Cage RIder, An Excerpt from a Novel in Progress

Cage Rider

By William E. Wallace

(Excerpted from a novel in progress)

Tommy Souza woke up at exactly 6:15 a.m. and stared up at the ceiling, hands folded behind his head, just as he had every day for the last twelve years. But this time, when 6:30 rolled around there was no loud buzzer that said the cops were opening up the main line so the inmates could go down to morning chow.

Souza found himself straining to hear the damned thing. Then he remembered that the buzzer was at California State Prison, Soledad. He was lying in a bed in a flop-house in Richmond, California, nearly two hundred miles north of there. He’d left Soledad Friday afternoon on the big gray C-DOC bus, carrying a cardboard suitcase with one change of clothes and $132.57 in gedunk money he had squirreled away.

That was the first time it hit him that he really was out of the state pen. His counselor in the joint found the flop he’d checked into and he had a job interview lined up Monday morning and a meet-and-greet with his parole agent later that afternoon. His entire weekend was free; all he had to do was get through it without fucking up.

That would be a good trick, if he could manage it.

He’d known cons that couldn’t make it through the first eighty hours out of prison without getting into trouble again. Inside the joint, the inmates called them “institutional men” because they didn’t seem to be able to flourish anyplace outside prison walls. Souza didn’t intend to be one of them. Getting into trouble again right after getting sprung was for suckers and half-wits. He was neither. He had seen enough of the California penal system to last him the rest of his life.

Since he didn’t have to get up and follow the other cons to the mess hall for breakfast, Souza laid in the sack until just after eight, trying to figure out what it felt like to be free. He decided he liked it. Then his stomach growled. He yawned, tossed back the skimpy blanket and tissue-thin sheet, swung his legs over the side of the bed and lit a Marlboro. 

The flop-house might not have a warning buzzer, a mess hall or guards, and Souza’s status might have changed from state prison inmate to parolee, but somehow that didn’t make him any less hungry when he first got up. He rose, shaved and took a long, hot shower without worrying about bending over to pick up the soap for the first time in twelve years. Then he got dressed for breakfast.

§

The diner was only a half-block from Souza’s hotel. He took a stool at the counter and ordered coffee and an English muffin from the little Latina-looking waitress who was standing behind it. The black plastic tag on her blouse said her name was Edna Johnson. So much for appearances, Souza thought.

“Excuse me, Edna,” he said. “I notice that you folks don’t have a clock. What time is it?”

She looked at her wristwatch and heaved a dejected sigh. “Late. That’s what time it is,” she said. “It’s a quarter after ten. My relief was supposed to be here 15 minutes ago.  Ah—here she comes now,” she added, brightening considerably.

Souza followed her gaze and saw a tall, middle-aged brunette in sunglasses come through the door.

“Shit, Edna!” the brunette said as she reached the counter. “Sorry for holding you up like this.  I just got into my car and put the keys into the ignition this morning when the landlord ran up and told me the mailman left a package for me with him yesterday. I closed the door when I got out of the car to get the package and I locked my keys in the damned thing.”

She took off her sunglasses and Souza couldn’t help but notice that her eyes were almost the color of brand new pennies. To Souza, they seemed strange but oddly attractive. He hadn’t seen a woman for twelve years, except on TV.  It’s like the Chinese say: “Hunger is the best seasoning.”

“I’ll bet the damned thing has been stolen by the time I get off shift,” the brunette said. “I only live about a mile from the Iron Triangle!”

Souza had only passed through Richmond three times before and he had no idea what the Iron Triangle was or where it was located. His knowledge of the city was based entirely on the brief walk he had taken around the hotel after he’d checked in the previous night.

“How far away is that?” he asked on impulse. He figured if nothing else, this could give him a chance to learn a little something about the city.

The brunette looked at him as if she was wondering what planet he had dropped in from. To her knowledge, she had never seen him before and she had no idea who he was, other than some guy sitting in the diner, reasonably sober, who might or might not be hitting on her.

“Why?” she asked sensibly.

Souza shrugged. “I can go and get your car and bring it back,” he said. “Then you won’t have to worry about it getting whacked.”

The brunette stared at him.  “Whacked?” she said. She had never heard the term being used to describe anything but “drunk,” or “crazy,” except when it meant both.

“Ripped off,” Souza corrected himself. Even after twelve years off the streets he found it too easy to slip into the language of his former profession.

She considered the offer. “Well, I probably should just call Triple A,” she said, uncertainly.

“You a member?”

“No,” she said, frowning. “Do you have to be a member to get Triple A service?  I thought you could just call them and pay them to open your car’s door.

Souza shrugged. “I’m offering to help you for nothing,” he said.

She thought about it. It was clear she was tempted but she seemed to need a little prodding to make up her mind.

“I wouldn’t leave your car sitting out there on the street too long with the keys hanging out of the ignition,” he said, sipping at his coffee. “Even the dumbest crackhead can break a window and drive away a car like that.”

She bit her lower lip as she thought. Souza liked the shape of her lips. He would have enjoyed nibbling on them himself.  She was in her late thirties or early forties but trim and good-looking. And those copper-colored eyes knocked him out. He’d never seen anything like them.

“Okay,” she said finally, acting more on impulse than from any sort of logic. She fished around in her purse for a moment, then looked up at him with a mixture of embarrassment and amusement. “Oh, that was stupid of me,” she said.

 “What?”

She laughed. “I was going to give you my keys so you could get in and start it! Of course, I don’t have them in my purse because they are still in the car.”

Souza smiled. He liked the sound of her laughter, too.

§

Coolie Sutton had been watching the pale blue Cavalier on the corner since that white chick from the apartment house across the street with the weird-looking eyes had started to leave in it that morning, then ended up running to catch the bus. Nobody rides the damn bus when they got a set of wheels, he thought to himself. When she was gone, he rolled himself a spliff. He lit the joint then held the smoke deep in his lungs while he looked at the car through the slat blinds in the Section Eight house he shared with his old lady, LaTonya.

He smoked two more joints while he studied the car and figured the angles. He hadn’t crossed over to glance in and see whether she had left her keys locked inside, but he didn’t really need to. He’d guessed that was what happened because when she got out of the car and shut its door to talk to the guy who managed the apartments, she couldn’t get back in.

“Stupid ass ho,” he muttered contemptuously.

Coolie could use a car, himself, even though his license had been revoked nearly two years earlier for DUI. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a job, so he didn’t have the money to buy one. What kept him from just getting in the Cavalier and driving it away was the same thing that kept him from employment: his basic laziness. He lived across the street from the chick who owned the Chevy, so he couldn’t just park the damned thing on the street. He might consider her a stupid whore—just as he did every other woman on the planet—but he didn’t think she was dumb enough not to recognize her own car when she came back from wherever she had gone that morning.

That meant Coolie would have to take the car down to the Triangle and see his partner, Rufus, to line up a buyer for the damned thing or to swap it for another set of wheels. Coolie usually got pocket money through strong-arm robbery, so anything that required more concentration and effort than running a block or two after grabbing a handbag or tapping some poor bastard on the head and taking his wallet looked a lot like a regular job to him. Regular jobs were for squares, not gangstas.

He took a final drag off the doobie and was just stepping out the door when he saw a white dude with a mustache like the cops wear walking down the street, looking at a little piece of paper he was holding in one hand. When the man with the ‘stache spotted the blue Chevy, he speeded up, slowing again only to check the back license plate against whatever was written on the paper.

Furtiveness was second nature to Coolie, so he held back, waiting to see what the stranger would do.  To his surprise, the man moved to the passenger side of the Cavalier and bent down to look in, then straightened up and pulled out a wire coat hanger he had tucked under his belt in the back of his trousers.  He fiddled with the hanger for a minute, untwisting the loop at the top and expertly bending it into a hook.  Then he used it to fish inside the window on the passenger door, snagging the door lock and releasing it with a quick pull.

A moment later the man with the mustache was inside the Cavalier, revving the engine and hanging a U-turn in the middle of the street to drive away.

Coolie went back into his apartment and rolled another spliff.  As he fired it up, he pondered the fact that a total stranger had just broken into and drove off the car he had been planning to steal himself. It made Coolie almost as angry as if the Cavalier belonged to him and not the woman with the weird eyes who lived across the street.

“Thieving motherfucker,” he said of the man with the mustache. “Stole my motherfucking ride right out from in front of me.”

Coolie’s anger at the theft was partly due to disappointment at missing his opportunity, which was irrational, considering that, during the 45 minutes he had spent smoking dope and thinking about stealing the car, he could have broken into the damned thing and driven it halfway to Sacramento. But he was also outraged that the poacher had entered his ghetto neighborhood to bag the car, walking up to it as boldly as a Jehovah’s Witness peddling “Watchtower” and breaking into it without even looking up or down the street to see whether a cop was watching. The bastard had a set of cast-iron balls and the way he broke in was really slick. Coolie wished he knew how he had done it. If Coolie could get into cars that easily, he would be tempted to give up his gig as a mugger.

The toilet flushed in the next room. LaTonya, who’d been out turning tricks until nearly three a.m., had finally got out of bed.  She stood naked in the doorway behind him, scratching her side and yawning.

“What’s up, Daddy?” she said. She could tell he was in a bad mood, but as a matter of fact, he usually was.

Coolie sat down on the couch and rolled another joint. “Some motherfucking white guy just stole the car across the street,” he said, lighting up and drawing a big lungful of smoke.

LaTonya took the joint out of his hand and took a drag.

“So what?” she said in a squeaky voice as she struggled to hold the smoke in. “It’s not like it was yours, is it?”

 “He just got a lot of fucking nerve, coming down to the ‘Hood to do his crime,” Coolie replied. “’Sides, I was planning to grab that car myself.”

LaTonya exhaled. “So, what you gonna do about it?” she asked. She was pretty sure she already knew what the answer was. Her boyfriend had the same solution to every problem he faced.

Coolie didn’t disappoint her. “I ever see that peckerwood again,” he said, “I’m going to kill his skinny white ass.”

§

When Souza walked back into the diner, the brunette was serving breakfast to a couple in one of the booths. He took the same seat he’d been in before and turned over the clean mug there, waiting to drop her keys on the counter until she brought over the coffee pot to fill it. “I parked it in the lot behind the restaurant,” he said.

“Wow,” she said with both surprise and relief playing across her face. It had occurred to her after he left that she had told a complete stranger exactly where he could find her car with the keys locked inside. For all she knew, he could have taken it himself.

“That was fast!” she added, giving him a smile and looking at him closely for the first time. He was sort of cute in a ratty way: his clothes were shabby but he had puppy dog brown eyes, dark, wavy hair and a mustache that drooped slightly over the ends of his mouth. “You were gone only a little more than a half hour. How’d you get inside it?”

“I used one of the coat hangers from my room,” he said, sipping coffee. “Sort of ruined the hanger, but I didn’t have a coat to put on it, anyhow. As for how long I was gone, you only live about a mile and a half from here so I followed the directions you gave me and just walked. I like to walk. I haven’t had much opportunity to do it lately. You’re so close that I’m surprised you drive back and forth, actually.”

She gave him a rueful smile. “You don’t know Richmond do you, Mr., uh . . .”

He smiled back and held out his hand. “My name’s Tommy Souza,” he said. “And you are . . .?”

“Jeanette Helmso,” she said, taking his hand in a friendly way. “Everybody calls me Netty, though.”

Her hand was cool and soft in his. He released it reluctantly.

“Well, Netty, you are right about me not knowing Richmond,” Souza said, picking up his mug. “Last night was the first I ever spent here. I think I drove through a couple times in the past, but that’s about the size of it. The last time must have been fourteen, fifteen years ago.”

“Most people don’t walk here, not in this part of town, anyway,” she said. “Walking around here is a good way to get robbed or raped or something.”

Souza grinned. “Well, I don’t have anything worth stealing and I don’t think anybody’d be interested in raping somebody with a face like mine,” he said. “Lot of crime here, huh?”

She nodded. “We have one of the highest murder rates in the nation,” she said. “It can be a pretty violent place.”

“Why do you stay, then?” Souza asked.

She shrugged. “I spent my whole life in Richmond,” she said. “I was born here. Graduated from Richmond High in 1989. I guess it’s just stubbornness: I feel like I can’t let thugs chase me out of my own hometown. So where are you from originally?”

“Around,” Souza said. “Colorado, Utah, Idaho. My dad was a construction stiff. But I used to work about 40 miles south of here in Hayward more than a decade ago.”

“What brings you to Richmond?”

It was Souza’s turn to shrug. “This is where they sent me,” he said. He didn’t feel like adding that “they” were the folks at the California Department of Corrections. “I have a job interview here Monday morning. I’ll see how things work out from there.”

“Well, welcome to Richmond, Tommy,” she said. “The coffee’s on me.  And next time you come in and I’m working, I’m picking up the tab for your meal.”

Souza decided to press his luck. “I’d be much obliged. When do you normally work?” he asked, hoping he wasn’t being too obvious.

“Saturdays and Sundays, I’m the ten ‘til seven girl,” she said with a smile. “Monday through Wednesday, I work swings, three p.m. until twelve.”

“I live just down the block and I’m used to three squares a day,” Souza said, grinning. “You’ll probably be seeing me in here so often you get sick of me.”

She laughed. “I doubt it,” she said.

Souza hoped she was right.

#

The Judas Hunter, Chapter One

The Judas Hunter

Chapter One of Twenty-three

 (An excerpt from the novel)

     Daniel Kelly slouched against the glass wall of the phone booth, cocking his head sideways to hold the handset to his ear while he rifled his pockets for change. He dropped two quarters into the pay phone’s slot, waited for the dial tone and punched in ten numbers. The mechanical voice told him how much money to deposit and he let coins rattle into the slot while he watched the tall blond man on the other side of the gas station put fuel into the rust-spotted 1947 GMC pickup. The phone rang twice before somebody picked up at the other end.

     “What’s up?” asked a male voice.

     “It’s me,” Kelly said quietly. “We’re almost there – maybe another half hour of driving. I’m going to put the shipment into the cabin and dump the rest of the stuff up in the back, just like we discussed. Are you taking care of that other thing?”

     “Yes,” said the male voice. “I’m still looking for somebody who can find out what we need to know to wrap it up. It’s just a matter of timing.”

     Kelly watched the tall blond man as he finished filling the truck’s tank, hung the gas hose back on the pump and reached into his jeans for his billfold.  “Just don’t let the timing get away from you,” Kelly said. “We have to tie up these loose ends as soon as possible – the feds aren’t going to screw around forever. Look, I gotta split. We’re just about ready to leave. I’ll call you later.”

     He put the phone back on the hook and absent-mindedly fished in the coin return before stepping out of the booth and moving toward the blond man.

     “We ready to go?” he asked.

     The blonde man nodded. “Yeah. She took about seven gallons. You’re gonna need oil by the time we get back, though.”

     Kelly grinned. “Hell, we probably burned a quart just starting this old son-of-a-bitch,” he said, patting the truck’s fender. “Go ahead and pay the man. Let’s motivate. I wanna get done before it starts getting dark.”   

     The primer-spotted Jimmy hooked east off Highway One onto Salmon Creek Road about a mile and a half north of Bodega Bay. Moving toward the tiny resort town of Occidental, it made a sudden, unsignaled turn onto an unpaved private drive running parallel to Finley Creek, spinning its wheels momentarily in soft, henna-colored dust before continuing north.

     Kelly slumped over the steering wheel, his lips pursed in a silent whistle, shifting his upper body from side to side as if the motion helped guide the truck up the twisting grade toward Sheep Ridge. As he drove, he glanced thoughtfully at the blond man sitting beside him.

     The passenger stared at the road ahead bleakly, his face set in an expression that was about three degrees south of hopeless. Occasionally he took a long pull from the half-quart beer can cradled between his thighs and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand.

     Kelly was a comic-book caveman, short, dark and heavy-set. Years of manhandling free-weights in prison recreation rooms had given his upper body so much bulk that even while relaxing, the muscles of his chest, arms and shoulders bunched under his Harley-Davidson T-shirt, stretching the fabric taut. His head appeared small in relationship to his overdeveloped body, with a bony brow and long sloping forehead that disappeared under a thick thatch of greasy black hair.

     His passenger, on the other hand, was a caricature of a hippie straight out of a Sixties-era underground comic book. Tall, thin and lanky in his faded jeans and Willie Nelson T-shirt, he had shoulder-length hair pulled into a stringy pony tail and a patchy blond beard covering most of his baby face. The crowning touch was a pair of gold-rimmed glasses glinting dully against the dark tan of his face. He could have blended into the crowd at any Grateful Dead concert in the country.

     Kelly smiled slightly and reached over to pat the blond man reassuringly on the thigh. "Chill, man," he said. "There's nothing to worry about. In a little while we'll be at the cabin and then everything will be cool. You'll see."

     The blond man shuddered and took another swig of beer. "Yeah, sure," he said. “I’m just edgy, that’s all. No big deal.”

     As the truck continued to climb up the dirt drive, both men lapsed into silence.

     The sun had dropped down onto the flat gray surface of the Pacific about a half-hour earlier and the late afternoon shadows were now lengthening into dusk. Despite the gathering darkness, Kelly waited until he was well off the county road before he switched on his headlights.

     The private driveway led to a small redwood shingle summer house nearly a mile off the paved road. Reflective tape letters on the signpost in front spelled "Hendrickson," and the pickup’s sealed beams flashed against them momentarily as it stopped.

     Kelly turned off the ignition and sat silently, listening. The only sound was the distant sigh of wind brushing the redwood-studded hills and the metallic click as the engine cooled. Satisfied, he turned to the blond man and said, “As the cable guy would say, ‘let’s get ‘er done.’ ”

     The two men unfastened the tarpaulin at the rear of the truck’s bed and folded it back to reveal four large wooden crates, each stenciled with the words "Cobray."

     With some effort, they manhandled the heavy containers into the summer house, stacking them neatly in the northwest corner of the cabin. After the boxes were stowed, Kelly took a second canvas tarp neatly folded in the back of the truck and carefully draped it over them so none were visible. When he was satisfied, that the boxes were completely out of sight, both men climbed back into the truck and the Kelly guided it onto a rough fire trail behind the house that ran through one hundred yards of tangled coyote bush, bay trees and redwood. The road ended abruptly in a small clearing where a platform made of splitting planks stretched over what could easily be seen was a hole in the ground. A piece of peeling plywood nailed to a nearby tree bore a crude drawing of a skull and crossbones and the words, “DANGER: DRY WELL."

     Kelly cut the engine. "This is it," he said, climbing out.

     Clouds of dry red dust hung in the air as they maneuvered the wooden platform off the mouth of the well. The pit yawned blackly before them, six feet across.

     The blond man peered into the hole skeptically. "I don't know," he said shaking his head. "Is it deep enough? Looks kind of shallow to me."

     Kelly dropped a small stone into the pit and it clunked hollowly somewhere in the shadows. “It's about ten feet and that's plenty deep enough," he said. “In a few minutes these jokers will be a puzzle for some archeologist to figure out a thousand years in the future. Let's do it.”

     They lowered the pickup’s tailgate and loosened the ropes holding down the tarp. Lined up neatly underneath were three man-sized forms wrapped in sheets of black plastic, each bound carefully with short lengths of clothesline cord and gray duck tape.

     Kelly pulled one of them to the rear of the truck, tugged it partially upright and slung it over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. The contents of the bag had started to stiffen during the two-hour drive to the cabin.

     He grunted with the effort. “Dead weight,” he leered as he hefted the bag. “Very dead. Grab one of the others."

     The blond man shivered and wrestled a bag onto the ground. "This is flat-ass creepy, man,” he said as he dragged it toward the well. “Reminds me of ‘Desert Storm,’ ‘cept our pouches were made in a factory, not in a garage.”

     When all three bags were underground, the two men stood together, staring into the hole in silence.

     The blond man shivered again, "Rest in peace," he said quietly.

     Kelly eyed him carefully. "Thirsty work,” he said, turning back toward the pickup. "You want another brew?"

     Lost in thought, the blond man peered into the well and nodded without speaking.

     Kelly found the cardboard six-pack on the floor of the truck. As he picked it up, he reached beneath the seat on the driver's side and pulled out a box-shaped weapon made of blue-black steel with cone-shaped tube that was nearly a foot long attached to its front. It was a 9-millimeter MC-11 machine pistol with a silencer, a full 32-shot magazine and a cocked bolt. Silently flipping off the pistol's safety, he set the fire-rate selector on semi and smiled.

     With the weapon at his side, he turned back to the well.

     The blond man turned toward Kelly when he was about ten feet away. The first time he saw the gun was when Kelly pulled the trigger. He opened his mouth but was unable to speak before the weapon jerked with a dry cough.

     At such close range, the slug went through the tall blond man’s belly like a spoon through tapioca, stitching a neat hole a little more than one-third inch across in the front of his T-shirt and a bigger, more ragged one in its back. With the flat whir of an angry mechanical bee, the bullet buried itself in a redwood tree 50 feet away on the other side of the clearing.

     The impact threw the blond man backwards against the far wall of the well. His body twisted as he hit. In a reflexive movement, he threw his arms out, grabbing the edge of the hole with a grunt and straining to keep himself from sliding the rest of the way in.

     Without haste, Kelly used the short sling hanging from the front of the weapon to steady it, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger again.

     The second bullet drilled a hole in the right side of the blond man's forehead just above his gold-rimmed glasses. He seemed frozen for a moment as a thick ribbon of red trickled down his nose into his beard. With a mild look of reproof on his face, he disappeared underground.

     Kelly locked the bolt and stuffed the gun into the waistband of his jeans. Popping open a can of beer from the six-pack, he guzzled half of it quickly and poured the rest into the well, dropping the can after it.

     "Rest in peace, brother," he said, quietly. "Rest in peace."

# 

The Jade Kotsutsubo, an excerpt from a novel in progress

The Jade Kotsutsubo

By William E. Wallace

Chapter One 

          Jake Connors parked the Zephyr with the front wheels locked against the curb to keep it from rolling all the way down the Oakland Hills into San Francisco Bay. He parked his wad of well-chewed Beeman’s on the backside of the Lincoln’s rear-view mirror and stepped out to see what kind of a view a war profiteer could buy.

            He had to admit it was impressive. If Randy Sykes looked out the window, a clear day would afford him a view of roughly 137 square blocks of residential real estate he had picked up for a song during the war and then developed into single-family homes with the assistance of the Federal Housing Administration. GIs were raising families in Sykes Homes from El Cerrito to San Leandro, and Sykes’ real estate holdings alone had made him one of the richest men on the West Coast.

            The vista took in the shipyards in Richmond and San Francisco where Sykes had been a subcontractor to Henry J. Kaiser at the beginning of the war.  It swept all the way down to the Regal Automobile Works in East Oakland, a plant he had originally cranked up to punch body panels for Jeeps and half-tracks. After the war, it had been retooled to manufacture the Regal Sedan, a limited edition four-door in the same price range as a high-end Cadillac.

            Connors knocked on the millionaire’s front door and listened as the sound disappeared   into the building’s vast interior. Sykes’ mansion, which seemed to crawl down the face of one of steepest slopes in the Oakland Hills, had been finished about three weeks after VJ day. Rumor had it the house had cost several million to construct.  Randolph Sykes had made a fortune slapping together the kind of inexpensive housing an ex-soldier could purchase on the G.I. Bill, but he hadn’t cut any corners on his own place.

            He listened for some response.  A minute passed, then another. Finally he heard the mechanical rasp of the latch inside and a long, low squeal that reminded him of the beginning of the radio show, “Inner Sanctum,” as the door swung slowly open just wide enough to allow someone to look out.

            “Yes?” said the fellow standing behind it, blinking at Connors uncertainly through the crack. He looked to be in his mid-sixties and his skin was almost the color of a mackerel’s belly, a sure sign that he spent little time outdoors.

            The man behind the door was apparently some sort of Sykes family retainer, a butler, possibly, or maybe just some garden variety serf. Connors handed one of his business cards through the crack and the serf inside received it distastefully, handling it with the tips of his fingers as if it might be crawling with germs.

            The card said:

Jacob Connors

California Licensed Investigator

Confidential Inquiries

Specialist in background checks, missing persons and divorce proceedings

References available from law enforcement agencies and attorneys

            At the bottom was the address and telephone number for Jake’s office in downtown Oakland.

            The serf read the card carefully. As a trained investigator with law enforcement experience, Connors deduced that the man was well educated because he barely moved his lips. When he finished, the serf looked at Connors almost as carefully as he had studied his calling card.

            “And you are Mr. Connors, I take it,” he said, his tone making it into a question. He peered at the private investigator skeptically as if he suspected that he might have found the card lying on the street just a few steps away from Sykes’ door.

            “Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,” Connors replied. “I’m here to see Mr. Sykes. He sent for me.”

            “Please wait,” the serf said. “I will tell him you have arrived.”

            He swung the door closed and Connors momentarily considered using his size ten shoe to block it. But when the massive oak and cast-iron fixture came to rest in the doorframe with a thunderous boom, he was glad he hadn’t: it wouldn’t be easy to drive the Zephyr back to his office in the Cathedral Building downtown with only one foot.

            Instead, he put his hands in his pockets and waited for the serf to return.

            It took him less than five minutes, and when he did he swung the door open, stepped back and bent slightly at the waist to invite Connors inside.  The ceiling of the foyer was at least twenty feet high and the entryway seemed to be more than sixty feet across, but the room was surprisingly shallow; if he took three long steps, Connors could have put his hands on the opposite wall.

            “Odd proportions,” he said to the serf, nodding at the entry as he took off his hat.

            The serf nodded. “A concession to the force of gravity,” he replied.  “This building was constructed to cling to the side of a steep cliff, held in place with steel girders that have been drilled into bedrock. It consists of six stories, all made from steel-reinforced concrete, hanging from steel I-beams. Mr. Sykes’ engineers calculated that the rooms should be rather shallow or the building’s weight would end up pulling it down the hillside into the canyon below.”

            Connors had once entered a bunker on a cliff on Guadalcanal after a Marine fire-suppression team burned out the gunnery crew with jellied gas. It had a similar construction to Sykes’ mansion, although the inside of Sykes’ cozy little den didn’t smell like cooked Jap. “Ah,” the investigator said. “That’s why it looks sort of like a lava flow, then.”

            “Precisely,” the serf replied. “As I said, a concession to gravity.  Forces of nature are among the few things on this planet to which Mr. Sykes is willing to bow.”

            “My name is Cortez, incidentally,” he added as he gestured for Connors to follow him down a staircase to the left of the foyer. “I perform a variety of functions for Mr. Sykes.  You could call me a valet of sorts.”

            Cortez’ manner was stiff enough for him to be a gentleman’s gentleman. “Sort of like Jeeves, eh?” Connors said with a slight smile.

            Cortez raised an eyebrow. He didn’t seem pleased by the comparison. “Nothing of the kind,” he said. “Jeeves found it necessary to do most of Mr. Wooster’s thinking for him.  I wouldn’t presume to second-guess Mr. Sykes. He is probably one of the brightest men on the planet.”

            Sykes’ “valet of sorts” led the investigator down the stairway, then down another that doubled back from it. 

            The interior was interesting to Connors:  in almost every room they passed through, Sykes had some Asian treasure on prominent display.  Jake, who had grown up in Hawaii and joined the U.S. Marines after Pearl, spotted items that looked similar to ones he had seen in museums in Honolulu, including antique lacquered chests, beautifully forged Japanese and Chinese swords, numerous pieces of fine crockery and a variety of intricately carved semiprecious stones.  The mansion itself was designed to show the art off splendidly: though the building was massive and built largely of concrete reinforced in some manner that Sykes had patented as a trade secret, each room had a low ceiling and a flooring that, while made of some blond wood, made Connors think of tatami matting. The huge windows, most of them overseeing stunning views of San Francisco Bay, were framed with massive pieces of dark oak, and the artworks themselves were arranged in little arcades that reminded Connors of the tokonama in the family room of his  godmother, Ruta Sakaramitsu, who had come to Hawaii to work in the fields as a cane cutter but ended up owning one of the most popular nightclubs and restaurants in Waikiki, Mama Koro’s.

            Connors felt like he was getting a complete interior tour of the house and would eventually find himself all the way down the hillside, stepping out a downstairs door into  what was known as the Rockridge neighborhood of North Oakland. He was glad to have a guide leading him on but he wasn’t looking forward to the return trip up all those stairs.

            After about five minutes they reached the millionaire industrialist’s study, the one room in the building that seemed to jut precariously out a substantial distance into space above the Oakland hills. Its construction seemed patterned in part on the traditional Bay Window, though on a mammoth scale: Set into the gray cement there were three angled panels, each filled with plate glass from floor to ceiling and offering a breathtaking view of a different portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. 

            To the east, Point Richmond, Belvedere, Tiburon and a portion of Sausalito could be seen, along with the tanker facilities that lay along the Richmond shoreline.  Directly opposite, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais and the Marin Headlines were visible.  And to the West, an observer could see San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena, as well as  a strip of the San Francisco shoreline that extended almost all the way to San Mateo.

            Connors wasn’t easily impressed, but Sykes’ view overcame his usual reserve.  “Wow!” he said in a hushed voice as he walked to the windows, checking the vista from each one and completely ignoring the man behind the library table at the room’s near end who had summoned him in the first place. “That’s a view for the ages!”

            Sykes joined Connors at the panel that overlooked San Francisco and the shoreline to its south. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, looking out himself with a broad grin. “I may be wrong, but I think it is the best San Francisco panorama in the entire East Bay.”

            Connors turned to respond and took Sykes in with a quick but thorough glance. The industrialist was average in height and weight, and appeared to be in his late fifties, with light-colored hair brushed straight back from his forehead in a fashion that made him look a little like a blond version of the composer, George Gershwin. He was dressed in a corduroy suit with suede patches on the elbows like an English professor at Stanford, one of the few Bay Area landmarks not visible from his windows. He also wore a pair of brogans that appeared to have been selected for comfort, not style.

            “I’d say it’s one of the best views of San Francisco, period, Mr. Sykes,” he said, offering his hand.  “I’m Jake Connors.  Glad to meet you in person this time.”

            The industrialist’s return grip was firm and dry, and his shake was vigorous, like that of a man who is used to dealing with all sorts of people and works to make a favorable impression on them from the first time he meets them.

            “A pleasure, Mr. Connors,” he said. “Why don’t you come over here and sit down on this divan.  I have a job I would like you to perform for me, but I want to satisfy myself that you are the best person for it beforehand, if don’t mind answering a few questions for me.”

            Connors allowed himself to be led.

            “So what can I do for you?” he said as he took a seat.

            Sykes pulled out a little notebook. “You mentioned meeting me in person this time,” he said. “I’ve hired you before, haven’t I?”

            “Yes,” Connors said. “You brought me in two years ago to find reds among the people who were trying to organize a union at your East Oakland plant. I took the job after an interview with one of your agents and didn’t actually talk with you in person. To make a long story short, there weren’t any communists.  You fired me because I didn’t find any and hired Western Research Foundation to finish the job.”

            The tone of his voice and the expression on his face made it clear that Sykes had made a mistake that raised serious questions about his probity.

            “Did we fire you or simply dismiss you because you had finished the work we assigned?” Sykes asked.

            Connors frowned. “Aren’t they the same thing?” he said. “To me, I was fired.”

            Sykes nodded, looking serious. “Did we contest your fee?” he asked.

            “No,” Connors said. “You paid it. In fact, you paid me a bit more than I had coming. I had to write a small check to return the difference.”

            “Ah,” Sykes said. He riffled through the pages of his notebook. “Did we cash your check?”

            Connors was beginning to wonder what this was all about.  “No, you never did, in fact,” he said. “It was sent back.”

            Sykes made a note in his book without looking up. “I see,” he said.

            “Do you happen to know what Western Research found out?” he asked when he finished writing and looked up at Connors.

            The investigator suppressed an urge to sigh. Sykes obviously was taking this conversation somewhere and he was going to have to hang on until he found out what it was. “I heard they determined that the entire union was full of commies,” he said. “The whole Third International was hiding out in that local.”

            Sykes closed his eyes and smiled. “Why did Western Research detect them when you couldn’t?” he asked.

            Connors let air out of his lungs in what could have been a sigh or simply an indicator of annoyance. “They found them because they bribed people to sign affidavits that their colleagues were communists,” he said. “The affidavits were false. The signers perjured themselves. For money.  I know because I have interviewed several of them, myself. There weren’t any communists, just pissed off workers.”

            “Could you have done that? Found non-existent communists, I mean.”

             “Probably,” Connors said. “If I had known that was all you wanted.”

            “So, why didn’t you?”

            Connors didn’t waste any time responding. “Mr. Sykes, I usually work for lawyers doing criminal defense work,” he said. “They want to know how guilty their clients actually are before they buy into their stories and try to use them in court. There’s practically nothing an attorney hates more than pursuing a defense and having it fall apart because their witnesses can’t stand up to cross examination.”

            “Before I worked for defense attorneys, I was with the DA’s office in Honolulu,” he continued. “Prosecutors don’t like having their witnesses fall apart any more than their colleagues on the other side do.  Knowing the truth makes life simpler for both sides because it tells you ahead of time just exactly how much you are going to have to twist the truth.”

            He paused momentarily to gather his thoughts.

            “Now I could have gone out and found people to say your union activists were communists but they wouldn’t have been telling the truth. When I took on your assignment, I thought you wanted to know the truth.  If I had known you just were looking for bullshit, I would have gone down to the stockyard and loaded up a truckful of it.”

            Sykes pondered this.  “Have I hired you for anything since then?”

            Connors shook his head in the negative.

            “But you’ve worked, right?” Sykes asked. “I mean, I didn’t have you blackballed because you didn’t identify the communists in that local union, did I?”

            Connors shook his head again. He knew that Sykes had checked him out before calling him for this appointment.  “I just finished one job,” he said. “I have an appointment to meet somebody at my office this afternoon who wants to retain me. I can’t complain about how much work I’m getting. I’m doing just fine.”

            Sykes looked in his notebook.  “Have you picked up an assignment from Art Francis?” he asked.

            Francis was a big building contractor.

            “Yeah,” Connors said, surprised that Sykes knew. “He needed me to do surveillance on a housing development he was doing in East Oakland. The contractor was reporting large scale thefts from the jobsites. It turned out that the contractor’s son and brother-in-law were stealing stuff off the job, selling it and splitting the proceeds with the contractor.  It was an insurance scam.”

            Sykes nodded, knowingly. “How about Howard Weininger?” he asked.

            Connors blinked. The Weininger investigation had been hush-hush, a family matter involving Weininger’s son-in-law: no cops, no newspaper items. It had been resolved without litigation or an arrest. He had no idea how Sykes had got wind of it.

            “I’d rather not say,” Connors told the industrialist. “A lot of my work is confidential.  The Francis case ended up going to court, so it’s a matter of public record. Other cases I have worked on aren’t.”

            Sykes tapped his cheek with a finger. He was smiling and Connors couldn’t figure out why. “Well, if it is a matter of public record, how did the Francis case turn out?” he asked.

            Connors was beginning to feel uneasy about the course of the interview.

            “The contractor, his son and his brother all went to state prison,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “The Alameda County D.A., George Cooper, built most of his prosecution on my investigation – evidence I turned up, documents I tracked down, witnesses I located. He used a lot of photographs I took, and some magnetic wire recordings. Why?”

            Sykes seemed amused. “It was a sensitive case, wasn’t it?” he asked. “I know it was because Mr. Cooper and I talked about it at length.  I’m one of the people who convinced him to stand for the office, and I support his efforts. I also know that you found that Howard Weininger’s son-in-law had another wife before he married Weininger’s daughter – and that they were still legally married when he and Carrie Weininger tied the knot. He had never bothered to divorce his first spouse. As a result of your investigation, Carrie’s marriage was annulled and Weininger was able to escape a costly financial settlement.”

            Connors cleared his throat.

            “Mr. Sykes,” he said, “I am enjoying this game of twenty questions but it’s obvious you know about these investigations already, so I don’t know why you are wasting your very valuable time – and my considerably less valuable time – asking me about them. Is there some sort of reason for this quiz?”

            If anything, Sykes’ smile grew broader.  Connors’ insolent tone didn’t seem to bother him at all. “You have some spirit, Mr. Connors,” he said. “How do you think Weininger and Francis came to hire you?”

            Jake was taken aback by the question. He never gave much thought to how his clients found him.

            “I suppose they saw my ad in the phone book,” he said, stammering slightly in his surprise.

            Sykes’ amused expression was now an open grin.

            “Two of the wealthiest men in Northern California just happened to come across your four-column-inch ad in the Yellow Pages and decided to hire you, out of the listings of some 400 private investigators in the San Francisco Bay Area,” he said in a voice that dripped with sarcasm. “No doubt they were drawn in by your promise of a ‘fast, discreet investigation.’”

            Connors stared, uncertain what point the millionaire was trying to make.

            Sykes took Connors by the arm and led him to a large leather arm chair at the opposite side of the room. Once the detective was seated, Sykes pulled a chair over from the library table and placed it in front of him. Sitting down, the millionaire said, “Mr. Connors, I recommended you for both of those jobs because you actually provided me with good service in that investigation you conducted for me.”

            “I hired Western Research because they provided me with expedient service.  Expedient service and good service are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, they are often not even remotely similar.”

            He tapped the back of Connors’ hand with a forefinger. “I needed to get rid of five men in my body parts fabrication plant in East Oakland because they were leading a unionization campaign,” he said. “When I hired you, I was hoping you would rather quickly ascertain that they were communists.  But, in fact, you proved just the opposite – the men that I suspected turned out to simply be union stalwarts and would-be saviors of the underdog.  Under normal circumstances, I might have lauded their effort to win better wages and working conditions for their fellow employees.  But the circumstances were not normal, not then and not in my own plant. That was useful information but it wasn’t the information I needed at the time, do you understand?”

            Connors nodded.

            “My sponsors in the federal government were pressuring me to get rid of communists, but not to dismiss workers who were simply trade unionists,” Sykes continued. “They were Democrats and Democrats like trade unionists.  So I looked for an information broker that was a great deal less scrupulous than you had been to provide me with information I could use to discharge those workers without drawing the ire of my political sponsors.”

            Connors got the picture. “So you hired crooks to dirty up the reputation of your unionization leaders,” he said. “Mox nix to me, Mr. Sykes.  I don’t have any politics but the truth.  About communists and union bosses I could give a shit.”

            Sykes inclined his head. “Just so,” he said. “But I appreciate your honesty and adherence to fact. Otherwise, I would never have recommended you to my two colleagues and friends, Mr. Weininger and Mr. Francis. You see, Mr. Connors, I also have an appreciation for the facts. And I need some specific facts in a great hurry.  That means I am in a situation where I need good service that is also expedient service, and I think you are the ideal candidate to provide me with both.”

            Connors was confused again. “Excuse me for asking this, but are you saying that you want me to do an investigation for you in which what you actually want is the truth, not some poppycock you can use to get rid of workers you don’t like?” he said.

            Sykes, still smiling, inclined his head again.

            “What if the information I bring you is something you find disagreeable?” the investigator asked.

            “In that case, Mr. Connors, I will not only be eternally grateful, but will also pay you a bonus on top of whatever fee we agree to,” Sykes said. “If your inquiry turns out as I expect it will, the result will be information that clears the way for another step in my career. And if you turn up something detrimental, it is better to know about it now, at the very beginning, than later when things have progressed too far to be resolved without a great deal of adverse publicity.”

            Connors thought about it. “So what, exactly, is it that you want me to investigate?” he said finally.

            Sykes grinned. “No less than the President of the United States has me under consideration as a candidate for an important government post,” he said. “I am undergoing a security investigation by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the people from that agency I have talked to so far have not impressed me. They seem to be simple policemen, more skilled at finding bank robbers and kidnappers than conducting a complicated investigation of an individual who is engaged in business activities the scope of which the average federal agent has no chance of understanding. I suspect they will find nothing, but if they accidentally stumble on some information that is detrimental to my interests – say something planted by one of my business rivals – I want to be able to counter it.  In order to do that expeditiously, I need to know what they are likely to turn up even before they do.  Do you understand what I mean?”

            Jake nodded. “I think so,” he said. “You want me to go out and look for the kinds of negative things your enemies would steer the feds toward. I suppose you could call it preemptory intelligence.  That way you can figure out ahead of time what you intend to say when this stuff comes up during, say, a hearing before HUAC or its Senate counterpart.”

             The industrialist smiled, eyes half closed. “Very perceptive, Mr. Connors,” he said. “I knew you were the proper person for this particular job.  In short, I want you to investigate me, thoroughly and exhaustively, before the nomination is official.  I want you to dig up every bit of dirt you can on me, to find out whether I can stand up to the federal scrutiny that will be required for me to take the position.”

            “In short, Mr. Connors, I am hiring you for a very special investigation – I want you to find out what a rotten bastard I actually am.”

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