Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (2 page)

“And the second thing he lied about was knowing the corpse.”

“Right. Of course, the cops didn’t know right away that he lied about that. But they found out fast enough. I guess they put someone on the Bright Future angle right away and found out Alan worked there. That was when they came back to get him. Right before I called you.”

“But they can’t hold him on that.”

“I guess not. But they took him in for questioning and he’s not back yet.”

My head was beginning to pound. Why wasn’t I home in bed? I looked at him. “Artie, I really don’t think you’ve got very much to worry about. All he has to do is explain about the undercover job. You can back him up on that. The cops will think he’s an idiot, but—”

“There’s more. Something the police don’t know yet. Or at least I don’t know that they do. Another reason why Alan panicked. He’d had a big fight with the guy, at the office. This vice-president, this James Smith—”

“James Smith? Is that an alias?”

“Shut up and listen, Jake. Smith threatened to fire Alan. They had this big argument. Lots of witnesses. It was about a course Alan was working on. Alan told me it was garbage, and that they didn’t care what kind of shit they sold, and he just had to say something about it. I told him to for Christ’s sake keep his mouth shut and keep a low profile. Dumb kid. This is what I get for giving him work. Fresh out of journalism school. He needed work. What could I do? My brother’s kid, after all. I gave him work.”

I sighed. Artie didn’t notice.

“Okay,” I said. “Take it easy. Tell me this. Do you think maybe he could have killed the guy?”

Artie glared at me. “He’s a journalism graduate, Jake. What kind of question is that, anyway?”

I shrugged. This was Artie’s movie, not mine.

“I was just wondering,” I said, “what this Smith was doing hanging around your ditch waiting to get killed.”

It was Artie’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know where he was killed. The cops have been doing a lot of looking around up here and up top. See, that’s where the water comes from. There’s a ravine up there where it collects, then it runs down the spillway to the ditch.” I remembered seeing some kind of stream running down the canyon side when I’d been struggling up the path to Artie’s house. “Alan says the body was a mess, like it could have washed all the way down.”

“And now you want me to check things out.”

Artie smiled hopefully.

I thought about it. Once, for a year or so, Marin County had been my home ground. That was right after I came out from Chicago, a young ex-cop who’d had his trial by fire in the summer of 1968, the summer of the Democratic National Convention and the Yippies and the stink of tear gas and the feel of a kid’s blood on my nightstick. Sickened and afraid of myself, I’d fled to California. Flower Land. I’d lived in Marin, and Sonoma, and farther north in Mendocino, wandering around, picking up money where it could be found, falling into and crawling out of a bad marriage, and, eventually, tiring of woods and fields and the role of bitter expatriate and going back to the kind of urban environment I’d grown up in. Not Chicago. Never again Chicago. But the East Bay, with its ethnic neighborhoods and its crime and its vitality.

I didn’t know Marin anymore. Maybe I knew my way around physically, but it wasn’t home. I didn’t know the cops. I didn’t know the attitudes. I thought of a few more excuses before I cut the bullshit and pushed the sad old memories out of the way. They had nothing to do with Artie’s problem. I could handle Marin if Marin could handle me.

Artie was waiting for me to do something besides think and make faces. Suddenly it occurred to me that he hadn’t said anything about money.

“Listen, Art. Investigations cost. Expenses. Things like that.”

“Sure. Naturally.” He waved his hand at me. “I can manage the expenses. If they’re not too high.” He hesitated. “But, you know, I’m already helping to pay the lawyer—”

“You’ve got a lawyer already?”

“Well, certainly. The minute they took him in. And you know we just bought this house and the down payment pretty well drained our capital…” He let his sentence dribble off into nothing. And nothing was what we were talking about. For me. Artie was looking for a better poker hand without laying out any chips. A free draw.

“This lawyer,” I said, probably sneering a little. “I’ll need to be in touch with him. If there’s really a problem.”

“Hey, sure. I’ll set it up. Now then,” he said eagerly. “What’s first?”

“You said the cops were all over the place up here.”

“Yeah. They had the whole area up top cordoned off, and down by the ditch, too. And half the canyon on this side. About half a dozen guys.”

That sounded about right. A couple of detectives, someone from the coroner’s office, a technician, a photographer… “I didn’t see anyone when I came in. Do you know if any of them are still around?” I wasn’t anxious to run into any investigating officers.

“They left right before you got here. And I’ve been in the house since then. With you.”

“Well, the first thing is to have a look around, get my bearings.” Artie sighed impatiently, but he didn’t argue.

We emerged from the bedroom into the living room where all the actors, apparently suspended in time, were doing exactly what they’d been doing when we left. The kid was still trying to play with the dog, the dog was still trying to avoid playing with the kid, Artie’s wife was still sitting in her chair watching the kid and the dog, and Jennifer was still sitting on the arm of the couch looking stunned.

I smiled expansively, like Santa Claus, and told the furniture that I’d be back soon.

It was a relief to get out of that small, crowded house. The rain had slowed to a soft, foggy drizzle, and, looking up through the redwoods, I could see the beginnings of sunlight trying to force their way through the thinning cloud cover. I blew my nose and scanned the canyon.

From where I stood, more than midway up the north side of the canyon amphitheater, I had a good view of the geography. A very pretty view, with fuchsias, hydrangeas, and ferns all over the place and the houses all but hidden by trees.

I was facing downhill, toward the canyon floor. At my left ran the spillway. About twenty feet below me, crossing the spillway, was a wooden footbridge. On the other side of that was another path cut into the eastern face of the canyon, with houses perched on stilts above it. About 200 feet along, that path met the top of a stairway that zigzagged back down to the floor of the canyon just this side of a three-level shingled house.

I turned around and began climbing, up toward the top of the trail and the place where the spillway began.

About fifty feet beyond Artie’s was another house, tucked back and well hidden by unmanicured nature. I wouldn’t have noticed the house was there, but I tripped over the end of a rough wooden walkway, raised above the clay by half-sunken concrete blocks. That was the last marker of civilization. A few feet farther on, the path dwindled to nothing. And someone was crashing through the underbrush above me.

He was a big man, dressed in boots, heavy cords, a plaid wool shirt with a sweater under it, and a navy watch cap. His eyebrows were dark and shaggy in a weathered, blunt-featured face.

“Hi,” he said. “What are you doing up here?”

“Just walking around.”

“Oh, yeah?” He dug out his wallet and flashed a badge. “Ricci. Sheriff’s department.” He was a sergeant.

“Isn’t it okay to go up this way yet?” I asked.

“You live around here?”

“No. I’ve got a friend lives here.”

“Mind telling me who?”

I told him. He nodded and gazed thoughtfully at me. “Mind giving me your name and address?”

I gave them to him.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Could I ask you something?” I was using my best earnest and respectful citizen manner, but he just looked at me impassively. “You haven’t got enough on Alan to charge him, have you?”

“He came along with us voluntarily for questioning. He’s being questioned.” He moved past me and headed down the trail. I slogged the rest of the way up.

I was looking across a ravine shaped roughly like an arrowhead. At its widest point, about twenty feet, a redwood tree had fallen to form a natural bridge, its roots exposed by the water and the slides of clay and rock that a wet winter brings to land like this. At the upper end of the ravine, water dribbled and splashed down the eroded sides from the woods above. The lower end narrowed to a cut between rocky outcroppings where the wooden trough of the spillway began.

The muddy water made it hard to tell how deep the ravine was. I guessed that it filled and emptied, or nearly emptied, from storm to storm. Although less than twenty-four hours had passed since the last heavy rain, the clay was wet several feet above water level and it looked like that level was dropping fast. If Smith had been killed up here, his corpse had caught the spillway on a good day.

I stood knee-deep in ferns, trying to get an imaginary glimpse of what might have happened that morning. But maybe I just wasn’t taking Alan’s supposed danger seriously enough. The only scene that came to mind was right out of Robin Hood. James Smith and his killer, dressed like Robin and Little John, halfway across the tree trunk, battling for macho domination until one of them won the right to cross by dumping the other one into the water. I think it was Little John who won, but it’s been a long time since I read the book.

I also wanted to cross to the other side. Maybe there was another trail over there. Maybe the cops had missed an important clue. Maybe the killer had dropped his social security card. Maybe there was a whole pile of bodies stacked up over there waiting to be tossed down the spillway. There were two ways to get where I wanted to go: around the upper edge of the ravine or across the log. I picked my way carefully to the upper edge and checked out the terrain. Not so much as a deer trail. Thick, tangled brush. A solid growth of thorny blackberry interspersed with poison oak. Not exactly impassable, but I hadn’t brought a machete. I decided the redwood trunk was the lesser of two evils. It was, after all, a good five feet in diameter. Even with a cold and the few extra pounds I was carrying from winter hibernation, I was in pretty good shape. If Robin Hood— or was it Little John?— could do it, so could I.

Using the tangled roots for handholds, I pulled myself up and balanced carefully on the rounded surface. The bark was damp, but the soles of my boots gripped it and I started across, very slowly. About halfway, where the log was some eight feet above the fast-running water, I slipped on a patch of moss. That made me nervous enough to sit down for a minute and take a look around. The water below me was muddy. Nothing to see but brush and branches and other woodsy debris that bobbed to the surface, sank again, and went rushing toward the spillway lip.

I raised myself carefully to my feet and finished crossing to the other side. More blackberry, more poison oak. A few patches of bare ground that might have been part of a deer trail. I poked around for a few minutes, inadvertently terrorizing a four-foot garter snake. Then I climbed up on the tree trunk again and strolled back across, by now being an old hand at crossing raging torrents on a high wire.

Retracing my steps as far as the narrow beginnings of path, I looked across the ten feet or so of canyon wall to the upper stretch of spillway. The trough was built of redwood, eight two-by-twelves, four at each angle of the V-shaped structure, tied together with four-bys, then staked and propped in a haphazard fashion with rocks, railroad ties, and concrete blocks. The thing must have needed reinforcement and repair at least every year, but it seemed to be doing the job it was intended to do— containing the runoff and keeping the soil reasonably intact so the houses at this end of the canyon could stay upright on their various and whimsical foundations. The wooden spillway ended about a hundred feet down, where the slope became a little more gradual and the water ran free to the ditch at the bottom.

The space between path and spillway showed boot prints in the muddy clay. Probably from the feet of the law earlier that day. I followed suit, half crawling, half sliding, making a real mess of myself. The trough was nearly three-quarters full of falling water. When I ran my hand along the edge, I realized that it wouldn’t take the wonders of modern science to figure out whether the dead man had passed this way. Even if he hadn’t left anything of himself behind, the spillway would have left a lot of splinters in him.

I stuck close to the side of the trough and crab-walked down the slope as far as the footbridge. A straightforward enough little bridge, nothing fancy. Solid support beams and a waist-high railing. I hauled myself back up to the path, slithering and scrambling, and returned to Artie’s house. The clay had begun to harden on my pants, turning them into a sculpture that cracked with every step. I was chilled. My nose was running and my throat hurt. Artie was sitting on his front steps waiting for me. He jumped up.

“Well?” he said hopefully.

“It wouldn’t be hard to kill someone up there and get away without being seen.”

“That’s right!” he hooted. “That’s what I say. So, why would a killer run around at the bottom of the canyon yelling so everyone could see him?”

“I don’t know about the yelling,” I said, “but they might think he went down to the ditch to see if the man was really dead.” Artie snorted. “I need,” I continued, “some dry pants. Got anything I can wear?”

“Oh, sure. Come on in.”

The picture had changed since I’d been in the house before. The dog was sleeping peacefully on the living room floor. Jennifer was sitting alone in the kitchen drinking coffee. “Julia’s taking a nap,” she explained. “So’s Pete.” Since the dog’s name was Berkeley, I figured Pete must be the kid.

Artie tiptoed into his bedroom and returned carrying a pair of ratty jeans. I changed in the bathroom. My pants peeled off well enough, but the mud that cracked off them lay in little pieces all over the floor. I found a sponge and wiped up the mess, shook the pants over the bathtub, and cleaned that up, too.

Artie’s pants were short in the leg by about four inches, but they covered the rest of me okay. I rolled up my own and carried them out to the kitchen. He was pouring coffee. He took one look at me in his jeans, took mine out of my hand, and tossed them in the washer. I sat down to drink my coffee.