Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (2 page)

And meanwhile, during those five years, I sat around the house in Oakland watching my cats Tigris and Euphrates slip fatly into middle age while I tried not to, running through six hopeless tenants, working not very much, chasing women, pouting some more, and harping at Rosie to come back to the East Bay, which she would not.

I was doing a bit of harping one night not too long ago, in my favorite Thai restaurant, when Rosie came up with another idea.

“Sell the house, Jake. Move to Marin. Come to work for me.”

I guess I must have stared at her because she burst out laughing.

“Why not? I worked for you. Now it’s your turn.”

I started to sing, “I cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry over me…”

She waited, patient, an ascending eyebrow, a condescending smile.

I shook my head. “I lived in Marin once. My wife left me.” Of course, that wasn’t Marin’s fault.

“You don’t have one now, so she can’t leave you.”

“I’m used to Oakland. Berkeley.”

“And too old and soft to change? Flexibility gone to pot, along with your once-flat gut?”

“Hey!” That was too much. A small spare tire, perhaps.

She grabbed my hand. “Sorry. You’re still gorgeous. But you’d love it, I know. And for God’s sake, it’s twenty minutes away!”

“Half an hour.”

“Give or take. Sell the house. Join me in Marvelous Marin.”

“I love my neighborhood— don’t you miss Rockridge?” Oops. What was that sudden funny feeling in my gut? An itch for something different?

“Sure. But Marin has whole towns like this. And a tax base too.”

My turn for the eyebrow routine. “Snobbery? From my politically correct Rosie?”

“I’ve never been politically correct. And I don’t think it’s snobbery to want to live someplace where you can forget to lock the door and where you can walk anywhere at night without a black belt.”

“You’re the one that’s getting soft, Vicente.” And I missed her like crazy. Obviously, she missed me too, and that was nice. We made an effort to get together often, but that’s what it was, an effort. Not a ten-second walk down the path.

“Could be.” She plucked at her fat-free waistline. “But think about it. The agency’s doing great. I could use the help.”

She wasn’t going to cave. That left only one option I could see— the caving would have to be mine. “Maybe I can find a place with a cottage?”

“If you did, maybe I’d move.”

So I went home to think about it, and found thinking about it fairly easy.

For one thing, I did like Marin. It is both cosmopolitan and beautiful— an unbeatable combination. For another thing, it was not like my “agency” could not be moved. Thanks to my mother’s will, I had a small but steady income that meant I only had to take cases I really wanted anyway. For a third thing, there were my weekly poker games. Lately, they’d been more like monthly. Two of my poker buddies had moved away in the past year, one to Seattle and one to D.C. Of the two who’d stuck around, one of them had always lived in Marin and traveled to my house for games: Artie Perrine, my best friend next to Rosie. Artie ran an investigative magazine, a slick monthly called
Probe;
he’d given me a press card years ago so I could fake my way into places an unlicensed PI might want to go. I’d given him tips about stories a few times, and once spent a couple weeks hanging out at his mildewed Mill Valley canyon getting his nephew out of some trouble that involved a dead guy he found. That was one of the first cases I’d worked on back when I first decided to parlay a brief, disastrous, and very youthful career on the Chicago Police Department into an occasional moneymaker as an unlicensed PI.

So that made portable work, two very good friends living across the Bay, a crippled poker game in Oakland, and a feeling of restlessness I hadn’t admitted even to Rosie.

That night I dreamed that Tigris and Euphrates asked me to buy them a house in the woods and hang up a lot of bird feeders.

And wouldn’t you know it would be that very night that some son of a bitch broke into my classic blue and white 1953 Chevy Bel Air, which I’d dared to park on the street, took it for a joyride, and ran it into the barred front of a west Berkeley liquor store. Totaled. Worst of all, the guy lived.

I had decided to consider it an omen and put the house up for sale.

Rosie was on a stakeout right now, down in Sausalito, and would be, late into the night. I called her car phone.

“You’re kidding, right, Jake? You thought I must be bored so you made this up.”

“I wish.”

“Some skinhead wants us to save the world?”

“That’s what he says. I think he wants us to save him.”

“Call the FBI, my friend. Kiss this one good-bye. We don’t need the money.”

“There’s something else, though. You remember Art’s goddaughter, Deeanne? She’s involved with the boy.”

“Oh. Damn. She’s not in the group, is she?”

“If she is, she’s a turncoat like Royal.”

“Okay. Let me make some calls, Jake, and see what I can find out. Does Artie know about this?”

“Not yet, but I’m going to call him the minute we get off the line.”

“I’ll get back to you. Where’ll you be in two hours?”

“In bed, sleeping.”

“I’ll wake you.”

“That’ll be a first.” She didn’t say good-bye, but the raspberry damned near broke my eardrum.

I called Artie. He wasn’t home so I left a vague message. Very vague. Then I fed the cats, got into my red ’64 Ford Falcon Futura convertible, and went up to College Avenue for takeout, a falafel sandwich with plenty of hummus. Heading back home again, I was hoping Rosie would find out that the FBI had someone inside the Aryan Command, and everything was under control.

A couple of hours later, my bedside phone rang. It was Rosie.

“Okay, Jake. Here’s the story. Pauline says they have some of their meetings in a house in San Rafael.” Pauline was her buddy on the San Rafael PD, survivor of a nasty divorce that had left her generally pissed off and especially pissed off at men. She refused to give me information directly, or so Rosie insisted. The mention of her name irritated me enough to bring me fully awake.

“So they’re Marin people.”

“Not all of them. And they’ve got a hangout in Berkeley too. Anyway, the FBI had a guy in there for a while. He was a member for over a year, couple years ago, and no one ever did anything but talk, and half the time all they talked about was their boots and their haircuts. Pauline says this informant of yours, this Royal, he’s maybe dramatizing things, showing off for his girlfriend. She says that as far as she knows, nobody’s going to get back onto these people unless someone brings them something real. I mentioned that Royal told you someone already got killed, but she says nobody knows anything about that. And Pauline says that if the boy’s telling the truth he needs to take it to the right people.”

“He won’t. I don’t think he likes cops.”

“Right. Just the Gestapo. Okay, then, how about this— why don’t you keep away from those people, but let this Nazi be your snitch. Risk his skin, not yours. If he’s telling the truth, let the FBI worry about it. If he isn’t, let the cops worry about him.”

“That won’t work. I’ll have to get more involved. He’s not that bright.”

“I don’t think we should touch this.”

I didn’t think we should either, but I honestly didn’t know what I was going to do.

“Say for the sake of argument that we do get some kind of information. Did Pauline give you a name to take it to— any G-man in particular?”

“Yes, San Francisco office. Pauline said, an agent named Harry George.”

“Sounds like a kid’s stuffed animal.”

“Ha. Ha.”

I thought it was funny. Something had to be.

I had barely fallen back to sleep when the phone rang again. This time it was Artie. Boy, did I not want to talk to him.

But I did. And when I’d finished, there was dead silence. Then a deep sigh, the kind I’d heard before when he talked about the girl. The sigh tailed off into a puppyish little groan. And more silence.

“Artie. About Deeanne— take it easy on her. You don’t want her to bolt for good, spend the rest of her life with people like this.”

Silence for a moment, then another sigh. “No, I guess not.”

Royal didn’t expect an answer until the next afternoon, but the part of my mind that pokes me awake wanted a decision that night.

Every dream reminded me, left me flapping around for an answer so I could go to sleep again. I thought about Rosie’s idea of letting Royal do the inside work and then having the cops circle back toward him whether he liked it or not. But that had a couple of problems. We’d be lying to a client, which in this case I wasn’t so sure I cared about, and— here was the big one— he was a dope who’d screw it all up, and in the process of getting himself hung out to dry, could put Deeanne in big trouble too.

Until I took a look at the group, I had only his word for it that he couldn’t just quit. If he was telling the truth, the only way to cut him loose was to bust the Aryan Command. Which also sounded to me like a good idea.

At 1:30, thrashing around in the sweaty sheets, I decided I was pissed at Deeanne for getting me into this. She needed to dump the little asshole and I needed to turn the job down. By 2:00, I was thinking I’d do it because I was worried about Deeanne and the people Royal said the group was planning to kill. By 3:00, the worry weighed about as much as the fear on the other side of the scales.

By morning, I’d decided to flat-out refuse.

Some things scare me a lot more than others. Hitler freaks, for instance, are much higher on my fear scale than your average run-of-the-mill killers. Terrorists. Zealots of any kind, any religion, any place along the spectrum. I believe in leaving people like that to the G-men, to the police, to those who are paid to uphold the Constitution.

Once upon a time, I had sworn to uphold the law. I’d been a rookie when the Democrats came to Chicago in 1968, along with the Yippies and the hippies and the just-plain idealistic and the just-plain dumb. The people who came to shake things up knew damned well what the Chicago cops were like, had to know they’d lose it, had to know what would happen. I was supposedly on the other side, but that didn’t keep me out of the just-plain-dumb category. It never occurred to me that my fellow cops would riot. When everything blew apart, when the tear gas hit the hot night air, I lost it too. When a kid close to my own age came at me, screaming, “Pig!”, I hit him with my nightstick. He fell, bleeding. I ran, leaving a trail of my own vomit. I’d been on the force a year. That was my last night.

Now, no matter how much I might get caught up in the problems of my clients, I am, after all, paid only to uphold my mortgage. I’ve got no official status of any kind, not even a PI license I could lose. What’s the point of all that freedom if I can’t turn down a bad-assed case? These days, I can run before I get to the point of throwing up.

So I was happy with my decision and happy that I’d made one. I left a message on Rosie’s machine and went outside to the garden to pick some tomatoes. Off the hook, free as a bird, and clichés aside, maybe yellow as a sapsucker’s belly.

I should have known better than to trust a cliché. Rosie didn’t get back to me right away, but while I was out having words with the hornworms, Deeanne called. The number she’d left was mid-county. Not right for the place she was supposed to be spending her mornings for one more school year— Tamalpais High in Mill Valley.

I called the number. Deeanne was right there to pick up the phone, wherever
there
was.

“Oh, Jake, I’m glad you called. See, we were all, ‘He’s not gonna do it,’ and Royal was like, ‘Maybe we should call him this morning.’ I didn’t want to bother you, but we were scared you’d just decide, well, you know…”

“You were right to worry, Deeanne. That is what I decided. It’s way out of my league.” My league is bush. Farm. “You need to stay away from him before you get hurt. And Royal needs to take his problem to the police.”

“He won’t do that! And I won’t leave him.” I was afraid she’d say that.

An agitated-sounding male voice said something in the background.

“Is that Royal? Are you with Royal?”

“Yes. He wants to talk to you.”

“Is this his home number?”

“No. Here he is.”

“There’s no point—”

Royal Subic was on the line.

“Mr. Samson, I been thinking. I was worried about how you feel about me and like that, but Deeanne, she says you’re really good at this stuff and we can trust you, and I can’t go to the police, I really can’t. They wouldn’t believe me anyway. And besides, there are other reasons.”

“See, that’s one of the things that worry me. You aren’t telling me everything. You’re hiding something.”

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. I just got used to being, you know… Listen, I’m really sorry I ever thought these guys were cool. I’m not like them. I don’t hate nobody.”

“Royal, I can’t do it.”

“What do you usually get a day, for the detective work?”

“Three hundred plus expenses.”

“I’ll give you six. I’ll give you seven. I need help. And I’ve got the money.”

Yeah, he’d said that before. “What do you do for a living, Royal?”

“I’m a plumber’s helper. Part-time.”

I asked the obvious question. “So where did all this money come from?” Images of Royal and his friends robbing blind beggars came to mind. No wonder he couldn’t go to the police.

“I didn’t steal it, if that’s what worries you.” I didn’t like the way he emphasized the word
I
. “My dad, well… he’s rich.” For some reason, Royal didn’t sound happy about that. “He’ll give it to me. I can pay you whatever you want right in front, like for a week? That’s…”

The calculation was taking him a while. I was in a hurry, so I did it for him. “At seven hundred dollars a day it’s forty-nine hundred, plus expenses.”

“Fine. Please. Make it five thousand.”

The balance was tipping again. Someone was going to have to get these kids out of the hole Royal had dug. I didn’t know whether to believe all that conspiracy crap, but if any of it was true the feds needed to know. There was that, and there was Royal’s more respectful, more beseeching attitude, his remorse, the money, and Deeanne. Against fear. I counted on my fingers. Five against one. So much for a night of decision-making.