Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (13 page)

I accepted a glass of white wine. She went to a glitzy wet bar at the upper end of the room, poured my wine, and mixed herself something with gin in it. Over my left shoulder, through a glass wall, I watched eucalyptus trees swaying and parting to reveal a view of gray winter ocean.

I looked back at the fire. She brought my wine and sat down next to me.

“Quite a house,” I said.

She laughed. “I worked with the architect. He thought I was insane, but it was so much fun. I just let my imagination fly. I love doing that.” She smiled at me. I smiled back. “Perhaps you’d like to see the rest of it later?”

“That would be nice.”

“Now, then,” she said, settling in beside me more closely. “You wanted to talk to me about some things, I believe?”

I nodded. “You came up here yesterday, isn’t that right?” She said it was. “How much do you stay here— have you been around at all in the past couple of weeks?”

She didn’t ask me why I wanted to know. She seemed to assume my questions were asked for reasonable purposes, and answered easily and to the point.

“I’m rarely here in the winter. I stay in my house in San Francisco unless I’m traveling. I’ve been holed up there since October working on a book. I came out yesterday because I was concerned about the house. And curious, too, I suppose, about the accident.”

“You heard about it before yesterday?”

“My neighbor called and told me.”

“Someone who lives here on the spit?”

“Yes. Henry Linton. Have you met Henry?”

“Man who owns the tavern?”

She laughed. “The tavern, one of the restaurants, a movie theater in Santa Rosa, half the real estate in town. He’s also the mayor. Yes, that’s Henry.”

“I didn’t know Wheeler had a king.”

“Oh, nothing like that. He’s a kind, quiet man. Anyway, he’s my neighbor on this side.” She gestured out toward the point of the spit. “He called to tell me the storm was causing some damage and I might want to check on the house. And he also told me about the Piedmont woman.”

“Did he say how he found out?” I remembered that Angie had told him, but I didn’t know the circumstances.

“As a matter of fact, he did. He’d gone over to Clement’s office to find out if they were going to keep an eye on things out here that night. He had to stay in town and work, and he was worried about his house. No one was there but Angie, and she told him where Clement and Perry were. And why.”

“Did you know Gracie Piedmont?”

She shook her head. “I know only a few people in town. Merchants, mostly, and people who live near me.”

“Was there any damage to your house?”

“There’s still the tree in the swimming pool. Once that’s out, the pool will need some repair.”

“I guess you assumed there’d be damage?”

She gave me a mildly irritated smile. “What do you mean?”

“You said you were upstairs working on a book today. I suppose that means you brought a manuscript or some notes or something with you, expecting to get stuck up here.”

She laughed. “I have a deadline. I take it nearly everywhere. I don’t have time for a day off right now.”

“What can you tell me about some of the other people who live here?” She had gotten up to get us fresh drinks, and when she sat back down again she rested a casual hand on my shoulder.

“You know Marty, of course, but there are only a few permanent year-round residents. Henry is one.” She described the other permanent residents. An elderly couple, retired. He had been an executive with the Sierra Club. They were involved in anti-whaling work, she said, and various other ecological causes. They had lived in Berkeley before they’d bought a lot on the spit and put up a “small jewel of a house.”

A poet or something, she said, lived farther inland. An elderly woman who kept to herself. “Friendly enough when she sees you, but odd, I think. As though something happened to her once that was so devastating that she no longer wants much human companionship.”

Well, I thought, Melody did write romances.

Then there was Frank Wooster.

Surprised, I said, “I wouldn’t think the town mechanic would have enough money to build out here.”

“The lot was in his family, and an old house that goes back, oh, forever. It’s a wreck, really, but he lives in it. There are advantages to staying in the same place for five or six generations.”

I laughed. “Or even two. But I wouldn’t know about that.”

The last of the permanent residents: a young couple in their thirties. He had made some big business killing in Silicon Valley or somewhere, had a heart attack, and now “dabbled in investments.” She made “pots or lamps or something.”

Of the part-time residents, besides herself and Marty, none of them, as far as she knew, had been out there at all since autumn and weren’t likely to return until April or May.

She offered me another drink. The fire was making me feel very peaceful, and my arm actually seemed to be feeling better. I took another glass of wine from her rather pretty hand. Life was good.

“Tell me this, Melody. Are you sure you didn’t see or hear anything around the beach the day our truck got booby-trapped? Anything, anyone at all?”

She rested the aforementioned hand again on my good shoulder.

“I think there were some people, way down the beach, nearer town. But I couldn’t see them clearly.”

“Male? Female?”

“I couldn’t be sure. I’m sorry, Jake, but they were quite far away.”

“You were up on the dunes. Were you up closer to the road? See any cars or anything?”

She shook her head, and ran a finger along my jaw. She moved closer.

“You didn’t hear anything? Any voices or cars?”

She said she thought she remembered hearing a car or two passing along the road, but nothing distinctive, no odd sounds. Just cars. She asked where the truck had been parked and I told her, and she said she hadn’t walked that far. She hadn’t heard us crash.

Her hand was on the nape of my neck, moving into my scalp. “I like men with curly blond hair,” she said. “I’ll bet your neck is stiff, and your back,” she said, “from holding your poor arm in place that way.”

Yes, I admitted, I was feeling a little stiff.

“Why don’t you lie down here?” She pointed at the white fur rug on the white carpeting between the couch and the fire. A white fur rug. I had never owned such a thing, and had never been invited by a woman to lie down on one. On other kinds of rugs, and other kinds of warm, soft places. But not a furry white rug.

“Is this real fur?” I asked, arranging myself on my stomach.

“Oh, no. I don’t believe in that. I contribute heavily to the Fund for Animals.”

She made me sit up again so she could help me off with my shirt. Then she went to a cabinet near the bar and came back carrying a jar of something.

“Skin cream,” she said. “For your massage.”

She sat beside me and began to work the cream into my spine, moving her fingers gently over the muscles around the shoulder blades, staying well away from the bandaged shoulder. She brought her thumbs up under my skull and pressed, then ran them down my neck and began to knead my back. My eyes were closed. I felt her move down, over my lower back, and sit astride my rump. She felt very, very warm. As she moved her hands over my back, she moved her body as well. And we both got very, very warm.

Then she slid down onto my thighs and began kneading my buttocks.

“If you’re going to do that,” I said, “I should probably take off my pants.”

“Wonderful idea. Let me help you.” Awkwardly, protecting my right shoulder, I turned over, then got to my feet. She looked me over, face to knees, and smiled. Then she unzipped my pants and peeled them off, along with my shorts. I didn’t move. I stood still, watching her. She undid the sash of her robe, and a few buttons, and let it fall. It slithered down to the rug. She took my hand, moved up against me, and gave me one helluva kiss. The next thing I knew she was lying on the rug, laughing up at me.

Maybe this was a scene she’d written a dozen times before. Maybe this was what she’d been writing when I showed up that day. Maybe it was ridiculous, and not at all the sort of thing a real sophisticate would be caught dead doing. But I didn’t keep her waiting.

There never was enough time, that day, to visit her hexagonal tower, which was too bad. On the other hand, there also wasn’t enough time for her to read to me from her books, which was probably a good thing. I’m a mystery fan, myself.

Our walk to the Hackman house that evening after dinner took us past Fredda’s house. The sky had cleared and the moon was bright, and a flash of light glinted off Joanne’s wheelchair on the front porch. We waved and said hello. She said hello back.

While I’d been distressing my bad shoulder that afternoon, Rosie had picked up some interesting information. She’d found Henry Linton working the bar at the tavern and talked to him for a while. She’d come at things sideways, saying she’d expected to find Wolf there— didn’t he work afternoons? She learned that he did, except for Sundays, when he worked just a couple of hours in the evening. He usually worked from noon to five, broke for dinner until six while Henry relieved him, then worked until eight or so, when Henry came in and worked until closing. On Fridays and Saturdays too? Yes. Which meant that unless there was something we didn’t know, he’d worked all afternoon the day before, which put him out of the way as far as the truck was concerned. But it also meant he’d been taking his dinner break right around the time Gracie Piedmont had died.

She’d also visited the bookstore and talked to Lou Overman, who still insisted he’d slept through the break-in.

“So you believe him?”

“Why should I?” Obviously, Rosie was not enamored.

We compared notes on our spit-resident findings. What Rosie had learned from Clement narrowed things down considerably. The two couples— the Sierra Club folks and the young retiree and wife— had been gone at the time of Gracie’s death. The old folks were visiting friends in Berkeley. The whiz kid and his spouse were in France. That left Henry, Frank, and the elderly poet.

“And Clement didn’t get anything out of her, I suppose?”

“She was hiding out from the storm behind her shutters.”

“We’ll talk to her anyway, just in case.”

The Hackmans lived just a few doors down from Fredda and Joanne. Rosie’s description of poverty overwhelmed by its own debris was accurate. An old dismembered car in the weedy drive, an equally old but whole car parked in front. A house that looked as tired as Mrs. Hackman herself.

The man who opened the door was a big guy gone to seed. He was clutching a can of cheap beer and looking doubtfully at us from watery red eyes. Rosie offered to leave Alice outside.

He still looked doubtful. He didn’t actually say hello, come on in. What he said was, “Dog’s okay. My wife said you were coming.” Then he jerked a thumb toward the interior and led the way into a living room full of sagging, stained beige nylon furniture.

Mrs. Hackman was sitting in front of the TV, which was tuned to the latest sex-and-violence-and-pseudo-history mini-series. With a look of resignation she turned it off and stood up.

“I’ll get the boys,” she said, and dragged wearily across the room to a door opening onto a pale pink hallway.

“Have a seat,” Hackman said. “Can I offer you a beer?”

Looking around me at the furnishings that had probably come to the house second-hand, the tattered rug, I told him no, I wasn’t thirsty. Beer, I suspected, was probably his big extravagance, and I thought I’d let him keep it to himself. Rosie, for maybe the same reason, said she was too full of dinner, but thanks anyway.

Mrs. Hackman returned, trailed by the fourteen-year-old Rosie had already met, and his older brother. Rosie’s good at descriptions. I could have spotted Tommy on the street. Rollie Hackman looked like his father must have looked at sixteen. Large, strong, a little blurred already, around the chin. His eyes were bright and alert, but I wouldn’t call them friendly.

When we were all seated, the Hackmans waiting silently for someone to speak, my eye caught a glimpse of a water color painting on the wall behind the TV. I stood up again and walked closer to get a better look. The piece was badly matted and had no frame, but I recognized the work. It had been done by the same artist whose paintings and drawings I had admired at Overman’s gallery.

“You like Rollie’s work?” Mrs. Hackman asked.

“Very much.” I took a longer look at the kid. His face was red, and he was looking at the floor. He still wasn’t smiling. “I saw some of it at Overman’s place when I first came to town. I thought it was the best stuff he had.”

I enjoyed not having to lie to get people feeling cooperative, for once. At least I was hoping to get some cooperation.

“Rollie,” Mr. Hackman said in a threatening voice.

“Thanks,” the kid said. He was looking somewhere over my left shoulder, scratching the top of Alice’s head. The dog seemed to find Rollie, of all the people in the room, particularly attractive.

“Sometimes people buy his stuff,” Hackman said. His voice held an odd mixture of pride and fear. I guessed he didn’t know what to do with his artistic son, knew he couldn’t help him in any way, and wished he hadn’t been “blessed” at all. “I guess he gets it from my wife’s side.”

“My grandmother was a milliner,” she said. “She made beautiful hats. And she sewed too.”

I decided against asking Hackman what he did for a living. Whatever it was, he wasn’t terribly successful at it and didn’t look like he was still trying.

“We don’t want to take a lot of your time this evening,” Rosie said, “and we’re very grateful that you’ve allowed us to come and talk to you.”

“That’s okay,” Mrs. Hackman said. “We want to set the record straight. Too many people are just too darned anxious to blame a poor man’s kids for anything that goes on.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” I agreed. I turned to Rollie. “Did you do it?”

“No.” He looked directly at me, defiantly. For a kid, he was hard to read. There was something hidden there.

“Why do you think some people say you probably did?”