Herman Ott, a man who has survived as a private detective since before the demise of that elevator, could not afford to be a fool. A knock and a boy’s voice calling out: “Pizza!” did not encourage him to open his door; it made him suspicious.
“I didn’t order pizza,” Ott called.
I could tell he was right behind the glass, sniffing the aroma of oregano, garlic, anchovies. Ott adores anchovies.
“It’s from Jill Smith,” the boy called. I’d given him a script. I know Ott so well by now that I could almost have had the boy read the answers without my hearing Ott’s questions. But for safety’s sake the boy was to check with me before he spoke. Now Ott would be thinking:
Smith? She doesn’t owe me anything. Maybe it’s not from Smith. Or if it is there’s a catch.
Which, of course, there was.
Take it away,
he’d almost say. Almost, but not quite. For Ott, passing up a free meal was like a canary turning up his beak at a tray of suet.
The delivery boy eyed me. I nodded.
“It’s got double cheese.”
Ott’s idea of pizza was suet on dough. If he’d had his way each slice would hold so much cheese that only a weight lifter could get it to his mouth. Herman Ott with barbells was a picture few could have imagined. Even on the warmest days Ott’s arms were usually covered by the long sleeves of a yellow, brown, or beige shirt. I had seen them bare once—it had been 100 degrees out that day and closer to 120 degrees in his office with its windows that opened on the air shaft. That day his ensemble had included Bermuda shorts with gold, rust, and chocolate stripes; his V-necked ecru T-shirt exposed an appalling amount of his blond-tufted chest and bony arms with the loosest skin I’d ever seen on an adult male.
I nodded again to the delivery boy.
“Double anchovies,” he called.
I could swear I heard breathing behind the door. Ott couldn’t resist anchovies. I’d seen him going after them, swooping down into that sea of yellow cheese like a giant canary of prey. I pointed to the paper.
“And pineapple.” The boy wrinkled his nose. I didn’t blame him.
There was still one more line on his paper. I didn’t expect Ott to turn down anchovies and pineapple, but I knew him well enough to wait for the final round before he capitulated. I gave the nod.
The boy looked at the paper, then at me. He shook his head in disbelief. “Say it,” I mouthed.
He shrugged. “And sunflower seeds.”
The door opened. The boy walked in and plopped two boxes on Ott’s desk. He was still shaking his head. “Hey, man, I don’t know what you even call this mess.”
Ott looked down at the two boxes as if expecting a pizza and a bomb. The latter suspicion was not entirely unreasonable, considering Ott’s clientele. Most of his clients were more familiar with
The Anarchists’ Cookbook
than
Betty Crocker.
As Ott was lifting the lid of the second box, I strode in. “You wouldn’t expect me to eat that concoction of yours, would you?”
He turned to glare at me, his deep-set hazel eyes narrowing, his round cheeks flushing an unattractive shade of orange. Hands bracing his plump hips, he looked poised to flap his wings and squawk. “Smith! I should have known you’d engineer a trick like this.”
Coming from him, I took that as a compliment. But I couldn’t let on. With Ott, if you lose your reputation, you don’t get a second chance. Despite his marginal clientele and his hand-to-mouth existence, Ott had standards as rigid as Madeleine Riordan’s. I extricated a five from my pocket and handed it to the delivery boy. He hesitated, perhaps expecting Ott to protest a woman paying the tip, but Herman Ott is no chauvinist, particularly when it comes to money.
I lowered myself onto one of the wooden client chairs. The slats cut into my back. I’d been dropping into Ott’s office for more than half a decade—virtually never invited—and not once in that time had I come across a chair any but the most desperate of persons would sit in. “Do you furnish from Discomfort Is Us?”
“No one invited you, Smith.” The one padded chair stood behind his desk, a caramel job with rips in the plastic the length of the back. He eyed it but didn’t sit.
“No one but me would bring you your favorite pizza. Being seen ordering that is like buying the
National Enquirer.
Now the Diner’s Club will never give me a card!”
I opened the lid of the double cheese, double anchovy, pineapple, and seed. Straight cholesterol. Raising the lid on the second, smaller pie, I reached for a piece of pepperoni, anchovy, and onion.
Before he could restrain it, a tiny gasp escaped from Ott’s mouth. Surely
he
couldn’t be offended by
my
choice. How could a man whose clothier of choice was Goodwill, who refurnished from the nearest curbs on the city’s annual trash-pickup day, view my taste as unacceptable? But he was still standing over the pizza boxes, his beak sniffing in disapproval. He looked from it to me, to my hand poised to extricate a slice of pepperoni. Finally, he said, “Just a minute,” walked to the trash can, and pulled out the day’s
Examiner.
As he lifted the boxes and spread the paper over his desk, I had to restrain a laugh. I’d forgotten how finicky Ott was about his office. The adjoining room, in which he slept, was a slovenly nest of discarded clothes, blankets, books, newspapers, and magazines, but in his office the queen could have perched without fear of soiling the royal tail feathers. Once again I reminded myself that Herman Ott had a very distinct set of rules; they were just different enough from the norm that most of us didn’t recognize them as rules.
Printed tablecloth in place, Ott pulled out a piece of the anchovy, pineapple, and seed. The double cheese put up a good fight. But Ott, a seasoned eater, yanked it loose, slurping up the stalactites of cheese in his waiting maw.
A lesser woman would have lost her appetite, but police training prepares you for desperate situations. I chomped down on the pepperoni.
Ott finished two pieces before he said, “She killed herself.”
I stopped, pizza in midair. It wasn’t that I was surprised Ott knew I was investigating Madeleine Riordan’s death. No one in town was arrested or died without his knowledge. In the realm of information Ott was a black hole, inexorably sucking every fact, observation, or theory into that mental space from which neither light nor matter ever reemerged. What amazed me was that without begging, cajoling, or promise of money, Ott gave information to an officer of the peace. It was a first. It was also a second: Ott was wrong. But I wasn’t about to say that—yet. “How do you know?”
“I’ve known Madeleine for years.”
“How well?”
“I’ve done some work for her. I’ve referred clients to her. She was a woman of unbending principles.”
I could see the bond of respect between them. And I recalled Madeleine’s cane, and the two long flights of stairs up to this office. “You made Madeleine Riordan come here?”
Ott laughed humorlessly (as he did most things). “Smith, I didn’t
make
Madeleine Riordan do anything. She insisted.”
I leaned back in my chair, jabbed my ribs against the slats, and sat forward. “Okay, I can picture that. She’d never have let anyone think that cane slowed her down.” I picked up a piece of pizza, folded it, and tapped a finger against the crust. “How’d you meet her?”
“An antiwar protest, like half the people I know.” But he said it too flatly; he was asking to be convinced he should elaborate.
“In marches?”
“Yeah, that’s what we did.” He reached for another piece of pizza.
Someone who knew him less well wouldn’t have noticed the slight relaxation in the arch of his eyebrows (eyebrows that were so light that most people wouldn’t have noticed
them),
but I had seen it often enough when I missed the mark he wanted to avoid, when he was settling back to watch me wander off on a wild-goose chase. “Ott, she wouldn’t have been a marcher. The woman walked with a cane.”
“Not always.” He moved the pizza to his mouth and began his vacuum imitation. The double-cheese, double-anchovy mix was rising from the middle of the folded piece, Vesuvius-like. A less skilled eater could have been asphyxiated. But while Ott persevered in a manner that would have impressed Henry VIII, I could tell he wasn’t enjoying it.
“You’ve known her since before she needed a cane?” I prompted. I wanted to ask what she was like then, before Nature had made every step a decision. “Why did she need that cane? What happened?”
“Auto accident.”
“When?”
“Toward the end of the protest days.” He wasn’t eating anymore. His forefinger was rubbing along the edge of the box, courting a paper cut, but he didn’t seem to notice. His gaze wasn’t on me, but on some image that floated invisibly a foot in front of him. He looked like I’d felt when I first saw Champion’s photos of Madeleine. Except that for him the compelling image was in his own mind. Or memory. I wished I could see what he saw.
“Ott,” I said softly, “she didn’t kill herself.”
“She told me she didn’t plan to linger on machines.”
I shook my head, amazed he hadn’t learned she’d been smothered, impressed by how well we’d kept that fact quiet.
“You didn’t know her like I did,” he went on. “Life was an orderly picture for her. Her job was to keep it that way. The kind of satisfaction that you get from a good dive in the pool she got from making you write your reports on time.”
I nodded slowly. It shouldn’t have surprised me that Ott knew about my newfound passion for diving. It just made me uncomfortable, as if the man were standing on his toes, stretching his plump body up so he could peer in over the edge of my eyelids.
“And when that order went, it was like a future of nothing but belly flops.” Ott looked down at his hand. His finger was bleeding.
“The cane, Ott. What happened?”
Ott sucked the blood off his finger. Then he picked up a napkin and began tearing a strip for a tourniquet. His pallid face was more bloodless than usual, his neck drawn into cords. He tore each strip slowly, and when the napkin had been divided into eight interchangeable rectangles, he began wrapping them around the paper cut. Brain surgeries have taken less time. Brain surgery patients have looked less pained. Knowing the source of his discomfort, I held my tongue. But it wasn’t easy. Finally he said, “Okay, Smith, I’ll tell you about Madeleine. This is pretty much third hand because by the time I saw her again I didn’t see any point in bringing it up.”
I nodded, amazed. Ott hadn’t even asked for anything in return.
“You think of her as an orderly, unflinching monitor, right?”
“Right.”
“But before the accident, she bicycled all over. She didn’t own a car. She wasn’t one of these people who’s at every demonstration. Even then she chose her causes, but when she was committed, she gave one hundred percent. A real firebrand. There was no stopping her. If she had to get a flyer to the printers, she pedaled that bicycle so fast you couldn’t see her feet. When she rounded corners you’d think she was going to scrape her ear on the pavement. She’d cut in and out between cars so fast they didn’t even brake, and she’d grin and slap the fender.”
The Madeleine Riordan I’d known never made a move without weighing all the angles. “Was it the accident that changed her?”
“Of course,” he said with disdain.
“Tell me about it.”
“She shattered her pelvis.” Ott paused so long I thought that was all he was going to give me. When he finally went on, his voice had risen half an octave and there were long gaps between sentences. “It was in the country. … The cops who found her didn’t know enough not to lift her. … Maybe they got her to a doctor as fast as they could, maybe not. … Probably didn’t make much difference. … Doctor was in a small town; he patched her up. … By the time she got to a hospital—” He shrugged, but his face held none of the anger I would have expected. I had the feeling I was listening to a ghost of the man. In all the years I’d known Herman Ott, I’d never heard him sound so drained.
There was more to this than a colleague who’d gotten inadequate medical care. I had the feeling he’d keep talking, if I could just come up with the right questions. But if I once erred, the spell would be broken. He’d finish his pizza and toss me out. “How did Madeleine come to have the accident if she didn’t even own a car?”
“It wasn’t her car. The Movement got it. If it had been her car, she would have made sure it was in better shape.”
“What was she doing with it?”
Ott pushed the pizza box away. “One of her jobs in the Movement was to find drivers to take draft resisters over the border into Canada. It was a long, tedious, routine drive. All the driver needed to be was reliable, bright enough to find an unguarded border, and able to keep his mouth shut afterward. That was the normal run.”
“But this one wasn’t normal?” I prompted.
“Some weren’t. In an emergency she’d take it herself.”
“And the accident run?”
“Guy with a fifty-thousand-dollar price on his head.”
I almost whistled—$50,000 is a lot of crime. I took a guess. “Someone connected with the bombing of the Oakland Induction Center?”
“No. Nothing violent. Madeleine didn’t deal with violence. She insisted that’s what we were against. The guy was the conduit to all the resisters the government hadn’t found yet. He knew all the safe houses. You can imagine how much the FBI wanted him.”
“And how bad it would have been for him, and the whole antiwar movement if they got him.”
“Right. Madeleine … Madeleine must have thought that, too.”
What had he edited out? “Madeleine … ?”
He shook his head. “She checked out the car and told them it was too old, too unreliable; they’d have to find another before she’d put one of her drivers in it. They’d have to get a good car and decent maps. They couldn’t, or maybe just didn’t; you know how things were in those days. In the end she decided the guy couldn’t wait, so she drove him herself.” He sighed so deeply I wondered if he had been involved in that disastrous decision or with that car.
“So they headed north?” I prompted.
“Yeah. And the word got out. After she crossed into Washington state, she called back to Berkeley. They told her to watch for cops. She was almost to the border when she spotted a car behind her. The draft resister was driving her car. She was in the passenger seat. What she told people was that the car was old, the door latch wasn’t reliable. They were driving a winding country road. He took a curve too fast and she fell out.”