Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

I'VE SAID I believe a person is revealed by their home but I guess I don't know what to say about the home away from home. I think maybe the home away from home could reveal our secret fantasies; as though to say, okay, while I'm here I'm somebody else. And you set up the vacation home to reveal that somebody else.

      
Of course I had never seen Jim
Davitsky's
home in L.A.

      
But this joint here on the island was bizarre, to put it mildly.

      
A party pad, obviously, and put together with that idea supreme in the planning. But it was opulent, gaudy, vulgar in a no-holds-barred stretch for sensuality, coming together as unrestrained erotica.

      
You got the feeling, walking through all that, that Jim Davitsky fantasized his "somebody else" as the Marquis de
Sade
. And you got the feeling, too, that this "somebody else" might just be unhinged—considering the context.

      
I mean, here is a guy with all the money anybody could ever want. True, he was born to a lot of it but he had more than tripled his net worth since he came into his own, so the guy had to have some business smarts. He was young, good looking, rich, popular in political circles; guy like that could reasonably entertain national political aspirations with maybe even an eye on the White House some day. After all, look who else has made it.

      
So what does this guy want, you could ask, that he does not already have?

      
Looking around this home away from home, it seemed pretty obvious what Jim Davitsky really wanted. And that "want" was clearly out of context with his many other assets. I mean, I was trying to picture this place as the Hawaiian White House, the president's home away from home, and the focus simply would not resolve. I am talking life-size copulating statuary, art-deco
Kama
Sutra wallpapers, the erotic art of the masters hanging from the walls, huge oversized sectional sofas upholstered in llama fur, funny chairs designed to accommodate every possible
sexplay
positioning, a white marble hot tub in the living room complete with retractable serving trays and even an "Oriental swing" suspended overhead—and all that is just what's up front.

      
Hey, I'm no prude. I enjoy a bit of erotica from time to time the same as anybody. I'll swing from a chandelier now and then, if I can find one to hold me. But to be totally immersed in it is, to me, to be immersed in some head problem. To be immersed in it to the point of self-destruction is akin to alcoholism or drug addiction.

      
My reading on Jim Davitsky did not all come from the Hawaiian home, of course. But taking everything together,
     
I figured I had my line on the guy.

      
Linda Shelton more or less confirmed it.

      
She had nervously but determinedly refused to hand over the big pistol she'd met me with but made no move to stop me as I went on inside for a look around. We passed no more than eight or ten words between us and things were decidedly stiff as I showed myself around the joint, then I hit her with it straight from the hip.

      
"Are you really a psychologist?"

      
"Yes."

      
I deliberately eyeballed the surroundings and

invited her to do the same. "Look around and tell me what you see."

      
She clutched the big pistol with both hands as she perched on a stool at a bar loaded with phallic symbols—even a brass bottle opener that was actually an eight-inch dildo. "We tend to see what we want to see, Joe."

      
I lit a cigarette, blew the smoke at her, settled down across from her; told her, "Don't give me that clinical stuff. This guy has a problem and you've been feeding it. So why don't you put that in your doctoral thesis?"

      
She gave me an angry look; said, "You really enjoy the leap to judgment, don't you."

      
I picked up a heavy ashtray designed as a reclining nude woman; you figure out where the ashes go. "I leap at what I'm given. Give me another and I'll try it on for fit."

      
She slid off her stool and confronted me with both hands tightly pushing the gun towards me. "You have no right barging in like this. I asked you to butt out. Why do you insist on dogging me around? I mean, really Joe. All the way to Hawaii?"

      
I wanted to laugh in her face but instead turned to an inspection of the bar. "Come on, Linda, you're a bright girl; you can do better than that. No right? People dying all around me, people invading my home and shooting it up, couple of attempts on my own life—I've got no right? If I can't leap at this, kid, you tell me what I should be leaping at."

      
Her gaze dropped, the gun with it, and it seemed that her anger was losing its focus. She turned away from me. "Joe ..."

      
I was not enjoying this, not even a little bit. I said, "Just to save us both some meaningless time, I know about your little talent pool enterprise."

      
“I see.”

      
"I don't. Maybe you could enlighten me. Give me something else to leap at."

      
She lowered herself onto one of the furry sofas, looking beautiful but also vulnerable as hell; placed the pistol on a table at her knees, delicately pushed it away from her. The outfit she was wearing was not designed for dispassionate viewing, a fluffy thingamabob over a sheer leotard that only highlighted the natural endowments
thereunder
. She lay back with her hair fluffed onto the furry background, sighed heavily, kept the eyes averted as she told me, "God, I'm tired, Joe. Haven't slept since . . . don't remember when. It's a nightmare."

      
I said, "Yeah. Let's compare your nightmares with mine. Start with the talent pool."

      
"You won't believe me. You want to believe the worst. Go ahead. Be my guest. Call me whatever you came to call me, then please get out of here before they come back."

      
I said, "You still don't get it, kid. I came to call you nothing. I came after some killers."

      
She looked at me, then; at her pistol, out of reach; back to me again. "Including me?"

      
"You do seem to be rather comfortably installed among them."

      
She raised to an elbow, regarded me soberly for a moment through half-closed eyes. "Guilt by association, huh?"

      
I shrugged. "Not to mention, birds of a feather and all that. What am I supposed to think?"

      
She said in a dulled voice, "Obviously you think like a cop so I guess you're supposed to think what you're thinking. I really don't care, Joe. At this point, I really don't care."

      
"Okay, you owe me nothing and it works both ways. But satisfy my curiosity. Why are you tangled up with this guy Davitsky?"

      
"He's my boss."

      
"So I gather. But when did you find that out?"

      
She lay back down, began picking her words in a rather careful recitation. "Private audience one night. He called me back, told me how much he appreciated my so-called art. We talked. One thing led to another."

      
"Culminating in what?"

      
She looked around. "All this."

      
"Uh huh. But take it backward several steps."

      
She sighed. "Ever think of it?" she asked a moment later. "Most of our troubles begin very small, so small we don't recognize it as a trouble until it has grown large enough to devour us."

      
I suggested, "Put it in your thesis."

      
She replied, "Maybe I will."

      
"Put it to me first."

      
She raised both knees and crossed them, interlaced her fingers behind her head, looked sort of dreamy for a moment, then said, "He was very charming. Nice looking. Fabulously successful. Very political, powerful. Did a lot of entertaining. Told me he was always in need of attractive women to help him entertain important visitors. Made sense. I was always worried about these girls out moonlighting on their own. Never knew what they'd run into. Jim's proposal made sense, at the time. So I talked it over with George. Look, the girls were already doing it. And in a highly dangerous way. We figured we could elevate the process a bit, do everybody a favor."

      
"Including yourselves."

      
The lady was apparently beyond anger now. "Sure. Why not? Nobody pays my bills for me. I'd been knocking myself out for years with very little gained. If I am going to perform a service I should be properly paid for it. Do you work for nothing?"

      
"Lately, yeah," I replied. "But not out of choice."

      
She sat up suddenly, clasped her knees to her chest, shivered. "I don't know why it should matter but I can't stand what you're thinking about me."

      
"Maybe I'm just your mirror."

      
She stared at me through a moment of heavy silence, then said, "There is that, too, I guess. Something of a psychologist yourself, aren't you."

      
"Most cops get that way."

      
"Some laboratory you've got, huh."

      
"We get it all, yeah."

      
"Joe, please believe okay—I admit that this whole idea fascinated me. Jim is an exciting man with a very exciting life ... including many interesting people. Someone I once studied in school, maybe Freud, said there's a little bit of whore in every woman. Maybe that's true, and maybe there's a whole lot of whore in me. I found it exciting. No, I found it positively fascinating. It really turned me on to be around such stimulating men, I mean powerful men who are shaping the future. But I—please believe this—I did not know the party was going to get rough."

      
I nodded my head at that. "Usually we don't. Or there wouldn't be a party. As for your future-shaping fascinating men, though ..." I let my eyes stray about the room again, silently inviting her to do the same. "What shape, you figure, do they have in mind?"

      
She said, "I didn't know about this. Well ... okay, I'd heard about it. But ... somehow it just didn't translate this way." She looked altogether miserable; dropped her gaze to inspect her own knee. "I know what you're thinking."

      
I told her, "I'm thinking your boy is certifiable for the loony ward."

      
She nervously rubbed her knees. "Maybe so.”

      
"So why'd you run to him?"

      
"You won't believe me."

      
“Try me.”

      
"I'm still not sure about any of this, you know. I mean, I don't know for sure what to believe about Jim. I just know that Maria—Maria Avila, she was Juanita's roommate .. ."

      
"I know. Go on."

      
"Maria served notice that she was out of it. Now Maria is ... well, as I think I once told you, Maria would go for anything. If enough money was involved, she'd take you in a cesspool if that was what you wanted. But even she was scared, really scared, and she flatly refused to take any more assignments for Jim Davitsky."