Poisoned Justice

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  CHAPTER 21

  I wolfed down a bowl of cornflakes and a giant mug of instant coffee, then swung by the office. Carol’s pop station was playing some insipid song which was supposedly revealing fifty ways to leave a lover. I could only decipher five while thumbing through the mail on the corner of her desk. Which was fine, as I was presumably saved from hearing another forty-five lines of the awful rhyme scheme that passed as lyrics. We chatted a bit about her weekend, which involved “a gnarly party” in the Castro. I wasn’t sure what made the party “gnarly” in her estimation, but I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know. When I heard the garage door opening in the warehouse, I headed to the back. Larry was putting his lunchbox in the locker and Dennis was changing into his work overalls when I pushed through the doors.

  “What’s up, boss?” Larry asked.

  “I have a favor to ask of you guys.”

  “Nothing’s too much for our fearless leader,” Dennis saluted, letting his overalls drop around his ankles.

  “Your respect for authority is truly moving, Dennis,” I replied. He smiled and pulled up his pants. “I need a dozen mice.”

  “Should we take them dead or alive, Commander?” Dennis was enjoying himself and poking fun at Larry’s military background at the same time. Larry hated the army, but he felt that only a grunt could badmouth the military.

  “If you send Dennis on rodent patrol, it’s likely Goat Hill Extermination will chalk up a KIA,” Larry broke in.

  “No mutherfuckin’ mouse could take this bad boy.”

  “Okay, you two listen up. It’s a simple job. Just set some live traps down by the docks this morning, dump the mice in a couple of ten-gallon buckets, and leave them in my office. Can you handle that?”

  “When do you need the little POWs?” asked Dennis.

  “By late this afternoon, if possible.”

  “They’re a lot easier to catch overnight, boss,” Larry suggested.

  “Yeah, I know. But time’s not on my side. Set out thirty or forty traps and bait ’em with peanut butter. That should catch a dozen or so by the end of the day.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Larry said.

  “Great. By the way, where’s Isaac?” I’d been too involved arranging for the mice to notice him missing.

  “He said he had an appointment with the art department at San Francisco State,” Dennis answered. “I figure he’s too smart, or creative, or something to stay long with this gig.”

  “Don’t worry boss, we have him covered,” Larry said. “He’s no more scatterbrained than I was at his age.”

  “Sheeit, like you’re Zen now,” Dennis replied. “C’mon, we hafta jump some mice and then get after the nasty cockroach job at the warehouse on Pier 36.”

  The two of them began gathering up chemicals and spray equipment, and I headed to the front. Carol was talking on the phone and gave me a wave as I passed her desk. My next stop was Laurie Odum’s house, where a pile of laundry promised to take me one step closer to figuring out whether I had bought into a case of paranoia or murder.

  I parked in front of the house, and knocked with the iron ring. No answer. The door was unlocked, so I pushed it open and called out. Still no answer. The hum of an electric motor came from the back of the house. I headed through the living room and saw that the glass door to the deck was open. Laurie Odum was lying on a towel, next to a hot tub with furiously bubbling water. I hadn’t noticed the hot tub when I met with her last week. It was sunken into the far end of the deck and had probably been covered. But now neither the tub nor the lady had a top on.

  Even though she was lying on her back, I could tell she had maintained the firmness of youth, including a flat belly. Paul had been a lucky man until a few days ago.

  I stepped back into the middle of the living room and called out, “Anybody home?”

  “Hold on,” she shouted and came to the door wrapped in the towel. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “You left the front door open. Until I know what’s up, it’d be a really good idea to keep things locked.”

  “I must’ve forgotten when I got the paper this morning.”

  “Okay, just be careful for a while.”

  “Do you really think that whoever killed Paul will come after me?” She pulled the towel tightly around her.

  “Slow down. I’m still not sure that your husband was murdered. The case has more holes than a Teddy Kennedy alibi.” She scowled. “But a pile of laundry might fill a big gap in the story with some physical evidence.”

  “It’s down in the basement.” She nodded toward the stairway on the other side of the room. “And you might also see if there’s anything in his study that could be useful in your investigation.”

  “Can’t hurt to look. Where is it?”

  “Over the garage. You have to go out the front and around the side of the house. I don’t know where he kept the key, but there are a bunch of keys in the drawer under the kitchen telephone.”

  “You didn’t go in there, I gather.”

  “No, it was off-limits. We each had our own spaces, which suited both of us. My office is upstairs. While you figure out how to get into his study, I’ll get dressed.” She padded across the tile floor toward the terracotta staircase that presumably led up to the bedrooms.

  I grabbed the pile of keys from the kitchen and headed around the house. A set of stairs led up to a rickety landing attached to the garage. The door was locked, and a deadbolt above the handle made breaking it down a messy proposition. After a bit of trial and error, I found the right keys and went into a shag-carpeted loft that extended the width of the garage. The ceiling slanted at a sharp angle, so you couldn’t stand up in half of the room. This was evidently no problem for Odum because that part of the floor held a built-in desk buried in stacks of papers, a worktable covered with scientific journals, and bookcases stuffed to capacity. The walls were plastered with graphs and charts, and the far side of the room was lined with filing cabinets. The only sign of comfort was a beanbag chair in the corner with a swag lamp overhead.

  I rifled through the notebooks and papers that were scattered about and read the notes pinned to a corkboard over the desk. There wasn’t much of interest, other than some phone numbers and names that I jotted down. The desk drawers were cluttered, but the filing cabinets seemed to be meticulously organized. I worked my way through all the files, finding reams of tabulated numbers, pages of calculations, and entire drawers of computer punch cards and printouts. I’d pretty much given up on coming across anything of importance when I pulled the handle of the last filing cabinet, a small two-drawer unit in the far corner of the room. This was the only locked drawer in the loft, which meant it was worth getting into. I retrieved a drill from the toolbox in my truck and polished off the lock in a few seconds.

  The top drawer had a sheaf of papers inside a folder, and the bottom drawer was packed with baggies of marijuana. I didn’t figure Odum to have been a pothead, so I was doubly intrigued. The papers had variously dated and rather cryptic notes, a checklist of what appeared to be construction supplies, a list of first names and last initials, and a set of hand-drawn maps. I turned on the desk lamp and examined the plastic bags. Each had a four-letter code followed by a series of numbers. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what this all meant, but I did find one particularly interesting bag. In the bottom were a couple of ladybird beetles, larger than those I’d seen in this region, and oddly colored, black with a couple of red spots. I picked out the beetles, dropped them into a vial, and put the bags back in the filing cabinet. I decided to take the papers from the top drawer for further study. I didn’t have much hope of deciphering anything useful from Odum’s scrawled notes and drawings, but maybe the beetles could tell me something. So far, insects were my most reliable witnesses in this case.

  I gathered up the booty from my pillaging, locked the door, and headed to my truck. From the storage box in the bed, I retrieved a pair of protective vinyl gloves and a plastic garbage
bag that we use for our contaminated overalls after a spray job. As I came through the front door, Laurie emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and glasses of iced tea. She’d changed into a floral sundress.

  “I made us something to eat and brewed up a pitcher of chamomile tea with ginseng,” she announced.

  “I thought you had concluded that I was not a nice man.”

  “You aren’t, but I’m used to having people around. With your warning, I’ve not had anyone over to the house and I’m getting lonely. Even the company of a man who kills things for work and pleasure is better than rattling around here in silence.”

  “Gee, that’s quite the compliment.”

  “Besides, I figured you’d worked up an appetite with whatever you were doing in Paul’s study. What was all that noise?”

  “Turned out that getting in was a challenge,” I lied. “I had to jimmy the lock. I managed to get things locked up when I was done, but you’ll need to call a locksmith to get the door re-keyed once I tell you that it’s safe to have people in the house.”

  “So none of the keys worked?” she asked over her bare shoulder, carrying the tray out to the back deck.

  “No luck. I’ll put the keys back where I found them,” I answered. I went into the kitchen and returned all but the ones for the handle and deadbolt. I didn’t want Laurie going up there and finding the pot, wondering about the empty drawer in the same cabinet, or coming up with questions.

  “Did you find anything useful?” she asked. She’d laid out a nice spread on the table where we’d negotiated our deal.

  “Nothing really.” I took a bite of my sandwich, which looked better than it tasted. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find it stuffed with sprouts, tomatoes, and cucumbers, but lacking in meat.

  “So you really do think he was killed?”

  “Let’s just say that I’ve come to believe it’s a valid question. But I’m a long way from having an answer.” I directed our conversation toward the Indian artifacts in the house, and she launched into a rambling account of the various trips she’d taken with her husband to the pueblos of the southwest and the art galleries of Santa Fe. It was reasonably interesting, but I didn’t have time for social niceties.

  So I finished my lunch, thanked Laurie for her hospitality, and started to get up. She seemed a bit peeved with my cutting short her walk down memory lane. I apologized for having to eat and run, but suggested that I was working under a bit of pressure. She caught my drift but didn’t offer to extend the deadline.

  While she cleaned up the lunch dishes, I went down to the basement. Paul’s clothing was piled on the floor. I slipped on the protective gloves and stuffed his things into the plastic bag. When I came back up, Laurie was at the kitchen sink, so I shouted my good-bye from the entryway and headed back down the hill to the Berkeley campus.

  So far the case was getting messier with each step. But eventually the pieces had to start coming together. Or so I told myself. I hoped that a visit with John Holling might be the turning point. Maybe Odum’s student could help put a frame around this poisonous puzzle.

  CHAPTER 22

  I managed to find a parking space on Telegraph Street—Berkeley’s version of Haight-Ashbury. Tie-dye and head shops on every corner. After feeding the meter, I grabbed a liverwurst-and-onion sandwich from Foley’s Deli and ate it while walking toward campus and marveling at the street vendors, record shops, and organic diners. I suppose a person can be amazed by a remote village in the Amazon jungle, but I’m just as dumbfounded in my own country sometimes.

  On my way to Hilgard Hall, I passed through the main plaza where the students had gathered for their daily protest. This time a group of pleasantly braless co-eds held up signs demanding the passage of the ERA while a middle-aged woman with long, straight hair and a pair of aviator sunglasses shouted into a microphone. For some reason, nobody asked me to join in.

  I found Howard reading a book on one of the benches in front of the biology building. “Whatcha reading?” I asked. He shut the book, holding the place with his finger, and read from the cover.

  “Ecological Methods with Particular Reference to the Study of Insect Populations.”

  “Sounds spellbinding. What’s the plot?”

  He smiled. “I’m trying to figure out how to use capture-recapture techniques as a way of estimating the size of populations.”

  “Ah, so you can tell me how many cockroaches are in a warehouse?”

  “That’s the idea. We’d catch a bunch of roaches, mark them with paint, turn them loose, collect another sample later, count how many marked individuals are recaptured, and from that we could figure out how many are in the whole population.” He sounded genuinely excited by all of this. I was lost.

  “Great idea. Of course, you’ll have to explain to the customer why you’re turning loose the first batch of cockroaches so you can catch them again. Just count ’em the first time and kill them.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he replied and ran his fingers through his curly hair, obviously wondering how to explain this to me. I saved him the trouble.

  “Don’t worry, Howard. I trust that you scientists know what the hell you’re doing. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come up with insecticides, and I wouldn’t have a business.”

  “I suppose that a lot of what we do seems pretty mysterious.”

  “Since you brought up mysteries, I have one more question for you.” The spark went out of his eyes, like I’d just told a child that his dog had been run over.

  “I thought I was done with that.”

  “You are, for the most part. It’s just that this woman you met might be more important than I first thought.”

  “Look, Riley, it seems to me that the more you try to find out about her, the less likely it is that I’m going to keep the whole thing quiet.”

  “Don’t worry, kid, I have no intention of exposing your fling. I’m sure I can get what I need and keep our little secret. I just want to know whether you can tell me anything more about her.”

  “Like what?”

  “You said she had an accent that was British or something like that. Right?”

  “Yeah, it was definitely foreign, but there is a professor in the department who’s British, as well as one of the lab techs, and Sarah’s accent wasn’t quite the same.”

  “All right. Did she use any words or phrases that were unique? You know, like how the Brits say ‘bloody good’ and call an apartment a ‘flat.’”

  “Sure, now that you mention it, she did have a couple of strange expressions. When we were at the bar, she asked the bartender for a dop. He was confused and probably figured she’d said another drop but he’d misunderstood her accent. Anyway, she held up her empty glass so he poured her beer. I guess that’s what she was asking for.”

  “Good. Now think, anything else?”

  “Well, she’d say ‘is it?’ during our conversations. It was like a way of encouraging me to say more.”

  “That might be useful. What else?”

  “I only remember one other term, and it’s kind of embarrassing, but I guess we’ve come this far, eh?”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “Well, after sex we’d lain there for a bit when she turned toward me and looked at my, uh, penis.”

  “And?”

  “Well, she said something like, ‘Looking slup there, Howard. Think we might be able to get you going again?’ I know what she meant, but I’d never heard it called that before.”

  “It’s a new one for me, too. Thanks for the help. Hey, do you know if John is around? I’m supposed to meet up with him.”

  “Yeah, I saw him go into the building with an armload of books about a half hour ago.”

  I let Howard get back to reading about capturing and counting insects and headed inside. It wasn’t hard to figure out why students hung around on the lawns between classes. Old university buildings can have nice exteriors, but in my limited experience they all have i
nteriors like some sort of third-world hospital. Long corridors lit with flickering fluorescent lights, drab walls, cheap linoleum, and unidentifiable odors. The door to Odum’s lab was open, so I stuck my head in and called out to John.

  “In here,” he replied from the cramped, windowless closet that served as his office. There was enough room for his desk, a spare chair, and a bookshelf. At least, the shelving was designed to hold books, although John had filled it with stacks of punch cards held together with rubber bands. The walls sported posters featuring plants (“The Trees of California” with a bunch of different trees surrounding a sequoia) and environmental slogans (“Forests: The Lungs of the Planet” with some trees arranged in the shape of lungs across a map of the world). He spun around in his chair and gestured toward the empty seat. With the stacks of green-and-white lined computer printouts covering the floor, there was no room to push the chair back, so our knees almost touched when I sat down.

  “My filing system takes up a lot of space, but at least I can find things when I need them,” he said.

  “Whatever works,” I replied, turning my chair sideways to gain a little legroom. “Looks like you’re a busy fellow.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Odum and I had some big plans for a research project. Now it’s fallen into my lap to find another faculty member who will take over the supervisory role, at least on paper.” He swung his arm over the stacks of papers. “All this is what ecologists think we know about nutrient cycling in Asian forests.”