Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (12 page)

Gerda was waiting for us.

“Rosie,” she said, smiling. “Please come in.” The look she gave me was politely blank.

“My name is Jake Samson,” I told her. “I’m a friend of Rosie’s. And Pam’s. We both wanted to talk to you about Joe Richmond.”

She nodded slowly. “Ja, you are a policeman? The one who helps Rosie?” We were still standing just inside the door.

“Not a policeman. Rosie’s partner. We’re investigating privately. For Pam.” I had figured out a while ago that it sounds less like I’m pretending to have a license if I say “investigating privately” than if I say I’m a private investigator.

“Have I seen you somewhere? I think maybe so.”

“Yes. I was at the benefit. And the meeting a couple of months ago.”

“Ja. The benefit. With Rosie. I remember now.”

I was getting impatient. “Do you think we could come in and talk to you?”

She laughed. Her left cheek dimpled. “Of course. Forgive me.”

She stepped aside and waved us graciously into a single large room that can best be described, I think, as utilitarian. It appeared to be a combination living room and workroom, a big square space that had probably been a neighborhood grocery in the old days. There was, in addition to the covered storefront windows in front, one small, high window on the back wall. At the right rear was a staircase which I guessed led to sleeping quarters and a kitchen upstairs.

The room was painted beige, a color that can be either restful or grungy. In this case, it had been painted beige a good ten years earlier. There was a worn brown corduroy sofa— a sofa bed, I guessed at first glance— with black iron-on patches on the arms, and several chairs in various stages of disintegration. One of those fake-wood coffee tables with metal legs sat in front of the sofa. A floor lamp with a drinks tray halfway up its stalk leaned toward the couch. A single scrap of carpeting, five by five, dirty gold and sculptured, protected the peeling blue linoleum from the coffee table’s legs. The chipped beige paint of the walls was covered, here and there, with old posters of various political persuasions. A lot of them had to do with stopping rape. I particularly enjoyed the one that said Disarm Rapists. It looked familiar. I wasn’t sure where I’d seen it before. At some date’s apartment, I thought, sometime in the late seventies.

The entire left side of the room was taken up with office equipment: a couple of old typewriters, one of them electric; boxes of paper; poster paints and brushes; a four-drawer file cabinet painted pale green. A dozen or so folding chairs were stacked against the wall.

Gerda invited us to sit. I perched on a white plastic armchair. She and Rosie sat on the sofa.

“So. I was glad to know that someone was investigating,” Gerda said, “I am very glad. The police are wrong. He was not a suicide.” She turned serious blue eyes on me, and for the first time I noticed that she was a good-looking woman. The braid wrapped around her head had somehow distracted me, I guess.

I wanted to ask her why she wore her hair like a Bavarian milkmaid, but I didn’t dare; she probably had some kind of belt in some kind of martial art, and I didn’t feel like fighting. So I stuck to safer subjects.

“How well did you know Joe Richmond, Gerda?” A safe, ease-into-it kind of question.

“How well?” She sighed. I waited. “Not so well, after all.” That sounded interesting. Like it was going somewhere. I waited some more, gazing at the perfect white-gold skin of her face and neck. The silence dragged on. I cracked before Rosie did.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we had met many times. We had talked. But I did not get a chance to know him so well. Not so well as I wanted. I would have, I am sure, but there was not enough time.”

I studied her. She was looking at me candidly, without the tiniest hint of a smile.

“I don’t want to pry,” I lied. “But are you saying you wanted to have sex with him and that you think he would have gone along with the idea?”

“Ja.”

“What about his marriage?” Rosie asked. She knew as much about his marriage as I did, without actually having met Emily, but I thought I knew where her line of questioning might be leading. “What about his political reputation?”

“Both would be safe with me.”

“No, I mean, what about his marriage? Was he in the habit of sleeping with his campaign workers?”

She shrugged and smiled.

“So he slept around,” I said.

“You are easily shocked, Mr. Samson.”

“I am not,” I protested.

She gave me a very sexy smile. I was surprised. My first impression of her, at the benefit, was being tested. I had thought, by the way she had responded to Rosie, and by her generally rather muscular manner, that she might have had little interest in men.

“I would not really say he slept around, not that much,” she said carefully. “He simply seemed to be, how shall I say it, available.” She leaned toward me. “Would you like something to drink? I have juice. Orange, grapefruit and papaya.”

“Orange would be nice,” I said. Rosie asked for grapefruit. Gerda sprang to her feet and trotted up the stairs. I heard a refrigerator door open.

“I see why you thought we should talk to her,” I said to Rosie. Glasses clinked overhead. The refrigerator door closed. “We need to pin this down a little more.” She nodded. Gerda came down the stairs, balancing a tray with three glasses, which she set on the coffee table.

“Has he been available recently?” Rosie asked.

She shook her head, sadly. “He did not seem to be. Not for several months. There were rumors that he had settled on Pamela. All I know is that he was different.”

“And so you missed your chance,” I said. She laughed and nodded. “Gerda, I have to admit that my first impression of you was not…”

“Heterosexual? I am surprised that you would see only one side of me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I got back to Joe Richmond. “Who were some of his lovers?”

“Mostly I heard rumors. I heard the rumor about Pamela, and I suppose now that it is true, but I am not sure and it does not matter. And rumors without names. But I am sure about Rebecca Gelber.”

I had to admit that one got me. That tall, dignified, beautiful woman… My first unworthy thought was that the man had eclectic taste. My second unworthy thought was that maybe our tastes were a lot the same. If they were, he definitely would have gone after Gerda. That blond exterior, that pale perfect skin— the more she talked about sex the more she radiated. And the warmer I got.

I had a third unworthy thought. Was I interested because she was German? There was something irresistible about the idea of this nice Jewish boy— who had gone about as far from his nice roots as it’s possible to go— with this handsome German woman. Reverse conquest? Hadn’t I been trained by a dozen liberated women not to think of sex as conquest? Wasn’t it time I got over World War II? I had, after all, once owned a Volkswagen.

“What are you thinking about?” Gerda asked warily. I cannot imagine what expression I had been wearing on my face.

“Cars. Sorry, my mind wandered. You’re sure that Joe Richmond had an affair with Rebecca Gelber?”

“I don’t know there was an affair, as you say. I heard only that they spent one night together.”

“When was that?”

“I think a year ago or so. At a meeting in Chicago.”

“You say you heard. Who told you?”

“Sandra.”

“Your roommate? Cassandra?”

“Yes.”

“And how did she find out?”

“She was in the room next to Rebecca’s at the hotel.”

“I think we probably need to talk to Sandra.”

“She might talk to you. She has been talking to men for three years now.”

“That’s good,” I said.

Gerda looked at her watch, a large, heavy, gold men’s job. “She will be home in half an hour, Mr. Samson.”

“I’d like you to call me Jake.”

She smiled again. “Very well, Jake, then. Would you two like another drink?” She looked directly at me. “Or perhaps I can get you something else?”

I allowed myself to let my eyes narrow just a bit, to give her the slightest hint of that old crooked smile. “I think I’ve had enough for now,” I said. Rosie said she was fine, too. “I did want to ask you, though, why you’re so sure he didn’t kill himself.”

“He was not that kind of man. I understand men”— she smiled again— “and women, too. I know he would not kill himself just as I know you want to make love with me.”

I did not look at Rosie. I didn’t dare.

“There was something else, too,” I said, realizing how silly that sounded in the context of this conversation. “The morning he died, there was a meeting, to talk about the benefit of the night before. Were you there?”

“The meeting was here. I was here. And as I told Rosie, Pamela was here, too.”

“And who else?”

She named her roommate and several people I had never heard of. I asked her to write down their names for me. She went to the electric typewriter and, laboriously, slowly, picked out the list of names. She was just finishing when the front door opened and Cassandra came in.

I remembered her from the benefit, the redhead, attractive in a distant kind of way. She worked in video. I stood up and she asked me to sit.

She said hi to Rosie and greeted me by name. That was nice.

Gerda pulled her list out of the typewriter and brought it to me.

“Sandra, Jake and Rosie want to hear about the night you saw Rebecca and Joe together.”

Cassandra looked at me appraisingly. “I don’t know if I want to tell you about that. Will you use it against Rebecca?”

“Only if she killed Joe Richmond.”

“Don’t be silly.” She sat down on the couch with the other two women. “Well, what can I say? They were together. It was a national organizational meeting in Chicago. My room was next to Rebecca’s. I got in late, and as I was walking down the hall, I saw Joe go into her room, carrying a bottle of wine. He was in there all night. I could hear them. Her bed was up against the same wall mine touched. I could hear them, and I could hear the bed. Just like a man. They can’t be trusted to be faithful.”

I did not say what should have been obvious: Rebecca was married, too.

“And when was this?”

“In November. I guess that’s about eight months ago, right?”

It was. Which would make it just about two months before Richmond started his relationship with Pam.

THE town of Benicia is about twenty minutes north of Oakland, just across the Carquinez Strait where the Sacramento River flows through a couple of smaller bays before it empties into the big one. A beautiful little town with quiet pretty streets, Victorian houses, a state recreation area, and a historical park.

A lot of artists have moved there in recent years because housing is relatively cheap— in Bay Area terms anyway— crime is low, and the surroundings look pretty and peaceful. An ideal town, in many ways, with a great future as an artist’s colony.

I’d consider moving there myself, if it weren’t for the refinery upriver and the toxic dump just outside of town. Kind of makes you stop and think.

The Gelber house was on one of the streets that looked like it was made of money. Big homes, big yards. Big-ticket cars. The house next to theirs had a new Mercedes in the driveway. The Gelbers lived more modestly, apparently, and tended toward Berkeleyism. They had a Volvo.

The house was a Victorian, painted the way Marietta Richmond’s place should have been— sky blue with two-color trim, white and dark red. Very nice. I parked the Chevy at the curb. It looked good there since it, too, is sky blue and white.

I checked my watch. Five minutes early. I glanced at Rosie’s face, which showed intense concentration. I guessed she was squeezing respect and admiration out of her mind so there’d be some room for suspicion and hard questions. Sometimes this is not an easy business. I winked at her as if to say, “No big deal, kiddo, we’ll all get over it.” Then we walked up the steps to the fern-hung front porch and rang the bell. A cheery, two-note chime.

The man who came to the door was wearing Birkenstock sandals, running shorts with a beeper hooked onto the waistband, and a Sierra Club T-shirt. He was eating a carrot. He was thin, gaunt like a runner, with a lined face and white hair. When he smiled, the lines in his cheeks deepened to crevasses. He transferred the carrot to his left hand and extended his right, first to Rosie, then to me, saying, “Bruce Gelber. Rebecca’s husband. You must be Jake Samson and Rosie Vicente. Come on in.” His face was not familiar. I didn’t think I had seen him at the benefit and I was sure I had not seen him in Minneapolis.

We followed him into a narrow hallway that opened onto rooms on both sides and led to a kitchen at the back of the house. The hardwood floors looked like dark glass. The walls were bright white. The little hall table with the mirror above it looked like cherry wood that had been aging pleasantly in the homes of the comfortable for a hundred years.

“I’m afraid Rebecca is going to be a few minutes late,” Gelber said. “She’s meeting with some of our neighbors today. I don’t know if you’re aware of the ecological issues here in town…” As he spoke, he led us into a room that would have been one of the parlors back when Victoria was matronizing half the world. The room was done in mauve and taupe— is that brown?— and various blues and creams. He sat us down in a pair of comfortable chairs.

“I know you have some problems here,” I said tactfully.

He nodded sadly. Then he brightened artificially, like a bare light bulb. “Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee? Beer? Wine?” We both asked for beer.

I was glad that we would have some time alone with Rebecca Gelber’s husband; I wanted to know more about him, how he felt about the party and his wife’s place in it. And how he felt about Richmond. I wondered if he had any idea that his wife had been charmed by the possibly terminally charming Joe Richmond.

Gelber trotted out of the room and trotted back in seconds later with three beer bottles. German beer. He handed one to me and one to Rosie.

“So,” I said, when he had sat down on a mauve love seat, crossed his legs, and taken a sip of beer. “What do you think about all this?”