Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  The wind was up. We were tooling down Sea World Drive, dodging fallen palm fronds and about to cross the San Diego River, when I pulled out my phone and called Saunders. They patched me through.

  “Saunders,” she said.

  “It’s Leo. Returned from the wilds of Lemon Grove.”

  “Hang on,” she said.

  She came back on a minute later. “Have any luck?” she asked.

  I told her about what we’d discovered.

  “Lemme see what I can find out about Allied Investments,” she said. “Gotta go. On my way to a home invasion in Mission Beach.”

  Click.

  “We have a problem, I think, Mr. Pemberton.”

  The man who billed himself as Samuel Rice Pemberton III looked up from his Architectural Digest. “How so, Hector?” he inquired.

  Hector gestured toward the room across from the library. “If I might,” he said.

  Pemberton rose gracefully from the brocade couch and followed Hector out into the richly carpeted hall. He had a manner of walking that made him look like he was on wheels, as if someone were pushing him along on a cart like they did for the Pope.

  They walked to the second doorway on the right, where Hector stepped aside and allowed Pemberton to enter first. In earlier manifestations of the house, this room had been an enormous walk-in closet. These days they referred to it as the media room.

  The uppermost bank of eight TV monitors were direct feeds from the eight cameras surrounding the house and the pair of flanking buildings, which they still referred to as “the sheds” in deference to their original use as storage facilities for the floats, nets, and other commercial fishing paraphernalia belonging to the property’s original owner, Mr. Mark C. Haller, way back in the early forties.

  Hector seated himself in his office chair, massaged the keyboard a bit, and an image appeared on the lower bank of monitors.

  “This gentleman appeared on yesterday’s report.”

  They watched as the man in the fishing charter T-shirt entered the alley behind the house, filming with his phone as he walked along. They watched as one of the security men said something to him. Whatever words were exchanged, they certainly had no effect whatsoever on the guy. He kept right on going, all the way to the end of the alley, then turned around and went back the way he had come, still filming.

  “And this is significant why?” Pembroke asked.

  Hector massaged the wireless keyboard again. Another video appeared on the adjacent lower-row screen. “Mr. Reeves’s domicile, this morning,” Hector said.

  At that point two people wandered onto the screen, walking along in front of an adobe wall covered with masses of red bougainvillea. Hector stopped the action.

  “Same guy,” Hector said, pointing at the taller of the two.

  Pemberton leaned closer. Looked from one screen to the other. “Yes, indeed it is.”

  He tapped the other person. “Is that a man or a woman?” he asked.

  “Not sure, sir,” Hector replied.

  They spent the next five minutes watching in silence as the pair on the screen went about what could only be described as casing the joint.

  Pemberton straightened up. “Have Mr. Reeves come here at his earliest convenience. Tell him it’s an important matter and won’t wait.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And tell your Ms. Cisneros it might be better if she were present too.”

  Gabe was taking an art class, and I was zoning on the couch, binge-watching the last season of Game of Thrones, when somebody started banging on the security door. I paused G of T, pushed myself up, and wandered over to the door. Saunders was standing on the landing, walking in tight little circles, looking seriously pissed off. I pulled open the door and motioned her inside.

  “Thought you had a home invasion gala to attend,” I said.

  “So did I,” she said as she squeezed by me in the doorway, the friction of which ranked right up there on my best things to happen to me list.

  Before I could frame another question, she started in talking.

  “So we’re waiting outside the home invasion house, waiting for forensics to finish up inside, and while I’m standing around, I decide to call in a request for information on Allied Investments of San Diego. Ten minutes later I get a call from my immediate superior. Says I’m off the home invasion case as of right now and need to get my butt down to headquarters posthaste . . . like immediately.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “So I fight the traffic all the way from Mission Beach to downtown, trying to figure out what in heck’s going on. When I get there, there’s a couple of Internal Affairs assholes waiting for me. They want to know why I made the request about Allied Investments.” She spread her hands in resignation. “We go round and round, and then who do you suppose shows up?”

  “Same guy who told you to mind your business the other day,” I guessed.

  She nodded. “The deputy chief’s personal assistant. Only this time he’s got my precinct supervisor with him. When I can’t come up with a good reason for making the inquiry . . .” She stopped and caught her breath. “My supervisor suggests I take a little time off—use up some of my comp time. Stops just short of telling me I’ll be out of a job if I don’t. Tells me it might be a good time to reorganize my priorities.”

  “Which means what in cop speak?”

  “It means I better mind my own business or face the consequences.”

  “Just for asking for information?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I looked up the plat maps for that house on the cliffs.”

  “And?”

  “Same thing. It’s owned by Allied Investments of San Diego.”

  “I get it, Leo. There’s some kind of shit going on.” She put her hands on her hips and took a deep breath. “But . . . they made it clear. If I push this any further, I’m gonna end up as a school crossing guard.”

  “I know somebody who can probably find out on the sly for us.”

  “Same person who created those fake identities for you and Gabe?”

  My turn to nod.

  “The way Gabe and I see it, seems like somebody with a whole lot of money and clout is trying real hard to keep something out of sight. Somebody with enough heft to influence government offices in Lemon Grove and now apparently in Ocean Beach too. We’re in heavy company here.”

  Her upper lip curled. “Someone a lot like your father.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “I told you. I read your file,” she said with a grin.

  “Yeah . . . I guess so,” I admitted. “But you know . . . those were different times . . . things were . . . people were . . .”

  “Money still talks,” she said. “And everything else still walks.”

  Hard to argue with that, so I didn’t bother.

  “So you’re on vacation now.”

  Her face clouded over. “A week,” she said.

  “Breakfast?”

  She thought it over. “Where?”

  “Fiddler’s Green?” I said, naming a joint on Shelter Island.

  “What time?”

  “Nine?”

  “Let’s make it ten. It’s not very often I get to sleep in.”

  I walked her down to the car. Soon as I was back in the apartment I called Carl Cradduck in Seattle. Carl Cradduck had once been one of America’s most prominent battlefield photographers. His work had appeared in every big-time magazine I could think of. Came through the jungles of Vietnam without so much as a hangnail and was sitting on top of the world when a random piece of Bosnian shrapnel severed his spine in September of 1993.

  Twenty-five years later, he’d morphed into what he liked to call security consulting, which actually meant that if there was a piece of IT information you needed—for your personal security, of course—Carl could get it for you, with the help of several highly talented computer monkeys with whom he wa
s professionally acquainted. These were the same people who had created total new identities for Gabe and me, back when disappearing suddenly became a major priority for us.

  Charity answered on the second ring.

  “Cradduck Data Retrieval,” he said in that lilting Jamaican voice of his.

  “Hey, man,” I said.

  Pause. “We good on your end?” he asked.

  “It’s a burner,” I said.

  “Leo, my mon. Good as hell to hear your voice.”

  “Same here,” I said. “Carl around?”

  “In Chicago, visiting his brother. Got the big C. Bladder.”

  We exchanged sympathies, traded compliments, and shot the breeze for a couple of minutes before I told him what I wanted.

  “Allied Investments of San Diego,” he repeated. “So what you want, mon?”

  “Everything you can get, particularly where the money comes from.”

  “Easy meat,” he said. “You gotta wade through all de dummy holding companies, de offshore corporations, de blind trusts and all dat crapola, but mostly it ain’t very hard. I got a cousin . . .”

  I laughed out loud. “You always do, Charity. You always do.”

  “We’ll send it along when it get done. Same email?”

  I said it was.

  “Got somebody on de other line,” he said.

  “Later, my old friend.”

  “Nice of you to join us, Mr. Reeves.”

  Reeves looked around the room. Other than the two of them, it was empty.

  “Us? What us? You got a tapeworm or something?”

  “I was referring to a metaphorical plurality.”

  “I’da been here sooner except I had to clear two toilets and a garbage disposal before anything else. You know how people get when they’re stopped up.”

  Ronald Reeves spread his feet, as if to better stand his ground. Normally he liked to keep his distance from Pemberton. Being in the same room with the guy always made Reeves feel disheveled. The guy never had a pleat or a wrinkle in his thousand-dollar trousers. He gave the impression that he slept standing up, like a horse in a stall, and stepped out each morning just as polished and perfect as he’d been the day before.

  “Like I told you before, Pemberton, I’m getting real sick of this shit. I don’t need to be cleaning other folks’ toilets anymore. I got enough stashed to—”

  Pemberton cut him off. “And as I’ve told you on several occasions, Mr. Reeves, we have a very busy season coming up. This is our final push before closing things down. Any changes in the players or the program makes things exponentially more dangerous than they need to be. So we’re going to keep everything just as it is until we get past this juncture. After that . . .”

  Pemberton trailed off. He looked away and began to pinch the pleats in the front of his pants. “It would have been better if you had not brought that boy here.”

  “Where the hell was I supposed to take him? He was sick as a dog, and that quack doctor of yours wanted to bring him here. So I did. I didn’t know the little shit was going to die. I’d known that, I’da buried his ass out in the old grove someplace. What in hell was I supposed to do?”

  Pemberton opened his mouth to respond. Somebody knocked on the door.

  “Yes,” Pemberton said.

  The door opened. Hector ushered Corinna Cisneros into the room. She was on the far side of fifty, built like a fireplug, but, as was her custom, showing mile-deep cleavage to the universe. She’d inherited Western Security from her late husband, Daniel, and to everyone’s surprise turned out to be a far more able administrator than her predecessor. In the course of five years, Western Security had morphed from primarily providing low-rent security guards for warehouses in the south end to operating as a high-tech, single-client security firm, while quadrupling the company’s profits in the process.

  Hector pulled out one of the upholstered chairs for her and poured a glass of ice water. She thanked him with a nod and took a hit of the water. Trying to hide his anger, Reeves found himself a seat in the far corner of the room. Hector then pulled out the office chair and sat down behind the console.

  Pemberton wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingers and then began.

  “As Hector has so ably pointed out, we seem to have a bit of a problem,” he began. He nodded at Hector, who tapped the keyboard in front of him on the desk.

  “This was a day or two ago,” Pemberton recited. “This gentleman wandered onto the street and filmed our little corner of the world. The usual admonitions as to this being private property seemed to have had no effect on him whatsoever.”

  Reeves rose from his chair and walked closer.

  Hector worked the keyboard again. Reeves’s house jumped onto another screen.

  “Your residence, Mr. Reeves. Yesterday morning. Same man and a companion of indeterminate gender.”

  Reeves leaned over Hector’s shoulder.

  “Yeah . . . I know those two,” he said. “From the Santa Cruz building. Pair of smart-asses. I threw them out of the parking garage a few days back. They were on foot.”

  “Which probably means they’re from someplace here in Ocean Beach,” Hector threw in. Nobody disagreed.

  “This isn’t good,” Cisneros said.

  “I’ll need you to find out who they are and where we can find them if necessary.”

  “Consider it done,” she said.

  “Also, we’re going to require an increased security presence for the foreseeable future. We cannot allow anything untoward to interfere with our present schedule.”

  “I only have six men left,” she said. “Everyone else has been let go.”

  “Half a dozen will have to do, then,” Pemberton replied. “We have parcels arriving tonight and another eight coming in five days.” He raised a finger. “Also . . . I’ve added Dr. Trager to the procedure. I’m going to have him do a health check on all of them before we deliver—as I’m sure you understand, we can’t be having a repeat of what happened last time.”

  “Trager’s a quack,” Reeves said.

  Pemberton waved him off. “Dr. Trager’s already on board. As the estate’s executor, I’m required to provide quarterly health reports. Trager, for all his warts, serves a useful purpose. Mrs. Cisneros, we need to find these people as quickly as possible. Anything that might help us identify and locate them. We need to be quite proactive here.”

  One bedroom. One bath. Maybe five hundred square feet. On a month-to-month basis, eighteen fifty a month. I was out the better part of five grand by the time I put up the security deposit and first month’s rent and paid for a credit check of myself, a modern rental custom that never fails to piss me off. Sure . . . I understand why a landlord would want to check a prospective renter’s credit. Just makes sense. But the logic behind why the renter should be forced to pay the check has always escaped me.

  Mercifully, the camera and recording equipment were cheap. Gabe and I tooled it over to the Best Buy in Mission Valley and picked up a motion-activated Spy Tech camera and a camcorder for under a hundred bucks. ’Tis a paranoid world we live in.

  On the way back home we stopped at Home Depot and bought a roll of duct tape and a couple of fairly comfortable deck chairs so we could at least sit down if we had to be there for any length of time.

  I picked up the apartment keys from the property management company later in the afternoon and met Gabe over at the new joint. Faced with a level of technology above our general area of competence, we did the most unlikely thing imaginable—we read the directions. It was awful, but when we’d finished and had kicked it around between us a bit, it took us under twenty minutes to get the whole shebang up and running.

  We set the camera up in the lower left-hand corner of the bathroom window, a placement that gave the camera a cinemascopic view of all three buildings and the street below. We set the camcorder to keep track of it all and then programmed the digital controller. Worked perfectly on the first try. Both of us were amazed. There was som
ething about filming the former filmers that appealed to my sense of the absurd. I even considered the possibility that somebody else might be filming us filming them . . . you know, etc., etc.

  We kicked around the question of whether the camera was going to take decent pictures at night, decided the answer was no but couldn’t come up with a viable solution. Lights of any kind were out of the question. Might as well put up a neon sign that read “We’re filming you!”

  So we’d walked back home, resigned to being strictly daytime spies.

  By the time ten o’clock the next morning rolled around, I’d shaved, showered, and managed to find a shirt with a collar. I’d been taking in the scenery and sipping at a cup of coffee for about five minutes or so when she arrived at the top of the stairs, in a boat-necked tropical floral-print dress that fit her like feathers.

  I’d never seen her in a dress before, which was a damn shame, ’cause despite Gabe’s notion that gender was a personal matter, it sure didn’t seem to be a problem for Sergeant Carolyn Saunders, and it sure as hell wasn’t a problem for me neither.

  We were seated outdoors, on Fiddler’s Green’s upstairs balcony, looking out over Shelter Island and the jagged skyline of downtown San Diego in the hazy distance.

  We’d ordered breakfast and were waiting for the food when she asked:

  “How come you’ve never been married?”

  I thought it over. “I’ve asked myself that for years,” I said. “And I never come up with an answer. It just turned out that way, I guess.”

  I wagged an accusatory finger in her direction. “You know, it’s not fair that you’ve read my file and know everything about me, and yet I don’t know a damn thing about you. Where’s your file?”

  “I was married once. Long time ago. Less than a year. A real cup of coffee romantic relationship.”