Poisoned Justice

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  Published by Pen-L Publishing

  www.Pen-L.com

  Fayetteville, AR

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit written permission from the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review purposes are excepted.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-68313-009-3

  First Edition

  Cover design by Conor Mullen and Kelsey Rice

  CHAPTER 1

  The threesome of Victorians would’ve made a matched set, except that even in the moonlight you could see the middle one had a garden that put its neighbors to shame. I turned the wheels of my pickup against the curb and set the parking brake. Connecticut Street was a fine example of San Francisco having been draped over the hills like an urban blanket. A few cases of dynamite in the 1800s would’ve made the place much easier to navigate. But there’s something to be said for the sheer cussedness of building a road straight up a thirty percent grade.

  Walking up the stairs flanked by the exquisitely tended plantings, I could see that the lights were still on in the living room. My mother often stayed up late to have some quiet time for herself; her reading lamp glowed through the lacey curtains. I slipped off my shoes to muffle my footsteps and climbed the stairs. The music from the stereo would’ve covered the sound of my rust bucket, but I didn’t want to disturb Tommy by clomping up to the porch if he was already asleep. Inside I could hear the opening to Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor.

  I savored the Introitus for a few moments, thinking how the one thing my mother had given me was a passion for classical music—and the one thing my father had given me was an interest in insects. A strange pair of gifts by any estimation. The one luxury that my mother had allowed herself when I was growing up was a top-of-the-line hi-fi system and a new record each month. She wore mended clothes and cooked simple foods. We always bought used cars, and vacations were two-dollars-a-night camping cabins along a state beach or in the mountains. Music was her only indulgence. I suspect that if the great composers had not written their assorted versions of the Mass and thereby received the blessing of the Church, she might’ve considered a record collection to be a sinful extravagance.

  In my rebellious years, I tried listening to Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. I knew rock ’n’ roll would annoy my parents, but I had no stomach for it. The hours of classical music in the evenings of my childhood had worked their way into my thick skull. My parents’ aggravation just wasn’t worth my own distaste. So I decided the best way to declare my adolescent independence was to reject the religion of my Irish Catholic parents and the music of my peers—that way, nobody would be telling me what was what.

  I tapped softly on the door and heard the shuffle of my mother coming into the entryway. She pulled back the gauzy curtain to peek out, and her eyes lit up as if I’d just returned from brokering world peace. Even when I had been dragged through the internal affairs investigation, pilloried by the press, and had to resign from the force, she never doubted me. According to her, nobody could say for certain what happened in that alley, but she knew that her son had done what principle and duty required.

  The door opened and she gave me a smothering hug. “Riley, you’re back!” she announced in an exuberant whisper. Over the lingering aroma of dinner, which had evidently included colcannon given the hints of garlic and cabbage in the air, I could detect lavender soap. She was as soft and plump as a mother from the old country ought to be.

  “That’s right, your prodigal son returns from the decadence of southern California,” I said. She scowled, believing that hedonism and the risk of mortal sin increased as one headed down the coast until the point at which women wore nothing more than “colored bras and panties” on the beaches. It might be 1976 for everyone else, but my mother was not about to concede ground to the new norms of dress—or undress. “How’s Tommy been?” I asked.

  “Come in, come in,” she said, pulling me by the arm into the entry. “He’s had a rough few days. You know how he misses you. And he was upset that you weren’t here to collect insects with him, or whatever the two of you do at the park on weekends.”

  “Sorry Mom, but the convention was important. You know, new products, business connections, and all that.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty, Riley. You’re a good man, providing for Tommy and me like you do. I know that means having to be away sometimes.” Her voice had become serious but then brightened. “Now, come into the kitchen and I’ll warm up a plate for you.”

  “That’s all right, it’s getting late. I just wanted to check on you two before I went home.”

  “But you’re getting so skinny.” She pinched my gut and didn’t find any flab, then sighed as if she’d somehow failed in her responsibilities, and nodded toward the stairs. “Go on up. I put him to bed at half nine, but I suspect he’s still awake hoping you might stop in tonight.”

  I slipped into Tommy’s bedroom. The light from the hall illuminated his San Francisco Giants bedspread and the posters on either wall featuring Willie McCovey and the butterflies of California. He was propped up in bed with the tired and happy look of a little kid who’d stayed up past his bedtime. Tommy had the mind of a child inside the body of a thirty-two-year-old man. He’d been as normal as you or me until his version of rebellion took its toll. While I was getting into fights, Tommy was doing drugs. Mostly pot, but I know he tried other stuff as well.

  He’d probably have turned out okay, but one night he smoked a few joints rolled from Mexican sinsemilla that nobody knew was laced with paraquat. The U.S. government had sprayed marijuana fields with this herbicide, and the result was poisoned plants and people. Tommy had gone into respiratory arrest at his friend’s house, and the other kid had been so scared of getting busted that he cleaned up the evidence before he called an ambulance. By the time they got Tommy to San Francisco General, brain damage had turned him into a permanent child.

  “I heard you and Mom whispering,” he said with a big grin, as if he’d caught us in some secret activity. Then he rolled onto his stomach and declared, “Back rub!” Along with his mental limitations, Tommy wasn’t able to walk normally. He’d thrust out his left leg and then swing his right leg in a wide arc, nearly falling over just before catching himself. This lurching gait put a strain on his lower back, so he was constantly seeking relief from the pain.

  “Okay, buddy. But not too long. You’re supposed to be asleep.” I began to knead gently, then more firmly. Tommy groaned quietly, his knotted muscles slowly relaxing.

  “I didn’t get to go to the park. How come we didn’t pin insects together like we always do?” he asked.

  “I told you I had to go away to Los Angeles for a few days. Remember? Now that I’m back we can go to the park. And you can come to my house and work on our collection.”

  “When, Riley?”

  “Let me talk to Mom about that. But I promise it will be this week.”

  “Tell me a story,” he sighed. The kid loved to hear about my time on the force. He never complained about listening to the same tales over and over, so I picked one of his favorites.

  “Back in ’67,” I began, “my best informant was an insect peeled off the grille of a Lincoln Continental.”

  “What color?” Tommy asked.

  “Black.”

  “And shiny?”

  “Yes, and shiny. Now then, it turned out that an FBI agent working the case figured that a hit man for the Grassi syndicate had dumped the
corpse of an uncooperative building inspector somewhere in the San Francisco area. The city Board of Supervisors, along with the feds, was determined to find the body, track down the assassin, and send a message to the Grassi family.”

  “The Grassis must’ve been awfully mean people,” Tommy said, shifting to put his left side under the press of my fingers.

  “They were, but the FBI agent was sharper than they were mean. He’d thought to scrape a smashed butterfly from the killer’s car a couple days after the building inspector went missing. Having heard about my interests, he dropped the mangled thing on my desk.”

  “You knew more about butterflies than anyone else in the police department, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. Dad taught me all about insects when you and I were kids.” My father and I hadn’t seen eye to eye on much. In fact, collecting insects was about all we’d had in common. It had taken us outside the city, while back home his Old World values and ways had been a source of embarrassment. But I created the illusion of a happy childhood for Tommy’s sake.

  “Keep going,” Tommy insisted, as I’d fallen into a bittersweet reverie.

  “Okay, sorry. Well, there was only one wing intact, and what was left looked like a run-of-the-mill metalmark butterfly.”

  “All silvery speckled. Isn’t that right, Riley?”

  “That’s right buddy.” The kid knew his butterflies but he also knew my stories. “But you just be quiet and listen or you’re not going to fall asleep,” I scolded softly. “So then, I also realized that the metallic flecks on the brown background of the wings didn’t quite match anything I had in my collection. It took a couple days, but I figured out that the hit man had also managed to hit a specimen that our dad and I had been after for years. This butterfly was found only in the sand dunes out by the Fulton Shipyard.”

  “How’d you know that, Riley?”

  I shushed him and continued. “Well, we knew from Dad’s books that the Lange’s metalmark laid its eggs on naked buckwheat.” Tommy snickered, as usual. “It’s called that because there aren’t any leaves on the stem,” I explained, as always. “And what with all the sand mining happening in the dunes, there was only one area near the shipyard that still had lots of buckwheat. I drew a map of the area for the FBI. It took them the better part of a week, but they managed to find the shallow grave with the inspector’s body. I didn’t get any credit in the report, but I got something even better. What with the Lange’s metalmark butterfly being listed as an endangered species this year, I figure I’m one of the few private collectors in the world with a specimen. It’s not in perfect shape, but it’s special.”

  “Like me,” Tommy whispered, finishing with the line that had come to be our traditional ending for the story. I pulled the covers over him. He began to breathe deeply and rhythmically, and I went back downstairs.

  My mother was sitting beside her reading lamp. The Tiffany-style shade cast a garish light into the room, which was filled with lacework, doilies, and flowered upholstery. A gilded mirror over the fireplace reflected the colored light, making it seem as if a cathedral with stained glass had been shrunk into a Victorian sitting room. The effect was enhanced by the discordant “Confutatis,” a movement that is both enchanting and disturbing. She sighed, her eyes focused far into the distance.

  I sat on the velveteen sofa across from her. “You look like you’re troubled by more than just a few rough days with Tommy. What’s up?” She turned down the music so we could talk quietly without disturbing my brother.

  “It’s not good, Riley. Mrs. Polanski told me that Tommy’s Fund will be depleted at the end of this month.” The fund had been set up using money from my father’s life insurance policy, and it had provided a daycare center for retarded adults at St. Teresa’s. But as my mother explained, the recession meant declining returns on the investments. In order to keep the facility open, the director had spent down the principal. My mother depended on the center to give her some relief. Caring for a child in a grown man’s body was exhausting—as I knew full well from the weekends that Tommy spent with me.

  “It’s not right that the center gets short shrift. Maybe the church can have a fund drive or something.” I was grasping at straws, but I could sense her confusion and desperation. A few days or weeks alone with Tommy would be doable, but eventually she’d wear out. My help would only delay the inevitable, and she couldn’t contemplate institutionalizing her son. “Jesus, it’s always the weak who lose out these days,” I grumbled.

  “Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, Riley.” She’d sustained her faith through the difficulty of coming to America, setting up a household, Tommy’s accident, and my father’s death. She’d nearly bled to death after Tommy’s birth, and the emergency surgery meant she couldn’t have another child. I remember her lying in bed at home, her body weakened and her hopes for a houseful of children dashed. I suspect that her music, more than the visits of the doctor or the priest, brought her back to us. But afterward she’d always refer to her faith as having saved her. Even this procreative disaster—just two kids in an Irish Catholic family—was “the Lord’s will.” It was more than a person should have to bear, and more than I could understand.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay, dear,” she smiled weakly. “The Lord will provide. He always has.”

  I tried to reassure her that we’d figure out something, and then said I had to leave. She smiled at me, but I knew her mind was elsewhere. I turned the music back up a notch. Instead of walking me to the door as usual, she stayed in her chair.

  I drove down to the shop and locked the truck in the compound. I wasn’t fond of the razor wire that I’d strung on top of the chain link fence, but being squeezed between the Southern Freeway and the projects up the hill meant taking certain precautions. I headed back up Texas, the hum of traffic fading away, and stopped at 20th Street. This was the best place on Potrero Hill. My hill. Where people put down roots and then figured out how to live together—the Polish baker next to the Irish dockworker, the Chinese launderer across from the Czech bartender.

  As a kid, I imagined traveling to each of the states after which the streets in the neighborhood were named: Arkansas, Connecticut, Missouri, Texas, Mississippi. Most of the people in the neighborhood would never leave California. I wondered why the states were so jumbled—the order didn’t follow alphabet, geography, or statehood. None of my teachers seemed to know, but Mr. Shalinsky, a retired chief petty officer who coached boxing at the Mission Bay gym, explained it to me. The streets were named for naval ships in honor of our military and the San Francisco shipyards. I figured that was much better than being named after a haphazard assortment of states.

  In the distance ahead lay the glitter of downtown, its buzz and vitality there for the taking. The Hill was a sanctuary above the city’s crush. Not a mile to the east, the floodlights of the Central Basin docks silhouetted a cargo ship, while further out a tanker plied toward the mouth of the Bay, its portside red running lights telling me it was heading out to sea. And a block away, the warm glow from the window of Hill Top Grocery felt like a beacon from my boyhood, this being where my mother had sent me for milk and bread—and where I’d hung out with friends after school. I’d attended parochial school at St. Teresa’s, but most of the kids on my block had gone to Daniel Webster Elementary just down the hill. They were taught that Webster had believed fervently in America and modern industry. I later learned that he was a three-time loser for the presidency. A fitting icon for the Potrero neighborhood.

  I headed west to Missouri and then down to my house, a tiny two-story sliver sandwiched between a couple of nice bay-windowed Italianates. My place had a living room and kitchen on the main floor and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs. It wasn’t much but it was all mine. While the other cops had bought fast cars and slick boats, I had managed to squirrel away enough for my own place. I went in, dropped my suitcase, poured a nightcap, and idly looked through the mail. Mostly bills and j
unk mail, including an announcement of a Billy Graham Crusade coming to Candlestick Park. Desperate people needing a reason to hope, not unlike my mother—although she considered evangelists to be shysters.

  I did what I could for her and Tommy, but I knew that her faith was all she had in hard times. She used to tell me that God acted in mysterious ways. “His plan is not ours to understand,” she’d say when life dumped on us. But if there was a God, He sure had a convoluted and perverse scheme for my corner of the world. The Master Plan for a distraught mother and a retarded man-child had started with my encounter with a stinking corpse in a Los Angeles hotel room earlier that day.

  CHAPTER 2

  I hadn’t figured there’d be maggots. Not enough time had passed. But then, I’d never checked out a corpse in the City of Angels. I’d seen enough bodies in my days with the San Francisco Police to know that no two places, times, and causes of death attract the same six-legged undertakers. So a stiff in a Los Angeles hotel room could prove interesting.

  “What’re the chances of my taking a look before your people mop up the mess?” I asked Sergio.

  His firm had landed the cleanup contracts for most of the major hotel chains in the city. Sergio had leaned over and shared this insider tidbit about the corpse with undisguised pride while the conference speaker droned on. Neither of us had been much interested in the pompous professor from UCLA who was giving the closing speech at the California Pest Control Operators Convention. The over-educated, under-experienced scientist declared that we had to anticipate a future in which pesticides would no longer be used. The guy had obviously never had his house overrun with cockroaches, let alone seen a baby covered in rat bites. At that point, Sergio and I had headed to the hotel lounge.

  “Let you into the room, eh? Depends,” he replied, shifting his eyes up to the ballgame on the television above the bar. Sergio scowled. The play-by-play guy didn’t hide his disappointment that Bobby Murcer had just launched an upper-deck shot off of Don Sutton, putting the Giants up by two over the hometown Dodgers. I knew Sergio was devoted to the LA ball club. Italians stick together, and with one of their own managing the team, I figured that Tommy Lasorda would be nominated for sainthood if he won a pennant. I hoped my San Francisco roots wouldn’t put Sergio in an ornery mood.