Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (17 page)

“You don’t have to do anything,” she said, and she climbed on top of me.

When I awoke the next morning, Debbi was gone. I didn’t think she worked on Saturday, so I guessed she’d fled out of embarrassment. It was nine o’clock. I jumped out of bed and almost yelled. The cracked rib reminded me of its existence.

Dressing quickly, I cursed myself for oversleeping. There was a good chance the police, like nearly everyone else, didn’t get their mail until late afternoon, and I comforted myself with that thought.

Debbi had left a note on the dresser. I thought, wryly, that maybe she should have left a ten dollar bill, as well. The note said, “You’re a nice man. I don’t usually like nice men.” I’d been nice, all right. So nice I’d forgotten to ask her where she’d been the morning Margaret Bursky was killed.

Cutter’s car was nowhere in sight when I got to his street. I rang the bell, banged on the door, and checked out his back window again. He wasn’t there. Sharp hunger pangs forced me to think about food, and I headed for a little restaurant down on Adeline, which was run by some friends of Rosie’s. They served a great breakfast, when you could get a place to sit down. I was in luck. There was an empty stool at the counter.

“What’ll you have, Jake?” Marcy, a woman I’d met a couple of times with Rosie, eyed my bruises but didn’t say anything. I ordered, we joked around a little, then she left me to brood while she took care of business.

Okay. What came next? I used the restaurant pay phone to put in a call to Hal at home. The cops hadn’t gotten to Cutter a second time. Not yet. He was still running around loose. That was all he knew.

One question kept going around and around in my head. Not so much who killed Margaret Bursky as why Debbi was still alive. If Cutter or someone from
CORPS
had killed the artist for some transgression or other, why had they just knocked Debbi around a little?

Once again I considered the possibilities. Bursky had been killed in the heat of someone’s passion—maybe Cutter’s, maybe Debbi’s, maybe Billy’s, maybe even the passion of some unknown person named
X.
Or her death had been an accident, a little error in timing or judgment by someone who was only trying to scare her, possibly Frank. Or she had torn out her own hair and jumped. She was dangerous to the group, and they had pushed her over the edge with picket signs. Any other possibilities? Probably an infinite number, but those were the only ones I could come up with before breakfast.

The food came and I wolfed it down. Two pancakes with just a touch of cinnamon; two eggs, over medium, with sausage; orange juice and coffee. That made me feel better. I felt so much better that I called Iris Hughes and asked her to have lunch with me. She wouldn’t, but she was curious about what I’d been doing and invited me to her office during her free hour between eleven and twelve. Goody.

I hadn’t been home for a long time, and it seemed like a good idea to check my answering machine and have a word or two with Tigris and Euphrates. Maybe even Rosie, if she was around.

She wasn’t, but she’d left a note: “Where the hell have you been? I’m worried and pissed off. Why don’t you ever call your old mother? The cats have been fed and soothed again. Alice sends her regards.”

There were some messages on my machine, too. One from Rosie, with a phone number where she could be reached. One from a man who left a number but no name, and whose voice didn’t sound at all familiar. One, heaven help me, from Sergeant Ralph Hawkins of homicide. One from John Harley. And one from, of all people, Eddie Cutter. Cutter said he couldn’t be reached by phone and would call me back. That left two important ones, Rosie and the cop. Rosie first. She was relieved to hear from me and sympathetic about my wounds. We made a date to have dinner together that night so I could fill her in. Then I called the number Hawkins had left. Unfortunately, he was at his desk.

He told me to stay put and that he’d be at my house in half an hour. He had some questions to ask me.

I made a pot of coffee and called the no name whose voice hadn’t sounded familiar. He said his name was Jared.

“Last or first?” I asked pleasantly. There had been, I recalled, a very important
J
in Cutter’s notebook.

“Either,” he said cryptically, “and both.”
Sure
, I thought. Just what I needed this morning before some cop dragged me off to jail. A mystery man. He said he wanted to see me, and I told him he’d have to wait his turn.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what you want to talk to me about?” I asked politely. Hell, maybe he was just a prospective client, offering me five thousand to find his striped tie in his underwear drawer.

He came on like Sydney Greenstreet. “We have,” he said in a fruity voice, “mutual acquaintances. You seem to be involved in a matter which concerns me, and I think we’d better discuss our mutual interests before you come up against some real trouble.”

A threat. Terrific. I had thought I’d be dealing with one nice harmless murderer, and I seemed to be meeting a whole flock of vicious birds. Well, wasn’t that just the way of it?

I told him I could make a tentative appointment to see him at three that afternoon, and I gave him the name of a bar that always had customers at that time of day.

Then I called Iris and told her I couldn’t make it at eleven. I didn’t tell her it was because I’d be talking to the law. Hell, I could be mysterious, too. I told her I’d be free to have a drink with her later that evening. She agreed to have Sunday brunch with me the next day. A small victory but a victory nonetheless. I took a badly needed shower to celebrate.

Hawkins was even more impressive close up than he’d been from across the room at the funeral. He looked even taller standing in my doorway. The bones of his face were clearly outlined, his skin a yellowish olive, his brown eyes tired. He was wearing brown denim pants, a brown-and-yellow-checkered flannel shirt, and a baggy lightweight safari jacket, which he didn’t take off. He eyed my battered chin with something that looked like disgust. When he introduced himself, he included his rank.

I offered him coffee; he accepted and sat down in my most comfortable chair. Euphrates joined him instantly. He patted the cat absently on its head, the way one pats a dog. Fortunately, Euphrates likes dogs and enjoys being treated like one. He settled down, purring, in Hawkins’s lap. When I came back from the kitchen, the man’s fingers were resting lightly on the cat’s shoulders.

He thanked me politely for his coffee, set the cup down on the end table beside him, scratched Euphrates’ neck, and turned a glittering hard look on me.

“Okay, Samson, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” The look and the question were all the more startling because his body seemed so completely relaxed.

“Don’t give me that innocent look. You’ve been running around questioning people, saying you’re a writer—let’s see your credentials, okay?” He didn’t get up. I did and I handed him the letter from
Probe.
“We’ll check on this, you know,” he said darkly. I nodded, secure in my cover. How could anyone prove I wasn’t working on an article? If it didn’t get printed, it could always be because it wasn’t good enough. “I’ve been tripping over you for days, Samson. When are you going to have everything you need and get the hell out of my way?”

“I didn’t know I was getting in your way, Sergeant.”

He glared at me. “That’s a pile of shit, pal.”

I frowned thoughtfully back at him.

“Come on, why don’t you just tell me what you’re doing and why? We don’t want any civilians getting hurt, you know.” He sneered, but that was just part of his act. I figured he was trying to get me mad enough either to say something stupid or do something even stupider. He was dying to put me somewhere out of the way for a while. He didn’t care whether I was working on an article. He didn’t care what I was doing as long as I stopped.

“Who did that to you?” He dropped his eyelids halfway and focused on my chin. I started to answer, but he cut me off. “You fell, right?” I nodded. “Last night,” he added. He was trying to impress me with his omniscience so I’d give up and talk to him. I wasn’t too impressed. If he’d talked to someone who saw me before the beating and someone who saw me after—like Jayne Doherty—he’d have before and after pictures of my face.

“What do you need from me, Sergeant?” I asked, trying to look like a man who was not feeling patient but was trying to act like he was. Just so he wouldn’t know I would have talked to him for six months if I could have found out what he knew that I didn’t. If anything.

“I want to know who you’ve talked to and what they’ve told you.”

I gave him a lot of what I had, with a few exceptions. I didn’t tell him I’d broken into Cutter’s apartment. I didn’t tell him I was the anonymous diary donor. I didn’t tell him I’d followed Cutter to the Greek Theater, met Frank, gotten kicked around, and had then given the drawings I hadn’t taken in the first place back to the people who didn’t have any business having them. I didn’t tell him I’d gotten a phone message from Cutter that day. I didn’t tell him I’d gone to bed with both Alana and Debbi and was dying to go to bed with Bursky’s shrink. I saw no reason to hide the fact that someone named Jared had called. Maybe, if he heard the name, Hawkins would give something away. He didn’t.

“Does that worry you?” he wanted to know. “This Jared guy calling?” He reached for his coffee and drank it straight down. Either he liked it cold or he was used to forgetting he had some.

I shrugged. If I admitted I was worried, I’d be halfway to admitting I’d had an experience that made me think there was cause to be scared. Hawkins was tricky, but I was sharpened by tension and physical pain. On the edge.

He didn’t push. “Sounds like you’ve got enough to write your story, Samson. Why don’t you get out of the way?” He said it without inflection, just so I wouldn’t know how much weight he was putting behind it.

“Want some more coffee?” He shook his head. “I can’t drop it yet,” I told him. “I have to follow through with these people, find out what was really going on.”

“And find out what really happened to her?” he said softly.

“Sure. Of course. What kind of story would it be—”

“Jesus, you’re an asshole,” he muttered.

“You’re probably right,” I admitted.

He sighed and gazed at the back of Euphrates’ head. “Okay, Samson. I’m going to believe you’re writing an article, even though I don’t believe it. I’m going to believe you haven’t been withholding evidence or obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty. You do know, by the way, that you could go to jail for that. For a year?” He paused for effect. I nodded agreeably. “I’m also going to believe you’re not operating privately without a license and fucking up a case against a killer because you don’t know what the shit you’re doing. Even though I don’t believe it. And I’m going to try very hard to believe you’re not going to get yourself, or me, or anyone else killed.” He shifted his gaze back to my face, like he was shooting icicles.

“What do you think about that, Samson?”

“I’m glad you believe me.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m against freedom of the press or anything.” He smiled viciously. “I just want you to know I’ll slice your ass for sandwiches if I find out that all those things I’m believing aren’t true.”

I ignored the challenge. “Of course. Sure. Listen, I want to cooperate with the police. If I get information—not that anything I get could be useful to you—I’ll pass it on. Maybe you’d be willing to do the same?” I expected that he’d either not answer or he’d take my head off for that one. He stayed quiet for a second before he answered me.

“You get any information you don’t pass on, and you’ll be writing a first hand exposé of what it’s like to be in jail. And I’m telling you only what I think will keep you from fucking up, if that’s possible. You’ve got nothing coming from me, Samson.”

“I understand that,” I replied gravely.

“Good,” he said. He put one hand in Euphrates’ armpits and one around his butt and lifted him gently to the floor. Then he stood up. He didn’t brush the striped hairs off his pants. He looked me over carefully.

“Tell me something, Samson, were you one of those types back in the sixties who used to call cops pigs?”

“No.” ·

“You’re the right age.”

“So are you. You want to know what I was doing in 1968?”

He looked bored. “Nam?”

“I was wearing a Chicago police uniform and bashing heads.”

“Couldn’t take it, huh?’’ His face revealed no surprise. I wondered if he’d already checked far enough to know about my short career.

“No,” I agreed. “I guess I couldn’t.”

He nodded. “If anything,” he said, “it’s gotten worse.” I knew he wasn’t talking about police violence. He was talking about the alienation, the frustration, the exhaustion of being a cop. But he didn’t punch me on the arm, buddy-style. He didn’t shake my hand. He just threw me another warning look and went out the door.

I couldn’t call Cutter because I didn’t have a number. Of the recorded phone calls left on my machine, only John Harley remained.

“I want to talk to you,” he blurted out the second I identified myself.

“You are.”

He growled at me. “They came to see me again this morning.”

“Hawkins?”

“No, his partner. They work in pairs, you know.” I knew that, but I let him hang on to his superiority. “He read me off a list of initials. He wanted to know if I knew anything about them. Who they might be. But that’s not all. He wanted to know if I’d been faithful to my wife. He wanted to know if there was any reason my wife would have had to wish me harm. How would they get information like that, for God’s sake?”

“From Cutter,” I told him. I didn’t explain further that the information came from Cutter through me. “I know about the documents they got the initials from.” I tried to sound reassuring. “They were something Cutter wrote, something that didn’t say anything about you and Rebecca specifically. And the same papers implicate him pretty heavily. He wrote that he went to your house, Harley, and the visit seems to have been recent. Also, you might be interested to know, he had some drawings that belonged to your wife. I don’t know where they are now, but he had them.”