Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (6 page)

Beatrice’s hopeless passion for me was fading fast. She just didn’t appreciate my humor, not to mention my prose. She was indignant.

“No, she was not. She believed in the ark. Carl wanted her to patrol West Oakland. We’re trying to save the whole human race.”

I was beginning to feel cranky. Zealots can be very boring. “You don’t have room for the whole human race.”

“We have room for some of the best, and then we can reproduce.”

“What about animals?”

“We’re not taking those. God says humans can’t be trusted with animals. He’ll take care of that end of things.”

I started to go after that interesting thought, but decided it could wait. The crawling roots of ark-people philosophy could go off in a thousand directions, none of which had much to do with the problem at hand.

“Where can I find this ex-boyfriend?”

“He works at the hat store up on Telegraph, the one near Dwight.”

I knew the place, in Berkeley, near the campus. “And his name’s Hinks?”

“Right. Carleton Hinks.”

I drove Beatrice back to the ark site, promising to get back to her if I needed anything. Whatever that meant.

The hat shop was a narrow storefront that stretched back maybe thirty feet into dimness. There were three people in the place, two browsers and a young black guy standing behind a counter near the door. About twenty-five years old, narrow handsome face, skin the color of milk chocolate, hair very short, dressed in 1950s drag. Baggy pants with pleats. A pink shirt that looked just like the one I had when I was about twelve, the one I wore with my charcoal gray suit.

“You Carleton Hinks?”

He looked me over. His eyes rested for a second on my “Visit Lake Tahoe” tee shirt. “Sure am.”

“Jake Samson,” I said, extending my hand.

“I don’t do the buying here,” he replied.

I explained that I was not a hat salesman, that I was helping out at the ark, trying to get a line on Noah and Marjorie. He looked at me more carefully.

“I don’t know what I can tell you, man. I don’t know where the hell she is.” He sounded like he wished he did.

“Maybe you can give me some leads. I don’t know. But I hear you know her pretty well, and I’ve got to talk to anyone I can.”

One of the browsers got serious and came up to the register with a straw boater. Carleton rang up the sale, bagged it, smiled at the customer, and said thanks. “Okay, I’ll be happy to tell you what I can. But I can’t really talk here.” Another customer stepped up to the counter.

“Have you had lunch?”

“Yeah.” He made the sale. “I get off here about six, but then I got to go take care of some business. You can meet me there if you want.”

“Where you’re doing business?”

“I’ll just be sitting around. Looking out for some people.”

“Guardian Angel work?”

“Yeah, that’s right. You know about that, then.”

“Where will you be?”

“You know the guy that’s been breaking into houses over in West Berkeley, beating up old people, taking their money and TVs and stuff?”

I remembered hearing my father yell about it. I nodded.

“Well, some of us are staking out the neighborhood, you know? Housesitting. Making it easy for him to break in where we’re waiting.”

“I thought you people just patrolled the streets.”

He flashed a cynical but charming smile. “We do what the situation calls for.” He wrote a Tenth Street address on a scrap of paper and handed it to me. “I’ll be there from eight o’clock on. Come at eight. The robber works later than that.”

I told him I’d be there.

I spent the afternoon wandering around Telegraph, bought some jeans and a shirt, had a cup of coffee, stopped in at the framing shop and looked through the prints, and went home to a quiet and wonderfully empty house. Pa and Eva had gone out to dinner and a movie. I pulled a TV dinner from the freezer, wondering briefly how long it had been in there, watched the news and a couple of game shows, took a long, thoughtful bath, and headed for West Berkeley at 7:45.

The house was a small, scruffy Victorian cottage, in need of paint and even more in need of a little yard work. There was one light on somewhere in the back of the house, and the dim porch light barely illuminated the front door. I knocked.

A long thirty seconds later, the door opened. Carleton invited me in with a curt jerk of his head. He was still wearing the pleated pants, but the rest of him was dressed in the group uniform, Angel beret and shirt. I followed him through a tiny entry hall, a living room overfull of shabby stuffed furniture upholstered in ancient green brocade, and into a kitchen lighted only by the overflow from a tiny bedroom lamp in the next room. We both sat, on plastic kitchen chairs with chrome-plated legs. Carleton took a slug from a half-empty bottle of beer that he’d left on the table.

“How many of those have you got?” I asked chattily.

His head shot up from his contemplation of the bottle. “Hey, I can drink just one of anything.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said, somewhat startled. “I was just hinting that maybe there’s one for me.”

He stared at me for a moment, then laughed quietly, embarrassed, got up, opened the refrigerator door just far enough to slip his hand inside, and took out another bottle for me.

“Sorry. Pretty rude. See, my old man drank himself to death, and I’m a little touchy. Matter of fact,” he shrugged, “I’m a little touchy in general, okay?”

“Okay with me,” I told him. “I suppose you’re pretty touchy about Marjorie, too.” I spoke in a near-whisper, following his lead.

“No.”

“I thought she was an ex-lover. I thought everybody was touchy about those. The recent ones, anyway.”

“Depends on the ex, don’t you think? I mean, how it went bad, how it was good.”

“Then tell me. How do you feel about Marjorie?”

He didn’t so much as blink. “I love her. She’s great. She never lied to me, never cheated, never fucked me over or fucked me up. She hurt the shit out of me, but that’s how it goes sometimes.”

“You mean when she left you for Noah?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t leave me for Noah. She didn’t leave me for anybody. She left me because she didn’t love me in the right way, that’s all. I don’t even know if she and this Noah dude got something going. If it happened, it happened after we broke up, and she never mentioned it to me.”

I thought about that for a while. I couldn’t get anyone to say they knew that Noah and Marjorie were involved.

I pushed harder. “You sound a little altruistic. You always so sweet about getting dumped?”

There was that cynical smile again. “Nothing sweet about me. Marjorie, she’s my friend.” He paused. “You think I might have something to do with Marjorie going away? You think maybe I’d hurt her? I’m going to tell you something, Samson. I went with a girl once, she lied, she cheated, she even tried to steal from me at the end. And then she just walked out on me with this dude she’d been seeing for months and months. . . . I’ll tell you something about that. I wanted them both dead. I wanted to take a gun and shoot her, and shoot him, and watch them bleed. That’s how bad it was. That’s how much hate she left inside of me. But I didn’t do anything. It’s been three years now, and I still wish, sometimes, that I could shoot them both. Dead, like they never lived at all. You ever feel that way? I was a dumb trusting kid and I didn’t know any better, and she poured shit on my head and so did he. But Marjorie? No. Not Marjorie. And I’m going to be more than a little bit upset if I find out someone has hurt her.”

I didn’t comment on his speech. I decided to change the subject for a while, just to ease things up a little.

“You alone here?”

“No. Got a partner. Out in the backyard. That guy starts to come in a window, we got him between us.”

“How come you left a light on in there”— I nodded toward the bedroom— “and the porch light?”

“Dark house is too suspicious. He don’t mind somebody being home, and if she was home, she might be watching TV in the bedroom. If she’s out, she’d still leave a light on. Nobody goes away and leaves a dark house. Maybe he even hopes she’ll be here. She’s an old lady.” He looked as though the beer had gone bad in his mouth.

“Where is she?”

He smiled. “Some of the neighbors are having a party, so we got half a dozen empty houses tonight.”

It took some effort to get back to the subject, back to the case I was working on, sitting as I was in the middle of an ambush. I found myself hoping the robber would show up. I was tired of thinking, of talking to people. A shot of adrenaline would be welcome.

“You say you and Marjorie are friends.” He nodded. “I need to find her. I need to find out what’s happened to her and Noah.”

He brushed me away with a wave of his hand. “You don’t care about her. You’re looking for Noah.”

“I was hired to look for Noah, that’s right.” I didn’t start whining around about how of course I cared about Marjorie. I probably would if I knew her. She sounded like someone I might like. But I didn’t know her, and my caring, if I could dig any up, was pretty abstract stuff. “But if I find Marjorie, I figure that will at least put me closer to finding Noah. I thought she might have said something to you before she went, might have given you some idea of where she was headed.”

He shook his head. “It was really kind of strange,” he said. “She never said a word to me. Not where she was going, or even that she was going somewhere. I expected to see her on patrol one night and she just didn’t come. Just never showed up. That’s not like Marjorie, man. She really cares, you know? She does her job, does her duty.” He swallowed the rest of his beer. I’d finished mine. He didn’t get another one for himself or offer me one.

“What night was that? The night you expected her to show and she didn’t?”

“It was last Saturday. I guess that’s the first night she was missing.”

“Was she around the night before?”

“Huh uh. But she wasn’t supposed to be on duty then.”

“You say she always does her job. I heard you two were having some disagreements lately about just that— she was spending a lot of time at the arks and not doing the job you thought she should be doing.”

“We worked it out. She couldn’t do it as often, but she always came when she said she would.”

“So I guess you’re pretty worried about her?”

“Well… I’d be a lot more worried about her except for one thing. Two things. First of all, she’s Marjorie. Second, she’s got this uncle or cousin or something. Victor. When she didn’t show up and I couldn’t find her, I went over to talk to Victor. And he said he thought he knew where she was, but he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Or maybe he just thought it was none of my business, since he never liked me. Anyway, he said up north somewhere. So her family, they maybe know where she is.”

In the second of silence that followed this, he held up his hand and cocked his head, listening. I stopped breathing. I didn’t hear anything. We held the silence. Then I heard it, a scraping sound. Tensed, ready, I looked at Carleton. He had relaxed.

“It’s just the tree again. Big old tree out in back, a little wind, it rubs against the aluminum gutters.”

I relaxed too, and pulled out my notebook and pen. “You said a relative named Victor. Victor who? And where can I find him?”

“I don’t know his last name. Just Victor. Victor’s Auto Wrecking over in West Oakland. Probably in the phone book.”

I wrote down Victor’s Auto Wrecking, Oakland.

“Now, I don’t mean to rush you, Jake, but I think I better pay a little more attention to what I’m doing here. You can find me at the hat shop if you need anything, or if you find out anything. I’d kind of like to know she’s okay.” He gave me his home phone number, too. “Tuesday through Sunday at the shop, though. Maybe you want to come in again and look at the merchandise some time.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Lot of guys your age go for those berets we sell, you know? You might look good in one.”

“I have one,” I said shortly.

He flashed a youthful and handsome smile and said, “Well, there, you see?”

“Looks to me,” I shot back, jerking a thumb at his head, “like a lot of guys your age go for berets, too.”

He laughed softly. “Yeah, well, these are a little different. You want one like this?”

“Maybe. You want some help here tonight?”

“You’re not trained. Besides, we’re staying all night.”

“The old lady is going to party all night?”

He laughed. “No. She’s coming home at midnight. But we’re staying.”

“I’ve got work to do tomorrow. But I could stick around for a while, maybe leave when she comes home.”

He shook his head. “Can’t have people running in and out of here at that hour. That’s prime time. If he’s around tonight, he’ll be out there somewhere around then, for sure.”

“What if he mugs her on the street?”

“Not his M.O. He likes houses, likes to take what’s inside. Besides,” he grinned, “we’ll be watching out there, too.”

“The night has a thousand eyes,” I muttered.

“But mostly I can’t let you stay because you’re not trained.”

I gave up. We shook hands and I slipped out the front door to my car.

Driving home, I thought about some of the things he’d said. He really seemed to care about Marjorie, but I couldn’t forget what he’d said about the other woman who’d left him. Even though it sounded like he’d had plenty of reason, the fact remained that his feelings about her, and her boyfriend, were pretty ferocious. Murderous.

He’d asked me if I’d ever felt that way and I hadn’t answered him. Had I? I’d had a hard time getting over a sleazy marriage to someone who had, like his girlfriend, lied and cheated. But had I ever felt like killing her, or the slime she’d been sneaking around with?

I remembered the day I went back to talk about possessions— which ones I would take right then, which ones she could have, which ones I’d want when I settled in somewhere.

It had been only two weeks since I’d walked out. I remember thinking, two weeks ago this woman was still my wife, still the woman I’d married and lived with and loved. In that two weeks, I’d sworn to leave her to her lovers, gotten scared of the loss and decided to forgive her, and discovered that she didn’t want my forgiveness, didn’t want me to come back. I sat there in our living room, across from her. She was sitting in my favorite chair; I was on the couch.