Serenity Kaetz had barely mentioned Ott, but now I was more worried about him than ever. If he strode into Brother Cyril’s lair armed only with wits and wile, after Bryant Hemming had just played Cyril for a patsy, I hated to guess how Cyril would react. Ott could drive a saint to murder. I hurried back to the squad room. Surely someone on patrol had some hint, some clue, some sighting of Cyril’s boys.
The place was Vladivostok on vacation. At 10:00
A.M.
shoulder radios were silent. No one was bitching about dead batteries yet. The copy machine wasn’t punching out memos too urgent to wait. Team 6 seemed as placid as the off-white walls. They ambled around the room, waiting for their meeting to get under way. Wednesday was the first day of their week, the only time they worked daylight hours. To a one they looked as eager to get back to the beat as Damon, the hairdresser, must have been to clip and color. They hadn’t called in sick, but they were eager to ward off the inevitable with questions. “Hey, Smith, what’re you doing in here on your day off? Can’t tear yourself away?” Jabbar asked.
“No, man, she’s not off duty; she’s just off patrol. Well, our patrol. She’s on Ott Patrol,” White said.
“Yeah,” Wilkins put in, “she’s the Ott Hound.”
“You hunting him down?” White asked. “Well, lady, you best get yourself a pair of hip boots for the amount of shit you’re going to be going through.”
“ ’Course now, she gets on with Ott. His favorite cop, right, Smith?”
“His
least-despised
cop,” I snapped. “Get your terms right, Wilkins.”
Wilkins stared, jolted.
“Ott may be with Brother Cyril. Any lead on where Cyril stays?”
“Smith, you have really gone over the edge,” Wilkins said. “But we’ll be keeping our baby blues peeled today. You can count on us.”
“Yeah, Smith, we’ll be there to rescue your friend.”
Eggs, who had been standing back by the mailboxes in the hall, stepped into the group. “And if by some chance, it was Ott who thought to use the gun he kept out of sight out his window to kill the man in his office?”
“Then I better buy hip boots that go up to my throat.” I said it lightly, and White, Wilkins, and the others laughed. Eggs flexed his lips, what passed for reaction to comments he felt unworthy of a real laugh. He started to speak, checked himself, seemed to reconsider in a process so long that the room had grown silent. “Macalester,” he said, and headed out of the room.
I followed, wondering if his hesitation was from ambivalence about sharing data with me. Was this suspicion—his and mine—how it was going to be from now on? I shoved the deadening thought to the back of my mind and focused on Roger Macalester. Spotlighting him suddenly made me realize how central he was. He was the genesis of the Bryant-paying-off-Cyril rumor. He knew Daisy Culligan, and Margo Roehner, and Serenity Kaetz, and Griffon, and—I plopped on Jackson’s chair and duck-walked it across the floor to Eggs’s desk—Ott. And he had Bryant’s records. “Eggs, Bryant must have had an address for Brother Cyril.”
“Right, same one we have. Monterey.”
“Or so Macalester says.”
He leaned forward, resting his forearms right below the elbow against the edge of his desk. The remarkably uncomfortable position suited Eggs and his awkwardness about this conversation. “What’s your take on him?”
“Macalester? He knows his limitations. Mediating between the bureaucracy and the average joe before the joe grabs an assault weapon was Macalester’s idea. According to him, Bryant was just the guy to bring it off.”
“I had another conversation with Mr. Macalester this morning. By then Hemming was not so untarnished in his eyes. He was more of a pie with shiny crust, covering what might be a murky middle, not that Mr. Macalester wants to believe that, you understand.”
“But he does?”
“Well, here’s the thing, Smith. Macalester’s a lefty, not an active rad, a library lefty.”
“Are we talking coffeehouse radical, only quieter?”
“And he doesn’t have to nurse a cappuccino till it evaporates.”
I smiled, but Eggs didn’t see that. He would never deign to check for a reaction. At times his compulsive restraint had driven me crazy; I’d wanted to shake him, kiss him, poke till he showed what was underneath it. Now I was glad it gave me an excuse to pretend nothing had changed between us.
“Macalester is committed in his way. He has a somewhat Utopian mediation plan; he’s read everything cross-referenced to it; he had Bryant Hemming front it, committed ACC to its success, and what did Hemming do in return?” Eggs eyed me. There was nothing on his desk for him to bend, stab, or rub, not that he would have done so. He sat still, as if he were interviewing a suspect or, I imagined, at dinner with a blind date.
“Spit it out, Eggs. Hemming did?”
He flexed his lips. “Opened the ACC fund to right-wing groups.”
I remembered Macalester’s alluding to that. “Macalester said if the right wanted to invest in the fund’s chosen stocks, ACC was happy to guide their money there.”
“Sure, Smith, Macalester
said
it was fine. But a lefty in bed with Family Rights Coalition, how do you think that would fly in the coffeehouse? And what could Macalester do about it? He couldn’t get the board to fire Hemming. Hemming was too popular, not to mention successful. In any conflict between the two, Macalester’ll be the one to look unreasonable.”
I glanced at the windows, as I had when I was a Homicide detective, hashing out a lead, bemoaning a dead end, or just watching Porter, the squirrel, on the ledge eating the organic walnuts that Eggs had shipped in from a farm in Pennsylvania. “Macalester could have made life uncomfortable for Hemming. He could have done it alone or with a little help from his friends.”
Eggs nodded. “Here’s an interesting point, Smith. Macalester was the ACC manager, and by contract, if Hemming left, Macalester was the one to choose his successor.” Now Eggs did smile, but he did it without meeting my eyes.
Still, he did elect to hash this out with me instead of waiting for Jackson or Inspector Doyle. He trusted me that much. I felt a ridiculous rush of warmth for Eggs, the type you need to subdue before you try speaking again. “But why kill Hemming? I mean, Eggs, the guy was leaving. Macalester’d already gotten what he wanted.”
“Not quite. He wanted ACC back and his mediation plan intact. What Hemming left is the money fund politically compromised and the mediation plan ethically suspect. What does Macalester need to salvage them? I’ll tell you, Smith, he has to pile the blame on Bryant Hemming—”
“Where it belongs.”
“So, if Ott was investigating Hemming, who hired him? Who’s more likely than our Roger, right?”
“Sounds possible.”
Eggs took that for agreement. “And in this investigation of his, who was Ott contacting?”
That was a question only I could answer. No wonder he hadn’t waited for Jackson or Doyle. He
had
to deal with me. Eggs would never watch my face
overtly
. I hoped I’d shifted away before he could see my flushed face or my misguided hope. “Ott,” I said, “had one of Brother Cyril’s little tin crosses. I don’t know how he got it, but he did have the cross. Daisy Culligan called Ott; Ott blushed.”
“The call must have been unexpected. A man doesn’t blush for a return call, not one to discuss a case.”
“And Bill Lewin. He called Ott, too, and Ott got all excited when he heard his name. Have you heard that name around town?”
“Spell.”
“Overheard. Could be l-e-w-i-n, or l-o-o-n, or some—”
“You sure it was a man?”
“What else, Eggs—Wilhelmina?”
Eggs leaned forward in his chair. “Could Ott be a birder?”
“A bir—” All the tension of our interchange overflowed, and I howled, picturing Herman Ott with his round head, thin blond hair, beaky nose, his narrow shoulders and round belly, his bird-thin legs. And they say dog owners resemble their pets! “You mean bird, like in loon, l-o-o-n.”
“Like yellow-billed loon.” Eggs’s eyes were opened wide. He stared unabashedly at me.
“Is that one of our birds?”
“Hardly. We have a plethora of avian life on the West Coast. Some are breeders here. Others migrate from Canada. So in one sense this is a birders’ paradise. But in another it’s hell because the possibility of sighting a rare bird is so frequently lost in the cover of our regular birds.”
“And a yellow-billed loon?”
“Smith, in the bird world there are breeding birds, the ones that live here, regular visitors that migrate here or through here, and casual visitors, migrants that stray off course. Your common loon and your red-throated loon winter along our coast. Even your arctic loon flies in for the cold months. But the yellow-billed loon summers in northern Canada and even in the dead of winter never flies farther south than the Canadian border.”
“So it wouldn’t be here then?”
“Normally no. But if an accidental flew south, it’d be a great rare bird alert, and birders who knew would drop everything to get to the spot.” He himself was half off his chair.
I sat back down. “Eggs, I assume I’m safe in assuming that you are a birder?”
He nodded.
“And knowing you, I would say you are probably the most well-read, well-prepared birder in the state. So if there’s a rare bird alert, how come you haven’t dropped this case and headed for a marsh, or estuary, or whatever?”
“I couldn’t leave, not with a high-profile case like this just started. I almost don’t want to call the rare bird alert. To know that a yellowbill is here and I can’t see it and that that spotting will never be on my list…” He let out a sigh and looked too depressed to be humiliated about it.
Things were becoming clearer now. “Your birder colleagues wouldn’t alert you?”
“A close friend maybe. A guy I see with binoculars hardly, not when he’s got his own life list to worry about.”
“Life list? You mean you jot down all the kinds of birds you see for your entire life?”
“It’s the equivalent of career home runs in baseball or touchdowns in football. The more birds you’ve actually seen, the more respected you are in the community. And to be the one to see a yellowbill all the way down here and have that verified…” His voice trailed off into the swampy realms of a birder’s dreams.
“How can we find out about the loon?”
He wrote out a number. “But don’t tell me, Smith. I don’t want to know if it’s here or how many people are eyeing it.”
I headed for the door. “Eggs, if it’s a life list, you’ve got time.”
It was only partly consideration that prompted me to make my call to the rare bird alert number from another phone, so that Eggs wouldn’t hear me asking whether the ranger had seen Ott.
Suppose Ott was a bird-watcher. He could be. Those trips to Bolinas lagoon at dawn and dusk could have been not for nefarious meetings but to bird, if that was the term for what birders did. Did that mean Ott had walked innocently out of his office and someone else had moved in for the kill? Was that too much of a coincidence to believe? Was it the yellow-billed loon of my own life list?
As it turned out, there was no rare bird alert. Might a birder have spotted the yellowbill and not alerted the rare bird alert? I asked the bird observatory manager. Reluctantly the man admitted that it was, alas, possible. Eagerly he gave me a list of the probable sighting spots of the improbable sighting.
Desperately he begged my assurance that I would notify him when I spotted a sighting.
I settled in at the phone and in the next forty minutes talked to department personnel in ten sites around the Bay Area, repeating Ott’s description and getting their promises to check if any such unlikely bird had landed in their premises. They insisted I notify them immediately, call them any time, gave me their home numbers, their pagers, the fax numbers of friends who would seek them out in forest or fen.
I put down the phone, amazed. I, who had thought of birds mostly in connection with Thanksgiving, never expected this level of, well, obsession. It seemed in fact at odds with the tranquillity of observing avian flight. More porcine than avian, this drop everything and run—or fly—attitude.
Still, the whole thing seemed like such a long shot. I could much more easily imagine Ott in Pittsburgh, merely avoiding the despised Hermans or Otts.
I called Laura Goldman again and left a message again.
Then I walked back to Eggs’s office, stepped in, shook my head before he needed to ask, and said, “If Ott was investigating Bryant Hemming, and if Roger Macalester hired him—two still unprovens—then Macalester must have had some credible suspicion to hook Ott to begin with.”
Eggs nodded slowly and kept nodding, thinking, assessing. Finally he spoke. “As we speak, Pereira’s over at ACC going through the books.”
If it hadn’t been for the yellow-billed loon, I knew he wouldn’t have confided that.
I
N THE BRIGHT YELLOW
trapezoid of sunlight coming through the ACC water tower window, Connie Pereira resembled a short-cropped Rapunzel in a squat tower. She didn’t look up when I walked in. Across the room Murakawa leaned against a segment of the clear plastic desk that hugged all four walls.
Roger Macalester was resting his rump on a portion of the desk between them. He was fingering a squishy orange ball, but not squeezing.
Color me nonchalant
. “Three police officers for what she said was just a superficial glance at the books? Like the road repair crews: one to work, two to watch? Or is one of you going to hold the flag?”
A little testy
. “The investigation seems to be stressful for you, Mr. Macalester,” I said smarmily.
“When your colleague’s been murdered, it can ruin your whole day.”
“What do you think we’re going to find in your books?” A retainer to Ott?
“Not
my
books, Bryant’s books. Bryant founded ACC. He hired me. My contribution was showing him the importance of mediating for individuals. I’ve got no idea what’s in his books.”
Pereira stopped still, then leaned into the books like a woman transfixed.
Macalester shook his pony-tailed head. The man looked as if he’d been up all night worrying. His Grateful Dead T-shirt was crumpled around the sides from hours of being pressed into a chair back. The skin on his elfin face sagged. Even his bald spot had lost yesterday’s shine. “ACC’s dead.” His voice was so soft I couldn’t tell whether he spoke in anger or grief.