The Shake
he said something that really pissed me off, and I punched him in the face. It was the first time in my life I’d ever really slugged someone. It wasn’t like in the movies. I hit him as hard as I could and I broke my hand. It really hurt! And of course, the asshole got a good laugh out of it. So now I spit. That way I don’t break any bones.”“You know, Karla, I like that about you.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“Even when you’re furious, you’re never completely out of control.”
She smiled, seemingly a little embarrassed, as if she wasn’t quite sure to what extent it was meant as a compliment.
“Can you drive?” I asked.
She started the car, put it in gear, but gave it too much gas, spinning the tires in the dirt. She backed off immediately and started again, more slowly.
“You know,” I said, “he might have had a gun. You had no way of knowing. In the future, if you should ever feel the need to drive away, if you feel it’s your only alternative, then drive away.”
“I thought I could handle it. You know, take care of myself, be the tough girl.”
I thought again of Chuang-tzu’s praying mantis. “You’re tough enough, Karla. But strength is always relative to the context. He was a lot bigger than you. In situations like that, you have to be smart, too.”
She was quiet for a minute. “He was bigger than you, too, Shake, but you...”
“You made a mistake with him. He made a similar mistake with me. Who knows? One day I might make the same mistake with someone else. We all tend to take too much for granted.”
Karla drove in silence for a few minutes. “What you did to him... he didn’t have a chance against you. Is this one of the things I’m not supposed to ask questions about?”
“Why don’t you turn right on Jackson and just drive for a while. We’ll take the long way home tonight.”
Chapter 11
I wanted to give Karla some time to think about what had happened. If she decided to quit, it was better that she do it now. I could cut her loose with a relatively easy mind. I decided not to call her for a week, or so. In the meantime, I could pay a visit to Hamilton Investigations, LLC.
With Richardson, I had been dealing with a man who had embraced corruption as a way of life, an all-around scum bag, someone practiced at intimidation, using it whenever it served his purposes. Violence, or its threat, was an integral part of his normal business strategy, maybe even a source of amusement. But intimidation isn’t always the shortest path between two points. Hamilton Investigations called for a more discreet approach.
A few minutes on the Internet followed by a few nights of observation told me that Hamilton Investigations was a one-man operation, run out of the owner’s home. David Hamilton, divorced, lived by himself in a modest house in a nondescript residential neighborhood just off Marconi Avenue. He seemed to spend most of his free time at a local watering hole, a bar called The Intermission.
It was time to take a closer look. I rode my bike to Hamilton’s house, passing by The Intermission on the way to make sure his car was in the bar’s parking lot. There wasn’t any activity on the street around his house, so I coasted up the driveway, opened the gate to the backyard and rolled my bike inside. The door on the side of the garage was locked, but the handle was old and wobbly. I turned it until it stopped against the lock mechanism, then continued to turn slowly. The lock gave a little as it bent, then snapped. The latch bolt was still in the lock plate, so I got out my knife, slid the tip into the space between the door and frame, and worked the latch bolt free.
The garage was a mess. I looked around briefly, satisfied that the accumulated junk wasn’t work-related, then tried the door to the house. It wasn’t locked. Unlike the garage, the kitchen was tidy. A few recently washed dishes were stacked in a drainer next to the sink. Across the living room, a hall led to three bedrooms. The front bedroom was Hamilton’s office. An old, beat up seven-drawer desk sat in front of the window. On the right side of the desk, two armchairs took up the remainder of the space along the front wall. On the adjacent wall, a movie poster hung over a coffee table: After the Thin Man, with William Powell and Myrna Loy. Two filing cabinets stood in the corner opposite the armchairs. I opened the top drawer of one of the cabinets and found a lifetime supply of paper clips, ballpoint pens, custom printed stickies, and other office essentials. The paper clips were particularly well stocked; enough to last a vampire’s lifetime.
I closed the drawer and tried the other filing cabinet. This one held hanging folders labeled with clients’ names. I found the one labeled “Arnaud,” pulled it out and sat down at the desk. There wasn’t much in the file: copies of a few receipts, the invoices Francine had paid, and two pages of yellow binder paper with hand-written notes like: 1st meet: 3/11. Husband killed. Dean Arnaud, cop. Drugs? Innocent? And so on. From what I could glean, it looked like Francine had wanted Hamilton to look into her husband’s death for the purpose clearing him of any drug-related wrongdoing.
According to Francine, the reason her husband had been in Vacaville had nothing to do with drugs. He was there looking for their missing niece, her older sister’s kid, who had disappeared several months earlier. A photo of the niece—it looked like a high school yearbook portrait—was clipped to the folder, “Miriam Moore” printed on the back. That much of what Richardson had told me was apparently true. From Hamilton’s notes, it looked like Francine