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

by Shelley Singer

  Pa and Eva came back from Tahoe Monday morning.

  “I saw the papers up there,” Pa said, when he thought Eva was out of earshot in the yard. “Big dope raid on an ark. Wasn’t this ark. Was another one. Theirs, too?”

  “Yes, Pa.”

  He nodded slowly, heavily. “Rico and me, we thought there was something fishy. That Arnold, very fishy. We knew there must be something wrong over there.”

  “It wasn’t Arnold, Pa.”

  “It wasn’t Arnold that what?” Eva demanded, marching in the front door. “It was a dope fiend that hit your father, yes?”

  “Not exactly, Eva. Well, yes. A dope fiend. Sure.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” Pa announced. “No more dope fiends. Next time you come to visit us. Now, let’s you and me go say hello to your tenant.” He was going to insist on an explanation.

  Eva would be neither distracted nor fooled. “We’ll all go down, you’ll tell us what’s what. You think I can’t read newspapers? You think maybe I didn’t notice something a little funny, you with a black eye, dope fiends in the yard?”

  So we all went down to the cottage and Rosie and I told them what was what.

  The part that took the most explaining was the part about the designer drugs. Pa remembered reading the story in the paper about the fake heroin that was flooding the market and turning people into vegetables.

  “It was the same thing?”

  “No. Something new. Not even an imitation of another drug. Brand new and not illegal— because nobody’s made it illegal yet.”

  “So how could the police arrest them?”

  We decided to start at the beginning.

  Durell had to be aware that other people, many of them chemists, were making fortunes by mixing their own drugs. All it took was a few quarts of ordinary chemicals and a little know-how, and you had a fortune in street dope. Millions of dollars worth of untested— but who cared about that?— drugs.

  Durell had access to the chemicals. He had a lot of know-how. And he had a laboratory. Unfortunately, he owned only a small share of the business, about a quarter of a million dollars worth, and his partner was around a lot.

  Then Noah had his vision. He started building his arks. He didn’t have time for Yellow Brick Farms anymore. Durell was pretty much on his own. As long as he kept the business going, no one, not Noah and certainly not Mrs. Noah, would interfere.

  All he had to do was get rid of his hard-working, conscientious lab assistant, who would certainly be able to tell that the lab was being used on weekends no matter how carefully Durell cleaned up after himself. Get rid of him and bring in a part-time employee to help with packaging and deliveries. Doreen. The Saturday secretary.

  He checked out the drug laws and found the loopholes. There are the illegal drugs and there are the ones that aren’t illegal yet.

  Under state law, an illegal drug like heroin or cocaine is illegal whether it is, according to the California Supreme Court, “produced directly or indirectly by extraction from substances of vegetable origin, or independently by means of chemical synthesis.”

  “That means,” Rosie interjected, “that if you imitate an illegal drug— the one the court was ruling on there was imitation cocaine— you’ve still got a banned drug.”

  Eva looked blank. Pa was squinting painfully. “But if you come up with something brand new,” I added, “the law can’t convict you. The new stuff you make— call it jellybean-x— has to be outlawed before it’s illegal to make and sell.” Their eyes cleared somewhat.

  So Durell came up with something new. Nothing crude, and no mere imitation. It didn’t melt people’s brains, but the high made them feel powerful, confident, Godlike. You get the wrong people feeling like that, you’ve got mean. Like the guy who was battering old folks down in West Berkeley so he could stay up all the time.

  Durell had managed to get only one batch on the street before he was stopped, but its effects were going to be felt for a while.

  That first batch was the one Marjorie saw being delivered to the ark early one Saturday morning.

  Because Marjorie, growing up as she did, where she did, had a suspicious mind, and it kicked in when Noah told her they had to push the schedule up because Joe Durell had had a dream of prophecy. He had dreamed, Noah said, that the flood was coming in December, a month sooner than they’d thought. They had to hurry. Durell himself would spend more time at Sonoma, pushing the project.

  Marjorie didn’t like or trust Durell and she didn’t for a minute believe he’d had a vision. She figured he had another reason for hanging around the Sonoma ark, for wanting it built faster.

  She went up to Sonoma, early in the morning on the 14th, earlier even than the crew was due to arrive. She left her car parked down the main road and hiked in. Durell, she saw, had been busy down in the hold. A finished bulkhead, sheathed in plywood, a refinement that wasn’t in the plans. She fiddled with it and it slid open. Empty. She heard a car coming, climbed up out of the hold and down the ladder to the ground, and hid in the woods. She saw the Toyota pull in. Doreen and Joe Durell got out, opened the trunk and started unloading boxes. Doreen dropped one. A couple of plastic bags fell out. When they’d gone, Marjorie drove like hell back to Oakland to tell Noah.

  Noah, I explained to the folks, refused to call the police. Against Marjorie’s protests, he called Yellow Brick Farms. Durell was there. Noah told him what he knew and said he was on his way up to talk to him. He didn’t want to go to the police, he told Durell. He didn’t want his project destroyed, his good works ruined, his cult blown away by scandal. He begged and he threatened and he offered a deal. He would buy Durell out of the business, buy him off.

  Durell told him to come right along to Yellow Brick Farms and they would talk about it.

  Noah took a check from his book, registering the amount he planned to write, and wrote a note to his wife. Yes, he admitted to Marjorie, he was worried about what might happen at the plant, but he had to go.

  Marjorie drove his car, and she took him, not to Sonoma county, but to someone she knew of in West Oakland who made false identification. Sure, she hated criminals, but she was desperate enough to buy the services of one. She knew they had to get away and that they had to cover their trail. She couldn’t force Noah to call the police, and she didn’t want to go against his wishes by calling them herself, but she had another plan, and during the hours while they waited for the fake paper, she convinced him to go along with her.

  They drove to Tahoe. She didn’t want to get her Guardian Angel pals involved in a drug situation, but there was someone else who might be willing to help: Jerry Pincus. If he couldn’t talk Noah into calling the law he could at least try to keep him away from Durell. And, she figured, they’d be safe with Pincus.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Pa interrupted me. “Why should this Durell be so worried? You said his drug is not illegal?”

  “Even so,” I said, “he could be arrested and he could be stopped. See, it works like this: the cops see you sneaking around with a lot of plastic bags full of white powder, they’ve got what they call ‘probable cause’ to arrest you. They take the stuff to a lab for analysis. Meanwhile, you’re out on bail, with the law looking over your shoulder. They’re going to go ahead with the prosecution while they try to figure out what they’ve got in those bags. If it’s something really new and it’s not a banned substance, you’ll get off. But by the time the whole mess is over and you’re free, the machinery is in motion to make your jellybean-x illegal, and the cops know who you are. You could try making something else, but…”

  “But meanwhile, a business worth tens of millions of dollars is out the window,” Rosie concluded. “And that’s why Durell was so worried.”

  “And that’s why Marjorie, who was planning to disappear with Noah, was so scared,” I said.

  So they went to Jerry Pincus, who was horrified. Noah tried to talk Pincus into going to Sonoma with him. No soap. Pincus said he would try to p
rotect them, somehow, but if they didn’t call the cops he would. Noah begged for some time to think it over, and Pincus agreed, reluctantly.

  Noah kept after Pincus, but he couldn’t break him down. He gave up and decided to go to Sonoma himself, even though he hadn’t decided what he would do there. He was, by now, convinced that Durell might be dangerous.

  When Marjorie discovered he was gone, she called Pincus, who went to the motel. She blamed him for not doing a better job of keeping Noah safe. She said she was afraid he’d gone to Sonoma.

  Pincus still wouldn’t agree to help. He fought with Marjorie about calling the police, but agreed not to do it himself, less, I suspect, out of loyalty than out of a growing unwillingness to get involved in the mess.

  Marjorie went after Noah herself. She holed up with a friend in Santa Rosa and drove to the River every day, looking for him, asking at motels, scared to death the whole time that someone from the ark would spot her. The Santa Rosa friend, who called the police when Marjorie turned up dead, said Marjorie seemed terrified but wouldn’t tell her why.

  Actually, she needn’t have been so worried at the River. Durell was busy at Yellow Brick Farms that weekend, giving me my virgin tour of the plant, and then, with me safely gone, getting to work on the second batch of jellybean-x. Once he’d met me, he decided to dispatch Fred and friend to the Bay Area to knock me around a bit and scare me off. And have yet another try at picking up the fugitives’ trail.

  They were still in the East Bay a couple of days later when Marjorie, unable to find Noah, went back to get some help from her friends. But Fred got to her before Carleton did.

  Noah, meanwhile, was camping out in the woods, meditating. While he was asking for divine guidance, he had enough sense to keep his recognizable car hidden on a back road. He made his decision. He stopped in Guerneville to pick up a can of gasoline and get something to eat, saw the paper, saw what had happened to Marjorie. He went wild. He drove to Yellow Brick Farms. The lab door had a new lock on it. He went out back, broke in, and tore the place apart. Then he went back to the Russian River, rented a canoe and paddled to the ark, hiding in the woods, waiting for his chance to finish making the world clean again. Not a flood this time. Fire.

  Pincus had by then also heard of Marjorie’s death, called the police with a half-story, and, he said, feeling somehow responsible for Marjorie, sent his own men to the River to try to find Noah.

  Durell, reasoning correctly that Rosie and I had found his trashed lab mildly suspicious, sent Doreen to the ark to warn Fred that we were in Sonoma and might be headed up that way. They told the crew we were criminals, and if we showed up asking questions they should tell us nothing.

  When we showed up, they stashed Fred’s partner in the hold, afraid we might recognize him from that night in Oakland. After we left, they sent the rest of the crew home. Durell was on his way; they were going to move the white stuff out.

  Then we all had our picnic in the woods.

  Durell would get off on the drug charge. Jellybean-x would be outlawed, but the ban wouldn’t be retroactive. He would not, however, get off on the murder charge. Fred’s passenger in the old blue Pontiac, the big guy who’d bashed Pa and helped to kill Marjorie, was babbling and plea-bargaining like crazy.

  “They should throw away the key,” my father said.

  “And you, you should be locked up, Mr. Jake Samson,” Eva railed at me. “You’re crazy. Don’t you ever do anything like this again!”

  “I won’t,” I lied. Pa looked at the ceiling for help from God, but he didn’t get any.

  Eva stood up. She knew what to do in a crisis. “I’m going to make dinner, now.” She glared at Rosie. “You come, too.”

  After dinner that night, I called Artie Perrine, my pal at Probe, and told him they had to run something on the story. He said Chloe would call me and they’d come up with something I could show to Hawkins. A piece on designer drugs, maybe.

  Then I called Lee. Since I hadn’t heard from Hawkins for a solid twenty-four hours, I figured I could make plans to go to Petaluma without having to worry about canceling them.

  “You’re sure you’ll be able to make it tomorrow, Jake?” she asked.

  “Positive.”

  “I remember you saying something about being an investigator of some kind?”

  “Yes. Sort of.”

  “There was a really big drug bust on the River that night.”

  “I know.”

  “Will you have an interesting story to tell me?”

  I laughed. “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  – 27 –

  I took the folks to the airport the next afternoon. Rico wanted to come along for the ride to see his new buddy off, and I warned Pa in advance not to say a word to the old man. I didn’t want him strolling around the neighborhood telling stories about me.

  “Undercover, right?” Pa said.

  “Yes.”

  He sighed. “Well, I guess it’s better than being a bum.”

  On the way back home, Rico said, “It was that Arnold, wasn’t it? He hit your father over the head.”

  “No. It wasn’t Arnold.”

  “You should watch him. I don’t trust him. You keep an eye on him, okay, Jake?”

  I told him I would.

  I stopped back at the house to feed the cats before I went on to Petaluma.

  No luggage anywhere. Nobody cooking or yelling at a newspaper. Rosie wasn’t home, either. I sat in my living room until I couldn’t stand the solitude any more, and then I headed north.

  I got to Petaluma early, drove around for a while, and pulled up in front of Lee’s house on F street promptly at six.

  She looked gorgeous. She was wearing a soft green blouse that matched her eyes, and very tight pants. We went out to dinner, and we went to see that movie she’d been wanting to see.

  It was a pretty stupid movie. I don’t remember much about it. Something about spies, and some jerk who gets mixed up with them. I’ve never understood the fascination with spies. They seem like a pretty tacky bunch to me.

  We shared a box of popcorn, no butter, and we held salty, but at least not greasy, hands.

  She also thought the movie was stupid. “That’s the last time I’ll ever take George’s recommendation,” she said, as we left the theater with the small crowd. We walked to a nearby bar for a nightcap, a trendy place full of trendy people.

  “Who’s George?” I asked, after I’d ordered a Czechoslovakian pilsner.

  “I think I’ll try that, too,” she told the waiter. “George is someone I work with.”

  I wanted to ask more about him, but that wouldn’t have been too subtle.

  She liked the Czechoslovakian beer.

  “You were going to tell me why you missed our date the other night,” she reminded me.

  Since I planned to keep seeing this woman I came clean, told her all about it, told her about the other times I’d done this kind of thing before.

  “Designer drugs,” she mused. “Tricky, very tricky. You know, there’s a California congressman who’s introducing legislation about that. He wants to go beyond banning the drug itself, beyond banning its imitations. He wants to make it illegal to produce and sell a drug that has the same effect as any illegal one.”

  I hadn’t known that. She was wonderful. She knew everything.

  “But couldn’t someone come up with something that had a whole different effect?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I suppose. But there are only so many effects that people want a drug to have, and we’ve probably managed to cover most of those already.”

  “Might work,” I agreed. “But I worry about laws that are too general.”

  “So do I. They usually don’t work very well.” We ordered another beer. She was watching me, smiling. “Speaking of legal problems, aren’t you playing a very tricky game yourself?”

  I smiled back at her. “Yeah. I am. But these things come along every so often, and Rosie and I ha
ve gotten to like the challenge. Or the excitement. No, I think it’s the challenge.”

  “What happened to the arks? What happened to Noah?”

  “He’s okay. He’s blaming himself for Marjorie’s death, says he should have called the police. The police agree, and he’s going to have to work that out with them. Meanwhile, Mrs. Noah is trying to put Yellow Brick Farms back together. And the arks— Arnold’s back to the old schedule, and things are quieter in the neighborhood at night.”

  “What happened to Jerry Pincus?”

  “Noah covered for him, said he didn’t know about the dope.”

  “I hate to sound like a lawyer,” Lee said, “but why don’t you get a license?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I could get one, I guess. I don’t know. If I had a license I’d have to follow the rules. I’ve gotten used to not having anyone looking over my shoulder.”

  She laughed. “A genuine free spirit.” Right. But I was beginning to have a problem with that. I’d been thinking that I liked Ralph Hawkins. That I didn’t like lying. Someone else could have gotten hurt if he hadn’t been fast enough, and sharp enough, to show up when he did. And maybe what I hated most of all was having to act like a moron in front of him.

  Lee interrupted my musings. “This Rosie,” she said. “Tell me more about her.” I told her.

  It was a weeknight, and she had to go to work the next morning, so I took her home around midnight. She offered me coffee “for the road.” I drank the coffee. I kissed her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For the kiss?”

  “No. For not saying it’s a long drive back to Oakland.”

  “It is.” I kissed her again. She kissed me back, but she moved away.

  “Haven’t you been reading the papers?” she asked.

  “Yes. What—”

  “The old free days are gone. They’re saying this is the age of restraint.”

  It was a long drive back to Oakland, but we had a date for the weekend.

  THE END