Poisoned Justice

by Jeffrey Alan Lockwood

  “Be careful. This is all poison oak,” she warned, gesturing toward the shiny green shrubs that stretched up a hillside. Now I understood why shorts would’ve been a very bad idea. “Use your stick to push aside the branches.” We made our way to the top of a low ridge and the vegetation changed markedly. The climb convinced my head and hand to join in a bout of synchronized throbbing.

  “Here’s Dr. Odum’s little secret,” Jen announced. Sunlight drenched an opening in the trees, allowing the marijuana to grow in green profusion.

  “Not bad. This must’ve provided a nice little income, eh?” I asked, pushing my way into the chest-high tangle of plants.

  “I’d guess we harvested nearly a hundred pounds last year.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, he cut me in on the deal after coming to trust me. First he sold me a couple of lids. When I was cool with that, he showed me his plots. I handled sales on campus. It wasn’t the big time by any means, but after expenses my share was nearly a thousand bucks.”

  “Not bad.”

  “The best part is that I knew this weed was safe. After the paraquat fiasco a few years ago, I preferred to grow my own rather than risk being poisoned.” She pulled a joint out of her pocket and lit up. “Wanna share another?” she asked.

  “No thanks. I was tempted by your first test, but I think I passed the second one this morning.” She looked hurt, knowing that I knew.

  “Sorry, Riley. I had to be sure,” she said, taking a deep drag and holding her breath. She sighed and released the sweet smoke. “You know, that first offer wasn’t just a test. I like mature guys and you’re really cute. There’s a nice grassy patch under that oak.” She nodded toward the far side of the clearing.

  “I’m flattered, but let’s keep things simple. There are plenty of students—and probably quite a few faculty—that’d be delighted to accept your offer.” The aspirin were wearing off and the sun was making my head pound, so the prospect of a romp in the forest was less than enticing at the moment.

  She stroked my arm and said, “But they’re not a challenge, and I like challenges.”

  “I’ll bet John would be a challenge.”

  “Yeah,” she laughed. “Luring him away from his punch cards would be a test of any woman’s seductive skills.”

  She finished the joint and we waded back into the poison oak. On the walk to the truck, I mulled over Odum’s hobby farm. He wasn’t making enough from his little operation to cover the costs of his attack on AmeriChem. Bribing the security and maintenance crews wasn’t cheap when you’re expecting a guy to put his job on the line for a one-time payment. But maybe a larger supply of high-quality pot would’ve funded his monkey-wrenching—say, a few bales of first-rate Asian dope. I asked Jen if she could take me to where Odum had stored the plant samples sent from Thailand.

  Jen drove onto campus and parked at a loading ramp behind Hilgard Hall. It sure was easier to access the university when you drove a truck with their logo on it. We went through an unmarked door and down a cool, dimly lit hall. A room had a sign in large block letters. “Do Not Enter: Biological Material Under Quarantine.”

  “This is Dr. Odum’s cold storage,” she said, producing a key and unlocking the door. She led me into a long, narrow room with racks of wire shelves. “The vegetation samples from Thailand are in these packages.” She swept her arm across three racks holding plastic-bound bales about two feet on a side. Each bore a label with a four-letter code followed by a series of numbers, along with “M. Srisai, Chief Scientist, Forest Regeneration Project, Ministry of Forests & Wildlife, Atsadang Road, Bangkok, Thailand, 10330.” Jen hugged herself against the chill, so I suggested she wait outside. She seemed reluctant to leave me alone with the samples, but her shivering drove her out into the hallway.

  I pulled out my pocketknife, cut through the plastic of one of the packages, and pulled back the flaps. The bale was stuffed with enormous glossy leaves of various shapes. I was going to try another, but making a mess of the storeroom didn’t seem fair to Odum’s students, since I wasn’t sure of finding what I was looking for. So instead I dug through the leaves on the open side of the bale, piling the vegetation on the shelf. By now my fingers were getting numb, but the cold was relieving the throbbing in my hand, so I pressed on.

  After pulling out a few inches of tropical tree leaves, I discovered another plastic package. Cutting into this, I hit pay dirt: a tightly packed mass of marijuana. I figured the inner package of pot had a street value of at least a grand. With twenty bales in cold storage Odum had plenty to finance his project at AmeriChem. Now I was shivering, so I stuffed the outer leaves back into the package and turned the cut side to the wall to keep the contents from spilling out.

  “So what did you find?” Jen asked as I emerged. Her question seemed utterly genuine.

  “Nothing,” I lied and watched her face carefully. She gave no hint of surprise or relief. “Just bales of leaves that I presume are valuable to the world of science.”

  She laughed, “One man’s detritus is another man’s treasure. Dr. Odum processed the first shipment a few weeks ago, but I don’t know when or if anyone will ever get to analyzing the rest.”

  “Can I buy you lunch?” I asked as we emerged into the sunlight. The sudden warmth momentarily melted the aching in my body.

  “That’s sweet of you, but I have to get back out to my field plots. The scientific ones,” she said with a wink. “I’m still hoping that my thesis research is going to work out. Wanna ride back to my apartment to get your truck?”

  “No, I’ve taken up enough of your morning.” And a walk across campus sounded like good medicine to me.

  “It was my pleasure. At least almost.” She gave me a peck on the cheek and climbed into the cab of the truck.

  As I headed across campus, I tried to fit the new pieces into the puzzle. It seemed that Odum had kept his new import business to himself, probably because he didn’t want to explain to Jen why he was getting into the big leagues. I presumed that he was wholesaling the dope to distributors, since even at Berkeley a professor selling bags of pot from his office might catch the eye of campus authorities. With his supply line to Thailand and a great cover story, he could easily fund his extracurricular monkey-wrenching and underwrite his wife’s environmental projects for years.

  The problem for Odum was that while small-time growers weren’t a threat to the major players, his new venture was sure to have attracted attention. Bino had convinced me that the companies dealing in legal chemicals weren’t behind Odum’s death. But the bigwigs in the illicit chemical industry don’t like competition any more than their corporate counterparts. Maybe in his effort to save the world, Odum had made himself worth killing.

  CHAPTER 31

  On the way across the bridge, KDFC was playing a marathon of Haydn’s London symphonies, with one of my favorites, No. 96—better known as The Miracle—being featured on my drive back. By the time I reached Goat Hill Extermination, my aches had returned with a vengeance. But learning that Carol and Dennis were feeling fine did me a lot of good. And thanks to a handful of aspirin from the bottle in the top drawer of Carol’s filing cabinet, life was improving by the minute.

  The most painful part of coming to the office was being accosted by the inanity of a man and woman singing about muskrat love. There is simply no musical context which justifies lyrics about rodent passion. Carol mercifully turned down the radio and filled me in on events at work. Larry and Dennis were working on a big rat control job on the docks, so Isaac was handling a bunch of little assignments. She told me that Isaac looked preoccupied when he came to work, so I might want to check on him, “if you can afford time away from your project.” I assured her that I’d be back full-time within a week. In fact, I had exactly seven days to come up with an answer for Laurie Odum. I was on my way out the door when the phone rang.

  “It’s Officer Madsen from the San Francisco Police,” Carol said, covering the mouthpiece with her free hand. “You w
ant to take it?”

  “I’d better see what’s up,” I said. “Can you forward it to my office?” A few seconds later, the phone on my desk rang.

  “Riley here, what’s up, Kelly?”

  “I have what you want,” she said provocatively. Kelly could sound as tempting on the phone as she appeared in person.

  “I know you do, but did you find out anything about Sarie Botha?” I answered, playing along.

  “I had to dig around quite a bit, but the summer crime flurry is over so it’s easier to work on special projects like yours. You know it’s not easy for a busy girl to slip in these requests.”

  “And?” Kelly had always been good at drawing out the suspense, which was one of the qualities that made her so good in the sack.

  “Your Miss Botha lives in Berkeley.”

  “No kidding?” I replied. The wheels were spinning.

  “I have more,” she cooed.

  “You always did.”

  She snickered appreciatively. “I pulled the institutional directories and found that she works at the university in the anthropology department.”

  “Kelly, this is great work. I owe you, doll.”

  “Yes, you do, Riley.”

  We left it there, and I headed out to find Isaac. It was lucky that I could navigate the city without thinking, as my mind was churning. Either Howard had misunderstood his mysterious lover’s name, or she’d used an amateurish alias. If she was Odum’s killer, she certainly would have wanted to cover her tracks. She could’ve been a brilliant anthropologist for all I knew, but she certainly wasn’t an experienced criminal. It hadn’t been all that hard to trace her—or at least someone with a remarkably similar name. I’d have to get back over to Berkeley tomorrow to see if she matched Howard’s description. With nearly five million people in the Bay Area, it was amazing how often names and identities got mismatched. And if Sarie Botha was a blond bombshell, then there was the little matter of figuring out a motive.

  I pulled up in front of Simon’s Seafood, on the north side of the Castro. As I walked into the entryway, Simon came mincing from the back of the ten-table restaurant. The lunch rush was over, so there were only a few lingering diners to fully appreciate his lavender silk shirt and the pair of white bellbottoms he must’ve painted on. No wonder the poor guy pranced rather than walked. But Simon made some of the best calamari in the city and his steamed clams Bordelaise was untouchable. As was Simon, at least if you were a woman.

  “Riley, ith just awful,” he lisped, taking my hand in his. “Thoth flieth will be the death of me,” he declared with all the drama he could muster. Simon ran a first-class establishment. I’d taken Kelly there for a candlelight dinner a couple of times because it was one of the nicest restaurants I could afford on a cop’s salary. So I knew his anxiety was real.

  “Don’t worry, Simon, we’ll take care of them.” I patted his hand, extricated mine, and headed through the kitchen. I found Isaac in the alley spraying the sunlit side of the building. A cloud of flies hovered overhead.

  I stood there for a minute, then interrupted. “What’s up, Isaac?”

  He was so startled that he nearly sprayed me with the pyrethrin. “Sorry! You startled me, Riley. It’s just a fly infestation. I should be done in a few minutes.”

  The concrete apron along the base of the wall was peppered with dead and dying flies. “Looks like you’re cleaning up the adults pretty well. But do you think there’s more where they came from?”

  “More flies? Sure.”

  “No, I mean what’s the source of these? Unless you treat the cause of the problem and not just the symptoms, you’ll have to be back here in a few days.”

  Having finished coating the brick wall with insecticide, Isaac stepped back to inspect his work and consider my question. “I dunno. I suppose they come from the dumpsters back here.”

  “But then, wouldn’t every alley be filled with flies, if all it took was a dumpster filled with garbage?”

  “I suppose.”

  “So, check out the dumpsters and see if one of them has anything special happening.” I had a pretty good sense of what he’d find based on the whiff I’d caught when I came into the alley. But it was a better lesson if he found out for himself. Isaac started working his way down the dumpsters, lifting the lids and letting them drop with a clang that made me wince. The aspirin were wearing off again.

  “Oh gawd.” He turned his head and screwed up his face.

  “What’d you find, sport?”

  He lifted his hand to his mouth and retched, but managed to keep his breakfast down. “In the bottom,” he said through clenched teeth.

  I held my breath, lifted the lid, and saw the remains of a pretty good-sized dog seething with maggots in the back corner of the dumpster. As I’d suspected, the oozing fluids had glued the carcass in place so the flies had an ongoing feast despite the efforts of San Francisco garbage trucks to periodically disgorge the contents of the dumpster.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Time to act like an artful assassin instead of a mobster from the twenties with a tommy gun.” Isaac looked quizzical. “The Orkin types rely on brute force. We rely on a tactical hit. So instead of repeatedly drenching a building with insecticide, lift the lid and soak the hell out of that maggot mine. And then get a shovel from the truck, take a really deep breath, climb in there, and scrape that mess loose so it’ll fall out with the trash the next time a garbage truck happens to come by.”

  “It’s not going to be pretty, but I can handle it.”

  “Good. And remember, kid, if it was pretty, nobody would pay us to do it.”

  He gave me a lopsided smile, and I headed back through the kitchen. I assured Simon that his fly problem was solved, and he was beside himself with relief. I was worried he’d try to hug me. To my relief, he conveyed his delight by offering me a platter of grilled shrimp. Squeezing some fresh lemon onto my meal was far more appealing than being squeezed by Simon.

  I spent the afternoon at the main public library, a massive gray edifice in the city center that seems more of a tribute to utilitarian geometry than great books. But I wasn’t there to peruse literature. With the help of a dumpy reference librarian who seemed utterly thrilled to be of assistance, I pored over university bulletins and course catalogues to get some idea of who Sarie Botha was and how she fit into the anthropology department. I needed a plan for tomorrow—I couldn’t just walk into her office and ask why she’d poisoned Paul Odum. I’m not much for pretentious shushing in libraries, although I had a pretty lucrative contract to exterminate a silverfish infestation from one of the branch libraries a few years back. So after a bit of research on archaeology—which turned out to be Miss Botha’s speciality—I was more than happy to hit Marty’s for a short, intense right-handed workout.

  Afterward, I showered and picked up Tommy so my mother could have an evening with the ladies from church. We ate the Dublin coddle she insisted on packing up for our dinner. I poured Tommy a Coke and myself a Black Bush after cleaning up the dishes, and we got down to work. I penned labels while he spread and pinned a gorgeous series of morpho butterflies that I’d collected from Mexico. Between the warmth of the whiskey and the tranquilizing strains of Mozart’s Serenade in G Major, which Tommy picked to start the evening, I lapsed into a contemplative mood.

  It struck me how much like tropical butterflies we humans can be. The upper surface of the morpho’s wing is the most iridescent blue imaginable, while the lower surface is a dull, spotted brown. The blue is important for attracting mates, and the brown for avoiding predators. Love and death. In the end we aren’t all that different than the insects. And so far, there seemed to be two sides to everyone involved in Odum’s death—one beautiful and the other ugly. I wondered about Sarie Botha.

  CHAPTER 32

  The morning drive to Berkeley reminded me why I would never be a commuter. I could leave my house, stroll down the hill, and be at Goat Hill Extermination in ten minutes. My walk to w
ork was sheer heaven compared to the chaos of morning rush hour on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. I might’ve thought I’d died and gone to hell had it not been for a cup of Gustaw’s coffee on the dash and Chopin’s piano concertos on the radio. I parked next to a sign that declared “Permit Parking, Zone A” on College Avenue and put the “On Job” sign on the dashboard.

  Kroeber Hall housed the anthropology department. I gathered from yesterday’s reading that Alfred Kroeber had been a real big shot in the field, working with the Indians before their cultures were completely screwed up by the modern world. It’s ironic that I feel sympathy for the Indians, given that European immigrants like my family were the reason for their dying out. But I look back on the values from the Old World that my parents brought with them, and I understand that just because something’s new and shiny doesn’t mean it’s better. Maybe the Indians and I have something in common. We’re both outdated.

  The building was apparently designed by the same architect who drew up the plans for the city library. It seems the guy only had a straightedge on his drafting table and loved the color gray. Once inside, I passed the entrance to the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, which was across from the main office for the anthropology department. I headed up to the second floor and worked my way down the hall. Sarie Botha’s office was next to the one with Rene Morley’s name on the door. I’d learned from my library work that she was his assistant. The calendar posted on his door indicated that he had a meeting all morning, but I couldn’t tell if Miss Botha was in her office. There were no lights on in either one. Pleased that the first element of my plan had fallen into place, I returned to the main office.