Shasta hires Doc to investigate the Wolfmanns' plot

Shasta hires Doc to investigate the Wolfmanns' plot after learning that Mickey Wolfmann’s wife and her lover are conspiring to take his fortune, possibly by having him committed. The investigation begins with Shasta’s fear that she is being used as bait, and Doc’s promise to seek help from Penny Kimball turns an intimate appeal into a case whose clues lead toward federal agents, organized crime, and Mickey’s coercive treatment in Ojai.

The Request and Its Stakes

Shasta tells Doc that Mickey’s wife knows about their relationship but is herself seeing someone; the two, Shasta says, are working together on a scheme to take Mickey’s wealth. The arrangement is not simply a plan to leave him: the conspirators believe Shasta can reach him when he is vulnerable and want her involved. Her position is therefore precarious. She has access to Mickey, but she does not know what the others intend to do with it.

Her concern deepens when she says she has heard that they may commit Mickey to a psychiatric institution. She cannot tell Doc whether the plan involves legal proceedings or an abduction, and emphasizes that nobody is explaining matters to her: she is only the bait. The uncertainty is central to the request. Shasta brings Doc a serious threat without a complete account of its mechanics, and asks him to investigate while warning him not to tell anyone.

Doc Agrees to Investigate

Doc asks whether Penny, a junior prosecutor in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, might help stop the plan. Shasta sees few places she can turn, and Doc agrees to speak with Penny and find out what can be done. He asks for the couple’s names and addresses; learning that the man is Mickey Wolfmann, the prominent real-estate developer, makes clear that Shasta’s private predicament intersects with a figure of considerable public wealth and influence.

The case also touches another strand of Doc’s work. Tariq Khalil identifies Glen Charlock as a bodyguard employed by a builder named Wolfmann, linking Mickey’s household to the search for Glen. The connection gives Doc a concrete lead, but it also enlarges the investigation beyond Shasta’s account of a marital and financial conspiracy. The Wolfmann name recurs across apparently separate inquiries, inviting Doc to test whether they share a cause rather than assume that they do.

Suspicions Multiply

When federal agents question Doc about Mickey’s disappearance, they point to a sequence of events involving Tariq’s visit, the killing of a prison acquaintance, Mickey’s disappearance, and Doc’s arrest. Their nervous exchange when Doc suggests that a kidnapping narrative could serve as a political cover story makes him suspect they have considered such an explanation themselves. It does not establish what the agents know, but it deepens his distrust of the official account.

Later, in Las Vegas, Doc learns that FBI agents have been asking after Puck Beaverton. He wonders whether the Black Nationalist explanation raised earlier was a front for an investigation of organized crime, and whether Puck’s fate is connected to Mickey’s. His thoughts remain explicitly conjectural: the evidence does not yet settle whether Mickey’s dealings involved organized crime or the FBI. The case develops through a collision of leads and suspicions, not through a single reliable authority explaining the whole scheme.

Another account gives Doc a possible mechanism of control. The state attorney general’s office has pursued Adrian Prussia for years, but he remains difficult to reach partly because he holds a portfolio of IOUs. Though the individual sums are not large, each debt is sufficient to secure obedience from someone in a position to command or control others. This debt network suggests how private financial leverage might support institutional power, while leaving open how directly Prussia’s operation connects to Shasta’s original warning.

From the Plot to Its Hidden Machinery

The novel eventually supplies a retrospective explanation for Mickey’s disappearance. Bigfoot Bjornsen says that Mickey stumbled upon something he should not have seen; men in disguise panicked and removed him temporarily. The federal authorities then learned that Mickey, an independently wealthy man, intended to give away his fortune. Bigfoot claims they had different plans for that money and, through the Golden Fang’s heroin-related activities in the Far East, had Mickey subjected to programming in Ojai. The account recasts the threatened commitment not as the whole story but as an entry point into a larger effort to control Mickey and his wealth.

Bigfoot says Mickey has returned to his old greedy ways, but Doc fears the opportunity to help him change has already passed. Bigfoot counters that events may recur without returning to precisely the same outcome, comparing the difference to a record shifting into another groove. That image preserves uncertainty rather than closing the case neatly: Mickey’s apparent return to his former interests does not prove that the forces acting on him have lost their influence.

An Investigation Without a Clean Boundary

Doc’s inquiry into the Wolfmanns’ plot is one of the routes by which the novel makes private wealth, law enforcement, federal power, and criminal networks appear entangled. Yet its claims arrive at different levels of certainty. Shasta reports what she has been told and fears what may happen; federal agents offer a chronology while withholding their own conclusions; Doc interprets nervous reactions and connections; Bigfoot later provides a more specific account of Mickey’s removal and programming. Keeping those sources distinct matters: suspicion drives the investigation, but not every suspicion is thereby confirmed.

The investigation’s open-endedness persists even after the Ojai account. Doc wonders what Bigfoot’s pursuit of a heroin shipment will reveal: who hired Adrian to kill his partner, what connection Adrian has to Crocker Fenway’s principals, whether the Golden Fang exists as Bigfoot understands it, and how safe Bigfoot himself may be. Shasta’s request thus begins as a search for a way to prevent a plot against Mickey, but leads into a wider inquiry whose institutions and motives remain only partly visible. The decisive significance of the action lies in that expansion: a warning about one man’s fortune becomes a test of how much of the surrounding system can be known, and by whom.