Cage RIder

By William E. Wallace

(Novel Excerpt)

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.

It 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 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, shaking her head.  “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 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 snofabitch,” 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 Cavalier, 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 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 in her little girl's voice. 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.

“I had the Jeanette part,” he said pointing at her name tag. “Didn’t have the Netty or the Helmso, though. You’re right about me not knowing Richmond. 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

By William E. Wallace

(Excerpt of a Work in Progress)

 

                The black and white San Jose Police Department patrol unit raked Jack Burial’s Chevy station wagon with its spotlight as it rolled by on the opposite side of the street. He winced as the harsh beam hit his eyes. The sky over the buff-colored foothills of the Diablo Range had a peach-colored glow although the place where Burial’s car was parked was still in shadow. He glanced at his watch with a yawn: it was shortly after 6 a.m.

                The police car made a U-turn in the next intersection and pulled to a stop just behind him. A young cop got out and approached Burial with his hand resting on the butt of his service revolver. His partner stayed behind, using the car's CAD unit to check Burial's plate for wants and warrants.

                The young cop was obviously still in field training and green as an avocado. He flashed a polite, professional smile. "Could I see some identification, sir?" he asked, with just a trace of apology in his voice.

                Burial climbed slowly out of the Chevy and fumbled his card case out of his back pocket. He held it out flipped open, so it showed his driver's license and private investigator's certificate. The young cop studied the license closely without touching Burial’s wallet.

                "First time I've seen one of those," he said. "Could you remove the driver's license from the wallet, sir?"

                Burial complied, and the young cop took the license back to the prowl car. Yawning again, Burial leaned against the side of the station wagon wearily, folded his arms across his chest and glanced up at the apartment he had been watching.

                The curtains were open on the living room window and a couple dressed in bathrobes stood staring down on the street. After a few moments the man said something to the woman and walked back into the room. She remained at the window, watching.

                Burial looked away, blinking hard.

                The young cop came back, accompanied by his partner, an older man with a huge, flat nose. "Here's your ID, sir," the rookie said, handing Burial back his license. "You’re clean; not even a parking ticket. Would you mind telling me what you are doing here?"

                Burial shrugged. "I'm a private investigator," he said. "I'm doing some . . . surveillance."

                Both answers were accurate as far as they went. They just didn’t go far enough to be completely true.

                "I see," the young officer said, giving his partner an “I told you so” look. "I thought it might be something like that soon as I saw your state license."

                Burial looked at the two cops. "Is there some problem, officers?" he asked. "Am I breaking the law?"

                The older one shook his head. "No, not really," he said giving Burial that dead-eyed law enforcement stare that seemed to add, Not that I’ve caught you at – yet. "We just had a report there was an unidentified man hanging around this neighborhood,” he said. “There’ve been a lot of residential burglaries here lately, so the dispatcher sent us over to check it out. You working or just hanging out?”

                Burial shrugged. “Just getting ready to leave, actually,” he said. “That is, if it’s okay with you.”

                The police cruiser's radio crackled to life with a call, breaking the quiet of the suburban street. As the older cop used the PIC unit on his shoulder to respond, Burial glanced up at the apartment he’d been watching. Several residents had come to their windows, peeking out furtively to see what was going on. The woman in the window was gone and the curtains had been drawn.

                “That’s for us,” the older cop told his partner. “Hot prowl three blocks south, let’s go.” Turning to Burial, he added, “you can go,” in a tone of voice that made it sound more like an order than a statement.

                "Sorry, sir," the younger cop said, as they turned away. "Just doing our job."

                Burial nodded. "I know," he said. "I used to be a cop, myself. Good luck with the hot prowl.”

                The officers drove away in the cruiser, flicking on the light bar in mid-street. Burial sighed and got into the Chevy. The woman from the apartment he had been watching was standing on the sidewalk in front of the building now, still wearing her bathrobe. He started the car and made a U-turn, pulling up in front of her and rolling down the passenger side window.

                "Hello, Carole," he said quietly. "Who called the cops, him or you?"

                The woman shrugged. "What difference does it make?"

                “None, I guess," he said. "Just curious. You know me – nosy as hell and all that.”

                When she didn’t respond, he added, “I’d bet it was you, though. It seems like something you’d do.”

                Shivering, she pulled the bathrobe up around her neck. "You're sick, you know that?'' she said without emotion.  “These occasional nighttime visits are juvenile. They’re just harassment. If they’re supposed to make me realize that I’m still in love with you, they aren’t working. In fact, they’re doing just the opposite – they’re reminding me why I left you in the first place, to get away from this kind of childish behavior.”

                “I’m not trying to harass you,” he said weakly. “I miss you, that’s all.”

                “You’re stalking me, Jack,” she said wearily. “Don’t you see that?  If you don't leave me alone, I'll go to the judge and get a court order; then when the police come, I'll have them throw you in jail for contempt."

                He considered that a moment, staring at the steering wheel to avoid her eyes. "Yeah, I guess you would," he said finally.

                "We've been separated almost a year," she said, bending down to lean on the car window frame. "The divorce will be final in six weeks. I'm out of it, Jack. It’s over. What you do with the rest of your life is up to you, but if it interferes with mine again, even for a minute, I'm going to court. Do you understand?"

                He stretched across the seat and gave the back of her hand a gentle pat. “Listen,” he said, “isn’t there anything I can do to make things right between us again?”

                She pulled away with a sneer and rubbed it as if she was removing germs, “You’re a loser, period, end of report,” she said. “Do you remember King Midas? The man with the original touch of gold? Well, you’re the anti-Midas; everything you touch turns to shit. You could have been chief investigator for the Alameda County DA by now but you decided to do your little Sam Spade thing instead. The only problem is, there isn’t any Maltese Falcon out there for you. You can’t even make a decent living.”  

                “Come on, Carole,” he said. “It takes time to start a new business. You have to develop a reputation, a client list. That doesn’t happen overnight.”

                She snorted. “You’ve had nearly three years of overnights to work on it and you’re nowhere, Jack,” she said. “You’re still interviewing workers for comp cases or pissing around with half-assed product liability claims. The shysters you work for sell those cases out to the insurance companies for chump change and then stiff you on your fee. You end up suing in small claims court to collect from your own clients, for Christ sake.”

                “That only happened once,” he said quietly.

                Her laugh had a bitter edge to it. “From what I hear, you have three small claims actions going right now,” she said. She shook her head and gave him a look of pity. “You’re a fucking train wreck. Fortunately, there’s nobody on board the train anymore but you. I decided to get off before you got too far downhill.”

                “To answer your question, no: there isn’t a thing on God’s green earth you can do to get us back together, unless you know how to step back in time six years and stop yourself from becoming a total fuckup.”

                He decided not to respond. The pained look that twisted his face said more than words could, anyway.

                "You gonna marry that guy when the divorce is final?" he asked, nodding toward her apartment window.

                "Maybe; maybe not,” she replied impatiently. “It's none of your business in any event. Just leave me alone, will you?"

                She turned and strode back into the apartment, the wooden soles of her clogs clacking hollowly on the cement steps. Burial looked back up at her living room window.

                The man was back, holding the curtain open with one hand and smoking a cigarette.

                Burial put the car in gear and started to drive away, then stopped, leaned out and stuck out his hand, middle finger raised. The man jerked the curtain closed.

                Burial allowed himself a small smile. Carole was right, he thought to himself: he was being juvenile; but if he was going to be childish, he might as well go all the way.

#

    

The Bone Jar

By William E. Wallace

 (Excerpt of a Work in Progress)

          I curbed the front wheels of my Zephyr in front of the Sykes’ mansion to keep it from rolling all the way to San Francisco Bay, parked my Beeman’s on the back of its rear-view mirror and climbed out for the kind of view only a war profiteer could afford.

Randolph M. Sykes’ Oakland Hills vista took in the shipyards in Richmond and San Francisco where he got his start as a Kaiser subcontractor 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, but which had been retooled to manufacture the Regal Sedan, a limited edition four-door in the same price range as a high-end Cadillac.

While I had been spending my share of the war killing Japs in the Pacific, the millionaire had been making a fortune using cheap materials, cut-rate labor and carbon-copy floor plans to mass-produce the kind of inexpensive housing people like me could purchase on the G.I. Bill when they returned home. But while Sykes might be short-changing the vets, he obviously hadn’t cut any corners on his own place: his mansion had cost several million to construct and wartime restrictions on building materials seemed to pass it by completely.

The Tribune said he’d finished the place about three weeks after VJ day, at a time when lesser folks were having difficulty just getting their leaky roofs repaired. It was mostly concrete and rebar, and it seemed to crawl nearly a half block down one of steepest slopes in the Oakland Hills. The front half that looked out past the Golden Gate had so many huge windows that it seemed to be walled with glass.

From it Sykes could look out on roughly 137 square blocks of residential real estate he had picked up for a song during the war and developed into single-family homes that were custom-made for sale under the terms of Harry Colmery’s Serviceman’s Readjustment Act. Vets like me were raising families in Sykes Homes from El Cerrito to San Leandro, and the man’s real estate holdings alone had made him one of the richest people on the West Coast.

I liked the millionaire’s view, but sightseeing wasn’t what had brought me up from my office in downtown Oakland. I was there to see Mr. Sykes about a job.

My knock on the front door seemed to disappear someplace inside the building’s vast interior. A minute passed, then another. Finally I heard the mechanical rasp of the latch inside and the low squeal of hinges as the door swung slowly open, just wide enough to allow someone to look out.

“Yes?” said the fellow standing behind it, blinking at me as his eyes adjusted to the glare of the sun. He was apparently some sort of Sykes’ family retainer, a butler, or maybe just some garden variety serf. He had a slight Spanish accent and looked to be in his mid-sixties. I handed one of my business cards through the crack and he looked at it as if a dog had deposited it on the front steps, holding it with only the tips of his fingers.

He took so long reading it that I was tempted to save him the trouble by quoting it from memory:

Jacob Connors

California Licensed Investigator

Employment background checks * missing persons * divorce investigations

References available from law enforcement agencies and attorneys

At the bottom was the address and telephone number of my office in downtown Oakland.

The serf studied it carefully. As a trained investigator, I deduced he was well-educated because he barely moved his lips while reading. When he finished, he studied me almost as carefully as the card.

 “You are Mr. Connors, I take it,” he said, his tone making it into a question.

“Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week,” I replied. “I’m here to see Mr. Sykes.” When he didn’t immediately respond, I added, “he sent for me.”

 “Please wait,” the serf said. “I will tell him you have arrived.” He swung the door closed. I momentarily considered using my right foot to block it but when it slammed with a boom, I was glad I hadn’t: it wouldn’t be easy to drive the Zephyr back to my office in the Cathedral Building downtown without being able to use the gas pedal or brake.

When he returned a few minutes later, the serf admitted me to a foyer that was gloomy as a sarcophagus. The ceiling appeared to be at least twenty feet high and the entry was three times that but surprisingly shallow; its lack of depth gave me the sensation the front wall was closing in like one of those man-traps in an RKO serial.

 “Weird layout,” I said to the serf.

  He nodded. “A concession to the force of gravity. 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 is six stories high from roof to basement, all steel-reinforced concrete hung from steel I-beams. The bottom three floors are tunneled into the rock of the hillside. Mr. Sykes’ engineers calculated that the upper rooms should be rather shallow or their weight would end up pulling the entire structure down into the canyon below.”

I 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 was built a little like Sykes’ mansion, although the inside of Sykes’ place didn’t smell like barbecued Jap.

“Ah,” I said. “That must be why it looks sort of like a lava flow.”

 “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 Armando Cortez, incidentally,” he added as he signaled me 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 his valet.”

“Sort of like Jeeves, eh?” I said with a slight smile.

Cortez raised an eyebrow. He didn’t seem to like the comparison. “Nothing of the kind,” he said. “Jeeves finds 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.”

Almost every room we passed through featured some masterpiece of Asian art: crockery, jewelry made from semi-precious stones, carved camphorwood statues, paints and calligraphy. I was from Hawaii, so some of it looked similar to stuff I’d seen in the museum in Honolulu, including antique chests lacquered a deep vermillion, beautifully forged Japanese and Chinese swords, numerous pieces of fine crockery and intricately carved jade figures.

The mansion itself was designed to show the art off: though the building was massive and built largely of concrete, every room other than the foyer had a low ceiling and some sort of blond wooden flooring that made me think of the tatami mats that my friend Ike Fukuyama had in his house in Oahu.

The huge windows, most of them offering views of San Francisco Bay that tourists would have paid hard money to see, were framed with massive pieces of dark oak, and the artworks themselves were arranged in little arcades that reminded me of Ike’s tokonama, a niche in his living room that held a tiny shrine.

 We trudged down so many stories that I thought we were going to come out in the Rockridge neighborhood of North Oakland. I wasn’t looking forward to climbing up all those stairs to get back to where my car was parked, but eventually we reached a room that seemed to jut out into space above the hills. It seemed sort of like an outsized Bay Window: set into the gray cement were three angled panels filled with plate glass from floor to ceiling that each offered a sensational view of a different part of San Francisco Bay.

To the east, Point Richmond, Belvedere, Tiburon and a portion of Sausalito could be seen, along with the tanker tie-ups nestled along the Richmond shoreline. Directly opposite, the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais and the Marin Headlands were visible. And to the West, an observer could see San Francisco, the new Bay Bridge, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena, as well as a strip of the San Francisco shoreline that extended past Candlestick Point.

 “Wow!” I said, walking over to check the vista through each pane, completely ignoring the man sitting behind the library table at the room’s near end. “That’s one helluva view!”

The man got up and joined me. “Impressive, isn’t it?” he said, looking out himself with a broad grin. “I may be wrong, but I think it’s the best San Francisco panorama in the entire East Bay.”

I didn’t have to ask who he was. I recognized Randy Sykes from a photo I had once seen in the Oakland Tribune. He  appeared to be in his late fifties, with light-colored hair brushed straight back from his forehead in a way that made him look like a blond version of the composer, George Gershwin. He wore a striped necktie on a white shirt ironed stiff with starch, and a brown corduroy suit with suede patches on the elbows like an English professor at Stanford, one of the few Bay Area landmarks that wasn’t visible from his windows.

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

The industrialist’s firm grip struck me as that of a man used to dealing with all sorts of people and making a favorable impression on them from the very first meeting.

“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 if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions first.”

I allowed myself to be led. “So what can I do for you?” I asked as I 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,” I replied. “You brought me in two years ago to find reds among the people who were trying to unionize your East Oakland auto plant. I’d just got out of the Marines at the time and hadn’t had my office open more than a month or two. One of your agents gave me the job and I 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 Inquiries Foundation to finish the job.”

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

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

 “Did we contest your fee?” Sykes asked.

 “No,” I 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?”

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

 Sykes made a note in his book without looking up. “I see,” he said making a note. “Do you happen to know what Western Inquiries found out?” he asked when he finished writing and looked up at me.

 I figured Sykes was taking this conversation someplace and I would just have to go along to find out where. “I heard they determined that the entire union was full of commies,” I said. “According to their report, practically the entire Third International was hiding out in that local – at least all the members Stalin hadn’t had murdered.”

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

I sighed. The conversation was beginning to bore me. “They didn’t,” I said. “There still weren’t any reds at your factory. Western Inquiries just said that there were and bribed some of your workers to sign false affidavits to that effect. That’s perjury, but your workers didn’t care because they were paid well enough not to. All Western actually found was exactly what I had: pissed-off workers.”

 Sykes pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Why didn’t you pay some workers to say there were communists at the plant like Western Inquiries did?” he asked.

 “If I had known that was all you wanted, I might have made a bid,” I replied.

 “So, why didn’t you?”

 I decided to cut the third-degree short. “Mr. Sykes, I usually work for lawyers doing criminal defense work,” I 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 attorneys hate more than mounting a defense and having it fall apart because their witnesses can’t stand up to cross examination.”

 “Before I joined the Corps and fought in the Pacific, I was a cop in Honolulu and I worked with the D.A.,” I 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 it.”

 “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 in Modesto and loaded up a truckful of it.”

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

 I shook my head no.

 “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?”

 I shook my head again. I knew that Sykes had checked me out before calling for this appointment. I couldn’t figure why he was going over all this old ground.

“I don’t think I have had more than two days off in a row for most of the last two years,” I said. “I can’t complain about how much work I’m getting. I’m doing just fine.”

 Sykes looked in his notebook.  “Did Art Francis hire you?” he asked.

 Francis was a big real estate developer. I was surprised Sykes knew I had worked for him. “Yeah,” I said. “He needed me to do surveillance on a housing project he was building in East Oakland. The contractor was reporting construction material thefts from the jobsite.”

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

 Now he had my interest. 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. I had no idea how Sykes had got wind of it.

 “I’d rather not say,” I told the industrialist. “A lot of my work is confidential. The Francis case ended in court, so it’s a matter of public record. Others I’ve worked on haven’t.”

 Sykes tapped his cheek with a finger. He was smiling and I figure out why. “Well, if it is a matter of public record, how did the Francis case turn out?” he asked.

I shrugged. “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,” I said. “They were running an insurance scam. The D.A., George Cooper, charged all three with fraud and grand theft, largely based on evidence I turned up in my investigation. They all ended up going to state prison.”

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 run for county prosecutor 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.”

 I cleared my throat.

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

 If anything, Sykes’ smile grew broader. My insolence 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?”

 I was taken aback by the question. Like most detectives, I spend money on business cards and advertising so I probably should find out how my clients learn I’m in business, but I never gave it much thought.

 “I suppose they saw my ad in the phone book,” I said uncertainly.

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 – or the little three-line classifieds you run in the Oakland papers – and decided to hire you, out 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.’”

 I said nothing, waiting to find out what point the millionaire was trying to make.

 “Mr. Connors,” he said, clearly enjoying himself, “I recommended you to Weininger and Francis because you actually provided me with good service in that investigation you conducted for me. I hired Western Inquiries because they provided me with expedient service. Expedient service and good service are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, they are sometimes not even remotely similar.”

 He tapped the back of my hand with a forefinger. “I needed to get rid of five men in my 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. What you gave me was interesting information, but it wasn’t the information I needed at the time, do you understand?”

 I nodded. “You needed a pretext to get rid of those guys,” I said. “My investigation didn’t give it to you.”

 “Exactly,” he said, leaning back and crossing his legs. “My sponsors in the federal government were pressuring me to get rid of communists, but not to dismiss workers who were simply trade unionists. They were Democrats and Democrats like trade unionists. So I ended up looking for a less scrupulous information broker to provide me with information I could use to discharge those workers without drawing the ire of my political sponsors.”

I got the picture. “In other words, you hired crooks to dirty up the reputation of your unionization leaders,” I said.

Sykes held up a finger. “But at the same time, based on your report, I reconsidered the discontent those five men had been playing on in trying to unionize my workforce,” he said. “I took it more seriously, knowing that they weren’t simply left-wing hooligans trying to stir up trouble, but men who were responding to real resentment about the wages, hours and working conditions at the plant. I increased the hourly wage, instituted one week of paid vacation each year for every full-time employee and improved the promotional opportunities for rank-and-file workers. So, in a way, your assessment of those five union leaders as non-communists led to some improvements for workers that they had hoped to achieve by unionization.”

 “Mox nix to me, Mr. Sykes,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to help the struggling masses. I don’t have any politics but the truth. I care fuck-all about communists and union bosses.”

Sykes inclined his head. “Just so,” he said. “But I appreciate your honesty and adherence to fact. And because of it, I 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 right now 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.”

 I wanted to make sure I understood him. “Excuse me for asking, but are you saying that you want me to do another  investigation, but this time you actually want the truth?”

 Sykes, still smiling, inclined his head again.

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

 “So what, exactly, is it that you want me to investigate?” I asked.

Sykes grinned. “The President of the United States is considering me 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,” he continued. “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?”

 I nodded. “I think so,” I 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 one of these congressional committees that seems to be investigating everybody these days.”

 The industrialist smiled with his eyes half closed. “Very perceptive, Mr. Connors,” he said. “I knew you were the proper person for this particular job. 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.”

 “Many people I've done business with have said I'm a rotten bastard; Mr. Connors, I want you to find out exactly how rotten I actually am.”

#