True-Life Adventure

by Julie Smith

  The upshot was, whether I liked it or not, I had to give Blick credit for good instincts. The Koehler file was missing and none of the others were.

  So it looked like someone connected with the case had killed Jack, stolen the Koehler file to cover his tracks, and then stolen my dupes of it as soon as he found out I was working with Jack. There just wasn’t any getting around it.

  “Okay, Booker,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “Find what you wanted?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, where is it?”

  “In here,” I said, tapping my temple.

  “Christ, you’re leaving empty-handed?”

  “I wanted information, my boy. You don’t need a pillowcase to carry that off.”

  “Shit,” he said, and picked up an orange plastic ashtray on Jack’s desk. He stuck it in his pocket. “It’s not official till you steal something.”

  “Booker, I need another favor.”

  “It better be more exciting.”

  “It’ll probably hurt your professional pride.”

  He sighed. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Could we go out in the hall and break in again? This time with a credit card?”

  “Hey, man, I’ve got the best key collection in six counties. You want a Visa artist, get an amateur.”

  “Just this once?”

  He sighed again. “Come on.”

  We went out in the hall and closed the door. Booker produced his loid and let us back in, approximately five seconds from the moment the lock went click. It might not have been his greatest accomplishment, but it impressed hell out of me.

  I forgot to be nervous. “Show me how.”

  He did. It took a few minutes and a few tries, but I got it down. Easiest thing in the world and kind of thrilling. I began thinking maybe your mother didn’t have to be gay to produce a burgling son, and put it out of my head right away. I was too poor and vulnerable to be fantasizing a life of crime— the thing seemed entirely too possible.

  I dropped Booker at his chic Russian Hill digs and tried not to think about how he paid for them. Then I tried to think of something I could do besides go home, because if I did that, I would probably be forced to think about the shambles my life was in, there being no TV on the premises. But I couldn’t go anywhere because I didn’t know anybody who’d want to see me and I didn’t feel I could afford a movie. A bottle of jug wine would be slightly cheaper and have longer lasting anaesthetic effects.

  So I ended up at home again with Mondavi Barberone. I couldn’t tell if the sun was over the yardarm, since I didn’t have the least idea what a yardarm was, and anyway, the fog was in; so I took a wild guess, decided it was, and poured myself a glass of purple pleasure. Then I sat down to survey the damage.

  I strode bravely into the cobwebby corners of my psyche and I rooted around. There was some very ugly stuff in there, and it is a mark of my spiritual growth that I currently have the nerve to put it down for anybody to read.

  These were the facts: I was thirty-eight. I’d spent fifteen years on one major metropolitan daily or another. I’d written six unpublished detective novels. Unpublished in spite of my name.

  John D. MacDonald did it daily. Ross Macdonald did it deeper. Gregory Mcdonald did it with dash.

  Wrote thrillers and got them published.

  But not Paul Mcdonald.

  I just wrote them, supporting my habit with clients like Jack.

  Pretty soon, I figured, some publisher was going to see the light. It had to happen— it was inscribed somewhere, like the Second Coming, I figured. But meanwhile, I was thirty-eight and putting on a brave face for people like Debbie Hofer.

  Debbie and a lot of my ex-colleagues thought I was a model of courage to quit the Chronicle and suffer for my art. They were pretty amused when I talked about being a ghostwriter for a private eye.

  But they didn’t know what it was like in those cobwebby corners. I had a nice line of patter that made them think I was Joe Carefree, just a rake and ramblin’ man.

  Women liked it, too; I was a big hit on the first date. But usually there weren’t a whole lot more dates. You don’t have a lot to say to strangers when what you do all day is fill up blank sheets of paper with imaginary sex and violence. You could talk about your disappointment and desperation, but they wouldn’t want to hear it.

  So I was a lonesome cowboy. Spot’s company needed supplementing.

  It was getting to the point that my mother was asking not-so-subtle questions aimed at determining whether Sonny was gay or not.

  I wasn’t, but I knew it was pretty rare for a guy my age to be a bachelor. Unmarried middle-aged women aren’t so rare, and neither are divorced men— even twice divorced at my age. But I didn’t know any other guys who’d made it this far without so much as living with someone for more than a few months— which I hadn’t— and I was starting to wonder why and whether I was ever going to find a woman.

  I hated thinking about that kind of stuff, but I’d made up my mind to root around in the corners and I figured I might as well do it right.

  And that meant I couldn’t ignore the fact that I didn’t have anything to offer anyone anyway. I owned one minuscule bit of real estate and a cat and a car and a stereo, but I couldn’t even afford a secondhand TV to replace my stolen one.

  Not that I wanted the kind of woman who was looking for a sugar daddy, but I did want one who was going somewhere in the world, and a woman like that wouldn’t want me. Because I wasn’t.

  I had about two hundred bucks to last me the rest of my life.

  My only client was dead.

  The market for mysteries was terrible.

  I didn’t get out enough.

  I was getting crotchety.

  The only thing I’d ever done successfully was write newspaper stories.

  And I was sitting on a great story.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the Chronicle.

  CHAPTER 4

  I asked for Joey Bernstein, who’s the city editor and the sweetest guy in the world.

  “Mcdonald, you nerd. I’m on deadline.”

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Joey.”

  “The only thing I want to talk to you about is when you’re coming back.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so sore about my leaving— you’ve got fifty or sixty other reporters.”

  “Yeah, and most of them a lot better than you are. It wasn’t the fact that you quit, shithead; it was the way you did it.”

  How I did it was, I sent him one of my favorite records— “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck. I thought he’d be amused.

  “Joey, I apologize. I thought you liked country music.”

  “Are you coming back to work or not?”

  “How about temporary?”

  “Okay. Nolte’s going on six months’ leave.”

  “I had in mind about two weeks.”

  “Mcdonald, give me a break. What good’s that going to do me?”

  “I meant two weeks’ special assignment. I’ve got a fantastic story, Joey, my boy. I mean, fantastic. You know Jack Birnbaum, the P. I. that got poisoned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, have you noticed that Lindsay Hearne is mysteriously on leave from ‘Bay Currents’? What if I told you those two things are connected?”

  “You would have my full and complete attention.”

  “Lindsay’s married to Jacob Koehler, first of all.”

  “The gene-splicer.”

  “Right. Here’s how it shakes down: Lindsay met Jacob on an interview ten years or so ago when she was a humble newspaper reporter. They got married and their union was blessed with issue. But they made like atoms when little Terry was five. At first they had joint custody, but then Jacob remarried and Lindsay relinquished her half of Terry, the better to pursue greatness, I guess.”

  “Get to the point, Mcdonald.”

  “Well, Lindsay had Terry every other weekend, and thereon hangs our tale.”
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  “She snatched her.”

  “Right you are. About three weeks ago. And Jacob hired Jack Birnbaum to find the kid.”

  “Hang on a minute. The station must know where she is.”

  “Uh-uh. She phoned in sick the Monday after Terry disappeared, but apparently not from home— could have been from anywhere. And then she resigned formally in a letter which her producer received the following Wednesday, posted Saturday from San Francisco.”

  “So if she’s quit, why are they saying she’s on leave?”

  “They want her back. She has a contract and they don’t want to let her out of it without a fight. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, Birnbaum was killed because of this case.”

  “How do you know?”

  I ran it down for him, about the files and all. He was suitably impressed. “So what are you going to do if I put you on the payroll? Solve it?”

  “Right, chief.”

  He sighed. “Be careful, Paul.”

  He hung up before I could ask to be switched to the library. So I called back and broke the news that I was back, however briefly. Then I named a few names and pretty soon a female voice was reading to me. It was very soothing.

  The voice read me a story written about Lindsay Hearne four or five years back, when she won the Peabody Award, which, I gather, is something like a Pulitzer in the broadcasting field. Lindsay won it for exposing a massive cover-up involving a breeder reactor at a government lab in the East Bay Hills— a machine that was masquerading as some sort of helpful friend to mankind, but which could be used to whip up a little plutonium any time a bomb was needed. She got that story when she’d been in San Francisco about six months.

  Before she came here with Koehler, she’d been, as I told Joey, a humble newspaper reporter. She’d worked first in Louisiana and then in Michigan. She hadn’t won a Pulitzer, but that was about the only journalistic honor she hadn’t bagged before she went into TV, which was an excellent move on her part.

  She was a great reporter. I said it and I meant it. Great. One of the best I ever saw. And she was also a fine figger of a woman. TV was unquestionably her medium.

  After the soothing voice got done with Lindsay, I asked it to move on to Jacob. It said Jacob had worked at Stanford with Paul Berg, the first guy to get the Nobel for genetic engineering, which, in case you don’t know, is a simple little process by which you can recombine DNA, the stuff that genes are made of, and invent new organisms. You probably think only God can make a tree, and you’re right; scientists just splice viruses and bacteria together to make new bugs. But gene-splicing is thought to have quite a future.

  Anyway, Berg did it first and he was Jacob’s mentor. Then Jacob improved on Berg’s method and won his own Nobel.

  Other whiz kids in the field, Herbert Boyer and Ronald Cape, left their respective universities and founded genetic engineering companies, Genentech and Cetus. But Koehler and Stanley Cohen, another protegé of Berg’s, stayed on at Stanford.

  That is, Koehler did until the fall of 1980, when he and his brother Steve founded Kogene Systems.

  They went into business just about the time Genentech, then four years old, offered its stock on Wall Street. You remember that. The offering price was $35 a share and within a few minutes it went up to $89. Brokerage houses ended up having to ration the stock. And Genentech didn’t even have a product on the market.

  The voice read me a little yarn about the formation of Kogene Systems, which said Steve had ponied up the money for it.

  So I asked for the clips on Steve Koehler.

  Steve sounded like a man for the ages— or at least the decades. In the seventies, he made money in microcomputers, which were about as high tech as you could get at the time. In the eighties, he’d apparently cashed in his chip money and put it on the come line. I liked his style.

  I thanked the nice librarian and rang off. It was just after five o’clock by that time, but who knew how late geniuses worked? I called Jacob Koehler at Kogene Systems.

  A female voice answered and I very distinctly asked for Jacob, but somehow I got Steve. What the hell, I needed to see him, too; so I told him what I wanted— or rather I didn’t, exactly, on the theory that I didn’t yet know either of the brothers well enough to broach the subject of whether one of them had killed Jack.

  “This is Charlie Haas at the Wall Street Journal,” I taradiddled. “We’d like to do profiles on you and your brother for a little story on genetic engineering.”

  “I see. You’re doing a general story on the whole field?”

  “Actually, we’re sort of concentrating on Kogene. The newest of the highest tech— state of the art and its future. That sort of thing.”

  “A science story?”

  “Mostly a business story, really.”

  “I see.” He seemed to perk up a little. “When would you like to meet?”

  “How about tomorrow morning?”

  “Eleven o’clock?”

  “Great. Could I see both of you at the same time?”

  “I’m afraid it’ll just be me. When we started Kogene, we decided I would be spokesman for the company.”

  “That’s fine. You can speak for the company. All we want from your brother is a personality profile. He’s a pretty well-known guy, after all. It wouldn’t look right to do a whole story on Kogene and not have a word from its principal asset.”

  “I’m afraid he won’t agree to it, Mr. Haas. It’s not really his policy to talk to the press.”

  “Okay. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  I guessed Jacob had good reason to be allergic to interviews— he’d gotten a bad marriage out of one once.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kogene is out by Cetus in Emeryville, a weird little town tucked in a corner between Berkeley and Oakland. Emeryville has a population of something like 4500, a little over half of whom live in sauna-infested condo complexes. That half tends to be white and well off. The other 2000, who tend to be poor and parti-colored, live in tiny houses on tiny streets surrounded by windowless industrial caverns that hover nastily. Cetus sprawled through several of the caverns; Kogene was squeezed into one. A small one.

  Someone had made a genuine effort to class up the reception area, which was all white and plant-filled. But no one had soundproofed it; I heard voices from somewhere in the recesses as soon as I crossed the threshold.

  “We’ve got to get another one. I’ve got to have her back.” A male voice, upset. Then footsteps; someone walking even deeper into the recesses.

  “Is anything wrong? With Lindsay?” A female voice, slightly alarmed.

  “No, no, of course not. The cleaning lady just quit, that’s all.” A different male voice, reassuring.

  “Have you got enough material?”

  “Sure. I’ll call you later in the week.” The female voice again, and then a female— presumably its owner— stepped into the reception room.

  She was tall, but not too tall, and thin but not skinny. She had soft, regular features, except for a square jaw; thick, shiny light brown hair; great legs. She looked like a nice girl from a good family. She just missed looking like a WASP princess ex-cheerleader post-deb preppy powder puff, and the reason she did was that she looked smart. Something about her bones or the line of her cheek was her saving grace— I couldn’t tell just what, exactly. But I could tell she was not only no dummy but also somebody who was going somewhere in the world. I thought of asking if I could go with her, but I lost my voice for a moment there.

  “Mr. Haas? Mr. Koehler is expecting you.”

  What do you know? There was a receptionist there. The ace investigative reporter hadn’t even noticed.

  Steve Koehler came out to meet me, which, I felt, showed a reasonable amount of class. He had an Ivy League accent, nice manners, and the uniform that went with them— gray flannel slacks, blue blazer, and cranberry tie. A walking cliché.

  He was a tall dude, and skinny, kind of gaunt around the cheeks like a seriou
s runner, but slightly soft around the middle like he wasn’t so serious. I figured he was about my age, but he had less hair, and what he had was dark and vaguely curly. His eyes were sort of filbert-colored and the only interesting thing about him so far.

  Women probably liked them, but I didn’t. They belied the impression of substance he’d cultivated so carefully.

  Back in the recesses, he sat me down and gave me coffee.

  “Sorry my brother can’t make it. He said to give you his apologies.”

  “Let’s start with you, then. I take it you run the business.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your background?”

  “Oh, Harvard Business School, a little time in the family business back in Chicago, and then Silicon Valley. I got lucky. I met up with a couple of computer wizards who were working out of their garage at the time, got into silicon chips, and made enough money to help Jacob start Kogene.”

  “What’s the family business?”

  “Real estate.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Age?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “San Francisco. Telegraph Hill.”

  “And your brother?”

  “My brother?”

  “Where does he live?”

  “We don’t usually give out that information. The truth is, Mr. Haas, my brother is something of a recluse. You know how these geniuses are— wrapped up in their work and not very sociable.”

  “He’s lucky to have you to fend people off.”

  Steve didn’t answer. Just gave me a filbert-eyed stare. I looked at my notebook. “Let’s see. Did I ask if you have any scars or other distinguishing marks?”

  He let a corner of his lip turn up, just to be polite. The result was a fourth cousin to a smile.

  “Nobody ever likes these preliminaries, but we have to have little facts to go between commas. You know, like ‘Steve Koehler, forty-one, a native of Chicago.’ Which reminds me— how old is your brother?”

  “Forty-three.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about Kogene a bit. You mentioned that you made enough money to help Jacob found it— was that a long-standing dream of his?”