Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4)

by Shelley Singer

  “I think,” I said, “that we should visit Melody anyway. She might know something.”

  Rosie laughed. “I’ll bet she knows a lot.” I grunted. “I think you should go to see her alone. I think she’d talk more freely, if she has anything to talk about.”

  I grunted again. “Have you actually read her books?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Positive.”

  We had reached the path that Melody had taken down to the beach from the spit above, a rocky, steep, ankle-twister zigzagging down the cleft where the spit joined the mainland. Not posted as private, spit-dweller property, but somehow seeming that way. Farther out toward the water, the scarp was nearly vertical, with a slight overhang, clay and rock crumbling to sand halfway down. Out still farther, midway along the spit, were the clusters of rock, broken and sharp, tumbled together like jagged eggs in a nest of foam, where Gracie Piedmont had fallen.

  It looked to me like she could have gotten as good a view of the stormy ocean from a softer, more inland part of the spit, if that’s what she wanted to do, like the part over the beach. I said as much to Rosie.

  “But she was already farther out, at Spiegel’s house. So she just crossed the road.”

  “If it was an accident.” Maybe I was too used to dealing with murders. A burglary, even at a sperm bank, seemed tame. Boring. My imagination was creating more mystery than there really was. I told that to Rosie too.

  She sighed. “Then we need to talk to those Hackman kids, get them to admit they stole the sperm, and go home.”

  “We’re playing poker tonight.”

  “Then we’ll go home tomorrow.” She was laughing at me. I grinned back at her. Sometimes I wish we were both heterosexual. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve been able to get this close because she isn’t.

  We turned back along the beach, walking close to the water. I spotted Melody’s pink pajamas up on the dunes, headed back to the spit, and waved. She waved back. Fifteen minutes later we hiked up the path to the road.

  Rosie started the truck, put it in gear, and pulled off the shoulder, heading toward town.

  We were about to hit the first sharp curve at about thirty-five miles an hour, and I couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t slowing down. Then I noticed that she was riding the brake and we still weren’t slowing down.

  I felt my heart lurch, and I gagged on the baseball that had suddenly sprouted in my throat.

  Rosie was wrestling with the wheel. The curve went on and on, and I wasn’t sure what the incline below us was like, how far down it went, how steep it was. There was no guard rail. Still struggling to steer, Rosie clawed at the hand brake blindly. I threw my left arm in front of Alice, on the seat between us, and braced my right arm on the dash. I wasn’t breathing. Rosie was keening, a high-pitched wail of concentration, yanking at the hand brake.

  We almost made it. Three-quarters of the way around the endless curve we slid sideways off the road, across the shoulder, across the tall green grass, and over the edge.

  The truck landed on its side— my side, against tree trunks. I wasn’t sure how far we’d fallen. It had felt like we’d been spinning off the road for twenty minutes. Alice was sitting on my shoulder, whining. My nose was running warm blood, although I didn’t remember hitting it.

  My right arm hurt like hell.

  I could hear Rosie breathing. Then she said, “Are you okay?”

  I coughed, and more blood bubbled out of my nose. “Yeah. You?”

  “Okay.”

  I heard her yank at the door handle, and I heard the catch give, but she was having trouble getting the heavy door to move upward. “Shit. No leverage,” she rasped. I turned my head, looking up past Alice, who looked alert, if confused, and saw Rosie’s butt going through the open window. She disappeared. Then the door swung open. Alice, using me as a springboard, leaped up and out. Rosie reappeared, reaching down toward me. I stood on the smashed passenger-side door— my legs seemed okay— and let her help me up. I could have done it myself if my right arm had been working.

  She helped me up to the road, too, which wasn’t more than ten feet above the spot where the truck rested, against a stand of young eucalyptus that the gods must have planted. Because there was another twenty-foot drop to the dunes below, and twenty more feet could have done a lot of damage.

  “You’ve got blood all over you,” Rosie said.

  “I know.”

  “And you can’t use your arm.”

  “Are we going to stand here forever stating the obvious?” I grumped. “I think my nose has stopped bleeding.”

  “I’ll go get help.”

  “I can walk perfectly well,” I said. But at that moment I found myself sitting on the shoulder and I decided not to say anything else.

  “Keep your head back. Sit tight. I’ll get someone.” She took off her jacket and put it over my shoulders. I did as I was told. I sat tight and watched Rosie and Alice trot off down the road.

  – 12 –

  It turned out that Rosie didn’t have to run all the way into town. Marty Spiegel, returning from his shopping trip, spotted her on the road, picked her up, and took her to Clement’s office. Clement called an ambulance and a wrecker, told them where to find the bodies this time, then followed the Jag back to where I still sat, head back, the nosebleed slowed to a trickle, the pain in my arm so massive I couldn’t tell what part of the arm was actually damaged.

  There was a game I’d played as a kid, when my anything-but-painless dentist was having at me, and I was playing it today. A game of history. The Inquisition Game. They were trying to convert me. I was stretched on a rack (or clamped into a thumbscrew, or tied to a stake on a pile of burning brush) but I was very brave and would not give in. My imaginings, then, had been so much worse than the reality that the pain of the dentist’s drill had seemed trivial. The game wasn’t working so well now. My arm really did feel like it was being ripped apart slowly, and I couldn’t imagine the rack hurting more. Rosie’s jacket wasn’t keeping me warm. The afternoon fog was coming in, cold and wet, and I was shivering.

  I was thinking about how cold I was getting— maybe I would go numb— when the Jag pulled up, spraying pebbles from its tires, followed by Clement.

  Clement had a blanket, which he wrapped around me. I was going to tell him the blanket was unnecessary, but my teeth were chattering.

  “What’s hurt, son?” he asked. “I mean besides your nose?”

  I hadn’t even remembered that I had a nose. “Arm. I think the shoulder’s all torn up. No big thing. No bones sticking out.”

  He gave me a look that said, “Sure, tough guy,” a look worthy of my own father.

  The wrecker got there before the ambulance, which had to come from Rosewood, ten miles away. The driver was the same man we’d bought gas from a little while before, and now I remembered that I’d seen him once before. He was the old, sour-looking guy who had been the third man at the table with Henry and Perry, the table across from me that first day I’d eaten at Georgia’s. He looked down at the truck, shaking his head. That’s what they do when they’re going to charge you too much. He hadn’t done a lot more than that by the time the ambulance arrived.

  I told Rosie I would understand if she wanted to stay with her truck. She said the man with the wrecker would see to the truck, thanks anyway, and she and Spiegel would go along to the hospital.

  Clement said Frank— the guy with the wrecker— was going to need some help. He’d stay with him.

  The hospital was big and modern and the emergency room wasn’t too crowded. It wasn’t long before my nose was pronounced unbroken and my shoulder dislocated.

  Rosie admitted to a crick in her neck, which the young doctor said was a crick in the neck.

  The Rosewood veterinarian confirmed our diagnosis. The dog was fine.

  Marty dropped us off at the police station, and took his groceries home. Clement was there, and gave us what he knew about the truck. It had a br
oken axle, a smashed muffler, a twisted drive shaft, a wrecked fender and passenger-side door, a front bumper ripped off, and a lot of dings. The brakes had failed, he said, because the lines had “come loose” from the master cylinder.

  “Come loose?” Rosie objected. “Those nuts don’t just fall off. And the brakes were fine when we drove up there.”

  He nodded, thoughtful. “Or someone took ‘em off,” he agreed. “Ground was soaked with fluid where you said you’d parked.”

  He offered us a ride the short distance to the motel and we took it. I swallowed a pain pill and went to bed. Rosie went outside, and returned half an hour later. She’d been checking out the Chevy.

  “Everything looks okay,” she said. “The well’s full, the brake lines are in one piece. No burning torch sticking out of the gas tank.”

  I heard her say something about “doing a few things” right before I dozed off.

  – 13 –

  Rosie was moving around in the next room. I looked at the clock. Two hours had passed. I called out, and she came in.

  “I brought back some food,” she said. “Hungry?”

  “Sure.”

  She had been doing more than going for takeout. She had gone to the Hackmans’, where she had found the younger of the two boys, Tommy, at home alone. He was about fourteen, she said. He wouldn’t let her in, but she did her best Nancy Drew act and got him curious enough to agree to talk to her out in the yard. She told me about their conversation over a dinner of gooey hot turkey sandwiches on Styrofoam bread on Styrofoam plates, which we ate sitting on my bed.

  She had started out by telling the boy that we were investigative reporters, and that her partner had been injured in a “suspicious accident.” We felt, she told him, that something very odd was going on in Wheeler, and that someone had tried to get us because we had been looking into the break-in at the bank and the death of Gracie Piedmont.

  Rosie described Tommy as a bright, nervous, sly-eyed kid, tall for his age, physically clumsy, and self-conscious in her presence.

  He had demanded to know exactly what she wanted from him.

  She told him that we’d heard his older brother, Rollie, had been the one who found the bank’s assets out on the beach the morning after the burglary, and that we were wondering if he’d seen anything else.

  “How would I know?” the kid said.

  “What did you think when you found out what had happened?”

  He tried to be cool, but he wasn’t handling it very well, she said. He grinned and blustered and picked at a hangnail and told her he thought the break-in was “pretty dumb” and the bank itself was “weird.”

  “Some of the people in town,” she said, “think you and your brother might have pulled the job.”

  He had laughed— proudly, she thought— and admitted that they had a reputation, all right.

  He wouldn’t say they’d done it— and he wouldn’t say they hadn’t done it. And he didn’t know where his brother was or when he’d be home.

  I was having trouble eating with my left hand, and dropped a gob of mashed potatoes and gravy on the front of my clean shirt. It slithered down to my lap.

  “What’s the house like?”

  “Poor. The yard’s a mess. There’s an old station wagon on blocks in the side yard.”

  “What do you think?” I maneuvered a slice of turkey into my mouth.

  “Hard to tell with a kid like that. Maybe they did do it. But then again, it’s possible he just wants to give the impression of guilt. Their reputation, you know. We need to talk to his brother. And his parents.”

  Rosie had made two more calls while I’d been sleeping.

  She had invited Nora to the poker game, but didn’t think she’d come because she had said something about wanting to work. Rosie had then dropped by Melody Clift’s house and invited her. Melody said she’d be delighted. An interesting group: Clement, Spiegel, Melody Clift, Perry, and us.

  I decided to skip the pain pills for the evening so I could be awake and alert for the poker game. Beer’s a pretty good painkiller, anyway.

  My arm was heavily bandaged, set in a sling. I couldn’t quite manage a shower, so I sponged myself down and put on clean clothes, once again.

  Rosie drove the Chevy. As a teenager I’d had a lot of practice at driving a shift car with my left hand while the right was otherwise occupied, but that had been a long, long time ago, and I didn’t feel like trying it just yet.

  Clement’s house was a small stucco bungalow, a couple of blocks from the center of town. Pale green with white trim. Maybe twelve hundred square feet, maybe a little more. It had a shallow front porch with barely enough room for two redwood chairs with plastic cushions and a small redwood table between them that held a jade plant in a clay burro planter. The concrete stairs and porch were freshly painted in that terra-cotta color they sell for concrete. The front yard was two small patches of carefully tended lawn, with rhododendrons up against the house.

  The front door was much newer than the rest of the house, one of those carved, Spanish-style numbers they sell in places like Sears and Montgomery Ward. It had a brass knocker. A horseshoe.

  When Clement opened the door, we stepped directly into a beige-carpeted living room painted a soft rose, and were invited to sit on a beige and gold brocade couch backed up against a side wall and facing a large white-draped window. Clement disappeared through a small dining room into the kitchen and we looked around the room. There were several large plants, including a five-foot palmetto in one corner and a large rectangular planter of asparagus fern against the arch-cut wall dividing living room from dining room.

  It was a while before I noticed that the palmetto was populated by several small plastic birds, and that nestled in the asparagus fern were a foot-tall mother monkey with child, glazed pottery of some sort.

  The wall behind us and above our heads was covered with photographs, family photographs that spanned at least four generations, framed and arranged, or so it seemed, chronologically from sepia Victorian formality to infant in paper diapers. Clement came back into the room, bearing a tray of cheese and crackers, chips and onion dip, and beer, which he set down on the glass-topped coffee table before us.

  The house was very clean, very neat, but Clement’s presence was comfortable, so I wasn’t afraid of dropping crumbs. Come to think of it, the place didn’t look much like it belonged to Clement, who tended toward a rumpled look.

  “Noticed you looking at the pictures,” he said. “That’s my wife up there.” He pointed over our heads. “The wedding picture. That’s me in the uniform.”

  World War II. A young soldier, a corporal, with a silly, glazed grin on his face. A young bride in white, with shoulder-length rolled-under and pompadoured blond hair. Dark eyebrows, dark lipstick, looking happy but exhausted, or possibly frightened.

  At last, their faces seemed to say, they would get to go to bed together.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, although that wasn’t strictly true. She was pretty, but it’s always hard to tell how good-looking someone from another era really is. The style, even the bearing, get in the way.

  “Yes, she was. Right up to the day she died.”

  “When was that, Clement?” Rosie asked. I didn’t want to know.

  “Been nearly two years now.” He was gazing at the photos. “Stroke. Just took her away. She died in our bedroom early in the morning. I couldn’t decide what she should be dressed in… but you don’t want to hear that.” We murmured things just below the level of real speech.

  “Quite a collection of pictures though, isn’t it? Both our families, way back.”

  Dutifully, we turned again, twisting our bodies to look up at the wall. He started with the Victorians on his side, who, he said, had lived in Oregon. My neck was getting stiff and I didn’t need to have anything else hurting, so I stood up. From the Victorians, he introduced us to the flaming youth, and then the serious folk of the Depression. World War II, his own wedding, and, i
n the years right after the war, what seemed to be dozens of relatives all living in little houses and multiplying like crazy. His own son as a baby, a fifties child, a long-haired student in Berkeley in the sixties. Clement and his wife, Rita, growing middle-aged and then beginning to get old. No more photos of them after that. Two grandchildren, a boy and a girl, rushing toward their teens. Another picture of the grandson, the infant in paper diapers.

  The tour was finished. Clement sat down. I sat down.

  “Nice house,” Rosie said, to change the subject.

  “It’s just the way she left it,” he said. “I haven’t changed much. She was the decorator in the family. Hell, I work most of the time, anyway. Hardly live here.”

  I remembered, then, that he was looking for something to do when he finally retired. I realized how important it would be for him to find it.

  Perry was the first to arrive, carrying a twist-cap jug of wine.

  “You drinking, Clement?” he asked, waving the bottle at his boss.

  “Not anymore.” Clement took a last swig from his beer.

  “The town has to have one sober peacekeeper more or less on duty.”

  Perry nodded agreeably, went to the kitchen, and came back clutching a tumbler of cheap red.

  We decided to wait for a fifth player to arrive before we began. Clement began counting out chips at the dining room table. I waited until Perry had swallowed half his wine, and then brought up the events of the night before.

  “That’s really something,” I said, “the way you thought to look over the edge of the cliff.”

  “Believe me,” he chortled, “it was the last place I looked. I wasn’t too eager to go out there and hang off the lip, looking for Gracie.”

  “What did you do first,” Rosie said, “when you got the call?” She sounded all breathless with admiration and wonder.

  “Well, first I spotted the car, of course. Went to Spiegel’s to look for her, where she was supposed to be. And spotted the car in the drive. So then I tromped all around the house, yelling like a fool in the wind. Damned near got beaned by a tree limb too.”