Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (13 page)

I would find the time somehow.

I passed the Claremont Hotel and turned up the money-cushioned street. The big new American car was right where I’d seen it last, parked in front of the house on the movie-style driveway.

I pushed the bell. Adele, the maid, pulled the door open after a while and gazed at me sullenly. Her red hair, I reflected, was nothing like Lee’s.

“Jake Samson,” I said. “Mrs. Gerhart is expecting me.”

She nodded, turned, and marched through the entry hall. I followed her, once again, to the library. June Gerhart was wearing a shirtwaist dress, heels, and a ribbon around her neck.

I put the folders down on a side table. She invited me to sit down.

“Is that everything?” she asked.

“No. I kept what I’m still using. I did want to talk to you about a few things, though.”

She nodded. She was looking a little tired. New lines had appeared around her eyes since I’d seen her last.

“Are you having any success at all, Jake?”

“Yes, I think so. I’m following a lot of trails. I don’t have the answer yet, if that’s what you’re asking, but I don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, either. I’m closing in on it.”

I was no such thing. At that point, as far as I knew, I could keep following trails for the rest of my life and never find Noah or Marjorie or the quarter of a million. But I was certainly taking the case more seriously since my father had gotten bashed. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t kosher.

“You said you had something you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Several things. One of the lists I found in your husband’s papers had to do with investors. In the arks. There were only three: Arnold, Beatrice, and Joe. Each name had five thousand dollars written after it. Did they each give five thousand dollars?”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jake, I just don’t know. I don’t know much about the finances for the arks. I had the impression that Joe had contributed something. He is involved, after all.”

“I can’t decide whether five thousand dollars is a lot of money or not very much, compared to what your husband was putting in.”

“Oh, that sounds like a good amount. After all, the arks were Tom’s project from the beginning. Other people gave what they could or what they thought would be suitable. Most people don’t have a lot of extra money, you know.”

“Are you saying Durell doesn’t have much money? Doesn’t he have an interest in Yellow Brick Farms?”

“Oh, yes. But Yellow Brick Farms is also primarily my husband’s project. Joe has some shares— they’d be worth quite a lot now, I would think— and of course a generous salary.”

“But he does have an interest. He shares in the profits, right?”

“That’s right, in a small way.”

“Well then, how does he feel about your husband’s siphoning off profits from the company for the arks?” There was a logical answer to that: it was none of his business. But I had to ask.

“Oh, but that’s not the way it works, Jake,” she objected. “I think we need some sherry now, don’t you?”

“Okay.” I didn’t need any, but if she did, what the hell. She picked up a little brass bell from the table beside her chair and tinkled it. Then she put it down again.

“Now, as I was saying, Tom was putting some of our share of the profits into the arks. He had every right to do that.”

“But don’t you have to plow a certain percentage, as they say, back into the business?”

“I believe,” she said with finality, “that there is more than enough for both purposes. If Tom thinks so, it’s so. He is a very good businessman. And Joe seems perfectly satisfied.”

“Good. Good. I also wanted to ask you something about who’s controlling the company.”

She looked puzzled.

“Your husband’s been missing for over a week now. Are you planning to take a more active part in the business, helping out, filling his shoes?”

She laughed lightly. “I don’t think so. It hardly seems necessary. Of course, I’ve always been somewhat involved. I know some of the oldest, biggest customers, socially. I would certainly help if I were needed. But Joe has worked with Tom a long time. They’ve worked together so well, for so long, that I see no reason not to trust him to keep things going until Tom returns.”

“I don’t want to upset you or anything, but you do believe that your husband is at least in danger. What if he doesn’t come back? Durell says you inherit his share of the business, is that right?”

“Of course.”

“What would happen then? Would you take control of the company?”

She looked offended. “I’m not sure I know what you mean by control.” She picked up the little bell and rang it again.

“I mean run the company. If you thought your husband wasn’t coming back. Knew he wasn’t.” Did her lip tremble, or was I running a movie in my head?

“You mean move into my husband’s office? Not unless I felt I needed to. If I heard of a problem of some sort…”

Her hesitation opened up another question. “Have you heard of any problems?”

“No, not really, just the kind of thing you might expect. You see, Joe lost his assistant a while ago, and there have been some minor tie-ups in deliveries. He just needs a little more help than he’s got right now. Certainly, if Tom didn’t come back, he’d need to do some hiring. But I don’t think I would have to actually go out there and work. I wonder, would you excuse me for just a moment?” She left the room. I checked over my notes. Just a couple more items to go into with her, then I’d go back to the house, have some lunch with the folks, see if Rosie was home, and go on from there.

June came back with two glasses of sherry on a tray.

“Just a few more questions, okay?” She nodded, looking a lot more tired than she had when I’d first arrived. “Do you know someone who owns an old car? Dark blue. Early seventies. A dent in the side. A license number starting with C?” I described the mugger and the driver— not much in the way of descriptions, but something, anyway.

“How did you meet these people?”

“I’m not even sure they have anything to do with the case, June, but they might.” I told her the big guy seemed to be looking for me.

She thought for a long time. Then she shook her head helplessly. “I’m sorry. I can’t think who that could be.”

“That’s all right, it’s just a long shot anyway. Don’t worry about it. There’s something else, something I’ve been wondering about for a while. It’s about the ark. When they first started working on the one down on my corner, they were putting in reasonable workdays, not too long. But in the last couple of weeks they’ve been working constantly, putting in as many hours and days as they can without running into problems with the noise ordinance. Do you know any reason why they might have decided to speed up the work?”

She thought about that for a long time, too. “I do remember something about that. Tom mentioned something to me; it was right before he went away, I believe. Yes. Something about thinking the flood was going to come sooner. Or something. That’s all I remember. Sorry.”

“No, that’s fine. I’ll talk to Arnold about it. That’s very helpful.” She sipped a little more of her sherry, then put it aside. It had helped. Her color was better. “Just one more thing. I’ve got conflicting reports about Marjorie, or maybe they’re not. I don’t know. What I have is that she told someone she was going to Sonoma, and then told someone else she was going to Tahoe. I understand why she might be going to Sonoma. That was part of her job. But why Tahoe?”

“She said she was going to Tahoe? I don’t understand that at all. I know she was doing work for Tom, but I thought it was only on the arks. I don’t understand that.”

I put my sherry aside, too, nearly untouched. “Could she have been doing other kinds of jobs, maybe connected with your casino?”

“We don’t own the whole casino,” she corrected me. “Just part of it. I don’t know. So… she said she was going to Tahoe and Tom said he had her with him.” For the first time, I saw a flicker of doubt about her husband.

“Does that worry you?” I asked. “Does that make you think he did just run off for some kind of fling?”

The doubt faded, replaced by anger. “No. Never. It had to be business.”

I decided that I had spent enough time with her, shaken her more than enough. I said good-bye, told her I’d be in touch, and left her alone.

Rosie had told me she didn’t think she’d be home before noon, and she wasn’t. Or at least her truck wasn’t, which was a pretty good indication. I passed right by the house and found a parking place near the copy shop on College Avenue. It took me half an hour to copy the pages in my notebook. Rosie was amazingly good at reading my handwriting, and those pages would give her a jumping off place on the case. She could run through them and then we could sit down for a couple of hours and go over the whole damned thing. If I was missing anything, she would be able to tell me what it was. While I copied, I planned out the rest of the day. Lunch. Then, if Rosie was back, a quick run over to Noah’s mechanic’s place. Maybe he knew something, maybe Noah had mentioned something to him. Maybe they were best pals. Who could tell? Then I wanted to spend some time going over what I had and trying to make some sense of some of it. And while I was doing that, Rosie could have a talk with Arnold— as good a way as any to get a hold on things— and ask him a couple of outstanding questions about the arks and their investors and passengers.

Then we were going to do some traveling. I didn’t think Rosie would mind that too much.

Eva had made a big salad for lunch, with those tiny cooked shrimp in it. Just a few years ago she would probably have served something like beet borscht and blintzes, one with lots of sour cream mixed in, the other with lots of sour cream on top. My world has changed. We are dying of nutrition.

Rosie came back to find me just as we were finishing, said she’d eaten, and told me to come and get her when I was ready. The folks were just as friendly to her now as they had been before Lee had become a more likely prospect.

I told them that Rosie and I would probably be going out of town later that day on business. They thought that was a terrific idea, but much to my relief said they had plans. Which were? I asked. They were driving up to Petaluma and having dinner with Lee. Too bad, they said, I couldn’t make it. They thought they might stay over, because Lee was taking some time off to give them a tour of the wine country the next day. Where would we be going?

“The Russian River, for starters,” I said. “That’s in Sonoma, too, but farther north.”

Maybe they would join us there later the next day? I said we would be on our way to Tahoe, by then.

“Tahoe?” my father cried. “That’s one of the places we want to be sure to go.”

“I’m sorry, Pa, but we’ll be working. And I don’t really expect to stay there much more than overnight, either.”

Maybe, he said, they would go on their own later in the week. Maybe Lee, he said, would go with them.

I escaped, and found Rosie sitting on her front deck reading a Robert Parker mystery. She stashed it next to her bed, told Alice it would be too hot for her to sit in the car, locked up the cottage with Alice inside, and followed me to my car.

Bert Olson’s Auto Shop was down in West Berkeley, just off University Avenue. On the way there, I filled Rosie in on what I wanted her to talk about with Arnold, and asked her if there was any problem with going to the river that night.

She looked delighted, and said there shouldn’t be any problem at all— she’d just need to find a dog-sitter.

Olson’s shop was tucked away on an industrial side street down the block from a lumberyard. It was a dirty white frame building with an office and garage space for three cars, two of which were filled. A sign over the garage doors said “We Specialize in Volvos and Other European Cars.”

Olson was bending over the open hood of a Volkswagen Rabbit. I introduced myself and Rosie and asked if he could spare a few minutes to talk about a customer who had disappeared. He straightened up and turned a grease-smudged face to us, checking us out with something like disbelief. Amused disbelief.

He was a short, thin man dressed in filthy gray coveralls. Brown hair and a straggly reddish-brown mustache.

“And who might that be?” he wanted to know.

“A man named Tom Gerhart, owns a Volvo. A blue 1975 wagon.”

He burst out laughing. “Disappeared, huh?”

“That’s right,” Rosie said. “Why is that funny?”

“Shit,” he said, shaking his head. “What do you want to know about him?”

“You’ve been his mechanic for a long time, isn’t that so?” she asked. He nodded, and wiped his hands on a greasy rag.

“I was just gonna take a break. Want a coke?”

We followed him into his office, declining the drink. He got one for himself, from a machine just inside the door, hoisted himself butt first onto a paper-littered desk, narrowly missing a dangerous-looking spindle, and pointed at two plastic chairs in the corner. We sat.

The floor was vinyl tile, most of them gone or half-gone. But the office itself was reasonably clean, and looked as though it had been painted within the last half-decade or so. There was a bank of rickety, olive-drab file cabinets behind the desk.

“Now, to answer your question,” he said, “I have been Tom Gerhart’s mechanic for a long time, yeah.”

“So you must know him fairly well?” I asked.

He grinned. “Well enough. Not like we was brothers or anything.”

“So,” I continued, “why do you think it’s funny that he’s disappeared?”

“Why don’t you tell me a little something about this disappearance?”

I told him. “Do you think it’s likely he would have run off with a woman?” I asked. “Did he maybe mention anything about having some problems or having to go somewhere?”

He took a long drink from the coke can. “Can’t say about the woman. He never said nothing about women at all. Never even a good, dirty joke. As to problems, well, that goes without saying, don’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Rosie asked.

“Well, shit, girl— ’scuse me, I should say woman, I guess”— he winked at her— “the man is crazier ’n a fuckin’ bedbug. I would call that a problem of sorts, wouldn’t you?”