Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (12 page)

There was an appointment calendar on the desk. I took it.

Then I picked my way to the other side of the room and examined the bookcase. Boards on bricks. After hearing him talk, I hadn’t been sure he could read, but there weren’t many books. One novel, written years ago by a woman who had the idea that superior people had more rights than other kinds of people, including the right to live and prosper. I’ve never cared much for inferior people myself, but I figured that my ideas about inferiority might not tally with hers. There were a lot of pamphlets written by people I’d never heard of, a few books about World War II, a biography of Joe McCarthy, a few history textbooks, and notebooks that held scribblings from history and political science classes. The notes were sprinkled with question marks, exclamation points, and words like
bullshit, commie,
and
fag.
I didn’t look to see what he might have done to the history books.

A few newsmagazines, ranging from moderate to very conservative, tossed casually on the couch like throw pillows, completed the intellectual decor. I raised my flashlight to the walls. Several copies of the
CORPS
fliers I’d seen in his desk were hanging from nails bashed into the damaged plaster, spaced artistically around the room. And two very good reasons why Cutter had not let me come into his apartment to talk to him. Two drawings, unframed and taped to the wall. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to punch nail holes in them. One was a portrait, in ink, of Cutter himself. The other was a drawing of the house Margaret Bursky had shared with John Harley. Both drawings were signed MB. I took them down, swept my light briefly around the room, and headed for the bedroom.

Cutter had used a less aesthetic approach in there. The walls were bare. His dresser drawers were unremarkable, except that they smelled about as good as the kitchen. Shirts, underwear, pants, socks. I found a cheap bracelet in with his underwear but I didn’t guess it was his. After all, I once found a bra in my sock drawer and I still don’t know how it got there. A couple of ties. I looked in the closet. More pants, more shirts, a couple of jackets, some shoes on the floor. I scanned the shelf above the clothes rod. A large paper bag. I brought it down to eye level and looked inside. Sketch pads. Three of them. I opened one and glanced at the first drawing. No signature, but a genuine artist had done it and I knew of only one artist in this case. Besides, the style was very familiar. I stuck the drawings I’d taken from the living room in with the sketch pads, tucked the bag under my arm and decided to get out of there. I closed the back door carefully behind me, tiptoed down the stairs, sauntered around to the front of the building, walked slowly to my car, and took off without the squeal of tires. If I hadn’t quit smoking a year back, I would have stuck three cigarettes in my mouth at once.

That was when I began to worry about the effect my burglary might have. Maybe it would stir things up too much, make the waters muddy, send felons fleeing in all directions. The only reason I was bothering to worry about that was because I didn’t have to worry any more about getting caught in the criminal act.

The important thing was that I had evidence of Cutter’s involvement in the case and I had it in my hands. And maybe, somewhere in the papers I’d taken, I’d get more. The second, and even more important thing was, I’d gotten out with my ass and my freedom intact. I should have felt clever and groovy and macho, like one of those lean fast-talking types in the old movies. But they had never even looked nervous, and I had been terrified during the whole adventure.

I headed straight home with the booty.

Rosie’s truck was out front and the cottage lights were on, so I knocked lightly on her door. I heard her footsteps and Alice’s.

“Hi. You alone?”

She nodded. “Come on in. I’ve got some information for you.” She paused and looked me over carefully. “You okay? You look a little flushed. Glittery around the eyes.”

“I’m okay, but I’d love a beer.” She got me one. I sat down with her at the kitchen table. “I burglarized a house tonight.”

“That’s more exciting than my news.” She laughed. “You tell first.”

I told her about Cutter, and about his apartment, finishing up with: “I haven’t even looked at the stuff yet.” Rosie was pleased. I hadn’t seen her look that excited since just before she found out the gorgeous dark-haired “writer” she was seeing was dedicated to group sex and was barely literate.

We decided to look through the spoils together, but first she wanted to tell me what she’d learned.

“It’s really only a sidelight on Bursky’s character,” she said modestly, “but the name was familiar and I remembered where I’d heard it before. A friend of mine used to work for a feminist art quarterly down in L.A. It ran out of money and folded a few months ago. Anyway, I called her today and asked her what it was I remembered her saying about Bursky. It turns out they wanted to do an article on her, a kind of ‘where is she now’ story.” I nodded. Apparently Bursky hadn’t been forgotten by everyone. “Well, they wrote to her up here, asking if they could talk to her. She wrote back, and she wasn’t friendly. She said she wasn’t an artist anymore, at least not a working artist, and even if she were, she would not have her name connected with a feminist journal.” I made a face. “Yeah,” Rosie said. “She said she opposed everything the movement stood for. She used words like
immoral, rabble-rousing
and
antifamily.
She said she was a wife and proud of it, and she didn’t see any reason to associate with lesbians and whores. Those are the words she used. Can you believe it?” Rosie was shaking her head in wonder.

“Sure I can,” I said. “And that clears up the mystery.”

She frowned at me, puzzled.

“She was murdered by a lesbian whore who worked for the feminist art journal.”

“Very funny. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

We sat side by side on her couch and pulled the largest sketchbook out of the sack. Most of the drawings were portraits. There was a pencil sketch of Alana and one of Harley. The one of Harley was softer-looking than the man himself, with a weaker jawline than he actually possessed. But neither Harley nor Alana had known she was working at her art, so, if I were to believe them, the drawings had been done from memory. I wondered how many of those suspicious looks Harley thought his wife was giving him were actually just the squint-eyed gaze of an artist studying a subject.

I gave Rosie personality sketches of the people I knew as we went along. There were several pencil drawings of Cutter. Even one of Billy that wasn’t very successful. I wondered if that was because she didn’t know his face as well as those of the others or because she was in love with him and couldn’t quite tell what he looked like. But that came under the heading of useless and probably erroneous speculation.

The drawing of Iris, on the other hand, was pretty good. I began to talk about her, and I guess I went on too long because Rosie jabbed me in the ribs and made me turn the page.

“For God’s sake, Jacob, we can talk about that later.” She was smiling. “Why do you think Bursky gave all this stuff to Cutter?”

“Maybe she didn’t want to keep it at home. Didn’t want Harley to see it. Some of the faces might have been familiar to him. Like Cutter’s. She wouldn’t have wanted that. Or maybe she was just shutting her wandering husband out of her life.”

The next drawing was a tiny sketch of Cutter’s house, just a few lines, really, but recognizable nevertheless. We turned another page and out slipped a
CORPS
leaflet, the notice of a rally to be held outside Chandler Hall the week before her death. Why would she be carrying a thing like that around with her? Even with what Rosie had learned about her, I was having trouble believing that Margaret Bursky could go along with a group like that.

But then, what the hell was she doing with a guy like Cutter? Not just a kid but a nasty, dangerous kid who was maybe involved with even nastier and more dangerous grownups.

And what about
CORPS
’ connection with the fire at Harley’s office? Did they do it or didn’t they? Was it a political gesture or were they really out to kill Harley? I passed on these questions to Rosie. She said she’d be happy to come up with some answers for a year’s free rent. If she came up with the right answers, I told her, she could have a year’s free rent. But I guessed I’d rather come up with the answers myself, so how about a race?

“Look, Nero,” she snarled, “stop eating that orchid and listen to me. Either I’m working for you or I’m not.”

“Very well, Archie, you may consider yourself an employee.”

“I’m terribly glad to hear you say that, dear Mr. Poirot.”

“Not at all, my dear madame Marple.”

“Gosh, Dad, I sure hope we can clear this thing up.”

“Don’t worry, Ellery, with your brains and my connections as a ninety-two-year-old policeman…”

We turned another page of the sketchbook, and another. Two more portraits, of men I didn’t think I’d seen before. Except that one of them, a very rough sketch, kicked up some little memory. I stared at it for a good thirty seconds. Rosie waiting patiently. Then I knew who he reminded me of. The other new guy in the meditation group. Charles. The one with the ulcer. Or at least it looked like him. I couldn’t be sure.

After that, we came to the blank pages. I picked up the book and shook it. No more fliers. The smaller sketchbooks yielded nothing much: a drawing of the Earthlight Meditation Center building was the only one I could place, and the rest looked like studies or exercises. There was nothing else in the bag. I put the books back inside of it and took the meeting notes and calendar out of my pockets. We started with the calendar. There were appointments with a lot of initials and a couple of names I didn’t recognize, most often someone named Frank. And there were several meetings with MB. I skipped through the book to the date of her death. He either hadn’t had or hadn’t written down an appointment with her that day. I didn’t expect any little reminders to “set fire to the PS department,” and I didn’t find any.

We turned to the pages I’d ripped out of his notebook. They seemed to be personal notes, a spotty little diary about his political life. I should have known a bunch like
CORPS
wouldn’t have someone actually writing down the minutes of their meetings.

There were no more than a dozen barely legible, badly misspelled, and heavily abbreviated pages. No dates or anything like that, and only initials for names. Initials yet. The kid was playing at spy. But those few pages held quite a bit of information, even if I still didn’t know enough to decipher it all.

We read through the pages once, quickly, and I filled Rosie in wherever I could. Then I took out my own notebook and began to organize the scribbles.

First heading: what seemed to be names, represented by single initials. I listed all the initials, starting with the two that I thought might connect with the two full names on Cutter’s calendar:
F,
maybe for Frank, and
A,
maybe for Arthur. Then there was an
H
, a
J
, a couple of
S’s,
an
R
, a
B
, a
D.
Of course, I couldn’t be sure the initials all stood for names.
F
could stand for fire,
R
for rally, and
H
for hellfire, for all I knew. We decided to go back to them after we’d made a few more notes.

Second heading: place names. King Street was mentioned. That was the street Cutter lived on. And Chandler. Chandler was mentioned several times. Various other campus and Telegraph Avenue locations—restaurants, coffeehouses, street corners. He had met
F
several times at Telegraph and Dwight, at the tiny triangular park, a little island of dope dealing and bad music.

The only other important place name was the name of the street where the Harleys had lived. Virgo Street. Bursky was becoming more incomprehensible to me every minute. I already knew they were pretty well acquainted, but to give that crazy her address? I couldn’t believe a sane woman would do it. I was beginning to think that maybe she had killed herself. But the address was one of the later entries. It wasn’t something he’d known all along.

Okay, so those were the names and the places. Now I wanted to connect them with events. The first entry had to do with a meeting, group unnamed. The contributions of three people were mentioned,
M
,
F,
and
J
.
J
, it appeared, said it was time to do something really “significant,” something that would attract a lot of attention. This information was followed by the notation, “
F
—
F
was worried about the plan,
J
said we could always deny it. Why should we?”

“Fire?” Rosie wondered. “And someone with the initial
F
was worried about that idea?” I thought that sounded reasonable. And
CORPS
had denied setting it, after someone had claimed responsibility for it in the group’s name. Cutter? Possibly. The notes made it sound that way.

Then
J
ordered
F
to go check out Chandler. This was followed by the notation, “
M
— said already checked out Chandler.”
F
said he would do it anyway.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what was being discussed. But was this
M
Margaret Bursky?

That seemed to be all there was to that particular conversation. Another entry followed half a blank page. The character lineup was
M
,
F,
and
J
. This time,
F
had apparently come to see
M
at King Street. Margaret? At Cutter’s house?

F
said he’d checked out Chandler. Then, “
F—
told
M
he was still worried,
F
too dangerous and be careful. What a jerk.
F
said
J
going out of town,
F
in charge. Shit. Why not me?”

This last seemed to pinpoint
M
as “me”—Cutter himself. If that were so, Bursky wasn’t in it yet. It was possible that Cutter had, indeed, gone so far as to give himself a code initial. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d referred to himself as 007.