It’s hard to make a case that a man’s not a killer when a body’s dead in his office, shot with a gun stashed outside his window, and he’s gone to the beach.
Gone to the beach, hung around overnight, and disappeared. Where was he now? In a safe house with the friend who had taken him to the beach? Or back in Pittsburgh? Cairo? Des Moines? Had he gone to the beach just long enough for his cohort to ready his present hidey-hole?
Herman Ott, murderer.
I guess I’d been seduced by Ott. I just couldn’t believe a man who’d governed his life by integrity, who’d given up things monastics and street people consider necessities would kill a man.
In his own office yet.
But it was just a belief—my naive belief about Ott—and every bit of evidence and logic argued against it. Ott had made a chump of me before; he could do it again now, big time.
It all pointed to Ott.
But I couldn’t believe it.
Maybe the truth was I couldn’t
bring myself
to believe it. Everyone has his price, Leonard had insisted. But if Ott sold his soul…Ott
was
the soul of the old sixties ethic here, the undercurrent of individual integrity that ran through Berkeley. That commitment to the integrity of the individual was why we put up with annual protests for People’s Park, with being panhandled three times on a block, with the toughest police review commission around. It was why we had a tree ordinance to protect citizens’ views, a gourmet ghetto ordinance to protect neighbors from being overrun with restaurants. It was why the city council had risked money and reputation setting aside an acre for transients living in vehicles, forging sister city agreements with cities that needed us more than we them. It was the good still left from the sixties, the assurance that people were more than impediments to downsizing, that on some level every person mattered.
If that ethic was a sham, then so was the city. My city.
I knew then if that were true, I’d have to move on, leave the only place I’d ever belonged.
My hands burned from squeezing the steering wheel. I wrenched them free, pressed my half-numb fingers around the keys, and started the car.
Cops work not from hunches but from evidence. What does this show? Can this be used in court? Each bit of evidence I found about Ott was more incriminating.
What about that cross that fell out of his pocket at the Claremont? I would believe he sold his soul and his city before I’d buy his becoming a disciple of Brother Cyril. He
had
to be investigating Cyril. Bryant and Cyril. The question was which came first. Had Bryant sicced him on Cyril and aroused Ott’s suspicions himself? Despite his poor-mouthing, Roger might well have thought the cost of getting the goods on Bryant was money well spent. The ACC books had to show that one of them paid him for that investigation. Surely.
I turned on the engine and headed to Delaware Street. When I pulled up in the parking lot, Connie Pereira was smiling.
D
ID YOU FIND ANY
record of a payment to Ott?” I demanded as Connie Pereira loaded the ACC books into her trunk.
“Macalester gave his permission.” She indicated the books. “He thinks that makes him look innocent.” Her expression said: More fool he.
“Ott?” I prompted.
“No, Smith, they didn’t hire him. Nothing in the books. Nothing on Ott, that is,” she said in an ask-me-more tone.
“Did you find a payoff to Brother Cyril?”
“
Nada
, believe me. I’ve inched through Hemming’s books; he’s not good enough to hide a bribe. Or a retainer to Ott. Unless there’s another set of books, of course.”
But if not for a bribe, why had Brother Cyril allowed himself to be mediated off Telegraph? And Ott, what was he after in the ACC books, the connection between Hemming and Cyril? Had he too been expecting to find a bribe? Focusing back on the revelation at hand, I said, “Okay, what’s the secret of the books?”
“Pyramid scheme,” she whispered.
“ACC? A pyramid? With the little money their people invested?”
“I didn’t say they could bury a pharaoh, Smith. It’s more like, remember those little metal pyramids people were sticking under or over their pears to keep them from spoiling?”
One of Howard’s tenants a few years back had been a devotee of pyramid power. He’d had a glass pyramid over his strawberries, clusters of metal ones under his broccoli, under vases of flowers, and when we found one under his girlfriend’s chair, we started to worry. “A sort of molehill of the pyramid world?”
Pereira grinned. “You got it, Smith. Tiny but structured like the big guys.” She followed me to my car and climbed in beside me. “The classic pyramid was the New Age Foundation in Philadelphia. There they had a fictitious group of donors, who supposedly would double any investment worthy nonprofit groups left with the foundation for six months. Nonprofits invested, and when it came time to pay off, New Age paid them from the money invested by later groups. The nonprofits told others about their great investment, and soon boards of charities all over the country were begging to be allowed to hand over their cash.”
I recalled that, though not in the gleeful detail Pereira did. “Connie, doesn’t it occur to the crooks who cook up pyramid schemes that there has to come a point when they can’t pay off?”
Pereira shrugged. “These con guys fall into three categories. One, the regulation crooks who figure they’ll attract a bundle of cash, clear the coffers, and disappear before the jig is up. Their problem is they forget they’re greedy. They’re like the Indian monkeys caught in the monkey traps. You know what those are, Smith?”
“The traps?”
“They’re nothing more than holes big enough for the monkey to slip his empty paw through and grab the banana inside. Too small for the paw holding the banana to come out. All the monkey has to do is let go of the banana, and he’ll be free. Does he? Does the pyramid con man clear out the account when there’s a million dollars in it or wait another month for the next million?”
I nodded uncomfortably. The con men were on their own, but I hated to think of the monkeys. Or the moral.
Instructing on economics, or her theories thereof, was Pereira’s banana. “The second group is too stupid to see the end. And the third—probably Bryant Hemming’s—probably started paying off initial contributors out of capital because he was pressed. He’d have intended to straighten things out as soon as pressures eased up, the next check came in, as soon as he had time to really go over the books: any number of excuses. And when no one noticed what he’d done, chances are he just forgot about it and his plans for making it right.”
“And the next time it was easier,” I said. “That sounds like Bryant Hemming. He got too busy with
A Fair Deal
to focus on ACC’s financial problems. He could hardly tell Roger Macalester to do it when he was skimming the funds.”
Pereira shook her head. “The guy wasn’t even promising his contributors a gonzo return on their money, just what a decent mutual fund would bring in. Without the new investors whose money came in the last week, ACC was broke. And people let him mediate their problems!”
I laughed. For a murderer Pereira might have compassion; for a financial philanderer, fat chance. “Hemming might have made as innocent a mistake as merely not paying attention. He chose the wrong stocks—”
“You can say that again.”
“He didn’t keep close enough watch on them—”
“Guy didn’t watch at all. When the market goes up fifty points and your stock drops, and you don’t at least think—”
“Bryant Hemming should have considered the rule of holes.”
“The rule of holes?”
“When you’re in one, quit digging.”
Pereira laughed and, when she stopped, shook her head in weary disgust.
“What this comes down to,” I said, “is Bryant Hemming could have made a careless mistake early on. Then the ACC fund got popular, and it was too late to ’fess up. Do that and he’s discredited, and much more publicly than before. No
A Fair Deal
, no big groundbreaking international mediation project, no ACC, or much of anything else for Bryant Hemming.”
Pereira was shaking her head again slowly, disgustedly. “ACC. I understand it wasn’t the Dreyfus Fund to begin with, but they had trustees. Didn’t those people ever look at the books?”
“Supposedly Margo Roehner did?”
Pereira stopped dead and stared at me. “Margo Roehner of the Roehner-Castillo Fund?”
“Could be. It’s not a common name.”
“And
she
didn’t notice the—”
If Ott had gotten a look at the books, he’d have come to the same questions. He’d have known about the Roehner-Castillo Fund, as he knew about everything in Berkeley, and he’d have had the same thought as I did: “Why don’t we drop in and ask Margo?”
Pereira called Murakawa to take possession of the ACC books, handed them over three minutes later, and climbed into my patrol car.
I pulled into the street “What’s the scoop on Margo Roehner? In the world of big bucks?” I asked minutes later as we stuttered east on Ashby Street, another of Berkeley’s stop-and-go thoroughfares. There used to be a belief that the city council refused road repair because bad surfaces slowed traffic, prevented accidents, reduced the need for police presence, the environmental government’s dream. Now congestion did it for them.
“You’ve heard of the Roehner-Castillo Fund?” Connie asked, pausing only for a breath. The question was of course rhetorical. Not only would I
not
have heard of the Roehner-Castillo Fund, but for years I’d assumed the Dreyfus Fund was a charity set up in the aftermath of the great case. My view of competent money management was having no checks bounce. It was the VW bug style of finance—no frills, no hassle, as long as you don’t change gears on a hill. Connie Pereira knew all that; it appalled her. She drove an Audi. “Smith, the fund was set up by her grandfather and Mr. Castillo. It’s one of the most respected in the state. Margo Roehner worked in the fund offices when she was in college, so she should know something.”
“If she cared. Could be she just worked there from family pressure or lack of ambition to find something else.” Though the woman whose storage locker had been tossed and abandoned was anything but lazy. A lazy woman would never have created Patient Defenders.
“She’s on the Roehner-Castillo board, but just nominally, I understand. Word is she hasn’t been to a board meeting in a year, not since her father married his trophy wife and changed his will.”
I turned right on Magnolia Street, pulled over in the middle of the crab apple tree-lined block. Not a magnolia in sight. But still, who wants to live on Crab Street?
Margo Roehner’s house was a green wood affair with a deep sloping roof, built sometime after the Great War. Looking from the street, I’d have classified it as a cottage, but when I walked up the driveway, I could see the second story hiding its bedrooms and sleeping porches behind that sloping roof. Berkeley had a number of these charming houses designed not to overwhelm the modest lots allotted to them. Here any resident with sufficient pucker could fling open the casement and spit on his neighbor. No activity in these jowl-by-jowl bedrooms was quite private. No renewed passion or gastrointestinal malfunction not announced to the neighbors.
Once I’d lived for half a year in an aluminum-sided development somewhere in Jersey, where the little houses were this close. But privacy survived there, thanks to the depressingly same views out the windows and to winter and rain. Here in the Golden State the seduction of sun and straw flowers, bougainvillaea and balmy air made it hard to keep the windows closed.
I glanced up at the roof Margo Roehner had been rushing back to on Monday. It looked fine. Perhaps her workers had been more reliable than she’d expected.
I pushed the bell. Pereira was surveying the lawn. Was she toting up the years of scrimping and stock market luck before she could live somewhere like this?
“Shaggy,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“The yard,” Pereira said.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs inside. Hurriedly I glanced around the yard. Pereira was right. The landscaping had been thoughtfully planned—rhododendrons against the house, Japanese maple in front—but they all needed trimming, like a four-month-old haircut with the bangs hanging in your eyes. And ivy, the bane of any serious gardener, threatened to creep over windows, mail box, suet feeders, doves, robins, red-breasted nuthatches, and, if we waited long enough, us. “The architectural equivalent of the Roehner-Castillo board meetings,” I whispered.
It was a moment before Pereira grinned. “You mean, unattended?”
The door opened. Margo Roehner didn’t look shaggy. She looked as if the energy of a six-footer had been compressed into her five-foot frame. In her tan corduroy suit with bombardier jacket she might have been as ready to deal with the public as she’d been Monday afternoon at her storage locker. But inside that suit all that energy was almost twitching. Her short brown hair had been finger-combed out of the way so often it stood in clumps. She could have been an October squirrel with more ungathered nuts than she could handle. Before I finished introducing Pereira, she snapped, “No. Look, I’m pressed for time.”
“We’ll only keep you a few minutes.”
“Tomorrow I’ll have all day.”
Tomorrow Ott could be dead. “We’ll be brief, really.”
With an economic sigh she hurried us into the dark living room, which sat under that sloping roof. Here the dichotomy of landscaping and owner was answered. The room was a collection of carved straight-back chairs, weathered leather, floral couch so soft it was a temptation to leap in, and a green oriental rug that pulled the eclectic pieces into a whole. The effect must have been charming—before the window seat became a shelf for manila folders, before the coffee table grew covered with pamphlets, before the fireplace was blocked off by two stacks of cardboard storage boxes.
Margo scooped up the papers on the couch, pointed us to it, and perched herself on a leather ottoman.
“Looks like Patient Defenders has taken over your life,” I said, glancing at the papers.