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

“Where do you think we should start?” Rosie wanted to know.

“With some hip boots,” I groused. I turned on Rosie’s transistor radio. Sure enough, more weather. A big ugly front out over the Pacific.

I left the radio on low. “We need to get to know the people in this town. We need to check out the religious fanatics the chief mentioned. We need to talk to the kid who found the stuff at the beach before Paisley got there. Oh, hell, you know. We need to be able to walk through town without using oars.”

“What time’s dinner?”

I told her.

“We’ve got a while, then. We could spend some time in a local tavern, catching the gossip.”

That’s one of the things I love about working with Rosie. We think alike.

Still, I wasn’t eager to go out into the storm again.

“Let’s finish these beers first, okay? It’s dry in here.”

“You’re such a tough guy, Jake.”

“Never said I was. Never will say so. People start expecting tough, a guy could get hurt.”

We both remembered a few times when the guy had, indeed, gotten hurt.

“Okay, so what we’re dealing with is several different possibilities.”

“Right.”

“It’s a prank, like the chief says. It’s the work of someone with religious convictions. It’s someone trying to get to Nora or to her company and covering up their real motives.”

“Right.” I finished my beer and stood up, ready to go again. “Or it’s something else.”

It was still raining, but not quite as hard, and the wind had died down somewhat. According to the Chevy’s radio, though, the lull was just that and the storm was going to have plenty more to offer before the night was over.

I remembered seeing a tavern not far from the police station. It was certainly not the only one in town, but at least I knew where it was. We parked on the street, right in front of an antique store with plywood nailed over its display window. The grocery store on the other side of the tavern was still open, and its smaller window was uncovered.

Henry’s Pub, pretentious though its name might be, was a pleasant, dimly lighted place with real wood paneling and a scarred and ancient bar. The few patrons, I suspected, were regulars who were not deterred by weather. A couple of guys who looked like hard drinkers perched on stools at the bar. A leftover hippie was playing pinball, and a man and woman in their forties huddled at a tiny table looking like they didn’t have much to say to each other but hoped that being out in public would help.

The bartender had a neat red beard and short red hair and a square face saved from Prussian sternness by soft brown eyes. Rosie and I grabbed a couple of stools.

“Hi. What can I get you?” A friendly, sad smile. We ordered beers. He slid them across the bar to us. “Visiting?” We said yes. “Not a real nice day for it.”

“We noticed,” I agreed. “And it sounds like it’s going to get worse.”

“Bad enough, but not too bad, maybe. Not like last year.” The winter before, whole towns had been flooded out in Sonoma county. “Weather service says it’ll blow by, tomorrow sometime.”

He didn’t seem terribly concerned. “People seem to think,” I said, “that there’ll be some property damage.”

“Maybe. Mostly out on the spit, and those folks are insured up the ying-yang.”

“I heard some of those houses are owned by celebrities.”

He leaned a little closer. The subject interested him. “Ever hear of Melody Clift? Marty Spiegel?”

“Melody Clift?” Rosie perked up. “Isn’t she a writer? Romance novels or something like that?” I was amazed. I would never expect Rosie to recognize the name of a romance novelist. Come to think of it, though, the name did sound familiar. “And Spiegel,” Rosie continued, “he’s the movie director. Big.” She turned to me. “You know, Jake, he did
Pirates of the Martian Sea.”

I knew, all right. Everyone did.

“’Course neither of them’s in town right now,” the bartender said. “Melody’s in and out, but Spiegel— he spends most of his time in L.A., I guess.”

The conversation lagged for a beat or two, and it seemed like a good time to introduce a new subject.

“I hear you had some other excitement around here a couple of days ago.”

He half-smiled. “Oh, yeah. You must mean the break-in over at the bank.”

One of the drunks halfway down the bar snickered. The other one said, “Hey, Wolf, how about another bullshot?”

Wolf— Wolf?— brought the man another bullshot. I ordered another beer to bring him back to our end of the bar.

“I’d think a crime that big would be quite an event out here,” I said.

Wolf shook his head. “Bunch of kids. Big joke.”

“The people at the bank don’t think it’s too funny.”

The laughing drunk laughed louder. “Guess this guy’s a depositor. You got an account over there, fella?” He cracked himself up. Wolf gave him a disgusted look, and the drunk tried to stop grinning.

“Got any particular set of kids in mind?” I asked.

He studied my face. “You some kind of insurance investigator or something?”

“No. I don’t even believe in the stuff. Insurance, I mean.”

He moved down the bar to talk to the drunks, which only goes to show how little he wanted to talk to us. Rosie was meditating quietly over her beer. I figured she’d start to ask some questions once she got her bearings in the town.

Right about then a tall fat man came in, shedding rivers from his Christmas-tree-green plastic coat. When he walked closer to the bar, I recognized the white-faced man from the cafe, the one whose house on the spit had been an object of amusement to his buddy. His face looked even paler, almost gray, like a dead man’s.

“Hey, Henry,” Wolf said, looking surprised. “What are you doing back here so quick?”

Henry leaned over the bar, took Wolf’s shoulders in his hands, and said something to him softly. Wolf’s body sagged, and his face looked like it was melting. The big man let go of him just long enough to get his body around and behind the bar. He led the bartender out to a chair.

The old hippie, the man and woman, and the two drunks surrounded Wolf and his large nurse.

“Hey, man,” the old hippie whined. “What’s goin’ on? What was that about Gracie?”

“Drowned,” Henry said. “She was out at the spit and it looks like she got blown over or slipped or something. Down onto the rocks. Maybe a wave took her. That’s all I know. Listen, Wolf, you go along home.”

Wolf shook his head. “Rather be here.”

“I’m your boss. Do what I say. My place, I say who works the bar and who goes home.”

“Fuck you.” Wolf continued to sit rigidly in his chair.

“Okay.” Henry backed off. “But you just sit there.” He peeled off his still-dripping coat and squeezed back behind the bar. Rosie ordered another beer.

Except for the bored couple, the other patrons of the bar drifted away from Wolf uneasily, the bearded time-warp back to his pinball, the drunks back to their drinks. The couple sat down with him, offering a kind of silent condolence. Wolf jumped to his feet. “I’m going to go find out what happened.”

Henry opened his mouth to object, then closed it again. The couple, their first overture rejected, watched Wolf go without offering to go with him.

Henry stared at the door. “Bad luck,” he sighed. “You’d think he’d have had enough of that.”

“This hit him pretty hard,” Rosie said. “Who was Gracie to him, anyway?”

“Girlfriend. They been dating for a couple years. Going to get married.”

“Rough,” I said. “I guess she lived out there on the spit, then?”

He shook his head. “No. I don’t know what the hell she was doing out there in this weather.”

“So,” Rosie pursued, “he’s had a lot of bad luck?”

Henry ignored the question and went down the bar to fill another order.

I looked at my watch. It was 7:45. We were due at Nora’s at: 8:00.

Alice was curled up on the backseat of the Chevy. She roused herself to greet us, then flopped back down again. She wasn’t even going to bother to look out the window as she rode. Smart dog. There was nothing to see. We checked Nora’s directions. Her house was in the hills overlooking the town.

Class and social lines are drawn clearly in a town like Wheeler, as much now as in the past. Maybe more now, with its mix of urban immigrants and old residents. The lines are drawn by nature and by the way that people see it— literally.

The very rich who were new to the town lived out on the spit, right out in the ocean, but above it. Close to its power but superior, like gods.

I hadn’t seen much of the side streets yet, but I was willing to bet that most of them were made up of homes for lower- and middle-income people, many of whom had been there for static generations. On some of those side streets, I knew, old mansions still rested in their spacious gardens, built by Victorians who were more interested in creating their own splendor than in looking at the ocean from their living room windows. Some of those might still be occupied by old families. Some would have been converted to inns. Some would have been cut up into flats.

The hills at the edge of town, on the other hand, held the newer construction of those who had some money, were priced out of the spit but wanted a view of the ocean. Successful people who could afford better than the viewless heart of town. People like Nora.

The rain had evened off to a steady downpour, and the road we took up into the hills, narrow and winding, was hard to negotiate. Parts of it were half-buried in slide debris and slippery with mud. Her house was set snugly among shrubs and partly sheltered by a good-sized black locust tree. The size of the tree told me that the house was probably about twenty years old, an A-frame modification of redwood and glass. Small, but I was betting she had a nice view of the Pacific from that upstairs room.

When Nora answered the door she asked if the dog was okay with cats. We assured her that Alice was very fond of cats, and we were all allowed in.

She offered us wine, and we sat down in a comfortable, small living room with a big stone fireplace warming and cheering and sending fragrant hardwood smoke up the chimney. Soft, deep chairs. The rug was a reasonable dark color, so it didn’t matter too much if Alice’s paws were damp and possibly muddy. I relaxed fully for the first time that day, sipped the wine, listened to the Vivaldi she’d put on the stereo. She was in the kitchen, working on something that smelled of curry. Rosie was in there, too, checking out the food. I just sat, wanting nothing more than warmth and dry-ness.

They came back into the living room. Nora looked distressed.

“I was just telling her what we heard about that woman who fell off the cliff,” Rosie said.

“It was an accident? Is that what you heard?”

A small knife of guilt cut me. “I’m sorry. We should have said something right away. You know her, then?” Of course she did. In a town this size?

“It had to be Gracie Piedmont. She’s been seeing Wolf. And you heard it was an accident?”

“Sounded that way,” I said. “Why?”

“I’m sure it must have been,” she said softly. “There’s no reason why it would have anything to do with the break-in. But it seems so odd…”

Her reaction was dragging me out of my warm stupor. A gray cat strolled out of the kitchen, made itself big and fuzzy, arched its back, and glared at Alice, who wagged her tail tentatively.

“Why would it have anything to do with the break-in?” Rosie wanted to know.

“Well, she worked with us. She was an employee.”

The cat continued to glare at Alice, who sighed and closed her eyes.

I sighed, too, and stood up. “How do we get to the spit?”

“Why?”

Rosie explained. “It probably doesn’t have anything to do with what happened at the bank. It was probably just an accident. But if there’s any chance that there is a connection, we need to go out there and see if there’s anything to see before everything’s taken away. Or washed away.”

“Of course,” Nora said, her incomprehension replaced by resolution. “Let me get a coat and turn off the oven. I’ll come too.”

I told her that wasn’t necessary, but she wouldn’t listen. We put our coats back on. Alice dragged herself away from the fire.

On the way down the hill, over that rotten road again, we asked Nora a few questions about the dead woman. She was in her early thirties. She had worked at the sperm bank. She had lived in Wheeler all her life and had relatives in town.

“What kind of job did she have?” Rosie asked.

“Mostly bookkeeping. But she also helped out part-time with insemination. Instructing women who do it at home, working at the clinic with women who want to do it there. A lot of us wear a number of hats. We try not to pigeonhole our employees.”

Just as I turned onto the road that led out onto the spit, an ambulance passed us going the other way. I aimed at a cluster of vehicles huddled in the flashing lights of two police cars, about halfway out. Not much of a road. Straight enough from land side to point, but barely paved and chuck-holed, flooded six inches deep in places, with a film of mud, washing out of the lots above, smearing the surface. Through the rain and the trees I could just make out a few houses at the upper side of the road. At our left, nothing but grass, mud, and rock ending suddenly about twenty-five yards from the road.

From what I could see of the houses, they were big. There didn’t seem to be very many of them, but there could have been others tucked farther back in the trees. I had no idea how wide the spit might be, but it was no more than five hundred yards long.

Besides the two police cars, there were a big old station wagon and a county car. A solitary figure squatted out in the rain and wind on the grassy bluff overlooking the ocean. I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel. I rolled down my window; the chief, in the passenger seat, rolled down his. He jerked a thumb at the backseat of the Chevy, where Alice, her body obscuring Nora, was peering through the glass. I pulled up alongside the wagon. Paisley was sitting inside. “Funny-looking bloodhound you got there.”

“Heard there was an accident, Clement.”

He opened his door, slid out, and ducked into the backseat of the Chevy with Alice and Nora. The wagon’s driver slid across the front seat to get a better look at us. It was a woman, swathed in clear plastic.