Killer Karma

9

The anger at his killer fueled Cole’s resentment at walking to Razor’s place. Damn it, he ought to be able to ziptrip! Standing in the hall outside Renee’s room, still hearing the Adagio, he tried again…picturing the apartment…straining to remember every detail as he imagined himself in the apartment. Did he need to take into account that at this time of night the drapes would be closed? Or maybe open just a crack, enough to admit light from the street and from the ground floor shoe store’s sign…and from the right angle, give a glimpse of the Coit Tower to the east.

The hallway blurred…turned into Razor’s front room. Cole stood behind the futon, at the window. Triumph at making it here mixed with bafflement. What was different this time? Yes, he thought about the view from the window, but could that detail really be what did the trick? Shaking his head, he turned away from the window.

Razor had the futon made out into a bed and wore sleep shorts and a t-shirt, but he still looked wide awake. Propped against pillows, he watched a movie on TV with the sound muted and closed captioning on.

Checking out the movie, Cole grimaced. He knew this one and it had barely begun. “Come on, amigo…you don’t need to watch this again. You know Segal whips Tommy Lee Jones’s ass and keeps Honolulu from being nuked. Turn it off and go to bed.” He moved behind Razor and dropped his voice to a drone. “Your eyelids are feeling heavy. Heavy…heavy. You’re getting sleepy…very sleepy.”

Razor remained wide awake.

Scratch suggestion as a solution. The TV remote Razor held gave Cole an idea, though. It should not be much different from a computer, right?

He reached down across Razor’s shoulder, put a finger on the power button, and closed his eyes. “Time to go to sleep.” He fished around until he felt the tickle, and heard the click of the TV shutting off.

Razor muttered. Cole opened his eyes to see Razor pushing the power button.

Well of course Razor would turn it back on. Cole turned it off.

Muttering, Razor hit the power again, this time with a hard punch of his thumb…and kept the thumb resting on the button.

Though that did not block his access to it, Cole decided to change tactics. He went for Mute. The closed captions disappeared and the sound came on.

The mutter became an expletive. Razor re-muted the sound.

Cole found himself enjoying the game. He went to the channel buttons and switched up one. When Razor changed back, Cole dropped down a channel.

With expletives turning into a longer curse, Razor returned to the movie channel. Cole hit the Menu button. Razor cleared that off the screen…accompanied by an expletive he never used around Holly.

Cole grinned. Now what could he do. Oh, yes. There was that time at home when Hannah played with the remote. He punched DVD.

The screen went blank except for the message VID, replaced moments later by: “Unusable Signal”. And as he had after Hannah’s monkeying, Razor began trying every button on the remote to restore normal TV function. His disgust and frustration grew visibly with each failure. Even turning the TV off and on did not restore the picture. Finally Razor happened to punch WHO-Input. Cole was ready, poised over the power button. As the movie came back, he turned off the TV.

That did it. Swearing in a tone which suggested only supreme self control let him keep it under his breath, Razor hurled the remote away from him. Fortunately, into the easy chair, not through the TV screen. He set his glasses on the end table, switched off the lamp, and flung himself flat on the futon.

Cole watched in satisfaction. They should be in business any time now.

Razor took several deep breaths and let them out slowly. His whole body relaxed and Cole heard his heart rate drop. In less than a minute, Razor’s breathing stabilized.

Asleep, just like that. Razor had done it in their patrol unit, too. Cole shook his head. It still amazed him. Razor woke just as abruptly, too. When their call number came over the radio, he went from dead to the world to fully alert, snatching up the mike for a reply. Possibly making it harder to convince him he was still asleep.

Cole considered the possibilities. He could wade through the futon, or sit on an invisible chair. That should be freaky enough for a dream.

He gave the chair a try. It worked fine, except it seemed…blah. Maybe make it a lounger? He lifted both legs and leaned back with his hands behind his head. No. A lounger still lacked the craziness a dream ought to have.

Staring at the ceiling, he suddenly remembered coming home after one late shift to find some old movie playing on the TV and Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly dancing up the wall. He should be able to do that, too…and better.

Behind him, Razor sighed and rolled over. Cole turned. Tension cranked tight in him. Time to see if he could pull this off. “I hope to hell you’re not ghost blind, amigo.” He stepped between the futon and drapes, grabbed one of Razor’s ears to give him a shot of cold, and hissed, “Sergeant coming.”

Razor sat bolt upright, eyes snapping open.

He heard! Would he launch into one of his start-in-the-middle conversations that made it sound to a sergeant as if he had been awake all along? It had been worth crying wolf once in a while just to see what came out of Razor’s mouth.

“I don’t know if there’s any good answer,” Razor said. “The Quakers thought their concept for Eastern State Prison was…” About which time he registered where he was and fell back on the pillow. “Sheesh. You’re starting to lose it, Kev.”

Cole laughed. “I don’t know. Your reflexes look as fast as ever to me.”

Razor jerked back upright and reached for the lamp. “Cole? Where the hell have you been?”

“No, don’t turn the light on! You’ll wake yourself up.”

Razor twisted toward him…and blinked. “What the hell? What’s with the glow-in-the-dark getup?”

Cole looked down at himself. Glow? Well, maybe a faint one. The important thing was… Razor saw him. Maybe they could skip the dream scam and just talk. Except, he realized, what happened when he came to the revelation that he was dead? No, better stick to the plan. “You’re dreaming.”

“No.” Razor squinted at him. “You look like those moon and stars we put up on Holly and Kyle’s bedroom ceilings.”

“I mean this is a dream.” Time to prove it. Cole imagined a curved surface reaching to the ceiling and trotted up it while Razor’s jaw dropped. Weird. The room appeared to revolve while he walked in place. “And, shhh.” He doubted Holly would hear him but he lowered his voice to encourage Razor to do so. “Just in case you’re talking in your sleep, you don’t want to wake Holly.” It felt like a dream…standing here with the furniture hanging overhead and Razor gaping down at him.

Then Razor felt himself and the bed around him, and squeezing his eyes shut, shook his head.

Shit! “Razor, no…don’t wake yourself up!” Cole dashed back down to the floor, mind racing ahead of him. “You need to keep dreaming. There…there are issues for you to work out, and this is the way to do it.”

Razor opened his eyes. “Issues?”

“The blood in the car for one. It’s mine and I’m dead. In your heart of hearts, you suspect that. Which is why you’re dreaming of me as a ghost.” He waded into the futon and sat down. “You know that even if I killed Sara Benay and decided run for it, I’d have contacted you and Sherrie.”

Razor stared at Cole’s legs disappearing into the futon.

Cole punched his shoulder. “Pay attention. The other issue, the most important one, is Sara Benay.”

Razor expression went baffled. “Benay? Why is she an issue?”

“She’s in some kind of danger because of me.”

“Danger?” Razor sounded skeptical.

Cole leaned toward him. “I don’t know whether it’s from witnessing my murder and recognizing the killer, or being caught searching the Flaxx company books for evidence against Donald Flaxx, but there’s this cloud of terror in the 2EC garage that I think is hers. From her apartment it’s obvious she blew out of there in one hell of- ”

Razor blinked. “What? Wait. How did she happen to be searching the Flaxx books?”

Cole winced. But he had to tell Razor. “Sara works in Flaxx’s Bookkeeping department. She’s the informant I met Monday evening. On Wednesday she left me a phone message saying she’d found- ”

“Did you put her up to it?” Razor reached for his glasses and peered at Cole through them.

Cole cleared his throat. “Not exactly.”

Razor frowned. “Not exactly? What the hell does- ” He broke off, sighing. “What am I doing? You’d think I’m really talking to you.”

Cole heard rising disbelief in that tone. He tried to keep Razor involved. “It’s your subconscious trying to work things out. Checking the books was her idea.”

Razor eyed him skeptically. “Her idea.”

“Basically.” He told Razor about the surprise call from Sara on Monday. “And we arranged to meet at Bon Vivre, where- ”

“Wait.” Razor frowned. “If she called Wednesday to tell you she’d found something, then the meeting Monday was for what…other than sending you to the men’s room to call in the cavalry?”

“Which didn’t come,” Cole said. “I had to rescue myself.”

Razor grunted. “I got tied up. I’ve already apologized for that. What happened at Bon Vivre?”

Across the table in the back booth she chose, Sara had shed her shoes and rubbed her feet, then downed nearly half the brandy and soda he ordered for her. “Here’s to Earl Lamper’s health. Preserve me from ever having Mao Tse Gao as my boss full time.”

Some interviewees had to circle a while before coming to what they wanted to talk about. Cole sat back to wait on Sara. “Lamper’s sick?”

“He had an emergency appendectomy last night.” She took another slug of her drink. “He’s such a sweetie to work for. Carries a share of the load; doesn’t give someone grief if they can’t make it in because their sitter didn’t show up that morning; doesn’t care if we come in late or play games on our work stations…as long as the work’s done and accurate. He even brings us flowers on our birthdays. But General Gao…” She grimaced. “If she’d divided Earl’s accounts among all of us, there wouldn’t be that much extra work for anyone.”

Cole sat up. His ears pricked. Lamper’s accounts?

“But she split them just between Joy and me — you remember Joy from lunch that day.”

Joy Quon, yes. A plain face but keenly intelligent eyes. She referred to accounting as having “elegant symmetry”. Kenisha Hayes, the third member of the trio, had personal elegance…tall and regal as her Masai ancestors.

Sara swirled the ice in her glass. “So I ended up with half of Earl’s accounts on top of my own. Of course Genghis Gao wanted everything updated before Joy and I left today.”

The skin prickled down Cole’s spine. So the books for the individual stores were divided up among the Bookkeeping staff. That was how Earl Lamper altered figures without anyone else being aware of it…take over the books for target stores! He fought to keep his voice casual. “Is it some of Lamper’s accounts you wanted to talk about?”

Sara swung her legs under the table and sat up. “I’m starved. Have you eaten? They have great sandwiches here, especially the Reuben and the Philly beef.”

They were still circling. Cole bit back his impatience and waved down a waitress. After waiting six years for a break in the Flaxx burglaries, he was not about to blow it by rushing things. Sherrie had been warned that he would be late.

As the waitress left, Sara leaned over the table toward him. The open top buttons of her blouse gave him a view down her cleavage and a cloisonne butterfly pendant dangling into it. “You come around to see Earl every time we have a burglary. Office gossip says you think the company is involved.”

He gave her a bland smile. “An inside job is always something we have to consider. You’ve had detectives from Homicide visit, too.”

“Yes, but they were asking for more information on that Kijurian character who was throwing firebombs into our stores. I didn’t think Homicide investigated arson.”

“A firefighter died in the Woodworks fire. Any death occurring in the course of a felony is a homicide.”

She stared at him for several moments, then ran her finger around the rim of her glass. “What does bookkeeping have to do with any of it?”

He took a sip of his beer, and pushed it aside. It had gone flat and warm while he nursed it at the bar, waiting for Sara. “Which of the stores I mentioned at lunch is Lamper doing the books for?”

Sara hesitated, then named five…two that had been burglarized and three that were torched, including Woodworks. “He also has stores that I remember being robbed other years. Two I used to do the books for, Glass And Brass and Wild ‘N Whimsey.”

Excitement jumped in Cole. Glass And Brass was hit last year, Wild ‘N Whimsey the year before. He kept his voice even. “How were they doing financially?”

She stared at him over her glass. “I don’t remember.”

A lie. It showed in her eyes and voice. He tried another approach. “Why aren’t you doing their books any longer?”

She shrugged. “Earl likes shuffling store assignments to keep us on our toes.”

Which let him unobtrusively take over target stores. Slick. “Were you keeping their books when they were burglarized?”

She finished off her drink. “Will you order me another of these?”

Another question she preferred to duck. He waved over the waitress.

Sara crunched a piece of ice. “Earl would never do anything detrimental to the company. He’s devoted to it and Mr. Flaxx. You can almost hear him saying ‘Master’ when he talks to or about Mr. Flaxx.”

Oh, yeah. Playing Igor to Flaxx’s Frankenstein. “You don’t have to convince me of his devotion.”

The waitress brought the new drink. Sara sipped it. Cole watched wheels turn behind her eyes. “If you think there’s something criminal in the books, why haven’t you audited them?”

He wished he could read her mind. What she found in Lamper’s files disturbed her enough to call him, but now she was backing off. Maybe to protect Lamper? He hunted for a soothing answer. “I don’t know there’s evidence of anything criminal, and we can’t go on fishing expeditions.” His gut feelings being insufficient probable cause for a warrant.

Their sandwiches arrived. Sara took a big bite of her Reuben. Cole saw the wheels still turning as she chewed. She swallowed, then said, “If you could go fishing, what would you be looking for?”

His neck prickled. “Why do you ask?”

She leaned toward him. “Because I can have a look if you want.”

Current shot through Cole. Shit, yes, he wanted! Only the opportunity sat in the middle of a frigging mine field. “Why would you do that?”

“Maybe to prove you’re wrong about Earl.”

Who did she really want to convince? He stared in frustration at the mine field. He said slowly, “If I asked you to look, you’d be acting as an agent of the SFPD, which needs a warrant or it becomes an illegal search. In which case, no evidence you found, or any growing out of what you found, would be admissible in court.” Not to mention how deep in shit he would be.

Her brows rose. “What if I never asked you and went looking on my own?”

Smart lady. Beyond the mines, looming ever larger, the Flaxx Goes To Jail sign flashed brightly…irresistibly. Carefully Cole said, “If we never discussed this topic and in the natural course of performing your job you happened to come across information you felt we should know about, reporting it could provide probable cause for a forensic examination of the books.”

“Never discussed what topic?” she said without a blink. “I believe I was telling you how sorry I am about Earl’s appendicitis. If he hadn’t had surgery, Kenisha and I would be taking off this Friday and Monday in a long week end, cruising down to Baja on the yacht of a friend. Now we can’t go.” She grimaced and sighed heavily…then smiled across the table at him. “Maybe you can suggest something for me to do instead? Maybe some indoor activity?”

A bare foot on his shin, sliding upward, said she already had an activity in mind. Suspicion and anger flared in him. Was this the real reason she wanted to meet? Not because anything in the books concerned her, but to come on to him?

He kept his voice level as he reached down to move her foot. “I’m married.”

Her smile only broadened. “I do see your wedding ring. I also remember how you flirted with us at lunch.” The foot came back up his leg, this time climbing to the inside of his thigh. “Don’t tell me women haven’t hit on you before.”

He removed her foot again. “Why are you?” As if her offer to look in Flaxx’s files were not dangerous enough — if she really meant it — add sex and the situation became a professionally and personally lethal explosive.

Her brows rose. “Why not? I like older men, especially when they’re good looking, have their hair, and are interesting company. At lunch you were all charm and guileless blue eyes, but I knew there had to be more to you. You’re a cop. You’re trained to use deadly force. You carry a gun and handcuffs — not that I’m into bondage.”

No…she appeared to be into power. That was what most older men represented…status, influence, material possessions. Like her friend with the yacht. A gun and handcuffs represented power, too.

“I was right.” She sipped her drink. “Tonight you feel dangerous. You’re strung tight and your eyes have been dissecting me.” She smiled. “Don’t you find me attractive?”

A new surge of anger went through him at the manipulative sub-text of the question. You don’t want me; fine; we’re quits. I guess you’re not interested in me looking in the books. But even as that made him want to walk away…and a dozen reasons said he should…he knew she had his number. He could not make himself give up this chance at Flaxx. The trick was to play the game, too…hold her off without losing her. “Yes, you’re very attractive.” Just not his type. She lacked wild red hair and breasts that strained bras and blouses.

Her smile broadened. “Then when we’ve finished, will you drive me home?” He almost heard her purr. “I’ll fix coffee for us.”

He nodded- “Sounds good.”-while his mind raced, hunting a way out that kept her hooked. Ah…Razor could call his cell phone, pretending to be Communications wanting him at a burglary scene. She was unlikely to know that Night Investigations handled all burglary calls between six p.m. and six a.m. He slid out of the booth. “Excuse me for a minute. I need to hit the men’s room.”

“Jesus, Cole!” Razor shook his head. “There’s rule bending and there’s twisting them into pretzels. You may have blown anyone’s chances of nailing Flaxx.”

“Right now I’m more worried about Sara.” He gave Razor a rundown on Wednesday night, from leaving the office to the explosive finale.

Listening, Razor’s brows first hopped, hearing about the phone messages and calls, then rose toward his hairline as Cole described being killed. At he end, he grunted. “Damn. Where does my brain come up with this stuff.”

Cole’s stomach plunged. Of course in thinking this was a dream, Razor considered it just a dream, unconnected to reality. Somehow he had to persuade Razor to act on the information anyway. He leaned toward Razor. “This isn’t ‘stuff.’ Your subconscious is putting things together from things you’ve seen and heard without being aware of it.”

“How would I hear or see anything about Wednesday night?”

Talk faster, numbnuts, Cole hissed at himself. Or this whole visit went down the toilet. “Inference and deduction. Putting together bits you know…my lunch with the women from Bookkeeping; my Monday meeting with a horny informant I strung along; my willingness to make a long day Wednesday even longer in response to a phone call from a woman named Benay; my obsession with nailing Flaxx. You know if I were alive I’d have contacted Sherrie. This is your subconscious talking. Don’t ignore it. Do you know who in Homicide has my case?”

Razor shook his head.

“It ought to be Andy Willner and Neil Galentree.” He eyed Razor. “I don’t suppose you’d go in and suggest that to Lieutenant Madrid.”

Razor snorted. “You suppose right. Why Willner and Galentree?”

“They’re working the firefighter’s death. Somehow that has to be what’s behind-”

“Jesus, here we go again.” Razor sighed. “You’re still fixated on Flaxx? But what am I thinking.” He banged his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course you still think Flaxx torched his stores. You don’t believe in the suspect they have for those fires.”

Obviously Razor remained unconvinced that Luther Thomas Kijurian existed only on paper. “Flaxx knows the building owner is always the prime suspect in arson. He’s created Kijurian to draw suspicion away from himself. Kijurian is like the Man Who Never Was that the Brits used-”

“Used in World War II to feed misinformation to the Nazis. Yes, yes, I know. You’ve told me.” Razor sighed. “Okay…let’s go through this one more time.” He ticked off points on his fingers. “You’ve told me Flaxx has a personnel file for the man. Their maintenance log and work orders say he unplugged toilets, worked on locks, and changed light bulbs. There’s the payroll record with his salary on it.”

“Flaxx went to a lot of trouble to set this up. But Kijurian’s name is on the payroll for just three months before being fired, allegedly for giving them a false Social Security number.” Cole ticked off points of his own. “Where did all those records come from? The computer. Who’s Flaxx’s IT guru? Faithful henchman and cooker of books Earl Lamper. It’s a snap for him to fake a personnel file. The work orders? Who pays much attention to who comes and changes the light bulbs? Someone went to those stores and did it, but the staff there can’t remember who.” He raised his brows at Razor. “I’ve asked them.”

“Even though investigating arson isn’t your job.” Razor shook his head. “Damn it, the personnel file has a photo, a copy of which you’ve shown me, you remember. He’s been described by witnesses who saw him throw the Molotov cocktails, as well as photographed in the crowd at a couple of the fires. People saw him at the residence hotel where he lived.”

“Where he was never seen in good light or for very long and he left the night of the first fire. Except for the fire photos, he hasn’t been seen since. And doesn’t he look just like someone who’d be throwing Molotov cocktails.” When Razor grunted in exasperation, Cole punched his shoulder. “Come on…think about it. Stocky, jowly, thick eyebrows and a mustache. An anarchist type straight out of Central Casting. Kijurian is a costume. That’s why no one can find a trace of him now.”

Razor set his glasses back on the end table and pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Cole…”

What did it take to convince him? “Damn it, Razor…it’s too big a coincidence for Flaxx to be burglarizing his own stores then someone else come along and start torching them. You’ve read the reports. Breaking the front window to throw in the Molotov cocktail set off the security alarms so the fire department arrived before more than contents burned. The buildings themselves sustained very little damage. Except at Woodworks. Notice there were no more fires after that. If Kijurian were real, do you suppose a firefighter’s death would have scared him off?”

Razor looked up. “Okay, I can agree with that, but- ”

“It’s Kijurian’s name that’s the final giveaway.”

Razor blinked. “His name?”

Cole nodded. “Remember how I told you it sounded familiar but couldn’t place it? The night after Woodworks burned I was doing the crossword puzzle in the paper and Kyle, who was hanging over my shoulder kibitzing, asked if Burglary was getting a new lieutenant. I said no, why, and he pointed to the margin of the paper. I saw I’d doodled Kijurian’s name over and over — L.T. Kijurian. The initials did look like the abbreviation for lieutenant. That made something click. Music started running in my head.”

“Music.” Razor shook his head. “Where am I getting this stuff?”

Cole swore silently. He kept forgetting Razor thought this was a dream. “It’s been cooking down in your subconscious, like it did in mine. When I hummed the tune for Renee, she identified it as Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kije Suite. She showed me the CD. Then I remembered hearing her play it.”

Razor grunted. “So of course you don’t believe the similarity in names is a coincidence.”

Cole shook his head. “Not after reading the liner notes. The music is from a Russian movie about another man who never was…a fictional army officer created by a clerical error.”

Razor sat silent for a minute, staring at him. “I wonder if the real you came up with this, too. It sounds like something Cole would. But there hasn’t been any change in the Alert for Kijurian. So if Cole did think that, and mentioned the idea to anyone, I guess they weren’t convinced.”

Cole grimaced. “Willner and Galentree weren’t, no.” If they had been, would he be alive today? Would Sara be just grumbling about missing the cruise to Baja? Not that Willner or Galentree were to blame for his current mess. Launching Operation Hello Dollies out of frustration with them had been his own doing. So were the consequences. “Razor, I need- there’s something you need to do.” He thinks this is a dream, remember.

Razor frowned. “What?”

“After you’ve taken Holly to school, you need to go to Homicide- ”

“I’m already planning to drop in and see what’s happening.”

Cole nodded. “I’d expect that. But…you need to tell whoever has my case about Sara, especially about her working for Flaxx and what she might have seen. I never met her on Wednesday. She didn’t kill me. But she needs to be found for her own safety. See that they read my case files on Flaxx so they have a real motive for my murder instead of Leach’s lovers quarrel shit.”

Razor’s expression went wry. “Tell them how to run their case? They’ll certainly appreciate that.”

“They have to be told about Sara.” Cole stared hard into Razor’s eyes. “Her life could depend on it.” Except he saw a thought forming in Razor’s head that set him swearing silently: importance in the dream did not make it important in reality.

Razor said, “Just how do I explain having knowledge of Wednesday night, and why I’ve said nothing before? I sure as hell can’t tell them it came to me in a dream.”

Cole clapped his shoulder. “Sure you can. We’ve all waked up with answers to problems that were bothering us when we went to sleep. This is more of that.” But he could not leave Sara’s safety solely to Razor and his fellow officers. He caused the problem; he had to do what he could to resolve it. “Now…before I let you go on to another dream, will you do me one more favor? Look up phone listings for Joy Quon and Kenisha Hayes. I’ll give them a chance to dream about me and tell me if they have any thoughts on where Sara is.”

Razor blinked. “You want me to look them up in a dream phone book?”

“Please.” He stood and stepped back from the futon.

Razor peered dubiously at him, then sighed and threw off the covers. He pulled the phone book from under the end table and opened it on his knees. “How do you spell Joy’s last name… K-W-A-N or Q-U-O-N?”