Welcome to book fourteen in the Operation Quickline series. When old evidence is uncovered in the long-unsolved murder of Sid’s mother, he and Lisa end up mired in one of the messiest cases of their careers. You can read the first chapter here, or check out the other chapters here.
(Sid’s Voice)
I will concede that I was definitely not happy to hear that Noah Taplin was sniffing around. Nor was I sure what to make of Lisa’s assessment of his skills. As annoying as those Company fucks were, they weren’t generally stupid. Petty, vindictive, obtuse as hell, but not stupid.
The one thing that seemed pretty clear was that Van Blinn was being unfairly targeted for political purposes. Lisa and I agreed that we were done, and I called the rest of the team to let them know that we had what we needed and were ending operations. We couldn’t do much about the tracker on the car, but Esther disabled it. Jesse took the van out to Newport Beach and got the tap off the phone. The only reason we held off on filing the report was that Lisa didn’t want to get Lillian in trouble in case somebody got a bug up their ass about us ending things so early.
Then we tried to figure out what to do about Van Blinn and Sheila’s death. I decided to take the lead on that.
That next morning, I caught Hannah Davis in, and she agreed to speak with me around one that afternoon.
Her house was in the Hollywood Hills, on a steep, turning road, and half built into a hillside. She’d clearly lived there for a very long time, with an old brass front doorbell and doorknob that had tarnished at uneven rates. The paint job looked faded, but was not chipped, and the walls were stuccoed with dark wood shutters.
Davis opened the door and let me into the spacious living room. The huge Persian rug was faded, yet dark wood floors gleamed around it. A large brown velvet corner group sofa looked out over sliding glass doors leading to a faded wood deck, strewn with white patio furniture and plants in hanging pots and stands. Shelves lined the walls, some glass-fronted, others not. They were filled with books and the many mementos of a very long career.
That felt a little odd. Davis couldn’t have been much more than ten years older than me. But then I remembered, she’d been acting since she was eleven or twelve.
She wasn’t hiding her age, either. She had delicate laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. Silver threads were scattered through her blond hair that had been cut in a wedge. Her figure was actor thin, and she wore jeans and a full sweater over them.
“Come on in and have a seat,” she said. “Can I get you anything? Some Perrier?”
“That sounds good. Thanks.”
She reappeared a moment later with two glasses filled with ice and the bubbling water, ornamented with a lime slice.
“I know this might be difficult for you,” I began slowly.
“You mean about what Mom did for a living?” She laughed ruefully. “I couldn’t care less about that. There may have been some studio heads who would have had a conniption if they’d known way back when.” She suddenly sniffed. “No. It’s just that a friend of mine passed away last week, and between helping his boyfriend clear out the home care junk and grieve and all that, I’ve been missing Mom more than usual. It’s only been a couple years since she died. Would you please tell your aunt that I meant to call her back?”
“Sure.” I sipped and waited.
“She was a wonderful mom. I know that sounds pretty weird, having started out in a brothel. But Mom kept me insulated from the worst of it.” Her eyes pierced me. “I don’t know how much you know about the life.”
“I, eh…” Oh, that was uncomfortable. “I’ve bought it before. I didn’t do it often. I used to be into sleeping around, and sometimes I’d need a quick connection. It seemed like just another way to have sex, and the most efficient way.” I winced. “Until my wife caught me once.”
“Oh?” Grinning, her eyebrows rose.
“She wasn’t my wife then. But, shit, she gave me hell.” I shrugged. “I haven’t bought it since. Haven’t needed to.”
“Most guys who buy it don’t need to.” Davis took a sip of her water. “I remember reading that once, and asked Mom about it. She said that sounded right to her. All of her clients could have found girlfriends, and most of them were married.”
“How well did you know her clients?”
Davis shook her head. “I didn’t. Like I said, I was very insulated from that part of it. I remember when five-thirty, six rolled around, Mom would take me up to our little set of rooms and have me lock the door. I think most of those guys would have been shocked to find out that Mom even had a kid. She let me hang around the girls, though.” Davis laughed again. “She later told me it was the best way she could think of to keep me from turning tricks.”
“Sounds like she had quite a sense of humor.”
“Oh, yeah.” Tears filled her eyes. “She needed it. Women do not get into that business for the fun of it. Oh, I know some say that they like their work, but I really think that’s what they tell themselves. I once asked Mom why she got into it. She just said that she didn’t have a choice.” Davis frowned. “I think it was something about my father, but I don’t know. She wouldn’t say and didn’t even put his name on my birth certificate.”
“Maybe she didn’t know who he was,” I said. “Sheila didn’t know who fathered me. It says unknown on my birth certificate.”
“Mom knew who my father was. I got that much. She just refused to say any more.”
“How well did you know Sheila?”
“Oh, I hung out with them before the clients arrived. Tina. Clare, MaryAnn, Lynn, Miranda, Earline, and Rhoda. And Sheila. They were okay. Sheila was a little weird in that she’d like me one minute, then not want me around another. Earline, though. Oh, my god. She gave me the creeps. I remember when I was around fifteen – I was still going to the studio school then. But I had to read this short story called The Bad Seed. You know? About that little girl who kills people? I hated that story, mostly because it reminded me of Earline. She could be really, really cold and calculating. But, if I’m honest, all of them were in many ways. They were hard women.”
“What about the night that Sheila died?”
“I don’t remember much about it.” Davis shook her head again, then sipped. “There was a lot of screaming, then Mom came up to the room and said that something terrible had happened and that Sheila was dead. I don’t know why, but she was very, very scared. Kept saying we were getting out of there. A week or two later, we’re on a train to California and Hollywood. I think it was something to do with one of the clients. She wouldn’t talk much about them, either. She’d sometimes make a snide comment about some guy who reminded her of so-and-so. But that was it. And she really clammed up when it came to my father or the night Sheila died.” She took another sip of her water, then looked at me. “How much did your aunt tell you about your mother?”
“Next to nothing,” I said. “I didn’t find out she was a prostitute and that she was murdered until two and a half years ago. Stella just carried all that inside her. All her bitterness because the cops never did that much to find the man who killed her sister.”
Davis groaned loudly. “What is it with them? Like, hearing about the bad stuff is automatically going to corrupt us?”
I had to laugh. “Stella said she didn’t want to pass all that crap onto me. I can sort of see that, but shit, it drives me nuts.” I got up. “Anyway, thank you very much for talking to me.”
“You’re very welcome.” She got up, too. “It’s good to talk about Mom.”
I left, then almost groaned when I got back to my car. It was getting awfully close to three when Alicia Mendoza would arrive for her two hours of lessons. I made it, but just barely, and it was really good having to focus on teaching her how to count beats. Alicia was (and still is) incredibly intuitive about her music. She taught herself to play piano by listening to what she heard on the radio. So she’d learned to feel her way around a piece. The problem was that if she was going to have a concert career, she was going to have to read music.
We did get a bit of a breakthrough that day, which helped my mood a lot. Also, with Alonzo Carrera coming in for the final hour right after Alicia, I did not get a chance to talk to Stella about Davis until after six.
We were cleaning up when Stella started in on me.
“Well? Did you talk to anybody today?”
“I talked to Hannah Davis, the madam’s daughter,” I said, sorting through several sheet music books.
“And…?”
I went over what Davis had told me. Stella snorted.
“What kind of mother raises her child in a brothel?”
“One who doesn’t feel she has another choice,” I said calmly. “There are plenty of people who would ask the same thing about a mother who let her kid run around buck naked all the time and screwing everything female within reach.”
“That’s normal and natural!” Stella gaped at me in horror.
“And damned unconventional.” I held up my hands. “I’m fine with it, by the way. I don’t think I turned out badly. But it does mean we can’t judge how other parents make their choices. Right?”
“I suppose not,” Stella said.
Later, after Lisa and I and the boys had eaten dinner and Darby and Nick had been sent to the library to finish their homework, I told Lisa about Hannah Davis. She sighed.
“That’s all very interesting, but it doesn’t tell us very much,” she said.
She sat in her desk chair, two books in front of her.
“I know.” I paced the room. “I don’t know what to think about it.”
“Neither do I.” Her face got that pained look. “In fact, I don’t know what to think about anything. I’m sorry, darling, but I’m just so peeved at the way that stupid surveillance case put me behind on my reading, that’s all I can think about.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “Anyway, I’d better get back on this. Do you mind?”
I smiled at her, my heart filling. “No. I appreciate the way you put it aside to watch Van Blinn for us.”
She grabbed her two books, and I followed her into the library. She settled herself on one of the two dark green wingback chairs and arranged the tan leather hassock, and put her feet up. The boys sat together on the window seat with two wooden tray tables and their homework in front of them. They were squabbling over something, as usual. I had stopped hearing it months before. I found the book I was reading on the lamp table between the two chairs. I would have played piano – we had a walnut baby grand in there. But it distracted Darby, who did not need distractions when it came to his homework.
At nine o’clock, I sent the boys to bed.
“Do you mind if I work on some Mozart?” I asked, setting my book down.
“No. Go ahead.” Her eyes stayed on what she was reading.
“I’ll play softly.”
I was working my way through Mozart’s piano sonatas and had gotten to the eighth one. I started with the allegro, but kept it quiet. When I’d worked through it a couple of times, and started the andante cantabile, I heard soft whistling and snorting.
I looked over at the wingback chair. Lisa’s head had rolled back, her eyes were closed, and her cute little whistling snore was going full force. My poor darling worked so hard. People don’t realize how much energy and time are involved in teaching. Plus, there was all the work she was doing for her PhD program. She was essentially working one and a half full-time jobs even without Quickline.
I got up from the keyboard. It was close enough to ten p.m. as it was. I got her awake enough to come up to bed and make love. She’ll always wake up long enough for that.
(Lisa’s Voice)
It was one of those things that happened. Just when we’d thought we’d wrapped something up, we’d find out we weren’t done. That morning, while we were eating breakfast, Sid and I got paged.
Sid drove the boys to school, and I called Lillian, who had paged us.
“This just gets more annoying,” she told me when we’d confirmed our codes. “Clint Foster says that somebody on his side talked to Van Blinn’s office and found out that Van Blinn has been talking to campaign donors.”
Clint Foster is our liaison with the Company.
“Yeah,” I said. “We heard him talk to one of them. Van Blinn said that he wanted to make the donor absolutely sure that the donation wasn’t going to affect how he voted.”
“That’s good to know.” She grumbled something else. “Alright. We’d better find out where else Clint’s crew has been sniffing around.”
“Fair enough,” I sighed. “Did Clint say who on his side was doing the checking?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I may have run across one of them yesterday.” I bit my lip. “The interesting thing is that Van Blinn knew him and told him the same thing – that he can’t be bought by the campaign donations.”
Lillian cursed. “Did this other operative see you?”
“Yes and no,” I said. “He saw me, but didn’t look like he’d made me as surveillance and even said that he was trying to see who was.”
Lillian cursed even more strongly. “If you’re talking about who I think you’re talking about, he holds quite a bit of influence over people who should, quite frankly, know better. But Taplin knows his politics.”
“Taplin. That was him.”
“He should have been dead years ago. Why he isn’t, no one knows. But if Noah Taplin is involved, then you’ll have to find out who else Taplin is talking to.”
“Okay.” I bit my lip. “Dare I ask who Taplin is, besides Division One?”
Division One was our code for the main part of the CIA.
“He’s mostly a desk jockey.” Lillian’s voice dripped with disdain. “I’ve had a feeling for years that he’s got somebody by the short hairs. They pulled him out of the field in the early seventies because he screwed up an operation and got one of our best people killed. Marge Bowers broke his jaw some years ago after he exposed her entire network by talking about it on an unsecured phone line. She said he was lucky she didn’t have her sidearm on her, or she would have killed him. She got the usual reprimand and Taplin got off, then later promoted as an attaché to various congressmen, supposedly for security purposes.”
“Is that when you began to suspect that he had the goods on somebody?”
“The reprimand was the usual sexism.” Lillian snorted. “You have no idea, my dear, just how bad it was for us women in intelligence. We were getting some of the best intel, but not only did we not get credit for it, the men gave us hell. It was even worse in the Bureau. It’s getting better, but you still have a lot of guys who were around during J. Edgar’s reign, and you can imagine what that was like. That’s why you find a lot more women in the shadow agencies. The higher ups could get the benefit of the work we did without having to give us credit for it. Nor did they have to deal with us that much.”
“Wow.” My brow creased. “But I’m confused. Van Blinn made it clear that his donors were not going to get what they wanted, and Taplin heard that as well as I did.”
“Yes, but the odds are decent that Taplin is the one setting Van Blinn up. Only one more reason why we hate these kinds of jobs and why we need to find out who else he’s talking to. But don’t attempt surveillance on Taplin. Just talk to the other campaign donors, and do it as Linda Devereaux.”
“But Taplin knows that name from the Kansas case.”
Lillian chuckled. “Exactly. If we have to risk burning one of your alter egos, I’d rather burn that one. Besides, it might just scare Taplin off if he realizes that we’re also looking at him.”
I went ahead and made a few calls while Sid was still out dropping the boys off at school. He was not happy when he got home.
“I’m sorry you have to deal with it, lover,” he said, watching me pace in the office. “On the other hand, Brightman does sound like a good suspect for Sheila’s murder.”
“There is that.” I grimaced. “Given how nasty he sounded on that phone tap Jesse got, it’s probably just as well that I’m going in with my alter ego.”
Sid had to leave shortly after that to talk to Tina Goetz and Paul West, whose phone number I’d found for him. I changed into a nice wool skirt and blazer, with a silk blouse underneath, then packed my makeup and blond wig in my bag.
I went first to the library to look up Mason Brightman in all the different local directories. But I found him in the Who’s Who. You can imagine my surprise (as in none whatsoever) that he was the owner and CEO of a decent-sized savings and loan. I also looked up Earl Manotti and found the main branch of his chain of S&Ls.
I spoke to Manotti from a nearby diner’s payphone, introducing myself as a freelance writer doing a story on political donations. Manotti told me that Mason Brightman had talked him into donating to Van Blinn’s campaign. However, Manotti had not talked to Van Blinn. After I mentioned that I might have a Mr. Taplin competing with me, Manotti said that he hadn’t heard from anyone else.
Brightman, on the other hand, wanted to talk to me at his office. So after lunch, I piled on the makeup in the diner’s restroom, put on my wig, and headed over to the office in Glendale. It was in a high-rise on Brand Avenue. Getting parked was no small trick, but once I got upstairs, I found the right office and was ushered into Brightman’s space almost immediately.
It was a corner office, with windows overlooking the foothills to the north and the boulevard below. Brightman was fairly short and somewhat rounded, balding, and wore half glasses on the end of his nose. Everything about him and his office screamed money and power, and his smile had a smarmy edge to it, as if I should be prostrate with gratitude that I’d been allowed into his inner sanctum.
The first few questions were strictly about campaign finances. I’d explained that I’d heard about him because he’d donated to Congressman Van Blinn’s campaign.
“What happens if the politician you’re donating to votes against things you want?” I asked.
Brightman sniggered. “Listen, sweetheart, they always do what I want. Guys like me can run those wimps out of office in a New York second.”
“I heard you used to know Congressman Van Blinn some time ago.”
“Yeah. That’s how I knew to donate to his campaign.”
“Were you friends?”
“Friends enough. We shared the same, uh, recreational facility, you might say.” Brightman adjusted the vest of his exquisitely tailored suit. “In fact, that’s how I know he’s going to go along with me and my buddies. I might have something on him. A lot of years ago, one of the girls at the, um, facility got murdered. Jimmy was real sweet on her. He probably didn’t kill her, but it wouldn’t look too good if I let it get out to his constituents that he did.”
“But aren’t you worried about it backfiring and getting you in trouble?”
“Why?” He sniggered again. “I’m not doing anything illegal. Let me tell you. Jimmy Van Blinn had better watch his ass around me.”
“I can imagine.” I looked down at my notes. “There may be another reporter, a Mr. Taplin, writing a competing piece on this.”
Brightman laughed out loud. “Sweetheart, if you think he’s a reporter, you’d better watch your own ass.”
“He’s not? Have you talked to him?”
“All the time.” Brightman sniggered again. “How do you think I got the goods on Jimmy Van Blinn?”
“Well.” I got up and put my notepad back in my purse. “I think I’ve got everything I need.”
“You’ll let me see that article before it runs, right?”
“We’ll see.”
Brightman’s smile grew menacing. “You’ll let me see it. Because, see? I can hurt you. And if you say I threatened you? No one will believe that. Trust me, doll, I’ve hurt sweet young things like you before and no one ever knew.”
“Interesting that you believe that,” I said, utterly fed up and drawing myself up to my full height. “Because you only think you can hurt me. If you try, you’re going to find out that any muscle you hire isn’t as good as you thought. And I will hurt you back and let everyone know that you got worked over by this sweet young thing.”
I turned and left the office feeling like I sorely needed a shower.
Thank you for reading. For more information about the Operation Quickline series, click here.
Please check out the Fiction page for the latest on all my novels. Or look me up at your favorite independent bookstore. Mine is Vroman’s, in Pasadena, California.