Dark Moon: A Mike Angel Private Eye Mystery

By David H Fears

In this complex mystery set in Portland, Oregon, 1965 Mike befriends an eccentric veteran with a drinking problem, whose estranged wife has been sleeping with hoodlums and racketeers. One night the man shows up at Mike’s office asking for a ride to the US side of the Canadian border. On the way the man discloses his wife had been murdered and he was being framed. Expecting a nice quiet life and a new start with love interest Molly Bennett, Mike is shaken by the history of crime and corruption still going on in the Rose City. Mike agrees to find the woman’s killer, but the more he follows her trail the more suspects are in the picture, with too few clues.

The Police Chief enlists Mike to infiltrate a famous whorehouse poker game to look into connections to the murder between the Teamsters, Big Jim Elkins, and other local hoodlums. Rick decides to put on his professor speech and infiltrate the house a day earlier than Mike. When Rick doesn’t return in twenty-four hours, Mike heads in the Victorian red light house of infamous Madam Little Rusty to find himself inside up against seven armed men, including three in police uniforms, and a lust-minded bombshell. In this episode Mike is tempted and tasted by two seductive roommates, one who attacks him sexually at gunpoint. The 6th in the Mike Angel Mystery series of historical, erotic novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David H Fears
• Release date: Oct 14, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465710697

David H Fears

David was known by the handle “professor” as a boy (no doubt the thick black spectacles, Buddy Holly style), and has had a lifetime interest in Mark Twain. He has also written nearly one hundred short stories with about sixteen published, and is working on the 14th Mike Angel PI Mystery novel.Fears is a pretty handy name for horror stories, but he also has written mainstream nostalgic, literary, some fantasy/magical realism, as well as the PI novels. For the past decade he has devoted his full time to producing Mark Twain Day By Day, a four-volume annotated chronology in the life of Samuel L. Clemens. Two volumes are now available, and have been called, “The Ultimate Mark Twain Reference” by top Twain scholars. His aim for these books is “to provide a reference and starting-off place for the Twain scholar, as well as a readable book for the masses,” one that provides many “tastes” of Twain and perspective into his complex and fascinating life. He understands this is a work that will never be “finished” — in fact, he claims that no piece of writing is ever finished, only abandoned after a time. As a historian, David enjoys mixing historical aspects in his fiction.David recently taught literature and writing at DeVry University in Portland, his third college stint. His former lives enjoyed some success in real estate and computer business, sandwiched between undergraduate studies in the early 70s and his masters degree in education and composition, awarded in 2004.He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, and has lived in New England, Southern California and Nevada. David is youthful looking and is the father of three girls, the grandfather of four and the great-grandfather of two; he’s written, “It all shows what you can do if you fool around when you’re very young.” David’s a card. How many of us think humor has a place in mystery tales or history tomes? He claims his calico cat Sophie helps him edit his stories while lying across his arm when he is composing, and sinking her claws in with any poorly drawn sentence. As a writer, a humorist, a cat lover and father of girls, he relates well to Clemens. Writing hardboiled PI novels is his way of saying "NUTS!" to politically correct fiction.UPDATE: Beloved Calico Sophie died on Apr 24, 2016 at 13 & 1/2 years. She is sorely missed.

Book preview

Dark Moon: A Mike Angel Mystery

By David H Fears

Copyright 2011

Discover other titles by David H Fears:

Dark Quarry, Dark Lake, Dark Blonde

Dark Poison, Dark Idol, Dark Moon

Dark Fantasy, Dark Conspiracy, Dark Red

Dark Eyes, Dark Union, Dark Drama

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

The red Austin Healy 3000 convertible screeched rubber around the parking lot, while the stunner passenger, arms aloft, Maureen O’Hara flaming hair flying riotously, was naked except for a silly donut of a mink cap — which only served to point out her attractions. After two laps I tore my eyes off the female and scrutinized the seemingly hypnotized driver — it was first time I’d laid eyes on Stephon Nelson Kasch.

I’d just exited the Turquoise Room, a popular watering hole on Barbur Boulevard in our newly adopted city of Portland, Oregon. An overcast and raw spring day in 1965. Not topless weather.

Kasch was smooth-faced and youthful looking save for a receding hairline and a transparent layer of chalk-white hair. A white-topped Meerschaum pipe looked like a small toilet seat clamped out one side of his wide grin. He wasn’t smoking but simply biting it. He wore an English tweed jacket and one of those pleated Victorian smoking vests — bright lime green — that was just showing off, especially for the Pacific Northwest. The vest would have looked out of place in Dublin. A bright magenta hankie, sharp enough to slice bread peeked out of his jacket pocket, and his neck looked strangled by a navy and yellow polka dot scarf. Only Le Mans racing goggles were lacking. The driver’s eyes gauged two levels past tipsy. He ripped around the blacktop with the glee of a six-year-old boy steering on his father’s lap.

His joy wasn’t solely from sprint racing around parked cars, but also from glances to the voluptuous beauty nestled beside him. She was no kid. I took her to be around 40. Her main two features on display for patrons entering and exiting the T-Room, as we called the joint, still defied gravity. All this at 2:30 p.m., not exactly happy hour. By the time the Healy made a dozen laps the audience swelled to twenty clapping, hooting male admirers, a few with chagrined females yanking them along.

Molly and I moved to Portland the previous fall after selling most of our worldly belongings and cashing in a highly collectible ten thousand dollar bill — payment for solving a forty-year-old cold case involving kidnapping, murder, and a cult of idol sex worshippers. We’d been worn out by those gritty streets, threats from mobsters, and corrupt politicians. We cast Chicago off for a fresh start as roommate lovers in the damp but fresh Pacific Northwest.

Someone in the gathering crowd hollered that cops were on the way.

I stepped into the path of the Healy, ready to flee should the driver ignore my raised arm. He stood the sleek sports car on its nose, the bumper an inch from my shin. His expression didn’t move off dead-stupid center.

The cops are on the way, I said, eyeballing the female’s natural assets, trying not to be too obvious. I doubt they’d appreciate your excellent driving skills and your attractive navigator, even though there’s a couple of nice points about her. But, It’s pretty cold out, and even on a sunny day these Portland blues aren’t that hip for free expression. I can see that you’re cold, Miss.

The driver held out his license, and mumbled, I’m quite sober, officer — we were just getting some air after that smoky dungeon. His hands were small, like a woman’s. On his index finger a gaudy diamond ring encircled by smaller emeralds. The rock, at least four carats.

I’m not the police, soldier. Never one to leave curiosity unsatisfied, I read the license anyway. Kasch was 43, five foot eight, 165 pounds, and lived at 2815 SW Illinois in the city. I handed it back.

The woman lifted her great pair and said, You look like police. You smell like police. Are you sure you’re not police? A strawberry mole next to her sensuous mouth bounced like that ball people follow in theater music. She had a lot of face and it all smirked seductively.

Had I used deodorant before leaving the house? I couldn’t recall — It’s not one of those things that stands out as memorable. Plus, I hadn’t smelled a cop in months. Her remark made me recall Detective Burk’s lack of hygiene on a few Chicago cases.

She dug into a gold lamé handbag and came up with a pack of Chesterfields, gracefully placing one between her lips. I reached over the still grinning driver and flamed my Zippo under her cigarette. She showed the fine line of her neck and blew a cloud of smoke over the windshield.

I handed her my card and said, Private investigator. Then I removed my jacket and held it out to her. Better put this on. A black and white’s heading up Barbur. I suggest you kill your motor. They can’t do much if you aren’t actually driving. I’ll stick around and say I know you, if that makes it easier.

The girl slid into my jacket and gave me a smile that would warm a polar bear. She was no Suzy Creamcheese. Something about her said pro. But then I wasn’t too familiar with Portland natives, and tried to resist judging folks by their Chicago counterparts. She might have been a bored housewife, out for a spin with the pool boy, except there are few pools in Portland and not much hot weather to enjoy a pool. She studied my card as if she saw more than Mike Angel, Private Investigations, Belmont 5-1325. Maybe she was a lit professor reading between the lines.

She aimed her smoke at Kasch and said, He’s a puppy. A lost puppy who doesn’t know he’s lost. We were just having a little fun.

I grunted and let that pass. A dame getting a good airing of her chest might make for a better world, but then again it would make for traffic accidents all over town.

A patrol car rolled up, black and white with a nice rose decal on the door — Portland is the Rose City, though not as famous as Pasadena. Two cops who might have been cops in New York or Jersey or Chicago, except one looked fresh out of high school, and the other at least six foot six. They swaggered up to the side of the Healy like they were about to break the Lindbergh nap case. The tags on their dark blues read Hirst and Fischer.

I leaned against Molly’s two-tone ’57 Chevy we’d shipped out from Chicago, and lit a Lucky while watching the Rose City flatties go through their paces. Couples gawked and walked slowly by, gaping at the show even though it was mostly over, with females putting on sour pusses. It seems those wonder breasts had evoked jealousy from female patrons and paralysis from males.

Kasch offered ID and answered questions affably, as if the cops were old school chums, all the while that silly grin pasted on his mug. The nudist wore whimsy until the blues barked at her to stay covered up. Then she spent the next few minutes putting knives in her stare.

At the appropriate moment I stepped forward and asked if I might be of any assistance.

Who are you?

Friend of Steve’s

Oh yeah? What were you doing when the speeding and exposing was going on? He pointed at the redhead. That your jacket?

Yeah. Fits her nicely, don’t you think? Where was I? Inside mostly. When I came out I put a stop to it and advised my friend that parking lots were not speedways. You’ll have to excuse him — he’s been under a lot of strain since his wife died recently.

The cops eyed each other and gave Kasch back his license. We can run both of them in or you can drive them home, said the young looking officer. The mountain of a cop tapped Steve on the shoulder, and said, If you don’t want further trouble, you should have your friend here drive you. He seems sober enough.

I was stuck. But I didn’t have to pick Molly up downtown after she got off work for another two hours. And, the pair of exhibitionists made me curious.

Thank you officer. I will be happy to escort them. His house isn’t far.

The radio in the patrol car sputtered out a code that in Chicago would be a break-in. For all I knew in Portland it meant jaywalking. The two rushed into their black and white and tore off up Barbur with lights flashing and siren wailing. Jaywalking’s serious in Portland.

After some cajoling I helped Kasch out and into the Chevy’s back seat. He was rubber-legged and sweating profusely. I suspected he’d had more than liquor, as his tweed jacket carried several strange smells, like a mixture of marijuana and licorice, if that makes any sense. The dame didn’t help, didn’t act like she wanted to help, in fact didn’t act like she even knew him. She got in the front seat without a word.

I had a rough idea where Kasch lived. He wouldn’t be much help, slumped in the back seat mumbling about someone named Marilyn.

I wound through neighborhoods heading north, through a bunch of streets named for states. I figured the 2800 block of Illinois Ave. would be just off 30th avenue, a through street I’d been on a few times before when we were searching for apartments. I remembered it as being a big hill that crossed a major thoroughfare a few blocks down. The Southwest side of town proved to be too expensive and we had a harder time finding places there. The east side was separated from the west by the Willamette River, which I kept mispronouncing like most rubes. The east side was easier to get around — a grid of northeast and southeast, separated by E. Burnside, named after that flop of a Union general in the Civil War, with north-south streets numbered from one to 200 or more. Burnside on both sides of the river was aptly named.

The dame sat looking disinterested, staring those knives out the side window, ruby lips eating Chesterfield smoke. She sported a layered hairdo and professional manicure. The little mink cupcake hat sat quietly in her lap, covering what my jacket couldn’t but not what my imagination could.

You Marilyn? And where did you lose your duds?

God, no. I don’t even know a Marilyn. He’s fixated on someone by that name. Evidently the dame remembered she had one sober male along or had hot flashes because she peeled off my jacket, and cupped her headlights toward me. You like these?

I liked looking.

"What’s not to like? They’re a matched pair. I can tell you like them, though it won’t be too many more years before they fly at half-mast. Your clothes?"

Ditched. On a dare from the puppy. You’re a shamus? Whoever heard of a shamus being an Angel?

Yeah. Even the word’s funny. Shamus. I prefer sleuth, or even gumshoe. In Chicago and Jersey plenty have heard of me. Here I’m a newborn gumshoe.

I was born in Rockville.

‘Tough town."

Could be that’s why I’m tough.

I’d say not much demand for tough in Portland. A nice, comfortable little town. Even the poor side doesn’t qualify for a slum.

That’s because it’s a white town. Very white. But there’s enough tough here. Oh yeah.

So what’s your handle — just for the record?

She dug out another smoke and used the dash lighter to get it going.

Lilah.

As in Dee-lilah?

As in Sampson. Delilah Sampson, as funny-ass as that might strike you. Unlike the muscle head Bible guy, I have a ‘p’ in Sampson.

I stuck a thumb back toward the snoring. He doesn’t look much like a Samson. What’s the attraction? His eyes were shut but the grin still froze in place.

No shit. You’re not much of a shamus, are you? Money, that’s what. He has a few piles of it sitting around fermenting. Like that glitter on his pinkie finger.

I wasn’t much of a working shamus then, so I let it pass. I hadn’t done more than print business cards and check out bars since we arrived in town. Oregon didn’t require an investigator’s license back then, and they didn’t object to a PI who sat reading the paper and cruising around town all day without any clients, either. I had no answer. Anyway, what can you say to a naked gold digger?

SW Illinois crossed 30th. I followed it until it split into an upper and a lower side, each no wider than a driveway. 2815 was a lemon cottage at the end of the lower dead end road. There was only one neighbor, with woods on beyond the house and a twenty-foot drop of the lower part of the road providing a hillside of trees down the right side. Birds announced us. Even though we were in the city limits, we might as well have been in the backwoods of Kentucky.

I killed the engine, got out and pulled Kasch up by his wrists to a sitting position. He was barely aware of reality, but his a reality not shared by anyone else on the planet.

I had to fish in his pockets for the front door key, a door with an antique frosted window in the top — this one chaotic flowers in a May basket. The only frosted pictures on doors I’d seen like that in Jersey had stags or bears or eagles. But this was Portland, and flowers were more in keeping with the sleepy woodsy town with more parks than buildings over five floors.

The cottage sported thick cedar shakes and manicured miniature boxwoods around a fishpond. A fountain gurgled in the middle of the pond. At the far corner sat a Morgan, British racing green, year unknown since they hadn’t changed styles since the 1930s. Mister Kasch obviously liked English cars, which meant he could put up with anything difficult to keep in working order, which also might explain his attraction to the sullen exhibitionist.

To say a cottage is small might be redundant, but this one could have doubled for a children’s phone booth. Half the size of my old place in Cicero, which I used to think of as tiny. The front door opened directly into a tidy living room not much bigger than a walk-in closet. The walls sported several interesting oil paintings, tiny miniatures in oversized gilt frames. Along one wall of custom shelves of various dimensions stood several bronze statuettes of ballerinas that would have made Degas giddy. A charcoal portrait of Teddy Roosevelt glared down over a tan leather loveseat, ready to object to anything unmanly. Or maybe the ballerinas upset him. Dominating the room stood a five-foot antique Round Oak stove on a brick hearth, its scrollwork outlined in silver, handles and footrests in gleaming nickel plate. The stove was designed for some Grange hall; it could easily exhale enough heat to drive everyone out of the cottage. Red oak parquet floors shined with high polish. A cozy, rich room — one fit for slippers, a pipe, some Chopin nocturnes, and slow sexual conquests.

I dumped Kasch on a king-size bed covered by a feminine bedspread with yellow and gold flowers. The awkward way his body sprawled reminded me of the time I dumped a buddy on a medic’s cot in Korea after hauling him up a frozen valley.

I followed the woman back through the living room into the kitchen — one of those you can stand in one spot and open any cupboard. A tuxedo cat milled about our feet after entering through its own small Plexiglas door in the living room. The cat, like its owner, inscrutable and silent. When I tried to make friends by rubbing it behind the ears it walked away bored.

A half full can of Folger’s coffee and a stainless coffee maker were enlisted to the effort. The spotless refrigerator wasted energy on but a half package of bacon and a can of Crisco. Steve obviously didn’t eat meals at home. The cat likely didn’t either, even if it lived there.

There was barely room enough in the kitchen for the coffee maker and me, so that when Miss Nude 1965 crowded her assets into my back I could hardly move unless I wanted to leap over the counter. I turned to look down into a pair of hungry eyes. She gripped my hips and rubbed against me.

You want to feel them, go ahead, I won’t object. Besides, you’re kind of cute, in a Neanderthal way.

My jaw-line scar, which at unreliable times burned or tingled with impending danger, experienced a long tingle, like a centipede with spike shoes doing the Wahtusi.

I doubt I can afford your rates. I’m a virgin gumshoe here, remember.

Her hand came up fast but I dodged and caught her wrist at the same time. She went off pouting into the living room. Maybe she wasn’t a pro, after all. She didn’t care much for talk of play for pay. I stood there watching the coffee pot and daring it to brew.

A few years back in Newark or Chicago I would have taken the babe up on her offer, tasted those delights fully, wiped my chin, and never looked back. Now things were different, or I wanted them to be — Molly and I had a place together. We were on a long slow cruise toward tying the knot, enjoying the ride. No woman had ever taken my heart and my libido like Molly Bennett.

Just as the brewing coffee filled the house with good aroma, Kasch came to the kitchen, steady and erect. His voice was clear, without a hint of his former state. Whatever had gripped him released him suddenly. Booze doesn’t do that.

He politely asked for a cup of black coffee, then took a seat at a square mahogany table in a room just off the kitchen, a high ceiling room wallpapered from ceiling to floor in patterns of raised red velour. A row of bay windows offered a one-eighty view over rooftops toward the back side, the suburban side, of the West Hills.

When I brought the coffee he lifted the cup cautiously to his lips with one hand, pinky finger signaling for a right turn, while cupping his other hand under the cup as if guarding against even one drop falling to the table. It was the first close up look I’d had at the man.

The way the light hit him, a scar peeked out at the edge of his scalp, back behind his left ear. It traveled back and then made a sharp turn as if heading over the top of his head. It was nothing like my jaw scar. It was neat and professional, with some years behind it. Somebody had opened Steve’s skull to fix whatever was awry inside. His facial features were not unattractive, and one might say his nose was even patrician, but overall he was an average looking duck. It was his manner that whispered eccentric with every word and gesture. Though only 43, he had calm, slow motion mannerisms of the geezers who sit in Lounsdale Square telling old war stories.

Why are we here? he asked, looking dumbly at the view. His once pasted smile had melted into an expression an aristocrat would have been proud of.

Here’s where you live, Bub.

He shifted his gaze to my