We made no effort to hide our tracks. It’d be entirely obvious that the house had been ransacked. We just walked out the back door, across the yard, over the fence, down the golf course and out to our car. It was just barely light and foggy as heck.
“Just made it.” Dave said.
“Just made it? What does that mean?” Smitty asked.
“Believe it or not, there’ll be guys playing already, but they’re all at the beginning of the course, what they call the front nine. We’re at the back nine, the end of the course, that’s why there’s no one here.”
“Now you tell me. Anyway we’re okay!”
We literally piled into the car. We had made the trip back from the house somewhat casually, but the moment we were at the car, everyone was in a hurry to get away, everyone but Smitty. He stepped in behind the wheel, took his good time fastening his seat belt, pulled away from the curb, and drove away quietly, indulging the neighborhood speed limit of twenty-five.
Down the hill and toward the freeway. When we got there I expected we’d be taking the on ramp and heading toward Oakland. We didn’t. We continued straight ahead, under the freeway and toward downtown Richmond. A few blocks later, we turned toward a commercial area below the freeway near the waterfront.
We passed a wholesale meat company, a backyard furniture outlet and several similar businesses before coming to a large metal building with a sign on the front of it. HOGHEAVEN TRUCK BODY CO., INC. Smitty pulled up to a huge metal door, honked his horn, the door rolled up and we drove in. The inside of the place looked big enough to house a football field. Along each side of the building were trucks – a lot of trucks in various stages of remodeling or repair. In the back were a bunch of large machines making a hell of a racket.
“How d’ya like it?” Smitty asked me.
“What is it?”
“We build and repair truck bodies. One of the biggest and best shops in the whole Bay area. The devils own it. We don’t particularly advertise that we own it, but we don’t keep it a secret either. We’re just like every other business – we have to bid on jobs like everybody else, but we get our share.”
Looking down the rows of trucks I could see several garbage trucks being worked on. Now I knew where our truck came from. Seeing me eyeing them, Smitty confirmed my supposition.
“Yeah, we borrowed one of the trucks we’re working on. What nobody knows don’t hurt no one.”
As I walked toward the garbage trucks I could see that the one we’d used had been almost emptied, but I didn’t see any sign of our three prisoners. I turned to Smitty.
“And our—?” and hesitated.
“Guests?” he said. “They’re safely stored in back for now. We’ll be taking all the paperwork up to my place so we can go through it all and see what we’ve got. That treasure trove you found makes me think this thing is a hell of a lot bigger than I’d imagined. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do next, except to keep digging and see what we see.”
“One thing we do know though,” I said. “We know Carpenter’s mixed up in this thing to his eyebrows, and that he’s the guy that ordered the killing.”
“You’re right,” Smitty agreed. “I just don’t know how to use what we’ve got yet. But first things first. We’ll take a good look at his records and then decide.”
Without the three prisoners, we were able to get all the papers loaded into two cars and headed back to Smitty’s house. As fast as Smitty drove, the Devils on their bikes were there before us.
Smitty backed into the garage and we all lined up to unload the papers.
“Just dump the stuff here in the garage first,” he decided. “Then we’ll gradually move it into the rec room, sorting it as we go. Keep all the papers from each room stacked separately. In case some sort of relationship develops. You know, like if we find something interesting and want to refer back to where it came from, we can find it.”
This whole operation was turning out to be pretty damn successful. I was really impressed with Smitty’s generalship and resourcefulness. In a rare burst of confidence in me, Smitty told me that I was to oversee the examination of all the papers and I would probably need help. My first thought was of Josie. Would he let her help me?
The stack of papers was getting higher and higher. It was going to be a big job. A thought occurred to me.
“Smitty, maybe the notebook isn’t as important as we thought it was, at least now.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m thinking that the book just referred to all this stuff that he thought was safe in his house. You know what I mean?”
“You’re thinking that if we have everything from his house, it doesn’t matter what’s in the book?”
“Exactly.”
Smitty took out his bandana, unfolded it, and blew his nose.
“Jesus, these papers are dusty. I can hardly breathe. You may be right about these papers being more important than the book.”
“It’s just an idea.”
“Yeah, but either way, we need to go through everything pretty carefully. I recognized several of the names you read to me. This stuff could be dynamite.”
CHAPTER 25
Before starting on the papers I needed to get to the bathroom and clean up. Then I wanted to get some food into me. Funny thing, even though we’d been up all night, involved in a fight and got shot. I wasn’t sleepy and the gun shot gash hurt like hell. I needed to have it washed and re-bandaged but I couldn’t have Josie do it. On the way back to the house, we’d agreed not to tell Josie about the gun play. It was probably just as well as the gash was in an embarrassing place anyway.
I locked the door to the bathroom, stripped my pants off and for the first time was able to see my wound. The bandage stuck a little and by the time I’d coaxed it off, the wound was bleeding again. The bullet had made about a two inch long gash in my cheek. Fairly deep, entirely in the fleshy part of my butt and still bleeding. I was admiring it in the mirror when there was a knock on the door.
“Casey, you in there?” It was Les. “I found some good bandages and some sulfa powder to sprinkle on your wound. Let me in.”
He was just in time. The bandage he’d put on before was soaked through and blood stains showed on my pants. He took a long look at the wound and let out a low whistle. “It’s a little deeper than I thought, that’s why it’s bleeding so much. We really need a compression bandage. You feel okay?”
“I guess so, but it hurts.”
“Well I’ll do the best I can. I’ll clean it to prevent infection and then I’ll bandage the hell out of it. We can’t take you to a doctor ‘cause it’s obviously a bullet wound and they have to report them. But it’s really just a flesh wound and should heal easily. You load up on Advil and I’ll try to find something stronger for you.”
A half hour later, re-bandaged and loaded up with Advil, I joined the gang in the kitchen.
Josie wasn’t there but she bounced in a few minutes later. When I say she bounced in, I only mean in comparison with the rest of us. Most of the guys were dragging. It appeared that she’d had a full nights sleep and was rarin’ to go.
“How about biscuits, bacon and eggs, guys?” Nobody objected.
I saw my reflection in the door window and decided I looked better than the rest of the guys, maybe because I was younger. Anyway she put me to work setting plates and silverware, while she whipped up buttermilk biscuits, fried bacon and eggs and had me put a half grapefruit in front of each of the guys. That together with coffee and it was back to work.
It was difficult walking without a limp and sitting down without grimacing while trying to conceal my condition to Josie.
Before Smitty showed up I asked Josie if she knew what had happened last night. All she knew was that we were back okay, that nobody’d been arrested and that we had a bunch of papers to look at.
After breakfast, I asked Josie if she’d like to help me go through the stack of papers I had to work on.
“Would
I? You bet!” she answered instantly. Talk about a hard sell. “That’s why I was asking you about books yesterday. I get so bored. All I’m asked to do is cook. When and where?” I told her about the bags of papers I had and that Smitty had just told me to move them someplace and get to work.
“Let’s take them up to the living room,” Josie suggested. “It’s quieter and a little bit away from all the rest of the guys.”
“Do you think you need to ask you dad?”
“No, let’s just do it. I’ll clear it with Dad on the way.”
The stack of dirty dishes in the sink drew our attention.
“We gotta get rid of those first. C’mon, we’ll get them in the dishwasher and go.”
Shortly thereafter we headed for the garage and started to pack up my pile to take it up to the living room. Smitty saw us but didn’t say anything, so I took that for tacit approval. It seemed like it was going to be okay for us to work together.
As we were leaving the garage, I heard Smitty telling the guys that some of them needed to leave. He said, “There’re too many people here for the job, and too many for Josie to cook for.” He asked Nips, Les and Dave to stay, and for them to pick out three others.
“The rest of you guys, take off. Can somebody check onJezebel?Looks like I’ll be here a couple of days, somebody could even stay on the boat.”
Two guys volunteered.
On the way upstairs, Josie asked, “Are you okay, it looks like you’re limping a little.”
Woops! Thinking fast, I said; “I think I turned my ankle a little when I ran across the lawn.”
It seemed to work. Her reply was a semi-disinterested, “Oh.”
We decided the best way to tackle the stuff from the filing cabinets was to keep it all in alphabetical order and go through the files drawer by drawer. Josie suggested we get a pad of paper and start listing every name we found. Then we could cross reference them every time we ran into the same name. The trouble was we had no idea what we were looking for, except that damn little book.
After the first hour, her notebook’s first page was almost full.
I’d been making a separate pile of every file that had a name we recognized, that pile was getting big enough that I was afraid it was going to tip over. We quit for a Coke when we finished with all the files from the first drawer, then started reading through the contents of the files of the most interesting names.
That’s when this whole exercise started to get interesting. We started opening and reading the files. Every single file had damning evidence in it, bad enough to send someone to jail or cost them their jobs or careers. Josie started to write down the evidence after each name, and it was scary. Believe it or not – okay, call me naïve – a couple of state representatives had been literally caught molesting minors. Others had stolen money. A couple had been involved in DUIs. Some of them were closet gays. Every one of them was a politician or prominent businessman. Each of them had committed crimes. As far as we could see, not a single one of them had been officially charged with anything.
It was clear to us that these were blackmail files. Each file was in a manila envelope together with proof of the crime. Some were yellowed newspaper clippings, some were in affidavit form, some were copies of records, it would take a lot of time to read them.
We decided it was time to show Smitty what we had. As I got up off the floor my wound bit me. I staggered a little and put my hand on the stack of papers for support. The stack shifted under my hand and most of it fell to the floor. Trying to gather the stack back together, I felt something hard in the middle of the pile.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “There’s something here.” I carefully separated the pile and extracted a small black book. The five by seven inch Holy Grail. It had been buried in the middle of this stack.
I called to Smitty and told him I thought I’d found the book. He yelled back that he’d be there in a minute. Examining the book closely, it looked like a diary. It even had a small lock on it; one that looked like it could be broken into by your average curious five-year-old. I asked Josie to find a screwdriver. I wanted to get it open before Smitty got there. Heck, I’m as curious as any average five-year-old.
The screwdriver and Smitty arrived at the same time, however. Smitty took one glance at the book and the screwdriver in my hands and yelled, “Put it down! Don’t touch it!” Shocked, I dropped it on the desk and Smitty picked it up – extremely carefully, I noticed.
“I saw an ad for an address book, looked just like this,” Smitty said, never taking his eyes off it. “It came with a cute little special feature. If you tried opening it without the proper sequence, it’d explode in your face. Let’s get Nips up here and see what he thinks.” He handed it back to me. I gingerly set it down on the desk.
We all stood staring at it until Nips got there. He picked it up and turned it round and round in his hands.
“Jesus Christ Casey, were you just going to open this?”
“Yeah, until Smitty stopped me.”
“He may have saved your life! Anybody got a small screwdriver?”
There was one in the desk.
“Okay everybody, back up a few feet; I don’t want anyone hurt except me. These things are tricky to open without the right sequence. Maybe I can unscrew it from the back and avoid the explosion, if I’m lucky. Fortunately, the blast is pretty small. It can blind you or take a finger off, but that’s about all.”
“Okay now, stand back.” Turning his back to us, he appeared to struggle with the miniature screwdriver for a moment then loudly yelled “OH SHIT,” and tossed the book at me.
CHAPTER 26
Stunned silence! Then I yelled, grabbed Josie and dove for the floor. A moment later I raised my head and saw Nips doubled over laughing.
“Wasn’t that fun?” he asked.
Rather mildly, Smitty said, “I should have known better. That’s not the first time you’ve got me with your weird sense of humor.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cuss him.
“You okay Josie?”
“Wow, that was exciting!” I guessed she was okay.
There was a moment of silence while the three of us adjusted to this little anticlimax. Nips handed the screwdriver back to me and told me I could have used it safely. “In fact, you could have used a sledgehammer on this little baby,” Nips said. “No explosive in it at all. At least not of the nuts and bolts and kaboom variety.”
I wanted to see what was in the little black book, but Smitty had other ideas. He took the book from Nips and said he’d take it and look at it downstairs.
“You might also want to look at the list of files we’ve checked through so far,” I suggested. Josie handed him the pad. His eyes bugged as he skimmed down the list.
“Casey, I’m beginning to agree with you about this book. I think the book tells the secret of the room you found. But now we don’t need the book – we’ve got the room! I’ll go through it, you two keep at the rest of the files.”
So Josie and I went back to the files. After a couple of hours, Smitty sent one of the guys up to us to tell us we should quit, at least temporarily. Smitty’d decided we already had more stuff than we could probably use. That was okay with us. We’d already been saying we needed time to start researching the names we already had.
In addition to the politicians’ names we had, we’d come across some other pretty interesting names as well. Many were prominent businessmen. One owned a small donut shop. Two or three were stockbrokers. Several were in management with large corporations. One was a police chief. Lots of leads to lots of people! We needed to figure where we were going.
Smitty hesitated, then said, “Casey, I think you were right. Carpenter’s little black book just referred to all these files. The files are more important than the book. What I can’t figure out is where all this stuff came from. Some of its years old. Carpenter got this info from somebody and that person’s pulling Carpenter’s strings. I’m thinking that whoever’s beh
ind Carpenter is just as much a murderer as Carpenter.”
Les spoke up, “There’s gotta be something in those files that’ll lead us to Carpenter’s boss.”
“I think so too,” Smitty said. “So everybody take a stack of files and let’s find him.”
For a short while there was a lot of silence, then some laughing started to break out, followed by lots of “wows,” “I always thought so,” and one incredulous “I voted for this guy?”
“Don’t play around guys, hop to it,” Smitty said, then grabbing Josie “I’ll see if I can talk this daughter of mine into making a bunch of sandwiches for you guys.”
Josie’d told me she never did lunch but she didn’t argue with her dad, either. She didn’t invite me to help her, so I stayed in the rec room and grabbed a bunch of the files.
The file I was most interested in was fat. It contained material about that California state senator I always thought was a crook, Goldberg. His file was more than a little juicy. One item involved a fifteen-year-old girl, a classic case of statutory rape; even though the senator claimed the girl said she was eighteen. There were letters, affidavits, etc.; all proving that it really happened. But no court case, no conviction. Reading more of the letters, it got even worse. The young lady was the daughter of a good friend of said senator. So good, the father was apparently willing to drop the whole case in return for an undisclosed amount of cash. Some father!
It was pretty obvious that Goldberg had been really important to Carpenter. There were a number of references to things Carpenter had been told to do. Oddly enough, however, I couldn’t find any evidence that Carpenter had gotten any money from the senator. The records appeared to be otherwise quite complete, but nothing about him getting any money. And there were plenty of other files like this one.
It took me a while to figure out how Carpenter’d used these files. He’d been blackmailing senators to get a vote for or against a particular bill. After the vote was cast Carpenter would get a payback, in either cash or check, from the sponsors of the bill. Josie said she’d bet that he was registered in Sacramento as a lobbyist and that’s how he got his money.
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