Good old Harvey!

She was breathing heavily now and I could smell her readiness. “I used to come down here,” she said, “when Harvey was at work and look through these old files. I’d get myself so worked up I was like a steam engine. Then I’d ambush Harvey when he came in the door.”

Lucky Harvey!

“Look,” she said, and pulled out a file. The folder was dark from much handling. She spread half a dozen pictures out for my inspection. In the background was an open window with curtains blowing inward, with makeup on a bureau and a couple of stuffed animals on the floor beside the bed. A bedroom in somebody’s home, not a motel room. The woman on the bed was small, slim, and dark. The man was young and muscular. He had taken her in various positions. Some were imaginative, and some looked painful. One involved tying her hand and foot to the bed, spread eagled. Laura Jacks moved that picture to the top of the stack. The photography was good. I could clearly see the expression on the woman’s face. She was fighting the ropes, but she was having a wonderful time.

“When Harvey first got started, I used to help him with his business.”

“I can see that.” The woman in the picture was younger, but she was clearly Laura Jacks.

“I miss it, but Harvey made me quit. Funny, for a man who did what he did, and screwed around on me besides, he was really jealous. Possessive, I guess you’d say.”

“Possessive,” I repeated.

“I was afraid to screw around on Harvey. He would’ve killed me. So I would come down here and spend hours on a slow burn. Harvey got the benefit of that. He liked having me hot all the time. And I was!”

She paused, rubbing her hands over her thighs. “It’s been months since Harvey died,” she said. Her voice echoed in the basement and in my singing head.

She passed her hand lovingly over the photograph. “I really like this one,” she said. “I still have the same bed, upstairs, and some soft ropes I kept for Harvey to use. He liked it; he hurt me sometimes, but I didn’t mind.”

She pulled the Tee shirt over her head, turning it as she did so that it formed a twisted manacle around her wrists. Her breasts were small and her face shone with need. She extended her bound hands toward me. I shook my head. She stood up and pushed down her shorts, and stepped out of them. Naked, she pushed her bound hands toward me again, and said, “Please!” Again, I shook my head.   

She went to her knees at my feet and leaned forward, placing her bound hands on my feet in a gesture of final submission.

That was the way I left her, and it wasn’t easy.

*       *       *

I drove two miles north and parked overlooking the public beach off the end of Golden Gate Park. I had left my soot stained boots at the warehouse and changed into running shoes. It was a good thing; I needed to run. Badly. I slogged down to the water’s edge where the sand was hard in the retreating tide and ran southward. After a mile, I turned back. I just wouldn’t feel right running all the way back to her house.

Back at the car, I had worked up a sweat even in the chilly ocean wind, but it had barely taken the edge off my energies. more tomorrow

Cyan is now ready for pre-order. Look at todays post on the AWL side of the blog.

_______________________

“Surely it can’t be that hard to find bank accounts.”

“Harvey never put anything in his own name. He always used dummy corporations to hide his earnings from the IRS.”

I said, “Hire an investigator.” But not me.

“Bill Bristol was going to help me, but never came through. I asked him for help the day he went through Harvey’s files.”

Now there was a bit of news. I asked, “When was this?”

“About a week after the day Harvey disappeared and the fire broke out in his office.”

“You mean those happened the same day?”

“Sure. Didn’t you know that? At first, we all thought they were going to find Harvey burned up in his office. And then they found him floating in the bay three days later.”

She shrugged and made a comic grimace. And she looked at me with slow, smiling eyes. Like she was a furnace, and she thought I was a sack of coal.

“So you asked Bristol to come over and help you sort things out?”

“No! I told you, those were old, dead files. He came by on his own. Said he had new information on something he and Harvey had been working on a couple of years ago. I took him down to the basement and he went through Harvey’s old files, but he didn’t find anything.” She shook her head in amusement. “Not anything he was looking for, anyway. Harvey’s files are always interesting.”

I said, “Would you take me down to the basement?” And I kept a straight face when I said it.

She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

She was wearing a long Tee shirt and short shorts. Her legs were long and brown as she swivel hipped down the stairway. I was thinking that ten years older wasn’t that much older. There was something distasteful and much that was cliché about the situation, but hormones are hormones.

Harvey Jacks’ files consisted of a single cardboard box jammed with manilla file folders. Each one was labeled with a name or series of names. I pulled out Debra Tomlyn/Richard Deberg and flipped it open. It held a half dozen grainy black and white blowups of a chubby young blonde woman and a bald, middle aged man having sex. In the first shot, he was in the saddle. In the second, she was on top, head back, eyes closed, nipples erect, while he held her waist and drove his hips up to meet her. The other three shots were close variations on the same theme. The angle of the shots never changed, and the participants were not well centered. Obviously a hidden camera; probably near the ceiling.

I tried another file. Same story, new actors. A skinny black man and a pale Asian woman. Then two models of suburban ordinariness. Two young men. Two paunchy men in their forties and a girl-child who was probably fifteen but looked twelve.

I said, “Did your husband own a motel?” My voice came out hoarse.

Jacks’ wife was squatting beside me with her arm around my waist. She said, “Probably. I never knew, but most of these were shot in the same two or three rooms. Harvey was a whiz at his game. That one,” she pointed at the girl-child, “is one of my cousins. Several of the ones you see over and over in these shots were on salary to Harvey. He was a real businessman.”

Good old Harvey! more tomorrow

I made a detour back to my place for a shower and a change of clothes. I hoped none of the gang bangers were dead, but it wasn’t out of concern for the good of their souls, or mine. If they lived, they would probably murder their grandmothers before the month was out. But if a body was found in that burned out room, my fingerprints would be on every charcoal smudged surface in the place.

The more I thought about it, the more surprised I was that they had come after me. I had known that more than Davis, Susyn, and Allen/Alan were after Raven, but I had not expected an organization with enough resources to stake out Jacks’ burned out office.

I had Jacks’ home address from Joe Dias, so I went there next. It was a plain one-story brick house on Vicente. Most of the houses on the block seemed to have been built by the same builder, maybe fifty years ago. The lawn was small, brown and close cropped, like a Marine haircut. The front door was overdue for painting. There was a low chain link fence, but no dog or child to be kept back by it.

The woman who answered the door was small, dark, and wiry. There was a touch of gray in her black hair; her eyes were bright and suspicious. She would not remove the chain from the door until I passed her my card, left over from a previous life, that showed my name under the logo of Dias Investigations.

Once I got inside, she was friendly enough. Whatever grief she felt at losing her husband, she was showing no signs of it. She said her name was Laura Jacks. She sat me down on the couch, fed me coffee, and listened to an abbreviated version of my story.

“I don’t know much about Harvey’s current business,” she told me. “He kept that strictly to himself. He would occasionally mention a client, but that was about all. He did say that he was working for a big-wig’s daughter from Sacramento. He didn’t say who.”

“Did he say why she hired him?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you what he found out?”

“No. He never said nothing. I told you that.”

And so on. Eventually I ran out of things to ask, and “No” was the only answer she seemed to know.

“Did your husband keep any records at home?”

“Oh, sure.  Mostly on old cases that he was finished with. Nothing valuable, or he would have hidden them. Harvey hid everything, and he never told me where.”

She sighed deeply and shifted her weight on the chair. In the ten minutes of our conversation, he whole pose had changed. The initial stiffness had had gone out of her, as if she were melting. She had a small, muscular body; very trim for a woman of forty. As I watched, she slid deeper into the embrace of the chair and the lines of her face softened with interest. “Did you know,” she said, “that I am about to lose this house? Harvey made lots of money, but he always squirreled it away. He had bank accounts all over the city, and I can’t find any of them. All his bank books burned up with his office. Now I should be a rich woman, and I’m about to lose my house.” more tomorrow

Two hours later I heard footsteps in the hallway. The door jiggled and someone laughed. 

I prepared to bluff my way out. I needn’t have bothered.

The door swung back and a slick haired young hood slipped into the room, moving to his right. A second followed, moving left, then a third came through and straight ahead. They wore wide legged pants, slung low, earrings, and tattoos. Chicano gang bangers.

Five years ago, they would have been Asian. Ten years ago, they would have been Black. Fifty years ago, they would have been Italian. A hundred years ago, they would have been Irish. There are always gangs; only the nationalities change. And they are always for hire for the kind of head smashing, knee breaking enforcement that fits in with their limited self-image.

Their leader carried a baseball bat. The two outriders no doubt had knives, but they were still out of sight. Three-to-one gave them confidence. It was a good thing for me that it did.

Suddenly, I was pissed. The anger I had had bottled up since Raven left me had not come out in Venice. That had been too serious. Davis with a gun was as dangerous as ten of these street punks. Last night, in my apartment, the wheels had begun to come off of my restraint, and the sight of these three smug faces finished the job.

I came around from behind the desk and went to meet them, moving lightly through the debris. Nothing in the room retained enough structural integrity to make a weapon. The only implement of destruction in sight was the baseball bat, and I meant to have it.

The leader slapped it lightly against his palm and snarled an insult. There was such a roaring in my ears that I missed the actual words he said.

He read my eyes and brought the bat up. I kept coming. He swung.

I went under the swing and pivoted. I hit the kid to the leader’s right with an open palm to the chin, hard. His skinny neck snapped back and I could feel something important give way. Continuing to pivot, I put a hard heel in the batboy’s kidney. He went to his knees and the bat spun out of his suddenly lax grip. I caught it in mid air as I jumped for the door.

The third kid went for his knife – only it wasn’t a knife. It was a small automatic.

So much for running. I dropped forward in a shoulder roll that brought me back to my feet right in his face with both hands on the bat, high and low. I hit him, double handed, with the center of the bat, right across the nose. He hit the floor spraying blood.

Their leader was coming to his feet. I hit him full bore with the bat. It took him in the forehead and slammed him back into the room. Then I was gone. more tomorrow

I parked three blocks away. The ground level entrance to Jacks’ office was a door to a steep stairway. At the top was a long hall. No one was in sight. Down the hall I could hear the hum of voices and light from an open doorway laid a yellow rectangle against the grimy opposite wall. Jacks’ office was behind the first door, with windows on the street. The door itself was charred but sturdy, and the frosted glass window had been nailed up with plywood. The next door down was also boarded. Presumably the fire had spread that far before the fire department had put it out. The only other door in the hallway was the open one down and on the opposite side. I moved quietly down to see what it was. There was a hand lettered cardboard sign in the window advertising acupuncture. Hot needles off a sleazy hallway sounded about as appetizing as a back alley abortion, but the poor have pain as well as the rich.

The padlock on Jacks’ door was impressive, and so was the hasp. But whoever put it up hadn’t turned the screw plate back under the arm of the hasp. The screws holding it to the door frame were exposed.

I walked down to the hardware store and bought a screwdriver and a roll of masking tape. Five minutes later I had unscrewed the hasp. It was still attached to the door with the lock in place. I stuck the masking tape to the back of the screw plate to hold it in place and stepped inside, closing the door behind me. To a casual passer-by the door would look undisturbed.

Jacks office had been completely destroyed. The fire department must have come quickly to save the building, but this space was reduced to charred stubs of wall studding.  You could still tell that there had been two rooms. I was standing in a reception area and the far side of the burned out shell had been Jacks’ office, but the wall that had separated them was mostly gone. You could step through it any place.

Jacks had used a metal desk, the kind you buy as industrial surplus. It had survived the fire, barely. The ceiling was gone and the fire had cut through to daylight. There was a jagged, ten foot hole in the roof, which was fortunate since I hadn’t brought a flashlight and all the windows were boarded up.

I circled the room briefly, getting my bearings, then got down to business. I had to work quietly; beyond that, I was not worried about being disturbed. If my shadow enemy had an interest in this place, they would have searched it right after it burned. And if there had been anything worth finding, it was probably already gone.

On the floor behind the desk was a scattering of charred papers. I went through that first. The desk itself was empty, of course. I pulled the drawers and upended the carcass, looking for hideaways, and found nothing.

I was reasonably sure there was nothing to find, but I kept after it. Two hours later, I had turned over every spongy, black piece of debris twice, when I heard footsteps in the hallway. more tomorrow