by Susan Dunlap
Ott just stared. “Or?”
“Look out your window.”
With a shrug of his spongy sloping shoulders, he sidled to the window. The panes hadn’t started as opaque glass, but years of external neglect by the building manager and internal neglect by Ott himself had turned them a mold-speckled gray. Ott had to raise the window to peer out down the alley to the small slice of street he could view.
“You see the black-and-white parked down there? The pulser light’s off now. At twelve-oh-one it’ll be on. At twelve-oh-two-there’ll be a patrol officer outside your door, calling to you. If you go out our guys will be waving to you.”
Ott slammed the window and turned toward me. “Smith, you need me to define harassment?”
“We’re not talking harassment. Just friendly attention, just so your associates know that we on the force are pleased to see you.”
Ott’s sallow face turned orange. If there was one thing Herman Ott valued it was his reputation of never cooperating with the police unless there was no way of avoiding it, and never admitting anything about a client. It was his pride, and it probably explained why a guy as out of shape as he was had survived as long as he had, and had gotten paid enough to live, even in the fashion to which he was naturally accustomed. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Find her.”
He rocked slowly back and forth on those long feet, thinking. It was a move of his I hadn’t seen before, one I couldn’t interpret.
“Find her, Ott.”
He stopped moving and stared down at his feet. “Look, Smith, I’m going to give you the truth. I liked Kris; he was a good kid in his way.”
I waited to hear the rest of his assessment of Kris. I couldn’t believe Herman Ott had missed the “to the highest bidder” quality in the boy.
But if he caught it, he didn’t mention it. Still eyeing his pedal digits he said, “The truth is, Smith, that I don’t know where Leila Sandoval is. And I have no idea how to find her.”
“Ott!” I exclaimed. “I’m, well, insulted that you would expect me to buy that. Come on!”
He threw up his hands. His yellow sleeves nearly covered them.
“Your client and you don’t know where to find her?”
“She’s not my client.”
“She has been, though, hasn’t she?” Ott was not one to bestow unpaid favors on acquaintances, like coming to their defense and letting them escape the police. But once a person had become his client, once he’d taken her under his professional wing, he seemed to feel an ongoing responsibility. This was not to say he would take cases for nothing; he wouldn’t. “Smith, I said I was giving you the truth. I don’t know where she is.”
I sat back on the edge of his big wooden desk, considering my options. Why would Sandoval have hired a private detective? How long ago? Would that reason have anything to do with this case? That was information I definitely would not get out of Ott. Still, what was the woman involved in? I was tempted to tell him that I already knew about her bringing Kris over from Nepal. But something stopped me. Instead, I said, “Be that as it may, Ott, you do understand it is in her best interest to turn herself in. It is in my best interest. And it is definitely in your best interest to get her here by noon.”
Ott stood motionless, still staring down at his calloused feet. “I’ll give you a gift.”
Words I’d never before heard from Herman Ott. I waited.
Still avoiding my gaze, he said, “I can’t have her here this morning. No way. I’ll do what I can to contact her, because, as you said, it’s in her best interest. Leila Sandoval is no killer.”
“What kind of gift—”
“Hey, keep your pants on, Smith. This gift may save you days of running after an innocent woman.”
I nodded warily. Ott fingered the edge of the phone directory, the business pages.
“Kris died at Brouck Diamond’s place, right?”
I nodded, making a mental note of the familiar way he referred to the periodontist.
“Also in that house is Beverly Zagoya, the mountaineer, right?”
And a woman whom he mentioned in formal style. I nodded.
“Do you know what the inside word was on her last expedition?”
“According to Kris?”
Ott’s shoulders tightened. Now I had insulted him. “According to more than Kris. I don’t take things on faith, Smith.”
“Right.”
“On that expedition, which Zagoya led, three people died.”
“Three out of how many?” I recalled Kris Mouskavachi saying that ten percent of mountain climbers die routinely.
“Ten. But that’s not the point, Smith. The point is that they were taking a route they should never have taken. They were going across part of the mountain where there were avalanches every hour or so.”
“Every hour?”
“That’s the word. You want the rest or not?” Ott was still avoiding my gaze.
“Go on.”
“They tried to time the avalanches, to make their way across the face right after one. But there’s no way to know for sure. Once they got to a certain spot on the open face, there was no turning back, and no cover. The next avalanche came early. It knocked the last three, one American and two Sherpas, a couple of thousand feet straight down.” He sidled over to the window and stared out, as if to focus on any scene other than the one he was describing, an abnormally squeamish reaction for Herman Ott. It was a moment before the real cause of his squeamishness clicked in with me; he wasn’t avoiding the picture of the avalanche, it was this scene here he couldn’t face, the scene in which he was giving, giving a police detective information.
I leaned back, eyeing Ott. His shoulders hunched, one foot tapped irregularly, and the loose cotton of his sweatpants ruffled like feathers in a storm. Ott looked as uncomfortable as I had ever seen him. A lot more uncomfortable than this comparatively innocuous bit of information warranted. “Ott, climbers die. It’s a fact of the sport.”
He slammed the window shut and spun to face me. “Do I have to spell it out for you? Okay. A: there was a safer route. B: that route was longer. C: the expedition didn’t have enough supplies to take the safer route. Because, D: Zagoya didn’t plan well enough. Got it?”
“But Ott, there are a lot of variables—”
Ott was actually shaking. “Smith, the woman cut corners buying food. Food, for Chrissakes. Everyone told her what she had wasn’t enough; she wouldn’t listen. There’s no second chance up there. They don’t have Seven-Elevens on the top of the Himalaya. She as good as killed those three people.”
15
WHEN I GOT BACK to the office, Howard was sitting facing into the room, the yard or more of his legs sprawled across it, his feet resting against my desk. On the edge of his desk sat Pereira, her feet propped on his lower drawer, her chin covered with powdered sugar.
“Where’d you find that doughnut? Has Sabec gotten a new supply?” Still eyeing her sugared chin, I demanded, “You didn’t eat the last one, did you?” I stepped over Howard’s shins, and dropped into my chair.
“I’m young, and blond, and upwardly mobile,” Pereira said, wiping the sugar off her face. “I have everything to live for. I wouldn’t throw it all away for the last doughnut when I know you’re going to show up.”
“Sabec’s empty. Not a doughnut in the box. Not a cruller in the station. Not a chocolate old-fashioned for blocks around.” Howard leaned forward and opened my bottom drawer. “But there is one jelly.” He pulled out a napkin-wrapped mound.
I unwrapped. “Ah, Howard. You’re a fine man.”
“Finer than you think.” He extricated a thermos and poured. The smell of Peet’s coffee floated up.
“Better than a mother,” Pereira said, patting Howard’s shoulder.
Into my mouth I stuffed the edge of the doughnut, the part where the jelly went in, and would, given the chance, squirt out. I had had experience, or rather experiences with jelly holes. Still chewing, I motioned
Pereira to report on her findings.
“Oh, no, Smith. Martinez said you were off to see everyone’s favorite private eye. You get nothing before you tell us about that.”
Howard grinned. “You keep up your record, Jill?”
My little niche of fame within the department was for getting more information out of Herman Ott than anyone else on the force, small amount that that was. I took another bite of doughnut and nodded.
Howard and Pereira sat and watched me chew.
“Okay, okay,” I said, putting the remaining half down, “but if all the jelly drips out while I’m talking you’ll both be in deep … jelly.” With that I recounted what Herman Ott had told me about the three deaths on the Zagoya expedition.
“So what happened? Did you let him off the hook about producing Sandoval?” Pereira demanded.
I took a long drink of coffee, savoring the first invigorating swallow. “Giving a gift of information to his local police department was a wrenching experience for citizen Ott.” I took another drink. The second swallow is never as good as the first. But it was still pretty darned good. “A finer person,” I said, eyeing Howard, “might have taken that into account.”
“A finer person who is not a homicide detective?” he asked.
I nodded.
“So, as Lout of the Day, you—”
“Amended my order and told him to get her in here by five.” I took another bite of doughnut, a small one, so I could talk with my mouth only partially full. “He was straight about not knowing her whereabouts; I’m sure of that. It was so humiliating for him to admit it. And besides, I figured by now you”—I eyed Pereira—“would have gotten me a lead from the Humboldt County guys.”
“And I have.” Pereira reached out a hand for my coffee cup, took a long swallow, and smiled. “And lots, lots more. Sandoval owns ten acres outside Garberville. At the address Kris Mouskavachi had in his pocket.” Pereira took another swallow of my coffee. Pereira had her own niche of fame in the department. Jackson had nicknamed her Spot, after his food-scarfing dog who was no longer allowed near the dinner table. “But you won’t need to visit that property, because the Humboldt sheriff’s department sent a man out and found Sandoval sitting in the sun on her porch. He is only too happy to have us pay for a weekend trip down to Berkeley. So, Smith, you will have Sandoval in your office before Herman Ott realizes it’s daytime.”
“Not half bad for a morning’s work,” I said appreciatively.
“Wait!” Pereira was grinning. “According to the sheriff the neighbors said there was a youngish man living on the property. Said his name was Cypress.”
“Is the sheriff bringing him, too?”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“Well?”
“No,” she said. “He’s gone. Wandered out into the back forty.”
Now it was Howard who was smiling.
To him, I said, “Do I take that smile to mean that under the mighty Cypress a little grass did grow, and change hands locally?”
“Humboldt County’s biggest cash crop, Jill. Our associates from the state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting were already on to him.”
I put the rest of my doughnut in my mouth and chewed thoughtfully. In Berkeley, marijuana is very low priority. Vice and Substance Abuse has coke and crack to deal with, drugs that lead to vicious muggings and drive-by shootings. But in Humboldt County it’s a different story. And with the pressure from CAMP, growing ten acres of marijuana up there could be a very risky business—a business to which Cypress was not likely to return, at least not soon enough to be any use to me. But as the owner of the property he had planted, Leila Sandoval had put herself in a dicey position. And that would be useful.
Howard must have been thinking the same thing. He said, “They don’t massage feet in the federal pens.”
To Pereira, I said, “How about her finances? Could she maintain a life in the hills on feet alone?”
Pereira finished my coffee, looked irritably at the empty cup and plopped it proprietorially in Howard’s trashcan. “Getting a banker’s assessment of a private account without a warrant is not an easy thing to do, Smith. And on Saturday morning, you’re asking your tame banker to make a special trip into the office.”
“Which you did, right?”
Pereira smiled. The world of stocks and bonds and margin calls fascinated Connie Pereira. While Howard and I swam laps or, as the case had become more frequently, didn’t swim laps, Connie Pereira dipped into A Survey of the History of Pork Belly Strategies. “Am I correct, Smith, in assuming that you figure Sandoval to be poor and Diamond richish?”
“Right.”
“Wrong. Or at least partly. Diamond, it seems, is pretty much living week to week—”
“Or gum job to gum job,” Howard put in.
“He refinanced his house a year ago to the tune of three hundred thousand. He bought heavily before the last crash—”
“In the stock market?”
Pereira nodded briskly. “He’s backing a film company, enough to drive any banker or broker to drink, and slicing up gum tissue to keep a roof over his head and suntan lotion on his body.”
“And Sandoval?”
Pereira sighed, looking around as if expecting to find a new platter from which to appropriate food as she dispensed her findings, and thus maintain an equilibrium of sorts. She sighed again. “She used to work in public relations on and off. But for a number of years right after her divorce—I can’t say how many, my source figured two, but it could be more—Sandoval really did live hand to mouth. She’s lived in that little house on Panoramic Way for years, so her house payment’s only three hundred a month.”
Howard whistled. The communal rent on his house was ten times that.
“Right. With the refinance Diamond’s payment is thirty-four hundred a month. But for Sandoval that three hundred was harder to come by than his. She had no income. My source doesn’t know how she managed.”
“Not public assistance, not with a house worth what that one is,” I said.
“It’d take a lot of tired feet to kick in three hundred a month,” Howard said, grinning.
Pereira groaned.
Ignoring that, I said, “We’ll have to check on how long she’s been a working masseuse.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, Smith,” Pereira said, “because a year ago Sandoval got a check for ten thousand, and another one two months ago.”
“Signed by?”
“Guess who?”
“Cypress?”
“You got it.”
I leaned back against my desk, smiling. “So I guess we know how she managed to pay airfare for Kris Mouskavachi. Now the only question is, why? After all those years of scraping by, why would she spend more than ten percent of her liquid assets to bring a strange boy over from Nepal?”
“Maybe Kris Mouskavachi wasn’t a stranger,” Howard said. He was smiling, too. This was just the part of the puzzle Howard loved. “After all, Cypress wasn’t a stranger. Maybe your masseuse had a thing for nubile toes and arches.”
“No down at the heels for her, eh?” Pereira pushed herself up.
“Where are you off to?” I asked.
“I’ve got a lead on the broker who had handled Diamond’s disastrous investments. A friend arranged lunch in Sausalito. I’m going to start charging the department for clothes.”
“We’ve got some spares in our detail. Check with the hooker decoys.”
“One does not lunch with a banker in lamé,” Pereira announced as she headed for the door.
“Check in when you get back,” I said.
“Right.”
As the door swung closed, Howard stood up and stretched. “And I, Jill, am going home, to catch up on the sleep you ruined this morning.”
“Me? How about your favorite beagle?”
Howard’s pause was infinitesimal, but plenty long enough for me to regret that comment, and its unintended derogation of his beloved house. And to
note, with a jab of fear, how much easier, more playful, less painful was Howard’s sparring with Pereira. I gave a quick listen to rule out approaching footsteps in the hall, stood up on tiptoe, and wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him. “About last night, I’ll make it up to you.”
“When?” he said, running both hands down my back and pressing me to him. I could tell he, too, was listening for footsteps.
“As soon as I get Kris’s killer. Now, tell me, how good a friend are you?”
Howard sighed, releasing his hold. “Not that good.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”
“I know that look.”
“It’ll just be half an hour. You have the whole day off.”
“I brought you coffee.”
“I’m working a one eight seven. I have to find out about Zagoya and her dead climbers. God knows when I’ll get home again.”
“I saved you the last doughnut.”
“Howard, if you don’t help I will be so exhausted for days …”
“The ultimate threat!” He leaned back against the edge of his desk. “On the other hand, if you won’t get home for days, what difference—”
I rolled up an In Custody report and hit him.
“Police brutality! Okay, what do you want me to do?”
“Water Mr. Kepple’s plants.”
“What?”
“Look, I haven’t seen him since yesterday. I have to fit in a quick visit sometime today. And what do you think will be the first thing he asks me?”
“Right. Consider your ass covered. Alas, figuratively speaking. And have a good time with Zagoya.”
Before I could answer, the phone rang. As I reached for it, Howard patted the anatomical area just discussed and headed out the door. I picked up the receiver. “Homicide. Detective Smith.”
“Vikram Patel here.”
“Mr. Patel? Are you calling about Kris Mouskavachi?”
“Yes.” There was an unusual hesitancy to his speech.
“Do you need to know when the coroner will be releasing the body?” I prompted.