by Pat Price
The Case Files of Newport Investigations
Case: Bright Sun
By
Pat Price
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed to be real. Any resemblance to actual events, persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Case Files Of Newport Investigations: Case File: Bright Son Copyright © 2011 by William Pat Price. All rights are reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Payment for this e-book grants you a one time, fully paid up, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and read the text of the e-book on the display screen of a computer or computer device. No part of the text of this e-book may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage device or retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including but not limited to electronic or mechanical means currently known or hereafter invented without the express written permission of the author, William Pat Price, or his assignees.
-1-
It was a warm balmy afternoon in early August. Jimmy and I sat drinking iced tea on the upstairs balcony of the Newport Landing Bar and Restaurant. The balcony stuck out above the sidewalk looking out over the harbor. Sail and powerboats were mixing it up in the narrow channel between Balboa Island and the Newport peninsula where the Newport Landing building is located.
My partner Jimmy Two Feathers and I own Newport Investigations. Our motto is no job too small or too large for us to turn down. Jimmy and I tend to be picky about the jobs we work on, especially if we are flush with cash. We finished a job the month before for Nick Albergamo, a major East Coast Mafia figure. A local Hispanic gangster named Pablo Sanchez, who owned the controlled substance importation business in Southern California, had kidnapped Nick Albergamo's son. It took us less than a week to retrieve the kid, still in good shape and, in the process, we earned a big chunk of change, about half of which we actually declared.
Jimmy Two Feathers stands six foot three and is every inch the best-looking Apache Indian in the Southwest or anywhere else for that matter. Jimmy was raised on a reservation outside of Phoenix, Arizona. He and his sister somehow managed to escape the typical ills, which fell most of their adolescent peers, namely suicide, alcoholism, drugs, paint sniffing, and propane huffing.
Jimmy rose above it all and fought to education himself, which he did admirably. He earned several degrees, including an MBA and a Masters degree in Operational Systems. To this day I haven't a clue what Operational Systems are or would be useful for. I on the other hand was born into a middle class California family and educated in the University of California system. I fell out of favor with my liberal family after graduating from college and, in their opinion threw away my education by volunteering for the Army in 1990. Being in the Army allowed me to discover my true talent, shooting guns and people.
A couple of years after the first Gulf war I sort of drifted into this business. After I left the Army I worked for a detective agency and discovered I liked the work. There was however, a large butt with legs walking around inside of me because I hated answering to the management, so I went off on my own. Jimmy was free-lancing at the time in the same business. He and I met when an insurance company had both of us, unknown to each other, working on the same case. The company wrongly assumed that we would not bump into each other, seeing as how we were sent off in different directions to different states. They did not count on both of us solving the case, which we did. It took Jimmy and me about ten minutes to settle our differences and we wound up playing the insurance company like a fine fiddle.
Insurance companies hire private detectives on contingency, which means you don't get paid if you don't solve the case. That's a good deal if you are the insurance company and it sucks if you are working your ass off and someone else beats you to the brass ring. The normal recovery fee for stolen property is ten percent and the insurance company will always try to low-ball the value of an item on a recovery. And, oh by the way, they always highball the value when calculating the premiums for the insurance coverage.
Anyway, Jimmy and I both had been assigned to the same case without either of us knowing the other was on the job. Jimmy and I joined forces and retrieved the item in question from the person who reported it stolen in the first place. A safe move considering it's a felony in California to falsify a police report or an insurance claim. We liberated the merchandise and put it in a safe place, then held the insurance company up for twenty percent just to teach them a lesson. We were warned that we would never, ever, work for them or any other insurance company in California again. They have used us on at least six other cases over the past four years. Jimmy and I have been in business together for just over six years.
So, there we were, enjoying the breeze, drinking ice tea, and watching the girls walking on the sidewalk below us. We saw a man, walking with a purpose, and carrying a skinned up black brief case that looked like it had been bought in the local Big Lots or some thrift shop. He was dressed in business casual, Dockers slacks and a short sleeved white shirt, that being the style here in Southern California. He was doing one of those fast walks you see some people doing at the airport when they know they have missed their plane but are hoping it might still be there at the gate, which is never very likely considering the absence of a plane at the end of the jet way.
We watched him enter the doorway into the building where our walk-up office on the second floor was located. We share the second floor with a tax accountant, a travel agency, and a software consultant, who is rarely in.
"Who would you suppose he is looking for?" I asked, directing my question to Jimmy, seeing as how no one else was with us.
"Well," Jimmy said in his best affected, laid back South Texas draw, "Walter, the software weenie, is out trying to scare up some business, Alice the travel agent is good looking but not that good looking, so that leaves Fred the tax guy and us. I can't ever recall anyone running to see their accountant. So as Sherlock Homes said, "When all of the obvious has been eliminated, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is the most probable solution. Therefore he must be looking for us."
"So, you finished reading the 'Case Files of Sherlock Holmes' I gave you for your birthday."
"Is that a guess or an observation?" Jimmy asked, all six foot three inches of him stretched out in the white plastic chair he was sprawled in.
"Actually an observation," I said. "You've had the book for five months and have never before quoted Sherlock Holmes," I concluded, somewhat smuggle.
"Well," he said with a smile on his face and his hands behind his head with his fingers interlaced, looking like a prisoner of war, "I was actually quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes, as you may or may not know, is a fictional character."
"Whatever," I replied, emphasis on the “ever” and keeping an eye on the door below us.
I did not have long to wait because less than two minutes later the man came out of the doorway and stopped. He stood looking around; his head quickly moving to the left and right like it was on a swivel. I whistled and caught his attention. He looked up and saw Jimmy and me.
"You looking for the sleuths?" I asked in my typical smart mouth manner.
"Yeah," he yelled, "you the guys with Newport Investigations?”
“That would be us,” I replied.
“Can I come up there and talk to you?" he shouted, his right hand covering his eyes so he wasn’t looki
ng directly into the sun.
"Sure, come on up.”
He entered the doorway of the Newport Landing restaurant directly below the balcony we were sitting on.
"Mark my word,” Jimmy said, “nothing good will come of this and most likely a great deal of pain.”
-2-
Mr. California Casual walked out onto the balcony where we were seated. He was puffing as though he had just run up the two flights of stairs.
"You run up those stairs?" Jimmy asked, dropping his arms and hands from behind his head and sitting upright in his plastic chair.
"Yeah," Joe Casual said, still attempting to catch his breath.
Jimmy was sitting across from him and nodded toward the chair in front of the visitor, indicating he could sit down. He pulled the chair out and sat down on the white plastic, a sigh escaping his body. He laid the battered briefcase on the table in front of him. It was easy to see that he was not in the same class as Mr. Jones, Nick Albergamo’s fixer.
"What's the chance you work for an insurance company?" Jimmy asked, and then glanced at me with a smile that had to have been the model Disney used for the Cheshire cat.
"Why yes, yes I do." Mr. Casual said. "How did you know?"
"Lucky guess," I replied while Jimmy was still formulating an answer.
The smile got bigger and I averted my eyes toward our guest so that the glare from Jimmy's pearly whites didn't blind me.
"What can we do to help you?" I asked.
"I don't think this is the place to talk about it," he said, looking around.
"Is this a matter of life and death or just a matter of national defense," Jimmy asked.
"Make fun of me if you want but this is serious business and yes, it is a matter of both life and death and national security."
His eyebrows were pulled together like someone’s grandmother had knitted them in place. He was sitting on the edge of the chair and leaning over the table. He had pulled the briefcase off of the table and onto his lap and he was holding onto it with a death grip.
Jimmy looked at me with the smile still on his face. I ignored him as best I could.
"And where would you feel safe?" I asked him, starting to agree with mister smart-ass' appraisal.
"Anywhere with more privacy,” He said, still grasping the briefcase.
Jimmy leaned forward onto the table and secured eye contact with our friend.
"Look amigo," Jimmy said. I knew Jimmy was getting ready to deliver our standard 'we don't need your business’ speech. Jimmy continued, "First of all, we don't need your business. Second, we don't have a clue who you are or which insurance company you work for. Third, no one is within fifty feet of this table and the background noise level is too high for a shotgun mike to pick up anything, so, you have two minutes to get our interest level up or you leave."
"You can't intimidate me with threats," our guest said.
"That's probably true but I can throw your scrawny white ass off of this balcony. So, what's it goanna be?" Jimmy asked with a threatening tone to his voice.
"Ok," our new friend said, "I work for Great Northern Financial. My company insures power plants and fuel processors."
"Wow, hold it right there Hoss," Jimmy said, "there are a lot of power plants in this country but the only kind that has anything to do with the processing of fuel is nuclear power plants. Are you telling me," Jimmy stopped, raised his right hand, palm out to inhibit the man from interrupting his thought for what seemed like several minutes but was probably more like ten seconds. He chewed on his lip while thinking then spoke, "You guys insure plutonium against theft, don't you."
Jimmy fixed him with a stare, or “put the look on him” as I like to describe it. Our man slowly turned red from his neckline to the roots of his hair and a vein running down his forehead stood out. He started to speak twice but his voice just croaked. Jimmy slid his half-empty glass of iced tea across the table to him.
"It's a bitch when someone reads your mind, isn't it," Jimmy said as a statement and not a question.
The man nodded and picked up the glass. He took a long pull on the straw as Jimmy leaned back in his chair - his hands relaxed in his lap. Red or yellow or black or white, Jimmy is the coolest person I know. It was 80 degrees at least and the humidity was at least the same or higher but he was not sweating like our new friend or me.
"Don’t get upset. It’s an Indian thing,” Jimmy said. “What pray tell is your name? Since you know ours it seems only fair we know yours."
"Jack Faraday," he said, "I'm the manager of claims at Great Northern."
"That means you don't really have much to do, does it." Again, Jimmy presented a statement that sounded like a question. He went on, "Why are you sitting here telling this to us instead of to the FBI?" This time it was a question and not a statement. I knew it had to happen sooner or later.
"We had an incident at either Oak Ridge or a depository in New England two years ago, give or take a couple of months. We…" he stopped and collected himself and went on, "Oak Ridge or the storage facility had an incident. They came up about 32 kilos or so short on the inventory after a batch run for a domestic plant that is also a fast breeder. The truth of the matter is that there may be more missing but we don’t have an accurate estimate of how much it may actually be."
Jimmy turned to me and said, "Any of this mean anything to you?"
"Nothing really after the word power plant," I said, not really meaning it.
As far as I could figure, someone had probably stolen some fuel, but I also figured Jimmy was going to use me as the straight man to draw information from Faraday
"Stop me when I make a mistake," he said, "a fast breeder burns a combination of Uranium-238 and Plutonium-239. The thing that makes a fast breeder reactor valuable is that it produces more Plutonium than it burns. In fact, the government has or had several fast breeders at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and at a Navy facility in Idaho. How am I doing so far Jack?" he said, shifting his line of sight from me to Faraday.
"So far you are right on," Jack said.
"So, someone stole 70 pounds or so of radioactive fuel?" I said, "What's up with that and how in the hell do you walk off with 70 pounds of anything?"
"Actually its 70.4 pounds that we know about," Jack said, "and that amount would fit in a 3 pound coffee can."
He was still looking around to see if anyone in the inside bar was looking at us.
"Stop being paranoid," Jimmy said. "No one is in the bar and no one is listening.
Back to my original question, why are you having this conversation with us instead of with the FBI?"
"We have been talking with the FBI, the Department of Energy and other alphabet government agencies."
Jimmy thought for a moment then asked, "Has anyone considered that this may have been a sanctioned theft, like the Israelis pulled off in the late 60’s or the early 70’s?"
"We don't think so." Jack said, "When the Israeli Operation went down, our company was warned off and the value of the stolen fuel plus the cost of processing was deposited in the company's account and we paid off on the claim for the materials. In this case, there were no communications with any agency and no demands for payment or concessions from any nut-ball group."
Jimmy thought for another minute, looking out at the bay at the sailboats and back at me. He raised his eyebrows in a questioning look. I nodded, knowing what he was thinking. Jimmy looked back at Jack Faraday and said, "OK Jack, you just got yourself an hour of our time back in the office."
-3-
The public has a stereotype idea of what private detectives look like. They have been conditioned to think of us in images of Rockford or Magnum. In truth, very few of us look like a detective because if we did we would not be able to do what we are paid to do. Jimmy for instance looks like anything but a private detective. He was dressed in jeans, exotic skin cowboy boots that cost more than a lot of people make in a week, and a raw silk cowboy skirt that I know for a fact cost over three hund
red dollars.
I, on the other hand, was dressed in what I normally would refer to as the non-descript Newport Beach style. This usually consists of designer jeans and a designer tee shirt like Calvin’s or a Tommy Bahamas button down. Jimmy calls my style “early Salvation Army” because the local thrift store has piles of these outfits donated by widows to charity for the tax deduction after papa died.
To the casual observer, Jimmy and I would not have looked like anyone's stereotype of private detectives and Jack Faraday did not look like what I would have thought an insurance company claims manager should look like. When we walked through the bar and the restaurant section of Newport Landing no one paid the slightest bit of attention to us. As far as the other customers were concerned, we were just three more local yahoos.
When we entered the office Jimmy indicated a chair in front of our desk to our guest who promptly sat down, still maintaining a firm grip on the hard shell plastic briefcase. Jimmy shut the door and locked it then turned to Jack and said, "Satisfied?"