Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (22 page)

Chloe came back into the living room with an opened bottle of wine and two stemmed glasses.

“Grey Riesling,” she said. “I remembered that you like it.” I nodded enthusiastically, even though I would have preferred beer.

Chloe turned the overstuffed chair around and dragged it closer to the fire. “I brought some things from the office for you to look at.”

“Are they exciting things?”

“I don’t know. I raided Morton’s files. Grabbed a couple of handfuls of correspondence.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“He was out of town. I just skulked around until his secretary was away from her desk, opened a drawer—”

“And pulled out a plum.”

“I hope so. I needed some excuse to get you here, but it would be nice if something else came out of it.”

I raised my eyebrows. That always makes people say more. Well, almost always. Chloe knew the trick, too. She raised her eyebrows at me. We were both silent, struck dumb by each other’s technique.

Ever since I’d first met Chloe, some memory had nagged at me. The look she had, one-third amused, one-third hostile, one-third sexual. The dark, sharp-featured face. Now I remembered. About twenty-five years ago. A long time. I’d been just a couple of steps past the first catastrophes of puberty. A hot, midwestern Saturday afternoon at my parents’ corner grocery. The heat, the dusty smell of the potatoes and onions in bushel baskets on the warped gray wooden floor, the sharp sugar scent of the penny candy and bulk cookies. My father was napping, my mother was out. I was in charge for an hour. I’d already neatened up the pyramids of apples and oranges in the front window. I was drinking an orange pop— I can taste it now— and thinking about turning on the fan in the transom over the door. But I knew I wouldn’t. My mother had infected me with her own fear that the ancient, exposed blades would fly off their mounting and decapitate me.

“Hey, little Jakey!” Rachel swooshed in the screen door, wearing a red skirt and a peasant blouse. Beautiful Rachel. Five years older than I. A Gypsy who had arrived in the neighborhood only a month before, part of a caravan of old, rusty cars full of brightly dressed, dark-skinned, laughing, teasing, Romany-speaking people. I never did know exactly how many there were, about fifteen I thought, and they all lived in one apartment in a ratty building across the street. Rachel and I had talked a few times, and I’d been horrified to learn that she’d never been to school. The last time we’d talked, we’d struck a bargain: I would teach her to read and write, she would teach me to speak Romany.

“Gimme a strawberry pop, Jakey. I came to say goodbye.”

I jumped to my feet, pulled a bottle of strawberry from the cooler, opened it for her, waved away the dime she was offering, and croaked, “Goodbye?”

My face felt as if all the muscles had fallen, and the orange pop was piping itself back up my esophagus.

“We’re going back to California today.” She looked very happy.

“Why?”

She looked at me as though I’d just asked why trees have leaves. “We always go back there. Besides, we don’t like it here. People look at you too much.”

I guess I just stood there, staring at her, confused thoughts of our aborted teacher-student relationship almost but not quite making their way out my mouth in speech. She gazed back at me, bemused. Then she laughed, shaking her head. She stepped closer, and she had that look. Part amused, part hostile, part sexual. “Oh, Jake,” she said, shaking her head again. Still holding the strawberry pop in one hand, she grabbed my waist with the other, pulled my pelvis up against hers, did a quick bump and grind, and swooshed back out the door again. She took the soda pop with her.

And there sat Chloe. She was wearing jeans, not a full red skirt. Her skin was Mediterranean olive, not Gypsy brown. Educated, literate, cynical, and more than twice the age Rachel had been. But by some trick of chemistry, some migration of spirit, she was Rachel. I was in trouble.

She refilled my wineglass. Dinner was popping and bubbling in the oven; it smelled like chicken.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.” I told her about my encounters with Morton and Bowen. She digested the part about Morton’s alibi slowly and reluctantly.

“Chloe,” I said, “you run the communications department. Didn’t you know Morton was out of town that weekend? And what about Franklin? He’s supposed to be working for you.”

“I don’t bother with the newsletter,” she said. “Franklin writes it and Morton checks it through. Sometimes I manage to avoid reading it altogether. But Jake, just because Morton says it’s so doesn’t mean it is. And the newsletter story might not be— quite accurate.”

“That’s true. Is there any way for you to check it out?”

“Yes. I’ll call some people in Santa Cruz with some excuse or other.” She looked sad.

“Sorry to bring you such depressing news.”

“Well, hell… I have to do some things to our dinner, now.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No, it’s all under control. Want to read some of that correspondence while I cook?”

I nodded and she handed me a stack of paper that had been sitting on the bookshelf. She left the room. I began thumbing through the letters. Most of them were addressed to admirals and commodores, a few to captains. Most of it was congratulatory— keep up the good work, numero uno— or threatening— shape up or ship out, commodore. Pretty boring. I read through maybe half of it, put it aside in two neat piles, and strolled out to the kitchen. Chloe had just finished putting chicken, broccoli, and parsley potatoes on two plates. I picked up the plates and carried them to the table in the living room. She followed me with more wine and a bowl of salad. She lit the candles and switched off the standard lamp.

I poured out two more glasses of wine and held up my glass. “To a pleasant evening.” We touched glasses, smiled at each other, and began to eat.

“Good chicken,” I said.

“Tarragon.” She helped herself to salad.

“I got through about half the letters.”

“Good. Have some salad. Find anything?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you clear on the hierarchy, the levels?”

“Reasonably. But what’s with the navy stuff?”

She laughed. “Multilevel companies tend to model their hierarchies on something traditional. The army, the navy, even British aristocracy. Anything with status and a sense of power.”

“Any archbishops?”

“Not that I’ve heard of. No rabbis, either.”

“Have you read any of Morton’s correspondence?”

“No. That’s for you to do. My department’s clean— more or less— and I want to keep it that way.”

We took the plates out to the kitchen, where dessert waited in the oven. Baked apples. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten a baked apple. She’d made real whipped cream, too. We sat in the chairs near the fire to eat them, and when we’d finished, I offered to do the dishes. No, she said, the dishwasher would do that. So I went back to my reading while she filled the machine.

In a few minutes, she returned to the living room and lay down on the couch with a book. Another half an hour and I’d finished. Morton was a careful man. The way some of the letters read, there was more between the lines than on them, but with the possible exception of one letter, there wasn’t much to go on. It was addressed to the captain of Los Angeles and it referred by name to a commander who was causing some kind of trouble about a “fee” that was due “with reference to” a new lieutenant, who was also named. I folded the letter and put it in my pocket. Then I put the rest of the correspondence back on the bookshelf.

Chloe glanced at me. “Finished?”

I nodded.

“What do you think?”

“Could be.”

She sat up at one end of the couch and I joined her. “You could still lose your job, you know,” I said. “If there’s an investigation, and if anything comes of it, the company might not survive.”

“I know,” she sighed. “But I could lose it anyway. Morton’s never been too crazy about me, and now— it’s a gamble, but a job’s just a job. I’ve had a lot of those.”

“Tell me about that. What it’s been like for you.”

“You want to hear my life story?”

“Yes.”

“Especially the parts with Smith in them?”

“Those too.”

At some point while I’d been reading, she had made the Grand Marnier appear magically on the table, along with two liqueur glasses. She got up, put another chunk of wood on the fire, and poured our drinks. When she brought them back to the couch, she sat closer to me.

“Friendship,” I said, raising my glass.

“Friendship,” she repeated, smiling softly. When she smiled that way, the crease between her eyebrows smoothed out and the sardonic lines at the corners of her mouth deepened into something happier. The firelight took the chill off a face that reflected a complicated life and a loss of faith. At that moment, I felt a kind of love for Chloe. What Iris and I had was good in its way, but she kept her emotional distance, so we managed to avoid the real closeness that carries the threat of loss. There was nothing cool, that night anyway, about Chloe.

“Samson, what is it about you?”

“What? What about me?”

“You look at me with those big blue eyes, run your fingers through your graying yellow curls, and I want to beat you to death with my life as a woman. Maybe it’s because you look so vulnerable. For a man.” I leaned over and kissed her gently. She responded, briefly, then moved a few inches farther away.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a bright, ambitious, eager young woman. College editor. Crusader. Star. But she made a big mistake. She graduated. Out into the ugly, real world. A home-sick kid five hundred miles from home. Like the song, you know? I used to sing it sometimes. Learning about life and love and pain and everything all at once.” She smiled wryly. “Nothing was like it was supposed to be. The job I thought I’d prepared myself to do, wanted to do, was a Rosalind Russell movie. The job I was doing was an existential nightmare. I hated it. When the stories weren’t stupid or senseless, they were painful. I was a ‘girl reporter.’ I begged for decent assignments but when I got them I seized up, paralyzed. I drank too much and I went to bed with too many men and I shattered, like the little porcelain receptacle I was.”

“Where was this?”

“Chicago.”

“Where was home?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Couldn’t you have worked there?”

“Sure. On what they used to call the Women’s Pages.”

“So you went to Chicago.”

“They offered me a job. Wire service. I took it. I don’t know why. Come to think of it, I don’t know why I came to California.”

“Because you got a job here.” I poured some more Grand Marnier.

“Oh yes, that’s right. I guess you know my life story, after all.”

“Not enough of it.”

“You have a nice, strong nose. Tell me about your life now.”

“Thank you. My nose goes with my blue eyes and yellow curls. We can talk about me another time. I want to hear more about you. What happened next?”

“I left the wire service and started drifting. You want words? I do words. Public relations, magazines, textbooks. Then I ran out of luck. You can only drift for so long before you become what is known as unemployable.”

“So, being unemployable, you went to work for Bright Future.”

“Correct. But when they started making plans to move, I decided not to move with them.”

“Because you didn’t like the job, or the company, or the management?”

“Does it sound like I liked any of my jobs? Temperamentally unsuited to corporate life. Or just a little too crazy for it. Or too sane. And of course, even after the move, Smith would be my boss. I couldn’t see moving all the way to California to keep on working for an asshole. I decided to write poetry, instead.”

“Speaking of working for an asshole, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. The Bright Future faculty. They worked with Smith. Did any of them have any problems with him?”

“Wrong tree, bloodhound. They all date back to Chicago days. The only one who doesn’t still live back there is an old woman who retired to Arizona five years ago.”

Well
, I thought,
it was just an idea, anyway
.

“So,” I said, “you didn’t want to move to California to keep working for an asshole. But you’re here.”

“I changed my mind. It turned out I was also temperamentally unsuited to starvation. And Chicago’s not a comfortable place to be poor in. I wrote Bowen a letter. He rehired me. Smith wasn’t happy about it, but he went along with Bowen.”

“So you never got along with Smith?”

“We got along. He made it clear I belonged in someone’s kitchen, and I could barely stand the sight of him, but we got along. And you’re not Sam Spade. You’re a cop, and now that you know I had a motive, you’re going to arrest me for murder, right?”

“No. I work for the attorney general’s office and I’m going to arrest you for fraud.”

“Good,” she said cheerfully. “Fraud has more class.” We had gotten to the point where a good dinner, good wine, and romantic firelight were combining to make us both feel attractive, witty, and compatible. Maybe there was a touch of adolescent memory in my attraction to her, but it was her real presence as Chloe that was doing me in.

It was all Iris’s fault. If she were more reliable, I wouldn’t have to travel all over the place chasing women. My stepmother was right.

“That’s a look of speculation, Jake.”

“The trouble with mature women is that they can pick up the subtlest look, the tiniest nuance. But the look is not one of speculation. It is a simple, honest look of lust.”

“That’s the trouble with mature men. High expectations. I suppose you think I invited you out here because I wanted to go to bed with you.”

I shook my head. “Never occurred to me. This was a business dinner. Purely informational.”

“That may be. But dinner is over.”

I didn’t get back to Mill Valley until the following afternoon. Chloe called in late and we spent the morning making love, before and after an omelet I threw together from some odds and ends including leftover chicken, jack cheese, and mushrooms. Chloe was as impressed with my cooking as I had been with hers.