nice. It was Ellen’s confessional bench, after all. She had gone to considerable effort and expense to refinish it. Why? Slowly, I drank the coffee and steamed milk. What had she wanted Bryn to confess, to repent? What was in that confessional?
I finished the latte and held the cup down so a particularly fine black lab could lick out the foam.
“Haircut?” a young woman with short crisp red hair asked. “We’re having a grand opening special. I could lob that tail of yours right off.”
If my mind hadn’t been on the confessional bench, my senses concentrated on the black lab, I never would have agreed, at least not without six weeks of indecision. But now, remembering the nudist yanking that tail, the crisp-haired woman seemed like a gift from the cosmos. “Fine, but I don’t have much time.”
The minute I walked out of the hair salon, I was sorry. When I looked in the car mirror at my tiny brown cap of hair, so short it could have been painted on, I groaned. My face, oval an hour ago, was now round. Sixty minutes ago I had looked thoughtful; now I looked perky. I was spunky, feisty—all those adjectives that mean a flash of ineffectual energy from a person too small to take seriously. I glowered—a feisty little glower.
And when I got to the station, I was sorrier yet.
“Hey, Smith,” Lieutenant Davis, the watch commander, said. “Got your hair cut, eh? You look … cute.” Lieutenant Davis was a man of precise actions and solid taste. By “cute,” he meant someone who had no place in the squad room.
“Wait up, Smith,” he said, taking a call-back card from a file on his immaculate desk. “These are yours. This one was misrouted to your old office.”
“Thanks.” I glanced at the date and time: Friday morning. “It’s been sitting down there all this time?”
“Someone just brought it by.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest that you had had it more than twenty-four hours.” I smiled. Lieutenant Davis routed forms so quickly he could have rented out space in his In box.
Davis flashed a smile, a conservative little smile. “You know, Smith, I don’t countenance putting off callbacks. Yet and still, in this case you’re probably just saving yourself work.”
Now I looked at the caller’s name: Candace Upton, the Presidents’ phone pal. “Shit!”
Davis normally doesn’t countenance profanity, either. Now he laughed.
The second sheet was from Inspector Doyle. I realized before I read it what it meant: He wouldn’t be meeting me to confer as he had in the old days when I was in Homicide. He was merely leaving me an order: “Take Bryn Wiley to the morgue and get an ID on the deceased.”
Still, there was a lot to be learned about a suspect as she views the corpse. I signed out a patrol car and headed for Telegraph Avenue.
Telegraph was blocked off for Sunday street market. Racks and tables that normally lined the sidewalks on weekdays filled the streets, and shoppers who normally craned and crammed now ambled around the displays of T-shirts: GO BERZERKELY! (with the requisite tie-dye background), SUPPORT ELITE LAWN-BOWLERS (the latest municipal controversy), CHINESE COLONIALISTS OUT OF TIBET! I passed the table of Sally, the tarot reader, who had always turned over a card for me when I was on this beat four years ago. She glanced up, but if she recognized me she was too polite to admit it. Next to her were open shelves of pottery and multicolored candles of the same vintage as the tie-dyed long Johns next to them. The sun was warm, the air light with incense, and music from open car windows sailed like ribbons in the wind.
I crossed the street and glanced in a sunlit store window, spotting a slightly perplexed-looking woman with short hair and a vaguely Asian look to her face. Wearing my clothes. I felt a flash of fear, like I’d lost my … self, and then, after a bit, I relaxed. I had walked these streets in uniform, with gun and baton. I’d always thought of myself as more of a Berkeleyan than a police officer. But to the people on the Avenue I’d been the Man. Even out of uniform. No matter how long I lived in Berkeley, I was always an outsider, the person whose very presence made others flinch, reduced them to children about to be found out. It was one of the ironies I bemoaned when I woke at four in the morning: I loved the city, I protected it; but I could never truly be a part of it.
But now, in the costume of my new hair and casual clothes, I could at least pass.
I wished I had time to stop, finger crystal earrings, or cedar boxes carved in the shapes of animals. I walked lightly, like I was just another civilian strolling among the blankets, looking at displays of handcrafted leather belts and pressed flower hangings, smiling at the shouts from Hate Man, dropping a dollar into the violin case of a guy in a tux playing something too formal for the day. My stomach lurched toward the garlic-onion-tomato aroma of the pizza place beside the entrance to Herman Ott’s building. Pity that I couldn’t be free of my junk food bet!
The momentary pizza-lust was gone almost as soon as it had arrived. The short-haired, bejeaned Berkeleyan that was me seemed to have a stranger’s stomach.
Even Ott’s building looked different. The “lobby” was an eight by ten square accommodating an old cage elevator—the one that had been a decoration since ’62—and a double-wide iron-railed staircase. But today it was missing its carpet of napkins, pizza plates, leaves, and dirt. Many times, when I’d trudged up the extra long flights of stairs to question Ott, I had lugged pizzas to lure information from him. I’d taken the steps two at a time, arriving panting to pound on his third-floor office door and threaten him for evidence withheld. I had been up these steps more than anyone in the history of the department. But never had I seen them so clean, or so crowded. Tanned, muscled, shorts-clad climbers raced up the steps like they were on the slopes of Everest.
I cut across the traffic at the third-floor landing and headed around the south side of the square hallway loop.
When I had first come here, the building was still home to the last of the hippies who had liberated the two-room offices and hung beads over the doors in the two bathrooms down the hall. Soon it became a crash pad for addicts who kept their doors locked for good reason. Only Herman Ott had bobbed with each wave of tenants. And when refugee families took over and children filled the halls and the aroma of coconut satay floated out from the open doorways, Ott felt like the elder statesman of the building. It was he the newcomers asked for advice. His door had never been unlocked—his clientele was too casual about possessions to encourage that kind of foolishness—but I’d seen him respond by name to soft knocks made by small fists low on his door.
The enthusiastic shouts of the Heat Exchangers heading to or from the top floor accompanied me. That was the only noise. All the doors of the offices-cum-apartments were shut. The hallway was empty of children, clear of cars and pails. Even the aromas were muted by the closed doors. The hall looked like it was under siege. No wonder Ott was so outraged about The Heat Exchange.
I knocked on Ott’s opaque glass pane. Not waiting for his requisite refusal to answer on the first try, I knocked again and called out, “It’s Smith, Ott.”
I was just raising my hand for the traditional third round when the door opened.
Ott stepped back without my forcing him—another rare greeting. His sallow face had none of its normal curmudgeonly verve. He was wearing the same gold-billed cap, tan and cream argyle vest over mustard polyester shirt, and bronze-ish khakis he had on last night, which meant he had probably slept in his obsessively well-ordered office and given Bryn his pack rat’s nest of living quarters—an arrangement that must have equalized their discomfort and inconvenience. He couldn’t get to his clothes; she co
uldn’t get out to the bathroom. This was not an arrangement destined for the duration.
I stepped into the light inside the office.
Ott didn’t move. He stood staring at me.
“Don’t even think cute or perky!” Before he could come up with a spunky little adjective of his own, I said, “Where’s Bryn?”
“Gone.”
Chapter 15
“BRYN IS GONE? GONE where, Ott?”
“Gone gone.”
“How could you lose her in less than twelve hours? What kind of detective are you that you can’t watch a witness for half a day?”
“I didn’t have her shackled to the wall. If you wanted that, you should have put her in Q for the night. You must have buddies there, Smith.”
“I don’t have to send a witness to San Quentin, Ott. One witness! A cocker spaniel could guard her!”
He eyed the door but he was too far into the room to reach it. He wanted to throw me out. I would have thrown him out if it hadn’t been his office. And if I hadn’t planned to squeeze a recompense for his admitted failure. “When did you realize she was gone?”
“Seven this morning.”
“How’d you discover that?”
“I made that deduction when she slammed the door.”
“You mean she just walked out?”
“Right.”
“Where did she go?”
“She wasn’t making a run to the grocery, Smith; she was leaving. She didn’t hand me her appointment book.” Ott kicked the door shut and sat hard on his clients’ chair.
I was so taken aback I almost reached out to him, but I caught myself before I made that terminal faux pas.
Ott, for all his counterculture clientele and antiestablishment code, has an unspoken office etiquette that would send Miss Manners back to school. Rule No. 1 is Ott sits in the ripped mustard leather swivel behind the desk. The client, or in my case, unwanted intruder, takes the other chair, a hard wooden affair that must have been designed by a chiropractor in need of business. Often I shoved one of his tidy piles of papers into the middle of his desk and settled on the edge, just to ruffle his feathers. Very occasionally, he perched there to stare down at me in the chair. But never had I seen him elect to take that seat himself.
I wanted to ask why he was so unhinged by a departure he had no authority to prevent, and really, no reason to. But that I couldn’t do either, at least not head on. “Ott,” I said, “what happened before Bryn left?”
“I made breakfast.”
I’d seen the electric coffeepot—a carbon dater’s dream—and the box of lemon-iced doughnuts Ott gets on sale Monday morning at Half Price Foods. By Sunday morning that meal would have made Salman Rushdie take a hike. “Did you turn on the radio?”
“Nah.”
“So you talked.”
He nodded.
When Ott was silent, I knew I was getting warm. “Talked about?”
“Are you sure you want to know, Smith?”
“Ott, a woman was murdered. What did you talk about?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. She wasn’t happy about you handling the investigation. I …” Ott’s sallow face flushed to an unhealthy orange.
“Yes?”
He looked downright embarrassed. Ott heard people complain about the police all the time; he did it himself all the time. I couldn’t imagine what in their innocuous conversation could have brought on this blush. “Ott?”
“I told her”—he forced it out—“she should count her blessings.”
I laughed. “That must have impressed her.” I was touched by Ott’s defense, but I was not about to mention that to him. I went on. “So she was saying she wanted a Homicide officer in charge—she already told me that. What else did she ask? What I was going to do next?”
Ott nodded.
“And you told her I was headed for Fannie Johnson’s?”
Again he nodded. But it wasn’t a final nod. “And then what, Ott? You two were sitting, eating breakfast, and something happened and Bryn walked out. What?”
Ott swallowed. He’d rather have choked than disgorge information to a cop, especially one he’d felt forced to defend. “I told her you were going to interview Sam’s wife about his whereabouts. She says: ‘At her mansion?’ I ask her why she assumes that. She says she’s never seen Sam’s wife at the construction site. She asks me what Sam’s wife is like. I say: Hasn’t Ellen told her? She looks so surprised that I say: Ellen knew her from before she came to work for you. She knew her through people at Boodlaces. Bryn’s face—it was like someone flipped the card. She picks up her stuff and walks out. No response to me asking how come? Or where are you going? No thanks for taking her in. The card, Smith, it was dead white.”
“Why was she so stunned, Ott?”
I couldn’t quite label Ott’s expression: part put out, part appalled he didn’t know the answer, part something else. The incident didn’t make sense to me either. “The re-entry center, Bootlaces, did Ellen volunteer there?”
“Volunteer?” Ott laughed. “Smith, she came for the food.”
“Bryn Wiley’s cousin needed free meals?”
Ott pushed himself up out of the clients’ chair and walked around behind the desk. “No, Smith, Bryn Wiley’s cousin did not need free food.”
“Wha—”
“Ellen Waller wasn’t Bryn’s cousin.”
Landfill. The case was like the filled land that turns to mush in an earthquake. By now Ott had stood up and I sat in his clients’ chair—where I clearly belonged—and tried to grasp some straw of truth in this case before it all turned into mud. “If Ellen Waller was not Bryn’s cousin, who was she?”
“Ellen Waller. What makes you think they were related?”
“They said so, both of them.”
Ott raised the pale skin where his eyebrows would have been if he had any. “And you didn’t question that?”
“Why would I, Ott? Two women, who have a familial resemblance, who are victims not suspects of a crime, say they’re cousins. It’s not like being married. You don’t get special privileges for being cousins. Why would they lie?”
“But they did.” Ott was smiling now. In a minute he’d be perching on the back of his chair, looking down.
“Why?”
“Don’t know. Didn’t know they were using that story.”
“Well, why do you think?”
He just shrugged, not an easy move for a man with virtually no shoulders. “Live-in help?”
Admittedly, it was the kind of bourgeois arrangement many Berkeleyans would be embarrassed to make—or admit to making. “Okay, Ott, if Ellen Waller wasn’t Bryn’s cousin, then Bryn didn’t call her cousin to come to Berkeley because she needed a secretary.”
“Well, a secretary she did need. Look, Smith, the thing with Bryn is she’s a great motivator, an idea person. But she has no patience with the small stuff. Like answering fan mail.”
Staring at Ott, I laughed. I glanced through the connecting door at Ott’s other room. It was not the sun-lit study of a social secretary’s dreams. The only rays that made it in there had traveled down the air shaft and squeezed through a four-decade accumulation of window soot. Covering the one ancient, formerly overstuffed chair and most of the floor were newspapers, magazines, books, and a spectrum of yellow clothes that belied the notion that yellows don’t clash. If clutter were dog hair, Karl Pironnen would have felt right at home.
“I represent all types, Smith. There are business people I’ll take on. I know about networking. And Bryn had a big campaign going to publicize her gym. She went through a number of secretaries early on. Wide-eyed and adoring when she got ’em; white-fisted by the time they stormed out. She wasn’t a considerate employer.”
“Tell me about it!”
I’d meant it as agreement but Ott took it as a question. “She’d go full-blast at one thing. Meanwhile, people want her to speak; they’re trying to confirm dates she’s already ag
reed to; get her commitment to be on this board or that. They need answers. The letters pile up unopened. The people are calling; they’re desperate; Bryn doesn’t answer. Then she dumps the whole thing in the secretary’s lap and expects her to come up with the kind of excuses that make her look good.”
“Like saying she screwed up and Bryn feels terrible she has such an incompetent for an employee?”
“Right. But once the gym was on its feet, she didn’t bother with a secretary. She hated having that efficient little person around, reminding her she was failing at things that she didn’t give a damn about but that she had to do because she’d hired this secretary.”
“She told you this?”
“Yeah.”
“So how did Ellen come into this marvelous job?”
Ott leaned forward onto the desk, a little less majestic than before. “This I got secondhand, from a source at Boodlaces. I haven’t checked it out. No reason to.”
“Go on.”
“Bryn was doing a motivational talk at Bootlaces. She’s a supporter. It wasn’t a big crowd.”
“That surprises me.”
“The reason was she was scheduled to do it a couple weeks earlier and she forgot. The people at Bootlaces were annoyed but they knew her well enough to insist she make good and be quick about it.”
“Safe to assume they felt she’d let her last secretary go too soon.”
“They may have thought so, but Bryn still didn’t. Bryn wouldn’t have put up with anyone wanting to straighten her office or put her on a schedule. If anyone was looking for that job, that evening was not the time to approach Bryn about it.”
“But Ellen didn’t have to, right?” I was almost out of my chair. “Bryn noticed Ellen because she looked so much like her? Right?”
“Yeah, right,” Ott said with a definite lack of satisfying finality.