“Are you saying someone else stole it?” I asked, amazed.
“It was gone.”
“Who took it?”
“Don’t you think if I knew I’d tell you?”
I had to admit I did. Nothing would have been more to Lamott’s advantage. Except having the TCMP figures himself. Still I asked, “Who else was around?”
“No one but a cop. I—”
“Which patrol officer? Describe him!” My throat was so tight, my voice squeaked, but Drem was too caught up in his own worries to notice. Please, I muttered silently to the powers that be, don’t say “shambling, gray-haired, middle-aged guy with wrinkled clothes.” Leonard. “Describe him!” I repeated.
Lamott shook his head. “Average cop. But look, it was dark; he was in the shadows. I spotted the uniform and the gun belt. That’s it.”
“Thin? Fat? Short? Tall? You sure it was a man?”
Lamott threw up his hands. “Look, it was just a glance. I didn’t care about him. I just wanted him out of the way and me out of his sight, see?”
I repeated my question.
“Average, okay?” he yelled. “Probably a guy, but some of you broads are pretty tough. That’s it!”
“Where was he?”
“Down the street near the bicycle.”
I stared at Lamott, amazed. “And you didn’t wonder why with a man lying in the street the only cop was half a block away?”
Lamott gave a big shrug. Shrug with attitude.
“And so you didn’t even call him back to Drem’s body. You just walked away, leaving Drem lying in the middle of the street?”
“Hey, come on. What was I going to do? I’m not a doctor. He was damned lucky I stopped at all.”
I shook my head. How had I ever found this man intriguing? It was so embarrassing. “Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime.” When he didn’t react, I stuck it to him. “When IRS hears about this, they’ll wonder what else you’ve been up to. If my guess is correct, they’ll feel the need to audit some of your clients’ returns for the last couple of years. Maybe all their returns. Certainly all of them for this year, wouldn’t you say?”
It was the first time I’d seen Rick Lamott speechless. I sat a moment, savoring my small triumph. It was petty and really only managed to cover a problem caused by my own lack of perception. Later, I’d be disgusted. But for the moment I felt like a lion with its paw on a gazelle and a roar deafening the countryside. We don’t get these situations much in Homicide-Felony Assault. But I could remember them from a stint in Traffic, ticketing Mercedeses. And I could imagine the controlled delight of the IRS agent, the former accounting major who drove a used beige sedan and dated girls with pimples, as he gave the coup de grace to the adult BMOC with the red sports car.
It was a moment before he said, “There’s no need for you to inform IRS.” It wasn’t begging, but it was close.
“The truth?”
“Okay. But look—I didn’t approach Drem. Who would have imagined Drem, the straight arrow, would think of selling figures?”
“Why did he?”
“He didn’t say.”
“You were suspicious of him. You wouldn’t have taken his offer with no explanation. The truth!”
“Okay. He was planning to leave the country, and he needed the money. He wanted a lot of money, fast.”
“So he offered you more than just the TCMP figures?”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
“This is off the record, isn’t it?”
“I’ll only use what I need. I’m not after your hide.”
Lamott had no choice but to take that offer. “Okay, he offered to throw an audit. My biggest client. Audit had been going on for weeks. Me, him, and the client. Me and the client yelling at him, Drem just sitting there like a sphinx, waiting to throw a levy on my client’s assets and seize his property. Client was scared shitless, calling me in the middle of the night, worrying about jail. Good chance, too.”
“But if you could pull it out, you’d have looked like God to that client, right? And to everyone he told.”
Lamott nodded.
“For how much?”
“Hundred thousand.”
I restrained the urge to whistle at that amount. Instead I waited Lamott out.
“When word got around, I’d have been representing half the money in Berkeley.” He hung his head.
I was sure his grief was not from guilt but for lost opportunity. “You were the last person to see Philip Drem alive. You followed him.”
Suddenly the reality of my charges struck him. “But I didn’t kill him! Why would I kill him? If I’d killed him, I wouldn’t have done it in a half-assed way like that, where I had to follow him and get the briefcase. Look, he was desperate for the money. I could have arranged to meet him anywhere. He and I are accountants, not mafiosi. Accountants don’t think of murder; they worry about double entries. If I had planned to kill him, he wouldn’t have suspected. He would have come to some secluded place. I could have killed him and taken the briefcase. I wouldn’t have had to trail him all over town. I’m not a fool, Jill.”
I probably felt worse than he did. I believed him. The best I could do was call Patrol, haul him down to the station in the cage, and make him go through the whole statement again. He was embarrassed and afraid. But I was left with a dead end.
G
ETTING THE FINAL STATEMENT
from Rick Lamott took nearly two hours. He tried to make deals. He jockeyed for position. His open-throttle face was flushed with the thrill of the game, the same expression he’d had driving his Lotus. By the end of the first half hour, I could picture Lamott at an audit with that same look, eyeing the competition, making moves, tossing out deals, trying to slip in five thousand dollars of questionable travel and entertainment for deleting three thousand of office supplies (which he could then claim under publicity). But this investigation was not a game or a race, and in any case Lamott was running on empty. By the time he signed his statement, he was as deflated as the driver of the last car in the Indianapolis 500.
Energy doesn’t disappear; it merely moves on. In the normal run of things it should have moved on to me. But it hadn’t. I felt as if I’d been driving in a circle too. Maria Zalles had turned out to be no more than a pit stop. With Rick Lamott I’d seen the checkered flag. But that had been a mirage.
It was eleven o’clock. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten. No, I could: the stale donut I’d grabbed as we raced to the airport. It was still poking its crystallized sugar corners into the edges of my stomach. I trudged out of the station. The fog had rolled in and was now so thick, I had to use the windshield wipers. It seemed appropriate.
I sat in my Volkswagen waiting while the engine warmed and realized that despite my exhaustion, the thing I wanted most was to hash over the case, to stretch it like pizza dough, sticking a finger in one option, maybe Lyn Takai, and pulling that as far as it would go before the dough split and I had to discard her as a suspect. Howard was great at that. He’d been known to stretch the pizza dough of a case so far that it ended up as a breadstick. But Howard, if he was home, was going to be in no mood to talk.
I shifted into first. Till now, I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed the old Howard—the guy who threw everything into the chase, the lighthearted plotter who could sniff out foibles at two hundred paces and weave them into a museum-quality net, who basked in being the ultimate sting artist—Howard whom I’d loved and maybe lost to his prison of a house and the prison of society’s rules for women. It made me cringe to think that he of all men couldn’t see the bars all the safety precautions made.
Again I had to fight the urge to get on the freeway, turn the radio up, and just keep driving.
Howard was asleep when I got home. His tax forms were still spread ominously and haphazardly over the door cum table.
I took a shower and climbed into bed. It’s a big bed. He wasn’t near me. But I heard the rustle of the sheet against his skin, and felt the tension of his body. His breathing was tight, angry. He was awake. I waited, but his breathing didn’t ease, and he didn’t say anything. And I was damned if I was going to. I’d put up with the taxes, the renovations, and the paint fumes that suddenly clogged my nostrils with that milk-of-magnesia smell. I could feel my neck tensing. My eyes refused to close. Dammit, I couldn’t afford to be so pissed off it kept me awake. Not while
he
lay there playing possum. I—
“Your case,” he murmured. “What happened?” It wasn’t a giant step into admission of error. It was a toe inching forward, testing the waters of truce, a toe pushing out the first of those prison bars. Shoptalk—it was the way we always handled situations we couldn’t handle. But it was only a toe, not the whole foot or leg. But once I grabbed that toe, the foot would come. Tomorrow, when we weren’t exhausted, we’d talk about the prisons and the jogger and the house. We’d talk on a level we hadn’t before. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all. For now, the toe was plenty. My eyes welled with tears of relief. “The case has dead-ended,” I said, my voice tight.
He started to roll over toward me but stopped. Clearly, he knew what he’d committed himself to tomorrow and that a truce is no more than a truce. “Nothing has to be a dead end. What have you got?” His voice cracked.
I threaded my fingers through his. I hadn’t realized he was so upset, that I’d hurt him that much. I could feel the nearness of his body, the heat almost warming me as I lay icily still. “Philip Drem wanted to get his wife away from the toxins in the air here. He needed money, so he offered to sell the TCMP figures to Rick Lamott. They arranged a meeting at PFA. Lamott drove around the block three times but chickened out. He couldn’t quite bring himself to do something so dangerous.”
“Kind of ruins him as a murder candidate.”
“I know. I really had hopes for Lamott.”
Howard sat up, awkwardly pulling the cover over his chest with his right hand, keeping his left clasped with mine. I had to sit too, or smother. Clumsily, I stuffed the ends of the covers around my shoulder. Howard didn’t offer to help. I’m sure he didn’t dare. I could hardly ask. And I couldn’t do more than catch one fold of blanket behind my shoulder. The cold air poured down my side. Freedom isn’t free.
“So,” I said in a soft voice, “Drem’s in the theater where he goes every Friday night, and while he’s in there, the killer comes and sticks a tiny hypodermic between the double seats of his bicycle. He uses a plaster-of-paris-type substance that he could have gotten anywhere.” I pressed my arm against my side. I was freezing.
“Okay, Jill, so the needle is planted. Drem sits on it. Then what?”
“He rides the bicycle up to College Avenue and turns right.”
“That tips the killer that he’s not going home.”
“Right. Home would have meant a left turn. With the poison beginning to work, Drem couldn’t have been moving fast. It would have been easy for the killer to follow him.”
“And by the time Drem rode a block or two, he would have been shaky, right?” Not waiting for an answer, Howard went on. “Drem pedals along to Dwight. He’s either got to turn uphill or down. Well, down’s a safe guess, even if it’s against the traffic.”
“Figuring that, the killer can run downhill on Dwight, probably faster than Drem’s pedaling. He can keep an eye on Drem, who’s too out of it to be looking right or left. Drem comes to the corner and makes his final turn—”
“He watches Drem stagger off the bike and into the street. Then, while Drem’s collapsing half a block away, he sidles up to the bike and steals the briefcase. Ta-da!” he said, with the wave of a hand.
The covers fell forward. I laughed and grabbed. Howard yanked them back up and tucked them back in place, but he didn’t let go of my hand.
I snuggled back into the pillow, wishing I were certain of his conclusion about the killer. “That’s fine, Howard, except that Lamott said the only person around was a cop. And one of the street guys swore the cop took the briefcase.”
“Course, both of those guys were there, and they didn’t see each other.”
“They wouldn’t have to have. Regent’s a long block there. Lamott was occupied with Drem and calling for help. The street person could have been at the other end by the bicycle then. He was planning to boost it. So when he realized he wasn’t alone, of course he split.”
“But they both said there was a cop at the scene. And we know there wasn’t, right?”
“We sure hope that’s right. If you accept Lamott’s description of his cop, at least it wasn’t Leonard.”
“What about Acosta?”
“Description doesn’t rule him out. But, Howard, I just can’t imagine—”
“No, not Mercurio.” Howard’s fingers tightened on my hand. I hadn’t ridden down this cop thing. I’d put it off as a road of last resort. Nothing wrecks a department like the idea that one of its members, one of our
friends,
has been light-fingered. And lying to the rest of us. We can’t trust many people. When we can’t trust each other, it’s like driving on ice with bald tires. Neither of us even mentioned Pereira. We couldn’t face that thought.
Howard sat up straighter. “But there could have been someone who looked like a cop. Or sort of like a cop.”
I pictured Pereira with her blond hair hanging just over the edge of her tan jacket collar, strolling forward, her revolver swaying, the bullets and cuffs and the rest of the gear on the belt riding awkwardly on her hips. It reminded me how glad I’d been to get out of uniform.
Howard turned away, grappling on the floor beside the bed. The light was still off—we weren’t ready to face each other—and I could hear a paper bag rustling. He sat back up and held the bag in front of me. Another time we would have sparred about the dangers of my sticking my hand in. But we weren’t ready to face that either.
I reached in. “Ah, chocolate old-fashioneds. You knew I’d be starved.”
“Safe guess.”
At times like this, there’s something to be said for sublimating one appetite by sating another.
“Let’s move on to motive, Jill. Takai’s being audited. Drem knows she’s switched her bathroom sink for the better one at the hotel. Probably he’s wondering what else she’s taken.”
“Likely,” I said between bites of chocolate.
“Scookie Hogan already hates him.”