Courage Matters: A Ray Courage Mystery (Ray Courage Private Investigator Series Book 2), Page 3

  Norris apparently spent the rest of the afternoon in the office because I sat in my car and watched his empty BMW in the Emerald Tower parking garage until almost six o’clock. There was no radio reception inside the garage and I didn’t bring anything to read. Sitting there, I thought about how my life had changed so dramatically in the past two years. It started with Jill leaving, of course. Then the allegations six months ago followed by the investigation. I knew that the university had no choice, but it incensed me that in a ‘he said, she said’ my 23 years of spotless service counted for nothing against the accusations from a one-semester coed who, at last count, had moved on to her fourth college. It brought me here. Probably I was more burned out on teaching than I realized, but the concept of becoming a private investigator had never been on my radar until all the shit rained down. Doing recon on an empty BMW for four-plus hours had me wondering if I’d made the right choice.

  Just when I was about to abandon the surveillance of the empty car, Norris came out of the elevator and into the garage. He lived in Granite Bay so it surprised me when Norris skipped the onramp to eastbound Highway 50. Instead he drove under the highway, turned right on Broadway and parked next to a popular hole in the wall called Jamie’s.

  By the time I parked and walked inside, Norris already had a drink in front of him at the bar. I chose an empty seat to his right, ordered a Stella Artois from a pretty redheaded bartender and pondered how to play this.

  When my beer arrived, Norris ordered another drink, a vodka and tonic. First drink down in less than five minutes. Maybe not the nice Mormon boy after all.

  When his second drink arrived I used it as an opportunity.

  “Cheers,” I said, raising my glass in Norris’s direction.

  He said nothing, offering a half-assed tilt of his glass in the general direction of mine.

  “I can use this drink,” I said. “Another bad day on the market. My 401(k) is killing me.”

  “What do you mean?” he said. “Every index was way up today. Been trending up the last three months.”

  Damn. I knew next to nothing about the stock market. Now Norris knew it.

  “It must be my portfolio. Lately, I’ve been losing my shirt.”

  “You probably have a lot of small cap or maybe heavy in the Pacific Rim. Those haven’t been doing so well lately.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Sounds like you know a lot about investing.”

  “I guess you could say that.” He studied the local news on the TV above the bar even though there was no sound or captioning.

  “Are you a broker?” I said, needing to move the conversation along.

  He nodded.

  “I’m not doing so well on my own. I could use a good broker.”

  Norris looked at me for the first time. He had a pretty boy quality about him. Nice skin, perfectly straight, white teeth, a hundred dollar haircut, and an expensive suit tailored perfectly to his slender frame.

  “Do you always ask perfect strangers to handle your money?”

  “Point taken. I’m guessing from that response you’re not looking for new clients?” I said.

  “No, I’m not.” He took what could only be called a gulp of his vodka and tonic.

  “Really? A guy offers you his money and you won’t take it. I’m impressed.”

  He looked at me again. His perfect teeth now revealed themselves in a phony, practiced smile.

  “I don’t mean to sound rude,” he said. “I’m not the kind of broker you are looking for. I don’t even do client acquisition. My boss does. All I do is schmooze the accounts he assigns me.”

  “I see,” I said, watching the bartender slide a bowl of pretzels between Norris and me. “Maybe your boss would take me on.”

  “He doesn’t take just any client.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Most of our clients are worth eight figures, some nine or more. It’s something of an exclusive club. No offense.”

  I laughed. “A little out of my league. You’re right.”

  He went silent and I decided to give him some time before pressing on, afraid that I might already have been a tad too persistent. He finished his drink. I checked my watch. He had downed two vodka tonics in less than twenty minutes, which meant he probably had a pretty fair buzz on. The bartender asked if he wanted another. Norris shook his head, probably the good Mormon part of him taking over, keeping him below the legal limit to drive. He left a twenty on the bar and started to stand. It was now or never.

  “Do you like it?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Your job. It sounds like a sweet deal. Schmoozing clients and all.”

  “Yeah, sweet. Too sweet to be real. If you only knew, buddy.”

  He fished his car keys from his coat pocket and headed out the front door.

  six

  After picking up the mail that kept coming to me at the Communications Studies Department offices, I decided to walk across campus to the athletic fields. Students strolled and biked between classes under blue skies and March temperatures that at mid-morning already pushed seventy degrees. I longed for the Giants opening day, now just two weeks away.

  Thanks mainly to the vision and perseverance of Head Coach Jill Stroud, the Sacramento State softball facility had become one of the best of its kind on the West Cost. In addition to a pristine, natural grass playing surface and grandstands that could accommodate a thousand or so fans, the facility had locker rooms for the players and coaches, a training room, video room, coaches offices, two bullpens and a six-tunnel batting cage.

  Jill and two of her players practiced hitting in one of the tunnels. A Jugs pitching machine with an automatic ball feeder shot pitches toward the hitter at speeds that would have challenged Major League hitters.

  She did not see me walk up to the cage, her focus on the pitches flying toward her. She squared up about ten or so consecutive balls, smacking them left, right and center. When she stepped out of the cage, breathing heavily, she finally saw me.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “Every pitch is a fast ball thrown at the same spot. Makes it a little easier.” She set down her bat and started removing her batting gloves.

  One of the players ducked under the netting to take her turn against the machine. The player had far less success than Jill, missing three pitches in a row before fouling two.

  “You need to load sooner,” Jill said to the player. “And don’t try pulling everything. It makes your front side fly open.”

  The advice worked because the player starting making solid contact. She gave Jill a smile after crushing one ball up the middle that bounced off the pitching machine.

  “What’s up?” Jill said, turning her attention to me. Her tone was cordial and I sensed no lingering animosity from our last conversation.

  “I was on campus,” I said, holding up the stack of mail in my right hand by way of explanation. “While I was here I thought I’d give you the latest.”

  She pointed at a spot a few feet away, out of earshot of the hitter and the other player waiting her turn.

  “OK. So tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  “Not much, actually. I followed Norris yesterday, saw him meet with a client. Ever heard of a Charles Burke?”

  Jill shook her head.

  “Older guy, white, looks rich.”

  “That would fit the profile of a typical client at Lionel Stroud Investments,” she said.

  “He seemed ticked off at something Norris said near the end of their lunch.”

  “Is that significant?”

  “I don’t know. Your dad won’t let me talk to the clients. Norris low keyed it, like it didn’t matter, but he seems stressed to me.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I chatted him up some after work.”

  “You did? I thought my father said to keep your distance?”

  “Norris had no idea who I was. Just some random guy at a bar.”

  “What made
you think he was stressed?”

  “It could be he’d had a bad day, the flare up with Burke and all. But he seemed more, I don’t know, disenchanted than that.”

  “Okay, professor, this is why my father is paying you the big bucks. Explain ‘seemed disenchanted.’ But wait a second.” She turned her attention toward the second player now taking her turn in the batting cage.

  “Elizabeth, I want you to take everything to the right side for ten, fifteen swings. Opposite field. Oppo, oppo.” To emphasize what she meant by opposite field she pointed at the right side of the tunnel.

  I waited for her attention to turn to me, which it did after she observed the hitter take four or five swings, hitting softballs into the right side of the netting.

  “Sorry,” she said. “She bats second in the lineup. I need her to hit opposite field more to move runners up rather than trying to hit everything out of the park.”

  I nodded and we watched the player hit three straight balls to the right side. “Back to Norris,” I said. “For someone whose sole job is to schmooze clients—his exact words by the way—he was not the most engaging fellow.”

  “Like you said, maybe just a bad day.”

  I thought more about my conversation the evening before at Jamie’s. What had clued me in to Norris’s mood? Not just his words, but his body language. And the fact he downed two stiff drinks in twenty minutes, an impressive feat even for a dedicated alcoholic, which I guessed Norris was not.

  “He had the look of someone defeated,” I said. “Defeated and dejected. Shoulders slumped, unenthusiastic speech pattern.”

  “Maybe it was the company.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  “What else?” she said.

  “I asked him if he liked his job. You know what he said?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He was very sarcastic. I said it must be a sweet job and he said it was too sweet to be real. He said something like ‘if you only knew,’ which I took to mean that the job was no bed of roses.”

  “Another satisfied Lionel Stroud employee, sounds like,” Jill said.

  “Meaning your father is difficult to work for?”

  “Uh, yeah,” she said. “He pays well but he’s tough on people. Just like he was on me.”

  “I never knew that,” I said.

  “Let’s just say having a softball playing, softball coaching daughter wasn’t his plan for me. We’ve come to a truce now. But back when, at least every three months he would try to get me to work for him. Anything short of following in his footsteps at Lionel Stroud Investments and serving on the board at Del Paso Country Club is considered massive failure. A softball coach? I might as well be selling my body on Stockton Boulevard.”

  Her eyes glistened. The only other time I’d seen her cry was that awful night two years ago when she sent me packing.

  “You’ve never talked about this before,” I said.

  “Not exactly my favorite topic.”

  “But at least now you said you and your dad have dinner a couple of times a year. That must help your relationship and getting to know each other better.”

  “I don’t think anyone could ever know my father. Even me. He has no close friends, both my mom and wife number two are long gone. I don’t think he dates. Work and a weekly round of golf at the country club is pretty much his life. Other than that his life is a closed book. A very closed book.”

  seven

  Rebecca Tampini and I met at Paragary’s for lunch. I don’t always drink at lunch, but when Rebecca ordered a Grey Goose martini I felt compelled to order a Fat Tire ale.

  “You look nice,” I said. I was used to seeing Rebecca, a former student of mine, in jeans and t-shirts, not the natty business suit she now wore.

  “Thank you professor, or may I call you Ray now that I’m a big girl?”

  “You may.”

  “Well, Ray, I must say retirement appears to agree with you. You look very yummy.”

  “Yummy?” Though one of my favorite students, Rebecca was also an unapologetic flirt.

  “Don’t be shy. You knew that your Rate My Professor Web page ranked you the number one stud muffin on campus.”

  I actually blushed and was glad that the waitress arrived with our drinks. We ordered lunch, a bay shrimp salad for her, a chicken panini for me. When the waitress departed, Rebecca raised her glass to mine.

  “To us,” she said.

  “Rebecca, I am literally old enough to be your father,” I said, clicking her glass nonetheless.

  “Oooh. Maybe you could spank me.”

  “I don’t date students.”

  “Who said anything about date? Besides, I’m no longer a student and you are no longer a professor. Next month I turn twenty-nine. Hardly jail bait.”

  “No, I suppose not. But given recent history I think it would be wise for me to decline any offers from students, even former ones.”

  “Oh, that.” Rebecca turned uncharacteristically serious. “Everyone knows that bitch was whacked out. I can’t believe they investigated you. She claimed you tried to cop a feel from her, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What happened exactly?”

  Except as part of the investigation no one had ever bothered to ask me that. None of my fellow professors, not Rubia, none of my friends. Maybe they wanted to spare me the discomfort of reliving a hard time, but in truth I wanted people to know what had happened and was glad for Rebecca’s unapologetic bluntness.

  “It was right after the last class of the semester, just before finals week. This girl, I mean young woman—”

  “Joanne—”

  “I’d rather leave her name out of it.”

  “Whatever, I know who she is.”

  “Anyway,” I began again. “This woman was failing my class. She’d turned in maybe half the work, failed the midterm. She stays after class to talk with me. She asks me what her grade will be in the class if she happened to get an A on the final the following week. I told her that she would need to make up a couple of projects, but if she did that and got an A on the final then she would probably get a C-minus in the course.”

  “That seems pretty generous of you if she had an F at that point.”

  “That’s what I thought. But I figured if she was willing to put in the work then a C-minus would be fair.”

  “But she didn’t go for that did she?”

  “Nope,” I said. “She looked me straight in the eye and as cool as could be asked me what it would take to get an A. And then she unbuttoned the top button of her shirt.”

  “What a slut. I’ll have to remember that one.”

  “Not funny.”

  Rebecca stopped smiling but I could tell she was still amused. “What did you do?”

  The waitress arrived with our food. After assuring her that we did not want ground pepper on any part of our food and did not need anything else at the moment, we watched the waitress leave before I resumed my story.

  “At that point I’m very uncomfortable and embarrassed, as much for her as for me. But she was bold. She was standing right next to me already and then she moved in closer. I moved away, putting the lectern between us. I told her that there was no way she could get an A. And then she came right up to me and put her hand in a very strategic spot on my body and offered to give me oral satisfaction.”

  “She said ‘oral satisifaction’?”

  “No, she used the street term.”

  “Blow job?”

  “Keep your voice down,” I said.

  “And you said no.”

  “Of course. She leaves in a huff and I’m sitting there wondering what just happened. The next morning I’m told that I’m on administrative leave for fondling one of my students and that I had to stay off campus until an investigation is completed.”

  “But I thought you were cleared. The investigative committee said that the girl wasn’t credible.”

  “They did,” I said between bites of my panini. “But it took a
month. The committee treated me like shit. Even afterwards it seemed like they thought I was guilty.”

  “But it was all over at that point. You didn’t have to quit.”

  “Things weren’t the same after that and I doubted they ever would be. I had become a pariah. A couple of my colleagues—the more hardcore feminists in the department—wanted me censured. Even my male counterparts stayed away from me. At staff meetings no one would look me in the eye. There were negative blog postings about me all over the place. So, I just said the hell with it, took an early retirement and started a new career. End of that chapter.”

  Telling the story to Rebecca, while maybe not cathartic, felt good. It felt as if I had made my relationship to this one person whole again, eliminated an unknown that both of us wanted known. I realized then, that asked or not, I needed to have this same conversation with everyone else I valued in my life.

  I drank about half my beer in several satisfying gulps. The Fat Tire tasted better than I remembered and I made a mental note to add it to my rotation.

  “That really sucks, Ray.”

  “I’m over it.”

  “Are you?”

  I didn’t answer because it was a question I asked myself every day.

  “How is the career going?” I asked, an abrupt change of subject.

  “Really well.” Rebecca sat back in her seat. I think she wanted to talk more about my situation but respected my desire to change directions. “I have more clients than I can handle.”

  “What firm are you with these days?” Rebecca had become a stock broker after graduating from college. We stayed in touch every month or so by e-mail, but she’d changed brokerages several times and I couldn’t remember where she last landed.

  “Ponton and Salles. I’m an associate partner. It’s a young firm and we’re doing very well.”

  “I never doubted you’d become a millionaire by thirty-five.”

  “Even though you gave me B’s in both the classes I took from you?”

  “A’s are overrated,” I said. “B’s build character. How’s the salad?”

  “Yummy.”

  “Now I feel cheap. Equated to a salad.”

  We ate in silence for a few moments. The restaurant was nearly filled, mostly with workers from the slew of state government buildings in the downtown area.