The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  “See if I can get him to talk about the Arnauds?” she asked, skeptically. “Should I just ask him, or am I supposed to somehow innocently steer the conversation to that one particular topic? I mean, the guy’s probably had a lot of cases. Why should he suddenly start talking about that one?”

  “I think it’s better if you don’t arouse his suspicion. I imagine you’ll have to do some steering. For all I know, he may have forgotten about the Arnauds. On the other hand, there’s always the possibility that the case still eats at him. Sometimes our failures stay with us more tenaciously than our successes. The Arnaud case could be stuck in his little private-eye brainpan, scratching at his professional self-image. Maybe a couple of drinks and a pretty face will loosen him up.”

  Karla picked quietly at her salad for several minutes. “You say this Arnaud guy was killed about a year ago?”

  “About a year, yes.”

  Again, she sat quietly for several minutes. When she spoke, it was as though she’d figured something out and this had given her the resolve she was looking for. “I’ll get him to talk.”

  •

  On the following Tuesday, Karla picked me up at the footbridge at 7:30 p.m. She was wearing running shoes with cutoff jeans over black tights and a white blouse under her leather jacket. She’d replaced the spiked hair with a softer style, her makeup was more corporate, and her perfume had been applied more liberally.

  “Evening, Shake.”

  “Bergamot and coriander.” I said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Your perfume,” I said. “Bergamot and coriander.”

  She’d started to pull away from the curb, but stopped, gawking at me like I’d just guessed some dark secret. “That’s one hell of a nose you’ve got! Anything else you’d like to comment on? My bathing habits? Menstrual cycle?”

  Those were things I could have commented on, but didn’t. “Bergamot and coriander are both fairly distinctive fragrances. I wasn’t complaining. I imagine Hamilton will like it, too.”

  She gave me a questioning look, then went back to her driving.

  “Speaking of Hamilton,” I said, “let’s drive by The Intermission and see if his car is there. If it is, you can park across the street and I’ll wait in the car while you do your stuff.”

  “Do my stuff?”

  “Initiate a surreptitious attempt to extract information from an unwitting subject.”

  “Right, do my stuff.”

  Karla was watching something in the rear view mirror. She let up on the gas, allowing the car to gradually slow. A moment latter, an SUV accelerated past us.

  “I hate it when people tailgate. If he wants to stick his nose up someone’s ass, why doesn’t he go home and stick it up his wife’s?”

  “Feeling a little prickly tonight?” I asked.

  “Sorry. I guess I’m a little nervous.”

  “Relax, Karla. You’ll be fine. Nothing is riding on this. If Hamilton talks to you about Arnaud, good. If not, it doesn’t matter. Either way, don’t sweat it.”

  As it turned out, Hamilton’s silver Volkswagen was in the parking lot. We parked in front of a Chinese restaurant across the street and I watched as Karla crossed the intersection and entered the bar. I reclined my seat so that I could just see the passing traffic above the dashboard, making myself comfortable for the wait. Even though it wasn’t late, not yet even eight o’clock, there were very few pedestrians in the area. After a few minutes, two young girls passed on the sidewalk, a rapid-fire exchange of empty chatter pulling them on their way. “It was so, like, shut up!” one of them said. “She’s like, in a bad mood. I’m like, okay!” the other said. I lost interest in them so quickly, it made me wonder if my attention span was even shorter than theirs.

  A few minutes later, a sheriff’s patrol car stopped in the turn lane at the intersection, then shot off against the light, tires smoking. When the car got up over the speed limit, its roof lights began flashing and the siren came on. I thought about some of the encounters I’d had over the years with the police. Most cops today, especially the young ones, are little more than punks with guns. I wonder sometimes if it’s because they’re the first generation of police to be brought up on video games and high-tech movies. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear they all took their police academy training at Universal Studios. They definitely know how to talk the talk, but too often they aren’t smart and they don’t inspire confidence. And when the chips are down, it’s not unusual for them to either piss themselves or go off half-cocked. I confess, I’ve put one or two out of their misery.

  The night grew cooler and darker, the air slightly damp and very still. The minutes passed. The traffic gradually decreased. It was a little after ten o’clock when Karla came out of the bar. She crossed the street against the red light. There was a noticeable veering in her trajectory. She opened the driver’s door and got in without her usual grace, plopping onto the seat, relieved to be free of the need to balance. After closing the door, she leaned her head back against the headrest and took several deep breaths before speaking.

  “That was weird,” she said. After a couple of minutes, she leaned her head forward and ran her fingers through her hair, then slapped her cheeks lightly as if trying to wake up. “Tell you what, Shake. That guy likes to talk.”

  “You okay? You’re not going to puke, are you?”

  “I’m fine. I never throw up from booze.”

  It sounded like one of those things people like to say about themselves, regardless of the facts, but I had no reason not to believe her.

  “It was weird,” she said again. “Like he was waiting for someone to talk to about Francine Arnaud. I go in, right? He’s sitting at the bar, so I sit two stools over. I don’t want to be too obvious. He looks like he’s already had a few. So I order a beer and when it comes, I glance over. He’s looking at me, so I tip my glass at him, just to be friendly, and he immediately moves over one stool and introduces himself. We do the small talk for a few minutes, he asks me what I do, do I like Sacramento, this and that. I make up some shit for answers. Then I ask him what he does. He says he’s a private investigator. I’m duly impressed and after some more chitchat I ask him what was the most difficult or interesting case he ever worked on.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Arnaud?”

  “Arnaud. He tells me the whole story, from day one.”

  “So much for client confidentiality.”

  “Really! But here’s the thing. He’s not telling me all this because the case was interesting. He’s telling me because he has a broken heart. The guy was in love with the Arnaud woman. I think it really tore him up that he couldn’t help her, and then, to top it off, she committed suicide.”

  “The love angle is interesting, Karla, but I don’t think it will help much.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “It doesn’t explain anything except why he’d tell the whole story to a stranger in a bar.”

  “Did he say why Arnaud went to Vacaville?”

  “He doesn’t know. Couldn’t ever get any solid answers. He knows Arnaud met someone at the motel, but he doesn’t know who, or if it was about drugs or the niece, or both. He doesn’t know if Arnaud was killed over the drugs or the niece, or over something else entirely. The only thing he seemed fairly sure of was that he didn’t think there was any connection between Dean’s drug activities and the missing girl. The niece had been gone a long time. Apparently, Dean didn’t want to look for her but Francine pressured him into it.”

  “So he knows Arnaud was dirty?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I guess everyone knew but the wife. Hamilton thinks telling Francine about her husband selling drugs was, as he put it, the worst mistake of his professional career. He thinks that’s why she killed herself.”

  “Did he say anything about a guy named Richardson?”

  “Richardson? Yeah, he thinks Richardson is some kind of big drug dealer, or something. He said he tried to talk to him, but Richardson wouldn’t see him.” />
  “Did he say why he wanted to talk to Richardson? What’s the connection?”

  “He doesn’t know. He said Arnaud told his wife he was working on something, a possible connection to Richardson, but he didn’t tell her what it was. He said he didn’t want her to get her hopes up. Hamilton thinks it’s entirely possible that Dean invented the connection to Richardson, just to make his wife think he was making progress.”

  “So he thinks Richardson didn’t have anything to do with the murder?”

  “He said it was a possibility, but he just didn’t know. It’s kind of sad, really. He thinks Francine would still be alive if he could have solved the murder.”

  For all of Hamilton’s talking, I still didn’t know whether Arnaud had gotten himself killed over drugs, or if it had something to do with the missing niece. No doubt, Richardson would have preferred the killing to be about something unrelated to his drug business. Denying the drug connection and shifting suspicion onto the missing girl might just have been an attempt to steer me away. But I had a hunch the niece was in the middle of it. As full of shit as Richardson was, he could very well have been right about the weakness of a drug-related motive. There wasn’t that much money involved to risk killing a cop. But if Arnaud was killed because of the missing girl, that meant he’d dug deep enough to make someone very nervous.

  “What about the niece?” I asked. “Did Hamilton try to find her?”

  “He said he looked for her for a while, on his own, but drew a complete blank. He brags about how good he is at finding people, but the niece just vanished.”

  We sat quietly for a few minutes while I thought it over. Karla was starting to fidget. “How are you feeling? Sober enough to drive?”

  “Yeah, and I need to pee.”

  She started the car and headed back. She did seem to have sobered up. At least she wasn’t having any trouble driving. When we got to the footbridge, she pulled over to let me out.

  “Are you going to look for the girl, Shake?”

  “You did well tonight, Karla. I appreciate your help.”

  I stepped out and closed the door and Karla pulled away, smiling.

  Chapter 13

  For a vampire looking for a little distraction, the Arnaud mystery was an interesting puzzle: a wife deeply deceived about her husband’s character, a husband who has given someone a reason to kill him, a missing girl, a possible drug connection. And as I pursued the puzzle, something else was adding to my curiosity; a familiar pattern, one that seemed to grow inevitably out of my entanglements with humans. As long as I kept my distance from human affairs, it wasn’t particularly difficult to maintain caution in my day-to-day quest for blood. The less I had to do with people, the easier it was to avoid complications that might arise from killing them. But as soon as I stuck my nose into something unrelated to my basic nutritional needs, things had a tendency to get a little chaotic.

  The problem was that involvement in people’s affairs almost always presented me with unforeseen dining opportunities. It wasn’t a question of being impulsive or reckless. The opportunities—more or less risky under the given circumstances—were simply there. I could either ignore them or take advantage of them, based on whatever concerns were relevant. I just had to use a little common sense in assessing the risk. Nevertheless, these improvised meals forced me to confront the fact that my decisions about who to kill, insofar as those decisions were the result of conscious evaluation, weren’t based on much of anything beyond risk assessment and resource management.

  However, there were exceptions. Every now and then, I would chose not to kill someone, regardless of how low the risk was. There were people I judged to be worth more than a meal. Not just obvious cases, like Karla, who worked for me and was therefore worth more to me alive. Sometimes a complete stranger would do or say something, behave in a certain way, and I would unconsciously give them a pass. Which meant there were considerations that took precedence over my personal dietary needs. Which meant in turn that the forces and motivations of my own life were not entirely reducible to blood. It bothered me that I didn’t understand how I was making these choices.

  The Arnaud business was typical. I was curious about how the pieces fit together, but pursuing it had quickly led to two random meals: Richardson’s girlfriend and Danny Weiss. There was something disconcertingly heedless about my actions. As if I were driven by forces I had no sway over. As if I had been reduced to physical processes, unable to weigh and evaluate the circumstances of my life. Because I wanted something from Richardson, I let the scumbag live, but drank his girlfriend’s blood, as if her life and death were inconsequential. As if she didn’t weigh in the balance of things. Then, with Danny Weiss, I did the opposite. I killed the little weasel and let the girl live. Danny may not have deserved any better, but it didn’t change the fact that, beyond the physical satisfaction of my thirst, my motivations were unclear to me.

  The truth was, I wanted there to be meaningful distinctions, points of reference. I wanted it to be possible to make a better or worse choice, so that I could make the better choice. But I didn’t know how to make the distinctions. Consequently, killing often left me with the nagging uneasiness of not knowing if I had made a mistake. Not necessarily an ethical mistake, but some kind of mistake; the kind you make when you do something irrevocable, knowing as you do it that you’re taking a great deal for granted about something you really don’t understand. The kind of mistake that reduces you to something less than you want to be.

  For reasons that also weren’t clear to me, unplanned meals seemed to bring all these unresolved questions to the surface, in a way that my routine feeding did not. There wasn’t any logical explanation for it. Why would a planned killing like Francine’s be any less unsettling? And that, too, was irritating. There was some kind of rationalization process at work that I wasn’t comfortable with. Like a man who tells himself his actions are acceptable if he abides by the rules, keeps his goal in mind, and doesn’t allow his greed to take precedence over his higher objectives. All the while, conveniently forgetting the possibility that the rules are only there in the first place to serve his greed.

  Chapter 14

  Meandering through the aisles at the bookstore in the Pavilion Shopping Plaza, it occurred to me that there was a time, not so long ago, when you could walk into a bookstore and be fairly confident that it was staffed by bibliophiles. They might be eccentric, and probably were, but their eccentricities were tempered by a genuine affection for books. Today, most of the few surviving bookstores are corporate chains. They’re run according to corporate policy, the employees are selected for their expendability, and with all the decor and the cafés, they’re just extensions of the shopping mall concept.

  The arrangement of books on the shelves has also undergone some curious modernizations. There often isn’t any obvious relation between content and shelf location. I suspect categorization is the result of some kind of management excretion via marketing statistics. Not surprisingly, these market-driven arcana are as incomprehensible to the average employee as they are to shoppers. Staff people are reduced to performing their various tasks according to their own more or less illiterate whimsy. Add to that the typical American’s regimen of daily pharmaceuticals, and you have a kind of stress-free commercial utopia where the staff is chemically indifferent to everything, including alphabetical order.

  I was watching a young woman who had staked out one of the armchairs. The night wasn’t particularly cold, but she was dressed for a winter assent of Denali. Her long coat, scarf, gloves, and hat were piled on the floor next to her chair, leaving what looked like no more than three or four layers of clothing to protect her from the elements inside the store. And I thought I was cold-blooded.

  She had gathered a couple dozen books in a pile at her feet and was busying herself sorting through them. She would take the top book, flip nervously through the pages, then stuff it between the chair arm and either her left or right thigh. This process contin
ued until she had sorted the entire pile, at which point she stood up and the two stacks of sorted books collapsed together into the space her butt had vacated. She put her coat on top of the books, tucked her cell phone into one of the coat pockets, and went to the restroom. I walked past the chair and deftly lifted the cell phone. There wasn’t any necessity behind this. It wasn’t as if the feds were tapping my home phone, or trying to triangulate on my location. It was more of a game whose practical implications, if there were any, were mostly just hypothetical. In the last few years, I’d been giving more thought to my technological footprint, the various ways of leaving digital crumbs along the trail of my misdeeds. Later that night I used the woman’s phone to call Richardson.

  “Goddamnit, Lisa,” he barked into the phone, “I’m not paying for it!”

  I’d obviously caught him in the middle of some delicate negotiations. “Hello, Ron. Having Lisa problems?”

  The line was silent for several seconds. “It’s you,” he said, sounding relieved that I wasn’t Lisa. “What do you want?”

  “Thoughtful of you to ask, Ron. Especially after all your bullshit about not knowing Arnaud.”

  “Jesus! You’re worse than the fucking cops.”

  “I haven’t quite made up my mind whether to punish you for lying to me, Ron, or give you an incentive to be more forthcoming.”

  There was another long silence. “You killed Danny Weiss, didn’t you?”

  “I read about that. A tragedy.”

  “Look, I admit I knew Arnaud. But I don’t know why he was killed and I don’t know who did it.”

  “Danny said something about a couple of Russians.”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Give me something useful and I’ll let you keep your ten thousand dollars for November.”