by Susan Dunlap
“Right, it is. But what that article does is remind her about Herman Ott, who—like you said—she doesn’t know well but knows a lot about from Daisy, from Roger Macalester, and probably from Bryant Hemming himself. She is on the ACC board. She’s organized Patient Defenders, gotten together a grant proposal. She’s used to planning. She figures: Get Ott out of the office; confront Bryant; get the Patient Defenders’ money. Then Bryant will fly out, Ott will drag back from Muir Beach disappointed about missing his yellow loon but no worse for wear, and everyone will be happy.”
“And?” he said, no less skeptically.
“Bryant blew her off. So she shot him.”
“Smith, jeez, what you’ve got here is theory. You’re talking about a woman with connections, one who kicks up a fuss as a vocation, and you want to accuse her of murder with no more evidence—”
“She focused everything on getting her grant forms in the mail today. That’s the only thing that held her together. Now—”
“No! Smith—”
“Inspector—”
“No. Smith. I’m not telling you to go home. I’ve already said that. Here’s what I’m saying now. I gave you an order; you ignored it. Smith, you are suspended.”
CHAPTER 40
I SPED ACROSS SHATTUCK, daring my colleagues, my former colleagues, to pull me over. The radio was so loud it shrieked. When I came to Ashby, I yanked the wheel right, west, toward the freeway. Another right there, onto Route 80, and I could keep going for three thousand miles. Going to anywhere. Free as Howard’s mother. I reached for the radio knob, but I had already turned it up as high as it would go. Something country was playing, something I didn’t recognize. No matter. The words were a blare that blotted out thought. I stepped harder on the gas. One more light and I’d be on the freeway.
The light at San Pablo was red. I sat, tapping my foot hard against the clutch, cursing Doyle, angrily shoving away thoughts of Margo Roehner, and Herman Ott and his effort to protect her.
I was suspended. I could drive to Chicago and come back for my hearing and be reinstated as if nothing, much, had happened.
And forget about Margo Roehner spinning out of control now.
What had I said of Bryant Hemming? He hadn’t considered the rule of holes: When you’re in one, quit digging. I had buried myself chin deep already. One more shovelful…
The freeway would still be there in an hour.
Margo’s house was dark. Someone had said it was designed to pull knees to chest and burrow its head forward, squeezing its girth into a small package on its small Berkeley lot. Now it looked dark and tiny among the bigger, blacker houses on either side. Her station wagon—the suburban warrior’s car—stood at the ready. I ran up the short driveway, onto the porch and peered through the glass in the door. Now I could see a dim light in the living room. Not a good sign. Her Patient Defenders grant application must be done and in the mail. Nothing was holding her now.
I knocked and rang the bell. Margo’s nine-millimeter was in an evidence locker, but guns are like tattoos: The first one’s a big decision; after that it’s easy to add to the collection.
The porch was a terrible place for cover, with narrow columns of glass on either side of the door and casement windows forming the east wall of the porch. Those, plus the living room windows on the far side of the door. I found myself hunching my shoulders forward as if that would make a difference.
I pushed the bell again, heard it ring inside, waited, knocked four heavy blows. Then I stood dead still and listened, straining to block out the whipping of branches and catch the muffled sound of slippered feet.
The house seemed to scream its silence against the roar of nature outside. A high-pitched moan broke the air. A tree scraping on a window?
The door opened, and I had no idea whether that low wail could have come from Margo Roehner. When I had first seen her at her storage locker, she had stood small and trim. She had reminded me of a Chinese tomb warrior, single-mindedly prepared to defend her emperor through eternity. Then she had stood squarely in front of me and faced me head-on, foot tapping impatiently. She had already murdered Bryant Hemming.
Now she stood staring at me. She had a gun, all right, but it wasn’t aimed at me; she had it braced against her temple.
Without speaking she backed into the living room. I shut the door and followed, afraid a misstep could kill her.
She was wearing a brown shirt and black slacks, clothes much too thin for this cold room. But she wasn’t shivering. Her awkwardly placed hand wasn’t even shaking. She was beyond that.
There was a glass next to the leather chair where she’d been sitting and a brandy bottle on the credenza in the dining room behind. How like Margo to be too organized to the leaving an open brandy bottle on the floor.
Now she planted herself behind the chair and waited.
“Margo, why don’t we sit down—”
“No.”
“You don’t mind if I do?” Better we both should have been in chairs or on the sofa, like friends gossiping. I had been hostage negotiator on the department team; now I felt myself slipping into that role. I propped myself on the sofa arm and tried to relax my face, to emulate a calm that would spread across the room. Then I moved to infiltrate her passionately held belief. Ideally it would become not hers but ours. Purposely I spoke in the present tense. “Margo, you are providing a vital service with Patient De—”
“I had a friend who died of pneumonitis because the emergency room doctors diagnosed the flu and sent him home. If he’d had a Defender—”
“Still, Margo, murder? It’s a big step for a nice middle-class lady like yourself.”
“Bryant would have destroyed Patient Defenders. He would have let people die.”
“But not from malice—”
“Ha! He wouldn’t have given it that much thought. He was too caught up in his own fucking importance. Just like the doctors. I gave him a chance to explain, there in Herman Ott’s office. I never planned to kill him; I just needed my money back. I had two new employees and no way to pay them until I got the grant money. If they quit before the grant evaluators checked us out, Patient Defenders would be in chaos, I’d look like an incompetent and a liar, and we’d never get a cent. ‘Show me how you’re going to pay me my money, Bryant,’ I said. Do you know what he told me?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t his problem anymore, he said. ‘Take it to Roger,’ he said. Smug little bastard. He was just about to start toward me; his hand was out; he was going to shove me out of the way.” Margo glanced at the brandy glass. Her small, skewed face twisted at the mouth. “I didn’t squeeze my eyes shut or look away when I shot him. I felt I owed him that much. It turned out I owed it to myself. You should have seen his incredulous expression when I pulled the trigger. He never thought I would follow through.”
“I guess he’d spent too much time looking at his own example.”
Her hand tightened on the gun. “I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry. Not about him. Just about—”
“I know.” My heart was racing; I struggled to keep my face calm. This was the critical point. I had to express thoughtfulness, concern. “It’s a shame now he’ll have beaten you. I guess the HMOs will be glad when you’re gone.”
She gave what might have been a laugh, except that she couldn’t laugh. Her mouth just pulled to the side. I wondered how many times men like Bryant Hemming had looked at her and dismissed her, an odd, disfigured woman, of no use to them. I wanted to look away as they must have done.
Margo’s hand quivered slightly, but it wasn’t shaking. Her legs were not braced. I did a handstand once in a yoga class, and for a moment, by a fluke, I was so balanced I couldn’t move my legs back or forth, couldn’t get down. I had been so in control that I had no control. Margo was like that now, balanced stiffly between life and death. In a moment she would crash down, one way or the other. In the case of my handstand, the teacher had nudged my heels, and my legs had dropped
easily forward into safety.
“Margo, you can shoot yourself. I’m not going to stop you. But if you do, you lose control of everything that follows—”
“That’s what death is.”
“Right. But you shot Bryant for a reason. For a cause. You’ve still got a choice. You can take the high road, admit you’re guilty, and make your trial a forum on the medical system. Tell the world that the self-important do get punished. Let people know about HMOs with gag orders on nurses, with doctors ruled by the bottom line; let people know why Patient Defenders is vital. By the time your trial is over, you’ll have a committed successor to take it over.”
She didn’t move.
“Bryant Hemming made a mess and walked out on it.” I was almost holding my breath. “Don’t be like him, Margo. People need you. Do what you expect of doctors; hang around to clean up your mess.”
It was her decision. There was nothing I could do now. A whiff of brandy cut through the icy air. I forced myself to look away from Margo, to give her privacy to decide. Pictures flashed in my mind: the bullet exploding into her eye; her face half gone; her body folding lumpily, bloody, to the floor; the paramedics arriving; Eggs and Jackson on the scene; Doyle eyeing me, shaking his head. I wasn’t breathing at all.
Slowly I leaned forward and put out my hand for the gun.
CHAPTER 41
“IT’S HARD FOR THEM to complain when you make the winning touchdown,” Howard had proclaimed. True on the gridiron, perhaps, but not with the Berkeley Police Department. Inspector Doyle arrived to read Margo her rights and take an official statement.
“I’ll need your report, Smith, before…”
“Before?”
“Before I sign you out on suspension.”
By the time I finished the paper on the case and left the report in Doyle’s IN box, it was nearing dawn. Doyle must have come back to the station from Margo Roehner’s house, but I hadn’t seen him.
I walked out into the charcoal gray morning. The fog was damp on my face, the air deceptively still as it is before the winds of morning gear up. All thumbs, I fiddled with the zipper on my jacket. Birds squeaked and chirped, whistled and squawked—a clamor that’s charming when you’re standing at the window with your lover’s arm around you and a cup of coffee in your hand. Now I felt as if those birds were squabbling for space on my shoulder, eager to snap their talons on my ear, hang from my hair, and run their claws down the blackboard of my eardrum.
It was a suitable mood in which to visit Herman Ott.
Ott owed me. He could start paying off with a flock of answers.
I drove to Alta Bates, thinking that a room here would provide the best day’s accommodations Herman Ott had had since he left Pittsburgh. I hoped he was on one of the upper floors so I could pause by the picture windows and watch the rising sun begin its daily quest to pierce the fog. If I spent enough time with Ott, I could stop at the window on my way out and see patches of bright blue bay rippling in the fresh sunlight, the San Francisco skyscrapers glistening as if they were dew-covered, the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge hooking the last shred of fog. If Ott had any sense, he’d aim to stand there too.
But he didn’t, of course. And I never got to the fourth floor. Ott had already checked himself out.
The man owed me! I slammed out of the hospital, strode furiously to my car, raced through the thick gray dawn to Telegraph, left my car in a red zone in front of Ott’s office, and stalked into the building. God damn him. I took the stairs two steps at a time, only sorry I didn’t have an ax with me to trash his office.
But I was too late. Ott’s friends or enemies had already done a number on the place. Clothes and newspaper, books, a pizza box, paper cups and crushed malt liquor cans and empty bottles of rotgut covered the floor. A tornado could have mistaken it for a trailer. But for the liquor detritus, the chaos in the bedroom might merely have meant Ott had moved back in. It was his office that shouted the truth.
Never had I seen a file drawer left open, papers piled on the desk, as much as a dust ball on the floor. Even after we had searched the files and the lab tech left a film of print dust on every surface, the room was still tidy. Now file cabinets were toppled, desk drawers yanked open, and Ott’s mustard-colored Naugahyde chair had been slashed in the few places where it wasn’t already taped together.
On the seat was a dead pigeon.
I found Ott curled up in a yellow wad on the backseat of Emma, the Studebaker. He probably hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. Exhausted, probably. I banged loud on the window.
Limp blond strands were matted to his forehead. His round, sallow cheeks were wrinkled from sleep. As his hazel eyes opened, his thin lips automatically curled.
Before he could greet me with his customary snarl, I said, “You owe me big time!”
He closed his eyes.
I banged the window so hard I thought it would break. “So, Ott, your friends—the Angels of Righteousness—trashed your office. What are you going to do, call the police?”
His eyes snapped open, and he was halfway to sitting up before he realized how much he’d given away.
So he hadn’t seen it. He’d just anticipated the danger.
“God damn it, Ott, if you had just told me about Cyril and the pesticide when you called me up to the Claremont—”
He mumbled something through the closed window.
“What?” I shouted, giving the window another bang.
He rolled it down an inch. “Couldn’t,” he mumbled.
“You couldn’t?” I screamed. “Why the hell couldn’t you?” Behind me in the apartment building a window opened. A guy shouted. I ignored him. “Why, Ott?”
“Because, Smith, I wasn’t going to leave you that bombshell.”
“Leave…” I could have wrung the rest of the explanation from him, but I knew him too well to bother. I shook my head. “It’s like Leonard said, we’ve all got our price. Ott, I thought yours was protecting your people. I was wrong, huh? You knew about the toxins. You weren’t about to tell the police at a time when you wouldn’t be around to monitor us as we investigated. And you couldn’t do that Sunday night, could you? Because between the time you called me and the time you got to the Claremont, Margo Roehner told you about the yellow-billed loon sighting.”
Ott’s lips pursed so tight he looked as if he’d swallowed his mouth. “Get out!” he growled, overlooking the fact that I was already out.
I went on. “And so you spent a night in the sand looking for the yellow-billed loon. And where is that loon? That loon, Ott, is where it always is: in Alaska.”
Ott’s face flushed pink. He shoved himself up higher on the seat and leaned toward me. “Get…”
“Ott, I took a lot of shit because I believed in you. No one else even entertained the idea that you might be innocent. Because of me, you are sitting in your own car instead of on a jail slab!”
He gave an odd little bouncy movement with his low sloped shoulder—his version of a shrug—and said the last thing I expected from him. “You’re right.” Then, as if the admission amazed him as much as it did me, he added, “You’re not a cop anymore; what is it you want from me?”
I stood there at the carport, staring blankly into the Studebaker. It didn’t surprise me that Ott knew I’d been suspended. It just shocked me to hear the words, to realize that I was no longer a police officer.
“Nothing, Ott. There’s nothing you can give me.” I turned and walked back to my Volkswagen bug and sat in the driver’s seat, feeling the closeness of the little car, the silence without the dispatcher’s voice sending out patrol officers, tracking chases, without the little give-and-take of those in the know. Suddenly I longed to banter with Eggs and Jackson, to watch Inspector Doyle shepherd his rhino herd to the side of his desk. I longed for Pereira to gobble down the rest of my scone before I had decided I was full. I longed for Howard. Oh, god, Howard.
A whirling cold emptiness expanded within me.
It would have been easy to “get” Ott, with a comment about his chauffeured ride to Kennedy Airport or a comment on his father. But like him, I have principles. I will never mention the Hermans and the Otts of Pittsburgh, nor think of him without picturing the smiling little running back on the Monongahela Mongeese team.
And I will never ask Daisy Culligan if it was Herman Ott who suggested her clever tat against Bryant Hemming. He merely wanted to know what was in the ACC books he couldn’t get at. Even Ott couldn’t have foreseen that it would lead to Bryant Hemming’s murder and Margo Roehner’s destruction.
The fog had thinned to that gauzy gray that makes the hills look Japanese and promises hidden spots of beauty and silence. I drove slowly west toward Howard’s house; I was almost to Ashby Avenue before I shifted out of second. The sky was the same murky battleship color that pales the orange and vermilion leaves. It wasn’t till I saw the looming brown shingle and the empty driveway that I realized I wasn’t ready to see Howard.
I drove on to Ashby Avenue and stopped at the corner. I could turn right and right again at the freeway, as Charles Edward Kidd would have done if he’d owned a car. As my great-uncle Jack’s neighbor Mrs. Bronfmann had done that day when she’d climbed onto the crosstown bus and the Spanish exchange student had caught her eye. As Howard’s mother had whenever hope or terror or maybe whim had teased her forward.
I’ve thought of the contrast between Howard’s mother and mine. My mother spent her life clutching on to the small acorn of security she could find in each new house and town to which her dreamer of a husband led her, putting her best foot forward toward the neighbors as if this house or job would be the one that would take root. She clung to her hope against the sea of fact and fear and common sense that surrounded her. Howard’s mother floated above it all. When I’d last visited my parents in their retirement apartment in Florida, their days were filled with golf and bridge, their nights thick with the fear that inflation would make their payments too steep. My mother cashes the checks I send, but I doubt she spends them. And Howard’s mother, Selena Bly, is she worse off? I sometimes wonder when they land in their final places if there will be a hairsbreadth of difference between them.