The Paul Mcdonald Mystery Series Vol. 1-2: With Bonus Short Story!

by J. Paul Drew

  The second was also from Rico. It came after one Jeremy and two Moms, so probably a reasonable amount of time had elapsed in the interim. “Hi, Babe. The Aztecs would have loved this. Sabina’s on the altar already, and I’ve got this really sharp knife—”

  CeeCee picked up the phone at this point, sounding out of breath, “Rico? Rico, I just got in. And guess what, I made a big discovery. I dropped the sculpture, jerkoff.

  “So now I’ll set the terms, okay? Bring Sabina home now. And also bring $5000...” Here, the machine clicked off, having recorded for as long as it was programmed to record.

  But I got the idea. Dropping the statue had given CeeCee a whole new outlook on things— apparently because it contained information she could use for blackmail.

  There was only one Rico— Rico Rainey— in CeeCee’s Rolodex. His address was a place called the Hall of Montezuma, on Minna Street.

  I phoned Booker and quickly filled him in. When he was breathing regularly again, I said, “Listen, I’m calling Blick now. If I stay and tell him all this, it’ll be at least a half hour, maybe an hour and a half, before the cops make a move.”

  “Sabina must be the roommate. Maybe she’s dead already and maybe she’s not, but I’ve been in a house with a corpse and her mother’s voice and some other stuff for 20 minutes and I don’t feel like waiting for Blick to get here and find out. You want to meet me at the Hall of Montezuma, whatever that may be, in ten minutes?”

  “Yeah.” His voice came out like a croak— he was shaken by CeeCee’s death.

  Next I called my least favorite cop, Homicide Inspector Howard Blick. “I want to report a homicide—”

  “Who is this?”

  “Jean-Paul Sartre. That’s J-e-...”

  “Spell it!”

  “I’m trying to. J-e-...”

  “G-e-what?”

  Too late I realized it was going to take the whole ten minutes I had just to get the name spelled properly. If Blick had become a tubewinder instead of a cop, the San Francisco Police Department would have been better served.

  “Forget it,” I said, and gave the address.

  Back in the light of day, everything seemed very vivid, very bright, and somewhat larger than life, which I felt damned glad to be living at the moment. Details caught my eye— a single rose blooming in CeeCee’s tiny front yard, or front flower bed— actually, just a strip of dirt; a ticket on a car parked illegally across the street; CeeCee’s handwriting on a letter in her mailbox...

  I investigated. Yes, the same writing on the Rolodex cards, and the return address was none other than her own— she’d sent herself a letter. I pulled it out and felt it. Heavy. I ripped it open— a locker key to God knew where. I put it in my pocket.

  Booker was waiting for me, in jeans and a black leather jacket that had probably cost slightly less than I’d get for the book I was working on. His car was parked in front of the Hall, as unprepossessing a place as everything else on Minna Street. You found it by its label next to the buzzer— “Montezuma,” a second floor hall. The door was unlocked.

  Booker shrugged. “Do we go in?”

  I nodded. “Sure. If anyone asks, we’ll say we took a wrong turn on the way to the shores of Tripoli.”

  The stairs led to a loft— a much more hall-like space than I’d thought we’d find. A couple of torches burned on either side of the thing Rico must have meant when he spoke of the altar— though no maiden was currently being sacrificed on it. In fact, there was a caged chicken on it. The odor of incense hung thick in the air.

  The place had no windows, but the walls were white, newly painted, and hung with pre Columbian masks that showed up well in the torchlight. Statues— also pre-Columbian, or maybe fakes or Miguels— stood on pedestals that lined the walls. A bunch of them had been massed around the altar. On the floor were small rugs, and some kind of weird music was playing. The whole effect wasn’t so much eerie as trying way too hard for eerie and ending up bogus. The thing that most spoiled the effect, to tell you the truth, was the table at the top of the stairs with a box marked “Donations” on it and the woman who sat behind it, her short, spiky magenta hairdo looking as if it would be wrecked beyond repair by an Aztec headdress.

  “Hi,”she said. “I’m Sabina.”

  Booker and I looked at each other, then quickly cased the Hall. Empty— or so it seemed, anyhow. I turned back to Sabina, put my face close to hers, smiled, and spoke very low. “Hi,” I said. “CeeCee’s dead.”

  Her eyes were blue, I noticed, as they expanded to resemble blue Frisbees, full of fear. Her jaw loosened and fell; I thought for a minute she was going to scream. She didn’t, but she glanced around, terrified, as if she were surrounded. If it was an act, it was a good one.

  I took her wrist. “Come on. We’ll get you out of here.”

  She didn’t even stop to grab her purse. She wasn’t the soul of discretion, either. She had on those black, lace-up old-lady shoes that hip young ladies love so much and that have little heels on them that sound like a parade. She set her legs going like two blades of an egg beater, a woman pursued by demons on uncarpeted stairs, and there wasn’t a thing we could do to stop her. We simply tore after her and once outside, slammed ourselves into Booker’s car, peeling out like characters in an Eddie Murphy movie.

  She was sitting on my lap in the front seat, since no one had time for the back, and she was crying now. Suddenly she caught on that she had leaped extremely precipitately into the arms of strangers. “Omigod!” she wailed. “Who are you?”

  I didn’t know where to start, but Booker said, “Are you CeeCee’s roommate?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m the guy that bought the sculpture.”

  That seemed to satisfy her.

  “We went looking for it,” I said, “and found her.”

  Booker headed for Hamburger Mary’s, and on the way we made a deal— our half of the story for Sabina’s half.

  Bucked up by a few beers, into which she would have been crying if such a thing were possible without making a spectacle of oneself, she explained first about the Hall of Montezuma.

  “It’s a cult, I guess you’d call it. I mean, Rico says it’s a revival of the Aztec religion— they have all these weird rituals and chicken sacrifices. I don’t know— they get a pretty good crowd some nights. Students go in for that sort of thing, you know, and some from the Art Institute went a few times and word got out about the artworks.”

  She paused for a minute, looking puzzled. “They aren’t Aztec is the only thing— and a lot of them aren’t really pre-Columbian. But, anyhow, most of them are pretty good. So people started going to see them like it was a gallery. The rituals were like this added attraction or something. Anyhow, that’s how CeeCee and I found the place.”

  “So who’s Rico?”

  “Rico? He’s— uh— the priest, I guess you’d call it. He’s— um— really handsome and kind of scary, like when he slits the chickens’ throats, you know what I mean?”

  We nodded.

  “I don’t know, that turns some people on, I guess. I mean, he has these women all over him all the time. CeeCee was one of them. He came around our place a lot.”

  She lowered her gaze, for a moment actually affording the tears a beer target. “He started coming on to me and, I don’t know, I guess I was just competitive with CeeCee. I started seeing him over at the Hall. And then I kind of got hooked on him.” She looked up again, the hard part over.

  “What happened was, CeeCee got this big opportunity down in L.A.— I mean, it really is a big deal— it could make her a lot of money. But have you seen that elephantine stuff of hers? It was going to cost a fortune to get it there. So she asked Rico to lend her some money and he wouldn’t do it. She asked him, see, because she knew how much goes into that Hall— it costs fifteen bucks to come to a ritual and then they always collect more money once you’re there and everything. I mean, it really is a cult, although—” She stopped, as if trying to collect her th
oughts.

  “Although what?” I prompted.

  “Something about Rico— he founded the thing and he’s the high priest and everything, but he doesn’t really talk about it when he’s, like, off duty. Anyway, a lot of money comes through there, but the bastard wouldn’t lend her any. He said it belonged to the church and he couldn’t.

  “Well, that pissed CeeCee off and I guess she was a little desperate, anyhow, so she took one of the statues. It wasn’t hard because she sometimes worked the desk, like I was doing today, and I guess she thought he wouldn’t notice. Anyway, she knew perfectly well what she could get for a Miguel at the gallery where she worked. To tell you the truth, she also knew they wouldn’t ask a lot of questions about where she got it. Everything’s on consignment, of course, but if someone bought it, she’d get just about enough to cover her expenses. And they have a list of preferred customers who’d been looking for something of the sort. They’d just arrange a private sale, the customer would never know the statue was stolen, and everybody’d be happy.”

  “Call me Mr. Preferred,” said Booker.

  Sabina nodded. “So it was sold almost the minute she stole it. But meanwhile I didn’t know anything about any of this. I mean, I knew he hadn’t lent her the money, but I didn’t know she’d stolen something from him. So the way he told it, it got me all outraged, like how dare she? And he asked me to stay at the Hall a day or two and pretend to be kidnapped.” She shrugged.

  “So I said okay. Look, I was jealous. I’m an artist too and she was the one with the big break and everything—” Booker waved a hand, explaining that she didn’t have to explain.

  “Anyway, that was the last I heard. I didn’t know she’d gotten it back— he didn’t tell me— all’s he said was he hadn’t heard from her.” Her eyes got big again. “And then he started talking about how that statue had a curse on it. I mean, it’s not even old. And he said he was worried about her and all—”

  I said, “You were getting suspicious, weren’t you?”

  She nodded, miserable. “I was really getting scared.” Her voice was tiny.

  “With good reason. When she tried to blackmail him, he apparently didn’t waste any time.”

  She turned Frisbee eyes on me. “Would he have killed me too?”

  “Maybe.” Actually, I didn’t think he would have, because he hadn’t yet, but I needed her help and I wanted her mad as hell.

  The plan we proceeded to put together was simple, and the first part went beautifully. That was the part where Sabina phoned Rico, said she had what was in the sculpture, or anyway, the key to it, that she’d be glad to give it to him for a small finder’s fee— say $1,000 or so— and would he meet her later?

  The next part went okay too. That was the part where we got Sabina some handcuffs and a gun. Booker knew someone who got the cuffs for us, but the gun, to tell you the truth, was one of those really realistic-looking squirt guns. However, it was going to be dark and Sabina wouldn’t be alone.

  The third part was the actual confrontation, due to occur at 7 p.m. in a very narrow alley near China Basin. We’d blocked one end with my car and the other with Booker’s, so no one could drive in. If Rico came alone, we could take him; if he didn’t, Sabina would have time to get away in one of the cars.

  At seven sharp, she stood between the cars, more or less in front of two one-story buildings across from each other. Booker was on top of one building, I was on top of the other. A man entered the alley— alone.

  “Rico?” called Sabina.

  “Yeah.”

  He kept coming till he’d passed Booker’s car, had gotten about ten feet away from her. She was holding the gun with two hands, like the cops do on TV. It looked pretty real.

  Sabina shouted, “Don’t come any closer.” Rico stopped.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  While he did this was the perfect time to jump him, but we’d agreed we wouldn’t do it till we were sure he wasn’t armed. He threw a packet of bills at Sabina. She threw the locker key at him.

  Cautiously, Rico knelt to pick it up. The moment had arrived. The plan was for me, being far the larger, to jump him and subdue him, Sabina helping with firearm threats. If there was real trouble, Booker would further surprise Rico by jumping on his head. Otherwise, he’d stay put till Sabina had produced the cuffs and then he’d come down and cuff Rico while I sat on him or something.

  The only problem was, I slipped as I was starting to jump. I regained my balance, but Rico had caught on by this time, and he moved quickly. So did Sabina. And so, alas, did Booker. He meant to jump on Rico to take up the slack, but unfortunately, he landed on Sabina. She hollered, they both went down, it was general bedlam, and Rico took off running.

  I jumped now, landing more or less safely (at any rate not breaking anything) and took off after him. He ran another block down our alley, then turned down a main street, and into another alley. I wasn’t even close to catching him, but eventually he had to run out of steam. Or I did. In this neighborhood— industrial by day, deserted at night— we could probably trot about for hours unmolested. It was just a question of endurance. And I was panting like a Husky in hell.

  I ran on, following the far distant footsteps, vaguely aware of some noise far behind me, blood pounding in my ears. And suddenly I realized Rico’s footsteps had stopped. But too late. “Slow down, bro’,” said a voice.

  I not only slowed, I stopped. Two guys who looked burnt out— one white, one Latino— had headed Rico off and captured him. That would have been great except that they didn’t seem to be planning to turn him over to me. One was holding him by his collar, a knife at his throat. The other also had a knife. He took a step towards me.

  And then I became better aware of the clatter behind me. About a milli-second later a female voice said, “Police. Freeze or I’ll blow your heads off.”

  We all froze. The burnouts dropped their knives. And then Rico shouted, “Sabina!” and unfroze. He headed towards me, trying to get past. Now I really did jump him.

  And a male voice said, “Police. Freeze or I’ll blow your heads off.”

  It was one of the goddam muggers. Both of them were cops on some kind of surveillance job involving drugs, but we found out that part quite a bit later.

  You’d think Blick would have been so grateful he’d have practically kissed my hand, but instead he made us stay at the Hall all night (Hall of Justice, not Montezuma), telling and retelling our stories, and not giving us anything back in return.

  It all came out later, though. We had unwittingly, it seemed, cracked a major gang of art thieves. That is, CeeCee had. The key opened a locker in the Greyhound terminal that held a small pre-Columbian gold pendant. CeeCee had apparently dropped the Miguel and realized when the pendant fell out what Rico was up to, which was buying legitimate artworks and bringing them through customs filled with much more valuable stolen ones— part of a cache taken from a museum a few years ago. She’d stashed the pendant in the locker and mailed the key to herself, in case Rico tried to get tough— but she’d underestimated how tough he was going to get.

  The pieces were being brought in slowly, one by one, at customs stations that didn’t tend to X-ray. They were sold to well-heeled buyers out of Rico’s storefront pseudo-Aztec cult, which made a nice cover. He didn’t really need it, but he liked the drama, power, and extra bucks he got out of it. He had a record as long as a fishing line.

  Incidentally, there was a reward involved— from the museum that lost the loot. Booker wasn’t eligible, having melted into the shadows during the alley confrontation in which the “P” word was mentioned, but Sabina and I would have happily split it. That is, we would have if Blick hadn’t explained about the nineteen or twenty things he would charge us with if we tried to claim it.

  He and the two undercover gorillas got it, a turn of events I blame on the ghost of a certain well-known Aztec emperor. After all, Booker and Sabina and I were the second bunch of gringoes to come along and demolish th
e Aztec religion.

  THE END

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  What they said about J. Paul Drew and TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE, the FIRST book in the Paul Mcdonald series by J. Paul Drew

  “One more blithe San Fran outing with a likable journalist-sleuth by the name of Paul Mcdonald… J. Paul Drew improves with each story and this is her best to date.”

  -Kirkus Reviews

  “A Prize Plot.”

  -San Francisco Examiner

  “A bright, light, cleverly written tale.”

  -Cincinnati Post

  Also by BooksBnimble:

  The Skip Langdon Series (in order of publication)

  NEW ORLEANS MOURNING

  THE AXEMAN’S JAZZ

  JAZZ FUNERAL

  DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK (formerly NEW ORLEANS BEAT)

  HOUSE OF BLUES

  THE KNDNESS OF STRANGERS

  CRESCENT CITY CONNECTION (formerly CRESCENT CITY KILL)

  82 DESIRE

  MEAN WOMAN BLUES

  The Rebecca Schwartz Series

  DEATH TURNS A TRICK

  SOURDOUGH WARS

  TOURIST TRAP

  DEAD IN THE WATER

  OTHER PEOPLE’S SKELETONS

  The Paul McDonald Series