Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (7 page)

“Wait a minute. Where’s the key? You put it right back under the pot, where it belongs.” Joanne sighed and returned to the back porch, replacing the key under a flowerpot. Then she spun the chair, slammed the back door, and we heard her wheelchair roll away.

“Kid’s locked me out more than once, palming that key,” Fredda complained.

I took a cookie off the plate and bit into it. No nuts, no raisins, no chips, not much taste beyond sweet. Dry and dusty. I put it on the table next to my coffee cup. “Do you mind talking about your cousin? I know it just happened and everything…”

She shrugged again. “Oh, that’s okay. It’s painful, but maybe it’s better to talk.” She sat down, the lump of dough untouched on the board, the rolling pin beside it.

“Then about this accident last night, could you go over that once more? Why she went? When?”

“It’s like I told Clement. And Perry. She went out to see if everything was okay with Marty’s house. He called her. Asked her about it. Around five it was. We were talking. We’d just had a glass of wine. She was going to fry some fish for us.”

“How much wine had she had, do you think?”

Fredda ate another cookie. “Just the one glass, I seem to remember. But, you know, I’m not really sure. She could have had a whole other bottle before I came. How would I know?”

“What time did you get there?”

“Must have been a little after four-thirty.”

“You think she was drunk?” Rosie asked.

“Not so I could see.”

“Did she usually drink a lot?”

“No. All I’m saying is how would I know what she did before I was even there?”

“So,” I said, “Marty called around five. They were pretty close?”

“Close?” She got up, poured herself an inch of coffee, and sat back down again. “I wouldn’t say close. I don’t think he was really close to anyone in town. Kind of full of himself, if you ask me. Maybe a little snobbish, if you know what I mean. No, see, Gracie was a movie freak. You know, she knew all about Cary Grant and Veronica Lake and people like that. All the old ones. And I guess they got started talking once. Had something in common. Friends, that way. If he ever talked to anyone else, it would have been different, but he didn’t, so she was the one he called.”

She made it sound like the woman had died because she liked old movies.

I ate the rest of my cookie so she wouldn’t be insulted. “Where was he calling from?”

“L.A.”

“And you and your daughter were there when he called?”

“Not Joanne. I took Joanne over to her great-aunt’s place. She likes it there.” A grimace.

“You don’t?” I asked.

“Oh, she’s okay. My mother’s sister. It’s just that she’s all the time talking about Jesus this, Jesus that. Joanne’s kind of gotten into it too.” She shrugged, a by-now familiar gesture that she seemed to use as a good-natured expression of “what the hell.” She looked at her watch, said “Whoops,” and went to the oven. Another batch of cookies, a bit on the brown side. She repeated her procedure up to the point of putting another batch in the oven. She didn’t have any ready.

“I’m getting behind in the system, here.” She frowned. “I forgot to roll out some more to go in when those came out.” She floured the board again, dropped another ball of dough on it, and began to smash away.

“We won’t keep you much longer,” I told her. “So she got this phone call and took off?”

“That’s right.” The dough didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes it looked like a steamroller had gotten it. “She said she’d just run over for a minute. It got longer and longer and I was sitting there getting worried, so I finally called Clement.”

Rosie, who is usually very polite, had not finished her cookie. She asked, “What were you afraid might have happened?”

“Oh, listen, in that storm? Anything. A tree could have fallen on her car. Somebody’s roof could come off and land on her head. Anything.”

“And you called back…” I prodded.

“Yeah, well, it was after seven and I still hadn’t heard anything. So finally I called the cops again. Angie told me they’d found her body. That was when I drove out to see.” She shook her head. “I saw, all right. I couldn’t believe it, you know? They were hauling her dead body up with ropes.” She wiped her eyes.

Rosie and I had been lucky, I thought. We’d gotten there when the body was already gone. I like it better that way.

“Did you identify her?”

“Heck, no. Clement did. You think I wanted to go out there and look at her?”

“Of course not,” Rosie commiserated. “And then Wolf showed up, too, right?” Fredda nodded. “He seems like a real sweet guy. We were in the tavern when he got the news. It knocked him right over.”

“Oh, sure. He’s the best. They seemed to get along pretty good too. They were probably going to get married.” She was cutting out circles of dough again.

“Henry mentioned that Wolf’s had a lot of problems,” I said. “Is that so?”

“Oh, nothing too big. Women. He had a marriage that didn’t work out. There was a kid too. And before that he had a thing for Nora; that was when they were pretty young. And she dumped him and took off for the city. Said she had things to do. Well, she did them and came back, but by then it was too late. Not that she came back for him. I heard she got homesick. Wanted to have a more, you know, natural life. By the way, be sure and put in that write-up that these cookies are all natural. No artificial ingredients.”

I thought it was probably time to go. She was putting two more cookie sheets into the oven. I don’t like to wear out my sources in one sitting, and besides, I was getting dizzy watching her.

We thanked her, assured her we didn’t need to be escorted to the door, and walked back down the hallway. Joanne was sitting on the front porch. “Is that your truck, with the dog in it?” Rosie said it was. “You going to write about my mother?”

“Maybe,” I answered, feeling guilty. “I’ll bet you’re glad your mom is in the cookie business, right? You get to eat all those cookies.”

She laughed, a short bark. “So what? She gave you some, didn’t she?” I said yes, she had. “They’re not very good, are they?” She swung her chair around and rolled to the other end of the porch, dismissing us.

We returned to Georgia’s Cafe for some non-Fredda coffee. I hadn’t noticed them before, but there they were, in a cardboard box on the counter: plastic bags with gummed mailing labels on them that said “Fredda’s All-Natural Cookies.” The label was hand-lettered neatly in ballpoint.

I was thinking I’d like to talk to Nora again, maybe get some background on Wolf and her relationship with him. Rosie mentioned she thought we ought to talk to the Hackman boys. Maybe we’d find out, after all, that the break-in had been an adolescent joke. In which case, she said sadly, Gracie Piedmont’s death was probably just an accident and there was no case of any kind. She was depressing me to the point of agreeing with her. Which turned her around.

“No,” she said. “I don’t really believe any of that.”

I noticed that Fredda’s cookies were also on the menu, under Desserts. Fifty cents apiece. “You don’t want to go home yet.”

She laughed. “You’re right. I want there to be a case, and as long as she’s dead anyway, she may just as well have been murdered.”

Nora didn’t answer her home phone, so we went over to the bank. The receptionist was there and sent us up after consulting with her intercom. But when we got to Nora’s door, which was ajar, we heard two voices. I knocked.

“Just a second,” she called out. “See you later, then, Marty?”

A short, muscular man wearing thick glasses brushed out past us, with just the quickest nod in our direction. I turned to watch him go before entering the office. He looked familiar.

“Marty?” I asked. She nodded. “Spiegel?” Yes, she admitted, it was.

Rosie was impressed, but she tended to business. “I guess he flew up here because he never got a return call from Gracie Piedmont last night? To check on his house?”

“I suppose so,” Nora said.

“And you’re buddies?” I asked. “He just dropped in to say hi?”

“Don’t be silly.” She played with a stack of papers on her desk. “He was here on business.”

“Business? What kind of business? Bank business?”

She didn’t answer me. “What did you need to see me about, anyway?”

“Look, if you want us to investigate, you’re going to have to give us information freely.” Actually, I was curious as hell.

“All right. But this is highly confidential. We always keep this information very strictly to ourselves.”

It turned out that the famous Marty Spiegel was what the guy in the bar had called a “depositor.”

I filed that information under “fascinating but irrelevant” and turned to Nora’s private life.

Nora had, it turned out, been very heavily involved with Wolf Oswald, but that had been a very long time ago. They had dated sporadically in high school, more seriously when she was attending junior college. He had wanted to get married. She had taken a series of jobs in the county, “nothing very exciting,” and had put him off while she tried to decide what she wanted to do.

What she wanted to do, after all, was leave, go to San Francisco, and work in the financial district at whatever she could find. She had worked, and she had learned. She had gone to school at night and taken business courses. There had been occasional weekends in Wheeler for a while, but finally he had married someone else, and he and Nora became, she said, friends. That marriage had fizzled a couple of years before she had come back to Wheeler to stay.

I was beginning to understand what Fredda had meant about Wolf’s problems with women, but his story didn’t seem very different from anyone else’s. Not very different, for example, from mine. A lot of us had limped footloose in one way or another through the seventies. Periods of realignment are hard on everyone, especially when they end up with absolutely nothing having been changed by all that agony.

“When you came back to town,” Rosie asked, “what happened between you then? He was free, wasn’t he?”

“He was free, but nothing happened. We went out once or twice, but it didn’t work.”

Rosie persisted. “And he never resented you for not marrying him?”

“I think he was relieved, when he got to know me again later. Relieved that we hadn’t gotten married. I’m not the easiest person to get along with and I love to work. I don’t think that’s the kind of wife he had in mind.” She sighed. “Poor Gracie. She would have been right for him. Poor Wolf. Anyway”—she drummed her fingers on her desk— “I really don’t think any of this has any significance. It’s all years and years ago.”

“You say Gracie would have been perfect for him,” I said. “How?” All she had ever said about Gracie before was that she was a good employee and was “sweet,” whatever that means.

“Oh, you know. Feminine in a traditional way. She would have let him take the lead, make the decisions. She wasn’t assertive at all as far as I could tell. Don’t misunderstand— I liked her.”

“But you weren’t friends,” Rosie said.

The phone rang. She picked it up, asked the party on the other end to hold on, covered the mouthpiece, and said, “Listen, guys, I’ve got an appointment in five minutes. Could we pick this up again later?”

We said good-bye.

I was thinking about those “years and years” since she and Wolf had been together. It didn’t mean much. A man can carry a heartache around for decades. A relationship that should have worked and didn’t— because you were too young and stupid, maybe— can leave you looking for that person for the rest of your life. I had one like that. It has been years and years, and a lot of women, including one marriage, in between. And if I knew where she was, I’d go and get her. If she was still the person I remembered.

It was early. I figured we should go look for Marty Spiegel, Gracie’s friend, and that the place to look for him was probably the house he’d been so worried about.

The road out along the spit was still slick with mud now half-dried. A birch tree had fallen onto the road, but it was passable. The big trees sheltering the houses didn’t look much the worse for wear, all in all, but there were branches scattered on the road and in what we could see of the yards.

In daylight, without blinding wind and rain, the spit was a beautiful place. The ocean was as quiet as it ever gets up here, and the air was fresh and salty. The glimpses of wealth between the trees didn’t spoil the effect one bit, although, on the way out to Marty’s, I noticed a couple of houses that didn’t look so great. One was modest. One was even humble, with plywood still covering the windows from the night before.

We stopped at the bottom of the driveway where, the night before, Gracie’s car had been parked. In its place now was an old red Jaguar. We didn’t doubt for a second that we’d found the right driveway. The Jaguar’s license plate said MOVIES. We left Alice sleeping in the car and walked up to the door.

It was quite a door.

One of those big double jobs, about ten feet tall, but not the kind you’d expect a butler to answer. Eric the Red, maybe, but not a butler. It was made of thick rough redwood slabs with monstrous black iron strap hinges. The small round windows on either side of the door were heavy leaded glass pictures of sailing vessels of some ancient and indeterminate origin.

The house went nicely with the doors. Very big. This was no rustic crackerbox covered with plywood siding and batten board. The front exterior was solid, with no windows other than the little leaded jobs by the door, and made of thick redwood planking set on the diagonal. I looked up. There was some transparent glass on what could have been the second or third floor, depending on the downstairs ceilings, but it was screened on the inside with potted plants. At least I supposed they were potted.

All he needed was a moat. I couldn’t wait to see the inside. I grabbed the big iron ring that hung from the door, but Rosie poked my arm and, reaching alongside the doorframe, pressed an electric bell. We heard it resound deep inside the building, a throaty two-note chime. A window slammed up somewhere around the side of the house and a voice yelled, “Who is it?”

“Friends of Nora Canfield,” I yelled back. “We need to talk to you.”