Sudden Exposure

by Susan Dunlap

  And if I didn’t get this case closed tomorrow, none of that would matter. While Brucker was trying to find the right path past all those closed doors, Bryn Wiley could be killed.

  I only had tomorrow.

  Herman Ott, however, had no time at all. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t called me. I’d told him I would call him. I could do that. But when you have to lay on pressure, it’s best to be on hand to do it.

  Chapter 20

  TELEGRAPH AVENUE ON A Sunday night looks like Berkeley’s answer to Pompeii. The craftsmen whose leather belts, pressed glass panels, silver rings, and snake bracelets had filled the street in the morning are gone. But the paper plates and empty coffee cups, the bits of pizza crust and discarded packets of sugar, the crumpled smoothie containers and wadded napkins would be an anthropologist’s dream. He’d find a lost tarot card, a crystal that would not bring long life or heal the bark of the tree it had fallen against. He’d dust carefully around the edges of a rough hand-thrown mug with a whiskered face on one side. And he could wrap it all in newsprint ads for adult school classes—dealing with fear of swimming, driving, or cooking for company.

  Yellow streetlights gave the littered sidewalks the look of an old photograph. On Sunday night, Cal students, dejected about Monday’s imminent arrival, were in the dorms or even the library, high school kids from towns over the hills had abandoned the cool life till next weekend, shoppers were home with their bounty, and even the beggars for spare change had taken their quarters and dollars to the store. Or to the dealers. As Howard would be glad to remind me, it takes only ten bucks for a dealer to spit out a rock of coke.

  Even the staircase in Herman Ott’s building was empty. I charged up, panting by the time I reached the third floor, and knocked on Ott’s door. I paused for a second, knocked again. Ott never answers the first time.

  “Who?”

  “Smith. Open up!”

  The door creaked open and I strode in.

  “Hey, whatsamatter, Smith? I said I’d talk to you. No need to burst in here like some TV drug squad.”

  “You could have told me Ellen Waller engineered her meeting with Bryn Wiley at Bootlaces.”

  He shrugged.

  I couldn’t decide whether that was his normal brush-off, or a cover for his not knowing about Ellen. We’d both be more comfortable with the first interpretation. “I wasted my afternoon and a whole interview finding that out.”

  “From Fannie.” He settled in the cracked yellow chair behind his desk, his narrow lips pulled into the smallest of smug smiles.

  I plopped on the corner of his desk, shoving together two piles of papers in the process. “I’m going to overlook that breach of faith—”

  “Hey, I didn’t—”

  “And let you remind me what you promised to give me: the background on Ellen Waller.”

  “Okay, Smith. Ellen Waller is an alias.”

  “There’s a news flash. For what?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Ott!” The man was slippery at the best of times. But with him a promise was a commitment. I could almost see the internal tug of honor with principle vs. commitment yanking him back and forth. “You gave me your word,” I said, hoping that would drag principle over the line.

  “She didn’t tell anyone her legal name.”

  “So how do you know ‘Ellen Waller’ is fake?”

  “Five months ago, she worked for a friend of mine. Cleaning house.”

  I resisted the urge to glance into Ott’s pigsty of a bedroom. He had a friend who hires outside help to clean his house? “And?”

  “Well, normally he would never have contacted Social Security, not before the Zoë Baird flap in Washington. And even so, he wouldn’t have bothered until Ellen had been working for him for months. She started a couple of weeks before Christmas; she probably figured she wouldn’t earn enough for him to report that quarter. But he’d had a couple run-ins with bureaucracies and he was tiptoeing around like the ground was on fire. So he sent a form in. And it came back a No Match.”

  “The number was legit, but it belonged to someone else, right?” Social Security checked automatically for transposed numbers. Ellen Waller hadn’t merely made a mistake.

  “Yeah.”

  “And so you suspect … ?” I suspected too, but I didn’t want to lead Ott.

  “The obvious, Smith. That she’s a fugitive. She was smart enough to know she’d normally have four months before an employer gets word her number’s a phony—the three months of the quarter and another month before Social Security’s computer gets a letter out. She quit in the middle of January. As little as he paid her, he shouldn’t have reported for that period either. She should have had plenty of slack. It was just a fluke he filed last year, and that she was still in town. Even so, Smith, it’s not like he ran into her on the street or tried to find out about her.”

  “But he contacted you.”

  “About something else. He just tossed that in because it struck him as weird.”

  I nodded. I’d guessed Ellen Waller to be in her midforties. She could have been older, but the fugitive lifestyle isn’t conducive to preservation of a youthful complexion. When you move fast and travel light, it’s not with a valise full of cosmetics. And the stress of being ever on the watch is likely to cause wrinkles. Ellen could have been one of the remaining antiwar fugitives from the Vietnam Era. We had run her fingerprints and come up empty. So she’d never been arrested, taught school, or worked for the government. Plenty of people go through life without ever being printed. Didn’t mean she hadn’t committed a crime—just that she’d managed to avoid being caught. “Ott, you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.” Or couldn’t have figured out.

  “Well, Smith”—he leaned back, his straw-colored head nowhere near the top of that leather swivel chair—“I guess you’re just too smart for me.”

  “Come on, Ott! When you agreed to find out about Ellen Waller, that meant coming up with more than I could surmise. So she’s a fugitive. You’ve got connections who can tell you about that.”

  “Not ones who talk to the cops.”

  “Our agreement wasn’t conditional on your friend’s delicate principles.”

  “You may think you make the rules, Smith. Ain’t so.”

  He was still sitting smug, like a canary on the best egg in fowldom. I wanted to grab his shoulders and yell: Fine, keep silent. See how well Brucker takes that Tuesday! But Brucker would never hear about this deal, and I would never let Ott even think my word to him was so valueless. Still … “What about Sam Johnson? He knows everybody in the movement.”

  “You believe him, Smith, you might as well throw the I Ching for your answer.” The smugness was gone from Ott’s pudgy face. He looked like his egg had just cracked. Like Sam Johnson had cracked it.

  “Johnson’s busy revamping a house in the hills into flats for the poor and radical.”

  “They better not give notice where they’re living.”

  I smiled. “Waiting for Sam to actually get the work done, huh?”

  “He’ll get it done all right. Co-opt some of the young guys who think he’s a mix of Machiavelli and Marx. Wear through their idealism. When he’s done, you see how many flats for the poor he’s got, in a house that Fannie wants for herself.” Ott shoved back from the desk and spun his chair to face the window. It should have been a statement of outrage. But the chair’s battered condition turned it into a slow, bumping rotation that mirrored Ott’s impotence, and left him facing the airshaft window that hadn’t been washed since World War Two.

  Ott and Johnson should have been allies. Ott wasn’t as far left as Johnson, but if Berkeley is the retirement home of the sixties, Herman Ott is rocking on the porch. He doesn’t call us pigs anymore, or view anyone over thirty as untrustworthy, but he could walk into most any counterculture meeting and not worry about being tossed out.

  “Ott,” I said, to his back, “what happened to Sam Johnson? There was a time when he w
ould have lit himself on fire rather than set foot in the high-priced hills. Then, suddenly, he marries a woman with a steady job and crushed ambitions, and he’s buying a house up there.”

  Ott rotated slowly. When he was facing the desk again, he stopped and leaned heavily forward. “I never thought it would happen to any of us,” he said with a sigh, “that we, too, would become burghermasters. I thought our commitment was real, that it was different. The classic delusion, right? I was a history major; you’d think I’d have known better. But what’s history: the story of all men but yourself.”

  “Ott, you’re still pure.” I grinned, but I meant what I’d said.

  “Who knows, Smith, maybe I’ll give up caring about the guys without enough sense to stay out of your way. Maybe I’ll pack it in and take over the family business.”

  “Which is?”

  But Ott wasn’t mellow enough to divulge that. Instead he pulled a stack of papers toward him and poised his finger at the edge, ready to tap the papers into line. “Sam Johnson grew up in the kind of family that’s not embarrassed to admit it has a maid, and a cook. Over the years the hardships, the disappointments of the movement, wore him down, and at some point he began to yearn for a ‘normal’ life.” He tapped absently. “I ran into him a couple years ago when he was getting fed up with the kids in the movement going off half-cocked, when he was tired of spending nights in jail for no purpose. He was reconsidering. And I’ll tell you, Smith, the guy was embarrassed about it. Well, hell, who wouldn’t be?” His tapping finger slowed. “But you get invited to a fund-raiser in the hills and you find those people up there aren’t all bigots and money grubbers. The fund-raisers are accomplishing more in one evening than your protesting does in a month. And you reconsider some more. And you like playing with their breadmaker, and clicking the mouse on their computer, and whipping down Shasta in a Miata. ‘Normalcy’ starts looking good. Not to worry every time a cop comes toward you looks real good. So you make a compromise here and there, and each time you block out your friends’ reactions and soon you don’t see the people you’ve affected at all, because you can’t, not and go on.” His finger hit the edge of the stack and papers shot across the desk. Ott made no move to corral them.

  If Ott was right about Sam Johnson having abandoned his friends and his principles for the kind of life symbolized by his house on Tamalpais, what would he do to the woman who tried to dismantle it? And Fannie, who loved him, what would she do? Strange what a conventional couple the Johnsons had become, worried about their mortgage and property like the drones Sam had so scorned, ready to compromise everything because they loved each other. Soap opera, radical style? Not The Young and the Restless; but The Middle-aged and the Burned Out! In contrast to them, Bryn Wiley was much more radical, committed to her ideals, using her house merely as a place to sleep. And Ellen Waller had been the most radical of all, with neither house, nor goal, or even a “self.”

  I studied Ott, needing to be reassured he was talking only about Sam Johnson, not himself. Ott’s sallow cheeks looked grayer and more sunken than I’d ever seen them, and his eyes seemed almost too large for his face. It took me a moment to realize they weren’t squeezed in wariness as they had been every other time I’d seen him. The man just looked dismayed. “What about misleading the poor?” I asked, partly for my own reasons and partly to snap him back on track.

  “Just what I asked. But you know, Smith, I don’t think he even heard me.” Slowly Ott shook his head.

  I could see how the drive for normalcy could blinker a man. I’d known cops who quit the force and moved to the country in search of a safety and stability that in their saner moments they knew was a fantasy. Certainly, I’d dreamed of a normalcy that excluded Howard’s tenants.

  Still, if Ott had objected to the creation of The Heat Exchange, he had had plenty of time and ample commissions, boards, and hearings at which to air his grievances. This was, after all, Berkeley, where only one kind of erection can be attempted without a permit. Sam Johnson might be end-running the process as he rehabbed his house in the hills, but turning a floor of apartments into a gym on Telegraph Avenue was another matter entirely. You don’t take housing units off the market in this town without a very convincing argument. If Ott and his fellow tenants had complained, the city would have been only too glad to hear them.

  If they’d complained, the city would still be hearing them.

  So, Ott had not complained.

  He had stewed, but done zilch.

  Why not? What had Sam Johnson promised him?

  A light went on in my brain. “Ott, you supported The Heat Exchange!”

  If I’d had any questions about my conclusion, Ott’s expression would have cleared it up. He shrank down in the seat, his narrow shoulders drawing in protectively. I could have asked how Sam had roped him in, but knowing Ott, it was with the promise of heat for his fellow tenants. Ott was no physicist, and the chances of his ever having set foot in a gym of any kind or seen a StairMaster or computerized stationary bicycle were as great as the Nixon Museum being moved to Telegraph Avenue.

  I didn’t push him. I didn’t say there are worse things than making a mistake out of compassion. Sympathy from a cop, Ott wouldn’t want. Nor did I add that if word of this mistake got out, Herman Ott, who counted on his reputation for seeing the truth behind the camouflage and knowing everything that went on, would be the joke of the Avenue.

  I had no intention of wasting my advantage on things we both already knew. I asked the question no one had come near answering. “Who was the nude runner?”

  “Which one?” A hint of a smile tried out Ott’s lips. “The one on Rose Walk a week ago or the press conference guy?”

  “Both. Who are they? Or do I mean who is he?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t pass on the information?”

  “They’re just kids passing through town, making an easy buck. Probably in Portland or Santa Cruz by now.” He sat up to his full—not great—height, unlocked the desk drawer, and handed me a business card.

  Rent-a-Freak. In the lower-left-hand corner was a phone number.

  I picked up Ott’s phone and dialed. The message said: “This is Rent-a-Freak. Freaks for every need, party, prank, personal pleasure. Leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you.” No name, no address.

  Keeping my face impassive, I put down the phone. “So, Ott, who is it?”

  Ott shrugged.

  “Not good enough, Ott. You promised me background on Ellen Waller. You didn’t come through. You indicate you’ll tell me about my nudists and you hand me a card that leads nowhere. You made a commitment. I expect you to honor it. Find out about Ellen Waller. Do it tonight. Call me at home.”

  I slid off the desk and strode out the door, only banging it softly.

  I was to the staircase before I let the smile cross my face. The individual runners weren’t important. If I got their names they’d mean nothing to me. The guy who was running the runners was the key. There had been no name on the Rent-a-Freak message, but the voice on that tape was familiar. It had cracked just the way Jed Estler’s had when he reported Ellen Waller’s death.

  Chapter 21

  WHAT WERE THE CHANCES of Brucker matching the voice on the 911 tape to the one on Rent-a-Freak’s answering machine? It galled me to think how much would be lost if the case were taken over by a man who hadn’t met Ellen Waller, hadn’t been to Chez Panisse with Fannie, or had anything but contempt for Karl Pironnen. But there was no way Doyle would keep me on once Brucker returned tomorrow. I left Doyle a terse message about Rent-a-Freak. Then I made my call-back to Candace Upton, the 5150 with the presidential problem. The phone rang eight times.

  “What do you want now?” The voice was wiry, whiny. My data listed Candace Upton’s age as 48, but her voice could have been ground down by six or seven decades.

  “Officer Smith, Berkeley Police. I’m returning your call, Ms. Upton. What is it you’d like the
police to do?”

  “Keep him away from me.”

  “Who?”

  “The President.”

  “How is he bothering you now?”

  “He’s tying up my phone. No one else can get through. I’m missing all my calls. I have business to conduct. I can’t be talking to him all night. He won’t take no for an answer. He’s the President. He’s not used to being told no.”

  Which showed how little she knew about politics. “Why don’t you take your phone off the hook? That’ll get the point across to him.”

  “I can’t! I told you, I’ve got business to conduct.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Important business.”

  “Right. Well, Ms. Upton, here’s what’s going to work. Line up all your business calls, and as soon as I hang up, start making them. Get the second number ready before you’re through with the first call, and the third ready before you’re off the line with the second, and so on, so you don’t let any time lapse between calls. You follow?”

  “Of course I follow. But it’s not going to work. He’ll still push his way in, even if there’s just a second. I know him.”

  “Well, I’ll call him and keep him on the line for half an hour. You can finish your calls by then, can’t you?”

  “Oh, no. It’ll take a full hour. It always does.”

  “Okay, an hour.” I could offer her two hours, even a whole day: Ah the joy of magnanimity. “You ready? Okay, I’m poised to dial. Hang up.”

  “Wait, don’t you want his number?”

  “Ms. Upton, this is the Berkeley Police Department. Do you think you’re the first person to call us complaining about the President? We have the numbers for all the former Presidents.” I hung up and headed to Jed Estler’s room on Tamalpais.

  But as I neared Andronico’s market, I realized just how long it had been since I’d eaten. Not eating chocolate decadence had hardly ameliorated the problem. I headed inside to make up to myself for the chocolate cake sacrifice. Howard had accused me of being addicted. Maybe he was right. A benign little addiction. A harmless vice. Everybody has some small addiction, some small shrine that makes their life better … at least when they can get to it. How many more days was it till the end of the month? An infinity. But when that day came … I’d have Chocolate Shower ice cream for breakfast. In bed. With Howard sitting next to me, empty mouthed. I’d eat it with a tablespoon and savor every bitter chocolate flake in every mound of milky chocolate.