Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (20 page)

“Which could explain why the Oakland ark is not as far along as the one in Sonoma. They’ve started some finishing work up there on the walls— bulkheads?— but not here. He could be cutting some corners, biding his time.” She poured us more orange juice.

“Possible. But why would he hire someone to find Noah?”

“He didn’t think he had a choice, with Beatrice recommending you as an investigator and Mrs. Noah pushing for some kind of action.”

I drank another half-glass of juice, which was beginning to give me heartburn. “All right. Let’s leave it at that. Either Arnold’s got the money, which I doubt, or Noah and Marjorie took off for Tahoe with it. Why take the money to Tahoe?”

“The man is crazy. Maybe he had a dream or got a message that he could quadruple his stake at the craps table.”

I laughed. “Makes as much sense as anything else.”

“They were in Tahoe for several days. Then Noah takes off, Pincus shows up at the motel and has some kind of fight with Marjorie. Over the money? Someone says something about Sonoma, and Marjorie takes off.”

“Yeah, but what’s Pincus got to do with Sonoma?”

She shrugged. “Unknown. Then, a few days after Marjorie leaves Tahoe, she calls Carleton. She’s scared, she wants him to meet her. And she winds up dead. And still no sign of Noah and no word.”

I scribbled a few more lines on my notepaper. “Got any pretzels?” She pulled a bag out of the cupboard and dumped it into a bowl. They were stale, but I ate one anyway. “Meanwhile, let’s not forget that someone sent a punk to scare me off, and the dumb shit clubs my old man.”

“That’s the kind of thing Pincus seems to enjoy. Scaring you, I mean.”

“But the guys in Tahoe were not the guys I saw here.”

“I’m sure Pincus has lots of employees.”

I ate another pretzel. “About Arnold— he seems so dedicated to the arks. Real nervous about running out of money, about getting them finished.”

“If he took the money, he’d be nervous.”

“If he never got the money he’d be nervous.”

Rosie took a pretzel, bit into it. “These are stale.”

“Yeah. What have we forgotten?”

We ran through the notes for a few minutes.

“That Saturday they took off,” I said. “Marjorie left home early in the morning, Noah left home somewhere before early afternoon, Marjorie called her grandmother in the evening, they checked in late that night at Tahoe. None of it seems to fit very tightly.”

“Neither does Noah’s head,” Rosie said uncharitably.

“True. I think we’ve got everything here. Sonoma seems to be the last lead from Marjorie, before she came back here. I want to go back up there. And on the way, why don’t we stop at Yellow Brick Farms. I’d like you to check it out with me, and I want to find out what the cops have said to Durell and vice versa. And meanwhile, I guess I’d better give Lee a call.”

“Was that too casual? Did I hear a tone of voice that was a little too casual?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She snorted at me. I handed her the bowl of stale pretzels. She said since I was going to be so busy calling Lee, she would take our summary over to Arnold, along with the request to pass it on to Hawkins as the product of many minds.

I wished Rosie a happy dinner, told her I’d talk to her first thing in the morning, and trotted back to my house. Pa was back from his walk. Dinner was still fifteen minutes away. I went into my erstwhile bedroom and closed the door.

Lee answered on the third ring. She sounded glad to hear from me. We chatted about Pa and Eva, and what a good time they were having.

Then I said, “I’m going to be up in Sonoma tomorrow. If you’re free in the evening, maybe we could go out for a drink or a movie or something.”

She was free. We decided on dinner and a movie she’d heard good things about. I wrote down her address, on F Street near downtown Petaluma. Of course, almost everything in Petaluma is near downtown Petaluma.

I would see her at six.

Eva was setting the table when I came out of the bedroom. Tonight was fish, she said. Poached salmon with green beans, beets, and parsley potatoes.

“A light meal,” she said, “because none of us is getting any younger.”

My appetite thus dulled, I sat down to eat.

“So, big shot, your face is healing pretty good. Been chasing muggers again?”

“No, Pa.”

“He was brave that night when the man hit you,” Eva objected. “You shouldn’t pick on him.”

“Pick on him? Who picks? But you know what they say about brave?”

“No,” I replied. “I do not know what they say about brave.” The fish was good. My appetite was returning.

“Neither do I, but curiosity killed a cat.”

“And a stitch in time saves nine.”

“And,” Eva snapped, “you should both grow like onions with your heads in the ground.”

The old Jewish curse shut us up.

The phone rang just as I was bringing out the coffee.

“Hi, Jake. Playing Batman again?” It was Hal.

“No. Captain Marvel. Shazam. What’s up?”

“We missed you at poker. It’s at your house next week.”

“I’ll have to call you.”

“Okay. Now about this Marjorie Burns— you know she was a Guardian Angel?” I told him I knew.

“She was shot with a .38, back of the head, hands tied behind her back, all that good shit. And it happened there, on the flats. There was, as they say, a struggle, because she had mud all over, and it looked like she did some running before they caught her— prints and stuff, hard to pick out in that mess, but enough.”

“Any hints about the alleged perpetrators?”

“You’re right to make it plural. There was a witness— a passing motorist. Not a real good witness, because he was zipping by on the road, but he saw a car parked on the shoulder and he saw a couple of guys climbing over the fence from the flats, real fast, jumping into the car. He thought it was pretty strange, so he didn’t forget, and when he saw the story in the paper about Marjorie Burns, he called the cops.

“Anything on the guys or the car?”

“The car was a dark-colored, older model, big. And one of the guys, he said, was blond. Some of you white folks really stand out in the dark.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but sometimes people can’t tell us apart.” I told him about the punk who’d come looking for me and gotten my father. “So, if the cops make the connection between that police report and this homicide, I’m tied in in about forty ways.”

“Maybe I don’t know you. Maybe we should plan on having the poker game somewhere else. Like the Oaks Club.”

“I’ve had enough of Emeryville for a while.”

“That’s all I’ve got. Except you know she disappeared with some guy a couple of weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“They’re looking for him.”

“Isn’t everybody.”

“Oh, and there was the thing about her identification. She had two IDs, her real one and a phony in the name of Hinks. They found her rented car on the Holiday Inn lot. Rented as Hinks. That’s all I got.” I thanked him for his help. “No problem. But you’ll have to tell me all about it when I’ve got more time. See you Tuesday, I hope.”

I took my coffee out on the front steps. Eva went into the bedroom to watch
Wheel of Fortune,
and Pa joined me.

“Eva wants to go to Lake Tahoe,” he said. “We thought we’d take one of those buses, go up tomorrow, stay a couple days, come back, stay here a couple days, go home.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said absently.

“I never gambled, except a little pool in the old days, a little cards for pennies. What’s a good game?”

“There’s Keno. And craps. And twenty-one. And of course the machines.”

“Ah. The one-armed bandits.”

“Yes, those.”

“What is this twenty-one?”

So I showed them, when Eva’s program was over. We played for a couple of hours. I was the house, and I won.

The first thing I did the next morning was go down to the cottage and call Victor’s junkyard.

“What do you want, Samson?” He sounded more tired than unfriendly.

“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about Marjorie. To ask how her grandmother’s holding up. And to ask you if you remember anything now you didn’t remember the last time I talked to you.”

“Okay. Yeah. Right. Sorry. Look, I’m not feeling too good. Her grandma’s feeling worse. And I don’t remember anything at all. What is it you want me to remember?”

“About Sonoma. You said you remembered she told you she was going to Sonoma. It would help a lot if you remembered when she said she was going.”

“I been thinking about that. I can’t be sure. But you know, I kind of have this feeling it was late in the week she told me. See, my wife doesn’t remember her dropping by, and my wife she generally takes off on Friday.”

“And you still don’t remember her saying anything about Tahoe?”

“No. She sure didn’t say anything about Tahoe.”

“Okay, thanks. If you should think of anything, please give me a call. Meanwhile, take it easy, and give my best to her grandmother.”

“Thanks, man. Life sure is a piece of shit sometimes, ain’t it?”

“Sometimes, Victor.”

I told Rosie what he’d said. “Sounds to me like that’s where she went Saturday morning.” I drank a cup of Rosie’s good coffee and told her about my date that night.

“So it’s Yellow Brick Farms, then north to the ark, then you head back down to Petaluma,” she said. “I’ll follow you up in my truck for the working part of it. Unless you want me along on your date.”

“I don’t think so. Take your truck.”

Durell was in, but the woman at the front desk told me he was busy. This was not Doreen, Durell’s Saturday secretary, but a much younger woman who seemed unbearably bored. If we could wait half an hour or so, she said, he would see us. We said we could. We went outside to stand in the sun. It wouldn’t be many weeks, now, before the rains started again.

“This place looks big,” Rosie commented. “Let’s walk around.”

There wasn’t anything else to do, so we walked. When we got around to the back, just beyond the loading dock, I noticed some broken glass on the ground. Looking at the wall above it, I saw that the window had been newly replaced— bright white glazing putty, shiny new glass. Rosie was peering into a dumpster near the dock. I called her over.

“Boost me up,” she said.

A second later, I heard her say, “Oh, hello.” The window shot up and Durell stuck his head out. Rosie dropped to the ground.

“Samson! The receptionist told me you were here. Why is your friend peeking in my window?” He was startled, and not amused at all.

“It’s a lab,” Rosie told me.

“Sorry, Joe,” I said. “I wasn’t planning on peeking in any windows until I saw this one had been broken.”

He shook his head, still not amused. “Come on back around to the front, both of you. I can talk to you now.”

His office door was open and he waved his hand at the side chairs.

“What happened to your lab?” Rosie wanted to know.

He smiled grimly. “Burglar. I guess we’ll have to put up some bars.”

“What did they steal?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Looks like they did some damage,” Rosie said. “That wasn’t just window glass you were cleaning up.”

“Burglars are clumsy. Maybe it was some druggie looking for something. There’s plenty of ex-flower children up here, and half of them are crazy.”

I was remembering something. Something I’d read in Noah’s papers. “Wasn’t there an employee? Someone you fired? He was complaining to Noah, saying you had no reason to let him go. Wasn’t he connected with the lab in some way?”

“I don’t know who that would be. It’s a good-sized company, sometimes we have to let people go.”

“This was pretty recently. And he was connected with the lab.”

“That’s right,” Rosie said. “I remember it, too. Howard. William Howard.”

Durell snapped his fingers. “By God, that’s right. He was my lab assistant. Incompetent, unfortunately. He took it hard.” He thought a minute, and shook his head. “But if you mean he did the burglary— out of spite or something— he wasn’t that kind of man.”

“Have you got an address or phone number for him?”

He sighed and pushed a button on his intercom. “Annie? Would you see if you can find a personnel file on William Howard? Terminated.” He thanked her and turned back to us. “Now, Samson, what did you come up here to talk to me about? I heard about Marjorie, by the way. That’s a real shame.”

“Yes, it is. I suppose the police have been here to talk to you?”

“Sure have. They wanted to check out his office. I think they also wanted me to tell them that Noah killed her, but I couldn’t exactly do that. They asked me if I knew anything about the two of them going to Tahoe. Say, I think you must know the cop I talked to.”

“Why do you say that?”

“When I mentioned your name, he acted like it was familiar to him.”

Wonderful. I didn’t think I’d call to check my answering machine while I was away from home. There might be something on it.

Durell caught my look. “Maybe you didn’t want your name brought into it? Hey, I’m sorry Jake. All I said was that you’d been doing some checking around, looking for Tom. Nothing wrong with that, is there? This is a murder case, after all.”

I didn’t say I’d already noticed that. “There’s something else, Joe. Arnold says that just a few days before Noah took off he told him to speed up the work on the arks, that the flood was coming sooner than he’d first thought. Know anything about that?”

“Only that I heard that’s what he said. That everything had to move faster. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it? To say that and then to take away the money. Just doesn’t make sense. Well, if that’s all you need, I’ve got one hell of a lot of work to do.” He pushed the intercom button again. “Annie? Did you find that file? Good. Pull out the address and phone number and give them to Mr. Samson. He’s on his way out.”

Annie handed me a slip of paper as we passed her desk. Howard’s address was in Glen Ellen. Annie gave us directions.

Number 517 was a duplex. Neither of the names on the bells was Howard. I rang the bell for the downstairs flat.

The elderly woman who answered the door smiled warmly at us, but said Mr. Howard no longer rented her upstairs.