Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

by Shelley Singer

  “Want to ride over with me?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Tell me more.”

  “Great party, great entertainment, great cause, and an inside view of a Pacific Heights mansion. What more do you need?”

  “The price.”

  “Hundred.”

  “Hundred?”

  “I’ll take you for your birthday.”

  “My birthday’s in February, and I’d rather you gave me a date with Debra Winger. Really great entertainment?”

  She named a famous impressionist and a sixties rock star I’d liked back then. “And some local acts, too. Joe Richmond will be in town for it, and Rebecca Gelber will probably come. I’ve never met her.”

  I’d been reading about Rebecca Gelber, from time to time, in my morning scan of the paper. She lived in the area somewhere. She was the woman who was running against Richmond for the Vivo endorsement.

  I don’t know what made me decide to go to the benefit. Fascination with a man who would be king? The impressionist? The rock star? The mansion? Maybe I felt guilty for making the Vivos waste all that postage on me. I agreed to go.

  The benefit was still a few days away when Richmond hit Northern California and began to get more local press again. He was all over the place— Silicon Valley talking about polluted groundwater, San Francisco talking about the Bay, Sonoma County talking about the Russian River and sewage problems. I saw him being interviewed on the six o’clock news, and I read about him in the papers. Gelber was also making the rounds. She was, after all, the native daughter, and her people didn’t take the opposition’s invasion lying down. She was everywhere, too.

  I was determined to have a good time, since I was paying so much for it, so on the big night I whipped myself into a party mood while I was getting dressed. I sang, I danced, I smiled at myself in the mirror. My twin tiger cats, Tigris and Euphrates, watched me from the bed with half-closed eyes. I ran a comb through my hair— it’s blond and doesn’t show the gray much, women like the curls, and it’s hardly thinning at all yet— one last time, dumped some food in the always-empty cat dishes, and headed up to Rosie’s.

  “So,” I said, as we cut down Fifty-first Street to the freeway on-ramp, “how come you aren’t bringing a date?” We hadn’t talked much lately.

  “Between engagements,” she said. I knew the social worker was long gone, but I’d thought the chef, Lissa, would be around for a while. I said I was sorry to hear it. “And you? Why isn’t Lee coming tonight?”

  “I haven’t talked to her for a week,” I said. “She’s been on one of her work binges.” Lee was an attorney who lived up in Petaluma. I’d been seeing her off and on for several months. Rosie murmured something consoling about that. We were crossing the Bay Bridge. It was a nice evening, with the fog beginning to drift in through the Golden Gate and lap up the western edge of the city. The City. San Francisco. All the other cities in the Bay Area are called by name. They are not The City.

  When you take the Bay Bridge into San Francisco you ride the upper level and you get the full impact of the view. Riding back to the East Bay on the lower deck, you don’t see much of anything. Which says a lot about attitudes around here. But what the hell, man, the East Bay’s tough; we don’t go for that fancy stuff anyway.

  Pacific Heights, on the other hand, goes for the fancy stuff in a big way. This is the kind of neighborhood where mayors live, and internationally notorious attorneys, and society remnants of an older San Francisco where coming-out parties really meant something. The houses are mansions made of stone, like rocky crags looking down on one of God’s most favored places.

  The one we were going to looked like it had fifty rooms. Unfortunately, it did not have fifty garages, so my Chevy and I were on our own. I found a spot on the street, only three blocks away, and we walked back. Just walking on that street made me feel like I had money.

  A butler in tails opened the door. He was very big and very muscular. He glanced at our tickets, and as he led us through the reception hall I whispered to Rosie, “He looks like a bouncer.” She favored me with an exasperated smile.

  The butler-bouncer escorted us to a double sliding door, at which stood a large blond woman who also could have been a bouncer. She wasn’t wearing a horned helmet, but I could imagine one. Her pale hair was captured in a braid that circled the top of her head, and when Rosie handed her our tickets, she smiled and said, “Ja, danke, Rosie.”

  “You’re welcome, Gerda,” Rosie replied.

  The room we entered was huge, maybe seventy feet square. What kind of house, I wondered, had a living room that size? Then I realized the “living room,” or parlor, or whatever this place had, was somewhere else on the first floor. This was a ballroom. It was furnished with a lot of folding chairs, some— get this— sconces on the walls, a couple of banquettes between three large draped windows, a big refreshment table, and a stage at the far end. People were milling around. Dress ranged from dinner jackets to jeans, from long skirts to shirts, tights, and no skirts at all.

  Rosie and I, pretty well covered by mid-level clothing, fit in just fine.

  About a hundred people were already there, and more were filtering in past the Valkyrie at the door. I recognized some faces from the speech, one of them belonging to the graduate student who had introduced Joe Richmond that night. Rosie said hello to a couple of people, and introduced me to a red-haired young woman who taught art somewhere and was a partner in a video company called Cleo’s Asp. Her name was Cassandra, or maybe it was Pandora.

  They got into a conversation about someone I didn’t know, so I wandered off toward the refreshment table, up front near the stage. There were two bowls of punch, both with orange slices floating in them. One was labeled nonalcoholic. I tried the other one, which turned out to be a watery sangria.

  I was drinking punch and listening to a nearby conversation about deformed ducks at a pesticide-polluted wildlife preserve, when a deep, soft female voice said, “I don’t think we’ve met, have we?”

  We definitely had not. She had long dark hair, hot brown eyes, and a quirky smile. She was dressed the way some college women dressed when I was twitching through puberty. The kind of older women I found agonizingly desirable. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, a black beret, a wraparound skirt, and black tights. I must have stared.

  “Have we?” she repeated.

  “No. But just for a moment there, you looked familiar. I’m Jake Samson.”

  She extended her hand and I took it, briefly. “Pamela Sutherland. I saw you come in with Rosie Vicente. I’ve heard her mention you. I don’t think I’ve seen you at any of our meetings, have I?” She was examining me closely as she spoke, as though she were trying to figure out where I fit in the world and if I fit in hers.

  “No. Obviously a mistake on my part.”

  She smiled coolly, ladled herself a cup of the nonalcoholic, slugged it down, and said, “Maybe I’ll see you later. I’m on, now.”

  The guitar case she retrieved from a chair next to the stage stairs was old and battered. She wasn’t old enough to have worn it out herself. But then, she wasn’t old enough to be copying the dress of the Beat Generation from memory, either. Maybe she’d been frozen for thirty years and someone else had been using her guitar.

  There was a quick burst of applause as she strolled onto the stage, set the instrument case down, and snapped it open. She looked around and gestured to someone in the crowd, who clapped his hand to his head in a “Damn, I forgot” gesture, trotted off to another room, and returned carrying a wooden stool, which he handed up to her. She placed it behind the microphone, fiddled with the mike until it shrieked, and said, “Hi.” The crowd went wild. Then she pulled out a guitar that was only a little less dark with age than the case. It was an acoustic guitar; the stool was a coffeehouse stool.

  Pamela’s style and her performance were perfect examples of the way cycles work. Everything comes back, but always with kinks, like the original idea had been lying w
rinkled in a closet too long. Her bearing was not quite right, and she was a better musician than most of the coffeehouse strummers I remembered. As a woman, she lacked the diffidence of those earlier female folksingers. Her songs were not political in the same way— there were no songs about unions and bosses in her repertoire— but there was a villain, a “they” as in “What Have They Done to the Rain?” By the time she’d gotten to that one, an old favorite of mine, I had rejoined Rosie near the back of the room. The song appeared to be a favorite of Rosie’s, too, because I caught a suspect glint of moisture in her eyes, and when the music ended, I was afraid she’d break her hands clapping.

  “Sentimental slob,” I said.

  “Yeah. I tend to get maudlin over life and death.”

  “Melodramatic, too.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  I just smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “Didn’t I see you talking to Pam before her performance?”

  “Just a couple of words. I think she thought I was a ringer for the nuclear-power industry. Direct from Rancho Seco, brought to you by the friendly folks at Pacific Gas and Electric Company.”

  Pam was being cheered wildly by the dewy-eyed crowd.

  I wondered if I could ever believe in even a good cause that passionately again. It would be fun. Probably even good for the arteries.

  Pam was taking her bows, but refused to do an encore. Instead, she introduced a band called Three Mile Island. I could not categorize their music at first, until I heard them singing “Moon Over Bikini,” followed by “Love Letters in White Sands.” Some of the members of the group had spiked haircuts in various colors; some, including the woman who played bass, had crewcuts. All were dressed in skewed copies of fifties clothing. The tenor sax, for example, had orange spikes and was dressed preppie— chinos, sweater and penny loafers. One guy was wearing white bucks, and had one of those little sacks of white shoe-dusting powder hanging from his belt.

  Much to my surprise, Pamela was heading our way. She stopped beside me, nodded at me, nodded at Rosie, and stood listening politely to the group.

  They were well into their fourth number when the graduate student I’d remembered from the night of the speech stalked over to Pam and whispered, “This is in very bad taste. I’m surprised at you.”

  Pamela gave him a lazy-eyed look that spoke of infinite boredom.

  “They do a great show, don’t they?”

  “Pam,” he said, “this is not funny.”

  “Noel,” she said, “it’s not supposed to be. When you produce a show, you can do it your way.” She nodded toward the stage. “People like them, they’re good, and we’re trying to raise money.” It was true. The audience was clearly crazy about Three Mile Island. I thought they were great.

  “I don’t produce shows.”

  Again, she gave him the lazy-eyed look, but this time with one raised eyebrow. For a woman who appeared to be under thirty, she was very good at the decades-of-disdain expression.

  Noel grunted and stalked off again. Three Mile Island finished their set and announced an intermission. Rosie got into a conversation with someone and wandered off again, toward the punch, probably.

  With perfect timing— was he waiting in the entry?— Joe Richmond appeared at the door and the crowd turned like a sheet in the wind to face the back of the room. He waved his hands, smiled, called out a few greetings, a few names, and was swallowed up in the enthusiasm of his partisans. Pam was smiling, but she didn’t join the mob.

  “Impressive man,” I said. I felt like I had to say something, and “impressive” was the first word that came to mind.

  “You don’t sound impressed,” she said.

  “I am. As an observer. I was also impressed by your performance. Very moving. But I’m curious about something.”

  She cocked her head charmingly and waited for me to go on.

  “How does it happen that someone your age does that particular fifties look so well?”

  She laughed. “I do it better than most, don’t I? I may be the only one in the folk revival that tries so hard to be authentic. I guess you could say it’s just part of my act. But I learned it from a good teacher. My mother was Elmira Sutherland.”

  It took me a second. “Oh,” I said stupidly. “The Elmira Sutherland?”

  Who was an old-time folksinger and writer of protest and satire songs. She did most of her best work in the fifties, but she wasn’t widely known then because a lot of her songs got somehow preempted by the male folksingers of her day. Her particular legend came briefly alive again in the late sixties and early seventies, with proper credits at last. Then, I thought I recalled, she died. And Pam had said her mother “was.”

  “She was a great woman,” I said. “She wrote some great songs. I remember.”

  “Thank you,” Pam said simply. “She was involved in some great demonstrations, too. One of them killed her.”

  Now that I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember Elmira Sutherland dying in a demonstration. I shook my head, puzzled.

  Pam explained. “In the early fifties, a bunch of artists and musicians went out to the desert to protest a nuclear test. They must have been too close to the test site. Every one of them is dead now.”

  “A lot of them must have gotten pretty old,” I protested.

  “They all died of cancer. Lung, mostly.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. For a beautiful person, with a beautiful talent, Pam was pretty damned depressing. I thought she was carrying the Beat image just a little far. I looked away, uncomfortable, and saw Joe Richmond coming toward me, smiling.

  Turned out that he was smiling at Pam.

  She returned the smile and I felt a moment’s jealousy, automatically trying to gauge the degree of intimacy.

  He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick, friendly hug.

  “Everyone says it’s a great show, Pam. Thanks.” He turned toward me, looking sociable.

  “This is Jake Samson. Jake, Joe Richmond. Jake’s an observer, Joe.”

  He laughed. “Good. Glad to hear it. How do you feel about what you’ve been observing, Jake?”

  I decided to tell him the truth. “I think your ideas make a lot of sense. But politics is politics, isn’t it? Doesn’t the term imply coming to an accommodation with whatever actually is? I don’t have a lot of faith in political organization, in political contests. Lots of screaming and yelling and stupid, petty point-making and all it ever amounts to, in the end, is who gets to take home the cash and the power.”

  He nodded. “That’s right. There’s been a lot of disagreement in our movement about whether we should enter the electoral process at all. The Greens have run some local candidates but have been pretty leery of anything on a larger scale. That’s why we broke away. We wanted to go farther. But even among the Vivos we have some people who don’t think we should be going for the governorship yet. We even have a candidate who’s running specifically so that, if he’s endorsed, he can refuse to run. I think it’s a tricky issue. Especially when it comes down to splitting the vote, maybe hurting people in the major parties who feel as we do, winding up with the wrong people in office. Very tricky.”

  What was wrong with this guy? He wasn’t self-righteous enough, didn’t have the God-is-with-me attitude you expect to hear from a politician, especially a politician with a cause.

  I decided to poke him harder. “I seem to remember reading some newspaper stories about the Greens in Germany,” I said. “The impression I got was that they’re pretty far to the left. Is that where you people stand?”

  “I’m afraid the press is simplistic,” he said. “The Greens have a slogan: ‘Neither right nor left, but in front.’ And that’s how we feel, too. We advocate nonviolence, something neither political extreme understands. And Marxism is as materialistic as capitalism. It’s the sanctification of unbridled production that’s destroying the world. I don’t think any of the old formulas provide the right answers. It would be
nice,” he said, smiling, “if the workers of the world would unite and stop insisting on consuming everything in sight.”

  I was staring at him. I could hardly believe my ears. Pam was laughing. She threw me a triumphant look.

  “How are you going to achieve all this great stuff?” I wanted to know. “With a strong state that will wither away when it’s done what it needs to do?”

  That cracked him up. “Strong states don’t wither away. Not ever. I think you need to read some of our material on grass-roots democracy and small-scale organizing.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said, smiling. I was enjoying the man. “But I try to avoid reading nonfiction. If I’m going to get depressed or pissed off, I figure it’s best to do it with fictional characters.”

  “I’m glad to hear you’ve managed to avoid reality,” Pam said. Her tone was cool. She liked me as long as I didn’t mess too much with Richmond. She seemed to be losing patience with me. So was I.

  “I keep trying.”

  At that moment, there was some excitement near the door and a tall, handsome older woman entered with a small entourage. There were some shouts and a lot of applause.

  “Rebecca Gelber,” Pam said for my benefit. Richmond’s opponent caught his eye and they both smiled and waved. At the next moment, a thin, dry-looking man in a dark suit— now here was a man who actually looked like a butler— came up on our other side and, apologizing for the interruption, asked for “a few words” with Richmond. Richmond looked suddenly very serious, and maybe even a bit tired. “Be right with you, Carl,” he said. Then, turning back to me, “I wish you would take a better look at us. We could use more people who think, who don’t take anything on faith. You’re an original, Jake. So are we.”

  How could you not like a man who says a thing like that?