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

“Here is the report on the Jacks investigation. There isn’t much more than I told you on the phone. He was killed execution style and dumped into the Bay. I know you think it was done by the same people you have been up against, but don’t count on that. Harvey was mean spirited, dishonest, and clumsy. I don’t know how he kept alive as long as he did. There must be three or four dozen people who would have happily put a bullet in his head. It may not have anything to do with your investigation at all.”

“For now, I’ll have to assume that it did. I told you he was investigating someone in Senator Cabral’s office. I now know that it was Alice Susyn Johnson, maiden name Davis.”

“Then you know more than I do. Jacks’ wife claimed to know no details of the investigation, although she knew it was going on. Apparently that was the way Jacks normally did business.”

“Because . . .”

“Bluntly, he was a blackmailer. He did investigations for hire just so he could find leads to develop. It made him rich, for all the good it did him.”

“Raven would not have known this.”

“Of course not,” Joe said. “She undoubtedly hired him in good faith, believed the report he gave her, and went on her way. Afterwards, Jacks put the squeeze on someone and started the train of events that put Raven in danger. But we don’t know who that person was, or what the nature of the squeeze was, or why Raven got caught up in a reaction that should have been aimed at Jacks alone.”

“Maybe he told his victim that he had sent information to Raven. Or maybe the victim found records of Raven’s hiring Jacks before he torched his office.”

“Possibly. But speculation is dangerous. You start thinking you know something when you are actually only guessing.”

“True. What about ballistics?”

“Probably a jacketed bullet. Probably 9 mm. It went in the back of his head and came out his nose. The bullet wasn’t recovered.”

“So, that leaves Jacks’ torched office and his wife.”

Joe agreed.

*       *       *

Joe keeps a stable of rough looking cars and pickups. They are never washed, and he has been known to dress them up with a sledge hammer and graffiti, but they all have fine tuned, oversized engines and new tires. He loaned me an ancient Pinto wagon. On the outside, it looked like a war orphan, but someone had shoehorned a rebuilt slant six under the hood.

I drove to Jacks office. It had been on the second story of a brick building in a block of brick buildings, in a neighborhood that was just holding its own against becoming a slum. Still respectable, but just barely. The storefront below his office was boarded up. There was an old style neighborhood pharmacy on one side, a hardware store on the other, and a liquor store down the street. The second story windows that faced the street were mostly blanked by shades or venetian blinds and some of them had gilt lettering advertising the businesses inside. Jacks’ windows were nailed shut with plywood panels. You could tell there had been a fire from the smoke trails that ran up across the bricks above each boarded window. more tomorrow

“The guy just pushed the knife into Talant’s throat until the blood started to trickle. I had to shoot him.”

“You were armed?”

“I had my old army .45 in a shoulder holster under a loose jean jacket. I was young and I wasn’t drawing attention to myself, so no one was looking at me. I shot the guy through the elbow. It was the only clear shot I had. It ruined him. He was never really able to use that arm again.

“The police came, and the ambulance, and Talant and I had to go down to the police station to make statements. They questioned us separately. It took hours, and when we were ready to leave, I asked Talant why he hadn’t used his famous piece. He said it wasn’t loaded. He had never fired it. He said he just carried it to ‘put the fear’ into people.

“It irritated me.”

Ed chuckled. “I should think so.”

“On the way back I pulled him into an alley and slapped him silly. Then I took his ‘piece’ away from him and told him not to show his face again. Last time I saw him, he was slumped against a dumpster with a glassy look and blood running down his face.”

I left Ed sitting on the couch and went to stare out the window again. I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Since Raven left, I had been holding my feelings tight inside. Now, in retelling the story of Talant, I had worked myself into a fine wrath. I didn’t want Ed to see my face, or the way my hands trembled.

Chapter Thirty

Ed dropped me off at Joe Dias’ the next morning, and went off to pursue some ideas of his own. He gave me a number to call, a couple of hundred dollars, and said he would be available if I needed help. Otherwise, I was on my own. It suited me just fine. I like Ed well enough, but I didn’t need a nursemaid.

Carmen was at her usual place in the reception room. When I first met her, she was cute. Pert. Not quite chubby. She had been growing an inch or two a year since then, and I don’t mean taller. Now she pretty much filled the space behind the desk.

“Hey, Stud, you’re looking good,” she said. “What happened? Job in Europe didn’t pan out?”

“Something like that. Is Joe busy?”

“Just paper work. Go on in.”

Joe looked up, then came around the desk to pump my hand. He was about five ten, wiry; his skin was like golden leather with laugh wrinkles on his face. His warm brown eyes had seen every kind of depravity during thirty years in a dirty business, and somehow remained human. 

The walls of his office were covered with framed pictures of his daughters, grandchildren, cousins, aunts, uncles, and every other known species of relative. He came from a huge extended family of Diases, mostly scattered around Livingston in the central valley. Joe’s grandparents had settled there early in the century after leaving the Azores. That section of California was practically a Portuguese colony, and Joe went back as often as he could.

In the years I worked for Joe, he had become a real friend. We took a while to update each other’s lives before we got down to business. more tomorrow