The Evil That Men Do

  Boson Books by Robert D. Rodman

  The Evil That Men Do

  Where Evil Lurks

  THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

  A Dagny Taggart Jamison Mystery

  Robert D. Rodman

  Boson Books

  Raleigh

  Published by Boson Books

  An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

  ISBN (ebook) 978-0-917990-89-2

  (print) 978-0-917990-87-8

  Copyright 2010 Robert Rodman

  All rights reserved

  For information contact

  C&M Online Media Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  Tel: (919) 233-8164

  e-mail: cm@cmonline.com

  http://www.bosonbooks.com

  Designed by Meagan Williford

  Prologue

  I was running dead out when the bell rang and I wondered why they kept chasing me. Recess was over—that’s what the bell meant—but still they chased me and I was afraid. I sprinted into the school building. They pursued me relentlessly through empty, crisscrossing, unending corridors.

  The ringing changed to a growling. I was my adult self on a beach at night—barefoot and naked, and my body was whole—rushing to reach the red beacon and safety of a lifeguard hut. The sand was loose and deep. It yielded beneath my feet and oozed between my toes. My legs churned in the slow motion of dreams; my guts ached and my chest heaved with exhaustion.

  The growling drew closer, grew louder. Over my shoulder, their apish faces—sickening blobs of flesh—bobbed in the sickly green moonlight. Desperately, I launched myself at the red light and I was afloat in midair. I touched the blessed light. The growling faded, and then it merged with the buzz of my alarm clock.

  I awoke terrified, drenched in sweat, my heart pounding. The Dream, again. Would it never stop plaguing me? Same plot, different scene. The school was new, but the matrix of corridors factored naturally into The Dream. Freud would have loved it, and he could have the damn thing.

  Time had passed. The case was closed. The bad were punished, the good rewarded. More or less. Still, I couldn’t quite close the psychic curtain on the final scene, where I had sprinted so desperately for my life, in an Oz-like world complete with flying monkeys.

  “Write up the whole case, little sis,” urged big brother John, when I complained bitterly to him about the nocturnal reruns. “Wallow in it. Share it with friends. Psyches are like vampires; they abhor the light. Maybe yours will tire of the dream game.”

  Not a bad idea, so here’s what I did last summer.

  Chapter 1

  I’m Dagny Taggart Jamison. Nine months out of the year, I live and work as a private investigator in Raleigh, North Carolina. But in the summer, when business slows and kudzu grows, I flee the soggy, sullen air of the North Carolina piedmont and fly to breezy Santa Barbara, California. There I live with, and work for, my brother John, who owns and runs a P.I. firm.

  I got my start as an apprentice in John’s private investigation firm while attending UCLA. “The profession needs more women,” John said. “Half the female P.I.s in the world are fictional.” To John’s disappointment, I moved to Raleigh to open my own practice after one year at the UCLA law school. It was a guy thing. By that I mean I was fool enough to follow my law professor boyfriend when he took a job at the University of North Carolina. He dumped me for a Carolina coed with big boobs and long vowels. Ouch!

  The summer of the flying monkeys, as I’ve come to think of it, I went to Santa Barbara in June, a month shy of my 30th birthday. (I was born on the day that Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind.) I was barely inside the door of John’s house, and still gasping from a brotherly bear hug, when John laid my first assignment on me. I had to interview a Chilean witness to an automobile accident. This required a Spanish interpreter, who was to come to John’s office at 8:00 the next morning.

  I woke eagerly at six, my body under the illusion that it had slept late. I jogged on the beach to the beat of the Pacific surf and by 7:30 I was fighting Monday morning traffic in my rented blue Ford Taurus.

  John’s office is located in a narrow three-story downtown building with a rust-stained stucco exterior. The sparse, wilted landscaping gives the building a lean, mean look, the perfect location for a knuckle-cracking P.I. to hang out and obsess over curios from the Isle of Malta like crosses and falcons. Neither John nor I fit the stereotype, but we’d once been to Malta with our parents, so maybe that counts.

  I parked the car in John’s stall beneath the building, took the stairs two at a time to the third floor, and walked briskly along the dully lit corridor to the office. John had proudly stenciled both our names on the door when I got my California P.I. license some years back. He said he didn’t have any reason to change it since I worked for him summers, so there it was:

  John Galt Jamison, P.I.

  Dagny Taggart Jamison, P.I.

  I’d just gotten out my key when someone stepped out of the elevator at the other end of the corridor. She came toward me, checking office numbers as she neared. “Oh, damn,” I thought. I’d gotten to work early because I wanted to have some minutes alone to get my act in gear, but this, I feared, was a too-prompt Spanish interpreter.

  I figured I’d make the best of it, so I stood by the office door. When she drew near I tried some Spanish I’d learned in a night class, just to be friendly.

  “Buenos días. Cómo está usted?”

  She looked quizzically at me and fired back some Spanish. Leastwise, I thought it was Spanish. She sure didn’t say “Muy bien, gracias, y usted?” the only answer I’d ever heard in class. Hell, she might have been speaking Maltese.

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand you. I’ve only had a bit of Spanish, in night school, actually.”

  “I know I look Latina, but we’d do best in English,” she said in the flat, unaccented English of a native Californian. She adjusted her shoulder bag and shifted her weight to one leg.

  I’d been so preoccupied I hadn’t actually looked closely at her. She was beautiful. She had light brown flawless skin that exaggerated the size of her dark chocolate eyes. Her hair was ebony, straight, and shining with good health. She wore it in a natural cut, parted in the middle, flowing over ears and shoulders, a perfect frame for a lovely, oval face. She did look Hispanic, as she said, but there was something else there, maybe some Asian.

  “Oh, I can’t do much with Spanish, but I thought given your profession, I’d see if I’d learned anything. I guess I haven’t.”

  Again the quizzical look, and the trace of a smile, and a twinkle that brightened her somber face for an instant. “You’re funny. Sparky didn’t mention a sense of humor. Can you figure out what I do just by looking me over? You know, like Sherlock Holmes could do.”

  A flashbulb went off in my head. “Wait a sec. I think I’m confusing you with someone else—someone I was expecting to meet. You're talking about Elaine Sparks, right? Goes by Sparky, and hates the name Elaine?”

  “Yeah, that's her. She’s a good friend of mine from the university. She said you practically saved her life last year. According to her, you’re the best private detective in California. She said you found the man who murdered her parents and killed him in a fight, but I don’t know…”

  Her tone of voice said, “…but you look too scrawny to win a fight with a man.”

  I said, “It wasn’t a wrestling match. I’m afraid I had to shoot him.”

  She grimaced. “Anyway, you’re her hero.”

  “So Sparky sent you, which means you’re not the Spanish interpreter I’m supposed to meet.” I looked over my shoulder hoping the real Spanish interpreter would materialize and make me look les
s of an idiot, but no such luck. “Can we start over? I’m Dagny Jamison.” I held out my hand. “You caught me off guard just now.”

  She gripped my hand firmly. “I’m Lucy Navarro.”

  “Let’s go inside.” I unlocked John’s office. “Why don’t you sit down while I put on some coffee?” I nodded toward a chair reserved for clients. I opened the blinds to let in the morning light, and busied myself with the coffee maker. “How did you know I’d be here? I just got into town last night.”

  Lucy put her bag down beside the chair, sat down, crossed her legs, and tried to relax. I could read tension in her face now. She said, “I thought you were from here. You’re in the phone book, you know.”

  I didn’t know, but it was all part of John’s ongoing schemes to get me to work with him full-time. He calls the agency Jamison & Jamison though I have no idea how he accounts for the missing Jamison nine months out of the year.

  “I’m just here for the summer,” I explained. Boiling water began drizzling over the coffee, filling my nostrils with the aroma of the brew.

  Lucy fidgeted in her chair. I took my seat behind the desk, propped my forearms on the desktop, and leaned toward her. “How can I help you?”

  She began to speak staccato-like, taking short breaths as she ran her phrases together. “I’m sorry if I acted like a smart ass. I’m just so upset—something awful’s happened and I don’t know what to do. My friends can’t help me and my parents think I’m crazy but I know I’m not. I tried to make an appointment with you. I called your office all weekend, but all I got was the machine. I was going to leave a message, but whenever I think of Judy I start to cry, and I didn’t want to leave a snively message so I hung up.”

  She sniveled, sucked in a deep breath, and exhaled with a sigh. “I figured you went to work early, so I came over here to wait for you. You’re my only hope.”

  The coffee finished brewing just as she wound down. The edge was off her and her shoulders slumped.

  “Would you like some coffee?” I offered.

  She shook her head, took a couple more breaths, and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me what happened?”

  “You probably figured out I go to UC Isla Vista. I’m a graduate student there, in Anthropology. I study the Churok Native Americans, you know, Indians. It’s a natural for me because my grandfather is Churok.”

  “The Churoks, don’t they have a big reservation along the Yacuma River?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, my best friend and roommate is—was—Judy Raskin. She was studying the Churoks too, only she was way ahead of me. She actually went to live on the reservation for a couple of years. The Churoks really loved her; she was so good to them. She worked in the schools, and helped the boys and girls study for college. Everyone loved her so much…”

  Lucy began sobbing and reached into her bag for a tissue.

  “I’m sorry,” she said between sobs, “I can’t help it when I think of Judy, but I want to tell you something about her, so you’ll understand why I want you to help me.”

  “Take your time. I want to hear your whole story,” I said.

  “Okay, here’s what she did,” said Lucy, composing herself. “She got the chief to let her tape record the Churok rituals. Nobody was ever allowed to do that before, and they aren’t written down. And that was so important that she could get her degree from it, you know, her Ph.D.”

  “So, that’s a lot of work, I guess.”

  Lucy shifted in her chair, now composed enough to speak earnestly. “Oh, it is. She recorded dozens of hours, and had to write it all down, too, afterwards. It was brilliant research—for all the good it did her!”

  Her face lost some of its animation. She tucked her feet under the chair, looking more and more uncomfortable with every tick of the large clock on the wall behind her.

  “Judy completed her research and wrote her dissertation. The final requirement for the Ph.D. is to give a talk about the research in front of all the faculty and students, who may then ask questions. The talk is called ‘the defense,’ because you have to defend the originality and worth of the dissertation.”

  I knew about that because I once had a teacher at UCLA who was actually a graduate student. He told us weenie undergrads about oral exams—we had some jokes about that—and about defenses. The week of his own defense, he was so freaking nervous he couldn’t lecture, so he read from the textbook.

  “Judy’s defense was last Friday. Everyone came to the large lecture hall for her talk. We friends of Judy came to hear her, and to rag her a little, calling her ‘doctor,’ and stuff. But really we were there to support her. The advisor is usually the last to arrive, and comes all smiles to the defense to share in the glory. When Professor Akrich entered the room, he wasn’t smiling—he was nearly snarling. He had both Judy’s dissertation and a sheaf of papers with him. He didn’t waste any time. He stepped to the rostrum and began speaking real quietly.”

  Lucy had her lower lip between her teeth and was worrying it like a puppy at the fringe of a rug.

  “I have a tape recording of what happened," she said. "I wanted to record Judy’s defense so when mine came up, I could review how she did. I thought she’d be brilliant, and I’d pick up some pointers. But just from the way Dr. Akrich looked, I could see something unusual was coming down.”

  She pulled a small tape recorder from her purse. It was gold in color, and about half the size of a paperback book. She set it on the desk between us, switched it on, and adjusted the volume. After some seconds of audience noise, a man’s voice that I at once found whiny began to speak.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, until a few moments ago I was prepared to welcome you to one of our university’s oldest traditions, the defense of the doctoral dissertation. For those of you not familiar with Miss Raskin’s work, it would have been a compelling story of ancient Churok history, as recounted by the Churoks themselves. Candidate Raskin collected, organized, and analyzed an extensive oral history, transcribing it meticulously as it was spoken in the language of the Churoks. Hers was a Brobdingnagian task, executed brilliantly in this dissertation.”

  The light had shifted and Lucy was squinting into it, her hand cupped over her eyes. I got up and adjusted the ancient Venetian blinds to mute the light, appalled at the dust that had accumulated on the slats.

  She smiled her thanks as the professor’s voice continued.

  “Less than an hour ago I was handed these papers.”

  There was a slight pause and then a rustling sound as he apparently brandished the pages.

  “These are photocopies from a journal of Native American history that appeared twenty years ago. On these pages can be found, word for word, much of the material that appears in this dissertation.”

  There was a sound of a flat hand striking a book, then silence except for the sound of people breathing and the low hum of the player’s motor.

  “What we have here is plagiarism. These proceedings can continue no longer. Miss Raskin, I’m sorry. Please meet me in my office as soon as you’re able.”

  The sounds of the professor leaving were interrupted by the scraping of a chair leg. A voice, a female voice, quavering, full of bitter emotion, cried out: “You, you of all people. How can you, how dare you…?” The sound of a woman in heels…tap, tap, tap…receded in the background. Then much scraping of chair legs, a cacophony of voices, a staticky click, and the hiss of blank tape.

  Lucy reached over and turned off the machine. “I never saw Judy, or anyone, look like she did when she said those words. Her face was white. She was trembling and fighting to speak. She fixed Akrich with so demonic a glare, it was like she was a different person, not one that I knew, not my best friend and roommate.”

  Lucy’s fidgeting turned to uncontainable agitation. She stood up, her right hand clenched in her left, and walked over to the window to look out through the dusty slats. I was hoping she wouldn’t hold the poor housekeeping against me. Still l
ooking out the window, her back to me, she went on in a low voice: “At first there was silence, then everybody was standing up and talking at once. The students were looking at one another in disbelief. None of us had ever seen such a spectacle. I tried to follow Judy, but by the time I’d squeezed my way through the crowd and run into the hall, she was gone.”

  Lucy turned to face me, her slatted shadow stretching across the room to the chair where she had been sitting.

  “I hurried up the two flights of stairs to the floor where Akrich had his office, hoping to find her there. The corridor was deserted. I waited by his office door until I heard voices in the stairwell. A gaggle of professors with Akrich at the center was approaching.”

  The phone rang. I flapped my hand at it and said, “Let the machine take it,” but when it clicked on the volume was up. It was the Spanish interpreter saying one of her kids was sick and she couldn’t make it, and asking me to call her back. I turned the volume off and asked Lucy to go on.

  “It dawned on me that Judy wouldn’t come straight to his office. She’d have to collect herself somewhere. I thought maybe she'd gone back to our place, about ten minutes from campus. I headed away from the jabbering group and went down the other stairwell. I wanted to find Judy real bad. When I got downstairs I ducked into the ladies room and took off my heels and pantyhose. I could make better time in bare feet. Do you want to return that call? I can wait.”

  I shook my head and motioned her on. I wasn’t sure where she was going, but I could tell by the tension rising once again in her demeanor that when she got there, I’d be interested.

  “I made it back to our place in under five minutes. I had my keys out but the door was unlocked. I went in. I knew Judy was there because her pocketbook was on the table by the sofa. I called her name. There was no answer. I walked through the living room and poked my head into the kitchen. No Judy, but the back door was ajar. I walked through the kitchen and I took a quick look out back. Not there, either.”