Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  “Anyway,” Carmen went on, “most nights T.J. would’ve been out walking for hours, stopping at the cafés, talking with the old-timers. He said he was trying to soak up the past, get in touch with the waterfront’s ghosts, find out how it really was.” He shrugged. “I figured he was a little cracked on the subject, but pretty much harmless.”

  “So on that night …?”

  “Like I said, he was drunk as a skunk. Bourbon—you could smell it. Surprised me. I never seen him drink more’n one beer, and mostly he just nursed it. But that night he was plastered to the gills and not making a whole lot of sense.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, he started out talking about the port, like usual. And then he was rambling on about some old-timer he’d gotten friendly with who’s living out of his van down around Mission Bay. And he just kept on rambling. He was talking about the port, but it wasn’t the port—you know what I mean? There was something about a railroad overpass and two people, or maybe it was three. And something else about heat lightning on the water. When I asked him if by railroad overpass he meant that tunnel he’s always telling me about, it snapped him out of it. He blinked and looked around like he’d woke up from a trance, and then he got real quiet.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Carmen reached across the table and put his big hand on my wrist. “Miss McCone, those fellas who took too many drugs back in the sixties? They flip in, they flip out. Does T.J. …?”

  Suits’s words of yesterday, when I asked him if he was on coke, replayed in my mind: “Drugs are a roller-coaster ride that’s not worth the price of the ticket.” In the old days he’d smoked plenty of grass, but now that I thought about it, I couldn’t recall him using anything more potent. “I doubt it, Carmen.”

  “Then what the hell was all that about?”

  “I don’t know. Did he say anything else after he … came out of the trance?”

  “Yeah, but that didn’t make much sense, either.” He closed his eyes in concentration. “He said … that even when you work hard at forgetting things and think they’re behind you, they’ve got a way of coming back. You get reminded when you least expect to, and then you realize what your own stupidity has ruined.”

  I considered his words in light of what I knew of Suits’s life, shook my head. “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it. He left then, and next thing I know, I’m hauling him out of the Bay. I figured he fell in because he was drunk, and then he made up the story about being mugged because he was embarrassed.”

  “And what do you think now?”

  Carmen spread his big hands on the table and studied them as if their lines and scars might contain the answer. “Well, I’d say either T.J.’s having a run of real bad luck or else somebody is out to get him.”

  Seven

  A railroad overpass, two—or maybe three—people, heat lightning on the water. The key elements of Suits’s drunken ramblings played in my mind as I drove south toward Pacifica, where Bay Vista’s concierge lived. Something Suits had tried to forget, a memory that refused to die. But was it related to his current problem? And if so, would he tell me about it?

  I’d ask him, but I wouldn’t count on him confiding in me. Suits, I’d realized, was an intensely private man; if the memory was painful, he wouldn’t share it with anyone, for whatever reason. Better to turn my attention to finding out how last night’s intruder got into his penthouse. If I knew that, there was a good chance I could identify him and wrap this case up. Then Suits could get on with the business of changing the history of the Port of San Francisco, and I could collect my obscenely large fee and get on with the business of attracting a stable of steady clients.

  I took the Pacifica exit from the 280 freeway, crested the hill, and glided down toward the flat gray sea.

  Pacifica is a town of many disparate areas: tracts that sprawl across the hills; commercial flatlands by the water; residential neighborhoods of all types that crowd deep into the canyons. Because of this diversity it hasn’t ever forged much of a cohesive identity, unless you count the fact that it’s odd. Things are done differently there than they are in the more mainstream Peninsula communities east of the hills. Pacifica, for example has a Fog Festival to celebrate its dreary, socked-in summer climate; a few years ago, in a fit of previously unheard-of political activism, its residents recalled the entire city council. As I exited Route One at Paloma Avenue, I reflected that I kind of liked the town—proving, perhaps, Rae’s contention that I myself was a little off center.

  Carmel Avenue, which I’d earlier pinpointed on my Rand McNally StreetFinder, was a narrow strip of eucalyptus-shaded pavement whose houses crowded up against a hill on which someone had built a castle. Not so much a house that looked like a castle as the real thing: stone walls and battlements and slits of windows at which to stand watch in case the enemy invaded by sea. I’d glimpsed it many times from the coast highway and vowed that one day I’d drive up there and have a close look; now there was no time, and I reluctantly bypassed the lane that led to it.

  The homes on Carmel ranged from 1950s tract houses to architecturally improbable structures that were only a level above shacks. Cars and trucks and boats on trailers clogged their driveways or stood along the edge of the pavement next to a treacherous-looking drainage ditch. The address for Sid Blessing was a dilapidated cottage that had been added on to without any definite plan: clapboard painted a blistered electric blue, with a broken and taped front window where several crudely executed stained-glass pieces hung. An assortment of flowerpots containing half-dead plants cluttered the front stoop; the lawn, if ever there was one, had gone to weeds.

  I pulled the MG into the driveway next to a rusted-out van whose rear axle was propped up on concrete blocks. The cottage’s wooden steps swayed ominously as I climbed them. When I rang the bell it played a familiar tune that I couldn’t immediately place. Then the lyrics “You can’t always get what you want” came to me. Appropriate.

  No one answered my ring. I tried a second time, then went back down the steps and checked the sides. A fence to the left, too high to see over; a padlocked gate to the right; no window in the garage door.

  The neighboring house was more conventional: brown wood and stucco, well kept up; a late-model Chevy with an infant carrier in the backseat sat in the drive. I skirted the drainage ditch and went up to the door of the house, noting the words “Welcome to Our Happy Home” stenciled in green paint on the concrete sidewalk. A more promising sentiment than the message delivered by Sid Blessing’s bell.

  The sweatsuit-clad woman who came to the door was young, Asian, and looked as cheerful as the words on her front walk. “The people in the blue cottage?” she said after I showed her my I.D. and asked my question. “I don’t know much about them. They’re kind of … well, nobody ever told them it isn’t nineteen sixty-eight anymore.”

  “Old hippies?”

  “Not exactly; they probably were just babies back then. Maybe they get it from their parents. All I can tell you is that their kids are called Ariel and Ariadne, and when the parents think we’re not looking, they throw their trash in our can because they’re too cheap to pay for pickup.”

  “The man has a job, though?”

  “Oh, yeah. Goes off every morning in this maroon-and-gray uniform. They’re just cheap about the trash, is all. I’m glad they’re moving.”

  “Moving? When?”

  “They may already be gone. A guy I see visiting there sometimes came in a Ryder truck yesterday and took away most of their stuff.” She glanced over at the blue cottage. “Maybe they decided to stick the landlord with that dead bus. But her stained glass is still in the window, so they might come back for one last load.”

  “What time did the guy with the truck come yesterday?”

  “Noon? Yeah, ‘All My Children’ had just come on.”

  “And you didn’t talk to him? Ask him where the Blessings were going?”

  “I didn’t care. The whole time they li
ved there, I kept wishing they’d go away.”

  I got out my card with the office and car-phone numbers and scribbled down my home number as well. “If they come back, will you call me?”

  “Sure.” She took the card, fingered its raised lettering. “Look, you want me to try to find out where they went? I could ask the people on the other side when they come home from work tonight. I think they’re the only ones on the street who had much to do with the Blessings.”

  “I’d appreciate that, and I’d pay—”

  She shook her head. “No, it’d be my pleasure. I’m kind of fascinated by P.I.’s. On ‘All My Children,’ there’s this guy, Tad? He used to be a P.I., but then he got amnesia from falling off the bridge and came back two years later thinking he was somebody else. The new P.I.’s, Charlie and Hayley, are okay, but they don’t have Tad’s—” She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide. “Sorry! My husband hates it when I do that.”

  I smiled. “Doesn’t bother me. Speaking of Tad, it’s noon. I don’t want to make you miss your program.”

  * * *

  I’d just passed the turnoff for Skyline Drive on my way back to the city when the car phone buzzed. I picked it up and heard Suits’s agitated voice. “Dammit, Sherry-O, I’ve been trying to get you for an hour!”

  “My name is Sharon, and I’ve been out of the car—on your business.”

  Suits ignored the comment. “I need you—now.”

  I sighed. “Where are you?”

  “My Oakland office.”

  “I can be there in forty-five minutes.”

  “No, go to Bay Vista. That second key I gave you works the elevator to the roof. I’ll have Josh pick you up in the bird.”

  “Suits, I’d rather—”

  “Josh’ll be waiting. Hurry, please. The goddamn butchers’re trying to cut me down.” He broke the connection.

  I replaced the receiver none too gently. Butchers—good God, he could be dramatic! But this latest crisis might be relevant to the case. …

  I drove to Bay Vista.

  * * *

  “Shut that thing down and come talk to me!” I shouted at Josh Haddon.

  He frowned and pointed to his ear.

  I ducked under the JetRanger’s rotor and shouted again. He nodded and turned off the engine. The rotor whiffled to a stop.

  I moved away and perched on the wall, nine stories above the ditch where construction workers and equipment toiled. Josh came over and leaned beside me, taking out a cigarette and lighting it in cupped hands. “T.J.’ll be furious if we don’t get to the office ASAP,” he said.

  “Too bad. I need to ask you some questions.”

  He glanced at me, lines around his eyes crinkling. “You don’t take any shit from him.”

  “No. Do you?”

  He shrugged. “Man’s got a lot of power.” Paused to drag on his cigarette and added, “But it’s easy to tune him out when I fly.”

  “You’ve been piloting for him how long?”

  “Thirteen years. Things sure have changed. At first all we had was my little patched-up Cessna.” His mouth tightened—something unpleasant about the memory.

  “So you’ve been with him during all his turnarounds?”

  “Knew him before he did the first. Back then I was flying for the … company.”

  “What company?”

  He smiled slowly. “Actually, it was a dope farm up near Garberville.”

  “He turned a marijuana farm?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you were their pilot?”

  “Yeah. Those were great days.” His freckled face softened, the way a child’s does when recalling a special Christmas. “Was a terrific spread, way up in the hills. Belonged to a guy named Gerry who’d made some money down in Hollywood and sunk it all into the land. He was growing class stuff; you could smell it for miles. I was flying it all over the country in my Cessna. We were distributing incredible quantities, getting top dollar. Trouble was, Ger wasn’t making any profit, and nobody could figure out why.”

  “So Suits …”

  “Suits.” He shook his head. “Jesus, it’s been a long time since anybody called him that. Remember the suitcase? What a piece of shit. Yeah, Suits was one of our customers. Used to make a run up there every month or so. Liked to hang around, get stoned with Ger. One night they were solving the world’s problems like usual, and Ger starts telling Suits about his problem—namely, no profit. And Suits says, ‘Hey, what’ll you give me if I fix that?’ And Ger—he’s really stoned by now—Ger goes, ‘A million dollars, cash.’ And Suits tells him, ‘Done deal.’ And they shake on it.”

  “So how did he fix it?”

  “Same way he has ever since. Fired everybody, including me. Posted armed guards to keep us off the land. Sent Ger on a long vacation. Brought in people who needed the work and didn’t blow weed. The problem was simple, see: everybody from Ger on down had been smoking the profit.”

  “Did Suits get his million?”

  “Yeah. Ger turned it over to him in four installments—each time in the rottenest old suitcases he could find. First thing Suits did was bail my Cessna out of hock—I’d gotten behind on the payments—and hire me as his pilot. Plane belonged to him after that, but I still got to fly it. Then Ger sent him to one of his doper customers in L.A. who owned a film-equipment company that was in trouble. That guy sent him to Colorado, and then we went to Texas, Pennsylvania, and Nevada. And the aircraft just kept getting better.”

  “So all this time you’ve been pretty close to Suits—”

  A beeping sound came from Josh’s windbreaker. He reached into its pocket, grimaced. “That means T.J.’s getting seriously impatient.”

  * * *

  Suits was waiting for us on the roof of the office building, uninjured arm semaphoring wildly, as if he thought Josh couldn’t set the JetRanger down without his help. When we landed, he rushed forward so heedlessly that I feared for his head. Josh opened the door, gave him a hand up, and he slumped beside me, panting.

  Josh glanced back for instructions. I motioned for him to shut the copter down. Suits, struggling with his headset, overruled me by pointing toward the sky. I helped him adjust the earphones, then said into my mouthpiece, “Let’s not go anyplace till we’ve talked.”

  “No.” Again he pointed upward. “Just fly, Josh.”

  “Suits, you’re wasting money—”

  “It’s my money, dammit! Some people take tranquilizers or drink when they’re stressed. Others work out or run to their shrinks. I fly.”

  Expensive stress-management technique, I thought. But he had a point: it was his money. “So,” I said, watching the building grow smaller beneath us, “what’s happened now?”

  He sank lower in his seat, cradling his cast with his good hand. “Noah and I took a run over to the Port of Stockton. Noah … what’d you think of him?”

  “I didn’t get a chance to form an impression, other than that he looks ill.”

  “He is—heart trouble. Could pop off any minute.” Suits’s mouth curled disapprovingly; he seemed to take Romanchek’s illness as a sign of weak character. “Looks like the perfect corporate lawyer, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed. “Not with his checkered past. Used to be a drug lawyer, defended some of the biggest names in the business—successfully. Proves appearances can deceive even you.”

  “I’ve been fooled a time or two. You said you and he went to Stockton?”

  Suits’s smile faded. “Yeah. Noah’d prepared the final contract for the guy who was going to be my terminal manager. All I needed was his signature. I wanted to bring him on board right away; this terminal’s going to be state-of-the-art, and I need its manager to work with the architects and contractors from the first. But the guy backed out on me.”

  “Why?”

  “He said word had gotten out about our deal, and his present employer had gone me one better. Bullshit. I know the operation he works for; they couldn’t�
�ve topped my terms. I think somebody bought him off.”

  On the surface, his reaction to this business reversal seemed extreme. “But you don’t have any proof of that,” I said.

  “No, but I’ve got a hell of a lot of coincidence. After Stockton I went back to the office. There was a message from the head of my architectural firm; I returned the call. He said they’ve run into some snags on their current project that’ll cause a delay in getting started on mine. He suggested I should think about getting somebody else.”

  “When was he supposed to start on the terminal?”

  “Next week.”

  “He didn’t give you much advance notice.”

  “No, and I happen to know he’s already wrapped up this current project.”

  “You confront him about that?”

  “Sure. He said I must’ve been misinformed and if I wanted I could verify what he told me with the client whose project supposedly got bogged down.”

  “Did you?”

  “Why bother? If he’s telling me to verify it, it means the client’s backing him up.”

  “All right, I can see why you feel that—”

  “You don’t see anything yet. You know the old superstition about disasters coming in threes?”

  I nodded.

  “About ten minutes after that conversation, I get another call. This time it’s one of my moneymen. He’s mumbling about unanticipated losses and shortfall in cash flow—all that kind of vague bullshit that I know’s bullshit because I’ve slung it a thousand times myself to cover up the fact that I’ve decided to pull out of a deal that I’m not yet legally committed to. The gist of what he’s saying is, he’s out. You still think this is simple coincidence?”

  “No,” I admitted, “I don’t.”