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  The Delaware Street Historical District was an odd place for the Arts and Creativity Council. The block of post-Civil War cottages and storefronts was odd in general. Painted and landscaped and set behind wooden sidewalks and numbered parking slots, it was chained off at night from the low-income area around it. People lived in the houses, businesses and nonprofits occupied the storefronts, but the street had none of the chumminess of a neighborhood or the browsability of tony Fourth Street a mere block away. Had the charming block been up by the Gourmet Ghetto, it would have been prized, but down here it sat like a movie set waiting for shooting to begin.

  The oddest of the buildings on Delaware Street was the one that housed the Arts and Creativity Council. Behind a mini manicured park a plain old wood water tower twenty feet square loomed at the edge of the light post’s range. Distressed wood would be a euphemism here. No street access, no water, just two slant-walled rooms atop each other. On three sides houses were ten feet away. Maybe the development had been built around it.

  The top half of the Dutch door opened before I could knock. A short, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties eyed my uniform with a look of weary annoyance that suggested I was on a par with the nagging phone. “You already sent someone, a Detective Eggenburger.”

  “I’d like to ask you about something different. I did try to call first.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said as if that explained everything, and glared at the phone as it went silent, then started ringing anew. “Our members.”

  “Calling in condolences?”

  “Calling to see if their money’s gonna be tied up. Talk to the bank, I told the first couple of them. But if you know Bryant’s dead, I could have added, the bank’ll know it by morning and the account’s in Bryant’s name, so it’ll be frozen harder than the stones in StoneWash Denims, one of our new members.” A compression of cheek that could have been a grin or a grimace passed over his face. Perhaps he was embarrassed to be associated with the ecologically objectionable stonewashing.

  “Okay if I come in?” I asked.

  He gave that shrug that translated to “What choice do I have?” and stood squeezing a small, squishy yellow ball in one hand, all the time looking not at the ball or at me but beyond me at the sky as if expecting a celestial explanation for why Bryant’s death was plaguing him.

  “You’re here late, Mr. Macalester.”

  “I just came down here to do a search on the Net. The Internet,” he said, glancing inside. “Then your buddy showed up. Then the phone started. I shoulda stayed gone.” In another city I would have said that a guy in torn overalls and a Grateful Dead T-shirt had been pulled away from his leisure time, but here it was an even guess that this was what he wore to the city council when ACC was angling for support. He had the look of one of those guys who have spent their wiry youths downing deep-fry and beer and were just beginning to see the result above their belts. His hairline had receded, and a little curly pigtail trailed in back as if his hair had seeped down from his crown and he’d barely caught it before it fell off his head entirely. The little-boy hairdo suited his elfin face, and my guess was that he was a social grumbler whose preferred response to complaint was the offer of a beer.

  “Does anyone else work here, Mr. Macalester?” He glanced back at the tiny structure. “If they did, we’d have trampled them by now. It’s all Bryant and I could do to be here together. I’m only part-time. But even so, if he was pitching a project downstairs, I was a prisoner in the tower.” As if he realized for the first time he was blocking the doorway, he jolted back and nodded me inside.

  Papers were strewn haphazardly, mixed with manila folders, computer diskettes, compact disks, pens, pencils, a cordless phone, and more squishy balls in primary colors. The slanted rough wood walls were hung with watercolors and prints. A clear plastic desk had been custom-made; it fitted against all four walls, barely leaving room for entry and the second-floor stairs. With the window on each side the effect was of entering a fast-food kiosk.

  I wished now I’d changed out of uniform and faced Macalester in less threatening garb. What did Ott ask you about? I wanted to say, but I knew better than to charge head-on with that. With a guy like Macalester, I needed to give him time to see me as a person rather than a uniform. “What are the balls for?” I asked, picking up a purple number.

  “Digital motility. Or at least that’s the rationale. Bryant wanted to protect against carpal tunnel syndrome and the rest of those wrist things. The balls also give clients something to do with their hands.”

  And watching those actions would have given Bryant Hemming a good read on his clients’ levels of anxiety. I wondered if he’d thrown Brother Cyril a ball before he decided he could safely mediate him off Telegraph.

  Macalester lobbed the ball against a bare wall. “But this’s the real therapy. How do you think Bryant kept his calm dealing with some of the assholes calling about their investments? On the phone, I mean. He didn’t toss them off while they were sitting here.”

  “Investments? I know Bryant and ACC are involved in mediating, but what is this investment part, and why are your people so anxious about their money?” The phone had stopped for now, and it occurred to me I had only Roger’s assumption for who was calling.

  “When Bryant founded it, the Arts and Creativity Council could have been called the Starving Artists’ Bitch and Beer Society. He did some classes on promotion, arts and the law, and the artist and the big buck. That’s the one that clicked. So he formed the artists’ fund, an investment group for small—very small—investors. He invested only in socially responsible funds approved by our board, and if you don’t think those meetings need a mediator, between, say, Edgar, the candlemaker, who refuses to support electricity because of the danger of power lines, and…Well, we don’t invest in cattle or alfalfa because they’re water-intensive, nothing in Japan, whale abuse; Norway, baby seals; France, nuclear tests; Asia, child labor; Central America…” He shook his head. “Finally Margo Roehner decreed nothing outside the country, not that that’s stopped the arguments.”

  “Margo Roehner?” Daisy Culligan had mentioned her as a board member, but it wasn’t till now that she struck me as an odd choice. “Is she an artist?”

  “Was before she got into her medical thing. But she is a Roehner; her family had money once, long enough for her to learn to tell a stock from a bond, which makes her the Adam Smith of our board. The rest of us on the board are more like the Addams Family.” He squeezed the little yellow ball till it gave what sounded like a screech. He grinned. “Maybe I’ve been left alone here too long.”

  “Be careful your yellow friend there doesn’t organize his fellows and beat you silly.” I leaned back against the counter. This strange, ratty water tower was to the nattily refurbished Victorians around it as Roger Macalester was to Bryant Hemming. I couldn’t imagine Bryant Hemming sitting in here, much less choosing the place. Or Macalester, for that matter. Herman Ott was the only one who would slide right in. I wanted to ask about Ott, but again I forced myself to wait as Macalester was forcing himself not to call my hand. I needed a clear picture of Macalester before I could judge his relationship to Ott. “How long have you been with ACC?”

  “Not quite three years. I tried mediating on my own, but I, well, it’s hard to take seriously a guy who looks worse than you do.” He shrugged. “I knew mediating the day-to-day abuses would make all the difference, tried to establish it for years, but you’ve got to have a certain je ne sais quoi to mediate, and I, alas, am quoi-less. I was in despair—just south of Reno. Just kidding.” His voice had risen half an octave. “Well, you can see why I didn’t make it as a mediator. Doesn’t do…to laugh…at…” He turned away and covered his face, trying to control his face, trying hard to swallow his emotion. “Sorry,” he kept saying from behind his hands. “Sorry. I just can’t believe he’s dead. Sorry. Shot. Murdered? How? He could have made the mediation work. He was a natural. He could have taken my idea and run with it, made it impor
tant. Like Jimmy Carter.”

  “Your idea?”

  “Yeah, I was sort of the Cassandra of the mediation world. I could foresee clients’ disasters and the solutions, but nobody cared until Bryant.”

  And the concept made Bryant famous. Famous enough to move on to Washington and take Roger’s idea with him. When you let another guy fly away with your baby, you want to believe he’s taking it to a better home. “You trusted Bryant that much?”

  Slowly he let his hands down. His face was blotchy but already fading back to its pale norm. He turned toward me, as if to show me his bared face. It didn’t look elfin now, still too subdued, but there was something so likable about him I almost missed his hand squeezing a yellow ball so hard it shook. “Bryant was a genius at presentation. He took the idea and ran. And when he went on TV, suddenly everything dazzled. We got new investors, even conservatives—a brouhaha over that one—but the board finally agreed if the guys on the right put their money where our mouth is, all the better. Now businesses see ACC as a way to ingratiate themselves with the community and make a buck at the same time.” His lips twitched, and this time a definite elfin grin flashed. “They’re the ones who grabbed the phone as soon as they saw the news. Our original members won’t connect Bryant’s death with their money until they need it. They’re used to waiting; they’d have to be after dealing with Bryant.”

  “Did Bryant withhold their money?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t mean that. He was just, well, focused on other things, and he’d forget about stuff that didn’t interest him, like the classes ACC used to have. He dropped those to concentrate on the mediation. He would have dropped the money fund too, but he couldn’t do that. So he let it limp along. People got their money, but sometimes they had to call him a couple of times. They understood that. It’s the new guys who expected more.”

  “Is that what Herman Ott was asking about?”

  “Ott? No.”

  I could tell from his expression I hadn’t slid that question in quite as smoothly as I’d hoped. “Mr. Macalester, Herman Ott was investigating Bryant. What did he ask you about him?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Daisy told me you did.”

  He sailed the ball against the wall, a swooping arc of defeat. “Yeah, okay. Ott called me. I know Ott, respect the guy, but sheesh, Bryant’s my boss; I can’t be inviting Ott over to peruse the office.”

  “What specifically was he after?”

  Macalester pushed himself up on the desk. “You want to know what I think? He was fishing.”

  “But why?”

  He shrugged.

  “Look, I’m going to be straight with you,” I said. “Ott’s missing. I can’t picture him shooting Bryant. It worries me that he’s been gone for over twenty-four hours. You say you know Ott; then you know how strange that is. I need to find him, and I’ll tell you, I have not a clue. Except that he was investigating Bryant. Now if I knew what his focus—”

  “I…don’t…know. Ott didn’t favor me with his purpose. Maybe if he hadn’t been so condescending—like whatever he thought Bryant had done, he figured I was up to my eyeballs too—maybe I’d have helped him. I told him to go screw himself.” He paused and stared me in the eye. “Maybe that’s what he’s gone and done.”

  Herman Ott, the equal opportunity irritant. It amused me that he’d infuriated Macalester as much as he had any cop. But finding him was like hunting for a skunk; no one cared where he went, just that he went, “You know Ott, right? Then you know he wouldn’t politely accept refusal and walk away. Is there anyone else he’d have asked?”

  “Friends, you mean? Bryant was too busy for a social life.”

  “Any business associates?”

  “Me.”

  “Could Ott have gotten in here without you knowing?”

  His mouth twitched. “I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  Touché. “But signs? Things out of place?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anywhere else he would have checked?”

  “Bryant’s apartment maybe. He could have tried the storage locker, but he’d only have found junk and not much of that.”

  “Where is the unit?”

  “Storit Urself, down on—”

  “I know the place.”

  “Yeah, it’s good. The third-floor units are like cheap—very cheap—apartments, no outside door, so spur-of-the-moment thieves don’t notice they’re there.”

  “What”—I was holding my breath—“is the unit number?” And I nearly whistled when he said, “Three-oh-seven.”

  I had been standing right beneath 307 this afternoon. Margo Roehner’s locker was 207.

  CHAPTER 14

  COINCIDENCES HAPPEN, BUT THEY’RE not highly thought of in police work.

  I headed up the station stairs, through the squad room—almost empty at this time of night—through the old records room to the inspector’s office. During the day his clerk guarded Doyle’s peace of mind the way Raksen did his crime scenes. But now I strolled through the empty outer office and tapped on his glass right above the INSPECTOR FRANCIS DOYLE sign.

  Doyle wasn’t asleep; he just looked that way, head back on the headrest of the faux leather director’s chair Mrs. Doyle had given him in celebration of his fifth cancer-free year. For her that milestone had been the day the lights came back on. He, a pessimist in the finest Hibernian tradition, had looked me in the eye and said, “You think those cells wear calendar watches?” He hadn’t said that to her, though, or that the expensive chair embarrassed him. That day was the first time he had said the word cancer aloud.

  As he recognized me now, his blue eyes widened momentarily in anticipation, then narrowed as if to block the disappointment before he could see it. “So, Smith, you nosed out Ott?”

  “If he were that easy to find, he’d have been dead years ago.” I perched on the edge of a padded metal chair and rested an arm on his desk, careful to avoid the three ceramic rhinoceroses that’d made it to this side of his IN box.

  When the inspector was hospitalized, it was rumored he liked rhinos. In lieu of yet more flowers or the no longer acceptable candy, relieved visitors arrived with rhinos. Now the herd in Doyle’s office outnumbered those in most African countries. It covered the top of his metal bookcase, spread onto his windowsill, trailed across the ledge of his interior windows, and, when not carefully supervised, made beachheads on his desk. I never did discover whether the original rumor was true.

  I plucked a blue rhino off IN box patrol and massaged its midsection as I relayed Ott’s interest in the mysterious Bill Lewin and Daisy Culligan’s pronouncement about Ott’s investigating Bryant. “Roger Macalester confirmed it, grudgingly. But Daisy was too caught up in pique and Roger in principle to find out why.”

  “Berkeley,” Doyle muttered.

  “But here’s the interesting thing. Bryant Hemming’s organization ACC has a storage locker right above Margo Roehner’s, and Roehner’s was burglarized today. And, Inspector, Roehner is on the ACC board.”

  “The reward she gets for service, huh? We’ll”—he glanced at a list on the desk—“I’ll get to her.”

  “Any word from the ME’s office? Time of death?”

  He emitted something between a hoot and a laugh. “Sunday night, after he left the television studio, before you found him.”

  “Bullet?”

  “Nine-millimeter.”

  “What about Ott’s office? What did the search turn up?”

  “You’ve seen that rat’s nest.” He shook his head, sending carroty strands onto his forehead. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the man could have a litter of piglets living in there, and no one’d notice. I’m surprised the place doesn’t smell.”

  I laughed. “Maybe it’s anaerobic. What about the neighbors in Ott’s building? They must have heard the shot.”

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you? Anywhere other than Telegraph, any place but that catchall building Ott’s in. First two families didn’t speak Engli
sh, and we had to wake up Clifton to figure out what language they were speaking. We’ve got a Hmong interpreter scheduled for the morning. Next batch of tenants was so busy flushing we were on the verge of going for a warrant. When they said they didn’t see anyone odd in the halls, they’re probably telling the truth; they probably haven’t seen anything for months. And God knows what would be odd to them. Other units appeared to be empty. Maybe some of those offices really are used just for business again. Anyway, Smith, the upshot is that we know not a da—blessed thing.”

  “What about his files? Not the ones with no names in his desk, the records in the file cabinets—”

  “All six of those manila folders? The rest of the file drawers are crammed with books. Taxes, penal codes. Guy’s got a whole room of bookcases, you’d think—”

  “Those six files, did they—”

  “Code.”

  “What?”

  “They’re all in some kind of code. Gibberish. I know you like Ott, and I don’t think the better of you for it, but he’s got to be fodder for the bin. Code! You know it’s not like he’s got a computer in that rat’s nest of his to do the encoding. He had to do it by hand, letter by letter. Has the man nothing at all to do with his time?”

  I’d wondered what Ott’s hobbies were. I’d wondered what had moved him to look into computers. “There’s got to be a key.”

  “Well, he’s your friend. Maybe you can find out. I suppose we could send the files to the feds for decoding, but Smith, you know it’s only going to make us a laughingstock.”

  “Give me a couple days to find Ott—”

  “A couple days! Tight as manpower is, if you don’t have Ott in here by this time tomorrow, you’ll be back on patrol.”

  “Tracking down Ott in Berkeley is like playing against the game master. One day isn’t—”

  “Out of my hands, Smith.”

  There are two times to keep your mouth shut, the old joke goes: when you’re angry and when you’re swimming. And there’s a third: when you’re facing a done deal. I got Doyle’s okay to check out Ott’s office and left. Another time I might have stopped to change out of my clunky uniform. Now I paused only long enough to call Howard at home and say I’d be late, real late. I didn’t have time to tell him more. I was racing not only against the murder case clock that ticks away the value of evidence and heat of leads but against the threat of the FBI. Ott had cooperated with me on a number of cases. I had given him slack. I’d taken chances for him. I had kept secrets for him, the kinds of secrets an FBI operative would never understand.