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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Introduction: On the Rails of Time

  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

  Also by Richard A. Lupoff

  Copyright

  To the three persons who first urged me to try my hand at a mystery novel: Henry Morrison, Patricia Lupoff, and Noreen Shaw. And to the wonderful editors who guided Hobart Lindsey and Marvia Plum through their many cases and their longtime relationship:

  May Wuthrich

  Donna Rankin

  Gordon Van Gelder

  Margo Power

  Keith Kahla

  … and to all the fans and readers who waited so long and who offered such encouragement, this final chapter in the saga is dedicated.

  INTRODUCTION: ON THE RAILS OF TIME

  BY PATRICIA HOLT

  It’s easy to get addicted to the writings of Richard Lupoff, a veteran quick-pace novelist who’s quietly written more than forty books, many of them with titles that appeal to the kid in all of us: Barsoom: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Martian Vision, The Return of Skull-Face, The Black Tower, and Circumpolar!

  For mystery fans, though, the most delicious of Lupoff’s works must be the eight novels spanning twenty-two years that feature Hobart (“Bart”) Lindsey, a mild-mannered insurance agent, and Berkeley, California, homicide detective Marvia Plum.

  We know from the outset that these two may never get together. An African American cop raising her son as a single mother (Marvia) doesn’t usually hook up with a white insurance adjuster living with his mother (Bart). On the one hand, there is Marvia, who sees homicide as both art and career advancement, while on the other there is Bart, who wants simply to settle insurance claims honorably and honestly.

  Yet gradually the two sleuths discover a subtle humor, an ability to outthink adversaries, a hidden spark of adventurism, and a growing respect for each other—especially, for Bart, when murder occurs and complicates the claim form. Love becomes such an incendiary element that Lupoff reveals himself as much an incurable romantic as a deft plotter and, in his way, scholarly researcher.

  This last occurs because if you’re interested in popular artifacts from the past—World War II airplanes, rare comic books, antique cars—a big bonus awaits you throughout this series. With such novels as The Comic Book Killer (1988), The Classic Car Killer (1991), The Bessie Blue Killer (1994) and The Sepia Siren Killer (1995), Lupoff explores the fascinating history of populist art, parts of which might have been lost forever if Bart and Marvia weren’t searching for murderers among the remains.

  Thoughtfulness fills these pages as much as intrigue. Of people who engage in the collectible arts, Bart observes, “Their minds all worked in similar ways. They felt that human achievement was bound in the artifacts of human creation, that the preservation and ownership of those artifacts kept civilization on the rails of time. To lose the things of the past was to lose the past itself, and to lose civilization’s compass.”

  The compass in Lupoff’s latest, The Emerald Cat Killer, is the world of lurid paperback whodunits that used to belong to the pulp fiction genre. Although he doesn’t delve as deeply into publishing as much as he has in other fields, Lupoff has another, more cerebral job to do this time—to bring Bart Lindsey back from retirement after thirteen years out of the field, to dust off his “mental Rolodex” containing the entire casts of noir movies and books, and to reintroduce Marvia as a new kind of partner in emotional as well as professional doings.

  While this eighth installment (plus a volume of short stories featuring Lindsey and Plum) may be his last in the series, it’s also perhaps the purest crime-procedural novel Lupoff has written. Showing us how dogged Bart must be to follow one less valuable clue after another, Lupoff also reveals something earnest and formal about Hobart Lindsey that keeps us turning these pages.

  Even now, after he’s been forcibly retired, then called back and ordered around by his old boss, it means something to Bart to represent International Surety. No matter how many adjusters do the same, Bart takes his role seriously. He is a special agent who follows company disciplines and acts with dignity and professionalism with villains and victims alike. When he prepares for an interview—“Lindsey took out a notebook and his gold International Surety pencil”—his subtle attention to decorum is touching.

  Perhaps it is Bart’s old-fashioned dignity that makes Lupoff’s series as charming and durable as the antiques about which so much mayhem is committed.

  Patricia Holt was book review editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for sixteen years, and is the author of The Good Detective (Pocket Books).

  ONE

  Red stopped in place, turned her face to the sky and shook her fist angrily. She shot a string of obscenities at God for doing this to her. Why had she let herself lose focus and wander into this yuppie-infested neighborhood, and why had that bastard in the sky sent this storm after her?

  She wore a ragged T-shirt, free-box jeans, and a pair of old sneakers with holes in the bottom. She’d had a hat earlier tonight—at least she thought she had—but that was gone, probably swept away by a gust of wind when she was thinking of something else. At least her hands were protected from the worst of the cold. There was an elementary school just up the street—she ought to know that, she’d been a student there once upon a time—and some kid must have dropped a pair of gloves on her way home from kindergarten or first grade or second grade, because Red had found them on the sidewalk and managed to pull them onto her skinny, undersized hands.

  The rain was coming down and there were even rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning, not common with Pacific storms, but who the hell knew what God was going to do? She paused under a streetlamp to look down at herself. She was skinny, the skinniest she could ever remember being. The cold rain and wind made her nipples stick out through the thin shirt. At least that was one good thing. They might attract the attention of a john if there was such a thing as a john in this neighborhood full of smug householders and students from smug families.

  And the fuzz patrolled this neighborhood. She knew that. It was too late at night for panhandling. Nothing to shoplift; all the stores turned off their lights and closed up before now.

  It was her own fault. Bobby had told her to stay in the flatlands when he turned her out for the night’s work. Stay in the Berkeley flatlands, or better yet, head for West Oakland. There was more business there and the cops were more likely to look the other way as long as what was going on involved what they called consenting adults.

  Was she a consenting adult? How old was she? Hard to remember her last birthday. Hard to remember anything anymore. Turned on in middle school, turned out in high school, dropped out, busted, released, juvenile hall, released, using, hooking, dealing. If she hadn’t found Bobby—or if Bobby hadn’t found her—there was no telling where she would be by now. Maybe dead.

  Although that didn’t sound like such a bad idea, either.

  A flash of lightning showed her a black-and-white coming up Claremont from the direction of Oakland. She was pretty sure she was still on the Berkeley side of the city line, but cops from both cities liked to cruise in this neighborhood, crisscrossing the boundary with impunity.

  She ducked behind a parked car. The black-and-white swept by, its tires making a hissing sound on the rain-wet roadway. She didn’t want to get picked up now. She needed a jolt, and she didn’t care how she got it—from a pill, a snort, or a pipe. She liked the pills best. They were like jelly beans—fun and easy to take. She’d tried a pipe and it burned her throat and made her cough. And she was seriously afraid of needles.

  Man, was she ever cold. If only she could get inside somewhere, out of this rain. She contemplated checking out the backyards of some of the houses in this neighborhood. Maybe she could sneak into a garage or a basement and get dry. She’d even try a kid’s playhouse or a storage shed.

  The black-and-white was gone. She hoisted herself to her feet, using the door handle of a shiny new sedan. She caught a glimpse of herself in the car’s window. Oh, man, what a vision. No wonder the johns were so few these days. She looked like a hag of forty, maybe even older. Nobody would take her for— She tried to remember her actual age. She was probably fifteen. Her hair was dirty and ragged, she’d lost half her teeth, her complexion looked like an old soccer ball.

  Maybe she could find a junkie looking for a fix. She could steer him to Bobby, and Bobby would make a sale and let her stay in the room overnight and not have to hit the street again.

  Fat chance.

  She started down the street again, trying car doors. They