Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

by Shelley Singer

  The drawing of Iris, on the other hand, was pretty good. I began to talk about her, and I guess I went on too long because Rosie jabbed me in the ribs and made me turn the page.

  “For God’s sake, Jacob, we can talk about that later.” She was smiling. “Why do you think Bursky gave all this stuff to Cutter?”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to keep it at home. Didn’t want Harley to see it. Some of the faces might have been familiar to him. Like Cutter’s. She wouldn’t have wanted that. Or maybe she was just shutting her wandering husband out of her life.”

  The next drawing was a tiny sketch of Cutter’s house, just a few lines, really, but recognizable nevertheless. We turned another page and out slipped a CORPS leaflet, the notice of a rally to be held outside Chandler Hall the week before her death. Why would she be carrying a thing like that around with her? Even with what Rosie had learned about her, I was having trouble believing that Margaret Bursky could go along with a group like that.

  But then, what the hell was she doing with a guy like Cutter? Not just a kid but a nasty, dangerous kid who was maybe involved with even nastier and more dangerous grownups.

  And what about CORPS’ connection with the fire at Harley’s office? Did they do it or didn’t they? Was it a political gesture or were they really out to kill Harley? I passed on these questions to Rosie. She said she’d be happy to come up with some answers for a year’s free rent. If she came up with the right answers, I told her, she could have a year’s free rent. But I guessed I’d rather come up with the answers myself, so how about a race?

  “Look, Nero,” she snarled, “stop eating that orchid and listen to me. Either I’m working for you or I’m not.”

  “Very well, Archie, you may consider yourself an employee.”

  “I’m terribly glad to hear you say that, dear Mr. Poirot.”

  “Not at all, my dear madame Marple.”

  “Gosh, Dad, I sure hope we can clear this thing up.”

  “Don’t worry, Ellery, with your brains and my connections as a ninety-two-year-old policeman…”

  We turned another page of the sketchbook, and another. Two more portraits, of men I didn’t think I’d seen before. Except that one of them, a very rough sketch, kicked up some little memory. I stared at it for a good thirty seconds. Rosie waiting patiently. Then I knew who he reminded me of. The other new guy in the meditation group. Charles. The one with the ulcer. Or at least it looked like him. I couldn’t be sure.

  After that, we came to the blank pages. I picked up the book and shook it. No more fliers. The smaller sketchbooks yielded nothing much: a drawing of the Earthlight Meditation Center building was the only one I could place, and the rest looked like studies or exercises. There was nothing else in the bag. I put the books back inside of it and took the meeting notes and calendar out of my pockets. We started with the calendar. There were appointments with a lot of initials and a couple of names I didn’t recognize, most often someone named Frank. And there were several meetings with MB. I skipped through the book to the date of her death. He either hadn’t had or hadn’t written down an appointment with her that day. I didn’t expect any little reminders to “set fire to the PS department,” and I didn’t find any.

  We turned to the pages I’d ripped out of his notebook. They seemed to be personal notes, a spotty little diary about his political life. I should have known a bunch like CORPS wouldn’t have someone actually writing down the minutes of their meetings.

  There were no more than a dozen barely legible, badly misspelled, and heavily abbreviated pages. No dates or anything like that, and only initials for names. Initials yet. The kid was playing at spy. But those few pages held quite a bit of information, even if I still didn’t know enough to decipher it all.

  We read through the pages once, quickly, and I filled Rosie in wherever I could. Then I took out my own notebook and began to organize the scribbles.

  First heading: what seemed to be names, represented by single initials. I listed all the initials, starting with the two that I thought might connect with the two full names on Cutter’s calendar: F, maybe for Frank, and A, maybe for Arthur. Then there was an H, a J, a couple of S’s, an R, a B, a D. Of course, I couldn’t be sure the initials all stood for names. F could stand for fire, R for rally, and H for hellfire, for all I knew. We decided to go back to them after we’d made a few more notes.

  Second heading: place names. King Street was mentioned. That was the street Cutter lived on. And Chandler. Chandler was mentioned several times. Various other campus and Telegraph Avenue locations—restaurants, coffeehouses, street corners. He had met F several times at Telegraph and Dwight, at the tiny triangular park, a little island of dope dealing and bad music.

  The only other important place name was the name of the street where the Harleys had lived. Virgo Street. Bursky was becoming more incomprehensible to me every minute. I already knew they were pretty well acquainted, but to give that crazy her address? I couldn’t believe a sane woman would do it. I was beginning to think that maybe she had killed herself. But the address was one of the later entries. It wasn’t something he’d known all along.

  Okay, so those were the names and the places. Now I wanted to connect them with events. The first entry had to do with a meeting, group unnamed. The contributions of three people were mentioned, M, F, and J. J, it appeared, said it was time to do something really “significant,” something that would attract a lot of attention. This information was followed by the notation, “F— F was worried about the plan, J said we could always deny it. Why should we?”

  “Fire?” Rosie wondered. “And someone with the initial F was worried about that idea?” I thought that sounded reasonable. And CORPS had denied setting it, after someone had claimed responsibility for it in the group’s name. Cutter? Possibly. The notes made it sound that way.

  Then J ordered F to go check out Chandler. This was followed by the notation, “M— said already checked out Chandler.” F said he would do it anyway.

  It wasn’t too hard to figure out what was being discussed. But was this M Margaret Bursky?

  That seemed to be all there was to that particular conversation. Another entry followed half a blank page. The character lineup was M, F, and J. This time, F had apparently come to see M at King Street. Margaret? At Cutter’s house?

  F said he’d checked out Chandler. Then, “F— told M he was still worried, F too dangerous and be careful. What a jerk. F said J going out of town, F in charge. Shit. Why not me?”

  This last seemed to pinpoint M as “me”—Cutter himself. If that were so, Bursky wasn’t in it yet. It was possible that Cutter had, indeed, gone so far as to give himself a code initial. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d referred to himself as 007.

  There was more complaining about not being left in charge. Then there was a full blank page followed by a little story about M and M. M told M—Cutter told Margaret?—about F and “M got all upset.” After that, there was a speculation: “Why should M care anyway? She ought to help!”

  Rosie and I looked at each other. “She” could be Margaret Bursky. Not liking the idea of setting her husband on fire even if he was philandering.

  “What if she threatened to tell the police?” Rosie asked. I wondered the same thing myself.

  There were two full pages of rambling stuff about how the corrupters were trying to destroy American institutions, then another break. I couldn’t see any immediate significance about the next few pages, just M talking to an S, an A and a B about F, at three different locations and at three different times. I got the impression he was drumming up enthusiasm for F— probably fire—and against F— probably Frank, the guy who’d been left in charge. I couldn’t tell, in all the confusion of Cutter’s mind, whether he’d had any luck at all. There was some babble about more meetings with F at Dwight and Telegraph, with F passing on some incoherent orders about protesting and picketing and leaflets.

  Cutter saw somebody named R somewhere on Telegraph A
venue and said it was “funny R pretended to not know me.” I couldn’t imagine what that could be about, and it probably didn’t matter. The pages were full of odds and ends that had oozed out of Cutter’s mind to no apparent purpose. Things like “D called me again some people cant take a hint I guess.” I thought of poor Debbi, who might have been the one who couldn’t take a hint.

  Then he wrote, “went to Virgo to see M. Ha! It wasn’t easy.”

  The item wasn’t dated, any more than any of them were. What wasn’t easy? Did he have to be so damned cute? Was he saying he’d killed her or sacrificed himself by going to bed with her? Or that he had convinced her it would be fun to cremate her husband?

  The last notation said “S— watch out for him.” Could be Samson.

  Rosie and I talked things over for a while. From what was in the notebook, it looked pretty good for Cutter setting the fire—“F said be careful”—and giving the group public credit for it which was later rescinded by the higher-ups.

  His reasons for going against the group policy could have been purely political or what passed for political in his mind: the desire to take credit for a protest against Harley’s politics and his corruption of American youth. Or they could have been personal. Harley was unfaithful to his wife and Cutter had some kind of attachment to that wife and wanted credit for avenging her.

  The police should be tipped off somehow, I reasoned, but I was reluctant to get them on Cutter’s trail just yet. They seemed to be a day or so behind me on the Bursky death, and I preferred to keep them that way.

  Rosie said I couldn’t do it, couldn’t play it that close to the chest with these nuts running around. No telling what they’d do next. At least if I tipped the police they could keep an eye on Cutter. If they had any spare eyes. I tried another idea on Rosie. First thing in the morning, I said, I would make copies of the notebook pages and send the originals to the cops. That would delay them for a day and give me a little more time with my prime suspect, but I’d still be passing on what I had.

  I admitted the plan was dangerous. If I were a cop, I’d bust my ass for it. Withholding evidence in a murder case, not to mention operating without a license. Not to mention breaking and entering. Quite a list. But ten thousand dollars was a lot of money, and things were beginning to break. And I hadn’t had this much fun in years. Besides, I was a writer, I told myself. This was my story.

  I’d find a way of dealing with all those details when the time came, I was sure. Rosie looked doubtful, but then Rosie is a skeptic. I changed the subject by telling her I’d seen her old friend Jill that afternoon.

  She nodded and changed the subject back again.

  “Tell the police now,” she insisted. “He’s dangerous. How would you feel if someone else died because you kept this to yourself?”

  We compromised. I would call the cops in the morning and tell them what I was sending them. Anonymously and without using Cutter’s name.

  I hate it when other people are right.

  – 15 –

  Next morning I made copies of the diary pages at a place up near the campus, printed Cutter’s name at the top of the first page of the originals, stuck them in an envelope, and mailed them to the Berkeley police. From a Berkeley mailbox.

  After that I called them from a Berkeley telephone booth. Anonymity, I reasoned, might as well include operating from a town I didn’t live in.

  The cop who answered the phone tried once to get my name, gave up, and listened to what I had to say. Which wasn’t much. Just that I was mailing them some material written by someone connected closely with the campus fire. Nothing about Bursky. They could figure that out for themselves.

  What I felt like doing then was wandering around, having another look at the Harley house, having another look at the charred campus building, turning my mind loose, and hoping some connections would come clear.

  But what I did was wander over to King Street, to Cutter’s apartment building. A return to the scene of my crime.

  His car was nowhere in sight. I parked, walked up to his front door, and rang the nameless bell. No answer, but maybe he was playing hard to get. I strolled around to the rear and climbed the stairs to his door quietly. No sign of life. The plywood had been knocked back into place, but somehow, in the process, he’d broken the lower pane. Clumsy. I banged on the door for a while and finally conceded that he probably wasn’t home.

  My next step required a decision that was giving me some trouble. The funeral. The cops were sure to have someone there, and showing up wouldn’t do much for my low profile. But at the same time I had the same reason they did for being there: the possibility of learning something new.

  I sat in my car thinking it over for a while, hoping Cutter would show up and make the decision for me. If I was busy talking to him, I couldn’t very well go, could I?

  So I waited and let my mind skip around among the suspects. Cutter. He certainly looked like the best bet, but there were still other possibilities. There was Billy, although I doubted if he could organize a trip to the Laundromat. Debbi. A pretty respectable type, but the facade covered a passionate soul. And it seemed to me that any woman who was hot for Eddie Cutter was capable of almost any insanity.

  A lot of people could have killed Margaret Bursky or at least could have wanted to. Including her husband. Including Rebecca. Including, maybe, someone who hadn’t even come into it yet. I was beginning to wonder if maybe I was in over my head.

  Sure, I knew a lot more than I had a day ago, but a collection of facts is only a collection of facts.

  Cutter made my decision for me, after all, by failing to show up. I went to the funeral.

  There were only a couple of cars there ahead of me that I recognized: Harley’s and Alana’s. A chubby guy who looked like he could eat lunch on a coffin ushered me into the elegant foyer, down a short passage, and into a small room with a couple dozen folding chairs facing a closed coffin and a dais. Harley was sitting in the front row looking mournful. I nodded to him but sat down one row back, next to Alana. She gripped my hand briefly. Her nose and eyes were red. I wondered if I should say something about seeing her again but I decided not to. After all, she had said she wouldn’t fall in love with me and would dump me before I dumped her. No obligation to say or do anything.

  Billy came in, looking brave, followed by three people I didn’t know who seemed to be together. Evan, the meditation group leader, arrived and took the empty seat on the other side of Alana. Then came Iris, just ahead of a tall, authoritative-looking, cadaverous man who I guessed was either the mortician or the minister. Iris sat in the row behind mine. The tall man positioned himself at one end of the back row.

  No one else showed up until, right at the stroke of eleven, the real mortician entered the room with the real minister, who advanced to the dais. So the tall man was either a friend of the family or a cop, and he looked more like a cop than any of the other people I didn’t know. I tried to avoid looking at him and tried to pretend I wasn’t avoiding looking at him. I would have preferred looking at Iris, but she was behind me.

  Evan was murmuring something I couldn’t catch to Alana when I felt a light touch on my shoulder and turned halfway around, just enough to catch Iris’s breath on my ear when she whispered “Hi.” Then she sat back and we all listened solemnly to the minister. Harley was crying.

  Iris left the instant the service was over, and Alana smiled good-bye and went off with Evan. I saw Billy heading toward me and raised a hand to hold him off for a moment so I could have a word with Harley, who had just had a word with the tall man.

  “Who is he?” I asked, nodding toward the tall man’s back as he walked toward the door.

  “Sergeant Hawkins. Police. I think it’s Ralph Hawkins.”

  The other people I didn’t know were standing a few feet away eyeing Harley. I assumed they were waiting to mumble their condolences. “What about them?”

  “My colleagues.”

  “Where’s her family?”
>
  “There’s hardly any family. A couple of old people back east she cared about, a couple of young ones she’d all but lost touch with.” He glanced toward the door. “I have to go talk to Hawkins now.”

  I didn’t let him go. “What about?”

  “He said they had an anonymous tip this morning about the fire.” My call, I thought. “He said the caller gave them a name, and they want to know if I’ve ever heard of the man.”

  “A name for the arsonist?” We weren’t talking about my call, after all.

  “Yes. I have to go. I’ll be at my office later if you want to talk to me.”

  “I do,” I said. I needed to find out more about that call. Someone else had dropped a tip to the police that morning. Rosie flashed through my mind, but I dismissed the thought. We’d made an agreement, and I knew she would stick by it. I reflected that maybe someone in his own group had done it, hoping to take the pressure off CORPS and put it on an individual.

  Harley left and Billy ambled over to join me. We left the chapel together.

  “When do you want to talk to me?” he asked. Translation: When’s the free meal?

  “How about lunch, right now?” He agreed, but he didn’t look terribly pleased. Probably counting on dinner.

  We met at a restaurant he suggested, a fondue place near the campus. He ordered the steak and a half bottle of burgundy. Not the house burgundy either.

  “You’re on an expense account, right?” He smiled innocently. I grunted something affirmative. “Now,” he said, sighing contentedly and settling back with his first glass, “what can I tell you?”

  “What was your relationship with Margaret Bursky? How did you feel about her?” The question was abrupt, and he wasn’t ready for it. He sighed again, louder, just to make sure I heard.

  “You know, Samson, those are two separate questions.” I stuck my tongue in my cheek and waited. “You want it straight?” I cocked an eyebrow and nodded, still waiting. He wasn’t going to answer without lots of preliminaries. “How did I feel about her?” I sipped my Perrier with a twist of lime, patience incarnate. “I loved her.” I looked at him, wondering what was coming next. “What was our relationship? That’s a little harder.” The waiter, a skinny little guy with black hair and long clean fingernails, brought our fondue. Mine was cheese, because I wanted cheese. With a big pile of sourdough bread. Billy forked a piece of steak into the hot oil and kept it there too long.