“So,” I said, dragging my eyes away from her mouth, “what do you think?”
“I think you have a problem. Are you sure this young man didn’t do it?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Well, that leaves only about a dozen suspects,” she said.
“Hanley, because he’s crazy. That’s one.”
“And Smith’s son,” she added, “because his father rejected him.”
“I guess.” I hadn’t thought much about Smith’s son.
“And then there’s all the people he worked with. Depending on what’s going on in that company, there could be some pretty strong motives. Doesn’t sound like he was terribly popular. What about that woman— what’s her name?”
“You mean Chloe?”
“Yes. Chloe.”
“Nah. I don’t think so.”
“Jake, you can’t just cross off people you like. That’s not very professional. And you do like her. I can tell by the way you talk about her.” Could that be just the tiniest edge of jealousy in her voice?
“So what,” I said. “I like you, too. A lot. I would like to like you a lot right now.”
She smiled. “Don’t you want to talk about the case any more?”
“No.”
She turned toward me. It’s amazing how warm gray eyes can look.
16
The morning was bright, dry, and clear. By the time I got back to Marin I had decided it was a good day for the long drive north to Mendocino. I stopped at a phone booth and called Bill Smith’s to see if I could get a room. The woman who answered the phone said I could.
I packed a bag and had just locked my door and turned to go down the steps when Arlene sauntered up.
“Where are you going?” she wanted to know.
“Won’t Chloe miss you at work?” I countered.
“I was waiting for you. I want to talk to you. Can we go inside?”
I was feeling antsy about getting on the road, but you have to take possibly helpful conversation when it comes. I unlocked the door. Arlene walked in and sat on the bed. I put my bag down and leaned against the work table.
“You’re investigating the murder, aren’t you?”
I began to protest, but she cut me off. “I don’t care what you say. You’ll lie. Why shouldn’t you?” She took a deep breath. I could feel her tension, but, as always, nothing showed in her eyes. “Hanley didn’t do it. I understand why you might think he would, but he didn’t. He was with me that night and that morning, so leave him alone. He gets upset very easily and he might get violent if he thinks you’re picking on him.”
“I guess that’s why he shoots the trees. Because they pick on him.”
She nodded. “In a way. You have to understand him. He’s very sensitive.”
I shook my head. “No, Arlene, I don’t have to understand him. You have to understand him because you live with him, but I don’t.”
She looked shocked. “I don’t live with him. I stay overnight sometimes. I couldn’t actually live with him.” She gazed blankly over my shoulder and out the window. “I need my space.” I had thought that particular expression had died with the seventies, but apparently some people still found it useful.
She continued. “What people don’t understand is that he acts crazy because he’s so frustrated by his work. When he shoots a redwood tree, it’s a social commentary. Really, he has flashes of genius when it comes to social commentary.”
I wanted to get to the point of all this, but my curiosity won out. “How is it a social commentary to shoot a redwood tree?”
“It’s his customers. Their ignorance and destructiveness. They’re always wanting him to cut down trees and prune things in the wrong season and kill perfectly healthy plants and poison perfectly harmless bugs. He hates it. He loses a lot of clients by arguing with them or ‘forgetting’ to do things. So when he gets drunk he shoots trees. Big trees with little bullets. Too big to kill with little bullets. It’s his way of expressing irony, you see.”
I thought about it and realized I’d have to think about it some more.
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me this. Spying on Carlota— is that a social commentary, too?”
She seemed unconcerned. “Oh, is he doing that? With binoculars, I suppose? Well, he has mentioned to me that he doesn’t trust her. I don’t quite know why. But he won’t hurt her or anything.”
“I’ll try to take your word for it. Maybe you can do something for me, too.”
She smirked. “I’m sure I could.” I let that go.
“What I mean is, maybe you could tell me some things about Bright Future. No one would ever know you told me.”
“I wouldn’t care if they did. I could always collect unemployment.”
So I asked her about Morton, and his sales scheme. And I asked her about Smith’s relationship with Morton, and I asked her to tell me everything she knew about Chloe and Bert Franklin and Armand and Bowen.
She didn’t know anything about the Bright Future navy and said she never paid attention to “things like that.” Nor did she know much about Armand and Bowen. She called Armand “frosted glass,” which I rather liked, and Bowen, she said, was “totally doddering.” All she would say about Chloe was that she had nothing but good to say about her.
“Smith was a— what’s a good word— a prig.” She laughed. “A male chauvinist prig.” This woman really had a way with words. “He was patronizing with women, including Chloe. He had this thing about morality and tradition. He gave me the creeps. He and Morton didn’t get along. I saw them talking to each other once in the hall and they looked like a pair of male dogs, circling each other, all stiff-legged and snarly.”
She said she didn’t know much about Morton except that he was “a classic— you know what I mean,” and that he’d come to Bright Future from a cosmetics company that had folded “for some reason no one talks about.”
I took hold of that. “Didn’t Bert Franklin come from a cosmetics company?”
“Uh huh. Same one. It was called Perfect Day. I think Morton got Bert the job at B.F.”
Unfortunately, that was all she had on the subject. I asked her one more question. “Who told the cops about Alan’s argument with Smith?”
“Oh, I did. Just in case someone started suspecting Hanley. But I wasn’t the only one. Bert told them, too.”
I looked at my watch. I really wanted to get started on that 150 miles. “Well, thanks Arlene. Can I talk to you again?”
She got up and walked slowly toward me. I already had my back to the edge of the table and couldn’t retreat any farther. She stood about two inches from me. I could feel her warm breath.
“You will leave Han alone, won’t you, Jake?” She reached out and stroked my hand. “I’d be your friend if you’d do that.”
The rhythm of her stroke was familiar. And the touch. I pulled my hand away. “It was you, wasn’t it? In the hot tub?” I accused. She smiled mysteriously. I slid sideways and got away from her. “I have to leave now,” I said sternly. She allowed me to usher her out the door, threw me one more sexy smile— her eyes were still blank— and walked off down the path.
On my way down, I knocked on Rosie’s door. No answer. I hadn’t seen her truck when I’d first pulled into the canyon that morning, and I guessed she was still over in the East Bay. I hoped she had slept in her own little cottage, alone. A relationship with someone like Joyce could put a real strain on our friendship.
I left a note stuck between door and jamb, telling her where I’d gone and when I expected to be back.
17
Mendocino is one of those places that looks like it was built for the movies. There are towns like that in New England and in the Midwest, too picturesque, too beautiful, too typecast to be real. But they are real. The midwestern towns with big old houses and big old elm trees, where you expect to see Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland turning the corner any minute. The New England towns with saltbox houses and widow’s walks and graveyards full of
dead sailors and the ghosts of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lizzie Borden flashing ectoplasm at dormer windows.
Mendocino is perfect Northern California coast. The town sits on a point of land that juts right out into the ocean like a big tall ship with a deck full of houses. The main street, which is called Main Street, runs along the southern edge of the town, and all the houses and buildings on it have a clear across-the-street or over-the-cliff view of the Pacific. You can walk the length of Main, from highway to westernmost tip, in about ten minutes. North of Main there are a few more parallel streets, intersected by a few side streets, and that’s about it.
The inns and shops and restaurants are well-kept and what my father would call artsy-fartsy, but most of the private homes look like they’re pretty much left to fend for themselves, weathered wood and yards gone to prolific nature.
Every time I visit Mendocino, I have fantasies about living there in one of those salt-scrubbed houses. The people who do live there have been known to go to war against whaling ships in small boats, a war of confrontation and harassment. I’d like to confront and harass a whaling ship. I’d like to be able to walk the quiet evening streets of a decent little town, and spend half the night gazing at the Pacific. No muggers, no fear after dark. The only strangers the enchanted tourists, treated like guests, behaving like guests, and representing money in the bank for the town.
I’d love it, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t love it for very long. There’s always a tradeoff. You can have quiet streets and a beautiful environment or you can have variety, excitement, and craziness any time you want it. Maybe an artist’s colony like Mendocino, with plenty of creative and intellectual stimulation, is the answer for some people. Artists, anyway. But I’d had my chance at rural Northern California and I’d ended up in Oakland.
I guess some of us are doomed.
So there it was, charming as hell out there on its own little peninsula. I turned left off the highway onto Main, passing some picturesque real estate offices. Just before I hit the business district, I turned off onto the side street that would take me to another side street where James Smith’s son maintained what I was sure was going to be a very quaint little inn.
I was partly right. The inn was partly quaint; the other part was just old. The building looked to be about halfway along in a renovation and beautification program. It was a medium-sized Victorian house. Not one of those insane castles built toward the end of the era, when architects felt somehow obliged to use up their wildest fantasies before the glory died, but an earlier creation big enough for a big family, fancy enough to satisfy the whims of the time, and solid enough to outlast everything that’s been built since 1945. It was half-painted in deep blue with white trim. A couple of window frames had been ripped out and had not yet been replaced. Those windows and part of the roof were covered with plastic.
Since Californians don’t normally start renovation work in the rainy season, I had my choice of several theories: the project had been started the previous spring and something had happened to stop it, like a lack of money; the owner had gotten the money together late in the season and was so excited he couldn’t wait until spring to start working; or the owner always did everything wrong and the place looked this way all the time. The only theory I rejected right away was the third one. A guy just past thirty who’d managed— probably without any support from his family— to get himself an inn in Mendocino is not the kind of guy who always does everything wrong.
I pulled my car up at the curbless roadside, got out, and ambled casually up the walk. The front steps were flanked by two big old-fashioned rose bushes that looked like they’d never been brutalized by a prune-it-to-a-dead-stick gardener. Lots of short-stemmed pink blooms, just the way I like rose bushes to look.
But then, I’m a clod. I like paté all right, but I’d rather have fried oysters. I believe that cats are about as mysterious and independent as puppies; I get bored listening to jazz; and I would never buy anything that had someone else’s name on it.
I pushed open the front door and walked into a long, high-ceilinged hallway with big sliding doors on either side that once led to parlors or drawing rooms or something. These, I guessed, would be among the Rooms with Fireplaces Bill Smith was charging so much for. I figured my room was tucked away somewhere upstairs. Maybe even the attic. There was a stairway at the left and more hallway going past it. At the end was a counter with no one behind it. I pushed the button that had a sign next to it saying, “Please ring for service,” and a voice called out asking me to please wait a minute.
The minute lasted only about five seconds. A very pretty young woman with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes appeared, wearing a large white apron over a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. She smiled at me beautifully but impersonally. I smiled back, also beautifully, and with what I hoped was inoffensive and even attractive warmth, and gave her my name. She gave me a key and told me my room was on the second floor, third door on the left. Not the attic, anyway.
“I wonder if the owner’s around,” I said.
She threw me a suspicious look. “Why?” she wanted to know. And I began to lean toward my first theory of interrupted renovation— a lack of money. She was looking at me like I was a bill collector.
“It’s kind of personal,” I said. “It has to do with his father.”
“He’s not here right now,” she said neutrally. “But I can leave a message that you wanted to talk to him— about his father?” I nodded. “I’ll tell him. But I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “He is coming back in the next day or so, I hope?”
She nodded. “You said when you called for your reservation you’d be staying a couple of days. Would you like to pay in advance for another night?”
“I’d love to,” I said. It seemed to be the only appropriate response, other than “No,” to a ridiculous question.
I took my bag up to my room. A small room with blue and pink wallpaper— flowers lined up inside stripes— and a white chenille spread on the high double bed. White lace curtains on the single window. A tiny closet, blue carpeting, and a rag rug beside the bed. I hung up my clean shirt and tweed jacket in the closet, left spare socks and shorts in the bag, and headed out to have a look around.
I turned toward Main Street, figuring I’d hang around the shops for a while. Once, a few years before, one of the shops along that street had had a collection of music boxes. All kinds, all romantic as hell. The one I liked best was wood with one of those eighteenth-century scenes painted on the lid. You know, the guy in knee breeches and white stockings with the ruffles down his chest and the powdered pigtail hairdo, standing around a garden with a woman wearing a huge wig and a huge skirt, holding a fan over her cleavage. The box played something by Mozart, I don’t remember what. I wanted to buy that box, but here’s the catch: I wanted to buy it for a woman I loved. At the time, there was no woman I loved, unless you count the wife I’d just walked out on because I’d found out she’d been sneaking, lying, and cheating for three years. Even if I had been willing to forgive and forget, I’d had no choice about leaving; she didn’t particularly want me to stay. In fact, two days after I left she was already moved in with the latest of her Jake-just-went-to-work-come-on-over gentlemen of the afternoon. So I stood there, I remember, wishing I had someone to buy that damned music box for, and playing the Mozart over and over again. Finally, I put the box back on the counter, walked out of the shop, went to the nearest bar and got drunk.
The shop was still there. It still had varnished Douglas fir floorboards, floor-to-ceiling shelves on all four walls, all covered with hand-blown glass and other objects of art and otherwise, and glass counters with items that didn’t look any more valuable than the ones on the open shelves. There were goblets and bowls and candlesticks. There were scrimshawed brooches and pendants with whales and sailing ships carved on them. There were paintings and chess sets and old photo albums. But there weren’t any music boxes. Probabl
y a good thing. I might lose my head, buy one, and still not know whom to give it to.
I wandered farther down the street, past the hotel with its Old West exterior and its opulent Victorian lobby and bar, and checked out a few more shops. An art gallery that sold mostly seascapes. Clothing, books and records, curios and wind chimes and whale sculptures. One shop had a white marble urn, slightly damaged, for only twenty-five dollars. I thought it would look great somewhere in my yard, but I wasn’t sure where. I would have bought it, too, but I lost interest when I tried to lift it. Somehow, the idea of carting it all the way back to Oakland and carrying it— or even pushing it in a wheelbarrow— all the way down the path to my house was less than appealing.
I strolled on to the end of the street and walked through the long spring grass to the cliff’s edge, where I sat on a rock and watched the ocean crash against the rocks below, indentations in the cliffside sucking the water in and blowing it out again. It was nice to be alone, or nearly alone, with the Pacific. A few other people were walking the paths along the cliff: an old woman with a cane and a small terrier, a young man with a child clinging to each hand, a pair of lovers, and a solitary middle-aged woman carrying an easel, a canvas, and a paint box.
The fog was coming in; it looked like a tidal wave in the distance and I could feel its chill in the first tendrils reaching out for the town. I was warm enough. I was wearing a down vest over a sweater over a cotton turtleneck. But I was also getting cold enough for a brandy.
Abandoning my rock, I headed back to Main, this time walking along the ocean side, and did a slow three blocks to the street that led to my favorite restaurant and bar.
Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) Page 11
