Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (11 page)

This was going to be a confusing case, I could see that now. She— and probably everybody else at Bright Future— thought I was after an exposé of the company. There I was, an unlicensed investigator looking for a killer, pretending to be doing a story on correspondence schools, and suspected of trying to dig up a business scandal.

“
Probe
does not,” I said self-righteously, “investigate murders. If you know what
Probe
is, you know that. But I do know that one of your executives was killed, and that one of your employees was arrested. It’s common knowledge. I was just making conversation, Chloe.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “Yes,” she said. “One of our executives was killed and one of my employees was arrested. But I really doubt that he did it.”

“His knife did it.” She shrugged, sipping at her drink and gazing out the window. “And someone at your office told the cops he’d had a fight with Smith.”

She turned back to me. “So?”

I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay, I’ll change the subject. Why did the company move to California?”

“That’s easy, but not very interesting.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“The company had always done all right, grew a lot in the fifties, stabilized in the sixties, rode out the early seventies. Bowen wanted to expand, open a new shop out here. He just didn’t see the economic handwriting on the wall, didn’t understand it wasn’t a good time to take chances. He sent Armand out here and bought the new building, began to relocate parts of the business. Bowen came out a few times. By the time they realized they couldn’t support the expansion, Bowen’s old bones— and his wife’s— had fallen in love with sunny San Rafael. The building here was smaller and prettier. They pulled out of Chicago entirely. See? Nothing to it. Things were tight for a while, now they’re fine again. No story there.”

So that was it, I thought. They’d blown it by making a bad move. And things had gotten tight enough to bring in the razzle-dazzle man. “I had an interesting talk with Morton about the sales structure,” I said. “Has it made a big difference to the company?”

“Yes.” I waited for more. There wasn’t any more. The waiter came again and we ordered lunch.

“Do you have more students than you had before?”

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe,” I said, “you’d rather talk about the murder.”

“I don’t know anything about the murder.”

“Don’t you know anyone who hated Smith?”

She laughed. “I wasn’t crazy about him myself.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try again. Tell me about the courses you work on.”

“I’ve got a capable staff.”

“You don’t trust me, do you?” I tried to look hurt. She laughed once more, but it was a different kind of laugh.

“Look, let’s get straight with each other, all right? I used to be in your end of the business. Not much in the way of magazines, but both wire services and a couple of newspapers. Depending on how ambitious you are, the story comes before damned near everything else. I know exactly where you’re coming from. And how you got there. You know what you represent to me? One of the five men ahead of me in line for the job, any job. I’m talking about the good old days before the women’s movement.” Our lunch came and she paused while the waiter served the food. My fried oysters looked good. Chloe stabbed hard with her fork at her crab soufflé and jammed some in her mouth. I ate a small oyster. She chewed, swallowed, and went on.

“There were women back then who were tough enough to push their way through. I was an innocent kid. I didn’t have the ego to fight or the humility to take it. I don’t know how long you’ve been doing this, but it’s long enough, and long enough means you’ve stepped over some talented women to get the jobs you’ve had. I want another drink.”

I waved at the waiter and got her another drink. One for me, too. I wanted to tell her I wasn’t really a reporter, and that I knew how hard it must have been because my friend Rosie was a carpenter and it hadn’t been easy for her, either, even though she was ten years younger than Chloe. I wanted to tell her that I believed women were people. I just looked at her, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t feel guilty for being a man. Just grateful.

Chloe lit another cigarette and muttered, “I shouldn’t talk about it. It makes me smoke and drink.” She took a deep swallow from her glass and settled back in her chair. “Besides, it’s not your fault. It was mine. I just wasn’t strong enough or smart enough or patient enough or some damned thing. But you asked me if I trusted you? Are you serious? You’re doing a job. You could probably justify an exposé even if the company folded and every innocent who works there was tossed out on the street.”

I leaned across the table and put everything I had into my disclaimer. “I’m not doing an exposé. Please believe that. I don’t know how to convince you, but it’s true.”

“I don’t believe you, because I can’t imagine what else you could be doing. If you are doing something else, tell me what it is and don’t give me that crap about a nice little piece on home study.”

I couldn’t. Since we’d started lunch I’d revised my earlier picture of the amazon. Amazons were small and wiry and forty years old. And sometimes dangerous. For all I knew, she’d killed Smith herself.

I raised my hands in surrender. “I don’t know what to tell you. I wish we could be friends.”

“Okay. We’re friends. As long as you don’t ask me any questions about the company.”

“And what it sells?”

She kept her eyes on her drink. “And what it sells.”

Only a few cars were parked on the canyon floor. Artie’s and Julia’s were not among them. I climbed the steps to my room, grabbed some clean socks and underwear, and walked over to Artie’s.

I knocked. No one answered, so I used my key. Sure enough, no one was there, not even Berkeley the golden retriever. The bathroom was all mine.

Now, there’s a myth that macho guys like me, men of action, always on the run, always just a little late for the next adventure, cleanse our bodies and refresh our spirits only in showers hard-driving enough to match our lifestyles. It’s not true. Oh, I like a shower as well as the next man. But for real relaxation and real thinking, there’s nothing like a long, hot bath. With or without bubbles.

After an entire morning and part of the afternoon at Bright Future, I felt the need for a bath. I filled the tub to the overflow, stepped carefully over a column of ants that was marching from the faucet wall, along the tub, and down to the floor, and settled in with my thoughts.

Bowen, the founder. A living anachronism. Flashes of intelligence in what seemed to be a generally dulled personality. Just drifting. Someone else had to be doing the real work. Howard Morton was easily the most dynamic type I’d met there, with the exception of Chloe. But Chloe had her own cloud cover, her own way of drifting. And she didn’t, as far as I could tell, have much power. Morton had been brought in to make things go, and maybe he had also been given the autonomy to do it. He could have an empire out there in the field.

But there was also Bill Armand. The man with two jobs. If his titles meant anything, he held all the power in the company. I’d gotten a chance to spend some time with him, finally, after lunch, when he’d insisted on giving me a tour of the parts of the building I hadn’t seen yet and didn’t particularly want to see.

I reached across the rim of the bathtub to retrieve my notebook, which I’d placed conveniently on the toilet seat along with some of the Bright Future propaganda I’d brought home, and knocked about a dozen ants into the water. I scooped up as many as I could get to and put them back in the traffic pattern to dry. The others broke ranks and zigzagged around them, waving their antennae.

Old Ed and his two assistants. The assistants had been busy packing courses into boxes. Old Ed was fumbling around in a pile of orders, but stopped fumbling long enough to shake my hand with his own sweaty one.

A typing pool of bored young women.

Someone sitting in a cubicle doing something with a computer.

An empty conference room with a very long, polished table.

Smith’s vacant office.

Armand hadn’t planned on showing me Smith’s vacant office, but when we passed a closed door with his name on it, I asked to have a look.

Armand the Smooth didn’t ask me why. He just shrugged and pushed the door open. The office was about the size of Morton’s, but the bookshelves were neater. I’d tried to get information about possible replacements for Smith, but Armand had been noncommittal. I’d tried to pump Armand about Smith’s attitude toward recent changes in the company’s way of doing business, but there was nothing doing there, either.

Some of the ants had dried out and rejoined their comrades. The others remained crumpled up and inert, obstacles the column marched around.

All in all, I had a strong feeling that nobody at Bright Future had told me a damned thing I could use.

I needed to find out more, maybe from Chloe, maybe from Arlene. Did Smith and Morton have a conflict? Where did Armand fit in? Why did the company think its sales force was a navy? Did Bowen care?

I set my notebook aside and reached for the handful of Bright Future paper. The first few items, the sketchy course descriptions I’d glanced at in Morton’s office, I skimmed again and tossed on the floor. They were followed by the sales organization chart. That left me with a newsletter of about sixteen pages and a booklet, smaller and thicker than the newsletter.

I started with the newsletter, which was called
Bright Star.
This, I remembered, was Bert Franklin’s handiwork. White paper, red headlines, and blue copy. A red spiral staircase on each side of the name. The photograph on the front page also was printed in red. Three guys clapping each other on the back. One of them was Howard Morton, showing pink teeth in a grin. The caption said the other two men were the “numero uno” and “numero dos” captains for the month of January. One of them was captain of San Diego, the other of Seattle. The story, the caption said, was on page 3.

Page 2 had another photo of Morton and a long inspirational piece signed by him. It had to do with “strong, independent business people” and “eagles soaring to the full altitude of human potential.”

The story on page 3, which included mug shots of the two supercaptains, was all about how they’d taken their cities to the top of the charts. I noticed no specific amounts of money were mentioned, but there was no way the reader could avoid imagining these guys wallowing in money and adulation.

I thumbed on. A lot of stuff about the value of training. Not much about the value of the courses. Just one page titled “new testimonials.” These were quotes from students about how they were getting rich and happy through accounting or how their high school diploma had opened the doors to success. There were many, many hyped-up mentions of commodores and admirals. I took Morton’s chart from the pile. Those were the two highest titles under Morton himself.

The most used word throughout was “excited.” Everybody was excited about something— the product, the training, the opportunity. I, however, failed to catch the mood. I tossed the newsletter on the floor with the rest of the advertising and picked up the booklet.

It appeared to be some kind of institutional brochure, something they used when they wanted to look classy. The cover was solid blue with a single, silver spiral staircase in the upper right-hand corner. The first page was a sheet of what looked like thick onion skin, blank except for the staircase reproduced like a water-mark, this time in the lower right-hand corner. This was followed by a blank page of the same coated paper that filled the rest of the brochure. Then came the history. The old building, with a shot of a crowded, old-fashioned office. A photo of the new building, taken with a wide-angle lens and several shots of the elegant new quarters. Bowen now and Bowen in 1953, maybe wearing the same suit I’d seen him in that day. The heading over the shots of the buildings was “Tradition and Growth Through Caring.” The one for Bowen’s page was “A Man and a Vision.” I didn’t read the text. I didn’t read anything until I got to the last page, and I couldn’t resist that. It was The Bright Future Creed. It went like this:

“To offer to all the opportunity for success through education; to offer to all within our ranks the opportunity to sail freely and speedily to the far horizons of financial security and self-reliance.”

If Chloe Giannapoulos had written this, she must have done it with her office door closed so no one would see her cracking up.

I went back to my notebook again and flipped to the pages on the canyon residents. Hanley the gardener who shot trees. Jim the computer-something who was in charge of gravel. Eric the critic and spillway checker. Mary the bookstore owner and county records searcher. Charlie the group leader. Nona the painter. Carlota the filmmaker and caretaker of the wooden stairway. Which reminded me of Rosie, and her estimate, and her one-on-one cocktail party with Carlota, which had been scheduled for that afternoon. Rosie and I were having dinner together, so I’d find out soon enough how that had gone.

The column of ants had completed its journey or its mission. A few individuals were making erratic circles around the bodies of the ones who hadn’t survived their dip in the bathtub. The cleanup crew, or the undertakers. One by one, they picked up the corpses and dragged them off.

I got out of the tub.

Rosie was waiting, with Alice, on the steps outside my room.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

“What does Alice want for dinner?”

“She ate. In our new canyon residence.”

“Which is?”

“Carlota’s spare room.”

“You’re going to share a house with Carlota and Nona?” An amusing idea.

Rosie thought so, too. “Well, only sort of. It’s a basement room, lower level. Has its own entrance.” She laughed. “And a toilet. And I don’t plan to share their kitchen.”

“Or anything else, I hope. How was cocktail hour?”

“Very short. I gave her my estimate for the steps, which she accepted, had a quick glass of wine, and escaped to buy the materials. I start work on the job tomorrow.”