I summoned my last spark of energy and opened the door.
In front of the big stone hearth Howard stood looking like an oversize Christmas ornament with his long red-tufted legs jutting from the hem of the green terry-cloth robe I’d gotten him from the Eddie Bauer catalog.
“I’m cooking.”
“Cooking?” I said. “No one has cooked here since the Berlin Wall fell. Alex”—the tenant in the back room—“keeps his thesis notes in the oven. Are you baking ‘Ecological Disaster Subsequent to Excessive Timber Exports and Land Fill Implementation’?”
Howard straightened to his full six-six. “I’ve got yesterday’s satay waiting for the magic finger. Follow and behold Chef Seth nuke to point of perfection.”
He strode through the half-lit living room, his bare feet splatting like flippers on the bottom of the pool. It was no wonder the man came in ten yards ahead of me when we swam laps. He pressed the start panel on the microwave, and in a minute the kitchen was filled with the spicy smell of peanuts and hot peppers and I realized how startlingly hungry I was. “You’ve been home for hours and didn’t eat it? Is there a love greater than that?” I wrapped my arms around him from the back and wriggled a hand between the sides of his robe, sliding my fingers along his warm furry stomach.
The microwave beeped. Howard gave my arms a quick squeeze with his elbows, extricated himself and the satay container. Extricated himself a mite quickly. I stepped back and looked more carefully at him. His hair was not mussed from sleep. His hands weren’t stained by Spackle. There was no sheen of sweat from a nocturnal run or pseudorun in the Y. “What have you been up to all evening?”
“Doing you a favor.” He stared at the satay bowl, and for a wild moment I played with the idea of what were desirable gifts to porcelain bowl or peanut sauce.
Howard swallowed. Once when he was a child, he had told me, he’d stared at a glass of castor oil and orange juice for two hours before forcing it down. How hard to swallow was what he couldn’t quite bring himself to say now?
“You were doing me a favor?” I forced out.
“Keeping my ears open—for you. Went to dinner…with a couple of the guys.…Came back to…finish up some paperwork.” He swallowed again, deliberately this time, and looked directly at me. “You want to hear what the word is around the station?”
“I just left Doyle’s office. I already know.” Balancing rice carton, spoon, bowl, and chopsticks in my arms, I headed for the coffee table.
“You sure?” He plunked the satay carton on the
Chronicle
. “Is this what you know? You don’t find Herman Ott, you’re either incompetent or sleeping with the enemy.”
“They said that to you?”
Howard nodded.
My throat constricted. It wasn’t so much the comment that frightened me as the realization that my fellow officers—my friends—viewed me as so suspect they felt free to damn me to my own lover. “And you said?” I choked out.
Howard sat and spooned broccoli over prawns over zucchini in the already mixed satay.
I pulled my arms closer against the chill. I knew what was coming. I just couldn’t believe it was really happening.
“Jill—” His voice caught. “Jill, on the force trust is all we’ve got. You know it. When we’re out there alone on patrol, we’ve got to be able to count on each other one hundred percent—”
“Are you saying my fellow officers can’t count on me?”
“Of course not. But if they aren’t sure they can, it’s the same thing.”
I could hear my voice hardening as I repeated my question, “And you said to them?”
He kept stirring the satay.
“It’s going to be cold,” I snapped.
“I
said
, Jill, that you knew Ott, you’d find him.”
“But not that they could count on me.”
It was a moment before he answered. “That wasn’t the question.”
I yanked his arm around. His chopsticks shot onto the floor. “It wasn’t
not
the question.”
He pulled his arm free. “Hey, don’t yell at me. I’m the one who’s trying to help.”
“I didn’t ask you to help. You can just mind your own damned—”
His voice was so muted I couldn’t hear it over the pounding in my ears.
“What?”
“It is my business.” He corralled the chopsticks off the floor. “It’s my business because I love you.”
Oh, God, how could I do this to him? I sank back into the emaciated cushion, onto the overstretched supports. Another half foot and I’d be seated on the floor. Howard should have replaced this hand-me-down years ago. Like he should have me. “Look, if you can’t trust—”
“God damn it, Jill, I’m the all-time expert on broken trust.”
I stared up unbelieving! A protest was almost out of my mouth before I realized that he was of course referring to his mother. To their sudden departures from one town after another throughout his childhood, to her disappearance after he had gone to college. His freshman year she had called him four times, his sophomore year twice. And when summer came, he had a job on campus as part of his work-study. He waited to hear from her. But her call didn’t come till over a year later. That was the time he suspected she had been institutionalized. He didn’t know for sure. Didn’t want to know. Couldn’t bear to think of her floating spirit caged. Or to wonder if she had been normal at his age.
I knew how important was the security of this house, his job, his friends. The house made up for apartment after apartment in which they ate off packing cartons under pictures left by previous tenants. It was the place his mother could always reach him should the spirit move her. He cherished his friends, made excuses for their failings, luxuriated in shared memories as if they were pictures in a family album, the kinds of pictures Herman Ott had torn out of his album in the Wanamaker’s box. Howard’s job protected it all and gave him entry into the family of police that no outsider could hope for.
And his friends were constant reminders that he was normal, that he would never be sucked off into the terrifying ether, as his mother apparently had been. The open road that beckoned me was to him the path to nothingness.
He was still standing over me fear-stiff. I longed to pull him down to me, to hold him so tight there was no room between us for emptiness or terror. To make the problem go away.
But the problem was me.
I struggled to sound uncompromising, to keep my voice from breaking. “Howard, stay out of it. There’s enough swirling around me; I can’t deal with dragging you into it too.”
“No choice.” He eased down next to me. “Jill, you’ve got to—”
“I’ve got to find Ott. And that probably means tracking down Brother Cyril and maybe Bryant Hemming’s killer.”
“Jesus, have you heard anything I said? Hunt the killer, and you’re going to be tramping on toes. The toes of everyone in the department, if there are any you haven’t already trampled.”
On the table the peanuty smell of satay mocked us, too sweet, too oily. Howard spooned rice onto plates, satay over the top. It was cold, of course, the way the room was cold, the way I was cold, down to my marrow. I longed to shift a couple of inches closer to Howard and feel his warmth, but I couldn’t move.
He waited another moment, shook his head slowly, and forked a shrimp. “So, Jill, you’ve got the word out on the Avenue?” It was the kind of question, shoptalk, that had gotten us through tension and crisis year after year. No one dived into a case like Howard, tossing out strategies, catching twists, loving the game of it. The question was one he would have asked anytime, but now there was no life to it, as if he had been called into a game he knew was already lost.
But I grabbed it. “Hardly. If Ott’s hiding out, no one’s going to convince him he would be better off in a cell. If he’s shackled and chained, it’s not like I’m offering a reward.” I fingered my chopsticks. “And if he shot Bryant—right, I can’t rule out the possibility—it’s the same difference. No one’s going to lead me to Ott. I’m going to have to figure him out like an acrostic puzzle and just hope I don’t have to substitute every letter in the alphabet before I find the answer.”
Howard trapped a pile of rice between his chopsticks. “I’ve given this a bit of thought.” He lifted the sauce-coated mass to his mouth and chewed. “Why were you at Ott’s office today? It’s not on your beat. So why were you there to find Hemming’s body at all?”
“Because,” I said, “Kidd was sleeping in Ott’s Studebaker.”
“And why did you discover him? I’m ignoring the fact that you skirted your superior officer to do it,” he said, brushing off what would normally have been a serious issue between us.
“I checked the car because Ott hadn’t called me back Sunday afternoon, like he swore he would—”
“—when he called you to his command performance Sunday afternoon. So, what did he want then?”
Slowly I bit down on a prawn, through the taut skin into the yielding, defenseless flesh. I was remembering that brief, infuriating confrontation with Ott Sunday afternoon. “No clue. He told me zip. Only thing I can be sure of is he was on to—or after—something important enough that he was willing to bargain with me.”
“But between the time Ott called you and you got to him, something happened to make him decide—”
“—he could do without me.” I plucked another prawn from the sauce and poised it an inch from my mouth. “It wasn’t that he was threatened; then he wouldn’t have shown up at all. But he was there, on time, in costume. He wasn’t going to give, but—”
“Yeah, Jill, he wasn’t burning his bridge with you either. In case he needed to make use of you later.”
“So graciously put. Ott wasn’t swept into someone else’s game; he was on to something. A lead. Something so explosive he didn’t need me. What, dammit?”
We both continued to eat, pretending to ignore the wall of difference that pushed between us like an overbearing guest. We took swallows of beer. Howard moved the serving bowls to the floor, slid his white-socked feet on the coffee table like two great sails on an outrigger canoe, and said, “Let’s try a different angle—Hemming himself. You always like this one, Jill: What did the man do to bring this heinous crime upon himself?”
I forced a tepid smile. Howard did know me. I acknowledged random shootings, houses broken into for no better reason than beer, coke, or dare, but with each case the stupidity struck me afresh. I clutched to the tenet of cause and effect, as if each victory over chaos was an affirmation that life was ultimately controllable. As if a woman whose husband had meticulously planned her shooting were less dead than if she’d been hit by a ricochet. It almost pleased me to find the victim had taunted, slighted, cheated her eventual killer, that all the strands curled back into the center of the ball. “What,” I mused, “was so vital to Hemming that he would stop at Ott’s office on his way to the airport? To see Ott, he’d have been assuming. What was there that Ott had discovered or Hemming thought Ott had discovered or might be on the way to discovering?” Our plates empty, we just sat.
It was Howard who said, “Hemming’s a big event guy. Do you remember what bounced him into mediating big time to begin with?”
I shook my head.
“The post office! Hemming’s in the main branch. He takes a number; he’s standing against the wall, balancing a boxed urn on its way to Pacific Beach. He’s worrying if he’ll get to the window before his meter expires when all of a sudden the clerk calls number seventy-seven and Harold Mackey walks up to the window with a ticking package he says is a bomb. Bryant drops the urn, and while everyone’s staring openmouthed, he asks Mackey what he wants, like it’s an everyday question. Mackey, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, hasn’t thought that far. He’s pissed; what he wants is trouble. It may be a bomb that’s ticking. There’s no time for negotiating back and forth. Bryant gets the postmaster down and says to Mackey, ‘You’re the guy who pays the postage, and you want to be treated with respect, right? With all these people in line here the postal service can hire an extra clerk to staff the window; if they keep you waiting, they can pay your parking ticket.’ Then he eyes the postmaster. What’s the guy to do in the face of a bomb and a roomful of citizens, all in Mackey’s corner?”
“Surely that deal didn’t hold?”
“Not the parking tickets. They’d have to charge a buck a stamp to cover that. But they did add an extra clerk. Harold Mackey gave up his package, which turned out to be a real bomb. One of the postal customers was a newspaper columnist. Next edition Bryant Hemming’s front-page news. A month later he’s on
A Fair Deal
.”
I nodded, a silent “That’s nice.”
“Bryant’s first three mediations on
A Fair Deal
were bombs—no pun intended. But that didn’t matter. The post office triumph gave him time to get the game right. So now Bryant’s heading to the big show in Washington, where the stakes are huge and the pitfalls bottomless. He needs to come riding in off a triumph.”
I nodded again, a silent “aha!”
“So the Serenity Kaetz-Brother Cyril deal was vital to Hemming.”
“And the reason the deal worked at all,” I said slowly, “was that Brother Cyril caved in.”
“And how did ol’ Bryant convince the godly brother to turn the other cheek? We talking threat or bribe?”
“And if we’ve figured this out, of course Ott did too. Of course Bryant would be panicked that Ott would go public. Of course he wouldn’t dare ignore a summons supposedly from Ott no matter how inconvenient.”
I called Jackson’s beeper, waited for him to get back to me, and relayed Howard’s theory. I don’t know where Jackson was calling from, but it was a place he didn’t mind laughing in. “That’s one fast blessing for the money, Smith.”
Howard was already upstairs when I got off the phone. The shoptalk was done, and the chasm still hung between us. Taking a step into its bottomless black terrified Howard even more than it did me, but he didn’t have the generations of avoidance techniques that my family had provided. I could dally a few minutes and he’d be asleep or at least in bed with his eyes shut. I took my time tossing out the satay cartons and washing the few plates—a mere shrug to my family’s tradition of scouring pots, scalding china, and polishing silver in a crisis—before I went upstairs, but when I opened the door, Howard was sitting against the headboard. “I’ll tell you the oddest thing I came across today,” I said before he could speak. “Break-in at a self-storage locker right under ACC’s unit. Renter’s Margo Roehner.” Hoping for a sign of recognition, I glanced at Howard. But I would have been surprised—amazed—if she’d been known to a former Vice and Substance Abuse detective. “She’s got this locker filled with medical records and files and stuff even the thief wouldn’t touch. And in the back of the locker, what do I find? A backed poster of a flashing pig.”