Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (3 page)

Pamela gave him a lazy-eyed look that spoke of infinite boredom.

“They do a great show, don’t they?”

“Pam,” he said, “this is not funny.”

“Noel,” she said, “it’s not supposed to be. When you produce a show, you can do it your way.” She nodded toward the stage. “People like them, they’re good, and we’re trying to raise money.” It was true. The audience was clearly crazy about Three Mile Island. I thought they were great.

“I don’t produce shows.”

Again, she gave him the lazy-eyed look, but this time with one raised eyebrow. For a woman who appeared to be under thirty, she was very good at the decades-of-disdain expression.

Noel grunted and stalked off again. Three Mile Island finished their set and announced an intermission. Rosie got into a conversation with someone and wandered off again, toward the punch, probably.

With perfect timing— was he waiting in the entry?— Joe Richmond appeared at the door and the crowd turned like a sheet in the wind to face the back of the room. He waved his hands, smiled, called out a few greetings, a few names, and was swallowed up in the enthusiasm of his partisans. Pam was smiling, but she didn’t join the mob.

“Impressive man,” I said. I felt like I had to say something, and “impressive” was the first word that came to mind.

“You don’t sound impressed,” she said.

“I am. As an observer. I was also impressed by your performance. Very moving. But I’m curious about something.”

She cocked her head charmingly and waited for me to go on.

“How does it happen that someone your age does that particular fifties look so well?”

She laughed. “I do it better than most, don’t I? I may be the only one in the folk revival that tries so hard to be authentic. I guess you could say it’s just part of my act. But I learned it from a good teacher. My mother was Elmira Sutherland.”

It took me a second. “Oh,” I said stupidly.
“The
Elmira Sutherland?”

Who was an old-time folksinger and writer of protest and satire songs. She did most of her best work in the fifties, but she wasn’t widely known then because a lot of her songs got somehow preempted by the male folksingers of her day. Her particular legend came briefly alive again in the late sixties and early seventies, with proper credits at last. Then, I thought I recalled, she died. And Pam had said her mother “was.”

“She was a great woman,” I said. “She wrote some great songs. I remember.”

“Thank you,” Pam said simply. “She was involved in some great demonstrations, too. One of them killed her.”

Now
that
I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember Elmira Sutherland dying in a demonstration. I shook my head, puzzled.

Pam explained. “In the early fifties, a bunch of artists and musicians went out to the desert to protest a nuclear test. They must have been too close to the test site. Every one of them is dead now.”

“A lot of them must have gotten pretty old,” I protested.

“They all died of cancer. Lung, mostly.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. For a beautiful person, with a beautiful talent, Pam was pretty damned depressing. I thought she was carrying the Beat image just a little far. I looked away, uncomfortable, and saw Joe Richmond coming toward me, smiling.

Turned out that he was smiling at Pam.

She returned the smile and I felt a moment’s jealousy, automatically trying to gauge the degree of intimacy.

He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick, friendly hug.

“Everyone says it’s a great show, Pam. Thanks.” He turned toward me, looking sociable.

“This is Jake Samson. Jake, Joe Richmond. Jake’s an observer, Joe.”

He laughed. “Good. Glad to hear it. How do you feel about what you’ve been observing, Jake?”

I decided to tell him the truth. “I think your ideas make a lot of sense. But politics is politics, isn’t it? Doesn’t the term imply coming to an accommodation with whatever actually is? I don’t have a lot of faith in political organization, in political contests. Lots of screaming and yelling and stupid, petty point-making and all it ever amounts to, in the end, is who gets to take home the cash and the power.”

He nodded. “That’s right. There’s been a lot of disagreement in our movement about whether we should enter the electoral process at all. The Greens have run some local candidates but have been pretty leery of anything on a larger scale. That’s why we broke away. We wanted to go farther. But even among the Vivos we have some people who don’t think we should be going for the governorship yet. We even have a candidate who’s running specifically so that, if he’s endorsed, he can refuse to run. I think it’s a tricky issue. Especially when it comes down to splitting the vote, maybe hurting people in the major parties who feel as we do, winding up with the wrong people in office. Very tricky.”

What was wrong with this guy? He wasn’t self-righteous enough, didn’t have the God-is-with-me attitude you expect to hear from a politician, especially a politician with a cause.

I decided to poke him harder. “I seem to remember reading some newspaper stories about the Greens in Germany,” I said. “The impression I got was that they’re pretty far to the left. Is that where you people stand?”

“I’m afraid the press is simplistic,” he said. “The Greens have a slogan: ‘Neither right nor left, but in front.’ And that’s how we feel, too. We advocate nonviolence, something neither political extreme understands. And Marxism is as materialistic as capitalism. It’s the sanctification of unbridled production that’s destroying the world. I don’t think any of the old formulas provide the right answers. It would be nice,” he said, smiling, “if the workers of the world
would
unite and stop insisting on consuming everything in sight.”

I was staring at him. I could hardly believe my ears. Pam was laughing. She threw me a triumphant look.

“How are you going to achieve all this great stuff?” I wanted to know. “With a strong state that will wither away when it’s done what it needs to do?”

That cracked him up. “Strong states don’t wither away. Not ever. I think you need to read some of our material on grass-roots democracy and small-scale organizing.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, smiling. I was enjoying the man. “But I try to avoid reading nonfiction. If I’m going to get depressed or pissed off, I figure it’s best to do it with fictional characters.”

“I’m glad to hear you’ve managed to avoid reality,” Pam said. Her tone was cool. She liked me as long as I didn’t mess too much with Richmond. She seemed to be losing patience with me. So was I.

“I keep trying.”

At that moment, there was some excitement near the door and a tall, handsome older woman entered with a small entourage. There were some shouts and a lot of applause.

“Rebecca Gelber,” Pam said for my benefit. Richmond’s opponent caught his eye and they both smiled and waved. At the next moment, a thin, dry-looking man in a dark suit— now here was a man who actually looked like a butler— came up on our other side and, apologizing for the interruption, asked for “a few words” with Richmond. Richmond looked suddenly very serious, and maybe even a bit tired. “Be right with you, Carl,” he said. Then, turning back to me, “I wish you would take a better look at us. We could use more people who think, who don’t take anything on faith. You’re an original, Jake. So are we.”

How could you not like a man who says a thing like that?

Then he shook my hand, told Pam he’d see her later, and moved away. I caught a glimpse of Rosie, in the middle of the circle around Gelber. She was talking to the candidate, and her ears— Rosie’s, that is— were pink with joy. Pam touched my arm.

“Listen, Jake, I’ve got to take care of some business right now, but you’re going back to the East Bay later, right?” I nodded. “I wonder if I could beg a ride with you? I came over with someone who’s staying in the city.” I told her sure, Rosie and I would be delighted. She patted my shoulder, smiled— she liked me again— and went to talk to the graduate student. Then intermission was over, and the aging rock star came on to shrieks of audience happiness. He was pretty good, but not as good as I remembered. The impressionist was better.

NOT every woman, or every man for that matter, is capable of appreciating a 1953 blue-and-white Chevy Bel Air. One of the things I’d first liked about Lee— besides the way she talked, looked, and moved— was her admiration for my admirable classic.

But Lee was a problem. Besides a tendency to work ten or twelve hours a day, she also got involved in community projects a lot. She would work herself into a state, sometimes, and drop out of sight for weeks. Of course, I could respect that, and understand it. But I didn’t like it much.

So I was pleased when Pam showed good judgment about cars, too.

“Beautiful,” she said, standing back a couple of feet to admire it. “I think my mother had one of these.”

Rosie slid unobtrusively into the back seat, so Pam took the passenger side next to me. She was quiet going over the bridge, responding briefly to my comments about Three Mile Island, her own performance, and the old rock star. When I said I thought Joe Richmond was one terrific guy, she said, “Yes.” Rosie brought up her conversation with Rebecca Gelber, and we got some mileage out of that.

Rosie said she had admired Gelber’s work for years and had been thrilled to finally get a chance to talk to her. Not only had Gelber been involved in environmental causes for a long time, she had been one of the early and leading lights of the women’s movement back in the sixties. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in the spotlight, but she’d dipped at least one hand in everything that had ever amounted to anything. The name had, now that I thought of it, sounded vaguely familiar.

Pam admitted that deciding between Gelber and Richmond had not been easy for her. She didn’t say what had finally convinced her. We crossed the bridge and headed for Berkeley. She directed me to the University Avenue exit. I drove all the way up University, turned north to go several blocks, then east again toward the hills. The house was not in anything like the same class as the Pacific Heights mansion, but it was big enough and nice enough. She’d inherited it, she said, from her mother. When she invited us in, I accepted happily, looking at Rosie for confirmation. She seemed to think it was a good idea.

The living room had a big fireplace that projected round like an igloo from the plastered wall. But the look was Southwest. Pueblo? I don’t know. All the doorways were rounded arches. The rug was definitely Southwest Indian, the furniture overstuffed and in earth colors. There were two paintings in the living room, both by that guy who paints Indians. I liked the room a lot. She offered us wine, and we sat down.

We didn’t stay long. We talked about the Vivos, about the convention that was coming in just a month. Somehow, the way Pam explained it, the Vivo election plan didn’t sound quite as ridiculous— not quite— as it had seemed at first. There’s a lot of stuff involved in becoming a real party: You have to caucus and choose officers. You have to file formal notice with the secretary of state, who then lets the counties know they should be on the lookout for the number of voters registering as members of your party. If you can register a number equal to one percent of the total vote in the last election for governor, you qualify. Or you can go another route, the one the Vivos had tried, and qualify by petition, collecting signatures equal to ten percent of the total vote. What that all means, though, is you have to convince that many people to actually change their party registration. And if you don’t register as a member of a major party, you can’t vote in a major party’s primary. Tends to keep the old two-party system safe.

The Vivos had managed to have a caucus, but since hardly anyone had ever heard of them, they had a little trouble filling the rest of the requirements. So their candidate would run in November as an independent, not as the candidate of a bona fide party. Much easier route, she explained. All it takes for an individual to qualify as an independent is the signatures of about 150,000 registered voters who think he or she should be allowed to run. No one has to give up being a Democrat or a Republican; no one has to be willing to give up the right to vote in the primaries.

But this was just a first step, Pam said. This campaign would bring them a larger following, would create public confidence in the Vivos. And next time around, they would qualify as a party. Easily.

Pie in the sky by and by
, I was thinking.

Pam didn’t go on and on about it, though. I was grateful when she asked a few questions about some of the detective work Rosie and I had done. We were fascinating.

I guess she must have liked me. I guess she probably thought I was the greatest detective since Sam Spade. When I thought about it that way, it wasn’t too surprising that she called me the next day because she’d found Joe Richmond hanging from her acacia tree.

PAM came out after making her call to the police, grabbed my arm and turned me away from the hanging man.

“All right, I called them. But tell me what to say. You’re a detective. What should I say? About his dying here?”

“Unless you killed him,” I said, “you should probably tell them the truth. How about I ask you some questions?” She nodded uncertainly. “First, what was he doing at your house naked?”

“Using the hot tub, I suppose.”

“Was he staying here with you?”

“No. In the city. I guess he wanted to get away from the people, and the work…”

“You guess? You weren’t here?”

“No. I was meeting with some of the campaign workers.”

“And he just came over on his own?”

She was sitting in one of her overstuffed couches. She waved her hand at me in exhausted irritation. “I guess so. He knew he was welcome, when he needed to escape.”

“He had a key?”

That really annoyed her. “Of course he did. I’m one of his local campaign managers, for God’s sake.”

I wasn’t so sure that necessarily followed, but I ran out of time. The Berkeley police rang the bell. They were charming, as they always are. I guess they have to be.