The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez

by Simon Hawke

  Leventhal grunted and flipped out his cigarette case with an abrupt motion. With a flick of the wrist, he snapped it open.

  "I'm sorry, but there's no smoking in here," said the receptionist.

  Leventhal ignored her. The Zippo appeared in his hand as if by magic and, with a flourish, he snapped it open and lit up.

  The receptionist cleared her throat. "Sir, there's no smoking in here."

  Leventhal gave her a heavy-lidded stare. "So call a 'policeman,' sweetheart," he said, saying the word with the same tone of distaste she'd used.

  She gave him an icy look and proceeded to ignore us. A moment later, a man in a powder-blue Neo-Edwardian suit came out into the reception area. He looked almost as glossy as the receptionist. His dark hair was styled in a very non-Edwardian geometric cut and he wore several gold amulets and chains that definitely clashed with the look.

  "I'm Dan Daniel, program director," he said, holding out his hand. "How can I help you, officer?"

  "Well, Dan Dan," Leventhal replied, ignoring his outstretched hand, "you can take me to see Mark Mike."

  The program director's smile slipped slightly. "I'm afraid Mr. Michaels is busy at the moment. Is there something I can do for you?"

  "Yeah," said Leventhal, exhaling smoke into the man's face. "Tell him to get unbusy and get his ass out here, or I'm coming in and getting it."

  Dan Daniel moved his tongue around inside his cheek for a moment, then took a deep breath and walked over to the phone. He picked it up and, like the receptionist, turned his back to us and spoke softly. I caught the word "hardass." Daniel replaced the phone on its cradle and turned back to us.

  "Mr. Michaels will see you now," he said stiffly. "If you would follow me, please?"

  We followed him through the reception area and down a short, carpeted corridor, past the glass-enclosed broadcast studios to the general manager's office. Daniel knocked on the door and entered. The man seated behind the large, glass-topped desk in the stark and airy office was speaking on the phone. A large book was open on the desk before him. The far wall of the office behind him was all glass, affording a panoramic view of the city and the foothills of the Rockies beyond. The wall to his right was one large cabinet, containing an array of recording equipment, a state-of-the-art sound system, and a large television screen. The opposite wall had shelves mounted on it, containing books, files, and what looked like bound reports or transcripts of programs. The carpeting was dove gray, and there was one single potted plant in the room, or actually three, thick-trunked corn plants crammed into one large pot. A small, comfortable, leather-upholstered couch was placed at an angle to the desk, in front of it, with two upholstered chairs across from it.

  Michaels finished speaking and hung up the phone, then stood to greet us. Daniel, the program director, lingered.

  "How do you do?" said Michaels, holding out his hand. "Mark Michaels, general manager."

  Leventhal ignored the outstretched hand. "Detective Leventhal, Homicide," he replied, flatly. "And this is my partner, Catseye Gomez."

  Michaels stared at him, then me, then finally let his hand drop after an awkward moment. "Your partner?" he said, glancing at me again.

  "Yeah. You got a problem with that?" said Leventhal.

  "Uh... no, of course not," Michaels replied hastily. "I was simply unaware that there were thaumagenes on the police force."

  "There aren't," said Leventhal. "Gomez is assisting the investigation in a special capacity, as a representative of animal interests in the case."

  "I see," said Michaels, not seeing anything at all. But he did give me a nod.

  "I'd like to ask you a few questions about your relationship with Susan Jacobs."

  Michaels nodded to Daniel. "Of course. Give us a few moments, will you, Dan?" he said.

  Daniel said, "Sure," and turned to leave, but Leventhal said, "Stick around, Dan Dan. The hardass might have a couple of questions for you, as well."

  Daniel hesitated and exchanged a quick glance with Michaels, who nodded and beckoned us to take a seat on the couch. Leventhal plopped down onto the cushions and I hopped up beside him. Michaels remained behind his desk and Daniel remained standing, despite the two chairs being free.

  "It's a terrible thing about Susan," Michaels said earnestly, shaking his head. "Just awful. Her death was quite a blow to us all. We're all still in shock here. But I'll do anything I can to help, of course."

  "What exactly was the nature of your relationship with Ms. Jacobs?" Leventhal asked.

  Michaels replied smoothly, without batting an eye. "We had a personal relationship, as well as a professional one," he said. "I was in love with her. Her death has hit me particularly hard." He moistened his lips and took a deep breath. "I wanted to marry her."

  "And did she want to marry you?" asked Leventhal.

  Michaels looked down at his desk and shook his head. "No," he replied. "No, she didn't." He looked up again and met Leventhal's gaze straight on. "However, if you're looking for a motive there, detective, I'm afraid you're wasting your time. Susan and I had a very good relationship; she simply wasn't ready to take that step. She didn't feel ready for marriage, or for having children. But it wasn't a question of commitment. There wasn't anybody else."

  "You sound pretty sure of that," said Leventhal.

  "I am sure of it. If there was, she would have told me. We were always very honest and open with each other. Susan was just that kind of person. You can ask anyone. She wasn't one to hold anything back."

  Leventhal nodded. "How long had you known her?"

  "Six years," said Michaels, reflectively, "ever since I hired her." He paused a moment, to collect himself, and took a deep breath. He was doing his best to be straightforward and businesslike about the questioning, but it was clearly difficult for him. "We started seeing each other. .. Well, we both had some reservations, at first, you know, about the pitfalls of dating someone you're working with, but we talked it over and we both decided we were mature enough and professional enough to deal with any potential problems that might come up." He shrugged. "As it turned out, there weren't any problems. None whatsoever. We were very much alike and we had a great deal in common. We..." His voice trailed off, and he looked away for a moment and cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. I realize you have a job to do, but you have to understand, this isn't very easy for me."

  "I understand," said Leventhal.

  "If you want to know who killed her, I can save you a lot of time," said Daniel, interjecting. "It was those Tabernacle nuts."

  "Tabernacle?" Leventhal said, raising his eyebrows.

  "Well, now, we have no proof of that," said Michaels, with a glance at Daniel.

  "Who or what is the Tabernacle?" Leventhal asked.

  "Bunch of Fundamentalist zealots," Daniel replied, tersely. "They call their church the Tabernacle of True Faith, but it's not so much a church as it is a cult."

  "We did a program with them once," said Michaels, "on Sean Prescott's 'Late Shift' show."

  Leventhal nodded to indicate he was familiar with it.

  "It was one of our more controversial programs," Michaels said. "It generated a flood of call-ins. The phone lines were tied up all night. I can get you a tape of it if you like."

  Leventhal nodded. "Yeah, I'd appreciate that."

  Michaels picked up the phone, punched a button for an extension in the studios.

  "What makes you think these Tabernacle people were responsible for the murder of Ms. Jacobs?" Leventhal asked Daniel.

  Daniel snorted with disgust. "I'll tell you what," he said, "you listen to that tape and draw your own conclusions. You know about the threats we received over the ERA features?"

  "I was about to get to that," said Leventhal. "I understand that there were threats phoned in to the station, as well as to Ms. Jacobs's home."

  Daniel nodded. "Yeah, that's right. And the rhetoric was the same as the kind of crap those Tabernacle loonies were spouting. I mean, it was almost word for word the s
ame kind of bullshit."

  "Well, you had those' people on the air, didn't you?" asked Leventhal.

  "That doesn't mean I like what they stand for," Daniel replied grimly.

  "No, but it does mean that anyone who heard them on that show could have borrowed some of their rhetoric, as you put it, to word their threats."

  Daniel grimaced. "I suppose you have a point," he admitted. "But anyone who'd act on that kind of demented logic belongs in the same camp with them. If I were you, they're the ones I'd be investigating."

  "I'll look into it," said Leventhal. He turned to Michaels. "Did you tape any of those calls? The threats, I mean."

  "No," said Michaels. "That is, we would have had them on tape if they'd called in on the air, during one of the programs, but they were phoned in directly to the station, to the main switchboard. A couple of times, the caller or callers pretended to be someone else, so the call would be routed to my office, or to Dan's, or to Susan, and then they'd spew their bile and hang up. We couldn't tape those. But Dan's right about one thing, those Tabernacle people were definitely hostile to the ERA, and to Susan in particular. Very strongly hostile."

  "Why didn't you call the police?" asked Leventhal.

  "We didn't really take them all that seriously," Michaels replied. "That is, not until Susan. .." He swallowed hard and looked away, out the window, into the distance. He remained silent for a long moment.

  Daniel picked up the thread. "You have to understand, we get a lot of calls like that. When you're doing talk radio, all sorts of kooks and cranks call in. Susan had said something about saving the calls she got on her answering machine at home for a show she was going to do with Sean this week, but other than that, none of us ever thought it was anything more than a bunch of crackpots letting off some steam. It happens all the time."

  "1 see," said Leventhal. "And employees of the station getting threatening calls at home, does that happen all the time, as well?"

  Daniel looked uncomfortable. "No," he said, awkwardly. "No, it doesn't."

  "Would it be safe to say it was a first?" asked Leventhal.

  "No, actually, it wasn't the first time," Michaels replied. "It was the first time for Susan, because of her personal involvement with the ERA, but Sean Prescott had received crank calls at home, as well. There was one particular caller who was uncommonly persistent and somehow kept getting hold of Sean's home telephone number, every time he had it changed. We never did find out who he was."

  "Were these threatening calls, as well?" asked Leventhal.

  "Well, not exactly," Daniel replied, with a smirk. "They were more in the nature of sexual propositions."

  "You mean obscene calls?"

  "I suppose you could call them that," said Michaels. "The caller seemed obsessed with Sean, with the sound of his voice, with his on-air persona. I understand that he would occasionally get rather explicit. Sean kept hanging up on him when he called him at home, and when he called during his show, the engineer simply wouldn't put him through. It got so we could recognize his voice."

  "He eventually give up?" asked Leventhal.

  "No, Sean did. He had his home phone disconnected. If we want to get in touch with him, we call his pager. He-that is, the caller-doesn't seem to have gotten that number. Yet."

  Leventhal shook his head. "Strange business you're in," he said.

  "No more strange than yours, detective," said Michaels. "We both often see people at their worst. Will there be anything else?"

  Leventhal shut his notepad. "No, not at the moment," he said. "But I would like mat tape you mentioned."

  "It'll be waiting for you at the front desk," said Michaels.

  "Oh, and one more thing," said Leventhal. "I'd like to speak with Mr. Prescott. Is that possible?"

  "He doesn't come in until just before his show starts," Michaels said, "usually about eleven forty-five or so. Sometimes he comes in with only seconds to spare before he has to go on the air."

  "But you said you can page him?"

  Michaels nodded.

  "Would you mind doing that?" asked Leventhal. "Tell him that I'd like to meet with him. I'll be at Mudd's Cafe tonight at about nine or so. If he could drop by before he goes on the air, I'd appreciate it very much."

  "I'll see he gets the message," Michaels said.

  "Okay," said Michaels, rising to his feet. "If there's anything else, I'll be in touch. Thanks for your time."

  "Look, uh, abut that 'hardass' remark," said Daniel, "I'm sorry. I was out of line. We're all a little on edge here."

  Leventhal nodded. "Sure. Forget about it."

  "Detective Leventhal?" said Michaels.

  "Yeah?"

  "Realistically, what do you think the odds are of finding the one who did this?"

  Leventhal gave him a steady look. "Better than even."

  "Get the son of a bitch."

  Leventhal nodded. "Count on it."

  Eight

  IN real life, watching a detective going about his work was nowhere near as interesting as it was in mystery novels. I hadn't really expected to see Leventhal slapping witnesses around or dodging gunfire from speeding dark sedans, but it was still a little disappointing to see how dull detective work could be. Mostly, it was fairly routine, methodical stuff. At this early stage of the investigation, he didn't know exactly what he was looking for, so all he could do was examine the evidence and question everyone he knew to be associated with the victim, in the hope that something would come out that he could follow up on. If Mike Hammer had worked this way, I never would've gotten past the first chapter of I, the Jury.

  As we were leaving the radio station, Leventhal picked up the tape Michaels had made for him, then used the phone to call the two women who had left messages on Susan Jacobs's answering machine. Neither of them were home, so he left messages asking them to meet with him at Mudd's Café later on that night.

  I pointed out to him that one of them, the one named Christy, had said something about having a hot date, but Leventhal replied that he hadn't met a woman yet who left for a date straight from work. She would go home to freshen up and change, and he felt reasonably sure she'd break her date to speak with a police detective about her girlfriend's murder. I had to agree that having a friend blown up was liable to put a damper on her plans for a romantic evening, so I conceded the logic of his point and we moved on to our next stop, which was the crime lab at the police headquarters building on Cherokee Street.

  It was amazing how quickly things moved when the police commissioner expressed a personal interest in a case. The crime lab boys had dropped everything else they were working on to give the Susan Jacobs murder top priority. What they had learned so far was interesting, to say the least. From the evidence left behind after the blast, they had determined that the bomb had been set off by a remote detonator, and that the explosive was of a type designated as C-4.

  "What the hell is that?" asked Leventhal, with a puzzled frown. "I never even heard of it."

  "That's not surprising," Eggleston, the forensics adept, replied. "It's a little before your time. They used stuff like this back in the twentieth century. It's ancient."

  "You're kidding," said Leventhal.

  "Nope. First time I've ever seen it myself, although I'd heard about it. It's pretty devastating stuff. And it wouldn't take much to get the job done."

  "Where would anyone get something like that nowadays?" asked Leventhal. "You're not telling me somebody's still manufacturing it?"

  "Not since the Collapse," Eggleston replied. "No, the only way you could make something like this today would be if you got a crooked alchemist to brew it up for you. And that's not the case here, or I'd have picked up thaumaturgical trace emanations. What we've got here is an explosive that dates back to the days of the Collapse, or even earlier.''

  "Wouldn't it go bad?" asked Leventhal.

  "Nope."

  "Who'd be dealing in stuff like this?" Leventhal asked, with a frown.

  "Your guess is a
s good as mine," said Eggleston, with a shrug. "If someone local is dealing in this stuff, they've probably only recently come into possession of it, because we've never run across it before. If you want my best guess, I'd say somebody found an old weapons stash. Here, take a look at this."

  He took a book off his desk and opened it to a page he'd marked. Leventhal picked me up and set me on the desk, so I could see it, too. The book showed a photograph of a large, heavy, metallic cylinder.

  "This was a type of safe used in the pre-Collapse days by survivalists," Eggleston said.

  "Survivalists?" said Leventhal.

  "People who apparently anticipated the Collapse. They often constructed underground shelters and stocked them with emergency supplies and weapons. They'd sometimes pack a cache of weapons and ammunition in a safe like this and bury it in some out-of-the-way location, so they could dig it up at some future date, when they had need of it. It was a way of stockpiling ordnance without risking being caught with an arsenal."

  "And you're thinking somebody dug up one of these things from the pre-Collapse days?" Leventhal said.

  "That would be my guess. Otherwise, if somebody had this stuff lying around from the old days, we'd have seen some evidence of it being used by now. Or we'd have nailed someone with a supply. I can't imagine anyone simply sitting on something like this for all these years. They'd either turn it in, use it, or sell it."

  "I see your point," said Leventhal grimly. "So what you're telling me is that we've got an explosive device that's impossible to trace."

  Eggleston nodded. "That's about the size of it."

  "Terrific," said Leventhal sourly. "Got any more good news for me?"

  "Not much, I'm afraid," Eggleston replied. "We're still working on those tapes. The trouble is, the caller had muffled his voice, so we're going to have to filter and enhance them to get a decent voice print. That's the kind of thing a defense attorney can have a field day with in court. Besides, it still wouldn't necessarily prove anything. If you arrest a suspect, we might be able to tie him in to the death threats, but that's still no proof your suspect actually committed the murder. It's circumstantial evidence, at best, and somewhat shaky evidence, at that."