The Do or Die Machine: A San Francisco Murder Mystery

By Barry Smith

David Moore hops a plane from San Antonio to San Francisco following an urgent call from his former private-investigator and police-force partner, Sam Roth. Sam has information from David's estranged wife, Jennifer, which David hopes is a plea to save their marriage. When he hooks up with Sam, David finds something more disturbing.

Sam's troubles go deeper than Jennifer's disappearance and are too much for him to handle alone. He's over his head investigating the San Francisco mob. When they find Sam's car abandoned with Jennifer's purse and keys inside, David awakens his long-dormant instincts for exposing corruption and violence.

Waiting for David is a bloodthirsty army waging a drug-supply war; an imaginative, yet amoral scientist who gives people joy as long as they become willing slaves; and an ex-cop on whom David blew the whistle for planting evidence. David's feel for the streets sustains him as he crisscrosses San Francisco's landscape to uncover greed and violence.

Worst of all, David rattles the cages of power. But fighting the machinery of falsehood means discovering a secret his wife had kept from him. Will David's enemies force him to live a life he has forsworn?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 12, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595918195

Barry Smith

Barry Smith is, it goes without saying, an islomane. He has spent much of his 60-odd years at work, rest and play on islands all around the world – from Scotland’s Western Isles to Sicily, from Alaska to Cape Horn. To cap it all, he has completed a doctoral dissertation... about islands. He lives in northern Scotland and France.

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Copyright © 2008 by Barry Smith

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-0-595-47551-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-71158-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-595-91819-5 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

For Meryl

Acknowledgements 

To my friends who read the manuscript with critical eyes:

Patricia Boyd

Judith Barnett

Phyllis Brooks Schafer

Carol Verity

CHAPTER 1  

August 15, 1972. Tuesday. A Simpler Time.

David Moore traced this painful gnawing in his heart and his head to his wife. Both hurts were Jennifer’s fault for putting him on this time-killing flight from San Antonio to San Francisco to tell her what she should already know—that he loved her. But he would tell her in person, not on the phone. It had been ten days since he had heard her voice, but Jennifer was the one who had left. She should do the calling. He would not budge. Yet here he was, in his best summer suit, one she had picked out for him, this suit that was beginning to feel tight and was poor defense against Bay Area fog. His dark hair was slightly long in the back, but she would like that. It’s the way a professor’s hair should look, she had counseled him. In fact, she had made whole parts of his image over: his socks were always long now, and no more white socks or sneakers either unless he planned to sweat. If he hastily snatched a baseball cap from the rack on his way to the campus, he got ‘that look.’ Yes, she had made some things over, but she had known not to go too far. His own stubbornness was a match for hers. On weekends he might not shave. He played poker once a month and took his turn to host the game while she read in another part of the house or went to a movie with a friend. Their marriage was fine. And she had wanted to go to San Francisco to see her mother. That’s what he told himself, and lived with that explanation for ten days without a word from her. For that whole time he tried not to remember that she didn’t even like her mother, had not even gone to her mother’s wedding that year to a man Jennifer didn’t know existed.

Did she even know her husband was arriving? Sam Roth had telephoned to say Moore had better come. He trusted Roth. They had been cops together in San Francisco and partners in private investigations after that. Roth and his wife Gladys would have talked to Jennifer. They were playing marriage fixer. Good. This is the way it would work: They would advise Jennifer to meet him at the San Francisco airport. David and she would be alone together. All forgiven. All problems behind them. Now go home to San Antonio.

Except it did not work that way. As he stood on the curb with his small bag, the car that arrived was Sam Roth’s, and the face behind the wheel was not smiling. They shook hands while his friend busied himself getting away from the curb and back into traffic. A deep worried frown had begun to destroy his old friend’s usually friendly face. Now that Moore had had a chance to study that face, he saw the changes a year had made. Skin hung on the jawbone like it wanted to fall off, and the brown eyes were flat and guarded against intrusion. The hair on the round skull was suffering through a drought. Sam’s clothes fit him the way they would if someone larger had thrown them there. Could it be money? Sam had his pension from the Department. He had a private investigator’s license and an office wall to hang it on. And his first book had made a little. The book he was now writing had generated an enthusiasm and an advance. But Moore knew little about it other than that. Even if Sam did have a future writing about San Francisco crime, it was having a terrible effect on him.

Gained a little weight maybe, Sam Roth chided him. Good tan though. He signaled that he wanted the outside lane, but the Bayshore Freeway traffic ignored him. You actually like that college life?

There’s a premium on truth and plain speech, David Moore snapped. His tan had always been a joke. His Irish ancestors had mixed in the blood of a Spanish soldier who had washed ashore in County Wicklow during the time of the Armada. A little sun tended to bring out an olive tone that Jennifer liked. Too much sun and it came out in splotches. It was sunny on the freeway, but over the parts of the city where they were going the cool fingers of August fog reached in from the Pacific. Along the ocean beaches it would be thick and gray. They went by Candlestick and topped the rise to Potrero Hill. The air was still clear over the Bay Bridge and Alameda, and a large ship sat dead in the blue water off Hunters Point.

You’ll lose the tan in this overcast.

Well, I won’t be here long enough to lose it. I just want to talk to Jennifer and … You said on the phone she wasn’t feeling too good. What does that mean?

Suddenly Roth fixed his eyes on the rearview mirror, then the side mirror. He slowed to fifty and the traffic blew by.

I said she was upset.

Moore watched curiously as Sam played mirror mirror again. The hell you did. To hear you talk she’s bad off. That’s why I flew all the way here from San Antonio on a day when I have other things to do.

What other things? What’s better than you getting back together with Jennifer?

Not a thing if that’s what she wants. Moore stopped ta1king. His friend’s head moved from side to side as though he were afraid of the traffic.

Sam sighed, Jennifer didn’t say what she wanted. Not to me.

They passed the Central Freeway exit where Sam should have gone west. You mean I flew two thousand miles because I thought things were fine.

Think what the hell you want to think.

Where’d you see Jennifer last? Moore demanded. Is she staying with you and Gladys or in mommyland? And why sneak past your turnoff? You’re headed downtown.

One thing at a time. Sam said. I just want to stop by the office a minute. He chewed his lip and stared into the mirror, reading its message with dread.

Moore turned and studied the traffic behind. A pickup and a station wagon and a black Ford LTD held the slow speed with them. Everybody else cheated on the limit.

Jennifer’s not staying with us, Sam informed him. She’s with her mother most of the time. His face sagged another inch. Tell me, was this a separation?

’She didn’t give it a name.

You leave San Francisco a year ago and go to Texas to settle down with the dignified life. Suddenly, without telling her best friends, your wife’s back. She and Gladys whisper a lot together, and nobody tells me anything.

Would you listen if they did?

Not if I thought you two were just being cool and modern.

We’re the new Adam and Eve. Wife does what she wants; husband minds his own business. The first two years we were married we lived here. I worked with you, remember’? You know what she’s like. She gets nervous, she hits the road. She rented a car and disappeared in Oregon once.

Three days she was gone, Sam said. Gladys was gone a month once.

And she told you she was going. You treated it like the new ice age.

Jennifer said she told you she was coming here to see her mother.

But she doesn’t get along with her mother. Didn’t even go to the old gal’s last wedding.

Didn’t Jennifer have a job in San Antonio? She quit?

No. She writes advertising for a land developer who’s got enough money to hire beautiful blondes who treat the work ethic like last year’s couch covers.

Then she means to go back, I figure.

Of course, Moore said. He knew it didn’t sound convincing.

Sam took the Fourth Avenue off ramp. Moore looked back again and saw most of the cars and trucks keep to the Bay Bridge approach. Only the station wagon and the LTD followed them. The station wagon came alongside and went up Bryant Street when Sam turned. The LTD hung on. Sam took Third Street to an alley called Minna and threaded his way between the trucks back across Fourth to Fifth and made a right. Already two things were clear to Moore: the real reason for Sam Roth’s call to San Antonio had been masked behind a concern for Jennifer; and he, David Moore, had reacted quickly because he needed any excuse he could get to see his own wife. So while he felt that way and had made a damn fool of himself anyway, he wanted to see her and tell her and let things fall where they would. All this running up and down alleys was making him feel tied down. He hadn’t been active at private investigations since he’d left Sam’s office to teach Police Science at San Antonio College. Of course, Sam wanted him to ask who the big guy was riding shotgun in the LTD. And who was the little Weasel driving it? Sam’s avoiding the straight line to the office was beginning to resemble the conversation they were having.

Moore didn’t want to ask. Asking Sam a pointed question was likely to land him in the middle of a footnote. What he really wanted was to pick up Jennifer from her mother’s place in Jackson Heights, take her to North Beach and get lost in a bowl of soup at Capps or a beer at Vesuvio’s where they would both talk at once, and then they would be walking the streets laughing and they would pass a hotel and know it was time and it would be a room they would remember the rest of their lives as the place where they stood mouth to mouth trying to get their clothes off without breaking the magic circle.

Magic circles were their specialty. They always came back to the starting point. Moore remembered the weekend he’d made up his mind to quit the San Francisco Police Department. Almost two years ago to the day. He had come home to their flat on Fourth Avenue to find Jennifer sitting moodily on the couch in jeans and a thick sweater, breakfast dishes frozen in time on the table. He’d stood before the couch trying to get her to look at him. You’ve got that wander lust in your eyes, he said.

Want to do something about it? She pouted. She’d washed her hair and it shone red gold in the afternoon sunlight.

It’s Friday. Shall we do it the whole weekend?

Right up until Monday morning when the Department pulls the chain and you come running, she said, standing up resolutely to kiss him.

According to rules of their game, each had one minute to grab whatever would be the most needed possession for two days and three nights on the road, lock the house, and flee without a backward look. Jennifer usually drove first, this time southeast turned toward Livermore and the warm valley sun like a heliotrope. Then Moore had taken over and driven eastward through Yosemite and Tioga Pass.

Not fair, Jennifer chided. There’s no place fun go to. How can you be whimsical when all you do is end up in the desert?

And they had ended up in the desert, in good old, Godawful Tonopah, Nevada, playing blackjack and drinking and jumping in the pool in their underwear at midnight. They’d turned the air conditioner off in the room and opened the window and lain naked in the desert’s heat.

You’re a hell of a stabilizing influence, David. What will Fetus Moore think? She spoke with her mouth on his chest, the heat sticking their bodies together.

Fetus Moore is a lazy bum. He’s decided to pass his life in single-celled splendor and miss all those trumpet lessons and acne.

Shall I play a dirty trick on him and get off the pill? A coyote laughed in the desert.

I’m quitting the Department. I’m not a cop anymore.

So that delayed things for the year he’d worked with Sam Roth as an investigator, trying to start a business partnership that demanded twelve hours a day. And then there was the job in Texas where everything was supposed to get organized.

Sam brought him back to the present. You aren’t paying attention. The corner of Fifth and Mission was bright and sunny, but the sun didn’t help the blight of cut-rate surplus stores, small one-room manufacturers, and joints that sold ten hamburgers and a package of gum all day. The intersection shivered with the pounding of jackhammers that worked at the decayed jaws of permanent excavations. Sam crossed Mission Street, and Moore could see the fourth floor window in the old red brick building where Sam had an office. The garage was in back and the tenants had to sneak down another alley called Jessie to park underground in marked stalls. Before he entered the garage, Sam stopped and watched the mirror again.

I’ll get a cab and go out to Jackson Heights …

Just sit still a minute for Christ’s sake. Your blonde goddess can wait a little longer. A couple of minutes.

O.K. But tell me why the hell you didn’t get out and bend the ear of that guy in the LTD. Without looking, he knew the moment the tail went by the open end of the alley by the way Sam eased the Dodge into the rolled-up door.

Because I’m not ready yet, that’s why.

Not ready, Moore repeated. At least that tells me you’re on top of it, not waiting for somebody to do your thinking. It’s nice to know that.

Stopping in front of a grimy wall that had ROTH scratched with chalk at eye level, Sam said, I can live without the charm. I just want you to listen to me for thirty minutes.

First it’s one minute, then two, now .

You can call it a consultation. I’ll pay you for your ear. Professors do it, you know. And you can write the plane trip off that way.

That’ll he1p. But you could just ask as a friend. It’s not as though you’re putting me on a spot.

I might be, Sam muttered. You’ve been seen with me. Frank House will know you’re back in town within an hour.

It was a name they both knew well. Inspector Frank House had made a career out of the SFPD Narcotics Bureau. And he was the main reason David Moore wasn’t still slowly inching his way up through the ranks of the force.

He got what he wanted out of me, Moore said. I quit, ran away from it and went to work for you. And he wouldn’t let me alone even then. He lifted my license so I had to work under your agency number until I could appeal. And I had to put people like Inspector Sellers on the spot to do it. That worked like the Bay of Pigs. All right, I went to Texas for peace of mind. What the hell does he want?

Who knows what satisfies the tough ones? But it’s not over until he says it’s over.

Moore had decided never to regret blowing open the mistakes of Frank House and Billy Kokosinski over two years ago. They’d deserved it. With all the arrogant stupidity two sworn officers could muster, they’d planted five ounces of heroin on a snitch named Phil Jackson, a young black who wanted nothing so much as to be a cop but who needed all the night school he could get in twenty years to pass the exams. In his zeal to cooperate, Jackson had given House and Billy Koko some unchecked facts, and they’d embarrassed the Department by busting a Mormon accountant, his wife and six kids. So the two cops got even with Jackson—laid the stash on a kid that would die before he’d use it or sell it, and when he’d freaked, Billy Koko had burned him. They might have made it stick if Jackson had died, but the kid lived long enough to tell David Moore what had happened. As Community Relations Officer, David Moore had taken his job seriously, too seriously some said; and when the Jackson affair had threatened to rock the Fillmore, he had forced Internal Affairs to trace the heroin to Narcotics.

Frank House had survived the probe; Billy Koko hadn’t. Neither had David Moore. If he’d been anything but Community Relations, he might have; but that slot made a man about as popular as a citizens’ review board. The machinery of revenge had ground him up.

You didn’t get me to San Francisco to talk about Frank House.

Sam got out of the car slowly. It could have been the end of the day for him. Moore followed to the elevator, and they stood in the cage as it groped and clanked its way to the fourth floor.

The office hadn’t changed since Moore had shared it with Roth. The entry door was half pebbled glass with SAM ROTH, INVESTIGATIONS and a telephone number written across it. There were three rooms in a suite, the first just large enough for a bored secretary. There wasn’t one, but a big IBM Selectric hogged the top of the desk.

Gladys comes in to help out, Sam apologized. Who’d want to sit in this dump all day?

After the reception room came two small offices in a line connected by doors, then a toilet at the end of the road. There was a desk in each room, surplus bankrupt 1950, and scarred filing cabinets that could take earthquakes. Each office had a door to the hallway, but Sam had blocked his off with two large files. A smaller file with an iron bar through the drawer handles sat locked beside them. The floor was covered with broken linoleum that had been pounded thin enough to show the forms of the boards beneath it. Atop the cabinets lay almanacs, dictionaries, the Physicians Desk Registry, and folders with colored tabs on them.

I had a temporary investigator in your old office for a while, Sam said. A Chinese P.I. named Jimmy Poon. He nodded and almost grinned. Well, this Jimmy Poon could tail a divorce case through Chinatown all day but he stood out in Pacific Heights. Right from Hong Kong. Spent a fortune getting a license and learned all his English reading Dashiell Hammett.

Where’s he now?

Got his own hole on Grant Street. I’ll introduce you sometime. He sat at the desk and dug sunflower seeds out of his pocket and began to crack them with his teeth.

I see you still do that, Moore said.

Keeps the weight down.

And helps get the story straight, Moore thought. It had been Sam’s way, digest facts bit by bit like the tiny seeds, slowly building evidence, nourishing the mind on fragments of near nothing until there was enough energy to carry a case to its close. There were a lot of men in the San Francisco P.D. Homicide Bureau who worked like that—men of persistence and tradition that carried on when one of them, like Sam, quit or retired.

Against the wall that separated Sam’s office from Moore’s old space there was a blackboard that served as a thought arranger. Down the left side of the board ran a string of pictures, some from newspapers, some photos taken from street angles, some mug shots. Moore recognized the old man in the news clip at the top as Little Vince Dimare, a grandpapa mobster with one of the most stable organizations in the hierarchy, an organization that kept low in San Francisco by confining at least sixty percent of its business to legitimate bakeries and restaurants. The fun forty percent included gambling and prostitution. The old man’s picture showed him white haired in an apron pouring wine for a young woman in a wedding gown.

That’s touching, Moore said, You keeping an album of the family and all. He ignored Sam’s grunt and studied a line that led from the picture across the blackboard. The line had dates on it and went back three weeks. There were no notations for the last three days.

Beneath the old man’s face there was a younger man’s, one that Moore had to think about. Pious John Dimare?

The baby of the family, Sam said.

Getting anywhere with his loaves and fishes trick?

Not the last I heard. He’s planting a money tree now. I don’t know what he’s gonna put on it to make it grow, but …

Never mind, Moore said. I don’t have time for two volumes of Dimare family history. He pointed to a big meaty face in the lineup. What’s Billy Koko doing in here?

Strictly a volunteer. The rest of those guys are new soldiers.

Moore walked to the desk and sat in an armchair that had been rescued from Sam’ s basement. He took a cigarette from his pocket. When Sam turned his mouth down and pushed the ashtray across the desk with one finger, he said, Mind if I smoke?

I don’t like to see my friends killing themselves.

You aren’t a picture of self righteous health. Maybe it’s those sunflower seeds.

A siren went along Mission Street and Sam got up to peer through dusty blinds at the scene below. While Moore studied his friend’s back, he got the uneasy feeling that he was watching a man who had lost something special. Oh, hell, he thought. Sam’s probably tired. But why that tired? One year ago, he’d been a big two-hundred pounder with energy to burn. At full pension and near-ing fifty, he had a future as his own boss. He’d made a good business of working the internal security for large firms that suddenly found chunks of material or money missing. Then he started writing advice to firms on how to up their security, and it turned into a book. When Moore had left San Francisco, he’d gone with the certainty that when he returned for a visit, Sam Roth would be sitting in a classy office on Montgomery Street.

That’s not the beautiful Sierras out there, Moore said. So if you’ve got something to say .

Sam spun around and glared at him. 1 would but you don’t seem interested. In the old days you would have been dying to know what those, he pointed a stubby finger at the pictures, are all about.

1 wouldn’t have had to ask either. Moore snapped. You don’t have to waltz me. My dear wife has found a new shoulder to cry on, and you’re messenger boy. Well, I’ve got a house in Texas I can’t pay for, a job that leaves me more free time than I can handle, and the cost of living is eating up the interest on both the dollars in my savings account. But I’m thirty-two and grown and can still face the truth.

Shaking his head, Sam collapsed into the creaking chair. You want to talk about Jennifer. Then let’s. He nibbled thoughtfully on the seeds. A point in the center of the worn green desk blotter seemed to have an invisible script on it from which he read mechanically. Jennifer came by the house last night to see Gladys. I was there. Somebody was outside in a car waiting for her, but she didn’t say who it was, at least not to me. I was eating in the kitchen because I had to go back out. Jennifer went out and told whoever it was to beat it and came back. That was when I left. I thought she was going to spend the night, but when I came in late, Gladys woke up and told me that Jennifer had left and taken Gladys’s Plymouth. He paused and cleared his throat. The heavy lids over his brown eyes drooped. Want a drink?"

Moore didn’t move.

No drink, Sam said. This morning I got a call from a guy at the Ghiardelli Square garage. He’s a cop and works security there moonlight. He knew the Plymouth and said a man had left it. Nobody remembered what the man looked like. They were going to leave the car there, but Gladys needed it; so I drove her down and she found Jennifer’s purse with money and ID and everything. He reached in his desk and took out the brown purse and laid it on the desk. The car was locked. No keys.

It wasn’t necessary to add that women didn’t walk off leaving purses and holding keys in their hands. Moore picked up the purse and opened it. It smelled of L’aire du Temps perfume. The red wallet contained seventy-six dollars, credit cards and a photo of Moore and Jennifer sitting beside a swimming pool in Nuevo Laredo. A telephone number on a torn piece of paper had the initials H.G. written on it in her handwriting. Also In Jennifer’s handwriting, he saw the fragment of a poem. It was her habit to keep these fragments in