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

by Shelley Singer

  He looked surprised. He wasn’t ready for that. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Where were you? Who were you with?”

  “Gee, I don’t exactly remember— there were meetings that day and the next. Everybody was meeting with everyone else. I’d have to think about it. That evening? I can’t remember. A meeting, I think. Or maybe I was with Cassandra.”

  “We’d appreciate it if you’d figure it out,” I said. “How could you spend Tuesday and Wednesday in meetings? You have a job, don’t you?”

  “I took some vacation time. The future of the party was more important.”

  The doorbell rang. He jumped up, moved quickly to the entry door, and pushed the buzzer. He walked out into the hall.

  “Cassandra?” I heard an answering call from below. I jumped up, too, and joined him in the hall, standing with him as he greeted her and ushered her in. “Are you feeling better?” he asked her. She nodded. She said hello politely, first to me and then to Rosie.

  “Cassandra,” he said. “These people want to know where I was the day of Joe’s funeral in Minneapolis.”

  “You were at a meeting.” She looked skittish.

  “Tuesday night?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about Tuesday night. We were both at big meetings Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon.”

  I remembered Pam mentioning those meetings.

  “Look, I’m getting tired of this,” Chandler said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done Tuesday night, but if I wasn’t in a meeting I was home in bed. Now Cassandra and I have dinner reservations, and if you don’t mind, we’d like to get there in time to get our table.” He walked to the door and opened it.

  “We don’t mind,” Rosie said. “Cassandra, will you be home later?”

  “I don’t think so.” She glanced at Chandler.

  I kept listening to Cassandra’s voice, trying to match her with the anonymous caller. I couldn’t be sure.

  “Do you mind?” Chandler shrilled.

  Actually, I did. The next morning we were catching a plane to L.A. But then, if she was going to give her boyfriend an alibi she’d have it all clear by the next day anyway.

  It was just 6:45 when Noel swept us all out his front door. Our appointment had been for six. I reflected that he hadn’t exactly set aside a whole lot of time for us.

  – 25 –

  WE had a lunch meeting with Carney; we’d left San Francisco a little earlier than we needed to, and had about an hour to kill after our flight touched down at Los Angeles. We spent it in the airport bar continuing the conversation we’d been having on the plane.

  Rosie sipped at her mineral water, scowling at the twist of lime. She tossed it into the drink.

  “You still don’t know who the caller was?”

  She’d asked me the same question at least three times. I shook my head again.

  “But the person who called talked a lot,” she complained.

  “Yeah, that’s true. For an anonymous tipster, anyway. But he or she was whispering. I’m not even sure it was a woman. It could have been Cassandra. Maybe. Something in the speech pattern. I don’t know. How well do you know Gerda and Cassandra, anyway?”

  “Cassandra, not well. I know Gerda better. I like her. If there is some kind of plot in the works, she wouldn’t be involved in it. And she certainly wouldn’t be involved in anonymous spook stuff.”

  “No,” I agreed. “She’s very forthright. To say the least.”

  “Could it have been Rebecca?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maddux bothers me a lot.” We’d followed up on his lunch meeting the day of Richmond’s death, and on his appointment with a “business associate” the night of the fourteenth. Both checked out. But, of course, his only alibi for the actual hours during which Richmond was killed was Noel Chandler.

  “Me too,” I agreed. “He’s off, somehow. But if you stop to think about it, he’s no more unlikeable than Bruce Gelber.”

  She laughed. We did a little more pawing over the suspects, then went to pick up our rented car. The outside air was warmer than it had been at home, the sun hot.

  From the airport, we found La Cienega and headed toward Beverly Hills. The air wasn’t much browner than it had been in Oakland that morning. We turned right on Wilshire, to Fairfax. It was only a couple of blocks farther to the restaurant where James X. Carney had asked us to meet him.

  The place was called the Chicago Kosher-style Deli. If they’d really been kosher, they wouldn’t have been open on a Saturday. But they didn’t have to be religious to have great food. It is very hard to find a good, really good, Jewish deli in Northern California. Great Italian deli, that’s easy. Great gourmet restaurants. Great ethnic food of nearly all varieties except my artery-clogging own. The big problem seems to be the corned beef. This has probably saved my life, but sometimes I resent it.

  We stepped inside the door. Nice enough, maybe a little glitzy for my taste in delis. All done in art deco pastels, like it was nouvelle cuisine. But someone had gone to some trouble to steal or have copied a street sign that said Howard St., an avenue of tender memory. Other tender memories were stirred by the smells. A symphony with corned beef brass and roast chicken cellos. Cymbals of horseradish.

  I looked around and saw a stocky red-haired man standing up at a booth and looking at us inquiringly. Rosie saw him, too. We walked toward him.

  “Carney?”

  “That’s right.” He grinned and stuck out his hand. “Sit down, Jake, Rosie. I think you’ll like this place.”

  “I think I’ll love it,” I said, sitting. “But I don’t remember telling you I’m from Chicago.”

  He burst out laughing. “You didn’t. I’m from Chicago. I didn’t live out in Rogers Park, but I had some buddies who did. I just figured a guy named Jake Samson would probably appreciate the food.” He smiled at Rosie. “And a woman named Vicente wouldn’t be a stranger to it. Want a beer?”

  I nodded and smiled back at him. “What I want to know is why the hell you’re not running for governor.”

  James X. Carney, it turned out, was about my age and had grown up in Mayor Daley’s neighborhood. He had a brother who was a priest and a sister with five kids. He knew more about political patronage than any ten guys who grew up somewhere else. We reminisced about Daley’s ward heelers, recalling how many of them were fat, balding men who looked just like the mayor. We talked about the neighborhood revolts in the late sixties and early seventies, culminating in the ‘72 Democratic Convention where the machine showed it was beginning to fail, and the mayor with it. I don’t remember when Richard Daley died, but it wasn’t many years after that. We drank beer and remembered Daley’s Chicago, not something you can ever forget, and Rosie, who grew up in Napa among the grapevines and was just a kid in 1968, smiled at us and listened patiently.

  I ordered flanken with potato latkes. He ordered a corned beef sandwich, potato salad, and extra pickles. Rosie ordered chopped liver on pumpernickel with pickled green tomatoes. The talk of Chicago dribbled off. The food came. I decided it was time to maneuver the conversation in a more personal direction.

  “So,” I said, in a brief interval between mouthfuls, “you grew up with politics and you were so impressed you decided to run for governor?”

  “You forget,” he said, smiling a smile that delayed a bite of kosher dill, “I’m only trying to get endorsed. I sure as hell don’t want to run.”

  “Right,” I conceded. “You were so impressed with Chicago politics that you decided to have a party and not show up.”

  He shrugged. “The problem is, it’s not a party. Not yet anyway.” He finished the pickle. “Let’s put it this way, Jake. I believe Vivo’s got a lot of the right answers. But what you have to understand is that the power in this country is already taken by the two major parties and a few monied special-interest groups. They make up the government. And even a government that’s more or less representative only rea
lly cares about the people it represents— the ones who can keep them in or toss them out. They care about the people who make the most noise and have the power to back up their noise. So what that amounts to is they care about some people. They don’t give a shit about the rest. Not the rest of the people, not the air or the water or the animals. Certainly not about anything that can’t yell and can’t vote.”

  He paused. He’d forgotten his sandwich. “And there are still a lot of people on the other side, who see us as nuts and extremists. You think some guy who makes his living, supports his family, working in a refinery, is going to admit that refinery will give his own kid cancer? People have an infinite capacity for taking the short view, painting the scenery green, letting tomorrow, and the planet, take care of itself. Our own planet, for Christ’s sake. It’s the single most incomprehensible stupidity in a long history of human stupidity, the worst cruelty, the worst sacrilege, the most vicious crime. It’s mass suicide and it’s mass murder. Richard Daley was a piker. All he did was toss green dye in the Chicago River every Saint Patrick’s Day. We got bigger and better now.” Carney took a deep breath and ordered another beer.

  “Do you hear me arguing with you, Carney?” I said, polishing off the last of the latkes, heavily slathered with death-dealing sour cream. “Don’t give me a campaign speech. If you’re so goddamn serious about all this, why don’t you run for governor and actually run? And change the government?” Big talk, I thought. No action.

  He had picked up his sandwich and was chewing again.

  “Because,” he replied, swallowing, “it doesn’t work that way. It’s stupid and precipitous and I think it will set us back. We need to change the government, but we need to get stronger first. We need to look like we’re for real, and the way to do that is concentrate our energy on becoming a qualified political party, complete with primary ballot. Then we need to concentrate on putting people in the state legislature and then in Congress. We need to be the ones who yell the loudest and pack the most votes. Then we can run a gubernatorial candidate and maybe even think about winning. Now? We’re just going to look silly. Just another bunch of goofs endorsing an independent who’s going nowhere.”

  “It’s good practice,” Rosie said stubbornly.

  The wide, lumpy face nodded at her seriously. “Okay, but tell me where you stand. Would you vote for a Vivo candidate for governor? This year?”

  “Yes. I would. If it was the right candidate.”

  “And you, Jake?” His pale blue eyes studied me.

  “I’d really have to think about it, Carney. I’d hate like hell to see some asshole elected because the rational people were split.”

  “Which is another consideration,” he said, nodding.

  We were all silent for a while, eating, thinking.

  “At the same time,” I said. “I always thought that was a bullshit reason not to support a third party or an independent.”

  “There’s that as well.” He was grinning again.

  “Fact is, I hate politics. I don’t talk politics. I don’t commit myself to politics. I’m investigating Joe Richmond’s death at the request of his people, and I don’t believe he killed himself. Do you?”

  He laughed at me, shaking his head. We finished eating. The place was crowded, all the tables and booths full, and there were people waiting. Carney grabbed the check.

  “About Joe,” he said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. How long are you two in town for?”

  “As long as it takes. We can go back any time today.”

  “I got an hour, hour and a half to spare. Want to go have some beers somewhere? If you insist, we can talk about Joe Richmond. But we could do something else at the same time.”

  Rosie said she thought that sounded good. He paid for the lunch, Rosie left the tip, and we went outside, where he led us to a new red Supra. Sunroof. Elaborate stereo with four speakers. White leather interior. He slid behind the wheel. He grinned like a kid.

  “Great car,” I said. “Did it really come with a white leather interior?”

  “Hell no. Came with black, of all the stupid colors for a warm climate. I had this done. You got a car?” I nodded. “Great. Go get it and follow me. Then I won’t have to bring you back here and you’ll be closer to the airport. You know Venice?”

  Both of us admitted we’d been there a couple of times.

  We followed the red flash west to about a block from the beach. He pulled up into the front yard of a two-story redwood-and-glass beauty that looked newly renovated. I could hear someone hammering inside. The second story had to have a view of the ocean. He waved at us to pull our car in with his. There was no place to park on the street.

  “My house,” he said proudly. “I love it as much as I love this car.”

  “How do you reconcile a love of cars with protection of the environment?” Rosie wanted to know.

  “Not easily,” he said. “I also eat meat sometimes. I’m not perfect. I’m not a saint.” He began walking toward the beach. “I’d ask you in, but they’re Sheet-rocking. It’s a mess.”

  “Nice piece of real estate,” I said.

  He laughed. “Well, real estate’s my business.”

  “You like living in L.A.?” Rosie asked. Rosie is a true provincial Northern Californian. It’s the only place on earth. I think it’s one of the few places on earth, but I like Los Angeles, too, and anywhere on the West Coast is fine with me.

  “Yeah,” Carney said. “I do. It’s a three-ring circus and everything’s too far from everything else and the air is bad sometimes. But the air’s bad everywhere else now, too, and I like all the ways you can live here. My life’s here. My wife has a life here. My kids. I’ve even got a granddaughter, newborn.”

  Carney took us to a cafe with some tables out in front so we could watch the show on the beach and along the wide walk. A guy was standing ankle-deep in soft sand working out with barbells. He was huge, muscles bulging and writhing all over his body. I wondered how fast he could move, wondered what he was like in a fight. Decided his boyfriend probably didn’t want him fighting. Our drinks came. Crowds of people were strolling past, rolling past, running past, masses of beautiful and not-so-beautiful bodies played in the sand.

  “I guess you like living in a busy neighborhood, too, huh?” Rosie said. She was laughing at a human pyramid forming out near the water.

  “Actually, I do,” Carney said, smiling. “We used to live up in the hills. Pretty. But I got an itch for, I don’t know. City?” He shook his head. “I guess I like walking around here.”

  “So you really don’t have any ideas about Richmond’s death?” I got back to business.

  “I didn’t know him very well.”

  “You must have some ideas, though,” Rosie said.

  “Must I now? Well, maybe I must. Did you ever meet the man?”

  We told him about the times we’d been around Joe Richmond.

  “And what did you think of him?”

  “I thought he was a star.” I said. “Amazing charisma. Kennedy-like. And I liked him. He was too good-looking, maybe, and he came across like some kind of superman or demigod, but I liked him.”

  “He wasn’t my favorite candidate,” Rosie added. “But I thought he was a good one.”

  Carney nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. I felt the same way. I liked him. But I don’t know if I really trusted him as a candidate for high office. I don’t know how much of him was real. I don’t know if maybe he wasn’t a little too rarefied, a little too perfect. When I was a kid I had a political hero for a while. Adlai Stevenson. But the man really wasn’t suited for the rough and tumble, the down and dirty of real-life politics. Stevenson, I mean. Too rarefied. Only difference between him and Richmond, Stevenson showed it. I met him once, at a neighborhood rally. I pushed my way up to the front and grabbed his hand to shake. The guy looked horrified.”

  “You think Richmond was too delicate? You think maybe he wasn’t too stable under all that star shine?” “Could be.”<
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  “Are you saying you think he could have killed himself?” Rosie was ready and waiting. Now we were going to start getting down to it.

  “I don’t know. I guess I’m saying a guy like that could have a— well, an episode of some kind, maybe over something personal. You’re the investigator, you tell me. You got anything that makes it look like murder?”

  Rosie shrugged. “Nothing we’re ready to talk about.”

  He nodded slowly at her. “I understand. I guess I could be a suspect. I was an opponent, after all. Interesting idea. Because I wanted to win or because— what, I didn’t want us to field an actual candidate and I’m a fanatic? Well, why not?”

  “That’s right,” Rosie said, smiling to soften her words. “Why not?”

  A man and woman, both dressed in bikinis covered by thin overshirts, roller-skated by and skidded to a stop just past us, looking at the human pyramid.

  “You didn’t go to his funeral. Why was that?”

  “I was busy, and I’m not a hypocrite.”

  Rosie again: “You didn’t think there should be an investigation.”

  “I was actually kind of neutral. Unenthusiastic, maybe.”

  “So, you were busy the day of his funeral?” I tried to mix just the right amount of disapproval with the suspicion. “Doing what?”

  “Visiting my new granddaughter in the hospital.” He smiled a leprechaun smile.

  “And that night?”

  “Having a party celebrating my granddaughter, what else?”

  “What about the day he died?” Rosie shot back at him.

  “That would have been on the Sunday… sorry, I guess you’ve got me. I was out walking. Alone.”

  “I got a phone tip that someone in the party is planning an ecological disaster right before the election,” I said. “To get votes for Vivo.”

  He turned gray. “Are you shitting me?”

  “No.”

  “Who was it? Who called you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did they say?”

  I told him.

  He shook his head. “Someone’s playing games with you.”