Strange Brew (The Tortie Kitten Mystery Trilogy Series Book 2)

by Constance Barker

  “Speaking of handsome, I don’t see your ramlin’ gamblin’ man.”

  Time for my face to fall. “Out of the picture.”

  “That’s what this is about,” Klein and I watched an elderly lady with an armful of stuffed dinosaur toys make her way to the kitchen. “You have a plan.”

  “I took a job in California, my home town. I can live cheap—” I stopped myself.

  Assessing eyes met mine. Guys from the estate sale company came in and moved my couch and recliner. Even though I wasn’t standing close to Everett, I could read his thoughts. This isn’t just a clean break. Something has really spooked Mary.

  “If you need to talk, we should talk,” he said.

  Even though Everett worked the supernatural side of the street, I couldn’t let on that a nightmare figure was extorting me for the price of my little girl’s soul. Not only was I too embarrassed, but I thought something bad might happen if the Soul Brokers caught on that I was looking into them.

  “I do need to talk,” I said, “but I can’t.”

  “You’ve helped me out a lot over the past couple years,” Klein said. “If I can return the favor—”

  I nodded. “I have your number.”

  He walked out, his shoes making that hollow sound that only rooms without furniture made.

  ...WHICH WAS THE SAME sound our feet made in Grammy Epi’s house, the emptiness reverberating in the pit of my stomach. I lived this way for one reason: to pay off the Soul Brokers who threatened to take my niece’s soul in payment for Murph’s debts.

  “What did I say?”

  Remy’s face was so drawn in concern, it was almost comical. I must’ve looked a wreck, so I tried to pull it together.

  “Sorry. I guess I don’t have any happy memories of moving.”

  “Guess not. I thought you were gonna cry.” He moved close, his hands on my upper arms. “Maybe we should knock off. It’s getting late anyway.”

  A sigh escaped me. “I have to get up at the ass crack of dawn and get back on this case.”

  My abilities honed in on his emotions. Concern, an empathetic sadness, all of it tangled in a desire he was afraid to express. I took advantage, stepping so close that our bodies were nearly touching. I reached up, my hands around his neck. His empathy was submerged, desire a sudden tsunami. He kissed me hard. I kissed him back, harder.

  Suddenly I felt a shock of fear in him, piercing his soul like an icicle. I pulled back and his eyes were wide and staring. His gaze was on the mirror of the built-in dresser. There was a flicker of motion in the glass.

  Damn it.

  “I gotta. There’s—okay, call me.” Remy stumbled back, bouncing off the door frame as he hurried out.

  My teeth clenched so hard they hurt. I stalked over to the dresser. There was no sign of my great-grandmother in the mirror. “What are you, some kinda sick pervert?”

  She didn’t appear. I slapped my palm on the glass. “Hey!”

  My reflection changed, from good ol’ redhead me to the sharp-featured, raven-tressed Epiphanía. “Oh, c’mon,” she scolded. “Don’t put prints on the glass. I only wanted to see that hunka burnin’ love naked.”

  Her voice sounded like it came from the other side of a window. I could only blink.

  “I haven’t seen a naked man since this place was a crack house. Those skinny boys weren’t nearly as pretty. Had some interesting tattoos, though. Does your boyfriend have tattoos?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And I’ll never know if you show up and scare the pants off him!”

  She narrowed her eyes and angled her head back. “Oh, you wish I’d scared the pants off him.”

  “This is way creepy. You can’t spy on me like that.”

  My dead great-grandmother shook her head. “I couldn’t see anything anyway. There’s no angle on the floor from here. You really do need to get a bed. And I wouldn’t need to spy on you if you got me a TV like I keep asking. There’s one in the attic, for pity’s sake.”

  There was a big, old console television up there. I couldn’t move it if I wanted to. At this point, I doubted Remy would be back to help. Not that I blamed him.

  “I need to go to sleep. You need to stop stalking me.”

  Grammy Epi frowned. “I got two mirrors in this house. This one,” she tapped on the glass, “and the one on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Can’t you see how boring it is to look out at two empty rooms all the time? Have some pity, kiddo.”

  “I’ll work on it,” I said, grabbing a big sleeping shirt from the dresser. In truth, I didn’t want to go to sleep. The blue moon and the planetary conjunction would happen soon. That meant the Angle Man would come for a visit. Still, there was a case to solve. I needed to be sharp. At some point, the thoughts stopped whirling in my head, and I nodded off.

  “YOU’RE GOING THE LONG way around on this case, Mary.”

  At some point, Ugly had crawled next to me on the sleeping bag. She purred out her words as she snuggled up.

  “Oh?” I sleepily looked in Ugly’s huge, bugged out eyes. “What am I missing?”

  “Provenance,” Ugly said. “The whole thing is about provenance.”

  “Well, duh, the record is supposedly an urban legend.”

  Ugly narrowed her eyes at me. “Until you figure it out, you’d better watch your tail.”

  The cat lifted her tail, the end of it twitching, making her point.

  “Okay, I will. Thanks.”

  “No prob.” Ugly kneaded the sleeping bag. “Your alarm is about to go off. I’m just here to lie in your warm spot.”

  “What?”

  I sat up, my cheap cell phone alarm sounding like a klaxon. As I headed for the bathroom, Ugly snuggled into the bag and went to sleep. Was she actually talking to me? Usually, I could only just barely interpret the sounds she made.

  In the bathroom, I filled the tub with hot water until the medicine cabinet mirror steamed up. Grammy Epi was still on my mind. As I drove to work, the Babykiller graffiti on the Cordoba’s hood looked less pronounced. Maybe this would be a good day. For once, I arrived before Chuck Shen. It didn’t do me any good. Nothing new had come in on the case overnight.

  I hit the coffee machine, and found Sgt. Josephine Gustafson. She was the Animal Control commander, which held a lot more weight in Delta Vista Metro due to the supernatural aspects of our local wildlife. While her tattoos and blonde-haired, blue-eyed looks made her appear more likely to arrest the groom at a bachelor party, the Sarge was one tough cop.

  “Heard the shooting case might be more than it appears,” Gustafson said.

  “That what brought you down from the third floor?”

  “Been a lot of activity across the hall since this went down.” Gustafson’s office stood across from the obliquely-named Office of Special Investigations. It was from there that our federal liaisons worked, although they didn’t liaise much and we didn’t even know what branch of the government they stemmed from. “Especially on a Sunday.”

  “It smells funny, for sure, but we haven’t figured out much. Danielson wants us to work it as a random mugging gone south.”

  “Lieutenant Dan.” She did a pretty good Forest Gump impression. “Stupid is as stupid does. I’m guessing you have leads he doesn’t want followed.”

  “Roger that,” I said.

  She blew on her coffee and sipped. “Look, I have nothing to do with Crimes Against Persons, so it’s not like I’m gonna go to bat for you. But you’re a hell of an investigator, Inspector. What’s your gut say?”

  “My gut says this is an impossible set of circumstances, hyper-unlikely coincidences, and if we go down that road, this case will turn purple in a hurry.”

  Josephine smirked. “Lieutenant Dan hates purple binders. My federal neighbors love them. Since this department gets so much funding from the feds, I’d say the field is level. Do what you have to do, Garcia.”

  “I’m on thin ice in this department,” I said.

  “You’re afraid of
dragging people down with you, if that ice breaks,” Gustafson said. “That ice is probably thicker than you know. But just in case, let me loop in Agent Herald and her motley crew. Maybe we can’t have your back directly, but Chief Walker has a lot of respect for our unofficial little Purple Gang.”

  I was already scheduled to meet with Agent Drusilla Herald this evening. It made me feel better just having Josephine on my side. “Thanks, Sarge, I appreciate that.”

  “Oh, hey, Sarge.” My partner wandered up to the coffee machine. His face darkened, and he looked a little shiny. Chuck Shen was a little infatuated with the blonde sergeant.

  “Shen,” she gave him a nod. “Gotta get back to work. We got reports about bears knocking over garbage cans. I figure, since this isn’t bear country, that we aren’t actually dealing with bears.”

  Shen’s eyes were glued to her as Gustafson walked away.

  “Were-bears?” I said.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t stop watching until the elevator doors closed on her.

  “You wanna put your tongue back in your head?”

  Shen snapped out of it. “What do you mean?”

  “C’mon, Shen, she’s single. It’s obvious you’re into her. Why not ask her out?”

  He snorted. “Way out of my league. We got anything new?”

  “Not yet. I was thinking about visiting San Francisco.”

  “That record store? You know Lieutenant Dan wants this looked at like a robbery.” He frowned. “You’re still thinking this is about some mystery record.”

  “I am. Besides, it’s a nice day for a drive. I haven’t been to The City in years.” The phone in his suit pocket tweedled. “I’ll drive.”

  “Deal,” he said, pulling out his cell.

  Chapter 9

  An hour and a half later, we circled around the Haight-Ashbury, looking for parking. Shen, in between whatever he did on his phone, notified SFPD that we were on their turf. They didn’t seem to care.

  Scorpio was a record shop straight out of the Age of Aquarius. Day-glo posters and reproductions of old Filmore West shows papered the walls. Rack after rack of albums filled the space, as did hippies, hipsters and people who looked like Midwestern tourists. It was quite the scene.

  We pushed our way to the checkout. “We’re looking for Sketch Moses,” I said, holding out my badge.

  “Hey, Sketch, the heat wants to rap with you,” the cashier, an elderly lady with a long gray braid and tie-dyed Grateful Dead T-shirt, called out.

  A man even older than the cashier pushed aside a bead curtain. He eyed us through little round granny glasses. “Haven’t you heard? Weed is legal in this state.”

  “Murder isn’t,” I said. “Can we talk?”

  Moses squinted at my badge in surprise. Then his caterpillar brows lowered. “You’re out of your jurisdiction, lady fuzz.”

  “The victim’s name was John Vandermoot. Ring a bell?”

  “Mootie? Crap. Ah, hell, maybe you should come on back.”

  We followed Sketch Moses past the rainbow bead curtain, down a short hallway, and into a minimalist office. Moses pulled a fat joint from his shirt pocket and lit up. “Been waiting for years to spark a doob in front of John Law,” he smiled.

  “Vandermoot was murdered yesterday morning,” Shen said. “We think it may have been over an old LP. Someone pointed you out as an expert.”

  Moses let a big cloud of smoke out of his nose. “Killing someone over music? What a bummer.”

  “The record in question was Sonic Lobotomy,” Shen said.

  Sketch Moses nearly dropped his joint. He blinked at Shen for a long moment. “Scarlet Jack?”

  “You know something about it?” I asked.

  He took a deep hit, coughed for a long time. Finally, he stubbed out the roach. “There is no such record.”

  “We’ve seen a picture.”

  The only chairs in the office were beanbags. Sketch sat on one beside his desk. “Well, Mootie was a real hound for rare records. I’ve bought a ton from him over the years.”

  “What would you have paid for ‘Sonic Lobotomy?’”

  He shook his head. “Nada. Zip. Zilch. That’s the kind of thing you get insured by Lloyds of London and then call Sotheby’s Auction House. Or, at least, that’s what I would have advised him to do. I couldn’t have touched it. Way out of my league. I wouldn’t have, anyway.”

  “Why not?” Shen asked.

  “Scarlet Jack, those were some weird cats. Real heavy vibe.”

  “I’m not sure how vibes are pertinent here.”

  Sketch folded his legs and settled into the beanbag chair. “Scarlet Jack was a local band. Well, from the valley, anyway. Played here a lot. But that was in the Summer of Love, you dig? Those dudes wore bomber jackets and shiny Army boots. You know, they didn’t make the scene what with Flower Power and all.”

  “You knew them,” I said. Robert Zackery mentioned as much when we interviewed him.

  Moses nodded. “They liked to play acid events. But whenever they did, everyone had a bad trip.”

  I didn’t know much about San Francisco in the 1960s. Sketch went on.

  “They didn’t fit in with the local musicians. They were tight, not a lot of jamming going on, and they played fast. I remember one time they opened for the Grateful Dead. They came on, charged through their set, one number after the other. They closed with a couple Dave Clark Five covers and walked off. That just wasn’t the way a show went back then.

  “I remember after they did their first album, Manifestoes from the Madhouse. They had a lot of positive response in Cleveland, Detroit, the Rust Belt. Real aggressive sound, but skilled, not like a garage band. Rumor at the time was that they were plants.”

  “Plants?”

  The old hippy nodded. “Government plants, like, trying to make the scene undercover. But nobody bought it. Those guys always had money. They didn’t smoke weed, but they did a lot of speed. We thought The Man was trying to edge his way into the youth culture, the peace movement.”

  Shen and I looked at each other. We didn’t get it.

  “Oh, c’mon. That first album, Manifestoes from the Madhouse? You know why it’s called that, right?”

  We didn’t.

  He sighed. “Scarlet Jack went to England. They took a reel-to-reel into the mental institution where Syd Barret was confined. Do I have to spell out who Syd Barret was?”

  “Pink Floyd?” Shen said uncertainly.

  “Right. He played a few licks that made it on the album. They tried to get Peter Green to do the same. He refused. They traveled to Texas and got Roky to lay down some harp. That was before his institutionalization, shock treatments and Thorazine, of course. But not long before.”

  “I’m not sure where this is going,” I said.

  “Well, first, they recorded guys in mental hospitals, which is just weird. Second, they had money to travel to England? The Scarlet Jack never had a charting single. How did they get that kind of clout with their label? It was all too fishy.”

  I still wasn’t following his paranoid Sixties logic. But I didn’t really need to. “Why is Sonic Lobotomy so rare?”

  Sketch pulled out his joint and relit it. After a pull, he went on. “Manifestoes didn’t do all that well. Hippopotamus wasn’t a big label. They released some early Great Society singles. But at that time, those cats weren’t great studio musicians. The singles went nowhere. That was before Grace joined the Airplane, you dig?”

  We didn’t, but we let him go on.

  “Manifestos was kind of a cult thing. It still is. When Hippopotamus released Sonic Lobotomy, they did a pressing of maybe five hundred. But something went wrong with the production. It was all just a bunch of noise, rumor has it. So they recalled them all. Not a one reached a record store. It forced Hippopotamus into bankruptcy. So The Peerless Scarlet Jack Explosion were no longer under contract. They fell out in a really, really heavy way.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was getting a contact high, or if I’d just
had enough of the old hippy. When I gave Shen the eye, he shook his head.

  “So no copies anywhere?” he asked.

  Sketch shrugged. “Might be like the Yesterday and Today butcher cover. You kids know who the Beatles are, right? It could be that someone, somewhere got a hold of Sonic Lobotomy and held onto it. But I’ve never seen one. I don’t think any exist, to be honest.”

  “What about Scarlet Jack? You said they were from around here,” Shen said. “Any chance any of them are still around?”

  “Gunmetal is still around, far as I know, Gunmetal Gray,” Sketch said.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have an address for him?” I asked.

  “Not a specific address, no, but he’s real easy to find, man.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Sketch shrugged. “He’s in Napa State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

  “DID YOU GET ANYTHING out of that?” I asked as we headed back to the vehicle.

  Shen made a speculative face. “It sounded like a lot of marijuana paranoia to me.”

  We drove through the Lower Haight toward the freeway. “Napa wouldn’t be a huge detour,” I said.

  Shen shrugged. “Do we take 580 or the 101?”

  I caught sight of a black SUV that pulled out at the same time we did. It changed lanes with us, like a shadow. “Go around the block.”

  Shen glanced at the rear view mirror. “We pick up a tail?”

  “Maybe.”

  At the intersection, the light turned yellow. Shen floored it, making a right as the light turned red. With a flurry of honking horns, the SUV stayed with us. I squinted, making the tag. From under the dashboard, I pulled the Mobile Data Computer into my lap. It only took a second to pull up the DMV website. In a moment, I had run the plate.

  “It’s a rental.”

  “Should I try to lose it?”

  “Maybe you should. Remember when we were staking out the old Navy base?”

  Shen nodded. “SUV picked up an illegal.”

  “Our shadow was rented from the same company.”

  Without a word, Shen hit the lights and sirens and floored it.