Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (22 page)

So much for Lou the sound sleeper. It didn’t prove anything, but it fit in with the picture we were developing very well, especially the part about Rollie Hackman.

We headed for Mendocino Street.

A darker night would have been better. The half moon was bright. The streets were empty of life. Not so much as a cat in a yard. Just us, standing out like clowns at a wake.

We made our way up the driveway to the back door of Fredda’s house, up the ramp to the porch. The key was where I hoped it would be, under the flowerpot where we’d seen Joanne replace it the first day we’d visited the house.

I put the key in the lock and turned it, very slowly, very carefully. It made a scraping noise that sounded, to us, like an alarm clock. We ducked down and waited. No lights went on. No voices. I turned the knob and pushed the door open. A hinge squeaked. A drop of cold sweat trickled down my cheek.

I was hating every second of it. I hate the sick-stomach feeling I get when I’m breaking into someone else’s house or falling downstairs or getting caught by someone’s spouse or lover. It’s times like this when I wonder why I do this kind of work. I don’t like that feeling of dread that I’m sure is like a drug to people who walk between skyscrapers on tight wires. I didn’t want to get caught. We had no right to be there. We had a lot of pieces that fit, that was all. No real proof. And this was not exactly a legal way to catch a criminal. But then, I told myself, I’m not a legal detective and Rosie’s a carpenter, so what the hell did we care?

We tiptoed across the kitchen floor to the freezer and opened it. The light from inside glared like a thousand kliegs. We began to search, methodically removing plastic bags of cookies from the shelves and replacing them exactly where they had been before.

Rosie found it. A small plastic bag. Inside, two small plastic tubes, no bigger than my thumb. Each one had the number 126 taped to it. Marty Spiegel’s donor number.

Having finished our sneaking around for the night, we went back to the motel to get Alice before we made our next stop.

Clement wasn’t happy to see us at three in the morning.

“What’s happened?” he wanted to know. “What have you found out?”

“We’re sure now,” Rosie said. “If you get a search warrant, you’ll find the evidence at Fredda’s.”

“What evidence? And what makes you sure?

This was the tricky part. “She stole the sperm,” I said. “And she kept some of it. We’re sure because we’ve been up all night putting it together.”

He squinted at me. “I’ve already heard your theory. I asked you why you’re sure now.”

“Pure deduction,” I said righteously. “We just put more of the pieces together, and—bingo!”

He looked at me. He looked at Rosie. Our bright, innocent, eager faces showed nothing but joy. He grinned sourly.

“Let’s have some coffee,” he said. “Then you can tell me all about it. Or maybe I should say almost all about it.”

“First of all,” I began when we were all settled around the coffee table with our cups, “there were so many little things that didn’t quite make sense, or that made sense only one way. Starting with the burglary, why did the thief take the stuff halfway to the spit before dumping it? To the beach past Spicer? The access at Cellini is much closer to the bank. And Lou— did you ever really believe he heard nothing that night?”

“It’s possible.”

I told him about our experiment earlier that evening. “Again, it doesn’t mean much all by itself, but it fits. It fits if he was involved or was trying to protect someone. Then there’s the burglary itself. There never was any way to tell if some of the vials were missing. And if the burglars were out for pure destruction, why did they just go through the files and mess them up?”

“Take it back a couple of months,” Rosie said. “Gracie worked at the bank. She was a friend of Spiegel’s. She knew he was a donor of some kind. She also must have known it was a very private thing to him. Yet she tried to get him to talk about it. He wouldn’t, but she gave it a try. Then a couple of weeks ago she used her job at the bank to go through the donor profiles— the public information. Why? She’s supposed to be marrying Wolf, and as far as we can tell, he’s okay— enough to have fathered a child a few years ago, anyway.”

“And a week after that the confidential files are rifled and the sperm stolen,” I said.

“And Fredda’s attitude toward Spiegel was a little strange,” Rosie added. “She seemed jealous somehow, and she said he was a snob. He doesn’t seem to be. What did he do that would make her say that? And that brings us to Gracie’s death. She was with Fredda that afternoon. Spiegel called. Now Spiegel says he just asked Gracie if she knew whether things were okay on the spit and she volunteered to go out and look. Fredda says he asked her to go out there. Let’s say Spiegel’s telling the truth. She volunteered. Why? Because she was crazy about him? Or because she wasn’t having such a great time with Fredda and wanted to leave?”

“And think back,” I said, “to that night out on the spit. When Fredda got out of her car she had mud all the way up her boots. The deep mud was out on the edge, where Gracie went over— and Fredda hadn’t gone out there when any of us were around. Sure, she could have picked up the mud somewhere else, but again, it fit. I got muddy that night. Rosie just got wet. And of course there was one big question— why did Gracie go out on the edge at all? She didn’t. Not by herself, anyway. Now add the peculiar behavior of two more people: Frank Wooster, who lied about being home that afternoon, and Rollie Hackman, who’s disappeared. Where does that take you?”

“You tell me, city boy,” Clement said, smiling.

“It takes you right to Fredda, all the way down the line.”

Fredda, who thought it was so wonderful that Nora’s folks had it made for life because Nora was bright and successful. Fredda, who had a daughter who was not only disabled, but didn’t seem to be much interested in anything but Hilda’s brand of religion, and certainly didn’t seem to be wild about her mother.

“Yesterday, when I talked to Spiegel, I asked him if Fredda had ever made a pass at him. She had, a couple of months ago. She told him she wanted him to father her child. He turned her down. It wasn’t long after that that Fredda’s cousin, Gracie, asked him about his donor status at the bank. Everyone we talked to about Gracie gave us a picture of a docile, sweet, dependent kind of woman. Nora said she was a follower. Fredda’s crazy as hell, but she’s strong and dominant and she goes after what she wants.

“Fredda’s next step was obvious. With Gracie’s help she would find out if becoming a client at the bank would get her the child of a rich and famous man.”

“And that didn’t work either, because his genes weren’t for sale,” Rosie said. “So she stole them. And she laid a false trail by leaving that ‘religious’ note and by stealing all the vials and making it look like all of them were dumped in the ocean. I don’t know whether her pointing the finger at religion was malicious, because she hated Hilda, or just the easiest way— the first thing she thought of. Anyway, she packed the stuff up, drove home— she must have had some idea about how perishable it is— stuck what she wanted into the freezer, and took the rest of it down Spicer to the nearest beach.”

“And Gracie,” Clement said, “wouldn’t have a lot of doubt about who the burglar was.”

“And being a good employee, and probably a decent enough person,” I said, “she was more than a little upset that she had, in a way, been a party to the crime. She was distracted, she was worried— and she must have let Fredda know how she felt. I suspect they were arguing about it when Spiegel called that night. Fredda’d gone through a lot by then. She’d worked hard. She wasn’t about to let Gracie ruin it. When Gracie volunteered to go to Spiegel’s— as much to get away from her cousin as anything else, I’ll bet— Fredda followed her. I’d guess she whacked her over the head, dragged her out to the edge, and tossed her over.

“Then she went back to Gracie’s, waited awhile, and called the cops.”

“There was another crime too,” Clement reminded me unnecessarily.

I poured myself another cup of coffee. My arm still ached a bit. “Fredda was one of several people who could have known where we were going that morning. You and Angie knew. Henry could have overheard us in the restaurant. Mrs. Hackman must have heard us too, even though she says she doesn’t remember catching any of our conversation. And Fredda came in to deliver some cookies and spent some time talking to Mrs. Hackman.”

“Or,” Rosie said, “by chance she could have spotted the truck parked there. I checked with that new client of hers up in Rosewood, the Italian restaurant, a few miles up the coast road. Fredda delivered some cookies there that morning. They didn’t know what time exactly, but it wasn’t long after we crashed.”

“Any number of people could have killed Gracie,” I concluded. “Wolf had a lousy alibi. But Fredda? It was only her word that she sat around and waited for Gracie to come back.”

“You’re leaving out a couple of important folks,” Clement argued. “Three, as a matter of fact: Lou, Rollie, Frank.”

“Especially Frank,” Rosie agreed.

“Lou too,” I said. “And that angry little discussion he was having with Fredda the night I followed them. And the fact that he acts like he knows something about Rollie he’s not telling.”

Clement went off to get his warrant; Rosie and I went to visit Lou Overman. We still didn’t know what part he’d played, but the last thing we needed was another inconvenient disappearance.

“We know what happened,” I told him. “Rollie’s gone through enough. Tell the truth.”

He let us in, but he wasn’t ready for truth yet. “What do you mean, you know what happened?”

“We know what Fredda did.”

“You can’t prove it,” he quavered. I wanted to break his nose.

“We can,” Rosie said.

“I’ll hear it from Clement.”

“Fine,” I said. “He knows where we are. We’ll just sit quiet and wait for him.”

It was a long couple of hours. Lou made breakfast— for himself only— choked some of it down, and ran to the bathroom to throw it up. I couldn’t remember when I’d had a better time on an empty stomach.

When Clement finally showed up, he said Frank Wooster, faced with the fact of Fredda’s arrest, had talked, and he’d fill us in later, “when we were finished with Lou.” He glared at Lou when he said it.

“Henry’s newspaper friends are going to run some pieces telling Rollie he can come home now, because we know everything,” Clement said to Lou. “This is your big chance to be a hero, Overman.”

The slimy little bastard broke down.

What happened was this: The night of the burglary at the sperm bank he heard a noise and looked out his window to see Fredda loading her wagon. She saw him watching her.

“We just stared at each other,” he said. “I saw the broken window. I didn’t know what was going on, but Fredda’s never been anything but trouble to me—” He stopped, looking almost guilty. “Anyway, I just backed up and went to bed again. But would she leave me out of it? Oh, no.”

She called him. She said if he told, she’d say he was in on it, that he’d helped her. She told him what she had done and why, and that it was his “duty” to keep quiet. And she told him she’d left something on the beach that belonged to him.

“She was always trying to torture me,” he whined. “I thought she was probably lying, but I couldn’t take a chance.” He drove out to the beach. Up on the sand above the water line he found the carton she’d carried the vials in— a book carton from a publishing company.

“She’s always using them for her cookies,” he said. “It wouldn’t have implicated me any more than her. It was just her idea of a joke, to scare me, to get me out there. To compromise me. But I took it. I picked it up. And that was when Rollie came along with his sketch pad.”

“And he couldn’t tell the law he’d seen his idol— his patron— out there that morning,” Rosie said.

“We never talked about it. Never. I never told him not to tell.”

“That helped a lot,” I said.

“And did you know she killed Gracie?” Rosie asked him.

“How could I know that?”

“Weren’t you afraid she’d kill you too?”

“I wouldn’t tell. She knew I wouldn’t.”

Through that whole long conversation he never once admitted why Fredda thought it was his “duty” not to tell. Never admitted that Joanne was his child.

Frank Wooster, on the other hand, wasn’t at all shy about admitting why he’d lied about the night of the murder. He had seen Gracie drive by. A few minutes later, when he was just finishing up with the windows at the side of his house, he saw Fredda following.

A few minutes after that, he said, he “heard a yell.” But he “didn’t think nothing about it” until later, when he heard what had happened.

The fact was, he said, he’d never really lied, except about being at the garage, because he didn’t know that Fredda had done anything wrong, and “I never said I didn’t see Fredda out there, and I never saw her hurt her cousin.”

He hadn’t wanted to get Fredda into trouble, he said, because then Hilda would have to take Joanne, and he and Joanne didn’t get along. An item Hilda had confirmed the last time I’d talked to her.

I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something more to it. Maybe he actually approved of what Fredda had done. But even Frank Wooster didn’t have nerve enough to say that.

Henry did what he said he was going to do, and Rollie spotted the story in a Marin County newspaper. He came home.

The boy, who had suffered so much trying to protect his hero, who had run away so no one could “make” him tell, managed to turn things around so that Lou came out looking noble for trying to protect his family. Even if Lou didn’t admit to having one.

When Rosie and I collected our pay from Nora, she told us the bank had some catching up to do, and some lawsuits to deal with, but it would win and it would survive. I never doubted it would.

As for Fredda, well, there are some people who just can’t win. Aside from being charged with murder and assorted other crimes, she’d done it all for nothing.

Gracie had apparently given her sketchy information about the insemination process. She knew the sperm had to be kept frozen, and that it would die quickly if it thawed. And it had thawed by the time she got it home. So, just to be sure, she stuck the three vials in the home freezer. Instant spermicide.