Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (9 page)

“I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just don’t have anything to go on. Maybe if I had better help. Or if I had anything to convince the sheriff with, so I could get some help from them. But the county plays straight poker, and you’re looking at one hell of a lot of wild cards, with the break-in and the death.”

“You play poker, Clement?” Rosie asked.

“Sure do. Don’t always have time, but I like to get a game going once in a while. You?”

“Once in a while. But Jake does it every week.”

“If I can,” I said.

Clement looked pleased. “Maybe we ought to get a game going tonight at my place. Perry plays. He plays stupid, but that’s okay with me.”

“Should we see if we can round up a couple more people?” Rosie asked.

“You bet.” He took the map back from me, and added another blob— the location and address of his house.

“Oh, by the way, Clement,” I said. “The Hackman boys. Are they the ones you think might be responsible for the break-in?”

“Who told you that, for Christ’s sake?” He frowned. “Well, could be. It was Rollie hanging around the beach the morning we found the stuff, but he hangs around there all the time, anyway. Hell, sometimes kids get in trouble… And in a way, if he did it, maybe he would want to watch and see what happened next. Or maybe he’d want to be as far away… I don’t know, forget I said anything.”

We thanked him for the information he’d given us, and walked down the street to the tavern. It was noon, and Wolf had just unlocked the doors. He looked haggard and he moved slowly.

We ordered mineral water. He handed us the bottles and glasses of ice with twists of lime. “I hear you two have been asking a lot of questions about Gracie’s accident.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Rosie asked. He didn’t answer her.

“I hear you’re some kind of writers or reporters.”

I nodded. “Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“From just about everybody. What are you here to report, anyway?”

I gave him the song and dance about writing a piece on the town, small town with sperm bank. “And, of course,” I added, “a death… well, it just seems to be part of the kind of thing that’s been happening around here lately.”

“You mean like a bad-luck town or something?”

“I guess.”

“Sounds a little peculiar to me. Some of the people in town aren’t so sure they believe that. Henry thinks you’re private investigators.”

Rosie broke in. “Investigators? Why wouldn’t we admit that? Besides, reporters work in teams. Investigators don’t.”

Sometimes I marvel at Rosie’s ability to make bald statements of fact about things she knows nothing about. A real and useful talent.

“That makes sense,” he said, and began washing glasses. The glasses, I reflected, must have been left from the night before, because we’d opened the place and there was no one there but us. The glasses looked clean to start with, though, so I decided it was just busy work.

“I didn’t expect to see you in here today,” I said. “Pretty upsetting for you, about Gracie.”

A muscle in his cheek twitched. He kept washing clean glasses. “Better to keep working.”

“You two were planning on getting married, right?” Rosie asked.

“Right.” He didn’t look up.

No reason to beat around the bush, I thought. “Do you think it was an accident?” He did look up, then, straight at me. His eyes were bloodshot.

“What the hell are you after?”

I kept on going. “Do you think she would have gone out on the edge to look at the waves? She was just there to check one of the houses.”

He stared at me. “Don’t try to make a big story out of this, pal. She fell. Leave her alone.”

Rosie took a turn. “You don’t know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?”

He glared back at her. “I bet you’d just love it if I pushed her. Just like a man, right?” He shoved our two dollars back at us, and spoke to me. “Drinks are on the house. There’s nobody who would have wanted to hurt Gracie, and don’t try to say there was. Now, get out of here. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to talk to you.”

I decided this was not a good time to invite him to a poker game, not a good day to get to know him better. We left.

We stopped for a quick lunch at a place we hadn’t tried before. It was called the Santa Rosa Plum, and the menu in the window had a lot of sprout and avocado kinds of things. Our waitress was a tired-looking woman who was polite but morose. We were just deciding to make the beach our next stop when she dragged herself over to take our order. We both ordered the vegetarian sandwiches— cheese, avocado, sprouts, and tomato on whole wheat. The waitress nodded to someone in the booth behind us, and said, “Be right with you, Henry.”

Henry it was, finishing his coffee and waiting for his check. He smiled at us. We smiled back. He got his check and left.

We had just made the first dents in our sandwiches when Fredda came in the door, carrying a cardboard carton. Our waitress went to talk to her. Most of it looked like chat, except when Fredda started stacking bags of cookies next to the cash register. Our waitress stopped her after the first dozen. They had a mild discussion. Fredda shrugged, turned, waved at us, and left carrying her carton, still nearly full.

After lunch we headed back to the truck, which was parked outside Clement’s office. Just as we passed the grocery store, the Jaguar with the MOVIES license plate pulled up.

Spiegel, dressed in rustic denim and plaid flannel, jumped out and greeted us in a friendly fashion.

“Where you headed?”

“Couple places. Beach, for one. Glad we ran into you,” I said. “We’re getting up a poker game for tonight over at Clement’s. Interested?”

He looked slightly suspicious. “What kind of stakes are you talking about?”

“Nickel ante.”

He thought about it. “What time?”

“I guess around eight.”

“Who’s playing?”

I reflected that celebrity must be hard on this man sometimes. “Rosie and Clement, me, Perry. Maybe give Nora a call.”

“Maybe so. It’d be a relief to do something besides think about work.”

I wrote down Paisley’s address for him, he went into the grocery store, and we continued on our way to the truck. After stopping for gas, we headed for the beach.

We took Cellini Avenue, which sloped downward through the center of town and ended a few feet above sea level at the coast road.

Sand, driftwood, even seaweed had forced itself through the bottleneck formed by the beach entrance path cut across the dunes. The storm’s debris was scattered across the surface of the road itself and made the right turn an obstacle course, which Rosie negotiated skillfully.

We followed the narrow road north. It wound along the edge of town, rising gradually above the beach until, at Spicer, I could see only the shoulder of the road and the ocean some distance below. Another half mile and we spotted the entrance Clement had marked on his map. Rosie made a U-turn, pulling the truck up onto the shoulder just beyond the path.

We stood on the rise for a moment, looking down at the beach, a cup deep enough, here, to contain its own evidence of the gale.

The triangular rock formation, at low tide, was near the edge of the beach. We picked our way out through weed and wood and, here and there, the corpse of a fish or bird caught by the storm. There were bits of glass in the sand, bits of plastic, shell, unidentifiable objects. I squinted at the rocks and tried to see someone, anyone, tossing vials of sperm for the rocks to catch like sea lions catching fish. I kept getting confused between vials of sperm caught on the rocks and a woman’s body that had been caught by different rocks on a different part of the beach. Alice was prancing at the edge of the water, playing tag with the gentle waves. Rosie stood, arms akimbo, looking toward the spit, which was clearly visible to the north. I tossed a stick for the dog a few times, feeling futile. There was nothing here to find because there was too much of everything. We began to walk toward the spit.

We’d gone about two-thirds of the way, when I saw something pink fluttering slowly down the side of the spit and onto the beach. Gradually, as it came closer, it took shape. A woman, dressed in some kind of pink pajamas.

Alice ran to meet her, and I heard her laugh as she stooped to pet the dog. A nice sound.

She was somewhere around forty-five. Slightly thick in the waist, with graying long auburn hair and nearly black eyes. She smiled at us. It was a very sexy smile. For whom, I wondered.

We said hello. She said hello. She stopped. “I’ll bet you’re those reporters everyone’s been talking about. Or are you detectives? Which are you, anyway?”

We introduced ourselves. “Reporters,” I said.
“Probe
magazine.”

“That’s very exciting.” The smile was definitely for me. “I’m Melody Clift. I have a house up there.” She waved an arm toward the spit.

“The writer!” Rosie exclaimed as if she were a fan.

Melody Clift ducked her head modestly. I’d never read one of her romances and I didn’t think I ever would, but I looked at her with new interest. The pink pajamas were a mite flashy, but you couldn’t tell from her manner or her soft voice that she’d made several million dollars writing porn for women.

She smiled a conspiratorial smile. “Yes, I do write. And I’m dying to know what kind of dirt you’re digging up about this town.”

“Maybe something you can use?” I smiled.

She laughed. “Why not?” She took my arm, which I found somewhat startling. But then, she was a startling woman. “Why don’t you drop in on me later and we can talk.” Although she smiled at Rosie, I wasn’t sure the invitation was for both of us. “My house is the seventh one out.”

I told her we would try, but might not make it that day.

“I’ll be in all evening, and all day tomorrow. Please drop by. I’m feeling very bored. It can be so dismal here in the winter.” There was an edge of mysterious sadness in her soft, husky voice. The day was bright and sunny and far from dismal.

“I guess you came up this morning?” Rosie asked. “To take a look at your house?”

“Yes. From my home in San Francisco.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m afraid there’s a tree in my swimming pool.”

We “tsked” in sympathy. “We should be going now,” I said. All that soft pinkness was making me nervous.

“I hope I’ll see you later, then. You, too, Rosie. And of course the poodle. She’s lovely.”

We said good-bye. She walked on down the beach and we continued toward the spit.

Rosie was chuckling. “She likes you, Jake. I could feel the steam rising.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Really. If I were Lee, I’d be worried about you visiting that woman.” I snorted. Lee is someone I’ve been seeing, off and on, for several months. A bright, beautiful attorney. She lives in Petaluma, which is nearly an hour away from Oakland. She works long hours and rarely makes the commute, which leaves it up to me. I’d been managing it a couple of times a week. She doesn’t think that’s enough, and accuses me of taking the relationship lightly. She is unjust.

“I think,” I said, “that we should visit Melody anyway. She might know something.”

Rosie laughed. “I’ll bet she knows a lot.” I grunted. “I think you should go to see her alone. I think she’d talk more freely, if she has anything to talk about.”

I grunted again. “Have you actually read her books?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

We had reached the path that Melody had taken down to the beach from the spit above, a rocky, steep, ankle-twister zigzagging down the cleft where the spit joined the mainland. Not posted as private, spit-dweller property, but somehow seeming that way. Farther out toward the water, the scarp was nearly vertical, with a slight overhang, clay and rock crumbling to sand halfway down. Out still farther, midway along the spit, were the clusters of rock, broken and sharp, tumbled together like jagged eggs in a nest of foam, where Gracie Piedmont had fallen.

It looked to me like she could have gotten as good a view of the stormy ocean from a softer, more inland part of the spit, if that’s what she wanted to do, like the part over the beach. I said as much to Rosie.

“But she was already farther out, at Spiegel’s house. So she just crossed the road.”

“If it was an accident.” Maybe I was too used to dealing with murders. A burglary, even at a sperm bank, seemed tame. Boring. My imagination was creating more mystery than there really was. I told that to Rosie too.

She sighed. “Then we need to talk to those Hackman kids, get them to admit they stole the sperm, and go home.”

“We’re playing poker tonight.”

“Then we’ll go home tomorrow.” She was laughing at me. I grinned back at her. Sometimes I wish we were both heterosexual. Sometimes I wonder if we’ve been able to get this close because she isn’t.

We turned back along the beach, walking close to the water. I spotted Melody’s pink pajamas up on the dunes, headed back to the spit, and waved. She waved back. Fifteen minutes later we hiked up the path to the road.

Rosie started the truck, put it in gear, and pulled off the shoulder, heading toward town.

We were about to hit the first sharp curve at about thirty-five miles an hour, and I couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t slowing down. Then I noticed that she was riding the brake and we still weren’t slowing down.

I felt my heart lurch, and I gagged on the baseball that had suddenly sprouted in my throat.

Rosie was wrestling with the wheel. The curve went on and on, and I wasn’t sure what the incline below us was like, how far down it went, how steep it was. There was no guard rail. Still struggling to steer, Rosie clawed at the hand brake blindly. I threw my left arm in front of Alice, on the seat between us, and braced my right arm on the dash. I wasn’t breathing. Rosie was keening, a high-pitched wail of concentration, yanking at the hand brake.

We almost made it. Three-quarters of the way around the endless curve we slid sideways off the road, across the shoulder, across the tall green grass, and over the edge.

The truck landed on its side— my side, against tree trunks. I wasn’t sure how far we’d fallen. It had felt like we’d been spinning off the road for twenty minutes. Alice was sitting on my shoulder, whining. My nose was running warm blood, although I didn’t remember hitting it.