Too Close to the Edge Page 19

  “Whew!”

  Murakawa was grinning. He had a shallow nose, but a wide strong mouth. His grin took over his face. “And that’s not all, Smith.”

  “What?” I was thinking Murakawa should team up with Heling. Between the two of them the suspense could be dragged out forever.

  “They said a guy was in Thursday asking the very same question.”

  I held my breath. “Did they get his name.”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “But, Smith, they gave me something just as good—his description. They said he was a short Caucasian, had limp blond hair, and was dressed entirely in shades of yellow.”

  “Herman Ott!”

  CHAPTER 25

  HERMAN OTT HAD BEEN investigating QuakeChek! That explained his message—“Liz, you were right; only they are up-to-date”—on Liz Goldenstern’s answering machine. And while I was up all night, racing around, searching for a key to this case, he had it. And at the time he was bartering with me, carrying on like he was selling his favorite daughter into slavery, he knew about QuakeChek. He could have told me then. When I was convincing Pereira to spend her night finding out about esoteric tax forms for him, he knew. And while she created order amidst the morass of his files, and I listened to Ian Stuart go on about the collective moving a helicopter up and down, and the throttle starting the craft just like a motorcycle’s, Herman Ott was curled up around the QuakeChek information, covered with his clutter of blankets, snoring away.

  I stormed out of the station, slammed down into the driver’s seat, and started the car, and put it into gear without waiting for the engine to warm. It jerked. I stepped harder on the gas, racing the engine. Then I headed through the fog to Telegraph.

  Despite the chill, the sidewalks were crowded with students and graduates meandering from displays of stained glass panels, to blankets of hand-tooled belts, to tables of turquoise jewelry. Parents fingered tie-dyed baby shirts for the future members of the class of ’08, while the strollers that held the incipient scholars blocked the sidewalk. By Herman Ott’s corner, melted glass wind chimes clattered atonally in the sharp wind.

  Cutting in front of a station wagon loaded with ficus and potted palm trees, I pulled into a loading zone, got out, and slammed the door. No space was wasted in this sidewalk commercial district. There was barely eight inches between displays. I squeezed between a table of ceramic toothbrush holders and one displaying hand-dyed shirts, shorts, and sweat pants, letting my butt bang against the latter. I had bought a forest-green shirt there once. Every time I washed it, it ran. Now it was running for the Salvation Army or whatever charitable soul took it off their hands.

  Despite the cold and fog, the kitchen fans at the pizza place were on high, blowing the smells of garlic and tomato sauce across the sidewalk. Dammit, I’d even bought Ott pizza Thursday night!

  I took the stairs in Ott’s building two at a time, arriving at his floor winded. The couple by the landing was still going at it, their retorts keeping pace with the television chase music. I raced down the hallway, skirting two six-year-olds playing catch, and banged on the office door.

  There was no answer. It hadn’t occurred to me that Ott might be out. How could he not be here when I was so furious!

  Before I could pound again, he pulled open the door. There was a sleepy look to his small hazel eyes. Crossing his arms over his saffron sweatshirt and gold-and-mustard-striped shirt, he said, “You’ve brought my money?”

  “Forget your money, Ott.” I shoved past him.

  “What’s with you? I’m the one who’s owed.”

  “You’ve had a day and a half to toss yourself into that heap you call a bed. You wouldn’t have had that if I hadn’t gotten Connie Pereira to do your taxes.”

  “It wasn’t a gift, Smith. We had a deal. I kept up my end.”

  “Some deal! Pereira spent hours on your return. If it hadn’t been for her, you’d still be sitting here dredging through scraps of paper and trying to figure out those forms. And what did you give us? A few asides, information so extraneous that we solved the case without it.”

  Ott shrugged. “A deal’s a deal. Sometimes you get an edge, sometimes you don’t. You shouldn’t get so worked up, Smith. You don’t see me down at your office, huffing and puffing because my money’s late.”

  Pulling the door from his hand, I slammed it. “Don’t give me this philosophical garbage. You and your flaunted ethics! Some friend you are.”

  Ott’s eyes widened in true disbelief. “Smith, have I ever given you the impression that you and I are friends?”

  “Not me, Ott. Liz Goldenstern. You were her friend. I heard her tape when you called and suggested dinner. That was the voice of a friend. And now your friend is dead, and you are so hidebound, so busy justifying your life by your own self-imposed rules that you don’t care whether her killer is caught or not.”

  He said nothing. No muscle in his face moved. Someone else might have taken that for impassivity. But I knew it was the skill of a detective who’d spent twenty years working on the streets. And I knew, too, that I’d gotten to him.

  “You don’t need to worry now, Ott,” I said, “I’m not going to ask you about that message. I’m going to give you something. But then I expect you to cooperate, completely.”

  His pale eyes narrowed. “What do you take me for, Smith, that’s a sucker’s deal.”

  “Wait till you hear it.”

  He shrugged.

  “QuakeChek had stairs, but no ramp, right? They don’t give information over the phone. So Liz asked you, her friend, to go there for her. And you found out that they have the most current knowledge of earthquake faults and their tributaries and traces, that only they are up to date, right?”

  “I’m waiting for your gift, Smith,” he said, showing no surprise, much less interest.

  “They told you that by the time a fault map is printed it’s out of date. They said, in essence, that there are earthquake traces so new that only they know about them. And that’s what you told Liz. And Ott, that’s what killed her.”

  His thin lips squeezed together until the darker color was entirely covered. Still, he couldn’t control the quiver at the sides. This was far and away the most emotional I had ever seen him. I could have saved him begging, but I didn’t. I waited until he said, “How?”

  I walked to the window and stared at its soot-covered surface. The building had been erected in the twenties. Sixty years of soot. There was only an air shaft out there, but I couldn’t see the wall on the other side. That show of contrition, so out of character for Herman Ott, still wasn’t enough. I could hear the bitterness in my voice as I said, “You didn’t even bother to find out why she needed that information, did you?”

  “It’s not my job to question clients,” he said. But his usual caustic tone was missing.

  I walked back to his desk. Yesterday afternoon it had resembled the bedroom. Now it was back to normal, completely orderly, a desk where any needed item could be found in less time than it took to pronounce its name. It epitomized the Ott Detective Agency. Shoving aside a yellow legal pad, I sat on the cleared spot. “This is what I’m giving you, Ott. Brad Butz followed all the steps to get his building permit, including getting a soils engineer’s report. Those engineers take soil samples every twenty feet or so. If two samples are the same they assume what’s between them is the same. Their reports stipulate that. If the soils engineer’s report had shown evidence of an earthquake trace, Butz would never have gotten a building permit. So we can assume it didn’t. If the soils engineer didn’t find a fissure, why would Butz think there was one, and why would he wait till after the building was up to contact QuakeChek?”

  It only took him a moment to reach the same conclusion I had. “He knew there was a trace because he’d worked for QuakeChek, a trace new enough so it wasn’t on the map. The trace wouldn’t be right under the building, but it’d be near enough to make the city decide not to risk housing people with disab
ilities there.”

  “Exactly.” I waited till he nodded. Herman Ott’s personal code of ethics could be a pain in the ass, but one of its positive points was that he stood by his commitments. And that nod, we both knew, was his agreement to come in on this. He owed Liz Goldenstern that much.

  “Fucking bastard!” he muttered. “Butz was a small time, barely licensed contractor. He didn’t have connections in the city. Liz made him the Marina Vista contractor. Without Liz there would have been no Marina Vista. Without Liz there would have been no variance. He could never have gotten it himself. He used her to get a variance for a building he planned to have declared uninhabitable.”

  “And she realized that, or at least she suspected it strongly enough to call you about QuakeChek.”

  “Jesus. When she found out about this, she must have been furious. I wouldn’t want to have been Butz when she got to him.”

  “Or vice versa, as it turns out.” I propped my feet on the edge of his waste basket.

  He shrugged. His gold and mustard collar scrunched against his plump shoulders. “She could have turned him in, of course, but it wasn’t her style. Racing down to the site and giving him hell; that was Liz.”

  “Maybe. Liz certainly had a temper. If she had heard this like you have, she probably would have taken off after him. But she had had enough time to formulate her suspicions. If she hadn’t been fairly sure beforehand, she wouldn’t have called you. So when you told her about QuakeChek you were just confirming what she already suspected. She’d had time to cool down and think clearly. She’d had enough time to call Butz at the site and make sure he’d be there. And she’d had time to consider what it all meant, which is what we have to do.” I hoisted myself atop the desk.

  “Mmm.” Ott pulled his chair from behind the desk, set it to face me, and plopped down in it. A lemon-colored sweater fell off the back. “He needed the variance just to get the building up. It’s not only the sole dwelling down there but it’s the only building over two stories. Then when the building was up …”

  “He planned to spring the QuakeChek report.”

  Ott leaned forward in his chair. “And the city would renege on the deal. I’ve seen these boards, Smith. The same five or six citizens who patted themselves on the back for okaying the variance to begin with would be hollering that they were the ones who were protecting the disabled now. There’d be enough righteous indignation to fill in the rest of the bay.”

  “And if Brad Butz realized that, Liz had to, too.” I sighed. “But once the city canceled the variance, what Butz would be left with would be an empty building.”

  “An empty, six-story building on the waterfront.”

  “The question is, why go through that elaborate deception? What does he want that building for?” I waited for the answer to arise, but it didn’t, not to either of us. “Let’s shelve that for the moment. Let’s posit that he planned to turn it into a warehouse.”

  “Why a warehouse?”

  “Well, anything but apartments. The restrictions for commercial use aren’t so strict as for dwellings. Ian Stuart wanted it to be a heliport.”

  “That’s a little more like it. The thing is, Smith, that building is one of a kind. He could do a lot better than a warehouse.”

  I was beginning to be sorry I’d mentioned warehouses and annoyed that Ott stubbornly insisted on following this sidetrack.

  Pushing off with his feet, he rolled the chair back against the wall, running over the sweater on the way. “This is a complicated, dangerous scheme you’re suggesting Butz hatched. He’d have to have had a goal that made it worth his while. He’d have to have planned to put something in that building that paid a helluva lot more than the prospective tenants and whatever government grants would come with them. But with a building on the waterfront, the only one of its kind that shouldn’t be hard.”

  “It won’t overlook the bay, remember. It’ll look out on the inlet and the city. For the next year or so the main sight from there will be the construction sites for those sports stores and playing fields…. Jesus, Ott, do you know what the plans of Marina Vista include?”

  He made a “come” motion with his hand.

  “The first two floors will have a weight room and a basketball court—supposedly for chair sports—a dining hall, a big swimming pool, and, an outdoor ramp that winds around the whole building. What does that sound like to you?”

  “A waterfront spa.”

  “Exactly. He wouldn’t have needed a variance for that. A spa would fit right into the city’s waterfront plan. Even if he had to reinforce the structure and the foundation, it would be a small price to pay for Berkeley’s only waterfront spa.” I jumped up. “I suppose there’s no point in telling you not to follow me. But stay far enough out of my way so you don’t create a loophole for Butz when we take him to trial.”

  CHAPTER 26

  IN THE CAR I called the dispatcher for back-up, who would preferably be Murakawa. I waited until I got off Telegraph to turn on the pulser lights. While I’d been hashing things out with Herman Ott, the fog had thickened to a rainy mist, heavy enough to coat the windshield but not thick enough to smooth the path of the wiper blades. Even on low they squeaked with each arc.

  The mist thinned the traffic—foot and vehicle—on Telegraph. I turned left and headed around the campus to University Avenue, slowing behind a Mazda driver looking for a parking space he was unlikely to find, then switching lanes, only to jam on the brakes as a trucker decided to turn left. I wondered about Brad Butz and the plans for Marina Vista. Had he intended from the beginning to build a spa? Had the idea come to him when he saw the soils engineer’s report and realized it didn’t mention the earthquake trace he knew was nearby? Or having known where the trace was, had he realized beforehand that there would be no evidence of it in the engineer’s report?

  The light at Martin Luther King Jr. Way turned from amber to red. I turned on the siren, cut around the Volkswagen in front of me and stepped on the gas, barely missing a beige Chevrolet making an illegal left turn against the light. Who were the backers for Marina Vista? (I’d have to have Murakawa check in City Hall.) They, of course, would be in for a hefty profit, having gotten the benefits of government incentives for building housing for people with disabilities—if we couldn’t prove they’d conspired with Butz from the beginning. How did Butz find them?

  I crossed San Pablo Avenue and kept on going west past tiny Indian cafes, sari shops, delis, and corner bars. Recalling Brad Butz as I had first seen him—standing irate at the Marina Vista site, denouncing Ian Stuart, screaming at me—I couldn’t picture him calmly putting together such an ambitious, such a risky plan as this one. I couldn’t picture him feeling out the backers and risking his career, if not his freedom with each carefully phrased question. That suggested a subtlety that Butz wasn’t likely to attain, not in this life, anyway.

  I pushed that consideration aside. I certainly could see Liz Goldenstern discovering Butz’s betrayal. I could see her dropping everything and driving the Capelli van—much as I was maneuvering the patrol car now, weaving in and out, hitting the horn, teed off with every dawdling vehicle. I could see her arriving at Marina Vista, pulling into the parking space where she knew she had room to get out, lowering herself on the rear platform, and pressing the chair forward toward Marina Vista at full speed. It must have been dusk when she came up to the shack.

  But why, I wondered as I headed onto the freeway overpass, had she gotten out of the truck at all? She had no more mobility in the chair. As events proved, she was only making herself more vulnerable. When she planned to confront Brad Butz, wouldn’t she have been better off physically, and psychologically, to stay in the truck and yell down at him from the window? So why had she chosen to park the truck by the docks and get out? To catch him off guard? Chairs aren’t as noisy as vans, but they’re also not vehicles for stealth. The small advantage the lesser sound might have given her would have been overcome by the time she spent coming up t
he unpaved road, completely visible to anyone in the shack. The only way to avoid that would have been to go along the path on the ridge, on the landscaped area that used to be the dump, and from there look down on Butz. That would explain how that twig caught in her sleeve. But why did she go up there?

  As I headed up the back of the neck of the marina, past the squat aluminum Calicopter building, any euphemism of mist ceased. The rain struck hard against the windshield. Gusts of wind and the undulating pavement made the patrol car seem like a tiny fishing boat in a Pacific storm.

  It would have been more sensible for Liz to stay in her van. Liz was no fool. She might once have been an impulsive fisherwoman, but she’d spent long enough in her chair to learn patience and planning. The Liz Goldenstern I had seen orchestrate demonstrations, the woman who had shepherded Marina Vista through the mazes of city bureaucracy, didn’t fling herself thoughtlessly into the fray.

  But she chose to get out of the van. Why? I turned left along the chin of the marina, past the field where the tennis boutiques and playing fields would be. To my left, the bare masts of the sailboats thrashed fitfully. In front of them was the empty space where the Capelli van had been. I passed the Marriott Inn and came to the end of the pavement where the macadam path veered behind the hedge of bushes up along the crest of the hillock. Walking, a man or woman would be spotted there with no trouble. But in a chair, only Liz’s head would have topped the bushes. Not expecting her, there would have been no reason for Butz to notice her dark hair moving in front of the dusky sky. And she would have been too far away for him to hear the chair.

  Of course, she also would have been too far away to chew him out, or hear any excuses he might have made. She would have been too far away to hear, period. Up there was not a place to listen; it was a place to watch. It was not a spot she would have chosen if she wanted to know what Butz was saying; it was the place to see who Butz was saying it to. It was the place Liz chose because she wanted to know who was in this scheme with Butz.