by Jim Nelson
The wine was getting me nowhere. I poured a glass of Blue Pharjé to shut up the chorus of laughter in my head. One moment they were laughing at me in unison. The next—blue silence.
*
I came to around 6:30am. I panicked and jumped up from my futon. The data brick was where I’d left it, on the window sill and undisturbed.
Outside my windows, the sun was shining bright, a remarkable event in San Francisco. The sun shone proudly, as though it was the vanquisher of the rainstorms plaguing this city. The sky hailed blue from east to west. That January the eighteenth would be a blue Monday—a solemn blue Monday.
A brief shower rinsed off my bed sweat. I made a quick coffee and toast, dressed in a twill suit and hat, and went to my genkan to slip on my shoes—
On the apartment door taped beneath the peephole was a note:
SOMEONE IS OUTSIDE
SOMEONE TRIED TO UNLOCK THIS DOOR AT 1AM
Written in blue ink beneath it:
1:33AM - SOMEONE ALMOST GOT IN HERE
BE CAREFUL
DONT FORGET
All of it was written in panicky lettering and unmistakably my handwriting. I stepped out to the hallway to examine the door handle and locks. Sure enough, someone had attempted to force the electronic lock. The plate over the hallway light switch was loose. Most likely they were fishing behind the wall for data hard lines to the electronic security. At the far end of the hall, black paint had been sprayed over the lens of the closed-circuit camera.
*
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Outside my apartment, Talley Whitcomb leaned against an unmarked police car blocking a fire hydrant. Its rear passenger-side door was wide open. She nodded at the satchel in my hand.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Lunch,” I said.
“Big lunch,” she said. “Hop in.”
The car's four seats were arranged facing each other. The autodriver chauffeured us across town. The onboard computer was so police-like, it flashed the cherry and sounded the siren at stoplights to speed us through intersections without stopping.
Talley sat in the passenger seat facing me. A slight Gallic-looking detective named Renoir sat beside me. He had a thick mop of black hair that hung cantilevered over his petite face. He was one of the detectives standing over Aggaroy’s body in Stevenson Alley four mornings earlier. He was chewing gum. The whole compartment smelled of spearmint.
“Any news on Gannon Chancellor?” I asked Whitcomb.
“I don’t think someone marched him out to Lands End at gunpoint and ordered him to jump,” she said. “But I don’t think he slipped on a loose rock either.” She peered down at my shoes with a soft sneer. "We're certainly having trouble locating his girlfriend, though. She might be able to tell us what he was doing out there."
The car descended Nob Hill and sliced between traffic and autotrolleys on Post Street. I was tempted to activate the sidestream. Knowing what Talley knew would be immense. If she figured out my game, though, I’d be through. Sidestreaming is illegal as hell, and it's doubly illegal to use on a cop.
"Now, Aggaroy, though," she said. "We spent the last three days combing through his office. The man was a goddamn packrat. I’ve never seen more books and papers and disks and…junk. Why’d you leave him? Falling out?”
“I didn’t care for his business practices,” I said.
“Tell me more.”
“He paid all his bills,” I told them. “He never missed a paycheck. Bonus money, though, he’d promise and ‘forget’ to come up with. It wasn’t so bad. But he could be kind of…”
“Shady?” Renoir offered.
“Something like that.”
“You knew he had his own retention server, right?” Whitcomb asked.
"He wouldn't have it any other way. He didn't trust renting one. He told me, 'Who would you trust with all your memories?'"
"Did you ever see it?" Renoir asked.
“Sure. I installed the software for that server. That was part of my training years ago.” I looked over to Renoir. "Unless he bought a new one since then. I wouldn't know."
"Could you crack its security?" he asked.
"Agg probably added his own defenses after I left. Who knows?"
"Can you drill a microhole?" he asked.
"Through the wall of a carbon-graphite safe? No."
Talley preoccupied herself with a piece of lint on the knee of her trousers. She flicked it away. The autodriver gunned the engine uphill on California Street. The cable car tracks in the street made the left tires go diddle-diddle-diddle. Chinatown’s red pagoda storefronts and soggy paper lanterns whizzed by us in the rain.
“We know for a certainty Aggaroy was in the employ of the Samuel Justin campaign," she said. "Gannon paid him out of his own pocket, but he was working for the campaign all the same.”
“You should be talking to the campaign, then."
“If it weren’t for Agg’s sloppy state of affairs, we might never have put it together. He had a paper contract with Gannon he’d apparently meant to file in the safe. It was in a stack of old receipts on his desk.”
“Agg was a big fan of paper, ink, and cash,” I said.
“We also discovered he was in the pay of a shell corporation registered in Antigua,” Whitcomb said. “We don’t know the real source of that money.”
“What’s the name of this corporation?”
“ZO Enterprises,” she said. “Ring a bell?”
I shook my head. “Maybe a front for Gannon Chancellor?”
“Doesn’t look like that,” she said. “What about a man named Ellis Brandt?”
I wondered if this car ride was leading up to this topic. "What about him?"
“You know the name?”
“I imagine you’re going to tell me about him.”
“Ellis Brandt is the nephew of Donahue Brandt,” Whitcomb said. “You know? The Mayor of Los Angeles? He’s running a campaign against Justin for the Senate.”
“And?”
“And I think Aggaroy was working for both campaigns at the same time,” she said. “Playing both ends against the middle. You think Aggaroy was capable?”
I considered my answer. “I saw him do similar things on a smaller scale. What you're describing would have screwed over some powerful people. He was too smart for that.”
“What if he was in possession of details he could hold over their heads later?”
“If Agg was blackmailing anyone, that would’ve been a definite business expansion. Agg was a take-the-money-and-run kinda guy. Extortion is a more…long-term investment.”
Whitcomb savored that for a moment. “You think this offshore corporation was Agg’s doing? Maybe he was laundering the money through it. Paying himself.”
I shook my head. “When it came to money, Agg had the financial sense of a sailor.”
The car eased to a halt. We were parked in a loading zone before an office building. Its entrance was overrun with kudzu and flowering wisteria happy to see some sunshine. We were directly before the lobby of the Medical/Dental Building, its brass Neo-Mayan bas-reliefs peeking through the overgrowth.
“I thought we were going to Agg’s office,” I snapped. She'd never told me our destination, though.
“One more name for you.” Whitcomb was practically purring in her seat. “Dr. Daryl Lund.”
“What about her?”
“Her?” Whitcomb flashed Renoir a smile. “Could be a man’s name.”
“Could be anyone’s name,” I said.
“A man named Ellis Lotte was working with Aggaroy in this very building. The night watchmen here saw them enter and leave together several times over the past week. When we were checking Aggaroy's papers, Dr. Lund's name came up."
“And?”
“And we think Ellis Lotte is actually Ellis Brandt.”
“And?”
She didn’t care for that. “And we think you can fill in some of these blanks."
“Soun
ds to me this Ellis Brandt character killed Aggaroy.”
“Could be,” she said. “But the best information we have today still says you were the last person to see Aggaroy alive.”
“Then keep looking,” I said. “He was breathing when we parted ways.” I put a hand on the car door handle. "Breathing through the nose. Breathing through the mouth." I undid the door latch.
Whitcomb put out a hand to stop me. “Not so fast. We’ve already been to the eleventh floor of this building.”
I nearly panicked and asked When? I edited myself just in time. “And?”
She pointed skyward. “Lund's done state work for thirty years now. She also kept up a private practice. We think Ellis Brandt wanted to get into her office safe for her files, probably to help his uncle’s senate campaign in some way.”
It was like waiting for the punch line to a joke you already know. “What does this have to do with me?”
“Lund is dead on the floor of her office kitchen,” Whitcomb said flatly. “All her appointments were cancelled by some third party. And someone seems to have opened the wall safe and relocked it.”
“Last time it was opened was around ten o'clock last night," Renoir said. The safe’s software keeps a history when it’s opened and closed. "And whoever opened it re-locked it forty-five minutes later.”
With the rabbithole defeated, it was a simple matter of reinitializing the manufacturer’s software and sealing the safe. It meant reactivating the rabbithole, though. I didn’t have enough time to uninstall it.
“What does this have to do with Brandt?” I asked.
“He's stiff up there too," Renoir said. "Someone dumped him in a laundry cart."
"We think they intended to move his body out of the building," Whitcomb said. "Getting a corpse outside is more difficult than it looks, even in a laundry cart."
"Lund was attacked," Renoir said. "Hit across the forehead and strangled."
"But that's not what did her in,” Whitcomb said. “Heart attack. She was taking digitalis. She was seventy years old. One of those tough women who don’t retire. The attack probably triggered a coronary.”
I waited for them to continue. That was it.
“Congratulations," I said. "You’ve got it all wrapped up.”
“How’s that?” Renoir said.
I spread my hands for them. “Come on, guys, piece it together. What would a seventy-year-old shrink keep in safe? She probably did things the old way, with pen and paper. She kept her most sensitive patient files in the safe.”
“We’re ahead of you there,” Renoir said. "We've got a team on the way to crack it open."
“Ellis Brandt comes to San Francisco to convince Dr. Lund to hand over a patient's file," I said. "Something incriminating the Brandt campaign can use. Or maybe something incriminating against Brandt himself. Ellis Brandt confronts Lund in her office. She’s a good doctor and refuses. He gets physical. He riles her up, she has a coronary, boom—down she goes.”
Whitcomb nodded carefully. “Okay. Continue.”
“Now Brandt has a problem. Getting rid of a body in a downtown high-rise isn’t easy. He stuffs her body in the refrigerator and cancels all her appointments and the cleaning service. Unless her husband or children come sniffing around, he’s bought himself some time.”
“She’s a widow,” Whitcomb said. “And childless.”
“Brandt’s job isn’t done,” I said. “He still doesn’t have the patient file he came for. Eventually, someone will get their hands on it, and that’s no good with an election coming up. So, posing as Lotte, he hires Aggaroy to break into the safe.”
“Which your pal Agg accepts,” Renoir said.
“Not while he’s working for the Justin campaign. That’s career suicide in this state. I think he turned down Brandt. Did you find a contract or payment from Brandt in Agg’s office?”
“No,” Whitcomb said softly. “We did not.”
"Brandt would've used cash." Renoir said it to Whitcomb as much as he said it to me. "And don't forget the security man seeing them together in the building."
"Obviously, Aggaroy realized this was political intel he could take back to his employers at the Justin campaign," I said. "He played Brandt to learn what he was up to. Then he turned down Brandt."
Renoir looked about to speak, but no words came forth. Whitcomb said, "Continue."
"So now Brandt is at the end of his rope. Lund is dead, Aggaroy turned him down, and the safe is still locked. The clock was ticking for him. He needed that safe open and to get that file out of town.” I considered the next theory before uttering it. “I wonder if Brandt followed Agg. Or saw him with Gannon Chancellor. One way or another, Brandt learned Aggaroy was working for the Justin campaign. He realized he’d screwed up. He’d just delivered a major piece of blackmail to the opposition.”
“And so Brandt killed Aggaroy,” Whitcomb said carefully. “And Gannon as well?”
“I’m not going that far,” I said. “Let’s just say Brandt killed Aggaroy. He probably lay in wait outside the Palace Hotel for him to finish his work that night, lured him into Stevenson Alley, and killed him on the spot.” I swung open the car door and put one foot on the curb. “Makes sense to me.”
“Hold up,” Renoir said. "Who opened the safe last night?"
"Search me," I said, hands clenched around the leather satchel's handle.
I hauled myself and the satchel out of the car, slammed the door behind me, and started walking. I walked like hell. Adrenaline punched at my heart. If they put me in front of the building's night watchman, I'd have some fast talking to do. If they found Gannon's memex in my pocket or the data brick in the case, I was done for. The men under her weren’t winning any spelling bees, but Whitcomb was as sharp as they came. She wouldn't be fooled for long. Time was pressing. Time would not wait for me.
32.
Cassandra Chancellor's assistant met me at the door of the Leavenworth house. She wore a black suit and an even more drawn face than before. She allowed me inside with only a word of greeting.
"I came to express my condolences to Ms. Chancellor," I told her.
"You could have sent a message or even a telegram."
"Tell Ms. Chancellor I have information on her son's death."
She looked at me quizzically, weighing my words, and excused herself.
With my hat brim in both hands, I circled the drawing room. Black cloth had been thrown over the mirrors. The wall clocks and the grandfather's hands had been stopped. A single white candle flickered alive atop the fireplace mantel.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Max Dorsett sauntered in. He wore a rumpled black suit and a pink dress shirt open at the neck. His five o’clock shadow usually offered a rugged look the ladies liked, but today, it just made him appear hung over.
"Like Dana said, you could have sent a telegram. It would have been more appropriate."
"Seems a little on the old-fashioned side," I said.
"Ms. Chancellor has a taste for the old ways."
We stood at a standstill for a moment. Max stared at me as though he would kick me out if he had the wherewithal. He did not, not here.
"How is Drake taking it?" I asked.
"How the hell do you think he's taking it?"
I nodded. “How long have you worked for him?”
“George? Ten years now. Since I was seventeen."
"You were a pilot at age seventeen?"
"I've been on the water since I was twelve," he boasted. "George opened a lot of doors for me.” He added, “My old man split when I was seven.”
“George Drake was the father you never had,” I said. “You were the son he never had.”
“It's not that simple.”
“You eat at the same table as George?” I asked.
“What?” Max shrugged. “Sure. Of course.”
“You go on vacations with him? I mean, not as his pilot, but as a friend?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “I�
�ll go with him and his girlfriend sometimes, when he’s got one. He flew us all to Florence last year. He put me up in the suite next to his.”
“You don’t have a girlfriend of your own?”
"Not generally." He cocked his head. “What are you aiming at?”
“I’m asking if you’re in a steady relationship, Max.”
He nodded with a puzzled look, as though I’d asked him a patently stupid question. “Girls come and go, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Leigh Blessing, though.”
“Yeah, Leigh is something else.” He softened a bit, cold butter left to sit on a radiator, then hardened back up. "But she's Gannon's girl."
“How long have you known Leigh?”
“I knew her before Gannon did,” he said with some pride. “I met her when she was at Stanford. She was spending the weekend in Santa Barbara. I was there with George. He loves the fishing down there. Anyway, I took her out on a date. Coffee and scones with a nice view of the Pacific.” The memory was sour. “Didn’t work out. She told me I was nice and all. I think what she really meant was, she doesn't date men with grease under their fingernails.” He extended his left hand and clenched and unclenched it, like a rebuilt android testing his new body. "I was George Drake's man, not a 'self-made man' like Gannon," he said mockingly and distant. He shook the memory off. "I mentioned Leigh to Ms. Chancellor. Gannon and her starting dating not long after that. Then Leigh won the Foundation prize."
“Cassandra told me she discovered Leigh.”
“Ms. Chancellor is mistaken,” Max said.
“How often do you talk to Cassandra?”
“She refuses to talk to George directly,” he said. “I’m their go-between. She likes me. She talks straight to me, which I like.”
"Does she treat you like the help?"
"The help?" he said, apparently unfamiliar with the term.
"A servant," I said. "You're not her errand boy."
"No," he said, disgusted.
“And it sounds like Drake doesn’t treat you like the help either.”