Cop Out

by Susan Dunlap

  Less than five minutes later, I left the car behind Leonard’s in front of Ott’s office. Ott always hated that; he figured we were out to besmirch his reputation.

  I yanked open one of the double doors to Ott’s building. The bulb in the lobby was out. The place was going downhill—again. It mirrored the socioeconomic state of the Avenue. Built in the twenties for fashionable offices, it had a double staircase, and its circular hallways had been ready to accommodate the rush of commerce. It must once have been a lovely building with its old open-grille elevator, but not so appealing that businesses stayed on Telegraph Avenue. And so began its decline. There were periods when the two-room office suites became illegal crash pads and the Ott Detective Agency was its most respectable tenant. Asian refugee families moved in, and the building improved. A gym followed on the top floor. The refugees prospered and moved on; the gym failed. Now Ott’s floor housed a hodgepodge of cottage industries. Whether the proprietors were living in their cottages was a question I was glad I didn’t have to deal with.

  Ott’s office was at the far corner of the third-floor hall. I came abreast of Leonard midway up the first flight of the once-grand double staircase.

  On Telegraph Avenue Leonard is as much of a fixture as Ott. Gray-haired and shambling, he looks out of place in uniform. Suspects tend to dismiss him, and they tend to be sorry when they do. As we headed up the next staircase, I started to brief him on Kidd, but before I finished a sentence, he was shaking his head as if he already knew. “Seems, Leonard, that Kidd did a little low-level watch-out work for Ott. In Kidd’s case it sounds like charity on Ott’s part as much as need.”

  “Maybe Ott wasn’t such a hot judge of character with this kid. Drugs create a lot of Mr. Hydes,” Leonard said.

  “You’d think Ott would know that. I’m inclined to believe Kidd, Leonard. He knew where Ott kept the car key.”

  “I’d believe Ott was forced before I’d picture him giving Kidd a tour of his hiding places.”

  We were rounding the landing toward the second flight of stairs. There were still tenants living illegally here, but fewer than were here a year ago, and the halls had the night-empty feeling of an office building. As we rounded the second landing and headed down Ott’s hall, I was five steps ahead of Leonard.

  “Smith, what’s your rush? So Ott goes off in a car. A case could have taken him out of town. He wouldn’t much like leaving Berkeley, but it’s the logical explanation.”

  “And you think he’d leave his dead bolt off?”

  “That’s the reason you got me risking a heart attack? The guy hasn’t dead-bolted his door!” Leonard was panting, but still, he edged in front of me. This was his beat. “Or Kidd says he didn’t dead-bolt it.”

  Before I could answer, the smell hit us: urine, shit, blood, decay.

  Leonard tried the doorknob. Of course it didn’t open.

  I pulled out my baton and smashed its end through the O on the OTT DETECTIVE AGENCY sign. The opaque glass held for a moment, then sprayed like white fireworks.

  I reached through and opened the door.

  The body was inside.

  CHAPTER 8

  I DON’T KNOW WHETHER I was more relieved or shocked. The body lying dead in the doorway between Herman Ott’s office and back room was not Herman Ott. It was Bryant Hemming. And he’d been dead awhile. There was what appeared to be an entry wound in his chest.

  I didn’t let myself think of Bryant Hemming alive—not now.

  Automatically Leonard and I moved back into the hall, and Leonard called in a DBF (dead body found). Chances were the killer was long gone, but you can’t be sure. I didn’t want my headstone to say: “Dumb Cop Assumed Everything Was Fine.”

  “I’ll lead,” I said. “I know the layout.”

  Leonard nodded and covered me as I moved back into the two-room suite. The nauseating smell of death struck me again; I blocked out all speculative thoughts of it, and of my reaction to it, and concentrated on the search. I surveyed Ott’s office: no closet, three tall file cabinets, big old wooden desk with chairs on either side. I edged around the office, keeping my back to the wall, till I could see under the desk. Nothing. Not even dust balls.

  “Window?” Leonard said.

  “Faces the air shaft. Probably hasn’t been opened since V-E Day. Hasn’t been washed since the Great War.”

  I had to step over the body to get into the other room, Ott’s bedroom. “Doesn’t have a closet.”

  “Jeez, Smith, it is a closet.”

  What it looked like was the box at the bottom of the laundry chute. Clothes, and blankets, and towels, cloth items I couldn’t classify formed a compost on the floor. Bookcases, overflowing with newspapers, magazines, cups, dishes, and paper bags, covered three walls, and one floor-to-ceiling bookcase jutted in the room next to the sprung lounge chair in which I assumed Ott slept. (Or maybe he just nested in the clutter on the floor.) Under the window was a hot plate, and under it a cabinet holding tea, sugar, instant coffee, and three boxes of caramel wafers. “The room’s okay, Leonard. It’s emp—unpeopled.”

  I took a shallow breath and looked down at Bryant Hemming.

  Bryant Hemming was a collage of the colors of death, all shaded with sepia as if to remind us that he was already part of the past. The chest wound was just to the left of his sternum, a shot right into the heart. Blood was caked around it, but not much. His heart would have stopped immediately, pulsing no more blood back out of the hole.

  “Jeez, Smith, he looks like he’s doing some kind of relaxation technique, straight out on his back like that,” Leonard said.

  Death had swollen Hemming’s features into a cruel parody of the eager face that had glowed as he had mediated the hardest case of the year. But still, there was something about his half-open mouth, the angry creases between the brows that death hadn’t eased. “He looks not so much frightened as, well, offended.”

  “ ‘How could this be happening to a good guy like me,’ huh, Smith?”

  I nodded. It was a reasonable question. One that Homicide Detail would be asking a lot. I edged around Hemming back into the office room and wrote down our time of arrival on the scene. In a few minutes Ott’s little office would be jammed with personnel: scene supervisor, Homicide detectives, ID tech, and later, when we were through with the body, the coroner. We’d be knocking on doors on every floor in the building, rousting the tenants who didn’t officially live here, who would be more worried about covering their housing violations than a neighbor’s demise. Maybe I’d be interviewing them; more likely I’d be here answering questions.

  Leonard moved to the wall of the office, as far from the corpse as space allowed. “So whadda you think, Smith? Hemming was here in the office, he cops to it that the bad guy’s gonna shoot him, and he starts backing into the bedroom?”

  “Bad choice,” I said, realizing it was something of an understatement. “Why not head for the hallway?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know the bedroom wasn’t gonna let him escape. Maybe he figures he can get inside and slam the door. Maybe he sees the door out to the hallway, figures it’s like a back door and he can zip out. Or maybe he panics and doesn’t think.” Leonard was a big proponent of “the average crook is not bright” theory. And “the small-time crook is not bright big time.”

  “Hemming was on his TV show Sunday, and, Leonard, the guy relished going headfirst into conflict. He’s a big guy. I don’t see him panicking or backing away. His flaw would be being too sure he could deal with any problem.”

  “You don’t mediate with a murderer.”

  “Yeah, but maybe the other guy wasn’t a murderer then, not till it was too late for Hemming. If Hemming had talked him down, what a great story he’d have to take to Washington. Think of the triumph.”

  “Or, Smith,” Leonard said without missing a beat, “Hemming could have been in the bedroom when the killer walked in and startled him.”

  “Why would he be in there? Anything could be living under tha
t clutter. Could be so many generations of mice they see themselves as the landed gentry.”

  Leonard peered into the room, looking for an answer. But it was Hemming’s feet that gave it to me. “Leonard, I’ve seen Ott walk across that room. He shuffled, because even he couldn’t be sure what was at the bottom of his clutter—a sticky remnant of yesterday’s lunch or a slick magazine that could send him flying. And by the time Ott made it from hot plate to chair, he looked like he’d been trudging through seaweed. Bryant Hemming could never have made it through that morass unflagged, certainly not if he were moving in panic.”

  Leonard moved back to the far side of Ott’s desk. It was useless; there was no way to get away from the sight of Bryant Hemming’s body, much less the smell of it, in this small office. Leonard glanced longingly at the bare desk but didn’t take the chance of sitting on it. A shiny surface like that was a natural for prints. If the killer were one of Ott’s clients, he might have balanced his butt on the edge of the desk and put a hand back onto the wood to push himself up. I’d done it plenty of times myself, mostly because it infuriated Ott. Maybe Bryant Hemming himself had perched there. But why? “Leonard, did Bryant Hemming even know Herman Ott?”

  Leonard stood peering out the dirt-caked window, as if the air shaft held the answer, as if he could see the air shaft. “Bad luck, bad judgment, take your pick. Maybe Hemming was too cocky to keep an eye on Ott.” His acid tone could have etched the glass. He made no move to turn toward me even when I didn’t answer.

  I’d forgotten—or momentarily chosen to forget—how much everyone else on the force hated Ott.

  “Chances are they shared clients.” An olive branch he was offering me.

  I snapped it up. “Of course! Serenity Kaetz and Brother Cyril. Either one could be Ott’s client. But why would Bryant Hemming come here? The man was just about to leave for a whole new life in Washington. He said on the news that he was flying out Sunday night. He’d barely have time to swing by here on the way to the airport. If he had one stop to make, why Herman Ott?”

  “If that stop was voluntary, Smith.”

  I looked back at Hemming. In death he was bearlike; he’d been a big guy, a guy in good shape. “It would have taken a sizable person to force him. Or a weapon. But that still leaves the question why here. Why would anyone abduct him and bring him to Herman Ott’s office?”

  “Because, Smith,” Leonard said with the kind of sigh I’d heard him use with particularly zonked-out suspects, “Herman Ott had something on him. Ott called him here. And Ott killed him.”

  I stared at Leonard. He knew the Avenue scene better than anyone. Merchants confided in him, old rads remembered him from college. He’d been on Beat 6 so long that he blended into the walls transients sat against as they begged for spare change. Leonard was honest, fair, and committed to Telegraph and making it an avenue everyone could enjoy. He was, in his way, the departmental equivalent of Ott. Maybe that was the problem. But while there was a certain respect between the two men, they didn’t like each other, and as if looking into the depths of their own souls and the secrets they’d managed to conceal, they didn’t trust each other. “Leonard, you don’t think—”

  “Yeah, I think, Smith. Ott makes a big thing about his code of ethics. Gets on his high horse about not talking with us, using us, lying to us, setting us up and being so damned righteous about it he’s lucky no one’s taken him out in here. Well, okay, I don’t like it, but I understand it. We’ve all got codes. But you know what the other side of those codes is?”

  “What?”

  “Prices. And we’ve all got those too.”

  “Are you saying you can be bought, Leonard?”

  “Oh, yeah. Just not cheap. I go for more than anyone on Telegraph or in Berkeley’s gonna pay for a beat cop pushing fifty. A lot more.”

  “And me? You’re saying I’d sell out too?”

  “Maybe not for money.” He turned toward me, his brown eyes sharp. “Would you sell out if it meant Howard’s life? Or for principle? Maybe that’s your Achilles’ heel, Smith. Yeah, if you sold your soul, it would be to defend a principle or a right. A small price to pay to lose your reputation if it meant preserving freedom in Berkeley, right?”

  I laughed uncomfortably. “A little melodramatic, Leonard. Burning at stakes and witch dunking have been passé for centuries.”

  “But you admit I’m right, Smith?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. And if I’ve got my price, and you’ve got yours, and we’ve sworn to uphold the law, of course Herman Ott has his.”

  Suddenly the smell of death seemed stronger, murkier, and unavoidable. I looked past Bryant Hemming’s body into the cluttered room in which Herman Ott had lived for at least twenty years. “If Ott sold out, he’d be living better.” Before the protest was out of my mouth, I knew the answer.

  “Ott wouldn’t have sold out for money. My guess is it would be for something even we wouldn’t think of. But the bottom line is it doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. Ott’s missing, and there’s a corpse in his office. Let me give you some advice, Smith. You’re a friend of Ott’s; it’s not to your credit, but there it is. If you’re any kind of friend, you’ll get him to turn himself in before the coroner’s got Hemming’s body out of here.”

  I shook my head. “If I knew where Ott was, I wouldn’t be here tonight.”

  Leonard shrugged.

  Leonard was right: Ott needed to be found. I glanced around the office. In a couple of minutes the room would be packed and I’d be in the hall. Carefully I opened Ott’s desk drawer and, using the eraser end of a pencil, shifted the papers in there. But there was no calendar, no address book. I tried the side drawers. The top one held a copy of the California penal code. The middle one was devoted to INS regulations. The bottom file drawer must have had twenty manila folders.

  “How typical of Ott!”

  “What?” Leonard had opened the door a crack and appeared to be peering out; at least his nose was to the crack.

  “Not one folder’s got a name. They’re all numbered.”

  “Is there a master list?”

  “In his head.” I lifted a file out. Inside were sheets of lined paper, filled with notes in Ott’s tiny scrawl. I flipped from page to page. “Lots of short reports. Years apart. Here’s one on the resale of stolen T-shirts from a vendor’s table on the Avenue and another on vandalism to display tables. Doesn’t look like there’s anything major, but there’s no name or address on the file.”

  “Must be a regular customer.”

  I nodded, replacing the file. “And Ott’d know how to reach him.”

  I plucked another file. “Pot thefts.”

  Leonard laughed. “Ott is hard up. Even we give marijuana low priority.”

  “No, not drugs. Flowerpots. And some land of chemicals, missing along with the pots. And no name or address.”

  Outside, footsteps resounded on the stairs.

  Leonard moved back, opened the door. The draft wafted under Ott’s big desk and tossed an eight-by-eleven sheet, a printout of a newspaper article, onto my foot. I scanned the sheet. There was no header, nothing to suggest which newspaper had been copied.

  Historical Review Subject Chosen: Famous Mine Case Disinterred. Mediation to be tried this time.

  At a meeting of the Historical Society last Thursday board members J. Reynolds Remington, Martin A. Burbacher, Christian Jensen III, Devlin P. O’Malley, Dr. Thomas Ashford Everett, Eldridge Everett, Cornelius E. Whipple, and Kyle Lovington Jones reviewed the records of suitable local cases for the third annual historical review to be presented this next spring in the community meeting hall at City Hall. It was decided that the

  Presumably the article continued on a following page, but that was a page I didn’t have. I bent, eyed Ott’s floor in all directions. It offered no other sheet.

  “Looks like Hemming brought it himself,” I said.

  But Leonard’s attention was
already on the hallway.

  I turned the sheet over. Blank. I read it again and wondered why the printer couldn’t have started at the top of the page so the entire article fitted on it. So much for the benefits of technology.

  “Smith!”

  I glanced up at Inspector Doyle, my old boss from Homicide Detail.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Smith! I guess it’s no surprise to find you here in Herman Ott’s office. So the little rat finally bought it, huh?”

  “No, not Ott, Inspector. Bryant Hemming.”

  “In Ott’s office? Where’s Ott?”

  I shrugged. “Out. No sign of him.”

  Doyle sighed. “Isn’t it just like the little rat? Leaves a corpse in his office, hightails out, and holes up. And how many man-hours’ll he eat up till we dig him out?”

  “Aren’t you talking ‘scenario before evidence’ here?”

  He didn’t answer, a tacit yes. “Well, Smith, you can go on back to patrol.”

  That would have been the safe thing to do, the smart career move. I glanced at Ott’s desk, seeing not its clean surface but remnants of the sparrings he and I had had over the years, many I’d lost, some I’d won, but none I’d left without baring bits of Ott he wouldn’t otherwise have exposed. Encounters like Sunday afternoon’s that had bared the “thing” Ott couldn’t bring himself to reveal. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, wouldn’t—or couldn’t—return my calls, and now a man was dead in his office. I didn’t know whether my words came from outrage at Ott, or worry, or just plain foolhardiness. “Inspector, no one knows Ott as well as I do.”

  “You saying you can find him, Smith?” Before I could answer, he said, “Well, then, you go ahead.”

  CHAPTER 9

  I GOT INSPECTOR’S DOYLE’S okay to get back into Ott’s office after Raksen, the ID tech, had finished. Ott had been in this office since he left college a quarter of a century ago. The walls here had to be a fingerprint archive of the Berkeley left. When he walked in here, Raksen would be in heaven. He would dust every surface; left unleashed, he would turn the office and its contents black.