Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (3 page)

“When you finish that,” he said, “you’ve got an appointment. With the woman who identified Alan. House alongside the stairway, across the canyon. Probably shortest to take the bridge and the eastern path. It’s called Hummingbird Lane.”

“You’re kidding.”

He got a little defensive. “We get a lot of hummingbirds up here. Anyway, she thinks you’re a reporter. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought we should get started right away.”

I sipped at the coffee and glared at my friend. “Fine. It’s always so hard to get started on a new job.”

A brass gong about ten inches in diameter hung suspended by two lengths of chain from the low-sloping eaves over the doorway. The hardwood mallet with brass trim hanging nearby looked like a companion piece, so, feeling like the opener in a J. Arthur Rank movie, I used it to give the gong a solid whack. The noise bounced and echoed and lingered in the amphitheater of the canyon. I was wondering how Carlota Bowman’s neighbors liked her doorbell when she opened the door.

“Mr. Samson?” she queried.

“Ms. Bowman?”

“Do come in.”

She was wearing a purple silk wrapper and three-inch pumps. The purple went well with her shoulder-length gray hair. The gray must have been premature because her face hadn’t seen more than thirty-five years. I followed her into the house and I couldn’t help but watch her walking ahead of me. She was tall and thin and she moved her hips in a way that, if it developed naturally at all, developed in bed.

I felt a little gauche and underdressed in my pedal-pusher length jeans.

The entry door led directly into a small, fastidious kitchen, complete with the requisite butcher block and expensive cookware displayed on the wall beside the stove. I followed her through another doorway into a large living room that looked as if even more money had been spent on it. Everything was in primary colors except the wood.

At the end nearest the kitchen was a round Victorian oak dining table. A baby grand piano squatted dramatically at the far side of the room near the French doors leading onto a deck. There was a bookcase, but it held stereo equipment and a lot of artsy-craftsy items and very few books. The paneled wall across from the stereo was a gallery of clustered drawings and paintings, all of them originals, all abstract or at least not easily recognizable, and all vaguely sexual. I couldn’t read the signature. On the same wall, as part of a composition of rectangles, was a full-length mirror. Another mirror, also full-length, hung on the wall with the French doors, near the piano, and next to the mirror was a single painting, about two feet by three. It was a portrait of a dark-haired woman.

Bowman waved her hand at a yellow corduroy loveseat and I sat.

“Would you like a glass of wine, Mr. Samson?”

I said I thought that would be nice. She opened a cabinet under the shelf that housed the stereo turntable and pulled out a cut-glass decanter and two discount store wineglasses. A chink in the perfection. I guessed that she either had a lot of parties or used up a lot of wineglasses herself.

She brought me a glass and sat down facing me in an oak rocker.

I took a sip. Good California burgundy, plain but honest. I didn’t recognize the vineyard or the vintage year, but then I never can.

“So, Mr. Samson, you work for Artie Perrine’s magazine?”

I explained that I was not regularly employed but free-lanced from time to time. I didn’t say what I was not regularly employed at or what it was I did free-lance. “And,” I said, “I’m following up on a piece about the company this Smith— that was his name, the dead man you found— the company he worked for. So I need information about his death.” I couldn’t tell whether she believed me or not, so I added a little something. “And of course if I can learn anything that might, well, clear up the, uh…”

The woman wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully, sipped at her wine, and nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She pursed her lips and sucked in her cheeks. She had more facial twitches than a junkie. “I can tell you basically what I told the police.” She got up and sashayed to the piano, leaning against it chanteuse fashion. “I heard someone shout, I went out on the deck, I saw that young man running up the path. Then I went down the stairs and found… it.”

I took her through the scene, step by step, slowly. It was pretty entertaining. She acted the whole thing out for me, complete with gestures. The first scene was Carlota Bowman pouring herself another glass of wine. I stayed with the half glass I still had.

She strode to the mirror near the piano and stood facing it, wineglass held at shoulder level. “I was courting a creative spark, a spark I had been trying all morning to coax into flame.” Her eyes, reflected in the mirror, dared me to understand. I nodded to show that I did. “I was standing here, at this mirror.” She whirled to face me, a drop of wine slopping onto the polished floor. “A mirror is a frame. A frame of the image in the film of my visual life. I have many mirrors.”

“Of course,” I said.

She turned back to the mirror and struck a new pose— cinema queen, 1939— gazing into her own eyes. “And then I heard the shout.”

Because the winter had been a particularly wet one, her first thought was that there was a mudslide, danger of some sort. She had stepped out on the deck and looked down. Here, for my benefit, she threw open the French doors and stepped outside. I went with her. She transferred her wineglass to her left hand and pointed with her right, indicating the area somewhere around the bottom of the steps.

“He was there, running. And he ran up that way.” She waved at the path that led up to Artie’s house.

She had called out to the man, she said, but he hadn’t turned around or answered.

“It was cold outside,” she said. I could well imagine that it was. Now, in late afternoon, the fog was wrapping itself around the tops of the redwoods. The giant trees, which even in high summer must have shadowed most of the canyon homes most of the time, were dripping with damp.

Carlota continued. “I came back inside and waited.” She led me back into the house.

“Waited?”

“Well, there are other houses down there. I thought surely someone else had heard or seen the man. So I waited. But nothing happened,” she said, with just a touch of the sulks in her voice. “No one was doing anything. I began to worry. My foundation is not all that it should be. With the ditch so full and the clay so saturated— well, one never knows.”

In preparation for the next scene, she poured another glass of wine. Then she went to a living room closet and got her coat. I held her wineglass while she thrust her arms through the sleeves. We went out the kitchen door to the landing.

She had gone down ten steps or so, she said, to see what she could see. We descended carefully. The steps were worn redwood, slick with wetness and somewhat in need of repair. “I couldn’t see anything from here. Not a thing.” We descended farther. About thirty steps from the bottom, she paused. “I stopped here to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything. Except the water.”

She beckoned me on and we went all the way to the bottom, where three planks, nailed to the bottom step and staked into the ground on the other side of the ditch, formed a makeshift bridge.

A few feet to the left of the planking, the stream disappeared into a narrow, brush-screened tunnel that the water had cut beneath the surface rock, undoubtedly, I thought, undermining the entire canyon. Carlota and I stood on the second step. She pointed toward the tunnel opening, where the foam slopped over the edges of the ditch, forced its way through the battered branches, and exposed roots of the tough native fuchsias.

“It was caught in those branches there.”

“That must have been terrible for you,” I said.

“Not at first.” She laughed madly, lurching a bit and clutching the stairway rail. “At first I thought it was a joke. There are some very macabre people living in this canyon, you know.” She laughed again. “I told him to get up and come out of there. Of course he didn’t.” She drained her wineglass and we plodded back up the stairs. I accepted another half glass of wine when she took her next refill.

“Then what did you do?”

“Well, I’ve never found a body before. So I wasn’t sure what to do about it.” She shuddered and frowned. “I decided to call Charles— up there.” She pointed upward. I remembered noticing a house behind and above hers, on the up-side of the path, and another one slightly beyond that. Charles, she said, had told her to call the sheriff.

“God, I thought the least he could do was call, or help me call. I was, of course, totally unnerved. He didn’t get out of bed at all until the sheriff’s men were coming up to see me. I was alone, all that time. It must have been at least fifteen minutes.”

Now we were getting to the important part. “About your identification of the man, the one you saw running. Are you absolutely sure it was Artie Perrine’s nephew Alan?” Alan had already admitted he had been down there, but maybe someone else had been there, too.

“Oh, yes,” she insisted. “It was he.” She said “It was he” as though she were very much aware that she was speaking correctly.

Occasionally, throughout our conversation, she had tossed in a touch of what sounded like an English accent. I figured she was probably from a small town in Indiana. Maybe Ohio. I was having a hard time lasting through this session with her. Part of the increasing, sandpapery irritation I was feeling came from the confusing signals I was getting from her. They kept leaping out of her skin, sexual signals of some kind. But they didn’t quite hit me, if I was, indeed, the target. She just seemed to pop open every now and again like a full seed pod, shooting off in all directions. I got up from the loveseat and strolled around the room, wondering what it would feel like if one of the seeds hit me by accident. Carlota, meanwhile, was making her way, a little clumsily, back toward the decanter. I shook my head when she waved the thing at me.

“Yes,” she was repeating, “I’m sure it was he. I’m sorry if this has created difficulty for Mr. Perrine, but the boy shouldn’t have lied to the police.” I agreed with her. I was standing in front of the artfully arranged exhibit of paintings, wondering if she’d seen anything down there besides Alan and the body, wondering if she would have noticed anything else if there’d been something else to see. How early had she started drinking?

“I see you’re enjoying our artwork,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Very good. I can’t make out the signature.”

“Nona Delvecchio.” She said the name as if it had special significance. I’ve been to a few art shows here and there, and I don’t think I’m a complete moron when it comes to painting, but I’d never heard of the woman.

“Local?”

“Very.” She flashed a crooked smile. “She lives here with me.” Carlota pointed at the portrait near the piano. “That’s a self-portrait.”

I took another look. Dark hair, full lips, angry eyes. “Has she had many shows?” I was just making conversation while I thought about what else I could ask this woman, but she wasn’t pleased with the question.

“Not many. It isn’t easy, you know, to get recognition.”

“I understand that,” I said reassuringly. “Was she here when you found the body?”

“No. As I said, I was alone. Nona was at work. She’s here now, but she’s painting.” She waved vaguely toward a door in the living room wall. “In her studio.”

“Who plays the piano?”

“I do.” She warmed up again.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “Professionally?”

Another wrong move. I was trying to keep her on my side, but paying occupations seemed to be a sore point with her. The room had chilled again.

“I teach. But primarily I am a filmmaker.”

I nodded. “It isn’t easy to get recognition.”

She lifted her chin. She was still standing near the decanter and stretched out an arm to pull a magazine off the bookshelf. She waved it at me.

“But I’m about to get some,” she said. “In this.”

I walked over to look at what she was holding. It was a slick little item called
The Marin Journal of the Arts.
A monthly. I cocked my head inquiringly.

“They are going to print a review of my films. In fact, the critic is stopping in to see me later this afternoon.”

I was impressed. “Where are they showing?”

“They are being shown twice this month at the film society in Mill Valley.”

“That’s terrific,” I said. “I’ll go to see them.” I didn’t really think I would.

“Yes,” she said. But she wasn’t focusing on me; she was frowning at the journal.

The pod wasn’t popping anymore. She was getting tired of having me around. I thought I’d better get in a quick question or two before she fell asleep or wandered off. She was a little put out when I asked her if she was sure she hadn’t seen anything else down around the ditch that morning. She was sure she hadn’t. I asked if I could come and talk to her again if I needed to. She wrinkled up her forehead, looked nervous, and said that would be all right. I didn’t think the nervous look— or any of her looks, for that matter— had much significance.

She escorted me to the kitchen door, and I made my way back along Hummingbird Lane, across the bridge, and up the path to Artie’s.

* * *

He was waiting for me with more coffee and settled us cozily at the kitchen table. Jennifer joined us, accepted a cup, and gazed pathetically at me.

“Well?” he asked.

I threw another question back at him. “Did you talk to the lawyer?”

“Couldn’t reach him. But I did leave a note for Charlie.”

“Another witness?”

“Oh, no. No, didn’t I tell you he’s got a spare room he might be willing to rent? He’s a neighbor.”

I sipped my coffee. It cut through the coat of wine on my tongue. Carlota had mentioned someone named Charles.

“See,” Artie continued, “I figured you wouldn’t want to be running back and forth across the bay all the time, and it would be more convenient for you to stay over here when you’re working late on the case.”

I thought that was very considerate of him, and I told him so.

“You should be able to wrap things up faster that way, and I figure we’ll break even by saving on your mileage and restaurant meals and things. Unless, of course, the police find the real killer right away and stop badgering Alan. Then we won’t need you.”