The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  When I walked in, a guy waved to me, a guy called Indian. He wears a big feather in his sweatband; calf-length, moccasin-style boots with a fringe on their turned-down tops; and a beaded leather vest. I went over and sat down with him. Indian's got hair about the color of mine—halfway between brown and blond—a red, Viking-looking mustache, and a ruddy complexion. Pretty un-Indian looking, except for facial structure. He insists he's a quarter Chippewa, and that his mother grew up on the Bad River Reservation in Wisconsin.

  Whatever, he's an Angeleno, born and raised. A tallish, strong-looking guy who works for Yitzhak's Transit as a casual. Some days Yitzhak has work for him, some days he doesn't. When he doesn't, Indian comes in to Morey's, about two blocks from Yitzhak's, for coffee and a fat, glazed doughnut. I see him quite a lot.

  Yitzhak's a New Gnu, and almost all the people who work for him are New Gnus, but not Indian. Indian's a Loonie, belongs to a cult of moon worshipers. They don't actually worship the moon, but they meditate on it. And it occurred to me a Loonie might know something about astrology. So after I gave Morey's daughter my order, I asked Indian about it.

  "Don't know much," he said. "But Moonbeam does. She checks the horoscopes in the paper each day and tells me if there's something I need to watch out for. Moonbeam's pretty spiritual, you know? She's part Indian too, and an Aquarius, so she's got a better feel for that stuff than me. That's why she's our house mother." He stopped and examined me a moment. "You got a girlfriend? You never talk about one."

  "Yeah, I've got one. Her name is Tuuli."

  "Tooley? That's a neat name! What does she do? For a living I mean?"

  "She's a professional psychic."

  "Hey! Wow! That's a coincidence! We got a fortune-teller in our house!" Indian's life is full of coincidences. "Her name is Becky. She's from Sacramento. You know they made a law against telling fortunes in Sacramento County?"

  I did. But to keep him going, I said no, I didn't.

  "Yeah. Ain't that crazy? What kind of country is this, they can make a law against telling fortunes? Becky didn't have no job, so she told a guy his fortune, and he's an undercover cop. She couldn't pay the fine, so they put her in jail. And when she got out, she still didn't have no job. A friend of hers, a hooker, give her the money to come down here."

  Indian grinned. "The hooker said she'd get even for her, with the guy that got the law passed. She didn't say how. Maybe he's a customer or something."

  Sometimes I just half listen to Indian. He rambles. This time he had my attention. "What's the guy's name?" I asked.

  "I don't know. She said, but I don't remember."

  "Wellington?" I threw that out to test him.

  "Nah, nothing like that."

  "Miller? Pasco?"

  "Pasco! That's it! You know about him?"

  "I've heard of him. He doesn't like psychics."

  Indian looked suddenly wary. "It's not against the law in L.A., is it? Nah, couldn't be. Besides, your girlfriend is a psychic."

  "Is Becky pretty good at fortunes?" I asked.

  "I don't know. I guess. You want yours told?"

  "Maybe. Tuuli won't tell me mine. Can I get in touch with this Becky?"

  "There's a house on Franklin, on one of those little streets east of Bronson. It's got a little sign in the front yard—House of the Moon. They rent rooms to fortune-tellers to tell fortunes in. It's close enough, Becky don't need no car, or to take the bus or anything. She just walks there from the house about a mile. The hill climbing's good for her."

  He told me Becky didn't leave for work till after nine, and gave me the phone number where he lives. So when I got to my office, I called her. A reading, she told me, cost ten dollars, and she'd be at the House of the Moon by ten o'clock.

  I was too. She called herself Madame Rebecca, wore a head kerchief, a black satin shawl with white stars and moons, and a dress to her ankles. The face beneath the kerchief was small and pointy, vulnerable looking. I suspect going to jail in Sacramento wasn't her first visit from hard luck.

  The fortune she told me was interesting. I'd entered a time of challenge and uncertainty, she said. And if I passed through it safely, I'd overcome the challenge. There was a special person in my life, someone with whom I shared a special communication, who would disappoint me. But if I persisted, I'd win there too. All this with appropriate silences and frowns, and passes at her crystal ball.

  The whole thing was general enough to give me a choice of things it could allude to. I could interpret the uncertainty and challenge as the Ashkenazi case, though I couldn't imagine any danger there. The special person in my life I could take to mean Tuuli. We even shared a special communication—Finnish—though hers is a lot better than mine. I learned some of it from my dad, and after he died, I lived with my older brother Sulo and his wife, who talked it to me.

  When Madame Rebecca had finished and I'd paid her, I got down to the questions I was really interested in. "Indian tells me you're from Sacramento," I said.

  She admitted she was.

  "I'm going up there on business next week. A couple of days. Can you recommend a lady I could look up? Someone reasonably nice looking, who's healthy and likes a good time?"

  She gave me a name—Marilyn Vanderpol—and an approximate address. She didn't remember the phone number. I gave her another Hamilton and left.

  7

  Back in the office I checked with the Data Center again and learned that Marilyn Vanderpol had died of a drug-induced heart attack five weeks earlier. Probably not that unusual for a hooker, I told myself. On a hunch I also got the name and number of the investigating officer. I called him, identified myself, and gave him my contract number. Then I asked him about the death of Marilyn Vanderpol.

  Sergeant Luciano is the kind of cop that doesn't have to refer to the files. He gave me the information off the top of his head, and I had no doubt he knew what he was talking about. The evidence, he said, would remain on file for at least two months from the time of death, because it appeared to be crime related. In this case drug related. Then the evidence, including the body, would be disposed of.

  "You said appeared to be drug related. What did you mean by appeared?"

  "It was drug related, but there was no evidence of previous drug use, or even an alcohol problem. But she'd apparently been servicing a john when it happened, and the drug in her bloodstream was HS, Harem Smoke. It doesn't do anything for the woman, but it enables repeated male orgasm and intensifies male climax, so it was probably his. And it's been known to trigger heart attacks." He paused and shrugged. "In males in climax. A coroner's decision is hard to argue with. He's the expert, and . . ." He shrugged again.

  "And she was a hooker."

  He nodded. And she was dead of a heart attack. Why complicate things? "Look," I said, "I'll fly up tomorrow morning. Can you show me the evidence?"

  "Tomorrow's Saturday."

  "I know." I could hardly justify the trip as a job expense. I'd have to go on my own time and money.

  "I'm on duty till noon," he told me.

  "I'll be there by ten."

  8

  I was there at 9:32, according to Luciano's wall clock. He showed me his brief written report, plus the evidence in a plastic bag. The report included photographs and a diagram. Vanderpol had been sprawled on the floor naked. In the plastic bag was a small fumer with Harem Smoke ash. Dope! I remembered my dad and mom dead in our living room, and feeling my mouth start to twist, took several deep quiet breaths. The opening step in a mental drill my therapist had taught me.

  Other items included a Franklin—a hundred-dollar bill that had been lying on an end table; a small, clear plastic pillbox that looked empty; and a plastic needle cap with a flattened tip and ornamental grooves. "What's in the vial?" I asked.

  "Semen. Found on Vanderpol."

  I didn't get any subconscious twitches from that, but I did from the needle cap. "You know what this is," I said, pointing at it.

  "Sure. A needle cap. It was
lying on the shag carpet.

  "One of the outpoints in the scene was, Vanderpol's arms showed no sign of needle useage, and there wasn't any needle lying around. And Harem Smoke was the only drug in her system. The needle could have belonged to the john, of course, and he could have taken it with him. Odd though."

  "It's not that kind of needle cap," I told him. "Unless I'm mistaken, this is off a cork popper. Look at the size of the hole where the needle fitted. Druggies don't use needles that big. Or that long."

  He looked puzzled. "Cork popper?"

  "Instead of using a corkscrew, you push a long needle through the cork and release a little jolt of compressed air. Pops the cork right out."

  Luciano nodded thoughtfully. "Was there a wine bottle there?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Two-thirds full, on her kitchen table. But it was Gallo port. They've got a screw cap."

  "Hmh!" Something was niggling my mind, just below the surface. "Look. Can you do something for me?"

  "Maybe."

  "I'd like this stuff sequestered."

  Luciano frowned. "Sure. I can do that. What's going on?"

  "I'm not sure. I'll let you know as soon as I do. Did you get any prints?"

  "Off the bill, the wine bottle, and the screw cap. Didn't do anything with them though. The coroner's report, you know."

  I did know. And she was a hooker who died of a heart attack. But the thing about the needle was surfacing in my mind. With Luciano beside me, I borrowed his office phone and used my code card to dial a friend of mine—an assistant L.A. county coroner, at his home. With the phone on speaker. "Elisio," I said, "what would be the effect of injecting a person with a jet of compressed air? With a cork popper."

  "Depends on where. In the brain or spinal column or heart, or a major artery, it would kill them."

  "Would the injection into one of those give the appearance of a heart attack?"

  "An injection into the heart would cause a heart attack."

  "If a woman was injected in the heart, what evidence would there be? Assuming she died at once."

  "Huh. To start with, there might be a spot of blood at the point of injection. The perforation would be visible anyway, if you looked closely enough. And minor damage to the capillaries in the skin and intercostal muscle, and in the heart. If the needle didn't penetrate into one of the chambers, and the compressed air was released into the myocardium itself, there'd be conspicuous local tissue damage."

  "And that would be deadly?"

  "Definitely. It would cause severe myocardial trauma."

  It helped to have had Introduction to Forensic Medicine back at Northern Michigan.

  Luciano looked impressed and pleased. "I'll write this up," he said, "and check those prints against the files."

  "Shave Vanderpol's head, too," I told him. "She wouldn't have held still for someone stabbing her with a needle like that one, unless she was unconscious. She may have been blackjacked. If she was, there ought to be discoloration. Maybe swelling; I'm not sure. And look under her left breast. That's a logical place to have injected her; it wouldn't show there. And if she was, check the breast for prints."

  9

  I left Sacramento with something further to do. Prints in the FBI archives are from police files. Access to print files of the military, government employees, and so forth are only accessible with a subpoena. And you need substantive evidence to get one. But Donald Pasco would have left prints on the video cubes he'd brought with him. They'd have other prints on them too, but with today's technology you can get useful images of prints overlain by prints, along with how many layers down any given print is. If prints on, say the bill and the needle cap, matched any of those on the cube, that would be evidence enough for the subpoena.

  And enough to get a hair sample for a DNA analysis, to compare with one of the semen. Assuming there was clear evidence she'd been killed by an injection.

  There were prints on both the cubes. I eliminated some of them as Joe's and Dalili's, his secretary. The rest, with a note, I sent from our computer to the police computer in Sacramento, attention Sergeant Luciano. Then I went home, stopping for a six-pack on the way, stripped down to cutoffs, and spent the rest of the day on my recliner watching baseball play-offs. Getting up mainly to put a frozen Mexican pizza in the oven. I felt like I'd earned it, calories and all, even if I hadn't made much progress on the Ashkenazi job.

  10

  On Monday I told Carlos about the Sacramento connection, which might or might not have anything to do with Pasco. I also ran down for him what I'd learned and hadn't learned about Ashkenazi, and recommended we call it a done.

  He thought about that a minute. "No," he said, "stay with it for now. If we get lucky, and they arrest Pasco, then you can pull together what you've learned about Ashkenazi, and we'll go over it with whoever replaces Pasco as director there."

  That meant waiting, not my favorite inactivity. So I took some compensatory time off and went to the club, where I stretched and did Choi Li Fut forms till I'd worked up a good sweat, then put in an hour on the exercise machines, twenty minutes on the bike, and an hour dozing on the grass in Plummer Park. After that I ate lunch and went to a matinee of A Man for His Time at Mann's Chinese Theater, where I ate a tub of popcorn. Finally I went back to the office. Vanderpol had been sapped and murdered, just as I'd figured. The prints on the needle cap and the bill were Pasco's. So were prints on Vanderpol's left breast. Pasco was being held without bond, for Murder One, and DNA prints were being made from the semen and hair. I played it for Carlos, and he congratulated me.

  "Write up your report on the Ashkenazi investigation tomorrow, and we'll see what Anti-Fraud says when they see the bill. They won't be happy, but we've got a signed contract."

  I went out to the parking lot, started my car, and turned on the radio to KFWB News Radio. I don't often listen to news while driving. It's a distraction. But this time I did, just in time to hear about the murder of Arthur Ashkenazi! The body had been discovered that morning and none of us had heard about it. He'd been shot in bed, through the head. I was back in the elevator in about fifteen seconds, up to the ninth floor, and caught Carlos just getting ready to leave. I told him what I'd heard.

  "Ashkenazi's place is outside Montecito," I said, "so it'll be in the sheriff's jurisdiction. We ought to get the contract for it. We can tell them we've been investigating Ashkenazi for the state, which gives us a head start on the case."

  He got on it right away. Carlos has the authority when Joe is out. The sheriff went for it, and Carlos told him I'd fly up that evening. I caught supper at Morey's, then headed for the Larchmont Station, and a flight to Santa Barbara.

  * * *

  At the Santa Barbara sheriff's headquarters I learned something about the case that hadn't been released. Ashkenazi had been critically ill when shot. Possibly even dead, according to Sheriff Montoya. He'd been shot through the brain, a shot that wouldn't have caused much bleeding alive or dead. The reason for keeping this quiet was, the coroner said the disease symptoms were of viral meningitis. And he didn't want to start a panic. People would remember EVM, the epidemic viral meningitis that had killed more than a billion people, planetwide, in the winter of early 2000.

  Tissue samples had been sent to the California Department of Health Services, attention the Chief of Vector Biology and Control. She and Sheriff Montoya were the only persons the coroner had informed. He hadn't told his secretary, hadn't entered it on his autopsy report, hadn't even informed the county health department. The sheriff didn't tell me until I'd signed an injunction in advance, forbidding me to tell anyone without his approval. Even his undersheriff didn't know.

  Viral meningitis! I wasn't very enthusiastic about going out to Ashkenazi's place, but I didn't have much choice.

  A deputy drove me. It was dark when we arrived. There was another deputy at the house, and Ashkenazi's servants were still there.

  The bedding was just as it had been when the body had been taken away, but not as it
had been when he was found. Ashkenazi had been somewhat wound up in the sheet, and they'd had to cut it to disentangle him. There was little blood. More sweat stain than anything else, from the meningitis. The pistol must have had a silencer; the shot hadn't wakened the servants. There'd been faint powder burns; the shot had been fired from about three feet, from the side toward the window. The gunman must have stood almost against the queen-size bed. The 9mm slug had been dug out of the floor for ballistic tests. There was no cartridge case. Probably the action had been hand operated to give more effective silencing.

  The house doors had all been locked—that was done by a single switch—and there'd been no forced entry. But a reasonably agile gunman would have had no trouble getting in through the window, which had been open. A moment's discomfort—the insect screen had been electronic—but no actual difficulty. Climb the encina oak in the side yard, walk out on a massive limb, then step off on the first-floor roof and walk to Ashkenazi's bedroom window.

  I talked to the servants, a middle-aged Hispanic couple whose English was more fluent than my Spanish. At about 5:20, Mr. Ashkenazi had told Mrs. Ruiz he was going to eat supper out, something he did occasionally, but almost never without giving her a lot longer notice. He'd seemed quite cheerful. "Mr. Ashkenazi was a very nice man," she added. Then her face crumpled, and I waited till she'd had a brief cry. He'd left the house about 5:30 and returned at 7:28; she'd looked at the clock when she heard him come in.

  "Did you notice if he seemed well?"

  "Well? I don' know. I didn' actually see him. But I heard him talkin' to his periquito—his bird—when he walked through the livin' room. He sounded like he always sound; very frien'ly." Her voice broke, and she started to cry again.