“I’m not only capable, I’m loyal and trustworthy,” I said, giving him a Boy Scout salute.
He blinked once. I cracked up this guy.
“What did you do before becoming an investigator?”
“I was a college professor at Sacramento State. Now retired.”
“So you know Jill from the college? What subject did you teach?”
“Communication studies.”
“Which means exactly what?”
“I taught public speaking and small group communication.” I decided to keep it simple and backed off from the academic mumbo jumbo that I used to embellish my curricula vitae back when I still needed a curricula vitae.
“That hardly inspires confidence, Mr. Courage.”
“You would be surprised at how twenty years of listening to 19-year olds deliver five-minute persuasive speeches can sharpen the senses.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Here is my proposal to you, Mr. Courage. I will give you one week to determine what Andrew Norris is doing and if he is compromising this firm’s best interests. I will pay you five hundred dollars a day, plus any reasonable expenses. I will have my secretary e-mail you a contract later today.”
“That sounds fair to me.” Fair? Hell, I was going to charge him less than half that.
“That’s not all,” Stroud said. “I will tell you now and it will be explicitly included in the contract. Under no circumstances are you to contact Andrew, his acquaintances, and especially my clients. If I hear one word that anybody knows you are snooping around the affairs of this firm you will be fired, forfeit any earnings, and very likely be subject to a lawsuit. Is that clear?”
“Mr. Stroud, I can promise you that I will be as discrete as possible. However, in any investigation there are risks that—”
“You are not listening to me. So let me repeat. You are not to contact anyone at this firm or any of our clients. You must be invisible in this whole thing. In the investment business, even the faintest suggestion of controversy is distasteful and can cause panic. Clear?”
I nodded.
“I’m doing this against my better judgment,” he said, almost under his breath.
“I elicit that response a lot.”
Stroud ignored the comment. He had already lost interest in me. He swiveled in his chair so that his back was to me. I sat there for at least a minute, waiting for Stroud to turn around or at least say something to me as he gazed out the window. As the silence became too awkward to endure, I stood, assuming our meeting was over. As I reached the door I took one look back at Stroud and saw his face buried in his hands, his shoulders racking, and I could hear him crying faintly in that big leather chair.
three
Rubia walked into the Say Hey about noon, thirty minutes later than promised, though I didn’t mind opening the bar for her and working the first hour. I did it as a favor to her and for the free beer it earned me as payment.
Rubia, to my knowledge was the only one of my students who belonged to a street gang, let alone, ran a street gang. By the time she enrolled in my organizational communication class, two busts and a dozen or so tattoos later, she had gone straight. Then, as now, it was difficult for me to imagine that this beautiful, petite Latina with the sad brown eyes and long black hair possessed the street smarts, guile and ruthlessness to have managed the Los Modernos gang, which until its demise with her departure ran a notorious meth operation in West Sacramento.
“It’s about time,” I said, giving her a fist bump over the top of the bar. “I thought you’d never come in.”
“You’re working your butt off I see,” she said, looking about the empty space.
“I have low tolerance for stress.”
“Thanks for covering for me.” She came around to the working side of the bar and I moved to the more familiar confines of the barstool across from her. “Beer?”
“Thought you’d never ask. How about a Full Sail?”
She drew the beer into a pint glass and set it in front of me on a coaster. She dressed simply as always, wearing worn designer jeans that fit her slender figure nicely and a short-sleeved blue top that could not conceal the tats that ran down to her biceps on both arms. She watched me take a sip of the beer. She sighed.
“Something wrong at the office?” I said. After graduating from Sacramento State with a degree in communication studies, Rubia started her own non-profit foundation, It’s My Life, dedicated to getting kids out of gangs and into schools and the job market.
“I shouldn’t complain. Donations are up. I have a part-time assistant now. Four volunteers. Got over thirty kids in the program and working on a few others. I do what I can a day at a time. One kid at a time. It can be wearying.” With what little free time she had between running her foundation and managing the Say Hey, Rubia used it to earn two black belts—one in Jujitsu, another in Tai Kwon Do—and learn to shoot a handgun well enough to become club champion at Cordova Shooting Gallery. Though I was almost literally twice her size, if the going ever got tough I knew the chances were that she would protect me more than the other way around.
“Must make you feel good, though. Making a difference and all that.”
“Could be doing worse things I guess. It’s just that instead of getting easier it’s getting harder. The Mexican cartels. They’re everywhere now. They’ve got the dads and even the grandpas cultivating weed up in the mountains. And the kids—some as young as ten—are packaging, muleing, and selling the stuff on the street. It’s bad, real bad.”
“The Mexican cartels are here in Sacramento?”
“Not just here. They’re all over California, probably most other states, too. Where have you been?”
“I had no idea.”
“Makes my job harder. These kids can make so much money. They see their parents for god sakes growing weed.”
I shook my head. Thank goodness for people like her who at least tried when it would be easier to give up. I admired her. I raised my glass to her and told her so. Rubia flushed, embarrassed by my uncharacteristic compliment.
“Let’s change the subject. Are you going to tell me about your girlfriend?”
“Get out of here.”
“Tell me about the gringa. She your new lover? I could see the way you looked at her.”
“Hardly.” I snorted. “She’s a client of sorts is all.” I told her about the job for Jill’s dad. “I might have some work for you on this, as a matter of fact.
Though she expressed some interest in the work she didn’t press for details. She was more interested in Jill.
“So this chick comes to you out of the blue?”
“We used to date.”
“Ahh. How long ago?”
“We went out for about three years. Broke up two years ago.”
“Did you dump her or did she dump you?”
“Well, Dr. Phil, there wasn’t any dumping of anyone. We came to a mutual, mature understanding that we were better off not seeing each other. Very adult. Very civil.”
“She dumped you.”
“Yes.” I drank some beer.
“And now you’re working for her?”
“Technically, no. I’m working for her father. She was just a referral.”
“Referral. Nice. You banging her?”
“Jesus, I thought that college degree put some couth into that gangbanging head of yours.”
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“No,” I said. “We are done. I will probably never see her again after today.”
“What’s today?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. She wants an update on my meeting with her dad. She’s worried.”
“And she wants to screw your lights out.”
“Stop!”
“Just saying.”
“Well, you’re wrong.” I stood and started to leave. “Thanks for the beer.”
Rubia blew me a kiss and thanked me again for opening and tending
the bar. “Oh, and keep me posted on how this case thing with the, uh, dad, works out. Don’t want you getting your ass into trouble.”
four
I sat in a corner at Espresso Metro trying to keep my cup of French roast from spilling on the wobbly table. I waved at Jill as she entered a couple of minutes after my arrival. She held up a be-there-in-a-second finger, and went to the counter to order. Jill could still turn heads, even from some of the community college boys sipping mochas and taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi. I wondered if I should buy her coffee. What would the protocol for this be? She had given me some business that would warrant a free drink. But then there was the fact we had broken up. Would she take my buying her coffee as a come on? I turned this around in my head like an angst-ridden schoolboy. Meanwhile, Jill ordered her own tea and joined me a moment later.
“Nice place,” she said.
“It’s the anti-Starbucks,” I said. “I defy you to find any two chairs or any two tables for that matter that match.”
She took a quick look around and saw the challenge as hopeless. She sat opposite me at the small table.
“And they have original artwork I see.”
While the Say Hey exclusively featured Willie Mays photos, Espresso Metro exhibited a new artist or group of artists each week. The exhibitor this week went by the moniker Lexie and her preferred medium appeared to be three-foot sections of fence planks on which she poured, with no apparent purpose, multiple colors of acrylic paint.
“On Saturdays they have free-form guitar jam sessions,” I said.
“Think I’ll pass.”
She pulled the tea bag from the cup, deftly circled the string around the bag and pulled, extracting most of the liquid remaining in the bag. She set the bag down and sampled her drink.
“So, how did the meeting go with my dad?”
“OK, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I mean he hired me, sort of.”
“Sort of. Geez, Ray, is the entire conversation going to go like this?”
“Maybe.”
That made her smile, but I could tell she wasn’t entirely amused.
“Sorry, once a smartass always a smartass.” I shrugged. “Let me be a little clearer. I met your dad in his office this morning, like I said in my text message. I would say the meeting was not exactly smooth. It took him awhile to admit that he had a potential problem with this Andrew Norris. Then he was very reluctant to have me look into it for him.”
“But he did hire you, right?”
“Yes, but if the leash was any shorter I wouldn’t be able to bend over to tie my shoes.”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“He’s much more concerned that I might spook the clients than he is in my flushing out his guy Norris. I can understand that to a point. As it is now, though, I’m not to enter the same zip code as a client, let alone talk with one. That leaves me with doing background checks and that’s about it.”
“I see.”
“If he hadn’t gotten strange at the end I would guess your dad wasn’t worried at all,” I said.
“What do you mean strange?”
“He was crying I think.”
“Crying? The Lionel Stroud was crying?”
“At the end of our conversation he turned away from me. He put his hands over his mouth and I heard what sounded like crying.”
“My god. What did you say to make him cry?”
“I don’t think it was anything that I said. It was kind of like what you told me when you first came to me. He seems worried, maybe even afraid, but he won’t admit it. It was like my talking to him reminded him of what is troubling him and the more we talked the more he got to thinking about it.”
“Forty-one years, my entire life, and I have never seen my father cry. Not even close.” Jill looked down at her tea.
“I’ll do what I can Jill.” I resisted the urge to reach across the table with a comforting hand. When was the last time I’d touched Jill—any woman—with a comforting hand, an intimate gesture?
We sat for several moments in silence, she feigning interest in a particularly gruesome piece of fence plank art, me studying the table top. I thought about the four women in my life that I had loved. My mother and wife were dead. Sara lived four hundred miles away. And Jill. As the cliché went: so near and yet so far.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course not.”
“Please don’t take this wrong, but I was wondering why you came to me about this thing with your father? I mean, there are plenty of PIs in Sacramento, all with more experience than I have.”
“I figured you needed the work,” she said after a pause. “You just started this new career and all. Besides, you’re smart and I knew you could be trusted.”
“Fair enough. Any other reason?” I regretted the question the second I asked it. I should have let her answer suffice, whether I wanted the answer to be different or not. It wasn’t just her good looks that made me act like this, like a lovesick sixteen-year old, desperate for attention, any kind of attention. I acted like an idiot around her because she had gotten to me in a way that I never imagined possible after Pam died.
She looked at me and spoke directly. “To be clear, Ray, I did not come to see you to rekindle what we had.”
“Message received,” I said. Ouch.
“If there was any other reason it would be your communications experience. Your research, the papers you wrote, your observations about things—they all show how good you are at understanding people. I thought that might be useful in this case.”
“In theory I understand people. I’m not sure about how good I’m at it in practice. You might even say I don’t know the first thing about people.”
Her face shut down, suddenly a blank screen. What I had said had the unintended effect of offending her.
“I have to go,” she said, leaving her nearly full cup of tea and me alone at the wobbly table.
It was nice to know I still had the magic touch with her.
five
Street parking on 13th Avenue between L and M Streets could be challenging anytime, mid-week at noon rendered it almost non-existent. According to the Outlook calendar that Stroud reluctantly sent me, Andrew Norris would now be having lunch with a client named Charles Burke at a popular downtown restaurant called Lucca. Earlier that day he’d met with a client by the name of Blake Rios and a couple named Eric and Joanne Tyler at his Emerald Tower office.
I drove around the block a second and then a third time, at last finding a metered parking space a block from Lucca. Just as I switched off the ignition my cell phone rang.
“I got what you asked for,” Rubia said, skipping the hellos.
“That was fast.” I’d just given her the assignment that morning.
“What can I say? I’ve got lots of friends in low places.”
“Isn’t that a country song?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Okay, what did you get?”
“Nothing.”
“At all?” I said.
“I mean, I have the basics, but you probably already know most of it. Andrew Norris, single, never been married, twenty-eight years old. Bachelor degree from Brigham Young, MBA from UC-Davis. Been working for Stroud just under two years. Lives in Granite Bay.”
“That’s all on his resume on the website,” I said. “Nice Mormon boy who lives in the whitest, richest part of the county.”
“Don’t get snippy with me. I’ve got more, but it’s probably not very helpful either.”
“I’ll take it anyway,” I said.
“He’s got a clean DMV, good credit scores, no IRS problems. He doesn’t have a criminal record. No dramatic changes in his bank accounts. No debt other than his mortgage, which is up to date. Appears to be a straight hetero. The guy makes some good money, socks a lot away in investments with a Ziebell Financial Services.”
“Do I want to know how you found
out some of this stuff?” I said.
“Nope. Not unless you want to get any on you.”
“Did you find any evidence that he’s bought or leased any property or working with a broker to find space for an office?”
“If he’s leased anything it’s not under his name. He hasn’t created a fictitious business name either. Not sure if he’s contacted a broker or not. No way to know unless we polled every commercial broker in town.”
“Skip that. They wouldn’t tell us anyway. Could we hack, I mean ‘access,’ his phone records to see if he’s called any?”
“I’d have to work on that, but maybe.”
A parking enforcement cop, an overweight woman with a bad auburn-colored dye job, walked in my direction, stopping occasionally to issue a ticket. I thanked Rubia for the information, hopped out of the car and put five quarters in the meter just before the cop reached my car. I smiled at her. She frowned. Some people.
Andrew Norris and an older, well-dressed gentleman sat at the far end of Lucca. Except for a pair of women in their sixties sipping white wine, the bar was empty. I chose a seat that afforded as good a view as possible of Norris without being obvious.
The man I assumed to be Charles Burke worked on a salad, Norris munched on some sort of sandwich. Both drank iced tea. I ordered one to justify my presence at the bar. Their conversation appeared calm, businesslike. For my first official surveillance it was boring as hell.
Just after Norris paid the check I saw him lean close to Burke and say something. When he leaned back after almost a minute, Burke looked at him a moment, then he slammed his fist on the table, hard enough to turn heads at the four nearest tables.
Norris hovered his hands above the table and gave a “stay calm” gesture. Burke would have none of it. He stood, and without another word, stormed out of the restaurant. If the outburst shook him up, Norris did a remarkable job of hiding it. He calmly picked up his receipt, examined if for a few seconds before tucking it into his shirt pocket. A moment later he departed.
Courage Matters: A Ray Courage Mystery (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 2