Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (12 page)

“And said she was on her way to Tahoe.”

“Well, I just never heard anything about that.”

“Could she have been going up to Noah’s casino for any reason?”

“I suppose. As far as I know, she just worked on the arks, and didn’t help him with other things, but…”

Not much help there, I decided, and went on to topic number two.

“About the arks,” I said. “Noah’s not exactly following the Bible in all this, is he?” I waved my hand, indicating the vessel and her workers. Beatrice looked vague, her face a Sandy Dennis smear of incomprehension. “The size. The size is wrong.” Her features became more solid again.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. You mean the cubits. Three hundred by fifty by thirty.”

“And three stories tall. This is one.”

“Yes,” she said. “The ark was really big.”

“About cubits, now. The Bible says the flood went fifteen cubits upward. Are we talking about foot-and-a-half cubits here?”

“Of course. A cubit is eighteen inches.” She was mildly interested. Here was a fact she knew.

“But it says the waters went fifteen cubits upward and the mountains were covered. That would make the mountains about twenty feet tall.” How did I get into this, anyway?

She laughed, delighted little tinkles of laughter. I was very cute. “Oh, Jake. I don’t know about your Bible, but mine says the water covered the mountains and then went fifteen cubits higher. Aren’t you silly.”

“I must have missed that.” So it was settled. A cubit was a cubit.

“And how big is this ark?”

“It’s one hundred cubits long by twenty-six wide by sixteen tall.” A hundred and fifty feet by thirty-nine by twenty-four. “But of course,” she added, “we have two of them. And our requirements are different.”

I asked her how they were different.

“For one thing, we’re not taking any animals. Just people. Carefully selected people.” I allowed her the touch of smugness she showed just then, but it suddenly occurred to me that so far, no one had invited me. I put that aside for the moment.

“Right,” I said, remembering that someone, maybe Beatrice, had mentioned that before. “You mean you’re just going to let them all die?”

Her face smeared again. “You really should be talking to Arnold. Or even Noah. There’s a really good reason.”

“And that is?”

“God is going to take care of the animals. Because he promised never to destroy everything again, you see, and he doesn’t trust us to do it right, anyway. We’re being entrusted only with the selection of our own kind.”

“I’m getting confused,” I told her. “This is sounding less and less like the Bible story.” I was, after all, an expert; I’d just read the thing that day, first time since about age nine.

“Oh, it’s a lot the same.”

“Maybe, but didn’t God promise never to have another flood at all? He made a covenant with Noah.”

“Oh, but you see… gee, I wish you’d talk to Arnold… He did. But there were things in the covenant, other things. About capital punishment and animal rights. And we’re not living up to those, so He wants to make a point.”

Capital punishment. There was, indeed, something in that story about whoso sheddeth man’s blood, about man shedding his blood right back again. Kill the killer, just as Arnold had said. But animal rights? I couldn’t remember anything about that.

“We were given dominion over them,” Beatrice explained. “And dominion implies responsibility. For instance, earlier in Genesis it specifically says God created the great whale. And look what we’re doing.”

Not noblesse oblige, I thought. Power oblige.

“It all has to do with victims, you see,” Beatrice said brightly. “We just go around killing and destroying and nobody has to pay for it. We let killers go free and polluters, and…” She ran out of steam.

“So this flood is going to purge the planet of the people who make victims of everyone and everything else? And your carefully selected group believes in capital punishment and environmentalism and the rights of animals and other victims?”

She smiled. “Yes. But you should talk to Arnold. He knows more about it.”

I didn’t know whether I would or not. I thanked Beatrice and set out for home. Only in the eighties could such a collection of causes coalesce, I decided. The kind of person who cared about animals and the environment didn’t use to be the kind of person who wanted criminals eliminated. Were Right and Left merging here into some weird hybrid? This eye-for-an-eye thing could get pretty dangerous if you mixed Old Testament justice with current-cause passion.

I thought of Marjorie. An angry young woman, justifiably so, who wanted so desperately for the world to be better that she had climbed off the dirty streets of reality and onto the deck of an ark.

Unless, of course, she’d seen the arks as a personal way out, and nothing more. And Noah. And his money. I preferred to think she’d tipped off into never-never land.

The tourists arrived at six. They had had, I could tell, a wonderful time. My father was laughing, Lee had a slight pink flush on her gorgeous cheeks, and Eva was chattering away about the seals on seal rock, which, I believe, are actually sea lions.

“So cute,” she was saying. “Jake, is it true that killer whales eat them? I heard somebody say that.”

I had some memory from some time back, something about somewhere up north… “I guess so, I think I remember reading something in the paper. But I don’t think it’s a big problem.”

“Not to you, maybe,” she said indignantly.

“How did you like Chinatown?” I asked. My father was enthusiastic.

“Better than Chicago,” he said. “Like you’re in China. The smells, the shops, everybody talking Chinese. Wonderful.” I’d taken him there once, on his first visit to the Coast, but we’d gone only for dinner. He had obviously loved his daylight tour. “Such interesting people,” he added. “An ancient culture, a great civilization. Did you know a lot of Jews went there from Europe, to escape?”

No I hadn’t, but I wasn’t surprised. They’d gone to Argentina, too. Never any peace and quiet.

I turned to Eva. “And you? How did you like it?”

She shrugged. “I liked the seals.”

“What about Chinatown?”

“Very interesting,” she said. “Different. But I don’t know…” I waited. “Who wants to look at old eggs and dead ducks?”

Lee laughed, and the angels sighed.

“Now,” I said masterfully, “where does everyone want to go for dinner? What do you feel like eating?”

“Not Chinese,” Eva declared. “Not today, anyway.”

“Italian? Mexican? Japanese?” Lee asked.

“No raw fish,” my father said.

“You don’t have to eat raw fish in a Japanese restaurant,” I told him.

“You know,” Eva said, “I only had Mexican food once before. Interesting. Different. But good.”

No one objected to that. I put on my fedora and took them to my favorite Mexican restaurant. I think, on the way, Lee glanced favorably at my hat.

The restaurant was just up the street, on College. For several years, this same place had specialized in authentic dishes native to the South Pacific. Now the same management had turned it into a mostly Mexican restaurant. The food was terrific, the service delightful, and they seemed to be having some success with their new menu.

We were seated by a young man who could have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five and who wore his dark hair short and spiky. I placed my hat carefully under my chair.

“Don’t forget it there,” my father warned.

“I won’t.”

The waitress was a member of the original, founding, Indonesian family. The cashier, who looked like Rudolph Valentino even unto the patent leather hair, was a new addition. The South Seas mural still covered one wall, but, on another wall, someone very skilled had painted a villa set on a distinctly Mexican landscape, complete with serape-clad inhabitants.

The clientele looked pretty much the same: Berkeley/ North Oakland young to middle-aged professional types who probably owned pasta makers. The only difference was, there were more of them than there used to be. Maybe Guadalajara was just a catchier name than Oceania.

“Listen,” my father said, “I’m paying, so you order whatever you want.” He studied the menu.

The waitress remembered me, although not by name.

“Good to see you again,” she said.

I smiled my reply and checked out the beer list. They still had Kirin, so that’s what I ordered. My father asked for red wine, but Eva decided that, having had wine once before that week, she’d had enough alcohol. Lee considered a margarita, until she learned that they had only a beer and wine license and made their margaritas with white wine. She decided on the wine all by itself. The waitress went off to get our drinks.

“So?” my father wanted to know, “what’s good?”

I explained some of the items on the menu while Lee’s eyes wandered to Valentino. My father settled on a taco-tamale combination. Eva went for the quesadillas, and I was in the mood for chicken enchiladas verdes. Lee came back from a dream long enough to order chili rellenos.

Okay, so I don’t look like Valentino. More like James Caan, I thought, with George Segal’s nose. Curly dark blond hair, some of it on my chest. Passionate lips. Strong but sensitive hands. What more could she want? Besides all that, I had maturity, which Valentino definitely did not have. When she was forty, I thought, she’d probably be chasing twenty-year-old tail. Women. They’re all alike.

I chatted unconcernedly with Eva. Lee drifted back.

“Eva tells me you write articles, Jake, is that right?”

Hah. Just as I thought. Eva had talked about me to Lee, no matter what she said. I avoided my father’s eye. I was afraid he would be either winking and smirking or looking elaborately secretive— or, worst of all, bearing my idiocy and impending death with courage and resignation. I wished they’d both go home to Chicago and leave me alone. With Lee. Who was probably wondering why I had not yet answered a perfectly ordinary ice-breaking question.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m a kind of investigator.”

“A kind of?” she repeated with interest.

I glanced around me at the nearby tables occupied by strangers.

“Maybe I can tell you more about it under more private circumstances.”

Eva raised her eyebrows, probably in despair at the duplicity of the rutting male. I still did not look at my father. Lee appeared to be reserving judgment. A tough cookie.

Dramatic effect dictated a change of subject, veering away from my sinister self, so I asked her what she did for a living. It turned out she was an attorney, working for a small firm up in Santa Rosa. Our food arrived; I was hungry, which made me happy. I was still in control of my vital organs, despite Lee’s presence. Nodding appreciatively at her choice of profession, I ate a few bites of enchilada. Good green sauce.

“Civil or criminal?” I asked, after a long swallow of beer.

“Criminal,” she answered, sipping wine and not looking seductively at me over the rim of her glass. “But sometimes it gets pretty disgusting.”

“Yes. I know what you mean.”

“Do you really?” That flicker of interest again, almost flirtatious. What a killer.

I smiled at her, confident, tough. “I do. Really.” The folks, trying their best to leave us alone, were carrying on a low-voiced conversation about their dinners.

Lee’s eyes were no longer straying quite so often toward the cash register.

“Must be a rough field,” I said. “Law, I mean. Overcrowded, isn’t it?”

“It is. There must be almost as many attorneys in Northern California as there are psychotherapists.” I laughed with her and felt a small flash of wonder. Was it coincidence, I asked myself, that I was so often attracted to women who were, in turn, attracted to overcrowded fields of work? Chloe was a journalist. Iris was a therapist. I decided that it wasn’t. I liked women who were what they wanted to be, period.

“Were you always interested in law?”

“No. Are you familiar with Hammurabi?”

I had to think hard for a moment. It was a name, and he was dead. I knew that. Phoenician? Assyrian? No, wait a minute— Babylon. “The guy with the code of laws?”

“Right!” She was pleased with me. Very pleased. “I was an anthropology student. Got my bachelor’s degree in cultural anthro. Archaeology. But I didn’t know what to do with it. I had gotten interested in Hammurabi’s code, realized maybe that law…” She shrugged. “Anyway, I came at it sideways.”

“Archaeology,” I said, eating some more enchilada. “I used to read a little ancient history now and then. You haven’t been formally introduced to my cats, have you?”

She laughed. “Not formally, no. Why?”

“Their names are Tigris and Euphrates.”

After that, I was sure she was giving me the edge over the cashier.

The next morning I got right down to business, calling Mrs. Noah to ask if it would be convenient for me to stop by. I wanted, I told her, to drop off some of the papers I’d taken from her husband’s office.

“Did you learn anything from them?”

“Not much so far.” That was true. I’d noticed that the man was rich, which I’d already figured out, and that he had indeed pledged the quarter of a million to the arks. I also learned that he’d been largely responsible for the funds that had gotten the arks started, as well. There were the lists of ark-people, but I thought I should go over those with Arnold at some point, to see if he could come up with anyone who might have been interested in doing the leader in. There was also a list, a very short list, of people who had donated various small sums to the construction: Beatrice, Arnold, and Joe Durell. I noticed that neither Jerry Pincus, Noah’s Tahoe partner, nor Bert Olson, his mechanic, was on either list.

I kept the file of memos and notes, and some of the personal correspondence I hadn’t had the time— or the inclination— to go through yet.

On my way over to the house, I saw an incredible-looking blond walking down Claremont Avenue, and, unavoidably, thought about the evening before. Lee had shaken my hand at the door and gone home to Petaluma— no surprise there— but she had held my hand a little longer than she’d needed to, and her smile had been a mite on the heavy-lidded side. We said we hoped we’d see each other again soon. I was planning to make sure of it.