Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (28 page)

She whispered, “No, Jake, that’s not true.”

“You knew Cutter was in
CORPS
. You saw him at the fire. You gave the police his name, anonymously.” That was only a guess, but I knew it was a good one. “You saw him at Harley’s. Did you figure that Bursky was involved with him or with the group?” No answer. I kept prodding for answers, my voice low and soothing. “You saw him leave the house, didn’t you?”

“I saw him,” she said. “He was there. He did it.” I could hear her breathing, harsh and fast. I thought she might he crying, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I felt sick.

“Did you go in the house then? Did you challenge her about her husband’s enemy, Eddie Cutter? Did you do some verbal pushing, Rebecca? And when she wouldn’t push verbally? What did you do then?”

I was just turning to face her when my peripheral vision picked up a rushing movement, and I spun, dropped to the balcony floor, and scrambled out of her way. One of the legs of the chair she’d been holding rammed the railing. My margarita glass went over the edge. The chair flew out of her hands, scraping across my cheek as I rose and lunged for her, catching her around the waist and crashing, still holding her, into the glass doors. She fought, punching and kicking. I clipped her hard across the jaw. She kept on fighting. I hit her again, and again, and she stopped. I stumbled back, nearly going over the railing on my own, and caught sight of movement on the balcony next door. He was standing there, his mouth open, his eyes round.

Staggering a little, I turned toward him. “Good evening, Mr. Lindstrom,” I said.

“She tried to push you off,” he said, pronouncing each word very carefully, as though he were giving me important information.

“I know,” I replied.

Hawkins took his time that evening pumping a few dozen three-quarter truths out of me and giving me enough trouble to make him feel better. The three-quarters that was true was everything I could tell him without telling him the one-quarter that might have put me in jail.

“Quite a job of investigative reporting, Samson,” he said with a voice like a straight razor. “If you’d stuck to your typewriter, it would have taken you another few days to get the information out of us.”

I’d been staring at my right knee. I looked up.

“That’s right,” he said. “Cutter looked good, but so did Harley. And Cutter’s girl friend. And,” he added, “we were on Rebecca Lilly’s trail.” He glared at me. “We’re pretty good at our job, you know.”

“I know,” I said. I meant it.

“What about the husband?” I asked him, as if I barely knew the man. Hawkins looked at me as if to say, “What the hell business is it of yours?”

Then he shrugged. “She says he didn’t know. He says he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t. He says he never even thought of it.”

I doubted that. He’d thought of it. That was why he’d paid me off. That was probably why he had been refusing to talk to Rebecca, except to tell her I was off the case. She must have been pushing him hard to get rid of me. Even Harley might have found that a little strange, especially after she’d convinced him to hire me in the first place.

Before Hawkins finally turned me loose that night, he told me the FBI would be calling on me soon for whatever I could give them on
CORPS
, and said he was “looking forward to seeing the article in
Probe
magazine.” I told him I hoped it was good enough to print. He curled his lip at me.

By the time I dragged through my gate, I was already late for my date with Faye and knew I wasn’t going to make it. In fact, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be up to anything amorous or even affectionate for a day or so, at least. I called and apologized and asked if we could move it up a day to Friday. She said I sounded awful and that the postponement was fine with her. Then I called Iris and gave her an outline of the big finish. After all, she’d gotten involved in it, and she had a right to know. Then we agreed on moving our date up a day from Friday to Saturday, and I promised I’d go over the whole thing in detail then. She said she was looking forward to it.

“I’m also looking forward to seeing you,” she said softly. “How are all your sprains, strains, and bruises?”

“You’ll never know I have them,” I said optimistically.

Several beers later my mind let go, my muscles loosened up a bit, and sleep moved several notches from unlikely possibility to no choice at all.

Morning came too soon, but I was feeling better and began the day by putting together some notes for Artie Perrine. Maybe a real writer could make something of them for
Probe.
A few paragraphs anyway. That would give me something to wave under Hawkins’s nose if I ever needed to.

The full story of the killing came to me in pieces over the next few hours, from Hal, from Harley, and even, very incidentally, from newspaper accounts. Rebecca had folded. She wasn’t holding anything back, although she was coherent only part of the time.

Late that afternoon the FBI visited me, asked me to identify a photograph of Jared, and poked me with questions about
CORPS
for an hour.

Rosie just missed them. She showed up at my door grubby from work, carrying two beers and ready to talk. She’d seen the papers, too.

“What made you so sure it was Rebecca?” she wanted to know.

I explained that I hadn’t been absolutely sure. But once I found out that Rebecca had been on Virgo Street that morning, the balance shifted. Cutter could have done it, but I’d never really thought so. Debbi could have dashed up there, waited for her chance, killed the woman, and gone back to work by noon, but it wouldn’t have been easy. Three people hanging around that house was just too much. Debbi had maybe wanted Cutter, but her career was more important to her than he was. She found another boyfriend pretty fast. One who matched her life-style. And she was less reluctant to tell me about her movements that day than she was to talk about
CORPS
. Just as scared of the group— and of people finding out she was involved with it—as she was of being connected with the murder. She didn’t fit any better than Cutter did.

Harley had no real reason to kill his wife. She would have stuck with him, money and all, no matter what. He wasn’t enough in love with Rebecca to leave Margaret, let alone kill her.

But Rebecca? She was up there. She had a good reason to kill Bursky. She’d lied to me. It had been difficult, but I’d finally had to admit she’d recommended me to Harley so he wouldn’t hire someone with brains. At least, that way she wouldn’t have both the police and a sharp investigator on her trail.

“So you think she planned the whole thing?” Rosie asked.

“I doubt it. Not any more than she’d planned on killing me.” I filled Rosie in on the murder picture as I’d reconstructed it.

Rebecca had finished her business on Virgo Street. She had wanted to call Harley, but since it was Monday, a day on which he had no classes, she didn’t know whether she could reach him at his office. She checked out his house to see if his car was there. It wasn’t, but another car, one that looked vaguely familiar, was parked on the other side of the narrow road.

“That old heap of Cutter’s you told me about?” Rosie injected eagerly. I nodded.

“But she didn’t place the car until she talked to Harley. She called him from the shopping center down the hill. While they were talking, he mentioned that
CORPS
was picketing him that day. She remembered then.”

She’d remembered that she had seen the car at Frank Shane’s agency and that it belonged to Eddie Cutter. She’d driven right back up the hill again, looking for ammunition in her campaign to get Harley away from his wife, and had just parked a short distance down the road when she saw Cutter emerging from Harley’s house with a shopping bag tucked under his arm. Eating an apple. There was a choice to make then, and she made the one that messed up her mind and her life. Instead of just snitching to Harley, she decided to confront his wife.
You loosen the reins,
she told Bursky,
and I won’t tell Harley you’re involved with his
enemies.

Rosie shook her head. “Sad.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “For everybody.”

Especially since Bursky was already upset. She’d just been forced to give up her drawings, possibly by the same kind of “I’ll tell your husband” extortion Rebecca was planning to try.

Rebecca bulled her way in and challenged Bursky on Cutter’s visit. Bursky tried to make her leave. When she wouldn’t, the distraught woman had walked out on the deck and closed the sliding doors. Rebecca opened them again and went after her. There followed a verbal battle, with Bursky demanding that Rebecca get out and calling her names, and Rebecca refusing to go, threatening her, beating her with questions about Cutter and
CORPS
, demanding that she give up her husband.

Bursky had then, according to Rebecca, advanced on her threateningly.

“I wonder if she really did,” Rosie murmured.

“We’ll never know.”

Also, according to Rebecca, Bursky had grabbed her shoulders and said that Harley had only been playing with Rebecca, that he didn’t love her, that he would never end his marriage. That Rebecca was an idiot if she didn’t know that men of Harley’s age couldn’t help doing that sort of thing.

That was when the fight got physical. Rebecca, blind with rage and in “the heat of passion”—as her lawyers were sure to put it—struggled with Bursky, pushing her against and then over the railing.

“She must have been horrified by what she’d done.” Rosie groaned.

“Apparently not. Before her attorney could shut her up, she told the cops she hadn’t meant to do it, but she wasn’t sorry it happened. She had gone down under the deck to have a look and found Bursky dead. Not breathing. No pulse. And she was glad.”

Rebecca had then returned to the deck. She didn’t know what to do about the signs of the struggle. She hoped the police would see the death as suicide, but she wasn’t entirely rational and was unaware of the small injuries the fight had inflicted on the victim. She saw that the coffee cup had been knocked to the floor of the deck. She picked it up and put it back on the table before she thought about fingerprints. Then she wiped it clean and got out of there, leaving the door on the spring lock as Harley later found it.

Over Rebecca’s objections, Harley had insisted on hiring an investigator, someone who would be on his side. Rebecca had sold him on me. Later, when she spotted Cutter at the fire, she saw her chance to get the police sniffing after him with her anonymous phone tip.

Even now, Harley still wasn’t admitting he’d begun to suspect her a few days later. His story was that the poor woman had illusions about a relationship with him, a relationship they never consummated. And it looked like he’d be a hundred thousand dollars richer in a short time.

Rebecca would either wind up in a hospital or serve a few years for voluntary manslaughter.

“What about
CORPS
?”Rosie wanted to know. “Don’t they get some money, too?”

I laughed. “They would if anyone was willing to come forward to claim it in the group’s name.” When Frank Shane had been faced with the combined force of the police and the FBI—and maybe his ulcer—and the information they already had about
CORPS
and the campus fire, he’d done some talking. He insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the fire and that he had, in fact, been appalled to learn that Harley’s fire was only the first in a series planned for campuses across the country. Part of a plan to make examples of liberal teachers, to develop a new and more powerful campus movement, even more disruptive than the radical left of the sixties, a radical right that would sweep a whole generation up in its cause. The cause of morality. With arson and hatred for all.

Frank had told the police he’d only recently become aware of the plan and had been meaning to get proof and take it to the FBI.

How had he met Jared in the first place? In the course of business, he said, as a party to a land deal. Forty acres in Northern California. And Jared had been his only contact with the larger group that was doing the planning. He gave no other names, not even a name for the group, but when the FBI checked out the acreage, they found a cabin full of guns and some old fool who said he belonged to an organization called
AMERICA
. Eventually, I guessed, they’d find out whether these people were part of one of the more familiar groups already operating, a splinter group, or a whole new bunch of daisies. I couldn’t see that it made a lot of difference.

“Cutter, on the other hand,” I finished up the story, “isn’t talking about anything.”

“So
CORPS
is defunct?” Rosie wanted to know.

“They seem to have scattered for the time being. They sure as hell aren’t claiming any inheritance. Their share of the money will wind up going to the state, by law.”

Rosie got up and retrieved two more beers from the refrigerator. When she came back into the living room she had a businesslike look on her face.

“So,” she said, “what’s my cut?”

I shrugged. “What do you think?”

“Well, I spent two evenings on
CORPS
, not counting Wednesday, when I risked life and limb and acquitted myself brilliantly, I might add. And I led you to Frank Shane. How does fifteen percent sound?”

Fifteen hundred dollars seemed a little high. But Arthur had twisted her arm pretty badly. She might have some trouble working for a few days. And she had, indeed, led me to Frank Shane.
Sure
, I said,
that seemed about right
. I got the money out of my sock drawer and handed it to her. I told her I had to get ready for a date.

“Is it Iris? Listen, Jake, she’s some woman.”

“No,” I said, “that’s tomorrow night. Tonight it’s Faye. You haven’t met Faye.” Rosie looked at me quizzically, laughed, and kissed me on the forehead.

“Have a good time. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Oh, by the way, I thought I’d set up a big poker game for Sunday night. Interested?”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m a rich woman.”