An Open Case of Death

by James Y. Bartlett

  Gennaro’s Cafe was a few doors down. I motioned at him to follow me and led him into the warm, brick-and-beams space. The aroma of roasting coffee filled the air, competing with the wonderful smells of baked good coming out of Gennaro’s brick ovens. Sorry, Dunkin Donuts, you lose!

  I ordered us each a large espresso and led Nelson to a table in the back, against the brick wall. I took the chair facing the door. One surprise a day is my quota.

  “What are you doing in Boston?” I asked when we sat down. “And did you bring Cassie with you?”

  “I need to talk to you,” he said. “Cassie’s still in California. But she had your business card. So I came east.”

  “Did you ever think about calling me on the telephone?” I asked. “It’s a great modern invention. Can save a body from flying across the country sometimes.”

  A waiter, an older Italian gentleman with a wonderful bushy gray walrus mustache, came over with a tray containing our coffees. He set them down with a flourish, nodded at us silently and disappeared.

  Mike sipped his coffee gratefully, like a man who hasn’t had much good lately in his life. He closed his eyes, savoring the taste. He opened them again and looked at me.

  “I couldn’t use the phone,” he said. “I think they were listening in.”

  “Who?” I asked. “The CIA?”

  He sipped some more coffee. He did look thinner than the last time I had seen him, working in the lap of luxury at the Ranch at Redwoods. I figured I was going to have to spring for some food to get him to talk to me.

  “They tried to kill me,” he said.

  Not much you can say in response to that. Oh, gee, really? Or Well, I see they missed are probably not proper comebacks. So I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to tell me.

  He did. About two weeks ago, he had finished up his work at the golf course, told his co-workers he was going home and headed off. But on the way, he had suddenly decided to go see Cassie, and had continued on to the vineyard where she worked. They went out for dinner, and then he decided to stay at her apartment for the night. None of this was unusual.

  His cellphone woke him up at three in the morning. The county cops were calling to tell him his trailer had gone up in smoke. Burned to a crisp. They said preliminary information was that a big old Molotov cocktail had been pegged through his front window, and did he know of anybody mad enough at him to try to kill him?

  Of course, he demurred. Even when Johnny Levin of the Monterey sheriff’s office had noted that Mike Nelson had been longtime best friends with the late Charley Sykes, who had met an ugly and as yet unexplained end at the bottom of the cliff at hole number eight at Pebble Beach back in December.

  Mike had sworn there was no connection, and then he had gotten the hell out of Dodge.

  “I hitched a ride with a trucker,” he said. “Got as far as Chicago. Then I found another who took me to Hartford. Got into Boston two days ago.”

  “You been on the streets?”

  He nodded.

  “Hungry?”

  He nodded.

  I waved for the old Italian gentleman and asked him for a menu. I ordered some calzones and a pepperoni pizza. And more coffee. I called the woman who had organized the weep and greet and told her something had come up and I was going to have to cancel.

  When the food came, steaming hot out of the oven, I mostly sat back, ate a slice of pizza and watched Mike devour the rest. I think he had been hungry.

  Once he was finished, he sat back with a groan of satisfaction.

  “How did they find you? I asked, while he wiped the tomato sauce off of his face and hands. “Did you tell anyone about Charley and the letter?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “ I swear, neither one of us has said a thing. I don’t know how they found me.”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  He started to shake his head again, but stopped. “Well,” he said, “There was this phone call…”

  “Tell me,” I ordered.

  “It was a few weeks ago,” he said. “I was home one night and my phone rang and the person said ‘Is this Mike?’ I didn’t recognize the voice. It was a man, with a deep voice. But it sounded kinda fake to me. So I said ‘You have the wrong number’ and hung up.”

  “Guess you didn’t fool him,” I said.

  “Guess not,” he said. His shoulders sagged. “I’m fucked, aren’t I?” His voice wavered a bit, but he was doing a good job holding it together. I imagine the calzones and pizza and the coffee helped.

  “Not fucked, necessarily,” I said. “But in a spot of bother, for sure. I would imagine whoever is chasing you has discovered that you and Charley Sykes were besties at Stanford, and maybe put two and two together.”

  “Will they go after Cassie, too?” He looked anguished at the possibility.

  “Don’t know, kid,” I said. “Anything’s possible.”

  “I left without calling her or anything,” he said. “Haven’t called her since I left. So if they’re listening in on her phone, they can’t trace her back to me.”

  “That’s probably a good thing,” I said. “Though she may be a bit worried.”

  “Can you call her?” He looked at me with big sad eyes. Like a puppy whose been lost for a week. “Tell her I’m OK?”

  “Probably not a good idea to say it exactly like that, in case someone from the dark side is listening,” I said. “But I can probably think of a way to get her a message. But more important to me right now is, what are we going to do with you?”

  The sad puppy eyes came back. “Well, I was hoping I could crash with you for a few days,” he said. “Until we came up with a plan. I don’t mind sleeping on a couch or something. Really. Even the floor would do.”

  I was shaking my head now. “Can’t do that, sorry,” I said. “Got a pregnant wife, a daughter, a mean cat and no extra room.”

  “Oh,” he said, shoulders slumping again. “Well, I can try the shelters. I had some soup over at a church yesterday, and they told me about some place on Pine Street or something.”

  “Pine Street Inn,” I said. “Fancy name for Boston’s best homeless shelter. But I might be able to do a little better than that.”

  I got out my phone, looked up a number in my contacts and dialed. When someone answered, I identified myself and asked to speak to the boss. “Have him call me back when he can,” I said. “And be sure to tell him that his daughter and grand-daughter are fine. This is not an emergency. Thanks.”

  I hung up and waited. Mike waited too. What else was he going to do? In about five minutes, the phone beeped.

  “Hacker?” Carmine Spoleto said. “What can I do for you?”

  The weekend before the U.S. Open, Mary Jane, Victoria and I flew out to San Francisco, rented a car and drove south. When we hit Carmel-by-the-Sea, we kept going for another half hour or so until we arrived at Big Sur. Turning up the mountainside that dropped down towards the Pacific for the last thousand feet or so, we found the laid-back hotel and spa I had booked, tucked away in the trees.

  Mary Jane signed up for yoga classes, an all-organic full body cleanse, and a daily reiki massage. Of course, she was still awash in maternal hormones, so I just smiled and told her that sounded great. Victoria oohed and aahed about everything, but was especially taken with the free bike rentals and the horizon pool that seemed to be perched at the edge of the cliff cascading down to the rocky shore. Wouldn’t we all love to be eleven again?

  And me? Our room had a nice patio with two comfortable chaises and the swimming pool, about fifty yards away, had a bunch more. With waiters hovering and asking if they could bring you another cool and refreshing drink. I had brought four new books I wanted to read, and had about another twenty on my laptop, so I was pretty much in hog heaven as well.

  I tried not to think too much about Mike Nelson, who was not in hog heaven at the moment. Although he might have been in real heaven if I had not int
ervened.

  My father-in-law, asterisk division, heard me out when I had called him a month earlier. And then he quickly arranged for a safe house for Mike Nelson. Well, I called it a safe house. I imagine Mike Nelson called it involuntary servitude or something worse. In any case, Carmine found him a place to stay, a back bedroom in a third-floor tenement walk-up in the wilds of Dorchester. His host was a bachelor who owned a liquor store and was one of Carmine’s trusted foot soldiers.

  Carmine had sent a car and when it arrived at Gennaro’s, I patted Mike on the back and told him to go with the flow for the time being. I said I’d try and straighten it all out. I had no idea how, but he didn’t need to know that.

  I went down to Dorchester to check on him about a week later. He seemed fine: he had been well-fed with Italian food and had drunk a lot of cheap red wine. And his host, Arturo Scavini, had put him to work in the liquor store, Big Al’s Spirits, sweeping, restocking shelves and taking a turn at the counter to ring up sales.

  “He’s a good boy,” Artie told me. “Hard worker. Doesn’t say much.”

  Mike had looked at me with his puppy dog eyes and asked when he could go home. He missed Cassie and wondered if he’d ever get his job back.

  I told him that we’d gotten word to Cassie that he was still alive and missed her. I had called Sharky, and he had volunteered Aggie to drive out to the vineyard and speak directly to Cassie, making sure no one else was listening. Cassie had burst into tears at the news, but quickly recovered and was now OK.

  I had nothing I could tell him yet about coming back home. Sharky was working some angles at his end, and I was scheduled to return to Pebble for the U.S. Open, which was now scheduled for the following week.

  And here I was. We had five nights in Big Sur before we had to move over to the Inn at Spanish Bay, the Pebble Beach property that the U.S. Golf Association had booked for us for Open week. My book signing was scheduled for Tuesday night at a bookstore in Carmel.

  The days passed blissfully. We all had breakfast together staring out the window at the banks of fog that socked the coastline in … it’s an official secret, closely guarded by the Chamber of Commerce and tourism board types, that summertime on the Monterey Peninsula is fog season. The temperature inversions between the ice cold Pacific and the hot, semi-arid mountains usually result in thick, soupy, sunless mornings all along the coast. If there’s any kind of a breeze, the clouds will usually blow away by noon.

  But we dealt with it. Victoria and I would set off on a long bike ride through the dripping forests and open vistas, stopping to gaze at one of the private mansions that dotted the hillsides, and pulling into our favorite little cafe for a fruit smoothie. Mary Jane usually disappeared into the spa after breakfast for one of her treatments, not to be seen again until dinner.

  One morning, I drove the Vickster down Route 1 to San Simeon to look at the Hearst Castle. There wasn’t much to see from the parking lots at the bottom of a hill—looking up we could see the bell tower and the tall palms in the gardens. Vickie took one look at the busloads of visitors lining up for the tours and decided she wasn’t all that interested.

  “Seen one castle, seen ‘em all,” she said with that unarguable logic of children. We went back to Big Sur.

  In the afternoons, Vickie would splash in the pool with some of the friends she had met, and I would lie on a shaded chaise and read. And sleep. And worry a little bit about what I was going to do next, now that the book was finished and the advance money almost spent. And about the case at hand and how I could figure that one out.

  Mary Jane noticed that last bit. She would reach over at dinner, frown, and rub her thumb against my forehead.

  “Worry wrinkles,” she would say. “They have this lovely hot stone massage where they put them on all of your chakras. Just melts all your stress away.”

  “Are you sure I have chakras?” I said. “I don’t think they were allowed in the Sunday school I used to go to.”

  “You went to Sunday school?” Victoria piped in. “What was that like?”

  “Very religious,” I said. “And not much fun. Except for sixth grade. That’s when I met Connie Stone. She was gorgeous, at least for a sixth grader, and if you overlooked her braces. I was certain I would marry Connie Stone and live happily ever after.”

  “Did you?” Vic asked.

  “Nah,” I said. “She dumped me for some nerd with a Game Boy.”

  “What are you worried about?” Mary Jane pressed. “We’re in Big Sur. Living with Nature. Getting in touch with our inner selves.”

  “My inner self is worried about making next month’s rent,” I told her. “So’s my outer self.”

  She blew out her breath. Then stopped and took another deep one in. I think it was something she had just learned.

  “The universe will provide, Hacker,” she said. She sounded a little sing-songy, like Baba Ram Dass.

  I let it drop, because this was bliss time. I wanted Victoria to have a good time, and I wanted MJ to relax and let little Junior soak in nothing but good vibrations down there in her womb. But I knew I’d have to come up with some kind of plan for the future. Little Junior was going to need diapers. And amoxicillin. And four years of tuition at Harvard. Nothing but the best for my kid!

  I looked around for a helpful waiter and told him to bring me a Scotch on the rocks. On second thought, I said, make it a double.

  Sunday afternoon, blissed to the max, we drove back up to the Peninsula and took 17 Mile Drive out to the Inn at Spanish Bay, where the Pebble Beach Company had constructed a big modern hotel overlooking the ocean, and added a golf course next door.

  The golf course, designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., the son of the man who designed Spyglass Hill, had great ocean views, but is just an OK track. Part of the problem was that the environmental crowd had gotten involved in the project early, and had designated all kinds of places around the course as “environmentally sensitive,” which meant places no humans were allowed to tread. Now, I’m as sensitive about the size of my carbon footprint as the next guy, but if I tug a little on my sand wedge approach to a green and my ball rolls off into a sandy area next to the green, an area fenced off and larded up with big neon signs telling me this is an environmentally sensitive area and to KEEP OUT!, and I can see my brand-new Titleist Pro-V1 sitting there doing nothing but polluting the environmentally sensitive area…well, I’m going to walk in there and pick it up, and if you don’t like that, I suggest you call Ansel Adams and complain.

  But I wasn’t playing golf on this visit. The hotel, while comfortable and nicely appointed, is just a big old convention hotel, with wings full of meeting rooms, lots of restaurants of various cuisines and a couple of big ballrooms for that corporate event. And on the Sunday before the U.S. Open, the lobby was full of conventioneers: the officials and people of the world of golf. I saw some of the same contingent of golfing officialdom that I had seen at Augusta for the Masters, and in St. Andrews for the Open Championship. It’s one of the perks of the job, whether you’re chairperson of the Wyoming Golf Association or the grand poohbah of the Indonesian Golf Federation: You get to go to all the major tournaments, stay in the official hotels and party like it’s Woodstock.

  Jake Strauss had kindly offered to put us all up for the week, courtesy of the US Golf Association. The girls planned to visit the Monterey Aquarium, shop Cannery Row and probably spend a day or two up in San Francisco. After my book signing on Tuesday, I’d pretty much be free to watch the tournament. It felt more than a little odd not to have any deadlines or worries about stories to write, but I figured I’d get over that pretty fast.

  We checked into our junior suite. Mary Jane decided to lay down for a brief nap and Victoria and I looked at the room service menu to see if we were hungry for anything yet. We decided to wait a bit. The golf tournament on TV was Memphis, where three nobodies were vying for the title. Victoria was engrossed in her telephone screen, I was half asleep and Mary
Jane was softly snoring on the bed when a horrible grinding noise made all three of us sit up, wide-eyed and stunned. I first thought it was a trash compactor that had gotten stuck mid-crush, but the sound kept going on and on and eventually turned into what sounded like musical notes.

  I opened the sliding glass doors and went out on the balcony to look. We were on the third floor, and down on the grassy terrace overlooking the Pacific, some guy dressed in a kilt, knee socks, tam o shanter and sporran was blowing air into a set of bagpipes. Once inflated, he began playing some descant or other while pacing back and forth.

  Mary Jane came out and stood next to me, watching. She put her arm around me.

  “You looked better in that kit than he does,” she said.

  “You’re slightly biased, I think,” I said. “And you’ve had a peek at what’s under the hood, too.”

  “A peek?” she said with a chuckle. “Son, you threw open the hood and let the whole neighborhood stare at the engine.”

  “TMI! Too much information!” Victoria called from inside.

  On Tuesday evening, we all spiffed ourselves up nicely and drove back into Carmel. The bookstore was on Dolores Street, between 7th and 8th. It was called Zen and Sons and featured a nice little stony garden out in the back, with benches for meditation and little trickling fountains designed to make the wounded whole and heal the sin-sick soul.

  The fountain bit didn’t work with Mary Jane. “I gotta pee,” she said when we walked out there to look. She disappeared inside. Victoria and I admired the peace and quiet.

  Inside, Jake Strauss had arranged for a nice little cocktail party surrounding a white cloth-covered table covered with stacks of my book. Victoria looked at my name printed on the bottom of the cover photo (an old black and white shot of Pebble Beach) and gave me one of her sly smiles.

  “They spelled your name right, at least,” she said.

  “Shut up,” I whispered.

  The blue-blazered USGA crowd was out in force. I hoped Strauss had told them they had to show up or get fired. But there were a few other people there I knew: a couple of golf writers I used to work with, some of the foreign golf officials in town for the US Open, and I even spotted one or two of the Tour players. Most everyone was gathered around the tables that had some finger-food laid out in trays, or were standing in line to get a glass filled with California wine or hand-crafted beer.