by P. J. Morse
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Free Preview of Exile On Slain Street
HEAVY MENTAL
BY P. J. MORSE
Heavy Mental: A Clancy Parker Mystery
Copyright ©2012 by P.J. Morse. All rights reserved.
Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1
THE WOMAN IN YELLOW
THE LADY DIDN’T SEE ANMOL’S ice-cream truck coming. She didn’t even flinch at his rumbling sound system, which was blasting rap music that could be heard all over South Park, if not all over San Francisco’s South of Market District. She didn’t hear him yell as she crossed his path, “Ice cream! Fruit cream! Soy cream! Yo!”
Nor did she listen when Harold and I put down our beer bottles and shouted, in unison, “Look out!”
“Baby!” Anmol yelled. “Get a move on!”
The woman held herself in tight, as if she were in a bubble. She didn’t seem to know how to act in our neighborhood, so she froze up. For starters, she was driving a Jag, and her bob haircut was almost as black and as sleek as her car. Tailored and tidy, this classy sister was unlike the rainbow-haired tech geeks who dominated our part of San Francisco. She was one of those people who looked intelligent without seeming to have any skills whatsoever, except maybe on the tennis court.
She was clad in a beautiful, light, lemony-shaded shift and matching short jacket that just barely prevented her from breaking the cardinal fashion rule that one does not wear white after Labor Day. She had on glimmering black Olsen Twin sunglasses that blocked a third of her face, but the skin that was visible was creamy and perfect, even if it did seem just a shade too taut. I thought of how my mother’s face looked after she had her first face lift and wondered if they went to the same doctor.
Harold leaned over and whispered, “Oooh! Oooh! I’ll be your backup. I’ll pretend to read.” He stuck his hand in his cheese nibbles, and then he stuck his nose in the Adlai Stevenson biography was reading. He got so excited when I got new clients that I wondered what he’d do during retirement without me.
Anmol leaned his turbaned head out of his truck to get a better look at the woman in yellow. “Damn!” he yelled, “If you weren’t so fine, I would be mad right about now!” Then he backed up and parked the truck as hipster computer programmers promptly sprang out of South Park’s live-work spaces, ready to relive their youth through Drumsticks and popsicles.
When Anmol’s ice-cream truck paused for customers, the woman in yellow continued to float across the narrow street toward me and Harold. Although she never once acknowledged Anmol, she raised an eyebrow at the sight of the two of us. You don’t see teams like me and Harold all that often: a young redhead like me and an old man lounging in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, both of us drinking Heinekens in the early afternoon. Neither one of us liked to wait until happy hour.
“I’m looking for Ms. Parker,” the woman said.
“You’re looking at her,” I replied. I finished what was left of my beer and smiled.
Pulling her chin in ever so slightly, the woman stammered, “I thought you would be … older.”
I figured what she really wanted to say was “cleaner,” but I wasn’t exactly dressed professionally. No private investigator dresses well. The other ones I knew were schleppy dudes who favored Hawaiian shirts. However, that day was one of my good ones, as I was wearing a polka-dot secretary shirt and jeans I picked up at a thrift store in Berkeley.
As she was sizing me up, I was already returning the favor. I quickly processed the woman’s car, outfit, and manner of walking. Although you wouldn’t have known it to look at me, I grew up with money, thanks to my father’s incredible knack for convincing people to pay big money for organic produce and imported European sweets. I didn’t fit in Dad’s world, though. I played music on the side, and I snooped on people for a living, so I had minimal access to Daddy’s pocketbook. I knew how the higher rungs of society worked, but it didn’t belong to me, even if I was related to it. I liked to say that I could read the language of rich, but I preferred not to speak it.
Now, this woman spoke the language of rich fluently. She might have known some words I didn’t. Watching her impeccable posture, I imagined the woman floating through the world on a cushion of inherited wealth. Maybe she got dirty once or twice if she had a pony, like a lot of those girls I grew up with back on Cape Cod. But the woman in yellow sure didn’t look like the type to muck a stall.
Harold, my landlord and spiritual advisor, tried valiantly to be more interested in his thick volume about the life of a perennial presidential candidate. But he was already radiating dislike toward my potential client. I knew he couldn’t help it. He’d been raised not to trust anyone who looked like they never had a real job. One time, when I confessed to Harold that my own family had been in the Social Register, Harold begged me not to repeat it again because he might have to lecture me for it. He went as far as to clap his hands over his ears.
The woman in yellow summoned the courage to approach me, held out her right hand, and declared, “Hello, Miss Parker. My name is Sabrina Norton Buckner.” Sabrina darted a quick, dismissive glance at Harold, who responded by swigging from his Heineken. “I need to speak with you -” she tossed a second pointed glance at Harold “-privately.”
I did not like the way Sabrina looked at Harold and had half a mind to tell her to take her business elsewhere. You work with me, and you have to deal with Harold. He sits out in his lawn chair every day, and he sees all my clients coming and going. On numerous occasions, he has steered me away from those who look like trouble or won’t pay up.
Then again, someone like Sabrina was bound to pay well. Women who dressed like that and who sported good face lifts were often involved in divorce cases, and they could always afford my rate because they were using their ex-husband’s money. I decided to take a chance. “Well,” I told her, “Let’s head upstairs so my good friend Harold—this is Harold Cho, by the way, my landlord—can read in peace.”
Harold stood and extended a damp, cheesy hand toward Sabrina, saying, “Pleasure to have your formal introduction.” Sabrina,
who possessed a perfect boarding-school sheen of manners, had no choice but to accept the handshake, but, when it was over, she held her hand out to her side as if she might catch plague. Harold grinned as he sat down.
As we headed for my door, Anmol finished his sales and rang his bell, advising Sabrina, “Open your eyes, baby! Next truck might not stop!” Then he threw the rap music on full blast, tossed me a free Drumstick, winked, and rolled on.
“Is your neighborhood always like this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I told her, taking out my keys. “But you know what they say: Try it, you might like it.”
She looked nervous, but she still followed me through the entrance and up to my office.
CHAPTER 2
EFFECTIVE FIRST, DISCREET LATER
SINCE MY SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT WAS a long shotgun shack, I kept the office up front. I played guitar in the bedroom when I felt inspired and couldn’t wait for my band, the Marquee Idols, to rehearse, but most of the music happened either in one of the rent-a-studios in Potrero Hill or at my guitarist Wayne’s place because his neighbors were either deaf or extraordinarily supportive of the arts, and they didn’t call the police.
The office was right by the kitchen, so I could treat clients to snacks and a cup of tea. Since my first name was androgynous, some people came in thinking they were going to get “Clancy Parker,” who they thought looked like Magnum PI and had a British butler. Then they saw me, and I was barely five-four. And I had Harold, but he had a bad hip and chronic Cheeto fingers, and he didn’t answer to anyone. Of course, they were disappointed. However, no one could resist free food, so I could rope them in with that, and pretty soon they hired me for their cases.
Before boiling the water, I handed Sabrina a box of tissues so she could clean up after shaking Harold’s hand, and Sabrina gratefully accepted.
I kept the front scrupulously clean and organized, almost like a dentist’s office. The office had a desk, a file cabinet with all my old cases, an end table and the choice of a hard-backed chair or a Barcalounger, depending on the client. Ninety percent of my clients went for the Barcalounger, and it didn’t take long before they were all laid out and talking to me like I was Sigmund Freud.
However, Sabrina took the hard-backed chair, the one preferred by insurance employees, the elderly and lawyers who don’t want to muss their suits. She looked around the office and seemed puzzled. “Nothing matches,” she declared.
“It’s shabby chic,” I replied, almost convincing myself that was the case.
Actually, despite how often I cleaned it, the office was just shabby. Almost all of my office items had been liberated from a Dumpster behind the offices of cupcakecity.com, a failed dot-com enterprise. Their job was to make and deliver cupcakes that people would, theoretically, order online.
However, it never occurred to anyone at the enterprise that it was much easier and cost-effective to whip up cupcakes at home, and you could eat the extra frosting and batter, too. Right after I moved into my apartment, Harold advised me to stake out the Dumpsters because he had the company on death watch for weeks, especially after the CEO of cupcakecity.com stopped by his lawn chair and asked, “Oh, wise sage, what do you do when you’ve spent all the VC money?”
Harold replied, “You start spending your own damn money.”
The CEO must not have had much cash on hand because, soon after, the employees were laid off, and they started trashing the place. Every day, a new item appeared in the Dumpster, and I took it or bargained with one of the homeless guys in the park for it. As a result of the rage of the CupcakeCity.com employees, my office chair had a cigarette burn or two, and my black laptop, also carelessly tossed in the Dumpster, was covered with bumper stickers that proclaimed “Gooey in the Center” and “Lick Our Frosting.” Despite the cracked case and salacious stickers, that laptop had never once frozen up on me.
Behind my desk was my favorite part of the office—black-and-white photographs of some of the musicians that I got close enough to capture in concert. Neil Young sitting with an acoustic guitar, taken in Santa Cruz. Neko Case early in her career. Sleater-Kinney in the midst of a raging performance in Portland. Not that any of my clients were observant enough to notice what was on the wall. That was why they were going to hire me—to pay attention to detail when they couldn’t.
After putting the water on to boil, I did my best to make Mrs. Sabrina Norton Buckner think she was the only person in the universe I cared about. I sat down at my desk, adjusting my chair so that I was at eye-level with my client. “May I ask what brings you here, Sabrina?”
Sabrina sat a little straighter. “I’ve read about you in the papers, and your mother gives out your business cards.” Sabrina gestured to one of a stack of my cards on the desktop. My card wasn’t hard to miss, as it had a picture of a woman holding a magnifying glass to her right eye, and it was printed in dark red ink.
I smiled. If my father wasn’t on my side and frowned upon my chosen careers, my mother, too eccentric for Cape Cod, not to mention too eccentric for my dad, was an enthusiastic backer. I could count on at least one cheating-spouse case a month because my mom recommended me to her friends. Wronged socialites regularly visited South Park while clutching my business card in their beautifully manicured hands. A few local gossip hounds started frequenting the neighborhood because, if a big name was knocking on my door, a dirty secret was sure to follow. Anmol, who was always generous, offered to rear-end them for me, but I declined.
Sabrina looked at the cards and curled her lip slightly upwards. “Normally, I would go with someone more-” she looked at the “Lick Our Frosting” bumper sticker on the computer “-discreet. But I need someone effective, and I have heard that you get results. And, from what I hear, your prices are reasonable.”
Most people revealed their true natures when the subject of money came up. But I was usually the one who mentioned it first. No matter the status of the person who came in the office, I needed to ease price into the conversation, often within the last five minutes. The professional clients, like the lawyers and insurance companies, wanted to bargain, whereas the people who came in through the front door had other matters on their minds.
But, this time, Sabrina needed to bring up money right away. I was surprised that she brought it up so quickly and even brought it up at all. Normally, women who looked like they came from a certain social caliber never once talked about money. They had other people talk about money for them. Money was the last item on the mind of a wronged woman, especially a wronged wealthy woman.
No matter how surprised I was, I always let the client drive the conversation, so I replied, “The price depends on the nature of the work.”
Sabrina sighed. “I have lost something very, very valuable. I intended to help someone important to me, and now I can’t help him.” Tears welled in her eyes. Something was weighing on her, something big enough to distract her from dangerous ice-cream trucks bearing down on her, something big enough to overcome Harold’s open contempt.
I pushed the box of tissues back toward Sabrina and didn’t say anything. Sometimes customers needed to pause, especially if they were the types who preferred not to admit their weaknesses.
Sabrina went on to explain, “I am fortunate to have inherited jewelry. Diamonds, mostly. All passed down through the family. The jewelry is small, mostly wearable. I don’t like to be too showy.” I wondered what Sabrina’s definition of “showy” was given that she drove a Jaguar and her outfit looked like Prada.
Then Sabrina touched her collarbone ever so briefly, as if something that should have been there was gone. I had a brief flashback, a childhood memory of when my mother managed to lose her own wedding ring, which she would take on and off depending on the state of the Parker marriage. This one time, when I was eight, Mom touched her finger and realized the ring was missing. As Mom swooped around the room and put the household help to work flipping over beds and digging in the sofa cushions, I calmly went to her jewelry box,
inventoried each item, and quickly discovered the precious piece. She bought me an ice-cream sundae as a reward, and I became a pro at finding whatever it was she lost.
My immediate look of recognition cracked Sabrina’s shell. She began to sob. “My necklace! I don’t know what to do!” Her eyes began darting around the room, and she grabbed her throat as if the harder she grabbed, the more likely the necklace would reappear. “I … I don’t think I should have come here.”
The kettle went off. I often had to pat clients on the back, but she didn’t seem to be the touchy-feely type. I imagined Sabrina never cried in front of anyone and probably needed a moment to get used to the feeling. So I gave her some space, leapt from the desk and walked across the hall to the kitchen. I grabbed a clean UC Santa Cruz Banana Slug mug from the cabinet, ripped open a bag of green tea, and poured in the steaming water.
When I returned with the mug, the woman in yellow was gone.
CHAPTER 3
HIGH STRUNG
I HEARD HER RUN DOWN THE steps, but she was much taller and must have taken advantage of her long stride. “Watch the beer!” Harold yelled. “Aw, c’mon!”
By the time I made it down the stairs and avoided a puddle that resulted after Sabrina ran into Harold, she had started the car and was peeling out of South Park, nearly hitting Anmol, who had parked his truck and was strolling over for his regular afternoon chess game with Harold. “Way uncool, lady!” Anmol shouted. He looked back at us and wagged a Drumstick in the direction of her departing car. “She is pulled tighter than one of your guitar strings!”
I gasped. That reminded me. I had to make band practice. I spun around, raced up the stairs, and returned with my guitar case and a roll of paper towels. I had already done a lot of running around for this client, and she hadn’t even hired me yet. Once we mopped up the beer puddle, I was gone. “You kids enjoy yourselves!” I told Harold and Anmol, immediately walking toward the Embarcadero and the nearest N-line stop. “And, if she comes back—”
