Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (22 page)

The good ol’ boy approach pleased him, as I thought it might. It was probably a rare event when Billy got let into the club of masculine shit-shooting. And it probably never happened with heavy masculine types like me, guys who wrote for magazines. Guys who asked questions about murdered women.

He slouched over to the counter, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. This man, I decided then and there, could never kill anyone. He’d be so busy watching himself do it that he’d never get it done.

“Yeah,” he said. “How about that Cutter? Looks like he’s the one, right?”

I raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips. “Yeah? What do you think?”

Billy lifted his shoulders in a languid shrug. “Good a guess as any.”

“Did you know Margaret Bursky was involved in
CORPS
?”I just tossed it to him. None of the newspapers had printed anything, as far as I knew, about Cutter and Bursky’s common cause.

“Not until today,” he said. “It’s all over the place this morning. You know how stuff like that gets passed on.”

“No, how?”

“Those
CORPS
people have got big mouths, that’s how. They’re making speeches on street corners, picketing her husband, and talking about how even she understood he was a corrupter, and how she joined
CORPS
to fight against her own husband. All kinds of disgusting stuff like that. Like I said, it’s all over the place.”

“Has anybody said anything about any other aspects of her private life?”

He was puzzled by the question. Billy, like Eddie Cutter, seemed to “hear things,” but he hadn’t heard anything about Rebecca. Nor had he heard anything about Bursky leaving the center money in her will. We talked for a while longer. I let him contribute more quotes for my article, and then I let him get back to work. If he’d killed Margaret Bursky in a fit of jealous passion or unrequited love, neither the passion nor the love had been strong enough to last a week after her death. She seemed to be a dead issue with Billy.

Before I went to see Harley I drove past the address Rosie had given me, the place where the
CORPS
meeting was going to take place that night. Just an apartment building, and a big one at that.

Then I found a parking place, this time in a yellow zone, and walked across the campus to Chandler Hall. Out in front, marching around on the sidewalk, was a clutch of
CORPS
picketers. I was relieved to see that Rosie was not yet among them. These seemed to be special friends of Eddie Cutter because their signs, this time, were all about his innocence, at least as a killer. One young man was haranguing a bored-looking crowd of about a dozen students. When I came closer, I heard him saying, “Eddie Cutter didn’t kill Margaret Harley. That woman had a political conscience. That woman was Eddie Cutter’s friend. She didn’t die of friendship. She died of shame, shame that her husband was working to bring this country down in moral ruins…”

They were being premature in defending their friend against a crime he hadn’t been charged with. Aside from that, I didn’t think this kid would have anything original to say about sin. I’m as much opposed to moral ruins as the next guy, especially when someone’s lack of morality gives him leave to beat people up. So I went upstairs to Harley’s office. The door was partly open, and I looked inside. He was with a student, a woman. He was leaning across his desk toward her, and she was leaning across the desk, from the other side, toward him. They were talking softly. I had time to see that his office was somewhat more put together than it had been the last time I saw it before he caught sight of me and jumped out of his chair. The student, also startled, saw me and blushed.

Harley was too pleasant. “Oh, hi there, Jake,” he said. “I’ll be through here in a minute if you want to wait.” I grinned back at him, nodded, and lounged against the wall outside the door. The two whispered a few more words to each other, and the young woman came out. Very young. About nineteen or twenty. A lot younger than Rebecca.

I went through the door and sat down in the warm chair she had vacated. Harley was, at this point, less pleasant.

“You should have called before you came here,” he said.

“Just stopping by on my way from here to there,” I said cheerily. “Wondered if you’d want a little progress report.”

“Of course I would,” he said grudgingly.

“Okay, but first I think you should tell me something. Why didn’t you keep me informed about the will?”

“Because I didn’t think it was relevant. You knew about CORPS.”

“She left you half of it.”

“Of course she did,” he said indignantly. “I was her husband.”

I decided to leave my thoughts unspoken and told him the good news about Cutter’s fingerprints. That made him very happy. I didn’t say anything about the peculiar circumstance of the printless coffee cup. That would have just confused him.

“Hah. So that’s why the police wanted to know if the bowl was out there when I left that morning. It wasn’t, of course. That certainly pinpoints when he was there.”

“It certainly does,” I agreed. It also had corroborated what Debbi had already told me. That Cutter had been there that morning.

I gave Harley a few more crumbs of information and finished up by telling him I’d found out why
CORPS
had chosen him as a target. He was very interested. He leaned forward, looking eager, just the way he had with the student. Well, maybe not exactly the same way.

“They just needed someone to go after,” I told him. “Anyone. Your wife suggested they go after you.” He stiffened right up, the eager look gone. I didn’t give him time to react but went right ahead and asked a couple of questions.

“Do you have any idea who’s behind
CORPS
, Harley?”

He shook his head. “Not really. But it seems obvious that a larger group is behind them. What’s that got to do with Margaret? Are you sure that’s why they picked me?”

“Yes. No indication of what the group is, huh?”

“I don’t know. But they don’t talk like real Nazis. Nothing about Jews or blacks or any particular ethnic groups. And they tend to get religious—I guess that’s what you’d call it—in their preaching. One of those moral righteousness groups. They all sound alike. They all think they’re the only ones who know what morality is. They all hide behind patriotism and Christianity—”

I didn’t particularly want to listen to Harley’s ideas on morality either, so I interrupted him.

“About Cutter and Rebecca, do you have any idea how he might have known who she was?”

He waved a disparaging hand and looked vague, gazing into the middle distance. “I’ve been thinking about that. He didn’t. He couldn’t have known her. I don’t know where he got her name, but I’ll bet that’s all he knows.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Because she would have told me. If they knew each other, she would have mentioned it to me. After all, with all that going on…” He waved his hand again, this time toward the window and the demonstrators outside. When his eyes refocused, they were fixed on me. “Who told you that’s how they chose me?” I was a little slow in catching up. His mind was jumping around like a fraternity boy in a room full of prom queens. He had returned to his arbitrary selection by
CORPS
as a bad political example.

“An ex-member of
CORPS
.”

“Oh. Well, he probably didn’t know.” Harley was beginning to look vague again. I stood up. He barely noticed. I said goodbye. On my way to the stairs, I noticed the woman student standing near a water fountain, watching my departure. I wondered if she was planning to go back to Harley’s office. I wondered what the hell the man had that fascinated so many women. I sure couldn’t see it.

The sky had been blue when I’d stopped in to visit Harley. Now dark clouds were filling the last clear gaps overhead. Not fog. Real rain clouds. The first since June. Autumn was ending, and winter was getting ready to start dumping on Northern California.

That was the only break in routine I could see coming in the next couple of days. I felt stale and dead-ended, in the case and in my life. The prewinter blues, a leftover from a time when the season meant months of cold and ice and snow.

I went home, filled the tub, made a large cheese, salami, bologna, tomato, onion, mayonnaise, and mustard sandwich, poured a glass of cranberry juice, and settled down for a long session with my stomach and my mind, the two of which are very closely related.

Two hours later I’d added hot water a dozen times and gone over the case again from beginning to possible endings from a dozen different angles.

The result? Wrinkled fingers and toes.

Wrapping myself in a warm robe, I made a couple of phone calls.

Hal didn’t have much that was new. Cutter had admitted that he’d visited Bursky at home once but said he’d been there days before her death. He kept insisting that Harley was the killer and had, indeed, told the police about Harley’s extramarital relationship.

“Has he got an attorney?”

“Public defender.”

So
CORPS
might have been one big family, and maybe the student members were spreading their loyalty to Cutter all over the jaded streets of Berkeley, but the big kids with the money weren’t about to stick out their creased necks on his behalf.

I was just about to dial again and try Rebecca when my phone rang. It was Artie. He wanted to let me know that an Oakland detective had visited
Probe
magazine and asked about me. “They wanted to know how long you’ve been a writer and where you’ve worked before.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That you’d done some stuff back East. I was as unclear as he’d let me be. Said you were a pal and I was giving you your first big break. I don’t think he believed me.” Artie did not sound worried.

“Okay,” I said, “thanks for the tip.”

When I got Rebecca on the line, she told me that Hawkins had also paid her a call.

“Are you all right?” I asked. She didn’t sound good.

“Yes. Fine.”

“Well, what did you tell him?”

“That the Harleys were clients. That Cutter might have seen me paying a friendly follow-up visit, but I couldn’t recall when that might have been.”

“That sounds okay,” I said reassuringly. Unless they got more evidence linking her with Harley.

“Jake?” Her voice was ragged with tension.

“What is it, Rebecca?”

“Maybe it would be best if you didn’t call me here again.”

I agreed to try to reach her only at home. I was relieved that she hadn’t panicked when Hawkins had questioned her and denied that she’d ever met Harley or his wife. It would be easy enough for the cops to find out who had handled the purchase of their house.

Tension was building in me, too. Even the bath hadn’t helped. I needed to get out and cut loose a little, get away from the case completely. The date with Iris was still two days away. The hell with her. There were other women, after all. Like Alana. For dinner and wine and whatever else happened.

Alana answered on the second ring. She sounded glad to hear from me, but when I asked her out, she said she was sorry and did I remember Evan?

Sure I remembered Evan. The leader of the meditation group. The slick, cozy type who had given me a little red ball and then let it get away from me. Her escort at Bursky’s funeral.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”

“Well, we’ve agreed to have an exclusive relationship, just to see if it works out.” She sounded very happy. I thought of Beatrice, the woman who had helped Evan with the group that night, and wondered how she felt about it.

“That’s wonderful, Alana,” I said with some sincerity. “I hope it does.”

“Oh, it may or it may not,” she said casually. “If it doesn’t, I’ll call you.” We both laughed and said good-bye.

I wondered briefly if I could whip together a poker game on short notice, move it up from Tuesday to Monday, but dismissed the thought before I dialed the first number. That was not at all what I was in the mood for. Did I want to dash around town with a friend, drinking and carousing, or did I want to slide into a singles bar looking solitary and mysterious and devilishly attractive? First I eliminated the friend. Then I eliminated the singles bar. I would have a drink somewhere quiet, then go out for some entertainment. There was a place on College Avenue, a jazz club, that attracted a lot of the local beautiful people, whatever they are. I don’t care much for most jazz. I think there are a lot of mediocre musicians wandering around looking cool and imitating people who were innovative thirty years ago. And I think there are a lot of people pretending to be jazz buffs because it suits the role they’ve chosen to play. But I love the atmosphere of jazz clubs. Like Alana, they represent the other side of the fifties, and I’m crazy about history.

I took a nap and woke feeling pretty good. Then I cooked and ate a leisurely dinner, spent some time dressing in clean jeans, royal blue shirt, and genuine Norwegian ski sweater, and stuck my head out the door into a fine drizzle. I added a thin waterproof jacket to my ensemble and topped the whole thing with an item I save for very special occasions: my genuine Basque beret. I looked terrific.

My first stop was a place called the Corner, a local bar that attracted an after-work crowd. Very mixed. Everything that lived in the neighborhood coexisting in one small, dim, warmly decorated space. There’s a dessert place down the block that’s four times as big and attracts the same kind of crowd. Everyone who feels at home in what a painter friend of mine once called the fern-hung, bentwood-chaired, half-the-people-are-wearing-contact-lenses atmosphere. He’s a house painter, by the way.

I slid onto a barstool and thought about drinking something. I was getting tired of wine, and that severely limited my choices.

Once, when I was young and thought I was someone I’d read about, I also thought I liked whisky. Sippin’ whisky straight up or on the rocks but never mixed with anything. Good solid sour mash. I’m not so young anymore, and I know damned well the stuff makes me gag. Watered down, maybe, or with a lot of soda. But who wants to pay whisky prices for a glass of tinted water? So I ordered a wine spritzer. White wine, soda, and lots of ice. When my drink came, I turned sideways on my stool, looking around, getting my bearings, outlining the cast of characters. It was close to eight o’clock, and the remains of the after-work crowd needed their dinners very badly.