Below: An excerpt from Alpha House, a new detective novel by local writer and attorney David Andrew Lee.

Alpha House — a tale “from the case files of Andrew Taylor, Esq.” — is available for sale at Booklegger, Amazon and eBay. A sequel, Aqua Regia, will be published this summer.

Are you a Humboldt County writer who has written a book? Or a writer who has written a book about Humboldt County? You should share an excerpt with LoCO Lit Bit! Hit us up at news@lostcoastoutpost.com, and put “Lit Bit” in the subject line. 

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It was early September 1998, the day after McGwire broke Maris’ home run record. We didn’t know chemicals were involved. The East Bay sweltered under a high-pressure cell and Oakland had been oven-like all morning. I stepped from a bus and moved slowly in the heat. A mile off, the sidewalks were kept civilized on business days by nine-to-fivers under the skyline of the commerce district, but I had a landscape of quick loans, bail bonds, pornography, and the kind of bars that open at six a.m. and sell double whiskeys for a buck fifty. The freeway overpass offered a moment of shade before Oakland Police Headquarters came into view. The State Bar reinstated my license six years earlier, but I hadn’t been inside the building since the night I was arrested for driving a stolen Porsche through the glass doors of the Merritt Hotel.

Capt. Enrique Moran assigned cases and phonied up crime statistics for the homicide division on the sixth floor, so I beelined for the elevator after the security check. I rode up with three uniforms I knew from better days. They were all right, but knowing too many cops is like knowing too many doctors — it shakes your confidence in the selection process. I found Moran behind his desk using a gold-plated lighter to fire up a cigar that wasn’t quite long enough to shoot pool with. A skinny lieutenant named Leighton Tubbs stood behind him. He had a high pimpled forehead and khaki-colored teeth, and he sized me up with eyes that were so muddy they looked diseased.

“Adam Taylor,” the lieutenant announced. “Junkie lawyer and mouthpiece for cop killers. Did you drive here, Taylor? We’d better run the VIN number. Never hurts to check.”

“Tubbs, you stupid fuck,” I told him. “VIN number is redundant.”

Moran signaled for a truce and pointed to a chair with his novelty-sized cigar.

“Sit down, Counselor. Thanks for coming. Don’t mind Tubbs. I think he has a flute up his ass or something.”

The lieutenant narrowed his eyelids into reptilian slits and moved to a wall next to the door. I took a mahogany chair near the desk, shifted it so I could see both men, crossed an ankle over a knee. Moran started right in.

“What do you know about Isaac Shariq?”

That didn’t just come out of left field, it came out of a different ballpark. In another city. It took a moment to calibrate.

“Nothing I could tell you.”

Moran considered that and nodded. He was a short, squat man with a smooth, hairless face and a buttery layer of fat beneath his skin, and he had enormous teeth that made him look amused even when he wasn’t. He wore too much gold and too much cologne, and I was pretty sure he could quote the line on every pony at Golden Gate Fields. He could also spot the guilty flicker of an eyelash on a crowded bus.

“We’re looking for him,” Moran continued. “Seems he’s suddenly hard to find.”

“That would be news to me,” I said.

Lt. Tubbs moved off the wall.

“Cut the bullshit, Taylor,” he barked. “Our guess is you’ve been talking to him all night. Keep lying to us and we’ll damn sure take you in. Charge your ass as an accessory.”

Moran froze him with a hard look.

I tapped the first cigarette out of a newly opened pack. Lit it with a safety match. Flicked the dead match into a hubcap on the desk that doubled as an ashtray.

“This ape is wasting my time,” I told Moran. “He smells bad, and he’s not house broken. Shouldn’t he be gunning down girl scouts for jaywalking or something?”

Leighton Tubbs pulled his lips back from two perfectly even rows of dingy teeth, but I wouldn’t have called it a smile. As a sergeant, Tubbs had three kills under his belt — the last one a 13-year-old boy he was trying to arrest for scalping Raiders’ tickets. The Department promoted him to lieutenant to get him off the streets and put a lid on the civil suits that were piling up.

“The lieutenant represents the Narcotics Division,” Moran said. “They’ve got an interest in this. But he’s all talked out now, and you won’t be hearing from him again.”

Tubbs fragged his captain with a sullen look and took his place back on the wall. Moran examined his pudgy hands and adjusted one of his rings.

“You and Ike go way back,” he continued. “I know that. And I know you’ll want to see him treated right. That’s why I asked you to come down.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular pal. What do you want with Ike?”

He paused, a maestro before the opening flourish. “Isaac Shariq shot his wife last night. She’s dead.”

I showed them nothing, but I felt like I just tossed back an ounce of birdshot.

“What’s Narcotics got to do with it?”

“Shariq’s got a few things in the works just now. One of them pretty big. We want to save that one if we can. The others we don’t care about.”

“What do you think I can do?”

“Find him. Be his lawyer. Be his friend. But get him in here with the right kind of confession and all the loose pieces of that dope case and I can talk the DA down to a second. Maybe even manslaughter.”

I blew smoke at a NO SMOKING sign on the desk and crushed out the cigarette.

“Isaac Shariq is not your killer,” I told him. “If you want to show me your evidence, I can probably tell you what’s wrong with it before a jury does. Save you a lot of trouble.”

Moran leaned back in his chair and smacked his fleshy lips at the fluorescent lights before he answered.

“No bite, Counselor. He’s our guy, all right, and you won’t be doing him any favors thinking otherwise. You’ll get everything when you bring him in. I’m going to the house this morning, and you can ride along. That’s the best I can do for now. When we get there be invisible and stay out of the way.”

On the ledge outside Captain Moran’s tinted window, a sparrow groomed herself and hopped to the edge and back. I imagined the small bird taking flight and soaring across Broadway to rise above the skyscrapers. There she would feel the sun on her feathers and ride the hot currents of air effortlessly while the noise of traffic below drifted upward, dampened by distance and robbed of urgency. Unconcerned with the doings of man, the sparrow would not fear loss or death, would not count the yesterdays against the tomorrows, would not waste the firing of a single synapse worrying about the juggernaut that was heading for Isaac Shariq with the single-mindedness of a heat-seeking missile.

Lucky sparrow.

###

We ran with lights but no siren in an unmarked Crown Victoria. Moran steered with one hand cupped on the bottom of the wheel, floating around yielding traffic and punching through amber lights with a nonchalance born of repetition. Like most detectives, he spent his early years in a patrol car. When a stoplight finally snared him, he used both hands to get his cigar working. Then he spoke.

“Got the call around eight this morning. The wife’s sister came by for coffee. Found the door unlocked.”

It was an odd game. One he had been playing since I arrived at Moran’s office. The good cop/bad cop bit made some sense, maybe, but the rest was puzzling. Cops don’t invite private attorneys to watch them investigate homicides, and cops like Enrique Moran don’t gossip.

“Coffee?”

“That’s what she said,” he confirmed, and his pupils locked in place for a nanosecond, telling me he was making a mental note of my question.

We took surface streets to Lake Merritt. Halfway around the perimeter we branched off onto a narrow, rising street that twisted through the hills above the south shore. Patches of coyote brush and creeping myrtle were more common than lawns, and mature coast live oaks followed us all the way. We pulled over behind a silver Volvo sedan with a crumpled fender that was parked skewed from parallel and too far from the curb, the way drunks do it. Squad cars and an OPD evidence van were up ahead, but we weren’t close enough to see the house. Moran issued latex gloves to us from a box he took from the dash compartment. We pulled them on before we approached the scene of the homicide.

Ike’s house was a jewel of Craftsman design — a single story, two-bedroom affair with a front porch tucked under eaves held up by square columns. The lot was bigger than most, which allowed a tiny, one-car garage to be shoe-horned between houses in later years. Ike’s 1959 Bentley Coupe was parked on two ribbons of concrete that ran up to a sliding, carriage house door. A beautifully restored, two-toned model, it stood out like a Super Bowl ring on the finger of a medical school cadaver.

“Stay next to me and don’t touch anything,” Moran instructed. “I have to be able to testify that you didn’t contaminate the scene.”

We stopped at the evidence van and were fitted with cloth overshoes and surgical masks, then I followed Moran through a gap in a fence of yellow police tape where we merged into the two-way traffic of lab-coated technicians processing the house. A bench on the porch propped open a lavender, scrolled-metal security door I painted for Zuri Shariq on her 42nd birthday.

We stood together just inside. Moran kept his eyes on my face while I watched a tableau of spent rage come into focus — whiskey tumblers smashed against a wall, coffee table upended, sofa cushions frosted with glass from a busted table lamp, telephone dangling from the limbs of a potted Philodendron, ripped from the wall and flung so forcefully into the bush that the receiver coiled around a thick branch stripped of leaves. Black fingerprint powder sooted the room.

Technicians huddled in the adjoining room, labeling and bagging items from an indistinct clutter on the dining table. A white sheet covered a motionless form in the hallway beyond. I stepped away to get a better view of the kitchen, which we could see through a wide doorway in the wall opposite the body. The table there held a sampler from some back-alley apothecary — loaded meth pipe, coke lines, a blackened spoon sticky with tar heroin. An empty fifth of Seagram’s gin sat next to the sink. All the cabinets were open to allow photographs of their contents. On an upper shelf, easily visible behind soup cans, was the iconic shape of a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle.

Moran nodded when a young criminalist — so bug-eyed I instinctively looked for a goiter — asked if we wanted to see the victim. Zuri Shariq lay on her back in a flannel nightgown. One leg was folded up beneath her, and her arms were bent with one hand up and one hand down like an Egyptian hieroglyph. Blood had pooled darkly around her head, and a scarlet wound, where her left eye should have been, was the only flaw on her still beautiful, pale-brown face.

“Exit wound,” our criminalist said. “She was shot from behind.”

He pointed to a splatter of fine, rust-brown droplets cascading along one wall toward a small hole circled with chalk at the end of the hallway.

“We got the slug. Large caliber. Found a Glock .45 in the kitchen.”

I went back out to the street and lit a cigarette. Moran joined me and fiddled with his cigar. We watched the covered body of Zuri Shariq go past us on a stretcher before he spoke.

“Well?”

“Your guess is that Ike relapsed big time and killed her in a rage?”

“It’s not a guess. We have a witness.”

“Who?”

“You have to wait for that, Counselor. Find Ike.”

“Can I use the bathroom?”

“What?”

“Are they finished with the bathroom?”

Moran blinked at me. He looked over at a tech who had been close enough to hear and got a signal before answering.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

He walked with me to the hallway and watched me from there. I slipped inside the bathroom and locked the door. Over the sound of flushing, I carefully lifted the top of the toilet tank and turned it over. Taped to the underside were a medical syringe, a small baggie of white powder, and a snub-nosed .38 special.

###

David Andrew Lee received his Juris Doctor in 1978 from UC Davis and practiced criminal law on both sides of the aisle until his retirement. He lives with his wife, Janice, in Eureka.