by Chill, David
"Nice girl."
"Yeah," he said, sliding around on his stool. "A real sweetheart. Of course, I don't let her know that."
"No?"
"Nah," he sneered and gave me an ugly wink. "Gotta keep babes guessing, let 'em know they're not the only fish in the sea. Keep them off balance. You know."
I knew that if I tried that with Gail Pepper she'd likely take a swing at me. I waited for him to continue.
"I'm a little surprised they got his wife in mind as the culprit, though," he said. "That's not the angle I'd be looking at."
"Who do you suspect?"
"A loser. One of Wayne's clients, or whatever he called them. Hey look, whenever someone like Wayne's made it, there's always a crazy guy out there who thinks he has to even the score. Someone that can't accept life's fate."
As he spoke, the jingling of bells interrupted his stream of words and we watched a man wearing a scuzzy black sweat shirt enter the store. Mel's eyes followed him as the man perused the cooler and came out with a bottle of Coke. Placing it on the counter, he dropped a pile of grubby looking change next to the cash register.
"I'll pay outta that," he wheezed.
"Look buddy, if you can't count, then take off. I don't want your business that bad."
"It's money, ain't it?" he demanded angrily. "You can take it or leave it, but I'm drinking this puppy."
With that, the man twisted open the cap and took a long swig. He glowered up at Mel and asked him if he wanted the Coke back. Mel reached down, hurriedly counted out some change, and pushed the rest back at him.
"Take it and get lost," he sneered. "Do me a favor and go shop at 7-11 next time."
The man pocketed what was left over on the counter. "No sir," he declared. "I like it in here. You all are so nice to me, I think I'm gonna tell all my friends about this place."
With the wry smile of a small battle won, the man strutted out of the store. Mel glared as he walked through the glass doors, a cold hostility forming in his eyes.
"Damn homeless," he sneered. "See what I have to put up with? And the police won't do a thing about them. They just keep saying their hands are tied because the Mayor doesn't want to prosecute them. I tell you, pretty soon Bay City's going to look like Skid Row downtown."
"If you feel this way, why volunteer at Second Chance?"
He hesitated for a moment before replying. Judging from the anger still remaining on his face, he seemed to be replaying the scene in his mind. Or replaying a previous encounter.
"Well it's mostly Nina's idea. But I liked the concept Wayne had. Helping people help themselves. Show 'em how to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That's the American Way. That's my way."
It sounded good but judging from the Fenster & Son sign on the door, old Mel probably had some help finding his own bootstraps, much less hoisting himself up by them. He did make a point about Second Chance though. There were a variety of shelters on the Westside of Los Angeles that offered services to the homeless. They provided some meals but not a lot more. The Second Chance philosophy was to give people direction rather than handouts. We held clinics on how to get a job, an apartment, and above all how to adjust back into society. It was a tough, no-nonsense approach geared towards getting clients to straighten out their own lives. Wayne felt there were some people we could help, and some who were too far gone.
Turning back to Mel, I asked him if he had any specific idea who might have shot Wayne Fairborn. The icy look remained.
"Like I said," he growled, "I think it was one of those homeless. I tell you, these guys are just plain jealous of us, because we've made it and they haven't. And Wayne's made it big, and they couldn't handle that."
"Go on," I said.
"Personally, I think it was one of those two janitors we hired. Eddy or that weird guy, what's his name?"
"Raff?"
"Yeah, Raff. In fact, I saw Raff hurrying down the street after the workshop was over. Like he couldn't wait to get outta there."
I stiffened. "When?"
"About ten minutes after we finished up. I walked outside for a smoke, it's against people's religion to allow cigarette smoke indoors these days. Raff took off a few minutes later in a major hurry. He had something under his coat, too. Something bulky."
"Did you see anyone else leave around then?"
"Sure," he whined. "But they were normal people like you and me."
"Did you tell the police this?" I asked.
"The police," he scoffed. "Yeah, I told that cop, Sack. But it was like he didn't even hear me. Went in one ear and out the other. Just like when I ask 'em to get rid of those bums outside my store. They just turn a blind eye. Businessmen like me, we just get squeezed."
I looked around his store, the store his father probably worked like a dog for, and I thought about how things could be a lot worse for him. At least he had a viable business. Not to mention a steady income. If he was seeking sympathy, I was the last person he should turn to.
Chapter 6
The next morning was warm and smoggy, and I spent the better part of the day sitting in my car outside of a beach house in Malibu. Looking through a pair of binoculars, I was feeling very much like a voyeur as well as feeling completely foolish. Young Violet, the dermatologist's wife, was doing little more than lounging around the sun deck with a girl friend, the two of them wearing skimpy bikinis and looking decidedly tantalizing. By two o'clock, they were both getting nicely tanned and I was becoming excruciatingly horny. Despite the sparkle of their lean, glistening bodies, I still would have preferred twenty minutes with Gail Pepper to half a day with either of them. Since it did not appear that any shenanigans would be enjoined today, I packed up the binoculars and headed back down to Bay City. Unlike the good doctor, I had doubts that Violet was engaging in any sexual liaisons, if indeed she ever had been at all.
The local Republican Party headquarters was situated along Wilshire Boulevard, on the fourteenth floor of a smoked glass office tower. The building was plush and quiet, as if there was either massive insulation or nobody was working on a Thursday morning. Even the air conditioning was silent. The subdued atmosphere continued as I turned the silver handle and walked into their office.
An attractive receptionist wearing a pleated white blouse that was nothing if not tasteful, turned from her laptop and said hello.
"Kind of quiet here," I remarked.
She sighed and nodded grimly. "The enthusiasm is quite low. May I help you?"
"I'd like to speak to Aaron Gregory."
"And your name?"
"Burnside. I'm a friend of Wayne's."
Her eyes widened as she picked up the phone and buzzed the intercom. A few minutes later I was ushered inside.
A grim faced man wearing a dark blue suit and maroon tie rose from his desk and shook hands with me. "Aaron Gregory. What can I do for you?"
"The name's Burnside. And thanks, but I'll pass on the coffee and Danish."
His mouth tightened. "Mr. Burnside, I am truly a busy man. Please spare me your sarcasm and tell me the purpose of your visit."
"I'm a friend of Wayne's. And a private investigator. I'm looking into what happened the other night."
"On whose behalf?"
"For now let's just say on the behalf of Wayne's memory. Not to mention my own idle curiosity."
"Your own curiosity," he repeated. "Oh, hell. I'll give you a couple of minutes. I don't think the police are bound to do much."
"Tell me a little about Jim Callison," I started.
He fluttered his lips in a way that would have sprayed me with saliva if I were a few feet closer. He looked off into the far wall at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe didn't look too happy about things either.
"Mayor Callison," he declared. "Where do I begin? The guy's had Bay City in his pocket for twelve years. Locked up. Everyone we ran against him got clobbered, he fit in so well here. This city may be the most leftist place in the country, and that includes Berkeley and Cambridge.
We call this city the PRBC: the People's Republic of Bay City. And for years Callison was the classic liberal democrat, right out of the George McGovern wing. Put the guy in Mississippi and they'd tar and feather him but around these parts he was a God."
"Seems he lost his touch a bit. I heard Wayne was running even with him in the polls."
"You bet he was. And Wayne was going to knock him off. He was perfect. He had that Homeless Center so all the bleeding hearts in Bay City loved him. Plus he was a businessman so that sat well with the conservatives. And his timing couldn't have been better. Callison's contributors were revealed -- the biggest developers on the Westside were backing him. Kiss of death around here. Mention you're pro-growth and they'll clobber you. At the federal level, abortion is the acid test. Around here it's development."
"I take it Wayne didn't mention he was pro-growth."
"We convinced him not to. A compromise. The traffic's a problem for people and it's getting worse. They used to blame all the ex-New Yorkers. Now they blame the developers."
"But Wayne was a businessman. And a former real estate developer himself."
"Exactly. We positioned Wayne as a guy who was on the inside and saw the horror of it and backed out of the business. Sold all of his real estate interests."
"So you convince the liberals he's a liberal and the conservatives he's a conservative."
"You got it."
Just like I thought, politics was easy. Once you give up your values, everything else was a piece of cake.
"And Callison was in real danger of losing his job," I said.
"Right."
"And would have done anything to keep it."
"Right."
"Including murder?"
Gregory shrugged. "Wouldn't surprise me. Might be worth looking into...." he said, his voice trailing off.
A thought occurred to me. "Who's filling Wayne's vacancy on the ballot?"
"Lee Finley," he said. "Local Councilman. It'll be announced next week."
I frowned. "What are his odds? Must be a near impossible job to try and run someone new with only five weeks to the election."
"Isn't it though?" Gregory said wearily. "Finley's a good man but it's certainly not my idea of a proper campaign."
*
The weekly workshop at Second Chance was to begin at six-thirty as scheduled. This week's topic was on how to interview for a job. It could have been postponed, but Jerry decided that Wayne would have wanted things to go on. No one was about to disagree.
Only three other volunteers showed up to assist the roughly fifteen homeless clients. The clients varied in age from twenty to fifty, and most were attentive and dressed cleanly. Second Chance worked in concert with two other homeless shelters in Bay City to provide training and job placement for those ready to re-enter the work force. That typically meant going through a screening interview with Jerry Winkler. If they came across reasonably well, they were placed in the program.
The other volunteers were Jerry, Amy Flanders, and a new volunteer named Matthew. Amy was one person I had yet to talk to; the car dealership she worked at kept telling me she was with a customer, and her voice mail kept saying leave a message and she'd get right back to me.
Jerry approached me before things got under way. "Light crowd here," he commented. "I guess some of our volunteers feel a little uneasy after what happened the other night."
I shrugged. "No need to be. This was no random act of violence. From what I can gather, there are plenty of people walking around with motives to shoot Wayne Fairborn."
"You don't think it was Crystal?"
"I'm not totally ruling it out, but I'd put my money on half a dozen others first."
Jerry nodded. "Have you considered Raff?"
"Sure," I said. "Still am in fact. Why?"
Jerry motioned upstairs with his thumb. "He came by earlier to pick up his paycheck. I caught him going through some things in Wayne's office. Said he was just dusting them off."
"Anything missing?"
"Not that I could tell," he said. "Then Raff said he had another job. Wasn't real specific and wouldn't tell me with who."
"When was he here?"
"About a half hour ago. I told him he was welcome to stay for the workshop but he insisted on having to leave. Strange thing, wouldn't you say?"
"Perhaps," I remarked and turned towards the podium. "But there's a lot of strange things going on here."
Jerry led the workshop, and gave a brief twenty minute synopsis on the do's and don'ts of interviewing for a job. He stressed the necessity of a clean appearance, an alert mind and most important, show a lot of interest in working there.
"You mean be enthusiastic?" one of the women asked.
He nodded. "Enthusiasm will get you a lot farther than brains." If they took nothing else from tonight's workshop, remembering that tidbit would help them inordinately.
Jerry then suggested we break up into groups of four or five and conduct some mock interviews. My group consisted of a gangly man whose name was Arthur Harris, a woman who said her name was Mary but preferred to be called Charmaine, a hefty guy named Lenny Mast who was built like a defensive tackle, and a little guy named Jimmy who observed attentively but said absolutely nothing.
I played interviewer and selected Mast as my first applicant. He told me in an outgoing demeanor that he was applying for a job as a chef.
"Okay Mr. Mast. What's your experience?"
"First of all, my friends call me Mustard."
"Mustard?" I asked quizzically, "why Mustard?"
"On account of I slap mustard on just about everything," he said, showing a toothy grin. "We was poor where I grew up. Back in Arkansas. No matter how bad our meals were, putting a little hot mustard on things hid the taste just fine."
My palate blanched. "You might want to hold off telling that story until after you're hired," I suggested. "What about your experience?"
"I put four years in as a cook," he said proudly.
"Where?"
"San Quentin."
I closed my eyes. "Why don't you try saying `a place up in the Bay area' or something like that? If they specifically ask if you were in prison then tell them the truth, but you do not have to volunteer it."
"Got it, man."
"Okay. What type of food did you cook at this place up north?"
"Soup, ravioli, chow mein. It was easy. Open up them giant cans and spill the whole mess into a big pot!"
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Try saying something like `the place served a lot of different entrees. Like a coffee shop.' And you have experience cooking lots of different things. Basically what I'm trying to tell you is put your best foot forward. Make a good impression. Remember, there's nothing you can't learn once you get the job."
"Sure," the gangly man said cynically. "Then when you see somebody whose job you like better, you can set them up, get them fired and then take their job away. That's the way it is in the business world."
The bitterness exuded from him like smoke from a burning bush. "What's your story, Arthur?" I asked.
"I used to work for a bank. Big one, downtown. Spent ten years doing financial analysis. Had just bought a condo when the financial sector collapsed. So they brought in these new executives and decided to clean house. They didn't like my boss, so our department was the first to get riffed."
"Riffed?"
"R-I-F," he spelled it out. "Reduction in force. Sounds nicer than getting canned, don't it? Happened at the worst possible time too. I had just bought this condo. Invested every dime I had and when the job went, so did the condo. I missed four payments and the bank foreclosed. Lost everything. The bank stole my investment. Said they needed to recoup the losses they took when they sold it. Said the value had dropped like a rock."
"Couldn't you have just gotten another job?" Charmaine asked.
"Try and find one," he sneered. "Oh, I could get a job that pays less than half what I was making before. Sure. Be a clerk somewhere. Or do da
ta entry. Take a job that's beneath me. Uh-uh."
Charmaine glowered at him. "What you're turning your nose up at is probably more than I ever made," she countered. "What are you going to do? Wait until some high falutin' executive position come along again?"
"She's got a point, Arthur," I said. "You had it better than most people. Maybe you'll get there again. But it looks like you're going to have to prove yourself."
"I already proved myself," he said indignantly. "Why should I have to go pay my dues once more? Tell me why?"
I lowered my eyes for a moment. He was asking me why life was unfair and I had no answers. Like him, I had mostly questions.
"Arthur," I said softly. "If I could explain it, I'd have the key to the universe. One thing I can tell you though, is that the winners are the ones who hang in there. The ones who don't give up when they have a setback. Pick the job you want and become the person who does it."
He mulled that thought over and I hoped that it sunk in. I turned to Charmaine and asked what type of work she was looking for. She told me she was an actress.
"Have you worked in the industry yet?" I asked.
"Not yet," she said, her voice coated with a little anxiety. "I've been in a few productions back home, though. I had the lead role in West Side Story. I played Maria."
"Nice. Where's back home?"
"Iowa City."
"Seems like half the native Californians have roots in Iowa," I said. "That's where my great grandparents were from."
"From what I can tell, half the people here are from New York," she said.
"They're not natives," Arthur commented and added wryly, "and they never will be either."
Suddenly we heard the sound of a door slam and the pounding of shoes on linoleum. Three seconds later Jerry burst into the workshop room, his eyes wide and his breath coming in spurts.
"Burnside," he gasped. "I need you. You've got to come see this."
He turned and sprinted towards the door and I walked purposefully after him, my eyes darting up and down the street and my hand on the .38 just in case. I followed Jerry around the corner to an alley that ran parallel to the building. The alley was old and narrow with a few pathetic looking bushes and some milkweed growing haphazardly abound. A pair of ugly orange dumpsters stood amidst the urban foliage.