The Rush of Death

Chapter One

The Newest Woman in My Life

My memory wasn’t what it used to be, but my hearing was good enough to catch Gloria Vogel entering my outer office two minutes before ten on a muggy Oakland morning. I glanced at the day planner on my desk. “Vogel: 10AM,” circled twice, as if the paper itself didn’t trust me.

I didn’t need a buzzer to know when a client arrived. The termite-chewed walls in my new-to-me office were thinner than the bad paint trying to hide them. I heard my secretary, on loan to me from a temp agency while I figured out how much an assistant is worth to a struggling private investigator, greet the appointed guest warmly, offer coffee, and suggest they have a seat while I was properly fetched.

The SFPD had shown me the door after 45 years, and with no taste for retirement, I’d kept the gun and opened shop as a private investigator in Oakland.

I moved as quickly as I was able, but the temp beat me to the door by a step. She jumped just a bit as we nearly bumped schnozzes.

“Mrs. Gloria Vogel to see you, Detective.” The temp smiled a beauty of a smile, which I returned before thanking her and greeting the woman rising from the surprisingly not too shabby sofa whose new life began when I pulled it off a street corner in Vallejo where I’m sure had been put to better use serving the homeless and assorted riffraff. I had it shampooed, twice, in the name of good hygiene and put it to work in my lobby. The couch, my desk, myself - refurbs trying to prove our worth. But not the temp, a dynamo ex-Mary Kay seller who’d joined the temp service after becoming disenchanted with the promises and pink Cadillacs of the multi-level marketing life.

“Mrs. Vogel. It’s good to see you again. You look lovely. Has my assistant offered you coffee?”

The gaunt, pale woman stared at me over tiny round bifocal glasses. She was rail-thin, with bony elbows and a figure bordering on what a Southern boy like myself might call too thin. It reminded me of the old saying that you can never be rich enough, or thin enough, but I think Vogel had taken the adage beyond too far. She was in her late forties or early fifties and had large watery eyes that I’m sure under different circumstances were captivating to men. I waved her to a seat in front of my desk, helped her into the chair, and patted her arm in the way a man from my generation does. I came around behind the desk, the side from which the peeling veneer was visible, and eased into the well-worn leather chair that no one in the SFPD Homicide Division seemed interested in stopping me from taking.

“I don’t suppose you would remember, but you killed my husband.”

The air drained from the room like an unplugged sink. I became very aware of the heaviness of the large semiautomatic I wore in a shoulder rig under my jacket. The gun that almost certainly played a role in the events she was laying out. Now it was my turn to blink.

“My first husband, Detective,” she said coolly in explanation.

I almost corrected her. In the SFPD, we were inspectors, not detectives. And 30 years of correcting people was a hard habit to break. But this wasn’t an Inspector Agency, and I was smart enough to keep quiet.

“His name was Timothy Johnson. You put him down in ‘94.”

The memory came quick and violent. Timothy Johnson had killed a prostitute for having a little too much equipment under the hood – and then tried to pin it on a homeless guy who couldn’t have afforded the all-you-can-eat pancakes at Denny’s, let alone the high-priced piece of ass Johnson had snuffed. There hadn’t been much of a confrontation. A simple-but-direct accusation had led to a panicked chase down the guy’s hallway to a closet where he attempted to get his hands on a shotgun he had stashed. I’d let him turn around just enough before I blew his head all over his wife’s wardrobe.

I studied the clothing of Gloria Vogel, the creases in the sleeves of her blouse, and wondered if anything had made it out of that closet worth keeping.

Johnson was number five of seven terminations I had in the SFPD. All seven right clean, cleared, and proper. Well, the seventh a little less clean and proper than I would have liked, which is why I retired early and opened shop here in Oakland. But that’s another story.

All that must have played across my face, because Vogel nodded satisfactorily.

“Yes, you do remember him.”

I nodded and decided that I needed to work on my poke face.

“I remember your husband. I’m sorry.”

Vogel shook off the memory and seemed to settle into business mode. “I am certain, Mr. Jones, that neither you nor I are sorry. Timothy was a louse, a real shit heel and the world is better off without him. Unfortunately, I may not have done much better the second time, which is why I’m here.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You said that already.”

Gloria Vogel’s emotions seemed to be running like a roller coaster and she reached into a patent leather cream-colored purse for a handkerchief.

“Let’s get down to it,” she said in the tone one uses when purchasing a car. “My second husband, Mr. Vogel, has gone missing. I reported it to the police and I’m sure they’ll do their best to find him. But I don’t just want him found. I want to know where he’s gone and what he’s been up to. If I’m married to another no-goodnik, I want to get out before things get as bad as the last time he went missing.”

Nice to know upfront that it was her own security and reputation she was concerned about. “He’s gone missing before?” I asked.

“Yes, years ago. Just after he got back from Afghanistan, right after we met, but before we were serious. I’m told they found him in a hospital in Los Angeles, beaten to a pulp and left for dead somewhere in Hollywood. He says he doesn’t remember how he got there.” She shook her head as if shaking off her worst suspicions. “And that was that. No charges, no explanation, and no satisfaction whatsoever. Not for me, at least.”

A dissatisfied wife – hardly a newsflash.

“Is there any reason why someone would want to do him harm? Enemies?” She shook her head no. “What did he do in the service?”

“I have no idea,” she said flatly, as though it were an old and tired subject.

“He didn’t talk about it?”

“You were a soldier, weren’t you, Detective? I seem to remember you were.”

I nodded, wondering how much she knew or didn’t know about me. “And do you ever tell war stories to your wife?”

I winced at the question. “No. I suppose I don’t.”

“There are aspects of our lives previous to our marriage that we simply agree not to discuss.”

“That works?”

“It has.” She let the final word drift into the air like cigarette smoke.

“Does your husband-”

“No,” she said with certainty. “So far as I know, no drinking, no drugs, no gambling. I even tried monitoring his phone and computer so that I’d know what he was up to. The closest he gets to straying is crinkling the pages of my Victoria’s Secret catalogs. He always orders me something ‘nice.’” She made air quotes. “Though God knows why. What woman looks good in that trash?”

I had the decency not to answer. Instead, I reached into my jacket and removed the Moleskine notepad and pen that kept my gun company. “Go on, Mrs. Vogel. When and where did you see your husband last?”

The woman sat up, dignified, as though it was about time that someone took her seriously. “Well, it would have been Thursday, last week. What, five days ago?”

I nodded, encouraging her to continue.

“We were at home, you know, sitting at the table for dinner. And he was telling me about his day, and he got a call from work. It wasn’t unusual for him to get calls during dinner. He runs a butcher shop that his father gave him, and the shipments come from all over, at all times.”

My mind wandered to ponder the will required of a middle-aged woman to stay this petite while married to a meat monger. Vogel continued, unaware of my distractions. “He goes in at all hours of the night to take the shipments,” she said in a tone that suggested the reason should have been obvious, “so he can cut out the distributors—the middlemen. He dealt with people back East,” Gloria Vogel said with a sort of knowing finality.

“Do you mean the mob, Mrs. Vogel?”

“No! Not the mob. Farmers. Cattle and pig farmers. Nebraska, Missouri, Ohio. Those kinds of things.”

“I’d say that was more Midwest than East.”

“Are we going to argue about geography or are you going to find my husband?”

I knew the very probable answers were, ‘yes’ and ‘yes.’ I was sure we’d argue about everything, and I would most definitely find her husband. Most likely with another woman. Most likely owing to a dissatisfaction that was, unbeknownst to Mrs. Vogel, quite mutual.

I flipped the page of my notepad and smoothed the collar of my jacket. Better sense required me to consider walking away, but there were no other cases to walk toward, and besides, the real mystery was why a woman whose husband I killed was sitting in front of me. If I didn’t need the money from this job, I definitely needed an excuse to get out from behind this desk. I rose from my chair all gallant-like, ignoring the piece of veneer that was poking into my thigh.

I figured I’d let it ride a spell.

“Mrs. Vogel. I’m going to find your husband.” That statement alone didn’t seem to impress her, so I figured I’d stick to the professional approach. “I’d like to have access to his phone and bank records. I’d like to interview people he might acquaint himself with, and I’d like to visit his business and dig into where the money was coming from and where it was going. It often tells me where a person might have run off to, and under what circumstances,” I said, amazed by my own diplomacy. I began to think I’d get good at this.

She reached into her purse and removed a series of stapled documents. Credit cards, mortgage payments, phone bills, all complete with handwritten online access usernames and passwords in a perfect fastidious script. “We trust each other,” she said, defensively, and I managed not to say that having all this information seemed like the complete opposite of trust. It reminded me a lot of the Southern Baptist upbringing that occasionally rattled around in my head from Sundays as a child in Northern Florida. You didn’t need faith if you knew everything. Faith, trust, they both allow for a bit of the unknown.

“Do you have a picture?” I asked, and she reached into her purse and carefully pulled out a five-by-seven photo.

“This is the only copy I have. You’ll return it, won’t you?”

“Better than that, I’ll have my secretary make a copy before you leave, so you can keep the original,” I said.

She handed over the photo. The sheen of the overhead lights moved across the luster finish to reveal one David Vogel, a big but very normal-looking man. His hair was cut short in what might have been a crew cut after two weeks of growth. His face was ruddy and pockmarked, and his arms revealed a pale, freckled complexion that seemed ill-suited for exposure to the sun. I looked up at Gloria Vogel, who appeared to be attempting to read my thoughts, but was striking out.

“David was a good man – is a good man. We married a couple of years after he returned from his deployment.”

“How did you meet?” I asked, trying to make the low-key interrogation sound conversational.

“We met at his shop,” she said, peering at the picture in my hand. “He didn’t reenlist after his father passed away and left the business to him. A butcher shop that had been in the family forever.”

“You were a regular,” I posited.

“Yes, I was. And one day, he just appeared. Back from war, ready for new beginnings…” She trailed off in the reminiscence. “He was a little out of his element. I guess I was too, considering what happened with my first husband. We gave it a go, and married two years in. That was, what, twelve years ago.” She had tears forming and she couldn’t bring herself to meet my eyes. She simply exhaled, nodded, and asked if I would take a check.

“Of course. I’ll let you discuss that with my secretary.” It suddenly dawned on me that that’s what they’re for. I maneuvered to the edge of my desk and half sat, half stood, laser-focused on every flicker of expression that crossed Vogel’s face.

“I’ll stop by your house later to look through his effects, but if you would, please tell me anything else you can about David, about your relationship, about his business. Anything. Spare no details. I’m not billing you until you leave the office, so take your time and give me anything useful. It will wind up saving us both a lot of time, money, and heartache if I know the whole picture.”

And so I listened to the woman, taking notes as she told her tale again. I listened for elements out of place, notes of emotion misaligned with the bars of the setting. There were few, and she was either a practiced liar or genuinely concerned about her missing husband. It was the story of a man, a life, a marriage. Nothing perfect. Worse: ordinary.

It was a story that almost certainly left out the truths that were important to discovering the whereabouts of David Vogel, but people have the tendency to lie. For good, for bad. To protect some memories and to erase others. That was what this business was about.

The notepad that I scribbled in had its own story, and I found myself more interested in the tiny ridges of the little black Moleskine pad that Etta Mae had given me after I’d decided to go private. “If you’re going to be a detective, you’ll need the right tools!” was written on the inside cover in Etta’s uncommonly beautiful handwriting. It was the kind of gift a wife gets her husband to help him understand who he is and who he is trying to be.

Unfortunately, it was more than a tool of self-discovery. For my entire career, I had never needed to write things down. The murder books that I had maintained as an SFPD Inspector, and the Army MP records forty years before, were written after the fact. Details leapt from memory on command. Facts and figures were summoned on the witness stand under oath with such precision that it doomed anyone stupid enough to challenge my testimony.

Sixty-three murder convictions, an additional 762 for violent assault, and another 2,334 for theft and other petty crimes.

Or was it sixty-four murder convictions?

Either way, I am essentially The Greatest. Or was at one point.

But too many forgotten items on the grocery list. Too many times I’d asked “where are you going” after she’d already told me more than once. The notepad was cute. It was also necessary. As surely as I used to know the names of every convict I’d put away, for how long, for what crime, and in what manner, I wasn’t going to remember a thing that Gloria Vogel was telling me two weeks from now.

The dutiful notetaking told clients that they mattered. What it kept to itself was that I was slipping.

“Are you listening to me, Mr. Jones?”

“Of course,” I said, holding up pad to prove my point.

Oh, if I didn’t tell you: sometimes, I lie.