“I never thought of the police. I just called to ask her about the storm, and she offered to check the house. That seemed okay. When I hadn’t heard from her by this morning, I decided to come up. And Clement told me about her accident.”
Rosie continued. “Was anyone with you when you called?”
He shook his head, laughing. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you? I really was in L.A. I’ve got a plane ticket somewhere around from this morning.”
“Is that the only reason you came up? To check on the house?” Rosie asked.
He glanced sideways at her. Was he blushing or just turning red from exertion? I would have been turning red from exertion.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well,” I eased into it, “there was that theft at the sperm bank. And we saw you there this morning.”
He turned off the treadmill, hopped off, and trotted over to the cycle. I didn’t push for an answer. He got on the cycle and started pedaling.
“We’re investigating what happened over there— that’s why we came to Wheeler in the first place. And I guess I was wondering if you had any ideas about why it might have happened. The break-in.”
He was breathing harder, blowing noisily like jocks do when they’re pushing it.
“I heard it was religious nuts. Nora said there was a note.”
“Could be,” I said. “I guess there’ll be a lot of activity around there for a while until they restock.”
“Yeah.” His dark curly hair was soaked with sweat.
“I’ve always been kind of curious about why a man would do that. What his motive might be. To have his sperm frozen that way. To be sold to a stranger.”
“Don’t know. Lots of different reasons for doing it, lots of situations. Ask Nora.”
Since I already had, I moved on to other things. “Do you know Fredda Carey?”
“Fredda? Gracie’s cousin? We’ve met.” He was grunting with every breath, but he kept going. Rosie must have gotten tired watching him, because she was lying down on the slant board.
“Were she and Gracie close? They were having dinner that night.”
He got off the cycle, went to a shelf in the corner and grabbed a big white towel. He wiped the sweat off his chest, arms, and hands. “They saw each other once in a while, I guess. They seemed like pretty different types, but they got along like relatives do, as far as I could tell.” He asked me to vacate the bench, tossed the towel on the floor, and lay down. I stood, watching him pump iron.
“How were they different?”
“Gracie was nicer. I mean, I don’t know Fredda, really, but the couple of times we met it seemed to me she was kind of pissed off at life or something. Always trying to cut a deal. Gracie said it had to do with her kid being born crippled. I don’t know.”
“Where’s Fredda’s husband?” Rosie wanted to know. She was still lying on the slant board.
“Never heard there was one.”
“You going to be around for a few days?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Grunt. “Got some repairs to see to. I need some time off, anyway.” He swung his feet to the floor and sat there, looking up at me. Rosie got off the slant board and stood next to me. “I’d like to hear more about the work you guys do,” he said.
Sure, I told him, maybe we could have a beer or something. I wanted to hear more about what he did too. Rich people can be pretty interesting, and I almost liked this one.
He showed us out. I said we’d be in touch. He was wearing his thick glasses again, and his eyes looked tiny.
– 10 –
Clement was sitting at his desk, staring at some paperwork. He looked happy to see us.
“I was just trying to think of an excuse to make another pot of coffee. Want some?”
I didn’t, really, but said I did. Rosie asked for some water for Alice, who was sitting outside the door.
“Bring her in. I got a soup bowl around here somewhere.”
Once we were all set up with liquid refreshment, I got to the point of our visit.
“Anything on Gracie Piedmont?”
“Only that she didn’t drown. No water in her lungs.”
“What did she die of?” Rosie asked.
“Her head was crushed in. But then, the rest of her was banged up too. Those rocks are pretty bad.”
“Any way to tell if all the damage was done by rocks?” I doubted it, but I had to ask.
He shook his head. “Let’s just say there wasn’t any damage that couldn’t have been done by rocks.”
“What about the car?”
“Nothing yet.”
“What do you think?” I persisted.
He shook his head again. “She was washed clean, jammed stuck down there on the rocks with the water washing her. Hard to tell if one wound killed her and the rest of them didn’t bleed. Hard to tell anything. You got any reasons to suppose someone did this to her somehow?”
It was my turn to shake my head. “None.”
Angie walked in the door, said hello to us, asked if we had enough coffee, and, reassured, moved on into the back room.
“Well.” Clement took a last slug of coffee and sighed deeply. “I got a bunch of little stuff to deal with here.” He tapped his finger on the pile of papers.
“I wanted to ask you,” I said. “How did Henry find out about Gracie?”
“I told him,” Angie chirped from the other room.
“One more thing,” I said. “We want to have a look at the spot where the sperm was dumped. Can you tell us where it is?”
“Sure. You won’t see much down there, though. What you do is, you take Cellini to the coast road, and on past the Spicer Street access…” He caught our blank looks, laughed, and picked up a ballpoint. He scribbled some lines, blobs, and words on a sheet of notepaper and slid it across the desk. “You’re here,” he said, pointing at a cross labeled “downtown,” at the far left of the sketchy map. “Cellini’s the next street over here, crosses Main. Runs into the coast road, here. You turn right onto the road and go north. About half a mile on you pass where Spicer comes in. All along in there you’re pretty high up above the beach. You go a little farther then, and you’ll see a kind of dip between the dunes. Big path down to the beach there. That’s the spot.” He pointed to some blobs he’d drawn out beyond the line of the beach. “Rocks out there make a kind of triangle formation close in. That’s where the stuff was, what we found of it. Tangled up in the seaweed around those rocks.” Over at the far right of the map he’d shown the spit, another half-mile or so beyond the triangle rocks. The coast road crossed the road out onto the spit, the one we’d taken on our way out from Nora’s hillside home, east of town, the night before.
“You going to keep on looking into Gracie’s death?”
“I think so,” I answered.
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just don’t have anything to go on. Maybe if I had better help. Or if I had anything to convince the sheriff with, so I could get some help from them. But the county plays straight poker, and you’re looking at one hell of a lot of wild cards, with the break-in and the death.”
“You play poker, Clement?” Rosie asked.
“Sure do. Don’t always have time, but I like to get a game going once in a while. You?”
“Once in a while. But Jake does it every week.”
“If I can,” I said.
Clement looked pleased. “Maybe we ought to get a game going tonight at my place. Perry plays. He plays stupid, but that’s okay with me.”
“Should we see if we can round up a couple more people?” Rosie asked.
“You bet.” He took the map back from me, and added another blob— the location and address of his house.
“Oh, by the way, Clement,” I said. “The Hackman boys. Are they the ones you think might be responsible for the break-in?”
“Who told you that, for Christ’s sake?” He frowned. “Well, could be. It was Rollie hanging around the beach the morning we found t
he stuff, but he hangs around there all the time, anyway. Hell, sometimes kids get in trouble… And in a way, if he did it, maybe he would want to watch and see what happened next. Or maybe he’d want to be as far away… I don’t know, forget I said anything.”
We thanked him for the information he’d given us, and walked down the street to the tavern. It was noon, and Wolf had just unlocked the doors. He looked haggard and he moved slowly.
We ordered mineral water. He handed us the bottles and glasses of ice with twists of lime. “I hear you two have been asking a lot of questions about Gracie’s accident.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Rosie asked. He didn’t answer her.
“I hear you’re some kind of writers or reporters.”
I nodded. “Where’d you hear that?” I asked.
“From just about everybody. What are you here to report, anyway?”
I gave him the song and dance about writing a piece on the town, small town with sperm bank. “And, of course,” I added, “a death… well, it just seems to be part of the kind of thing that’s been happening around here lately.”
“You mean like a bad-luck town or something?”
“I guess.”
“Sounds a little peculiar to me. Some of the people in town aren’t so sure they believe that. Henry thinks you’re private investigators.”
Rosie broke in. “Investigators? Why wouldn’t we admit that? Besides, reporters work in teams. Investigators don’t.”
Sometimes I marvel at Rosie’s ability to make bald statements of fact about things she knows nothing about. A real and useful talent.
“That makes sense,” he said, and began washing glasses. The glasses, I reflected, must have been left from the night before, because we’d opened the place and there was no one there but us. The glasses looked clean to start with, though, so I decided it was just busy work.
“I didn’t expect to see you in here today,” I said. “Pretty upsetting for you, about Gracie.”
A muscle in his cheek twitched. He kept washing clean glasses. “Better to keep working.”
“You two were planning on getting married, right?” Rosie asked.
“Right.” He didn’t look up.
No reason to beat around the bush, I thought. “Do you think it was an accident?” He did look up, then, straight at me. His eyes were bloodshot.
“What the hell are you after?”
I kept on going. “Do you think she would have gone out on the edge to look at the waves? She was just there to check one of the houses.”
He stared at me. “Don’t try to make a big story out of this, pal. She fell. Leave her alone.”
Rosie took a turn. “You don’t know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?”
He glared back at her. “I bet you’d just love it if I pushed her. Just like a man, right?” He shoved our two dollars back at us, and spoke to me. “Drinks are on the house. There’s nobody who would have wanted to hurt Gracie, and don’t try to say there was. Now, get out of here. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you.”
I decided this was not a good time to invite him to a poker game, not a good day to get to know him better. We left.
We stopped for a quick lunch at a place we hadn’t tried before. It was called the Santa Rosa Plum, and the menu in the window had a lot of sprout and avocado kinds of things. Our waitress was a tired-looking woman who was polite but morose. We were just deciding to make the beach our next stop when she dragged herself over to take our order. We both ordered the vegetarian sandwiches— cheese, avocado, sprouts, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitress nodded to someone in the booth behind us, and said, “Be right with you, Henry.”
Henry it was, finishing his coffee and waiting for his check. He smiled at us. We smiled back. He got his check and left.
We had just made the first dents in our sandwiches when Fredda came in the door, carrying a cardboard carton. Our waitress went to talk to her. Most of it looked like chat, except when Fredda started stacking bags of cookies next to the cash register. Our waitress stopped her after the first dozen. They had a mild discussion. Fredda shrugged, turned, waved at us, and left carrying her carton, still nearly full.
After lunch we headed back to the truck, which was parked outside Clement’s office. Just as we passed the grocery store, the Jaguar with the MOVIES license plate pulled up.
Spiegel, dressed in rustic denim and plaid flannel, jumped out and greeted us in a friendly fashion.
“Where you headed?”
“Couple places. Beach, for one. Glad we ran into you,” I said. “We’re getting up a poker game for tonight over at Clement’s. Interested?”
He looked slightly suspicious. “What kind of stakes are you talking about?”
“Nickel ante.”
He thought about it. “What time?”
“I guess around eight.”
“Who’s playing?”
I reflected that celebrity must be hard on this man sometimes. “Rosie and Clement, me, Perry. Maybe give Nora a call.”
“Maybe so. It’d be a relief to do something besides think about work.”
I wrote down Paisley’s address for him, he went into the grocery store, and we continued on our way to the truck. After stopping for gas, we headed for the beach.
– 11 –
We took Cellini Avenue, which sloped downward through the center of town and ended a few feet above sea level at the coast road.
Sand, driftwood, even seaweed had forced itself through the bottleneck formed by the beach entrance path cut across the dunes. The storm’s debris was scattered across the surface of the road itself and made the right turn an obstacle course, which Rosie negotiated skillfully.
We followed the narrow road north. It wound along the edge of town, rising gradually above the beach until, at Spicer, I could see only the shoulder of the road and the ocean some distance below. Another half mile and we spotted the entrance Clement had marked on his map. Rosie made a U-turn, pulling the truck up onto the shoulder just beyond the path.
We stood on the rise for a moment, looking down at the beach, a cup deep enough, here, to contain its own evidence of the gale.
The triangular rock formation, at low tide, was near the edge of the beach. We picked our way out through weed and wood and, here and there, the corpse of a fish or bird caught by the storm. There were bits of glass in the sand, bits of plastic, shell, unidentifiable objects. I squinted at the rocks and tried to see someone, anyone, tossing vials of sperm for the rocks to catch like sea lions catching fish. I kept getting confused between vials of sperm caught on the rocks and a woman’s body that had been caught by different rocks on a different part of the beach. Alice was prancing at the edge of the water, playing tag with the gentle waves. Rosie stood, arms akimbo, looking toward the spit, which was clearly visible to the north. I tossed a stick for the dog a few times, feeling futile. There was nothing here to find because there was too much of everything. We began to walk toward the spit.
We’d gone about two-thirds of the way, when I saw something pink fluttering slowly down the side of the spit and onto the beach. Gradually, as it came closer, it took shape. A woman, dressed in some kind of pink pajamas.
Alice ran to meet her, and I heard her laugh as she stooped to pet the dog. A nice sound.
She was somewhere around forty-five. Slightly thick in the waist, with graying long auburn hair and nearly black eyes. She smiled at us. It was a very sexy smile. For whom, I wondered.
We said hello. She said hello. She stopped. “I’ll bet you’re those reporters everyone’s been talking about. Or are you detectives? Which are you, anyway?”
We introduced ourselves. “Reporters,” I said. “Probe magazine.”
“That’s very exciting.” The smile was definitely for me. “I’m Melody Clift. I have a house up there.” She waved an arm toward the spit.
“The writer!” Rosie exclaimed as if she were a fan.
Melody Clift ducked her hea
d modestly. I’d never read one of her romances and I didn’t think I ever would, but I looked at her with new interest. The pink pajamas were a mite flashy, but you couldn’t tell from her manner or her soft voice that she’d made several million dollars writing porn for women.
She smiled a conspiratorial smile. “Yes, I do write. And I’m dying to know what kind of dirt you’re digging up about this town.”
“Maybe something you can use?” I smiled.
She laughed. “Why not?” She took my arm, which I found somewhat startling. But then, she was a startling woman. “Why don’t you drop in on me later and we can talk.” Although she smiled at Rosie, I wasn’t sure the invitation was for both of us. “My house is the seventh one out.”
I told her we would try, but might not make it that day.
“I’ll be in all evening, and all day tomorrow. Please drop by. I’m feeling very bored. It can be so dismal here in the winter.” There was an edge of mysterious sadness in her soft, husky voice. The day was bright and sunny and far from dismal.
“I guess you came up this morning?” Rosie asked. “To take a look at your house?”
“Yes. From my home in San Francisco.”
“Is everything all right?”
“I’m afraid there’s a tree in my swimming pool.”
We “tsked” in sympathy. “We should be going now,” I said. All that soft pinkness was making me nervous.
“I hope I’ll see you later, then. You, too, Rosie. And of course the poodle. She’s lovely.”
We said good-bye. She walked on down the beach and we continued toward the spit.
Rosie was chuckling. “She likes you, Jake. I could feel the steam rising.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Really. If I were Lee, I’d be worried about you visiting that woman.” I snorted. Lee is someone I’ve been seeing, off and on, for several months. A bright, beautiful attorney. She lives in Petaluma, which is nearly an hour away from Oakland. She works long hours and rarely makes the commute, which leaves it up to me. I’d been managing it a couple of times a week. She doesn’t think that’s enough, and accuses me of taking the relationship lightly. She is unjust.
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 7
