Cop Out by Susan Dunlap Page B

in touch all along?”
    “No. Herman disappeared for a few years.”
    “Disappeared? When?”
    “Right after he left college.”
    Ott had never bothered to graduate. He’d just dwindled away. “Where’d he go?”
    “No one knows. No one, believe me. I tried to find out when he came back. If he’d had a secret like that in our soap days, I could have teased it out of him. But whatever he did those three years changed him. Or maybe he just got older. Whatever, he wasn’t a cute little waif of a guy anymore. He was in the beginning stages of what he is now.”
    I picked up the fallen rake and fingered the tongs. “Where do you think he went?”
    “That question intrigued me for years. I didn’t meet with Herman, but you know how Berkeley is; you’ve always got more than one path of connection to a person. So I heard about him. Sometimes he was mentioned in the papers. A few-people remembered him from before. But no one knows about that absence. I’ve done the sensible thing; I’ve given up. If you’re smart, you will too.”
    “Sorry, I can’t make that kind of promise. But tell me what other connection you have to Ott.”
    She opened and shut her lips, little fish pouts. Then she bounced up and headed up the circular stairs.
    I took it as an invitation to follow. The room upstairs was half the size of the first, its floor covered with abandoned bedclothes and street clothes. Herman Ott could have been hidden under the mounds. “I see you and Herman have the same theory of housekeeping.”
    She shrugged awkwardly as people do when admitting a failing.
    “When did you last see Ott’s office?” I pressed.
    She turned toward me. “Okay, okay. So maybe I did have a little thing with Herman. It was years ago, and it was no big thing then.”
    “Did he give you a key?”
    “What! Look, that was over twenty years ago. What possible difference—”
    “I’m not here to cause you problems, Ms. Culligan. I just need to find Herman. And to get an idea how many copies of his keys are floating around. Three or three hundred?”
    She moved around me and down the stairs and stood waiting at the bottom, hands on rounded hips. “He gave me a key, but what’s the big deal? Herman Ott’s well-being is hardly a top police priority. Yet it’s after midnight, and here you are sniffing out his past.” She moved toward the chairs, then changed her mind and stood looking out the window into the dark. “What’s going on with Herman? Is he suspected of some crime?”
    I considered my options and went with my read of her: She really wanted to help Herman. I motioned her back to the chairs and, when we’d both sat, said, “I have to ask you not to talk about this interview until we find Herman.” When she nodded, I went on. “A man’s body was found in Herman Ott’s office.”
    “Really?” She was on the edge of her chair, waiting for the cliffhanger.
    “I know Herman Ott. I respect him. I wouldn’t say this to his face, but I care about him.”
    She smiled knowingly.
    “But when there’s a dead body in your office and you’ve disappeared, neither option is good. I don’t see Herman Ott killing a man and walking away from his life here.” But apparently he had disappeared before. I could tell from Daisy Culligan’s face she was thinking the same thing. “A much more likely scenario is: He walked in on the killer, and the killer forced him into a vehicle and—”
    “And killed him.”
    “We don’t know,” I said, looking her in the eye. My chest was tight, my voice constricted; it was no act I was giving her. I swallowed hard. “Help me.”
    She sat pulling her stubby fingers over the back of her other hand. Her nails were clipped short, washed clean. She was swaying a bit and behind her, her shadowy reflection in the dark window wove side to side. “I didn’t see him for years. Then early one Sunday morning a few years ago, I ran into him at Bolinas.”
    “On the beach?”
    “The garage in town.