The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4)

by Richard Levesque

  The Jetpack Boogie

  The Crossover Case Files

  Book 4

  Richard Levesque

  Copyright © 2021 RICHARD LEVESQUE

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely coincidental. Any historical figures, setting, or events described in this book are also a product of the author’s imagination and are not intended as depictions actual people, places, or events.

  Cover design & illustration © 2021 Duncan Eagleson

  Photo sources:

  Man: theartofphoto/stock.adobe.com and ra2 studio/stock.adobe.com

  Woman: GoldenEyesL.A./stock.adobe.com

  City: juanmrgt/stock.adobe.com

  Used By Permission

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to several people for their help in the writing of this book, including Jefferson Smith and my wife Karianne Levesque, all of whom read early drafts and helped point the book in the right direction. I’m also grateful to Duncan Eagleson and Corvid Design for his work on the cover. Finally, as always, I’m grateful to my friends and family for putting up with me as I work on these books and for always believing in me, no matter how crazy the ideas may seem.

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  Chapter One

  The plush carpet and fancy chairs in Imelda Bettencourt’s lobby screamed out the difference between her set-up and mine. Where Imelda’s visitors stood a good chance of being able to fall asleep in the cushioned luxury of her lobby, the furniture in my office offered nothing but splinters.

  Imelda’s secretary was young and comely but aloof as hell. On a previous visit, she’d given me the vibe that she was immune to my questionable charms. The thing was, she apparently hadn’t gotten the vibe from me that charming her was so far from the top of my list that I wasn’t sure I could count that high.

  I was a few minutes early for my appointment, but the secretary buzzed in to the boss regardless. Imelda’s voice came through the intercom right away. “Send him in.”

  The secretary looked a little disappointed that she wasn’t going to get to ignore me while I waited, but shot me with a cold smile anyway and said, “You can go right in, Mr. Strait.”

  I thanked her and headed for the double-doors to Imelda’s inner sanctum.

  Imelda Bettencourt was a wealthy lawyer for wealthy people, not the kind of person I usually did business with. She was about sixty, and I couldn’t decide if her jet-black hair was a wig or a dye job. She wore a lot of make-up, probably to throw visitors off the scent of her crow’s feet and the little wrinkles around her mouth that some women get when they’ve spent a lot of years with their lips wrapped around cigarette holders. Such a holder was in her dainty fingers now as she stood up from her desk upon my entrance, straightening her expensive business skirt and turning to the man who sat across from her, his back to me.

  “Peter Mulligan,” she said, her voice a haughty drawl. “I’d like you to meet Jed Strait, my investigator.”

  That rankled.

  I didn’t like the idea of my being anyone’s anything, but there was a paycheck dangling at the end of my humiliation. The thought of having to tell Peggy, my own secretary, that the business was going to have to go toes up and that she’d have to go back to driving a hack was a pretty powerful motivator.

  Peter Mulligan turned and stood. He was tall and good looking, a man in his late forties with wavy brown hair and a cruel smile. His cigarette didn’t burn in a fancy holder but rather rested between his lips as he stepped forward to shake my hand, the grip firm but the skin soft.

  Imelda indicated the chair next to Mulligan’s, and we all sat down.

  “Have you read about Peter’s situation in the papers, Jed?” she asked.

  “I have,” I answered. Peter Mulligan’s face had been splashed across The Record’s front pages four or five times in the last week, along with other sensational images not fit for polite company. “Although I’m not in the habit of believing everything I read in the papers. I’ve found they don’t give the whole story.”

  “I agree,” Imelda said.

  Uninvited, I added, “I find it’s always better to get a story straight from the person involved in it.” This had been aimed at Mulligan, who squirmed a little in his chair, then pulled hard at his smoke. I caught him giving Imelda an imploring look, and she caught it, too. She started talking, sparing her cash cow the humiliation.

  Score one for Mulligan, I thought. I wasn’t going to get the story the way I wanted it. There was nothing for it, though.

  “You’ve seen the stories referencing Penny King, yes?”

  “The actress,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Imelda said. “Peter tells me he met Miss King about six months ago. They ‘hit it off’ as the younger set calls it, Peter’s marriage notwithstanding.”

  I’d caught a few of Penny King’s pictures since coming to Los Angeles. They weren’t bad. She was funny and brassy, but the pictures almost always ended with her tamed, married off to a banker or a prince with polo ponies. I found those endings disappointing, and I guessed that Penny probably felt the same way. The things some people will do for a paycheck, right?

  Imelda continued. “Miss King entered into an arrangement with Peter and his wife, Katrina. She moved into their house in the Palisades.”

  “Sounds like the stuff of scandal,” I said, aiming this at Mulligan.

  “It was,” said Imelda. “It is. Which is causing some complication for Peter’s case. I would like very much to keep the sensational parts of the story out of the courtroom and stick to the facts.”

  “Which are?”

  “A week ago, Saturday, Miss King was at a function in Hollywood. She went alone. Peter had an arrangement with her that if she was to stay out past midnight, he would lock the doors of the house and she wouldn’t be allowed entry.”

  “That doesn’t sound very friendly,” I said to Mulligan. He shot me a cool stare but said nothing.

  “I don’t need your opinions, Jed,” Imelda chided. “There’s a rat in this story that’s lost in the woodpile, and you’re the terrier who’s going to flush it out. That’s all you’re getting paid for, understand?”

  Opting to appear chastened, I waved a hand for Imelda to continue.

  To my surprise, Mulligan jumped in instead. “I don’t mind telling you, Mr. Strait, that both of the women I lived with responded well to my being the lord of the manor, so to speak. I set the rules, and they followed. My wife and my lover, under one roof. What man wouldn’t want that?”

  Millions, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Imelda jumped in, clearly wanting to retain control of the narrative. “Miss King left her function, took a studio limousine to the coast road. The driver says she was inebriated and told him to leave her at the steps leading up to
the street from the highway. He said she claimed to be too tired to give him proper directions to the house.”

  This made some sense to me. If the houses along the coast were anything like the mansions in Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the streets would be a serpentine mess, threading in and out of little canyons and leading up to clifftop castles. In the dark, from the back seat of a limo, a drunk woman might not have been interested in sending her driver on an impossible quest to find the right combination of turns that would lead her to a house that wasn’t hers.

  Imelda continued. “He did as she asked, letting her out at the foot of the stairs and watching her ascend before he pulled away. That was around 1:30 Sunday morning. He was the last person to see her alive.”

  Some of this part of the story had made the papers—the limo drive, the stairs, the shared house—but not the curfew or the locked door. I knew that in the morning, Penny’s chauffeur arrived at the Palisades house the way he always did, ready to pull her big Terranova out of the garage and drive her up to Hollywood. He got a surprise when he opened the door, though.

  “In the morning,” Imelda said, “Miss King’s body was discovered behind the wheel of her car in Peter’s garage. She died of asphyxiation, apparently strangled with her scarf. The killer—if it was a killer—tried to make it look like an accident with the scarf being wrapped around the steering wheel and Miss King slumped over in her seat, her body hanging out of the car door and held up only by the scarf around her neck. She also had a broken nose, the killer probably hoping it would look like she’d fallen face forward onto the steering wheel while drunk, broken her nose on it, and passed out from the pain with the scarf essentially acting as a noose.”

  “And the police think it was…” I said while I let my index finger point not too subtly at Mulligan.

  “Peter has been accused of murder, yes,” Imelda said, sounding a little bored. Such things were part of her day, every day, the way heart attacks are for some doctors—a commonplace enough thing to the professional, a world-rocker for everyone else involved.

  “From your tone,” I said, “I gather you haven’t completely ruled out the accident theory.”

  “What I’ve ruled in or out is none of your concern, Jed. Your job is to find Peter’s wife.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this and waited for Imelda to go on.

  “His alibi,” she said.

  “Ah,” I responded.

  The wife had been kept out of the papers quite neatly, mentioned only in connection to descriptions of the salacious living arrangements.

  “Mrs. Mulligan has gone missing,” Imelda said. “No one has seen her since the body was discovered.”

  “But she was there throughout the night?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mulligan answered before Imelda could, finally ready to take up some of the narrative. “I locked the doors at midnight and Katrina and I slept in the same bed until morning. We got up. She cooked an egg. When we heard the chauffeur shouting in the street, I ran downstairs to see what the commotion was about. And that was the last I saw of her.”

  Fully in detective mode now, I asked, “Was there anyone you know of who’d have wanted to harm Miss King?”

  “You’re not here to ask questions, Jed,” Imelda said sharply, inserting herself before Mulligan could answer. “You’re here to find out about Mrs. Mulligan and then to go and find her. I’d like to have the chance to talk with her alone before the police catch up to her.”

  “The police are looking for her, too?” I asked, wondering if Mrs. Mulligan was being looked at as a missing person. If so, that meant things were stacking up against Peter as far as the cops and the District Attorney were concerned. It was also possible, I supposed, that she was being treated as a second suspect. If there was reason to think she might have actually killed the woman in the ménage-a-trois—or helped her husband do it—that would likely make finding her a slightly trickier prospect.

  “As a material witness,” Imelda said, her tone suggesting she was aware of the horses I’d just let out of the barn and that I should corral them immediately.

  I nodded. “If the police bring her in first, they get to hold all the strings.”

  “There are no strings, Jed. Stop telling yourself that you’re trying to solve the case. Just find Katrina Mulligan. Peter’s first court appearance is on Thursday. If we can get his alibi established by then, I should be able to get the case thrown out without him having to go through the ordeal—which means I’m going to need something concrete from you by Wednesday afternoon at the latest so I can prepare.”

  “You do know it’s Monday today, don’t you?”

  Her eyes narrowed by way of an answer.

  I shrugged. “Sorry, but this is kind of a tall order for three days. What can you tell me about your wife, Mr. Mulligan?”

  “She enjoys the finer things,” Mulligan said. “Nice restaurants, nice clothes. She took her purse and whatever cash she had with her. I’ve frozen our bank accounts so she can’t get more money if she runs out. It’s already been long enough that—given the way she spends—it’s hard for me to imagine her being able to keep off the radar unless someone is helping her, or something has happened to her, too.”

  I nodded at this but said nothing.

  I’d been sniffing around cases and studying others long enough to know that when a wife disappears, it’s usually the husband who’s forcefully misplaced her—which is not to say that I was setting myself up as Mulligan’s judge and jury. Rather, I was having my doubts about him and wasn’t sure I wanted to take this job, not if it meant helping a murderer go free.

  Maybe Imelda picked up on my moral quandary. Or maybe she was simply moving forward with telling her hired man what to do. Either way, she slid a sheet of paper across her desk and toward me. I leaned forward and picked up a neatly typed list of names, Imelda Bettencourt’s imposing letterhead across the top of the page. I spent more time looking at the black ink spelling out her name and business than at the names on the list, which was a good indicator that I probably needed to get some letterhead of my own. The current version—a page torn from a yellow tablet with my business card stapled to the top—was hardly impressive.

  “Those are Mrs. Mulligan’s closest friends and acquaintances,” Imelda said, while I wondered what one would have to do to qualify as a close acquaintance. She slid something else toward me, saying, “And this is a recent picture of Katrina Mulligan.”

  I picked it up, scanning the image for a longer spell than I’d bothered to look at the list of names. Katrina Mulligan was a dark-eyed beauty, flowing waves of brunette hair framing a face with high cheekbones and full lips that were parted in the barest hint of a smile. It was a secret smile, I thought, one that hinted at promises to be kept for the right recipient.

  “Is she an actress?” I asked.

  “No,” Mulligan answered. “Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “The camera likes her.”

  “She was a model when we met,” he said but without emotion, giving no indication of annoyance that I’d expressed admiration for her beauty. “Now she doesn’t need to work.”

  “Good for her.”

  I folded the list and put it in my coat pocket with the picture.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me about your wife?” I asked. “Anything that might help me narrow down her location?”

  “If there was,” he said, “I’d have followed the trail myself and saved myself the expense of paying Imelda to hire you.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this but said nothing. Peter Mulligan didn’t look like a fellow who was broken up at his lover being strangled or his wife disappearing when he needed her most, and his smugness wasn’t helping him capture any of my loyalty. I was close to returning the photo and list of names, telling myself I’d sleep better if I was hungry than if my dinner was paid for by helping a guy like Mulligan get away with killing a woman.

  But then another thought occurred to me.

 
If Mulligan really was dirty, then there might be a second victim here in the person of his wife. She might be dead—in which case this easily documented effort at finding her would, in theory, draw the cops and the DA off of Mulligan’s scent—or she might simply be in hiding, a victim fearful of further damage. In either case, there was a missing woman who very well might need someone in her corner. If working to help her happened to net me some of Peter Mulligan’s cash via Imelda Bettencourt, then who was I to complain?

  “All right, then,” I said, turning to Imelda. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, Jed,” the lawyer said. “Just keep me informed and submit all your paperwork. I need this to wrap neatly and quickly, so I’m counting on you to do all the hard work Cosmo Beadle said you were good for.”

  This last bit drew an eyebrow raise from Mulligan, but he said nothing. At the very least, his reaction told me that Imelda hadn’t informed him ahead of time that I’d come to her through Cosmo’s recommendation. My guess was that Mulligan was either involved in Cosmo’s Crossover cult or at least had heard of it, and that my stock had just gone up a little bit in his mind because of it. Whether it did or not mattered not at all to me.

  I stood to go, shaking hands with both Imelda and Mulligan as I did.

  “Call me as soon as you know anything,” Imelda said, not bothering to get up and walk me out of the office. “And if you don’t get anywhere, I still need to hear from you by Wednesday afternoon.”

  “You’ll hear from me,” I said as I headed for the fancy doors, eager to feel a squeaky car seat against my back rather than Imelda’s cushy chair.

  Chapter Two

  The drive from Imelda’s Wilshire Boulevard office to Chavez Ravine wasn’t far at all if you thought of it in terms of miles covered, but when considered in light of how long it took, that was a different story. Cars crowded the streets, and every red light seemed to have it in for me that day.