“Rosie, your truck. You shouldn’t be driving your truck. It’s probably okay right now, but not again.”
She glared at me, hands on hips and one eyebrow quirked sardonically.
“You know, Samson, you’re a jerk.”
“Huh?”
“I borrowed a car. I will continue borrowing a car while I am a member of CORPS. A very ordinary all-American Japanese car.”
The heat of embarrassment crept up my neck and into my face.
“You should blush, Jake,” Rosie said self-righteously. I nodded. “I’m going to assume,” she continued, “that you would have said the same thing to anyone you thought was inexperienced and maybe a little dumb. Not just a woman. Not just me.” I nodded again. Then she dropped the attack and got to the important business. “I found out about a meeting tomorrow night. I’m going. Here’s the address.” She handed me a scrap of paper. A North Berkeley address.
“Can I keep this?”
“Yes,” she said, “I wrote it down for you.”
“Any problem finding out about the meeting?”
“None at all. There were notices up all over the place. Looks like they’re anxious to recruit members.”
I told her about my dinner with Rebecca.
“Poor woman,” she said. “I wonder if he really does plan to start seeing her again when this is over. I think she wonders, too.”
We talked about Cutter’s confession and his fruit-bowl fingerprints. “Maybe,” Rosie said, “he’ll confess to the murder next. Maybe that blow knocked his conscience loose.”
I snorted. “He didn’t need to have anything else knocked loose. His brains have been rattling around for a while.”
By the time we’d finished catching each other up, we were on friendly terms again. It was still early when I got in my own door, so I put in a call to Debbi.
She sounded strange: I couldn’t tell whether she was glad to hear from me or not, but I decided she probably was not. Her throat sounded tight and her words came out a little fast.
“Yes, Jake. How are you? What can I do for you?”
“It’s like this, Debbi, I’ve been talking to some more people and now I’ve got a few items I need some help with. Maybe you could answer a few more questions?”
She sighed with exasperation or exhaustion.
“I don’t know what more I can tell you, Jake.”
“Maybe there’s something you forgot. If I could come and see you?”
“Tonight? I don’t think so. No. Is there some reason why you always want to see me at night?”
Like my father always said, there’s no justice. I didn’t think it would do much good to argue with her, deny my lust, accuse her of seducing me. I had to stay on her good side. Not under her, not on top of her, but on her good side.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I protested. “Not tonight. But soon. It’s important. You know Cutter’s in jail?”
She sighed again. “Yes. I saw the paper. Why should I care?”
“Can I see you?” I repeated.
“Oh, all right. Tomorrow morning. Before eight. Before I go to work. But I don’t know anything I haven’t told you already.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I won’t take up much of your time, I promise.”
She hung up without saying good-bye. You let them use you, and they lose respect for you.
When I awoke early Monday morning, I felt more like my old self. Cuts, bruises, and cracks healing nicely, no unusual fatigue. I even sang in the shower.
Debbi was wearing workclothes. A neat little suit that made her look efficient. Her wounds, too, were healing well. She offered me coffee but avoided my eyes.
“Before you start asking questions,” she said, “I should tell you that the police came to see me. I told them you’d been around asking questions. And I told them what I’m telling you. I don’t know anything.”
“Did you tell them that Cutter was at Bursky’s house the day she died?”
“No. And I never told you that either.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll get him without my help. I don’t have to be a witness. If I don’t know anything, they can’t drag me into it. Right?”
“Sure.” Unless the police found out she’d wanted Cutter and Bursky had gotten him.
“Ask your questions.”
“Okay. Who is Jared?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did the people in CORPS know Bursky had left the group some money?”
“I didn’t. Was it a lot?”
“No, not really.” Thirty-three thousand dollars was a nice sum but no fortune.
“Who’s really behind CORPS?”
“I don’t know. Nobody.”
She was lying transparently, with just the slightest touch of defiance in her near-monotone. She’d have to learn to do better than that if she wanted to succeed in business.
“Debbi, there’s something I’ve never asked you. And if you get brought into this at all, the police may want to know. Where were you that morning?” She just looked at me, tight-lipped. “You told me you were supposed to meet Eddie for an early lunch, but he canceled because he was going to see Margaret. Were you at work? What time did he call?”
“Eddie won’t tell them about that. About me.” Her torso looked rigid, like her face.
“Then just to set my mind at ease…?” After all, I’m a nice man, remember?
She shrugged stiff shoulders. “We were supposed to meet at eleven-thirty. He didn’t know how long he’d be with her, so he broke our date. I guess it was around ten when he called. I worked for a while, then I went out to lunch. Alone. I can’t prove where I went.”
“What time did you get back to work?”
She thought a minute, struggling between indignation and fear. “A little after noon, I think.” I decided to get back to Cutter.
“How did Cutter get Bursky’s drawings?”
“I don’t know. Is that why he went there?”
“Possibly. In any case, he did have them. And Frank sure didn’t want anyone else seeing them. Neither did Jared.” I told her about my run-in with Frank, the return of the drawings, and the meeting with Jared. She didn’t respond.
“Jared’s picture was in there. So was Frank’s. Among others.”
“Mine? Was my picture in there?” Her lip trembled. I was glad I could tell her it wasn’t. She was very relieved, and relief made her more friendly.
“What else do you want to know, Jake?”
“There’s something I can’t quite figure out, Debbi. It’s not particularly important, but it might connect with some other things.” I leaned forward, confidentially. “Cutter knew about John Harley’s affair with someone. He knew her by sight and he knew her name. Did people in the group know Harley was being unfaithful to his wife?”
“We didn’t even know he had a wife. And we certainly didn’t know it was Margaret. Not until she died.” She was confirming what she’d already told me once before. It was probably true. “I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning a wife. Or a mistress. It never came up. He was just a goat anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“A goat. The group was looking for someone to take on, just any left-wing professor. Someone to make an example of.”
“How was Harley chosen?”
She laughed. “Margaret suggested him.” She tilted her head at me. “So he was having an affair? I guess she knew about it. I suppose that’s why she sicced the group on him.” She laughed again. It was not a pleasant laugh.
“I guess so,” I said. “Sure you never heard of a man named Jared?”
“I said I didn’t know who he was. His real name. He was around. Around CORPS.”
“Why? I thought it was a student group.”
“I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I’m tired of this. I have to go to work. Go talk to someone else.” I got up, thanked her for her help, and left. That might be about all that could be squeezed out of her. Ever
. She was going to close the whole thing off, pretend it wasn’t happening, pretend she didn’t know anyone or anything. Maybe it would work.
– 27 –
Bit by bit, the picture was forming. Nasty goings-on. Rivalry. Hate.
Maybe Cutter went to get the drawings, fought with Bursky and killed her. Or Jared killed her because CORPS needed a little money. Or because she had sketched his face. If I were Jared, I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to draw my face.
Or a stranger meandered in off the road, shoved her over the railing, and meandered off again, cackling insanely. And apples grow on walnut trees.
The story would all fit together, I knew, if I wasn’t missing something. A piece. Two or three pieces. But I was beginning to run out of places to look. Did that mean the pieces were hidden where I’d already looked or that I didn’t know where I should be looking next?
Infiltration of CORPS seemed an unlikely way to find the answers. The answers to the murder anyway. Rosie would probably be stuck listening to a lot of raving fanatics for a while, and that would be that.
The answers, I reasoned, would come through individuals, not through groups. But then, maybe that was just my noncollective mentality rebelling against the idea that a group could achieve anything. Even an efficient murder.
I thought I’d head over in the direction of the campus, have some breakfast, harass Billy once more, and check in with Harley. The police hadn’t shown a lot of interest in Billy, and I didn’t plan to waste much more time on him either, but it wouldn’t do any harm to mention Cutter and CORPS and other odds and ends and watch his reactions. He might eliminate himself once and for all, or he might come at me with a paper knife, screaming a confession.
Billy was at his usual stand, behind the counter at the Earth-light Meditation Center. He greeted me in a neutral fashion and inquired softly about what I had come for.
“Nothing much, Billy. Just to say hello. Ask what you think about some of what’s happening. Shoot the shit. So, how ya doing?”
The good ol’ boy approach pleased him, as I thought it might. It was probably a rare event when Billy got let into the club of masculine shit-shooting. And it probably never happened with heavy masculine types like me, guys who wrote for magazines. Guys who asked questions about murdered women.
He slouched over to the counter, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. This man, I decided then and there, could never kill anyone. He’d be so busy watching himself do it that he’d never get it done.
“Yeah,” he said. “How about that Cutter? Looks like he’s the one, right?”
I raised my eyebrows and pursed my lips. “Yeah? What do you think?”
Billy lifted his shoulders in a languid shrug. “Good a guess as any.”
“Did you know Margaret Bursky was involved in CORPS?”I just tossed it to him. None of the newspapers had printed anything, as far as I knew, about Cutter and Bursky’s common cause.
“Not until today,” he said. “It’s all over the place this morning. You know how stuff like that gets passed on.”
“No, how?”
“Those CORPS people have got big mouths, that’s how. They’re making speeches on street corners, picketing her husband, and talking about how even she understood he was a corrupter, and how she joined CORPS to fight against her own husband. All kinds of disgusting stuff like that. Like I said, it’s all over the place.”
“Has anybody said anything about any other aspects of her private life?”
He was puzzled by the question. Billy, like Eddie Cutter, seemed to “hear things,” but he hadn’t heard anything about Rebecca. Nor had he heard anything about Bursky leaving the center money in her will. We talked for a while longer. I let him contribute more quotes for my article, and then I let him get back to work. If he’d killed Margaret Bursky in a fit of jealous passion or unrequited love, neither the passion nor the love had been strong enough to last a week after her death. She seemed to be a dead issue with Billy.
Before I went to see Harley I drove past the address Rosie had given me, the place where the CORPS meeting was going to take place that night. Just an apartment building, and a big one at that.
Then I found a parking place, this time in a yellow zone, and walked across the campus to Chandler Hall. Out in front, marching around on the sidewalk, was a clutch of CORPS picketers. I was relieved to see that Rosie was not yet among them. These seemed to be special friends of Eddie Cutter because their signs, this time, were all about his innocence, at least as a killer. One young man was haranguing a bored-looking crowd of about a dozen students. When I came closer, I heard him saying, “Eddie Cutter didn’t kill Margaret Harley. That woman had a political conscience. That woman was Eddie Cutter’s friend. She didn’t die of friendship. She died of shame, shame that her husband was working to bring this country down in moral ruins…”
They were being premature in defending their friend against a crime he hadn’t been charged with. Aside from that, I didn’t think this kid would have anything original to say about sin. I’m as much opposed to moral ruins as the next guy, especially when someone’s lack of morality gives him leave to beat people up. So I went upstairs to Harley’s office. The door was partly open, and I looked inside. He was with a student, a woman. He was leaning across his desk toward her, and she was leaning across the desk, from the other side, toward him. They were talking softly. I had time to see that his office was somewhat more put together than it had been the last time I saw it before he caught sight of me and jumped out of his chair. The student, also startled, saw me and blushed.
Harley was too pleasant. “Oh, hi there, Jake,” he said. “I’ll be through here in a minute if you want to wait.” I grinned back at him, nodded, and lounged against the wall outside the door. The two whispered a few more words to each other, and the young woman came out. Very young. About nineteen or twenty. A lot younger than Rebecca.
I went through the door and sat down in the warm chair she had vacated. Harley was, at this point, less pleasant.
“You should have called before you came here,” he said.
“Just stopping by on my way from here to there,” I said cheerily. “Wondered if you’d want a little progress report.”
“Of course I would,” he said grudgingly.
“Okay, but first I think you should tell me something. Why didn’t you keep me informed about the will?”
“Because I didn’t think it was relevant. You knew about CORPS.”
“She left you half of it.”
“Of course she did,” he said indignantly. “I was her husband.”
I decided to leave my thoughts unspoken and told him the good news about Cutter’s fingerprints. That made him very happy. I didn’t say anything about the peculiar circumstance of the printless coffee cup. That would have just confused him.
“Hah. So that’s why the police wanted to know if the bowl was out there when I left that morning. It wasn’t, of course. That certainly pinpoints when he was there.”
“It certainly does,” I agreed. It also had corroborated what Debbi had already told me. That Cutter had been there that morning.
I gave Harley a few more crumbs of information and finished up by telling him I’d found out why CORPS had chosen him as a target. He was very interested. He leaned forward, looking eager, just the way he had with the student. Well, maybe not exactly the same way.
“They just needed someone to go after,” I told him. “Anyone. Your wife suggested they go after you.” He stiffened right up, the eager look gone. I didn’t give him time to react but went right ahead and asked a couple of questions.
“Do you have any idea who’s behind CORPS, Harley?”
He shook his head. “Not really. But it seems obvious that a larger group is behind them. What’s that got to do with Margaret? Are you sure that’s why they picked me?”
“Yes. No indication of what the group is, huh?”
“I don’t know. But they don’t talk like real Nazis. Nothing abo
ut Jews or blacks or any particular ethnic groups. And they tend to get religious—I guess that’s what you’d call it—in their preaching. One of those moral righteousness groups. They all sound alike. They all think they’re the only ones who know what morality is. They all hide behind patriotism and Christianity—”
I didn’t particularly want to listen to Harley’s ideas on morality either, so I interrupted him.
“About Cutter and Rebecca, do you have any idea how he might have known who she was?”
He waved a disparaging hand and looked vague, gazing into the middle distance. “I’ve been thinking about that. He didn’t. He couldn’t have known her. I don’t know where he got her name, but I’ll bet that’s all he knows.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because she would have told me. If they knew each other, she would have mentioned it to me. After all, with all that going on…” He waved his hand again, this time toward the window and the demonstrators outside. When his eyes refocused, they were fixed on me. “Who told you that’s how they chose me?” I was a little slow in catching up. His mind was jumping around like a fraternity boy in a room full of prom queens. He had returned to his arbitrary selection by CORPS as a bad political example.
“An ex-member of CORPS.”
“Oh. Well, he probably didn’t know.” Harley was beginning to look vague again. I stood up. He barely noticed. I said goodbye. On my way to the stairs, I noticed the woman student standing near a water fountain, watching my departure. I wondered if she was planning to go back to Harley’s office. I wondered what the hell the man had that fascinated so many women. I sure couldn’t see it.
– 28 –
The sky had been blue when I’d stopped in to visit Harley. Now dark clouds were filling the last clear gaps overhead. Not fog. Real rain clouds. The first since June. Autumn was ending, and winter was getting ready to start dumping on Northern California.
That was the only break in routine I could see coming in the next couple of days. I felt stale and dead-ended, in the case and in my life. The prewinter blues, a leftover from a time when the season meant months of cold and ice and snow.
Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) Page 17