Cop Out Read online

  The door burst open.

  I stood against the wall, in the darkest corner.

  The burglar was nearly as tall as Howard. And about half Howard’s weight. He looked as if he’d been on meth so long he’d forgotten what food was. Everything about him was long and bony and sickly pale. Greasy brown hair hung over his forehead and hooked behind one ear. Black leather jacket and black jeans had that loose hang that screams “sick.” I’d seen him on the Avenue, skulking along the sidewalk, never stopping to chat with the street artists, never patronizing the sushi wagon or the strawberry smoothie stand. I’d had no reason to stop him; he hadn’t broken laws when I was on beat here, nor had he been connected with anyone who did. He was an alien on this strip of macadam much of the country viewed as home to the politically deranged, drugged out, or just strange. An alien aloof from aliens. His name, what was it?

  He loomed over the room. He was so much taller than Herman Ott his presence seemed to change the dimensions of the room, an eagle pushed into the canary’s cage. As he pulled open Ott’s file cabinet, I had a good look at his talonlike hands. He wasn’t shaking, and his movements had none of the jerkiness of the crack addict’s. And he knew just what he was looking for in here.

  Or he thought he did. “Goddamn fucking fuck!” He slammed a file drawer shut. The metal shrieked under the thrust of books hitting metal. He yanked open another drawer, looked inside, and slammed it shut. And a third.

  The files of course were at the station. I wondered how many fileless drawers he would have to see before he realized they all were like that. Hurry up!

  Show me if you’re just looking for a file or something more.

  Give me a lead.

  He was out of my range of vision now, attacking the near file cabinet next to the office window. More drawers slammed.

  My head was nearly through the bookcase, my chin propped on a precarious stack of newspapers. I pulled back, stood up, and moved against the wall. Any minute Kovach would stroll in, and I’d lose this lead forever.

  The burglar froze, then slowly looked around him, eyes squinting as he peered into the dark bedroom. I could almost see his thought: I should have checked in there.

  He started toward the bedroom, reached in through the doorway, flipped the door back against the wall. The crack of wood on plaster surprised him. He hesitated, hand still on the door.

  As he pulled his hand back, I saw the jagged black lines bisecting his thumb and forefinger. Now I remembered his name. Griffon. No first name, just Griffon.

  With his other hand he grabbed on to the molding near the light switch.

  Come on! Something tapped. Footsteps on the stairs? Kovach’s?

  Griffon didn’t turn on the light. He glanced around the room, then down at the floor, his brow wrinkled in suspicion just as mine would have done in his place. He moved slowly, feeling with his feet as if Ott’s normal clutter might pop up and grab his ankles. He passed the end of the bookcase. I slid around the other end, as Ott had prepared for.

  Definitely feet coming up the stairs. How could Griffon not hear that?

  Griffon stopped in front of the window, staring out through the sooty pane into the dark of the air shaft, peering down. He hesitated, weighing options, then lifted Ott’s mugs from the windowsill to the low bookcase next to the window. Then the sugar jar and a bottle, maybe vitamins.

  The hall door opened. “Smith, I brought you—”

  Griffon spun around, raced past Kovach and into the hall.

  Kovach dropped his paper bag, grabbed for the doorway, pushed off, and ran.

  I called the dispatcher. “Adam sixteen, Control. Got a suspect headed out of Herman Ott’s building. Kovach giving chase. I—”

  “Adam seven. I see ’im.”

  “Roger, Seven,” the dispatcher said. “Headed which direction?”

  “South on Tele.”

  Adam 6 reported in; he was two blocks away. Griffon would never go that far. I knew where he’d head. He would keep.

  But what he was after outside the window wouldn’t. I shone my flashlight out the dirty window, along the sill.

  Screwed into the sill was a metal cup holder. And in it was a handgun. A nine-millimeter.

  CHAPTER 17

  YOU HAVE REACHED THE Homicide Detail of the Berkeley Police Department.…”

  “If you’ve found a body, press one,” I muttered over the recording.

  Inspector Doyle wouldn’t have gone home already—thank God. When I was in Homicide, I’d woken him so often his wife referred to me as the other woman. I called the dispatcher to tell Doyle to answer his phone, waited a minute, and called him again.

  “Why didn’t you just come through the dispatcher, Smith?” Doyle grumbled.

  “This isn’t a public announcement. I’m at Ott’s office. Been here half an hour. One break-in and one hidden weapon, a nine-millimeter.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Out the window. But the interesting thing, Inspector, is that the burglar knew to look there.”

  “Okay, Smith, I’m lifting out of my chair.”

  Exactly seven minutes later Inspector Doyle walked in. And almost on his heels came Wisniewski from beat 1 and Crowe from 8.

  I pointed out the gun.

  Doyle and contingent strode to the window. Doyle yanked it up. At six inches it stopped. He tried again, getting no movement at all, and was set for a third assault when Crowe moved in next to him. “Let me try. All my years in the weight room should be worth something to the department.”

  Through Crowe’s shirt I could see the outline of muscles that must have looked sexier in his mirror than to 95 percent of the female population. Crowe squatted, straightened back, and lifted.

  Another two inches.

  With a volcanic exhale he resumed his squat.

  “Inspector,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t matter how high Crowe can bench-press this window. We’re talking Herman Ott here. Ott’s arms could pass for Crowe’s fingers. He’s had me open his peanut butter jar. You got this window up half a foot on the first try; you can believe Ott never raised it farther.”

  Crowe backed away as if he’d been pulled off the mat in the middle of the match, and Doyle shone his light out the window. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Smith, you know what he’s got the gun in out here? A flagpole support. Jeez, isn’t it just like the guy? Musta tore him up that he couldn’t figure how to desecrate the flag while he did it.”

  He challenged me with a glance and, when I didn’t respond, said, “Crowe, get Raksen back here. Camera, print kit, the works. Herman Ott’s got a lot of explaining to do.”

  “We don’t know it’s his gun,” I said.

  “Right, Smith. Maybe he rents out this holder outside his window like a garage for his neighbors’ guns.”

  “Is it registered to Ott?” Kovach asked.

  Doyle laughed. “You been on this beat how long, Kovach?”

  “Six months.”

  “So maybe you can picture Herman Ott standing in line at the department, waiting for us to fingerprint him, so he can register his weapon with us.”

  Pigs may fly, but they’d be taking transatlantic passengers before Ott would give us that much control. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but this out-the-window arrangement didn’t ring true. “Inspector, Ott wouldn’t have a gun out there.”

  “Why not? You think he flew a flag there? In the alley?”

  “The holder’s rusted. It must have been there forever.” As soon as the words were out, I readied for the natural rejoinder, which came at once.

  “Ott’s been in this office forever, Smith,” Doyle pointed out. “Give me another good reason why that window opens just six inches.”

  It amazed me it opened at all. I wondered how recently Ott had wrenched it up and how long that process had taken him. Whatever, you don’t put a flag in what’s essentially an air shaft where there’s no one to see it—or at least no one but Charles Edward Kidd. But I wasn’t about to wander into th
at byway. “Inspector, I don’t believe Ott would have a gun, period.”

  Doyle made a show of surveying Ott’s insecure rooms, letting his eyes rest on the wooden panel nailed over the broken glass pane in the door. I didn’t mention Ott’s sleeping arrangement or the “secret passage” behind the bookcase, which to me screamed, “Flight rather than fight.” To anyone else it would merely giggle “loony.”

  “Inspector, Ott’s a realist. He wouldn’t have a gun, because”—I knew I was right, but I had to grope for the reason—“because what he loves about being a private eye is the puzzle. His treasure is his contacts and his knowledge. He prides himself on using his mind; you don’t have a body like his otherwise. He doesn’t need a gun, and more to the point, he knows any kid on the street could snatch it out of his hand and shoot him.” Ott had been in shape to play football. If he had cared about physical protection, he’d have stayed in shape. His decline was a political statement.

  Doyle shook his head. “Smith, when you find a corpse in a room, shot with the same kind of gun that’s stashed out the window, and the tenant is missing…But he’s not going to be missing long. We are going to pull out all stops. We’ll get his picture in every paper.” Doyle paused, smiling. “It’s not a face you’d forget.”

  “And where are you going to get that photo, Inspector? From the Chamber of Commerce annual picnic picture? It’ll be easier to find Ott than a picture of him.”

  “Okay, we’ll use the sketch artist. With all of us who’ve seen Ott, it’ll be the easiest drawing in ID history.”

  “Right, and every one of Ott’s supporters will feel it’s their civic duty to mislead us. They’ll have us running in more directions than we knew existed.”

  In the next room Crowe was calling the dispatcher. Wisniewski had planted himself by the outside door, a safe distance from which to observe the interchange between Doyle and me.

  “So,” Doyle said, as if he were continuing his train of thought, rather than shifting subject, “what have you got on this burglar, Smith?”

  “Name’s Griffon. Operates the Chartreuse Caracara.”

  Doyle sighed. “Chartreuse, indeed. And what in the name of Berkeley is caracara? It sounds like something you wouldn’t want to eat.”

  “Close. Something you don’t want eating you. The caracara is a tropical American vulture.”

  “And what is it Griffon is running under this charming name, a café?”

  “A tattoo shop. It’s under a yellow sign in the alley that leads back here right below Ott’s window.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE CHARTREUSE CARACARA WAS half a block off Telegraph behind one of the metal doors in the alley I’d sloshed through only two hours ago. There was no alley name posted at the street, no looming likeness of a caracara with an arrow pointing potential customers back to the tattoo parlor. But Griffon was the silent, mysterious kind of man who draws attention the way, well, carrion draws caracaras.

  Two hours ago the alley was dark, slimy, and fetid. Now it was merely dim, slimy, and fetid, the heightened illumination coming from the kind of wrought-iron outside light that might have graced a tract house in the suburbs. Here it shone on the Chartreuse Caracara sign above. Chartreuse is a color of many possibilities. I had never seen a caracara. But the puke yellow vulture on the sign didn’t speak well of either. On the other hand, it suited the setting.

  I’d been in these alley rooms before, on 911 calls to check out doors that hadn’t opened in days, buddies friends were so worried about they were willing to call the police. I’d come with a crowbar, into airless rooms with filthy, grate-covered windows that allowed neither light nor escape.

  Now I knocked, covered the essentials, and walked inside. Kovach was waiting with Griffon.

  Griffon’s place was bigger than most—an eight-by-twenty-foot room, kitchen/bath at one end. And it was like something out of a different world. Clean, to begin with. The beige linoleum shone, and the smell was not the familiar eau de body fluids of the alley but Clorox. The place reeked of it. It was almost more offensive than the smells outside. The room was a shoe box, long enough to accommodate a Formica table between two kitchen chairs and a sleeping bag. Beyond the archway were toilet, sink, and hot plate, and between them a drawing board. Presumably the toilet seat doubled in purpose as the artist’s chair.

  But it was the walls that stopped me dead. Every inch was adorned with plastic-covered sheets of tattoo sketches. Hearts: round happy hearts, hearts bearing bannered names, hearts broken as if by lightning, and, filling two entire sheets, Jesus and his sacred heart. Skulls, snakes, wolf claws, bear claws, bird claws. And dragons, mythical, Chinese restaurant varieties, and purple polka dots. There were photos of single scenes spanning men’s entire backs, women’s breasts, scenes that covered the wearers like a T-shirt (some short-sleeved, some long). The tattooed models were posing; they were strolling; they were standing as if waiting for a bus. As if their engraved epidermises were not colored skin but clothes. I wondered if the ink had seeped into their brains and colored their perceptions till they no longer recalled the reason for clothing. It’s one thing to have sag and flab under sweatsuits, quite another to display the result of too many desserts beneath the Last Supper. Particularly when the table shape has stretched from rectangular to oval.

  But if Griffon saw any oddity in the displays, he gave no indication. Griffon had to be a business name chosen to accompany the vulturous shop name, but it suited his predatory appearance. Dressed all in white now, he looked like a vulture in crane’s clothing. Hair tousled, stuffing the hem of a long-sleeved white turtleneck into his jeans, he glowered down the length of his long, beaked nose. He had the tight mouth of one who’d never stretched it in laughter. Even his hands were talonlike, I noticed as I sat in one of the kitchen chairs, tacitly forcing him to take the other and rest an arm on the Formica table. The veins were marked with the black lines I’d spotted in Ott’s office. I decided against asking him to remove the drills and bits on the table. With the bottle of tongue depressors on the table, the whole setup could have belonged to a disbarred dentist.

  He lifted a white-clad arm and tapped one nail on the table.

  “So what do you want to know about ol’ Herman? He’s no killer, man, you can believe that. You here for a character ref? From a member of the Chamber of Commerce?” he said in a gravelly voice.

  Good try. “You break and enter into a murder scene; then you flee the scene and try to avoid arrest”—I glanced at Kovach, and he nodded that he already had covered this ground—“the only question you should be asking now is, ‘How can I help you, Officer?’ Your one hope is me; you got that?”

  He nodded quickly, unconditionally. It made me suspicious.

  “Your real name?”

  “Griffon. It’s legal.” He pulled out his driver’s license.

  I copied down his birth date and the street address here. “What were you looking for in Herman Ott’s office an hour ago?”

  “Herman asked me to take a look.”

  “Puh-lease.”

  “No, really, he called. Said he was worried about you cops and all, and he needed to know if the place was a shambles.”

  Shambles was the place’s natural state. Now I wondered if Griffon had ever been in Ott’s office before tonight. “Go on,” I said, but I could tell by the way he sucked in his already sunken cheeks that he knew we both understood he was spouting fiction.

  Still, he gave it one more try. “Herman needed a report on his files and his books and all.”

  “And about his gun?”

  Griffon’s face didn’t move. He just sat, his arm taut on the table between us, fingers snaking around a tube of Vaseline. “That’s it. I’m not answering any more questions.”

  He was within his rights. If I planned to arrest him, I’d have to Mirandize him. But arrest leaves no room for maneuvering, for the suspect or for us. I wanted to forestall that every bit as much as Griffon did. “You broke into a crime scene. I was
there; I saw you. The easiest thing for me to do is arrest you…unless…you give me some reason not to. You understand? But if you don’t want to talk, we can go on down to the station and the jailer can book you.”

  Griffon didn’t move. Behind him Kovach shifted his feet, scraping one sole across the linoleum.

  “So, Griffon?”

  “Okay, okay. What do you want?”

  “Where is Ott?”

  “If you’re going to ask the impossible, there’s no point. Ott and I aren’t close.”

  “Yet inside his office you walked right over to the murder weapon.”

  “What? Murder? Hey, man, I wouldn’t—”

  I held up a hand.

  He stared at the wall behind me, perhaps asking guidance from a purple wizard or strength from a snarling red tiger, perhaps just staring. When he spoke, I couldn’t tell if he was giving up or just trying out a new riff. “Okay, why don’t you tell me what you need to know.”

  “When did you talk to Ott last?” I asked, hoping it had been after Kidd had seen him hauling ass into the mysterious car.

  But he said, “Last Thursday.”

  Too early. “What about?”

  “This and that.”

  “Griffon!”

  “Okay, he needed some background for an investigation he was doing.”

  “On?”

  “The Tele scene.”

  “Enough!” I stood up. “You can play your game in a holding cell.” Ott had been on Telegraph forever; he was the authority.

  “No, honestly. Shocked me too.” Griffon hadn’t budged from his chair, but his talons were wrapped tightly around the edge of the Formica table, as if he’d known his story was unbelievable and expected Kovach and me to drag him out.

  So unbelievable suddenly I believed it. “Why? What exactly did Ott ask?”

  “Background on Serenity Kaetz, Brother Cyril, anyone else who had over five hundred dollars in the ACC money fund.”