Not Exactly a Brahmin by Susan Dunlap

‘Excuse me, sir, are you adulterating your soybeans?’ You go to the pesticide companies; you check their records. You interview the field workers, the union. There could have been ten detectives there and we’d never have run across each other.”
    I didn’t comment. He didn’t believe that any more than I did. “When did you give Ralph Palmerston your report?”
    “Listen, I don’t—”
    “Come on, Ott, I don’t have to tell you how suspicious this looks. You had plenty of time to leak it to the papers. You wouldn’t even have had to walk far to try a little blackmail.”
    “Blackmail! Goddamnit, are you saying I’m on the take? I’ve had my chances, plenty of them. But I don’t operate that way. That’s how come I’m still living.” He glared at me, his flaccid cheeks tightening into ridges and hollows. With more control he said, “That’s why I’m still living here. ”
    I believed him. Anyone with any money would have moved long ago. Even a man who doesn’t care about his surroundings would like a shower that wasn’t down the hall. “So, when did you give Ralph Palmerston your report?”
    He hesitated, still glaring, then said, “The tenth.”
    “That was nearly three weeks ago. Wasn’t he satisfied with it?”
    “Satisfied! Christ, it was twenty pages.”
    “Then how come he didn’t contact you about the other four members of Shareholders Five?”
    He leaned back against the desk. “Got me.”
    “I don’t believe that.”
    “Your privilege.”
    “This is a murder—”
    “Skip it, I know my rights better than you do. The Berkeley Police Department has been on me for twenty years. You better believe I know how far you can push.”
    “Look—”
    “Talk to me when you’ve got money in your hand.”
    I turned and left, nearly stumbling over two refugee children playing a game with sticks in the hallway.
    Ott was right; he knew his law. I had gotten as much as I was going to from him, at least until the discretionary fund came through. But I had been wrong in thinking that Ralph Palmerston hadn’t paid him. He’d have been paid when he handed in his report.
    Even with Ott refusing to divulge more, the report itself might give me a lead to the other subjects, or to Palmerston’s intentions for them. Palmerston had no business office, so the report would probably be in his house.
    I was tempted to drive up there, but I decided against it. I had left Lois Palmerston in shaky condition last night. She had been planning to take sleeping pills. Waking up a widow, a prominent widow, the day after her husband had been killed to demand to search her house would be a tricky business. Shareholders Five might well have had nothing to do with Palmerston’s murder. It could have been just another charitable gesture on his part. (Or it could have been something else.) But if it hadn’t led to his death, then the best suspect I had was Lois herself. It wouldn’t hurt to find out more about her, and to find it out from the man who had bought her her Mercedes.
    I drove west toward the bay, my thoughts bouncing between Lois Palmerston, Adam Thede, Herman Ott, and Herman Ott’s two crullers. It was nine-thirty when I pulled up in front of Munsonalysis.
    Munsonalysis occupied the second floor of a modern stucco building in the industrial section of Berkeley. Fifteen years ago this area had been a mixture of old factories and wooden houses. The streets were patch-paved; lawns were littered with cars in various states of disembowelment. Its only attraction then was the easy access to the freeway. But with the advent of small businesses—printing, publishing, and all the computer offshoots—the low rents for commercial space drew Berkeley’s young entrepreneurs. The same boys and girls who had marched in the sixties’ demonstrations, who had primal screamed and been Rolfed in the seventies, had now wriggled toeholds or even footholds into the commercial world of the eighties. And those toes were