Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (11 page)

I followed the walk around the garage to another, separately fenced yard wherein lay half a dozen vehicles of varying age, all missing vital parts.

I was stopped by the sight of a large tan dog, approaching me stiff-legged with suspicion. I spotted Victor’s feet sticking out from under a Gremlin.

“Hi, pooch,” I said. The phrase, “meaner than a junkyard dog” was running through my mind. The beast relaxed a bit, but my voice had been a signal. Another dog, a large tan female, strolled out from behind an ancient pickup truck that had no headlights and no grille. With her were two large tan pups, smudged with grease, rolling all over each other’s fat little bodies in play. The female glanced at me and lay down. The male joined her. I reflected that Marjorie had a very doggy family.

Victor was still under the Gremlin. I spoke loudly to his overalled legs.

“Victor?”

“Yeah, just hold on a minute, man.”

He did something to the car’s underside that required two bangs and a grunt, and eased himself out into the sunlight, holding a wrench in his hand. He stood up and propped his butt against the fender.

“I’m pretty busy. What do you need?” He was short and stocky, about thirty-five, with acne-scarred cheeks.

“I’m looking for some information. Carleton Hinks said you might be able to help me.”

“What kind of information?” His voice was neutral, his face blank.

“I’m looking for a man named Gerhart, Thomas Gerhart.”

Victor shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

“He calls himself Noah.”

“Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “That crazy white dude. But I still don’t know him.”

I took out my wallet.

“Put that away,” Victor barked. “What I mean to say is, I don’t know the man. Not to talk to. Marjorie, she knows him. Don’t know why.”

“And Marjorie is your niece?”

“She’s my cousin.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

He was still holding the wrench. He shifted it to his left hand and began tapping himself on the thigh with it. “I don’t see that that’s your business. You a cop, you show me your I.D.”

“I’m not a cop. Noah’s friends are worried about him. They think he’s with Marjorie. I’m trying to find them. Just helping out, okay?”

“And Hinks sent you here?”

“He gave me your name.”

“That boy’s got a big mouth.”

“Come on, man,” I told him. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened. When did you last see her?”

He shrugged. “Before she took off.”

“Which was…?”

“Week or so ago, I guess.”

“Did the family report her missing?”

He was tapping the wrench against his thigh again. “Ain’t no family, just me and her grandma. You mean report to the police?” He laughed. “Marjorie, she’s been pretty much on her own since she was sixteen. I helped her out once or twice, but she don’t take nothing from nobody, if she can help it. She’s just that way.” He shifted the wrench back to his right hand again.

“Do you think she would have run off with Noah?”

He sighed. “No way to know what she’d do. Look, I got work.”

“So do I. Carleton says you think you know where they might be.”

He shot me a hostile look. “Maybe Carleton’s lying.”

I gave him a look of my own. “Maybe she’s in trouble. Maybe this time she needs help.”

He backed off a little. “Uh huh. And what if she’s doing something she don’t want people to know about?”

“Look,” I said, “that group of Noah’s doesn’t think he ran off. They think something’s wrong.”

He shook his head. “Right, Samson. And they think they’re going to sail away on an ark when the world ends.”

This was a game that could go on all day. “Christ, Victor, let’s cut the shit. Marjorie and Noah are missing. I’m looking for them. If they’re all right, that’s as far as I’ll go. Okay?”

He eyed me. He was thinking about it. “You doing this for money?”

“Yeah.”

He nodded. That was okay. “Sonoma. She said something about going up to Sonoma, along the Russian River someplace. That’s all I know. Maybe her grandma knows more.”

“Her grandmother said she went to Tahoe.”

“Maybe she did that, too. Or maybe I heard her wrong. I remember she said Sonoma. And that’s all I know, and I got work to do.”

“All right. Thanks.”

“Any time, man.” He turned away, dropped to the ground, and began to wriggle back under the car. He gave me one last look.

“Don’t mess with Marjorie.”

I walked away without answering. Mostly because I didn’t know whether he was threatening me on his own account or warning me about the dangers of Marjorie, herself.

On my way back along the walkway, I passed the dogs. The puppies were tearing the stuffing out of a broken car seat. The adult dogs were asleep.

The woman was standing in the sun just outside the miniature door, which she had propped open with a corrosion-iced battery. We nodded politely to each other. She moved aside just enough to let me by. I looked back at her, once, as I was picking my way through the darkness of the office. She was watching me, so I didn’t steal any bolts or anything on my way out.

I still had plenty of the day left, so I decided that, before I did any more work, I would take Carleton up on his invitation to visit the hat shop and look around. I found a parking place a block down from Telegraph on Dwight and strolled into the dim narrow shop for the second time in three days. I nodded to Carleton, who, busy with a customer, nodded back.

This time, I was looking at the merchandise. I ignored the rack of berets. After slouching around Berkeley-style for a few minutes, sneering at the overcrowded, ceiling-high shelves of headgear, I spotted a glass case, along one side, in which were perched about a dozen very beautiful fedoras. Soft felt in beige, brown, black, blue, and forest green.

I approached the counter. “What do I have to do to try on one of those fedoras?” I asked.

“Just go around the back of the case and slide the door open.” He looked pleased with me for some reason.

I did as he said. I found a brown one in my size and tried it on in front of a mirror that needed resilvering. Gorgeous. I was Alan Ladd. No, too tall. George Raft? Scott Brady? Thirty-five dollars. Not much for a great image. I wore it up to the counter.

“Mm-hm!” Carleton said admiringly. I grinned crookedly, film noir style, and paid the man.

“I guess you remember when guys wore those things the first time around, right, Jake?” He smiled innocently.

“I guess I should warn you,” I said, smiling back, “that Victor’s a little pissed off that you sent me over there.”

“Yeah?” He laughed. “What’s he gonna do, smear me with grease? Anything new on the case?”

“Hard to tell,” I said cryptically, and headed for the door.

“Maybe the hat will help,” he called after me. I did not turn back or answer him.

My car and my hat suited each other. First of all, there was none of that nonsense about headrests. People were tough in the fifties and didn’t worry about things like broken necks. You can wear a hat in a 1953 Chevy. Modern cars, on the other hand, were built for an era of hatlessness. You cannot comfortably wear a hat, except a beret, in a modern car with a headrest. First of all, the ceilings are low. If you’re even moderately tall, you’ll smash your hat against the ceiling. If you slump to avoid this, or if you’re short, you collide with the headrest. The back of the hat gets squashed, or the hat gets pushed down on your nose or off your head altogether.

I wonder what will happen if hats continue to be popular once again. Will cars change? Will hat racks and hatcheck concessions return to public places? I’ve seen people sticking their hats under their chairs in restaurants, sometimes forgetting them. Or stepping on them. And it’s not much fun to wear a hat to go someplace when you have to take it off to drive there and back. The point of a hat is to wear it.

I, at least, in my headrestless classic, could drive down Telegraph wearing my new fedora. Sure, whiplash could be a problem. But me and my fedora and my ’53 Bel Air, we didn’t give a damn.

It wasn’t easy to switch from my carefree mood to the chore I’d set for myself when I got home. It wasn’t even easy, I discovered, to find what I needed to begin the job at all. After half an hour’s search, though, I found it, where it had slipped behind the astoundingly outdated world atlas I had bought from a book club when I was fourteen. The Old Testament. This, unlike the atlas, was not a memento of my childhood. It was a souvenir of a brief but uncomfortable relationship with an attractive, odd woman who was trying to find herself by going back to her roots: attending Friday night services, taking Hebrew classes, dating only Jewish men, that kind of thing. The Bible had been a birthday present.

I hadn’t worried much, at first, about the discrepancies my father had pointed out in the construction of the ark. After all, I reasoned, if a man decides he’s the second Noah, actually hears God saying so, he can decide damned near anything else he wants— that the ark should be smaller, that there should be two, three, or forty of them, that God changed his or her mind about a promise that was, after all, made a long time ago. A lot of water had passed, so to speak, since the original flood.

But discrepancies are discrepancies.

I skimmed through the first five chapters of Genesis. There he was, in Chapter 6, Noah himself. The original one. I had only the vaguest memories of the text, from Sunday school too many years before. But my strongest memory— that the stuff was damned hard to follow— held true.

Here was God talking about how evil man was, and saying how he repented making such a wicked creature. So he decided to destroy us, and, while he was at it, everything else— beasts, creeping things, and fowls of the air, it said. Everything was corrupt. Except for Noah and his family. So God told Noah to build the ark, and he told him how to do it. Gopher wood and lots of pitch. I pulled out my dictionary. Gopher wood. An unknown kind of wood, believed to be a kind of pine or fir. And there were the directions as to size: 300 cubits by fifty by thirty high. I looked up cubit. Sure enough, the dictionary, also, said it was the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The Romans figured it at 17.4 inches, the English at a nice, round 18, and the Egyptians, who apparently had longer forearms than the others, at 20.6 inches. I thought I’d go with 18, an easy foot and a half. The ark was supposed to be three stories high, with a window and a door. Once it was built, God told Noah to hop aboard, and, while he was at it, take on two of every kind of creature and all kinds of food.

I remembered wondering, when I was a boy, how Noah was going to tell which of the animals were not corrupt. Or had God really meant that everything was corrupt? Or just people?

In Chapter 7 the issue was further confused. Now Noah was supposed to take the clean beasts on by sevens, the unclean by twos, and birds by sevens.

The Bible said Noah was six hundred years old. No wonder he was so good.

And then it rained.

Next came the part where it said “fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.” Wait a minute, I thought. I pulled out my nine-dollar solar-cell calculator. Fifteen times one and a half. The mountains had to be taller than twenty-two and a half feet. Were we all talking about the same cubits?

No wonder people have Bible study groups.

Chapter 9 was mostly about the no-more-floods covenant God made with Noah, to the effect— or so I gathered— that as long as humans were such bastards anyway, there wasn’t much point in destroying the earth again when they acted like the bastards they were.

The next thing I couldn’t figure out was this human superiority dominion stuff. Why would God give dominion over other creatures to someone whose imagination was “evil from his youth”?

As always, when I got involved in the poetic or the philosophical, I felt vaguely angry.

Then there was some stuff about requiring the blood of man at the hand of every beast and at the hand of man, and the line about anyone who sheds man’s blood getting his blood shed by man. Then Chapter 9 went on to a whole different subject, something about Noah being naked.

So there it was. I didn’t know what to make of it. But my father was right. The ark was too small. Even if they had three or four of them. I slipped into a mathematical stupor, poking away at my calculator, trying to figure out how many of the smaller arks it would take to make the real thing. If a cubit really was eighteen inches, it would take at least fifty. Did they really have fifty of them? Were they lying to me? Was I going to spend the rest of the day multiplying any number of numbers by eighteen inches, coming up with wrong answers, building little three-dimensional drawings when numbers alone failed? I stowed my calculator and opened a light beer.

Tigris strolled in. “It seems to say here,” I said, tapping the Bible, “that you’re supposed to get a chance to kill a human, in return for being stuck under my evil thumb.” She purred and jumped into my lap. “Heathen,” I said. I gave her a couple of minutes under my thumb, then I gave her the whole chair and took a walk down to the corner.

About a dozen people were working. Arnold wasn’t there, but Beatrice was, gamely hacking away at a two-by-four with a handsaw. Either she wasn’t very strong or the saw wasn’t very sharp. She was glad to stop and talk to me.

“I’ve been wondering about a couple of things,” I began. “Maybe you could help me out.”

She looked uncertain. We sat down on a stack of lumber.

“First of all,” I said. “There’s some confusion about Marjorie’s disappearance. Her cousin Victor says he saw her before she left and she said something about Sonoma. Her grandmother says she called her on the Saturday and said she was on her way to Tahoe.”

Beatrice wrinkled her nose, lifting her upper lip, a look of pain that, I guessed, meant distress of some kind.

“Gosh,” she said. “I just don’t know. See, she might have been going up to Sonoma, because she’s gone there a few times, just to check things out and report back to Noah. I’m not sure she was supposed to go there that week. Usually, that’s just between her and Noah. Although Arnold might know. But if that’s what she told her cousin, then I suppose she was planning on going there. But you say she called Mrs. Burns?”