Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

by Shelley Singer

  “She just didn’t see me that way, you know?”

  I tossed out what I hoped would be a leading question. “Political differences?”

  He shook his head, overcooking another piece of steak. “Not that I know of.” He screwed his face into a puzzled expression. “That’s an odd question.”

  “Just wondering. I didn’t mean anything by it.” Casually, I skewered a hunk of bread and dipped it in the cheese. “By the way, do you like fruit?” I was thinking of the bowl of fruit on Harley’s deck. Billy didn’t even blink.

  “Not with fondue,” he said. Then he paused, fiddling with his fondue dish. “You know,” he said sadly, “she never told me she was married.” The flame under the oil, smothered by his fidgeting, went out. “Damn.” He looked around for the waiter, spotted him at the other side of the room, and waved at him. The waiter, serving another table, nodded in acknowledgment.

  “No, she didn’t tell me anything at all. Just that she wanted us to be friends. I even asked her if there was someone else. She said there wasn’t.” Billy shot an impatient look across the room at the waiter, talking to a customer. Then my gentle companion did something I would never have expected him to do. He stood up, marched across the room, and tapped the waiter on the shoulder. I couldn’t hear what he was saying to the man, but he didn’t act friendly. He stalked back to our table, followed by the waiter, sat down, and pointed imperiously at his fondue dish. It was duly lighted, and the waiter left.

  Maybe, I thought, Billy could organize a trip to the Laundromat after all. If the Laundromat served food.

  “You were saying?” I prodded. His face was still congested with irritation. He slumped back in his chair again and took a deep breath.

  “I really loved her. I would have understood if she’d only told me the truth about being married. Although I don’t really see what difference that makes.”

  I lost a piece of bread in the viscous mass of cheddar and fished around for it. “So I guess you were pretty pissed off about the whole thing, huh, Billy?”

  He looked shocked. A little drop of oil glistened in his beard. “Of course not! I could never have been angry with Margaret. I told you, I loved her.” This man, I was thinking, didn’t know much about love.

  “So, why are you telling me all this now?” I had talked to him twice before. The first time he’d said he barely knew her. The second time he’d said they were good friends. Now he was saying he had loved her. Maybe the next time I talked to him he’d tell me they’d been lovers for five years.

  “Well, I was pretty upset at first, afraid to get mixed up in it. But then the police came to see me anyway. And I don’t really have anything to hide. What the heck, Samson, I don’t mind being in your article. As someone who was close to her. Someone who kind of loved her from afar. You could mention the meditation center, too. Her story is a story that should be told, and I would be proud to be part of it.” Some suspect, I thought. He wants publicity. Then he leaned confidingly across the table. “Listen, Samson, what do you really think about that fire at her husband’s office?”

  “I think somebody doesn’t like him. Did you tell the cops you loved her?”

  He looked at me like I’d just said meditation gave you warts.

  “I told them we were friends. After all, that’s all it amounted to. Friendship. They could see it was hard for me to talk about it, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.” I waved at the waiter and asked for the check.

  “About this article,” Billy asked, “when will it be printed?”

  I shrugged. “Hard to say.”

  “Well, listen, you, uh, you haven’t even asked for my last name. For the article. It’s Wolter.” He spelled it, and I wrote it down dutifully on the back of a hardware store receipt I found in my pocket.

  – 16 –

  Billy was not ruled out completely, but he’d moved way down on the list for the time being. His aggression with the waiter had been surprising; still, I couldn’t imagine a killer being so anxious to talk about his private life. And as an unsuccessful lover, at that.

  I drove over to King Street again. No sign of Cutter’s car yet. I sat there for more than an hour, reading through his diary pages, before I got restless enough to start pawing through my dash compartment looking for something more interesting to read. I found a book of crossword puzzles I’d bought for a friend in the hospital. He’d been released before I’d gotten to see him and I’d been carrying it around ever since. Scratching a little deeper in the accumulated papers and debris, I found a pen. Then I put the diary pages at the bottom of the other papers, closed the glove box, and began to pass the time more pleasantly.

  Another two hours and a dozen or so puzzles later, Cutter showed up. I decided just to keep an eye on him and see if the police came to visit. See who else came to visit. Wait for him to go somewhere and maybe meet someone. It was time to meet some of the other characters in his book.

  Two more hours passed. I’d gotten there around two and it was now nearly seven o’clock. My legs and back ached from sitting, and I couldn’t get up and get out of the car. He might see me. I was getting hungry. I was considering driving down to the corner and stretching my legs when Cutter came out his front door.

  Considering that someone had broken into his flat the night before and taken away some items that connected him with arson and homicide, Cutter looked unconcerned. He was wearing the same emotionless expression he’d affected the other times I’d seen him. Or was it an affectation? He didn’t check out the street, didn’t look around before he got in his car. The perfect automaton. Hitler would have loved him.

  I waited until he’d driven almost all the way up Alcatraz to Grove before I started my car and began to follow him. He turned left on Grove, heading north. At Ashby he turned right. He was working his way east, toward the campus.

  Sure enough, he was on his way to University Avenue. Then he cut over to the north side of campus. I was a block behind him when he parked on Euclid and got out of his car. I swung past him and parked in a red zone. When he crossed onto the campus grounds, I got out of my car and started after him on foot.

  I’ve never done a lot of tailing, and it’s pretty tricky. If the guy doesn’t look behind him, you’re okay. If he knows your face and is worried about being followed, and has half a brain, it’s damned near impossible. But Cutter never turned around. He just kept on marching down the campus paths. I wondered if we were headed for a demonstration.

  We walked for a while. A lot of it seemed to be uphill, and I was beginning to realize that I could be in better shape. I didn’t get tired. I just knew I was walking. He turned up the steps to the Greek Theater, the giant amphitheater donated to the university by a newspaper mogul. I’d been there only a couple of times before, once for a country-western concert.

  Cutter went through the turnstile area. The place was deserted. It was nearly sunset. Crouching on the steps, I watched him go toward the theater itself. There was no reason to go through it to get somewhere else. I guessed we’d reached our destination.

  Like I said, I’d been there twice before, once for a concert. The other time I went to meet a woman in the eucalyptus grove above the theater. A very spectacular place to get romantic, looking down the tiers of the immense semicircle with the moonlight illuminating the fake antiquity of the seats and the big stage at the bottom with its Greek columns. As far as I know, no one in my family was ever Greek, but that night I had gotten carried all the way back. I figured it was either a strong genetic memory or an indelible mark made sometime in my childhood by a Hollywood production.

  I decided not to go right into the theater. Anyone already in there couldn’t miss someone coming in after him. I went up above, where I’d been that other night. From there I could see and not be seen, with any luck at all. I cursed myself for not carrying binoculars. If he’d come to meet someone I didn’t know, the distance down to the bottom of the half-bowl would make it awfully hard to recog
nize the person again.

  I got down on my belly next to a fragrant eucalyptus and looked down. I saw Cutter, his back to me, sitting alone on the lowest tier. There were leaves and strips of bark on the ground beneath me from the perpetually shedding trees. My clothing would smell medicinal. Well, I thought philosophically, eucalyptus was supposed to be a flea repellent. I looked at the trees. The time I’d come for the concert it had been sunset, too. The dull moss green leaves had been lit from within, like they were today, by the rust red glow of the trunk and the branches, a glowing shadow of red. As the sun drops lower, the red glow fades to mauve and merges, finally, with the moss of the leaves. And then it’s night.

  This time I didn’t get any further than mauve.

  “Don’t move, Samson,” the voice behind and above me said. A deep male voice. I moved my head, twisting my neck as far as it would twist, and saw the man with the gun. Someone I knew but not very well. It was the man named Charles, the other newcomer at the meditation group the night I’d gone. The one in Margaret Bursky’s sketchbook. We’d given only our first names that night. He’d picked up my last name somewhere else.

  “Hello, Charles,” I said calmly, gazing up from the ground into the gun’s good-sized muzzle. It looked like a .38.

  “I told you not to move, Samson. Eyes front.” I did as I was told. There was still no one down below but Cutter.

  Charles took a deep breath and then bellowed, “Hey, Eddie!” Cutter looked around, startled, unable to place the sound. “Up here!” Cutter turned and saw us and started climbing the eighteen tiers of concrete. He came up fast. He was breathing hard when he got to the top. He glared down at me. I shrugged as well as I could and smiled.

  “I guess,” Charles’s voice was heavy and sarcastic, “that you didn’t know you were being followed, right, Eddie?”

  “Shit,” Eddie replied in a strangled voice.

  “I saw him come in after you, dummy. I was looking for cops.”

  “Listen, Frank, how the hell could I know—” Frank, I thought. The F in Cutter’s notes. The Frank on his appointment calendar.

  “Forget it,” Frank, alias Charles, cut in. “We’ve got him anyway. Roll over, Samson.” Reluctantly, I turned over on my back, the leaves crackling under me.

  Frank was wearing the same sports coat and slacks he’d had on the night the meditation group met. He still looked like his ulcer was bothering him. He had little lines of pain around his mouth and eyes, and his left hand rested protectively over his stomach.

  “Okay, Samson. Where’d you put the stuff you took from the dummy’s apartment?”

  “Listen, Frank,” Cutter began to protest.

  “And you had to tell him my name, too, didn’t you?” Frank turned partway toward Cutter, abruptly, threateningly. Cutter looked a little less emotionless than usual. Then Frank turned back to me.

  “Answer me!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a writer—” He kicked me hard in the side. I couldn’t keep from crying out. That made me mad. I started to get to my feet and he planted his toe on the point of my chin. The vertebrae in my neck made a cracking sound—a sound I heard just before I blacked out for a fraction of a second. I’d been punched in the jaw a few times in my life, but I’d never been kicked there. It makes a difference. The pain was so bad and so generalized that I couldn’t tell what damage had been done. But I could still move. And I could see that Cutter had turned his head away. Squeamish?

  “What did you do with the bag, Samson?” My eyes flicked to Cutter’s face. I couldn’t be sure, but he seemed to be warning me or pleading with me. My head was clearing a little. “The bag. Where is it? The pictures?”

  I didn’t think Cutter would beg me to keep quiet for my own sake. And why wouldn’t he want to get the bag back? Then I realized that he wasn’t worried about the drawings. Frank hadn’t said a word about the really interesting item—the diary. Cutter’s own contribution to the evidence. That had to be it. He hadn’t told Frank about the notes. Frank wouldn’t have liked it if he’d found out the kid had been writing little stories about all his friends. He might turn his gun on his own lackey. This Frank was no student playing at politics.

  Nevertheless, he did know the drawings existed, including, presumably, the one of his own ugly face. Even if he didn’t know for sure that I had them, he seemed to be willing to gamble my life on the possibility.

  I, on the other hand, preferred staying alive to holding on to the drawings. But they were at my house. My nice private house. My castle. A good place to kill me once he had what he wanted. And Rosie might be home. Taking them there could endanger her. If I’d been physically able to manage it lying down, I would have kicked myself.

  I didn’t have to. Frank got impatient with my slow thinking and kicked me in the balls. I rolled up like a snail, gasping, blinded in a deep red and watery universe.

  “The bag,” he repeated. I couldn’t talk, but he knew that. He waited.

  When the first shock of pain had passed and I was able to feel other things, like the tears still gushing out of my eyes, I asked him a question.

  “Let me stand up? I’ll get the bag for you if you’ll let me stand up.” Oh, how badly I wanted to be up on my feet, level with this bastard, away from his feet.

  He smiled slightly and nodded, stepping back, pointing the gun at my gut. I struggled to my feet, nearly falling to the ground again.

  “I took the bag for the story. The drawings. There aren’t any others, none that she’s done recently. So I took it. Okay?”

  Frank glanced at Cutter. “Search the boy, Eddie. Let’s find out who he is.”

  Eddie obeyed, and I was very glad I’d tucked the diary pages away in my car. I didn’t care how much trouble they gave Eddie, but I sure didn’t want Frank to know I knew as much as I did. I was also glad I had no investigator’s license. All they found on me—driver’s license, credit cards, library card, letter from Probe magazine—was stuff that showed I was what I said I was. Jake Samson, writer. No evidence of any other kind of work.

  “Okay, Samson, maybe you are a writer. Maybe that’s why you’ve been nosing around. But you can’t have the drawings.” He smirked. “I just can’t tell you how sorry I am about that.” He seemed more relaxed, now that he’d beaten me. Almost happy. I was beginning to think that, if he did believe me, he might let me live. He could figure that it was more dangerous to make another corpse, a reporter’s corpse, than to take a chance on my writing about a couple of guys who took back some stolen property.

  Okay, so now what? I was on my feet, but I still couldn’t stand up straight. My chin and jaw felt stiff, partly with blood, I thought. Something, probably a broken rib, stabbed me when I moved. As for the rest, well, walking would not be easy. And through the physical pain something just as strong and primitive was prodding me. My territory was about to be invaded and the prospect was sickening. I made a desperate, futile try at stopping that invasion.

  “Let me deliver the sketchbooks to you, anywhere you say. I’ll go right now and get them. I know what I did was breaking and entering. I don’t want trouble. I’m not out to get anyone.” I faked a catch in my voice, hoping they’d actually fall for it. Frank just laughed at me and Cutter exploded.

  “Well,” he sputtered, “Someone’s sure out to get me. And the cops—”

  “Just shut up, dummy,” Frank growled. Then he laughed. “Besides, we took care of her.”

  Cutter turned to his boss. “We don’t know she called them. Maybe he did.” He jerked a thumb in my direction. He certainly had grounds for suspicion. Who else would have called the police? Yeah. Who else?

  “And how would he know anything about it?” He gave me a Richard Widmark sneer. Apparently I had succeeded in failing to impress him.

  So Frank thought he knew who had turned Cutter in that morning. A “she.” A member of CORPS? Someone he’d “taken care of.” How?

  Frank said “Let’s go,” and stuck his gun in his
pocket. He kept his hand in there, too. He shoved me to get me going and we started to walk. My mind was moving a little more smoothly than my body. Cutter knew the cops had gotten a tip about him. That meant one of two things. Either he’d gotten a tip himself and was evading them and their questions or he’d already been questioned and left alone. For the time being. I knew the police couldn’t do much with an anonymous phone tip except question him and maybe watch him, and they didn’t seem to be watching him very carefully yet. I wondered how much further they’d take it when they got my package of diary pages in the mail.

  Although the pain was easing everywhere but in my neck and my ribs, I moved as slowly as I thought Frank would tolerate. He tried once or twice to hurry me along, but he didn’t push very hard. I hoped that was because he’d exhausted his need to torture me.

  He stopped our parade at the first water fountain, pulled out a handkerchief, and washed the blood off my chin. After all, a shambling wreck being herded along wouldn’t attract that much attention in Berkeley, where people have seen even worse wrecks getting by on their own. But blood might have raised a few eyebrows.

  – 17 –

  We made our way across the campus, earning no more than a few curious glances. Just three pals out for a walk. We emerged into Berkeley proper. When we passed Cutter’s car, he turned toward it, but Frank growled at him again.