Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

Praise for SUICIDE KING, the FIFTH novel in the Jake Samson mystery series:

“Singer depicts campaign shenanigans and backroom wheeling and dealing, while Jake, caught in a dangerous game of political intrigue, delivers another solid performance.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Ms. Singer is one of only three or four authors that I wouldn’t miss whatever she wrote.”

—
Over My Dead Body

SUICIDE KING

A Jake Samson Mystery

BY

SHELLEY SINGER

booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.

Suicide King

Copyright 1988 by Shelley Singer

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Originally published by St. Martin’s Press

eBook ISBN: 9781625174666

www.booksbnimble.com

First booksBnimble electronic publication: May, 2014

Cover by Andy Brown

Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by
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Full Table of Contents

I knew from the beginning that I never should have gotten involved in politics.

But I went ahead anyway. I listened to a speech about saving the world and I opened my skinny wallet and my big ears and stuck around to hear more. And that was why I was standing in a backyard in North Berkeley looking at a gubernatorial candidate swinging naked from the limb of a feather-leafed acacia tree. Not like a monkey; like a corpse.

It had been about fifteen minutes since my friend Pamela had called me with the news.

“Jake! Thank God you’re there.”

“Pam?”

“Come to my house. Joe’s dead. Please. You’ve got to come.”

“Dead?” A heart attack? Joe Richmond was a young man, in his forties, but…

She began to cry. “Hanging… from… a… tree.”

“Oh, shit, Pam. I’ll be right there.”

I ran for my Chevy and drove much too fast down Telegraph Avenue, zigzagging around the UC campus and coming out on the side of Berkeley that’s as far from Oakland as it can get.

I didn’t have to search too hard for the place. The last time I’d been there was the night before. The house was a big two-story, Spanish-style set well back on a smooth lawn, shaded by a huge old avocado. Not the right tree, though. No one was hanging from it. I saw no sign of anyone living, either. I pushed my way through a side gate, following the brick walk to the back.

Pam must have heard the gate, or maybe my car pulling up, because she ran to meet me, grabbed my arm, and tugged me into the sheltered green privacy of the backyard, past the hot tub, until I could see it.

Hanging from a low branch, his bare feet just a foot or so off the ground, was the Vivo Party’s favorite candidate for governor of California. He was wearing a thick hemp noose. On the patio bricks nearby, kicked over on its side, lay a small redwood garden bench. Richmond looked very dead, but I dragged the bench over, climbed onto it, and lifted his eyelid. The pupils were asymmetrical, the lids flabby, the glaze of death like a cloud. I touched his shoulder. It was cold. I stepped to the ground.

Pam was babbling.

“I should have cut him down. I know that. What if he was alive when I got here? But I couldn’t do it. He looked dead. I’m sure he was dead. Jake, what if he was still alive?”

“I doubt it, Pam.” I heard a car door slam out on the street. “Maybe that’s the cops.”

She got quiet, her eyes shifting away from me. “I haven’t called them.”

“Call them now.”

She did.

I didn’t cut him down, either. He wouldn’t have known the difference, and the cops might as well get a crack at what was left of the scene. Pam had probably littered the yard with evidence of her own presence, and had called me— and was now calling the police— from a phone in the house. And then I had come marching in, moving the yard furniture and fiddling with the corpse.

I stood and looked at Joe Richmond. His handsome face was grotesque now, blood-filled, his head twisted to the side, his tongue sticking out. I was glad he hadn’t messed himself when he died. I understood why Pam hadn’t been able to bring herself to call the police. It was bad enough that two people who liked him were seeing him this way. If Joe Richmond had a flaw, it was personal vanity, pride in his near-perfect flesh. He should have been reduced to ash in a fire or lost at sea. He didn’t deserve to die ugly because he’d hanged himself.

As quickly as that thought came, it brought one of those moments of certainty that go beyond reasoning.

I knew he couldn’t have done it.

I didn’t know Pam yet, back when all this began. It was another woman who got me into it in the first place. My friend. My tenant. My sometime business partner— if you can call unlicensed investigation a business— Rosie Vicente.

Rosie lives in the other cottage at my two-cottage place. We share the garden, the garbage can, the water supply, and the birdhouse-shaped mailbox up at the front gate. Sometimes, when I’m sorting out my mail, I can’t help but notice some of hers. And one thing I’d never noticed a lot was political stuff.

As far as I knew, Rosie hadn’t been involved in politics since she was a very young woman in the early seventies, passionately fighting for the feminist cause. She didn’t fight much anymore, because, she said, she got tired of hearing different people say the same old things as if they were newly invented. But she was still a passionate feminist. After all, she said, what else could a female carpenter be?

Sure, she voted, because like me, she keeps hoping. We think pretty much the same things are bad, good, or funny. But she’s just not into groups much.

So I was mildly surprised when I started seeing envelopes from the Vivo Party in her mail. And mildly annoyed when she invited me to go hear a speech by a man who wanted to be the party’s gubernatorial candidate.

“Oh, come on, Rosie,” I said. “You know how I feel about politics.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Politics is a trivial pile of shit, a ball game played for power and money. Fun and profitable if you understand the game, futile and frustrating if you don’t. Right?”

“Right,” I grumped. “Exactly.”

“This is different.”

“Oh, sure. They’re the ones who want to save the planet, isn’t that so?” She nodded patiently. “Like the Greens and Greenpeace and Earth First! and all those people?” She nodded again, a mother tolerating an adolescent son. “Well, they sound good. But I’m reserving judgment. Maybe they’ve got a secret agenda. Maybe they’re tied up with too many other causes to be effective, too many knee-jerk pals bending them around and deflecting them. How can I trust anything that calls itself a political party? Why would I support someone who wants power and God knows what else? Why—”

“Oh, shut up,” Rosie said, laughing. “I already know you think the only thing better than anarchy would be for you to be king.”

“That’s chieftain, not king. And actually, I’ve been thinking about that. Even Reagan aged in office. Maybe my hair would fall out. You never can tell.”

“I think you should come.”

“Oh, all right.” So I went.

The speech was in a church in South Berkeley, just over the Oakland border and about a mile from my house. I drove.

“Is this guy we’re going to see the front-runner?” She said yes, he seemed to be. “Okay, then, if this group is so terrific, so free of conventional political ties and all that horseshit, why isn’t their front-runner a woman?” I turned onto Shattuck Avenue, a triumphant flourish of a right turn. Let her answer that.

“Maybe they want a candidate, not a burnt offering,” she retorted. “Besides, there’s a woman running close behind.”

“Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. The woman behind the man, eighties’ style. Seems to me that’s hardly worth all the trouble she’s going to. She is going to some trouble, isn’t she?”

“Do you expect an argument?”

No, I didn’t. A dozen other cars were cruising around the church, which didn’t have a parking lot of its own. I slipped my ‘53 Chevy Bel Air into a spot about a block away.

The scene inside the church was familiar. A large basement room, the kind where neighborhood crime-watch groups sit and listen earnestly to representatives of the police force telling them how to lock their windows. There were the inevitable sign-up tables at the back, with intense young people handing out literature. I accepted a flyer from one of them. Rosie nodded to several acquaintances. I saw a couple of people I’ve run into around Berkeley and North Oakland, including a man who had, the last time I’d seen him, been involved in building an ark to escape the great flood. I guessed he’d been disappointed when it hadn’t arrived on schedule and destroyed the world, and had gone looking for solutions to the world’s problems, instead.

I glanced through the flyer. The main message was that Joe Richmond, the guy who was going to be speaking that night, was the strongest choice in a field of Vivos competing for the group’s support as candidates for governor. That he was the candidate they should “vote for at the June convention.” I found this puzzling. I didn’t know much about these things, but I was pretty sure the gubernatorial candidates in California were chosen by primary, and that the primaries were also two months off, in June. But Rosie was yanking at my arm, so I decided not to worry about it and let her drag me along.

With ten minutes to go before speech time, the place was filling up fast. A news team from the Oakland TV station arrived, looking bored, then three more from San Francisco, looking even more bored. I figured they were disappointed no one was demonstrating outside, maybe carrying signs that said things like NUCLEAR WASTE CREATES JOBS and FREE THE PETROCHEMICAL SEVEN.

We managed to grab a couple of chairs in the back row. A quick count told me there were about 300 seats, filled, and by the time I turned around to check the standing room at the back of the house, it was filling up, too.

When I’d gotten a general fix on the audience, which looked pretty normal on the whole and, in some cases, even excited and happy to be there instead of just sincere, I turned back to the stage. Just in time to see a young man in tight-ankle jeans, corduroy jacket and narrow tie trot up the stairs and bound to the dais. He had graduate student written all over him, from his short, dark, curly hair to his white running shoes.

There was applause. The young man, with what was either charming self-effacement or incredible arrogance, did not introduce himself, but instantly launched into an introduction of the main speaker, a “man of business” from the Midwest who had started out in state politics there and had become aware of the “need for a new vision of reality, a transformation of values.” After said business had moved him to Los Angeles— they were making a big point of this business stuff, maybe to confuse conservative voters?— he had gotten involved in the beginning of the Green Party’s movement in the U.S. and had then become an organizer when the Vivos split off from the Greens to form their own party. I had only a vague idea of what that might mean. I’d seen a few news stories on the Greens, mostly about the German ones. I’d gathered they were a pretty recent phenomenon. As for the Vivos, I’d seen maybe one or two mentions in the press and only in the past year.

That was pretty much it for the introduction, except for, “Here he is, the next governor of California, Joe Richmond!”

Which caused quite a stir. As a man trotted up to shake the graduate student’s hand and wave at the crowd, nearly everyone jumped up and cheered, at the same time doing a kind of two-handed salute, a double
V
for victory or V for peace, depending on which piece of history you were living. Maybe now it was a
V
for Vivo. Odd name, Vivo. Sounded kind of Spanish, I decided. I made a mental note to ask Rosie where it had come from.

I say nearly everyone jumped up and cheered and waved their arms, because quite a few people, including me, just applauded politely. I guessed the less enthusiastic supported other candidates for the nomination. As for me, I hadn’t heard anything worth cheering for yet.

But I was impressed. Standing up there at the dais, grinning and holding his hands in the air palms out— a gesture that seemed to combine “There, there now, I’m just a man,” and “Hey, everybody, we’re gonna win this sucker”— was one of the most astonishingly handsome and charismatic people I’ve ever seen.

I remember thinking that these folks had found themselves a Kennedy.

He was tall, which is always a good thing, especially if you’re running for office. His hair was yellow as sunlight, shading to gray just above his ears. His eyes were bright sky blue with just enough wrinkles around them to imply good humor and wisdom. His teeth were, of course, perfect. His suit was gray and expensive.

Star quality.

Back in the sixties in Chicago, I went to see Judy Garland perform at a huge auditorium. Her voice was going by then, and I guess her spirit was faltering somewhere inside— this was not long before her death— but oh, my God, what that woman could do with an audience. We were all cupped in her hands through the whole show, intimately, passionately. The power of her presence was not something you see that many times in life. I was seeing it in Joe Richmond. Star quality, magic, whatever you want to call it. The fact is, some people are smaller than their own bodies, some people fit their own space just fine, and a very few are much, much larger than life. They manage to fill a room all by themselves, and here’s the real magic: they don’t crowd anyone else out because they absorb everything around them. Joe Richmond was standing in front of us, filling the room, and holding everyone there comfortably inside himself.