We walked to the foot of the porch steps. She pointed the mop head at us.
“You must be those reporters from San Francisco,” she said. “I don’t know what you want with me, but I’m busy. I’m washing the kitchen floor now.” She turned and lumbered toward the open front door.
“Please,” I said. “If we could just have a word or two with you.”
She looked at our shoes, and she looked at the dog, none of which appeared to pass inspection. “Wait out here while I finish the floor.” I didn’t think she’d let us near her clean floor. I wasn’t even sure she’d come back out again.
She did come back, in about five minutes, by which time we had moved up the stairs and onto the porch, which displeased her. We began to cross the boards to get within conversational distance.
“Don’t come any closer.”
“We don’t mean you any harm,” Rosie said, “and the dog is gentle. We just want to talk.”
“It’s not the dog I’m worried about, and you’re close enough.” We were about five feet away from her.
“All right,” I said. “We’ve been talking to your niece about some of the things that have happened in town lately, and we wanted to get your feelings about them. About the break-in a couple of weeks ago, and about Gracie Piedmont’s death. How were you related to Gracie, anyway?”
“Indirectly,” she said.
“We’re asking people in town why they think someone might have wanted to vandalize the bank,” Rosie said, deciding, apparently, to veer away from Gracie for a moment.
I leaned against a porch railing, and she looked at me as if I’d lifted my leg on it, dog fashion. My shoulder hurt and was making me tired. I kept leaning.
“How would I know? Filthy place. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go near it. I never could guess why that Gracie wanted to work there, or why Fredda would want to associate with anyone who did. Spreading disease, that’s what I say.”
“Disease?” I asked.
“You live in San Francisco,” she barked. “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Disease. Death.”
“I see,” I said. “Then you must be upset that the thieves threw what they stole into the ocean. Spreading disease.”
She nodded slowly. “I told my little Joanne not to go near that beach for six months.”
“Do you think the people who committed the vandalism were infected?” Rosie asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised. Crazy.”
“But the note they left said they did it to fight ungodly wickedness,” Rosie said. “Don’t you think that’s a good reason?”
She snorted, glaring at Rosie. “Young lady, don’t try to make me think you think so.”
“What about Nora, then?” I asked. “Do you feel she’s doing something evil?”
“I won’t argue religion with you, young man.”
“But how do you feel about her? She’s doing so much good with her money, taking care of her family. That’s virtuous, isn’t it?”
“Some people don’t care where their money comes from. And I’ll tell you this, if Fredda tried to help me with that kind of filth, I wouldn’t accept it. I’ll tell you what seems wicked to me. That Nora can take care of her family and Fredda can’t. Because Joanne and me could use some money. If it was clean money. Oh, Fredda scrapes along. She makes do. No fancy gardeners or house painters, like some people. Fredda had to learn to do everything for herself because that’s what you do when you’re poor. It’s a dirty shame.” She shook her large head and her wattles quivered.
“That is too bad,” I said. “I’m sure Joanne has a lot of needs that money could help with.”
“Oh, yes. But the sins of the mother…”
“Were you at all close to Gracie?” Rosie asked.
“Not anymore.”
“You know why she went out to the spit the night she died, don’t you?” I asked.
She nodded. “To see if that house was all right, that’s what I heard. That Mr. Segal’s house.”
“Spiegel. And she slipped and fell, or got washed off the scarp— you knew that?”
“I don’t know how she fell. The kind of life she led, maybe she was drunk. Or maybe that boyfriend of hers pushed her. Men get tired of the cow when they don’t have to pay for the milk.”
I was stopped by that, for just a minute, and caught myself trying to get at her logic until I got back on the track.
“You think her boyfriend killed her?” Rosie wanted to know.
“I don’t think anything. I don’t know anything about people like that. It’s all I can do just to try to keep Joanne from seeing too much in this town, the way things are going these days. To keep her following the word, obeying the Bible.”
“Doesn’t her mother take care of that?”
She shook her head. “She wouldn’t know how.” She turned halfway away from us, preparing to go back inside. “I have to take care of my house now. The child’s coming today.”
“You’re very close to Joanne, aren’t you?” I asked.
She turned that heavy face toward me one more time. A heavy, angry, sad face. “The child came into this world with a heavy burden. I’m doing all I can to save her soul.”
At that moment Frank Wooster came walking up to the house. Astoundingly, he was carrying a little bouquet of flowers.
“The child’s coming in a while, Frank,” she told him.
He grunted disgustedly. “Then I won’t stay long.”
He glared at us, and the two of them went into the house together and closed the door.
– 20 –
Dinner seemed like a good idea, but I wanted to talk about the case in some detail and I didn’t think it would be easy to do that in a public place, with the whole damned town listening, directly or indirectly, to the two “reporters from San Francisco.”
We picked up burgers and fries at Georgia’s and took them back to the motel. Long after the food was gone we were still going around in circles, trying to make some sense of the crime rampage we seemed to be involved in.
Rosie wrote out a list of suspects under three headings: vandalism, murder (?), and truck crash. We were hoping to see some cross-category likelihoods.
The first point to be decided, though, was what to call the attack on the bank. Was it vandalism? Now that we knew the thief had gone through the files, or at least rummaged around in them, we had to reconsider the cause. Maybe someone was after information? Maybe some files had been stolen and no one was aware of it yet? Maybe most of the sperm— it was valuable, after all— had actually been stolen? We stuck a question mark after the word vandalism to go with the one after the word murder.
Under the first heading, then, we listed Frank Wooster, Aunt Hilda, and Joanne. Now that I’d seen Aunt Hilda, I could imagine her doing almost anything. She didn’t move well or quickly, but she looked strong enough to lift crates of rocks in the service of the Lord. On general principles we added Wolf to the list, because he was Nora’s ex-boyfriend if for no other reason. Then came the Hackmans, followed by generic disgruntled employee and generic disgruntled client.
As an afterthought I added disgruntled donor. Maybe someone who had been rejected? Rosie was dubious about that.
“You mean someone might have thought the bank was impugning his manhood?”
“Sure.” The more I thought about it, the better I liked it.
Next came murder (?), which I wanted to change to “death.”
“If it wasn’t murder,” Rosie said reasonably, “there’s no point in talking about it.”
That made sense, I had to agree, so for the sake of our deliberations, we would consider it murder. This second list was harder than the first. We decided to include several people who were involved in the events of that night one way or another. Perry, who had found the body. Wolf.
“What about the guy who asked her to go out there in the first place?” Rosie wanted to know. I argued that he hadn’t exactly asked her, or said he hadn’t
, and that he was in L.A. at the time. But since we had no proof in either case, we added Marty Spiegel. Fredda, because she had been with the dead woman that evening. And all the other residents of the spit who were actually living there at the time. Which included Henry Linton and Frank Wooster.
That took us to the truck crash. Whoever removed those nuts knew at least a little bit about cars. We had seen Wooster at the garage before we’d driven to the beach, and he’d driven the wrecker out after the crash. Could he have been on the road in the interim?
“Don’t forget the Hackman kids’ father seems to be working on that car in the yard,” Rosie said. Possibly he was. I suspected half the people in town knew enough about cars to lose the brake fluid, if it came to that, but we had to start with what we knew. We added Melody Clift, because we had actually seen her in the area, and, again, Spiegel, because he was on the road soon after the crash.
The category-crossers, those who qualified easily as suspects in at least two categories, were Wolf, Marty, the Hackmans, and Frank Wooster.
We drew up another list. People to see or find out about. Where was Wolf at the time Gracie died? Check on it. The residents of the spit— what were their connections with the bank or with Gracie? Was Spiegel really in L.A. that night or had he called from someplace closer? How did Frank Wooster feel about getting germs from the bank’s assets? Did he have a connection with Gracie we hadn’t yet discovered?
We still needed to get information about unhappy bank employees, who would also, after all, have known Gracie.
“How long has the bank been there?” Rosie asked. I realized I didn’t know. “Because we do know one person who would be an unhappy client if she had been a client.” She peered at me, waiting for me to catch up with her. I was there already.
“Fredda. Her kid was born disabled. A birth defect. There doesn’t seem to have been a husband. You’re saying, what if the birth came about as a result of the bank? And Fredda’s bitter about it?”
“Or Hilda.”
“The kid’s twelve years old. Kind of a long wait for revenge.”
Rosie stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling thoughtfully. “Maybe there was never the right opportunity before.”
“And how would Gracie come into it?”
“They’re related. She could have been involved somehow. She and Fredda were friends.”
“And for some reason Gracie was interested in the donor files.”
So there was a fourth list. Information we still needed to get to fill in the gaps in the lines we were following.
The three unanswered questions that interested me the most at the moment were Wolf’s whereabouts at the time of the death at the spit, any reason Fredda might have for a grudge against the bank, and, my favorite and mine alone, the insulted donor.
– 21 –
I woke up the next morning around nine, thinking about doing something that had nothing to do with the case, or not much, anyway. I wanted to visit Louis’s gallery and take a better look at Rollie Hackman’s work. Off and on, the day before, I had thought about the boy, and his family, and I had decided to buy something. What the hell, it was a good investment.
Lou Overman was reading a paperback. He looked up when Rosie and I walked in.
“I hope you haven’t come to ask me— again— what I heard or saw on the night of the burglary. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Satisfied?”
“We came to buy something,” I told him.
“Oh?” He wasn’t impressed.
“Something by Rollie Hackman.”
“Oh!” He looked pleased.
I deliberated for a long time before I decided. I liked a watercolor of Main Street, with the tavern and the drugstore foremost, but I was particularly attracted to the drawings of the beach, debris-strewn and deserted. Rosie made up her mind quickly, as she often does, and bought a charcoal sketch of the spit, seen from a distance along the beach, for fifteen dollars. I finally settled on a watercolor of the triangular rock formation offshore, where the vials of sperm had been dumped. It would be nice, I thought wryly, to have a memento. And there were no drawings of the bank itself.
We brought our purchases to the counter, and Lou approved.
“I think those are two of his best. Kid’s got a future. At least I hope he does.”
“What do you mean, hope?” I asked. “He’s talented. He seems to have drive. Does a lot of work. Why shouldn’t he succeed?” I had several ideas as to why he might not, like lousy genes, but those ideas pissed me off and made me want to argue.
“Talent, even with drive, isn’t always enough,” he sighed. “Sometimes things happen to people. They sink. Fade.”
“Or make bad mistakes,” Rosie said. “Like breaking into places.”
He glared at her. “This conversation is getting unpleasant.”
The bell over the door tinkled, and Joanne wheeled in. She was wearing a jacket that looked too big for her, and her lank hair needed combing. I wondered why she wasn’t at school. She said hello to us without smiling, and nodded to Lou. Then she aimed for a rack of lurid paperbacks, on which I had noticed, earlier, a couple of Melody’s books. I had thought about buying one. After all, I knew the author. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I was curious to see what the child had in mind. I didn’t think Great Aunt Hilda would be too thrilled to see her there. While Lou was wrapping the painting and drawing, I wandered casually in her direction.
She was thumbing through something called Forever Eden by Melody Clift. I wondered whether there were any white fur rugs in it. I also wondered whether she’d written one called Gone with the Breeze.
When Joanne realized I had noticed what she was doing, she turned abruptly, glared at me with scared black eyes, and stuck the book back in the rack. She looked like Lou had looked a moment before, when Rosie had made the crack about “breaking into places.” Very much like he had looked.
I glanced back at him tying string around my package. The same thin face, the same eyes. The hair was different, but that look of anger was exactly the same.
I wondered if anyone else had ever noticed. I wondered if Joanne had.
“I wasn’t actually reading it,” she said.
“Would your mother be upset with you if you were?” I wasn’t exactly wild about Fredda, but I felt compelled to act as if her mother, not her great-aunt, were the authority in her life.
“He shouldn’t sell books like this,” she said, and wheeled off to a table piled with books about northern California ecosystems. I pursued her.
She fiddled with the books.
“No school today?” I asked.
“I don’t feel good.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
She wheeled away from me, up to the counter. I heard her telling Lou her mother needed a couple of boxes for delivering cookies. He went into the back room, got two book cartons, placed one inside the other, and set them on her lap. She wheeled out without another word to anyone.
Rosie and I took our packages and left. Walking back to the motel, I mentioned what I was thinking.
“You’re right. There is a resemblance. She doesn’t look exactly like him, though.”
“You didn’t catch the expression on her face when she realized I was watching her look at one of Melody’s books. I felt like I was looking at Lou, not Joanne.”
“Go on. I’m listening.”
“Lou has strong connections with both Joanne and Rollie. He thinks a lot of Rollie, seems to really care about him. And he could have witnessed the burglary. I wonder if there’s any connection between Rollie and Joanne, or Rollie and Hilda? Jesus, what a can of worms.”
“Everybody’s connected to everyone else,” she groused. “The whole town probably has a common ancestor.”
“Yeah. A Kallikak or a Juke. I want to add Overman to the list of cryobank suspects. For a lot of reasons. He could have seen something. And maybe he’s a rejected donor.”
“You mean something’s wrong
with him and that’s why Joanne was born that way— there are a lot of reasons for birth defects, I think.”
“Let’s just check it out.”
Since we didn’t want to talk to or see Mrs. Hackman, we went to Georgia’s for breakfast. Seated in a booth at the back were Henry and Wolf, Wolf with his back to the door. Henry nodded at us, and Wolf turned around. He stood up and came to our table.
“I hear you were looking for me yesterday,” he said to Rosie.
She thought fast. “Not exactly. I just wanted to try to make peace with you. You were so angry at us the other day. No hard feelings, that kind of thing.”
He sat down. “Sure. That’s why you wanted to know if I was at work when Gracie died.”
Henry stood up and came over too. “Wolf, why don’t you let these people eat their breakfasts?” He stopped, gazed at us benignly. “Better yet, why don’t you two join us in that back booth. Let’s have a talk. Clear the air.”
I was tempted to ask, “What’s it to you?” There was something about his manner that offended me. Big Daddy making peace among his children. But my investigative side shut me up. We joined them.
The waitress brought coffee and took our orders. Henry got back to his soft scrambled eggs, sausage, and whole wheat toast. Wolf let his sit and congeal.
“This man,” Henry said, tilting his head toward Wolf, “has been through hell in the past few days.”
We waited, silent.
“His fiancée was killed in a terrible accident. You were there in the bar when I came in to tell him. You saw how he was.”
I nodded. “But if it wasn’t an accident? He wasn’t working when it happened, he was working after she was found.”
Our food arrived. “Maybe Wolf can tell us,” I continued, “where he was between five and six o’clock?”
“I don’t know why I should tell you anything. I told Clement. He asked me this morning and I told him. And I’m sick and tired of people looking at me funny because you two are asking questions. Because your questions are making people wonder.”
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 13
