Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) (21 page)

“No, I don’t think it, Gabriel-boy,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “And don’t you think it, either. It won’t do you any good. You’ll only lose sleep.”

I smiled sincerely and headed for the parking lot. There was an old Polish gentleman in San Francisco General Hospital who was overdue for a visit.

Parting Words

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Not Sleeping, Just Dead
:
An Excerpt

Not Sleeping, Just Dead
is the sequel to
Goodey’s Last Stand
.

CHAPTER ONE

I was stretching a tall gin and tonic at Aldo’s, the only bar I knew that hadn't yet torn up my tab, when I looked up and discovered that my elbow room to the west had been annexed by an elderly gentleman in a three-piece suit.

Before I could decide how I felt about that, my new neighbor reached over and placed a cellophane-covered card over the mouth of my glass. Even in the dim light Aldo cultivated—he claimed that it confused germs—I could see that it was a business card identifying Frederick M. Crenshaw, Chairman, Cosmopolitan Fire & Casualty Insurance Co., Los Angeles. I had to make a quick decision: say something or drink the card.

“You’re out of luck,” I said. “Even if I bought some, someone would probably bum me down before the night was out.”

He didn’t answer but just flipped the card over, revealing a colored photograph of a fresh-faced girl with a wide mouth, freckles and long, auburn hair. She was wearing a white graduation gown and a mortarboard at a slightly rakish angle.

“Very pretty,” I said, “but is she old enough to hang out in a joint like this?”

“She would have been,” he said, withdrawing the photograph, “but she’s dead now. She was my granddaughter.”

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically.

“Don’t be,” he said, slightly sharply. “It won’t help Katharine or me. But you could help me a lot, Mr. Goodey, by finding out who killed her.”

I sipped the watery dregs of my drink. “Do you want to tell me about it, Mr. Crenshaw?”

“Do you have an office?”

“Not one that I’m very eager to go back to right at this moment,” I said honestly, if enigmatically. That’s the trou
ble with having an office. I'd found in the nine months since I’d left the San Francisco Police Department that it gave people I didn’t want to see very much—like Gabriel Fong and other creditors—a pretty fair idea where to find me.

“Well, then,” said Crenshaw, still game, “have you had dinner?”

"Yes,” I said. "Quite often in the past. But not recently.”

Twenty minutes of silent taxi ride later, we were putting our feet under an expensive tablecloth in a very private back room at
McGinty’s, the best steak house in San Francisco. Carlo, the waiter, an ectomorphic Italian with the eyes of a failed tenor, watched glumly as I ripped through the menu. A closet vegetarian, Carlo worried about my carbohydrate intake. He cheered up at Crenshaw’s order of a bowl of clear broth and then disappeared through the thick velour drapes that separated us from the rabble.

I lapped appreciatively at some very nice claret and waited for Crenshaw to enlighten me further, but he didn’t seem to be in an awful hurry. He took a drink from a glass of iced Perrier water and
watched me with eyes that were not particularly kindly. Probably nobody at Cosmopolitan Insurance called him Uncle Fred. Crenshaw was a trim, upright man barely on the wrong side of sixty-five with a faintly military look that seemed cultivated. His cropped hair was an honest, uniform gray, which cast a pallor over regular but thin features. His eyes were a brittle blue and didn’t seem to spend a lot of time twinkling. His well-kept hands had probably never touched anything dirtier than money.

Crenshaw seemed to be looking me over, too, possibly with a view to adopting me. I couldn’t tell whether he liked what he saw, and I didn’t care much. I’ll eat any man’s steak—friend or foe. Finally, he spoke.

"You’re probably wondering, Mr. Goodey, how I know who you are and how I came to seek you out.”

“The question occurred to me,” I said, “but I imagine you’
ll tell me when you’re ready.”

His expression didn’t change, but I could tell that he wasn’t really too happy with my attitude.

“
If
you’re going to work for me, Mr. Goodey,” he said, "it is essential that we establish a viable relationship. Do I detect a certain negativity?”

I could guess that the sort of relationship he was think
ing of wouldn’t involve a lot of camaraderie. "Not really, Mr. Crenshaw,” I said. “It’s just that I’m hungry. I get a lot more likable with a full stomach.”

At that moment, Carlo wafted in through the drapes and put a lobster bisque in front of me as if it were a time bomb. He lingered while I took my first taste, sup
posedly to see if I liked it, but I knew that he was waiting to see if I was
really
going to subject my insides to that sort of abuse. “Wonderful,” I said with a glutton’s smile. He administered the Kiss of Death with his black- olive eyes and disappeared.

Crenshaw thought he’d try again. “Ralph Lehman tells me that you’ve been off the police force since last August.” So it was Ralph's size-nine sombrero from which Cren
shaw had picked my name. Good old Ralph. He looked out for his boys even from beyond the veil of retirement. I knew Crenshaw must have been pretty desperate, or Ralph would never have put him onto me. Ralph loves me, I know, but he has no illusions that I’m Bulldog Drummond.

             
“That’s right,” I said, “but it hardly seems that long, I’ve been having such a good time.”

His face pretended to believe me, but his eyes didn’t bother. “Ralph was under the impression that life for a newly established private detective in San Francisco was somewhat—
straitened
,” he said. I appreciated his nice choice of adjectives. He could have said poverty-stricken.

“I won’t say I’m being measured for a yacht yet,” I said, “but I’ve turned down more cases than I’ve accepted."

I skipped the details of those rejected cases. For instance, the one just that week in which a perfectly respectable car dealer had wanted me to kidnap his ex-wife and knock out all her teeth. They’d been really rotten when he’d picked the tramp out of the gutter, he said. Now she kept flashing them at him when they met in public. I had to refer him elsewhere.

And that overlooked the
really
unpromising offers I’d had since I’d turned in my shield for a private operative’s license and a used hair shirt. But I didn’t want to take the chance of depressing Crenshaw so much that he ran off before paying the bill. McGinty had a couple of lads in the back room who were expert at handling slow payers.

Carlo picked that moment to arrive bearing about half of a charred cow and a disgusted expression. For the next little while I was too busy to do much talking anyway, so a discreet little silence, broken only by grunts from my side and the gentle lapping of the broth in Crenshaw’s bowl, fell over the table. I couldn’t help admiring his way with a soupspoon. Each spoonful rose what seemed to be about four hundred feet from bowl to thin-lipped mouth with unerring precision and zero fallout. His back was parade-ground stiff, the eyes resting comfortably on the middle distance.

Once Crenshaw had reduced the broth to a polite level of about three sixteenths of an inch—without unseemly bowl-tipping—he placed his spoon at parade rest and patted spotless lips with the spotless linen napkin. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Goodey,” he said, “if I give you the background of the—situation—while you go on with your meal.”

Caught in mid-chew, all I could do was bobble my head up and down. I could have used a bit more butter for my baked potato, but it didn’t seem fair to make Cren
shaw wait any longer. And I knew that Carlo would get after me about taking in too much cholesterol.

Crenshaw correctly interpreted my mime and began: “Mr.
Goodey, are you familiar with an organization called The Institute?”

I nodded, choking only a little, and managed: “I’ve heard of it. But all I know is that it’s some kind of cult down below Monterey that seems to have some problems with the neighbors and the authorities from time to time.” I could tell from his expression that I hadn’t exactly put The Institute in a nutshell, but he plowed on. “Last summer, Mr.
Goodey, my granddaughter, Katharine Pierce, joined The Institute at its headquarters at Las Palomas near Big Sur. Katharine—-her friends called her Katie”— he said this as if it were a mystery—
;
“was a
restless
young girl. She quit Stanford University and had had a certain problem with—”

I could see that he was a bit stuck, so I swallowed the last of my steak and said: “Drugs?” It was a bit of a guess, but not that great considering what I knew of The In
stitute.

“Barbiturates, Mr.
Goodey,” he said, in case I was mentally bunching her with hash heads and needle enthusiasts, “Originally prescribed for her nerves. Unfortunately, Katharine became somewhat dependent on them. It was nothing really serious, but the doctors couldn’t seem to help her.’’ He paused. “Nor could I.” That was probably as close to a confession as I was going to get out of Fred Crenshaw. “Then, early last summer, she went to a lecture given by a man called Hugo Fischer, the founder and president of The Institute. I don’t quite understand what happened, but within days, Katharine had left her apartment on Nob Hill and had moved into The Institute’s mansion at Las Palomas, taking a certain amount of money with her. Fortunately, most of her inheritance was legally tied up, but—”

Crenshaw suddenly realized that he was getting off on a tangent. Looking about as embarrassed as his nature would allow, he finished starkly: “On a Sunday morning late last December, Katharine was found dead on the rocks below the mansion. She had
allegedly
fallen from a roof terrace during the night.” He leaned on the word
allegedly
so hard that it nearly snapped. And he wasn’t too happy with
fallen
.             

"At The Institute,” he went on, "they claim that Kath
arine jumped to her death. I don’t believe it. I want you to go down there and find out exactly what did happen. Will you do it?”

I didn’t say anything right away. There was something boiling behind his cool exterior, and I wanted just a peek at it. Even a dead-
broke private investigator likes to get a glimpse of the real person who’s hiring him. I took longer than was strictly necessary polishing off the claret and then spoke slowly.

“You think someone may have pushed your grand
daughter to her death from that terrace, Mr. Crenshaw.” I didn’t ask him; I told him.

Crenshaw’s eyes, never jolly, took on a glittering hard
ness. He put a well-manicured hand on either side of his soup bowl; the knuckles were dead white.

“Mr.
Goodey,” he said with tightly reined vehemence, “I know that someone at The Institute injected my granddaughter with a heavy dose of barbiturates and then threw her to her death on the rocks below. I want you to find out just who did it and see that they are punished. Will you do it?”

There was only one answer to that question, and I gave it. Crenshaw went back to being an aging, none-too-healthy business executive with a big problem. He put his hands back in his lap and asked me if I’d have any dessert. I almost said yes, but then decided that I couldn’t face Carlo’s disapproving eyes.

Instead, we talked a bit more, and Crenshaw gave me three things: a check for a retainer big enough to let me hold my head up among my fellow men and my creditors; a thin, blue-folder report marked: “Confidential—Monterey County Sheriff’s Department”; and another thicker report from an outfit called Brazewell Associates, Beverly Hills, California.

We agreed that I’d get in touch with him in Los Angeles just as soon as I had anything to report. To nobody’s sur
prise, Carlo gave the bill directly to Crenshaw. Outside McGinty’s, Crenshaw favored me with a crisp handshake, advised me that he was staying at the Fairmont Hotel, and vanished in a taxi, leaving me standing there with only two problems in the world: getting used to having money in my pocket again, and finding out who—if anyone— killed Katie Pierce.

Did someone kill Katie Pierce, or did she jump to her demise? And what trouble will Joe Goodey get himself into finding the truth? Grab your copy of
Not Sleeping Just Dead
from your favorite online bookseller to find out today!