She was standing at the open door to her apartment waiting for me. When I passed apartment 14, the one where the nice old guy lived, I could hear the muted sounds of television from within. I glanced at the name card on his door. It said simply: LINDSTROM. I wondered again why anyone would choose to live all jammed together this way.
Rebecca gave me a big smile of greeting and led me into the living room. I sat down.
“It’s nice to see you, Jake.” I nodded at her. “What would you like to drink? I’ve got Scotch and vodka and I can make some margaritas if you want.”
I told her the margaritas sounded terrific, and she set to work with her blender. I got up, wandered around the small living room, looked out at the balcony with its view of the Bay Bridge and, beyond, San Francisco. It was a clear afternoon, and The City seemed to glow in the distance as though dirt, crime, and misery did not exist on its streets. The glass doors were slightly open to let in the breeze. I turned toward the kitchen. Rebecca was concentrating pretty hard on carrying our drinks, and I wondered if she’d already had a couple of something.
“I thought we’d sit out on the balcony for a while, since it’s so warm.” She handed me my salt-rimmed glass, pushed the sliding door farther open, and led the way onto the tiny concession to California living. The whole balcony was about four by eight, with duplicates above, below, and off to either side. She had a couple of plants out there and a small table and two chairs. We sat at the table, sipping.
“Well, Jake, how’s life treating you?” I almost expected her to reach over and slap me on the back. She ignored my lack of response. “Any interesting women in the offing? You must not work all the time.” She chuckled. It really was a chuckle.
“Of course, I’ve been working all the time, Rebecca,” I retorted. “Your boyfriend’s been paying me to work.” I regretted my flippancy immediately. Mention of Harley put her on edge, which was not where I wanted her to be.
“I talked to Harley,” she said. “Very briefly. He says you’re not working for him anymore. Because the case is solved. After all, you turned Cutter in.”
“Yeah, for trying to kidnap me.”
She shrugged as if kidnapping were pretty trivial stuff. “The police found his fingerprints at Harley’s house.”
“That doesn’t prove he killed her,” I said, although I knew that enough circumstantial evidence against the man could convict him.
“My God,” she hissed, “he started the fire. He was involved with Margaret. He was at her house. What more do you want?” Then she looked at me wide-eyed. “You’re not still working at it, are you? On your own?”
“Look, Rebecca,” I said quietly, “maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t. There seem to be a lot of ramifications.”
She snorted at me and swallowed half her drink. “Want another one?” I agreed and she went inside. I got up and leaned against the railing, looking at the view some more. When she returned with our second drinks, she stood next to me.
“Jake,” she said, “if the police are satisfied, why aren’t you? You’ve earned your money. Why don’t you drop this intuition kick you’re on?” She hesitated, walked a couple of feet away from me, and leaned against the table. “The police are satisfied, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know. They may be.”
Her lips formed an etched line across her face. “Then drop it. He was there. He did it.” She was talking to me like I was a little kid. She’d spent a lot of time throughout the case trying to push and maneuver me, as though I were not quite bright enough to get from here to there.
“He was there at some point,” I admitted, “because he left his prints. But I don’t know when he was there.”
“He was there! That day,” she rasped. “You know damned well he was.”
“If you say so,” I answered softly. “You should know.”
She stood up straight. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you were on Virgo Street that day.” She was very pale, and she didn’t say anything. “I talked to the woman down the block, Rebecca. The one whose house you sold. She told me you’d sold a couple of houses recently. You were doing well. Why did you lie to me about that?”
She shrugged. “I guess I just wanted your sympathy.”
“Right,” I said. “The more the better. So I wouldn’t look too closely at you. But I did anyway, finally. The same woman told me about the day Bursky died. She remembered that day well. She remembered the police cars and the wagon that came for the body. You don’t see that much action on a street like that one very often. So she remembered. And she remembered that you had stopped by that morning with some papers for her.”
“So what? I do a lot of business in that area. You didn’t expect me to volunteer the information, did you?”
“You were there. You saw Cutter. You knew who he was, didn’t you?”
She was studying her margarita.
“Of course, maybe you were afraid to tell me, afraid I’d tell the police.” Remembering Debbi, I added, “I guess you just didn’t want to have to deal with the police. Was that it?”
She nodded energetically. “That’s right.” She was nodding too energetically. She didn’t stop. She was gripping the back of a chair as if she needed something to hold her up.
“So you didn’t trust me. But why should you? You always thought I was a loser.” I watched, fascinated, as her head continued to move up and down.
“Tell me this, Rebecca. If you thought so little of me, why did you tell Harley to hire me? He wanted to hire a professional, and you convinced him to hire me, instead. A jerk.” I could feel my own head trying to nod along with hers. I controlled it, telling myself that I was sane. I couldn’t look at her face anymore. I half-turned away and set my empty glass on the railing. “Maybe you thought I was still interested in you. Maybe you thought I’d never suspect an old friend. But when I wouldn’t let you maneuver me, when I kept on looking for the killer, you tried to get me to drop the case. Harley did, too. Was he beginning to suspect you?”
She whispered, “No, Jake, that’s not true.”
“You knew Cutter was in CORPS. You saw him at the fire. You gave the police his name, anonymously.” That was only a guess, but I knew it was a good one. “You saw him at Harley’s. Did you figure that Bursky was involved with him or with the group?” No answer. I kept prodding for answers, my voice low and soothing. “You saw him leave the house, didn’t you?”
“I saw him,” she said. “He was there. He did it.” I could hear her breathing, harsh and fast. I thought she might he crying, but I still couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I felt sick.
“Did you go in the house then? Did you challenge her about her husband’s enemy, Eddie Cutter? Did you do some verbal pushing, Rebecca? And when she wouldn’t push verbally? What did you do then?”
I was just turning to face her when my peripheral vision picked up a rushing movement, and I spun, dropped to the balcony floor, and scrambled out of her way. One of the legs of the chair she’d been holding rammed the railing. My margarita glass went over the edge. The chair flew out of her hands, scraping across my cheek as I rose and lunged for her, catching her around the waist and crashing, still holding her, into the glass doors. She fought, punching and kicking. I clipped her hard across the jaw. She kept on fighting. I hit her again, and again, and she stopped. I stumbled back, nearly going over the railing on my own, and caught sight of movement on the balcony next door. He was standing there, his mouth open, his eyes round.
Staggering a little, I turned toward him. “Good evening, Mr. Lindstrom,” I said.
“She tried to push you off,” he said, pronouncing each word very carefully, as though he were giving me important information.
“I know,” I replied.
– 35 –
Hawkins took his time that evening pumping a few dozen three-quarter truths out of me and giving me enough trouble to make him feel better. The three-quarters that was true was everything I could
tell him without telling him the one-quarter that might have put me in jail.
“Quite a job of investigative reporting, Samson,” he said with a voice like a straight razor. “If you’d stuck to your typewriter, it would have taken you another few days to get the information out of us.”
I’d been staring at my right knee. I looked up.
“That’s right,” he said. “Cutter looked good, but so did Harley. And Cutter’s girl friend. And,” he added, “we were on Rebecca Lilly’s trail.” He glared at me. “We’re pretty good at our job, you know.”
“I know,” I said. I meant it.
“What about the husband?” I asked him, as if I barely knew the man. Hawkins looked at me as if to say, “What the hell business is it of yours?”
Then he shrugged. “She says he didn’t know. He says he didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t. He says he never even thought of it.”
I doubted that. He’d thought of it. That was why he’d paid me off. That was probably why he had been refusing to talk to Rebecca, except to tell her I was off the case. She must have been pushing him hard to get rid of me. Even Harley might have found that a little strange, especially after she’d convinced him to hire me in the first place.
Before Hawkins finally turned me loose that night, he told me the FBI would be calling on me soon for whatever I could give them on CORPS, and said he was “looking forward to seeing the article in Probe magazine.” I told him I hoped it was good enough to print. He curled his lip at me.
By the time I dragged through my gate, I was already late for my date with Faye and knew I wasn’t going to make it. In fact, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be up to anything amorous or even affectionate for a day or so, at least. I called and apologized and asked if we could move it up a day to Friday. She said I sounded awful and that the postponement was fine with her. Then I called Iris and gave her an outline of the big finish. After all, she’d gotten involved in it, and she had a right to know. Then we agreed on moving our date up a day from Friday to Saturday, and I promised I’d go over the whole thing in detail then. She said she was looking forward to it.
“I’m also looking forward to seeing you,” she said softly. “How are all your sprains, strains, and bruises?”
“You’ll never know I have them,” I said optimistically.
Several beers later my mind let go, my muscles loosened up a bit, and sleep moved several notches from unlikely possibility to no choice at all.
Morning came too soon, but I was feeling better and began the day by putting together some notes for Artie Perrine. Maybe a real writer could make something of them for Probe. A few paragraphs anyway. That would give me something to wave under Hawkins’s nose if I ever needed to.
The full story of the killing came to me in pieces over the next few hours, from Hal, from Harley, and even, very incidentally, from newspaper accounts. Rebecca had folded. She wasn’t holding anything back, although she was coherent only part of the time.
Late that afternoon the FBI visited me, asked me to identify a photograph of Jared, and poked me with questions about CORPS for an hour.
Rosie just missed them. She showed up at my door grubby from work, carrying two beers and ready to talk. She’d seen the papers, too.
“What made you so sure it was Rebecca?” she wanted to know.
I explained that I hadn’t been absolutely sure. But once I found out that Rebecca had been on Virgo Street that morning, the balance shifted. Cutter could have done it, but I’d never really thought so. Debbi could have dashed up there, waited for her chance, killed the woman, and gone back to work by noon, but it wouldn’t have been easy. Three people hanging around that house was just too much. Debbi had maybe wanted Cutter, but her career was more important to her than he was. She found another boyfriend pretty fast. One who matched her life-style. And she was less reluctant to tell me about her movements that day than she was to talk about CORPS. Just as scared of the group— and of people finding out she was involved with it—as she was of being connected with the murder. She didn’t fit any better than Cutter did.
Harley had no real reason to kill his wife. She would have stuck with him, money and all, no matter what. He wasn’t enough in love with Rebecca to leave Margaret, let alone kill her.
But Rebecca? She was up there. She had a good reason to kill Bursky. She’d lied to me. It had been difficult, but I’d finally had to admit she’d recommended me to Harley so he wouldn’t hire someone with brains. At least, that way she wouldn’t have both the police and a sharp investigator on her trail.
“So you think she planned the whole thing?” Rosie asked.
“I doubt it. Not any more than she’d planned on killing me.” I filled Rosie in on the murder picture as I’d reconstructed it.
Rebecca had finished her business on Virgo Street. She had wanted to call Harley, but since it was Monday, a day on which he had no classes, she didn’t know whether she could reach him at his office. She checked out his house to see if his car was there. It wasn’t, but another car, one that looked vaguely familiar, was parked on the other side of the narrow road.
“That old heap of Cutter’s you told me about?” Rosie injected eagerly. I nodded.
“But she didn’t place the car until she talked to Harley. She called him from the shopping center down the hill. While they were talking, he mentioned that CORPS was picketing him that day. She remembered then.”
She’d remembered that she had seen the car at Frank Shane’s agency and that it belonged to Eddie Cutter. She’d driven right back up the hill again, looking for ammunition in her campaign to get Harley away from his wife, and had just parked a short distance down the road when she saw Cutter emerging from Harley’s house with a shopping bag tucked under his arm. Eating an apple. There was a choice to make then, and she made the one that messed up her mind and her life. Instead of just snitching to Harley, she decided to confront his wife. You loosen the reins, she told Bursky, and I won’t tell Harley you’re involved with his enemies.
Rosie shook her head. “Sad.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “For everybody.”
Especially since Bursky was already upset. She’d just been forced to give up her drawings, possibly by the same kind of “I’ll tell your husband” extortion Rebecca was planning to try.
Rebecca bulled her way in and challenged Bursky on Cutter’s visit. Bursky tried to make her leave. When she wouldn’t, the distraught woman had walked out on the deck and closed the sliding doors. Rebecca opened them again and went after her. There followed a verbal battle, with Bursky demanding that Rebecca get out and calling her names, and Rebecca refusing to go, threatening her, beating her with questions about Cutter and CORPS, demanding that she give up her husband.
Bursky had then, according to Rebecca, advanced on her threateningly.
“I wonder if she really did,” Rosie murmured.
“We’ll never know.”
Also, according to Rebecca, Bursky had grabbed her shoulders and said that Harley had only been playing with Rebecca, that he didn’t love her, that he would never end his marriage. That Rebecca was an idiot if she didn’t know that men of Harley’s age couldn’t help doing that sort of thing.
That was when the fight got physical. Rebecca, blind with rage and in “the heat of passion”—as her lawyers were sure to put it—struggled with Bursky, pushing her against and then over the railing.
“She must have been horrified by what she’d done.” Rosie groaned.
“Apparently not. Before her attorney could shut her up, she told the cops she hadn’t meant to do it, but she wasn’t sorry it happened. She had gone down under the deck to have a look and found Bursky dead. Not breathing. No pulse. And she was glad.”
Rebecca had then returned to the deck. She didn’t know what to do about the signs of the struggle. She hoped the police would see the death as suicide, but she wasn’t entirely rational and was unaware of the small injuries the fight had inflicted on the victim. She saw that the
coffee cup had been knocked to the floor of the deck. She picked it up and put it back on the table before she thought about fingerprints. Then she wiped it clean and got out of there, leaving the door on the spring lock as Harley later found it.
Over Rebecca’s objections, Harley had insisted on hiring an investigator, someone who would be on his side. Rebecca had sold him on me. Later, when she spotted Cutter at the fire, she saw her chance to get the police sniffing after him with her anonymous phone tip.
Even now, Harley still wasn’t admitting he’d begun to suspect her a few days later. His story was that the poor woman had illusions about a relationship with him, a relationship they never consummated. And it looked like he’d be a hundred thousand dollars richer in a short time.
Rebecca would either wind up in a hospital or serve a few years for voluntary manslaughter.
“What about CORPS?”Rosie wanted to know. “Don’t they get some money, too?”
I laughed. “They would if anyone was willing to come forward to claim it in the group’s name.” When Frank Shane had been faced with the combined force of the police and the FBI—and maybe his ulcer—and the information they already had about CORPS and the campus fire, he’d done some talking. He insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the fire and that he had, in fact, been appalled to learn that Harley’s fire was only the first in a series planned for campuses across the country. Part of a plan to make examples of liberal teachers, to develop a new and more powerful campus movement, even more disruptive than the radical left of the sixties, a radical right that would sweep a whole generation up in its cause. The cause of morality. With arson and hatred for all.
Frank had told the police he’d only recently become aware of the plan and had been meaning to get proof and take it to the FBI.
How had he met Jared in the first place? In the course of business, he said, as a party to a land deal. Forty acres in Northern California. And Jared had been his only contact with the larger group that was doing the planning. He gave no other names, not even a name for the group, but when the FBI checked out the acreage, they found a cabin full of guns and some old fool who said he belonged to an organization called AMERICA. Eventually, I guessed, they’d find out whether these people were part of one of the more familiar groups already operating, a splinter group, or a whole new bunch of daisies. I couldn’t see that it made a lot of difference.
Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) Page 22