The Brimstone Murders jo-2

by Jeff Sherratt

  CHAPTER 21

  The following morning, a Friday, I walked into the office a little after eight feeling refreshed. I’d thought about my problems before I hit the sack, and had slept well in spite of the trouble swirling around me. I knew that Webster had turned his Section 32 file over to Hammer and his team of homicide detectives, the cops investigating Hazel Farris’ murder. And I figured Webster would wait for me to be eliminated as a suspect in the murder investigation before he’d file against me on the section 32 charge.

  So I knew I had a little more time to find Robbie. But this morning on my way to the office, I’d seen two hard-nosed guys in a plain-Jane Chevy four-door, trailing me, lurking behind about three car lengths. It had to be a couple of Hammer’s detectives. A waste of taxpayer dollars, but I wasn’t worried about it. Call me crazy, but I felt that being Hammer’s number one suspect wasn’t so tough. I was a lawyer and I knew that without the gun Hammer had scant evidence to tie me to the murder. Besides, once I found Robbie and brought him in, most of my problems would go away.

  But when Hammer finds the real killer and they drop me as a suspect, then if Webster actually charges me with the Section 32 matter, Robbie’s escape, I’ll just handle the case professionally. At worst, I’ll cop a nolo contendere plea and pay a fine.

  I ducked my head into Rita’s office. She sat behind her desk, hands folded politely in front of her. Seated before her was her new client-my old one-the credit card guy charged with fraud. When Rita looked up, I mouthed a thank you, referring to the work she did at my apartment. She smiled. I quietly closed the door.

  I was making the coffee when Mabel stormed in the door, uncharacteristically late. She shook her head and flashed a cold look, but her language could melt an iceberg.

  “Goddamned government, sonofabitch,” she said. “I got a goddamn odd-numbered license plate, and it’s an even-numbered day. Had to siphon gas from my neighbor’s car,” she said as she slammed her purse down. “If this keeps up, gas will soon be a dollar a gallon, goddamn thieves.”

  What she said reminded me that I’d have to get gas today for sure. The Yom Kippur War in the Middle East had started a few days before, gas was in tight supply, and lines were forming at gas stations.

  Mabel walked to the coffee bar. “Get out of my way, Jimmy. I’ll make the coffee. My mouth still tastes like gasoline. Why make it worse?”

  “Hey, my coffee tastes as good as Chevron, maybe not the high-test, but certainly as good as the regular,” I said, and in a low voice added, “Sol told me you found a mouse.”

  “Yeah, and it’s gone,” Mabel said.

  “No one will ever find it?”

  “I said it’s gone. Don’t ask.”

  “You didn’t happen to mentioned finding the gun to Rita, did you?” I asked.

  “Nope, and if I were you I’d keep my mouth shut. She doesn’t even know the police were here. Why compromise her position?”

  “Well, she wants to be my lawyer on this matter…”

  “There you go. She doesn’t have to turn it over, if what I know about the law is correct.”

  “Where did you study law?”

  “Don’t be a smart aleck. I watch Perry Mason.”

  Just then, Rita and the client emerged from her office. “Danny, say hello to Jimmy O’Brien.”

  We shook hands. “I’m out of work right now, but I sell aluminum siding.”

  I shot a quick look at Rita, then turned back to Danny. “Aluminum siding?”

  “That’s why he needs us, Jimmy,” Rita said. “It seems Danny didn’t have a job. So he went to one of those seminars. You know the type, ‘You too can make fifty thousand per year selling aluminum siding.’ Of course, he believed them. Why would they lie?” she said in a sarcastic tone. “Anyway, he signed up, paid the three-hundred-dollar fee, got his sales kit, and left. The next morning, before starting his door-to-door sales calls, Danny stopped at the bank and filled out an application for a credit card. He wrote in fifty thousand dollars as his annual earnings. What the heck, that’s what the sleazebags running the scam said he’d make. Unfortunately, it was a bad year for aluminum siding.”

  “Couldn’t pay his credit card bill, and now the bank wants to make an example of him,” I said.

  “Yeah, owes a thousand. The bank called the FBI.”

  “That’s civil, not criminal,” Mabel said.

  I glanced at Mabel. “Perry Mason?”

  “The bank, Cooperative Purchasers Bank, screamed criminal fraud,” Rita said. “They’re saying he lied on the credit app.”

  “That’s the same bank that lost a billion on high-interest loans to Brazil, and now wants Uncle Sam to pick up the tab,” I said.

  “Yep, that’s them. They had Danny arrested. Then at the arraignment, he acted proper.” Rita turned to the poor guy standing next to her.

  The phone rang. Mabel answered, then handed the receiver to me. “Excuse me a second, Danny.” Covering the receiver, I asked Mabel to offer Danny a cup of coffee. His eyes lit up.

  The call was from Joyce, Sol’s secretary. I put her on hold and went to my office.

  A few minutes after I had finished the conversation with Joyce, Rita stepped in and slipped into the client chair next to my desk. “Everything okay, Jimmy?” She crossed her legs and pulled down her skirt. “You look a little down.”

  I lifted my eyes from her legs. “I guess so.”

  We were quiet for a second. “Do you want to tell me?” Rita asked.

  I quickly brought her up to speed on my progress, or more accurately my lack thereof. I told her about the Barstow trip, downplaying the scene in the cafe, at least the rough stuff, but I shared my disappointment at not finding the teen drug center. I also explained Sol’s and my theory that the base was now a right-wing compound of some sort. Of course, I didn’t mention anything about the cops searching my office or about Mabel hiding the gun.

  “That was Joyce on the phone just now,” I added.

  “What did she say?”

  “Sol is with the FBI right now, telling them what we discovered.” I paused for a moment, glanced at the ceiling and gathered a breath. “Joyce said she found out that the Jerobeam Corporation is an offshore company. The owners are hidden, but she’s sure the FBI will get to the bottom of it sooner or later.”

  “What about that guy, Ben Moran?” Rita asked.

  “Yeah, it seems Moran is not the penniless old geezer he’d like us to believe. He has extensive mining interests scattered around the Mojave Desert. Could be he owns the old borax mines the pilot told me about. I don’t know if that has anything to do with Robbie, but I did see a lot of earth-moving equipment at the base.”

  “He must be tied in somehow. I mean to the base.”

  “Maybe so, but that still doesn’t help finding Robbie,” I said.

  I told Rita that I thought the ex-military base was a dead end, but down deep, I wasn’t so sure. There was too much going on at the Bright Spot Cafe to totally ignore the idea that the base somehow figured into Robbie’s escape. Moran held mining interests that could’ve made use of heavy equipment, and there was lots of it at the base. He was obviously the honcho at the cafe, and he had lied when he said Jane didn’t work there. Jane had said she lived at the drug center. She’d called it “the base.” All of that tied the cafe to the base, and I couldn’t shake the idea that the base was the teen drug center.

  It’s true the men rushing out of the buildings weren’t teens, but they had guns and they could’ve been holding the youngsters under lock and key. But why would they do that? Is that how a Christian drug rehab center was supposed to work? I didn’t think so.

  It was thin. Maybe my reasoning was flawed, but with Sol putting pressure on the FBI, I knew they’d raid the place. If Robbie was there, they would find him. I made a mental note to have Sol inform the FBI that I was still Robbie’s lawyer and that I wanted to be there when the raid went down. I needed to protect my client’s interests.

  Rita interr
upted my thoughts. “Jimmy, you’ll find him, I’m sure. By the way, while you were in Barstow I contacted Webster to officially let him know that I’m now your lawyer. All questions go through me.” She paused. “You do want me, don’t you, Jimmy? I mean-”

  “Of course I want you.”

  “Maybe you think I’m not experienced enough to be your lawyer at a time like this. Maybe Sol can get you someone better.”

  Someone better? The thought of Sol’s nitwit nephew, Morty, flashed in my mind. But anyway, they’d drop me as a suspect in Hammer’s investigation as soon as the FBI raided the base where I felt in my gut Robbie was hiding. At that point, my need for a lawyer would become doubtful. However, one look at Rita sitting in my client chair, her legs crossed and skirt to mid-thigh, had me convinced. “Rita, yes, I want you to be my lawyer. I need you with me in this.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy, for the confidence you’ve placed in me. It means a lot. I’ll do everything in my power to… well, you know. But now, I’ve got to give you my little speech, the speech I give to all my clients.”

  “Cash up front?”

  “Shut up,” she said playfully. “It’s about trust and being open, telling me everything, even if it’s embarrassing.” She sat straight, her eyes intent and brimming with sincerity. “Now listen…”

  While she talked, the gun matter with Mabel ticked at the periphery of my mind.

  CHAPTER 22

  I jumped on the freeway and headed north to the San Fernando Valley, ending up at Golden Valley College just off Reseda Boulevard in Van Nuys. I parked in lot A, reserved for the administration staff, and walked onto the campus following a pathway covered with shiny steel beams. The college was relatively new, built in the fifties, coming to life under Governor Brown’s massive higher education program. No ivy walls, trees, or even a blade of grass were in sight. In fact, the architecture-like a lot of stuff built around L.A. at that time-was reminiscent of Disney’s Tomorrowland or a chain of modern coffee shops; Googie’s came to mind.

  I approached a round, metal-clad, futuristic structure that looked more like a large flying saucer than the admissions building. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see Michael Rennie, dressed in a pair of shiny coveralls, walk out, stiff-legged, his arms in the air, saying, “Klatuu, Barada, Nikto.”

  Seated at a desk behind the reception counter was a perky young woman with a lot of feathered hair. She wore a fuchsia satin jacket and pink pleated skirt, cinched with some kind of weird belt that had rhinestone monkeys running around on it.

  The girl glanced up when she spotted me and laid the book she was reading on the desktop with the title showing: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions. Heavy stuff, heavier than the girl.

  “Hey, sunshine, what can I do for ya?” she asked in a pleasant tone. “My name is Mandy.”

  “Hi, Mandy. I’m Jimmy O’Brien, a lawyer, and I need some information about Professor Carmichael.”

  When I mentioned the professor, Mandy’s jovial spark vanished. She turned away, faced her desk and glanced at the book, as if Sartre could bring back her cheerfulness. It was a longshot.

  Carmichael was the professor whom Robbie had murdered. Now that the FBI was going to raid the base and perhaps capture Robbie, I felt that I’d better find out all I could about the professor in case my insanity defense fell apart. Maybe Carmichael had a temper and threatened Robbie, maybe it was an accident, or maybe it was something else. Plenty of maybes, plenty of questions, but not many justifiable reasons for one human being to kill another. Then again, all I needed was one.

  Mandy turned back and gave me a feeble smile. “The professor was a good guy. I liked him a lot. So did just about everyone else.”

  “Did he have a temper, anything like that?”

  “Oh, no, just the opposite. I mean, like, he was wicked.”

  “Wicked?”

  “Yeah, man, you know, like, totally awesome.”

  “Tubular.”

  “Yeah, bitchin’.”

  “A radical dude.”

  “Mondo primo.” Her spark was returning and the smile grew on her pretty face.

  Just then, an older guy emerged from an inner office. The guy looked like Mr. Weatherbee, the high school principal from the Archie comics-round, bald with just a tiny tuft of curly hair floating on top. He wore a herringbone suit with a white shirt and a red-checkered vest. His eyes were droopy circles behind pince-nez spectacles pinched high on the bridge of his long nose, and his world-weary countenance was perfect for the role he played-that of a junior college administrator. “Mandy, I’ll handle this matter,” he said, while looking me over. “Mr. O’Brien, I couldn’t help but overhear. My name is Gerald Grundy. You are an attorney, is that correct?” His voice had a lyrical but lisping trait to it.

  “Call me Jimmy. I’m representing Robbie Farris.”

  “Yes.” Grundy sighed. “I suppose someone must.”

  He asked me to step into his office. It wasn’t much, standard issue government desk, a couple of mismatched filing cabinets, and unlike the building, there was nothing Space Age about it, unless you considered the huge computer monitor taking up half of his desk Space Age.

  I sat in the uncomfortable chair facing him and asked about the computer.

  “Oh, I see. Well, we are trying to computerize all of our records. Grades, transcripts, that sort of thing.”

  I didn’t say anything, just nodded. I didn’t care much about computers, just being polite. Starting out with a little small talk always seemed to take the edge off meetings like this.

  “It will never work,” Grundy said. “The machine gave Reggie a full scholarship.”

  “Reggie?”

  “A bulldog, our mascot,” Grundy said, nodding with a cheery grin. Had to have been an inside joke, I was sure.

  “I see… hmmm.” I gave him my best knowing smile. “That’s rich.”

  “Now, Mr. O’Brien, what information are you seeking regarding Professor Carmichael? Information that is not in the police report, I presume.”

  “What kind of a guy was he? I’ll bet he could get a little rough, maybe when a student missed an assignment.” I smiled wider.

  Grundy waved his hands back and forth in front of his face. “Oh, pshaw,” he said, but with his lisp it sounded like thaw.

  “Pshaw? You mean he wasn’t a hothead.”

  “Oh no, not at all. He was a gentle soul. But I know what you are up to.” He squinted. “You’re looking for mitigating circumstances. Something to justify Mr. Farris’ dastardly deed.”

  First, pshaw, and now dastardly deed. This guy wasn’t Weatherbee, but he talked as if he came from a comic book. Anyway, pshaw, I was striking out with my angry hothead theory. “Maybe you could hit a button on that thing,” I pointed at the computer monitor, “and tell me about his workload. Anything would help.”

  Grundy glanced at me for a moment. He pursed his lips and started to say something, but then he leaned over and starting punching keys on the high-tech gizmo that looked like an IBM electric typewriter. After pounding away on it for a while, he looked up at the screen, waited a couple of minutes, and then started again. He typed some more and waited some more and typed again.

  I sat there patiently. All of that typing, he could be writing a book. Who knows, maybe he was: Dastardly Deeds, a saucy sex thriller, the rhinestone monkey solved the case. Reggie was the culprit.

  Finally, after an eternity of this, he called out, “Mandy, bring me the Carmichael file.”

  Instantly Mandy was at the door. Her arms cradled a thick folder pressed against her chest. She toddled over and plopped it on Grundy’s desk. He peered inside then pulled out a huge sheet of paper, the kind from a computer, I presumed. He handed the lined sheet across to me. “Eyes only, I’m afraid, Mr. O’Brien, the report can’t leave this building.”

  Mandy flashed me a quick smile as she left the office.

  I scanned the printout quickly. Everything appeared routine, nothing there that
would help. Carmichael had been a professor of geology, and had taught several classes, Geology 104-Physical Geology and Laboratory, five units. The geology classes and a couple of lectures had taken most of his time, but he also taught a class that had nothing to do with his chosen field: Television 022-Television Production, four units. It was a night class and it was after this class in the parking lot behind the college’s small TV studio that Robbie had murdered him.

  I couldn’t fathom the connection between geology and television. I looked up from the paper and glanced at Grundy, who sat with his hands clasped, resting on the desk. He was actually twiddling his thumbs.

  “The professor taught a TV course?” I asked. The direction of Grundy’s rotating thumbs reversed.

  “Yes, it started as a hobby. Lately, however, it took practically all his time.”

  “Teaching a TV course took all his time?”

  “No.” Grundy shook his head; the hands disappeared beneath the desk. “I meant the time he spent running the studio. He volunteered when no one else would, but as time went on his avocation became much more labyrinthine.”

  “What do you mean? Like, complicated?”

  “Well, certainly more harried than it should have been. KVXR is a PBS station with programming produced here on campus, but for years the station has been losing money. About six months ago the trustees, in their wisdom…” He rolled his eyes. “…had voted to either sell the station or close it down.”

  “Who’d buy a station that was losing money? Anyway, what does this have to do with Carmichael?” I asked.

  “Professor Carmichael, in due course, understood the trustees’ position. He finally figured out the station would have to close, and he more or less resigned himself to that fact.”

  I glanced at my watch and started to fold the printout. “Yeah, I guess that happens,” I said, more concerned about the rush hour traffic than Grundy’s droning commentary on a small-time college TV station. There was nothing here that would help me with Robbie’s defense.