Death and Taxes (17 page)

Jackson had never left without a good-bye to me. That was two firsts for this interchange. I stared at Eggs.

It was a moment before he said, “Jackson’s uncle—I forgot about him. He was a big Raiders fan, season-ticket holder, had a bunch of friends he’d meet there each Sunday, flew to all the away games. He must have used every spare penny for that. When the Raiders left, he was lost. I guess he’d drunk a lot at the games, all those tailgate parties and all. But the games were his social life, and when his team left, he fell apart. Jackson and the whole family tried to divert him, but nothing worked. He died. God, how could I forget?”

“Suicide?”

“No gun. Drove off the road, drunk, on a Sunday afternoon. Same thing. Or worse.”

I put a hand on Eggs’s shoulder. “Jackson knows you feel bad.”

Eggs shrugged.

“Look, maybe you’ll lose a few hairs over it.”

He didn’t look up. I was beginning to feel as awkward as he did. Eggs and Jackson had shared this office for nearly a decade. They were as close to friends as two so different men could be, and still Eggs poked a raw spot till it bled. Inadvertently, sure, but that only made it worse. Eggs and Jackson were different races, from different states, had divergent interests, but they were both men. They shared a more common background and mythology than Howard and I ever would. How could I expect Howard to understand how life imprisoned women, imprisoned me? Was I asking the impossible?

I pulled my hand back. “About those extra ten points—if they weren’t for closeness of relative, for what?”

Eggs shook his head. “Individual choice. Each player chooses the name on his list he’d most like to see die. If they cash their chips, he gets a bonus.”

“Add ten to seventeen,” I said in triumph, “and you get Scookie Hogan’s twenty-seven points.”

“So Drem finally did something good for her.”

“Or she decided he would.” I wished Howard were here to enjoy contemplating such a macabre sting. But I’d spent enough post-sting time with him to know the smug delight that flows from the triumphant. I recalled Scookie Hogan’s glee as she accepted kudos in the Med. To a serious player that victory over Drem and
because of
Drem would almost have evened the score. “Did she kill him, or was she just lucky?” I asked, slipping into death-game mentality. “Eggs, do you remember names of players?”

“Only code names. Tarantula, and Clumsy Medic, and—wait—Ice Pick, and, oh yeah, I think the game master was called Canary’s Keen.”

“Canary’s Keen?” I smiled. In a case that had been plagued with dead ends like Maria Zalles and blocked alleys like the IRS, Canary’s Keen could be an eight-lane freeway. I thought back on the game-master requirements: smart, reliable, informed, no danger of losing his job, someone people trust. I’d been speculating about Eggs. Had he been game master, I doubted he’d have admitted it. But he wouldn’t lie and make up a name just because it didn’t fit him. Whatever his hobbies, he was a police detective first.

“Canary’s Keen, indeed. It just may be that I know that yellow bird.”

I
CHECKED MY IN
box, hoping for word from Leonard that he’d unearthed Sierra, the street person, and derailed his tale about the errant cop near Drem’s bicycle. But the box held only the normal departmental memos. I left a message for Pereira to get in touch with Mason Moon and check out the Inspiration Hotel books. Then I signed out a car, headed up to Telegraph, and parked across the street from Herman Ott’s building.

Darting through the plodding two-lane traffic, I ran toward a doorway between a take-out pizza parlor and poster shop. Fog dampened already mushy piles of discarded napkins on the sidewalk. The aroma of tomato and garlic flowed out of the storefront, and up from the debris, and followed me inside Ott’s lobby. There the elevator car, one of the old ones behind a folding metal gate, sat waiting. It had been waiting for as long as I’d been on the force.

Ott’s building, once a sought-after business address, had fallen into hippie-pad-dom during the seventies and more recently had been occupied by Asian-refugee families who were willing to endure life in offices-cum-apartments with the bathrooms down the hall.

I climbed the two flights of double central staircase and made my way around the square track of hall that surrounded them. It had been a couple of months since I’d had reason to poke into Herman Ott’s burrow. But I could sense another change in the building. The hardworking refugees were moving on. The inviting smells of satay and curry were sparser now, thinned by an odor of turpentine and chemicals. Was the landlord renovating? If so, it would be a first for this building.

Ott had been the first tenant to illegally transform his two-room office into an apartment of sorts. One room was an immaculate office. The other housed cot, hot plate, an overstuffed chair that had been spitting out its springs and batting for years, and a pile of blankets, newspapers, and clothes that covered the floor shin-deep. Had that pile been mud, Ott could have gotten federal disaster relief. I knocked on the
D
of the
Ott Detective Agency
in the opaque glass window.

“Who?” Ott called.

“Jill Smith,” I said, omitting “detective.” I didn’t want to proclaim Ott’s connection to our department—not yet, anyway. Herman Ott made it a policy never to cooperate with the police, at least never without a long and exceedingly tedious argument, never without recompense, and never never if it endangered one of his clients. I had gotten information out of Ott over the years, an achievement worthy of an epitaph. More amazing was the fact that for once, there were no overdue discretionary-fund disbursements outstanding to Ott. I was not indebted to him. In fact, I had done him a favor, a big one, and for the only time in the years I’d dealt with him, Herman Ott owed me. It made him exceedingly uncomfortable. Seeing Herman Ott edgy, having to choose his words with care instead of merely growling “out!” was almost payment in itself. Almost, but not quite.

I was just about to move into stage two of our encounters and start ordering him to open up when he surprised me and did. Debt was definitely improving his manners.

But not his appearance. For a moment I thought I’d woken him. He rubbed a small plump hand across his little hazel eyes and gave his stringy blond hair a shake. There was no sartorial clue to his immediately previous activity. As if sleep came as a startling discovery every night, Ott didn’t own night-clothes. He fell onto his cot in whatever he had on and yanked up the clutter of sheets, blankets, clothes, and newspapers that covered the floor.

I walked into the twelve-foot-square office. Maybe I
had
woken him. Ott’s office was always in order: no stray papers, pens, or newspapers. Pages of notepads with any written message were carefully torn off. Even his paper coffee cup was usually deposited in the trash. But this morning the
Daily Californian
, an eight-pager, was lying open across the scarred wooden desk. Covering something. And the cover-up had been too hurried to conceal the lump beneath but unfortunately too proficiently done for me to tell the nature of that lump.

“Whadaya want, Smith?” Ott’s thin lips formed a scowl—his natural expression.

“Courtesy’s hard to maintain, huh?” I shouldn’t have gloated. I couldn’t help it.

Automatically Ott’s mouth formed a circle, ready to demand “out!” Instead he closed his mouth.

I settled in his straight-backed pine chair and watched for his reaction. “Does the name Canary’s Keen mean anything to you?”

Ott’s tiny pale eyes pulled back in his sallow skin. Each time I saw the man, I had the same initial reaction.
He looks even worse than the last time I was here.
With the best haircut, the best tailor in town, Herman Ott could never have looked good. But had he also been the richest man in town, he would still have been too counterculture to spend money on his appearance. His clothes came exclusively from the Salvation Army or Good Will and would have come from the free box in People’s Park across the street had he not felt guilty about taking clothes out of the hands of the destitute. Today his ensemble included a lemon turtleneck with a hole in the neck seam, a tan-and-ocher argyle sweater with a stain just below the point of the V that could have been from dark curry or pale bean sauce, a tan down vest that was unlikely to make it around the arc of his gut, and spanning that gut but hanging so loose on his spindly legs that they looked more like curtains than pants were threadbare chinos with two of those brown patches that you ironed on and then waited uncomfortably as they worked loose again. I hadn’t seen those since I was in high school. I wondered if Ott got them from the Salvation Army too. I had never seen Herman Ott in any garment that quite fit—anything new, anything not some shade of yellow. I repeated my question. “Does the name Canary’s Keen mean anything to you?”

Ott shook his head. His thin blond hair shivered in response. Barbering was another extravagance Ott disdained.

He didn’t look as if he were dissembling. But he was a pro at hiding the truth. “Ott, you may recall you owe me.”

“Smith, if it’ll get you off my back, I’ll come up with a meaning. Canary’s Keen, eh? Distress at the opera? Death at the bank cage?”

“Smartassedness is not repayment. Repayment is the truth.”

“If I give you the truth, we’re even? You’re on. Canary’s Keen doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

I sighed. From behind him came the burning smell of space-heater filaments. The heater revved up slowly, groaning as if it knew how useless its efforts were in this cold room. “Ott, there are many things about you that are reprehensible. But I did assume you were honest.”

Ott settled in his gold Naugahyde desk chair. “I’m flattered that you assume I know all things. But what can I tell you, Smith?” He threw up his hands.

I was beginning to have the distressing feeling that Ott might be telling the truth. Maybe this potbellied, bandy-legged, yellow-clad bird was not Canary’s Keen. If I had wasted the one indebtedness I had had from Ott in three years …

“The death game, Ott. Surely you’ve heard of that,” I said, as if my knowledge spanned years instead of less than an hour.

Ott grinned, never an attractive sight. He wasn’t a big man by any means, not quite as tall as I am, but he had the smallest teeth I’d ever seen in an adult. Little baby teeth that stood like white pickets in a fence. Fortunately they weren’t in sight often, for Herman Ott had virtually no sense of humor. “Smith,” he said, “you a death-game player?”

“You?” I parried.

“This the question?” He held out his hand to be shaken.

“Ott, I saved your reputation. Is that worth no more than a research question?”

The grin faded, and the hand withdrew. Herman Ott prided himself on fairness.

“Consider it a partial. Tell me what you know about the group and Canary’s Keen.”

Ott sighed. “I’d like to, Smith, but what I can tell you isn’t going to shave much off my debt. The local group has probably twenty-five members. They choose twenty-five ‘nominees’ to bite the dust.”

“The national group’s requirement is that a nominee must be likely to have an obituary in the
New York Times.
”

“None of that bourgeois status for the locals. Here, the rule is a nominee must be known to five of the members.”

“No obit in the
Express
?”

“No obit anywhere.”

“So they could choose the old guy down the street if four other people have seen him?”

“Yeah, Smith, if they don’t mind looking at the guy every day and getting itchy fingers when they see him cough.” Ott pulled the edge of the
Daily Cal
toward him. From underneath it a corner of paper appeared.

“So who are the players?”

“I can’t give you names. You understand that. Just say it’s a fair cross section of Berkeley.”

“Do you know who the game master is?”

Ott hesitated. “No.” I couldn’t decide whether he knew and had considered telling me or, more likely, didn’t know and hated to admit there was some clandestine position in the city limits that had escaped him.

I hurried to capitalize on this minor mortification. “Ott, so far this tells me nothing that’s not common knowledge. What other requirements do they have? Any limit on professions? Like could they choose twenty-five firemen? Or all drug dealers and deckhands?” I asked, naming three of the most dangerous ways to make a living.

“If they wanted. It’s Berkeley, Smith. They don’t have rules, and the ones they have are by consensus.” Ott rubbed his hands together as if cleaning off his obligation.

Before he could stand up and reach for the door, I said, “Okay, Ott, let me give you a for-instance—”

“Drem.”

Of course he’d know what case I was working on. No one died in Berkeley without Herman Ott finding out. If I hadn’t known he slept under the wad of blankets on the cot in the next room, I would have wondered if he rented a room in the morgue. “Was Philip Drem on any of the lists?”

Ott smiled again. Two smiles in one visit. “You bet, Smith. He was a nominee on five or six, and on two a bonus baby.”

On five or six lists, and got the coveted ten-point spot on two! I didn’t try to disguise my amazement—not that Ott knew who the nominees were but that he passed on the information without a fight. I stood up and leaned over his desk, brushing the
Daily Cal
to the right. It didn’t surprise me to find tax forms underneath. Only that it was a Schedule D.

I broke into laughter. “Ott,
you
have stocks?
You
have invested in the establishment? Why did I bother saving your reputation when there’s this just waiting for someone to discover?”

“It’s not establishment. It’s solar panels,” Ott insisted, puffing up his chest feathers. “Cheap solar panels, Smith, will save the planet—if we don’t fuck it up completely before that.”

I found Ott’s indignation and his explanation comforting. I also found it encouraging. He might not be Canary’s Keen, but a man like Ott, with complicated taxes … “I take it from all this that you knew Philip Drem?”

Ott nodded.