Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

by Shelley Singer

  “Did she ever talk about marriage or art or lovers—”

  She flapped her hand impatiently. “I’ll get back to that, Jake. Just let me follow this process, all right?” I agreed, irritated. “For the past month or so, though, she’s seemed happier. I even commented on it, making some remark about her cheerful mood, and she said something about having direction and purpose. She didn’t talk about it any more than that and I didn’t ask. Now, to get back to your question. I got the impression she had pretty strong ideas about marriage. I’d been talking about my own divorce, five years ago, and she said she didn’t really approve of divorce. I told her my husband had been a philandering lout. That made her angry in a righteous way, but she still wasn’t sure I should have left him. She was an odd mixture, you know? Conventional about some things, like divorce, and unconventional about others.” She stopped and looked confused. “But is that so?” she asked wonderingly. “Isn’t it conventional now to get divorced?” She shook her head. “I’ve lost track, I think, of…”

  I took a chance on interrupting her again and being chastised. “How did she feel about lovers? Did you ever talk about things like that? I assume that even if she didn’t talk much about her life, you talked a bit about yours.”

  She smiled wryly. “About my lovers, you mean? There have been one or two.” She looked at me almost seductively. “I did talk about one man, as a matter of fact. She didn’t seem shocked.”

  All right, so I’d have to be more direct. “Do you think she might have had one?”

  “If she did, she never told me. But the way she felt about marriage, it seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

  I reflected that either Margaret Bursky-Harley had resigned herself to the celibacy of a dead marriage or she’d been the most successfully secretive woman since my ex-wife. The level in our carafe was sinking pretty rapidly toward the one-quarter mark. I gestured at it. Alana smiled. I ordered another carafe and allowed myself some rumination time. Alana didn’t seem about to press me to ask more questions.

  The self-portrait I’d seen of the dead artist had shown a passionate face, with warmth, appeal, strength, and intensity. The face, and the art, had shown real sensitivity. But it could have been the sensitivity of an ascetic or even a martyr.

  “So,” I said with an air of renewal, “she was in a meditation group. How else did she spend her time? Any other groups or organizations?”

  Alana’s face closed up. The wine bearer brought us our second carafe. I was getting a little foggy. I would have to slow down, let her do more of the drinking.

  “I know she was doing some therapy or other, some kind of group thing, right?” I asked.

  She smiled tightly at me. That was it. She felt strange about the therapy. She was, truly, confused about what was now conventional. “Well, of course, everyone does that at one time or another, isn’t that so?” Her voice was a bit higher than usual. “There wasn’t anything wrong, you know. She was just exploring herself.”

  “Of course,” I agreed, looking shocked that anyone could think that therapy served any purpose beyond that of the emotional dilettante. She relaxed. “I don’t know more than one or two people who haven’t done some of that sort of thing during the past ten years,” I lied. “Actually, what I wanted to know was—” I had lost track of my sentence. One should not get fuzzy-brained when questioning people. It’s not professional. “I still need to talk to more people who knew her. You know, find out how people saw her. And I wondered if you knew where I could get in touch with this group or the therapist. Or whatever.”

  Alana had finished her first glass from the new carafe. She was speeding up while I was slowing down, and she didn’t seem to be feeling anything at all. She shook her head. “No, but I do know that she picked the name off the bulletin board at the center. The therapist. The card or notice is probably still up there. I just didn’t pay any attention to who it was or what kind of group.” Her tone was light, implying that such a group was not the sort of thing she had any use for. I remembered that I’d seen several therapists’ cards on the board. Oh, well. No one ever said this was going to be easy. I wanted to talk to Billy again, so I’d be going back to the center the next day, anyway.

  “Alana?” She looked at me expectantly. “If you’re sure she wouldn’t have killed herself, what do you think happened?”

  She laughed shakily. “Well, is there any question? The poor woman fell. That seems clear enough, doesn’t it?” She was asking me the question as though her own faith in the reasonableness of the world were at stake.

  I peered down into my wine. I didn’t for a minute believe that a woman of forty or more still thought the world was reasonable, but I didn’t see any purpose in not going along with the fantasy. I looked up at her and smiled into her own anxious smile. “Sure,” I said heartily, “decks are almost as dangerous as hot tubs. Dangerous place, California, hazards everywhere.”

  We both laughed, although I hadn’t said anything very funny.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her; and I thought I’d probably get another chance if I did think of something. We struggled through the last half of the second bottle of wine, two to one her favor. She challenged me to a California hazard-naming contest. We raced, one after another, through decks, hot tubs, smog, drought, tidal wave, earthquake, dry rot, terminal laid-backness, termites, mud slides, Mediterranean fruit flies, banana slugs, and unemployment, and then it got harder. She came up with slow strangulation by Algerian ivy; I countered with the probability that the two halves of the state, north and south, would always be bound in their unnatural union.

  Although her naturally heavy eyelids were drooping very low, she managed a grin. “You win, Jake. That’s the worst.” It was decided that I would follow her home and she would make some coffee.

  Alana drove very slowly down Telegraph toward Oakland, turning left on Alcatraz and right again just before College Avenue. Nice neighborhood. She pulled up in front of the basic brown shingle with red trim on lots of casement windows. Big dark tree in the front yard. Two flats, upper and lower. I followed her up the stairs. Converted, I thought, burping slightly with the effort of climbing, from a single-family house.

  She led me into the kitchen and sat me down at a table with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Bentwood chairs, four of them. New cabinets. New floor. She was weaving around on it, making coffee. I offered to help. She waved me away with a shoo-fly gesture.

  “Nice place,” I said smoothly.

  She was concentrating hard on measuring the coffee into the top of the Melitta. “Thank you. Had it converted after the divorce so I could rent out part of it.” Well, good, I thought. I hated to think of her without something to fall back on. She seemed softer than most of the women I’d known, as though her emotional life had been too painful and the pain had destroyed her elasticity.

  She got the coffee measured and the kettle on to boil and sat down across from me. The kitchen light, stark above us, showed every line in her face. She looked tired. I guessed that I did, too, and that the bags under my eyes were standing out in high relief and my incipient whiskers were making my face look a little dirty. I took her hand.

  “Alana, I want to thank you for the help you’ve given me. You’re a good and loyal friend, and I swear to you that you will never read a bad word about Margaret Bursky that was written by me.” Easy enough to promise that. I wasn’t going to write any words at all if I could help it.

  She looked into my eyes. “I think you’re a nice man, Jake. I hope I’m right about that.” The water boiled and she poured it through the coffee.

  “Smells like French roast,” I said.

  “Of course,” she replied.

  We took our coffee into the living room, where one lamp was burning next to the couch. She sat down and patted the cushion next to her. Comfortable couch. I set my coffee down on the coffee table. So did she. The light was softer than in the kitchen. Neither one of us had to be disturbed by the sight of the o
ther’s life history engraved on flesh. She put her hand up and touched the back of my neck.

  “I think,” I said, “that you’re a nice woman.”

  “No,” she whispered, “I’m not. I won’t fall in love with you. I’ll just use you a few times and dump you before you have a chance to dump me. I’m not a fool, and I’m no longer fooled by romance.”

  Nice speech. It was either true or calculated to put me at my ease. In either case, I lied to myself, it got me off the hook. She was unbuttoning my shirt. She slid both hands inside to my chest, then moved one around to my back. She leaned slowly and smoothly back against the arm of the couch, pulling me on top of her. The hand that had been stroking my chest was working its way down inside the waistband of my pants.

  – 8 –

  I woke about four in the morning and couldn’t drop off again. Alana was snoring slightly. I sat up on the bed and realized I wanted to be home, so I dressed quietly and left her a little note saying I would call her soon.

  Tigris and Euphrates were irritated with me for being gone so long. Euphrates glared at me and grunted nasally, a kind of inhh sound he makes when he complains. Sometimes, when the sound doesn’t quite make it out between his shiny black lips, the complaint degenerates into a silent meow. I gave them some breakfast and decided that I needed a hot bath.

  While the tub was filling I hunted through my canned goods. Aha. I did have one. Nothing like a hot bath and a can of smoked oysters for whipping up a little creative thought, even at five in the morning. I opened the can and Euphrates left his breakfast in mid-chomp, his eyes glowing with greed. I carried the can, a fork, and a saucer into the bathroom and put them all up on a high shelf while I undressed. Euphrates danced around my feet, whipping up his adrenaline and grunting at about the rate of one grunt a second.

  He got half a dozen oysters on the plate, on the floor. The rest, I told him, were mine.

  Roughly half an hour after I stepped into the tub, the phone rang in the bedroom. It rang because I had forgotten to take it into the bathroom with me. I climbed out of the tub, dripped and puddled my way to the phone, carried it, still ringing, back to the tub, submerged again and picked up the receiver.

  “Will you accept a call from Isaac Samson?” the operator wanted to know.

  My father, who lived in Chicago, always called me collect. He had a theory that went like this: “If you can still afford to take a collect call, you’re not starving to death and I don’t have to worry about you.”

  “Hi, pa,” I sighed. “Do you know what time it is here?”

  “Sure. You think I’m a dummy? Two hours different. I wanted to catch you before you went to work.” Pause. “You are working, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, pa. How’s Eva?” Eva was my stepmother. He’d married her a few years back, two years after my mother died and he’d given up trying to run the grocery store without her. He lived in cheerful retirement with Eva, who was about sixty-five and looked ten years younger.

  “She’s fine, thank God. You wanta talk to her? Hey, Eva, the boy wants to talk to you.” I could have done without it, since I never had anything to say to the woman, but my father’s calls always required stoicism.

  “Jake? How are you?”

  “Fine, Eva, fine.”

  “So, are you dating anyone?”

  “No. Not really. No one special.” She tut-tutted.

  “All because of that tsatske you had before.” She meant my ex-wife, and she didn’t mean her well. “I could see from the beginning she was no good.” She hadn’t known her from the beginning, only during the last year when we visited Chicago. “I hope you’re a little smarter about women now. Your father wants to talk to you.” The two of them were so much alike in their hit and run conversation that it seemed as though they’d been married for fifty years.

  “So? Are you listening to your stepmother? You’re not a kid anymore, you know.”

  “I know, pa.”

  “So I suppose you have to get ready for work now? You got a job?”

  “Yeah. I got a job.”

  “And what are you doing this time?”

  I sighed. “It’s kind of complicated, pa.”

  “Complicated.” He snorted his contempt. “Nothing is ever complicated, Jake. Complicated is something you say when you don’t want to tell. It’s not even a real English word.” My father’s concept of proper language was largely judgmental. “Something looks complicated, you look again until it looks simple. Now tell me.”

  “Research, pa.” I was laughing. “I’m doing some research for some magazine articles.”

  “Magazines? Now he’s a writer?”

  “Listen, pa, I got to go to work. I’ll write soon.”

  “Sure, sure…”

  After only another three or four minutes at long-distance prices, we all managed to say good-bye to each other. I ran some more hot water and collapsed neck-deep in the warmth spreading over my legs, belly, and arms.

  A little folk wisdom to start the day. Could be worse, I thought. I could have been forced to listen to the bullshit platitudes of my own generation instead of the true ones of theirs. You look again until it looks simple…

  In this case, though, I couldn’t see any simple answers. Unless the answer was Billy. Maybe she’d rejected him. The last coherent thought I remember having before I dozed off was that I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  I woke up two hours later, shivering with cold, got out of the tub, toweled briskly, wincing at the agony in my stiff neck and lower back, and got dressed. I made and ate breakfast and fed the cats again. It was still too early to go to the meditation center, so I called Hal at home to find out if he’d learned anything about the case yet. He had. There wasn’t much doubt that it was homicide. A few items of what the police call physical evidence. Signs of a struggle. They’d found a little plug of the dead woman’s hair on the deck and a fresh, corresponding wound on her head. Her blouse was torn at the shoulder, but there were no scratches to indicate she’d torn it on a rock when she’d fallen. The redwood table was slightly out of place, a crescent of less faded wood showing at one side of the round base and a corresponding faded area partly covered by the base. They’d also noticed that the coffee cup was slightly chipped and had found the chip on the deck along with some traces of the spilled coffee. Most interesting of all, there had been no fingerprints on the cup. None. Not even Margaret Harley’s. Someone had picked up the cup, wiped it clean, and put it back on the table. There was a pretty good thumbprint on the fruit bowl, but the police hadn’t been able to trace it yet.

  I thanked Hal and said I’d keep in touch. It was nearly nine o’clock, but I remembered a sign on the meditation center door that said they didn’t open until eleven.

  Rebecca might be in her office. I wanted to know if the police had followed up on finding her name in Bursky’s address book. Bursky. I decided not to call her Margaret Harley anymore, at least not in my thoughts.

  Rebecca’s realty company was in Oakland, near Lake Merritt. I didn’t call. It was just a few minutes from my house.

  She wasn’t there. There was only one person in the office, a woman, and when I asked about Rebecca she looked at me with her face squeezed up in a “should I tell you, it’s really very puzzling” look. She decided in my favor.

  “It was really strange,” she said. “The radio was on, and all of a sudden she stood up and stared at it like she’d heard something terrible and went tearing out of here like a crazy woman. I’ve had it on ever since, but I can’t figure out what it could have been.”

  “May I?” I asked, striding to the radio and turning it up. A few odds and ends of news stories and then there it was, being repeated, an update.

  “No word yet on injuries in that campus fire. The firefighters are still trying to get it under control. About all we’ve been able to find out is that it started in Chandler Hall, in one of the offices of the political science department. We’ll keep on it and keep you informed…”

 
; I was out of there and in my car in maybe three seconds. I had to be sure I still had a live client.

  Half a mile was as close as I could get by car. The police had barricaded the roads close to the campus and only emergency vehicles were getting through. A campus is a crowded place, and they weren’t taking any chances.

  The smoke was visible for some distance, a dark blot on the sky. By pushing rudely through the mob I was able to get fairly close to Chandler. Smoke was gushing black and smelly out of three second-story windows in a row. I didn’t see Rebecca anywhere. The whole area stank of melting plastic. I didn’t argue when a line of cops pushed us all back. I was still in the front row.

  The fire was at the political science department’s end of the second floor, but I couldn’t be sure whether one of the windows was Harley’s.

  I turned to the young man standing next to me. He looked like a student. Short-cropped hair and straight-legged jeans and pale yellow shirt. A vision of the eighties, via the fifties. He was watching the fire with his eyes half-shut and his mouth half-open.

  “Do you know what offices those are?” I pointed at the smoking windows.

  “Sure.” He was half-smiling. “The one in the middle, that’s John Harley’s office. The ones on either side, I don’t know.”

  “What about Harley?” I persisted. The kid narrowed his eyes even more and closed his mouth. He barely opened it again to speak.

  “You a friend of his?” Jesus, I thought, what movie did he get that line out of?

  I clenched my jaw heroically and muttered something incoherent but macho-sounding.

  The kid turned his eyes back to the firefighting scene. “I hear he got out okay.”

  Maybe I blinked because the next time I looked for the kid he was gone. Funny, I thought. Usually the people who push their way to the front line at a disaster stick around until it’s all over.