Poisoned Justice

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  “It could be. If things go right, I may have Tommy set up for a long time. But there’s a lot that has to fall into place. Which reminds me, what would you guys think about finding a fresh corpse in a hotel room with a bunch of dead flies?”

  “Weird, man,” Dennis offered. “Unless somebody had sprayed the room.”

  “It’d be like finding a pile of corpses at the end of the buffet line at Wyatt’s Cafeteria,” Larry observed in his sardonic way. “Either the old folks’ home dropped off a busload of geezers for their farewell dinner or there was something nasty in the mac-and-cheese.”

  “My money’s on the mac-and-cheese,” Dennis observed, his brow deeply furrowed as he searched for another explanation.

  “Good bet,” Larry nodded. “Why’s it matter, boss?”

  “Just trying to put some puzzle pieces in place. And you two have been more helpful than you might imagine. Now, can you handle Isaac for a while longer?”

  “Yessir, I be used to carrying the load. The Man has kept us brothers down for so long, it’s part of our nature,” Dennis answered in his best slave dialect to break the tension.

  “Well, as long as you black brothers are used to the Man giving orders, how ’bout you take the Foodway warehouse job and I’ll work the Chinatown gigs.” Larry smiled mischievously, knowing that he’d probably score a free lunch at one of the Chinese restaurants.

  As I headed out to the back door to the compound, I heard Dennis replying, “Sheeit, you honkeys are always shafting us black folk.” I knew the two of them would try to work with Isaac, but they didn’t have the time or inclination to babysit him. I figured it’d help for me to aim the kid in the right direction.

  CHAPTER 14

  My reliable rust heap started up without a complaint. The warm fall weather agreed with the old truck. I headed out to the Morgans’ house. They were a longtime customer that my father had landed not long after starting the business. The Morgans were wealthy, and from their recommendations we’d managed to build quite a list of customers in the Nob Hill area. Even rich people have problems with pests, especially when old Victorian mansions are built over dark, wet crawlspaces.

  When I arrived, Mrs. Morgan let me in and told me that Isaac was in the conservatory at the rear of the house. She took me through the mahogany-floored entryway, down a hallway lined with Mr. Morgan’s photographs of the mountain peaks he’d conquered, through the study which had more books than I suspected the Morgans could’ve read in their lifetimes, and into the glassed-in room that was Mrs. Morgan’s pride and joy. She started pointing out the newest additions to her orchid collection, when she caught herself. “Oh dear, Mr. Riley, I am a prattling old dame, aren’t I?”

  “Not at all, Mrs. Morgan. I collect insects, so I appreciate your fascination with exotic flowers.”

  “You’re too kind. And I know you’re also a busy man, so I’ll leave you with your helper to sort out those awful ants.” Then she took me gently by the arm and whispered, “Mr. Riley, could you please send one of your other people next time. I’m afraid my husband wasn’t too happy with this young man. He’s not so fond of ‘them.’ I’m sure you understand.” She headed back into the main house, leaving me with Isaac.

  “How’s it going?” I asked while he put down a thin spray of insecticide using a handheld pump.

  “Fine, except for having to work for an anti-Semite. The old man answered the door, took one look at me, turned around, and walked back into the house. He left me standing there like a piece of trash until his wife came and showed me in.” The kid did have a helluva nose and wavy black hair, but I hadn’t known that Mr. Morgan had a problem with Jews.

  “No sense stewing about it. You can’t change them, so just do your job well.”

  “That sounds fine coming from a Gentile. You don’t know what it’s like to be a Jew. People driving by shout, ‘Hey Hymie, you dirty Christ-killer,’ or ‘Go back to your own neighborhood, Yid.’ I’m sick of ignorant bigots.”

  “Ok, you’re a kike and I’m a mick. The Irish weren’t exactly greeted with open arms when we showed up. All that ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’ stuff was a great come-on for cheap labor.”

  “Yeah, but your people didn’t suffer a Holocaust. Nobody was out to exterminate you.” Isaac was a spunky fellow, I’ll give him that. But I wasn’t going to buy into his self-pity.

  “What is this? Some sort of a sick contest? Okay, you win. Your people got screwed big time. But all that matters in my world is whether I can count on a person. And I don’t have much use for a whiny kid with lots of excuses.” Until then, I hadn’t laid it out to him in direct terms, but if there was any hope of his working out, Isaac had to know the deal.

  “You don’t know me or what I’ve gone through.”

  “I know enough about you. And I know that everyone’s got a reason to complain. Hell, Dennis is black and Larry’s a Vietnam vet. It’s not like the world is giving them a big hug. And whether you figured it out or not, Carol’s a lesbian. I got a nigger, a baby killer, and a dyke working for me.”

  “Sounds like you’re something of a bigot yourself.”

  “Like I said, I judge people by what they deliver. If you give me an honest day’s work and take pride in the quality of your product, I don’t care if you’re a Jew, an Arab, or a goddamn space alien.”

  “I’m sorry, Riley, it’s just that the old codger set me off. It gets tiring.” Isaac’s bluster had waned and he looked spent.

  “Listen kid, I get it. Life isn’t fair and nobody said it would be. But from what I can see, you ended up with more than your fair share of smarts. It’s time to start using your head to solve problems instead of making excuses.” We’d both said our piece. It was time to get to work for the Morgans, whatever their prejudices. I gestured toward the baseboard along the glass panes. “What’re we looking at?”

  “An infestation of flying ants,” he answered without glancing down. I bent over and plucked a specimen from the few dozen insects that were staggering around. The poison had begun to do its job.

  “I don’t think so, Isaac.”

  “Why not?”

  “Tell me what you know from the training manual.”

  “I read that ants often emerge in huge numbers after a rain. And it rained here a few days ago.”

  “Good. Now look closely at these insects.” I held my captive up to his face. “Tell me whether you think this is an ant.”

  He squinted. “I see what you mean. It doesn’t have the skinny waist like an ant should.”

  “So what do you figure we’ve got here?”

  “Termites?”

  “Damn straight, kid. Now you’re thinking, not just spraying. That’s what people pay us for. The rains bring out winged termites as well as ants. They’re all waiting at this time of year to start new colonies.” In that moment, I flashed back to Paul Odum’s hotel room. That nagging sense of something askew returned, and this time I wasn’t going to let go of it. I stared into space, recalling the details. The winged ants along the glass door. That was the other piece that didn’t fit. What the hell were they doing in the room? Ants aren’t attracted to dead bodies. Isaac gave me a strange look.

  “You okay, Riley?”

  “Yeah, Isaac, you just got me thinking about another customer. Where were we?”

  “The termites. Should I bother spraying? The queen will be down in the wood under the greenhouse where the insecticide won’t reach.”

  “Right again. I might just have to keep you. Here’s the deal. Until I can get Larry and Dennis out here for a foundation treatment, which takes a load of experience and equipment, the Morgans will want to see some results. So put down a barrier of insecticide to generate a body count and keep the termites from crawling all over the windows. I’ll go tell Mrs. Morgan the good news and the bad news.”

  “Good news?”

  “Yeah, her orchids are safe.” I winked at Isaac and he seemed energized. I’d chewed his ass at the st
art, but that way he knew that my praise was genuine—not just happy fluff to make him think he was a ‘valued employee.’ I hate it when people pull that nonsense.

  My father never gave gratuitous compliments, and he let me know when I screwed up. Like the time I sprayed a lady’s house for flies. I was in high school and was just going through the motions to make some gas money. When he swung by to check on me, he looked at all the dead insects that had been clambering on the inside of the windows.

  “So, what’re you going to tell Miss Freeman?” he asked.

  “That I solved her fly problem,” I said.

  “You treated the symptom, not the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those are fungus gnats, you knucklehead. They feed on the mold growing in the wet soil of her houseplants. If she doesn’t water them so much, that’ll put an end to the fungus and the gnats. And she won’t be calling in a couple of weeks to tell me that the treatment didn’t work.”

  His lesson stuck with me, especially when I was hitting the bottle while on the force. I’d wake up and take a handful of aspirin every morning. But I was just treating the symptom. Until I laid off the booze, the headaches were going to keep coming back. I probably should’ve quit entirely, but I’m no saint. Just a better sinner.

  I told the Morgans that I’d have a crew out to treat for termites, and that it’d be pretty expensive. Mr. Morgan didn’t flinch at the cost, but he asked who would be coming. I told him I’d send my most experienced technicians and left it at that. Isaac wouldn’t be on that job, but I had no interest in giving Mr. Morgan the satisfaction of his bigotry.

  I drove down Broadway toward Chinatown to grab some lunch. I picked out a bustling place on Hang Ah Street. The clatter of plates, the orders called out in Chinese, and the drone of pop music on a tinny radio blended into the background. I concentrate best when it’s dead silent or chaotically noisy, and it’s easier to find noise than quiet in the city. And I knew that people would be too busy to bother a guy looking at some glass vials while eating Sichuan chicken.

  I’d taken the specimens that I’d collected from Odum’s room out of the glove box and put them in my coat pocket before going into the House of Hong. I had to use a hand lens to be sure, but a close inspection revealed that the ants in the hotel room were not a species typically found inside of buildings. They were field ants that had probably emerged from the soil under shrubs that bordered the patio. I figured that after the rain, hundreds of them had poured out of the nest and dispersed. A few of them could’ve accidentally found their way into the room through the torn screen.

  That all made sense, but according to Howard, the sliding glass door had been shut during the day. Even if they had forgotten to close it in the morning, the maid would’ve done so. In fact, the housekeeping staff kept closing my door, which I tried to leave open. And my room was on the third floor and opened onto a tiny balcony, so they’d surely not have left a guest’s door open on the ground level. The flies obviously found their way into the room through the torn screen during the night, when the odor of death and filth rang the flies’ dinner bell. But the ants wouldn’t have been attracted to the stench, and in any case they weren’t nocturnal.

  I dug into my chicken, which was first-rate—fiery but not quite painful—and thought about what the ants might be telling me. Insects never lie. In fact, the six-legged bystanders make the best witnesses. And it pays to know where your witnesses come from. The difference between typical indoor ants and the field ants in Odum’s room would be understandably lost on most people. But I had learned about the importance of small distinctions as a detective.

  Like I’d told Tommy a couple nights ago, a rare butterfly stuck in the grille of a car had allowed us to catch a killer. What I’d left out of the bedtime story was that although the butterfly was a bit mutilated, it had looked and smelled much better than the building inspector when he was found. The dunes make for a challenging game of hide-and-seek, and I’d heard that the corpse had been found by following the stench of decomposition.

  And something stank in Howard’s story. I figured I needed to talk with his fellow students, John and Jen, but now I had some more questions for Howard. When it comes to getting at the truth, sometimes finding an ant on the carpet is just as good as being a fly on the wall.

  CHAPTER 15

  I headed across the Bay to Berkeley, or as Larry calls it, Berserkly. Despite its politics, the university is first-rate. Mostly. Any college that offers courses in Bodies and Boundaries, Art and Meditation, Transcendental Peace Studies, and Black, Lesbian, and Womyn’s Literature—all of which were listed in a recent article in the Chronicle—is a bit off its rocker. The traffic flowed reasonably well during the midafternoon, which was good because KDFC was playing classical guitar, which I don’t particularly enjoy.

  One of the advantages of driving a work truck is that the company logo usually allows me to park in restricted places without getting a ticket. Most cops cut some slack to construction and trade types, although an exterminator’s truck in the granola capital of California was a riskier prospect than usual. I pulled into a “B permit only” zone along Durant Street, and put the “On Job” sign on the dashboard in the hope of some mercy. I’d been to the campus before, but I didn’t know where to find the biology building. So I stopped to ask a group of long-haired students, who were holding antiwar signs on the plaza in front of a massive building at the gates to the campus.

  They seemed stunned that I wanted simple directions rather than a political lecture. “Biology? Man, we’re trying to find justice,” one smartass carrying a “US out of Africa!” sign replied. He wore a black, red, and green headband and seemed quite taken with his cleverness. “Did you know that the United States government is providing arms to Somalia to prolong the killing fields of Africa?”

  “Sounds bad. But can you tell me how to find the biology department?”

  A spacey girl with a very tight “Stop the Killing” T-shirt answered, “The peaceful people of Ethiopia are being slaughtered on their own land.” I nodded in my best imitation of sympathy, trying not to stare at what was jiggling under “Stop” and “Killing.” This wasn’t getting me anywhere. Fortunately a passing student overheard my question and suggested I try Hilgard or Mulford Hall.

  I thanked him and started to walk away when the headband guy stepped in front of me and shouted, “Don’t work for the Man, work for peace.” A dopey-looking fellow with greasy blond hair and a pimply face was evidently emboldened and added, “Yeah, we’re working for change.”

  I’d had enough. “Let’s get clear on something, kid. What you’re doing is standing in the sun, wasting your parents’ money, holding a stupid sign, and making an ass of yourself. Instead of ‘working for change’ try working for a change. Once you’ve done some actual work, then we’ll talk.” I gave him a pat on the shoulder and headed through the archway onto campus. The protesters shouted slogans after me.

  I should’ve just kept to myself without provoking the kids who had carved out a comfortable existence without being burdened with a job. But I held a special loathing for lazy bastards whose only effort went into figuring out how to avoid genuine labor and cut corners. Mostly because one of them had cost my father his life.

  After Tommy had come home from the hospital, it was clear that expenses were going to be high. A father’s first duty is to his family. So he’d been working weekends and taking some jobs in rough places. A lowlife landlord who owned a string of tenements had contracted him to spray for roaches because the city threatened to condemn the largest of his properties if the infestation wasn’t brought under control. The sonofabitch hadn’t lifted a hand to repair the place in years, just collected payments from the Housing Authority and rent from down-and-out folks who were hoping to stay dry and stash away a bit of money until they could find somewhere better to live.

  On a Sunday afternoon, my father was heading down a dimly lit hallway with a heavy canister and
spray hose when the bottom dropped out. The extra weight must’ve been enough to collapse the termite-riddled flooring. His leg plunged through the floorboard and became wedged. A nail had ripped open an artery, and he knew things were bad pretty quick. The splintered wood had him trapped, and he was losing blood fast.

  Miss Cassie, a big black lady who I met afterward, took charge and told her nephew to call for help. A lot of people don’t know that in run-down apartments, cockroaches seek out the warmth inside telephones, and their chewing and crapping destroys the inner workings. In any case, there wasn’t a working phone in the building, so the kid ran a couple of blocks to a drugstore and called an ambulance. I suspect that rescue squads weren’t much more enthusiastic about rushing into poor neighborhoods than the cops were when I was on the force.

  By the time sirens wailed their way up the street, my father had bled to death. He died in the lap of Miss Cassie, who told him that everything was going to be all right. She was wrong, but that sort of faith must’ve sounded like my mother was there with him. I had to wonder about the wicked irony of my father being killed by a booby trap laid by termites in San Francisco, after avoiding landmines on the islands of the Pacific as he followed the American forces and battled mosquitoes.

  I made my way toward a grassy opening amid the hodgepodge of architectural styles that made up the university. A sign said I was standing in Memorial Glade, but it hardly felt like a mountain meadow. It was a lawn. The open space was surrounded by a monumental classical library, a modern ten-story block of concrete with rows of windows, and an old granite block building with a vestige of character. The most attractive things on the glade were the sunbathing co-eds. The Frisbee-tossing shirtless boys were doing their best to attract their attention. I found where I was on a campus map and headed down the hill to Hilgard Hall. Just inside, the building directory listed Paul Odum’s office as room 214.