The Gossiping Gourmet: (A Murder in Marin Mystery - Book 1) (Murder in Marin Mysteries) (9 page)

His one shining hope in the
dismantling of this bronzed statue of a man was that Alma and the Ladies of
Liberty no doubt felt that the husband of Barbara Grant could not be much
better than she was.

“Both of them are a little full
of themselves, don’t you think?” was Robin Mitchell’s question for the other
women on any committee she served. Whether it was the Library Ladies Auxiliary,
the Waterfront Beautification Association, or several other groups, Robin
Mitchell, following Warren Bradley’s lead, felt it her place to sound the alarm
that these two immigrants from the “cutthroat business of Manhattan art
galleries are to be embraced only with the greatest of caution.”

Robin enjoyed speculating
with Warren that perhaps the two of them were involved in the sale of forged
artworks or other nefarious crimes.

“What a delicious scandal
that would be,” Warren told her, as his gray eyes lit up and his aging face
broke into a smile.

Some, but not nearly all, of
the storm warnings regarding the Randolph’s social standing blew back in the
direction of Barbara and Grant. What little did, they took as one more example
of Debbie’s advice regarding, “small towns with even smaller minds.”

But as much as Grant still
enjoyed his work in Sausalito’s small, but very active art scene, and as much
as Barbara continued to say she loved their home and frequently put up pictures
on her laptop’s wallpaper of views from their patio, the town’s insular nature
began to wear on both of them.

Of more concern was the fact
that the two of them, once inseparable, had begun over the past months to spin
more actively in distinctively different circles.

Barbara thoroughly enjoyed
working with Anna Moss. Even at seventy-two, the gallery owner moved with
ceaseless energy. Her passion reinvigorated all Barbara loved and missed about
the art world.

Regularly, Anna would come to
Barbara with a digital portfolio of a new artist and ask her opinion. “Is he
too daring for us?” was invariably Anna’s first question. “I think of our
artists as a blend of different flavors, all unique of course, but they have to
work well together, otherwise you’ll never be able to cultivate a collector to
move from one artist to another.”

Anna’s experience came
through in everything she said and did.

What Barbara enjoyed most was
Anna’s constantly prodding her for her opinion. “I want to know what you think,
Barbara. I don’t think I’ve met anyone more in tune with collectors than you.”

Barbara equally enjoyed
getting to know Anna’s forty-year-old son, James. Barbara felt an immediate
attraction to him, since the first day they met at the gallery. James, she
learned, had divorced two years earlier, and as he told her, “I doubt that I’ll
ever find the right woman now.”

Barbara, ever the optimist
insisted, “none of us knows what tomorrow might bring, James. The perfect woman
for you might come walking through the gallery’s front door next week, and all
your pessimism will vanish as if it was never there.”

“What if that woman already
walked in? What if she’s you?” James asked in that sly, half-teasing,
half-serious attitude that she’d come to recognize.

James didn’t have the raw
physical appeal that Grant embodied, but he had a level of sensitivity that
Grant had in short supply. His eyes were a remarkable blend of blue and green.
His face was open and kind. And while it would have been impossible for her to
explain, a small thrill went through her whenever he would laugh and gently pat
her hand.

Watching Barbara and her son
together, Anna declared, “Watch yourself, my dear. When he wants, James can be
very charming. He’s much more like his father than I ever thought possible.”

Barbara laughed. “James is
wonderful, but I assure you, my Grant is man enough for me.”

Still, as the commuter bus
that dropped her within six blocks of her home crawled along the overburdened
approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, Barbara found herself staring out the
window and wondering what James would be like to hold in her arms. Would his
kisses be tender? Would his lovemaking be a little less fierce, and hopefully
more patient, than Grant’s?

She had to admit that she was
curious. But she had no intention of acting on her curiosity until, at a
reception for the budding young geniuses that made up the heart of the Gate Six
Artists Cooperative, she met Grant’s latest prodigy, Kitty.

Twice during the evening
event, she caught a glimpse of them sharing a joke. At one point, when Grant
wandered off to another artist’s studio, Barbara made it a point to strike up a
conversation with Kitty.

“We have two artists at the
Moss Gallery in San Francisco where I work who use a similar blend of colors
and materials as you,” Barbara said, hoping to seem relaxed when she really
wasn’t. “You should come in one day, and we can have lunch.”

Kitty seemed disinterested
and distracted, and then said, “I should ask Grant if he’d like to go into the
city with me; all three of us could have lunch together.”

Everything Barbara disliked
about Kitty doubled with that one comment. It didn’t help that she was ten or
more years’ Barbara’s junior, with high check bones, ash tinted blond hair,
exotic brown eyes, and her breasts were all but falling out of the stylish
white cotton she was wearing.

Call it a woman’s intuition,
or just put it down to the glances she saw them exchange, but for the first
time in many years, Barbara wondered if Grant had once again fallen victim to
his own insatiable appetites.

Before coming to Sausalito,
he had seemingly ended the distractions that frequently arose in their marriage
whenever he found himself interested in another woman. Barbara was never sure
if it was just lustful curiosity or something more serious than that. After
all, when she met Grant, he was involved with that Jamaican woman he moved out
shortly before he suggested that she move in.

Barbara also wondered if his
pursuit of a perfect physique had returned to Grant not just renewed interest
in their shared lovemaking, but other sexual exploits as well. A hunger so
great that perhaps she was failing to satisfy him.

There was a part of Barbara
that badly wanted to share her suspicions with Grant, but she couldn’t bring
herself to do that. Then, when she arrived home from a busy Saturday at the
Moss Gallery, she detected a scent and a presence in her home she’d never
noticed before. As she wandered through the empty house, it came to her that
this was the same scent she had smelled on Kitty just a few days before.

It was going on eight, Grant
was not home, and there was no note and no cell phone message. Between the
scent of that blond scamp that she now thought she smelled in every room of her
home and the irritating image of those perky breasts that announced their
presence so clearly under the light, tight cotton top she wore the night of the
Gate Six reception, Barbara was convinced that Grant had taken a turn away from
her and into the arms of a much younger woman.

A fire began to burn in her
that could not be extinguished by the three ice-chilled margaritas she
consumed. Barbara fell asleep on the couch, wondering if Grant and his little
pet had made love there as well.

As for Grant, it was rare for
him to go for a beer with Ray after an evening workout, but he did this night.
Mistakenly, Grant thought that this Saturday night was the evening of Barbara’s
reception at the Moss Gallery for a new artist’s exhibit. He was wrong; it was
the following Saturday night. So, when Ray invited him to come back to his
place, since Debbie was spending the night up in Healdsburg with an old
girlfriend visiting from Chicago, Grant thought for a moment, and then said,
“What the hell, why not?”

Ray threw a couple of steaks
on the grill, and the two shared another couple of beers. It was a mild night,
so the two sat outside swapping stories about some of the interesting
characters that they had met at Gold’s. There was the guy who did dead lifts
while releasing a grunt that could be heard from one end of the gym to the
other, and another guy who both Ray and Grant assumed had dropped a weight on
his “noggin,” at some point, because he was just “a little off center.” He was
the one who asked them both in the locker room one night if they were gay, to
which Ray, not at all pleased by the question, replied, “Why the hell would you
ask that?”

The fellow looked down at the
floor for a moment, trying to recall what gave him that idea in the first
place, then looking up, he furrowed his brow and said, “I don’t know. I guess
because I always see you both together.”

“We share a ride,” Ray said
with obvious annoyance as he loudly shut his locker’s door. Grant, who was
lacing up his shoes, avoided eye contact with either of them, but laughed to
himself, considering that Ray could get so irritated with a guy who struggled
to have a single coherent thought even on a good day.

By the time the steaks, and a
six pack of beer had been finished off, and Ray had pulled out some very
special Tequila Clase Azul for both of them to sample, and then sample again,
Grant got up, with some difficulty, and suggested that it was likely Barbara was
back from the gallery reception by now. Ray offered to drive him home, but
Grant said it was better if he walked. “We don’t want Sausalito’s finest making
you their big catch for the night.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,”
Ray said. “Besides, this isn’t New York or Chicago; the scariest thing you’ll
run into in Sausalito at this time of night is a family of raccoons raiding a
trash can.”

It was close to midnight when
Barbara awoke and called out to Grant. “He’s still not home! Where the hell is
that son of a bitch?” she mumbled to herself. She walked over to the kitchen
counter where she had placed her cell phone earlier and started stabbing her
fingers against the phone’s cold glass keyboard. Bringing up her “favorite
contacts,” she angrily pressed, “GRANT.”

But Grant, who was listening
to an old Miles Davis in Paris jazz album coming through the ear buds of his
iPod mini, never heard his phone as he turned onto Bulkley, just a short
distance from their front door.

A few minutes later, when he
walked through the door in a relaxed, inebriated state, a ripened grapefruit
flew past his head, hitting the front door with a dull thud. Barbara shouted,
“Where have you been, you bastard?”

His brain immediately sensed
trouble. He knew he was under attack, but he was bewildered as to the cause.

“Out late with your little
whore girlfriend?”

“What?”

“You heard me, you son of a
bitch.”

“What the hell are you
talking about?”

Enraged, Barbara came rushing
toward him. She was carrying an oversized hardcover coffee table book—it was a
three-hundred-page retrospective on the work of Salvador Dali.

Grant’s adrenaline surged.
His mind was still in a fog. Wildly, he swung his right arm forward to block
the book from striking the side of his head. Instead, however, his powerful forearm
cracked across Barbara’s lower left cheek and jaw, and sent her reeling
backward, crashing to the floor.

It was Barbara’s
bloodcurdling scream at that moment that compelled their next door neighbors,
the Andersons, to call the Sausalito police department. Although it was after
midnight and the town was as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb, two patrol cars,
blue lights flashing, raced up Bulkley Drive. The patrol officers, Steve Hansen
and Chris Harding, knocked on the Randolphs’ front door less than three minutes
after they were summoned.

Grant, who had run to
Barbara’s side to make a tearful apology, opened the door when he heard a deep
booming voice say, “Sausalito police, open the door.”

Standing there, reeking of
beer, sweat, and tequila, Grant pulled open the door. He immediately told
Hansen and Harding that everything was okay.

“Sir, is that your wife on
the floor?” Harding asked, “We’ll have to check on her condition.” Harding bent
over Barbara, who was still laying flat on the floor looking up in a daze at
the eager young faces of the two police officers. “Ma’am, are you alright? Do
you need medical assistance?”

On top of suffering from a
surprisingly powerful hit, she had struck the back of her head when she hit the
bare tiled floor. Barbara, whose head was ringing, responded groggily to the
officers’ questions. Hansen called into the fire department to send up the EMT
crew.

Meanwhile, Harding took out
his handcuffs. Before Grant fully understood what was happening, he had been
restrained, and was being escorted out the front door by Harding, who then
drove him up to the county jail for processing on charges of assault and
battery.

A stretcher was brought in,
although, in a less than clear voice, Barbara said she thought it was
unnecessary to take her to the county hospital, Marin General. But the EMT
officers told her that it was a wise precaution whenever someone had suffered a
blow to the back of the head.

Oscar and Clarice Anderson,
both in their eighties, stayed at their upstairs bedroom window and watched in
horror as first Grant Randolph was taken out in handcuffs, followed by the
shadowy figure of his wife, who was being wheeled on a gurney into the back of
a Sausalito Rescue medical transport vehicle.