by Susan Dunlap
“And pineapple.” The boy wrinkled his nose. I didn’t blame him.
There was still one more line on his paper. I didn’t expect Ott to turn down anchovies and pineapple, but I knew him well enough to wait for the final round before he capitulated. I gave the nod.
The boy looked at the paper, then at me. He shook his head in disbelief. “Say it,” I mouthed.
He shrugged. “And sunflower seeds.”
The door opened. The boy walked in and plopped two boxes on Ott’s desk. He was still shaking his head. “Hey, man, I don’t know what you even call this mess.”
Ott looked down at the two boxes as if expecting a pizza and a bomb. The latter suspicion was not entirely unreasonable, considering Ott’s clientele. Most of his clients were more familiar with The Anarchists’ Cookbook than Betty Crocker.
As Ott was lifting the lid of the second box, I strode in. “You wouldn’t expect me to eat that concoction of yours, would you?”
He turned to glare at me, his deep-set hazel eyes narrowing, his round cheeks flushing an unattractive shade of orange. Hands bracing his plump hips, he looked poised to flap his wings and squawk. “Smith! I should have known you’d engineer a trick like this.”
Coming from him, I took that as a compliment. But I couldn’t let on. With Ott, if you lose your reputation, you don’t get a second chance. Despite his marginal clientele and his hand-to-mouth existence, Ott had standards as rigid as Madeleine Riordan’s. I extricated a five from my pocket and handed it to the delivery boy. He hesitated, perhaps expecting Ott to protest a woman paying the tip, but Herman Ott is no chauvinist, particularly when it comes to money.
I lowered myself onto one of the wooden client chairs. The slats cut into my back. I’d been dropping into Ott’s office for more than half a decade—virtually never invited—and not once in that time had I come across a chair any but the most desperate of persons would sit in. “Do you furnish from Discomfort Is Us?”
“No one invited you, Smith.” The one padded chair stood behind his desk, a caramel job with rips in the plastic the length of the back. He eyed it but didn’t sit.
“No one but me would bring you your favorite pizza. Being seen ordering that is like buying the National Enquirer. Now the Diner’s Club will never give me a card!”
I opened the lid of the double cheese, double anchovy, pineapple, and seed. Straight cholesterol. Raising the lid on the second, smaller pie, I reached for a piece of pepperoni, anchovy, and onion.
Before he could restrain it, a tiny gasp escaped from Ott’s mouth. Surely he couldn’t be offended by my choice. How could a man whose clothier of choice was Goodwill, who refurnished from the nearest curbs on the city’s annual trash-pickup day, view my taste as unacceptable? But he was still standing over the pizza boxes, his beak sniffing in disapproval. He looked from it to me, to my hand poised to extricate a slice of pepperoni. Finally, he said, “Just a minute,” walked to the trash can, and pulled out the day’s Examiner. As he lifted the boxes and spread the paper over his desk, I had to restrain a laugh. I’d forgotten how finicky Ott was about his office. The adjoining room, in which he slept, was a slovenly nest of discarded clothes, blankets, books, newspapers, and magazines, but in his office the queen could have perched without fear of soiling the royal tail feathers. Once again I reminded myself that Herman Ott had a very distinct set of rules; they were just different enough from the norm that most of us didn’t recognize them as rules.
Printed tablecloth in place, Ott pulled out a piece of the anchovy, pineapple, and seed. The double cheese put up a good fight. But Ott, a seasoned eater, yanked it loose, slurping up the stalactites of cheese in his waiting maw.
A lesser woman would have lost her appetite, but police training prepares you for desperate situations. I chomped down on the pepperoni.
Ott finished two pieces before he said, “She killed herself.”
I stopped, pizza in midair. It wasn’t that I was surprised Ott knew I was investigating Madeleine Riordan’s death. No one in town was arrested or died without his knowledge. In the realm of information Ott was a black hole, inexorably sucking every fact, observation, or theory into that mental space from which neither light nor matter ever reemerged. What amazed me was that without begging, cajoling, or promise of money, Ott gave information to an officer of the peace. It was a first. It was also a second: Ott was wrong. But I wasn’t about to say that—yet. “How do you know?”
“I’ve known Madeleine for years.”
“How well?”
“I’ve done some work for her. I’ve referred clients to her. She was a woman of unbending principles.”
I could see the bond of respect between them. And I recalled Madeleine’s cane, and the two long flights of stairs up to this office. “You made Madeleine Riordan come here?”
Ott laughed humorlessly (as he did most things). “Smith, I didn’t make Madeleine Riordan do anything. She insisted.”
I leaned back in my chair, jabbed my ribs against the slats, and sat forward. “Okay, I can picture that. She’d never have let anyone think that cane slowed her down.” I picked up a piece of pizza, folded it, and tapped a finger against the crust. “How’d you meet her?”
“An antiwar protest, like half the people I know.” But he said it too flatly; he was asking to be convinced he should elaborate.
“In marches?”
“Yeah, that’s what we did.” He reached for another piece of pizza.
Someone who knew him less well wouldn’t have noticed the slight relaxation in the arch of his eyebrows (eyebrows that were so light that most people wouldn’t have noticed them), but I had seen it often enough when I missed the mark he wanted to avoid, when he was settling back to watch me wander off on a wild-goose chase. “Ott, she wouldn’t have been a marcher. The woman walked with a cane.”
“Not always.” He moved the pizza to his mouth and began his vacuum imitation. The double-cheese, double-anchovy mix was rising from the middle of the folded piece, Vesuvius-like. A less skilled eater could have been asphyxiated. But while Ott persevered in a manner that would have impressed Henry VIII, I could tell he wasn’t enjoying it.
“You’ve known her since before she needed a cane?” I prompted. I wanted to ask what she was like then, before Nature had made every step a decision. “Why did she need that cane? What happened?”
“Auto accident.”
“When?”
“Toward the end of the protest days.” He wasn’t eating anymore. His forefinger was rubbing along the edge of the box, courting a paper cut, but he didn’t seem to notice. His gaze wasn’t on me, but on some image that floated invisibly a foot in front of him. He looked like I’d felt when I first saw Champion’s photos of Madeleine. Except that for him the compelling image was in his own mind. Or memory. I wished I could see what he saw.
“Ott,” I said softly, “she didn’t kill herself.”
“She told me she didn’t plan to linger on machines.”
I shook my head, amazed he hadn’t learned she’d been smothered, impressed by how well we’d kept that fact quiet.
“You didn’t know her like I did,” he went on. “Life was an orderly picture for her. Her job was to keep it that way. The kind of satisfaction that you get from a good dive in the pool she got from making you write your reports on time.”
I nodded slowly. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Ott knew about my newfound passion for diving. It just made me uncomfortable, as if the man were standing on his toes, stretching his plump body up so he could peer in over the edge of my eyelids.
“And when that order went, it was like a future of nothing but belly flops.” Ott looked down at his hand. His finger was bleeding.
“The cane, Ott. What happened?”
Ott sucked the blood off his finger. Then he picked up a napkin and began tearing a strip for a tourniquet. His pallid face was more bloodless than usual, his neck drawn into cords. He tore each strip slowly, and when the napkin had been divide
d into eight interchangeable rectangles, he began wrapping them around the paper cut. Brain surgeries have taken less time. Brain surgery patients have looked less pained. Knowing the source of his discomfort, I held my tongue. But it wasn’t easy. Finally he said, “Okay, Smith, I’ll tell you about Madeleine. This is pretty much third hand because by the time I saw her again I didn’t see any point in bringing it up.”
I nodded, amazed. Ott hadn’t even asked for anything in return.
“You think of her as an orderly, unflinching monitor, right?”
“Right.”
“But before the accident, she bicycled all over. She didn’t own a car. She wasn’t one of these people who’s at every demonstration. Even then she chose her causes, but when she was committed, she gave one hundred percent. A real firebrand. There was no stopping her. If she had to get a flyer to the printers, she pedaled that bicycle so fast you couldn’t see her feet. When she rounded corners you’d think she was going to scrape her ear on the pavement. She’d cut in and out between cars so fast they didn’t even brake, and she’d grin and slap the fender.”
The Madeleine Riordan I’d known never made a move without weighing all the angles. “Was it the accident that changed her?”
“Of course,” he said with disdain.
“Tell me about it.”
“She shattered her pelvis.” Ott paused so long I thought that was all he was going to give me. When he finally went on, his voice had risen half an octave and there were long gaps between sentences. “It was in the country. … The cops who found her didn’t know enough not to lift her. … Maybe they got her to a doctor as fast as they could, maybe not. … Probably didn’t make much difference. … Doctor was in a small town; he patched her up. … By the time she got to a hospital—” He shrugged, but his face held none of the anger I would have expected. I had the feeling I was listening to a ghost of the man. In all the years I’d known Herman Ott, I’d never heard him sound so drained.
There was more to this than a colleague who’d gotten inadequate medical care. I had the feeling he’d keep talking, if I could just come up with the right questions. But if I once erred, the spell would be broken. He’d finish his pizza and toss me out. “How did Madeleine come to have the accident if she didn’t even own a car?”
“It wasn’t her car. The Movement got it. If it had been her car, she would have made sure it was in better shape.”
“What was she doing with it?”
Ott pushed the pizza box away. “One of her jobs in the Movement was to find drivers to take draft resisters over the border into Canada. It was a long, tedious, routine drive. All the driver needed to be was reliable, bright enough to find an unguarded border, and able to keep his mouth shut afterward. That was the normal run.”
“But this one wasn’t normal?” I prompted.
“Some weren’t. In an emergency she’d take it herself.”
“And the accident run?”
“Guy with a fifty-thousand-dollar price on his head.”
I almost whistled—$50,000 is a lot of crime. I took a guess. “Someone connected with the bombing of the Oakland Induction Center?”
“No. Nothing violent. Madeleine didn’t deal with violence. She insisted that’s what we were against. The guy was the conduit to all the resisters the government hadn’t found yet. He knew all the safe houses. You can imagine how much the FBI wanted him.”
“And how bad it would have been for him, and the whole antiwar movement if they got him.”
“Right. Madeleine … Madeleine must have thought that, too.”
What had he edited out? “Madeleine … ?”
He shook his head. “She checked out the car and told them it was too old, too unreliable; they’d have to find another before she’d put one of her drivers in it. They’d have to get a good car and decent maps. They couldn’t, or maybe just didn’t; you know how things were in those days. In the end she decided the guy couldn’t wait, so she drove him herself.” He sighed so deeply I wondered if he had been involved in that disastrous decision or with that car.
“So they headed north?” I prompted.
“Yeah. And the word got out. After she crossed into Washington state, she called back to Berkeley. They told her to watch for cops. She was almost to the border when she spotted a car behind her. The draft resister was driving her car. She was in the passenger seat. What she told people was that the car was old, the door latch wasn’t reliable. They were driving a winding country road. He took a curve too fast and she fell out.”
“And shattered her pelvis?”
“Pelvis, leg, and arm. Hit her skull hard enough to knock her out.”
I shut my eyes to block out the picture. Then I said, “And what really happened?”
Ott glared at me. “You know her well enough to guess.”
I sat a minute thinking of Champion’s pictures. Even in the shot of joy there was a focus in her smile. And in her outrage, she didn’t look as if she were about to explode; she looked like she’d get someone. “How close was she to the border?”
Ott nodded approvingly. “Eight miles.”
“She wouldn’t let one of her drivers go in that car, but she went herself because it was vital to get the passenger over the border. She wouldn’t have put him next to a car door he might slide out of. So, then,” I said slowly, “Madeleine didn’t slide out that door, either. The door didn’t suddenly unlatch.” My stomach lurched as I realized the corollary. “My God, then she must have waited for the right curve and opened the door.” I could see her hand tightening on the door handle, bracing to pull it up, knowing as a wary person would that in another breath she could be dead, or maimed. “And did the man get away, Ott?”
“Of course. She knew the cops would have to stop to take care of her. The FBI was crazy to get him, but the cops, well, Smith, you guys have your faults, but you’re not going to leave a woman to die by the side of the road.” Before I could comment, he said, “The doctors told her she’d never walk again. It was a year before she could get around with the cane. And after that, Smith, she’d used up all her leeway.”
“Ott, who was the passenger?”
“Code name Cisco. He kept his identity hidden.”
“But you knew it,” I said, feeling on firm ground.
“He didn’t tell anyone.”
“Ott,” I said, exasperated, “that doesn’t mean you didn’t find out. Who was he? And is he back in town now?”
Ott shrugged. “He’s dead. Been dead twenty years.” It went against Ott’s code to reveal an identity to the police, even an identity that had been dead twenty years. Before I could press him, he said, “He was hit by a bus in Vancouver. Wasn’t looking where he was going. Just like him. He could concentrate on something that concerned him and do a first-rate job, but for the rest of life he was like …” Ott stared at me. A movement flickered on his face, as close to a smile as his thin lips were trained to handle. “For everything else, he was as flaky as Coco Arnero.”
I swallowed, futilely willing my skin not to flush. Whenever I recalled the Arnero incident I’d assured myself that it was too insignificant for anyone else to remember. I hated to have anyone remember it, but particularly Ott. “Did Madeleine find Coco flaky?”
He couldn’t resist a little smile of victory. “Smith, you of all people should know about Arnero. Lived wherever there was a free couch, always found a short-term job when he needed it, broke minor laws, missed appointments, but God, the man had panache. You had to love him, even when he drove you nuts.”
“Did Madeleine feel that way?”
“She did.” Ott pulled loose another piece of pizza. The cheese had cooled and congealed; it reminded me of turkey fat the day after Thanksgiving. “She had to work like hell to keep him in line every time she represented him. He’d weird out. But once Madeleine committed herself, his weird spells didn’t bother her; like she didn’t even see them, except when they affected the case. The thing was, Smith, she liked planning t
he hearing strategy; the bigger the challenge the better, if she believed in the client. But she also got a kick out of playing the game. It was like riding her bike between cars. She loved leaning over the brink.” Ott stared over at me, his eyebrows raised in amazement. “She was something like you, Smith, an adrenaline junkie.”
Coming from Ott, that was a compliment. And by Ottian standards he was forced to give it, no matter how it pained him. He was right. I love the chase—all or nothing—only this moment exists. And hostage negotiation, when lives hang on every word. Then it doesn’t matter that I live in a room filled with unpacked boxes, that my car is falling apart. My life can be a shambles, but adrenaline makes it okay. It’s an addiction—I can’t imagine giving it up. And to be forced to, like Madeleine, was … “How did she survive, Ott?”
Ott was still staring at me, as if he saw a whiff of her escaping through my pores. “She focused.”
I nodded. “She brought it all to her cases?”
“One helluva lawyer.”
“But it wouldn’t have been the same.”
“Dammit, it couldn’t be! She was just more adult than you.” He looked away in disgust, the whiff dissolved in the mire of my ordinariness.
But he’d answered too quickly. I’d seen him do that often enough, throw the switch, send me angrily onto the siding. “No, Ott, I don’t believe planning cases for even the most deserving of clients—”
“You don’t understand, Smith—”
“No, Ott, I do. It wasn’t the client, it was the cause, right?”
I held his gaze till he admitted, “Yeah, okay.”
“Even so, planning courtroom strategy is not cutting between cars. It’s not just the difference between intellectual challenge and the physical. The difference is that with the court cases she was always inside the law, always safe. You don’t get the rush from that. You’ve got to do what we do, go where laws don’t count, where you could get shot. Or you break the law.”
Ott didn’t disagree. His face remained utterly still.