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

by Shelley Singer

  “We need to talk to your employees, see what we can get. Someone might know something, some small piece that will lead us somewhere.”

  “I suppose that would have to be tomorrow, then. It will really cut into the workday, but I suppose you have to.”

  “Yes. We do. We’ll be there in the morning sometime. Another thing. You’ve got family in town, right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Where can we find them?”

  “Why?”

  Jesus, she could be tiresome. “There could be any number of reasons for the burglary,” I explained. “We can’t rule out someone having a personal grudge against you or someone close to you. They might know something you don’t. It’s just routine.”

  I hated to fall back on cop talk, but I was tired of answering questions. I wanted to ask some. She gave me the phone number of the aunt and uncle who had raised her. I thanked her, said we’d see her the next day, and hung up.

  Her aunt and uncle were home, and gave me directions to the house. They lived at the extreme edge of town, as far away from the ocean as you could get and still be in Wheeler.

  These were the people who had brought her up when her own parents had died. They were her mother’s sister and brother-in-law. They were in their sixties, retired from whatever it was they had done before.

  Unlike so many of the houses we’d seen in Wheeler, theirs was freshly painted, white with French-blue trim. Carpenter gothic, small, with carving on the eaves. The front yard was perfect, which is no small feat in January in northern California. Someone had been keeping the grass down and the weeds away. The hedge was trimmed. Even the birches in the front yard looked tidy. Not a branch out of place anywhere, despite the recent storm.

  Mrs. Dorfmann answered the door with a sweet smile and a charming welcome. She had, she said, just made some coffee cake, and she hoped we’d join them in the kitchen. We followed her through the house, through a cozy, overstuffed living room and small dining room, and into a large kitchen that had been completely remodeled and equipped with shiny new appliances, expensive-looking cabinets, and, judging by the food processor, which must have raised real estate values on the block, the latest and best doodads.

  Mrs. Dorfmann looked around the room, puzzled. “He was here a few minutes ago. He won’t hear me if I shout,” she fretted. “I wonder, Mr. Samson, if you’d go out in the yard and find my husband while Rosie and I set the table.”

  I didn’t dare look at Rosie.

  As directed, I went out the back door. The elderly gentleman, his back to me, was puttying a new pane of glass on a homemade cold frame constructed of two-by-fours and window frames. A large cold frame or a small greenhouse, about two by three by six.

  Assuming from what his wife had said that his hearing was not perfect, I took great care not to sneak up on him. I approached him from the side, then circled around so he could see me coming, which he finally did. I smiled. He smiled. “Time for coffee cake,” I said in a hearty baritone. He didn’t seem to have any trouble hearing me, and when he spoke, it was at normal volume.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

  Just thinking about homemade coffee cake was having the same effect on me, so I was a little disenchanted when I noticed the plastic wrapper with a familiar brand name lying on the sink. Still, the cake was hot. That was something.

  “You wanted to talk to us about Nora?” Dorfmann asked. “What exactly did you want to know and why?”

  “She couldn’t think of anyone who might want to harm her business,” Rosie said. “It occurred to us that her family might be able to fill things in a little.”

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do her any harm,” Mrs. Dorfmann protested. “Not many people in this town have a child like Nora. It was hard, when her parents died— in a car crash, it was— because we didn’t have any money and there we were with a child to raise. But Nora was always finding little jobs around town, always bringing something in to help out, even when she was a child. Even when she went down to the City, she’d send us presents, useful things we needed. When Bernard retired from the nursery we didn’t have anything to live on but social security, and here he’d had his heart attack and everything.”

  “Is that when she came back, when he had the heart attack?” Rosie asked.

  “Not long after,” Mrs. Dorfmann continued. “I don’t know what we’d have done without her. She’s certainly paid us back for raising her. Now you could say she’s raising us. She takes care of everything. We never have to worry. Isn’t that right, Bernard?” He didn’t respond. “Bernard?” She repeated what she’d said.

  Dorfmann nodded, and shoved a huge chunk of coffee cake into his mouth. “Wonderful child, wonderful girl,” he said, spraying crumbs.

  The conversation pretty much went on like that. We complimented them on their house and got praise for Nora, who kept it in good repair. We complimented them on their yard and got praise for Nora, who had hired and paid for a weekly gardener.

  I asked about Wolf. “He must have been pretty disappointed when she left town.”

  Mrs. Dorfmann laughed. “He sure was. But you know men.” She winked at Rosie. “He got over it fast. Couldn’t have the one he loved, loved the one he got next.” Dorfmann, too, laughed, and, fortunately, had nothing in his mouth at the time.

  We kept trying for a while, but we got the same answers over and over again, and the coffee was giving me heartburn. We finally left, with a lying promise to return sometime.

  – 16 –

  We were walking down Main when we ran into Clement, who was coming out of a doorway beside the grocery store.

  “That’s pretty much it for Gracie’s effects,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to sound dumb,” I said, “but what are you talking about?”

  “Gracie. You know, the dead woman?”

  “Yes, we know the dead woman.”

  He laughed. “That’s her apartment up there.” He jerked a thumb toward the apartment upstairs of the grocery. “Was. I closed the place up when she died. Went over everything— just in case. Nothing to find. Fredda’s up there now, picking over the corpse.” He was eyeing me sardonically. “What’s the matter, Jake? You’re looking kind of surprised. Didn’t you expect me to do what I could to follow up? Like I say, just in case?”

  I denied it. I was torn between kicking myself for neglecting that part of the dead woman’s private life and being glad that Clement had done it. I was beginning to think that if this man said there was nothing to find, there might not be anything to find.

  “Have you got some time, Clement?” Rosie asked. “We need to get more information about the people who live on the spit. The ones we don’t know about yet.”

  “Matter of fact, I don’t. Got a family thing over in Rosewood, won’t get back until later this afternoon. How about then?” She said that would be fine.

  My arm was bothering me, so we picked up sandwiches at Georgia’s and walked back toward the motel, laying plans for the day.

  I reminded Rosie that I had promised to visit Melody.

  “There’s a lot I want to talk to her about— her neighbors, for one thing. And see if I can’t get her to remember seeing something on the beach yesterday. I know she doesn’t think she did, but who knows? Maybe she remembered something at three o’clock this morning.”

  “Sure, Jake. And I’m sure you want to do that alone, so I’ll deal with things here in town. Checking on Wolf, for instance.”

  I ignored her smirking attitude. We agreed to meet back at the motel in time for dinner. Rosie ate her sandwich and took off. I gave myself half a pain pill and half an hour in bed, thinking. Then I got into the Chevy and drove out to the spit.

  When I drove past Marty’s place, I spotted his Jaguar halfway up the driveway and thought again about what part or parts he could have played in the week’s events. He was involved with the sperm bank. He had asked Gracie to go out on the spit. And he could have followed us out o
f town, messed up the truck, driven back toward town, turned around and driven back again, a while later, to see what had happened. And there was Rosie, walking the road looking for help. He couldn’t very well ride on by. Besides, he’d want to know if we’d gotten scared enough, or if I’d been badly enough injured, to pull out of town.

  It wouldn’t be the first time someone I’d liked had turned out bad. I was hoping, though, that Rosie would come up with something against Wolf. Where was he when Gracie died? And the truck crash— we knew he was at the tavern earlier that day. Was he there all afternoon?

  Melody’s house was redwood and glass, like Marty’s, but only the materials were the same. If Hans Christian Andersen had moved to the Sonoma coast, he might have built a house like this one.

  The main floor was a big hexagon, with large hexagonal windows on either side of the doorway. The door itself was carved with flowers and flanked by carved columns. The second floor got more elaborate. Dormers and eaves all over the place, each with scrollwork gingerbread and all jutting out from the parent hexagon in various directions, creating, I thought, what must be some interestingly shaped rooms. Rising from that confusing second story was a tower, also hexagonal, that made me think of sleeping beauties and ladders made of yellow hair. There should have been flags flying somewhere.

  It took about thirty seconds for Melody to answer the door. She had been waiting for me, she explained, but she had been up in her study working, just until I arrived.

  “Is your study in the tower?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “That’s the bedroom.”

  She was wearing a shiny pink robe, full length, with white lace peeking out of the bosom and fluffy mules peeking out from under the hem. This was fun, I thought. Like walking in on the star of a 1952 movie. The house wasn’t quite right, but she was.

  She led me into an immense living room with an immense fieldstone fireplace in which someone had laid an immense fire to drive away the foggy chill of the day. The fireplace was set into the lower level of the split-level room, a snug area with a pink semi-circle of a couch and red, pink, and white pillows. The carpeting was white, an alien concept that goes better with condos in Miami or the homes of L.A.’s conspicuous consumers than it does with the rugged, natural, and, therefore, dirty northern California coast. She sat me down on the couch, against some pillows, asked how my arm was feeling, and offered me a drink.

  I accepted a glass of white wine. She went to a glitzy wet bar at the upper end of the room, poured my wine, and mixed herself something with gin in it. Over my left shoulder, through a glass wall, I watched eucalyptus trees swaying and parting to reveal a view of gray winter ocean.

  I looked back at the fire. She brought my wine and sat down next to me.

  “Quite a house,” I said.

  She laughed. “I worked with the architect. He thought I was insane, but it was so much fun. I just let my imagination fly. I love doing that.” She smiled at me. I smiled back. “Perhaps you’d like to see the rest of it later?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Now, then,” she said, settling in beside me more closely. “You wanted to talk to me about some things, I believe?”

  I nodded. “You came up here yesterday, isn’t that right?” She said it was. “How much do you stay here— have you been around at all in the past couple of weeks?”

  She didn’t ask me why I wanted to know. She seemed to assume my questions were asked for reasonable purposes, and answered easily and to the point.

  “I’m rarely here in the winter. I stay in my house in San Francisco unless I’m traveling. I’ve been holed up there since October working on a book. I came out yesterday because I was concerned about the house. And curious, too, I suppose, about the accident.”

  “You heard about it before yesterday?”

  “My neighbor called and told me.”

  “Someone who lives here on the spit?”

  “Yes. Henry Linton. Have you met Henry?”

  “Man who owns the tavern?”

  She laughed. “The tavern, one of the restaurants, a movie theater in Santa Rosa, half the real estate in town. He’s also the mayor. Yes, that’s Henry.”

  “I didn’t know Wheeler had a king.”

  “Oh, nothing like that. He’s a kind, quiet man. Anyway, he’s my neighbor on this side.” She gestured out toward the point of the spit. “He called to tell me the storm was causing some damage and I might want to check on the house. And he also told me about the Piedmont woman.”

  “Did he say how he found out?” I remembered that Angie had told him, but I didn’t know the circumstances.

  “As a matter of fact, he did. He’d gone over to Clement’s office to find out if they were going to keep an eye on things out here that night. He had to stay in town and work, and he was worried about his house. No one was there but Angie, and she told him where Clement and Perry were. And why.”

  “Did you know Gracie Piedmont?”

  She shook her head. “I know only a few people in town. Merchants, mostly, and people who live near me.”

  “Was there any damage to your house?”

  “There’s still the tree in the swimming pool. Once that’s out, the pool will need some repair.”

  “I guess you assumed there’d be damage?”

  She gave me a mildly irritated smile. “What do you mean?”

  “You said you were upstairs working on a book today. I suppose that means you brought a manuscript or some notes or something with you, expecting to get stuck up here.”

  She laughed. “I have a deadline. I take it nearly everywhere. I don’t have time for a day off right now.”

  “What can you tell me about some of the other people who live here?” She had gotten up to get us fresh drinks, and when she sat back down again she rested a casual hand on my shoulder.

  “You know Marty, of course, but there are only a few permanent year-round residents. Henry is one.” She described the other permanent residents. An elderly couple, retired. He had been an executive with the Sierra Club. They were involved in anti-whaling work, she said, and various other ecological causes. They had lived in Berkeley before they’d bought a lot on the spit and put up a “small jewel of a house.”

  A poet or something, she said, lived farther inland. An elderly woman who kept to herself. “Friendly enough when she sees you, but odd, I think. As though something happened to her once that was so devastating that she no longer wants much human companionship.”

  Well, I thought, Melody did write romances.

  Then there was Frank Wooster.

  Surprised, I said, “I wouldn’t think the town mechanic would have enough money to build out here.”

  “The lot was in his family, and an old house that goes back, oh, forever. It’s a wreck, really, but he lives in it. There are advantages to staying in the same place for five or six generations.”

  I laughed. “Or even two. But I wouldn’t know about that.”

  The last of the permanent residents: a young couple in their thirties. He had made some big business killing in Silicon Valley or somewhere, had a heart attack, and now “dabbled in investments.” She made “pots or lamps or something.”

  Of the part-time residents, besides herself and Marty, none of them, as far as she knew, had been out there at all since autumn and weren’t likely to return until April or May.

  She offered me another drink. The fire was making me feel very peaceful, and my arm actually seemed to be feeling better. I took another glass of wine from her rather pretty hand. Life was good.

  “Tell me this, Melody. Are you sure you didn’t see or hear anything around the beach the day our truck got booby-trapped? Anything, anyone at all?”

  She rested the aforementioned hand again on my good shoulder.

  “I think there were some people, way down the beach, nearer town. But I couldn’t see them clearly.”

  “Male? Female?”

  “I couldn’t be sure. I’m sorry, Ja
ke, but they were quite far away.”

  “You were up on the dunes. Were you up closer to the road? See any cars or anything?”

  She shook her head, and ran a finger along my jaw. She moved closer.

  “You didn’t hear anything? Any voices or cars?”

  She said she thought she remembered hearing a car or two passing along the road, but nothing distinctive, no odd sounds. Just cars. She asked where the truck had been parked and I told her, and she said she hadn’t walked that far. She hadn’t heard us crash.

  Her hand was on the nape of my neck, moving into my scalp. “I like men with curly blond hair,” she said. “I’ll bet your neck is stiff, and your back,” she said, “from holding your poor arm in place that way.”

  Yes, I admitted, I was feeling a little stiff.

  “Why don’t you lie down here?” She pointed at the white fur rug on the white carpeting between the couch and the fire. A white fur rug. I had never owned such a thing, and had never been invited by a woman to lie down on one. On other kinds of rugs, and other kinds of warm, soft places. But not a furry white rug.

  “Is this real fur?” I asked, arranging myself on my stomach.

  “Oh, no. I don’t believe in that. I contribute heavily to the Fund for Animals.”

  She made me sit up again so she could help me off with my shirt. Then she went to a cabinet near the bar and came back carrying a jar of something.

  “Skin cream,” she said. “For your massage.”

  She sat beside me and began to work the cream into my spine, moving her fingers gently over the muscles around the shoulder blades, staying well away from the bandaged shoulder. She brought her thumbs up under my skull and pressed, then ran them down my neck and began to knead my back. My eyes were closed. I felt her move down, over my lower back, and sit astride my rump. She felt very, very warm. As she moved her hands over my back, she moved her body as well. And we both got very, very warm.

  Then she slid down onto my thighs and began kneading my buttocks.

  “If you’re going to do that,” I said, “I should probably take off my pants.”