Now there was a witness who could identify Alan and James Davis for attempted murder, and implicate Susyn as an accessory. A quick flight to Marseilles would solve that problem, except that the pair had once again failed to kill Raven and now they had two witnesses.

My death must have been planned before Susyn and I ever met.

Who was running the show? Not Susyn or Jim or Alan. Seventeen pieces of property that I knew of, and probably more that I hadn’t found, meant an organization with real leadership. Someone running that kind of an organization couldn’t move to another city for years to infiltrate Cabral, and wouldn’t fly across the Atlantic twice to make hits. There had to be at least one echelon above the players I knew, and that was what I had to uncover if I wanted a lever to pry Susyn and Alan off Raven’s back.

Chapter Thirty-two

I called Ed Wilkes again, early, then loaded up the Pinto in the pre-dawn light. I drove to a filling station for gas and a road map, then headed a mile deeper into the city to Rusty Dixon’s shooting range. He lived in an apartment over his business. I walked up the outside stairway and rattled his door, then made sure I was in plain sight through the uncurtained window. Rusty is a bit trigger happy.

A few minutes later he came to the door dressed in ragged jeans and shower sandals. His bare chest was scar pocked and hairless. In the years I had known him, his ponytail had gotten longer, and his hairline had receded, but nothing else seemed to change or age. He had Norman Rockwell red hair and the coldest pair of eyes you would ever want to look into.

He said, “What?” in the same irritated tone I would use on a Jehovah’s Witness.

I said, “Good morning to you, too, Rusty.”

He grunted and stepped away from the door, and I followed him into the ancient kitchen. It was a relief to know that he was going to be in such a good mood. There were weeks at a time that I wouldn’t go near him. This was about as friendly as he got.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“A guy tried to kill me about a week ago, and I had to fight off a small Chicano gang yesterday, but that’s about all. Nothing I can’t handle. I need some information.”

Rusty won’t talk to anyone unless he thinks they’re tough enough to chew up nails and spit out tacks. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“Tell me about pot farming on the north coast.”

Rusty’s eyes went far away and his face became very still. He was going into paranoid mode, and I couldn’t afford that, so I quickly gave him an abbreviated version of Raven’s problem. His face cleared and he became talkative. more tomorrow

I pushed away from the computer and paced around the room, trying to make sense of it. 

Assumption: the Davis family was heavily into pot farming. Pot makes a lot of money and the state spends a lot of time and effort trying to stamp it out. But it isn’t a high priority item; not like cocaine. The President of the United States declares war on Colombian cocaine cartels, not on hayseed, backwoods pot farmers. State law enforcement makes an ongoing effort to control the business, and sporadic mass raids, but it is just enough to keep prices up. Almost a partnership. If the state tried harder, it could cut into profits. If the state stopped trying, supply would go up and prices would go down.

Daniel Cabral’s arguments were starting to make more sense to me, but they still ran up against the usual counter-argument. Most would-be conspirators aren’t smart enough to run a conspiracy.

So there was a connection, but it was a tenuous one. If I were into pot farming, I might want to infiltrate the local sheriff’s office, but why Cabral’s organization?

Cabral did have a staff dedicated to finding out all there was to know about drug enforcement, in order to discredit it. If I were a big pot farmer, and I wanted a pipeline to the agenda of the state law enforcement people, I might give a lot to tap into Daniel Cabral’s database. It would be safer to let Cabral’s people collect the information, and then steal it from him. The only other obvious possibility was that they wanted to derail Cabral’s attempts at legalization, and Susyn was too smart to believe that Cabral was going to succeed in this decade.

So, Cabral had useful information, and Susyn had infiltrated his organization to get it. It made sense, and nothing else did. Then one night Raven found Susyn where she should not be and blew the whistle. But no one listened, so Raven hired Harvey Jacks to pursue the matter further.

Harvey Jacks, whose cover was as a private detective, but whose real profession was blackmail.

Much of what I “knew” had come from Susyn. She had named Adrian Brock, and it was beginning to look like he was not part of the game. Suppose the story was true, with only the names changed. Susyn had said that Jacks did the investigation, found the connection, then sold his information to Brock. Change the name Brock to “whoever runs the Davis family”.

Then, according to Susyn, Jacks had tried to extort another payment and had been stepped on. To save his life, Jacks had claimed that he had copies of his report sent to Raven. It had not saved his life, but it had put Raven’s in danger.

When Jim and Alan Davis tossed Raven overboard, the Davis family must have breathed a sigh of relief – until Raven called home from Marseilles. And Susyn had been there to find out about the call. Then they had all their old problems back along with a witness who could identify Alan and James Davis for attempted murder, and implicate Susyn as an accessory. more tomorrow

Marriage records confirmed that Susyn’s maiden name was Davis. Birth records gave me Susyn’s place of birth, a small town in northern California, and her parents’ names. That led me to siblings, including one named James and one named Alan. Interesting. DMV told me what kind of car she drove and gave her Sacramento address. Checking back through previous addresses, I found the same one her ex-husband still maintained. James Davis drove a BMW and also had an address in Garberville. I checked a map. It was five blocks from Susyn’s ex-husband’s house. Alan Davis drove a Jeep Cherokee and lived in Redway, a little town just outside Garberville.

I put in a call to Ed Wilkes. He was staying in a guest room at the Cabral house with its own phone extension. I caught him getting ready for bed.

“Ed, did Interpol run a check of fingerprints on Jim Davis with the FBI?”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“There was nothing special in his criminal record. A DUI, a couple of arrests for possession of marijuana, and a number of unsuccessful tries at catching him for pot growing. Just your typical back woods cowboy growing a little weed in his back yard.”

“Address?”

He gave me the same address in Garberville, and I told him about my findings.

“Now isn’t that interesting? A family business of some sort? I wonder what?”

“I’m beginning to get a picture.”

“Me, too. I’ll run Alan Davis by the bureau tomorrow. Call me if you get anything else, but wait till morning, OK?”

How does the old song go? You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind – and you don’t go hiking in Mendicino county in October. Not if you value your life. You just might stumble into someone’s pot plantation at harvest time and get your head blown off. Marijuana is California’s biggest cash crop, and most of the back-to-the-land hippies of the seventies that got the ball rolling have been run out by others who have no aversion to violence.

Maybe. And maybe the Davis clan all live in Garberville for the scenery. But that wasn’t likely. It would be good to see if they had any land there, outside the town. It might be rented under informal agreements or they might be squatting on government land, but if they owned land it would be in the records.

It took a while, but when the printout came through I had a list of seventeen properties owned by Alice Johnson, Susyn Johnson, Alice Davis, Susyn Davis, Jim Davis, Alan Davis, and William Johnson. There were no Fletchers. Apparently that was just an alias. None were owned by Adrian Brock or any reasonably close variation on that name. I got out a map of Mendicino county.The properties were all small. The largest was ten acres. They were scattered all over the county and all were well away from centers of populations, and well away from main roads.

Interesting, indeed. more tomorrow

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. Adrenaline and testosterone; the macho cocktail. I had had a powerful infusion of each today, and it would be a while before I was calm again.

The sun had dropped behind the evening fog bank as I ran, and now an early dusk fell across the city. I drove through the park as fog tendrils wove tapestries among the trees, watching joggers bundled against the chill and the last rollerbladers of the day, all heading somewhere for a warm haven against the damp and cold. 

I found a pay telephone and a fast food joint. Ed Wilkes was not in, but would be back in an hour.

While I was running, it had occurred to me that the strangest thing that had happened all day had slipped past my notice in a testosterone haze. Laura Jacks had simply assumed that I would accept her actions and her husband’s “profession” as normal. She had led me to incriminating evidence with childish (and that was the word) innocence. No wonder old Harvey had taken her out of the business and kept her at home where she could do him no harm.

Chapter Thirty-one

When I got back to Dias Investigations, everyone had gone home. I let myself in and called Ed again. He was still out, but he called back before I had time to brew a pot of coffee. There was no way I could sleep in my condition, so I planned to spend the night at the computer.

Our conversation was brief. He had searched Raven’s room at the Cabral’s Sacramento house and had found the report Jacks had sent her. He also had a dozen pages of data on the various actors in our play. He faxed it all to me, and I skimmed it sheet by sheet as it came out of the machine, then sat down for a closer reading, though I had seen some of it in Paris.

Alice Susyn Johnson had worked for Cabral for three years.  Her personnel record gave her salary, social security number, residence, and next of kin.  The name Fletcher did not appear anywhere in the file.  The next of kin was William Johnson, listed as an ex-husband, with a residence in Garberville. A visit to her apartment would be worth doing, but I could leave that to Ed since he was in Sacramento anyway.

There were four James Davises in the Sacramento phonebook. According to Ed’s notes, none of them was likely to be our James Davis. A fax of the Allens showed dozens, but none of them jumped off the page.

There was a great deal on Adrian Brock. He was an investor, contractor and real estate developer. He cultivated contacts at the capital and there were hints of a shady doings on the side. Ed was investigating further, but I had his name from Susyn. There was no reason to believe that she would give me the name of her real employer. It was probably a false lead.

I would have to do it the hard way. Computers were new on the scene; I had helped set up Joe’s system, and now it was time to put it to use. I wasn’t the internet, of course. That was years in the future. But I knew how to use the crude beginnings of what it would become. more tomorrow

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