Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (27 page)
Read Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) Online
Authors: Shelley Singer
Tags: #mystery, #San Francisco mystery, #private eye mystery series, #contemporary fiction, #literature and fiction, #P.I. fiction, #amateur sleuth, #mystery and thrillers, #kindle ebooks, #mystery thriller and suspense, #Jake Samson series, #lesbian mystery
“Ah hah!” Chloe said. “And then?”
Rosie was starting her third wedge of pizza, so I picked up the narrative.
“And then Smith got nasty.”
According to Eric, Smith called him a bum and a criminal. He asked Eric what had happened to his daughter, the one he hadn’t seen in years. Had he managed to ruin her life, too? Like he’d ruined Bill’s?
Eric was sickened and enraged by the reference to his child. He started to feel dizzy, he said, and confused. And still the tirade went on. Something about how Bill was trying to pass his sickness on to another child, but he, Smith, was going to save her. Something about saving a little girl from the likes of Eric.
Anderson says now he has no idea how it happened. He says he went crazy, found the knife in his hand, and used it. He doesn’t remember anything about throwing the body in the water, but he admits that he must have. He does remember falling in the mud afterward, picking himself up and running away.
There’s no way to know whether his story was true. Rosie thinks it is, but I’m not so sure. In any case, his version of things didn’t get him off with the voluntary manslaughter verdict his lawyer was trying for. The jury did go along, though, with second degree murder, because the prosecution couldn’t prove premeditation.
“And Rosie,” I concluded, turning the floor over to my friend, “was the one who really got things moving along the right lines.”
Rosie explained that all the time she’d been working on those steps, she’d wondered about Eric’s visits with Carlota. She said they looked like duty calls. He obviously wasn’t having an affair with her. Just as obviously, he didn’t really like her all that much.
Then Carlota referred to him as a “colleague,” and that made her wonder even more. He reviewed films, but he didn’t make them. If he were also a filmmaker, Rosie was sure, the blurb under his review would have said so. Did artists think of critics as colleagues? She didn’t think so. Then she saw the lousy films he’d said were so great. Including the one that showed Carlota had a good view of the lane from her living room mirror.
When she finally hit Carlota with some solid questions, she got some interesting answers. Carlota made her living as a teacher. Eric was an ex-teacher, and therefore a colleague.
And Carlota had been spending a lot of time with her mirrors the morning of the murder. She had, as a matter of fact, seen Eric rushing home along the lane, beyond her own reflection, earlier that morning. She had wanted to talk to him about the review he had said he would do of her films. She dashed out to her kitchen deck, hailing him. He had hesitated, yelling back that he would talk to her later, and continued on to his house.
She had assumed, she told Rosie, that he wanted to go home because he was all muddy. At least she remembered seeing some mud.
Carlota, it seemed, had begun her wine drinking early that day. If the films were any indication, Carlota’s “creative sparks” were often alcohol-fueled. So she missed something that Eric was sure, once he got home and saw it himself, she must have seen. A splash of blood on his shirt. Along with the mud.
He went back to see her that afternoon and told her all about the wonderful review he was going to write. She didn’t mention the blood. He thought if he took good care of her ego, she never would.
Carlota had never felt, she said at the trial, that his appearance on the path had any significance. It was his job, after all, to inspect the spillway in the spring.
When Rosie and I sat down, at the last, to put things together, a fairly clear picture emerged. “A neighbor” telling Mike he had something that belonged to Artie, whose initials, like Alan’s, were A. P. Eric, at the hot tub meeting after the murder, telling Artie that he didn’t have anything of his, after all. Just a trowel he’d realized actually belonged to someone else. Eric, spillway inspector, wandering around the trail, the week before the murder, where the knife had been lost. Mary, his second wife, confiding that she’d met him when he was searching for a runaway daughter— not significant in itself, but consistent with the picture Bill had given me of an ex-teacher whose life had fallen apart. There was the location of Eric’s house; he had to pass Carlota’s to get to it. Then there was Smith’s sudden decision to quit his job and leave the area, made on the day he visited the bookstore, a day when Mary wasn’t there.
A lot of interesting bits and pieces.
And while Rosie had been talking to Carlota, I told Chloe, I’d been talking to Bunny and Mrs. Smith on the telephone. Bunny had never known the name of the teacher in Chicago. Mrs. Smith wasn’t quite sure. It was something Scandinavian, she said. Johnson? Peterson? No, maybe it was Anderson. Yes, that sounded right.
We finished the pizza. Rosie had to leave so she could get home to the East Bay in time for a date. Chloe and I had a date, too. For the weekend.
What it all came down to in the end was getting Bill to identify Anderson. I didn’t think he’d do it voluntarily, and Eric certainly had no reason to admit a connection with a murdered man. The police had checked out every likely suspect they knew about, concentrating on Morton, but they’d never taken the conflict over the lot very seriously and they’d never heard the story of the teacher back in Chicago. Sure, there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, but it can take a long time to follow a twenty-year-old trail, and meanwhile, Alan was sitting in jail.
While I was waiting for Bill to pay me a visit, Ricci was following my tip by checking with Mrs. Smith and with Carlota.
And we set Bill up. The review had a picture of Eric, as well as a byline. It said he was a partner in Mary’s Bookstore, in Mill Valley. If we could get Bill to take a look at that review, I thought we might be able to bring the whole mess to a head.
Eric will spend a few years in prison, but maybe it’s worth it to him. I don’t think it’s worth it to Mary. She’s given up plans to open another store, but she’s keeping the one in Marin open so when he gets out he’ll have a job.
There were a few other side effects, too. The law went after Bright Future. They couldn’t pin anything on the company, but they found head-hunting in the field, all right. And with the loss of the corporate good name, Bowen and Armand closed up shop. Artie helped Chloe get a job as copy editor at
Probe,
which she likes very much. Arlene Shulman went off to New York to become a free-lance book designer, and Hanley Martin stayed in the canyon. He gets drunk more often, and shoots trees more often, but the other residents try to be understanding.
Alan wrote a series on life in the Marin County Jail. He and his family have their own place, now, an apartment in San Francisco.
Bunny and her mother are doing fine on Smith’s investments.
Howard Morton is probably connected with a company up in Seattle, but no one seems to know for sure.
And no one knows what became of Bert Franklin.
As far as I know, no one else has ever reviewed Carlota’s films.
The county accepted the canyon’s report, and the lot belongs to the residents.
A couple of weeks after Eric’s arrest, a judge ruled that Andy’s ex-wife would have to be satisfied with the original custody agreement, and Andy kept his visitation rights.
Before that happened, though, I took a drive up to Mendocino to see how Bill was doing. I couldn’t seem to get through to him on the phone.
Andy was working the desk at the inn.
He looked up when I walked in, but he didn’t say a word.
“I came to see Bill,” I said.
“Let’s go outside and talk about it, Samson,” Andy growled.
We went outside. Andy was gripping my arm hard.
“Bill’s in his room. He spends most of his time there, ever since we got back. He talks a lot about betrayal. For a while he couldn’t sleep and he would hardly eat. But it’s okay. The doctor says he’s coming out of it. He’ll be better soon.” Andy was still clutching my arm. I could feel the bruises turning color.
“I’d hoped that if I showed him how his father died, he wouldn’t—” I began.
That was when Andy slugged me. Then he picked me up and slugged me again.
It hurt like hell, but it helped.
THE END
For Linnea Due and Sabina Thorne
Week after week
The author is grateful for the help of Ellen M. Lacroix, attorney at law; Jacqueline Letalien; Caroline and Michael Norris; and Rosanna Poret.
AND WE LISTEN TO OUR READERS
We’ll give you your money back if you find as many as five errors. (That’s five verified errors—punctuation or spelling that leaves no room for judgment calls or alternatives.) If you find more than five, we’ll give you a dollar for every one you catch up to twenty. More than that and we reproof and remake the book. Email
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and it shall be done!
The Paul Mcdonald Series
And
The Rebecca Schwartz Series
Jake Samson Mysteries
Royal Flush
Suicide King
Spit in the Ocean
Full House
Samson’s Deal
Barrett Lake Mysteries
Following Jane
Picture of David
Searching for Sara
Interview With Mattie
Other Novels
The Demeter Flower
Blackjack
Elise, in collaboration under the pen name Claire Kensington
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Free Draw
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SHELLEY SINGER has had 13 novels, including a Shamus Award nominee, and several short stories published. Most are mysteries, including the six books in the Jake Samson series. Her most recent novel is
Blackjack
, a near-future thriller, written as Lee Singer. She teaches writing online and does manuscript consulting. She has served as a judge in a number of fiction writing contests, including the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction writing competition. She lives in Petaluma CA with two dogs and the love of her life.