Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (11 page)

But I wasn’t ready to tell her. Telling her would be like reporting to Harley and I wanted more to go on. “Not yet.”

“Why not?” She was disappointed, maybe even angry.

“Because I don’t have anything definite yet. I’m just following some leads that may go somewhere. And of course there’s the fire. The police are going to think it’s a pretty strange coincidence, a man’s wife gets killed and next thing you know someone’s trying to cook him. This is going to stir them up a little for sure.”

Her mouth twisted in an ugly grimace. “The police. They would have been just as happy to snoop around a little and let it go at suicide. They’ve got enough to do. But now, oh, hell.” Suddenly there were tears in her eyes. I checked my hand for catsup and reached across the table to grasp her shoulder. The tears didn’t spill. She drained her wineglass and ordered more wine.

“Look,” I said, “it’s going to be okay. I’m going to clear this thing up, and you and Harley can ride off into the sunset. Hey, what are friends for?”

“Don’t you mean what is money for?” she shot back at me.

“Rebecca, I’m on your side.”

“Terrific. But are you sure you know what you’re doing?” She was close to tears again, but I didn’t touch her. Sure, she was upset, but I was beginning to feel a little cranky, too.

I let myself go. “Listen, bitch, you want to change your mind about my doing this job, you just let me know. But Harley owes me for the time I’ve already put in.”

She peered at me as though she’d just realized I was sitting across from her. “No. No, that’s not what I’m saying.” She slumped. “I’m sorry. Of course I want you. I guess I’m just angry with Harley and upset about the fire.” I looked unconvinced, so she added one more trouble for good measure. “I’m feeling a little crazy around business, too. It’s been rough lately. There’s a deal I’ve been trying to close, a contingency thing, I need the money, and it’s dragging on. If I seem irritable, that’s a big part of it.” She sighed, deep and long, and reached her hand across the table to mine. I realized then that the woman was close to the edge. It was all just too much for her. All that and business problems, too. And Harley, far from being a pillar of strength, was adding to the strain, helping to drain her of her stamina. She was trying to hold up both of them, and he wouldn’t even let her close enough to do it right.

I got the feeling that if I wasn’t careful I’d get the blood sucked right out of me. I wasn’t about to try to do this job with the pair of them wrapped around my neck. I finished my beer and told her I had to get going. She nodded absently.

“You will tell us, Jake, when you have something definite?”

“I’ll report directly to Harley, Rebecca,” I said. That wasn’t good enough for her, I could tell. She’d said “us”; I’d said Harley. But she let it go, and I left her sitting there chewing her thumbnail and staring into her wineglass.

I made a quick stop at home to water my begonias and feed the cats. Rosie still wasn’t there. I put in another call to Debbi Lawton. She was home and invited me to come right over.

Debbi lived in one of those straight-edged apartment buildings erected in the fifties, the kind that hasn’t aged gracefully. It was pink stucco with six door bells and a carport that seated six. I rang her bell and she buzzed me in the door. She was second floor left rear.

She showed me into a nearly characterless living room that was saved by human clutter: a pile of magazines in a chair, an unframed poster rolled up and leaning in a corner, dirty ashtrays and rings on the Plexiglas top of the coffee table. The living room windows had a view of the carport roof and the pleasant tree-shaded yard of the house next door.

Debbi gave me a very bright smile and offered me a drink. I asked for coffee. I was a little muzzy-headed from my encounter with Rebecca and needed to sharpen up. I had plans for the evening.

“All I have is instant,” she said with a “we bachelor girls are just so flighty” expression on her face. I smiled and said that would be fine. She trotted to the other side of the bar that divided the living room from the tiny kitchen area.

I’d been right about Debbi. She was young. About twenty-three, I guessed, with the slightly dulled bounce of the aging cheerleader. She was pretty, with even features and a body with no apparent flaws. Light brown hair, medium height. I stifled a yawn and told her about the magazine article. She was still smiling, but the smile looked a bit strained.
Lord
, I thought,
what is the idiotic convention that teaches women they must smile constantly?
I have never understood. Is it supposed to be attractive? Is it supposed to keep up the morale of the unsmiling male? Or are they baring their teeth?

She brought a tray into the living room. One cup of coffee, one glass of orange juice. She set the tray down in front of me, on the coffee table, and sat next to me on the couch.

“If you want a screwdriver, too,” she said, flourishing her glass, “don’t be shy.”

I mumbled my thanks. The coffee was too hot to drink. Nice apartment, I said. Thanks, she said, but she didn’t believe in apartments. She wanted to buy, make an investment. She was looking around. We talked about ourselves for a while. She was one of that new breed of young people coming out of school with business degrees and corporate ambitions. Very steady, very work-oriented, very much a part of what my age group used to call the establishment. It was inevitable. A law of nature. There’s always a conservative reaction to radical chaos, and vice versa. She was two years past graduation and two years along in her five-year plan for corralling her own key department at the downtown Oakland office of her home conglomerate. I thought it was all admirable. She thought my work as a writer was admirable. We sat there like two aliens from different galaxies, smiling and nodding at each other in different languages.

I brought the conversation around to Margaret Bursky. I told her I had some of Bursky’s private papers and that was where I’d found her name.

She raised both her eyebrows. “Whatever would I be doing in her private papers?” she wanted to know.

“Well, she just mentioned you.”

“In whatever context?” The question was friendly, but the skin on her face looked stretched.

“As a member of the group—”

She turned pale. “What group?”

“The therapy group.”

She stood up abruptly and walked to the kitchen, ostensibly to make herself another drink. But I caught a glimpse of her averted face. It was flushed. “That’s supposed to be confidential,” she said in a hard, tight voice.

“I assure you,” I said in what I thought might be a corporate manner, “that this article concerns itself only with Margaret Bursky.”

“Well, I don’t see why!” she flashed at me. “What was so damned wonderful about her anyway?” She marched back into the living room with her second screwdriver and faced me squarely, free hand on her narrow hip.

“She was a fine artist.”

“Hah!” She swallowed a whole lot of orange juice and vodka. “She was a dirty old woman. She had no business messing with men half her age. You want to know about her? I’ll tell you about her. Always so damned prissy and mealymouthed. Like she’d never even heard of sex. And all the time she was leading him around like—”

“Who was she leading around? Him? Who?” I interjected. “Billy?”

She stared at me. “Billy? Who’s Billy? I’m talking about Ed. Eddie Cutter.” She practically spat the name at me.

My coffee had finally cooled. I drank some. “They were lovers?” I asked.

She studied my face, her eyes narrowing. “I don’t know.” Her voice was bitter. “How would I know? They certainly weren’t talking about it if they were. And they certainly weren’t about to tell me.”

I ruminated. It was not easy to ruminate in a small space filled with passion, but I ruminated anyway. To Alana, the woman had been sexless. To Debbi, she was a sex-mad hag. Once, to the art world, she’d been a creative, innovative painter. Now, to a middle-aged gay gentleman, she was a narrow-minded bigot. Who the hell was she? Probably all of them. I guessed, if you’d asked four people about me, you’d come up with four different references, too.

As I ruminated, Debbi regained her control.

“Sorry I blew up, Mr. Samson. May I call you Jake?” Some of that old smile was back. I smiled, too. “It’s just that some people seem to think that being an artist excuses anything. Anything at all.” I nodded sympathetically. That was certainly true. And there were the posturing nonproducers who stretched that premise to its limit. But I had often thought that if you were cursed with a creative compulsion and the insecure life it could bring, you maybe had the right to a little leeway.

I stayed another fifteen minutes, by the end of which she was working on her third screwdriver and flirting heavily. An old-young woman-girl, angry, bewildered, and stuck in her own contradictions. Trying to solve her own puzzle and ashamed, apparently, that she was getting help from a therapist to do it.

Dusk had given way to full dark when I drove back to Edward Cutter’s apartment building. I parked just down the street on the other side and began to watch for signs of life at his windows. A light was on in the front room. I thought I saw a shadow of movement across one of the drawn shades, so I settled down to wait.

About an hour later the light went out. A few minutes after that, Cutter burst out the front door, climbed into an old battered blue Chevy two-door and drove off.

When he’d turned the corner, I got out of the car and approached the house, reconnoitering. I was carrying a glass cutter and a tire iron, the cutter in my pocket and the prying tool tucked inside my jacket under my arm. Only one of the other apartments showed light from the front, the second floor west. Cutter’s apartment was second floor east. I strolled up the driveway, casually, like I belonged there, and around to the back of the house.

The place was a burglar’s dream. No lights at the back. Precarious-looking wooden porches, roofed and shadowed, stretching across both stories. There was music coming from a well-lighted house across the back fence, but no people were in sight. I squinted up at what had to be Cutter’s back door and could just barely see that there was a window next to it.

This was as good a time as any. I headed up the creaky wooden stairs to the second-floor porch.

The upper pane of Cutter’s back window had been broken and patched with plywood. That was good and bad. I wouldn’t have to deal with any tricky window locks, but it was going to take some time to get the plywood off.

I jammed the prying end of the tire iron down inside the frame and began to push at the wood, nailed from the inside, very slowly and gently. Splintering wood makes a hell of a noise.

The wood itself wasn’t the problem, though. The silly fool had nailed half-inch plywood with two-and-a-half-inch spikes. Careful as I was, a couple of those nails squawked like chickens giving birth.

Finally the bottom of the plywood was free and the sides loosened enough for me to reach in and unlock the bottom half of the frame. When I pulled my hand back out again, I ripped my index finger open on one of the exposed nails. Blood dripped on the sill. I didn’t bother to wipe it up. Cutter would be able to tell someone had been there whether I left some of myself behind or not.

The lower frame was stuck, but I levered it up with the prying tool and crawled inside. Then I unlocked the back door so I could get out fast if I had to.

The flat had the usual layout, with the back door opening into the kitchen. It could have smelled better. The odor was easily traced to a sinkful of dirty dishes. A long hallway led from the kitchen to the living room, with bedroom and bathroom opening onto the hall.

I started in the living room, at the front of the flat. The room was dimly lit by the street lamps outside. There was just enough light to get an idea of the contents of the room. The windows were covered by cracked old shades. No curtains. The usual furniture. A desk. Pictures of some kind, of varying sizes, on the walls.

The stomach flutters that had begun when I was working on the window were now accompanied by a heavy heartbeat and an aromatic sweat. All the signs that tell you when you’re doing something dangerous and probably stupid, like burglarizing someone’s apartment or falling in love. I had a little talk with myself.
Jake
, I said,
you are bigger than Cutter and probably stronger. He doesn’t look like he’s ever done much physical work. If he surprised you, you could just punch him out and go
.

I aimed my pocket flash at the desk. The first drawer didn’t yield much. A savings passbook that showed eighty-eight dollars in the bank; several months of checking statements, all of which showed a consistently survival-level income; a request to register for the draft; a few letters from his mother.

The second drawer was more interesting. It held some leaflets distributed by
CORPS
. Lots of them. Under those were some old publications from the Save Our Children campaign of a few years back, and some newer stuff put out by the Moral Majority. The guy was on some interesting mailing lists. Down at the bottom of the pile I found some fliers announcing a Nazi party rally in Chicago. And I found a notebook with just a few pages filled that looked like notes or plans. It was hard to tell with a quick glance, since the style was not lucid. I ripped out the pages and stuck them in my pocket. The leaflets I left alone. All that junk is the same.

A car door slammed outside, and a fresh flood of sweat soaked my armpits. I waited. Nothing. Nothing but new and awful thoughts. Maybe all Cutter had to conceal was a crush on a dead woman. Maybe he’d see the faint light of my flash from outside and call the police from the corner liquor store. Credentials from a magazine wouldn’t go far in a defense for breaking and entering.

I went through the rest of the drawers more quickly, anxious to work my way toward the back door. No photographs of Cutter and Bursky. No photographs of Cutter wearing a swastika armband or holding an apple pie in one hand and a flag in the other. A picture of his mom. She looked like a nice woman.