Bright Futures lf-6

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Tough,” I said.

  “There are tougher things,” Viviase said. “Like finding out your daughter went behind your back to involve a process server in a murder case.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Of course you are. People who commit crimes are always sorry when they get caught.”

  “She didn’t hire me,” I said.

  “I know. The hell with it. I’ll have a beer.

  A beer ain’t drinking.”

  It was Edmond O’Brien’s line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, forever to be honored by alcoholics.

  Ames rose to get the beer.

  “I’ll get the tape back to you,” Viviase said.

  “No hurry,” I said. “You ground her?”

  “For what? Disappointing me?”

  “Guess not.”

  “You really think Gerall didn’t kill Horvecki?”

  “Yes. And he couldn’t have killed Blue Berrigan. He was in jail.”

  “Who says he killed Berrigan?” asked Viviase as Ames came back with three beers.

  “The angel of common sense,” I said.

  “Only thing holds the two murders together is you,” Viviase said, drinking the beer directly from the bottle. “And I’m reasonably confident that you didn’t kill either one of them, unless you’ve gone Jekyll and Hyde on me.”

  “The Gerall boy’s a bad apple, but he didn’t kill anybody,” said Ames.

  “Ames and I are partners now,” I explained.

  “Partners in what?” asked Viviase, shaking his head. “Operating an illegal office of private investigation.”

  “We find people,” I said.

  “You find people who commit murder,” Viviase said.

  “Sometimes,” I admitted.

  “Ames have a process server’s license?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Not never,” answered Viviase, after nearly finishing his bottle of beer. “He’s a convicted felon.”

  “We’ll work on that,” I said. “He’s my partner either way.”

  “You and Ames here bothered a Venice policeman, a detective.”

  “We talked to Detective Williams,” I said.

  “Mr. McKinney here fired a weapon at him after you practically accused him of murder.”

  A bustle of businessmen and — women came through the door, laughing and making in-jokes that weren’t funny, but when you want to laugh any flotsam of intended wit will do.

  “What does he want?”

  “Nothing now, but for you to stay away from him.”

  I knew why. If Ames and I were arrested, the story of his aunt and mother being raped would hit the media again.

  Viviase finished his beer while Ames and I kept working on ours. He rolled the empty bottle between his hands. No genie emerged. Viviase got up.

  “You find anything, let me know,” he said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  He left.

  Then Ames and I decided to do something stupid.

  II

  PLAYING FOR KEEPS

  12

  I was holding two pair, jacks and fours, in a five-card stud game. That was the only game being played in the card room of Corkle’s house. The old doctor with the slight tremor was the only one left in the hand with me. The pot stood at four hundred dollars and change. The doctor had a pair of sevens showing. He could have had three of them or, since one of his cards showing was a king, he could have had a higher two pair.

  On my left was Corkle, clad in a green Detroit Lions sweatshirt. Next to him was a bulky man who had been introduced as Kaufmann. “You know who he is,” Corkle had said in his initial introduction when I had sat at the table three hours earlier. I didn’t know who Kaufmann was, but about an hour into the game Corkle asked him something about a union meeting. On his left, across from me, was a kid, college age. Corkle introduced him as Keith Thirlane. Keith Thirlane looked like an athlete, a very nervous athlete trying to look calm. He was tall, blond, and wearing black slacks and a black polo. The last player at the table was “Period Waysock from out of town.” Period was about sixty, bald, and slowdown fat. He did everything from betting to going to the snack table with the deliberation of a large dinosaur.

  I pushed in another hundred dollars and looked at the steel clock on the wall. It was almost one in the morning.

  Ames and I had pooled our money. I had cashed the check from Alana Legerman. We came up with the requisite four thousand, with another thousand borrowed from Flo Zink. We had a slight cushion. Then I had called Laurence Arthur Wainwright, who was one of the poker players Corkle had mentioned and the only one whose name I recognized. Wainwright was a state representative, a lawyer who owned pieces of banks, mortgage houses, property, and businesses worth who knows how much. Wainwright made the local news a lot, partly because he did a lot of donations to charities and looked good in a tuxedo at society dinners. Wainwright, also known as LAW or Law by the Herald-Tribune, was in constant trouble for his business practices, which were often barely legal.

  On the phone, I told Wainwright that I had some documents he had been looking for. There are almost always documents a person like Wainwright is looking for.

  “What documents?” he had asked.

  Ames had gone through past newspaper articles mentioning Wainwright and come up with a list of four prime names. The best bet seemed to be Adam Bulagarest, a former Wainwright business associate who had moved out of Florida before the law could catch up with him.

  “Does the name Bulagarest ring a bell?” I asked.

  “Is this extortion?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “How did you get these documents?”

  “They’re originals taken from papers in possession of Mr. Bulagarest. You can have them for a nominal fee. We will provide you with a signed and notarized guarantee that there are no copies.”

  There was no chance Wainwright could check on my tale with Bulagarest. In researching the poker players, Dixie had discovered Bulagarest was serving time in a Thai jail for child molestation.

  “How do I get these documents?” Wainwright asked with a tone of clear skepticism.

  “Come tonight to the Ramada Inn at Disney World. Register as F. W. Murnau. We’ll meet you at the bar at midnight.”

  “To Orlando tonight? What’s the hurry?”

  “My associates and I are not comfortable in Florida. Bring one hundred thousand dollars in cash. If you don’t come, we have another buyer.”

  “I don’t…” Wainwright said, but I hung up.

  People like Wainwright always had piles of cash handy in case the real law was about to knock at their door.

  I waited an hour and then called Corkle to ask when there might be an opening at his poker table.

  “You have four thousand dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re in luck. One of our regulars can’t make it.”

  Two hours into the game, I was ahead about three hundred dollars. After three hours I was ahead by almost eleven hundred dollars. It wasn’t that I was a particularly good player. They, including Corkle, were all incredibly bad, but I was learning that in a five-handed game, the odds of one of the bad players getting lucky was fairly high. Besides, I had to remember that I wasn’t there to win, just to keep the players busy.

  From time to time, when they were out of a hand, the others at the table either ambled to the snack table in the corner for a plate of nuts and a beer or to the toilet just off the room toward the front door.

  I didn’t meet the first raise on the next hand and moved toward the small restroom. It was a minute or two after one. Law Wainwright was sitting in a hotel room at Disney World with one hundred thousand dollars or a pistol with a silencer in his lap. I didn’t care which.

  I looked back. The players were bantering, betting, acting like their favorite television poker pros. I moved past the restroom, turned a corner and went to the hall beyond to the front. I opened it quietly. Ames, flash
light in hand, stepped in. I closed the door and pointed to a door across the hallway. He nodded to show that he understood and showed me the Perfect Pocket Pager, one of the gifts Corkle had given us. I had an identical one in my pocket. Both Ames’s and my pager were set on vibrate. Each pager had originally been offered not for $29.95 or even $19.95, but for $9.95 with free shipping if you ordered now, but the “now” had been a dozen years ago and, until we had tested them, we didn’t know that they would work.

  On the way back to the poker table, I reached in and flushed the toilet. The same hand was still being played, but only Corkle, who never sat out a hand, was still in it against Waysock from out of town. The pot, a small mountain of crisp green, looked big.

  Corkle won the hand with a pair of fours. Both men had been bluffing.

  I was worried about Ames. He wasn’t carrying a gun. I didn’t want a shoot-out and Ames was not the kind of man to give up without a fight. Ames and I were partners now. I was, I guess, senior partner. I know he felt responsible for me and to me. I felt the same.

  Ames was going through Corkle’s office in search of the evidence Corkle had mentioned-evidence that might tell us who had killed Blue Berrigan and Philip Horvecki. Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it was just another invention proceeding from Corkle’s heat-oppressed brain.

  I was having trouble concentrating on the game.

  “Two hundred more,” Keith the Kid said.

  He hadn’t been doing badly. At least not in the game. He was a little over even. He winced in periodic pain or regret and gulped down diet ginger ale.

  We were down to three players in the hand. I saw the bet and, for one of the few times during the game, Corkle folded. When the next cards were dealt to Keith and me by Kaufmann, Corkle got up and headed for the restroom. I watched him walk past it. I pressed the durable and easy-to-clean replaceable white glow-in-the-dark button on the pager in my pocket.

  “Your bet, Lewie,” said Kaufmann.

  “What’s the bet?” I asked.

  “Three hundred,” said Kaufmann. “Keep your eyes on the prize.”

  Period Waysock from Out of Town had waddled to the snack table.

  I was holding two fours down and a third four showing on the table with one card to go, a set of three in a five-card-nothing wild game. The Kid could have had three sevens, eights, or jacks or just a pair of each. He wasn’t betting like a player with a set. I reluctantly folded, got up from the table and hurried after Corkle.

  I caught up with Corkle in the foyer where he was pacing and talking on a cordless phone in front of the front door.

  “No, D. Elliot Corkle is not sorry that he woke you. There are more important things than sleep. I did not make my money by sleeping. I made it by staying awake. You can sleep later.”

  He looked around at the three closed doors and the elevator and kept pacing as he listened.

  “Not everyone who goes to jail gets raped,” he said. “D. Elliot Corkle will put up the bail in the morning. Watch him all the time. Do not let him run away… All right. Let me know.”

  Corkle pushed a button on his phone and I ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. I heard him walk past, come out, pushed the button on the pager twice and watched while Ames stepped out of Corkle’s office. He headed for the front door holding up an eight-by-eleven brown envelope for me to see. Then he went through the front door and closed it as I turned to return to the game.

  Keith the Kid was standing across the foyer looking at me. He didn’t say anything, but he did give me a look of slight perplexity.

  “Stretching my legs,” I said. “Bad knee.”

  “What’d you have?” he asked. “That last hand.”

  “Queen high,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Not the way you bet.”

  “I figured from the way you were betting that you had a set. The odds were against me.”

  “You gave me the hand,” he said. “I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  He touched his cheek nervously.

  “I thought I could make back some of the money I lost here last time,” he said. “My father was a regular in this stupid game. He’s not well enough to play again. Heart. I took his place. I don’t want to lose, but I don’t want any gifts either. Besides the ones Corkle gives out in boxes as we leave.”

  “Kaufmann won’t play a hand unless he’s holding an initial pair,” I said. “Period bluffs half the time, no pattern. Corkle never folds unless he’s beaten on the table.”

  “And me?”

  “You shouldn’t be playing poker.”

  “You?”

  “I don’t like to gamble,” I said.

  “Then…”

  “Hey, you two,” Corkle called. “Clock is moving and a quorum and your money are needed.”

  I moved past Keith and took my place at the table. Keith came behind me and sat.

  “Question,” Period Waysock From Out of Town said. “You wearing that Cubs cap for luck or because you’re going bald.”

  “Yes, in that order,” I said.

  “Let’s play some poker,” Corkle said, and we did.

  At two in the morning, the last hand was played, the cash was pocketed and the lies about winning and losing were told. I estimated that Ames and I had come out about five hundred dollars ahead.

  On the way out, Corkle handed each of us a small box about the length of a pen.

  “See Forever Pocket Telescope with built-in sky map,” he said. “Specially designed lenses. You can clearly see the mountains of the moon or the party your neighbors are having a mile away, providing trees or buildings aren’t in the way.”

  We thanked him. I was the last one at the door. Corkle stopped me with a hand on my arm and said in a low voice, “D. Elliot Corkle knows what you did here.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You did some losing on purpose,” he said. “You’re a good player. You’re setting us up for next time.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was sure I had come out ahead and not behind.

  “Well,” he went on. “I don’t think that opportunity will be afforded to you. You’re a decent enough guy, but not a good fit here.”

  I agreed with him.

  “One more thing,” he said. “My daughter has bailed out Ronnie Gerall.”

  He looked for a reaction from me. I gave him none.

  “She stands to lose a quarter of a million if he skips,” said Corkle. “I’ll be grateful with a cash bonus of four thousand dollars if he doesn’t skip.”

  He didn’t tell me why Alana Legerman would bail Ronnie out, but I could see from his face that we were both thinking the same thing.

  I took my See Forever Pocket Telescope with sky map and went out the door.

  Ames, leaning over so he couldn’t be seen from the door, was in the backseat of the Saturn. He didn’t sit up until we hit Tamiami Trail.

  “What’d you find?” I asked, looking at him in the rearview mirror.

  “Our chief suspect has a lot of explaining to do,” he said.

  Victor wasn’t around when we got to my place.

  Ames waited for me to sit behind my desk, and then produced the envelope he had taken from Corkle’s office. He opened it and placed the first two sheets next to each other in front of me.

  They were birth certificates. The one on my left was Ronald Gerall’s. It said that he was born in Palo Alto, California, on December 18, 1990. The birth certificate on the right gave his date of birth as December 18, 1978. If the certificate on the right was correct, Ronnie Gerall was 29 years old.

  “I’m betting that one,” Ames said pointing at the certificate on my right, “is the right one and the other one’s the fake.”

  “We’ll find out,” I said. “You know what this means?”

  “Gerall started high school here when he was twenty-five or twenty-six years old,” said Ames.

  He reached back into the envelope and
came out with two more pieces of paper. He handed them to me and I discovered that our Ronnie had graduated from Templeton High School in Redwood City, California, and California State University in Hayward, California.

  “Best for last,” Ames said, pulling one more sheet of paper out of the envelope.

  It was a marriage certificate, issued a year ago in the State of California to Ronald Owen Gerall and Rachel Beck Horvecki. Ronnie was married to Horvecki’s missing daughter.

  We had more questions now. Why had Ronnie Gerall posed as a high school student? Where was his wife? What was Corkle planning to do with the documents that were now on my desk?

  It was three in the morning. We said good night and Ames said he would be back “an hour or two past daybreak.” I told him nine in the morning would be fine.

  I handed the papers back to Ames and said, “You keep them. If Corkle finds that they’re gone, he might think I’m a logical suspect.”

  Ames nodded and put the documents back in the envelope.

  When Ames left I went to my room and closed the door. The night-light, a small lamp with an iron base and a glass bowl over the bulb, was on. I had been leaving it on more and more when night came. I put on my black Venice Beach workout shorts and went back through my office to the cramped bathroom. I showered, shaved, shampooed my minor outcropping of hair; I did not sing. Catherine used to say I had a good voice. Singing in the shower had been almost mandatory-old standards from the 1940s had been my favorites and Catherine’s. “Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree,” “To Each His Own,” “Johnny Got a Zero,” “Wing and a Prayer.” I had not sung or considered it after Catherine died. When I turned off the shower, I heard someone moving around in the office.

  I got out, dried my body quickly, put on my Venice shorts and stepped into the office while drying my hair.

  Victor Woo was sitting on his sleeping bag on the floor in the corner. He had placed the blanket so that he could look up at the Stig Dalstrom paintings on the wall. He glanced over at me. He looked exhausted.

  “I called my wife,” he said.

  I draped the towel over my shoulder.

  “What did you say?”