Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (14 page)

“Because me and Tommy got in trouble once, that’s why.”

Hackman broke in. “Couple years ago these two damned fools got themselves caught breaking into Frank’s garage. Trying to jimmy the cash register. That’s why. They made a stupid kid’s mistake.”

“Why’d you do that?” Rosie asked. She looked first at Rollie and then at Tommy, both of whom sat tight-lipped.

“They wanted a moped.” Mrs. Hackman sighed.

I changed the subject. “Rollie, you were down at the beach when Clement arrived that day— the day they found the stuff from the cryobank. I guess you’re down there a lot?”

His mother answered for him. “He goes out to the beach a lot of mornings. To draw.”

“Is that right?” I asked, addressing myself to the boy again. He nodded. “Did you look at it at all? What did you think it was?”

Tommy snorted, looking sideways at his brother, who stuck his chin out at me and kept his eyes as far from Rosie as he could.

“I thought it was a bunch of junk. Chief Paisley wouldn’t say anything when I asked him why he was messing with it.” Though Tommy seemed amused, his older brother still looked sullen. I was beginning to wonder how such a depressed kid could produce work with so much space and light in it. Maybe, I thought, the beach was the one thing that made him happy.

“You saw it there, then you saw the chief… did you see anything else earlier? Anyone else?”

“No,” he said softly.

“Are you sure, son?” Mrs. Hackman asked.

“Mom!” he protested.

“Okay,” she said. “The boy says he didn’t see anything.”

“So,” I said. “You guys didn’t do it. Who do you think did?”

Tommy spoke up. “Perry. He’s stupid enough to do something like that.”

“Hey,” Hackman said, “don’t talk that way about a policeman.”

“He’s dumb.”

“And he caught you jimmying the cash register at Frank’s, so I guess he ain’t all that stupid, right?” Hackman yelled. Tommy set his lips again. I guessed he wouldn’t say another word.

“I think that old Hilda,” Rollie said. I was glad he had decided to say something. “She’s always talking about how bad the place is.”

“Hilda?”

“She’s related to little Joanne? Fredda Carey? You know them,” Mrs. Hackman elaborated.

I nodded. “You mentioned her, too, I remember. And Perry.”

Her husband looked disgusted. “She don’t like Perry because he’s my buddy. You can scratch that.” He glared at her and she glared back at him.

“Buddy!” Mrs. Hackman said. “Drinking buddy, anyway.”

“But Hilda must be pretty old if she’s Joanne’s great-aunt,” Rosie said.

“I don’t know how she did it,” Mrs. Hackman said stubbornly. “Maybe she had an accomplice. Like Frank.”

“You also mentioned Wolf,” Rosie continued. “What made you think of him?”

“Well, think about it. He used to go with Nora and she walked out on him. And look what happened to his girlfriend. Something’s wrong with that man. I never trusted him. I think he’s got it in for the whole female sex.”

“And you’ve got it in for my friends,” Hackman groused. “Wolf’s a good man.”

Rosie cut in. “Were he and Gracie having problems?”

“I heard they argued sometimes,” Mrs. Hackman said.

“Oh, hell,” Hackman said. “Everybody argues.”

“You and your pals.” She sighed.

We stayed for a bit longer, but the conversation kept going in circles, and it didn’t look like the Hackmans were going to be much help that night. About all we’d gotten out of the visit was a slightly reinforced suspicion of Wolf, who we already knew was unaccounted for, so far, when Gracie hit the rocks.

And a funny feeling that Rollie might be hiding something.

My shoulder was giving me trouble, and I felt tired and angry and frustrated. I signaled to Rosie, we thanked our hosts, and started back to the motel.

Joanne was no longer sitting on her front porch. The street was quiet. Television voices nattered from a couple of houses, living room lights were on. But the night was chilly and no one was outside.

Even on Main Street nothing much was happening. Music from the tavern. Both restaurants mostly empty. I felt quiet too. The walk was working the kinks out of my mind, but I was having trouble thinking logically.

“What do you think of Rollie?” I asked.

“Strange kid, but Alice likes him. And the parents… God, what a depressing house.”

I agreed. And I wondered how far Rollie could go with his talent, coming from that place. He’d have to be really determined, and he’d have to be smart enough to learn, on his own, how to live in the world that seemed to have battered his parents to death.

I said good night to Rosie, took a pill, and fell asleep.

We had a lot of work lined up for Monday. First on the list was a quick run to the spit to talk to a woman named Filomena Barth, the older woman who made her home there. Clement had told Rosie she was indeed a poet. The second item of business was a stint at Nora’s bank. Nora had reluctantly given us a small office and had promised to make a general announcement about us.

I had filled Rosie in on the things I had learned about the bank earlier, and she had decided there were a lot of gaps in our knowledge of the cryo-business. I wasn’t sure we needed to know more. She was. She offered to go down to the bank and get things set up while I checked on the poet. I took her up on it.

Filomena Barth’s house was the one I’d earlier classified as modest, next door to the one I’d classified as humble. It was a tidy brown shingle, the trim painted deep red, that looked like it had been picked off a side street in Berkeley and dropped beside the ocean. Hydrangeas clustered under the front windows. A Monterey pine, planted close to the house, sheltered its face.

Something rubbed against my leg, and I looked down. A perfectly petite and beautiful black cat, female in all her moves, was batting her eyelashes at me. She wore a red collar with a red tag that said “Sara.” I knelt to pet her. As I was saying, “Hello, Sara,” the door opened and a woman stepped out on the threshold. I stood quickly to introduce myself.

She had been just about to have a glass of beer, she said. Would I join her? I resisted the urge to look at my watch— I knew it was just after nine in the morning— and said I’d be delighted.

“Unless you’d like a toddy or something warming?”

“No, beer’s fine.”

“Yes, and good for you in the morning. Like cereal.” She led me into a living room decorated in earth colors. A fire was burning in the brick fireplace, which needed tuckpointing badly.

I sat on a brown corduroy easy chair, she took the red one.

She was at least eighty years old, and wore her fine gray hair in a bun. She was dressed in a gypsy skirt and a yellow turtleneck sweater, and wore beaded moccasins on her feet. The rug, I noticed, was Navajo.

“I want to thank you for being so hospitable,” I began, remembering Melody’s evaluation of the woman as solitary and unfriendly.

She smiled. “I’ve heard about you and your friend, and I’ve been curious about you. I like the way you look, and the way you pet my cat.”

“I have cats.”

“I’m not surprised.”

There was a silence during which we regarded each other warmly.

“You’re a poet,” I said.

“And you’re a journalist.”

“No, I’m not.” She only raised her eyebrows. “I’m…” There it was again. What am I, anyway? Maybe I should just get a license, especially if there are going to be some people I can’t lie to. “I’m investigating the break-in at the bank. The cryobank.”

She laughed. “Do you think I have something to do with that? I assure you, menopause is long past.”

“I’m also looking into Gracie Piedmont’s death.”

She nodded, sipping at her beer. “Would you like some pretzels?”

“No, thanks.”

“And you’re wondering if I know anything about what happened out here on Friday night?”

“Yes. Did you see anything? See her drive past? Anything that happened when she was here?”

She ate a pretzel. “No, I’m afraid not. I had put up my shutters that afternoon, and Sara and I were tucked up quietly by the fire when I heard all that commotion later— the police, the ambulance, and whatever else there was. I thought about going out to see what had happened, but to tell you the truth, I was working on a poem about the storm and I thought I would find out soon enough if it concerned me, and a little later if it didn’t.”

“Could you tell me who your neighbors are, on either side?”

“Inland is Frank Wooster.” She gave me a sly, almost nasty look, and we both laughed. That was the house I kept thinking of as humble. Maybe it was a crooked house with a crooked man? “And on the other is that young couple. He was in business. Does something with money, still.”

“So you saw nothing from— when did you put up your shutters?”

“Four or four-thirty, it must have been. I can’t be more exact than that.”

“And they were up until after the body was discovered?”

“They were up until the next day. You’re not as tall as Magnum, but you’re nearly as good-looking.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll be going away for a day or two. I have a daughter in Mill Valley. But I hope we’ll meet again when I come back.”

“I hope so too.” I got the feeling I was expected to leave. Maybe she wanted to work on a poem. I got up, thanked her again, and left. I think I was a little bit in love.

I found Rosie in a room on the bank’s second floor. She had barely gotten started, because Nora had not had a room waiting and there was much shifting around before Rosie could begin.

Most of the employees had little to do with the storage area. The front desk receptionist had nothing useful for us, Rosie reported, and most of the clerical staff dealt with more immediate matters. But we wanted attitudes as well as information. Were any of them disgruntled, angry, dissatisfied? It seemed to us that the act of destruction was more likely to be the work of someone who didn’t get a raise than of a pair of kids or a religious groupie. Maybe someone who had been fired?

The personnel manager assured us that while several people had left in the last two years for one reason or another, no one had been, as she put it, “terminated.” Why had various people left? Had any of them left angry? Any particular problems with anyone? She didn’t think so, didn’t remember anything specific. So, she said, nothing very terrible could have happened, or she’d remember.

“It might not have been terrible in your eyes, only in theirs,” Rosie said.

She saw that there might be some sense in that. “Maybe I could go through my files and see if there’s anything…” she said tentatively. “But I’m not sure when I could do that. Not today, certainly.”

We managed to convince her that we really needed any information she might have, and soon, and after a lot of negotiating got her to promise she would work on it that evening. I think I charmed her.

The bank’s medical consultant— Dr. Reid, her name was— was immune to my charm, but not to Rosie’s.

Rosie had made a point of telling me that I hadn’t found out much, in my first talk with Nora, about the women who were the bank’s customers. The doctor was happy to fill us in.

“I know almost nothing about this process,” Rosie began. “Is it safe?”

“We do everything we can to make it safe,” Dr. Reid said. “One of the good things about freezing is that it gives us time to put the sperm in quarantine until it’s been tested. The donors and their sperm go through very careful genetic and medical screening.”

“Do you reject very many of them?”

“Yes. Some weeks as many as eighty percent.”

“What about AIDS?” I asked.

“That’s part of the medical screening of the sperm. The AIDS antibody test. It shows whether the donor has been exposed.”

“Say I were going to do this,” Rosie said. “How much would it cost? How would it be done? What are the rules?”

Dr. Reid smiled. “Rules?” They laughed. “We have a sliding scale, so your cost would depend on your income. Anywhere from five to fifteen hundred dollars, I believe, although that’s not exactly my area of expertise.” They smiled at each other again. “You would go through an orientation that would cover legal matters and donor screening, that kind of thing. Then there’s a class on the fertility cycle, and of course you would get a complete physical.” She paused.

“When do I pick my donor— or is it donors?”

The doctor laughed. “How many did you want? One donor at a time, please.”

“All right,” Rosie said agreeably. I was beginning to feel like I should be somewhere else.

“You’d go through the donor files and take your pick. There’s consultation for that, too, of course.”

I decided to get more involved in the conversation. “So she’s picked her donor. Then what?”

The doctor took her eyes off Rosie long enough to smile at me. She was about my age, tall and slender, with medium length blond hair and bright blue eyes with laugh lines. She was tan, in January. I liked having her smile at me.

“Then we wait for her fertile time, and she makes an appointment for her insemination visit or pickup.”

“Pickup?” Rosie asked.

“Some women use their own doctor. Some prefer to do it at home, themselves, or with the help of a friend.”

I thought that sounded like fun, but I wouldn’t have said so for anything in the world.

“What else do I get for my money?” Rosie asked.

“Pregnancy test. And six months worth of tries, if you need them.”

“Six months?” I said. “How much do you get from one guy?”

“We buy insemination units in threes. But donors can repeat. And of course a woman can try an alternate donor.”

There was a point here that was fascinating me. “Do you mean to say a guy could keep donating indefinitely and have maybe hundreds of kids born through this bank?”

“No. We limit each donor to ten live births.”

So much for a strange fantasy. Then I remembered something Nora had told me about donors, and a question that had occurred to me later.

“Nora told me that some donors are men who are about to have vasectomies.” She nodded, giving me her full attention. “In case they want to have kids later. But I’ve heard that a vasectomy can be reversed. So if you wanted…”