Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (2 page)

This group, with Noah as its organizer and leader, believed that a series of tidal waves was about to inundate the world, drowning all the continents. The first wave, Arnold said, was due to start swallowing North America by January 1, which meant that they had only a little more than three months to finish their arks. That’s arks, plural. They had two: the one on my corner and another up in Sonoma County near the Russian River. The people who worked on the arks, and their families, would be the only ones saved when the world went under.

So they really believed, as the muscular young ark-builder had told me, that when the vessels were finished, they would be “afloat.” Arnold had cut that conversation short because they didn’t want people outside the group knowing about the project. It was like the old story about the fallout shelter. Once it started raining, everyone would try to get in.

But a problem had come up. Noah had disappeared. He had left a note for his wife and he had gone away, apparently with a woman and certainly with a quarter of a million dollars of his own money that he had promised to invest in the arks.

Arnold was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to finish the arks without the money, but even if they could somehow make up for that loss, he said, they could not make up for the loss of their leader. The police wouldn’t help because the note was in Noah’s handwriting and he hadn’t taken anyone’s money but his own. They said it looked like the man had simply run off with a woman. Arnold said that there were even some rumors among the ark group itself that Noah had abandoned them. But that was impossible. He would never have run off. He would never have lost faith and he would never have left his wife. Arnold was sure that Noah had been kidnapped, at the very least.

Like the police, I had my doubts. Unlike the police, I had time and nothing much to do. Also, unlike the police, I stood to make some money on the deal, and my own funds were getting a little low.

I don’t mind working for crazies, as long as they’re not bad crazies. These people seemed to be reasonably okay crazies. They weren’t blaming the flood on any particular group of people or any particular life-style or set of beliefs. They included in their number all kinds of people, as long as said people, according to Arnold, led “lives of love and peace.”

What they were blaming it on, as it turned out, was what Arnold called “mankind’s violation of our covenant with God.” It wasn’t so much that people were doing a lot of bad things, he explained, it was that we weren’t following God’s law by punishing the wicked. An eye for an eye. A life for a life.

“All legal?” I asked suspiciously.

“All very legal,” he hastened to assure me. They believed in the law, and that the law should be used to punish and protect. To kill the killers and stop the victimization of the innocent.

I reflected that Noah’s bunch were, so to speak, riding a wave. Killing the killers. I remembered reading about a national poll that showed a clear thirty-year cycle. In 1953, nearly seventy percent of the population favored the death penalty. By 1966 that figure had crashed to around forty percent. By 1985 it was up in the seventies again, and if I remember correctly, was the highest it had been since polls were taken. There was nothing simple about the reason, or at least I didn’t think so. It wasn’t just because people were returning to fifties-style conservatism, although there was some of that in it. It wasn’t just because history moves in thirty-year cycles, although it sure seems to. No, what happened was closer to this: life itself changed. Cities changed. In the forties and early fifties retribution was simply an ethical and philosophical issue. Most people weren’t exposed to that much crime or that many criminals. When legal fashion began to change, about the time we started trying to understand everybody, no one worried too much. The same people who had gone along with the old eye for an eye, that same mass of Americans who hadn’t been exposed to much crime, went along with the mood. They were, after all, civilized people, and believed in keeping up with the times.

By the end of the sixties, though, a new element had come into it. Nearly everyone, at least those who lived in or near a city of any size, now had the opportunity to learn about crime and criminals firsthand. Suddenly, or so it seemed, there was a huge criminal class of people who thought being pissed off generally was a good excuse. Crime was no longer academic and the criminal was not someone you never had to meet, a poor oppressed product of an unjust or unfeeling or economically tilted society. He was the son of a bitch with the lead pipe in his hand who’d strolled up to you on the street, the one who’d paid for your skull fracture with less than a year in prison. And now everybody was pissed off. Killing the killers. Right, Noah, I thought. That’s the wave of the future.

The figures from that national poll— Gallup, it was— had stuck with me for strong personal reasons. That low point for retribution, 1966? That was the year I became a cop, back in Chicago. The summer of love hadn’t happened yet, and the summer of hate was still two years off. I was a pretty idealistic kid. I wanted to be a cop to protect good people. Chicago was a hard town, people barricaded inside their neighborhoods, spitting over the line into the alien territory next door. But I believed everything was going to get better. We were beginning to understand people, see, beginning to understand why criminals were criminals. If we understood, we could maybe make it all better. And I was going to help. Sixty-six was okay.

Sixty-seven was not bad, although, as a cop, I wished the hippies would wave their dope around a little less. Then came 1968, summer, the Democratic Convention. Chicago in the summer is bad enough without the smell of tear gas. Somehow, in the middle of the mess, I stopped a kid who was coming at me, a long-haired kid waving a sign that said “Make Love Not War.” I stopped him with my truncheon, and I saw the blood pour down his face, and I saw his friend carry him off. That was pretty much it for me. That whole, bloody, stinking time, with kids rioting and the “leaders” who didn’t give a shit how many of them got hurt. The leaders who knew the Chicago cops were rotten and would be encouraged to be rotten and bust heads and lob tear gas canisters into the yards of citizens, and generally prove they were the pigs these people said they were. That whole bloody stinking time. I was a scared kid and I just knew that the kid I’d hit had been an innocent, an idealist, a peace-lover pushed to the edge of stupidity. I didn’t report for roll call the next morning. I never went back to the force. I lit out for California, the northern part, and wandered around doing odd jobs, soaking up the culture, helping out a few friends who got in trouble, living on a commune, living with a woman, getting married and getting divorced and moving, eventually, to the metropolitan East Bay, to Berkeley and then across the border to Oakland. I was a Chicago boy, a city kid, returned to his roots. And I could understand how other city kids might want to believe God was going to wash away all the bad guys, the ones who made innocent people bleed.

So even though Arnold was clearly nuts, I had decided to take his money.

Flight 501 from Chicago was coming in for a landing.

I got up and stood near the ramp entrance as the passengers began emerging, swarming with relief from their portable environment to solid, stationary airport. Although I was looking hard, I didn’t see my parents until they were nearly on me. They’re both short, and a little plump. It was my father’s shirt I saw first, a red and blue Hawaiian number. This was not a concession to current fashion, but a decades-old concession to alien places. He’d been to visit me only a couple of times since I’d moved west; his ideas of California remained unshakably L.A., and his idea of L.A. came, I think, from Alan Ladd movies.

Eva was wearing a turquoise polyester pants suit. She grabbed me before my father had a chance to, and damned near squeezed the life out of me, planting a lipsticked kiss on my lips. Then it was his turn. He hugged me close for a few seconds, then, pushing me away with his hands on my biceps, looked me up and down.

“So, bum? How are you?”

“Isaac!” Eva laughed. “Is that something to call your only son? Such a doll, too.”

“A doll in blue jeans.” He shook his head, but he was smiling.

Eva patted my stomach. “A little more weight, maybe, since I saw you last?”

I shrugged. “I’m on a diet,” I lied.

It took a while to get their luggage, not because the service was slow, but because there was so much of it. Two big ones, three medium, and two canvas bags. I took the two big ones and a bag. My father picked up the three medium ones, grunted, and handed one to Eva.

When we got to the Chevy he looked at it the way he’d looked at me. I braced myself, but he surprised me.

“Hah! Now, that’s what a car should look like. Like an automobile.”

That was great, but, it turned out, he also believed a house should look like a house and a yard should look like a yard.

“What is this?” he wanted to know, as we trudged up the gravel driveway. “A farm?”

“That’s the vegetable garden, Pa.”

“In the front yard?”

“In this neighborhood,” I told him, “you show off your vegetables.”

We passed Rosie’s cottage.

“This is where the Italian lives?” They knew Rosie’s name and they knew she was my friend. Like most of the immigrant generation, they approved of Italians, even if they
were
Catholic.

I nodded. “That’s the cottage.”

“Could use a little paint,” Eva said. The cedar shingles were only five years old. I wondered what they’d say about the house. I’d started painting the exterior stucco three years before, and, tiny as the place is, I’d never quite managed to find the time to finish. It’s half pale pink and half white. The trim is half scabrous white and half dark green. They didn’t say anything, which is, for them, the ultimate comment.

We dumped the bags in the middle of the living room.

“This,” I pointed to the steel trap, “is a sofa bed, where I will sleep. You get the bedroom.”

“We wouldn’t think of it,” Eva said quickly, before my father got his mouth open. “We wouldn’t want to put you out.”

“Eva,” I kissed her on the cheek. “You couldn’t possibly do that.”

They got up at seven the next morning, tiptoeing heavily around the house until I crawled out of the trap.

“I’ll bet you always get up this early, right?” I asked, untwisting my pajama bottoms— I don’t normally wear anything to bed— and accepting a cup of coffee.

“Sure,” my father replied. “If you had a job you’d get up early, too.”

“I have a job,” I grumped. “I just hadn’t planned on starting it before nine or so.”

Eva made oatmeal. I had a piece of toast, showered, dressed, wandered around the yard for a while, and got underway by nine-thirty.

Following the directions Arnold had given me, I took Claremont Avenue into Berkeley and turned up Ashby, passing the Claremont Hotel. Actually, they call it a resort hotel, but I can never quite get myself to accept the idea of a resort in Berkeley. The massive turn-of-the-century structure occupies acres of insanely expensive real estate. It straddles the Berkeley/Oakland line, but for some reason the management says it’s in Oakland. Must have something to do with taxes. Nothing else that is able to say it’s in Berkeley ever says it’s in Oakland.

I took the second left after the hotel and started the uphill climb through some other very expensive real estate. When I found the house, my first thought was that if all this belonged to me I’d drown before I’d trade it in on a crowded ark.

It had a circular driveway, something you don’t see very often outside of old movies. The middle of the bagel was a mass of flowers and shrubs. The grounds looked big enough and complicated enough to require a full-time gardener. The house itself was one of those Georgian neoclassic numbers with the Greek columns across the front.

One car was parked in the driveway. It was a big, new, expensive American car. I don’t know what kind. All big, new, expensive cars look alike to me. I pulled up behind it. The steps leading up to the portico were wide, and so was the portico. The front door had a fanlight. The bell was a three-note chime.

A thirtyish maid with a sullen freckled face and bright orange hair answered the door. At least I guessed she was a maid. She was wearing a droopy shirtwaist dress and white tennis shoes instead of a cute little uniform, but she was carrying an open bottle of furniture polish. She was a flaw in the fantasyland of this house, and I was still resenting that when she told me Mrs. Gerhart would see me in the den. Georgian houses don’t have dens.

Still clutching her bottle, she led me across a large entry hall with— sure enough— a wide stairway curving down from a gallery, and ushered me through a large door. She didn’t announce me, she just turned and padded away.

The den was a dim hideaway that had been designed as a library. An easy deduction: the walls were lined with shelves. The woman who rose from the brown leather couch to greet me was in her late forties. She was wearing a full skirt that came halfway down her calves, high-heeled pumps, and a short-sleeved blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a ruffle down the front. Her blond hair was styled in a slightly updated bastard version of the Italian Boy cut of the fifties. She had an upturned nose, red lipstick, and a bright smile.

“Mr. Samson,” she said pertly, “I’m so happy to meet you. Arnold has told me so much about you.” Arnold didn’t know so much about me, and it was probably just as well, but I nodded agreeably and took a seat in the matching leather chair she offered me. “Adele is bringing sherry. I hope you like sherry?”

I assumed Adele was the maid who had let me in. I hoped she would put down the furniture polish before she poured the drinks. I said that sherry would be fine.

“You’ll have to ask me questions— may I call you Jake?— because I really don’t know what you need to know. Call me June.”

“Well, June, for a start, why don’t you just tell me a little bit about your husband. Your history together, his interests, his friends, that kind of thing.”