“And then?” I prodded.
He took a long swallow, nearly emptying his glass. “Checked the houses right around, of course. Henry’s, next door, and Melody’s. No sign of anyone, no sign of Gracie. Excuse me.” He got up and went to the kitchen again, returning with a second water glass full of wine. He took a long pull and plunked himself down in his chair, his round face shining with pride. “Now, where were we? Okay, so I checked all around, yelled, looked around the yards. She just wasn’t nowhere around there, so I crossed the road. The waves were splashing up pretty good, coming right up over the top every so often. I timed them. Took my chance, and looked over the edge. I can tell you, it was something.” He paused for approval, and both Rosie and I nodded admiringly. “There she was, down there on the rocks, those waves pulling her— well, trying to pull her, but she was jammed in pretty good. Still, I was scared we’d lose her.”
“Hell of a job, finding her like that,” I said.
“I got three dollars each here to start,” Clement yelled from the dining room. “Think that’s about right?”
We said we thought it was.
Marty Spiegel was next to appear, wearing the same jeans and plaid shirt he’d been wearing earlier that day. I was glad to see I hadn’t bled on him. He greeted Clement and Perry as if he were glad to see them, smiled sweetly at Rosie, patted the dog, and asked how I was feeling.
“No problem,” I lied. We all moved into the dining room, paid our three dollars, and took our chips.
Clement rummaged in a drawer and found the cards.
“There seems to be an awful lot going on around here these days, Clement. Must be keeping you busy,” Spiegel said.
Clement shook his head. “Yeah. Too damned much.”
“Yeah,” Perry said. Then he squinted like Clint Eastwood and added, “But you just try to get your teeth into any of it and it’s like biting into… well, wine.” He finished his second glass and poured more.
Clement glared at him. I didn’t know whether it was for the comment or the drinking.
There was a knock on the door, and Clement went to answer. Melody Clift swept in and rushed to my good side.
“You poor thing! Rosie told me there was an accident. Imagine, right after I talked to you on the beach. How very terrible. What happened exactly?”
“Brakes failed,” Clement said tersely, but he was gazing at her with some approval. Which wasn’t hard to do. She was wearing a flowered blouse in blue and lavender, and tight lavender pants. The blouse showed cleavage for days, and very nice cleavage it was too. In artificial light she looked younger than she had on the beach. She was one of those super-feminine women I don’t usually feel drawn to. I tend to date lawyers and journalists. Like Lee. Still, I thought, appreciating Melody’s softness, it wasn’t like I was engaged or anything.
We drew for the deal. Rosie got it, and started out slow with five-card draw, guts to open. Melody, sitting next to me, said she would be glad to put my chips in the pot, since I was playing one-handed. I thanked her and accepted the offer. Rosie was trying not to grin, and failing in the effort.
She dealt me the two, seven, and nine of spades, a six of diamonds, and a jack of clubs. I tossed in the six and the jack, hoping feebly for more spades. I was amazed when I actually got them. A ten and a four. I took the pot with no trouble at all.
Clement dealt next, seven-card stud, deuces wild. I folded after four unimpressive cards, and watched Melody play it out. She had, when the fourth up card was dealt, a pair of jacks, a five, and a deuce showing. Everyone but Spiegel folded. He raised her dime bet to twenty cents and lost, holding three kings to her jacks-over-fives full house.
It was interesting, watching her play. She gave nothing away, and she milked the other players carefully, never raising so much that she scared them out early. Soft, maybe, but a good poker player.
When the deal passed to Perry, who was flushed with wine, he called spit in the ocean. Once again Clement glared at him. Spiegel looked like he thought the reference was in bad taste. I wasn’t sure, looking at Perry, whether he meant anything by it at all.
The up card was a four. I had another one in my hand. Two wild cards. And a queen of hearts and ten of diamonds. And a five. Three queens, at least, and a possible, though not likely, straight. This was one of those games where four of a kind tends to be the winner. My hand was not terrific. Enough to stay in, not enough to count on.
I decided to start out by bluffing, raising the nickel bet to a dime first round. In the draw I asked for one card. I got the ten of spades. Not bad at all. I raised the bet to twenty cents. Rosie, Clement, Marty, and Perry all folded, stunned by my confidence. Melody studied my face and raised me a quarter. I guess people don’t get rich by being passive, not even romance writers. But what the hell, maybe she had a full house or four twos. I called, and raised her another quarter. She laughed and saw my quarter.
She was holding a pair of fours and a pair of sixes— five sixes with the common wild card. Five.
We played a few more hands, and then Spiegel jumped to his feet and said to deal him out, he wanted to stretch his legs outside for a few minutes. I went with him.
Walking wasn’t great, because it jarred my arm, but I wanted to get to know him, and a crowd wasn’t the best place to do that. He walked slowly, which surprised me and made me think maybe he was matching his pace to my wounds.
“Tell me what it’s like to be a detective, Jake,” he said after we’d walked for a couple of minutes.
I laughed. “Look at me. Arm in a sling, nose swollen. That’s what it’s like.”
He shook his head. “No, come on. Why do you do it if that’s all there is?”
“Hell, Marty, I just kind of fell into it. It seemed to be something I was pretty good at, I got a couple of requests from people to help them… it worked. I like figuring things out, tracking things down. When I was a kid I thought I wanted to be a cop. I was for a while, in Chicago.”
“When was that?”
“One of the years was 1968.”
He stopped and leaned against a tree. “Your arm’s bothering you. Let’s stop for a minute. You were there in ‘68? As a cop? Jesus.”
“Why, were you there as something else?”
“No. I was pretty young, and I was no yippie, anyway. I didn’t have much interest in the Democratic convention, or in any kind of politics. I was an L.A. kid, hanging around Venice, writing poetry. Is that why you’re not a cop now? The ’68 riots?”
“Yeah. I hit a kid in the head with my stick and his friends carried him away. Maybe he was an asshole, maybe he was a decent, idealistic kid. I think the people that led him there knew what they were getting him into, because everyone knew the cops were assholes, and the mayor was an asshole…” I realized I was going on and on. “I left. Left the force, left Chicago. Came out here and bummed around, got into this and that. And wound up being a kind of cop anyway. By the way, Clement thinks Rosie and I are just reporters. We’ve got a tie-in with Probe magazine, so in a way it’s true, okay?”
I was taking a big chance trusting him with the information, but I couldn’t see that there would be anything in it for him one way or the other. Even if he were a killer.
“Sure. Whatever you say. Just don’t end up quoting me in some stupid article.”
“Promise. Whatever happened to the poetry?”
“Well, I was going to be a poet, then I took this course in astrology, and that kind of changed things.”
We were walking again, back toward the house. He continued. “One day I was able to read my own chart and I saw something in it that scared me.” He hesitated. “An early death. I suppose you think that’s bullshit.”
“I didn’t know you could see things like that in a chart.”
He shrugged. “I saw it in mine. And suddenly a life of artistic poverty didn’t seem so wonderful. I decided the best defense against death was money, and I decided— also according to my chart— that movies were the way to
make it.”
“You still think you’re going to die young?”
“I don’t know anymore. But I’m putting things by for that eventuality.”
I had to ask. “Like at the sperm bank?”
He laughed. “Could be.”
We’d been gone only a few minutes, but Rosie’s stacks had grown. Melody gave me a big smile and asked if I wanted her to pour me another beer. Yes, I said, and thanks.
I noticed when I sat down that her chair had crept closer to mine, so that our thighs were half an inch apart. The slightest twitch and we’d be touching. Fun, I thought. Too bad my arm feels like a bag of screaming nerves. And the thought of kissing someone and accidentally bumping noses was almost more than I could stand.
I tried concentrating on the play, and on the players. Clement had been right about Perry. He played stupid. But he was interesting to watch as part of the group. He was easy with Clement, shy with Melody, and deferential to the point of insult with Spiegel. He called him Mr. Spiegel, stiffly. I couldn’t tell whether he was afraid of the man or disliked him.
We played until eleven-thirty, when Clement, noticing that Perry was nodding off, told us to go on playing while he took his sodden employee home. Marty stayed for a while. When he left, Rosie took Alice outside for a walk, leaving me alone with Melody.
She shared a last beer with me.
“You don’t feel very well, do you, Jake?”
“Rotten,” I admitted.
“Well, of course. Poor baby. I’ll just finish this little bit of beer and go right home. But you must promise to come and visit me soon.”
“Tomorrow.”
She kissed me in a sisterly fashion, on the cheek.
Rosie and Alice came back in, followed by Clement. Melody announced her departure, and we all agreed it was time to stop.
– 14 –
The arm kept me awake until about three A.M., when I gave up and dropped some pain pills.
Rosie let me sleep until ten. I tried to ignore her loud fidgeting in the next room, but the message was clear: it was time for breakfast, time for work.
The hot turkey sandwich the night before had put me off Georgia’s, and I didn’t feel like eating a giant, greasy omelet, anyway. We went back to the Santa Rosa Plum, the sprout-and-avocado place, where bran muffins got top billing on the breakfast menu.
It was nearly empty. I was beginning to wonder how the town survived every winter. We took a booth and began to plan our day, but we hadn’t gotten far when the waitress, the same tired-looking woman who had waited on us the day before, dumped a couple of menus on the table and said “Good morning” in an unfriendly voice.
I looked up at her, startled. “When you decide what you want,” she said, “I want to talk to you.”
“Sure,” Rosie said. “About what?”
“About my son Tommy, that’s what.”
I was touched. Strangers knew us by sight. Nothing like a small town. We glanced at the menus, ordered muffins, orange juice, and coffee. She went to get them, and, when she returned with our orders, pulled up a chair at the end of our booth. I could tell this was going to be very good for the digestion, especially after her first few words.
“You got a lot of nerve, you media people,” she said. “Sneaking around and talking to kids when they’re all alone.”
“We didn’t know he’d be all alone,” Rosie said reasonably.
“But he was. Now suppose you tell me what this is all about.”
My sore shoulder did not make me a more charming and agreeable person, but I tried.
“Possibly you know, Mrs. Hackman, that there are rumors around town that your boys might have been involved in a prank over at the cryobank.”
“Why would reporters care about that? What kind of story are you after, anyway?”
I studied her. She had that look people get when they’ve worked too long at tedious jobs for too little money. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five or forty, but her long brown hair looked undernourished, drained. It wouldn’t comb properly and had no real color. Her face was pale and her skin looked dry. Her blue eyes sat deep in premature crepe. She was slightly overweight and gone to sag. And she looked really pissed off.
“We’re just interested in finding out what happened over there,” I told her. “You have to admit it’s an odd story. Maybe it was a kid’s prank and maybe it wasn’t.”
She looked doubtful. A couple of new customers came in and she got up to give them menus. Then she came back and sat down again.
“I think you should leave my kids out of it. They’re good boys.”
Yeah, I thought. That’s what everybody always said about mass murderers.
“So you don’t think they had anything to do with it?” I asked unnecessarily. “Then what do you think happened?”
She snorted. “Maybe someone didn’t like the merchandise they got or something. Or it was religious, like I heard. Maybe someone had it in for Nora Canfield. But my kids were home all night, in bed. I know that.” Bullshit, I thought. There wasn’t a kid in the world who couldn’t sneak out of the house and sneak back in again with enough motivation.
“Why do you think people would suspect them of it, then?” Rosie asked.
“People. What do they know? The boys had a few problems a couple of years ago. They’re high-spirited. You know boys. If Clement Paisley can’t solve a crime, that’s his problem, not mine.” The new customers called out to her and she went to take their order. She came back again. We had started on our second muffins.
“You’ve got to admit,” Rosie said, swallowing, “that it looks like a kid’s prank.”
“No, it does not. What about that note? Religious nuts. We got a couple of those in this town, let me tell you.”
“Got any candidates?” I asked.
“You can just bet I do. I know you talked to Fredda. You meet that kid of hers? You go talk to the kid’s great-aunt, that Hilda Carlson. And while you’re at it, talk to Frank Wooster, over at the garage. He’s been pals with Hilda for thirty years. You maybe should talk to Joanne too. But not my kids. They’re okay. They don’t do burglary.”
After much sympathetic listening to her list of alternate suspects— at one point she mentioned Wolf, and even Perry— she agreed to let us stop over that night when her whole family would be home and get the boys’ side of things. Maybe, she said, they would have some ideas too.
I wasn’t looking forward to it, but meeting the family was a good way to get a real line on the kids.
She finally left us alone. We finished our coffee and got out of there.
Our first stop was the garage, to see if the mechanic could tell us any more about the accident and to take a second look at the mechanic himself.
He was under the truck. He eased himself out, and spoke to me, ignoring Rosie. “Mr. Samson, I sure can’t tell how those lines came loose.”
“The truck belongs to my friend,” I said, nodding at Rosie. He acted like that put a new perspective on the problem, and turned to her abruptly.
“You need to take more care with it,” he told her. “Get it checked out once in a while, make sure everything’s screwed on tight. You got to maintain a vehicle.”
“I do,” Rosie said. “It was fine. Something happened.”
“Vehicles don’t just do things like that,” he argued. “It’s like someone opened up that hood and pulled them nuts right off.” Once again he was talking to me, man to man, about Rosie’s obviously neglected and mismanaged truck.
Up until this point Rosie had taken his attitude in stride, but she was beginning to lose her sense of humor.
“Maybe that’s exactly what happened— if that’s what it looks like,” she snapped.
He frowned at the truck. “Well, that’s what it looked like, all right. You can ask Clement and Perry. They was here to check it out. And I didn’t touch no part of it beforehand, either.” He scratched his gray stubble. “You think maybe someone done this on purpose, Mr.
Samson? For a joke or something like that?”
The prank theory of crime seemed popular in this town.
“Not much of a joke,” I said.
He pursed his thin lips and gazed straight at me with icy blue eyes.
“Makes a good story,” he said.
Rosie was staring at him, dumbstruck. But I was cool.
“Don’t you think it would be kind of stupid to commit suicide for a story that someone else would have to write?”
His eyes skipped away from me again. He didn’t want to call me stupid outright. “Maybe,” he said, gazing out the door, “someone got irritated. That can happen when you go around looking for things, annoying people.”
“We had no idea we were annoying anyone,” Rosie said, all wide brown eyes. “Why would anyone be irritated with us?”
He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Maybe you just rubbed someone the wrong way. Some people around here think the burglar did a good thing.”
“Do you?”
“I obey the law. About the truck,” he said, turning to me again, “I got to wait for some parts before I can get this altogether fixed. Got a body man can’t work on it until Tuesday. If you need to get back to the city, you’ll have to come back and get it later. Can’t be helped.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Rosie said. “It looks like we’ll be around for a while.” The estimate figure was, of course, immense. Rosie told me that she had a five-hundred-dollar deductible. I said we’d have to get that from our employer.
– 15 –
Once again there was no answer at Nora’s house, so I tried her office. Sure enough, she was there.
“You missed a great poker game last night.”
“I probably should have taken the evening off. I think I’m spinning my wheels today. Speaking of which, I heard about your accident.”
“It was no accident.” I told her about Rosie’s deductible after I told her about the disconnected brake lines. She said she’d pay.
“Is everyone else there working too?”
“No. I’m the only one who came in today. You can expect people to put in overtime on Saturday, but Sunday…”
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 9
