Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (17 page)

“It’s different there. The system is different. Parliamentary government means proportional representation. If you get 10 percent of the vote, you get 10 percent of the seats. Not like here. Here, 10 percent of the votes, 20, means nothing. You get nothing. You can’t get anywhere without a broad base of support. You either win or you lose. Maybe that’s what finally convinced me. The Greens were using a European model, and that can’t work in the United States. If we want to change things— we have to change them. Now.” He wasn’t sweating anymore. He looked much happier, just talking politics. I thought I’d keep him happy for a while longer, before going back to some hard questions. Relax, then attack.

“Yeah, but didn’t I read a while ago that the Greens had a national conference somewhere back East, and then wasn’t there some kind of regional thing, here, just last spring? Looks to me like they’re trying to get bigger, more national.”

He nodded. “They are. They’re even planning a platform conference, and maybe by 1990, a founding convention.”

“So, there you are,” I said, spreading my hands.

“I said 1990! Maybe! Before they even have a convention. Not enough drive, not enough unity or certainty. They have dances to raise money.” He shook his head.

“You had a benefit,” I said.

“That was to get people involved. It wasn’t serious fund-raising.”
So much for my hundred bucks
, I thought. “We’ve paid more attention to the practical aspects of politics. And we’re having a convention next month. With Joe, we had a strong candidate. That was important, too.”

“And you think Werner can take his place?” Rosie sounded disdainful.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t Joe ever tell you he suspected Werner of making plans to bolt the party, take his influence and his supporters and go for more power in a bigger pond? So to speak?”

“Joe didn’t tell me,” Noel said smugly, “because I told him. I told him that I had heard Werner was hoping to get endorsed and then defect, taking everything with him, convincing people we would be able to get real power within the Democratic party. That’s what I heard, and that’s what I told Joe.”

“Where did you hear it?” I wanted to know.

“Carney. James X. Carney. He told me Werner tried to get him to go along with the idea. And I believed him. But it was a lie.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Carney was just spreading confusion. Trying to get the legitimate candidates squabbling over nonsense, wasting their resources.”

“How do you know that?” I asked again.

“Maddux looked into it.”

He said the words with great finality and conviction.

“I got a funny kind of phone call last night.” I took a long, easy drink of that crummy beer, watching his face. It was blank. He finished his beer and set the can carefully down on the coffee table. “Someone warning us about a plan to create an ecological disaster.”

His eyes clamped onto mine. He was sweating again.

“What? What did they say?”

“They— actually, I think it was a woman— said that someone in the party is planning to create a disaster, like Bhopal, only in California somewhere. Sabotage of a chemical plant, made to look like an accident. To win votes. Maybe bad enough to scare people into electing a Vivo for governor.”

“That’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. No one would do that.” His hands were grasping the skinny little wooden arms of his chair. He was still looking hard at me, horrified, defiant, angry. “It must have been the killer, trying to deflect you from himself. It’s a lie. Maybe you’ve forgotten that James X. Carney doesn’t want us to back a candidate. Maybe you ought to ask him some questions.”

“We plan to, but we have a couple more for you,” Rosie said. “Like where were you the morning Joe Richmond was killed?”

“I was meeting with Carl Maddux from ten to just after noon.” He said it quickly. He had been ready.

“And where were you the night of Joe’s funeral?”

He looked surprised. He wasn’t ready for that. “What do you mean? What happened?”

“Where were you? Who were you with?”

“Gee, I don’t exactly remember— there were meetings that day and the next. Everybody was meeting with everyone else. I’d have to think about it. That evening? I can’t remember. A meeting, I think. Or maybe I was with Cassandra.”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d figure it out,” I said. “How could you spend Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings? You have a job, don’t you?”

“I took some vacation time. The future of the party was more important.”

The doorbell rang. He jumped up, moved quickly to the entry door, and pushed the buzzer. He walked out into the hall.

“Cassandra?” I heard an answering call from below. I jumped up, too, and joined him in the hall, standing with him as he greeted her and ushered her in. “Are you feeling better?” he asked her. She nodded. She said hello politely, first to me and then to Rosie.

“Cassandra,” he said. “These people want to know where I was the day of Joe’s funeral in Minneapolis.”

“You were at a meeting.” She looked skittish.

“Tuesday night?” I asked.

“I don’t know about Tuesday night. We were both at big meetings Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon.”

I remembered Pam mentioning those meetings.

“Look, I’m getting tired of this,” Chandler said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done Tuesday night, but if I wasn’t in a meeting I was home in bed. Now Cassandra and I have dinner reservations, and if you don’t mind, we’d like to get there in time to get our table.” He walked to the door and opened it.

“We don’t mind,” Rosie said. “Cassandra, will you be home later?”

“I don’t think so.” She glanced at Chandler.

I kept listening to Cassandra’s voice, trying to match her with the anonymous caller. I couldn’t be sure.

“Do you mind?” Chandler shrilled.

Actually, I did. The next morning we were catching a plane to L.A. But then, if she was going to give her boyfriend an alibi she’d have it all clear by the next day anyway.

It was just 6:45 when Noel swept us all out his front door. Our appointment had been for six. I reflected that he hadn’t exactly set aside a whole lot of time for us.

WE had a lunch meeting with Carney; we’d left San Francisco a little earlier than we needed to, and had about an hour to kill after our flight touched down at Los Angeles. We spent it in the airport bar continuing the conversation we’d been having on the plane.

Rosie sipped at her mineral water, scowling at the twist of lime. She tossed it into the drink.

“You still don’t know who the caller was?”

She’d asked me the same question at least three times. I shook my head again.

“But the person who called talked a lot,” she complained.

“Yeah, that’s true. For an anonymous tipster, anyway. But he or she was whispering. I’m not even sure it was a woman. It could have been Cassandra. Maybe. Something in the speech pattern. I don’t know. How well do you know Gerda and Cassandra, anyway?”

“Cassandra, not well. I know Gerda better. I like her. If there is some kind of plot in the works, she wouldn’t be involved in it. And she certainly wouldn’t be involved in anonymous spook stuff.”

“No,” I agreed. “She’s very forthright. To say the least.”

“Could it have been Rebecca?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

“Maddux bothers me a lot.” We’d followed up on his lunch meeting the day of Richmond’s death, and on his appointment with a “business associate” the night of the fourteenth. Both checked out. But, of course, his only alibi for the actual hours during which Richmond was killed was Noel Chandler.

“Me too,” I agreed. “He’s off, somehow. But if you stop to think about it, he’s no more unlikeable than Bruce Gelber.”

She laughed. We did a little more pawing over the suspects, then went to pick up our rented car. The outside air was warmer than it had been at home, the sun hot.

From the airport, we found La Cienega and headed toward Beverly Hills. The air wasn’t much browner than it had been in Oakland that morning. We turned right on Wilshire, to Fairfax. It was only a couple of blocks farther to the restaurant where James X. Carney had asked us to meet him.

The place was called the Chicago Kosher-style Deli. If they’d really been kosher, they wouldn’t have been open on a Saturday. But they didn’t have to be religious to have great food. It is very hard to find a good, really good, Jewish deli in Northern California. Great Italian deli, that’s easy. Great gourmet restaurants. Great ethnic food of nearly all varieties except my artery-clogging own. The big problem seems to be the corned beef. This has probably saved my life, but sometimes I resent it.

We stepped inside the door. Nice enough, maybe a little glitzy for my taste in delis. All done in art deco pastels, like it was nouvelle cuisine. But someone had gone to some trouble to steal or have copied a street sign that said Howard St., an avenue of tender memory. Other tender memories were stirred by the smells. A symphony with corned beef brass and roast chicken cellos. Cymbals of horseradish.

I looked around and saw a stocky red-haired man standing up at a booth and looking at us inquiringly. Rosie saw him, too. We walked toward him.

“Carney?”

“That’s right.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Sit down, Jake, Rosie. I think you’ll like this place.”

“I think I’ll love it,” I said, sitting. “But I don’t remember telling you I’m from Chicago.”

He burst out laughing. “You didn’t. I’m from Chicago. I didn’t live out in Rogers Park, but I had some buddies who did. I just figured a guy named Jake Samson would probably appreciate the food.” He smiled at Rosie. “And a woman named Vicente wouldn’t be a stranger to it. Want a beer?”

I nodded and smiled back at him. “What I want to know is why the hell you’re
not
running for governor.”

James X. Carney, it turned out, was about my age and had grown up in Mayor Daley’s neighborhood. He had a brother who was a priest and a sister with five kids. He knew more about political patronage than any ten guys who grew up somewhere else. We reminisced about Daley’s ward heelers, recalling how many of them were fat, balding men who looked just like the mayor. We talked about the neighborhood revolts in the late sixties and early seventies, culminating in the ‘72 Democratic Convention where the machine showed it was beginning to fail, and the mayor with it. I don’t remember when Richard Daley died, but it wasn’t many years after that. We drank beer and remembered Daley’s Chicago, not something you can ever forget, and Rosie, who grew up in Napa among the grapevines and was just a kid in 1968, smiled at us and listened patiently.

I ordered flanken with potato latkes. He ordered a corned beef sandwich, potato salad, and extra pickles. Rosie ordered chopped liver on pumpernickel with pickled green tomatoes. The talk of Chicago dribbled off. The food came. I decided it was time to maneuver the conversation in a more personal direction.

“So,” I said, in a brief interval between mouthfuls, “you grew up with politics and you were so impressed you decided to run for governor?”

“You forget,” he said, smiling a smile that delayed a bite of kosher dill, “I’m only trying to get endorsed. I sure as hell don’t want to run.”

“Right,” I conceded. “You were so impressed with Chicago politics that you decided to have a party and not show up.”

He shrugged. “The problem is, it’s not a party. Not yet anyway.” He finished the pickle. “Let’s put it this way, Jake. I believe Vivo’s got a lot of the right answers. But what you have to understand is that the power in this country is already taken by the two major parties and a few monied special-interest groups. They make up the government. And even a government that’s more or less representative only really cares about the people it represents— the ones who can keep them in or toss them out. They care about the people who make the most noise and have the power to back up their noise. So what that amounts to is they care about some people. They don’t give a shit about the rest. Not the rest of the people, not the air or the water or the animals. Certainly not about anything that can’t yell and can’t vote.”

He paused. He’d forgotten his sandwich. “And there are still a lot of people on the other side, who see us as nuts and extremists. You think some guy who makes his living, supports his family, working in a refinery, is going to admit that refinery will give his own kid cancer? People have an infinite capacity for taking the short view, painting the scenery green, letting tomorrow, and the planet, take care of itself. Our own planet, for Christ’s sake. It’s the single most incomprehensible stupidity in a long history of human stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst sacrilege, the most vicious crime. It’s mass suicide and it’s mass murder. Richard Daley was a piker. All he did was toss green dye in the Chicago River every Saint Patrick’s Day. We got bigger and better now.” Carney took a deep breath and ordered another beer.

“Do you hear me arguing with you, Carney?” I said, polishing off the last of the latkes, heavily slathered with death-dealing sour cream. “Don’t give me a campaign speech. If you’re so goddamn serious about all this, why don’t you run for governor and actually run? And change the government?”
Big talk
, I thought.
No action
.

He had picked up his sandwich and was chewing again.

“Because,” he replied, swallowing, “it doesn’t work that way. It’s stupid and precipitous and I think it will set us back. We need to change the government, but we need to get stronger first. We need to look like we’re for real, and the way to do that is concentrate our energy on becoming a qualified political party, complete with primary ballot. Then we need to concentrate on putting people in the state legislature and then in Congress. We need to be the ones who yell the loudest and pack the most votes. Then we can run a gubernatorial candidate and maybe even think about winning. Now? We’re just going to look silly. Just another bunch of goofs endorsing an independent who’s going nowhere.”

“It’s good practice,” Rosie said stubbornly.

The wide, lumpy face nodded at her seriously. “Okay, but tell me where you stand. Would you vote for a Vivo candidate for governor? This year?”