We headed north to Benicia.
– 28 –
REBECCA Gelber looked harassed and confused. Her hair wasn’t perfect. She almost looked her age.
“Jake, Rosie, I’m glad you’re here.” She waved us in. “My husband and I have been trying to have dinner for three hours now. First Cassandra, then Phil. At least you were invited.” She sat down heavily in an armchair and waved vaguely at us, indicating we could sit.
I didn’t know who to ask her about first. For a second, I just sat there, stunned. “Phil?”
She nodded.
“Start at the beginning,” Rosie said. “Please. First Cassandra?”
“Yes. She showed up here looking very nervous. She said she wanted to talk to me about something, but she couldn’t seem to get it out. Then she asked if she could stay here for a few hours, maybe overnight. I said she could. I didn’t want to press her about why, or what it was she wanted to tell me. She looked so awful. I had her sitting down in the kitchen with us, finally, at dinner. Then the bell rang again. Bruce got up. He came back and told me Phil Werner was here and wanted to talk to me. I was surprised, to say the least. Phil is not an informal man. It must have been soon after that that you called. I heard the phone ring while I was talking to Phil.”
“What did he want?” I asked.
“That was very confusing. He was so oblique. He asked me about an anonymous phone call, wanted to know what I knew about one. He was, well, he seemed accusing, as if I knew or had done something, and he acted as if I were keeping some secret from him or telling a secret or some peculiar thing. He wanted me to admit this secret without telling me what it was. He kept asking me, ‘Did you make that call?’ It was really rather ugly.”
Bruce Gelber walked into the room and glared at us. We said hello. He nodded.
Rebecca turned to him. “I was telling them about Phil.”
This time, there was no word from Rebecca letting him know we were talking about her business. He was in on it.
“Pretty damned peculiar, too,” he snarled. “I went back into the kitchen. Couldn’t have been more than a minute later when you called. But I could hear Werner, out here. He sounded threatening. I got off the phone and made short work of that.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “Maybe even a good thing you did. He left?” They both nodded. “Did he say where he was going, by any chance?” They both shook their heads. “And Cassandra?”
“That was strange, too, Jake,” Rebecca said.
“It was,” her husband agreed. “No sooner had I told Rebecca that Werner was here, and sat down at the table with Cassandra, when that young woman slipped out the back door. We haven’t seen her since. I feel like I’m living in a movie. And most of it on an empty stomach.” His beeper went off. “Oh, shit,” he said and left the room. “Never a minute…”
I told Rebecca about the anonymous call, the warning that someone was planning a catastrophe. She looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“And I think Cassandra made the call,” I said.
“And just yesterday,” Rosie added, “we were sitting in Werner’s office in Sacramento questioning him about it.”
“Is it true?”
“I’m beginning to think so,” I admitted. “Since asking people about it seems to have stirred things up so much. I’m really afraid it’s so.”
“But there’s time,” she said. “If it’s not planned until after the convention.”
“Right.”
“But you’ll need to catch Philip.”
“Can we use your phone?” Rosie asked.
“Good God, Rosie, of course you can. My phone, my house, my car. Everything but my husband.” It was a feeble attempt at a joke, but I could see she was having trouble keeping calm. I didn’t blame her.
We called Gerda’s number again. This time she answered.
“Gerda,” Rosie cried. “We’ve been looking for Cassandra. She did? Well, stay put. We’ll be right there.”
She hung up. “Gerda just talked to her. On the phone. She said she was on her way home.”
I told Rebecca not to worry, that everything was under control. Positive thinking. Rosie and I drove south again, to Oakland.
Cassandra was not home.
“Didn’t you say she was on her way?” I said.
“That is what she said,” Gerda answered. “I do not know from where. She did say she might stop off at Noel’s apartment first.”
Rosie agreed to stay put, in case Cassandra showed up. Or in case someone else showed up.
“No heroics,” I said. “If you have to, call the cops.”
“Same to you, pal.”
I went to Berkeley.
There was a light on in Noel’s place, which might or might not mean he was there. I rang the bell. The buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open.
“Who is it?” Noel called out.
“Samson.”
“Go away.” I kept walking up the stairs. Footsteps. I looked up to see him peering over the railing. He started down, rushing me. He was carrying a suitcase in one hand and his trendy deco ceramic lamp in the other. “Get out of my way, Samson.” I didn’t. I put myself directly in front of him and braced my legs. He swung the suitcase at my chest, and as my hands went out to protect that part of me he brought the lamp down toward my head. I ducked, going for his midsection. But he had the advantage, two steps above me. His lamp connected with my head before my head connected with his gut. A glancing blow, stunning but not quite a knockout. As I fell down the stairs, I heard a crash and a terrible yell. Someone bumped into me from below and kept going. More yelling. Footsteps thumping up the stairs. Rosie was beside me.
I stood up, swaying, and saw Cassandra, wide-eyed, clutching the splintered frame of the front door, her red hair a tangled, flying mess. “Noel,” I croaked to Rosie.
“Gerda went after him.”
“Help her.” I lurched out the front door. There had to be a back way, and I could imagine Noel outrunning Gerda and escaping down the back stairs to his car. I would die before I let that son of a bitch get away.
He was close to the bottom of the stairs when I got there, just in time to see Gerda, two steps above him, wrap him in a stranglehold. Rosie had just come out the back door. He was kicking and elbowing and thrashing. I grabbed him, yanked him out of Gerda’s hands, spun him around and smashed him into the building, which lost a few shingles. Then I hit him, hard, several times. It felt great. Nobody hits me on the head twice and gets away with it. I was only sorry I probably wouldn’t get a chance to drown him in his own shower.
– 29 –
NOEL was more than willing to talk to the police, hoping, I suppose, that talking would help him get away with murder. Or at least get a lighter sentence for it. He probably thought it was a good idea to dump on Maddux before Maddux dumped on him.
He sent the cops to Maddux’s Ross house, where they found Werner and Maddux pretending to negotiate. The candidate was looking for information to use to his own advantage; Maddux, alone in the house with Werner, was killing time, after calling Noel, waiting for his boy to arrive and help him get rid of the candidate.
They both tried to have the other arrested. They both got hauled off to the station.
But then, Maddux could have waited forever for Noel. When we’d caught him he’d been on his way out of town.
Cassandra was ready to tell what she knew, too. What she knew was what she’d whispered to me on the phone a few nights before. Well actually, she had left out the part about the information coming from an eavesdropped phone conversation between Chandler and Maddux, and stuck in a reference to Werner, from that same conversation, that proved to be irrelevant.
As for Werner, the cops turned him loose pretty quickly. They had nothing on him. And the first thing he did was call a news conference. He told the assembled scribblers that he had been instrumental in exposing the plot, had been at Maddux’s house tracking it down, as a matter of fact. That he had first gotten word ov
er the weekend through anonymous sources and had been determined to prevent the disaster.
He was heartsore, he said, that the good name of the Vivos had been destroyed by the insane acts of a few men. Too often, he said, dangerous people, “the kind of people capable of this ultimate dirty trick,” were drawn to good causes and found homes in minor parties and “would-be parties that could never hope to have a real effect, create real change.” That was why, he said, he was declaring as a Democrat and was, as a matter of fact, planning to run for the assembly on a conservation platform.
He got big coverage for his little speech, too, because the media believed him and included him in their stories about the “barely averted disaster.”
What the hell, Rosie and I couldn’t very well stand up there and say, “No! It was us! Unlicensed private detectives! He didn’t solve it, we did!”
In fact, when Sergeant Cotter of the Berkeley police department wanted to know what the hell we thought we were doing, anyway, we told him Werner did it.
Cotter, at least, had the sense not to believe that, but he took what credit he could for Chandler’s confession and left us alone.
We got home very late that night. I called Pam, woke her up, told her it was over, and said we would meet her the next day and give her a full report. The next morning I called James X. Carney. He was relieved, but kind of quiet about it. Thoughtful. Then I called Marietta Richmond and told her she could stop whatever investigation she was still conducting. She was disappointed, I think, but glad the killer was caught.
After I finished talking to Marietta, I called Lee at her office. I told her how we’d solved the case and said all the bad guys— well, most of them— were in jail. She said that was wonderful.
“Are we still on for tomorrow night?” I asked her.
“I was going to call you about that, actually… I don’t think so, Jake.”
“Why not?” I asked, reasonably. I couldn’t yell. My head still hurt from the ceramic lamp.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, that’s all. You weren’t happy about the idea. You didn’t love me enough to make a commitment right away.”
“That’s not true. I did— do— love you.” I had never said that to her; I wasn’t sure it was true. “But that has nothing to do with my reluctance to commit to having a child, and my reluctance to go along with extortion.” I was getting pissed off at her again.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But your reluctance has something to do with how I feel about you. Let’s just forget it. We can still be friends.”
I doubted that. The thing was, I had felt pretty involved with her, and I was more than a little upset at the outcome. I went back to bed and lay down, fuming, hurt, trying to decide whether I should dash to Petaluma and try to make it all right again. I didn’t think it would work, so I went back to sleep.
Rebecca Gelber invited Rosie and me to the convention, which was held in San Jose. We made plans to drive down with Pam who was, I thought, maybe beginning to see her way clear of grieving for Joe Richmond.
Just before I left the house, bag in hand, my father and stepmother called. Eva wanted to thank me for the birthday flowers. Pa got on the kitchen extension to join the chat.
Neither one of them could get over the fact that I was going to a political convention.
“So what is this party called?” Eva wanted to know.
“Vivo,” I said for the fifteenth time.
“And what does it mean, Vivo?”
“ ‘Life.’ In Esperanto. They’re an ecology party. Terrific people.”
“Didn’t I hear something about some ecology party was going to blow up California?” My father said. He reads the newspaper every day and remembers almost everything. He remembers it oddly, but he remembers it.
“There were some crazy people, Pa, not the whole party. One man planned it. Not the party.”
“So tell me this,” Eva said. “This Vivo. They’re Democrats?”
Ron Lewis was at the convention, working as some sort of media consultant for Rebecca Gelber, whose husband had managed to make it to this event. Lewis knew some of the bits and pieces of the story, but wanted all the details. Pam, Rosie and I went out for a long dinner with him the night before the convention opened and went through it with him.
I’d invited James X. Carney, but he seemed to be awfully busy.
The one thing Lewis wanted to know most of all was whether Joe Richmond had any idea what kind of man he’d gotten involved with.
I reassured him. “He didn’t. Not right away. Not until the end, actually.”
The night of the benefit, Richmond had confided to Noel that he was feeling worried about the campaign. He wasn’t sure, he told him, that he trusted Maddux. The man was forever sidling up to him with suggestions, he said. He felt as if he were selling himself to someone dishonest for an election he couldn’t win, as if he’d gotten into something he couldn’t get out of without getting out of the race. Noel, of course, was horrified. Everything was planned, and he had already sold himself.
“If Noel had had any sense,” I said, “he would have gone to his boss right then and asked him what to do. But he didn’t. He tried to talk to Richmond. About what he called ‘necessary evils’.”
“Oh, lord,” Lewis said.
“Lord, indeed,” Rosie agreed. “As nearly as we can figure out, he actually told Richmond that Maddux had a plan that would bring a lot of votes, and said that Richmond should have faith and hang on.”
Richmond wanted to know what the plan was. Noel realized he’d gotten himself in a hole, asked Richmond if they could talk about it the next day. Richmond didn’t want to wait, but he agreed. The next morning he called Noel and told him to meet him at his East Bay retreat— Pam’s house. Pam would be gone. They could talk.
“And meanwhile,” I said, “Noel Chandler had gotten his instructions. Meet with him. Fix it. If you can’t fix it, kill him. And make it look like he did it himself. I don’t know who actually came up with the hanging idea, but Noel, a Wyoming boy, probably felt pretty much at home with a rope.”
“Joe must have had no idea about Noel,” Pam said. “He must have been sitting in the hot tub when Noel…”
“Dropped the rope around his neck and pulled,” Lewis murmured. Pam nodded and excused herself.
“Shit,” Lewis said, looking after her.
“She’ll be okay,” Rosie said.
I continued the story, telling Ron about my little ordeal in Minneapolis.
“That’s cute. He could have killed you.”
“That wasn’t the object, but they wouldn’t have minded. They were trying to scare us off.”
All they had to do was find out where I was staying. Then Noel could go to his morning meeting, fly to Minneapolis, torture me, and fly back again for his meeting the next day.
I had remembered that Pam, when she’d arrived for the funeral, had said everyone in the organization was harassing her, wanting to know when she was going back, where she could be reached. She had specifically mentioned talking to Noel. When I got back to Minneapolis I confirmed it with her— Noel, along with Gerda, had known that the number she gave them was my hotel number.
The anonymous telephone tip, even before I realized who had called, brought in another element. Power. If there was such a plot, it would take money, power, and connections to pull it off. The other candidates were still unknown quantities. I didn’t think Rebecca Gelber had that kind of stuff going for her, even if I had thought she was capable of such a thing. Richmond had been collecting money and power. Who was next in line? Maddux told us he was switching his support to Werner. The caller had said, “Ask Werner.”
Werner was a wild card in the game, but we’d gotten no indication he had any real money or power before he hooked up with Maddux— and the fake accident had been planned before he had access to Maddux’s backing.
Pam came back and sat down. Her eyes were red and a little swollen.
“What about Carney?
” she asked. “Why not him?”
“A man who knows where to get a good corned beef sandwich,” I said, “is not a man of violence.” She smiled. “Besides, he didn’t have anything to gain, not unless he was a screaming fanatic who wanted to kill off the front-runner so Vivo wouldn’t have a candidate. I’ve lived around the Bay Area long enough to know a screaming fanatic when I see one.” She smiled again.
“So you thought Maddux must be the key,” Lewis said.
“We thought he might be. And if he was, it was significant that he and Noel alibied each other for the morning of the murder. Noel was obviously in the man’s pocket.”
“And,” Rosie added, “Noel could have been anywhere the night of Richmond’s funeral. Cassandra made it clear to us she didn’t know where he was that night.”
“What about Cassandra?” Lewis asked. “What the hell was she doing? How did she find out about the plot?”
“That is one very suspicious woman,” Rosie said. “She had a thing about men being untrustworthy. Noel had been acting pretty peculiar. On Thursday night, when she was at his apartment, his phone rang and he took the call in the bedroom. She was in the living room. He closed the bedroom door to talk. That made her mad. She picked up the living room extension. First she heard a small part of a reference to Werner, then she heard Maddux and Noel talking about the toxic accident.”
“I guess they were talking about supporting Werner,” Lewis said.
Rosie smiled. “Actually, they were talking about Werner’s campaign against Fielding Chemical. Noel thought they should switch the disaster there— I think it’s somewhere near L.A.— to Werner’s bad guys, to give more weight to Werner’s campaign. Maddux told him he was a moron, that everything was already in place for the original plan.”
“Anyway, Cassandra freaked out, as we used to say,” I added. “She sat around with him for a while, faked illness, and went home. Once she got there, she decided to handle it with an anonymous tip. The next day, when we went to talk to Noel, and she showed up, he asked her if she was feeling better. She could have been sick earlier that day, sure, but he also could have been talking about a problem the night before. Which would work out just fine if she had actually been the caller.”
Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) Page 16
