Читать книгу The Emerald Cat Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

Gordian House wasn’t a house at all. Not that Lindsey expected it to be one, but he’d looked forward to something more impressive than a dingy office suite on the sixth floor of an aging commercial building on Shattuck Avenue. The furnishings looked as if they hadn’t been changed since Ike was President. There was actually a Remington Standard on the receptionist’s desk and a half-height wooden room divider with a swinging door in it. The only thing missing was a PBX switchboard. They probably kept that in the storage closet, waiting for time to flow backward.

The receptionist looked as if she couldn’t decide whether she was an unreconstructed hippie chick or a frowsy housewife, but when Lindsey presented his card she buzzed him through to an inner office. That was no more modern and no less dingy than the outer chamber. There was only one desk in the room, a small sign reading Jack Burnside.

The shirtsleeved man behind the desk looked to be in his sixties with unkempt, graying hair and a bushy moustache to match. He stood up and removed a half-smoked cigar from his mouth. He snarled, “I hope you’re not from the god-damned tobacco police.”

Lindsey said, “No, no. Nothing like that.”

Was Burnside joking or was there really such a thing as the tobacco police in this town? Never mind. He presented his card. “I’m from International Surety. We carry your liability policy.”

“I know that, I know that.” Burnside transferred the cigar to his other hand and extended a callused paw to Lindsey. He gestured Lindsey to a battered wooden chair that must have come from a liquidation sale at a thrift shop in the process of going out of business.

“Look, I don’t know what these high-tone bluebloods at Marston and Morse have against an honest businessman. Christ, Linsley—”

“Lindsey.”

“That’s what I said. Linsley.”

“Lindsey.”

“Jesus Christ on a crutch, did you come in here to interrupt me every five words? Look, I’ve been in this racket all my life. You know I worked with Aaron Wyn in New York? I sold pictures for Irving Klaw. You wouldn’t believe it, I once made a move on Bettie Page. So innocent she didn’t even know what was going on. But there was some hot, hot stuff. I mean, hot. I worked for Hamling in Chicago. I gave Milton Luros his start. I published pulps that would make a Donnenfeld blush and Miltie painted covers for me.”

He had placed his cigar on the edge of a huge cut-glass ashtray. The cigar had fallen off and added a blackened spot to the many on the wooden desktop before burning out. He picked it up, clicked a butane lighter into life and reignited the cigar. After a couple of puffs he leaned back in his chair and started up again, looking and sounding to Lindsey like the great Lee J. Cobb.

“These snooty s.o.b.’s want to put me out of business. I’ll fight the bastards. I’ll fight ’em all the way. I’ll whip their asses in court.”

Lindsey raised his hand, feeling like a schoolboy asking permission to leave the room.

Burnside grunted acknowledgement but he kept on rolling. “There’s no way they can beat me but if they do it’s on your backside, not mine. International Sure-As-Hell, that’s what I call you guys. International Sure-As-Hell. If I lose—no way I lose, I’m going to clank their clock, those arrogant s.o.b.’s, but if they do win International Sure-As-Hell has to pay, not Gordian House.”

He paused again to draw on his cigar. Before he could resume, Lindsey said, “Mr. Burnside—”

Burnside exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke. “Jack. Call me Jack. What’s your first name?” He squinted at Lindsey’s business card. “Hobart. Hobart. What the hell kind of name is that? I think I bought a Hobart stove one time. Or was it a dishwasher? My wife buys these things. I give her an allowance, I don’t know what she does with the money half the time.”

“Yes, well, that’s my name. You’d have to ask my mother how she picked it. Jack. All right. Jack. What I need to know is your side of this story.”

“You been talking to those snobs at Murder and Monkeyshines?”

“No, sir. I haven’t talked to them yet. I hope I can get this matter straightened out. If Gordian House is blameless I hope we can convince the other side to drop their case. If not, International Surety will try and work out a settlement. We don’t want a court fight and I hope they don’t want one either. Nobody wins that kind of battle except for the lawyers.”

“You want to hear my side?”

Lindsey nodded.

“I already told my lawyer all about it. What’s her name, Caswell. J. P .Caswell. Won’t even use a first name. I call her Jaypee. Firm is Hopkins, MacKinney, Black. In Oakland.”

“Yes, I’ll talk with them. With Ms. Caswell. But I’d like to hear it in your own words, Mr., ah, Jack.”

“Okay. Here we go.”

He pushed himself up and opened a door to another room. Lindsey peered though the doorway. The room was full of modern equipment. A crew of young men and women sat at computers, busily clicking away at keyboards. Burnside disappeared. Lindsey waited. Burnside reappeared, closed the door behind him. He tossed a paperback book at Lindsey. Lindsey managed to catch it. He turned it over and studied the cover.

The cover painting showed a woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse and a short, tight skirt sitting on a barstool. A tough-looking, unshaven male in a tee-shirt and jeans had one hand on her thigh. His other hand held a revolver. The whole scene was framed in a porthole-shaped window. The title of the book, lettered in simulated neon tubing, was The Emerald Cat.

“This is the cause célèbre?” Lindsey asked.

“The what?”

“The cause of all the trouble.”

“Yeah, right. See the byline on that thing?”

Lindsey read it aloud. “Steve Damon.” He opened the book, looked at the copyright page. The book was credited to Gordian House, Inc.

“Why isn’t it copyright by the author?”

Burnside said, “Huh. We bought it. Agent sold it to us. What they call work-done-for-hire, even though it wasn’t done for us. But it’s ours now.”

“You bought it from Steve Damon?”

“Nope.”

Lindsey decided that it was time to wait the other man out.

They stared at each other for a minute, then Burnside said, “Agent.”

“All right, then I’ll need to talk to Mr. Damon’s agent.”

Burnside opened a desk drawer and pulled out a Rolodex. “Here you go.” He flipped cards until he found the one he wanted. “Rachael Gottlieb.” He read off a Berkeley address. “Says she’s Damon’s agent. She signed the contract, he signed it, too. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Check went to Gottlieb. I guess she took her pound of flesh and gave the rest to Damon but I wouldn’t know for certain. Maybe she screwed him out of it. No pun intended, Linsley. No skin off my back either way.”

Lindsey jotted Gottlieb’s name and address in his organizer and slipped it back into his pocket. “So you never actually met Damon.”

“Nope. Never talk to authors. I have people to do that.” He gestured toward the door that led to the high-tech room. “Don’t think anybody talked to him, though. I handled that one myself. Met Gottlieb. Nice piece. Tight jeans, what the kids wear nowadays. Made me wish I was twenty years younger.”

Forty would be more like it, Lindsey thought. He stood up. “All right. Thank you, ah, Jack. I’ll be in touch.”

“Any time. Any time. Say hello to my girl on the way out.”

Lindsey said hello to Burnside’s receptionist on the way out. Shortly, in the building lobby, he studied the address Burnside had given him for Rachael Gottlieb. Dana Street. He remembered that from past years.

He was about to retrieve his rented Avenger from the parking garage and head for the Gottlieb Literary Agency but standing in the bright sunlight of Shattuck Avenue he realized that he wasn’t ready to meet Damon’s agent. Instead, he walked the short distance to the Berkeley Public Library, settled himself in the airy, high-ceilinged reading room, and opened the copy of The Emerald Cat that Jack Burnside had tossed at him.

It was a short novel, less than two hundred pages, and Lindsey felt no need to study every paragraph of Steve Damon’s deathless prose. He could get a reasonable take on the book by skimming, and in fact an hour’s attention proved sufficient.

The Emerald Cat seemed to be a standard hardboiled murder mystery. The title referred to a sleazy saloon on San Pablo Avenue in El Cerrito, a town just north of Berkeley. It had obviously been written in the recent past, as the author wrote at length about the Emerald Cat’s Dutch doors. Smokers could stand inside the tavern while leaning over the half-door and getting their nicotine fix outside the establishment.

Damon’s tough-as-nails private eye was one Troy Percheron. Percheron had an equally tough girl-friend. Damon referred to her as a frail, bringing a grin to Lindsey’s face. Her name was Helena Cairo. She was obviously the sexy woman featured on the cover of the book.

There was a fairly brutal murder, motive not quite clear to Lindsey. The victim was one Henry Blank. It wasn’t altogether clear to Lindsey why Blank had been garroted, either, but after a series of chases, beatings, drunken interludes, sexual encounters described in almost as much detail as Percheron’s fights with fists, brass knuckles, and tire chains, Percheron subdued the killer, a gigantic brute known as Frank “Frankenstein” Farmer, and turned him over to the local gendarmerie.

Lindsey wasn’t exactly an authority on hardboiled dick novels. He knew the genre more from films noir, but he’d read a couple of Chandlers and a sampling of Spillanes, enough to know what they were like. As far as he could tell, Steve Damon was an average practitioner of the craft.

Okay. He breathed a sigh of relief, slipped the paperback into his jacket pocket, and headed for the garage. Traffic wasn’t too heavy and he reached his destination in a matter of minutes.

He’d expected the Gottlieb Literary Agency to be located in an office building like the one that housed Gordian House but in fact he found himself standing in front of a well-maintained Victorian. He looked at the address in his organizer again, then at the house number. He climbed the steps and found a row of doorbells.

There was a hand-written card marked simply, Gottlieb, next to the buzzer for 4A. Maybe this was the agent’s home. Why would Burnside give him her home address rather than that of her office?

He rang the bell and was answered with a loud buzzing. He pressed the latch and the door opened. He made his way to apartment 4A. A young woman greeted him at the door.

Jack Burnside’s vulgar description of Rachael Gottlieb might have been reasonably accurate for a twenty-something female with an olive complexion, reasonably attractive features, and dark hair drawn back in a pony tail. She was attired in blue jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of a woman Lindsey did not recognize on the chest.

She looked questioningly at Lindsey. He introduced himself, proffered his business card and said, “Miss Gottlieb?”

She admitted as much. From the apartment behind her Lindsey could hear voices raised in slow, mellow music. There were rugs and cushions on the floor and a narrow column of gray rising from what had to be an incense burner.

The young woman asked Lindsey’s business.

He asked if she was indeed Steve Damon’s literary agent, Rachael Gottlieb. She was. He wondered if this was a convenient time to discuss a business matter involving Mr. Damon. Or would she prefer to meet him at her office?

“This is my office.” She had a soft voice that would have been at home with the singing—more like chanting—from inside the apartment. “You can come in.”

Either Rachael Gottlieb couldn’t afford much furniture or she preferred to do without it. Lindsey found himself seated on a floor cushion, listening to the recorded chants. Rachael Gottlieb left the room briefly, returned carrying a cast-iron pot, and poured a cup for Lindsey. “It’s pu-erh. It’s very soothing. I find that it harmonizes the body with the music of Hildegard. Do you know the Antiphon for Saint Ursula? It elevates the spirit.”

She lowered the cast iron pot to a three-legged trivet and herself to a floor cushion facing Lindsey. “Now, Mr. Lindsey, what do you wish to know?”

Lindsey sipped the pu-erh tea. He didn’t know whether it would harmonize his body or not, but it tasted good. He said that he was investigating an alleged plagiarism case involving Steve Damon and asked if Miss Gottlieb could put him in touch with the author.

“That’s not so easy.”

Lindsey asked why not.

“I’m afraid he’s dropped the class.”

Lindsey frowned. “I’m sorry, you’re losing me. What class is that? Aren’t you an agent? Isn’t he your client?”

She did have a sweet smile. Somehow the spirit of a generation ago survived, at least a little bit, in this eccentric town.

“We were taking a class together at Laney. You know Laney College, in Oakland?”

“I know of it.”

“‘Female Poets from Sumalgalamata to Maya Angelou.’ You see?” She waved a hand gracefully toward a small stack of books. Lindsey didn’t recognize many of the bylines but he was willing to take her word.

“Rigoberto was the only man in the class. He—” She stopped when she saw Lindsey’s frown.

He said, “Rigoberto?”

“Oh.” The smile again. “Steve Damon is a pseudonym. Rigoberto, Rigoberto Chocrón, was in the class. We went out for coffee afterwards, it was an evening class, we went out for coffee a few times and he told me he’d written a novel and he didn’t know how to market it. I told him he should ask Professor Rostum, Rosemary Rostum, she taught the poetry class, but he thought she wouldn’t like his book. So I suggested that he just go to the library and get a directory of publishers and try to sell it himself but he didn’t want to.”

She paused to sip her own pu-erh.

Lindsey asked if Damon—Chocrón—had said why he didn’t want to market the book himself.

“He’d been in a certain amount of trouble. He was getting a stipend from some kind of rehabilitation people for going to school. He seemed afraid of publicity. He asked if I would do it for him. I thought maybe he was just shy. Anyway, I looked up local publishers and there was Gordian House so I called them up and went to see Mr. Burnside and he bought the book. That’s about all there was to it. I didn’t even take a commission. I just cashed the Gordian House check and paid Rigoberto in cash. He said he didn’t have a bank account and he couldn’t cash a check himself.”

Lindsey asked Rachael Gottlieb for Chocrón’s address.

“I don’t know. He dropped out of the class. I think he dropped out of Laney altogether. He was a pretty elusive character, as a matter of fact.” She paused, tilted her head to one side, listening, Lindsey decided, to the gentle voices coming from a set of speakers in the corners of the room.

She smiled that smile again.

“He told me he has a favorite restaurant where he picks up telephone messages. I can give you that.”

Lindsey took it, with thanks. He got to his feet, not as quickly or easily as he might have a few decades earlier. He thanked Rachael Gottlieb for her help.

Just at the doorway he stopped and turned back, feeling like Peter Falk in a rumpled trench coat. “Just one more thing, Miss Gottlieb.”

She nodded, holding her cup of pu-erh tea to her lips, smiling amusedly at him over the rim.

Lindsey decided that she was a Colombo fan after all.

She waited expectantly on her floor-cushion.

“How did Mr. Damon—Chocrón—give you his book?’

She looked puzzled.

“I mean, was it a typewritten manuscript or a computer printout or—you see?”

“Oh, yes. It was on a disk. Mr. Burnside said they don’t bother with paper manuscripts any more. They ask their authors to email their manuscripts, or else to turn them in on CDs. I told Rigoberto and he said, okay, he’d download the book and give me the CD at our next class. That was before he dropped out of the poetry class.”

Lindsey said, “Do you know anything about his computer?”

She smiled gently. “No. No, I don’t. Good-bye, Mr. Lindsey. I hope you enjoyed the pu-erh tea.” She floated to her feet and crossed the room to close the door.

On the porch of the Dana Street house he blinked at the late afternoon sunlight, wondering how long he had spent in Rachael Gottlieb’s apartment listening to Hildegard’s music. Whoever Hildegard was. He checked his watch. Next stop—? He had to make a plan.

He returned to his hotel room, opened his own laptop, plugged it into a phone jack and sent a report to Denver. Then he did a web search for Marston and Morse, Publishers, and placed a phone call. He made an appointment for the following morning.

He closed down the laptop and stretched out on the hotel bed. It wasn’t time for dinner yet. He’d earned his day’s pay from International Surety. He kicked off his shoes, burrowed into the pillow, and took a nap.

He was astonished when he woke up and discovered that it was the next day. He checked his watch, ordered an egg and toast from room service, took a shower and climbed into a fresh outfit.