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  Praise for TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE, the FIRST book in the Paul Mcdonald series by Edgar-winning author J.D. Smith (sometimes known as Julie Smith):

  “One more blithe San Fran outing with a likable journalist-sleuth by the name of Paul Mcdonald… Smith improves with each story and this is her best to date.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A Prize Plot.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “A bright, light, cleverly written tale.”

  —Cincinnati Post

  TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURE

  A Paul Mcdonald Mystery

  By

  J.D. SMITH

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  True-Life Adventure

  Copyright © 1985 by Julie Smith

  Cover by Nevada Barr

  ISBN: 9781625171139

  Originally published by Warner Books, a Time Warner Company

  www.booksbnimble.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: April 2013

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1 • CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3 • CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5 • CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7 • CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9 • CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11 • CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13 • CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15 • CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17 • CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19 • CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21 • CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23 • CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  Dedication and Acknowledgments

  Guarantee

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  The Paul Mcdonald Series

  Also by Julie Smith

  A Respectful Request

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  “That stuff’ll kill you.”

  “What? Your coffee?” Jack was just doctoring his second cup.

  “No. All that saccharine. You’re poisoning yourself.”

  “We’ve all gotta go sometime.”

  Jack went right about then. His eyes rolled back and he let go of the cup. Coffee sloshed all over my rug. His big body fell forward in the chair.

  I tried to lift him by the shoulders to get him upright again. I wasn’t sure why— I thought I wanted to look at his face or loosen his tie or something. But really I just wanted to undo what had happened, to see him sitting in the chair the way he’d been a moment before.

  But I saw how dumb that was and I called 911.

  I tried feeling for a pulse; I couldn’t find one. So I tried to think of something else I could do, anything. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation maybe. But I couldn’t get him in position. He was built like a bear and I wasn’t sure I should move him, anyway. I wound up just standing there by his chair with my hand on his back. My cat Spot rubbed against my legs, sensing I needed comfort, trying to do the same thing for me I was trying to do for Jack. I was grateful.

  We were there a long time, Jack and I, like some tableau in a wax museum. I heard a siren and I went to let the paramedics in. They laid him out and attached something to his chest. I went into the kitchen, telling myself I needed to get out of their way. But the truth was, I didn’t want to watch. Jack wasn’t a friend or even someone I especially liked, but I was afraid he was dead and death makes me squeamish. Or dying does, anyway.

  So I stood in the kitchen, patting Spot and staring out the window.

  After about a month and a half, one of the paramedics came in. He was twenty-fiveish and blond, very innocent-looking. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We couldn’t do anything.”

  “I— uh— thanks for trying.”

  “My partner’s calling the coroner’s office. We’ll wait till they get here.”

  I said I needed some fresh air and they let me go out into my postage stamp of a garden and sit there until the coroner’s wagon came. Then they said good-bye and a deputy coroner came out to talk to me. He said his name was Stanley Smith.

  “Paul Mcdonald,” I said.

  “And your friend’s name?”

  “My friend?” I realized he meant Jack. “Oh. Jack Birnbaum. He wasn’t a friend, exactly. I was doing some work for him.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “Client reports. Jack was a private detective.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m— uh— a ghostwriter.”

  It sounded dumb and I was embarrassed. Sometimes I said I was an editorial consultant. Really I was an ex-reporter trying to make a living freelancing. I did brochures for banks and how-to books for publishers and autobiographies for rich people who didn’t know how to write— anything, so long as you could do it on a typewriter and it wasn’t journalism.

  I started doing Jack’s reports when some client or other dumped him because he couldn’t make sense out of them. Jack called the Chronicle and tried to hire Debbie Hofer, who referred him to me.

  I thought the gravy train had just pulled into the station. Jack would detect all day and phone me at six for what he called “debriefing.” Since his verbal skills were pretty wanting, that usually took at least an hour, and I charged him thirty dollars a phone call. Then, at the end of the week, I’d whip him up a client report and he’d work me into his expense account somehow, and everybody’d be happy.

  The gig bought Spot a lot of Kitty Queen liver and chicken, but what I liked best was that it was so cute. I could go to a party and say I was a ghostwriter for a private detective and I’d have a crowd around me in about three seconds.

  But somehow, telling it to a coroner’s deputy in my backyard on a Monday morning, it didn’t sound so cute. It didn’t matter, though. Jack was the one he was interested in. I told him all about how he was drinking coffee one minute and lying there dead the next.

  “Did he complain of feeling sick at all?”

  “Yes. Come to think of it, he did. He said he thought he was getting the flu.”

  “Did he mention any symptoms?”

  Something Jack had said came back to me with a nasty clarity. “He said his heart felt funny— like it kept skipping a beat. And he said he was seeing spots.”

  Stanley Smith looked at me like I was a moron. I tried to explain why I hadn’t diagnosed heart trouble and bundled Jack off to Mission Emergency: “I didn’t think about it much because mostly he complained about his stomach. He said he had the stomach flu.”

  “Did he eat anything while he was here?”

  “Just drank some coffee. I didn’t think it was the best thing for the flu, but he wanted it.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about any heart trouble— any medication he took for any chronic illnesses?”

  “No. He seemed fine until today.”

  “How long have you two been working together?”

  “About three or four months.” I shrugged, feeling helpless. “I’m afraid I really didn’t know him very well.”

  Stanley Smith left, taking his colleagues and Jack with him. I felt not just depressed, but panicky, as if I didn’t dare look back because something might be gaining on me. Jack was fifty-five, which is too young to die, and I was thirty-eight, which is too old, like the man said, to be a young talent.

  When I was in my early twenties, I took off to see the world, so that was out of the way. When I was a reporter, I covered the war in Vietnam; the entire Patty Hearst case, including the trial; the holocaust at Jonestown; and approximately fifty-nine thousand soporif
ic meetings of various city councils and county commissions. Nobody could say I hadn’t been around. I’d also known lots of women and maybe loved one of them, I think.

  But the things I hadn’t done were the ones I didn’t want to think about, and Jack’s death was kind of stirring things up. I was afraid they might start crossing my mind and that’s what was making me panicky. If I’d known a woman who was fond of me, maybe I could have called her and she would have made me feel better. But there was no such woman in the world, probably including my mother, and that was one of the things I didn’t want to think about.

  So I did what I always do when too much reality starts intruding on me— I sat down at my typewriter and made up things. I write detective novels when I’m not ghostwriting. I’d never gotten any of them published, and that, of course, was the main thing I didn’t want to think about.

  But writing them is what keeps me going. It’s a way of making things make sense. My characters do what I want them to and I know right from page 1 that everything’s going to come out okay. And nowhere along the way, no matter how many unfortunate incidents occur, am I going to have to smell nine hundred bodies rotting in Guyana and wonder what could have been done to prevent the thing and whether anyone will be punished for it and how much, if anything, can be learned from it.

  You’ve heard about journalists burning themselves out? Too much true-life adventure is what does it. Making things up saves a lot of wear and tear.

  That’s what I decided when I quit the San Francisco Chronicle and became an unsuccessful detective novelist masquerading as a ghostwriter. And now here I was: sitting in my dining room/office, trying to think up trouble for a made-up detective to get into when a real-life detective had just walked into my house and died drinking a cup of coffee. I’m not normally given to writer’s block, but this was ridiculous.

  I gave up and went to the movies.

  When I got back, I was feeling a little better, but my house, which I loved and which was the only thing besides Spot I could call my own, wasn’t where I wanted to be. It felt oppressive, as if death had left behind a murky residue. The murk was in my head and I knew it, but I opened all the windows just in case.

  Then I put Dolly Parton on the stereo, poured myself a glass of Mondavi Barberone, and got my mind on Dolly’s troubles. For such a smart, successful, good-looking woman, she has lots of them, and I can sometimes take comfort in the knowledge. Not that I want Dolly to be unhappy— it just kind of puts things in perspective to know that no one’s exempt.

  I was on my second glass of the Barberone and feeling its purple glow in my cells and synapses when Debbie Hofer of the Chronicle rang up. There was a woman who was fond of me. Maybe two, even— I’d probably been wrong about my mother.

  “I’m calling about your dick.”

  Debbie was sixty-three and getting younger every day, apparently. “Sweetbuns!” I said. “I knew you’d come around.”

  “Jack Birnbaum, you idiot. Wasn’t he your dick?”

  “Oh. Yeah. I forgot for a minute.”

  What I’d forgotten was that I used to call Jack Birnbaum my dick to amuse my friends. As in: “Gotta go now; my dick’s going to call in at six”; or, “Yeah, I’m making it okay; I’ve still got my dick.” What a card.

  “The cops say he died at your house.”

  “You doing his obit?”

  “Yeah. What was it, stroke or something?”

  “Heart attack, I think. ‘Died suddenly’ ought to do it.”

  “What was he doing there, anyway?”

  “Picking up one of my handcrafted client reports.”

  “Oh, God. Don’t tell me he didn’t pay you before he conked out. Look, if you need any money— ‘”

  “Thanks, Deb. I’m okay.”

  “You want a mench?” A mench is a mention in Debbie-speak. It was sweet of her, but I didn’t want to steal any of Jack’s glory.

  “No, thanks. How about ‘died suddenly at the home of a friend’?”

  “Okay. Let me know if you need a loan.”

  When I hung up, the purple glow was fast disappearing.

  Though with the best of intentions, Debbie had brought up yet another subject I didn’t want to think about. Jack hadn’t paid me before he conked out. He owed me $250, which would have doubled my fortune.

  Somehow, in the previous month or so, no banks had needed brochures and no egotistical rich people had needed autobiographies. Jack was my last and only client. I literally didn’t know where my next dime was coming from.

  I drank a lot more wine before I went to bed that night and still didn’t sleep very well.

  I got up early. I was sitting on my sofa, reading Jack’s obit, when the doorbell rang. I threw the Chronicle down on the coffee table and opened my door to Howard Blick, a guy I knew from my days on the police beat.

  He might possibly have achieved some measure of success as a hod-carrier, say, or a tube-winder. Unfortunately, some bozo with even fewer brains than he had had made him a homicide inspector for the San Francisco Police Department.

  I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, but he was on my doorstep and my mother brought me up right. I asked him in and offered coffee.

  “No, thanks,” he said. “That’s what Birnbaum was drinking, right?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I didn’t poison him, Howard.”

  “Somebody did.”

  It took me a second to catch on; I’m a little slow in the morning. “They did the autopsy already?”

  “Yeah. Digitalis poisoning.”

  “Digitalis? The heart stuff?”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t have heart trouble. He had no reason in hell to take it and no prescription for it. Somebody croaked him.”

  “And you think it was me.” This might seem like jumping to conclusions, but you have no idea how dumb Blick can be.

  “Well, now, there’s a little mystery about it, Mcdonald. And mystery’s what you specialize in, right? You still writing that trash?”

  “What are you getting at, Howard?”

  “There’s a couple of little tricks to killing somebody with digitalis. Not everybody would know how to do it. Maybe a mystery writer would.”

  “Not this one. But if I wanted to know, I’d call up the coroner, say I was writing a book, and ask him.”

  “Somebody did.”

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody did, exactly like that, about a week ago. Dr. Blankenship thought it was kind of a coincidence. Seems when you do an autopsy, you’ve got a choice of certain tests you could do or not do, depending what the first tests show. You follow?”

  “Barely.”

  “Well, early on, this one started looking like a toxicity, so Blankenship did the test for digitalis. When it turned out positive, he remembered the phone call.”

  “Was the caller a man or a woman?”

  Blick looked confused. He’d probably forgotten to ask. “The point is, it’s the sort of thing you’d do. And you know what else? Digitalis has an alkaloid taste.”

  “So?”

  “So you couldn’t taste it in coffee. That’s one of the little tricks to pulling it off. Also, it’s not very soluble in water. But the heat of the coffee would increase the solubility.” That was supposed to tighten the noose and scare the hell out of me. What it did was shift my famous quicksilver brain into gear— I remembered why Jack and I had been having that little talk about saccharine being poison.

  “Don’t tell me what the other trick is. Let me guess. One tablet wouldn’t kill you, right? You’d have to get somebody to take them for several days.”

  “Bingo, Mcdonald. Now how’d you know that?”

  “Like I said, Howard. I guessed.” I swept the Chronicle off the coffee table. Underneath was Jack’s little bottle of saccharine, right where he’d left it. “See that? It was Birnbaum’s. Ready for my second guess? Have it analyzed and you’ll find some of the pills are saccharine and some are digitalis.”

  Blick’s face wa
s as flat as his feet, and right now his eyes were practically hidden under great hooded lids. He looked more like a potato than a man. I had a chance to observe all that while he was gathering his meager wits. The potato spoke, or rather blurted: “How do you know that?”

  “Little gray cells, Howard. Simplicity itself. Birnbaum kept saying my coffee was lousy. Then he said everybody’s coffee’d been tasting lousy lately and he guessed it was the flu he had. He was using a lot more saccharine than usual. From that I deduce that everybody’s coffee tasted bitter when he put digitalis in it and that made him keep putting pills in till he hit enough of the saccharine to sweeten it.”

  “Deduce, shit! Maybe you know because you put the pills in the bottle.”

  “Howard, come off it. If I’d done that, I would have poured the contents of that bottle down the toilet the minute my victim was dead, then thrown the bottle out.” He looked doubtful. “Look. Jack always carried that saccharine bottle with him. He always used it to sweeten his coffee and he always drank two cups— in fact, that probably explains how he happened to die when he did. He’d just finished one cup and was starting on his second— that means he’d probably just gotten a blast of digitalis.

  “The point is, he always put his saccharine bottle on the table and left it there to sweeten his second cup. And he always picked it up just before he left and put it in his pocket again. At least that’s what he always did here, and you can ask his wife if he did it everywhere. I’m betting he did, and that means anybody he’d seen in the last week could have substituted a doctored bottle.”

  “They’d have had to know his habits.”

  “I expect the murderer was someone he knew, Howard. A perfect stranger would hardly have a motive, would he?” I was just about out of patience and I guess my tone of voice was a little on the sarcastic side. Even Mr. Sensitive couldn’t help noticing.

  He said: “Don’t get smart with me, asshole.”

  And I said: “Don’t accuse me of murder, douchebag.”

  “Maybe you’ve got a motive.”

  “Come on, Howard. He was keeping Spot in cat food. The minute he stopped breathing I stopped having an income.”