Not Sleeping, Just Dead
A Joe Goodey Mystery
Charles Alverson
Copyright © 1977, 2014 by Charles Alverson.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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Not Sleeping, Just Dead/Charles Alverson. — 1st ed.
ISBN 978-1-940708-26-3
1
I was stretching a tall gin and tonic at Aldo’s, the only bar I knew that hadn’t yet torn up my tab, when I looked up and discovered that my elbow room to the west had been annexed by an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit.
Before I could decide how I felt about that, my new neighbor reached over and placed a cellophane-covered card over the mouth of my glass. Even in the dim light Aldo cultivated—he claimed that it confused germs—I could see that it was a business card identifying Frederick M. Crenshaw, Chairman, Cosmopolitan Fire & Casualty Insurance Co., Los Angeles. I had to make a quick decision: say something or drink the card.
“You’re out of luck,” I said. “Even if I bought some, someone would probably bum me down before the night was out.”
He didn’t answer but just flipped the card over, revealing a colored photograph of a fresh-faced girl with a wide mouth, freckles and long, auburn hair. She was wearing a white graduation gown and a mortarboard at a slightly rakish angle.
“Very pretty,” I said, “but is she old enough to hang out in a joint like this?”
“She would have been,” he said, withdrawing the photograph, “but she’s dead now. She was my granddaughter.”
“I’m sorry,” I said automatically.
“Don’t be,” he said, slightly sharply. “It won’t help Katharine or me. But you could help me a lot, Mr. Goodey, by finding out who killed her.”
I sipped the watery dregs of my drink. “Do you want to tell me about it, Mr. Crenshaw?”
“Do you have an office?”
“Not one that I’m very eager to go back to right at this moment,” I said honestly, if enigmatically. That’s the trouble with having an office. I’d found in the nine months since I’d left the San Francisco Police Department that it gave people I didn’t want to see very much—like Gabriel Fong and other creditors—a pretty fair idea where to find me.
“Well, then,” said Crenshaw, still game, “have you had dinner?”
Yes,” I said. “Quite often in the past. But not recently.”
Twenty minutes of silent taxi ride later, we were putting our feet under an expensive tablecloth in a very private back room at McGinty’s, the best steak house in San Francisco. Carlo, the waiter, an ectomorphic Italian with the eyes of a failed tenor, watched glumly as I ripped through the menu. A closet vegetarian, Carlo worried about my carbohydrate intake. He cheered up at Crenshaw’s order of a bowl of clear broth and then disappeared through the thick velour drapes that separated us from the rabble.
I lapped appreciatively at some very nice claret and waited for Crenshaw to enlighten me further, but he didn’t seem to be in an awful hurry. He took a drink from a glass of iced Perrier water and watched me with eyes that were not particularly kindly. Probably nobody at Cosmopolitan Insurance called him Uncle Fred. Crenshaw was a trim, upright man barely on the wrong side of sixty-five with a faintly military look that seemed cultivated. His cropped hair was an honest, uniform gray, which cast a pallor over regular but thin features. His eyes were a brittle blue and didn’t seem to spend a lot of time twinkling. His well-kept hands had probably never touched anything dirtier than money.
Crenshaw seemed to be looking me over, too, possibly with a view to adopting me. I couldn’t tell whether he liked what he saw, and I didn’t care much. I’ll eat any man’s steak—friend or foe. Finally, he spoke.
“You’re probably wondering, Mr. Goodey, how I know who you are and how I came to seek you out.”
“The question occurred to me,” I said, “but I imagine you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
His expression didn’t change, but I could tell that he wasn’t really too happy with my attitude.
“If you’re going to work for me, Mr. Goodey,” he said, “it is essential that we establish a viable relationship. Do I detect a certain negativity?”
I could guess that the sort of relationship he was thinking of wouldn’t involve a lot of camaraderie. “Not really, Mr. Crenshaw,” I said. “It’s just that I’m hungry. I get a lot more likable with a full stomach.”
At that moment, Carlo wafted in through the drapes and put a lobster bisque in front of me as if it were a time bomb. He lingered while I took my first taste, supposedly to see if I liked it, but I knew that he was waiting to see if I was really going to subject my insides to that sort of abuse. “Wonderful,” I said with a glutton’s smile. He administered the Kiss of Death with his black-olive eyes and disappeared.
Crenshaw thought he’d try again. “Ralph Lehman tells me that you’ve been off the police force since last August.” So it was Ralph’s size-nine sombrero from which Crenshaw had picked my name. Good old Ralph. He looked out for his boys even from beyond the veil of retirement. I knew Crenshaw must have been pretty desperate, or Ralph would never have put him onto me. Ralph loves me, I know, but he has no illusions that I’m Bulldog Drummond.
“That’s right,” I said, “but it hardly seems that long, I’ve been having such a good time.”
His face pretended to believe me, but his eyes didn’t bother. “Ralph was under the impression that life for a newly established private detective in San Francisco was somewhat—straitened,” he said. I appreciated his nice choice of adjectives. He could have said poverty-stricken.
“I won’t say I’m being measured for a yacht yet,” I said, “but I’ve turned down more cases than I’ve accepted.”
I skipped the details of those rejected cases. For instance, the one just that week in which a perfectly respectable car dealer had wanted me to kidnap his ex-wife and knock out all her teeth. They’d been really rotten when he’d picked the tramp out of the gutter, he said. Now she kept flashing them at him when they met in public. I had to refer him elsewhere.
And that overlooked the really unpromising offers I’d had since I’d turned in my shield for a private operative’s license and a used hair shirt. But I didn’t want to take the chance of depressing Crenshaw so much that he ran off before paying the bill. McGinty had a couple of lads in the back room who were expert at handling slow payers.
Carlo picked that moment to arrive bearing about half of a charred cow and a disgusted expression. For the next little while I was too busy to do much talking anyway, so a discreet little silence, broken only by grunts from my side and the gentle lapping of the broth in Crenshaw’s bowl, fell over the table. I couldn’t help admiring his way with a soupspoon. Each spoonful rose what
seemed to be about four hundred feet from bowl to thin-lipped mouth with unerring precision and zero fallout. His back was parade-ground stiff, the eyes resting comfortably on the middle distance.
Once Crenshaw had reduced the broth to a polite level of about three sixteenths of an inch—without unseemly bowl-tipping—he placed his spoon at parade rest and patted spotless lips with the spotless linen napkin. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Goodey,” he said, “if I give you the background of the—situation—while you go on with your meal.”
Caught in mid-chew, all I could do was bobble my head up and down. I could have used a bit more butter for my baked potato, but it didn’t seem fair to make Crenshaw wait any longer. And I knew that Carlo would get after me about taking in too much cholesterol.
Crenshaw correctly interpreted my mime and began: “Mr. Goodey, are you familiar with an organization called The Institute?”
I nodded, choking only a little, and managed: “I’ve heard of it. But all I know is that it’s some kind of cult down below Monterey that seems to have some problems with the neighbors and the authorities from time to time.” I could tell from his expression that I hadn’t exactly put The Institute in a nutshell, but he plowed on. “Last summer, Mr. Goodey, my granddaughter, Katharine Pierce, joined The Institute at its headquarters at Las Palomas near Big Sur. Katharine—her friends called her Katie”—he said this as if it were a mystery—”was a restless young girl. She quit Stanford University and had had a certain problem with—”
I could see that he was a bit stuck, so I swallowed the last of my steak and said: “Drugs?” It was a bit of a guess, but not that great considering what I knew of The Institute.
“Barbiturates, Mr. Goodey,” he said, in case I was mentally bunching her with hash heads and needle enthusiasts, “Originally prescribed for her nerves. Unfortunately, Katharine became somewhat dependent on them. It was nothing really serious, but the doctors couldn’t seem to help her.” He paused. “Nor could I.” That was probably as close to a confession as I was going to get out of Fred Crenshaw. “Then, early last summer, she went to a lecture given by a man called Hugo Fischer, the founder and president of The Institute. I don’t quite understand what happened, but within days, Katharine had left her apartment on Nob Hill and had moved into The Institute’s mansion at Las Palomas, taking a certain amount of money with her. Fortunately, most of her inheritance was legally tied up, but—”
Crenshaw suddenly realized that he was getting off on a tangent. Looking about as embarrassed as his nature would allow, he finished starkly: “On a Sunday morning late last December, Katharine was found dead on the rocks below the mansion. She had allegedly fallen from a roof terrace during the night.” He leaned on the word allegedly so hard that it nearly snapped. And he wasn’t too happy with fallen.
“At The Institute,” he went on, “they claim that Katharine jumped to her death. I don’t believe it. I want you to go down there and find out exactly what did happen. Will you do it?”
I didn’t say anything right away. There was something boiling behind his cool exterior, and I wanted just a peek at it. Even a dead-broke private investigator likes to get a glimpse of the real person who’s hiring him. I took longer than was strictly necessary polishing off the claret and then spoke slowly.
“You think someone may have pushed your granddaughter to her death from that terrace, Mr. Crenshaw.” I didn’t ask him; I told him.
Crenshaw’s eyes, never jolly, took on a glittering hardness. He put a well-manicured hand on either side of his soup bowl; the knuckles were dead white.
“Mr. Goodey,” he said with tightly reined vehemence, “I know that someone at The Institute injected my granddaughter with a heavy dose of barbiturates and then threw her to her death on the rocks below. I want you to find out just who did it and see that they are punished. Will you do it?”
There was only one answer to that question, and I gave it. Crenshaw went back to being an aging, none-too-healthy business executive with a big problem. He put his hands back in his lap and asked me if I’d have any dessert. I almost said yes, but then decided that I couldn’t face Carlo’s disapproving eyes.
Instead, we talked a bit more, and Crenshaw gave me three things: a check for a retainer big enough to let me hold my head up among my fellow men and my creditors; a thin, blue-folder report marked: “Confidential—Monterey County Sheriff’s Department”; and another thicker report from an outfit called Brazewell Associates, Beverly Hills, California.
We agreed that I’d get in touch with him in Los Angeles just as soon as I had anything to report. To nobody’s surprise, Carlo gave the bill directly to Crenshaw. Outside McGinty’s, Crenshaw favored me with a crisp handshake, advised me that he was staying at the Fairmont Hotel, and vanished in a taxi, leaving me standing there with only two problems in the world: getting used to having money in my pocket again, and finding out who—if anyone— killed Katie Pierce.
2
My old friend and former boss, Ralph C. Lehman, newly retired as chief of detectives of the San Francisco Police Department, lived at the top of a modest hill in the not so sleepy little town of Mill Valley. When Ralph had moved in about thirty years before, Mill Valley had been so small and homey that the chief of police had come around personally to investigate the rumor that the new residents were of the Jewish persuasion. The Negro had not yet been invented in Marin County. Ralph had offered to dropkick the chief all the way to Milpitas and had lived there peacefully ever since.
I put my tired old Morris convertible into a tight turn up Molino Avenue and listened attentively for the first sounds of the death rattle. But the old four-banger took the challenge and somehow propelled me up Ralph’s steep drive and onto the gravel apron in front of his crumbling Victorian house. Ralph came out onto the porch with a look of vexation on his big, ellipsoidal face. He was waving a sheet of white paper as if it were a flag of surrender.
He stepped all over my “Hi, Ralph” by booming: “Do you know what those sons of bitches have done, Joe? They’ve nearly doubled the property taxes on this shack. I can’t afford to live here anymore. They’re going to drive everybody but the fags and the millionaires right out of Mill Valley.”
I had a mental image of Mary Frances Lehman upstairs tying up a bundle of rags for the trip to the poorhouse, but then there she was peering out at me through the half-open screen door.
“Oh, shut up, Ralph,” she said. “Stop rending your garments for a moment and make us a drink. Come on in, Joe. He’s going to do the heath speech from King Lear in a minute, and I want to be sure to miss it.”
I followed the tight bun at the nape of Fran’s neck into the Lehman’s big, old-fashioned living room. In one corner, Ralph’s small desk overflowed with bills and receipts. In another, a television set flickered soundlessly as a black dude in a malnourished afro stretched his mouth and gesticulated at us. The room smelled of well-waxed wood and old leather and softly gleamed with brass and copper ornaments.
Ralph went over to a mahogany drinks cabinet and began rattling bottles while Fran whirled and leveled a long, bony finger at me. “You haven’t been to see me in months,” she accused. “All you have to do is retire, and all your friends pretend you’re dead.”
Before I could defend myself, Ralph forced a cold glass in my hand and fell into his massive, green leather chair at one side of the big stone fireplace in which a small fire behaved itself.
“Mary was up here with her sniveling little brutes last week,” Fran continued. “She sends you her love, but she wasn’t surprised to hear that you’d gone wrong.”
I’d first met Fran Lehman as a hot-blooded claimant for her daughter Mary’s hand about a dozen years before when I’d been a young detective just out of the blocky, blue uniform of the SFPD. Mary had wisely decided to marry a petrochemical engineer from Los Angeles, thus breaking my heart. And once I’d gotten past the gargoyle front Frannie put up, she’d become an auxiliary mother to me.
“You can tell y
our faithless daughter that I am risen from the fallen,” I said, putting Crenshaw’s check in front of Fran’s face.
“Not bad,” she said. “Who did you have to promise to kill? No, don’t tell me. Then I can’t tell the Grand Jury.” She gathered up a wicker basket of embroidery and her drink. “I sense a certain amount of business talk coming up,” she said, “and I’m too old and cantankerous to have to put up with it. You can find me in the nunnery.”
Before the door quite closed behind her, I asked Ralph:
“This Crenshaw bird you’ve sicced onto me, how much do you know about him?”
Ralph communed with the ice cubes in his glass before saying: “Fred Crenshaw was the best defensive end I ever saw. Between us we ruined more halfbacks than you’ve had Chinese dinners. I used to slow them down, and Fred would break them off just below the knees. It was murder.” He said this with gentle, contemplative relish as if remembering a great wine.
“I’ll bet,” I said. “But I assume that he’s given up that habit by now. Do you think you could bring me up to date a bit?”
“He was in the war, you know,” Ralph said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “The Marines. Used to crawl into Japanese machine-gun nests and slit throats. Won a couple of medals that way.”
“Thanks a lot, Ralph,” I said. “I now know who killed his granddaughter. Crenshaw did, by crawling into her machine-gun nest, breaking her off at the knees and slitting her throat. Case closed.”
“Don’t look at me like that, Joe,” he said, not sounding very hurt. “I’m not quite senile yet. Look at these eyes. Do you see any geriatric haze over them?”
I had to admit that I didn’t. Any haziness would have been Scotch-induced, and I couldn’t begrudge Ralph that.
“Well, then,” Ralph said, “don’t be too wise. I didn’t ask you to come begging for information. Hell, I got you the job, and now you want me to carry you around piggyback. Remember, I was the one who advised you to take the mayor’s offer of your old job back. You wanted to be a lousy private operative. So operate. If I’d wanted to handle this case, I’d have taken Crenshaw’s money myself.”
Charles Alverson - Joe Goodey 02 - Not Sleeping, Just Dead Page 1