One Murder at a Time: A Casebook. Richard A. Lupoff
so Dr. Chih says.”
Dorothy Yamura turned to Marvia Plum. “I don’t want to keep you here longer than necessary, Sergeant. I know you have plenty of work to do.”
“I have,” Marvia Plum admitted. “I surely have.” She left the meeting and went back to her job.
BLACK BOY IN A BOX
“I don’t think so. I don’t work narco. Never have.”
“I know that. I have your record right here.”
“Well, then.”
“Besides, I’ve known you for your whole career.”
“Well, then.”
“Tell me why you feel this way, Marvia. You’re one of my best people. You’re a fine detective. You have a great arrest record and an outstanding conviction rate. Why don’t you want this assignment?”
Sergeant Marvia Plum shifted in her chair. It wasn’t just that Lieutenant Yamura was her boss. If anything, that should have made it easier. Keep things objective, professional. Don’t let your feelings get control. But it wasn’t that way. Lieutenant Yamura was her friend and had been her sponsor in the Berkeley Police Department, had coaxed her into the job to start with, and had pushed her promotion to sergeant.
More, Dorothy Yamura had helped her get her job and her stripes back when she’d resigned from the force to marry and move out of state, and then returned with an annulment in one pocket and a restraining order against her new ex in the other.
“Look, Dorothy, I’ve got a twelve-year-old. He asks me why it’s okay for me to have a drink after work. And he wants to know why it’s okay for TV stars to smoke cigarettes and baseball players to chew tobacco, but a high school kid can get busted for smoking a joint. And I have a hard time answering him.”
Dorothy sighed. “It’s the law.”
Marvia shook her head. “I tell him that. The law is the law. But he just turns off. And I don’t blame him.”
“So you don’t want to work narco.”
Marvia nodded. She wouldn’t refuse the assignment if Dorothy Yamura made it an order, but short of that, she hoped she could argue her way out of it or plead her way out of it. She’d much rather work on a nice juicy murder.
But Dorothy Yamura wasn’t biting. “We’re not talking about high school kids smoking a little pot, Marvia. We’re talking about bad, bad stuff. We’re talking about crack and smack and ice. And we’re pretty sure that the stuff is going through the Crash Club.”
“Okay.” Marvia touched the corner of her badge, as if subconsciously afraid that it wouldn’t be there. “Just raid the place.”
“You’re kidding. We’d have a riot. Hundreds of university students, slumming yuppies, you know the kind of trashing we’d take in the city council?”
“Who owns the club?”
“Solomon San Remo.”
“Saintly Solly?”
“The very.”
“I thought he was running some kind of real estate scam. You sure we’re talking about the same leading citizen?”
“Yes.”
Marvia caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the glass fronting on a citation hanging on the wall behind Dorothy Yamura’s desk. Short, black hair. Dark complexion, heavy bones, a generous figure that required a constant struggle to keep under control. Her Berkeley police uniform was immaculate, although she knew she’d work in civvies if she worked a narco case.
“Last I knew, Solly was running a youth rehab center on University Avenue. Pulling in funds all over the place—federal, state, city, private donors, do-gooder foundations. What’s he doing running a nightclub?”
“You know Solly. He managed to live high and sock away a fat retirement fund for himself, bought up a nice parcel of real estate on University, announced the ground-breaking for his project.”
Yamura paused. Marvia Plum waited for her to go on, and finally she did.
“Wouldn’t you know, the whole thing just never quite happened. The neighbors started hollering NIMBY. Everybody was in favor of a rehab center, but Not In My Back Yard! They got their city council member—who had been one hundred per cent in favor of San Remo and his good works—to fight against it when it came up for a vote. You know the buzz-words. Dangerous characters roaming the streets, school children and old people getting mugged or worse, send these troubled individuals off to the wholesome air of the countryside someplace.”
“I get it,” Marvia put in. “So there was Solomon San Remo with all that real estate and nothing to build on it.”
“Right.” Yamura stood up and studied some papers held onto a file cabinet with superhero magnets. Marvia Plum recognized Mary Marvel and Supergirl and Wonder Woman. “Guess I don’t need my invitation to a retirement party three weeks ago. A free pass to a movie that closed last month.” She pulled a few scraps from beneath the magnets and dropped them in her waste basket.
“So now he wants to put up a couple of condo’s on the land. Take him years to pull that deal together and get it through all the boards and commissions. But in the meanwhile he wound up owning the Crash Club and he’s kept it open because it generates a nice little cash flow for him.”
Marvia Plum let the heel of her hand rest on the grip of the 9 mm. Glock resting in a holster on her hip. She’d got so accustomed to carrying a piece in her years on the Berkeley force, she’d felt half-naked without it when she moved to Nevada. It was a comfort to have it back.
She said, “Who’s dealing the dope at San Remo’s club?”
Yamura looked stolidly at Marvia. “I don’t know.”
“Have we talked to Solly? Is he cooperating? If we can show criminal activity at his club, even if he isn’t involved, unless he exercises due diligence he can lose his license.”
“That’s just it. We think Solly himself is behind it. Either he’s looking the other way, letting the pushers do their work and taking baksheesh for his kindness—or he’s actively involved.”
“What do our sources say?”
“Nothing. Nada. Nix. You have to get past Solly’s personal door dragon to get into the club, and he’s got a sharp eye. Seems as if he knows all the regular junkies and speed freaks in town, won’t let ’em inside the place. And a real terror on ID. Crash Club caters to UC students, twenty-something’s, yuppies. We can’t even get an underage kid in there to bust ’em for selling liquor.”
Marvia Plum lowered her face into her hands and pressed against her eyelids. Flashes of light went off inside her eyes. Images of past busts, trials, funerals. “Okay.” She raised her head. “Okay, Dorothy. What’s our strategy?”
Dorothy Yamura briefed Marvia on the plan for taking down the operation at the Crash Club. When she finished talking, Marvia stood up and turned to leave Yamura’s office. Dorothy stopped her with a word. “Marvia.”
Plum turned around and waited.
“Marvia,” Yamura repeated, “What convinced you?”
Marvia managed a weak smile. “You know I’m a realist, Dorothy. I don’t believe in ghosts or visions or ESP or UFO’s or any other hooey. I go to church once in a while, but that’s not belief, it’s desperation.”
Yamura raised her eyebrows. She was in uniform today, her creases razor-sharp and her lieutenant’s insignia glistening in the cold glare of fluorescents. She waited for Marvia to get to the point.
She did. “I had a little vision. Something like old Scrooge and the Spirit of Christmas Yet-to-Come.” She shuddered and rubbed her hands against the sleeves of her woolen uniform blouse; the