Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (2 page)

The crowd had quieted.

“Whether or not I’m the next governor,” he said, “I’m going to be very proud to be your first candidate.”

The crowd went wild again. He smiled and raised his hands in that double-V salute, and stirred them up even more. Then he got serious, lowered his hands halfway and made quieting motions, a gentle pushing that said clearly, “I’d like to speak now.” The crowd hushed and he began.

His voice was good, but not as perfect as the rest of him. It could have been deeper. It could have been a little less nasal. But it did have one important thing going for it. He spoke midwestern standard English, the kind that knows no accent. The kind that most Californians speak and that television actors and anchors strive for. Classless but classy.

His blue eyes blazed with a vision of glory as he spoke of a worldwide movement, of the need to preserve the integrity of the planet, of our symbiotic relationship with all forms of life. Of the duty to protect and to bring about ecological renewal. He used the words wisdom, care, respect and responsibility. He talked about peace, too, and he lost me because I don’t believe it’s possible within a single human, let alone among us all. But he caught me and dragged me back again by advocating decentralized political authority— I personally happen to think people can’t govern themselves in units bigger than villages. And he held me when he talked about ecologically based economies and technologies.

All that stuff sounded good, partly because the man used none of the standard rhetoric of the standard left. Not once, for example, did he use the word
struggle.
But the hysterical cheering of the crowd made me nervous. There was something sexual about it.

Richmond concluded with a rousing call to the “defense and regeneration of life, a future of love and cooperation among the communities of humanity, living in harmony with all of nature, and an unswerving effort to deliver intact to the future the air, the land, the seas, the plants, the animals, the earth itself— our home!”

The crowd was on its feet, screaming, yelling “Vivo!” and “Joe! Joe! Joe!” Rosie and I stood, too. The TV people and several predators I guessed were print-media reporters rushed up front, mikes and pencils waving.

I was thinking,
yeah, I’d give both my legs to see it happen, but I’d never have to make that sacrifice
. Humans have been shitting in their own cave too long. Joe Richmond’s vision was science fiction. We lived in a world where people thought birds were dirty and pesticides were clean. It made me want to cry, way down in some childlike core, but I was pretty sure that when I died, the earth would be a more poisonous place than it was when I was born.

“Jake? My God, you look so depressed.” It was Rosie, snapping me out of my polluted blue reverie.

“No I don’t,” I said. “What is this Vivo, anyway? What’s it stand for?”

“It’s Esperanto for ‘life’.”

“Terrific,” I said. But I let her talk me into signing up for their mailing list.

A little over a month later, in May, Joe Richmond came into town again for one last Bay Area bash before the June convention.

I’d been getting mail from the Vivos all that time, announcements, schedules, pep talks, and I’d read just enough of it to figure out why they hadn’t run their candidates in the primaries. They couldn’t do it because they weren’t a legal political party. They’d tried to qualify with a petition campaign, but they hadn’t gotten the numbers they needed. They said they got a late start. So what they were doing instead was having a kind of nominating convention where they would vote to support one candidate who would run as an independent. The candidates had agreed to abide by the convention’s choice. As far as I was concerned, this was a pretty loopy approach to the electoral process. I lost interest and stopped reading the stuff they sent me, and I certainly didn’t go to any of their meetings. So it was news to me when Rosie said there was going to be a benefit in San Francisco on the tenth of the month.

“Want to ride over with me?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Tell me more.”

“Great party, great entertainment, great cause, and an inside view of a Pacific Heights mansion. What more do you need?”

“The price.”

“Hundred.”

“Hundred?”

“I’ll take you for your birthday.”

“My birthday’s in February, and I’d rather you gave me a date with Debra Winger. Really great entertainment?”

She named a famous impressionist and a sixties rock star I’d liked back then. “And some local acts, too. Joe Richmond will be in town for it, and Rebecca Gelber will probably come. I’ve never met her.”

I’d been reading about Rebecca Gelber, from time to time, in my morning scan of the paper. She lived in the area somewhere. She was the woman who was running against Richmond for the Vivo endorsement.

I don’t know what made me decide to go to the benefit. Fascination with a man who would be king? The impressionist? The rock star? The mansion? Maybe I felt guilty for making the Vivos waste all that postage on me. I agreed to go.

The benefit was still a few days away when Richmond hit Northern California and began to get more local press again. He was all over the place— Silicon Valley talking about polluted groundwater, San Francisco talking about the Bay, Sonoma County talking about the Russian River and sewage problems. I saw him being interviewed on the six o’clock news, and I read about him in the papers. Gelber was also making the rounds. She was, after all, the native daughter, and her people didn’t take the opposition’s invasion lying down. She was everywhere, too.

I was determined to have a good time, since I was paying so much for it, so on the big night I whipped myself into a party mood while I was getting dressed. I sang, I danced, I smiled at myself in the mirror. My twin tiger cats, Tigris and Euphrates, watched me from the bed with half-closed eyes. I ran a comb through my hair— it’s blond and doesn’t show the gray much, women like the curls, and it’s hardly thinning at all yet— one last time, dumped some food in the always-empty cat dishes, and headed up to Rosie’s.

“So,” I said, as we cut down Fifty-first Street to the freeway on-ramp, “how come you aren’t bringing a date?” We hadn’t talked much lately.

“Between engagements,” she said. I knew the social worker was long gone, but I’d thought the chef, Lissa, would be around for a while. I said I was sorry to hear it. “And you? Why isn’t Lee coming tonight?”

“I haven’t talked to her for a week,” I said. “She’s been on one of her work binges.” Lee was an attorney who lived up in Petaluma. I’d been seeing her off and on for several months. Rosie murmured something consoling about that. We were crossing the Bay Bridge. It was a nice evening, with the fog beginning to drift in through the Golden Gate and lap up the western edge of the city. The City. San Francisco. All the other cities in the Bay Area are called by name. They are not The City.

When you take the Bay Bridge into San Francisco you ride the upper level and you get the full impact of the view. Riding back to the East Bay on the lower deck, you don’t see much of anything. Which says a lot about attitudes around here. But what the hell, man, the East Bay’s tough; we don’t go for that fancy stuff anyway.

Pacific Heights, on the other hand, goes for the fancy stuff in a big way. This is the kind of neighborhood where mayors live, and internationally notorious attorneys, and society remnants of an older San Francisco where coming-out parties really meant something. The houses are mansions made of stone, like rocky crags looking down on one of God’s most favored places.

The one we were going to looked like it had fifty rooms. Unfortunately, it did not have fifty garages, so my Chevy and I were on our own. I found a spot on the street, only three blocks away, and we walked back. Just walking on that street made me feel like I had money.

A butler in tails opened the door. He was very big and very muscular. He glanced at our tickets, and as he led us through the reception hall I whispered to Rosie, “He looks like a bouncer.” She favored me with an exasperated smile.

The butler-bouncer escorted us to a double sliding door, at which stood a large blond woman who also could have been a bouncer. She wasn’t wearing a horned helmet, but I could imagine one. Her pale hair was captured in a braid that circled the top of her head, and when Rosie handed her our tickets, she smiled and said, “Ja, danke, Rosie.”

“You’re welcome, Gerda,” Rosie replied.

The room we entered was huge, maybe seventy feet square. What kind of house, I wondered, had a living room that size? Then I realized the “living room,” or parlor, or whatever this place had, was somewhere else on the first floor. This was a ballroom. It was furnished with a lot of folding chairs, some— get this— sconces on the walls, a couple of banquettes between three large draped windows, a big refreshment table, and a stage at the far end. People were milling around. Dress ranged from dinner jackets to jeans, from long skirts to shirts, tights, and no skirts at all.

Rosie and I, pretty well covered by mid-level clothing, fit in just fine.

About a hundred people were already there, and more were filtering in past the Valkyrie at the door. I recognized some faces from the speech, one of them belonging to the graduate student who had introduced Joe Richmond that night. Rosie said hello to a couple of people, and introduced me to a red-haired young woman who taught art somewhere and was a partner in a video company called Cleo’s Asp. Her name was Cassandra, or maybe it was Pandora.

They got into a conversation about someone I didn’t know, so I wandered off toward the refreshment table, up front near the stage. There were two bowls of punch, both with orange slices floating in them. One was labeled nonalcoholic. I tried the other one, which turned out to be a watery sangria.

I was drinking punch and listening to a nearby conversation about deformed ducks at a pesticide-polluted wildlife preserve, when a deep, soft female voice said, “I don’t think we’ve met, have we?”

We definitely had not. She had long dark hair, hot brown eyes, and a quirky smile. She was dressed the way some college women dressed when I was twitching through puberty. The kind of older women I found agonizingly desirable. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a black beret, a wraparound skirt, and black tights. I must have stared.

“Have we?” she repeated.

“No. But just for a moment there, you looked familiar. I’m Jake Samson.”

She extended her hand and I took it, briefly. “Pamela Sutherland. I saw you come in with Rosie Vicente. I’ve heard her mention you. I don’t think I’ve seen you at any of our meetings, have I?” She was examining me closely as she spoke, as though she were trying to figure out where I fit in the world and if I fit in hers.

“No. Obviously a mistake on my part.”

She smiled coolly, ladled herself a cup of the nonalcoholic, slugged it down, and said, “Maybe I’ll see you later. I’m on, now.”

The guitar case she retrieved from a chair next to the stage stairs was old and battered. She wasn’t old enough to have worn it out herself. But then, she wasn’t old enough to be copying the dress of the Beat Generation from memory, either. Maybe she’d been frozen for thirty years and someone else had been using her guitar.

There was a quick burst of applause as she strolled onto the stage, set the instrument case down, and snapped it open. She looked around and gestured to someone in the crowd, who clapped his hand to his head in a “Damn, I forgot” gesture, trotted off to another room, and returned carrying a wooden stool, which he handed up to her. She placed it behind the microphone, fiddled with the mike until it shrieked, and said, “Hi.” The crowd went wild. Then she pulled out a guitar that was only a little less dark with age than the case. It was an acoustic guitar; the stool was a coffeehouse stool.

Pamela’s style and her performance were perfect examples of the way cycles work. Everything comes back, but always with kinks, like the original idea had been lying wrinkled in a closet too long. Her bearing was not quite right, and she was a better musician than most of the coffeehouse strummers I remembered. As a woman, she lacked the diffidence of those earlier female folksingers. Her songs were not political in the same way— there were no songs about unions and bosses in her repertoire— but there was a villain, a “they” as in “What Have They Done to the Rain?” By the time she’d gotten to that one, an old favorite of mine, I had rejoined Rosie near the back of the room. The song appeared to be a favorite of Rosie’s, too, because I caught a suspect glint of moisture in her eyes, and when the music ended, I was afraid she’d break her hands clapping.

“Sentimental slob,” I said.

“Yeah. I tend to get maudlin over life and death.”

“Melodramatic, too.”

“You don’t mean that.”

I just smiled at her. She smiled back.

“Didn’t I see you talking to Pam before her performance?”

“Just a couple of words. I think she thought I was a ringer for the nuclear-power industry. Direct from Rancho Seco, brought to you by the friendly folks at Pacific Gas and Electric Company.”

Pam was being cheered wildly by the dewy-eyed crowd.

I wondered if I could ever believe in even a good cause that passionately again. It would be fun. Probably even good for the arteries.

Pam was taking her bows, but refused to do an encore. Instead, she introduced a band called Three Mile Island. I could not categorize their music at first, until I heard them singing “Moon Over Bikini,” followed by “Love Letters in White Sands.” Some of the members of the group had spiked haircuts in various colors; some, including the woman who played bass, had crewcuts. All were dressed in skewed copies of fifties clothing. The tenor sax, for example, had orange spikes and was dressed preppie— chinos, sweater and penny loafers. One guy was wearing white bucks, and had one of those little sacks of white shoe-dusting powder hanging from his belt.

Much to my surprise, Pamela was heading our way. She stopped beside me, nodded at me, nodded at Rosie, and stood listening politely to the group.

They were well into their fourth number when the graduate student I’d remembered from the night of the speech stalked over to Pam and whispered, “This is in very bad taste. I’m surprised at you.”