Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3)

by Shelley Singer

  “What else did you tell the police?”

  “All I know is what I told you. That’s what I told them.”

  “You didn’t say anything about the fact that we’ve been looking for Noah and Marjorie?”

  “I did mention that some of our people might have been trying to find out what happened to them, but that’s all I said.” He tossed me an accusing look. “It isn’t as though we actually know where he is.”

  I blessed Arnold, in my heart, for his bureaucrat’s caution.

  “Is Beatrice around?”

  “No. She’s not feeling well today.”

  “Give her my condolences.” I thought of Marjorie’s grandmother. Condolences would never be enough, there.

  “But how are you doing, anyway? Do you know anything at all? I was hoping you’d be able to keep this from happening. I certainly hope—”

  “So do I. And yes, we’re making headway.” I told him about our visits to the Russian River and, particularly, Tahoe.

  “I’ve always thought,” he said, “that Jerry Pincus is a frightening kind of man. Cynical.”

  I would have used stronger words. I heard someone coming down the ladder to the hold. It was Rosie. They greeted each other, Arnold still sulky.

  Rosie must have heard the tag-end of my little speech.

  “We got a lot of new information, Arnold,” she said. “We’re getting close. We’ll find Noah and bring him home safely.”

  Rosie’s confidence shored me up, even if it was just an act. Having done her part, she began strolling around the interior of the ark and left Arnold to me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve got a lot of work today. We’ll let you know what we find out. Perk up, Arnold, you have an ark to build.”

  “That’s right,” Rosie said, ambling back toward us. “And the people up in Sonoma are ahead of you. The deck’s almost finished and they have some interior plywood up…” Arnold wasn’t listening.

  “If something doesn’t happen soon, I don’t know what I’ll do,” he ranted. “We’ll run out of money.” I didn’t think it was the right time to mention that I’d been on the case a week and it was time for the rate to go up to $200 a day.

  “We’ll talk to you later, Arnold,” I said, and we got out of there, climbing up out of the belly of the beast, walking back to my car, parked in front of the house.

  Our first stop was Noah’s place. I left the file folders with the maid, Adele, at the door to avoid further depressed or depressing conversation. We cut back over to Oakland, Claremont to College, and from there, took Broadway toward downtown.

  Carleton Hinks lived in the first-floor flat of a narrow three-story Victorian just west of downtown Oakland. I parked in a faded red zone across the street, alongside an apparently nameless warehouse or factory that showed no signs of life. I figured I could get away with it there.

  Carleton’s door was opened by a boy with a long, spiky crewcut and a Guardian Angels tee shirt. A young man, I guess, but I estimated his age at somewhere around eighteen.

  “Jake Samson,” I said. He looked at Rosie.

  “Rosie Vicente,” she said.

  He looked back at me. “When I talked to you on the phone you didn’t say nothing about two people. He don’t feel so good, you know.” His pale blue eyes were resentful. I was getting sick of resentment.

  “I know,” I told him. “But she’s my partner. We’re together, that’s how it is.” I figured that sounded enough like a bad cop show to make sense to him. It did; he shrugged and invited us in.

  We let him lead us through a sunny living room furnished in wicker, bamboo, and plants. There was art on the walls, mostly posters and fruit crate illustrations, but all framed. A large braided rug seemed to float on the highly polished hardwood floor. The kid walking ahead of us was muscular, with a swagger that might have been for Rosie’s benefit, might have been just self-consciousness. His chinos had a belt on the back, and he was wearing white high-top sneakers.

  The bedroom was dark.

  “Don’t turn on the light, man,” Carleton said.

  I sat down on the bed next to him. “This is my partner, Rosie.” He muttered hello. “I’m really sorry, Carl.” He didn’t answer. “I just wanted to check with you. See if the cops have been around, what they’re asking about. See if you know anything about what happened to Marjorie.”

  He sighed deeply, with a ragged edge. “Yeah. It was the cops that told me. They said someone told them I was her boyfriend. I said I was her friend. They wanted to know when was the last time I saw her, all that shit. I told them. And I told them about the phone call, a couple nights ago.”

  I stopped him. “What phone call a couple of nights ago?”

  “Look, Jake, I know I should have kept you posted, but she didn’t want anyone to know, she said, and I honored that. I shouldn’t have. Maybe we could have— oh, shit, I don’t know.” His voice broke.

  “What are you talking about, Carleton?”

  “She called me. A couple of nights ago. Said to meet her at the flats in two hours. Would’ve been about eleven o’clock. So I drove on over there. I was a little late, because we were doing some planning here— you know, about that druggie that’s been hitting West Berkeley— but I got there by eleven-thirty, anyway, and I sat down on that big pile of driftwood, right there where you first get down onto the flats, and I waited for her. No Marjorie. I waited until three in the morning.”

  “She just said to meet her? That’s all she said?”

  “No. She said there was big trouble. That she needed my help. I asked her what about the cops, should we bring them in on it. She said not yet. She wanted to talk to me first, figure out what to do. She sounded real nervous. Worried and scared.” He stopped talking and blew his nose.

  “Do you know where she was calling from?”

  “No.”

  “Go on,” Rosie urged.

  “Okay, so I waited. When she didn’t show up, I called Victor, and I called her grandma, and they both said they hadn’t heard from her, didn’t know if she was in town. Yesterday I talked to Arnold. He said he hadn’t heard from her, that as far as he knew no one had, nor from Noah, either. Then last night the cops show up, tell me she’s dead, start asking me a lot of questions. I told them what she said on the phone. Figured I’d better. They said they’d be back. Bet they will, too.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. I told him how we’d picked up Marjorie’s trail in Tahoe.

  “She was using fake ID up there, calling herself Beatrice Hinks,” Rosie said. “Do you know where she might have picked up some fake identification?”

  “Oh, well, there’s half a dozen guys around her neighborhood. Easiest thing in the world. It might not be good, might not get past a cop or a bartender, but it would be okay for most purposes.”

  “Tell me this,” Rosie said. “How long would it take to get hold of a fake driver’s license? If you knew who to go to? Hours? Days?”

  “Same day.”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea who she might go to for that?”

  “Nah. Like I said, could be anybody.”

  Even so, the information was helpful. It meant she could have found out she needed to cover her movements, gotten fake ID, and taken off for Tahoe all in the same day.

  “Have you talked to her grandmother since she was found?”

  “Yeah. I called over there. She’s pretty bad. Got a neighbor in to look after her. Victor did, I mean. She wasn’t talking to anybody.”

  “Do you have any idea why she might have wanted to meet you at the mud flats?”

  “It just kind of worked out that way. See, she seemed like she was afraid to go home, and she said she didn’t want to meet anyplace that, well, she said might be watched. I don’t know what she meant. I guess whoever killed her… Anyway, we used to go there, together, sometimes. It’s real peaceful. So we just agreed to meet there.”

  I stood up, reached over and squeezed his hard shoulder, and told him to try to get
some rest. The crewcut kid met us in the living room and escorted us to the door.

  I took the parking ticket off my windshield and stuck it in my pocket.

  Naturally. It went along with everything else. We’d started out with a nice, cozy little disappearance the cops couldn’t have cared less about. Now some vicious son of a bitch had gone and complicated things. I had to come up with some way of telling what I knew to the cops— withholding evidence in a homicide is not something the law looks upon kindly— without admitting that I’d been investigating the case. The old magazine writer cover would have to do it. Or maybe Arnold… I needed to think it through a little.

  But the only thing my brain would focus on was that someone I was supposed to be finding was dead.

  – 22 –

  Emeryville is a city, a weird little waterfront appendage stuck onto the Bay side of Oakland. A mishmash of houses, restaurants, warehouses, businesses, condos, tall corporate headquarters, and low-ball poker clubs. And the Emeryville Mud flats.

  As far as I know, there are only three ways to get down to the mud flats. You can pull up on the shoulder of the freeway and climb the cyclone fence, you can take a boat in until it scrapes bottom and wade the rest of the way on foot, or you can approach from Powell Street. From there, it’s a short hike across the flats to the sculptures, a pleasant enough challenge if you’re wearing waders, which we were not.

  I parked in the Holiday Inn lot and we crossed Powell. The highway department’s ice plant at the roadside, which squashes unpleasantly underfoot, gave way almost immediately to wild grasses, which gave way again to a muddy bank dropping down to the flats. We half picked our way and half slid down the bank, sloshing over to the biggest collection of driftwood, the warehouse of raw materials, a deep cut full of tons of wood, huge planks and poles, smaller bits crisscrossed in the mud, all interspersed with odd bits of metal and trash and big chunks of styrofoam from God knows what or where. It was here that Carleton had sat and waited for Marjorie.

  Rosie led the way across the bridge of flotsam. A sandpiper screamed, nearly upsetting my balance. Another one took up the call. Standing on a perfectly beautiful two-by-twelve that I knew I could find some use for around the house, I turned to watch the birds. There were three sandpipers running around on the shore yelling at me, and when I slipped off my plank and fell against a charred telephone pole, a flock of doves I hadn’t even seen, those small beige doves you see everywhere in the East Bay, took off. Oddly, there were no gulls. Gulls circle the parking lot of my neighborhood Safeway, miles from the Bay. Gulls hang around downtown Berkeley. But here, on the Bay itself, I didn’t see even one.

  I turned back in the direction of the sculptures. Rosie was waiting silently for me, twenty feet ahead, on a hillock of grass.

  “Birdwatching,” I said. She nodded and negotiated a tricky leap from the hillock to a cross-hatch of railroad ties three feet away, sliding dangerously on their muddy surface, catching herself, and stretching a leg toward another patch of semidry grass. I, passing lightly, Nijinsky-like, over the last of the dry footing of nearly solid driftwood, reached a stretch of mud and water-logged turf, following Rosie’s trail along the slightly dryer, upper side of the flats nearer the freeway fence.

  Rosie had already entered the field of art, so to speak. The sculptures were still some distance away from me, stretching to the south. I stopped again to get my bearings, to look toward the exhibit, when I saw a flashing movement, just to my left. A pale orange cat, small, wiry, was watching me from its perch on yet another chunk of phone pole— is there a country in the South Pacific where a revolution against ITT has been launched? Was the cat lost? More probably abandoned, maybe as a kitten. Probably wild. A survivor, admirable and smart. I called to it.

  “Hey, cat, don’t be scared. Want to come home with me? Here kitty…” I was sure Tigris and Euphrates would understand and accept a poor refugee. The cat continued to stare at me. Afraid, interested, maybe even wishing it could believe me, but too frightened to approach. Face to face at twenty feet but no closer. I turned my head away for an instant, to find Rosie. When I turned back it had vanished into the brush.

  Rosie was standing under a huge humanoid figure, waiting, again, for me to catch up. I nodded to her, held up my hand, took a deep breath of the unnameable soup of undefinable ingredients, and sloshed on, trying to find solid footholds, failing half the time.

  The driftwood art of the Emeryville mudflats tends to the abstract. I hadn’t really looked at it lately. A quick glance from the freeway every so often. Lots of humanlike figures and some animals. Looking around me, straining my eyes in the mist-glare of the afternoon, I thought I remembered that there had once been more representational art out there: more real-looking objects and machines. But maybe some of today’s abstractions were the ruins of those earlier creations. It could have been ten years since I thought I saw them.

  The closest one to me was a human, or a tyrannosaur, or something, nine feet tall. A post with assorted scrap propping and climbing it. A mane of aluminum fringe. A big styrofoam head, mouth open, red tongue sticking out. A single protrusion— a unicorn horn?— sticking out of the middle of its head.

  There was a gallowslike structure with a piece of wire fencing hanging, executed, from it; a horse-shape, maybe fifteen feet at the head, and another big horse, farther on, to which Rosie had now progressed. To the left, a thing with two wheels that looked vaguely like a dive-bombing airplane.

  A windmill.

  A cross complete with shreds of martyr.

  Rosie had reached the one we were looking for, the first one that offered a shelter for a corpse. Tent-shaped, plywood propped against car tires and two-by-fours. Alongside it, a picket fence, or six pickets of one, that seemed to go with the little tent in a casual way, was stuck upright in the mud.

  To get to Rosie, to get to the tent, I was going to have to cross some very wet land, and go a dozen feet closer to the Bay than the track I was following. I didn’t expect to find anything there. My shoes were already soaked. I stepped off the plank from which I’d been surveying the art show, down onto soggy grass. Up to the laces of my white running shoes.

  The water was six inches deep in spots; some of those spots had planks laid across them, bridges for sculptors. I used the planks when they were there to use, but mostly I slogged. Through sticky mud that damned near sucked my shoes off; through drowned grass.

  I passed a door, propped by two-by-fours, upright, looking closed for some reason. A boat shape perched on a pillar of phone pole. I ran out of bridges and sank shin-deep, negotiated the other foot around to higher ground, did a couple of hops and a jump, and reached Rosie and the tent.

  “Anything?”

  Rosie shrugged. “Looks like someone’s been here. But then,” she added, “someone has.”

  Lots of someones. The mud was churned to the consistency of cheese spread, a distasteful item even on crackers, where it’s supposed to be. Squatting as best I could in the mush, I looked inside the little tomb. The surface was gouged by the pushing and pulling of a body, and by the feet of laboring cops. A few footprints disappearing into the marsh grasses. Nothing interesting stuck in the mud or the sculpture, or at least not any more. No bits of clothing, hanks of hair, bloodstains. No crouching killer.

  I got down on my knees and crawled inside. Not much doubt that the structure had been there a long time. Rot was creeping up its deeply mired sides. I pulled out my pocket flash and checked more carefully. Crud. And enough room for two if two should want to have a cold and sloppy alfresco screw. But like Marjorie’s had, someone’s feet would have stuck out. I exited backwards.

  “You’re a mess,” Rosie told me.

  I stood up.

  “Think she was killed here?” Rosie asked.

  “I guess. Followed. Killed. Shoved inside. To hide the body? From Carleton?”

  “Maybe just to delay discovery. How would they know she was meeting someone?”

  I nodded. “
He didn’t see anything or anyone. He just sat there and waited, he says.” I glanced to my left, toward the cyclone fence and the freeway, the southbound traffic no more than a hundred feet away. The top of the fence, in a direct line from the wooden tent, was bowed out of shape. But that could have happened in 1973. I pointed it out to Rosie.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Marjorie would have come over from Powell, like we did. The killer could have followed her from there…”

  “Not without being noticed, coming down the bank.”

  “Right. She’d run.”

  “And he’d chase her down. Maybe he shot her while she ran, got her in the back of the head.”

  “Hard to do, isn’t it?”

  I agreed. I thought about it. “What if there were two of them? One of them went down the bank, the other one drove the car along here, hopped the fence, and caught her running from the other one. Neat. Then they tied her up, shot her, and stuffed her in the tent. A shot, out here, with all the noise from the freeway?”

  “Sure,” Rosie agreed morosely. “That would work great. One shot. A few screams. No trying to hit a moving target in the dark in the mud.”

  “Or Carleton met her, killed her, stuck her away.”

  “Or the killer got off a lucky shot and dragged the body out here to hide it.”

  I turned to the right. A dancing human figure, twelve feet tall, of rusted scrap. Beyond that, the Bay, the Bay Bridge, The City and its conglomerate skyline of old and new San Francisco. A little farther to the north, the Golden Gate and Marin, the Marin headlands hiding in the afternoon fog.

  “I wish she’d been killed somewhere else,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. But if I thought I was going to die, it would break my heart to know I was looking at that”— I waved my arm at the view— “for the last time.”

  “You’re a romantic son of a bitch, Samson.”

  “I know.”