Cop Out

by Susan Dunlap

  Instructing on economics, or her theories thereof, was Pereira’s banana. “The second group is too stupid to see the end. And the third—probably Bryant Hemming’s—probably started paying off initial contributors out of capital because he was pressed. He’d have intended to straighten things out as soon as pressures eased up, the next check came in, as soon as he had time to really go over the books: any number of excuses. And when no one noticed what he’d done, chances are he just forgot about it and his plans for making it right.”

  “And the next time it was easier,” I said. “That sounds like Bryant Hemming. He got too busy with A Fair Deal to focus on ACC’s financial problems. He could hardly tell Roger Macalester to do it when he was skimming the funds.”

  Pereira shook her head. “The guy wasn’t even promising his contributors a gonzo return on their money, just what a decent mutual fund would bring in. Without the new investors whose money came in the last week, ACC was broke. And people let him mediate their problems!”

  I laughed. For a murderer Pereira might have compassion; for a financial philanderer, fat chance. “Hemming might have made as innocent a mistake as merely not paying attention. He chose the wrong stocks—”

  “You can say that again.”

  “He didn’t keep close enough watch on them—”

  “Guy didn’t watch at all. When the market goes up fifty points and your stock drops, and you don’t at least think—”

  “Bryant Hemming should have considered the rule of holes.”

  “The rule of holes?”

  “When you’re in one, quit digging.”

  Pereira laughed and, when she stopped, shook her head in weary disgust.

  “What this comes down to,” I said, “is Bryant Hemming could have made a careless mistake early on. Then the ACC fund got popular, and it was too late to ’fess up. Do that and he’s discredited, and much more publicly than before. No A Fair Deal, no big groundbreaking international mediation project, no ACC, or much of anything else for Bryant Hemming.”

  Pereira was shaking her head again slowly, disgustedly. “ACC. I understand it wasn’t the Dreyfus Fund to begin with, but they had trustees. Didn’t those people ever look at the books?”

  “Supposedly Margo Roehner did?”

  Pereira stopped dead and stared at me. “Margo Roehner of the Roehner-Castillo Fund?”

  “Could be. It’s not a common name.”

  “And she didn’t notice the—”

  If Ott had gotten a look at the books, he’d have come to the same questions. He’d have known about the Roehner-Castillo Fund, as he knew about everything in Berkeley, and he’d have had the same thought as I did: “Why don’t we drop in and ask Margo?”

  Pereira called Murakawa to take possession of the ACC books, handed them over three minutes later, and climbed into my patrol car.

  I pulled into the street “What’s the scoop on Margo Roehner? In the world of big bucks?” I asked minutes later as we stuttered east on Ashby Street, another of Berkeley’s stop-and-go thoroughfares. There used to be a belief that the city council refused road repair because bad surfaces slowed traffic, prevented accidents, reduced the need for police presence, the environmental government’s dream. Now congestion did it for them.

  “You’ve heard of the Roehner-Castillo Fund?” Connie asked, pausing only for a breath. The question was of course rhetorical. Not only would I not have heard of the Roehner-Castillo Fund, but for years I’d assumed the Dreyfus Fund was a charity set up in the aftermath of the great case. My view of competent money management was having no checks bounce. It was the VW bug style of finance—no frills, no hassle, as long as you don’t change gears on a hill. Connie Pereira knew all that; it appalled her. She drove an Audi. “Smith, the fund was set up by her grandfather and Mr. Castillo. It’s one of the most respected in the state. Margo Roehner worked in the fund offices when she was in college, so she should know something.”

  “If she cared. Could be she just worked there from family pressure or lack of ambition to find something else.” Though the woman whose storage locker had been tossed and abandoned was anything but lazy. A lazy woman would never have created Patient Defenders.

  “She’s on the Roehner-Castillo board, but just nominally, I understand. Word is she hasn’t been to a board meeting in a year, not since her father married his trophy wife and changed his will.”

  I turned right on Magnolia Street, pulled over in the middle of the crab apple tree-lined block. Not a magnolia in sight. But still, who wants to live on Crab Street?

  Margo Roehner’s house was a green wood affair with a deep sloping roof, built sometime after the Great War. Looking from the street, I’d have classified it as a cottage, but when I walked up the driveway, I could see the second story hiding its bedrooms and sleeping porches behind that sloping roof. Berkeley had a number of these charming houses designed not to overwhelm the modest lots allotted to them. Here any resident with sufficient pucker could fling open the casement and spit on his neighbor. No activity in these jowl-by-jowl bedrooms was quite private. No renewed passion or gastrointestinal malfunction not announced to the neighbors.

  Once I’d lived for half a year in an aluminum-sided development somewhere in Jersey, where the little houses were this close. But privacy survived there, thanks to the depressingly same views out the windows and to winter and rain. Here in the Golden State the seduction of sun and straw flowers, bougainvillaea and balmy air made it hard to keep the windows closed.

  I glanced up at the roof Margo Roehner had been rushing back to on Monday. It looked fine. Perhaps her workers had been more reliable than she’d expected.

  I pushed the bell. Pereira was surveying the lawn. Was she toting up the years of scrimping and stock market luck before she could live somewhere like this?

  “Shaggy,” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “The yard,” Pereira said.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs inside. Hurriedly I glanced around the yard. Pereira was right. The landscaping had been thoughtfully planned—rhododendrons against the house, Japanese maple in front—but they all needed trimming, like a four-month-old haircut with the bangs hanging in your eyes. And ivy, the bane of any serious gardener, threatened to creep over windows, mail box, suet feeders, doves, robins, red-breasted nuthatches, and, if we waited long enough, us. “The architectural equivalent of the Roehner-Castillo board meetings,” I whispered.

  It was a moment before Pereira grinned. “You mean, unattended?”

  The door opened. Margo Roehner didn’t look shaggy. She looked as if the energy of a six-footer had been compressed into her five-foot frame. In her tan corduroy suit with bombardier jacket she might have been as ready to deal with the public as she’d been Monday afternoon at her storage locker. But inside that suit all that energy was almost twitching. Her short brown hair had been finger-combed out of the way so often it stood in clumps. She could have been an October squirrel with more ungathered nuts than she could handle. Before I finished introducing Pereira, she snapped, “No. Look, I’m pressed for time.”

  “We’ll only keep you a few minutes.”

  “Tomorrow I’ll have all day.”

  Tomorrow Ott could be dead. “We’ll be brief, really.”

  With an economic sigh she hurried us into the dark living room, which sat under that sloping roof. Here the dichotomy of landscaping and owner was answered. The room was a collection of carved straight-back chairs, weathered leather, floral couch so soft it was a temptation to leap in, and a green oriental rug that pulled the eclectic pieces into a whole. The effect must have been charming—before the window seat became a shelf for manila folders, before the coffee table grew covered with pamphlets, before the fireplace was blocked off by two stacks of cardboard storage boxes.

  Margo scooped up the papers on the couch, pointed us to it, and perched herself on a leather ottoman.

  “Looks like Patient Defenders has taken over your life,” I said, glancin
g at the papers.

  “It is my life. You wouldn’t believe the need. People broadsided by illness. It can come out of nowhere. You’re dizzy, you’re weak, terrified, you don’t know what’s going on, and you’ve got to make the most important decisions of your life. And hassle your HMO.” She looked directly at me, no hint of the palliative smile women are prone to. But then she wouldn’t. She was the woman who had trained herself not to smile when her face had been paralyzed. “That’s when you have to have a defender—”

  “We’ll be brief. There’s a question about ACC’s books. Did a private investigator named Herman Ott try to question you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She sighed irritably. “I haven’t answered the phone all week. These grant forms, they’ve got to be in the mail today. I’ve got two new employees who have to be paid. I had to stop everything Monday morning and hassle Roger to get my money out of ACC and into my own account—”

  Pereira stared at her. “There are laws—”

  “Sue me. Look, I don’t want to sound callous about Bryant, but he couldn’t have died at a more inconvenient time. I’m not going to let his death endanger hundreds of people who need Patient Defenders.”

  “Couldn’t you have waited a week?” Pereira pushed.

  “A week? Have you dealt with government? A month, more like it. People are dying.”

  “And if you miss the deadline and don’t get your grant?”

  “We can’t go on. Not without paid staff, people you can count on when you end up in the emergency room at two A.M. Christmas Eve.” Her lips moved in an odd, minimal way.

  I wondered if she meant that to be a grimace and didn’t realize that the residue of her facial paralysis had turned it into a meaningless movement of flesh.

  “As I said, I’m really pressed—” She let out what in another person would have been a long, harried sigh, but that in her case was cut short because everything about her screamed, “I’m in a hurry.”

  Pereira was not impressed. “So,” she said in a voice most people save for pets who’ve relieved themselves on the antique quilt, “how often did you check over the ACC books?”

  “ACC?” Her tone mirrored Pereira’s. “Please. If I don’t get these forms all in order—”

  “Should we take that as ‘never’?”

  “Hardly. When I came on to the board, before I made my investment, I went over those books. They weren’t something I’d have taken home to Daddy, but they were legit. I told Bryant to get a good accountant, and I assume he did.”

  Pereira was unmoved. “And that was when?”’

  “About a year after Bryant founded it. I’d say three years ago.”

  “Have you checked them since?”

  Margo Roehner looked around the room slowly, theatrically. “As I said, I’m pressed for time. So if you don’t mind…” She reached for the doorknob just as the doorbell rang.

  CHAPTER 27

  MARGO ROEHNER DIDN’T GROAN when she opened the door to Daisy Culligan, but only self-control kept her from it. If I’d dropped in on a friend and been greeted with shoulders hunched in frustration and a mouth crimped into the beginning of “Oh, no, not you too,” I’d have been out of there before she could start spewing excuses.

  “I’m really rushed,” Margo said, unnecessarily. “I’ve got to get the grant papers…And the police are still here. They’re just leaving.”

  Daisy patted Margo’s shoulder. “So you’re saying you don’t want to go for coffee, huh?”

  “Daisy! Every HMO is cutting back; they’re tossing patients out of hospitals, giving outpatients appointments so short the doctors can barely figure out who they are, much less what complications they’ve got. Emergency rooms are zoos. I don’t have time—”

  “You want me to vamoose? Maybe take the cops with me?” Daisy shot me a grin.

  It goes against my grain to leave a witness who wants me gone. But we’d asked what we came to ask. I wasn’t going to get any closer to Herman Ott here. And I did have questions for Daisy Culligan, the woman who had driven Ott to the beach regularly always before dusk or sunrise. I could have taken her to the station, but she was like Howard, the King of Sting. They’re delicate flowers on long, winding stems that get their nourishment not from the solid soil but from the air in which they sway and weave and bob when it suits them. Uprooted and plunked in pots, they shrink down and petrify. And they certainly don’t answer questions.

  But on a bench outside Peet’s with latte in hand, they’re likely to diffuse the seeds of their brilliance to the winds. And the cops.

  “Peet’s?”

  “You’re on.”

  Pereira called in for the beat officer to drive her to her car, and I headed the few blocks to Peet’s. Daisy had a head start, but I still got on the coffee line before her. That’s the advantage of driving—and parking—a patrol car.

  I chose the one secluded bench at the edge of the courtyard. Ahead was Domingo Street, beyond were the tennis courts of the Claremont Hotel, and behind them was the great white shingle hotel itself, which holds court over this tony section of Berkeley like Queen Victoria keeping watch on her subjects. In the firestorm of 1991 in which twenty-five people died in the hills above, we all watched for hours as the fire jumped and scrambled down toward the Claremont, anxious for that one delicious bite that would fuel it for a leap onto the rest of the city below. Houses behind it burned, leaving nothing but foundation slabs and barbecues. But the Claremont had been saved. It had become a symbol of Berkeley’s survival. Now the sun shone off its turrets and shingles, its porches and porticoes. I sipped my latte, ate the scone that was lunch, and thought how odd it was that my last visit to the grand old lady had been in the company of the last person I would have expected to find on the grounds, Herman Ott.

  In the last place I’d have expected to find him.

  My breath caught. Herman Ott in the Claremont?

  I glanced over at the coffee line at Daisy Culligan and back at the hotel.

  Could Ott be hiding in the Claremont? Why would he? If he was back in Berkeley lying low, it would be so he could keep after whatever he was after before he’d gone to the beach.

  Yet—I was barely breathing—the Claremont was the last place we’d look for him. It was a spot neither his enemies nor his subjects would consider.

  I was off the bench and looking for a spot to pour out my coffee when good sense slapped me. A witness in the hand is worth a bunch of hunches in the bush. Or the hotel. Daisy was coming toward me. If Ott were undercover in the Claremont, he’d still be there in fifteen minutes. Daisy, on the other hand, would not be sitting next to me, drinking a latte machiato, and sighing in pleasure.

  “Daisy, you’ve had time to ponder those trips to Bolinas with Herman. What did he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s an hour’s drive. Even Herman wouldn’t call you for a ride and then sit in your car like a stone.”

  “Are you sure you know Herman?” She raised her machiato to her lips. I knew from experience it would still be too hot to drink, but Daisy kept the cup at her mouth, pretending to drink. Then she devoted a minute to dabbing the foam off her lips.

  “Daisy, Herman—”

  “Look, I said I don’t know anything more.” She lifted the cup, and this time she did drink. The coffee was still too hot. She pressed her lips together to keep from spitting it out.

  I watched, holding my own latte in abeyance and wondering what it was that had turned chatty Daisy Culligan so suddenly taciturn. I tried another tack. Looking her in the eye, I said, “I heard about Damon, the hairdresser.”

  “Oh.” I could almost see her changing mental gears and doing it with relief. In the new gear wariness battled pride, but it was an uneven skirmish. She pushed her curly gray hair off her face and grinned. “It was a nice tat, wasn’t it?”

  “Tat? You call your revenges tats?”

  “Revenge is too mean a word. I’m
not the Mafia. I’m just trying to bring a bit of balance into the universe. Life is so unfair. We’ve got such a bully culture, all these Goliaths stomping around so busy beating their chests they trample the Davids. And then the only thing they regret then is that their feet hurt. What I do is provide the occasional pebble for the occasional David. Or Davida.” She looked me in the eye. “After all we women are the ones who get stepped on most. Tit for tat.” She grinned.

  I was amazed she was so open about her avocation. I sipped my latte, turning the paper cup so the coffee washed the foam and chocolate to the top, and watched Daisy out of the corner of my eye. “And what was the pebble you aimed at Bryant?”

  “I didn’t—”

  I shook my head. “He wrecked your career because he was too self-absorbed to tell you the restaurateur screwed your predecessor. How much time, money, reputation did he cost you? You didn’t sue him. He didn’t bankroll you in your own café. You’re living in two rooms, nice ones, but so small you have to use your stairs as a file cabinet.” I sighed and indulged in another head shake. “You’ve got a grievance that makes the woman with the canceled hair appointments a piker. You are the Joe Montana of revenge. You could throw a Super Bowl-winning touchdown, and you’re asking me to believe you just took a sack?”

  She laughed.

  “Was the tat Roger Macalester?”

  “Roger?” She bobbled the paper cup. “I should be insulted. Roger? I did Bryant a favor sending him a guy with integrity who could also keep the office running. I did it for ACC. It galled me to take the chance of bailing out Bryant. I mean, I was married to the man. I knew he’d make a mess of ACC given the time. He had a great facade, but he was so self-absorbed he forgot anyone else existed. But Roger had years of credibility with the left; he’s utterly committed to the idea of mediation. Roger was a gift.”

  I took that with a grain of salt. “So what was your tat then?”

  “Why are you so sure…” She paused, took a long drink of coffee, and said, “Okay. You’re right. What Bryant did to me was like sacking the quarterback. And I couldn’t stay there on the ground after he ripped the ball out of my hands.” She leaned in toward me in a posture I’d come to recognize as the Howardian Personification of Smug. “It was a delicate operation. If I planned a tat that was too endangering or too public, it could backfire. The ex-wife’s always the first suspect, right?”