P.J. Morse - Clancy Parker 01 - Heavy Mental

by P. J. Morse

  Sabrina kept talking. “Dr. Redburn was going to sell that necklace, and the 500,000 would go to him, and then the rest I would save for Peter until the crisis blew over. And now it’s all gone. And I don’t know what to tell him.”

  I asked, “Is your husband going to need money soon?” I considered that Sabrina’s husband had to maintain at least two homes—a home on campus in Sacramento and a home in San Francisco. Shuttling at least an hour and a half between the two also had to be expensive.

  Sabrina struggled for a few moments with the concept of needing money. “I am not sure. He asks me occasionally. But, when he does, I have to go through the trustees, and it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. If the trustees have their way, I’ll never have the chance to give money to either Dr. Redburn’s practice or my husband.”

  Perhaps Sabrina should have thought of herself for a change instead of her husband or her psychiatrist because, if she had, maybe she wouldn’t be in this mess. “Now that we know what’s ahead of us, I have to ask you a question. Brace yourself.”

  A puzzled Sabrina did exactly that, planting her hands on the edge of the Barcalounger as if I were about to hit her. I then asked, “Are you having an affair with Dr. Redburn?”

  Sabrina gasped, “No. No. No. Absolutely not.”

  “Not to sound like your psychiatrist, but how is your relationship with him? Feel free to tell me about your husband, too.”

  “What, may I ask, does any of that have to do with a lost necklace?”

  “I don’t want complications. And I’m a private eye, so I’m going to find out anyway. I’d like to save myself some time. Maybe get your necklace back faster.”

  Sabrina shook her head. “Dr. Redburn is a handsome man, and I know some women who would jump at the chance, but I respect the doctor-patient relationship. He helps me. I merely want others to learn what I have about themselves.”

  I took a note about the doctor: “She says no.” “Then exactly how would you describe your relationship?”

  “He’s my doctor. He helped me when I was at a low point, and I feel that I owe him.”

  “You’re giving your psychiatrist that much cash out of your own good will?”

  “What is this?” Sabrina’s face began to turn scarlet, and she reached for her clutch.

  I waved my hands. “Whoa! I’m not judging! I’m not judging! I’m trying to ask questions that other people might ask. And, believe me, that’s one they’re going to ask.”

  Sabrina settled back down in her seat, dejected. “People are terrible, aren’t they? Well, when my father died, I felt very lonely. Peter was busy. My brothers were busy. And Dr. Redburn helped me cope with the grief, quite successfully.”

  I took down another note: “I think I believe her.” “You said your husband was busy when your dad died?”

  Sabrina replied, “He’s a busy man. I understand that. And he does most of his work on campus, so I don’t see him much.” Her face grew distant, as if she were trying to remember what her husband even looked like.

  I glanced at my list to see if I missed anything. I was fairly satisfied with what I got out of Sabrina’s preliminary visit. “Well, Sabrina, I think we have it all. I’m going to get right on this case. Just be sure to look under the bed to see if I’m there. I wouldn’t want to spook you!” I flapped my hands a little for dramatic effect.

  Sabrina didn’t laugh.

  CHAPTER 7

  A REAL JOB

  WHEN I ESCORTED SABRINA OUTSIDE, Mom was sitting on the front steps with a pillow under her bottom so she wouldn’t get her skirt dirty. She was enjoying one of Anmol’s popsicles, a red one. It matched her sling. Leave it to Mom to turn getting kicked out of my office into a fashion statement.

  I swept Sabrina past Harold before she could damage anymore of his beer. Anmol and his truck were long gone, and he was probably making the rounds somewhere over in Potrero Hill.

  Mom couldn’t find a parking space in my neighborhood, so I walked with Mom and Sabrina along Third Street until Mom remembered where she parked her car. Although I loved my mom, I was already looking forward to getting back home. The thought of hanging out with Harold in South Park helped me forget about Larry and the hole in the Marquee Idols lineup. Every time I walked into South Park, I felt better.

  Once they were gone, I practically ran home to my sanctuary. South Park was the kind of neighborhood that hid its charms from tourists. The entrance looked like an alley, but the street split, wrapped around the park, and became an alley again at the exit. The small path contrasted with the wider lanes of Second and Third, and anyone driving or walking in would be surprised by the sight of a leafy playground nestled among warehouses and high-rises.

  South Park enjoyed one of the most dramatic plotlines in an already dramatic town. It was born as an enclave for the rich in the 1850s and began a leisurely decline, until the 1906 earthquake gut-punched it. As the neighborhood recovered, it became a haven for the homeless, the arty and the eccentric.

  During the dot-com boom at the end of the century, the arty and eccentric characteristics of the neighborhood attracted big-spending, high-flying tech types. These people were like kids playing a game of Monopoly, only the money was real. According to Harold, they would make business deals involving obscene sums while playing on the swing sets or holding impromptu picnics in the center of the park. Their bodies were positively dripping with gadgets. The stories of their extravagance got bigger every time Harold told it. But, with the dot-com bust, the South Park offices emptied out, and the big spenders fled home to their parents’ basements.

  I was one of the few people who benefited from the bust, as I came to town after the bubble had popped, and the only people left were the companies whose CEOs couldn’t cope with reality and the ones who already lived in San Francisco before the bubble expanded. I couldn’t get a straight gig at one of the dot-coms since they were still laying off employees left and right, so I started working for a detective agency.

  I found Harold’s room-for-rent on Craigslist while I was crashing at Shane’s apartment. When I met Harold for the first time, I had to ask how a guy like him got a place in such an expensive neighborhood. He told me that, while he was working at the public library, he bought his home in South Park during a seedy period in the late ‘80s. Once he retired, dot-com companies frequently offered to buy him out so they could convert his two-story into a live-work space, but the dot-com gang made him violently ill. He told them he bought a home to live there, not to make a profit, and they could take a hike. In fact, he even put a sign on his front door telling them to do exactly that.

  When the soufflé of the dot-conomy collapsed, the companies finally left him alone. However, Harold’s old tenant got laid off and took a job somewhere in Contra Costa County. Harold needed a replacement, unless he wanted to go back to the research desk in his advanced age, but he remained picky about his tenants. In fact, he grilled me about my line of work as he looked over my rental application.

  “A musician and a private eye.” He adjusted his bifocals and read over the sheet again. “Good. I like that. A person with a real job. Two of them!”

  That was precisely the opposite of what my father had said of my chosen professions. Dad lectured that I was frittering away my money-making and child-bearing years with silly habits like music and detective work. Once in a while, he would offer me some sort of marketing job for Parker’s Pantry, saying I might meet a “nice boy” back East.

  I usually responded with the words, “Nice boy, my ass!” If by “nice boy” Dad meant one of the entitled, smug, hockey-loving scions at the boarding school I attended, I’d rather hang myself by a strand of pearls. After those kinds of conversations, I was glad I moved up to San Francisco once I graduated from UC Santa Cruz instead of returning to Massachusetts.

  As I turned off 3nd Street and entered the park, I remembered Harold’s next question during my rental interview: “Ever worked in marketing?” His face then wrinkled up as if
he tasted a sour lemon.

  I grinned. Target markets and demographics were subjects Dad loved talking about, which meant that they certainly weren’t my kind of business. I proudly informed Harold, “I wouldn’t know marketing if it jumped up and bit me!”

  Harold clapped, and he looked way more childlike than his 60-odd years would suggest. “So it’s done! You’re home! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a book to attend to.”

  “Attending to books” was what Harold did most of the time, when he wasn’t sneering at socialites and playing chess with Anmol. Harold was a voracious reader of biographies, largely of the political variety. He would pull out a lawn chair, unfold it in the shade of the tree in front of his door, pop open a bucket of cheese-flavored nibbles and a Heineken, and dive in. He even did it on the cold days so he could take in the fresh air.

  Sometimes, he would chat with the homeless in the park about what he was reading or would challenge them to games of chess, which he usually won. He told his neighbors that the lifestyle kept him “plump and happy.” Even though it was getting dark by the time I helped Mom and Sabrina to the car, Harold was still churning through his Adlai Stevenson biography and was halfway finished.

  I had taken a shine to Harold and often relied on his research skills for my work, only his pay came in the form of rent. I called him the “human computer.” He despised actual computers because they were eliminating his beloved card catalogs. The word “Google” made him foam at the mouth. To him, research was a tactile experience that meant more than clicking away on a keyboard. Since my business required proper research and legwork that a computer couldn’t handle, Harold saw it as his duty to help whenever he could.

  During the dot-com boom, he got quite a reputation for launching trivia questions from his lawn chair toward the young professionals. If they didn’t know the capital of Kenya (Nairobi) or the date of the Whiskey Rebellion (1794, I think), he would sneer, “Oh, I forgot. You can look it up online! Why learn something when you can Google it?” One of the local city papers described him as “Alex Trebek—if Alex Trebek were scruffy and sarcastic.” Harold wrote a letter to the paper saying he was insulted because he was smarter than Trebek.

  But Harold liked me. He never had a daughter, and he made sure I took care of myself. He gave me the key to his door so I could use his washing machine and borrow books from his library. When I was busy, he would invite me downstairs for suppers of lentil stew and homemade bread.

  On that particular evening, Harold tore his eyes away from the life of Adlai Stevenson and stood as soon as he saw me approach. “I spy a private eye!” he called.

  “Thanks for being patient with the unexpected guests,” I said.

  “That’s okay. I’ll just hide my beer from this Buckner person the next time she comes over. Now that your guests are gone, how was band practice?”

  I told the truth. “It was smoky and depressing.”

  “Did Wayne get hold of some bad pot?” Harold asked. He leaned in and shook his head. “I like him, but he doesn’t smell so good sometimes.”

  “That’s only part of it.”

  “Well, let me brighten your day. Methinks you may be in for a lucrative job. About 10 minutes ago, someone else in a very nice car stopped by.” He made a soap-in-mouth face. “A UC chancellor. Mr. Buckner, hubby to your newest client.”

  I remembered Jamal’s description. “Let me guess. Peter D. Buckner? Fat man in a Beamer who can’t drive?”

  “Yes!” Harold pointed at Cherry 2000. “He almost hit Cherry! Good thing Anmol wasn’t around. I can assure you there would have been a fender-bender.”

  “Interesting. He’s already been chatting with Jamal.”

  “Why would a UC chancellor have a Beamer when tuition is so high?” Harold stamped his foot on the concrete for effect. “That man should be driving a Camry. Back when I was at Berkeley, tuition was—”

  As much as I appreciated a good tirade against the expenses of higher education, I started to feel tired. With my newest client’s missing necklace and the hole in my band, I didn’t need my client’s husband complicating the situation. Why would the Buckners track me down separately?

  Harold noticed that I spaced out. “Uh-oh. It’s guitar time, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Oh, yeah.”

  He gave me a Heineken and sent me up the stairs.

  When I got into my apartment, I threw open a window and reveled in the rare warm air. I took my guitar case, opened it, and pulled out my guitar. My breathing became deeper and more even, and I wasn’t even playing yet.

  I listened for a moment to the sounds of the neighborhood. Harold had given up on his book and gone inside. He must have turned the television to one of those old concert rebroadcasts they sometimes had on public television. I hummed along to the music, spinning myself a few times around the room. My guitar was a wonderful dancing partner. Unlike Larry, it never talked back.

  I was ready to play the guitar now instead of just dance with it. After I threw the strap over my shoulder and plugged it in, my fingers jittered over the strings. I couldn’t stop thinking about the necklace, and I wondered why I was excited about this particular job. The missing necklace was a twist on the usual wayward-spouse gig, and I loved puzzles. I told Shane and Wayne that I did the private eye work for the money, but I truly adored it, and the thought of tracking down a two-million dollar necklace and maybe even holding it in my hands had a certain appeal.

  Besides, it was just finding a necklace. How hard could it be?

  Soon, I was racing my way through a new chorus about diamonds melting in my hands and sending lava on the floor. The energy of the music and the oncoming night were starting to charge up my batteries.

  Right then, my Crackberry delivered its siren song that a text message arrived. It had been a surprising amount of time since I’d even looked at my cell phone, when lately I’d been looking at it every five minutes. After getting a particularly nice paycheck from a wife who received a fat divorce settlement when I busted the husband with his dental hygienist, I finally broke down and got myself one of those handy gadgets that the dot-com kids toted around and thumbed as they walked down the street.

  In the beginning, I adored how I could store my whole life on the thing. But then it started to own me more than I owned it. My thumbs began to twitch every time the gadget was nearby. Clients could call me, e-mail me and text me at any time, and then they would be hysterical if I didn’t answer immediately because it seemed they all had Crackberries, too, and they assumed I checked it every five minutes. Of course, I did, but they didn’t need to know that.

  I fought the urge to read the text, but the sweet, sweet Crackberry juice was already in my veins. I set down the guitar and picked up the Crackberry. Instead of a client, it was my friend Muriel, and all that appeared on the screen was a question mark.

  I tapped a “Yes?” on the little keyboard. I wasn’t a huge fan of the texting lingo, as it reminded me of the silly “love you lots” messages that high-school girls wrote to each other in their yearbooks, and I would vomit before I used lingo like “LOL” or “WTF.” Muriel was bound to chide me for writing too much later.

  “@ Seagull’s Nest.”

  “Be there,” I thumbed back.

  Muriel returned a text for the sole purpose of correcting me. “B there.”

  A drink seemed like a good idea. I had a long day with practice and the new case. I grabbed my keys and satchel and zipped down the stairs. Harold heard the sound of my boots and leaned out of his living room to greet me. “Are you off to the Seagull’s Nest?”

  “You know me all too well, Harold! Don’t wait up!”

  I heard Harold chuckle and return to his Sinatra. He watched out for me in a way that my parents, who were always entangled in various social obligations, never did. Before the divorce, they hired nannies and relied on boarding school headmasters, anyway. Even though my professions required me to stay out all night and sleep late, I admitted that I
liked the idea of a father figure who was a little bit worried that I might not come home.

  CHAPTER 8

  BUCKY

  SMILING TO MYSELF, I WALKED along my side of the park toward the Shell station. Some drunk computer programmers were clowning around on the swing sets. One of them yelled the line from the “South Park” cartoon show, the one about killing Kenny, as if it were an original joke.

  A homeless guy who liked to take his naps there shouted, “Kenny is dead, dammit! He’s been dead for a while, and I didn’t see nothin’!”

  As I turned onto Third Street, another homeless guy shouted, “Every time you people say that, I expect a dollar!”

  I crossed over to Bryant Street and was already thinking about a tall, fresh glass of cheap beer. Despite the city’s reputation as an artists’ mecca, I believed San Francisco bars as a whole were too clean, tidy, and tourist-ready. When I went to a bar, I didn’t necessarily want my choice of overpriced microbrews and fusion cuisine. The Seagull’s Nest wasn’t a tourist hangout. Instead of microbrews, it had the basics on tap. In place of fusion cuisine, the menu featured bags of Funyuns and Fritos hanging off the wall behind the owner, who usually staffed the bar. It had wood paneling, pool tables, and what I thought was the best jukebox in the city.

  I was already rehearsing what I’d say to Muriel, who was a coffee jockey by day and a bassist for the all-girl punk band the Thunderpussies by night. Her particular band dressed in color-coordinated mini-dresses from the ‘60s. They chugged from whiskey bottles on stage and were once arrested en masse for mooning a heckling crowd and inciting a riot. When I first moved to San Francisco and started going to shows, the Thunderpussies were making their debut, and I admired their sense of style. We started hanging out since our bands used the same practice facility, the Echo Chamber.