In a Bind

by D. D. VanDyke

  “Maybe that works both ways. I ain’t stupid, Cal.”

  “Okay. Then take the job, and be ready to up your game. No more sleepy small town, I’m thinking.”

  “Right.” He paused, and I could almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Have they pulled the bullet out of the rental car? The one that almost took me out?”

  “I think so.”

  “Might want to do a ballistics match against weapons registered to everyone we know is involved, or might be. Kerry, the Conrads…your own weapons. Alice. Marilou. The bikers. Everyone.”

  “My weapons? You’re kidding, right?”

  “Did Linda just blow a hole in Kerry, or did I imagine that?”

  Davis sighed heavily. “Okay. I get it. That all?”

  “Yeah, Mike. Take it easy. Talk to you later.”

  I killed an hour snooping around the Davis household, mostly in Linda’s room. Not strictly legal, but I could argue Davis had invited me to stay over and so gave me permission. As I looked through drawers and checked in all the usual hiding places – under the mattress, in the top shelf of the closet and so on – I half expected to find some shocking piece of evidence that put a new twist on things, but that kind of stuff only happens in airport thrillers.

  My life seemed exciting enough without making it something it wasn’t.

  By the time Alice showed up, the coroner had picked up the body and the deputies had finished processing the crime scene. With four living witnesses and the suspect in custody there was no need for complicated forensics work. Documentation was enough.

  Alice locked the house and I followed her car to her home, a modest bungalow across the railroad tracks from the Forty-Niner Diner. “Hope you don’t mind trains passing by,” she said as she quickly made up the spare bedroom.

  “Not a bit,” I lied. Right now any bed seemed like heaven, and after a shower, I fell into the one provided and slept the sleep of the dead, trains or no trains.

  Chapter 16

  I awoke when Alice knocked on the door and stuck her head in, already wearing her work uniform. “Come on over to the diner when you want some breakfast,” she said.

  The clock on the nightstand read five-thirty a.m. “Yeah, sure,” I mumbled, and then rolled over and went back to sleep. At eight fifteen the sun got me up, and I put on the same clothes from last night with distaste. After a quick breakfast at the diner and a lot of coffee, I got on the road back home.

  “You happy?” Dad’s inevitable revenant said as I wended my way down out of the hills toward the flat valley floor.

  “More or less. Linda killed Frank and tried to make it look like suicide.”

  “Not Kerry?”

  “I think Kerry was blackmailing Frank, so I doubt it was him. No point in killing the mark.”

  “Why not Jerry Conrad, or even Carol? Or the bikers?”

  “Jerry and Carol are obviously operating at a much higher level – probably bribing politicians, working lucrative development deals and so on. White-collar crime, the kind that’s hard to nail down and prosecute. A thousand a week is peanuts to them, and they wouldn’t piss in their own pool.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  I sped up to pass a laden dump truck hauling gravel down toward the more populous valley floor. “Kerry paid the price for his crimes and misdemeanors. The Conrads will get investigated. If they’re not dirty, they’ll still suffer for letting Kerry get away with too much. If they are dirty, they’ll have to pull in their horns and lie low for a while. Maybe they’ll cut a deal with the DA, pay a fine or something. Bartlett will go after the bikers, things will calm down and get back to normal, more or less.”

  “That doesn’t sound like justice.”

  “Justice is always incomplete and imperfect, Dad. You of all people should know that.”

  “What about Linda?”

  I flipped a palm up in a gesture of helplessness. “She’ll be taken care of. Maybe if Mike hadn’t been so protective and let her live a little growing up she wouldn’t have been so naïve now. Staying at home with a couple of Bible-thumpers can’t have been good for her.”

  “I thumped a few Bibles myself,” he replied.

  “Technically you did, but you didn’t shield me from reality.”

  “More than you might think. Every father wants to keep his daughter as innocent he can.”

  “Look how that worked out.”

  “You of all people know you can’t point to any one cause of her breakdown,” Dad said. “The first two guys she falls in love with are jerks and treat her badly. Mike is a good man, but you want to blame him and his beliefs for how Linda turned out. You can’t do that. People will be who they are, shaped by their experiences and their decisions. Just like you.”

  “Me?” I glanced over at him. He seemed as solid as he ever was when alive. “Nobody shaped me, at least after you died. I shaped myself. It wasn’t like Mom influenced me.”

  “More than you know, she did. You’re equal parts nonconformist and hedonist, with a strong dose of righteous crusader thrown in. Who does that sound like?”

  “You, mostly. And Mom,” I admitted.

  “Even bad examples are powerful. Kids either emulate their parents or they rebel, and every decision echoes down through their lives.”

  “You make your choices and your choices make you, huh?” I laughed.

  “Still true.” He didn’t speak for so long that I thought perhaps he’d gone, though I was afraid to look over to confirm it. Then he said, “What about Thomas?”

  “What about him?”

  “You don’t want to talk about him?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? If I’m just a part of your own psyche you won’t be divulging anything.”

  “Maybe I’d rather not think about him.”

  “He’s not going to go away.”

  Sighing heavily, I said, “I know.”

  When I checked again, Dad had gone.

  Speak of the devil, they say, and he shall appear. My phone rang and I plugged in the headset to answer. “Hi, Cal,” drawled Thomas’ cultured voice.

  “Dammit,” I replied.

  “That’s hardly a proper greeting for a lady.”

  “Who said I was a lady?”

  “I do.” His tone brooked no disagreement.

  “Well, thanks for that. Anything else?”

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “Oh, this time you’re asking?”

  “I was hoping to progress toward something approaching normalcy.”

  I choked a laugh. “First you hold me at gunpoint. Then you invade my bedroom. Now you’re merely phoning me. I suppose that could be viewed as progress.”

  “Excellent,” he said, blithely ignoring my sarcasm. “Dinner, then?”

  “I’m really not at my best today, Thomas. I got clocked pretty good yesterday and I need some rest.”

  “I know. You did well, Cal. I’m proud of you.”

  “I didn’t do anything but shoot a distraught woman.”

  “You solved the case.”

  I snorted, a sound of disbelief. “The case solved itself. I just happened to be there when it did.”

  “And you saved the day. If you hadn’t, more people might have died. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why are you so hard on yourself?”

  That stopped me. I realized he was right. I’d worked hard, I’d dug up a lot of dirt, and I’d aided the authorities in figuring out what was going on. In poker there’s a saying: winning is about putting yourself in a position to get lucky. I guess I’d done that.

  “Okay,” I said. “Dinner sounds good, but only dinner. I’m not up for any athletics tonight.”

  “Whatever you say, dear.”

  A fit of laughter seized me, alone but still connected by phone with this enigmatic man I realized I’d like to get to know better. I was probably crazy, but I found I was looki
ng forward to this evening.

  “Then it’s a date. Where should I pick you up?”

  “Meet me at Acquerello. Eight o’clock.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “Bye, Cal.”

  “Bye, Thomas.”

  I glowed all the way back, even after Tanner Brody crossed my mind. Yes, I thought, I must be crazy. For the first time in my life I was interested in a man not old enough to be my father, and he was a criminal. Brody made a lot more sense: a cop, lived in the City, had a nice smile and a good sense of humor – and oh, didn’t kill people for a living.

  If Dad were here he’d tell me I’d always been attracted to danger and excitement, and he’d be right. Brody was the safe choice, but I’d never been into “safe.”

  When I got back to my office I washed down four ibuprofen with a liter bottle of water and called Allsop to update him on everything that had gone on.

  “We’re getting the court order for Frank’s bank,” he told me. “We interviewed some of his drag queen friends and they told us he took money to liven up swinger parties.”

  “That explains his extra income. What else you got?”

  “Financial Crimes Division will be looking into the Conrads. And…”

  “And?” I could tell Allsop had an ace in the hole, something that would let him score points off me.

  “The computer geeks recovered a bunch of stuff off Frank’s phone. Looks like he sent a picture to Linda Davis the day he was killed.”

  “A picture?”

  “Yes…one of the blackmail pictures. I guess he pushed the wrong button. Butt-dialed it maybe. The record shows a call from her phone to his a few minutes after, and then one about three hours later, late in the evening.”

  “Makes sense. The pic pushes her over the edge. She phones him up and wheedles his location out of him. Says she wants to meet him no matter where he is. He has no transportation so he tells her to come to his room at the Five Star. She drugs him and hangs him. Covering the phone with the Bible was a statement. She was quoting the Old Testament the whole evening before she admitted killing him in front of me.”

  “It fits,” Allsop said grudgingly. “But where does she get the drugs?”

  “From the blackmailer, Kerry Lindquist, her current obsession. He always had a small amount of stuff available.”

  “No proof, but you got an answer for everything, don’t you, Cal?”

  I rubbed my aching head. I wasn’t in the mood for his bitterness. “Not by a long shot, Jay. Hey, I got hit in the head last night and I need to rest, all right?”

  “Fine. Go sleep it off while the real cops work.”

  “Glad to, Jay. And I know what you really wanted to say was, ‘We couldn’t have done it without you,’ so consider it said.” I hung up before I had to listen to any more of his bile, and to have the last word. You’d think he’d be happy to close a homicide case, even having to put up with me helping, but there was no pleasing some people.

  Mickey wasn’t in the basement so I pulled a couple of C-notes out of my safe and set them on his keyboard, and then made one more call as I walked home in the noontime sun.

  “Cole Sage.”

  “Hey, Cole, It’s me.”

  “Hi, Cal. I’m sorry, but I hit a dead end at your Chicago box. It’s a big drop-forwarding service with thousands of clients. A lot of them are shady, but it’s technically legal. None of the employees my contact approached would talk.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Cole.” I told him about the events of last night.

  “You want to grab some lunch and tell me more?”

  Last week I’d have jumped at the chance. Today…I had other things on my mind. “Thanks, Cole, but some other time. My head’s still throbbing and I need a couple days to rest. Maybe next week?”

  “Sure, Cal. Talk to you soon.”

  As I put the phone back in my pocket and approached the front door of my house, I mentally patted myself on the back. Good job, Cal, I thought. Time to move on and stop chasing someone who’ll never be interested in you anyway. Thomas wants you, and if that doesn’t work out, Brody’s interested. Both know the kind of life you lead and neither will be put off.

  When I opened the door, Snowflake pounced on my foot and Mom called a greeting from the kitchen. I smelled something cooking that almost seemed like food, and an open bottle of Chardonnay on the coffee table whispered my name. I poured myself a glass, suffered through some of my mother’s breezy babble, ate and put myself down for a nap.

  Acquerello at eight, I thought. That had a nice ring to it.

  End of In A Bind.

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  READ ON for an excerpt from Slipknot: A California Corwin P.I. Mystery.

  SLIPKNOT Excerpt

  A California Corwin P.I. Mystery

  BOOK 3

  “All in,” I said, shoving my stack of chips to the center of the table.

  The sharp-faced, dark-haired woman stared at me from across the poker felt, repeatedly shuffling her chips one-handed as she tried to get a read on me.

  If the sound was meant to irritate me, she was off base. I actually found it calming, like a smoker reacting to nicotine.

  I couldn’t get a decent read on her either. Except for the last three hours at the table, she was unknown to me. She did seem to overplay her hands, I thought, but she hadn’t paid for it yet.

  This was the beauty of the big play, though, betting all my chips. Now she had to make the decision.

  Call and risk a showdown, or fold and give me a huge pot.

  I resisted the urge to check my pocket jacks again. I knew what I had. The question was, did she?

  Pocket jacks was one of those hands every poker player loves to hate: too weak to be confident, too strong to simply throw away as a bad job.

  Like many things in my ex-cop-turned-P.I. life, they tempted me to get in too deep.

  In this case, though I had reason to be confident. With a jack and two queens on the board, I had a well-hidden full house. Only two possible hands could beat me, and based on my observations of the way she played, I didn’t think she had one of them.

  I stared at the pot, over six grand, and imagined the chips as mine. In fact, I imagined those chips plus her remaining stack as mine, which would mean eight and a half at least.

  She took a sip from the water bottle she’d been nursing all evening, pulled an envelope out of her purse, removed a stack of cash and placed it on the felt. “Raise.”

  “Table stakes,” the dealer reminded her.

  The rules of table stakes said I didn’t have to risk anything but the chips in front of me. I could refuse and we’d play for the money on the table, a pretty nice payday.

  My opponent smirked as she replied, “Unless she wants to accept the bet. I see car keys if she doesn’t have cash.”

  I’d set my key ring in front of me as a convenience. I don’t carry a purse, and the metal had been poking me inside my tight jeans. With only two players in a pot, poker etiquette said we could make whatever bets we wanted on the outcome of the hand, as long as we agreed.

  “How much is the raise?” I asked.

  “Twenty large.”

  Twenty thousand, plus the eight in the pot. Several month’s operating expenses. No need to accept mind-numbing spouse-surveillance or skip-tracing cases for a while. Maybe I could even afford to take a vacation. I hadn’t gone anywhere fun in three years.

  I drew in a deep breath. I should refuse, but with her pattern of overplay, I thought I had a big chance here. There was a possible flush showing on the board, which was strong, but would lose to my full house.

  The greedy hope-monkey every player knows seized me by the hair and gibbered in my ear. Okay, maybe greedy wasn’t really the right word. The money was nice, but it was also about what it represented: a big, satisfying, ego-boosting win. Bragging rights, respect in the card rooms. They’d say, “Hey, Cal, remember when you called that cocky chick
’s big bet and took down twenty-eight grand at Sergei’s?”

  Yeah, she must be overplaying that flush or bluffing. That’s what the hope-monkey told me.

  “Call.” I took a set of car keys off my master ring and tossed them into the pot. “That’s to the 1968 Mustang in my garage. It blue-books at twenty grand.”

  “Done.”

  A bit overeager – I should have made her show first – I rolled my jacks, displaying the full house, jacks over queens.

  She shrugged and turned over a queen and a jack, giving her a winning hand, queens over jacks.

  End of Slipknot excerpt.

  Look for Slipknot at your favorite book site.

  Books by D. D. VanDyke

  D. D. VanDyke is the Mysteries pen name for fiction author David VanDyke

  California Corwin P.I. Mystery Series

  Loose Ends - Book 1

  In a Bind - Book 2

  Slipknot - Book 3

  Off The Leash - Short Story

  ***

  Books by David VanDyke

  Plague Wars Series

  The Eden Plague

  Reaper’s Run

  Skull’s Shadows

  Eden’s Exodus

  Apocalypse Austin

  The Demon Plagues

  The Reaper Plague

  The Orion Plague

  Cyborg Strike

  Comes The Destroyer

  Stellar Conquest Series

  The Plague Wars continues 100 years later!

  First Conquest

  Desolator

  Tactics of Conquest

  Conquest of Earth

  Conquest and Empire

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