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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by The Thing Itself, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-49119-8

  E3-202210104-DA-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  Discover More

  About the Author

  For Diane Houslin and her tireless pursuit of truth

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  1

  Monday, July 7, 1969

  I looked down from the third-floor office window onto the hastily built greenhouse in our back-fence neighbors’ yard. The hothouse frame was constructed from pine four-by-fours. This structure was tightly wrapped in semiopaque plastic sheeting that fluttered only slightly in the morning breeze. The structure reminded me of an army barracks at maybe one-third size. Standing around six and a half feet high and wide, it was four times that in length, with a partially flattened triangular roof. These current neighbors, seven long-haired hippies, had moved in five months before. They built the nursery and wired it for perpetual electric light on the first day. Nearly every daylight hour since then they went back and forth armed with bags of soil, watering cans, clay pots, insecticide brews, and various pruning devices.

  At night they sometimes had parties. These festivities often spilled out onto the front porch and lawn but never the backyard. The hothouse was off limits to anyone except the Seven.

  They were an interesting-looking crew. Three young women and four men; all somewhere in their twenties. All white except for one young black man. Wearing embroidered jeans and threadbare T-shirts, they spent an hour or so almost every afternoon sitting around a redwood picnic table eating food prepared, served, and shared by the women. They poured wine from green-glass gallon jugs of Gallo red and passed hand-rolled cigarettes from one to the other in an endless circle.

  I liked the city farmers. They reminded me of life in my childhood home—New Iberia, Louisiana.

  LA was a transient city back then. People moved in and out with predictable regularity. Five months was a long stay for tenants without blood ties or children.

  When the back door to the hippie house came open I looked at the round white face of my Gruen Chronometer mit Kalender. It was 7:04 a.m. on Monday, July 7, 1969. The hippie I’d dubbed Stache came out of the split-level ranch house wearing only jeans. The nickname was because of his generous lip hair. I was standing at that window because Stache came out early every morning toting a long-necked tin watering can, wearing neither shirt nor shoes. This ritual had tweaked my detective instinct.

  When Stache bent down to get the garden hose I turned away from the window but remained standing behind the extra-large desk. A case had taken me out to Las Vegas over the past week. This was my first day back at the agency and I was the only one there so far that morning.

  For a moment I considered sitting and writing down the specifics of the Zuma case, but the details, especially the payment problem, felt like more than I could handle on my first day. So instead I decided to take a walkabout, reacquainting myself with the offices before my colleagues arrived.

  Our bureau occupied the entire upper floor of what once was a large house on Robertson Boulevard, a little way up from Pico. My workspace was the master bedroom at the very back. Walking up the hall from there I first passed Tinsford Natly’s office. Tinsford was generally known as Whisper and his room embodied the understated tone of that name. This office was small and windowless, furnished with a battered oak desk barely larger than a writing table you’d expect to find in a junior high classroom. There were two straight-back wooden chairs, one for Tinsford and another to accommodate any visitor or client who found their way to him. He rarely spoke to more than one person at a time because, he said, “Too many minds muddy the water.”

  The tabletop was bare, which was unusual. As far back as I could remember, Whisper would have a single sheet of paper centered on his desk. It was always a different leaf with writing that seemed to say something pedestrian but most often held deeper meanings. There were no pictures on the walls, no file cabinet or carpet. His office was like a monk’s cell where some ageless cleric considered the scriptures—one verse, sometimes just one word, at a time.

  A little ways up and across the hall, Saul Lynx’s office was three times the size of Whisper’s and a quarter that of mine. His desk was mahogany and kidney-shaped. Saul had a blue love seat and a padded leaf-green chair for clients. A burgundy swivel chair sat behind the burnished desk, which was crowded with knickknacks and photographs of his Negro wife and their multiracial children. There were at least two hundred books on the shelves next to the window. He had five maple filing cabinets, a huge standing globe of the world, and a small worktable with an overhead lamp where he mapped out his investigative campaigns.

  Saul’s office was cluttered but neat. His tabletop and desk were most often disheveled because Saul was usually in a hurry to get out in the street, where detectives like us went up against the jobs we took on. But that Monday morning everything was in its proper place—almost as if he’d left for a vacation.

  I wandered from the back offices up to the repurposed foyer, where Niska Redman’s desk sat.

  Niska was our secretary, rec
eptionist, and office manager. A few years earlier Tinsford got her father out of a jam and she went to work for him. When I had my windfall and decided to start the WRENS-L Detective Agency, she came along with her boss. The caramel-cream biracial young woman was perfect for our needs. She was a night-school junior at Cal State, friendly, and completely reliable. She knew all our quirks and needs, temperaments and habits. Niska was that rare worker who did the job without direction and was more than capable of thinking on her own.

  I sat down at her sleek cherrywood desk facing the front door to our offices. Taking in a deep breath, I noted how it felt good being alone and unhurried. Everything was fine, so I’m not quite sure why the darkness entered my mind . . .

  Four years before, I’d been drunk for the first time in many years, driving barefoot down the Pacific Coast Highway at night, far above the rocky undergrowth along the shore. I tried to pass a tractor trailer, met oncoming traffic, and was forced off the pavement onto the soft shoulder, which then gave way to nothingness.

  Some hours later Mouse, under the direction of the witch, Mama Jo, found me.

  The coma lasted for weeks but I was still aware under that pall, feeling as if I had crossed far beyond the border of expiry. The moments of a wasted life littered the floor around my deathbed.

  That same debris surrounded me in Niska’s sunlit office space. Breathing became a chore and the memory of a life filled with pain and dying seemed to grasp at me from an incalculable depth. It was as if I had died in the accident and so whenever the specter of that time returned I had to struggle once more against the desire to let go. I could have breathed my last right then and there. Later I’d be found by my friends, having passed away from no apparent cause.

  Though assailed by hopelessness I was not afraid. The suffering of my people and my life pressed like tiny embers burning away at the release the numbness of death promised. I took one breath and then another. My chest and shoulders rose and fell slowly. In sunbeams coursing through the windowpane I saw motes of dust illuminated by the light. These floaters were accompanied by unimaginably small insects going about their winged search for sustenance, succor, and sex. Hearing the intermittent sounds of the house creaking in the morning breeze, I somehow slipped back into the rhythm of living.

  After all that I was both exhausted and relieved. It was a reminder that the most desperate battles are fought in our hearts and souls, and that death is only one final trick of the mind.

  “Hi, Mr. Rawlins.”

  I glanced at my white-faced watch before looking up at Niska Redman. It was 8:17. Nearly an hour had passed since I commandeered her office chair.

  Niska wore a one-piece shamrock-green dress that didn’t quite cover her handsome knees. I liked the freckles around her nose and the smile that said she was honestly happy to see me. Hanging from her left shoulder was a rather large buff-colored canvas sack.

  “Hey, N. How you doin’?”

  “Fine. I made brown-rice pudding last night.” She swung the shoulder bag out onto the desk and opened it wide. Therein I saw her polka-dot blue-and-white purse, a few books, an exercise mat, a fine-toothed comb and an Afro pick, two brushes, a makeup bag, and a quart-size Tupperware tub. This last item she brought out and set before me.

  “Want some?” she asked.

  “Maybe later.” I stood up from her chair and she moved to stand next to it.

  “Were you looking for something in my desk?”

  “No. Just getting a different perspective is all. Where’s Tinsford? I don’t think I’ve ever gotten in before him unless he was on a case.”

  “Uh-huh, excuse me, but I have to go to the restroom.”

  She went down the hall of offices to the door just beyond Whisper’s. I pulled a guest chair from the far wall and set it before her workstation, still feeling the tremors from my mortal battle with demons of the past.

  The phone rang once and I reached over to answer.

  “WRENS-L Detective Agency.”

  “Easy?”

  “Hey, Saul. Where you callin’ from?”

  “Niska didn’t tell you?”

  “She just got in.”

  “I’m up north. At the Oakland shipyards.”

  “Oakland?”

  “The IC called last Wednesday,” he said. “They’ve been underwriting a policy for Seahawk Shipping Lines. Too much cargo’s gone missing over the past eighteen months and they want us to look into it.”

  The IC was actually the IIC, the International Insurance Corporation, an indemnity provider owned by Jean-Paul Villard, president and CEO of P9, one of the largest insurance consortiums in the world. JP’s number two was Jackson Blue, a good friend of mine. The IIC had us on commission and so whenever they called, one of us answered.

  “You ever hear of a group called the Invisible Panthers?” Saul asked.

  “No.”

  A toilet flushed in the back offices.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “They say they’re some kind of left-wing political group that don’t want to be known.”

  Niska came out from the hallway and pointed at her ear with a query on her face.

  “It’s Saul,” I said to her, and then I asked him, “It’s a whole political organization?”

  “I really don’t know. Maybe paramilitary. Is Niska there with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her hello for me.”

  “Those radical groups up there are dangerous. Maybe you should have somebody with you. I could ask Fearless.”

  “No. At least not yet anyway. I’m just making some contacts buying black-market Japanese electronics. Nothing to worry about so far.”

  “Okay. But don’t cut it too close.”

  “Don’t worry. Tell Niska I’m saving the expense reports for when I get home.”

  “Okay. Talk to you later.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Lynx!” Niska shouted before I hung up.

  “He says he’ll have the expense reports when he comes back.”

  “That’s what he always says. Tinsford’s gone too.”

  “Where?”

  Niska started organizing her desk while answering my question.

  “This older white lady named Tella Monique came in last Tuesday,” she said. “She wanted for him to find her son Mordello because her husband had disowned him and threw him out when he had married a Catholic woman nine years ago.”

  “Nine years?”

  “Uh-huh. But now that her husband died she wants her son and his family back.”

  “So where’s Whisper doin’ all this?” I asked.

  “He’s in Phoenix ’cause the son was mixed up with a motorcycle gang called the Snake-Eagles, somethin’ like that, out there.”

  “A black motorcycle gang?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Damn. I hope he got his will up to date.”

  Niska grinned and said, “Nobody ever sees Mr. Natly. They won’t even know he was there.”

  “Any news for me?”

  “Not really. You got the check from Mr. Zuma?”

  “Um . . .”

  Charles “Chuck” Zuma was a millionaire who had a twin sister named Charlotte. It took Charlotte most of her thirties to run through her half of their sizable inheritance. Then she used a loophole in the family trust to turn Chuck’s twenty-eight million into bearer bonds. After that Charlotte Zuma disappeared.

  Her brother offered me two-tenths of one percent of as much of the money as I could return. I took the job because there was no violent crime attached. I was trying to take on easy jobs that didn’t include, for instance, motorcycle gangs and left-wing paramilitary groups.

  “Did you get the money?” Niska asked again.

  “Technically.”

  “Technically how much?”

  “The sister learned from her wasteful years,” I said. “Her investment advisers increased Chuck’s money to nearly forty million.”

  “That’s an eighty-thousand-dolla
r fee.” She did this calculation without using her fingers.

  “The forty million is all tied up in funds that a whole army of forensic accountants have to disentangle.”

  “But all you need is eighty thousand.”

  “Chuck’s broke. He’s living with a rich cousin up north of Santa Barbara.”

  “So we don’t get paid?”

  “It’ll take at least a year before he gets his and we get ours. But he gave me collateral.”

  “What kind of collateral?”

  “A pale yellow 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI.” I might have grimaced a little while reciting the name.

  “A car?”

  “They only made a few hundred of ’em,” I said. “And none in America. It’s worth at least twice what Zuma owes.”

  “But you can’t put a car in the bank.”

  “I could sell it.”

  “A car.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You parked it downstairs?”

  “It’s in the shop.”

  “A car that doesn’t even work?”

  “I’ll be in my office.”

  2

  I liked Niska. She considered every problem before offering an answer and therefore almost always did a good job. But I wasn’t in the mood for good service or comradeship. That morning I had a yen for isolation. Just hearing her footsteps down the hall wore on me. When she went to the restroom a second time I had to put down the book I was reading because of the whining of the pipes and the sound of the door clicking shut. Even the faint whiff of her essential-oil perfume seemed to crowd my space.

  By 10:17 I made a decision. It took a few more minutes to tamp down the unreasonable anger before going out to the front office.

  Niska was typing at great speed on her IBM Selectric. She typed, organized, and filed away our notes, correspondence, and case journals. At seventy-five words a minute, the rapid-fire clack of the letter ball on paper set my teeth on edge.

  “Niska.”

  “Yes, Mr. Rawlins?” She stopped the racket, looking up innocently.

  Behind a forced smile I asked, “You like that Transcendental Meditation stuff, right?”