Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (12 page)

After much sympathetic listening to her list of alternate suspects— at one point she mentioned Wolf, and even Perry— she agreed to let us stop over that night when her whole family would be home and get the boys’ side of things. Maybe, she said, they would have some ideas too.

I wasn’t looking forward to it, but meeting the family was a good way to get a real line on the kids.

She finally left us alone. We finished our coffee and got out of there.

Our first stop was the garage, to see if the mechanic could tell us any more about the accident and to take a second look at the mechanic himself.

He was under the truck. He eased himself out, and spoke to me, ignoring Rosie. “Mr. Samson, I sure can’t tell how those lines came loose.”

“The truck belongs to my friend,” I said, nodding at Rosie. He acted like that put a new perspective on the problem, and turned to her abruptly.

“You need to take more care with it,” he told her. “Get it checked out once in a while, make sure everything’s screwed on tight. You got to maintain a vehicle.”

“I do,” Rosie said. “It was fine. Something happened.”

“Vehicles don’t just do things like that,” he argued. “It’s like someone opened up that hood and pulled them nuts right off.” Once again he was talking to me, man to man, about Rosie’s obviously neglected and mismanaged truck.

Up until this point Rosie had taken his attitude in stride, but she was beginning to lose her sense of humor.

“Maybe that’s exactly what happened— if that’s what it looks like,” she snapped.

He frowned at the truck. “Well, that’s what it looked like, all right. You can ask Clement and Perry. They was here to check it out. And I didn’t touch no part of it beforehand, either.” He scratched his gray stubble. “You think maybe someone done this on purpose, Mr. Samson? For a joke or something like that?”

The prank theory of crime seemed popular in this town.

“Not much of a joke,” I said.

He pursed his thin lips and gazed straight at me with icy blue eyes.

“Makes a good story,” he said.

Rosie was staring at him, dumbstruck. But I was cool.

“Don’t you think it would be kind of stupid to commit suicide for a story that someone else would have to write?”

His eyes skipped away from me again. He didn’t want to call me stupid outright. “Maybe,” he said, gazing out the door, “someone got irritated. That can happen when you go around looking for things, annoying people.”

“We had no idea we were annoying anyone,” Rosie said, all wide brown eyes. “Why would anyone be irritated with us?”

He shook his head, smiling ruefully. “Maybe you just rubbed someone the wrong way. Some people around here think the burglar did a good thing.”

“Do you?”

“I obey the law. About the truck,” he said, turning to me again, “I got to wait for some parts before I can get this altogether fixed. Got a body man can’t work on it until Tuesday. If you need to get back to the city, you’ll have to come back and get it later. Can’t be helped.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Rosie said. “It looks like we’ll be around for a while.” The estimate figure was, of course, immense. Rosie told me that she had a five-hundred-dollar deductible. I said we’d have to get that from our employer.

Once again there was no answer at Nora’s house, so I tried her office. Sure enough, she was there.

“You missed a great poker game last night.”

“I probably should have taken the evening off. I think I’m spinning my wheels today. Speaking of which, I heard about your accident.”

“It was no accident.” I told her about Rosie’s deductible after I told her about the disconnected brake lines. She said she’d pay.

“Is everyone else there working too?”

“No. I’m the only one who came in today. You can expect people to put in overtime on Saturday, but Sunday…”

“We need to talk to your employees, see what we can get. Someone might know something, some small piece that will lead us somewhere.”

“I suppose that would have to be tomorrow, then. It will really cut into the workday, but I suppose you have to.”

“Yes. We do. We’ll be there in the morning sometime. Another thing. You’ve got family in town, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“Where can we find them?”

“Why?”

Jesus, she could be tiresome. “There could be any number of reasons for the burglary,” I explained. “We can’t rule out someone having a personal grudge against you or someone close to you. They might know something you don’t. It’s just routine.”

I hated to fall back on cop talk, but I was tired of answering questions. I wanted to ask some. She gave me the phone number of the aunt and uncle who had raised her. I thanked her, said we’d see her the next day, and hung up.

Her aunt and uncle were home, and gave me directions to the house. They lived at the extreme edge of town, as far away from the ocean as you could get and still be in Wheeler.

These were the people who had brought her up when her own parents had died. They were her mother’s sister and brother-in-law. They were in their sixties, retired from whatever it was they had done before.

Unlike so many of the houses we’d seen in Wheeler, theirs was freshly painted, white with French-blue trim. Carpenter gothic, small, with carving on the eaves. The front yard was perfect, which is no small feat in January in northern California. Someone had been keeping the grass down and the weeds away. The hedge was trimmed. Even the birches in the front yard looked tidy. Not a branch out of place anywhere, despite the recent storm.

Mrs. Dorfmann answered the door with a sweet smile and a charming welcome. She had, she said, just made some coffee cake, and she hoped we’d join them in the kitchen. We followed her through the house, through a cozy, overstuffed living room and small dining room, and into a large kitchen that had been completely remodeled and equipped with shiny new appliances, expensive-looking cabinets, and, judging by the food processor, which must have raised real estate values on the block, the latest and best doodads.

Mrs. Dorfmann looked around the room, puzzled. “He was here a few minutes ago. He won’t hear me if I shout,” she fretted. “I wonder, Mr. Samson, if you’d go out in the yard and find my husband while Rosie and I set the table.”

I didn’t dare look at Rosie.

As directed, I went out the back door. The elderly gentleman, his back to me, was puttying a new pane of glass on a homemade cold frame constructed of two-by-fours and window frames. A large cold frame or a small greenhouse, about two by three by six.

Assuming from what his wife had said that his hearing was not perfect, I took great care not to sneak up on him. I approached him from the side, then circled around so he could see me coming, which he finally did. I smiled. He smiled. “Time for coffee cake,” I said in a hearty baritone. He didn’t seem to have any trouble hearing me, and when he spoke, it was at normal volume.

“Perfect,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

Just thinking about homemade coffee cake was having the same effect on me, so I was a little disenchanted when I noticed the plastic wrapper with a familiar brand name lying on the sink. Still, the cake was hot. That was something.

“You wanted to talk to us about Nora?” Dorfmann asked. “What exactly did you want to know and why?”

“She couldn’t think of anyone who might want to harm her business,” Rosie said. “It occurred to us that her family might be able to fill things in a little.”

“I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do her any harm,” Mrs. Dorfmann protested. “Not many people in this town have a child like Nora. It was hard, when her parents died— in a car crash, it was— because we didn’t have any money and there we were with a child to raise. But Nora was always finding little jobs around town, always bringing something in to help out, even when she was a child. Even when she went down to the City, she’d send us presents, useful things we needed. When Bernard retired from the nursery we didn’t have anything to live on but social security, and here he’d had his heart attack and everything.”

“Is that when she came back, when he had the heart attack?” Rosie asked.

“Not long after,” Mrs. Dorfmann continued. “I don’t know what we’d have done without her. She’s certainly paid us back for raising her. Now you could say she’s raising us. She takes care of everything. We never have to worry. Isn’t that right, Bernard?” He didn’t respond. “Bernard?” She repeated what she’d said.

Dorfmann nodded, and shoved a huge chunk of coffee cake into his mouth. “Wonderful child, wonderful girl,” he said, spraying crumbs.

The conversation pretty much went on like that. We complimented them on their house and got praise for Nora, who kept it in good repair. We complimented them on their yard and got praise for Nora, who had hired and paid for a weekly gardener.

I asked about Wolf. “He must have been pretty disappointed when she left town.”

Mrs. Dorfmann laughed. “He sure was. But you know men.” She winked at Rosie. “He got over it fast. Couldn’t have the one he loved, loved the one he got next.” Dorfmann, too, laughed, and, fortunately, had nothing in his mouth at the time.

We kept trying for a while, but we got the same answers over and over again, and the coffee was giving me heartburn. We finally left, with a lying promise to return sometime.

We were walking down Main when we ran into Clement, who was coming out of a doorway beside the grocery store.

“That’s pretty much it for Gracie’s effects,” he said.

“I don’t mean to sound dumb,” I said, “but what are you talking about?”

“Gracie. You know, the dead woman?”

“Yes, we know the dead woman.”

He laughed. “That’s her apartment up there.” He jerked a thumb toward the apartment upstairs of the grocery. “Was. I closed the place up when she died. Went over everything— just in case. Nothing to find. Fredda’s up there now, picking over the corpse.” He was eyeing me sardonically. “What’s the matter, Jake? You’re looking kind of surprised. Didn’t you expect me to do what I could to follow up? Like I say, just in case?”

I denied it. I was torn between kicking myself for neglecting that part of the dead woman’s private life and being glad that Clement had done it. I was beginning to think that if this man said there was nothing to find, there might not be anything to find.

“Have you got some time, Clement?” Rosie asked. “We need to get more information about the people who live on the spit. The ones we don’t know about yet.”

“Matter of fact, I don’t. Got a family thing over in Rosewood, won’t get back until later this afternoon. How about then?” She said that would be fine.

My arm was bothering me, so we picked up sandwiches at Georgia’s and walked back toward the motel, laying plans for the day.

I reminded Rosie that I had promised to visit Melody.

“There’s a lot I want to talk to her about— her neighbors, for one thing. And see if I can’t get her to remember seeing something on the beach yesterday. I know she doesn’t think she did, but who knows? Maybe she remembered something at three o’clock this morning.”

“Sure, Jake. And I’m sure you want to do that alone, so I’ll deal with things here in town. Checking on Wolf, for instance.”

I ignored her smirking attitude. We agreed to meet back at the motel in time for dinner. Rosie ate her sandwich and took off. I gave myself half a pain pill and half an hour in bed, thinking. Then I got into the Chevy and drove out to the spit.

When I drove past Marty’s place, I spotted his Jaguar halfway up the driveway and thought again about what part or parts he could have played in the week’s events. He was involved with the sperm bank. He had asked Gracie to go out on the spit. And he could have followed us out of town, messed up the truck, driven back toward town, turned around and driven back again, a while later, to see what had happened. And there was Rosie, walking the road looking for help. He couldn’t very well ride on by. Besides, he’d want to know if we’d gotten scared enough, or if I’d been badly enough injured, to pull out of town.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone I’d liked had turned out bad. I was hoping, though, that Rosie would come up with something against Wolf. Where was he when Gracie died? And the truck crash— we knew he was at the tavern earlier that day. Was he there all afternoon?

Melody’s house was redwood and glass, like Marty’s, but only the materials were the same. If Hans Christian Andersen had moved to the Sonoma coast, he might have built a house like this one.

The main floor was a big hexagon, with large hexagonal windows on either side of the doorway. The door itself was carved with flowers and flanked by carved columns. The second floor got more elaborate. Dormers and eaves all over the place, each with scrollwork gingerbread and all jutting out from the parent hexagon in various directions, creating, I thought, what must be some interestingly shaped rooms. Rising from that confusing second story was a tower, also hexagonal, that made me think of sleeping beauties and ladders made of yellow hair. There should have been flags flying somewhere.

It took about thirty seconds for Melody to answer the door. She had been waiting for me, she explained, but she had been up in her study working, just until I arrived.

“Is your study in the tower?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “That’s the bedroom.”

She was wearing a shiny pink robe, full length, with white lace peeking out of the bosom and fluffy mules peeking out from under the hem. This was fun, I thought. Like walking in on the star of a 1952 movie. The house wasn’t quite right, but she was.

She led me into an immense living room with an immense fieldstone fireplace in which someone had laid an immense fire to drive away the foggy chill of the day. The fireplace was set into the lower level of the split-level room, a snug area with a pink semi-circle of a couch and red, pink, and white pillows. The carpeting was white, an alien concept that goes better with condos in Miami or the homes of L.A.’s conspicuous consumers than it does with the rugged, natural, and, therefore, dirty northern California coast. She sat me down on the couch, against some pillows, asked how my arm was feeling, and offered me a drink.