The Blackmail Club (6 page)

“Have Mary Lou stop by. I’ll be here all day.”

The chief gulped the last of his coffee and left the empty cup on the corner of Jack’s desk. “I appreciate your agreeing to see her. Whether you hire her or not is your call.”

“It’ll be my pleasure to meet Mary Lou.” Jack rose to walk the chief out, then asked, “Where’s her momma?”

“She died giving birth to Mary Lou. You don’t think that happens anymore, but it does.” He started to say something else, but his mouth closed on the first word. Then he restarted, “She just bled out. Tino was all the family Mary Lou had until the job took him. Now she has none.”

“Except for you,” Jack said, his hand clasping the chief’s shoulder.

“I promised her papa,” he said, twirling his hat another half a turn. “I’m glad you’re back to work. It’ll be good for you.”

Jack smiled and accompanied the chief to the elevators. After Mandrake stepped inside one, Nora stepped out of another. She wore an above-the-knee black skirt, a black blouse, black high-heeled shoes, and a blazer the color of yellow mustard, which sounds ugly but looked great.

“And a good morning to you, Eleanor.”

She smiled and punched Jack on the arm. “That’s the last time I want to hear that from you, mister.” When he turned to open the office door, she slapped him on the butt. “My name is Nora.”

Jack wondered if his growing infatuation with his partner was because her body and style of dress reminded him of Rachel. Yesterday he had lingered near her long enough to breathe in her fragrance before walking away.

“How ‘bout I get us some coffee,” she said, “and then we can talk about the Andujar case?”

“I’ve got a cup,” he said. “I’ll get you one. But we’ve got something else first. Chief Mandrake asked that we interview his goddaughter, Mary Lou Sanchez, for our receptionist.”

“I’ve met Mary Lou. She’s a cutie and talks mature for her age.”

“I told the chief to have her come by this afternoon. I’m ready to hire her unless she flat turns us off. What do you think?”

“I agree.”

Nora followed Jack into their case room and sat on the same side of the conference table, leaving a chair between them.

“Give me your impressions on this Andujar case,” Jack asked, “then we’ll come up with a plan.”

“Sarah must be the honorary grandmother of all the neat freaks in the world. I kept trying to find a towel hanging crooked on a rack or a book out of kilter on a shelf.”

Jack laughed. “I’ve always suspected that Sarah had a secret side, something like an elder leader of the flower children of the sixties, but for as long as I’ve known her she has been exaggeratedly proper. She’s going through a difficult period right now and being overly fussy may bring her some comfort. It’ll pass.”

Nora raised her eyebrows. “I know she’s special to you, but I sensed a hard broad lurking somewhere inside that sweet, old frail lady.” She opened her notebook. “I jotted down the titles of a couple of the books that were on the shelf in the study:
Perversions of Infidelity
, and
The Symbolism of Sexual Mutilation.
”

“They probably belonged to Chris; his practice was sexual difficulties.”

“That’s true.”

“I guess the bottom line is,” Nora said, “if you want us to help her as a freebie, its okay with me.”

“Chris Andujar did more for me than I could ever repay. I’ve gotta understand his death.”

Nora leaned toward Jack, the light reflecting off her nylon-covered knee. “Where do we start?”

Jack took a deep breath. “Donny Boy’s a jerk; I just hope he isn’t mixed up in it somehow. It’d break his momma’s heart.”

“Remember his comment about Sarah’s shawl?” Nora said. “Donny hadn’t seen his mother since the funeral. Her son came by to size us up, and Sarah said she hadn’t told her son we were coming.” Nora slouched forward in her chair and crossed her arms, pushing her black bra and its mounded contents into sight. “Maybe he got a call from Smokehead in the coupe.”

“Smokehead had to have been tailing us,” Jack said. “If he was tailing Donny he would’ve split when Donny left, and we’d have never seen him. But as you say, he might have called Donny to tell him we were at his mother’s.”

Nora sat her coffee cup down, the red crescent from her lips still kissing the rim. “Let’s talk with Chris’s former receptionist and his psychiatrist buddy, Radnor.”

Jack got up and wrote
Radnor
and
Receptionist
on the white board on the wall of their case room. Then he wrote Donny Andujar above those two.

“What else?”

Nora pushed a runaway strand of her strawberry-blonde hair away from her eyes. “I’ll go through Chris’s appointment book, and then attack his laptop. Maybe I can find a few more strings we can pull.”

“I’m going to ask Sarah again if she told her son about our visit,” Jack said. “Then I’ll meet her at the bank to make certain Chris didn’t add someone else to the signature card for the box. And I’ll try to get Chris’s medical doctor to talk. We need to eliminate the possibility he had some serious health condition that made him choose suicide. I’d like you to call Suggs over at Metro to find out the status of any insurance policies on Chris’s life. We could ask Sarah, but I’d rather not. Now, how should we proceed with Donny Boy?”

Nora swiveled the extra chair between them a half turn, kicked off her heels, and put her legs into that seat, her toes pointing toward Jack, her skirt inching up her thighs. “We need to learn more about his doings,” she said. “We could tail him, but we’ve got a problem. He knows us both by sight.”

“We need somebody Donny doesn’t know,” Jack said. “That sounds like Max Logan, assuming Donny doesn’t know Max.”

Nora’s calf muscles lengthened when she got up and dented her well-shaped butt against the edge of the table. “I’ll call and ask him to come by as soon as possible.”

Chapter 8

Max came into MI mid-afternoon, Nora buzzed Jack to alert him before sending Max back. Jack motioned him to a chair and jumped right into why they’d ask Max to come in.

“Did Nora talk to you about the help we need?”

“She told me you’re needin’ some tailin’ done.”

“That’s right. You interested?”

“Yes, sir, I can do your job and would be glad for it. Truth is, I miss havin’ me nose in the wind.”

“We want this fella tailed round the clock.” While Jack talked, he pulled two bottles of water from the half fridge in the corner behind his desk. “The job includes you putting together a team, and keeping it going until I say stop.”

“Can do, and I’ll be startin’ and stoppin’ when you say. We do need to talk pay a mite. I’ll have to give up being a security guard. It’s a flavorless job, but it buys me needies.”

“We’ll pay you thirty an hour and guarantee the number of hours needed to cover what you made as a security guard. We might work you more. We’ll pay the men you pick twenty an hour, without a minimum. You okay with that?”

Max screwed the cap off his water bottle. “A more’n fair offer, Jack. I’m aware it’s a temporary job, but I should be telling ya I take it with the intent of convincing ya to retain me permanent.”

“That could happen, Max, but I don’t promise. At the moment we have but one case.” Jack leaned forward and handed him an information sheet.

“Life has few promises,” Max replied. “I’ll take what I earn, no more.” He held up the page Jack had given him. “Is this the donkey you want me to pin a tail on?”

“Yes. Donkey—Donny Andujar.”

“I know the lad by sight, but he has no shine on me. I know his club. It’s fancier than most, but when you lift the lid, it’s no different from the rougher stripper joints.”

“Do you need a camera with zoom and night vision?”

“Takin’ pitchers is me hobby.” He raised his hand and clicked the button on a phantom camera. “I have one, and I can pass it along to my lads as we change shifts.” After a pause, he said, “Art Tyson, a local PI—Nora knows him—tried to hire me to be one of his camera-slingers. But to paraphrase your American West, ‘a man’s gotta decide which brand he’ll ride for.’ For me,” he shook his head, “it’ll not be Tyson’s outfit. I’m ready to start anytime.”

“Now would be good. Thanks for riding for our brand.” Jack winked. “Welcome to MI.”

“Good to be with you.”

Jack took another twenty minutes to bring Max up to speed on the case; what little they knew and that at this point they had no clues or intuitions.

After he walked Max out, he told Nora the terms under which Max would be working and that he had started immediately. In turn, Nora told Jack that Mary Lou Sanchez had come by while he was talking with Max. That she had hired Mary Lou and she would be starting tomorrow morning. Nora and Mary Lou would work out their schedules so that one of them was always at the office.

Jack stood shrouded by the afternoon shadows, at the grave of his dead wife, Rachel. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you, Rach. I’ve been traveling, trying to learn if there was a connection between your death and my past work for the government. I found none. Nora caught up with me in Egypt to say that Chris Andujar was dead. The police have ruled suicide, but Sarah thinks Chris had been blackmailed and that’s why he took his life. We’ve meet with Sarah and have nothing so far that confirms either explanation of his death. But I swear to you I will find the answers.”

After a while a breeze brought aromas that made him remember Luigi’s, Rachel’s favorite restaurant, but Luigi’s was miles away. He touched the chiseled granite, letting his fingers ride the cold grooves of each letter.

Rachel McCall, beloved bride of Jack McCall

The choice of bride, rather than wife, had been unusual, but after so short a time together, bride had seemed right.

The stone showed her age to be forty-three, four years younger than Jack.

He had survived hell many times on the world’s declared and secret battlefields. He had seen so much he could only explain through a belief in God. Had an angry God orchestrated Rachel’s death to punish him for some of his past covert activities? He could not accept that the God he believed in would do so.

For the second time, Jack let his fingers trace the curves of his love’s name, and then he walked into the lengthening eastward shadows.

After dinner, a long walk, and a whiskey neat, Jack poured another and called Nora at home.

“Did I wake you?”

“No. I got back from a jog about two hours ago, and just got out of a candlelit soaking tub. It was heavenly. Is the Andujar case playing with your mind?”

“Yeah. Kinda. You had any more thoughts?”

“You know we have no proof that the quarter mil was ever in the bank.”

“I can’t see any reason Chris would lie to his wife about that?”

“I agree. So, let’s assume for now that the money did exist,” Nora said. “But Chris could’ve spent it lots of ways other than blackmail or, maybe no cash and no blackmail. Either way, Metro may have gotten it right—your friend put himself down without outside influence.”

“They found no suicide note,” Jack said while rinsing out his glass over the sink.

“That’s unusual,” Nora said, “but not probative.”

Chapter 9

Jack’s alarm went off at six. He had suffered through another night of late drinks, old movies, and little sleep. He remembered watching Humphrey Bogart’s great portrayal of Sam Spade in the classic,
The Maltese Falcon
, and wished real cases were so easy and as filled with colorful characters.

He sat on the edge of the bed dry-scrubbing his face with the palms of his hands, then went into the bathroom and brushed and flossed. That took the flannel out of his mouth, but did nothing for the pattern of red lines in his eyes that resembled something printed from an Internet mapping site.

In the kitchen he recapped last night’s whiskey bottle, and poured a cup of black coffee. The coffee pot timer had come on before the alarm clock went off. God bless automation. For a while he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and fooling around with the crossword puzzle in the morning paper. After a second cup he picked up the cordless phone and called Sarah Andujar.

“I can meet you at the bank in an hour,” she said. “I am on the other line with Christopher’s medical doctor. I am going to try to add you in on the call. We do this sometimes in my book club. If I mess it up, I’ll call back.”

He waited until Sarah came back on the line. “Jack, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“We’re on the line with Christopher’s physician. Doctor, thank you for answering my questions, I will hang up now and let you and Mr. McCall talk.”

When Jack got off the phone, he had learned something he had expected and something he had not.

Jack had left the bank and was turning right onto Twenty-first to get back to MI when his cell rang. It was Nora. She had arranged a meeting with Chris Andujar’s psychiatrist buddy, Dr. Radnor, and had spoken to Chris’s former receptionist, Agnes Fuller.

“Fuller told me,” Nora said. “‘I’ve put that sadness behind me. The police declared his death a suicide, so I don’t have to talk to you, and I won’t.’ Frankly, her attitude caught me by surprise, and I didn’t handle it very well. She stonewalled me, after having told Sarah she’d help any way she could. I’m going to call that woman back and find out why she’s playing both ends against the middle.”

“Why don’t you hold that thought until after we talk with Radnor?”

“If you say so. How’d it go at the bank with Sarah?”

“The signature card for the box showed only Chris and Sarah. She had signed to gain entry only once, the day after Metro declared Chris’s death a suicide.”

“What was in the box?”

“Empty. Where are you?”

“In the office.”

Five minutes later Jack pulled into MI’s underground parking and saw Nora waiting next to his parking space. She opened the passenger’s door and leaned in, her breasts and white bra showing.

“I thought I’d meet you down here. We need to be at Dr. Radnor’s at one, and I need a favor. It’s on the way.” She got in carefully so as not to spill her coffee, then put her hand on his forearm.