Royal Flush (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 6) Read online

  Praise for ROYAL FLUSH, the SIXTH novel in the Jake Samson mystery series:

  “Great bar scenes, a wonderfully wry narrative, and the obvious nonsexual affection between Jake and Rosie will have readers clamoring for more.”

  —Library Journal

  “Ms. Singer is one of only three or four authors that I wouldn’t miss whatever she wrote.”

  —Over My Dead Body

  ROYAL FLUSH

  A Jake Samson Mystery

  BY

  SHELLEY SINGER

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Royal Flush

  Copyright © 1999 by Shelley Singer

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover by Andy Brown

  eBook ISBN: 9780990454311

  Originally published by Perseverance Press

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble electronic publication: June, 2014

  Digital Editions (epub and mobi formats) produced by

  eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Full Table of Contents

  – 1 –

  The boy was about nineteen. He had a black eye, a shaved head, brown boots with yellow stitching and red laces, a bomber jacket, muscles, and an attitude.

  When he’d showed up at my door with Deeanne, my first impulse was to spin him around and shove him back down the stairs. But heaven help us, he was Deeanne’s boyfriend, so there he was, sitting on my couch and glaring at me, while she begged me to help him.

  “See, Jake, I didn’t want to tell Artie I was coming to see you because he doesn’t, you know, have a lot of sympathy for, like, mistakes.” She shrugged her bony adolescent shoulders helplessly.

  She was talking about my oldest friend, Artie Perrine. Her godfather. Her keeper for the past half year while her parents were off somewhere on the other side of the world doing God knows what. Artie had told me she’d begged to stay with him and finish high school where she was. Being Artie, he’d agreed. But the more I heard about Deeanne, the more I thought her folks had planned the whole thing just to get away from her.

  And now she wanted me to keep secrets from him. I needed a minute to think, and the September heat gave me an excuse to get up and move around. I opened a window, then I opened the front door. When I turned back, the boy had taken off his jacket. He was wearing black suspenders, and the short sleeve of his black T-shirt didn’t cover the swastika tattoo.

  I stared at it, disgust rising in my throat like a fast-food meal. “Mistakes? What kind of mistakes are we talking about, here?”

  The kid jabbed a finger toward the ugly black symbol on his arm. “This kind.”

  I tore my eyes away. I had an almost irresistible urge to spit on the floor three times like my mother used to do. An old Yiddish spell against the evil eye.

  “Hey, man! I was drunk. My buddy told the guy to do it.”

  I controlled my impulse. I hate washing floors.

  “But you don’t believe me. Come on, Deeanne, let’s get out of here.” He started to stand up, but the movement was pretty halfhearted.

  Deeanne sighed and stroked his untattooed arm. He sat back again, sulky, James Dean but without the elfin charm.

  “Royal, he’s really okay. He’ll listen.”

  That was his name. Royal. Royal Subic. And this wasn’t the first time, if Artie’s poker-night complaints were any indication, that Deeanne had shown weird taste in boyfriends. Maybe he was a little more presentable than some of the others— clear blue eyes, military posture, and a strong chin— but as far as I was concerned, he had to be the worst of the bunch.

  “I think you should talk to Artie.”

  Deeanne shook her head hard, and her ragged shoulder-length blond hair played peekaboo with her ringed and studded ears. “You know what he’ll do? He’ll start yelling about Hitler. Like it wasn’t a million years ago and like he hasn’t lived here all his life or something.”

  “You think I’ve got more sympathy than he does for that crap?” I glared in the general direction of the boy’s tattoo. Not to mention what Rosie would think.

  “But you’re reasonable! And Royal’s not a skinhead anymore.”

  I glanced doubtfully at his bald head. He stared defiantly back at me.

  “I am, I’m still a skin. Dee doesn’t understand. I just don’t want to be an Aryan Command skin anymore.” He seemed to be making a fine point there. I had no idea what it was.

  Deeanne hesitated, frowning. Apparently she didn’t get the fine point, either, but she recovered nicely. “Really. He wants to stop them.”

  “Yes, you said that.” I gave Deeanne my best private eye scowl. “You need to know this— if I did decide to help I wouldn’t keep it a secret from Artie.”

  “I knew that, Jake. I knew you’d talk to him.”

  “The point is, you don’t want to.”

  She gazed at me, all pathetic Juliet. “He doesn’t know about Royal. He’s never met him.”

  I could believe that. It might be kind of fun to be there for the introduction, though. “Before we go any further, or stop altogether, what is it you want me to do?”

  “Royal, honey, you tell him?”

  He shrugged. “It’s like this. I joined Aryan Command because I thought it was kind of cool, the boots and tattoos and shit, like a club, only more exciting. Like a war, but without getting killed.”

  He stopped, chewing on a dirty-nailed thumb, groping for words. Dumb kid.

  I pushed. “And? How did that change?”

  “They’re connected, man. All over the place. Real Nazis in places like, well, Germany, and South America. And Washington.” I hoped he meant the state, not the city. I didn’t ask. “And they’re serious.”

  Tigris and Euphrates were bumping against my legs, meowing for their Friskies Buffet. “Come on, Royal, it’s dinnertime. Get to the point.”

  “Okay. They want to kill somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Preston Switcher.”

  The kid was loony. “The conservative radio guy?” Wasn’t he their pal?

  “Yeah. See, then they’ll hit the other side too. Burn down a black church or something, maybe kill a lefty. They got it all planned out. A giant, like, race war. Everywhere at once.”

  Big plans for a bunch of morons, but hey, morons have succeeded before. Suddenly, I wanted to close the door, close the window. I felt cold, so I sniped at the skinhead.

  “And you used to think that was a good idea, but now you don’t?”

  “Come on! I said they’re serious, man. I think they already killed a guy.” His voice shook on the word “killed,” and his lock on my eyes faltered. Royal’s newfound conscience seemed to have a personal angle.

  “Someone you knew?”

  “Someone who tried to leave, tried to quit.” That was it, then. This was the personal part, and maybe the only real part. He was scared. He wanted to quit and he was afraid to. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d made up the rest of it. The story sounded like a kid’s idea of making the world self-destruct. A movie.

  “I didn’t want to come here. I told her you wouldn’t care. But Deeanne said you would. She said you’re really smart and you can stop them.”

  Yeah. Smart. Smart enough to know when a dumb punk was trying to con me with flattery.

  I turned to Deeanne. “
How deep are you into this Aryan Command?”

  “Oh, like not at all, Jake. See, by the time I met Royal he was already, you know, disenchanted. I was at this bar they go to, a couple times for a few minutes. He didn’t want me to get to know the people.” But they’d met her.

  “Go to the police, Royal.”

  “No. I can’t do that. No cops. I want you to stop them.”

  “And exactly how would I do that? Shoot them all? Go to a Bund meeting and sign up? I don’t think I’d pass. You know, they say that under stress we all revert to our first language. I might call somebody a schmuck.”

  He looked puzzled, almost smiled, and decided he shouldn’t. “I don’t know. You could hang out. Hell, you got light-colored hair. And your nose…” He must have caught the look in my Jewish blues because he stopped right there. “I could be your snitch. Your ringer. And maybe I can get you into one of the meetings. It’s hard, though.”

  Hang out? Sure. Have a little beer. Do a little goose step.

  “When do they plan to start this war?”

  “Couple weeks, I guess.”

  “Let me think about it. And I’ll need to talk to my boss.” Did I mention Rosie Vicente’s my boss now? It’s a long story.

  “I can pay you a lot of money.”

  “We’ll talk about that part later.” Where would this guy get a lot of money?

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “At two o’clock tomorrow.”

  “Where can I reach you, Royal? In case we miss each other.”

  He just shook his head. He wasn’t ready to trust me with that information.

  I gave him my home number and my car-phone number. Like I trusted him. The kids stood to go, Deanne’s baggy flared jeans flopping around her calves.

  “Just a minute, Royal, I want to give you something.” They waited while I went to the bathroom and got a cardboard box of Band-Aids. I tossed the box to him.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Any time you’re with me, you keep that damned tattoo covered.”

  His grubby hand clutched the box tightly. For a minute, I expected him to throw it back at me. But Deeanne was quick. She took his arm and led him out the door.

  I watched them go, chewing my lip and wishing I still smoked.

  With any luck, the cops were already on top of this Aryan Command thing. For all I knew, and certainly for all Royal Subic knew, the FBI had a ringer in the local chapter. Or platoon, or whatever they called it. Of course, the FBI might not care about pulling Royal’s butt out of the fire, and there was Deeanne to worry about. If Royal’s buddies went after him, they might get her, on purpose or by accident, it didn’t matter which.

  But before I did anything, even began to try to make a decision, I needed to talk to Rosie. We’re gumshoeing together again now, after a long and not-so-wonderful break. The only difference is that these days I work for her, in a loose kind of way, instead of the other way around. No big deal, you understand. As the French say: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  It all started one night when Rosie and I were sitting in my Oakland living room drinking a glass of California red. Suddenly, she dropped the news on me. She was moving, running off to Marin County with a woman I didn’t like. I had been pretty upset. Rosie was my best friend and sometime investigative partner. She’d been my tenant for nearly ten years, close quarters too. My house was fifty paces down the path at the back of the lot. And she’d turned her little cottage— a studio slapped together in 1910— into a show-place. She was a professional carpenter who could, in a pinch, do plumbing, and that property had lots of pinches. On top of all that, she always paid her rent.

  We’d seen each other through a few hard times, she’d worked some jobs with me, and we’d taken care of each other too.

  How were we going to do that if she lived in Fairfax, Gateway to West Marin?

  “You can’t live there,” I told her. “I’ve seen the place. The sign says, Population 7,500.”

  “The sign exaggerates.”

  “I can’t hold the cottage for you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I need your help with the agency.”

  She gave me the look she always gave me when I used that word. I’m not licensed. “No, you don’t need me.”

  I did, but she wouldn’t listen. She poured herself another glass and waved the bottle in my direction. I shook my head. My stomach was upset.

  “Stop pouting, Jake.”

  Pouting? I never pout. I picked up Euphrates and nuzzled his ear. He purred.

  There was more. She sipped her wine and looked at the ceiling. That made me really nervous. There’s nothing up there but a few cracks, a few webs. She was avoiding my eyes. “I got a job. In Marin.”

  “You can do carpentry anywhere.”

  “A PI job. With an investigator.”

  This was too much. “You’re going to work for someone else?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “I want my license. I have to work for a licensed PI. And you refuse—”

  “Damn right. I’m not interested in being some guy’s apprentice for six thousand hours, or six million, or whatever it is, just to get a piece of paper that says I can do what I’ve been doing all along.” I don’t believe in pieces of paper. They clutter up the world. Computers are cluttering up something too, but I can’t figure out what it is.

  “Well, I am. Interested. And it’s not a guy.”

  “I don’t care if it’s a suckling pig.”

  She laughed. “Jake, come on!” I couldn’t help it. I grinned back. I do love the fool, after all.

  The years were slipping by, she said. She wasn’t getting any younger.

  I told her I thought she was. It didn’t work.

  She said she didn’t want to be schlepping two-by-fours when the hot flashes kicked in. It was time, maybe past time, to set herself up in a business she could stay with.

  What could I do? Nothing there I could argue with. So I told her to go with God. That was five years ago. She’d lived with the woman I didn’t like for three of those years until she decided she didn’t like her either. I never said, “I told you so,” but she still didn’t come back to my side of the bridge. She found her own place, got her license, and opened up an office in San Rafael. Sunny San Rafael. County seat and the only place in the county that bore any resemblance to a city. Population 50,000.

  And meanwhile, during those five years, I sat around the house in Oakland watching my cats Tigris and Euphrates slip fatly into middle age while I tried not to, running through six hopeless tenants, working not very much, chasing women, pouting some more, and harping at Rosie to come back to the East Bay, which she would not.

  I was doing a bit of harping one night not too long ago, in my favorite Thai restaurant, when Rosie came up with another idea.

  “Sell the house, Jake. Move to Marin. Come to work for me.”

  I guess I must have stared at her because she burst out laughing.

  “Why not? I worked for you. Now it’s your turn.”

  I started to sing, “I cried for you, now it’s your turn to cry over me…”

  She waited, patient, an ascending eyebrow, a condescending smile.

  I shook my head. “I lived in Marin once. My wife left me.” Of course, that wasn’t Marin’s fault.

  “You don’t have one now, so she can’t leave you.”

  “I’m used to Oakland. Berkeley.”

  “And too old and soft to change? Flexibility gone to pot, along with your once-flat gut?”

  “Hey!” That was too much. A small spare tire, perhaps.

  She grabbed my hand. “Sorry. You’re still gorgeous. But you’d love it, I know. And for God’s sake, it’s twenty minutes away!”

  “Half an hour.”

  “Give or take. Sell the house. Join me in Marvelous Marin.”

  “I love my neighborhood— don’t you miss Rockridge?” Oops. What was that sudden funny feeling in my gut? An itch for something
different?

  “Sure. But Marin has whole towns like this. And a tax base too.”

  My turn for the eyebrow routine. “Snobbery? From my politically correct Rosie?”

  “I’ve never been politically correct. And I don’t think it’s snobbery to want to live someplace where you can forget to lock the door and where you can walk anywhere at night without a black belt.”

  “You’re the one that’s getting soft, Vicente.” And I missed her like crazy. Obviously, she missed me too, and that was nice. We made an effort to get together often, but that’s what it was, an effort. Not a ten-second walk down the path.

  “Could be.” She plucked at her fat-free waistline. “But think about it. The agency’s doing great. I could use the help.”

  She wasn’t going to cave. That left only one option I could see— the caving would have to be mine. “Maybe I can find a place with a cottage?”

  “If you did, maybe I’d move.”

  So I went home to think about it, and found thinking about it fairly easy.

  For one thing, I did like Marin. It is both cosmopolitan and beautiful— an unbeatable combination. For another thing, it was not like my “agency” could not be moved. Thanks to my mother’s will, I had a small but steady income that meant I only had to take cases I really wanted anyway. For a third thing, there were my weekly poker games. Lately, they’d been more like monthly. Two of my poker buddies had moved away in the past year, one to Seattle and one to D.C. Of the two who’d stuck around, one of them had always lived in Marin and traveled to my house for games: Artie Perrine, my best friend next to Rosie. Artie ran an investigative magazine, a slick monthly called Probe; he’d given me a press card years ago so I could fake my way into places an unlicensed PI might want to go. I’d given him tips about stories a few times, and once spent a couple weeks hanging out at his mildewed Mill Valley canyon getting his nephew out of some trouble that involved a dead guy he found. That was one of the first cases I’d worked on back when I first decided to parlay a brief, disastrous, and very youthful career on the Chicago Police Department into an occasional moneymaker as an unlicensed PI.

  So that made portable work, two very good friends living across the Bay, a crippled poker game in Oakland, and a feeling of restlessness I hadn’t admitted even to Rosie.