Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (22 page)

Hawkins concentrated on me.

Yes, I told him, we were helping our neighbors at the Oakland ark look for their lost leader, because I was hoping to get a story of some kind. After all, a bunch of crazies building an ark? Great copy. He sneered at me.

Yes, I admitted, Rosie and I had picked up the trail of Noah and Marjorie in Tahoe. Yes, we’d seen the papers. We knew she had been killed. No, I had not gotten the message he’d left on my answering machine that afternoon and I didn’t know he wanted me to call him. That was true.

Then I really started lying. Putting on my best innocent-idiot face, I asked why we would think it was strange that Durell had fired his lab assistant and had a different secretary on Saturdays than he did the rest of the week.

I also said it had never occurred to me that Durell might be using the ark for a drug warehouse, even though yes, of course, we knew he was a chemist. Had we seen the insides of both arks? Yes. Then we must have noticed the plywood sheathing on the walls of this one. Of course. Rosie was, after all, a carpenter. But why, I protested, would we think it was strange that no one was putting up any plywood in Oakland?

As a matter of fact, we’d been slower on that than we should have been. We’d seen Noah’s construction sketches, along with his other papers, early on. But they were Noah’s, and we didn’t take them seriously. Until more pieces fell into place, we just assumed they were incomplete.

Hawkins let me make a phone call. I called my lawyer, but only to tell her I would probably not make it for our date that night and would call her again when I was free.

After yet another hour of questions, they put Rosie and me in a room together. We compared notes carefully, on the chance that the light fixtures might have ears. While we were talking casually about what we had said we didn’t know, they opened the door and another wrung-out specimen stumbled in. Jerry Pincus.

A small but adequate adrenaline rush propelled me toward him. He held up his hands and said, “I’m sorry, Samson.”

“Yeah?” I snarled, grabbing the front of his shirt.

He didn’t seem to notice. “Yeah. I tried to call Arnold that night to check you out, but I couldn’t get an answer. I didn’t know who the hell you were. For all I knew, you were out to get Noah and Marjorie.” He glanced up at the ceiling light and raised his voice. “Of course, I called the police the minute I heard about Marjorie, to tell them what I knew.”

That left a lot unexplained, but the Jerry, who represented a piece of the picture we hadn’t been able to fit in yet, wasn’t about to talk any more that day. Not to me and not in that room.

Hawkins turned us loose in the small hours of the morning, promising that he would see us the next day in Oakland and we’d better keep ourselves available if we knew what was good for us.

Over the next three days, we each got a few more sessions down at Oakland Homicide, and putting those sessions together with what we learned from Noah and from Jerry Pincus, we managed to fill it all in.

During my last visit with Hawkins, on Sunday, he had told me he was anxious to see the story I wrote for
Probe.
“You be sure and send me a copy of it,” he said.

Pa and Eva came back from Tahoe Monday morning.

“I saw the papers up there,” Pa said, when he thought Eva was out of earshot in the yard. “Big dope raid on an ark. Wasn’t this ark. Was another one. Theirs, too?”

“Yes, Pa.”

He nodded slowly, heavily. “Rico and me, we thought there was something fishy. That Arnold, very fishy. We knew there must be something wrong over there.”

“It wasn’t Arnold, Pa.”

“It wasn’t Arnold that what?” Eva demanded, marching in the front door. “It was a dope fiend that hit your father, yes?”

“Not exactly, Eva. Well, yes. A dope fiend. Sure.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Pa announced. “No more dope fiends. Next time you come to visit us. Now, let’s you and me go say hello to your tenant.” He was going to insist on an explanation.

Eva would be neither distracted nor fooled. “We’ll all go down, you’ll tell us what’s what. You think I can’t read newspapers? You think maybe I didn’t notice something a little funny, you with a black eye, dope fiends in the yard?”

So we all went down to the cottage and Rosie and I told them what was what.

The part that took the most explaining was the part about the designer drugs. Pa remembered reading the story in the paper about the fake heroin that was flooding the market and turning people into vegetables.

“It was the same thing?”

“No. Something new. Not even an imitation of another drug. Brand new and not illegal— because nobody’s made it illegal yet.”

“So how could the police arrest them?”

We decided to start at the beginning.

Durell had to be aware that other people, many of them chemists, were making fortunes by mixing their own drugs. All it took was a few quarts of ordinary chemicals and a little know-how, and you had a fortune in street dope. Millions of dollars worth of untested— but who cared about that?— drugs.

Durell had access to the chemicals. He had a lot of know-how. And he had a laboratory. Unfortunately, he owned only a small share of the business, about a quarter of a million dollars worth, and his partner was around a lot.

Then Noah had his vision. He started building his arks. He didn’t have time for Yellow Brick Farms anymore. Durell was pretty much on his own. As long as he kept the business going, no one, not Noah and certainly not Mrs. Noah, would interfere.

All he had to do was get rid of his hard-working, conscientious lab assistant, who would certainly be able to tell that the lab was being used on weekends no matter how carefully Durell cleaned up after himself. Get rid of him and bring in a part-time employee to help with packaging and deliveries. Doreen. The Saturday secretary.

He checked out the drug laws and found the loopholes. There are the illegal drugs and there are the ones that aren’t illegal yet.

Under state law, an illegal drug like heroin or cocaine is illegal whether it is, according to the California Supreme Court, “produced directly or indirectly by extraction from substances of vegetable origin, or independently by means of chemical synthesis.”

“That means,” Rosie interjected, “that if you imitate an illegal drug— the one the court was ruling on there was imitation cocaine— you’ve still got a banned drug.”

Eva looked blank. Pa was squinting painfully. “But if you come up with something brand new,” I added, “the law can’t convict you. The new stuff you make— call it jellybean-x— has to be outlawed before it’s illegal to make and sell.” Their eyes cleared somewhat.

So Durell came up with something new. Nothing crude, and no mere imitation. It didn’t melt people’s brains, but the high made them feel powerful, confident, Godlike. You get the wrong people feeling like that, you’ve got mean. Like the guy who was battering old folks down in West Berkeley so he could stay up all the time.

Durell had managed to get only one batch on the street before he was stopped, but its effects were going to be felt for a while.

That first batch was the one Marjorie saw being delivered to the ark early one Saturday morning.

Because Marjorie, growing up as she did, where she did, had a suspicious mind, and it kicked in when Noah told her they had to push the schedule up because Joe Durell had had a dream of prophecy. He had dreamed, Noah said, that the flood was coming in December, a month sooner than they’d thought. They had to hurry. Durell himself would spend more time at Sonoma, pushing the project.

Marjorie didn’t like or trust Durell and she didn’t for a minute believe he’d had a vision. She figured he had another reason for hanging around the Sonoma ark, for wanting it built faster.

She went up to Sonoma, early in the morning on the 14th, earlier even than the crew was due to arrive. She left her car parked down the main road and hiked in. Durell, she saw, had been busy down in the hold. A finished bulkhead, sheathed in plywood, a refinement that wasn’t in the plans. She fiddled with it and it slid open. Empty. She heard a car coming, climbed up out of the hold and down the ladder to the ground, and hid in the woods. She saw the Toyota pull in. Doreen and Joe Durell got out, opened the trunk and started unloading boxes. Doreen dropped one. A couple of plastic bags fell out. When they’d gone, Marjorie drove like hell back to Oakland to tell Noah.

Noah, I explained to the folks, refused to call the police. Against Marjorie’s protests, he called Yellow Brick Farms. Durell was there. Noah told him what he knew and said he was on his way up to talk to him. He didn’t want to go to the police, he told Durell. He didn’t want his project destroyed, his good works ruined, his cult blown away by scandal. He begged and he threatened and he offered a deal. He would buy Durell out of the business, buy him off.

Durell told him to come right along to Yellow Brick Farms and they would talk about it.

Noah took a check from his book, registering the amount he planned to write, and wrote a note to his wife. Yes, he admitted to Marjorie, he was worried about what might happen at the plant, but he had to go.

Marjorie drove his car, and she took him, not to Sonoma county, but to someone she knew of in West Oakland who made false identification. Sure, she hated criminals, but she was desperate enough to buy the services of one. She knew they had to get away and that they had to cover their trail. She couldn’t force Noah to call the police, and she didn’t want to go against his wishes by calling them herself, but she had another plan, and during the hours while they waited for the fake paper, she convinced him to go along with her.

They drove to Tahoe. She didn’t want to get her Guardian Angel pals involved in a drug situation, but there was someone else who might be willing to help: Jerry Pincus. If he couldn’t talk Noah into calling the law he could at least try to keep him away from Durell. And, she figured, they’d be safe with Pincus.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Pa interrupted me. “Why should this Durell be so worried? You said his drug is not illegal?”

“Even so,” I said, “he could be arrested and he could be stopped. See, it works like this: the cops see you sneaking around with a lot of plastic bags full of white powder, they’ve got what they call ‘probable cause’ to arrest you. They take the stuff to a lab for analysis. Meanwhile, you’re out on bail, with the law looking over your shoulder. They’re going to go ahead with the prosecution while they try to figure out what they’ve got in those bags. If it’s something really new and it’s not a banned substance, you’ll get off. But by the time the whole mess is over and you’re free, the machinery is in motion to make your jellybean-x illegal, and the cops know who you are. You could try making something else, but…”

“But meanwhile, a business worth tens of millions of dollars is out the window,” Rosie concluded. “And that’s why Durell was so worried.”

“And that’s why Marjorie, who was planning to disappear with Noah, was so scared,” I said.

So they went to Jerry Pincus, who was horrified. Noah tried to talk Pincus into going to Sonoma with him. No soap. Pincus said he would try to protect them, somehow, but if they didn’t call the cops he would. Noah begged for some time to think it over, and Pincus agreed, reluctantly.

Noah kept after Pincus, but he couldn’t break him down. He gave up and decided to go to Sonoma himself, even though he hadn’t decided what he would do there. He was, by now, convinced that Durell might be dangerous.

When Marjorie discovered he was gone, she called Pincus, who went to the motel. She blamed him for not doing a better job of keeping Noah safe. She said she was afraid he’d gone to Sonoma.

Pincus still wouldn’t agree to help. He fought with Marjorie about calling the police, but agreed not to do it himself, less, I suspect, out of loyalty than out of a growing unwillingness to get involved in the mess.

Marjorie went after Noah herself. She holed up with a friend in Santa Rosa and drove to the River every day, looking for him, asking at motels, scared to death the whole time that someone from the ark would spot her. The Santa Rosa friend, who called the police when Marjorie turned up dead, said Marjorie seemed terrified but wouldn’t tell her why.

Actually, she needn’t have been so worried at the River. Durell was busy at Yellow Brick Farms that weekend, giving me my virgin tour of the plant, and then, with me safely gone, getting to work on the second batch of jellybean-x. Once he’d met me, he decided to dispatch Fred and friend to the Bay Area to knock me around a bit and scare me off. And have yet another try at picking up the fugitives’ trail.

They were still in the East Bay a couple of days later when Marjorie, unable to find Noah, went back to get some help from her friends. But Fred got to her before Carleton did.

Noah, meanwhile, was camping out in the woods, meditating. While he was asking for divine guidance, he had enough sense to keep his recognizable car hidden on a back road. He made his decision. He stopped in Guerneville to pick up a can of gasoline and get something to eat, saw the paper, saw what had happened to Marjorie. He went wild. He drove to Yellow Brick Farms. The lab door had a new lock on it. He went out back, broke in, and tore the place apart. Then he went back to the Russian River, rented a canoe and paddled to the ark, hiding in the woods, waiting for his chance to finish making the world clean again. Not a flood this time. Fire.

Pincus had by then also heard of Marjorie’s death, called the police with a half-story, and, he said, feeling somehow responsible for Marjorie, sent his own men to the River to try to find Noah.

Durell, reasoning correctly that Rosie and I had found his trashed lab mildly suspicious, sent Doreen to the ark to warn Fred that we were in Sonoma and might be headed up that way. They told the crew we were criminals, and if we showed up asking questions they should tell us nothing.

When we showed up, they stashed Fred’s partner in the hold, afraid we might recognize him from that night in Oakland. After we left, they sent the rest of the crew home. Durell was on his way; they were going to move the white stuff out.