Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (19 page)

Great
, I thought. I was going to love this guy. “I don’t know what kind of name Samson is because it originated at Ellis Island. But I’m Jewish.”

He nodded, feigning disinterest. I didn’t ask him what kind of name Jared was.

“Well?” he said.

“Okay.” I shrugged. “What did you want to see me about?”

He took a long swallow of his bourbon. “I want to know what you’re after.”

“I’m sure you already know that. I’m doing a magazine piece on Margaret Bursky. That’s what I’m after.”

He smiled. “Going to stick to that, are you?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, Samson, let me put it this way. I don’t have any problem with you doing a magazine piece on what’s-her-name. But I do have a problem with some of the things you might say in that article. And I have a problem with your temporary possession of some drawings. I wouldn’t want any mention of them to appear in any magazine.” I started to speak, but he held up his hand. “And I wouldn’t want anything about
CORPS
in there either, and that nonsense about the fire.”

“Who the hell are you?” I snarled. “I’ll write what I please.” I thought I was striking the proper attitude for a reporter who was being told not to write his story.

“How much do you get for an article, Mr. Samson?” All of a sudden I was “mister.”

But the question caught me. “Two thousand dollars,” I said, wondering if that was even close to what writers actually got.

He laughed. “Hardly seems worth the effort.” I stared deliberately at his off-the-rack brown suit. He turned a little redder. “What would you take to drop the whole thing?”

“I don’t think I can drop the whole thing,” I said, with just the slightest edge of slyness in my voice and an upward, open-ended inflection.

His eyes narrowed. A traveling salesman looking shrewd. “I’m going to trust you, Mr. Samson. I think you can do a nice little story about the woman without getting into anything political. After all, it’s a story about art, right?”

I returned the shrewd look. “Could be.”

“For, say, a couple of thousand on top of what you get for the piece itself?”

I laughed at him. “Not enough. Double it.”

“Four thousand dollars?” He contrived to look both angry and admiring at the same time. “I’ll compromise. Three.”

I stared at my beer, pretending to think it over. Then I reached my hand across the table. “Deal,” I said. We shook.

“One more thing, though,” he added. “I want to see a copy of the article before it’s printed.”

“No problem. No problem at all.” I smiled, looking smug. “What if I decide not to write it at all, later I mean. Will you make up the difference?”

“The two thousand?” I nodded. He pursed his fleshy lips. “Not worth it to me. Who cares about an art story? How much longer until you finish it?”

“Couple weeks, maybe,” I told him.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think you’ll finish a lot sooner than that.”

“I can certainly try,” I said cheerfully.

“Good. Another thing.” He seemed to enjoy adding provisos. “I hear you turned in some kid named Cutter today. You pull anything on me and you’re dead.” He smiled broadly and swallowed the rest of his bourbon.

“Don’t worry about it,” I muttered through my teeth. “I need the money.” I hesitated before I added, as though I hadn’t been thinking about it all along, “But where can I get in touch with you when the article is finished?”

He stood and threw some money on the table. Enough for both our drinks and a small tip. His friend stood up, too. “I’ll get back to you.” Then they both lumbered out of the bar.

I ordered another beer to get the taste of Jared out of my mouth.

Running through my mind was the line in Cutter’s notebook about
J
going out of town and
F
being placed in charge. Out of town where? In charge of exactly what? There was too much I still didn’t know and only three people, other than Jared himself and the dead woman, who could fill me in: Cutter, Frank, and Debbi.

Eddie was pretty much out of my reach. I didn’t know where to find Frank. And I wasn’t terribly anxious to see Debbi again right away. I was glad I was having dinner with Rosie. I needed to talk the thing out a little.

Obviously, Jared, like Frank, was no student. And Jared was in charge or delegated leadership to Frank. So, just as obviously,
CORPS
was a student group run from the outside, from the big adult world in which some very obnoxious people had organized some very obnoxious groups. Like the groups whose propaganda Cutter’d had in his desk. I wondered which one Jared represented.

And I wondered if any of those groups had any reason for killing a depressive, unhappily married artist who had a habit of doing portraits from memory. Jared had made it clear that he didn’t want her connected with
CORPS
in my imaginary article.

But I also remembered that he had specifically mentioned the fire. Not her murder. Just the fire.

Hal Winter had been home that morning, but his machine was answering the phone that afternoon. The trouble with answering machines is that they leave you in limbo. Oh, sure, you get to leave a message, but what if the guy you’re calling is a thousand miles “away from the phone”?

Cutter had been in custody a couple of hours, and I was itching to know if he was talking and what he was talking about. I calmed down, hoped for the best, assumed that Hal hadn’t taken it into his head to leave town, and left a message that Cutter had been arrested and that I’d be home around five. Please call.

Then I phoned Harley. If I wanted him to keep paying the bills, I was going to have to baby him along. He was still at his office, so I went over there. I hadn’t seen the place since the fire. It was an ugly sight.

I could see right through parts of the smoke-blackened walls, past the skeleton of charred studs, into the rooms on either side. Soggy, sooty sheetrock lay in chunks all over the floor and hung precariously from the ceiling.

Harley was standing at the file cabinet in the corner.

“I was just going through things to see what could be saved,” he said sadly. I looked in the file drawers. Wet papers. The cabinet itself had held up pretty well considering the rush of fire that must have hit it. Some of the contents, at least, looked salvageable. I remembered that he had also had some papers stacked on a bookshelf against the wall. A wooden bookshelf. There was nothing left there now but charcoal and ash. He’d always had his desk piled with papers, too, and its metal surface showed blistered paint with little black scraps stuck in the blisters. His chair was shoved into a corner. It still stank. It was a burned and melted mass of plastic and stuffing.

I felt sorry for the man. He looked so lost. His whole personality was tied up with this office.

“Come on, Harley,” I said. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk about the case.”

For the first time since I’d arrived, he looked directly at me. He stared at my face, still bandaged and purple with bruises.

“Looks a little like your office, doesn’t it?” I quipped.

He didn’t even smile. “I hope that didn’t happen to you in the line of duty.”

“It did. But don’t worry about expenses. I’ve got medical coverage. Coffee?”

He shook his head. He wanted to stay with his debris. Nothing was going to make him perk up, I thought, so I tried the big news out on him.

“The police have got Cutter now. This time they’ll be able to hold him. He tried to kidnap me.”

He brightened just a little. “Will they charge him with Margaret’s murder?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It has to be Cutter!” he cried. “If the police can’t prove it, you have to. Otherwise, they’ll keep looking. And I think they actually still suspect me.”

“Relax,” I said. “That’s what you hired me for.” I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. The old familiar distaste was returning with every word out of his mouth.

“Well, they asked me again what time I went to work that day and when I went home. I think they even asked those Nazis what time they saw me leaving the building.”

“They have to ask those questions. You’re probably all right.”

“I don’t understand. You said Cutter had information about my marriage that he gave to the police. You said he had even been to my house and that he had some of Margaret’s property in his possession. What was he doing at my house if he wasn’t killing my wife?”

“I don’t know when he was there. I do know that he knew your wife pretty well. And that she was probably involved with him through
CORPS
.”

He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look very surprised.

“Even so,” I continued, “I still don’t know that he killed her. There are other possibilities.”

Harley looked angry. “Like who? Don’t give me that. Our deal was that you would find the real killer before the police implicated me because of Rebecca. It sounds like the police caught Cutter anyway. Maybe you don’t want to admit he’s the killer because you didn’t catch him.”

I ignored the bullshit and decided to tell him that Cutter knew about his relationship with Rebecca.

He gaped at me. “He saw us together?”

“Yes. And he told Margaret.”

He gave that a couple seconds thought. “But he couldn’t have known who she was,” he said resolutely. “I could have been talking to a student.”

“You’re wrong, Harley. He knew. He mentioned her by name.”

“But he’ll tell the police!”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“You were supposed to prevent this.” He banged his fist down on what was left of his desktop. “You shouldn’t have turned him in. You’ve really-—”

“Shut up, Harley.” I said softly. “It couldn’t be helped.”

He rested his elbows on the desk, blackening the brown suede patches of his jacket, and covered his face with his hands. I thought he was going to cry.

“They must have been following me around, watching me. Those Nazi bastards.” He took his hands away from his face. He wasn’t crying. “If the police ask me, I’ll deny it, that’s all. It’s his word against mine. The word of an arsonist and a killer. I’ll say he’s trying to avert suspicion from himself. He can’t prove anything.” The look he gave me was half terror, half impotent rage. “But you’d better. For God’s sake, do something. That’s what I’m paying you for. Make sure they charge Cutter. I can’t take much more.” His voice rose hysterically, then sank again to a near whisper. “It’s all been too much. I’m pretty tough. But first my wife, and then my office, and now… I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“Just try to leave it to me,” I said with more confidence than I was feeling. I told him I’d get back to him soon and left him to his charred remains.

On my way home, I turned my mind loose, hoping it would be creative. But I kept getting stuck on Harley. On his insistence that I concentrate on hanging Cutter. Maybe that had been the object all along. A fall guy. And an amateur detective with lots of evidence against the fall guy dropped in his lap. Except that Harley hadn’t exactly directed me to Cutter. Or had he? Maybe he’d known all along about his wife’s affiliations.

I drove through Berkeley mumbling to myself. No, the whole idea was stupid. Harley wasn’t dumb enough to discount the police or think they’d be influenced by whatever I might come up with. Nor was he clever enough to come up with such a convoluted scheme. He was an average jerk with more than the average amount of arrogance and selfishness. Just another of Margaret Bursky’s bad choices. The woman was no judge of character.

The first thing I did when I got in the door was make another try at reaching Hal. He was home and he’d been busy.

“Yeah, Jake, I just tried to call you. Cutter’s got his whole body in a sling.”

“Well, yes, I assumed he was in a little trouble. After all, he tried to kidnap me.”

“Right, right, but that’s not all they’ve got him on. He’s confessed to the arson. Conviction on either of those charges would put him away for a while. Even if the fingerprints aren’t enough to go on for anything else. Like homicide.”

“Fingerprints? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, sorry. Guess I got a little ahead of you. When they took him in today, they put him through the usual routine. They’d been waiting for word from Sacramento on those prints they found on the fruit bowl. They don’t have to wait any longer. The prints were Cutter’s. On the bowl they found on the deck the day she was killed.”

“Sounds like he’s had it,” I admitted.

“Could be. It sure gives them something to work on.”

“They’re still looking at other suspects, then?”

“You bet.”

I was remembering Harley’s fear. “What about the husband? Is he clear?”

“Hell, no. His campus alibis won’t do it. They can’t pinpoint the time of death that closely. He could have killed her before he went to work. And there is a money motive.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She left him half her money. At least a hundred thousand.”

“Where’d the other half go?”

“Divided three ways between some ditsy meditation center, a few relatives back east, and a political group called
CORPS
.”

That explained why Harley hadn’t been surprised when I’d told him his wife was involved with
CORPS
. I’d asked him to let me know about the will, but he hadn’t bothered. Probably afraid I’d start suspecting him myself. So, I thought, Bursky had managed, in death, to stab her husband in the back. An act worthy of the woman whose self-portrait had so fascinated me. A great joke, if she’d meant it as one: leaving money to her husband’s enemies.

Rosie had a look in her eye that I didn’t like. We were having dinner at a Japanese restaurant on Claremont that had the best fried oysters in the East Bay. That’s what I had ordered. Rosie had shrimp teriyaki. We were working on our second bottle of sake by the time I’d finished filling her in. She chewed a piece of carrot thoughtfully and met my eyes straight on with a funny little smile. I wondered what was coming.

“There are two sides to this, at least,” she said. “The political and the personal. Two different possible reasons for the killer. Personal hate or political necessity.”