Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (8 page)

Nice speech. It was either true or calculated to put me at my ease. In either case, I lied to myself, it got me off the hook. She was unbuttoning my shirt. She slid both hands inside to my chest, then moved one around to my back. She leaned slowly and smoothly back against the arm of the couch, pulling me on top of her. The hand that had been stroking my chest was working its way down inside the waistband of my pants.

I woke about four in the morning and couldn’t drop off again. Alana was snoring slightly. I sat up on the bed and realized I wanted to be home, so I dressed quietly and left her a little note saying I would call her soon.

Tigris and Euphrates were irritated with me for being gone so long. Euphrates glared at me and grunted nasally, a kind of
inhh
sound he makes when he complains. Sometimes, when the sound doesn’t quite make it out between his shiny black lips, the complaint degenerates into a silent meow. I gave them some breakfast and decided that I needed a hot bath.

While the tub was filling I hunted through my canned goods. Aha. I did have one. Nothing like a hot bath and a can of smoked oysters for whipping up a little creative thought, even at five in the morning. I opened the can and Euphrates left his breakfast in mid-chomp, his eyes glowing with greed. I carried the can, a fork, and a saucer into the bathroom and put them all up on a high shelf while I undressed. Euphrates danced around my feet, whipping up his adrenaline and grunting at about the rate of one grunt a second.

He got half a dozen oysters on the plate, on the floor. The rest, I told him, were mine.

Roughly half an hour after I stepped into the tub, the phone rang in the bedroom. It rang because I had forgotten to take it into the bathroom with me. I climbed out of the tub, dripped and puddled my way to the phone, carried it, still ringing, back to the tub, submerged again and picked up the receiver.

“Will you accept a call from Isaac Samson?” the operator wanted to know.

My father, who lived in Chicago, always called me collect. He had a theory that went like this: “If you can still afford to take a collect call, you’re not starving to death and I don’t have to worry about you.”

“Hi, pa,” I sighed. “Do you know what time it is here?”

“Sure. You think I’m a dummy? Two hours different. I wanted to catch you before you went to work.” Pause. “You are working, aren’t you?”

“Yes, pa. How’s Eva?” Eva was my stepmother. He’d married her a few years back, two years after my mother died and he’d given up trying to run the grocery store without her. He lived in cheerful retirement with Eva, who was about sixty-five and looked ten years younger.

“She’s fine, thank God. You wanta talk to her? Hey, Eva, the boy wants to talk to you.” I could have done without it, since I never had anything to say to the woman, but my father’s calls always required stoicism.

“Jake? How are you?”

“Fine, Eva, fine.”

“So, are you dating anyone?”

“No. Not really. No one special.” She tut-tutted.

“All because of that tsatske you had before.” She meant my ex-wife, and she didn’t mean her well. “I could see from the beginning she was no good.” She hadn’t known her from the beginning, only during the last year when we visited Chicago. “I hope you’re a little smarter about women now. Your father wants to talk to you.” The two of them were so much alike in their hit and run conversation that it seemed as though they’d been married for fifty years.

“So? Are you listening to your stepmother? You’re not a kid anymore, you know.”

“I know, pa.”

“So I suppose you have to get ready for work now? You got a job?”

“Yeah. I got a job.”

“And what are you doing this time?”

I sighed. “It’s kind of complicated, pa.”

“Complicated.” He snorted his contempt. “Nothing is ever complicated, Jake. Complicated is something you say when you don’t want to tell. It’s not even a real English word.” My father’s concept of proper language was largely judgmental. “Something looks complicated, you look again until it looks simple. Now tell me.”

“Research, pa.” I was laughing. “I’m doing some research for some magazine articles.”

“Magazines? Now he’s a writer?”

“Listen, pa, I got to go to work. I’ll write soon.”

“Sure, sure…”

After only another three or four minutes at long-distance prices, we all managed to say good-bye to each other. I ran some more hot water and collapsed neck-deep in the warmth spreading over my legs, belly, and arms.

A little folk wisdom to start the day. Could be worse, I thought. I could have been forced to listen to the bullshit platitudes of my own generation instead of the true ones of theirs. You look again until it looks simple…

In this case, though, I couldn’t see any simple answers. Unless the answer was Billy. Maybe she’d rejected him. The last coherent thought I remember having before I dozed off was that I wasn’t a kid anymore.

I woke up two hours later, shivering with cold, got out of the tub, toweled briskly, wincing at the agony in my stiff neck and lower back, and got dressed. I made and ate breakfast and fed the cats again. It was still too early to go to the meditation center, so I called Hal at home to find out if he’d learned anything about the case yet. He had. There wasn’t much doubt that it was homicide. A few items of what the police call physical evidence. Signs of a struggle. They’d found a little plug of the dead woman’s hair on the deck and a fresh, corresponding wound on her head. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder, but there were no scratches to indicate she’d torn it on a rock when she’d fallen. The redwood table was slightly out of place, a crescent of less faded wood showing at one side of the round base and a corresponding faded area partly covered by the base. They’d also noticed that the coffee cup was slightly chipped and had found the chip on the deck along with some traces of the spilled coffee. Most interesting of all, there had been no fingerprints on the cup. None. Not even Margaret Harley’s. Someone had picked up the cup, wiped it clean, and put it back on the table. There was a pretty good thumbprint on the fruit bowl, but the police hadn’t been able to trace it yet.

I thanked Hal and said I’d keep in touch. It was nearly nine o’clock, but I remembered a sign on the meditation center door that said they didn’t open until eleven.

Rebecca might be in her office. I wanted to know if the police had followed up on finding her name in Bursky’s address book. Bursky. I decided not to call her Margaret Harley anymore, at least not in my thoughts.

Rebecca’s realty company was in Oakland, near Lake Merritt. I didn’t call. It was just a few minutes from my house.

She wasn’t there. There was only one person in the office, a woman, and when I asked about Rebecca she looked at me with her face squeezed up in a “should I tell you, it’s really very puzzling” look. She decided in my favor.

“It was really strange,” she said. “The radio was on, and all of a sudden she stood up and stared at it like she’d heard something terrible and went tearing out of here like a crazy woman. I’ve had it on ever since, but I can’t figure out what it could have been.”

“May I?” I asked, striding to the radio and turning it up. A few odds and ends of news stories and then there it was, being repeated, an update.

“No word yet on injuries in that campus fire. The firefighters are still trying to get it under control. About all we’ve been able to find out is that it started in Chandler Hall, in one of the offices of the political science department. We’ll keep on it and keep you informed…”

I was out of there and in my car in maybe three seconds. I had to be sure I still had a live client.

Half a mile was as close as I could get by car. The police had barricaded the roads close to the campus and only emergency vehicles were getting through. A campus is a crowded place, and they weren’t taking any chances.

The smoke was visible for some distance, a dark blot on the sky. By pushing rudely through the mob I was able to get fairly close to Chandler. Smoke was gushing black and smelly out of three second-story windows in a row. I didn’t see Rebecca anywhere. The whole area stank of melting plastic. I didn’t argue when a line of cops pushed us all back. I was still in the front row.

The fire was at the political science department’s end of the second floor, but I couldn’t be sure whether one of the windows was Harley’s.

I turned to the young man standing next to me. He looked like a student. Short-cropped hair and straight-legged jeans and pale yellow shirt. A vision of the eighties, via the fifties. He was watching the fire with his eyes half-shut and his mouth half-open.

“Do you know what offices those are?” I pointed at the smoking windows.

“Sure.” He was half-smiling. “The one in the middle, that’s John Harley’s office. The ones on either side, I don’t know.”

“What about Harley?” I persisted. The kid narrowed his eyes even more and closed his mouth. He barely opened it again to speak.

“You a friend of his?”
Jesus,
I thought,
what movie did he get that line out of?

I clenched my jaw heroically and muttered something incoherent but macho-sounding.

The kid turned his eyes back to the firefighting scene. “I hear he got out okay.”

Maybe I blinked because the next time I looked for the kid he was gone. Funny, I thought. Usually the people who push their way to the front line at a disaster stick around until it’s all over.

Another hour passed before the fire was completely out and most of the crowd had scattered. That’s when I saw Harley, trying to push his way into the building. Not even singed, from what I could see. But when I got up closer to him I could smell the smoke on his clothes. He was clutching his briefcase.

They wouldn’t let him near his office. It wasn’t safe yet and there were things that had to be done before anything could be touched. That’s what they told him. They said he should check back with them in an hour. I offered to buy him a cup of coffee. He fumbled along after me.

“God!” he kept repeating. “God! I couldn’t get anything out of there. I don’t know what’s been destroyed, what’s left. I almost got caught. It was coming from two directions at once.”

I got him calmed down enough to tell his story coherently.

“Those two rooms on either side of me. The storage rooms. It was sudden. This roaring sound and heat, and then I heard someone scream ‘Fire,’ and then my walls, on both sides of me, they were on fire and I barely made it out the door. Someone tried to get me, Samson.” His thin lips bit off those last words like a parakeet nipping at cuttlebone. I cocked my head, still listening to him. “I’m not sure, but I think a few minutes before the fire, I heard someone go into those rooms. First one side and then the other.”

“Why would anyone want to get you, Harley?” I felt, somehow, that the question did not sound sincere.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked. “I have a strong liberal reputation. Apparently they think I’m dangerous to their movement.” He patted his briefcase and stuck out his chin, a martyr to righteousness and what he saw as his own fame. “They were probably after this. My manuscript. It’s going to be the definitive work—”

I didn’t care. “Did Rebecca find you?” I interjected. He looked at me, and I saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

“Yes. Can you imagine her, actually coming here?”

I shrugged. “She was worried.”

He nodded, accepting the inevitability of her devotion. “I should have called her, I suppose, if only to keep her away. I made her leave.” I didn’t comment on that but told him I needed to go through his wife’s effects and see if the police had left anything that might be informative. We agreed that I would meet him later at his house.

I left Harley with the cops, who wanted to know why he thought someone might start a fire in his department. There wasn’t much question but that it was arson. Everything flammable in the two storerooms had been piled against the walls connecting with Harley’s office and doused with gasoline. The arsonists had even, obligingly, left their gallon cans behind.

An hour after that the police and several radio and TV stations received a communique from
CORPS
claiming responsibility for the fire and saying that they meant it as a message to all the corrupters of American youth.

Everyone rushed to broadcast the news. But within a couple more hours there was a second message, also from
CORPS
, denying that it had anything to do with the fire.

The first announcement was broadcast right around the time I got to the Earthlight Meditation Center. I walked in just in time to hear it on Billy’s office radio. He held up his hand for silence, and we listened together. The announcer liked the word
commu
nique.
He used it three times.

Billy smiled ruefully at me and shook his head. “A little excitement on the campus, huh?” He paused, shook his head again, and then gave me a politely inquiring look. “What can I do for you today?”

I smiled back at him. “I’ve been hearing some stories about you, Billy.” I hadn’t heard much, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“Oh?” he said. No expression at all. Not hostile, not scared, not even puzzled. Just blank.

“About your relationship with Margaret Bursky.”

He rubbed his eyes, long-suffering. “What is it you want? I have work to do, you know.” He turned away, heading toward a bank of file cabinets.

“Just hold it, Billy. I want to talk to you,” I barked. I was gambling that he’d respond to that kind of treatment. He did. He skidded to a stop and turned around.

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” He was trying to snarl. He was also trying to cover up, with bravado, the fact that he had followed orders and stopped walking away from me.

“I want to know why you lied to me yesterday. About your friendship with Margaret Bursky.”

He stopped trying to snarl and looked merely offended. “I don’t have to answer your questions. I think you should leave.”

I tossed him my best wolfish grin. “Come on, Billy. Maybe the police don’t have to know how close you were to the woman.”