Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) (3 page)

“Okay. I’ll give it a try. But if it looks too crazy, too impossible, too bad, I’m going to back out fast.”

“That’s fair.”

“Thank you.” He’d said his father would give him the money. That raised another question. “Your family— are they in this Command thing? Have they been involved in it?”

“Jesus, no! They don’t even know about it. They met one of the guys once, and— well, they hated him.”

Deeanne was back on the line. “Oh, Jake, I don’t know how to thank you for this. You won’t be sorry. I’ll be grateful forever. Whatever you want, I’ll—”

“Fine. Whatever I want? I’m going to take you up on that, Deeanne. Where are you?”

“We’re in a diner. At a pay phone.”

“Hang up the pay phone, leave the diner, and go to school. That’s what I want.”
Get a little smarter. Maybe you’ll learn to avoid
the Royals of this world
. “You’ll only be a couple of hours late.”

She hesitated for several seconds. “Okay. ’Bye. Don’t tell Artie I wasn’t in school, okay?” I grunted. “And I won’t hang up yet because Royal wants to talk to you again, okay?”

I didn’t have time to answer. Royal was back on the line. “I’ll try to think about where you could start, and what all I need to tell you, and then I’ll call you this afternoon, okay?”

“What time?”

“When I was going to before. Two. Okay?”

“Fine. You fill me in and we’ll do some real planning. Then I can think about getting started.”

“Thanks, Mr. Samson.”

I said something like “Gmph” and cradled the receiver.

Rosie called me from the office to tell me she was glad I hadn’t taken the case.

“Well, uh, I kind of decided that maybe we should.”

“Oh, Jesus, Jake. Why don’t we have lunch and talk about it?”

“Okay, pick you up at the office at, what—?”

“Make it twelve-fifteen.”

I had a couple of must-do chores that morning. First, I had to return a phone call from a client whose case I’d wrapped up the month before. He didn’t understand some of the expenses he’d been charged for. The man had had a hard time understanding a lot of things, including how his girlfriend managed to embezzle a hundred thousand dollars from his electrical business. His wife didn’t understand it either.

I spent fifteen minutes on the phone going over the costs with him. The one he balked at was the fifty bucks I’d given a waiter to listen in on the girlfriend’s conversation with her accomplice, a guy who looked like he spent every waking hour working out. The client finally whined an agreement and said next time he’d hire a real PI. Yeah. Go with God.

Then I sat down at my 486— listen, it works okay— to check my e-mail. That’s right, a computer. Blame Rosie for it. I personally am convinced that one of these days the airwaves or the circuits or whatever the hell are going to fill up and spontaneously combust and we’re all going to drown in a shower of cybershit. But people kept trying to e-mail me, and Rosie asked really nice, and I’m going to make up for giving in by refusing to upgrade for as long as I possibly can.

So the e-mail. Not much of interest there. A friend of a friend had what sounded like a pretty sleazy divorce case. After the electrician, I didn’t want to touch it, but I’d run it by Rosie anyway.

Then I went outside to try, for the seventeenth time, to fix my front gate. It sagged and scraped the ground, no matter what I did to it. Sometimes I thought the place hated me because it knew I wasn’t going to stay. The Oakland house had sold fast, and I’d had to hustle to find this one. It was in Fairfax, and that was good. But there was no cottage for Rosie, the lot wasn’t as big as the one I’d had in Oakland, and the house had carpeting and no fireplace. The droopy gate was just a bonus.

I had an appointment with a realtor the next day, matter of fact.

When I opened the office door at Sphinx Investigations, Rosie was on the phone, sitting in her executive swivel facing the window, only her short, dark hair visible above the chair’s high back. Her black standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, stood up to greet me with a bow, a squeaky yawn, and a wag. She, like Tigris and Euphrates, was getting on in years and had gone from unbridled enthusiasm to friendly dignity. Like me too, I guess.

Rosie swung around and nodded to me, said a few more words to whoever was on the other end of the line, and hung up.

“About this Nazi job, Jake…”

“I think we should do it.” I told her about the pay.

“I was going to ask you to do this one—” she looked down at a letter on the desk and shoved it toward me “—divorce case, hourly cut or straight salary basis.”

I laughed, and slid my own e-mail printout across to her. “I was going to give this one to you, in case you had some time.”

She let it sit there, looking at me hard, her hazel eyes a little too motherly for my taste. She’s younger than I am.

“I mean it, Jake.”

“I’m a big boy. I think we should do it. You don’t have to help. I don’t want to risk your neck.” If she can be motherly, I can be fatherly.

She was silent for a moment, fiddling with the e-mail. Then she pushed it aside.

“What’s the next step?”

I told her Royal was supposed to call that afternoon.

“Get money up front, Jake, and make sure it doesn’t have a picture of Adolf on the hundred-dollar bill.”

After which we went out for some healthy burritos— a contradiction in terms as far as I’m concerned— and argued about Nazis some more.

I got home just before 2:00, and while I waited for Royal to call, I thumbed through that afternoons Marin
Independent Journal.

There was a story on a new history curriculum in the local school system. The high school kids were going to get a bigger dose of the twentieth century, for one thing. That made me think of Royal. If my new client had ever heard or read anything about World War II, it had slipped his mind, buried under a mountain of adolescent fantasies. He had probably been too busy thinking about sex, or boot wax, or hangover remedies.

I unrolled the San Francisco
Chronicle
that had been delivered that morning, skipped the front section, and went right to “Bay Area” to check out what was new over in the East Bay. Berkeley was enjoying the latest escapades of a far-left group called ThePeople, and their leader. Or maybe they called him a facilitator. Moderator? Chair? The
Chron
wasn’t clear. Anyway, his name was Cary Frasier. I’d been seeing him around Oakland and Berkeley for years, and he was always up to something political. Frasier believed in a lot of things I cared about— the environment, free speech, human rights— but he was such a pamphlet-mouth he embarrassed me, and he wasn’t very good at drawing a line between protest and violence. He was also not very good at picking a few causes and sticking with them. He attacked anything right of center, scattershot. He was always in some kind of war, and he was always on the side of the angels. The group was currently being investigated, the paper said, for involvement in some window-smashing. Which brought me full circle to World War II and the Nazis. The story didn’t say who the windows belonged to, but it could be almost anyone.

Right about the time I was getting tired of the world as we know it, and dropping all the newspapers into the recycling box, the phone rang. Royal, I thought.

As it turned out, though, the caller was Deeanne. He’d asked her to do it for him. Busy polishing his head, no doubt.

“I expected to hear from Royal, Deeanne.”

“Oh, he was all, maybe you’d change your mind again and maybe it would be better because you like me.”

The message he was sending through her was that he would meet me that night at the Aryan Command’s hangout in northwest Berkeley, a bar called Thor’s.

Thor’s. I’m a little light in the Norse god department. Thor, I thought, made thunder with a hammer and tossed lightning around. He didn’t have the status of Odin, who was, I thought, the Big Guy, the Zeus of the north, but he was loud.

“Tell me about Thor’s.”

“It’s just this, you know, like, sleazy bar. With hamburgers.”

“Is it owned by the group?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I guess the bartender likes them okay.”

“How do the people who go there dress?”

“Dress?”

“Dress.”

“The usual stuff. Let’s see. Some of them are skins, and they wear flight jackets and Docs—”

“Docs?”

“Doc Martens. They’re boots. Some of the women wear leather miniskirts. Some of them don’t, though. Jeans. The men wear jeans or camouflage pants. Gee, I can’t remember anything specific. A lot of them look pretty tacky.”

“So you won’t be there tonight?”

“No. Artie’s taking the family out for dinner.”

“Good. Keep away.”

“You don’t even have to say it. I don’t want to be around those people. They scare me.”

“They should. Another thing, Deeanne— how old is Royal?”

“Twenty.”

“Isn’t he a little old for you?”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

Wow. That old. “And the crowd that hangs out at this bar— are they all young?” And underage?

“Oh. Well, mostly, I guess. There were some older people too, though, I think.”

She clearly hadn’t paid much attention, and I was concerned about the age factor, along with a dozen other things. Would I look out of place? Were all the men twenty years old?

My qualifications for this job could have been better.

I couldn’t do anything about my birth date or my ancestry, but I could do a couple of things to change my looks for a walk on the far-right side.

The hair. Curly, but for general master-race purposes, light enough, especially with the threads of gray. Blue eyes from my Riga
bubbe.
Very non-Semitic nose, also courtesy of Bubbe Fanny. But I didn’t want these weirdos to know what I really looked like. I had to change something and I didn’t have time to grow a toothbrush mustache.

I picked up the phone and punched in the number for Hairfax.

“Betty, this is Jake. I’m desperate. You’ve got to squeeze me in this afternoon.”

“Sure, hon. Need a cut?”

“I want it bleached and straightened.”

A second of silence, followed by laughter. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

Betty still thought I was putting her on. “I watched the news this morning, Jake. They didn’t say anything about hell freezing over.”

“Please?”

“Come on in at three. But stop and see your therapist first.”

If I had one, I might consider it.

Okay. Now for the outfit. I looked in my closet. Jeans, no problem. Crammed into the back of a T-shirt drawer I found a black muscle shirt that qualified as tacky, I guessed. It didn’t smell too good and it was wrinkled.

Shoes. I figured running shoes weren’t right. I did, however, have a pair of cowboy boots I’d worn twice. Black with some really ugly stitching in red. I didn’t have a leather jacket, but there was the old denim job I’d had since the Seventies.

I put it all together, took a good long look in the mirror, gave up, and went shopping.

The night was unusually warm, even for September, and the door to Thor’s Bar and Grill stood open. The hard heartbeat of heavy metal pulsed into the street. I walked in like I belonged.

The wooden floor was gray with age and deeply embedded dirt. Decades of traffic had worn a hollow in the floorboards along the bar, a shallow cup carved by the feet of generations of drinkers. The bar itself was a thrown-together pile of cheap paneling and Formica, the dozen or so stools a scratched collection of red plastic seats and crippled legs. The air smelled of stale beer and old grease. Off to one side was a grill, where the cook, a scrawny, sweating skinhead kid who looked too young to be there, was frying burgers. He wore a clean white apron over his jeans, and his black suspenders looked new. He yanked a dripping basket of fries out of the well and dumped them on a couple of plates.

I had a little trouble picking Royal out of the crowd. I’d met him only once, and although I generally remember faces, hairless people in skin-drag tend to look a lot alike. Then I spotted him, sitting at the bar waiting for me.

He didn’t recognize me at first either. I had to walk right up to him and poke him in the swastika before he reacted. After a blank first look, his eyes widened. Staring, he took it all in, beginning with the straight platinum hair and moving down to the new leather jacket— I was sweating under the damned thing— and the shiny black Doc Martens boots.

When Royal had recovered from the sight of me, he grabbed a paper napkin from under his beer, wiped off the next bar stool, and invited me to sit. I guessed that meant he was impressed by my disguise.

“Uh, good to see you, Ja—”

The bartender was at the other end, and no one else seemed to be listening, but I grabbed his hand and shook it, saying, “Shut up” under my breath. Then, through gritted teeth: “Yeah, kid, been a while since you and your old cousin Jason tossed one back together.” Meaning, Get it kid? I’m not using my real name. At least he hadn’t called me “Mr. Samson.”

“Jason?” Well, I already knew he was none too bright.

“Oh, that’s okay. You just keep on calling me Jase. You been drinking too much?”

Light dawned behind his pale eyes. “How about a beer Jase?”

“Sure.” There were a lot to choose from. Domestic on tap and in the bottle, Guinness, a couple of West Coast ales. A bunch of German beers.

While he ordered the drinks, I looked around the dim bar. A big Confederate flag was tacked to the wall above the jukebox. A couple of the men wore them on their backs, one on a T-shirt and one on a leather jacket. Since he was the only other guy wearing his jacket, and he was sweating more than I was, I figured it was okay to take mine off. I draped it on my bar stool and sat on it.

Most of the customers were men, and I wasn’t the only one over forty. The women covered a wide range too. The youngster with the shaved head, leather miniskirt, and nose ring looked underage. Another looked like she was in her thirties, had too much messy hair, wore a polyester dress and heels, and hung on the arm of an older guy dressed in suit pants and a frayed white dress shirt. She looked very excited to be there. Hey, so was I.