A Case of You

by Rick Blechta

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re in the United States. I don’t think they’d take kindly to any of this snooping, especially from Canadians. We’re already on the windy side of the law since we don’t have licenses to operate in California. I know someone in Oakland who will help us. Stay close to a phone today.”

  “You want me to do anything in the meantime?”

  “I want you to keep your head down. If they suspect a thing, we’re dead in the water. Stay in your room. We don’t know who in town works at Sunnyvale. Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “All I’ve got to do is come up with some way to get you in there.”

  “I’ve already got that in hand.”

  “Great! What’s your angle?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Chapter 16

  Someone was on my porch, moving around quietly. Jumping to the window, I saw Shannon. Why hadn’t she rung the bell?

  Hitting mute on the stereo, I went out. Other than scuttling in and out as quickly as I could to grab each morning’s Globe and Mail, it was the first time I’d been on my porch since the previous Thursday.

  I found her leaning back against the railing, looking down at the chalk outline, still horrendously vivid on the weathered wood and flaking paint.

  “Communing with the dead?” I asked.

  She looked up, her face showing her fatigue. “Something like that.”

  “Are you ready to come in? I’ll make coffee. You look like you could use some.”

  “In a minute. I’m just trying to get my bearings. Maggie was a big part of this mess, and I really haven’t stopped to consider her.”

  I turned and looked out at the street. A car was going slowly by, and even though I’d taken down the yellow police tape, it slowed and the driver peered out curiously. I stared back, heartily fed up with the notoriety.

  “I hadn’t either. I couldn’t see past our mutual animosity towards each other.”

  “I’d like to know how she fits into all of this.”

  “I think I can tell you that.”

  We spent the next hour going over what I’d learned the previous evening from the two “working girls”.

  Shannon looked at something on the three pages of notes I’d given her. “I’m glad you took the time to do this while it was fresh in your mind. It will be very helpful.”

  “What do you think we should do about what the ladies told me?”

  “Meaning Palmer?”

  I nodded. “Shelley and Donna don’t want hassles. I’m sure Palmer, using that charm only he possesses, will come down like a hammer on them.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Unless we’ve completely misread what happened to Maggie, Palmer’s been barking up the wrong tree for several days now, and knowing the way the department runs, the boys above him are beginning to get antsy at the lack of results. Oh, he’ll pounce on them all right.”

  “So how do we get the information to Palmer without involving the women?”

  Shannon pursed her lips and silently considered. “I don’t see how we can, but there are two reasons we may not want to.”

  “What are they?”

  “These,” she said as she reached into the open briefcase sitting next to her on the sofa. “This is a report of what I found out on my trip to New York. And this is a report Jackie Goode dictated from California to my secretary. She’s still out there waiting for instructions. You read them while I make a few phone calls.”

  She left the room, heading for the back door, which closed quietly behind her. I was just about finished when she came back. Even though she had only briefly mentioned her encounter with the man who tried to steal her purse, I noted how awkwardly she was walking.

  “Knees okay?”

  She sat back down on the sofa. “Just a bit stiff. No lasting damage.”

  “These reports read like a mystery novel.”

  Shannon smiled. “Mystery novels seldom get it right. What you’ve read is what an investigator does, private or public. While getting knocked down on the streets of New York is no fun, it happens. It could always have been a bullet to the back of the head, so I don’t feel too bad about banged-up knees.”

  “You think things are that dangerous?”

  She shook her head. “No. Maxine St. James is not stupid. The police would be after her in a heartbeat. She just wanted what I had and used a perfect opportunity to get it. She knows I won’t go to the cops about what happened, though. Unless whoever stole the journal and broke into the car was caught and then confessed as to who put him up to it, no one could connect her with anything.”

  I was outraged. “So we just have to take this?”

  “For the moment,” she yawned. “Sorry. What Maxine gave us yesterday was a wake-up call. I picked up a tail when I picked up the journal, and the bad thing was, I didn’t catch on. I now know she heard about me from the retired butler, but I should have been more on my guard. I will be from now on, and I suggest you do the same.” She let that sink in, then asked, “Any questions on those reports?”

  “This report from you,” I said, “says that you’ve read Olivia’s journal. Did it contain anything useful?”

  “Hard to tell. There’s a lot to wade through, and some of it’s pretty dense. It has given me one lead, though, which I haven’t been able to follow up yet.”

  She again reached into her briefcase, pulling out a thick manila envelope. “This is the journal.”

  I chuckled. “Wouldn’t Ms St. James be annoyed to find out you’d hoodwinked her.”

  “We have the advantage as long as she doesn’t know I still have a copy.” Shannon leaned over and handed me the sheaf of papers. “Look this over for me.”

  “It’s Olivia’s handwriting all right.”

  I stopped on the third page, where there was a stunning little sketch of a cat asleep on a bed.“The style is very different from what’s upstairs on the walls of her room. I’ve got some of her doodling in the basement, if you’d care to see it. While I’m up, would you like more coffee?”

  Shannon smiled. “Absolutely.”

  When I returned to the living room, she wasn’t there. “Shannon?”

  “I’m upstairs,” she called. “Be right with you.” The old staircase creaked comfortably as she made her way down. “I was just looking at the room again. It really is amazing.”

  “Communing with Olivia this time?”

  She picked up the dozen or so sheets I’d brought up from the studio. When Ronald, Dom and I would stop to discuss some arcane musical point during rehearsals, Olivia would often get bored and pick up any piece of paper lying around to sketch something, usually one of us. They were all a bit irreverent, as she’d catch us in some slightly unflattering way. Ronald was the one most lampooned.

  But some of the sketches were of things like a beach or mountains. She’d also drawn Kate curled up on the sofa with a book, and had not only caught her likeness quite well, but also the look of intense concentration she gets on her face when she’s reading. Whether Olivia had done it from memory at a rehearsal or from life, I didn’t know. I wanted to get it framed for one of the bare spaces on the living room wall.

  Shannon studied the sketches while I skimmed the photocopies of Olivia’s journal. At times the entries sounded quite lucid, but sadly there weren’t many of those. A great deal of it was troubling. Very little of it reminded me of the Olivia I’d known.

  “You’ll notice that she mentions the name Jack quite frequently,” Shannon said,“and there is also someone called Taggart, usually written about in unflattering terms. I believe it’s the same person.”

  “Yeah, there’s one on this page. She calls him her saviour here.”

  “Look on page twenty-two.”

  I read the entry, then looked up. “Jesus! This is over the top.”

  “The person she usually reserves that kind of venom for is her stepmother.”

  “What do you make of it?”
>
  “Taggart was the one who brought her heroin,” Shannon said.

  “You know that for sure?”

  “Call it an educated guess. I’m sure in the back of her mind she was worried someone might find the book. The fact that she uses euphemisms for her drug dependency seems to confirm that. It’s the one thing she would never want anyone to know.”

  “And the way she talks about her stepmother?”

  “I don’t think she cared about that. And I’m also pretty certain Maxine St. James knew about her feelings without reading the journal.”

  “May I keep these?” I asked. “I might spot something you wouldn’t.”

  “Do you have someplace safe you could put it, a place no one could find – for certain? If Maxine St. James discovers I made that second copy, we lose our advantage.”

  “Haven’t you made more?”

  “Of course, but she’ll figure that out.”

  “Do you honestly think she’d have someone break into my house?”

  She looked at me seriously. “There is the outside possibility, just to make certain she’s not surprised by anything we might have that she doesn’t know about. They could have searched here already, for that matter. I’m sure she’d hire the best, and those people don’t leave any trace. But no, I don’t think you have much to worry about.”

  “Is it safe to bring Kate over here?”

  “Have you been concerned about that?”

  “I did think that maybe Maggie was dumped here as a warning.”

  “I think she was dumped here to make trouble for you.”

  “So where do we go from here?”

  “You’re up to speed now on what Jackie and I have been doing. Now we have to make the hard decisions.”

  “Like?”

  “There’s no question you have information that should go to the police. Withholding it is a crime.”

  “The way you just said that, I’m thinking you’re going to give me a better reason than protecting those two women to keep us from contacting Palmer.”I smiled.“Just a wild guess.”

  “Maxine wasted no time in going after me. Obviously she had someone look in my shoulder bag when I was at her home. I was baiting her by bringing the journal into the house with me. I also left one photocopy I’d made in plain sight in my car. She rose to the bait with alarming speed. I wasn’t even a block from her house when that guy was on me, and I’m sure she already had the photocopy from the car by that time. She also thinks I never got a chance to read much of it.

  “If we take all we’ve learned and stir in a bit of conspiracy theory, Maxine St. James could have been responsible for the murder of her predecessor, Lydia St. James, and her stepson, had Olivia committed and ordered the murder of Maggie.”

  I was surprised. “You honestly believe that?”

  Shannon shook her head.“I just don’t know, but it’s not a theory we can throw out, either. Tell me, Andy, you lived with her for several weeks. Do you think Olivia should be institutionalized?”

  “She is very odd, but no, definitely not.”

  “But yet they’ve had her at Sunnyvale for six years, and the experts examining her say she should stay there. I’m concerned about Olivia’s wellbeing. If we’re right on any of the suppositions I’ve made, especially if we’re right on more than one of them, she could be in big trouble. In that sort of high stakes game, Maxine has a lot to lose.”

  “And if something happens to Olivia, the whole problem just disappears,” I said, finishing the thought for her. “Jesus... Why not just go to the cops with all this? Let them handle it.”

  “Two reasons,” Shannon said. “One, we’ve got almost no concrete evidence. Yes, we can lead them to Sunnyvale because of Maggie, but then we have to lay all our other cards on the table, and that could totally screw up what we’re trying to do. Two, once Maxine gets wind of anything, we’re forcing her to make a move we may not want – at any cost. And don’t forget, we’ve also got a very thick border in the way. That slows down police investigations considerably.”

  “So what choice do we have?”

  “One I personally don’t want to make. We have a person on site whom the bad guys don’t know. If we get her into Sunnyvale, we can accomplish two things: we have a way to get more information, and we have somebody who can keep an eye on Olivia.”

  “Why are you so worried about sending Jackie Goode in there?”

  Shannon sighed. “Because she just started working for me. I don’t know if she’s up to it – and it could be dangerous.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Because I’ve already played my hand with Maxine. They know who I am.”

  “So we have no choice?”

  “We have no choice.”

  “You look tired, honey,” Shannon’s mother said as her daughter hung her jacket on a peg by the back door.

  Judging by the smells coming from the oven, dinner was well in hand – a good thing, because if dinner had been up to Shannon, everybody would have been eating take-out pizza.

  “Is that beef stew I smell?” she asked, giving her mom a hug. “When do we eat?”

  “About a half hour.”

  “Good. I have a couple of phone calls to make.”

  Her mother poured a glass of wine. “Take this. You look like you could use it.”

  Shannon smiled. “Thanks. I do need it.”

  Glass of wine in hand, Shannon went into the small room off the kitchen that served as her home office.

  Taking out her laptop, she turned it on so she’d have all her data at hand. With a quick consultation of her phone list, she dialed a number in California.

  “Bump City Security,” a female voice said.

  “I’d like to speak to Roy Moody, please.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available. Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Shannon O’Brien.”

  “Shannon!” A deep voice, sounding as if it came right out of the earth, blasted from the phone a moment later. Shannon was ready and had the receiver a good two inches from her ear.“How long has it been since we last talked?”

  “Four years next month.”

  “That long? Man, I’m feeling old.”

  “We all are.”

  “So, how ya doin’?”

  “I’m fine, Roy.”

  “And that ne’er-do-well husband of yours?”

  “Ex-husband.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Shit happens.”

  “Yeah, don’t I know it.”

  Shannon had first met Roy when she and her husband had attended a convention in Las Vegas just after they’d quit Toronto Police Services and struck out on their own. Roy had recently done the same thing with the Oakland force.

  “Built like a door” had been Shannon’s first assessment of the huge black man with the shaved head, the ready smile and the quick comeback. The three ex-cops had bonded and spent a good weekend learning the ropes about what was new and hot on the PI and security scene as far as equipment, methods and business practices went.

  Roy was unmarried, and twice over the years, they’d helped each other out on jobs, the last time being four years ago when the O’Briens were trying to get information on a scam being run out of San Francisco. Their friend’s knowledge of the area had proved invaluable and had saved them days of leg work.

  “I suspect this isn’t a social call after all this time.”

  “Got a bit of a sticky situation in your neck of the woods.”

  “Bay area?”

  “A bit east. Portola, to be exact.”

  “That’s not exactly near here, Shannon.”

  “It’s a hell of a lot closer than I am.”

  “So what’s it about? There isn’t much around Portola other than fishing on Lake Davis. Nearest thing of any consequence is Reno and Lake Tahoe.”

  “Ever hear of a rehab-slash-psychiatric institution called Sunnyvale?”

  “Sure thing. They
do big business with Hollywood types who wander too far into substance abuse. You running with that chi-chi crowd on this one?”

  “Yes and no. While there is a substance abuse aspect to my case, it goes much deeper than that.” She stopped, her natural cautiousness poking up its head. “At least, I think it goes deeper.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Use your connections. All I know about the place, I’ve gleaned from their website and a few other mentions on the Internet. I need the inside scuttlebutt.”

  Roy chuckled. “You think I run in the rarified atmosphere of those circles?”

  “Doesn’t everyone in California?” Shannon shot right back. “I’m sure you have sources you can call on.”

  “How quick you need it?”

  “ASAP.”

  Shannon had to move the receiver an additional two inches from her ear because of his laugh. “I got a lot of things on the go at the moment, girl.”

  “I’m really glad business is good, Roy, but I’m in a time bind. I stirred up something in New York the other day, and I’m worried about some sort of violent reaction in California.”

  “How violent?”

  “The worst kind.”

  “On you or one of yours?”

  “On someone in Sunnyvale.”

  “Nothing you can go to the cops with?”

  “Not at this point, but I’m working on that angle. This is a devilishly tricky one.”

  His decision was characteristically swift.“I’m on it. Where can I reach you?”

  “I’m flying out tomorrow morning. I can be reached on my cell, except when I’m in the air, of course.”

  “I’ll do what I can tonight, but it’s more realistic you’ll hear back from me tomorrow.”

  “Roy...”

  “We always got each other’s backs; you know that. Nuff said.”

  “Regardless, thanks.”

  Shannon needed to be at the airport by seven the next morning. When she called him after dinner, Michael insisted on driving her.

  “I hardly get to see you lately,” he said when she objected. “Besides, if you’re not back in three days, I’m not going to see you at all. I’m in the UK rehearsing as of the weekend.”