Not Exactly a Brahmin

by Susan Dunlap

  “And if you’d gotten Ralph Palmerston’s information a week ago, before this story came out?”

  “I could have broken the story. I could have denounced my suppliers. I could have been the one who was protecting Berkeley from tainted food, instead of someone who is foisting it on them.” He slumped down in the chair.

  “What will you do now?”

  “Wait. What else?”

  “Do you think this will pass?”

  He looked down at his desk calendar. “I don’t know. I’ve got a year’s lease, so that gives me another six months to sit and count customers.”

  “And if things don’t get better?”

  “I’ll close.”

  “You’ve put a lot of money into Sunny Sides Up.”

  “I’ll lose a lot of money. Probably have to sell my house and go to work for someone else.” Now he stared directly at me. “I waited nearly five years to open this restaurant. I’ve only been here six months. Do you know how awful it is once you’ve had your own place, created each entrée, made it the best, to have to take orders, to cook commercial eggs with fake cheese and canned mushrooms? Do you know what it’s like to do your best and realize it makes no more difference than your least? Creating a superb breakfast isn’t like doing dinner. People don’t reserve months in advance even for the best eggs Florentine. The only chance at expression is in your own restaurant.” He dropped his gaze. “So you see, money is a small part of it. And any gifts I could have received are a week late.”

  But, I thought, as with Ellen Kershon, had it worked out, Ralph Palmerston’s gift to Adam Thede would have been perfect.

  I asked him where he had been yesterday afternoon—home, alone—then handed him my card and told him to call me if he recalled anything about Ralph Palmerston.

  I walked out through the dining area, which now held only four people, and down the avenue to Herman Ott’s building.

  CHAPTER 8

  “SOMEONE BEAT YOU TO it,” I said.

  Herman Ott looked exactly as he had last night, only more rumpled. If there had ever been a question of what he slept in, it was now answered to my satisfaction. He had come stumbling to the door on my second knock, his eyes half closed, his yellow-and-brown shirttail now completely out of his pants. But behind him on his desk I spotted a mug of coffee and two crullers. It made me think better of him.

  “I thought you came to bring me my money.” His sarcasm was not veiled.

  “By the time Thede got the same information you gave Ralph Palmerston, it was already in the newspaper.”

  “So?”

  “So someone was quicker than you were in checking on the growers. Who was that?”

  He started to shrug and stopped before his shoulders lifted half an inch. I could see that the question bothered him. It impugned his professional competence.

  “Did the people you talked to say someone had been there asking the same questions?”

  “No. Listen, there are a dozen places you could get that information. You don’t just go up to the grower and say, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you adulterating your soybeans?’ You go to the pesticide companies; you check their records. You interview the field workers, the union. There could have been ten detectives there and we’d never have run across each other.”

  I didn’t comment. He didn’t believe that any more than I did. “When did you give Ralph Palmerston your report?”

  “Listen, I don’t—”

  “Come on, Ott, I don’t have to tell you how suspicious this looks. You had plenty of time to leak it to the papers. You wouldn’t even have had to walk far to try a little blackmail.”

  “Blackmail! Goddamnit, are you saying I’m on the take? I’ve had my chances, plenty of them. But I don’t operate that way. That’s how come I’m still living.” He glared at me, his flaccid cheeks tightening into ridges and hollows. With more control he said, “That’s why I’m still living here.”

  I believed him. Anyone with any money would have moved long ago. Even a man who doesn’t care about his surroundings would like a shower that wasn’t down the hall. “So, when did you give Ralph Palmerston your report?”

  He hesitated, still glaring, then said, “The tenth.”

  “That was nearly three weeks ago. Wasn’t he satisfied with it?”

  “Satisfied! Christ, it was twenty pages.”

  “Then how come he didn’t contact you about the other four members of Shareholders Five?”

  He leaned back against the desk. “Got me.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Your privilege.”

  “This is a murder—”

  “Skip it, I know my rights better than you do. The Berkeley Police Department has been on me for twenty years. You better believe I know how far you can push.”

  “Look—”

  “Talk to me when you’ve got money in your hand.”

  I turned and left, nearly stumbling over two refugee children playing a game with sticks in the hallway.

  Ott was right; he knew his law. I had gotten as much as I was going to from him, at least until the discretionary fund came through. But I had been wrong in thinking that Ralph Palmerston hadn’t paid him. He’d have been paid when he handed in his report.

  Even with Ott refusing to divulge more, the report itself might give me a lead to the other subjects, or to Palmerston’s intentions for them. Palmerston had no business office, so the report would probably be in his house.

  I was tempted to drive up there, but I decided against it. I had left Lois Palmerston in shaky condition last night. She had been planning to take sleeping pills. Waking up a widow, a prominent widow, the day after her husband had been killed to demand to search her house would be a tricky business. Shareholders Five might well have had nothing to do with Palmerston’s murder. It could have been just another charitable gesture on his part. (Or it could have been something else.) But if it hadn’t led to his death, then the best suspect I had was Lois herself. It wouldn’t hurt to find out more about her, and to find it out from the man who had bought her her Mercedes.

  I drove west toward the bay, my thoughts bouncing between Lois Palmerston, Adam Thede, Herman Ott, and Herman Ott’s two crullers. It was nine-thirty when I pulled up in front of Munsonalysis.

  Munsonalysis occupied the second floor of a modern stucco building in the industrial section of Berkeley. Fifteen years ago this area had been a mixture of old factories and wooden houses. The streets were patch-paved; lawns were littered with cars in various states of disembowelment. Its only attraction then was the easy access to the freeway. But with the advent of small businesses—printing, publishing, and all the computer offshoots—the low rents for commercial space drew Berkeley’s young entrepreneurs. The same boys and girls who had marched in the sixties’ demonstrations, who had primal screamed and been Rolfed in the seventies, had now wriggled toeholds or even footholds into the commercial world of the eighties. And those toes were planted solidly in southwest Berkeley.

  The building occupied half the block. It was beige, three stories, with a blue stripe along the top edge, and resembled a beige brick lying on its side. Between it and its brown-and-blue twin that filled the other half of the block was a courtyard with white metal chairs and tables, and several potted trees that gleamed in the post-rain sun. I walked up the outside metal steps. At the top the door said MUNSONALYSIS.

  The reception area was surprisingly small, a no-frills room that fit the southwest Berkeley ethic. The only indulgences were on the receptionist’s desk—a phone with a panel of buttons attached, computer, electric pencil sharpener, plastic pencil and pencil clip holder, and a calendar with removable plastic numbers. The woman behind the desk—young, Oriental, with hair well down her back—looked up from a book. “Can I help you?” She glanced almost imperceptibly at my brown herringbone jacket and corduroy slacks.

  “I need to speak to Jeffrey. I’m Detective Smith, Berkeley Police.”

  Her facial muscles changed only
the slightest amount but that tiny pulling back and tightening was a statement that she had misjudged my status. I almost smiled.

  She picked up the phone, chose one of her panel buttons, pushed, and announced me. “Jeffrey will be with you in a minute. If you’d have a seat …” She indicated one of the two minimally padded chairs at the other side of the small room.

  I nodded but remained standing, glancing out into the empty courtyard.

  It was more like ten minutes when a thin man with receding light brown hair opened the door. He was a bit older than I, probably mid-thirties, a bit taller, probably five foot ten. He looked more like he played squash than lifted weights. His dark brown eyes were small but had an almost bulging quality, as if he had squinted so long that he’d pushed them out of place. And his wide mouth looked crowded between the frown lines on either side.

  He extended a hand. “Jeffrey Munson.”

  I introduced myself and shook his hand.

  As I followed him along a narrow corridor past offices and small, round-tabled conference rooms, I was aware of his heavy steps. In spite of the fact that he wore running shoes, he almost trudged. Maybe I had been wrong about his playing squash; maybe he did nothing more athletic in those running shoes than walk down this hall.

  His office was at the far corner from the courtyard. Two aluminum windows looked out on the streets. The room was beige. His desk was walnut, as was a large table against the far wall. Vintage posters of Ché Guevara, Huey Newton, and the Free Speech Movement adorned the wall.

  “Why are you here?” he asked as I sat down.

  “Have you seen today’s paper?”

  “I don’t read newspapers, other than the financial news, of course. It’s all slanted.”

  “Then you may not know that Ralph Palmerston is dead.”

  His eyes seemed to pop back into their rightful place. Surprised, perhaps, but the look that followed was closer to one of calculation. Then both vanished. “I knew of him, of course. But I’ve never met him.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. We don’t travel in the same circles.”

  “But you do know his wife?”

  “Lois, yes.” His expression was still neutral.

  “You knew her quite well, I understand.”

  His eyes roamed left to his computer screen, as if he wished it were programmed to provide him the least incriminating answer. “She was a friend of my wife’s. Was Palmerston killed?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because,” he said with a tight little grin, “the police wouldn’t send a detective out to discuss the natural death of someone I’ve never met.”

  “Right. Where were you yesterday afternoon?”

  His back stiffened. “In and out.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Because,” I said with a sigh, “Ralph Palmerston was murdered.”

  “I told you I never met the man. I’ve told you twice, three times now.” He smiled that tight smile again, glancing at his posters. “The man was a parasite. He lived off the labor of the men in the fields. He did nothing for society to make up for the hundreds of thousands a year it gave to him.”

  It had been years since I’d heard this rhetoric in such vintage form. “He contributed a lot to charities.”

  “Charity,” he snorted, “the salve of the bourgeois conscience.”

  “Is that how his wife described him?”

  “Yes.”

  “In those words?” I asked, trying to hide my surprise.

  He smiled fleetingly—a more natural smile. “Lois told us, I my wife and I, actually my ex-wife, but she didn’t comprehend what a drain on society he was.”

  “Why not?”

  He swallowed; his wide lips pressed together. “Because Lois has become the same kind of parasite. Maybe she always was.”

  That didn’t sound like the observation of a lover. It did sound like an ex-lover or a thwarted lover. “Tell me about her.”

  He looked at the computer screen. “I’ve already said more than I intended.”

  “Intended? Did you expect this interview?”

  “No. Why should I? It’s just a word choice.”

  I decided to let that pass. “Mr. Munson, this is a murder investigation. You helped Lois Palmerston buy her car. You overhauled it. Your wife is her closest friend. And you have expressed emotional feelings about both the deceased and his wife. You are involved. So it’s past the point where you could ponder what you should or shouldn’t divulge. In a murder investigation everything you know is important.” I let a moment pass before allowing a small, accommodating smile on my face. Jeffrey Munson might have had the same feelings about the police as Herman Ott, but I was betting that he would be less on guard in dealing with a woman cop, particularly a smiling one. “Start from the beginning. How did you come to know Lois Palmerston?”

  “She was in college with my wife. She was Lois Burk then. My wife was her big sister. It’s a thing they have at the college. The senior girls sort of watch out for the freshmen. Lois was Nina’s freshman.”

  “And after college, did they keep in touch?” I prompted.

  “We were in New York City then. Lois stayed with us. She was looking for acting jobs. They’re damned hard to come by no matter how much talent you have.”

  That sounded more loverlike. “Did Lois have talent?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw her act. She did some work in a few pieces of fluff off-Broadway, nothing of any social consequence, nothing worth seeing.”

  “But she did get jobs? She must have had something going for her.”

  “But not enough to support herself. She lived with us on and off for four years. In some of the apartments we had it was damned crowded.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “We came out here.”

  “Lois didn’t come with you?”

  “No. Actually she almost did. It was her idea. She was such a user. She got caught up in the idea of California. She thought she’d try the movies. She thought there would be more opportunities for her here. She got Nina all caught up in it. Nina really was a big sister to her. Nina had a good job. She was editing a poetry magazine in the Village. You can imagine how often a job like that comes along. It didn’t pay much but it paid. But Lois convinced her that California was where the muse was. Lois convinced her that I could work in computers anywhere. So Nina came out here to check things out. And by the time she’d had a look at L.A. and then come to Berkeley and found a place, Lois had a part in a play and wasn’t about to move.”

  “But you did?”

  “Everything was already in the works.”

  I leaned back, crossed my legs, and decided to postpone guessing whether he was Lois’s lover, former lover, would-be lover, or would-have-been lover. “When Lois did come out here, where did she stay?”

  “Where else? With us. But at least this time it was only for two months.”

  “Why was that?”

  “She moved to the city.”

  “Where in San Francisco?”

  He looked at the computer screen. His finger caressed the ERASE key. “Pacific, near Octavia. She got a job in the city.”

  Hammonds architectural firm would have to have paid their receptionists—or “customer relations”—people very well indeed, I thought. Pacific and Octavia were in Pacific Heights, the old-moneyed section of the city. It was a definite step up from having to stay with friends.

  “She said you got her her car.”

  His finger moved back to the ERASE key.

  “When was that?” I prodded.

  “Right after she moved to the city.”

  In Berkeley one could get along without a car, but life was easier with one. In San Francisco, parking was such a hassle and public transportation so convenient, that driving was a luxury, if not an added problem. The only thing you needed a car for in the city was to leave it. Had Jeffrey Munson found Lois the
car so she could drive to Berkeley? To see him? “Why did you get Lois the Mercedes?”

  He tapped the ERASE key. “It was used. I got a good deal for her. It needed a lot of work. It had been owned by some rich parasite in the hills. He had two Ferraris in the garage. He left the Mercedes standing out summer and winter. The finish was down to rust. And the engine! You couldn’t see out the back window when you started it, the emissions were so black. It needed a lot of work. That’s why the guy was selling it. Of course, he had no idea how to fix it. Why would he, he didn’t even know how to keep it up.”

  “How long did it take you to get it in shape?”

  “Let’s see, I got it in the middle of the summer. Lois needed it in September. So even with Nina helping, it probably took me a month. I had to hit the junkyards for used parts. And then the finish takes a long time with the drying and all. I had to take three days off work but I got it done. Her mechanic said it was a better job than they do in most shops,” he said proudly. “I worked as a mechanic’s assistant for a couple of months when I first got here, so I know he was right.” In contrast to his wooden demeanor when denouncing parasites, now those deep frown lines lifted, pulling his wide mouth up into a smile of remembrance.

  I leaned forward over the desk. “Mr. Munson, let me ask you this. You’ve told me Lois made use of both you and your ex-wife when you were in New York and in engineering your move out here. Then she came and stayed with you for two months. You let her. And then, Mr. Munson, you spent all that time redoing an expensive car for her. Why?”

  Deliberately, he moved his hand away from the computer. “My wife, ex-wife, Nina, was her big sister. No one could complain about Lois in front of Nina. For Nina, whatever Lois took she must have needed, she must have had a reason for everything she demanded. It was just easier not to argue.”

  “Are you sure that’s all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Mr. Munson, another interpretation of these events would be that you found yourself attracted to Lois. She’s a beautiful woman. You—”