The last photo was wider than the others, a professional job, and near the back of the book. It was the most stunning of all. If I’d had to guess which club Herman Ott had headed in high school, it would have been the Nerds’ Club, by whatever name it was known in that era. Wrong again, Smith. There, in black and white, was Herman Ott, squatting in the second row of boys in football uniforms, behind a banner:
GO MONGEESE!
The Herman Ott I knew was not even as tall as I, with shoulders so stooped that only a shrug made him look near normal. His cheeks were rounded; his chin receded. His were arms that never lifted more than a pen, his legs were toothpicks, and when he was sitting, he looked as if he were holding a volleyball on his lap.
I stared at the handsome little boy in pads. Already he was shorter than average. He’d have played running back, one of those little guys who size up their slower-thinking opposition, fake to the right, and squirt left through the line. He’d have been a hero. Herman Ott, the all-American kid.
What had happened to him? I sat down between the sprung springs of his chair, smelling the remnants of death from the doorway, the cold of the unheated office chilling me through my thermal shirt. Ott had had everything and had chosen this. What, indeed, had happened to him?
There’s a theory that floats around in the esoterica above Berkeley about walk-ons. When someone is depressed, becomes ill unto death, or perhaps attempts suicide and is resuscitated at the last moment, the theory is that the initial tenant of the body really did give up on life and, in that moment before reviving, ceded the body to another soul anxious to enter life midstream. The body regains health. Friends and relatives are astounded, delighted, not only at the victim’s recovery but at his wonderful change of spirit. If they note there is something just a bit different about him at base, they’re willing to overlook it. They probably didn’t like that aspect of him to begin with. The maudlin devil you know is hardly preferable to a chipper one you don’t know.
If Ott was a walk-on, he’d gotten the sequence backward.
Still, where better to hide out than with his old buddies and his own family? I squinted at the photo, peering closer until I could make out the word above
Mongeese
. Monongahela Mongeese.
Anyone who has watched the Raiders is all too familiar with the fearsome Steelers in Three Rivers Stadium. Three Rivers: the Ohio, Allegheny, and the Monongahela. Ott was from Pittsburgh! Or thereabouts.
I could have called the dispatcher, but you can never be sure who is listening to the police scanner, and I was too impatient to talk in code. Instead I pulled out my cell phone and dialed information. It was still late evening here, but in Pittsburgh it was after midnight. I punched in the number, flicked off the light, and settled on the edge of the chair as Ott himself must have done many times.
“Sergeant Laura Goldman, please. Is she on duty now?”
“I’ll ring.”
“Goldman.”
“Laura! Jill Smith.” We’d been roommates at the National Women’s Police Officers’ Association convention the previous spring, placed together to share the joy of not smoking. “Still snoring?”
“I’m working up a storm for you next year. You still emptying hotel minibars? You gave me the worst moment of the convention, coming back to that empty—”
“Just the chocolate, Goldman. I left you plenty of those little liquor bottles. You could have drowned your grief in bourbon, vodka, and Grand Marnier. Yeah, four ounces each.”
“Ugh.”
“Listen, Laura, I’ve got a missing suspect who grew up in Pittsburgh. Could be he’s back there. Not dangerous. But we did find a murder victim in his office—”
“Bet that victim found him dangerous. And you’d like to have him back, huh? Shoot.”
“All I’ve got is a football picture from a high school team called the Monongahela Mongeese. That mean anything to you?”
“Nooo. But there’s a Monongahela High School here in town. And I’ll bet the Monongahela High School alumni woke up one morning and changed that team name back to Lions or Tigers like it should be. ‘Can’t call our little lads furry snake eaters!’ ”
I laughed.
Snake eater
suited Ott.
“You got a name and DOB for the suspect, Smith?”
“Right. Plus, I’ve got a photo that looks like an old family gathering, but it could have been taken anywhere. So I don’t know if there was much of my guy’s family in Pittsburgh at all. He’s been out here since the sixties. But anything you can find on him, I’ll appreciate. And if there’s nothing—” I shrugged. Not that Laura could see it. “His name is Herman Ott—”
“Ott?”
“Right.”
Laura Goldman was laughing. “Smith, I think I can help you out. Ott, huh?”
“What were they, the town crooks? Or the drunks? Or the old lefties at every factory gate?”
Goldman laughed harder. Finally she spit out, “Coal.”
“They were coal miners?”
“No, Smith, the Otts didn’t dig the coal. The Otts owned the mine. Now which Ott did you say you’re after?”
“Herman Ott.”
“Which Herman Ott? They’re all Herman Otts. John Herman Ott. Richard Herman Ott. Robert Herman Ott. The mother was a Herman. You’ve heard of Herman Steel, haven’t you?”
I hadn’t, but Goldman wasn’t waiting for that admission.
“Herman Steel and Ott Mining. That marriage made the papers for months. My grandmother still talks about it. She was a housemaid at the Hermans’ before she married my grandfather. That wedding was far and away the biggest event of her life, way more important than her own marriage. The only glamorous thing she was ever involved in. She kept hoping her daughters and then her granddaughters would go into fashion or theater or at least be airline stewardesses. We’ve been disappointments, Smith.”
I laughed. “And if you don’t get back to my Herman Ott, you’ll be one again.”
“But you say you don’t know which one he is.”
“He’s forty-six years old.”
“Oh, okay, he’d be the oldest. Of course. The one who disappeared. Sure, that makes sense.”
“Why, Goldman? Why did he disappear?”
Goldman laughed again, but a different land of laugh, with the merriment replaced by bitter knowledge. “No one knows. Believe me, finding out would have made a reporter’s career. But a family like that doesn’t go on
Oprah
with its secrets. Your guy, Alexander, graduated from high school and was never mentioned again. People knew better than to ask, or presumably they learned after the first time.”
“Do you have any idea?”
“No. But I’ll tell you this, Smith, whatever it was, it cut to the core. His mother died fifteen, twenty years ago, and he didn’t show up at the funeral; there was talk about that, believe me. Nana carried on so long we had to threaten her with ‘the home.’ I can’t imagine anything in the world that would bring Alexander back to Pittsburgh.”
“Rats. I really hoped…” Ott’s outside door rattled. Kovach hadn’t dawdled at Cal. Automatically I lowered my voice. “Check around for me, Goldman, just in case.”
“Goes without saying. I’ll go through our files and the news morgue and fax you what I uncover. Cheer up, Smith, you still have this year’s convention to look forward to. Another couple of great nights with me.”
“I can handle that. They’ve got this plastic staple that clamps between your nostrils to keep you from snoring.”
She laughed. “You sure it works?”
“Not positive. But if it doesn’t, I’ll tie a string to it and tether you outside the door.” The door rattled again.
It was a rattle, not a knock.
“I have to go.” I turned off the phone, moved behind the bookcase, eased my gun from the holster, and waited.
I
T WASN’T
K
OVACH AT
Ott’s door.
I turned off the volume on my radio and tightened my grip on my semiautomatic.
“Hello? Ott?” A question, not a demand. I didn’t move, barely breathed. The voice wasn’t familiar. Male, not young, not old, a middling voice with a squeaky core. He knew Ott wasn’t here. No surprise. All of Ott’s cronies on the Avenue would have heard about the crime scene. But this guy knew Ott’s entry routine: Never let on you’re in here till you’re sure who’s out there, and even then never open the door till the third demand.
Carefully lifting, silently setting down my feet, I moved to where I could see the door to the corridor. A celluloid strip waggled between it and the molding. It moved slowly. The guy wasn’t worried. He must have missed me coming, just seen Kovach leave, and figured all that was protecting the scene was the locked door.
I eased back into the darkness of Ott’s bedroom.
The plastic strip hit against metal, then slapped the wood as the guy snapped it out to try again. Loiding a lock isn’t as easy as people think.
I moved back a couple of steps along the bookcase. I’d always wondered why Ott had chosen to have this large, flimsy piece of furniture poking out into the room he slept in. Not wise in earthquake country. The smartest people don’t have bookcases at all in bedrooms. The rest of us have them bolted to the walls. The end of Ott’s bookcase was eight inches away from the wall, so the whole thing was standing free. There was no back to steady it. In a tembler it would shimmy once or twice, toss its six shelves of books and clutter, like Parmesan cheese sprinkled thickly over an everything pizza. And over Ott. Why not screw the thing to the wall?
But now I understood why. And the import of it made me feel sorrier for Ott than I’d ever imagined I could.
For the first time I realized why the newspapers and magazines and crumpled paper cups were mixed in with the books he cared about.
I was standing hidden in the narrow aisle between the bookcase and the window. This was where Ott slept. He may have considered the danger of burial under books, but if so, it had been overridden by a more pressing threat. From any position, standing, squatting, sitting on the floor, even lying down on his side, Ott could peer between the bookshelves and see through the doorway into his office. Ott must never have gone to sleep without the thought that he might be woken up by a burglar, a pissed-off client, an irate subject he was investigating, or just some wacko from the Avenue looking for drug money. How could the man live like this? And why? Why, when he seemed to have an ideal life in Pittsburgh?
The door burst open.
I stood against the wall, in the darkest corner.
The burglar was nearly as tall as Howard. And about half Howard’s weight. He looked as if he’d been on meth so long he’d forgotten what food was. Everything about him was long and bony and sickly pale. Greasy brown hair hung over his forehead and hooked behind one ear. Black leather jacket and black jeans had that loose hang that screams “sick.” I’d seen him on the Avenue, skulking along the sidewalk, never stopping to chat with the street artists, never patronizing the sushi wagon or the strawberry smoothie stand. I’d had no reason to stop him; he hadn’t broken laws when I was on beat here, nor had he been connected with anyone who did. He was an alien on this strip of macadam much of the country viewed as home to the politically deranged, drugged out, or just strange. An alien aloof from aliens. His name, what was it?
He loomed over the room. He was so much taller than Herman Ott his presence seemed to change the dimensions of the room, an eagle pushed into the canary’s cage. As he pulled open Ott’s file cabinet, I had a good look at his talonlike hands. He wasn’t shaking, and his movements had none of the jerkiness of the crack addict’s. And he knew just what he was looking for in here.
Or he thought he did. “Goddamn fucking fuck!” He slammed a file drawer shut. The metal shrieked under the thrust of books hitting metal. He yanked open another drawer, looked inside, and slammed it shut. And a third.
The files of course were at the station. I wondered how many fileless drawers he would have to see before he realized they all were like that.
Hurry up!
Show me if you’re just looking for a file or something more
.
Give me a lead
.
He was out of my range of vision now, attacking the near file cabinet next to the office window. More drawers slammed.
My head was nearly through the bookcase, my chin propped on a precarious stack of newspapers. I pulled back, stood up, and moved against the wall. Any minute Kovach would stroll in, and I’d lose this lead forever.
The burglar froze, then slowly looked around him, eyes squinting as he peered into the dark bedroom. I could almost see his thought:
I should have checked in there
.
He started toward the bedroom, reached in through the doorway, flipped the door back against the wall. The crack of wood on plaster surprised him. He hesitated, hand still on the door.
As he pulled his hand back, I saw the jagged black lines bisecting his thumb and forefinger. Now I remembered his name. Griffon. No first name, just Griffon.
With his other hand he grabbed on to the molding near the light switch.
Come on!
Something tapped. Footsteps on the stairs? Kovach’s?
Griffon didn’t turn on the light. He glanced around the room, then down at the floor, his brow wrinkled in suspicion just as mine would have done in his place. He moved slowly, feeling with his feet as if Ott’s normal clutter might pop up and grab his ankles. He passed the end of the bookcase. I slid around the other end, as Ott had prepared for.
Definitely feet coming up the stairs. How could Griffon not hear that?
Griffon stopped in front of the window, staring out through the sooty pane into the dark of the air shaft, peering down. He hesitated, weighing options, then lifted Ott’s mugs from the windowsill to the low bookcase next to the window. Then the sugar jar and a bottle, maybe vitamins.
The hall door opened. “Smith, I brought you—”
Griffon spun around, raced past Kovach and into the hall.
Kovach dropped his paper bag, grabbed for the doorway, pushed off, and ran.
I called the dispatcher. “Adam sixteen, Control. Got a suspect headed out of Herman Ott’s building. Kovach giving chase. I—”