An Open Case of Death

by James Y. Bartlett

  He stood up. The interview was apparently at an end. I stood up too, and extended my hand.

  “Well, thanks anyway, Mr. Newell,” I said. “Appreciate the time.”

  “It’s Nelson,” he said.

  “Oh, right, sorry,” I said. “Thanks again.”

  Sharky and I retraced our steps to the entrance, collected my rental car, gave the valet kid a few bucks and drove off. But I only went a few hundred yards and pulled in to one of the hundreds of empty parking spaces at the far end of the lot.

  “What are you doing?” Sharky asked.

  “Just wait a sec,” I said.

  It was more than a sec. It was about four minutes before we saw Mike Nelson come out of the clubhouse, rush down the stairs and head off around to the left, out of sight. But shortly, we saw an old black Nissan SUV come out of a back lot and head back down the main drive. Mike Nelson was behind the wheel. I waited a few seconds and then followed.

  Nelson was motoring pretty damn fast as we went down the main drive. He blew past the gatehouse entrance doing about 40 mph. I was going fast enough to keep him in sight, and as we approached, I watched the uniformed guard come out and yell something at the speeding Nissan as it disappeared in the distance, screeching its tires as it turned right with a nice little fishtail maneuver onto the main road.

  I slowed down as we went past the gatehouse, dropping my green visitor’s pass out the window as we went through. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the guard chasing the paper as it blew around in the air currents.

  “Where do you think he’s going?” Sharky asked as I picked up the pace on the main road.

  “Dunno,” I said. “I just hope he makes it. He keeps driving like this, he’s gonna end up wrapped around a tree.”

  I managed to get within about two hundred yards of the speeding Nissan. I kept that distance as we descended down the long valley. I don’t think Nelson was paying too much attention to what was going on behind him—he was bound and determined to get where he was going as soon as possible.

  I was beginning to think we were going to trail him all the way back to Carmel Valley, when he suddenly slammed on his brakes and swerved onto a dirt and gravel access road that branched off to the right. The Nissan disappeared in a cloud of yellow dust that swirled up behind it.

  I slowed down as we approached the spot where he had turned, pulled ahead of the dirt road and stopped. The access road dropped downward on a nearly parallel angle to the main road, and ended after a hundred yards at a double-wide trailer at the bottom. The trailer rested in a shady spot along the bank of a rocky creek that flowed behind it. Across the creek was a flatland of golden grass and a few bushy shrubs.

  “Casa Nelson,” I said. “Out here in the boonies.”

  “Very peaceful,” Sharky said.

  The Nissan had stopped in front of the trailer. The driver’s side door was open. There was no sign of Mike Nelson. The cloud of yellow dust had mostly dissipated, with just a few swirls left in the air.

  The door to the trailer flapped open with a bang and we watched as Nelson came out, holding a phone to his ear. He was waving his other hand around wildly. He paced back and forth forcefully as he spoke.

  “Who do you suppose he’s talking to?” Sharky wondered out loud.

  “Dunno,” I said. “But he doesn’t look happy.”

  “No, he does not.”

  “What do you think set him off?”

  Sharky chuckled. “Well, if I were a betting man, I’d guess that somebody calling him ‘Mr. Newell’ might have done the trick,” he said.

  “Yeah, he did kinda react to that, didn’t he?” I said. “That, and he wanted to know if we were cops.”

  “You think he’s the one who wrote the letter?” Sharky asked.

  “I’d say he’s the leader in the clubhouse,” I said.

  “Shall we go down there and ask him?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Might prove injurious to our health. Anybody who lives out here in the boonies likely keeps a shotgun by the front door. I know I would. Besides, I’m more interested in who he’s talking to right now.”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Just guessing,” I said, “But I’ll go with one of the three surviving partners in the Pebble Beach Company. And since Jake Strauss pretty much told me that Jack Harwood and Will Becker are going to be bought out, that leaves one Harold Meyer as the leading candidate.”

  “I’m betting he’s talking to a woman,” Sharky said. “There’s always a woman involved in stuff like this.”

  I thought about that. Sharky had a point. I pulled my car forward a ways, turned it around and pulled up on the side of the road facing back down towards the trailer, down in the hollow below the road. I turned off the engine.

  “Let’s wait a bit and see what happens,” I said.

  “Okay,” Sharky said. “But let’s not wait too long. I’ve got some iced tea floating around that’s gonna need to escape pretty soon.”

  I motioned over my shoulder. “Lotta woods out there,” I said. “Long as you don’t piss on a bear.”

  While we waited, I kept one eye on the trailer down below us to the front, and one eye on the road coming up behind us. It was about fifteen minutes later that I saw a red pick-up heading our way. I told Sharky and we both ducked down as it drove past us, slowing and turning on the dusty access road down to the trailer. We sat up again and watched.

  The truck stopped behind the Nissan, and Mike Nelson came out of the trailer again. The pickup’s door opened and a woman got out. She looked to be in her twenties. She had dark brown hair and was dressed in blue slacks and a matching polo. She and Nelson hugged.

  “Told you,” Sharky said. “The femme fatale.”

  “Good call, Garth,” I said.

  We watched the couple talk. At a couple of hundred yards away, there was no way to hear what they were saying. After a few minutes, Nelson fumbled in his pocket, pulled out his phone and held it up to his ear. He began nodding and talking. He seemed to ring off, put his phone away, and, after saying something to the girl, they hugged and each got back in their vehicles. They drove up the access road, and Nelson blasted away towards the Ranch at Redwoods.

  The pickup turned in our direction, heading back the way it had come. Sharky and I ducked down again, but I kept my head high enough to read the plate on the front bumper. I read it out loud, so one of us could remember. The truck whooshed past us and disappeared down the road. I sat up and wrote the plate number down.

  Sharky got out his phone and dialed.

  “Johnny Levin, please,” he said. He waited. “John, it’s Sharky. Can you run a license plate for me? Yes, I know it’s illegal or unethical and all that, but I need to know who’s pickup it is.” He read off the plate numbers. “Thanks, man,” he said. “Let me know.”

  He hung up and looked at me.

  “That was a good afternoon’s work,” he said. “Let’s go get a beer.”

  We went back to Steinie’s in Monterey, and Sharky, after a visit to the men’s room, took up his position at the far end of the bar. We ordered up a couple of beers. The crowd was a little bigger and more boisterous than it had been the other night. The Warriors were playing the Bulls back in Chicago, and some of the bearded biker dudes were apparently rabid fans of Golden State. I thought of doing a poll to find out which golfer the bikers in Monterey preferred among all others, but decided that while that might be funny, it might also be somewhat dangerous to my health.

  I was talking to Sharky about something or other when I noticed his eyes light up as he was looking over my shoulder. He smiled and nodded his head. I turned to look. A pretty woman, in years way beyond the hot-babe phase, dressed well if still casually, with shortish pixie hair spiking in all directions and a pair of bright twinkling eyes, was making her way across to us from the front door.

  She came up, draping an arm on the back of each of our stools. �
��Hiya, men,” she said, her mouth breaking into a wide grin. “Room for one more?” She leaned over and gave Sharky a kiss on the lips and turned to look at me. That grin, those eyes bright with life and even the spiky do, all made for a pleasant package. Here was someone you’d like to get to know.

  “Hacker,” Sharky said by way of introduction. “This is Aggie. Short for Agatha.”

  I got up and gave her my bar stool. “Delighted,” I said. “I hope your last name is Christie because Shark and I have been trying to solve some of the many mysteries of life.”

  She smiled her thanks at me as she hung her big straw bag over the back rail and perched her athletic rear end on my stool. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s Lindstrom. I know a lot about medical things, and nothing at all about murders on the Orient Express.”

  She was, I learned, an ER nurse at the Community Hospital in Monterey, the largest medical facility on the Peninsula. And though no one told me, I could tell that she and Sharky were something of a couple. Maybe it was that kiss hello. Maybe it was the way he looked at her, with equal parts longing and admiration.

  “So, how was your day, hon?” she asked Sharky, waving at the bartender for him to bring her a beer. Maybe it was that she called him ‘hon’ and asked about his day. My powers of deductive reasoning are pretty awesome.

  “Meh,” he said. “The usual. Dealing with other people’s problems.”

  She turned those sparkling eyes on me. “And how about you, Hacker?” she said. “You have to deal with problems all day?”

  “Me?” I said. “Nah. In my world, it’s all unicorns and gumdrops.”

  She chuckled. “I’d go live in your world, if I wasn’t spoken for,” she said.

  “Don’t believe him, Ags,” Sharky said. “His world is just as dark as any other.”

  On the television over the bar, Stephen Curry drained a three-pointer from the corner. Kevin Durant then stole the inbounds pass, tossed it back out to Curry, who drained another three. The bikers in the bar roared their approval.

  “I have a medical question,” I said, when the crowd calmed down. Agatha looked at me. “You know who J.J. Udall was?”

  “The guy who ran the Olympics?” she said. “Know the name. Didn’t he pass on a little while ago?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He had a heart attack and then died a few days later. He wasn’t in your hospital, was he?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

  “I think he was up at UCSF, in Frisco,” Sharky said. “I remember reading that in the newspaper.”

  “Makes sense,” Agatha said. “Udall lived in the Bay area. And being a rich and famous dude, he’d likely be taken to the best hospital in the state. That’s UCal, San Francisco. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m trying to decide if I think there was some funny business with his death,” I said.

  “OK,” Agatha said. “What do we know?”

  “He was in his mid-eighties,” Sharky said. “He’d had three heart attacks already, this was his fourth. They got him stabilized, resting comfortably.”

  “He had visitors,” I chimed in. “At least two. They reported he seemed to be his usual self, except for a little weakness and fatigue from the attack itself.”

  “On the day he died, he seemed fine at nine in the morning,” Sharky finished up. “They found him dead at three in the afternoon.”

  “They said it was from natural causes,” I said.

  “And you wonder?” Agatha smiled at me. “Old guy, weak, past history … I dunno, Hacker, when the man upstairs calls your number, most of the time the jig is up.”

  “What kind of medications would they give him?” I asked.

  “Well, after a heart attack, they usually are on warfarin,” she said. “That’s a blood thinner. And they put them on aspirin, to keep the platelets from binding together. Neither one of those would be fatal in any normal dosage amount.”

  She thought a bit. “They might have put him on digoxin,” she said. “That’s if he had a-fib … sorry, that’s atrial fibrillation, for his ticker. Too much of that stuff will kill you, for sure.” She shrugged. “Those are the normal things. Of course, he might have had a billion other things going wrong, and his docs might have had him on something weird. Hard to tell unless you’re in the room.”

  “I wonder how one would go about getting a peek at his medical records,” I said.

  “Almost impossible,” Agatha said. “California laws are pretty strict about privacy. You’d need a court order and even then the hospital would likely protest. Could take years.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I guess that’s not gonna happen, then.”

  “Or,” she said, “You could buy a girl dinner and another beer or two, and said girl might be willing to call a friend of hers who works in the ICU at UCSF Medical Center and see if she can shake something loose.”

  “Done,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Hoo, boy,” Sharky said, shaking his head sadly. “Hope Jake Strauss’s expense account has no limits.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that to your friend,” Agatha said, with a sparkle in her eyes that said, oh yes she would. “But I haven’t been over to La Bicyclette in ages. Let’s go there!”

  And so we did. The restaurant was in Carmel-by-the-Sea, that lovely little, tree-shaded town by the beach. In Carmel, every tree is considered sacred or something like that, so even thinking about cutting down a tree requires a permit; and the people of the town decided long ago that having street numbers on each house or place of business was un-American or something. So we parked along 8th Avenue and walked down the crunchy, leaf-strewn sidewalk to the corner of Dolores and 7th. That’s the address of La Bicyclette: “the corner of Dolores and 7th.” One reason California has so much smog is that people trying to ship things to Carmel cause the United Parcel Service computers to overheat.

  La Bicyclette was a charming little French bistro of a place, with four tall, arched windows (one containing a bicycle) in the front, and inside, dappled walls, barn-siding table tops, chalkboard menus and soft lighting all of which looked like it had been flown in direct from Montmartre. With all the celebrities in town for the golf tournament, the place was busy, but we were seated after a short wait in the little bar in back.

  Agatha ordered the duck, Sharky had one of their wood-fired pizzas and I went with the charcuterie sampler of cured meats with some fromage on the side. They told me they had a special on a bordeaux from St. Emilion, so I ordered a bottle.

  There was a handful of recognizable Hollywood celebrities dining around us, and we were enjoying being some of the Beautiful People out for a night in Carmel, when Sharky’s phone rang. He took the call, nodded a few times and hung up.

  “Johnny L,” he said, looking at me. “Got a name to go with the plates. One Cassie Conway. Lives up in the Valley. Works at one of the vineyards, in the tasting room.”

  “Salude,” I said, holding up my glass of red. “In my business, we call that a clue. The game is afoot!”

  My dinner companions clinked glasses.

  “It’s gonna be the butler, isn’t it?” Agatha said, eyes alight with delight. “It’s always the butler that did it.”

  “I don’t think there is a butler,” I said. “But I’ll keep my eyes peeled for one.”

  Finding Cassie Conway had been my main priority for the next day, but she had to wait. When I got out of bed, Coach Connover was already up, and when I made it into the kitchen, he was back at the kitchen table, eyes locked onto his telephone screen. Sharky and Aggie were also seated at the table, sipping their coffee and looking rumpled and happy. My amazing powers of deduction suggested that they had had an enjoyable evening while I was fast asleep from an overdose of beer, wine and good French food.

  My phone rang and I saw it was Jake Strauss calling.

  “Crap,” I said. “He’ll be wanting to know if I’ve found Mike Newell yet.”

  I answered.
r />   “Have you found Newell?” he said. Not even a hello, first.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe? You’re giving me maybes?”

  “There are still a few things to check out before I know for sure,” I said. “These things take time.”

  “Well, hurry the fuck up,” he said. “I can’t wait forever.”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said, “How soon can you get over here to the Lodge? I’m supposed to go up to San Francisco and meet with Meyer this morning. I want you to come along.”

  “Why?”

  That took him aback. He probably wasn’t used to having people question his decisions.

  “Well … because … oh, I don’t know,” he stammered. “I thought you’d want to interview him for the book.”

  “Oh, yeah, the book,” I said drily. I didn’t tell Strauss that the chapter on Pebble Beach was mostly done. I didn’t think I needed anything more from Harold Meyer. “OK. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  “Make it twenty,” he said and rang off.

  I looked at the others.

  “Maybe it’s just me, but I’m beginning to think Jacob Strauss is something of giant asshole.”

  “Nah,” Sharky said, refilling my coffee cup. “I think most people in golf think he’s an extra-large anus.”

  It was more like forty-five minutes before I arrived in the lobby of the Lodge. I’ll admit I dawdled a bit getting dressed and out the door. Sharky’s coffee was pretty good and Agatha Lindstrom was fun to talk with. More fun than Jake Strauss would ever be. Plus, she laughed at all my jokes.

  I parked in the designated lot and walked down to the hotel. There was a long stretch limo idling in the turnaround drive by the front door. Jake Strauss was inside the lobby, phone glued to his ear as he paced back and forth in front of the huge windows that looked out over the golf course. The lobby was abuzz with pre-tournament excitement, and a lot of people were gathered on the narrow deck beyond those big windows, looking down on the 18th green. There was nobody on the green, but I guess it was nice to look at.