“Your uncle’s not here, hasn’t been any of the times you walked in here. You can see that. You should leave.”
Jon stuck his hands deep in his pants pockets. “Here’s the funniest part,” Jon said, casting his glance around the filthy den. “I walk in here looking for my long-lost uncle, and see my dog, Max, that someone stole out of my yard. I was just about to call the police to help get him back from that freak over there with the tattoo of Jesus on his forehead.”
“Don’t bother,” answered the interlocutor. He glanced at his companion, who took out a switchblade from his pocket and took a gigantic step toward Jon. Waiting to see if Jon would scream or run away—he did neither, just stood his ground—the muscle walked past to the unconscious addict and cut the rope off his wrist.
“Max, come here, old boy!” Jon called out. The desperate little dog ran over and jumped into Jon’s arms, licking his hands. The dog would probably have run over to anyone who called his name in a friendly tone—but on top of that Jon had rubbed his hands in his pockets where he kept a stash of beef jerky for his long walks through the city, and the dog could have smelled it a mile away. Jon had a friend who was a former animal-control officer and now ran a rescue shelter—Max would have a new home within days.
“Now I feel better,” Jon said, lowering the dog and taking up the leash. “Let’s go for a walk, old boy.”
12
MICHAEL PALMER
Hank Zacharius always knew when he was being followed, although he had never really gotten a good look at them and had only vague suspicions as to who they might be.
As a freelance investigative reporter, he was often working on as many as a dozen stories at one time. Corruption in Oakland city hall; union graft underlying the renovations of pier 41; the hedonistic society of young starlets that were catering to the wildest fantasies of selected studio executives and then using the resultant compromising photographs to blackmail their way into films. Years ago he’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for exposing the ties between higher-ups in the LAPD and the most powerful L.A. gangs.
No wonder his stories were so often blocked from publication by the crooked politicians and powermongers that were as much a part of the landscape as the Golden Gate Bridge in the City by the Bay. No wonder he was followed nearly every time he left his apartment. He knew things, lots of things, and there were always people who wanted to learn what he knew.
But tonight he needed to be certain he was alone.
Tonight he had scheduled a meeting with an informant—his best. It was hard enough to set anything up with a man who guarded his identity so closely that he’d never even given Zacharius his name. Call me Calvin, he’d say, it’s as good a name as any. Calvin was a cop, or maybe a gang member, for all Zacharius knew. He had no idea. He had guesses, but he had never been able to nail down any of them, and that was probably good. Whatever he was, Calvin was, as they said in the business, plugged in. Ask a question, come up with the cash, and the man either knew the answer or knew how to find it.
Zacharius was aware that Calvin stood to make much more money by stringing information for some of the better-known reporters, the police, or even the feds. But the informant never said no to him, and when Zacharius’s stories weren’t selling, which at the moment was most of the time, Calvin often did what he could to help.
This night Zacharius was fearful not only of exposing his resourceful snitch but of putting himself in harm’s way as well. Now after ten years, he was going to use any publicity surrounding Rosemary Thomas’s memorial to show the world that she had not killed her husband, as he had always maintained in his initial investigation and reporting. His articles had largely been dismissed by his peers and the public, but Zacharius always knew there was more to the story, and not surprisingly he’d never been able to shake this one case.
He’d known Rosemary for twenty years. He’d even known Chris. Zacharius had been to their wedding, their children’s christenings, birthday parties. Rosemary had cried on his shoulder after discovering the first of Chris’s infidelities.
Altogether, he had written four articles about the highly publicized murder. One of them had centered on the physics of the crime itself, stressing Christopher Thomas’s size and weight and the difficult logistics of getting his body into the eight-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound iron maiden. Then moving the corpse and torture device from the site of the actual murder to some sort of truck, to the Lufthansa flight that transported the body overseas. Another one traced Rosemary Thomas’s movements throughout the week prior to her husband’s murder, up to the widely heard verbal battle after Christopher had demanded a divorce. The timeline ended with her allegedly sedating him prior to killing him and laying him out in the museum’s iron maiden.
The final article was speculative, but Zacharius considered it his best. It was an in-depth investigation of Christopher Thomas’s life, focusing on his ever-changing finances, his overseas trips as gleaned from photocopies of his passport, and his relationship to an underworld thug, an art fencer, and possibly a Chinese drug lord named Roger Hong, another witness who had turned up dead.
But Zacharius was largely discredited—partly because of his friendship with the Thomases, particularly his friendship with Rosemary. It eventually got to the point where the news biggies wouldn’t even read his stuff, let alone buy it or at least check the facts.
Now after ten years, he hoped to regain his credibility among his peers and the public.
The meeting place Calvin had chosen was number six on a list of ten locations Zacharius had provided in and around the Castro, Mission, and Haight districts. Zacharius would institute a meeting by taping a small piece of paper beneath the lip of a bar on Divisadero Street at precisely 4:00 p.m. Within a few hours, a piece of paper with a number from the list and a meeting time would be taped in the same place. This evening, the number directed the reporter to a trendy, always crowded coffee shop, just a few blocks off Golden Gate Park.
“Mr. Zacharius, I presume.” They’d known one another for years, and Calvin greeted him the same way each time they met. The informant slipped into a seat directly behind him.
Zacharius turned to face him.
Calvin was a thin, African-American man in his fifties, physically unremarkable in almost every respect except for his eyes, which were dark and feral, probing one moment, scanning the room the next, always on red alert. But his averageness allowed him to maneuver in society, listening in on conversations as he passed, noting who was pausing to speak with whom.
“You look tired,” Calvin said.
“I am tired. Sometimes it’s hard—” Zacharius frowned. “I was the best, you know, the best.”
“I know. You were damn good, Hank.”
Zacharius sighed. “They tried to ruin me, Calvin. From the moment I claimed Rosemary Thomas was innocent. First they blocked the article I wrote detailing the facts of the case, and how she couldn’t have killed him. Then they set about to discredit my theories about the posse of people who each had the big three—method, motive, and opportunity—by portraying me as some whack job.”
“That’s old hat, my man. Probably true but old hat just the same.” Calvin leaned forward. “But you didn’t seek me out to whine, did you, Hank?”
Zacharius worked some of the tension from his sloping shoulders. “I’ve got a hundred and a half I can give you right now, but it’s been a little hard lately keeping the boat afloat these days.”
“When I need the money, I’ll send up a flare. What is it you want to know?”
“Thanks.” Zacharius stared down at his hands, trying to get past his embarrassment.
“So, there’ve been developments, yes?”
Zacharius motioned the waitress over, ordered a coffee light.
He then slipped the invitation out of his jacket pocket and, after scanning the coffee shop once more, handed it to Calvin. “This arrived at my place today. There’s a stamp on it, but it never was posted—just slid under the door of my apartment.”
>
“The Tony Olsen?” Calvin raised an eyebrow.
“Yes. He was a friend of Rosemary’s.”
Calvin whistled. “Why do you think Tony Olsen wants to open up this old wound?”
“That’s why I’m here. I was hoping you might have some theories.”
The informant shook his head. “I don’t, but it wouldn’t take me too long to come up with some. Men don’t go from obscurity to being as rich as Tony Olsen is without mucking about in a few compost heaps.”
“And?”
The waitress arrived with the coffee. Zacharius drank half of it in a single gulp
“Maybe it’s an owed favor to that cop who went nuts after the Thomas execution. Jon Nunn. Maybe this memorial is supposed to give that washout another chance—get all the principals together, see what happens.”
“What’s Olsen got with Nunn?”
“Don’t play so naïve, my man,” Calvin said “You know as well as I do what the cops are like in this city. A lot of them play both sides.”
Zacharius remained silent.
“Speaking of cops who play both sides, ever hear of Artie Ruby?” Calvin asked.
“Artie who?”
“Artie Ruby, the cop who got into trouble for walking off with evidence years ago—white, powdery evidence from what I remember—and all of a sudden, just like that, he wasn’t a cop anymore, and he was working security at the McFall Museum.”
Zacharius felt a rush of adrenaline. “Why would a museum hire a rogue cop to provide security?”
Calvin chuckled. “You know Chris Thomas was crooked… drugs, forgeries, you’ve heard the rumors.”
“And…”
“If you’re so convinced Rosemary Thomas didn’t kill her husband, you might want to talk to Ruby. I hear he’s available for pretty small money.”
“Any ideas where I can find him?”
Calvin shrugged. “Know a place named Steve’s?”
“The Bogie rip-off by the Embarcadero?”
“I would start there.”
Neon and black paint.
Zacharius felt that the attempt by the management of Steve’s to create a noir ambience had failed miserably. Still, despite or perhaps because of the stench of stale booze, body odor, and cheap perfume, the place was busy. It took a twenty, but a heavily rouged barfly on the last stool pointed him to a back room that was hazy with cigarette smoke. He spotted Artie Ruby immediately—a skeletal, Runyonesque man with serious bags under his eyes, and the stub of a cigar poking out of the corner of his mouth. The worn leather easy chair next to the former cop was vacant. An ashtray on a stand next to the chair was filled to overflowing.
“So much for California’s fearsome smoking ban,” Zacharius said, moving the ashtray a few feet away and settling down in the chair.
“The cops are no more expensive than the fines,” Ruby replied, staring straight ahead. “In fact, those two smoking over there are both detectives. Who are you by the way?
Zacharius introduced himself.
“Yeah. I’ve heard of you.”
Zacharius rubbed at the stinging in his eyes. He had stopped smoking eighteen years ago and now was like a human bloodhound when it came to cigarettes, able to tell someone was a smoker ten feet away. Ruby had yet to make direct eye contact with him, but even at this angle, something about him was pathetic. Small. That was the word that popped into Zacharius’s head. This was a small, limited man.
“I have three twenties in my pocket,” Zacharius said. “They’re yours if you’ll come someplace away from this smoke and talk to me for a minute.”
Zacharius wondered if he should have offered more, but something about Ruby said Zacharius could dole out what remained of his hundred and a half a bit at a time.
“You got any more than that?” the oddly pathetic man asked.
“If I like what you have to say, I do.”
“Call me Artie,” he said, pushing himself up abruptly and leading the way back down the hall.
They moved through the crowded nightclub to a small table in a black-lit corner that seemed to have been forgotten.
It was hard to believe that this twitchy, sad-eyed sack of a man was once a cop.
“You once worked in security at the McFall museum.” Zacharius said. “You must have known the place pretty well, known Rosemary and Chris Thomas.”
Artie continued staring off into the crowd. “You know, I never stole that cocaine from the evidence room. I was an honest cop. Oh, I cut a corner here and there, and maybe made a deal with a small-time crook to get at a bigger one. But I never deserved what came down on me.”
“Who hired you to work at the museum?” Zacharius asked, trying to keep the conversation on topic.
“I ended up becoming a fucking pariah.” The sadness in Artie’s eyes had intensified, and for a moment Zacharius thought Artie was actually going to cry. Instead, he got Zacharius’s assurance to cover his tab and ordered a boilermaker with Wild Turkey and a Heineken.
“Artie, tell me about Chris Thomas.”
“I don’t know anything. Thomas was a curator; I was a security guard—the two don’t mix. I said good-night to him when he’d leave for the night. That’s all.”
The boilermaker arrived and the shot of Wild Turkey was gone before the waitress had turned away. Zacharius now sensed that Artie had been drinking before he arrived.
“You’ve heard the rumors about Thomas…”
“Yeah, so what, he used to screw around on his wife, lots of guys do that.” Artie still wouldn’t look Zacharius in the eye.
“No, I don’t mean that. There was talk about drugs, forgery, theft…”
“I can’t tell you anything about that. Like I said, I used to do my job and go home.”
Zacharius knew that the window for getting any useful information was rapidly closing. The Heineken was gone and Artie’s words were beginning to slur. Hesitatingly, Zacharius slipped all of his wad but a twenty under the table and stood to go.
“Pay for your drinks out of that,” he said.
Zacharius had taken just a step when Artie Ruby cleared his throat, looked up at him, and spoke in a coarse whisper. “You should let sleeping dogs lie, Zacharius. You’re messing around in a cesspool, and the whole mess is going to blow up in your face. Now, how’s that for a fucking image?”
Diary of Jon Nunn
J.A. JANCE
After Chinatown, I went to a meeting, and when one didn’t work, I went to a second one. The idea of seeing Sarah at the memorial, now that it was drawing closer, made my guts roil. I wanted to see her. I didn’t want to see her. I wanted to smack Stan Ballard in the face. No, that’s not true. I wanted to put a bullet through his heart. That way we’d match. We’d both have holes there.
I knew those scumbags would all come out to mark the occasion. They’d have to. Snakes can’t hide under rocks all their lives. To give the appearance of having nothing to hide, they’d all be there; that’s what I was counting on. Rosemary’s good-for-nothing brother would come for sure. How could he stay away? He was in the witness room that night, and I noticed one thing about him that no one else seemed to catch. The other people there had the good grace to shed a tear or two, or at least they pretended to look sad. Not Peter Heusen. He had watched, grim faced and dry eyed, as they put the needle into his sister’s arm. Maybe it was the drink. I don’t know. He followed me out to the parking lot that warm, dark night. We had a few words. Rather, he did. Then I watched him drive away from his sister’s execution in an older-model Lincoln. And after he left, I drove away too, fully intending to get drunk. Evidently I did that in spades. By the time I finally sobered up, well, Sarah was gone for good and my job was history. And Peter Heusen? As the legal guardian for both his niece and nephew and as the conservator of the Thomas estate, he had come up in the world. Way up. As far as Sarah and her new husband, Stan, were concerned, they seemed to be living in much improved circumstances as well. They had all moved on in Rosemary’s unlamented absence, a
nd as far as I could see, they had all prospered.
When the second AA meeting was over, I went to a third. It wasn’t all about drinking either. I had managed to keep my craving for liquor in check. Nowadays my drug of choice was guilt—the hard stuff, pure and unadulterated. To quit that addiction, I’d need far more than ninety meetings in ninety days. There was only one cure and it hadn’t changed: I needed to find the person who was really responsible for Rosemary’s death. To do that, I had to find Christopher’s killer, his real killer. And that’s what I was doing. The ball had started rolling and there was no way to stop it now.
I thought about Rosemary and Christopher Thomas. How they had lived and died in a marriage of convenience. That was their hell, at least Rosemary’s hell. But somehow I’d gotten sucked into it, had inadvertently become another one of Christopher Thomas’s victims, right along with so many others.
13
GAYLE LYNDS
Haile Patchett didn’t want to get caught by the police. She’d do whatever she could to avoid being locked up. But crime was in her blood. The danger, the fear, the cash—it always brought her a rush.
She put a smile on her face and kept her footsteps light as she walked toward the Ritz-Carlton, a sprawling, shingle-style resort commanding a bluff above the Pacific. The hotel was surrounded by emerald fairways, tidily winding cart paths, scattered cypress trees, and the endless sea.
When she stepped inside, she looked all around, nodding casually at the valets as if she belonged there. In her Vera Wang high-heel sandals and her Charles Chang-Lima sundress—short and sexy, just above the knees, to show her long, tanned legs—she could belong there. Should, even. But that was an old story.
Taking off her sunglasses, she entered the lobby, her shoulder bag clasped to her side. The men watched her, the clerks behind the registration desk and the aging husbands with glittering, hopeful eyes standing in line with their credit cards and forgotten wives. She was not truly beautiful, but she had something, something inside her that was like fire.
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