Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2)

by Shelley Singer

  “This lawyer,” I said, probably sneering a little. “I’ll need to be in touch with him. If there’s really a problem.”

  “Hey, sure. I’ll set it up. Now then,” he said eagerly. “What’s first?”

  “You said the cops were all over the place up here.”

  “Yeah. They had the whole area up top cordoned off, and down by the ditch, too. And half the canyon on this side. About half a dozen guys.”

  That sounded about right. A couple of detectives, someone from the coroner’s office, a technician, a photographer… “I didn’t see anyone when I came in. Do you know if any of them are still around?” I wasn’t anxious to run into any investigating officers.

  “They left right before you got here. And I’ve been in the house since then. With you.”

  “Well, the first thing is to have a look around, get my bearings.” Artie sighed impatiently, but he didn’t argue.

  We emerged from the bedroom into the living room where all the actors, apparently suspended in time, were doing exactly what they’d been doing when we left. The kid was still trying to play with the dog, the dog was still trying to avoid playing with the kid, Artie’s wife was still sitting in her chair watching the kid and the dog, and Jennifer was still sitting on the arm of the couch looking stunned.

  I smiled expansively, like Santa Claus, and told the furniture that I’d be back soon.

  It was a relief to get out of that small, crowded house. The rain had slowed to a soft, foggy drizzle, and, looking up through the redwoods, I could see the beginnings of sunlight trying to force their way through the thinning cloud cover. I blew my nose and scanned the canyon.

  From where I stood, more than midway up the north side of the canyon amphitheater, I had a good view of the geography. A very pretty view, with fuchsias, hydrangeas, and ferns all over the place and the houses all but hidden by trees.

  I was facing downhill, toward the canyon floor. At my left ran the spillway. About twenty feet below me, crossing the spillway, was a wooden footbridge. On the other side of that was another path cut into the eastern face of the canyon, with houses perched on stilts above it. About 200 feet along, that path met the top of a stairway that zigzagged back down to the floor of the canyon just this side of a three-level shingled house.

  I turned around and began climbing, up toward the top of the trail and the place where the spillway began.

  About fifty feet beyond Artie’s was another house, tucked back and well hidden by unmanicured nature. I wouldn’t have noticed the house was there, but I tripped over the end of a rough wooden walkway, raised above the clay by half-sunken concrete blocks. That was the last marker of civilization. A few feet farther on, the path dwindled to nothing. And someone was crashing through the underbrush above me.

  He was a big man, dressed in boots, heavy cords, a plaid wool shirt with a sweater under it, and a navy watch cap. His eyebrows were dark and shaggy in a weathered, blunt-featured face.

  “Hi,” he said. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Just walking around.”

  “Oh, yeah?” He dug out his wallet and flashed a badge. “Ricci. Sheriff’s department.” He was a sergeant.

  “Isn’t it okay to go up this way yet?” I asked.

  “You live around here?”

  “No. I’ve got a friend lives here.”

  “Mind telling me who?”

  I told him. He nodded and gazed thoughtfully at me. “Mind giving me your name and address?”

  I gave them to him.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Could I ask you something?” I was using my best earnest and respectful citizen manner, but he just looked at me impassively. “You haven’t got enough on Alan to charge him, have you?”

  “He came along with us voluntarily for questioning. He’s being questioned.” He moved past me and headed down the trail. I slogged the rest of the way up.

  3

  I was looking across a ravine shaped roughly like an arrowhead. At its widest point, about twenty feet, a redwood tree had fallen to form a natural bridge, its roots exposed by the water and the slides of clay and rock that a wet winter brings to land like this. At the upper end of the ravine, water dribbled and splashed down the eroded sides from the woods above. The lower end narrowed to a cut between rocky outcroppings where the wooden trough of the spillway began.

  The muddy water made it hard to tell how deep the ravine was. I guessed that it filled and emptied, or nearly emptied, from storm to storm. Although less than twenty-four hours had passed since the last heavy rain, the clay was wet several feet above water level and it looked like that level was dropping fast. If Smith had been killed up here, his corpse had caught the spillway on a good day.

  I stood knee-deep in ferns, trying to get an imaginary glimpse of what might have happened that morning. But maybe I just wasn’t taking Alan’s supposed danger seriously enough. The only scene that came to mind was right out of Robin Hood. James Smith and his killer, dressed like Robin and Little John, halfway across the tree trunk, battling for macho domination until one of them won the right to cross by dumping the other one into the water. I think it was Little John who won, but it’s been a long time since I read the book.

  I also wanted to cross to the other side. Maybe there was another trail over there. Maybe the cops had missed an important clue. Maybe the killer had dropped his social security card. Maybe there was a whole pile of bodies stacked up over there waiting to be tossed down the spillway. There were two ways to get where I wanted to go: around the upper edge of the ravine or across the log. I picked my way carefully to the upper edge and checked out the terrain. Not so much as a deer trail. Thick, tangled brush. A solid growth of thorny blackberry interspersed with poison oak. Not exactly impassable, but I hadn’t brought a machete. I decided the redwood trunk was the lesser of two evils. It was, after all, a good five feet in diameter. Even with a cold and the few extra pounds I was carrying from winter hibernation, I was in pretty good shape. If Robin Hood— or was it Little John?— could do it, so could I.

  Using the tangled roots for handholds, I pulled myself up and balanced carefully on the rounded surface. The bark was damp, but the soles of my boots gripped it and I started across, very slowly. About halfway, where the log was some eight feet above the fast-running water, I slipped on a patch of moss. That made me nervous enough to sit down for a minute and take a look around. The water below me was muddy. Nothing to see but brush and branches and other woodsy debris that bobbed to the surface, sank again, and went rushing toward the spillway lip.

  I raised myself carefully to my feet and finished crossing to the other side. More blackberry, more poison oak. A few patches of bare ground that might have been part of a deer trail. I poked around for a few minutes, inadvertently terrorizing a four-foot garter snake. Then I climbed up on the tree trunk again and strolled back across, by now being an old hand at crossing raging torrents on a high wire.

  Retracing my steps as far as the narrow beginnings of path, I looked across the ten feet or so of canyon wall to the upper stretch of spillway. The trough was built of redwood, eight two-by-twelves, four at each angle of the V-shaped structure, tied together with four-bys, then staked and propped in a haphazard fashion with rocks, railroad ties, and concrete blocks. The thing must have needed reinforcement and repair at least every year, but it seemed to be doing the job it was intended to do— containing the runoff and keeping the soil reasonably intact so the houses at this end of the canyon could stay upright on their various and whimsical foundations. The wooden spillway ended about a hundred feet down, where the slope became a little more gradual and the water ran free to the ditch at the bottom.

  The space between path and spillway showed boot prints in the muddy clay. Probably from the feet of the law earlier that day. I followed suit, half crawling, half sliding, making a real mess of myself. The trough was nearly three-quarters full of falling water. When I ran my hand along the edge, I realized that it wouldn�
�t take the wonders of modern science to figure out whether the dead man had passed this way. Even if he hadn’t left anything of himself behind, the spillway would have left a lot of splinters in him.

  I stuck close to the side of the trough and crab-walked down the slope as far as the footbridge. A straightforward enough little bridge, nothing fancy. Solid support beams and a waist-high railing. I hauled myself back up to the path, slithering and scrambling, and returned to Artie’s house. The clay had begun to harden on my pants, turning them into a sculpture that cracked with every step. I was chilled. My nose was running and my throat hurt. Artie was sitting on his front steps waiting for me. He jumped up.

  “Well?” he said hopefully.

  “It wouldn’t be hard to kill someone up there and get away without being seen.”

  “That’s right!” he hooted. “That’s what I say. So, why would a killer run around at the bottom of the canyon yelling so everyone could see him?”

  “I don’t know about the yelling,” I said, “but they might think he went down to the ditch to see if the man was really dead.” Artie snorted. “I need,” I continued, “some dry pants. Got anything I can wear?”

  “Oh, sure. Come on in.”

  The picture had changed since I’d been in the house before. The dog was sleeping peacefully on the living room floor. Jennifer was sitting alone in the kitchen drinking coffee. “Julia’s taking a nap,” she explained. “So’s Pete.” Since the dog’s name was Berkeley, I figured Pete must be the kid.

  Artie tiptoed into his bedroom and returned carrying a pair of ratty jeans. I changed in the bathroom. My pants peeled off well enough, but the mud that cracked off them lay in little pieces all over the floor. I found a sponge and wiped up the mess, shook the pants over the bathtub, and cleaned that up, too.

  Artie’s pants were short in the leg by about four inches, but they covered the rest of me okay. I rolled up my own and carried them out to the kitchen. He was pouring coffee. He took one look at me in his jeans, took mine out of my hand, and tossed them in the washer. I sat down to drink my coffee.

  “When you finish that,” he said, “you’ve got an appointment. With the woman who identified Alan. House alongside the stairway, across the canyon. Probably shortest to take the bridge and the eastern path. It’s called Hummingbird Lane.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He got a little defensive. “We get a lot of hummingbirds up here. Anyway, she thinks you’re a reporter. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought we should get started right away.”

  I sipped at the coffee and glared at my friend. “Fine. It’s always so hard to get started on a new job.”

  4

  A brass gong about ten inches in diameter hung suspended by two lengths of chain from the low-sloping eaves over the doorway. The hardwood mallet with brass trim hanging nearby looked like a companion piece, so, feeling like the opener in a J. Arthur Rank movie, I used it to give the gong a solid whack. The noise bounced and echoed and lingered in the amphitheater of the canyon. I was wondering how Carlota Bowman’s neighbors liked her doorbell when she opened the door.

  “Mr. Samson?” she queried.

  “Ms. Bowman?”

  “Do come in.”

  She was wearing a purple silk wrapper and three-inch pumps. The purple went well with her shoulder-length gray hair. The gray must have been premature because her face hadn’t seen more than thirty-five years. I followed her into the house and I couldn’t help but watch her walking ahead of me. She was tall and thin and she moved her hips in a way that, if it developed naturally at all, developed in bed.

  I felt a little gauche and underdressed in my pedal-pusher length jeans.

  The entry door led directly into a small, fastidious kitchen, complete with the requisite butcher block and expensive cookware displayed on the wall beside the stove. I followed her through another doorway into a large living room that looked as if even more money had been spent on it. Everything was in primary colors except the wood.

  At the end nearest the kitchen was a round Victorian oak dining table. A baby grand piano squatted dramatically at the far side of the room near the French doors leading onto a deck. There was a bookcase, but it held stereo equipment and a lot of artsy-craftsy items and very few books. The paneled wall across from the stereo was a gallery of clustered drawings and paintings, all of them originals, all abstract or at least not easily recognizable, and all vaguely sexual. I couldn’t read the signature. On the same wall, as part of a composition of rectangles, was a full-length mirror. Another mirror, also full-length, hung on the wall with the French doors, near the piano, and next to the mirror was a single painting, about two feet by three. It was a portrait of a dark-haired woman.

  Bowman waved her hand at a yellow corduroy loveseat and I sat.

  “Would you like a glass of wine, Mr. Samson?”

  I said I thought that would be nice. She opened a cabinet under the shelf that housed the stereo turntable and pulled out a cut-glass decanter and two discount store wineglasses. A chink in the perfection. I guessed that she either had a lot of parties or used up a lot of wineglasses herself.

  She brought me a glass and sat down facing me in an oak rocker.

  I took a sip. Good California burgundy, plain but honest. I didn’t recognize the vineyard or the vintage year, but then I never can.

  “So, Mr. Samson, you work for Artie Perrine’s magazine?”

  I explained that I was not regularly employed but free-lanced from time to time. I didn’t say what I was not regularly employed at or what it was I did free-lance. “And,” I said, “I’m following up on a piece about the company this Smith— that was his name, the dead man you found— the company he worked for. So I need information about his death.” I couldn’t tell whether she believed me or not, so I added a little something. “And of course if I can learn anything that might, well, clear up the, uh…”

  The woman wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully, sipped at her wine, and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She pursed her lips and sucked in her cheeks. She had more facial twitches than a junkie. “I can tell you basically what I told the police.” She got up and sashayed to the piano, leaning against it chanteuse fashion. “I heard someone shout, I went out on the deck, I saw that young man running up the path. Then I went down the stairs and found… it.”

  I took her through the scene, step by step, slowly. It was pretty entertaining. She acted the whole thing out for me, complete with gestures. The first scene was Carlota Bowman pouring herself another glass of wine. I stayed with the half glass I still had.

  She strode to the mirror near the piano and stood facing it, wineglass held at shoulder level. “I was courting a creative spark, a spark I had been trying all morning to coax into flame.” Her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dared me to understand. I nodded to show that I did. “I was standing here, at this mirror.” She whirled to face me, a drop of wine slopping onto the polished floor. “A mirror is a frame. A frame of the image in the film of my visual life. I have many mirrors.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She turned back to the mirror and struck a new pose— cinema queen, 1939— gazing into her own eyes. “And then I heard the shout.”

  Because the winter had been a particularly wet one, her first thought was that there was a mudslide, danger of some sort. She had stepped out on the deck and looked down. Here, for my benefit, she threw open the French doors and stepped outside. I went with her. She transferred her wineglass to her left hand and pointed with her right, indicating the area somewhere around the bottom of the steps.

  “He was there, running. And he ran up that way.” She waved at the path that led up to Artie’s house.

  She had called out to the man, she said, but he hadn’t turned around or answered.

  “It was cold outside,” she said. I could well imagine that it was. Now, in late afternoon, the fog was wrapping itself around the tops of the redwoods. The giant trees, which
even in high summer must have shadowed most of the canyon homes most of the time, were dripping with damp.

  Carlota continued. “I came back inside and waited.” She led me back into the house.

  “Waited?”

  “Well, there are other houses down there. I thought surely someone else had heard or seen the man. So I waited. But nothing happened,” she said, with just a touch of the sulks in her voice. “No one was doing anything. I began to worry. My foundation is not all that it should be. With the ditch so full and the clay so saturated— well, one never knows.”

  In preparation for the next scene, she poured another glass of wine. Then she went to a living room closet and got her coat. I held her wineglass while she thrust her arms through the sleeves. We went out the kitchen door to the landing.

  She had gone down ten steps or so, she said, to see what she could see. We descended carefully. The steps were worn redwood, slick with wetness and somewhat in need of repair. “I couldn’t see anything from here. Not a thing.” We descended farther. About thirty steps from the bottom, she paused. “I stopped here to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything. Except the water.”

  She beckoned me on and we went all the way to the bottom, where three planks, nailed to the bottom step and staked into the ground on the other side of the ditch, formed a makeshift bridge.

  A few feet to the left of the planking, the stream disappeared into a narrow, brush-screened tunnel that the water had cut beneath the surface rock, undoubtedly, I thought, undermining the entire canyon. Carlota and I stood on the second step. She pointed toward the tunnel opening, where the foam slopped over the edges of the ditch, forced its way through the battered branches, and exposed roots of the tough native fuchsias.

  “It was caught in those branches there.”

  “That must have been terrible for you,” I said.