Susan was getting a little cranky too. “Amber,” she said evenly, “if Funnie Frankie turns up missing, I’ll be the first one to go to the police, how’s that? Now get back in there and hit the sack.”
“I hope he fell off the stupid boat and drownded,” Amber grumbled, and banged the door closed.
“Drowned,” her mother called, turning the page and yawning. “You hope he drowned.”
SUSAN DUNLAP
OTT ON A LIMB
Susan Dunlap lives near Berkeley, California, where Christmas is different. Even your Christmas turkey might not be what it seems. If it’s suspiciously easy to carve, it may be molded tofu.
Homicide Detective Jill Smith is no stranger to odd meals or odd places. For two years she lived on a converted back porch whose indoor-outdoor carpet became more “outdoor” after every rain. She drives an old VW that ascends Berkeley’s precipitous hills only in first gear and takes the downslopes like Santa’s leap down the chimney.
But this year Jill Smith has hopes of a Christmas dreams are made of: curled up with her favorite man by a roaring fire, sipping champagne.
But odd things do happen in Berkeley. So don’t be surprised when Susan Dunlap interferes with Jill Smith’s plans and sends her to one of the oddest spots in town.
Telegraph Avenue may be the spiritual repository of Berkeley radicalism but during the Christmas holidays it goes whole hog capitalist. The sidewalks are crowded with street artists and their displays of tie-dyed long johns, stained glass panels, and crystals of every hue for every ache, pain, or psychic need. Turbaned men offer hand massage, foot massage, or tarot readings, $8 each. A violinist plays Mendelssohn. String bands strum blue grass.
You can sip a strawberry-mango smoothie or eat a falafel sandwich as you peruse card tables of used socialist books, hand-tooled belts, Peruvian sweaters, embroidered Cambodian jackets, feather earrings, beaded earrings, earrings with dangling rubber frogs. Artists display watercolors, gardeners hawk potted pine, palm, and persimmon. And there are the ever-popular T-shirts that extol the peculiarities of the city—“Berkeley, A Radical Solution,” “Berserkley” (a perennial favorite), and “People’s Park Lives,” commemorating the city’s biggest antigovernment demonstration when then Governor Ronald Reagan (not a perennial favorite) called in the National Guard.
When dusk fades to night the street artists pack up their display cases, fold their card tables, and leave the Avenue as deserted as a dry water hole. And yet the aura remains and makes the darkness darker, the emptiness blacker. On Christmas Eve, Telegraph Avenue seemed like the last place on earth.
It was the last place I wanted to be. I had passed up five invitations in favor of the one Seth Howard had whispered: “Homicide Detective Jill Smith is invited to a night of champagne, Howard and …”
Now, at eight-thirty Christmas Eve, Howard would be sprawled in front of his fireplace with the champagne. I was headed through the litter of pizza plates and smoothie cups on Telegraph Avenue to the office of the Herman Ott Detective Agency.
As a nocturnal companion Howard was a “10”; Herman Ott would be a minus 6. As a nocturnal habitat Ott’s office slid below the scale.
I could have done the prudent thing and avoided Ott, but he’d tracked me down at eight P.M. just as I was heading out of the station, pondering if sausage rolls and chocolate macaroon ice cream would go with champagne. Herman Ott had said the only thing that could have diverted me from both Howard and ice cream. He said, “I need a favor.”
Herman Ott asking a favor from the cops was like Fidel Castro proposing to Princess Margaret.
But Princess Margaret would not have chucked the royal ball and hopped the next plane to Havana.
I, on the other hand, told Howard I’d be late, and hotfooted it for Telegraph.
Ott had established his reputation on the Avenue by never voting for anyone more conservative than a Peace and Freedom party candidate, never cooperating with the D.A., and never, never giving information to an officer of the Berkeley Police Department—unless it was unavoidable, innocuous, and he got something in return. Usually that something was money from the discretionary fund, and usually the detective he got it from was me. When I did squeeze a piece of information out of him, it was something I could get nowhere else. At least two murderers were behind bars because of Herman Ott (a fact that neither of us would ever admit). I couldn’t afford to ignore his request.
And besides, I was too curious.
And I owed him two hundred dollars. It was part of Ott’s code never to spend the money on himself. It was an even bigger part to make sure he got it.
Two months earlier I’d leaned on Ott till he came close to snapping. He’d bent that rigid code of his and given me the key fact that linked Angus Simpson, a slippery weasel with friends on the Avenue, to a felony assault rap. Simpson was, for the moment, out on bail; Ott’s info would send him back to Atascadero. In an unguarded moment Ott had announced that Angus Simpson had just one redeeming quality: he was even more adamant than Ott in his refusal to talk to the police.
There was no way I was going to get Simpson without Ott’s help. Ott knew it and I knew it. I’d promised Ott two hundred dollars from the discretionary fund. I suspected he’d planned to give it away before Christmas to salve his conscience. But it still hadn’t come through. And now, on Christmas Eve, I knew that the ball would drop in Times Square before he saw that money.
I hurried past the pizza shop. It was closed, but the smell of garlic and tomatoes still filled the empty street and made me think of Howard downing the sausage and champagne. The door to Ott’s building had been left open again. No surprise. Between the World Wars, Ott’s building had been a snazzy address for advertising agencies, dental offices, and groups of C.P.A.s. In the following decades it had gone seedy. By the seventies there were few other commercial ventures, some of which the guys in Vice and Substance Abuse busted, some Forgery-Fraud merely watched. But the old building had taken a good turn in the eighties.
I, too, took a turn now, from the landing of the double staircase to the left. The hallway formed a square around the stairs. On the outside of the hall were two-room “offices,” on the inside the old-fashioned bathrooms with the toilet in one room and the sink in another. In the seventies the halls had reeked of marijuana and urine, and stepping over a crumpled body had not been a startling experience. Now what I had to watch out for was tricycles and toy trucks careening around corners, small legs pedaling like mad on the straightaways. The offices had been taken over by refugee families, and the hallway had become the Indianapolis of the under five set. The odor of marijuana had been replaced by the smell of coconut or peanut sauce or curry.
But tonight the hall was empty. Through the open doors in the “offices” I could see children seated close together on old sofas, as if posing for sepia tone family portraits. Christmas music mixed with the smell of coconut satay. And small faces eyed cardboard fireplaces with Woolworth’s stockings.
My knuckles barely brushed the opague glass on Herman Ott’s door before it opened. Standing by the door, Herman Ott was short enough for me to have a distressingly good view of those limp blond strands that composed his thinning plumage. His rounding stomach perched over thighs so thin that his pant legs fluttered like turkey wattles. His clothes were exclusively from the Good Will, the politically correct couturier of the sixties, and exclusively yellow (or as close to yellow as he could find). I never saw the man without wondering if he knew how much he resembled a canary.
At first I had assumed his sartorial statement was an elaborate joke. But it wasn’t. His manner of dress was not a joke; nothing he said was in jest. Because Herman Ott had no sense of humor whatever. None. He never saw the humor in any situation (an accomplishment of no mean proportions for a man with an office on Telegraph Avenue). And, of course, he hated being laughed at himself.
Which made his dress all the funnier. And had tested my self-control more than once.
“No need t
o scowl, Ott. You invited me,” I said, walking into his small, tidy office. Never had I seen a file drawer left open here, or papers strewn on his desk. The only thing that looked out of place here was Herman Ott.
With the same appalled fascination that keeps one from graciously looking away from a wart on the nose of a friend, I glanced into Ott’s other room. A jumble of blankets and pillows decorated a decrepit armchair (Salvation Army circa ’66). Blankets, clothes, and newspapers cascaded to the floor. It looked like the bottom of the canary’s cage. Many times I’d wondered what a psychiatrist would make of Ott’s two rooms. Which was the spiritual home of the real Ott?
Now Ott perched on the edge of his mustard-colored leather desk chair and said, “I’ve got a deal for you, Smith.”
“I’m a homicide detective, Ott. I don’t do deals.”
Unlike some, Ott, of course, didn’t laugh. “You owe me, Smith.”
I settled on the corner of his desk. “Ott, you know our files are closed. There’s nothing I can run for you.”
He shrugged, lifting his narrow, sloping shoulders to almost normal height. “I don’t need anything from the police. I need it from you, just you.”
I looked down at Ott. Frayed cuffs hung over pudgy hands which caressed an empty coffee cup. A forefinger traced the lip. An appalling thought crossed my mind.
I could have sworn I saw the shadow of a grin on Ott’s pallid face. But it was probably just gas.
“I want you to spend the night here.” He paused so long that my whole life could have passed before my eyes. “Alone.”
“What is this, Ott, a test of my ‘manhood’?”
Ott shifted in his chair. He glanced behind me, those pale brown deep-set eyes straining not for a view of an intruder sneaking in the office door, but for someone—anyone—more desirable than me to deal with. But that was something Santa wasn’t bringing him. Ott sighed; his narrow shoulders dropped so low that it looked like he had no shoulders at all. “Smith, someone’s been breaking into my office at night.”
“So, have a couple of cappuccinos and keep watch.”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried watching!” He pushed himself up and walked quickly to one of the file cabinets, taking short rapid steps so that his weight was never wholly on one foot. It was a careful balancing walk, the walk of a high wire artist, or a bird on a phone line—or a detective whose bedroom floor is perpetually covered with sheets, blankets, and newspapers. Ott could probably ford the slipperiest stream in the state with the daily training he got here. He rested an ecru sleeve against the file drawer handle. “If I’m here, Smith, nothing happens. Even when I’ve been asleep, nothing’s happened. I’ve tried sitting here in the dark all night; I’ve driven around town till I was dead sure no one was following me and then looped back and came up the fire escape at two A.M. Nothing.”
“Well, why don’t you have a friend stand guard? You’ve got to have closer friends than me. Me, a cop,” I couldn’t resist adding.
Ott apparently couldn’t resist glancing in the direction of the Avenue. It was a small slip, and one that someone unfamiliar with the community of Avenue regulars Ott counted as his friends and clients would not have noted. It reminded me that no secret stayed secret down there. Ott crossed his arms over his chest. “You owe me, Smith.”
I plopped down in his client’s chair, leaned back and said, “What is it, Ott, that’s so secret you can’t trust your friends to find out? So secret you have to turn to an Officer of the Peace?”
Ott glared.
Usually it was me trying to wheedle something out of him. God, it was wonderful to have the trumps for a change. Trying to restrain myself from becoming too obnoxious, I said, “What is your thief taking?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing! Is this a joke? Candid Camera for Cops?”
Ott shook his head. The limp blond strands trailed the movement like a fringe from a particularly decrepit ball gown. If Ott was setting up a practical joke he was doing one helluva job. But, of course, he wasn’t. To create a joke, Ott would have needed an instruction manual. “He takes nothing. He leaves something each time—an envelope, wrapped in Christmas paper.”
“Containing what?”
“I can’t say.”
I laughed. “Ott, this is a delicacy I hadn’t expected of you. Are these gifts of too personal a nature to be discussed in mixed company?”
Ott’s scowl deepened. Nothing ruffled his feathers like being laughed at.
I felt like I was pulling out those feathers one by one. But I couldn’t help myself. There is something so irresistible about teasing the humorless. It’s like giggling at a funeral; you know it isn’t right, but once you start it’s almost impossible to stop. I stood up and braced my hands on his desk. “Ott, you call me away from my plans on Christmas Eve. You ask me to spend the night in your office, which doesn’t even have a bathroom. I’m not going to play blind here.”
Ott turned and took five short, rapid steps to the window. Looking out at the six feet of nothingness between him and the next building, he said, “It is personal.”
I started toward the door. “Merry Christmas, Ott!”
He spun around. “Okay, Smith. Wait. It’s about my ex-wife.”
“Ex-wife!” There were things I had considered Ott having, many of them contagious, but a wife was definitely not one of them. “You were married!”
He hunched forward. His head lowered and tilted toward his right shoulder. I had the distinct feeling he was about to tuck it under his wing and pretend I had disappeared. “Long time ago,” he muttered.
“Go on.”
“I was in college.”
“Ott, you were in college for the better part of a decade.”
His shoulders drew closer. “It was 1969. We met in the People’s Park March.” That was the biggest of the antiwar era marches in Berkeley, when tens of thousands of students and residents protested the University of California’s plan to turn that block of green by the Avenue into a parking lot. “We got married six weeks later. In Reno,” he added as if that made his accommodation to law acceptable.
“What was your wife’s name?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Ott!”
“Saffron.”
Saffron! With an Olympian effort, I swallowed the urge to laugh, to say I could certainly see what had attracted him. To say that that must have been a match made in the lemon-yellow clouds of heaven. To contain myself, I had to picture Ott in the full-blown rage of being laughed at. I had to remind myself how much I needed him. I had to stare hard past Herman Ott to the window. Opening on a narrow alley three stories up, it wouldn’t have been an easy one to clean, and before tonight Ott had never made an effort. But now the window was spotless. “What happened to Saffron?”
Ott began to pace, five little steps from the window to the file cabinet, turn, return. “Divorced. By the end of the year.”
I nodded. I had been through my own divorce. No matter what the circumstances, it’s never a pleasant experience. Still, it hardly explained Ott’s mysterious deliveries. Or his clean window. “So what’s in these packages?”
“Messages”—he stopped in front of the file cabinet—“with letters clipped from the newspapers, just like on television,” he added in a tone of disgust.
“Messages, saying?”
Ott hesitated, then pulled open his desk drawer and extricated an envelope, a plain white envelope with no return address, and an Oakland postmark. He didn’t bother to hold it by the edges. I didn’t offer to get the ID tech to dust for prints. I opened it and unfolded the plain sheet of cheap paper. On it, newsprint words said, “1971 Saffron Sacramento. 1989? Have a Merry Christmas.”
“After the divorce, she moved to Sacramento,” Ott explained.
There were two more messages, both originally wrapped as Christmas presents. The first said, “$200 a month. Have a Merry Christmas.”
“Ransom?” I asked. “Do you think Saffr
on’s been kidnapped?”
Ott shook his head so abruptly and definitely that I couldn’t doubt his reaction, or at least his belief in it. “I got a Christmas card from her last week. She’s been living in D.C. since ’81. She’s done real well for herself. The card said she’d gotten another job there with the Interior Department. It was one of those mimeographed Christmas letters. It’s not like she writes me personally.”
I couldn’t resist asking, “Do you send her a Christmas card?”
Ott looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. The reaction was deserved. I almost got the giggles picturing one of those red-and-gold cards embossed with “Holiday Greetings from the Herman Ott Detective Agency.”
“Then if the two hundred dollars isn’t a demand for ransom for her, what’s it for?”
“Not ransom. I called her; she’s fine. She doesn’t know anything about this.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s making fifty thousand a year. What could she want from me? Besides, she’s not the devious type. That’s half of the reason we got divorced.” Ott almost smiled. “You know how it is, Smith, if they’re not always on the lookout for an ulterior motive, they’re just not very interesting.”
I laughed uncomfortably. I knew exactly how it was. I wanted to ask Ott what the other half of the reason was for his divorce, but I doubted I could push him any further than I already had. Instead, I said, “Okay, if not ransom then just what does two hundred dollars a month mean?”
Ott studied his shoes, tan sneakers, the old type made when sneakers were still three bucks at Woolworth’s. They must have been Salvation Army specials, too. He mumbled something.
I moved around the desk closer to him. “What?”
“Alimony,” he muttered to the shoes.
Mistletoe Mysteries Page 21