Poisoned Justice Read online

  “Depends on what?”

  “On the odds of you buying me a bottle of that eighteen-year-old Jameson you’re drinking.” He grinned as I rolled a mouthful of whiskey over my tongue. I obviously failed to hide my intense pleasure. The liquid velvet matched the blood-red drapes framing the dark paneling of the Hyatt Regency lounge.

  “Why Jameson?”

  “Because, Riley, you’re my favorite mick. And while you don’t know shit from Shinola when it comes to baseball, I figure you know Irish whiskey.” He was right. I kept track of the Giants, but that was about it for baseball. It didn’t help that they hadn’t won a pennant since ’62, and this season was more of the same. Football was more to my liking, and I followed Notre Dame out of ethnic loyalty. The Fighting Irish excelled at cracking skulls—a more watchable endeavor than swinging at curve balls. I love this country, but America’s pastime is too tedious for me. The bartender at the hotel lounge, who I’d become pals with on the first night of the convention, stopped polishing the glass he was holding. He threw me a sideways smile.

  For the past two days, I’d settled for the cheap American stuff. But this being the end of the convention, I had splurged. After sitting down next to Sergio, I’d asked the burly redheaded barkeep if he had any Bushmills or Tullamore. He didn’t. But he reached under the bar and pulled out a bottle of Jameson Limited Reserve and gave me a conspiratorial wink. Whiskey drinkers can sense their own kind, and the hint of a brogue let me know that we came from the same stock. A shot was one thing, but a whole bottle was going to set me back nearly forty bucks. I figured it might be worth it.

  “You drive a hard bargain for a dago,” I replied. I wasn’t much for ethnic slurs, but Sergio was the sort who used insults as expressions of endearment. I’d been around enough tough guys to play my part. A large part of succeeding as a cop or businessman was being able to meet people on their own terms. And growing up in the ethnic hodgepodge of Potrero Hill, you had to figure out to say “Doamna”—not “Missus”—Cosmescu and “Pani” Kowalski and “Frau” Müller, or get smacked for being disrespectful.

  “That’s why we own the East Coast. Give us a couple years and every neighborhood in California will have a place serving decent cannelloni. The Spaniards dropped the ball when they arrived. You can’t bring culture to the wilderness by building a bunch of goddamn missions.” He paused to quickly bless himself with a condensed sign of the cross to avoid God’s wrath. “Any paesano knows it takes food and wine. We’ll civilize this place.”

  Even though we’re 350 miles apart, I’d gotten to know Sergio through these annual gatherings of exterminators. Like me, he refused to call himself a “pest control operator.” Sergio lacked social graces, but he wasn’t a phony—and that’s worth something in today’s world. They might call the guy who throws the switch a “State electrician” but he’s an executioner in my book. A janitor isn’t a custodian and a strip joint isn’t a gentleman’s club. I hate it when people try to hide behind fancy labels. If you’re not proud of your work, do something else.

  Sergio DiMaggio had a thriving extermination agency in LA. But he probably would’ve traded the whole thing for evidence that he was related to the Yankee Clipper. Joe DiMaggio was born and raised in California, but despite Sergio’s best efforts he hadn’t been able to link the two families. And he’s never forgiven the San Francisco Seals—DiMaggio’s minor league club—for selling the young centerfielder to the Yankees.

  At last year’s convention on my turf, we’d ducked out for a Giants game. After a day of listening to chemical salesmen lying about their products in air-conditioned meeting rooms with fake crystal chandeliers, I was getting bored and testy at the same time. I figured the ocean winds blowing into Candlestick Park would revitalize me. Besides, Sergio had nearly converted to being a Giants fan since the team had two Italian pitchers, Pete Falcone and John D’Acquisto.

  While Sergio knocked back a beer per inning, he told me about his adding a crime-scene cleanup service to his business. His story was more interesting than the game, which was a pitchers’ duel, meaning that even less was happening than usual. Even in our business, it takes a hard-case fellow to eat a bratwurst with sauerkraut and gobs of mustard while explaining that employees who are used to wallowing in roaches can be readily convinced to scrub brains off walls and tear up blood-soaked carpets. “They’ll roll up their sleeves if there’s good money to be had,” Sergio explained. He knew that clients paid well to get rid of their vermin, so he figured a grieving widow would “pay just about anything to get rid of the splattered leftovers of her suicidal husband.” And he was right, which worked out well for his employees and customers—but mostly for Sergio.

  “Okay Sergio, you know I’m good for the Jameson. When can your people let me into the room and where is it?”

  “Let’s see. The coroner should have the body bagged and out of there by one o’clock, and my crew is supposed to get here around one thirty. It’ll be an easy job for them, as the hotel management tells me it was a nonviolent death. No blood or guts to wipe up.”

  “That’s fine. I’ll just cool my heels for an hour. So, what’s the room number?” I asked, grabbing a cocktail napkin to jot down the information.

  “You get that when I get my lunch.”

  “Now I’m buying your lunch?” I crumpled the napkin and tossed it into the wastebasket behind the bar.

  “Think of it as a down payment on the whiskey.”

  “You’re a slimy bastard, Sergio.” And he was, but I liked the big-hearted slob.

  “Yeah, but in our business a guy encounters all kinds of unpleasantness. You shouldn’t be offended.”

  “But I’m used to eliminating pests, not feeding them meals.”

  “Riley, my friend, I hardly deserve such an insult.” He put his hand on his chest. “After all, your whole life has depended on vermin. Even before entering the noble field of extermination, eh?”

  “You win,” I said and waved at the waitress, who sidled over to take our order.

  Sergio was referring to my earlier days as a beat cop working my way up to detective on the San Francisco Police Department. I’d told him about my former life yesterday over breakfast at a diner. Between mouthfuls of greasy eggs, crispy bacon, and crunchy hash browns—a perfect breakfast compared to the prissy omelets filled with asparagus and mushrooms they served at the Hyatt—I told him that the transition from police work to running my father’s company wasn’t such a big deal. I’d just switched from one kind of pest to another.

  Something about the brooding clouds, Sergio’s sympathetic eyes, and both of us being second-generation immigrants put me at ease. Our lingering was further encouraged by Sergio’s obvious admiration for the waitress, who kept bending over to fill our coffee cups while nearly falling out of her D-cups. Sergio left a dollar tip to show his appreciation. At least she gave us a reason to settle into the vinyl booth, our elbows propped on the gold-flecked Formica. I didn’t usually talk about my past, although if people cared to, they could piece together the not-so-pretty details of my being run off the force, working as a private dick for a couple years, and then taking over the family business when my father died.

  We got drenched on the five-block walk back to the hotel. I knew winter rains were common, but a September soaking was something of an oddity in this part of the state. At least it gave me the chance to rag him about “sunny California.” He asked me if I was any happier when the sun broke out later in the day and turned LA into a sauna. I told him it just furthered my belief that southern California was overrated.

  CHAPTER 3

  When our lunch arrived, Sergio and I moved from the bar to the table furthest from the door. Even the sunlight in LA felt fake, reflecting off the marble floors in the lobby after pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows that framed gaudy pink bougainvilleas and a turquoise pool. The lounge’s darkness fit my mood and hid the unappetizing aspects of lunch. The club sandwiches were slathered in mayonnaise and the fries
were soggy, but that’s what you get at a hotel. You might get a real drink or a decent steak, but breakfast and lunch were afterthoughts. And unlike the bartender, who evidently cared about his craft, the girl who brought our food was a gum-chewing blonde whose slouch and eye-rolling showed obvious disdain for us or her work. Probably both.

  Sergio pressed me for more about why I was interested in the corpse, wanting to know if it had to do with my time on the force. I was reluctant, but he’d become a friend of sorts. A fellow something-American working his ass off because he took his obligations seriously. He loved and lived deeply. Sergio had told me all about his family, his beautiful but volatile wife, his plans to one day turn DiMaggio Pest Services over to his son if only the little shit would acquire a sense of responsibility, and his dreams of opening a café in the heart of the San Pedro neighborhood. So I figured it wouldn’t hurt to reveal a bit more about myself, keeping the ugliest parts for some other day. Or never. If he really wanted to know, he could check out the San Francisco Chronicle headlines from the summer of ’69.

  “By the time I quit the force, I’d made detective. I was the department expert on postmortem insects. You know, like using flies and beetles to figure out how, where, and when a victim bought it. I didn’t crack many cases this way, but we got some important leads.”

  “Like what?” Sergio was stuffing a triangle of club sandwich into his mouth. For a guy hoping to open a restaurant, he sure didn’t seem picky about what he ate. I kept the butterfly-and-mafioso story for Tommy, but there were plenty of others.

  “I remember the time a suspect’s alibi collapsed when the maggots feasting on the victim’s brains were three days behind those setting up house in his mouth and nose. Turns out his business partner poisoned him at his house in the middle of the week and stuffed the body into his car trunk for a couple of days, where the flies found easy pickings. Then he hauled the corpse up to their office on the weekend when nobody was around. That was the hard part. The easy part was propping him in a chair, putting his hand around a .38, and blowing out the guy’s brains. The staged suicide might’ve worked, but a few enterprising flies found their way into the office through an open window. So, when I looked at the mess on Monday morning, the ages of the maggots on the splattered brains didn’t match those who’d set up house in his face.”

  “That’s a damn good story.” Sergio nodded approvingly. “But I thought the universities had experts who picked up a few bucks with that sort of stuff.”

  “They do. But the cops and faculty at UC Berkeley don’t play nicely. Hell, even the entomologists over there were peaceniks. For the most part the professors hated cops, and we didn’t have a whole lot of interest in asking for their help. So I learned everything I could about maggots.”

  “Okay, but why you?” He was working his way through the soggy fries, although with less enthusiasm than he’d had for the sandwich. At least the man had some sense of taste.

  “It’s kind of convoluted.”

  He looked at his watch, a gaudy gold-plated number, and shrugged. “We got time. Go ahead.”

  “I wasn’t what you’d call a ‘good kid’ in high school. In fact, I was hell on wheels. If there hadn’t been that thing about welcoming sinners, the nuns would’ve kicked me out of St. Teresa’s.”

  “I know what you mean. My kid is like that.” Sergio nodded, hoping to salvage the fries by adding ketchup.

  “In my freshman year, Father Fortier thought Golden Gloves would provide an ‘outlet for my anger.’ But it mostly taught me how to take a punch and the satisfaction of beating up people.” Sergio smiled knowingly. I’d given up on my sandwich and fries, only to find that even the pickle was limp.

  “How’s that add up to an interest in insects?”

  “During my renegade years, my father did what he could to stay connected with me. I rejected what I called his Catholic mumbo jumbo and old-fashioned ideas about character and virtue. But for some reason I shared his interest in collecting insects. Maybe it was something that didn’t require us to argue. In any case, after beating the Japs in the Pacific, he came back with two things.”

  “Which were?” Sergio was evidently enjoying my story, because he caught the bartender’s eye, ordered us a couple of beers—and put them on his own tab.

  “About twenty cigar boxes filled with the most incredible insects you can imagine. He had Goliath beetles the size of my fist, walking sticks a foot long and as thick as your thumb, and butterflies with wings that looked like some acid-trip junkie had painted them.”

  “What was the other thing he brought back?”

  “Experience with insecticides. He’d run mosquito-control programs in New Guinea, the Marianas, and Guam.” The beer was ice cold, served in a frosted mug with a perfect head. Almost good enough to make up for the lunch.

  “So he opened his own extermination business, eh?” Sergio paused and dropped his voice to a lower pitch, giving his best imitation of a newsreel announcer: “Uncle Sam trains American men for productive work at home.”

  “Yeah, something like that. I wasn’t so keen on having to work for the family business, but collecting was entirely different. While he was making money killing cockroaches and fleas, he kept building his collection with insects from all over the Bay Area. He got me hooked. There’s something about finding that perfect specimen. It’s another world, and I needed someplace to escape.”

  “Crappy neighborhood?”

  “Not really. At least Potrero Hill wasn’t any worse than lots of the city. Better in some ways. And my parents tried hard. But being first-generation immigrants, they embarrassed me with their accents, foods, and stories from the old country.”

  “You should’ve tried being Italian. My family still believes they’re in Assisi.”

  “That’s a sweet irony, Sergio. You make your living poisoning insects, rats, and mice, while the blessed Francis is the patron saint of animals.”

  “Yeah, life does that sometimes. So, if you were a rebel without a cause, how’d you end up as a cop?” He took a deep swig of beer and muttered that whoever was in charge of the food needed some lessons from whoever was running the lounge. Maybe there was hope for his culinary aspirations after all.

  “The courts had seen enough of me by the time I finished high school. I got nailed for stealing a car the summer after I graduated, and the judge told me I could enlist in the army, apply to the police academy, or spend six months in juvenile hall. If I’d been a month older, I’d have done real time. I picked the force and worked my way up to detective.”

  “And kept collecting bugs, eh?” Having drained his beer, Sergio held up his hand to stop my reply, got up to nab a toothpick from the dispenser on the bar, and settled back into his chair to attend to his dental hygiene.

  “Yeah. Even when I was being a real jerk as a teen, I still went out with my father on weekends to look for new stuff. I started my own collection when I got on the force, and he’d go out with me when he wasn’t working. In the evenings, mounting and labeling the specimens was my way to unwind. I could just sip whiskey, concentrate on this other world, and forget about the streets. Those were good times.” I took a deep drink and stared into my past. The room was dark and quiet, and I savored my daydream for a while until Sergio broke the spell.

  “A badass cop armed with a butterfly net. If your buddies only knew.” He chuckled and punctuated his cleverness by shifting the toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

  “They did. Sort of. In my rookie year, my partner came by my house and saw the display cases with insects. He ragged on me and told the other guys. At first they made fun of the ‘bug guy,’ but over time they brought me all sorts of interesting specimens in pickle jars and pill bottles, wanting to know about them. Mostly it was great.”

  “Mostly?” His eyebrow arched, as if he were a reporter catching a politician hedging on a campaign promise. I indulged him.

  “Well, there was the sergeant who brought in what he thought was a tick th
at he’d found in his son’s beard. The kid had been out the night before at a prayer meeting. It was one of those churches where the teens sing hymns around a campfire while some youth minister strums a guitar. The old man was a holy roller and figured his son must’ve picked it up walking through the beach grass. A good theory, except.”

  “Except?”

  “It was a crab louse looking for a new home. He didn’t pick it up going down to the beach. The kid picked it up going down on some girl. Pubic hair, beard—any port in a storm when you’re a louse.”

  Sergio gave a belly laugh, leaned back in his chair, and resumed scraping his teeth. “Did you tell the sergeant?”

  “Nah. Once the kid moved on to real sex, I figured he’d pick up the clap and learn his lesson.”

  “So that’s why you’re interested in seeing the body this afternoon. An ex-cop checking out a corpse for old times’ sake?” Sergio started working the toothpick around his upper molars, like he was trying to flush a rat from a drainpipe with a broomstick.

  “Yep. I still like trying to make sense of the insects at crime scenes. My old buddies call me to help out sometimes, off the record. So I like to keep up, learn new stuff. And I’d like to see which of my little friends answer the dinner bell in LA.”

  “You know, even the maggots down here dress in leisure suits.” Like me, Sergio was not a slave to fashion and had little love for popular culture. He dropped the toothpick into his shirt pocket, having either succeeded or given up on the molar project.