Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2)

by Shelley Singer

  “I do not go out with sixteen-year-old girls.”

  “Okay.” She sat looking straight ahead, smiling to herself.

  “This is extortion.”

  “I guess.”

  “Why are you playing this little kid game with me, Barbara?”

  “Because I’m a bored little kid.” She was still smiling that tiny smile.

  “What do you mean by ‘going out’?”

  The smile got bigger. “We could go dancing.”

  “Forget it. Any place I’d want to go dancing wouldn’t let you in.”

  “Fuck you, Samson.” But she didn’t stop smiling. We’d reached the center of town. “Still got my card, Jake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, if you want to know what I know, just give me a call. I’d settle for dinner. You won’t be sorry.”

  Sure, I thought, I’ve heard that line from women before. And always from women who made me very sorry indeed.

  Bunny got out of the car and headed for the bus station.

  The kid made me tired. I didn’t realize how tired until I was standing at the bottom of the canyon steps. They looked steep and damned near endless. Afternoon sunlight was sifting down through the redwoods. Gold and green and red brown. The water in the spillway ditch was shallow, and eddying around the rocks and outcrops of root-bound clay instead of crashing and foaming. But this was still March, and there would be more rain. Alan had been unlucky. That knife could easily have stayed hidden in the mud until May. Or even forever.

  I didn’t see Rosie sitting on the steps below my room until I got all the way up to the path-called-a-lane. She was holding a pair of binoculars in one hand and using the index finger of the other to give me the “shh” signal. I crept up and sat beside her.

  “What’s happening, Rosie?” I whispered. “What are you doing?”

  She flashed me a grin. “I’m watching Hanley watching Carlota.”

  I laughed as quietly as I could. “Are you also watching Carlota?”

  “Oh, every so often I take a look just to see what Hanley’s seeing.”

  “What’s he seeing?”

  “Nothing very much. She’s fully dressed, and she and Nona aren’t rolling all over the floor in uncontrollable lust or anything. Nona’s not even home. I don’t know why he does it. Can’t be all that entertaining.”

  “What’s he doing while he’s seeing nothing?” I bent over and peered around the corner of my room. Hanley was just visible on the other side of the bridge, crouching behind a fuchsia.

  “The last time I looked he was drinking beer and belching.”

  “Wow.”

  “I know, Jake, but there must be something to it. He says he doesn’t trust her. He must suspect her of something.”

  “Oh, hell, Rosie, that reminds me. I completely forgot to tell you what I found out yesterday.” In all the excitement of the night before, I’d neglected to mention my visit to the county building and my talk with Mary.

  “That does make the canyon motive stronger, doesn’t it?” she said thoughtfully when I’d finished my story.

  “Yeah, but there’s more.” I ran down the day’s Bright Future events.

  “So Mrs. Smith confirmed what Chloe said about Smith quitting.”

  “Right. And it was a very sudden decision.”

  Rosie shook her head stubbornly. “Maybe that’s important and maybe it isn’t, but it doesn’t let the canyon off the hook.” She jerked a thumb in the general direction of Hanley Martin.

  I agreed. “Hey,” I said, changing the subject, “I’ve got a poker game on tonight. Want to sit in?”

  “Can’t. Got a date.”

  “Same one as last time?”

  “Uh-huh. Her name’s Carol. Really nice.” She was peeking through her binoculars at Hanley.

  “Nice? That could be serious.”

  Her smile reminded me a little of Bunny’s, but she would not be deflected from her detective work. “He’s still there, watching.”

  I stood up. “The hell with this bunch of freaks. I’m heading for the East Bay.”

  25

  After two weeks, I was really looking forward to my poker game. Maybe it’s part of my mid-life crisis, but I seem to require a certain consistency in my life these days, a few habits. That Tuesday night game is one of the little habits that keeps me from floating off into outer space.

  Those who have no trouble keeping their feet on the ground, and those who prefer life in outer space, will have no idea what I’m talking about.

  Tigris and Euphrates came to meet me as I trudged up my gravel driveway with one large grocery bag tucked in the crook of each arm. Tigris rubbed against my leg, purring, and almost tripped me. Euphrates was a little cooler. He meowed once in irritated greeting. Then they both ran ahead, leading me to the house as cats will do. I hadn’t been home in days. Rosie had been around a couple of times, I knew, and had given them some attention. But I noticed, as they trotted to the door, that their round bellies were rounder than ever. My neighbor, it appeared, had been taking good care of them.

  Appearances were not deceiving. When I dumped my two bags on the kitchen table I noticed that their food dishes were full to overflowing. One large bowl of canned food, one large bowl of dry. Dinner had been served.

  I unpacked the bags. Beer and chips for poker; steaks, salad makings, smoked oysters, canned clam chowder, and French bread for dinner. Hal likes his food, and he’s congenitally skinny no matter what he eats. But I like him anyway.

  Then I got a towel from the bathroom and hung it on the fence between my yard and my cat-sitting neighbor’s. The prearranged signal. I was home. No need to cater to the felines until the towel came down again.

  I was gently stirring the vodka martinis, Hal’s favorite drink, when he banged on the door.

  “Hey, man,” he said, slapping me on the back, “getting into trouble again, right? Another case?” For some reason, Hal finds me amusing. I poured his martini, straight up, and gave myself a short glass of beer.

  “Can’t seem to help it, Hal.”

  He plunked himself down in front of the Franklin stove and stretched out his long legs. “Don’t suppose it has anything to do with Artie’s nephew being in jail?”

  “You heard.”

  “Sure. Is Artie going to be here tonight?”

  “He said he would. I tried to convince him that sitting up in that canyon having a nervous breakdown wasn’t going to help anything.”

  “Good. Now about your problem. I picked a couple of expert brains for you today, so ask me some questions.”

  I sat down across from him in my favorite chair, the one that tips over if you sit on the arm, and shoved the footstool halfway across the small room so we could share it.

  “Bright Future, for starters. Did the people you talked to have anything on the company?”

  “They sure knew the name. They’ve been trying to keep tabs, you know? Keeping an eye out. But they don’t have anything solid.”

  “What about a company called Perfect Day?”

  “California?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Cosmetics, though, I know that.”

  “You didn’t say anything about it in your phone message.”

  “I guess I forgot. I wasn’t at my best that night.”

  He thought a minute. “Don’t recall anyone saying anything… Let me use your phone a minute.” When he got his party, he asked him or her about Perfect Day. Then he said “Uh huh” once, recited my phone number, and said goodbye.

  “She says it sounds familiar. She’ll call me back. Now, ask me some more questions.”

  “I don’t know. It’s hard. The whole thing sounds so tricky, legally.”

  He grinned, and his face, which is the color of strong black tea, broke into a whole new set of good-looking planes. “I’ll tell you, Jake, it seems to be a tricky issue. The laws are relatively new and they vary from state to state. And there’s a whole lot of vagueness.”

  “
Anything federal?”

  “There’s an FTC decision that’s reasonably clear and pretty recent.”

  He dug in his hip pocket, pulled out a notebook, flipped past the first few pages, and shoved his glasses farther up on his nose.

  “Now the FTC says multi-level marketing companies have got to concentrate on retail sales. They don’t like big investments in front or any kind of purchase requirement of inventory. They’ll land on any company that makes misleading claims about earnings or sells distributorships. And you got to let people sell product back to the company if they can’t move it.”

  “What’s that about retail sales— what does that mean?”

  “Means you’ve got to have a product and you’ve got to sell to the public. You can’t have a plan where the only real consumers— the only people who buy the product— are people participating in the plan. Distributors. In other words, the product has to be viable in its sales potential. You can’t just go along making people buy twenty cases of goose grease nobody wants so they have to unload it on someone else just below them in the pyramid who has to unload it on someone else in the program. That kind of closed system is, as a matter of fact, called a pyramid. And it’s illegal. Legal multi-level marketing doesn’t involve a closed system.”

  I was beginning to see a little light. “In other words, you can’t just circulate the product, whatever it is, among your own people, with the guy at the bottom sitting on goose grease he can’t sell and everybody above him making money on what he paid for it.”

  “Yeah. That’s part of it. Like a chain letter. And the buck stops somewhere. Before it ever gets to the poor sucker who bought in last.”

  “That’s it? You have to sell real product to real consumers and not tell lies about how much people can make doing it?”

  “Don’t forget the part about big investments. And telling people they have to buy a ton of product in order to get in on this hallelujah-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Got another martini?”

  I went to the kitchen, trying to get it clear in my head. As far as I could tell, Bright Future and its sailors sold a more or less real product to real humans. Also as far as I could tell, they didn’t require any big initial investments. About ninety dollars to get some demonstration materials, according to some of the stuff Morton had showed me. Was that okay?

  I brought Hal his second martini and put the question to him.

  “Sure. Most states say anything under a hundred dollars is okay for sales materials.”

  I was remembering that Bright Future had a lot of ranks in their navy. I showed Hal the chart Morton had given me. At the bottom were lieutenants, with commanders above them. Then every city had a captain, who was under a state commodore, who was under a regional admiral, who answered only to Howard Morton. And everyone made a percentage off sales. Hal said that was okay.

  “That’s what makes it multilevel. But legally, everyone’s got to sell product. And everyone who makes a commission off someone else’s sales has to be functioning as a supervisor in some way.”

  “Can that go on forever? I mean could you have a hundred levels?”

  “No, not really. Because you have to sell retail. That’s the catch. If you’ve got a hundred people divvying up the commissions you can only go one of two ways. You’ve got to have an awfully big markup to start with, or you’ve got to find people who are willing to work for nothing, or damned near it.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Well, look. You’ve got, for instance, a fifty percent markup. Say you’re selling books. You buy a book for five dollars from the company and the ultimate consumer gets it for ten. That means you’ve got five dollars to spread around in commissions. That will only spread so far before nobody wants to work.”

  I got that part. Then I had one of those flashes of insight that make me so valuable as an investigator. “And since you have to be able to sell retail, you can’t get bigger commissions by pricing the book out of the market.”

  “Right. Exactly. The only way an endless chain would work is if nobody outside the company ever had to buy any of the company’s product.”

  That was all pretty clear, but I still couldn’t see where Bright Future was slithering over the legal edge.

  “This company,” I said, “has a so-so product. They did okay with it in the good old days, but then they started going downhill. I don’t think they’ve improved the product, but they brought in this multilevel stuff and they’re doing better. How would you explain that?”

  “Could be better motivation of the sales people, bigger volume. Could all be legitimate. They making any big money claims?”

  “Nothing specific. Just a lot of hype.”

  “That’s standard. But you think there’s something funny going on?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think they’re not selling to real people?”

  “I don’t know. I never got a straight answer on the number of students they have, and I wouldn’t trust any ‘proof’ they showed me. But I can’t believe they’re running a straight business. The system’s just too damned complicated.”

  “But that’s how they work it. They dazzle the people with this mishmash of levels, with the downshoots and offshoots and money moving all over the place, and they dazzle them with figures. And the figures look good. All they can see is that this company offers them a whole lot of different ways of getting rich.”

  “And the company makes money by dazzling people with figures?”

  “In a way. See, one of the things that happens is that the company does tend to sell more product, at least for a while. Things look better because you’ve got people buying up batches of books, or courses, or whatever, because they’ve been hyped into believing they can sell them. The company can’t make them buy the stuff, because that’s against the law. But these guys look up the line, and see some— what is it, admiral?— driving a big car, and they get the idea. Go along with the program. Look good. Make an impression. Get up there yourself.”

  “Up the ladder,” I said, remembering what Morton had said to me.

  “Yeah. Sure, everybody’s supposed to be selling to consumers, but the guys at the higher levels are also making a percentage off the guys below them, guys they bring into the program, for supervising and training. And the people they bring in bring in more people. Up, down, and sideways, money stacked on money. Or so they say. And the only way you can move up is by creating volume.”

  “So the company might actually make more money, at least for a while, if they got enough people hyped up enough.”

  “Sure.”

  Maybe that was all there was to it, but Chloe had implied that something more was going on. She’d said something about recruitment. Hal had said something about selling distributorships.

  I mentioned that.

  “You think there’s a chance people are getting head-hunting commissions?”

  “Head-hunting? Is that what they call it?”

  “Yeah. And that’s the big one. That’s the one big no-no, in pretty much all the states. You can’t make money from slave trade. Nobody pays to join the program, and nobody makes a fee for recruiting. It’s product or nothing. But head-hunting, huh? Well, the fact is, that’s where some big money can be made if you can get away with it long enough.”

  “Okay, but what I don’t understand is this: Say some guy buys in. He pays a lot of money to get the job and he buys a lot of product and runs right out to recruit a bunch of people. And he fails. He can’t sell the product and he can’t find any suckers. Isn’t he going to be a little bit upset?”

  “Separate the product from the head-hunting. If it’s a matter of product, remember this: You can’t make people buy product to get into the program, and the company’s required by law to buy back at least ninety percent of the investment of anyone who does buy product. In a legal operation, that’s how it works. And if the product doesn’t sell eventually, the company loses. Eventually. But if it’s a matter of head-hunting, wha
t you have is a totally under-the-table arrangement. Maybe a guy halfway up the pyramid pays a kickback to the guy below him for every new recruit he brings in. Or say the sucker being recruited doesn’t know the law about recruiting and somebody tells him he’s got to slip some cash— maybe a whole pile of cash— to the guy above him in order to be let in on the ground floor of the biggest thing since vitamins. Or in order to be promoted so he can make bigger commissions. If you have enough people slipping a thousand apiece up the line, you’ve got something to divide that beats the hell out of selling some piddly product. Someone’s going to make some real money.”

  I looked at my watch. It was time to start the steaks. Hal followed me into the kitchen.

  “But to get back to my original question,” I said. “People might go along with something like that for a while, but eventually, won’t someone make a complaint?”

  He nodded. “Great-looking steaks. Sure. Eventually, someone figures out he isn’t getting rich and he’s out some money. But one of the things that happens with these companies is that you’re made to feel like a real asshole if you don’t persevere. There’s a lot of pressure, a lot of you-can-succeed-if-you-really-work-the-program kind of hype. And sometimes people are just plain embarrassed to admit they’ve been conned. But some day, somewhere, there’s going to be a complaint. And when that happens the law begins to look into it. And eventually the company is run out of business. But before that happens, there might be a few people who make a lot of money, and the hell with the company.”

  “And that’s happened?”

  “It’s happened.”

  The phone rang. I was busy with the food, and Hal went to answer it. He didn’t seem to be saying much. Mostly, he was listening.

  “You’ve got something there, all right,” he said when he came back into the kitchen. “About Perfect Day cosmetics. Couple of years ago. Atlanta. Not a big deal, not a real big company. But it looked like there was head-hunting going on and when the Georgia law started having a look, the company just kind of faded away. What’s the connection?”

  I told him about Morton.