“And shattered her pelvis?”
“Pelvis, leg, and arm. Hit her skull hard enough to knock her out.”
I shut my eyes to block out the picture. Then I said, “And what really happened?”
Ott glared at me. “You know her well enough to guess.”
I sat a minute thinking of Champion’s pictures. Even in the shot of joy there was a focus in her smile. And in her outrage, she didn’t look as if she were about to explode; she looked like she’d get someone. “How close was she to the border?”
Ott nodded approvingly. “Eight miles.”
“She wouldn’t let one of her drivers go in that car, but she went herself because it was vital to get the passenger over the border. She wouldn’t have put him next to a car door he might slide out of. So, then,” I said slowly, “Madeleine didn’t slide out that door, either. The door didn’t suddenly unlatch.” My stomach lurched as I realized the corollary. “My God, then she must have waited for the right curve and opened the door.” I could see her hand tightening on the door handle, bracing to pull it up, knowing as a wary person would that in another breath she could be dead, or maimed. “And did the man get away, Ott?”
“Of course. She knew the cops would have to stop to take care of her. The FBI was crazy to get him, but the cops, well, Smith, you guys have your faults, but you’re not going to leave a woman to die by the side of the road.” Before I could comment, he said, “The doctors told her she’d never walk again. It was a year before she could get around with the cane. And after that, Smith, she’d used up all her leeway.”
“Ott, who was the passenger?”
“Code name Cisco. He kept his identity hidden.”
“But you knew it,” I said, feeling on firm ground.
“He didn’t tell anyone.”
“Ott,” I said, exasperated, “that doesn’t mean you didn’t find out. Who was he? And is he back in town now?”
Ott shrugged. “He’s dead. Been dead twenty years.” It went against Ott’s code to reveal an identity to the police, even an identity that had been dead twenty years. Before I could press him, he said, “He was hit by a bus in Vancouver. Wasn’t looking where he was going. Just like him. He could concentrate on something that concerned him and do a first-rate job, but for the rest of life he was like …” Ott stared at me. A movement flickered on his face, as close to a smile as his thin lips were trained to handle. “For everything else, he was as flaky as Coco Arnero.”
I swallowed, futilely willing my skin not to flush. Whenever I recalled the Arnero incident I’d assured myself that it was too insignificant for anyone else to remember. I hated to have anyone remember it, but particularly Ott. “Did Madeleine find Coco flaky?”
He couldn’t resist a little smile of victory. “Smith, you of all people should know about Arnero. Lived wherever there was a free couch, always found a short-term job when he needed it, broke minor laws, missed appointments, but God, the man had panache. You had to love him, even when he drove you nuts.”
“Did Madeleine feel that way?”
“She did.” Ott pulled loose another piece of pizza. The cheese had cooled and congealed; it reminded me of turkey fat the day after Thanksgiving. “She had to work like hell to keep him in line every time she represented him. He’d weird out. But once Madeleine committed herself, his weird spells didn’t bother her; like she didn’t even see them, except when they affected the case. The thing was, Smith, she liked planning the hearing strategy; the bigger the challenge the better, if she believed in the client. But she also got a kick out of playing the game. It was like riding her bike between cars. She loved leaning over the brink.” Ott stared over at me, his eyebrows raised in amazement. “She was something like you, Smith, an adrenaline junkie.”
Coming from Ott, that was a compliment. And by Ottian standards he was forced to give it, no matter how it pained him. He was right. I love the chase—all or nothing—only this moment exists. And hostage negotiation, when lives hang on every word. Then it doesn’t matter that I live in a room filled with unpacked boxes, that my car is falling apart. My life can be a shambles, but adrenaline makes it okay. It’s an addiction—I can’t imagine giving it up. And to be forced to, like Madeleine, was … “How did she survive, Ott?”
Ott was still staring at me, as if he saw a whiff of her escaping through my pores. “She focused.”
I nodded. “She brought it all to her cases?”
“One helluva lawyer.”
“But it wouldn’t have been the same.”
“Dammit, it couldn’t be! She was just more adult than you.” He looked away in disgust, the whiff dissolved in the mire of my ordinariness.
But he’d answered too quickly. I’d seen him do that often enough, throw the switch, send me angrily onto the siding. “No, Ott, I don’t believe planning cases for even the most deserving of clients—”
“You don’t understand, Smith—”
“No, Ott, I do. It wasn’t the client, it was the cause, right?”
I held his gaze till he admitted, “Yeah, okay.”
“Even so, planning courtroom strategy is not cutting between cars. It’s not just the difference between intellectual challenge and the physical. The difference is that with the court cases she was always inside the law, always safe. You don’t get the rush from that. You’ve got to do what we do, go where laws don’t count, where you could get shot. Or you break the law.”
Ott didn’t disagree. His face remained utterly still.
“So what law did she break, Ott?” I said, my breath quickening.
“Her car was parked in red zones.”
“Ott!” He wasn’t lying, but he sure wasn’t admitting to the truth.
“She had an old Triumph, a TR-3, I think.” Ott was probably the only private detective in the continental United States who had to look up makes of cars in a book. “She loved it. She bought it after her accident and had it modified so she could drive. It was a dumb indulgence; there were times she could barely get in and out. ‘Sports cars don’t have cane racks,’ that’s what she said. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it up.”
“Was it a statement of freedom?”
Ott looked away and nodded. It was a moment before he said, “The car wasn’t in good shape. Rust. Couple of different colors of paint. One of a kind. And, Smith, it was in red zones—different ones—Friday and Saturday.”
“This Friday and Saturday, the days before she died?”
“Right.”
“Surely she was in no shape to drive then.”
“Of course not. I didn’t say she drove.”
“Then who did?”
But that question Ott was not about to answer. He sat in his lemon plaid shirt, his scruffy ecru vest, pressed back in his chair like a sick canary huddling at the back of his cage. Madeleine was an old friend, or as close to a friend as Ott had. “Ott, here’s an easy question for you. Would Madeleine have let her dog run freely down into the canyon?”
The corners of Ott’s mouth twitched, as if trying to laugh. “Madeleine was a no-nonsense woman, except when it came to that dog. She had her blind spots—”
“Like she loved him too much to take the chance of judging him? Or finding something wrong?”
Ott nodded and hurried on, “She never let him go where he might get wet, or step on a burr, or … The dog lived better than a lot of her clients.”
In fact, I thought, he lived a good deal better than Herman Ott. I pulled my jacket tighter around me. I was about to admit I’d gotten as much out of Ott as I could, when I realized that he had not shifted into his normal end-of-visit etiquette: telling me to get out. There was something more he was willing to let me extract, not because he wanted me to know, but in response to something he owed his own code, or Madeleine. “Ott, just what was your debt to Madeleine?”
“No debt.”
I stood up. “Can we skip the semantic games? You owed her something. Or maybe you promised her something. Ah, yes,” I said watching the tiny signs of acknowledgment on his face. “Okay, you promised her something you couldn’t deliver. I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, well, it’s too late,” he said in a voice so low I had to lean in to hear. “It’s been too late for years.”
“It’s not too late to help find her killer.”
“Killer?” He started forward out of the chair then sank back, clearly deflated by the realization that he, Herman Ott of the Ott Detective Agency, had not even considered the possibility of murder.
Before he could regroup, I made an offer that even I found appalling. Detective to detective, we’d both understand it; but between two people who cared about a woman who had died, it stank. “Tell me what you promised her and I’ll tell you how she died.”
Ott didn’t lift his head. “After the accident, Madeleine was in the hospital up in Washington state for nearly a year. Down here her mother had a stroke. She ended up in a nursing home, a place in Contra Costa County where they were so busy not letting patients go to the bathroom alone that they didn’t bother to check that they took their medication. Just left the pills on the trays for the ones with brain damage to stick in their pockets or toss under the bed. The old woman’s condition was fragile. When Madeleine called, she couldn’t let on that she was injured; she had to wait for her own pain medication to wear off enough so she could call, and then she had to make excuses about why she wasn’t visiting. But as she started getting better she realized her mother was sounding worse. She was worried. So she called me.” He stopped speaking but he didn’t move.
I waited.
He lifted the top sheet of newsprint and began tearing at it. “I was working on a case, my first big one. I needed the money. Hell, it was more than that, I needed to prove I could break the case.” His right hand jerked; the paper tore free. “By the time I got to the nursing home, Madeleine’s mother was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I muttered, careful not to look at him.
“Madeleine never blamed me. She said her mother died because no one noticed.”
Because no one noticed.
Her words from the Coco Arnero hearing seemed to come out of my mouth by their own volition: “Or, during which moments is his life important enough to merit your attention?” It kept coming back to that.
I
WISHED
I
COULD
have gotten Ott to tell me what law Madeleine had really broken. Parking in red zones, or letting someone else park your car in red zones, is hardly a memorable crime in Ott’s book. Clearly Ott wanted to lead me along the path to the unnamed driver. But was that path a shortcut to the killer or a just a torturous loop to nothing?
I was so stunned by his long-nurtured guilt and by his uncharacteristic decision to tell me about it that I left without the rest of my pepperoni-and-onion pizza.
Now, as I walked from Howard’s nearly empty fridge into the living room, I regretted that oversight. It was small recompense to think Ott would have a better than normal breakfast off it.
“I’m comforting myself with that,” I told Howard now, “and with remembering how cold and congealed it was.”
“Noble of you, and tasteful,” he said, settling back on the sofa in his living room. “I would have saved you some of my pizza—I could have, I’m a lot bigger than Jason.” Jason was second to Howard on the tenants’ list, and second to none in food consumption. So far the only item I’d found to be safe in the kitchen was chicken hearts, if raw. Anything else he took to his room to consume in silence. Jason was a student of one of our numerous local gurus, one who focused on Spiritual Consumption. He chewed each bite thirty times, noted the variety of tastes and textures and internal reactions thereto, and recorded all in his spiritual journal. I was willing to bet that was one diary that wouldn’t be a hot property for publication. “At least it’s kept him out of the living room,” I said curling my feet under me on the sofa. I leaned back against the worn fabric in the corner. The whole sofa reminded me of the edge of Claire’s chair where Coco had rubbed. “I just don’t know where I am with this case.”
Howard nodded, opened a beer, and stretched his legs, intertwining his feet with mine. The room smelled of sandlewood and garlic, suggesting that Jason had carried his incense to the kitchen and had a go at spiritual munching there before retiring to the holy table in his room.
I told Howard about Madeleine’s accident. “I can picture her before that, Howard, whipping around corners on her bicycle, cutting in and out, gauging her chances in quarter inches. And I can see her as I knew her, walking with the cane. It was always like she really didn’t need that cane, like she’d grabbed it walking out the door, just in case.”
“She would have liked to hear that. It’s a real testimony to how well she planned.”
“How so?” I asked. Vice and Substance Abuse deals with a more righteously indignant clientele than other details, so Howard had faced Madeleine Riordan in more hearings than most. Still, I was taken aback by the familiar way he spoke of her. I couldn’t recall his ever mentioning her before.
Howard felt around the floor for his beer can, leaned back against the sofa end, and rested the can on one knee. He seemed to have forgotten to drink. “A couple of times we were in hearings that dragged on till midnight. Five to twelve Madeleine’s doing her thing like she’s the head lion in the cage. Quarter after, we’re leaving and she’s wincing with every step. And hurrying off so no one sees. After that I kept an eye on her.”
“What did you see?”
“She always parked near the door, or the ramp, or the elevator. She saved her strength. She”—he ran a finger slowly down the wet side of the aluminum can—“planned everything. All the stuff we just do, she had to plan.”
“So she could look like she was just doing it,” I said, finishing his thought. “Never a chance to ride free.” I wiggled my foot in tighter between his. No one would have called Howard and Madeleine soul mates, but the lines of similarity they did have were etched very deep. Suddenly I felt intrusive, as if his knowledge was privileged and I was asking him to break faith exposing it to an outsider, even me. “Howard, she spent a year convalescing. Do you think she changed so much that the woman who cut between cars was entirely gone? I know she liked mapping strategy, being the architect of the sting, but would planning her legal cases have been enough?”