“I’m sure it must have been,” she said softly. “There’s no reason why it would have anything to do with the break-in. But it seems so odd…”
Her reaction was dragging me out of my warm stupor. A gray cat strolled out of the kitchen, made itself big and fuzzy, arched its back, and glared at Alice, who wagged her tail tentatively.
“Why would it have anything to do with the break-in?” Rosie wanted to know.
“Well, she worked with us. She was an employee.”
The cat continued to glare at Alice, who sighed and closed her eyes.
I sighed, too, and stood up. “How do we get to the spit?”
“Why?”
Rosie explained. “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with what happened at the bank. It was probably just an accident. But if there’s any chance that there is a connection, we need to go out there and see if there’s anything to see before everything’s taken away. Or washed away.”
“Of course,” Nora said, her incomprehension replaced by resolution. “Let me get a coat and turn off the oven. I’ll come too.”
I told her that wasn’t necessary, but she wouldn’t listen. We put our coats back on. Alice dragged herself away from the fire.
On the way down the hill, over that rotten road again, we asked Nora a few questions about the dead woman. She was in her early thirties. She had worked at the sperm bank. She had lived in Wheeler all her life and had relatives in town.
“What kind of job did she have?” Rosie asked.
“Mostly bookkeeping. But she also helped out part-time with insemination. Instructing women who do it at home, working at the clinic with women who want to do it there. A lot of us wear a number of hats. We try not to pigeonhole our employees.”
Just as I turned onto the road that led out onto the spit, an ambulance passed us going the other way. I aimed at a cluster of vehicles huddled in the flashing lights of two police cars, about halfway out. Not much of a road. Straight enough from land side to point, but barely paved and chuck-holed, flooded six inches deep in places, with a film of mud, washing out of the lots above, smearing the surface. Through the rain and the trees I could just make out a few houses at the upper side of the road. At our left, nothing but grass, mud, and rock ending suddenly about twenty-five yards from the road.
From what I could see of the houses, they were big. There didn’t seem to be very many of them, but there could have been others tucked farther back in the trees. I had no idea how wide the spit might be, but it was no more than five hundred yards long.
Besides the two police cars, there were a big old station wagon and a county car. A solitary figure squatted out in the rain and wind on the grassy bluff overlooking the ocean. I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel. I rolled down my window; the chief, in the passenger seat, rolled down his. He jerked a thumb at the backseat of the Chevy, where Alice, her body obscuring Nora, was peering through the glass. I pulled up alongside the wagon. Paisley was sitting inside. “Funny-looking bloodhound you got there.”
“Heard there was an accident, Clement.”
He opened his door, slid out, and ducked into the backseat of the Chevy with Alice and Nora. The wagon’s driver slid across the front seat to get a better look at us. It was a woman, swathed in clear plastic.
“How’d you find out?” Paisley demanded.
“My partner and I”— I introduced him to Rosie— “were in Henry’s when he came in to tell Wolf.”
Paisley sighed. “Yeah. Wolf came running out here. We sent him home.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, nodding at the woman in the wagon.
“Dead woman’s cousin. Fredda Carey.”
“What happened?” Rosie asked.
“Hard to tell. That’s the coroner’s man out there sitting in the mud.” He was referring to the figure I’d seen out on the edge. “Looks like she slipped down the bank, maybe got caught by a wave and pulled over.” He glanced quickly at the cousin and whispered, “Onto the rocks. All battered up.”
The cousin didn’t miss the whisper. She got out of the wagon, swinging cheap plastic boots, muddied to the ankle, down onto the wet road, and came over to join us, standing wretchedly in the rain.
“Hello, Nora,” she said, glancing into the backseat. Then, to Paisley, “Who are these people?” He introduced Rosie and me as magazine writers from San Francisco.
Nora leaned around the dog. “They just told me, Fredda. I’m very sorry.” The woman acknowledged the condolence with a heavy shrug.
The door of the other police car slammed, and a young cop trudged over to us. He was the one I had seen at the cafe that afternoon, the one who looked out for other people’s investments. He mumbled something to Paisley about the morgue, and Angie, and the radio. “Okay, Perry,” the chief said.
There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask Paisley, but that was hard to do with the cousin, and everyone else, clustered in and around the car. I invited him to step across the road with me. Out in the rain again, I walked him across the grass toward the coroner’s man. Rosie stayed with the others.
“Where’s the body?” I began.
“Ambulance been and gone. Some job, hauling her up off those rocks.”
“What was she doing out here? And what’s her cousin doing out here? Does the Carey woman live on the spit?”
He snorted. “Not much chance of that. No, see what happened was Fredda and Gracie were having dinner together at Gracie’s, when this friend of Gracie’s called. Marty Spiegel, his name is. Heard of him?” I nodded. “Anyway, he called and he was sitting down there in L.A. and getting all worried about his house up here in the storm. Asked her to go out and take a look, give him a call back.”
“When was that?”
“Around five, a little past. Just dark. By six she wasn’t back yet and Fredda got worried, gave me a call. That was right about the time Perry was getting out there to check on things. I had Angie relay the message to his car. He actually spotted the body down on the rocks. Must have done some real work for a change.”
“Then you came out here?”
He nodded.
“And you called the cousin?”
“No. She called the station a while later. We knew Gracie was dead by then. Angie told Fredda we’d found her, Fredda came on out.”
“When was that?”
“About an hour ago.”
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to nine. “When did Wolf get here?”
“About fifteen minutes after Fredda.” That tallied with the time he’d left the bar.
The coroner’s man slogged across the grass and joined us.
“What do you think, Kurt?” Paisley asked.
The man laughed and shook his head. “Could have slipped. Could be one of those waves came up over the top. There’s some rock dislodged, but there’s nothing much to see, all this rain still coming down.”
I broke in. “Could she have been pushed?”
The man looked at me as though he’d just seen me turn purple. Paisley introduced me, and Kurt grunted. “Looks to me like she just got too close to the edge.” He smirked. “Of course, if she was poisoned or shot or anything, the autopsy ought to show it. I’ll give you a call tomorrow or so, Clement.” He drifted off. A couple of minutes later I heard the county car start. The lights went on and he swung around and headed back down the road.
I walked closer to the edge and looked down. Not very high up, after all. Maybe twenty-five or thirty feet to the rocks below, a scene like the inside of an overeager washing machine with a dozen agitators. A wave battered the rocks, washing over them. Another, higher wave crashed halfway up the scarp. The wind was trying to push me away from the edge, and I should have let it. I had to leap back when a third, much larger wave lunged at the spit, gobbling it up to the lip, spraying me with foam, turning my mud-plastered boots into soaked sponges and my pants legs into dishrags.
“I don’t think I’d stand out there if I were you,” Clement said. I rej
oined him on more solid ground.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “The house is back there in the trees, right?” He nodded. “Then what the hell was she doing out here on the edge in this weather?”
He shrugged. “Does seem a little peculiar. But people get killed along this coast all the time. Don’t take a storm serious enough. Don’t take the ocean serious enough, for that matter. People do stupid things. You just did.” He began to walk back toward the cars. I followed him, but I wasn’t finished with our talk. Perry, Rosie, Nora, and Fredda were all sitting in the Chevy. Clement headed that way, but I cut him off, asking for a few more minutes alone.
For the first time, I noticed the tail end of an old white Gremlin sticking out of an overgrown driveway across the road.
“Is that the house?” I asked as we climbed into Clement’s warm, dry car.
“Yeah. And that’s Gracie’s car.”
“Any way to tell if there was any violence?”
“She was all banged up. Head. Body. Probably won’t be any way to tell a thing like that.”
“What about the car? Anything there?”
“No. No blood, if that’s what you mean.”
“Any sign of a second person?”
“You mean like a puddle on the floor of the passenger side?”
I smiled. “Exactly.”
He smiled back. “You sure you’ve never done any detective stories? I’ll tell you, Perry didn’t look for anything like that— you wouldn’t need a low-paying job, would you?— but I checked it out. I thought about another car, too, but hell, fifteen minutes of this rain would have washed away any sign of that. No way to show this was anything but an accident.”
“Clement,” I said, but the name was swallowed in a sudden gust that pushed at the patrol car and drowned it in a wash of rain. “Clement, you’ve had two violent events here in less than a week. A break-in, with destruction of valuable property, and now a death. And the dead woman worked for the place that got burglarized.”
He shifted irritably in his seat. “Don’t argue with me, Jake, and don’t lecture me. I’m wet and I’m tired and a woman I’ve known all her life… look, I don’t disagree with you.” Car doors slammed. I rolled down my window to see what was going on. Perry was getting into his car, Fredda Carey into hers. She started the engine and drove away. I rolled the window up again.
“Sorry, Clement. Go ahead.”
“Like I said, I don’t disagree with you. But I still think the break-in was a prank, and even if I think this needs looking into, a little physical evidence would be a big help in getting started. Maybe, with something to go on, I could get some help from the sheriff. He wasn’t too impressed about the break-in.” He sighed. “Then again, maybe he’s more ready for pasture than I am, and doesn’t get too impressed with anything anymore.”
“You’re not ready for pasture.” Despite my wariness of lawmen, I was beginning to like the man, and I didn’t like hearing him put himself down.
He laughed and patted my shoulder. “You’re a nice fellow, Jake. Maybe I could get put out to stud.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I told him I wanted to get a quick look at the dead woman’s car. He said he’d open it up for me, but I couldn’t touch anything.
Rosie saw where we were going and hopped out of the Chevy. The three of us crossed to the driveway. We looked around the Gremlin. No tracks of any kind on the smooth paving. I walked up the drive, looking to either side. No marks on the grass, no footprints, a lot of leaves and debris lying around from the storm.
Nothing I could see in the car.
The lights of a tow truck were coming down the road.
Driving back off the spit, I noticed that the visible houses had boarded-up windows, and reflected that at least some of the residents believed in being prepared.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t much I could do to prepare for that drive, again, up into the hills. The road was even worse. I drove very slowly while we talked about the events of the night. Rosie said that Fredda had elaborated on what happened, somewhat, to Nora. The two cousins had been drinking wine. Not much, Fredda had insisted. And Marty Spiegel had called and asked Gracie if she could possibly go out and check on his house. She had told Fredda to sit tight and listen to the stereo and she’d be right back. An hour later Fredda called the police. She called again, a bit more than an hour after that, to learn from Angie that Perry had found Gracie and Clement had gone out to the spit. That was when Fredda had driven there.
“She kept blaming herself for not getting worried sooner, not going out to see what was wrong,” Nora said. “They grew up together.”
“You didn’t by any chance ask her why her cousin might have walked out on a cliff in the middle of a gale?” I asked as I maneuvered, with some relief, into the driveway.
“I did mention that. She said something about Gracie being a romantic. That she liked storms. Then she just broke down and said she had to go pick up her daughter.”
The curried chicken was badly dried out, but we ate it anyway. Nora tossed our socks into the dryer, and I toweled my pants legs as well as I could. The dog had settled again by the fire, but the cat was keeping its distance.
“What do you think, Nora?” I asked. “Was Gracie a romantic? Or was she just suicidal?”
She thought about it. “I don’t really know. She was a nice person, quiet. A good employee. Steady. I always liked her, but she was younger than I am, so we didn’t go to school together or anything. Nice. A good worker. We didn’t have a lot in common. She didn’t have any, well, drive.…”
Her tone was not exactly patronizing, but it was clear that she had seen nothing in Gracie but a good, pliable flunky. Nora had by this time drunk a good deal of wine, and was beginning to relax.
“Could she have had anything to do with the break-in?” I sipped the cold wine and took a last bite of chicken. Sawdust.
“Do you mean did she do it? Would she do it?”
“Well? Would she?”
To my surprise, she laughed. “I think she’d be more likely to fall off a cliff.”
I changed the subject; I didn’t much like hearing her talk about this one. “I was wondering something. You said you have strict rules of confidentiality. Does that mean that only a few employees work in that section?”
She nodded. “For the sake of confidentiality and as a precaution against error. The last thing you want to do with a man’s frozen sperm is get it mixed up with someone else’s. Get the records switched or something. These things are all carefully cross-referenced, and we can’t have some new employee fumbling around in there.”
“Who does fumble around in there, then?” Rosie asked.
Nora smiled. “I do. And one woman who has access to all the records, and is in charge of them.” She looked at me. “You saw her there this afternoon.” I remembered. The woman who was typing labels.
“But not Gracie Piedmont?” I asked.
“No.”
“Was she really friends with Marty Spiegel?”
“I believe so.”
“Just friends?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“How did they meet?”
“At the bank.” She bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to say that. Her face closed down, her usual tension returned, and Rosie, ever alert, turned to less confidential matters.
“So,” she said. “How’s business? I mean before all the trouble happened.”
“Business was great, and it is again. Or will be.”
“Big future in this kind of thing?”
She smiled smugly at Rosie. “There are currently something like twenty thousand children conceived every year in the United States by our method.”
Darn, I thought, I never get in on the ground floor.
– 7 –
By the time we left Nora’s that night, the storm had kicked up several notches to a full-force gale. Getting to the car, ten feet down the driveway, was like swimming a wild river upstream.
Rosie held on to Alice’s collar the whole way, pulling the horrified and half-drowned animal along, yanking open the car door and giving her a boost inside.
Nora had invited us to stay the night, but I wanted to get back to the privacy of our motel and work some things through.
The road was hellish. My ancient windshield wipers, never particularly speedy, were nearly useless, and I had to roll the side window down to see anything at all. At one point I had to guide the Chevy through mud and rock that must have been a foot deep, washed down from the hill above. That was on the easy part, where the road was sheltered somewhat by trees. A dangerous kind of shelter, with those big eucalyptuses tossing their heads like 1968 schoolgirls, but shelter, nevertheless. I crept down the hill and around a hairpin curve, remembering that there were exposed places where the ground fell away steeply below the road, and where the wind, much worse now than on any of our previous trips up and down, would be coming off the ocean right at us. We hit one, suddenly and sooner than I thought we would, and got belted by a blast that wrenched the wheel out of my hands and nearly smashed us into a rock wall. Nearly.
It took me twenty minutes to hit the main street and what I hoped was the safety of the motel. I parked as close to the shelter of the building as I could get. The lot was strewn with branches. I was thinking I should have asked for more money for this job.
We went to our rooms to get dry and changed. I wiped the mud off my boots and left them sitting near the wall heater, changed into some sweats, and knocked on the communicating door. Rosie was in her pajamas. She was clucking over her cowboy boots, soaked to the ankle and damp the rest of the way up.
We settled down on the twin beds, Rosie leaning against the pillows on one, me sitting on the other, and began to talk about what we knew and where we should go from there.
“Let’s get to the timetable first,” she suggested. I opened my notebook to a clean page.
“First,” I said, “came the burglary, or vandalism, or whatever it is. That was Tuesday night, discovered Wednesday morning.”
She smiled. “That’s the easy part, because we don’t know anything much about it.”
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 4
