Jeff Sherratt - The Brimstone Murders

Mabel walked to the coffee bar. “Get out of my way, Jimmy. I’ll make the coffee. My mouth still tastes like gasoline. Why make it worse?”

“Hey, my coffee tastes as good as Chevron, maybe not the high-test, but certainly as good as the regular,” I said, and in a low voice added, “Sol told me you found a mouse.”

“Yeah, and it’s gone,” Mabel said.

“No one will ever find it?”

“I said it’s gone. Don’t ask.”

“You didn’t happen to mentioned finding the gun to Rita, did you?” I asked.

“Nope, and if I were you I’d keep my mouth shut. She doesn’t even know the police were here. Why compromise her position?”

“Well, she wants to be my lawyer on this matter…”

“There you go. She doesn’t have to turn it over, if what I know about the law is correct.”

“Where did you study law?”

“Don’t be a smart aleck. I watch Perry Mason.”

Just then, Rita and the client emerged from her office. “Danny, say hello to Jimmy O’Brien.”

We shook hands. “I’m out of work right now, but I sell aluminum siding.”

I shot a quick look at Rita, then turned back to Danny. “Aluminum siding?”

“That’s why he needs us, Jimmy,” Rita said. “It seems Danny didn’t have a job. So he went to one of those seminars. You know the type, ‘You too can make fifty thousand per year selling aluminum siding.’ Of course, he believed them. Why would they lie?” she said in a sarcastic tone. “Anyway, he signed up, paid the three-hundred-dollar fee, got his sales kit, and left. The next morning, before starting his door-to-door sales calls, Danny stopped at the bank and filled out an application for a credit card. He wrote in fifty thousand dollars as his annual earnings. What the heck, that’s what the sleazebags running the scam said he’d make. Unfortunately, it was a bad year for aluminum siding.”

“Couldn’t pay his credit card bill, and now the bank wants to make an example of him,” I said.

“Yeah, owes a thousand. The bank called the FBI.”

“That’s civil, not criminal,” Mabel said.

I glanced at Mabel. “Perry Mason?”

“The bank, Cooperative Purchasers Bank, screamed criminal fraud,” Rita said. “They’re saying he lied on the credit app.”

“That’s the same bank that lost a billion on high-interest loans to Brazil, and now wants Uncle Sam to pick up the tab,” I said.

“Yep, that’s them. They had Danny arrested. Then at the arraignment, he acted proper.” Rita turned to the poor guy standing next to her.

The phone rang. Mabel answered, then handed the receiver to me. “Excuse me a second, Danny.” Covering the receiver, I asked Mabel to offer Danny a cup of coffee. His eyes lit up.

The call was from Joyce, Sol’s secretary. I put her on hold and went to my office.

A few minutes after I had finished the conversation with Joyce, Rita stepped in and slipped into the client chair next to my desk. “Everything okay, Jimmy?” She crossed her legs and pulled down her skirt. “You look a little down.”

I lifted my eyes from her legs. “I guess so.”

We were quiet for a second. “Do you want to tell me?” Rita asked.

I quickly brought her up to speed on my progress, or more accurately my lack thereof. I told her about the Barstow trip, downplaying the scene in the cafe, at least the rough stuff, but I shared my disappointment at not finding the teen drug center. I also explained Sol’s and my theory that the base was now a right-wing compound of some sort. Of course, I didn’t mention anything about the cops searching my office or about Mabel hiding the gun.

“That was Joyce on the phone just now,” I added.

“What did she say?”

“Sol is with the FBI right now, telling them what we discovered.” I paused for a moment, glanced at the ceiling and gathered a breath. “Joyce said she found out that the Jerobeam Corporation is an offshore company. The owners are hidden, but she’s sure the FBI will get to the bottom of it sooner or later.”

“What about that guy, Ben Moran?” Rita asked.

“Yeah, it seems Moran is not the penniless old geezer he’d like us to believe. He has extensive mining interests scattered around the Mojave Desert. Could be he owns the old borax mines the pilot told me about. I don’t know if that has anything to do with Robbie, but I did see a lot of earth-moving equipment at the base.”

“He must be tied in somehow. I mean to the base.”

“Maybe so, but that still doesn’t help finding Robbie,” I said.

I told Rita that I thought the ex-military base was a dead end, but down deep, I wasn’t so sure. There was too much going on at the Bright Spot Cafe to totally ignore the idea that the base somehow figured into Robbie’s escape. Moran held mining interests that could’ve made use of heavy equipment, and there was lots of it at the base. He was obviously the honcho at the cafe, and he had lied when he said Jane didn’t work there. Jane had said she lived at the drug center. She’d called it “the base.” All of that tied the cafe to the base, and I couldn’t shake the idea that the base was the teen drug center.

It’s true the men rushing out of the buildings weren’t teens, but they had guns and they could’ve been holding the youngsters under lock and key. But why would they do that? Is that how a Christian drug rehab center was supposed to work? I didn’t think so.

It was thin. Maybe my reasoning was flawed, but with Sol putting pressure on the FBI, I knew they’d raid the place. If Robbie was there, they would find him. I made a mental note to have Sol inform the FBI that I was still Robbie’s lawyer and that I wanted to be there when the raid went down. I needed to protect my client’s interests.

Rita interrupted my thoughts. “Jimmy, you’ll find him, I’m sure. By the way, while you were in Barstow I contacted Webster to officially let him know that I’m now your lawyer. All questions go through me.” She paused. “You do want me, don’t you, Jimmy? I mean-”

“Of course I want you.”

“Maybe you think I’m not experienced enough to be your lawyer at a time like this. Maybe Sol can get you someone better.”

Someone better? The thought of Sol’s nitwit nephew, Morty, flashed in my mind. But anyway, they’d drop me as a suspect in Hammer’s investigation as soon as the FBI raided the base where I felt in my gut Robbie was hiding. At that point, my need for a lawyer would become doubtful. However, one look at Rita sitting in my client chair, her legs crossed and skirt to mid-thigh, had me convinced. “Rita, yes, I want you to be my lawyer. I need you with me in this.”

“Thanks, Jimmy, for the confidence you’ve placed in me. It means a lot. I’ll do everything in my power to… well, you know. But now, I’ve got to give you my little speech, the speech I give to all my clients.”

“Cash up front?”

“Shut up,” she said playfully. “It’s about trust and being open, telling me everything, even if it’s embarrassing.” She sat straight, her eyes intent and brimming with sincerity. “Now listen…”

While she talked, the gun matter with Mabel ticked at the periphery of my mind.

I jumped on the freewayand headed north to the San Fernando Valley, ending up at Golden Valley College just off Reseda Boulevard in Van Nuys. I parked in lot A, reserved for the administration staff, and walked onto the campus following a pathway covered with shiny steel beams. The college was relatively new, built in the fifties, coming to life under Governor Brown’s massive higher education program. No ivy walls, trees, or even a blade of grass were in sight. In fact, the architecture-like a lot of stuff built around L.A. at that time-was reminiscent of Disney’s Tomorrowland or a chain of modern coffee shops; Googie’s came to mind.