Cop Out by Susan Dunlap Page A

New Yorker magazines were stacked as high as the seat. The little teak table between the chairs, which must have been meant to hold a cup or two, sported one of those sandbox miniatures of Japanese Zen gardens given so the person who has everything can pretend to deal with nothingness.
    “A gift,” she said. “From a friend here in town. So it’ll be a while before I can pack it off to the Goodwill.” She scooped up the mail, deposited it on the New Yorkers . “Sit.”
    I shifted my flashlight hanging from the back of my belt and sat on the chair. “Herman Ott blushed when someone walked in on your call,” I said, feeling a pang of betrayal of Ott.
    “Did he now?” She plopped onto the other chair, pulled her round legs up to cross under her. She was not quite fat, but all comfortable circles—round eyes, ruddy cheeks, long, wiry gray curls, substantial breasts, and a gentle mound of stomach. She smiled like the Mona Lisa. “Herman Ott?”
    “I’ve never seen Ott blush.”
    “And you’re wondering why he’d get all worked up over an old broad like me, huh? Is there fire under the snow and all that crap?” She was watching me, ready to judge my reaction, still smiling.
    It wasn’t Daisy, it was Ott I couldn’t imagine in the sack. But there was no professionally acceptable way to say that. I matched her smile. “Why did you call him?”
    “Why are you asking?”
    “Because he’s missing. And his office door was unlocked.” Or so Charles Kidd contended.
    Her smile vanished, and I could tell from her expression she understood how dire a picture I’d painted. “I’ve known Herm since college; he was an undergraduate—”
    “He was an undergraduate for a decade.”
    “I see you do know him. Yeah, Herm avoided graduation longer than cholesterol’s been a villain. I was a teaching assistant around the time he realized that a degree in poli sci and philosophy wasn’t going to lead to the kind of work that interested him.”
    “Which department were you in? Poli sci or Philosophy?”
    She laughed. “Social work. It’s gotten me where I am today.”
    I cocked an eyebrow.
    “Self-employed, thank God.” She picked up the tiny Japanese rake that belonged to the Zen garden and dragged it across the box, leaving deep gouges in the sand. “The welfare department destroys you. Occasionally you help someone, but mostly you fill out forms to justify your job, your superiors’ jobs, and—” She’d caught the rake on the box edge. The whole thing clattered to the floor, spraying our feet with sand. “Shit. So much for the calming effect of that little gift. Well, I guess time hasn’t cooled my passions enough.”
    I could see why Ott liked her. “So what was your connection to Ott?”
    The smile returned to her round face. “We watched the soaps together. I should have known what it meant about us then. I loved to see all those problems that I didn’t have to do anything about. And Herman, he liked to guess the deep, dark secrets. Every Friday after the show we’d go to Larry Blake’s on the Avenue, have a burger, and Herman would make a guess at the cliffhanger. Who was the father of Tiffany’s baby? Why was Lance hospitalized with no visitors allowed? A dread disease or a sex change? Mondays we’d see how he did. Tuesday we’d switch to a different soap, so I’d have new problems to not deal with, and the trends of the show wouldn’t become too obvious for Herman.”
    I laughed, joining her. A bourgeois indulgence from the past, was that the cause of Ott’s blush? “Is that all?”
    “Surely it isn’t material to your investigation now whether I slept with Herman a quarter century ago.”
    Probably it wasn’t. I certainly couldn’t make a case for pressing her. But, dammit, this was like not coming back for the Monday soap. I let the silence sit like a demanding pet. Daisy Culligan merely smiled; as a social worker she must have played this game too. Finally I asked, “Have you kept