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

“Should I start way back at the beginning?”

“Sure.” I wanted to get a picture of the man who had married this fifties princess and become first a rich man and then a cult leader. And I wanted to get a feel for his wife.

“Okay. Let’s see, we met in 1957, at college. He was in graduate school. I was a junior, in education. We met at a sorority party. He was going to be a chemist. I thought that was wonderful.” Yeah, I thought. In 1957 everyone wanted to be a chemist or an engineer and have a great job forever. My mother, may she rest in peace, had wanted me to be a nuclear physicist when I grew up.

She continued. “I admired him so much. All my friends envied me.” She sighed.

“By the way,” I interjected, “is his real name Noah?”

“Oh, good heavens no. His real name is Thomas. Anyway, we were married just two weeks after he got his master’s. I decided I really didn’t need a degree, myself. Of course, he got a job immediately. We bought our first little house. That was back in Ohio. Cleveland. We settled down to raise a family.” She sighed again. “But we didn’t have one.” So much for her generation’s American Dream. “They thought it was because he’d had mumps. Well, things just sort of went along like that. We lived in Cleveland, then Texas. He had wonderful jobs and life was very good. We saved lots of money. But in 1968 or thereabouts, Thomas began to be unhappy. He began to have nightmares. He began to talk about… well, he said he was contributing to the poisoning of the planet. One day he just sat me down and he said, June, I want to move to California and open a health food business. Well, you can just about imagine… But he said he’d worked all those years and made all that money, and he thought there was even more he could make in health food. He said health food and vitamins and things were going to get very big. And you know, Jake, he’d always been right. After all, I had to give him credit for that. He always knew about trends; that’s why he became a chemist in the first place. So I said, okay, Thomas, I guess you know what you’re talking about.”

We were interrupted by the arrival of Adele with the sherry. Two glasses and a bottle on a tray, no furniture polish.

“Thank you, Adele,” she said. Adele left without answering. “So to make a long story short, we moved here. First thing, he opened a store, to get the feel of the business. Then, sure enough, he began to expand. Before I knew it, he was wholesaling and then he had farms and brand names and everything. That was all in five or six years, I forget which.”

This guy, I thought, was a real whiz. I began to wonder how he figured to make money out of arks.

“And then what happened?” I prompted.

“We got rich.” She smiled and sipped her sherry. “But that wasn’t enough for Thomas. He is a seeker. He began to study religion. Oh, not just Christianity, you know, but all kinds of things. And then, just a couple of years ago, he started having dreams again. Nightmares. And then he started getting messages about a flood. That was when he took the name Noah and started organizing these arks. Well, I hate to admit it, Jake, but I thought he was crazy. I begged him to go see a therapist. He wouldn’t and he wouldn’t and then he finally did, somebody here in Berkeley, and he came home and said the therapist told him he was okay and if he wanted to organize arks he certainly had the money and the time and why shouldn’t he? I don’t know if the therapist actually said that, but what could I do? He seemed all right otherwise. I certainly didn’t believe there was going to be a flood, but he was happy, and I thought, what if it’s true? I’d certainly want to be on the ark.”

“What happened to the health food business? Did he sell it?”

“Oh, no. Yellow Brick Farms is still going strong. Although it hasn’t been easy with Thomas concentrating on the arks.”

“You’ve been running the business, then?”

“Oh, no. There’s his partner Joe, Joe Durell. He’s running things. I admire him tremendously, but I’m sure it’s difficult, not having Thomas. He’s understaffed right now, too, besides that. And of course he’s been helping with the arks all along… Jake, Thomas would never leave me. He’s been kidnapped, or maybe he’s been murdered.” Her eyes filled with moisture. Her hand shook and she set down her sherry glass and poured it half full again. I accepted another one. She looked up at me and the tears spilled over. “I hope you can help us.”

“I hope I can, too. So, this Durell’s running Noah’s business affairs, and he’s involved in the arks?” She nodded. “And Arnold’s running Noah’s ark affairs? Is he also involved in the business?”

“No.” She placed her sherry glass on a side table without taking a sip.

“Why keep the business going, I mean, if you believe there’s going to be a flood?”

“Oh, Jake, you can’t just put people out of work. Joe was very concerned about that. And then it brings in money, of course. Along with the casino.”

“The casino?”

“We have a casino up at Tahoe. Well, a part interest in one.”

Of course, I thought. I asked her if there were any other major business interests I should know about, and she said there weren’t. That was a relief.

There were a lot of things I needed to know about Noah neé Thomas Gerhart, but the most important item, at the moment, was the one that came last in the scheme of things: the dear June letter he’d left his wife before he’d disappeared. I asked to see it. She nodded, businesslike, and handed me a file folder that had been lying on one of the bookshelves.

I opened it. It contained an original and two photocopies of the letter. I took out the original. It was six days old, dated September 14.

My Dear June:

I have gone to do something I have to do. I can’t tell you how long it will take or even if I will be back at all. I can’t tell you what I’m doing or why because it’s better for you not to know, and the last thing I want is to see you get hurt. But I have to do this. Tell Arnold for me, please, and tell him that Marjorie is with me.

Love, Noah

The note was handwritten.

“What do you think about this?” I asked carefully.

“I think it was written under duress by someone who wanted the money.”

“You don’t think he’s just run away with this Marjorie— what’s her last name?— to have an affair or something?”

“Of course not. Her name is Burns.”

“You know her, then?”

“We’ve met. She’s a loyal worker. That’s really all I know about her, except that she’s black.”

“Can you describe her?”

“Not really.”

“I’d like to have this,” I said, waving the note.

“You may have one of the copies,” she said softly. I went along with her. She wanted the original, she could have it. I stuck the original back in the folder and kept one of the copies.

She’d found the note, she said, propped up on her dining room table that afternoon when she’d come home from shopping. She’d taken it to Arnold. The two of them had agonized for a couple of days, finally deciding to take the note to the police. The original. The police hadn’t wanted it. They’d asked two questions: “Is this his handwriting?” and “Does the missing money belong to him?” Yes it was and yes it did, so that was that.

Arnold had known how much money was involved, because it was the amount he and Noah had decided was necessary to cover the remaining construction on the arks, and for supplies, seeds, tools, and equipment for the new world they were planning on building. As before, Noah would hand over the money to Arnold, who would deposit it in the ark account and oversee its disbursement. Mrs. Noah also knew how much was to be handed over, and knew that the check her husband had written— with no payee listed in the check register— had nearly depleted the account from which ark money was usually taken. The check had been dated, according to the register, September 14, the day he had disappeared.

“Do you normally keep that kind of money in a checking account?” The question was half investigation, half awe.

“Certainly not,” she said. “It had to be put there on purpose.”

I should hope so. “Couldn’t he just transfer the funds somehow?”

“He enjoyed handing it over personally. He and Arnold liked to make a little ceremony out of it.” Did I catch a slightly patronizing touch there? Probably not.

I asked her if she could put together a list of people who were close to Noah before I left her that day. She said there weren’t very many. His partner at Yellow Brick Farms, his partner in Tahoe, and a few others. No relatives.

“Another thing,” I said. “His car. I saw one parked in the drive.”

“Oh, that’s mine. They must have kidnapped him in his car.”

It was a blue 1975 Volvo station wagon, “kind of beat up.” I guess I must have raised an eyebrow, because she went on to explain. “He was very attached to it. He was always having it worked on. He said it suited him and he saw no reason to get a new one.”

“And the car is missing.”

“Yes. I suppose if the police found it blown up or something they’d take the trouble to look for him.” She sounded bitter. I asked for the license number, and wrote it in my pocket notebook along with her description of the car.

“Does he have a study or an office here at home? Some kind of room he uses for his own stuff?”

She nodded.

“I’d like to have a look around, see if I can find anything that might give me a lead.”

“Upstairs,” she said reluctantly. “Second door on the left. Please, try not to disturb anything.”

“I may need to take some of it home with me.”

She sighed a poor, ragged little sigh.

“And while I’m up there, maybe you could make out that list of his friends.” She agreed that maybe she could.

I had never in my life walked up a staircase like that one, not even in a museum. I felt like Cary Grant, or maybe George Washington.

Noah’s office was plain and sparsely furnished. A leather couch, like the one downstairs, a recliner, a desk and swivel chair, two four-drawer file cabinets. Nothing on the desk. The bookshelves were heavy on philosophy and religion, with nutrition and farming running a poor second. There were no chemistry books that I could see. The desk was locked, but the file cabinets weren’t.

They contained a lot of the usual debris, mostly personal financial records, old tax forms, and correspondence. Way in the back of the bottom drawer I found his old master’s thesis, which seemed to have something to do with oil refining, I say seemed because H
₂
O is about all I have managed to retain from high school chemistry and my brain goes dyslexic— or is it aphasic?— the second it realizes it is being asked to read something technological.

The financial files told me only what I already knew: the man was rich and he was building arks. There were a couple of slim folders about the health food business and the casino, but it looked like most of the business files were stashed at the businesses themselves.

I pulled about a dozen file folders and stacked them on the desk to take with me. They included the names of people involved in working on the two arks, a couple hundred names, and some personal papers.

June peeked diffidently in the door. “I’m finished,” she said, waving a green steno pad.

“Great. These lists of ark-workers, are they complete?”

“I don’t think so. Arnold would know.”

“The desk is locked,” I informed her. “Do you have a key?”

“I don’t know. I could look for one.” She didn’t want to.

“I don’t want to force the lock, but…”

“Oh, please don’t. He was very attached to that desk.”

I reflected grumpily that it was too bad the man was more attached to his possessions than he was to his sanity. She handed me the steno pad and went off to look for a key.

Meanwhile, I thumbed through the ark names. On the Oakland list, I recognized a couple of names. Arnold and Beatrice, and Marjorie Burns. I found Noah’s Yellow Brick partner near the bottom of the Sonoma list.

I opened the steno pad. Durell was listed, and the casino partner, whose name was Jerry Pincus. Arnold. A guy named Bert Olson, who was, according to the scribble beside his name, Noah’s auto mechanic. That was it. Pincus was apparently not involved in the arks, or at least his name wasn’t on the lists I had.

June reappeared with a key. “I think this is it.” I took it and tried it. The desk drawer slid open.

“Are Pincus and Olson in on the arks?” I asked her, pulling out two old checkbooks, a dog rabies certificate dated 1976, a few photos of June and a man who was probably Noah. Odds and ends.

“No, Jerry doesn’t believe in them. I don’t know Bert… I’ve met him once or twice.”

I found an address book. “Is this current?” She looked through it.

“Not really,” she answered. “It’s from Houston.”

“Do you have a more current one?”

“He must have it with him if it’s not in the desk.”

I pawed through the other drawers. A lot of ballpoint pens, paperclips, junk. I have seen neater desks, but not at my house.

“Is this Noah?” I asked, pointing to one of the snapshots.

“I have better pictures of him if you want one.”

“I do.”

We walked down the stairs together. She didn’t remind me of either Katharine Hepburn or Martha Washington. And since I was carrying file folders, I couldn’t have any illusions about myself.

“This list you gave me,” I began. She looked attentive. “These are all the people who were closest to him?”

“Besides me,” she chirped.

“Shouldn’t Marjorie be on it?”

She reddened slightly. “Yes, well, I suppose… she has worked closely with him…” She took the list from me and added the name Marjorie Burns at the bottom. Then, angrily, “But certainly not as closely as the police seem to think.”

“Anyone else you might have forgotten?” I tried to sound kindly.

“No.”

“If you think of anyone, give me a call.” I ripped a corner off the mostly blank page listing Noah’s closest buddies and wrote my number down for her.

Then I took the file folders and the photo of Noah she’d given me and drove down to the Berkeley Marina, where I sat on the grass reading, thinking, and watching people and dogs playing. When the sherry wore off, I had a couple of tacos at a place on University Avenue and headed for home.