The Goldilocks Murder

By James Coyle

San Francisco detective Timothy Walker has just been hired for another missing person assignment, this time by an east coast business consortium called the Seven Sisters. When he quickly finds the missing sister, murdered by a blow to the head, he begins a transcontinental search for the killer. The murder weapon: a vintage-era, fully loaded canvas sack of gold nuggets. Travelling with former client and current partner Molly Dugan, Walker takes his investigation from California to New York. They pursue clues which will incriminate the gentlemanly and dangerously unstable Carol Brandauer, who is engaged in a deadly game of pursuit himself, seeking that which Walker is beginning to learn. Gold fever is the enduring ailment infecting the cast of characters whom Walker uncovers in his hunt, which involves not only Brandauer and his strangely afflicted henchman Dwight Blossom, but also individuals who lived and died in the gold fields of 1850’s California. Intelligently assessing characters is one of walker’s strengths. but in this investigation, he must also haunt the libraries and booksellers of New York City to see what he can decipher from a long-ago novel, journal, and newspapers. Those who enjoyed Jim Coyle's California detective novel, Evil at Its Ease, will enjoy the way in which that state’s storied history becomes a gold mine of clues to solve The Goldilocks Murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Coyle
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301588442

James Coyle

James Coyle was born in 1945 and died in November, 2009. This is the first of three detective novels he wrote. Educated at St. Louis University, Rice and Fordham, he relished life long passions for reading, writing and film. In his 40’s he studied the detective genre and found it ripe territory for his talent and his uniquely “literary” approach. His narratives weave in rich tapestries of places he lived in and loved including San Francisco and Northern California (the settings for this novel) and New York City. His novels are punctuated with clever and often humorous references to his wife and close friends.

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The Goldilocks Murder

by

James E. Coyle

.

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 James E. Coyle

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Table of Contents

NOTE TO THE READER

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

AFTERWORD

THE ART OF THE DETECTIVE NOVEL

THE AUTHOR

The original dream was golden,

its awakening was California.

And so it was again.

NOTE TO THE READER

Jim Coyle died in November of 2008. As a tribute and in remembrance his wife, Jeannie Coyle, and three close friends, John Bacialli, Don Knies and Bob Shea published a detective novel that Jim wrote in the 1980s, Evil At Its Ease. In publishing Jim's second novel, The Goldilocks Murder, we again remind ourselves of our many connections to Jim and his work. The two novels share a central character, settings in San Francisco and New York (cities familiar to each of us) and complex use of physical detail for character insight and to advance the narrative. The Goldilocks Murder relies on connections between the past and the present in its intricate plot line, just as our connections to the past, shared with Jim, remain inviolate.

The hard question is this. Does death break the connections? When friends precede you in death, is your life irretrievably diminished or is their memory not only in the past, but now, and tomorrow? One answer may well be in the enduring qualities of Jim's own novels, of art and of memory.

The text of Jim's novels abounds with metaphors and allusions to the art of literature and the art of film, shared passions among us all. And so we look to those worlds for words that capture the connection we make to our shared past with him...First to a poet we all studied in college:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

-T.S. Eliot

And to the screenplay writer of one of our favorite detective films, Chinatown:

Chinatown for me was an acknowledgement that

I lived with things I loved but could no longer see.

-Robert Towne

And so it is for us.

Jeannie Coyle

John Bacialli

Don Knies

Bob Shea

ONE

The San Francisco Examiner was already calling it The Goldilocks Murder.

And because of it I was in a jam and felt like I was twelve years old again, back in New York, holed up all day in that cavernous balcony of the Roxie theater. Avoiding the world outside.

I lifted a slat cautiously and peered down through the blinds into the bright December air. Still there, after three days. Two bored reporters and one video cameraman waiting to ask me a question I couldn't answer. The same question the police kept asking Friday night after I found her body.

I had let them down, all of them. I had lost face in the community, with the police and with myself. And that's bad for every detective, bad for detectives everywhere, as Bogie said in The Maltese Falcon.

So I felt twelve years old again. Back when the big movie palaces still had live entertainment and I had led a gang of friends downtown to Times Square. Bragging all the way that I could get us backstage at the Astor to see the magician, who, I boasted, was my friend.

But the stage door guard wouldn't let us in no matter what I said about knowing the magician. And, for five endless blocks back up Broadway to the IRT stop, I had endured the merciless jeering, ragging and hooting of my friends. Until I fled down 50th Street into the welcoming darkness of the giant Roxie theater.

The annoying part was that I really did know the magician. And he would have let us in, cleared up the whole misunderstanding, if only I could have gotten to him. And that's how it seemed again.

I really did have a client who hired me to find the woman who was now dead. A client who could clear up the whole mess if only I could get in touch with her. But, unlike the corpse I found, which was all too real, I couldn't find my client. Or even prove her existence. And that's why I was holed up in my apartment. Waiting for my mystery woman to contact me.

The missing woman she had hired me to find had been easier to locate. A cold, storm-driven rain had swept down from the Aleutians earlier in the week, and two monotonous, wet days of showing her picture all over town finally led me to a motor-hotel on Lombard, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge.

As I had walked down that characterless corridor to her seventh floor room, the chill in my bones went deeper than the cold rain outside. As if my senses were preparing me for what I would find.

No one answered my knock so I turned the knob and entered. It was cold and damp inside. The window at the distant end of the room was wide open and the draft from the open door had sucked the gauzy white curtains far into the room, draping them over a small table and chair.

I turned on the light and at first everything appeared okay. But when I closed the door the gauzy curtains flew back out the window, flapping high above Lombard Street like an escaping ghost.

That's when I noticed her, no longer obscured by the curtain. She was sitting in a chair beside the table, by the window.

Even from twenty feet I was struck by her curious, open-mouthed stare. Framed against the pitch black rectangle of the open window, with the fluttering white gauze curtains behind her, she looked angelic.

Her pale white face was surrounded by a head of gleaming black curls, filled with golden sparkles. Twinkling at me. Like an angel in a Christmas pageant. I almost spoke to her. But then even at twenty feet I knew she was beyond answering.

As I moved closer the angelic illusion grew more disturbing. All around her on the dark rug and all over her clothes and all through her black curls, were more golden sparkles. But even as she seemed more like an angel hovering in a cloud of golden dust, her open-mouthed stare more clearly revealed the anguish of her unexpected and violent death.

She had been slammed hard across the right side of her head, neck and face violently twisted left at a sharp angle to her torso, her mouth and eyes still open in startled protest.

With golden dust filling her eyes and more golden flakes in her open mouth, she sat like a warning gargoyle at the entrance to King Midas' tomb.

When the police arrived they found slightly over twenty pounds of pure gold in flakes, grains and dust. Well over $100,000 in unprocessed gold. Nature's gold, just as it had come from some primordial Sierra stream or hillside.

They also found a very old, thick canvas sack, ripped and partially rotted, that had held the gold, and had exploded like a golden bomb against the dead woman's head.

At first the gold had held their complete attention and I was just one more person in the way in an already crowded room. Then the first video unit from one of the local TV stations showed up as the cry of gold and murder spread.

That's when my problems began. The media had hold of a big story and suddenly the police had to make an official statement. The excitement of the gold and the bizarre death had to be explained and all eyes turned to me. Especially since the dead woman had no identification and the coroner estimated she had died less than an hour before they arrived. Especially since the names I gave for the murder victim and for my client both turned out to be false. Even worse when my client wasn't at the hotel I said she was.

So I told my story. The first of a dozen times. The same story I was still stuck with, the one nobody was happy with, including me.

My client had appeared at my door two days before, five days ago, now. Elizabeth Hewes, she had said. A good-looking young woman of about twenty-seven. Stylishly dressed, but not glamorous, and very sure of herself. The new woman, a blending of old values and new styles.

She had said she was out from New York to find a business partner of hers who had come to San Francisco earlier in the week, and who seemed to have disappeared. Probably nothing to worry about, she said, but could I find her? She was a young woman, younger than her even, inexperienced, and might get into trouble. No big deal, it seemed. Except it didn't work out that way.

Well, I had certainly found her.

So now I sat back in my darkened room and fitfully watched reruns and game shows all afternoon. Hardly like the balcony of the Roxie where I had a stage show plus Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr to divert me during two complete showings of An Affair To Remember.

Undoubtedly, a strange movie for a twelve year old boy to find comforting after the ridicule of his friends. But it got me through that embarrassing day, even though my magician friend soon left town and I never did get my friends backstage.

But it wouldn't be so easy this time. The Roxie theater was long torn down and holing up in my darkened apartment wasn't going to get me out of my current predicament.

I would have to produce my client if I wanted to work as a detective in this town. Because I had stumbled into the biggest sensation to hit San Francisco since the Gold Rush. The murder and the gold were now topic A in Baghdad by the Bay, and me along with it.

The facts now in circulation were that the torn canvas sack bore the label of Brannan's General Store in Sacramento, owned by one of gold rush California's most prominent citizens, and its like hadn't been seen in well over one hundred years. And that particular type of sack was known to have been preferred by many gold hunters to carry their poke of gold, even to bury it, since it was heavy and strongly made and almost indestructible.

And the gold, in flakes, dust and grains, some as large as a pea, was the stuff dreams were made of. The authentic article, just as it had been washed out of Sierra streams and hillsides. A professor at Berkeley even examined the few stray dirt particles and proclaimed positively that the gold came from the hills around Sonora.

Suddenly everyone wanted to know where the gold had been hidden all these years. And was there more? Especially, was there more! And who was the mysterious dead woman that the police couldn't identify? and who killed her? And was that idiot detective telling the whole truth or did he know more about the gold?

At four o'clock I finally got the call I had waited three days for.

This is Ashley Fisk Whitney, Mr. Walker. I held my breath. I'm the woman who hired you.

TWO

Six hours later we were on United's red-eye flight to New York.

We, because Molly had jested I needed a chaperone when I learned I had six clients, all young, all female and all living in New York. We, because I wanted Molly with me, to finally show her my old home town.

So the dead woman's name was Cassandra Stewart Hill, Molly said with a trace of grim irony.

Yeah, I know. The name doesn't bode well, does it. And she was the seventh partner in a business venture called The Seven Sisters.

Fanciful beginnings for such a horrible ending, she said. And the one who hired you...Ashley Fisk Whitney. She's the head of this partnership?

"Yes. One from seven leaves six. But the arithmetic of this case isn't so simple. Despite the deposition she gave to the New York police, Ms. Whitney doesn't seem to know much about what happened. Well, at least she got me off that hook I was hanging by. Temporarily.

But that's not going to be enough. Neither the media nor the police are going to let go of this one. It has too much 'star-making' potential. I'll be racing the clock, and my reputation's riding on the outcome. And a lot of eyes will be watching.

Despite the pressures I felt, we had managed to sneak out of town pretty much unobserved. Although I had notified Detective Keegan, who was heading the Goldilocks investigation, that I'd be back by the day after Christmas. The day my client was due to return to San Francisco from New York for more questioning.

But now all my problems seemed to be suspended as the snow covered tops of the Sierras began to slide by beneath us, faintly luminescent in the cold, near midnight air. All around us lights were being turned off and most of our fellow travelers were settling into their seats for as much sleep as they could manage before our dawn arrival at JFK.

Molly lowered her voice and almost whispered, and your client was very nervous, you said, when she called?

"Nervous. She was damned mysterious. She repeatedly apologized for leaving me out on a limb and said she had just given a deposition to the New York police stating that she had hired me and telling what she knew of her partner's murder.

But what she knows seems to be very little. And what she told me over the phone is even less. Except that someone has followed her back to New York from San Francisco.

Molly's eyes widened.

She said her apartment was ransacked last night, but nothing was taken. And she thinks someone is following her. And she's probably right, because someone called me just before we left and tried to hire me to go to New York to find something for him.

Molly's voice jumped a couple of octaves when she blurted out, to find what? and a weary businessman across the aisle shifted in his darkened seat and looked disapprovingly at us. Molly lowered her voice again. Do you know who it was?

No. He was even more mysterious than Ashley Fisk Whitney. But I upset him when I said I already had a client. His deep bass voice cracked into a high-pitched squeak, and he hung up on me.

Molly turned sideways facing me, and her voice dropped so low that the distinct sound of her words was almost all air. My god! You might have been talking with the murderer!

A very real possibility. Take a good look at that well-tailored gentleman on the other side of the plane. On the far side, three rows back, by the window.

Molly slipped off her shoes and pulled her feet up onto her seat as she turned to peek over the seatback. After a few seconds she slid back down into her seat, her long red hair tangled about her shoulders, and smiled at me.

5 feet 3 inches has its limitations, you know, but I got a good look at him. He's the only one over there with his light on, reading a green Michelin tour guide. About thirty with premature silver gray hair. High, patrician forehead with thin black eyebrows. Narrow, deeply recessed eyes. Wide, thin lips. Altogether an impressive man, even handsome. She leaned toward me playfully. How'm I doing, Sherlock?

You missed the color of his eyes.

You've got to be kidding! In this light, at that distance. Her legs still drawn up under her on her seat, she turned to face me. Put her nose tip to tip with mine, brushed my lips lightly with hers, before drawing back. But surely, Sherlock, even from here I can deduce that his, whatever color, are no match for your baby blues.

She was all cat-like now. Playful and graceful. Watching me. Expectantly. Smiling, almost laughing, with her deep green eyes. Radiating pure feline confidence that she was admired. And well worth it.

Was that a test? she teased. Did I pass?

No test, I answered.

No test, she repeated, thoughtfully. The playful animal alertness in her eyes was sharpened by intense intelligence. You don't mean you think that's the man who called you? she said incredulously.

That's what I want you to help me find out. He was sitting across from my house in a black Porsche this afternoon, and I thought maybe he was watching my place. Now he's on the plane with us. And that's quite a coincidence.

You think you can recognize his voice?

Maybe. If it's a deep bass that cracks and squeaks when he's upset, I'm sure I can.

So, I'm to get him upset while you listen from that empty row behind him? Molly whispered excitedly as she slipped her shoes on.

I couldn't help laughing a little. That's about it. But only if he has a smooth, deep voice.

Suddenly Molly's tone grew somber. But, if he's our man on the phone, it's possible he's also our murderer. Don't we care if he knows we're on to him?

Take it easy, I said. This might be nothing. I hesitated. But if it's not, let's make him nervous. See what happens.

As I left my seat and headed back toward the lavatory through the nearly empty first class section, I knew he was watching. I stopped at the partition and looked back into the crowded cattle car section which the airlines euphemistically insist on calling coach. I winced, wishing I could set them all free.

I waited another minute until I saw Molly get up, go to the front, cross the middle section of seats and come back down the opposite aisle. Then I crossed over from the back and slipped unobserved into the empty row behind our man just as Molly approached him.

As Molly stepped into his row, our man's head turned as he looked up at her. Molly put her right knee onto the aisle seat, leaned in against its back and half stood there, facing him sideways.

Well, what do you plan to do about it? Molly said to him impatiently.

Startled, he said, I beg your pardon?

Smooth as silk, rich and deep, like one of the Mills Brothers. So far so good.

Molly continued. Don't play dumb with me, Mack. You smashed in the back of my Volkswagen Beetle on the airport parking lot. Thought I didn't see you, didn't you?

I don't have the faintest idea what you are talking about, he said, his voice heavy with measured composure, wildly out of sync with his agitated manner. He started craning his neck toward our seats, wondering where I was and confirming that Molly was the woman from the seat next to mine.

You drive a black Porsche, don't you? Molly whined in an obnoxious, grating tone.

That threw him for a moment.

Get on with it, Mack. We've got some business to settle and I'm not leaving 'til you show me your driver's license. And you'd better be insured. Them Beetles are classics, you know. Real collectors' items.

My dear woman, he began. I arrived at the airport by taxi. Then he stopped.

His voice was still resonant and controlled, without a crack or a squeak that would positively identify him as the man on the phone. I heard him sigh deeply as he turned in his seat to face Molly. He could almost see me now. The composure he contrived in his voice seemed to be at war with every other part of his nature.

I have no intention of showing you my driver's license and I refuse to play this farce with you. Your name is Mary Dugan and your acting is as bad as that ham actor's detective work.

Molly's face showed her surprise at his tone. Somehow he had managed to whine like a petulant child in a deep masculine bass. She began to speak. Don't bother to lie, he interrupted. The newspapers and television were full of it.

He gestured with sharp erratic movements, as if laying out the headlines for her as he spoke: DETECTIVE FINDS BODY...FORMER NEW YORK ACTOR AT CENTER OF GOLDILOCKS MURDER MYSTERY...WHO ATE ALL THE PORRIDGE?...DETECTIVE CAN'T PRODUCE CLIENT.

His hostile