Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (8 page)

“Damned good thing, too,” Han growled.

“Yes,” Mary agreed, not in the least disturbed that Martin had just implied a man’s death was a damned good thing. Jim was looking almost happy. Charlie was nodding cheerfully, and Martin was actually smiling. Nobody had the bad taste to applaud, but I could tell that most of them wanted to.

Everything had worked out well for them. Someone had solved their immediate problem— Smith— and barring some as-yet unknown obstacle to their legal rights, the lot was safe. But what if that unknown obstacle existed? And what if another buyer showed up tomorrow? I had a fleeting picture of corpses bobbing down the spillway like logs from a lumber camp.

Again, it looked as though the grapevine had done its work before the meeting. Only Artie and Julia had looked surprised to learn that the murdered man was the prospective buyer. But then, the Perrines had been busy with family problems.

Julia also looked shocked. “Listen, all of you, the man was murdered. And they think Alan did it. And he didn’t. And every homeowner in this canyon had a motive for killing him.”

That really sobered them up. Jim shrugged, Eric sighed, and Hanley Martin said, “Oh, pig pellets.” I guessed the expression was related to “horse pucky” and “dog doo-doo,” and felt as though I’d gotten a whole new perspective on his personality. The more you knew him, the worse he got. “The cops,” he continued, “don’t care diddly squat about motive, especially not a silly motive like that. They’re into physical evidence. Besides, the ruling will stand.”

“Of course it will,” Mary agreed. “I’m sure he would have been prevented from going ahead anyway. But Julia does have a point. The man is dead. I’m sure the police won’t suspect any of us, but perhaps we can celebrate the survival of our canyon without celebrating a murder too. Let’s just be glad we have a good chance to win and time to fight if we have to.”

They were also glad, I was sure, that someone outside their immediate group had been charged with the murder.

“Well,” Charlie said, “quite a few of us haven’t had a turn at the tub. Let’s take a recess and get back to this.” I wasn’t happy about the interruption. I had been hoping they’d really start arguing, and maybe reveal a little something about themselves. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. After a bit of “Oh, no, really, I’ve been in long enough” conversation, four people got out of the tub and four prepared to take their places. Charlie, Artie, Julia, and Eric went into the house to dry off and dress. Nona, Hanley, Jim, and I took off our clothes and joined Carlota, Arlene, and Mary in the water. I’d never taken a hot tub with more than one other person before, and I thought about leaving on my jockey shorts. But Rosie was trying her best to embarrass me by watching me undress, so I stuck my tongue out, turned around, and removed the last scrap between me and the cold air. If she wanted to laugh at my backside, she was welcome to. Once I was safely in the tub, I told her she was really missing something.

“Oh, yeah?” she laughed. “What?”

That was when I felt the fingers on my left thigh. What, indeed, I wondered, was Rosie missing? Both Arlene and Carlota were submerged to their necks in the middle of the tub and both were close enough to touch me. Someone had turned on the bubbles, and I couldn’t see anything beneath the surface of the water. I suppose I should have enjoyed the mystery, but I kept thinking about Hanley, on my right, and Nona, on my left. I was not interested in making either one of them jealous. In fact, if I’d had my pick of all the people I would least like to make jealous, those two would have been the big winners.

Charlie had come back outside, dressed warmly in jeans and sweater, and got the meeting going again, unfortunately on a completely different topic. The spillway needed repairing and they had to talk about materials and volunteer labor time. Eric had been asked at a previous meeting to check it out, and he droned on with his report while the delicate touch of someone’s hand was raising the hair on the back of my neck. I kept looking cautiously at Carlota, hoping that if I caught her eye, she’d stop. I couldn’t catch her eye, which was wandering between Rosie and Nona. I switched to Arlene, staring at her until she turned her vacant gaze my way. She blinked once and turned her head again. The hand never stopped moving slowly up my thigh, and whoever it belonged to managed to keep it so disembodied that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Not so much as the touch of an elbow. The fingers reached my crotch, resting lightly against me. When they began to do more than rest, I thought this was my chance to solve the puzzle. Surely, there would be some small movement to give the culprit away. Then I could look offended and move away from her, whoever she was. But I forgot to look for movement. Then I caught myself beginning to think what the hell, maybe no one would notice anyway. That’s when I knew my mind was going, and dealt with myself sternly, sliding my butt off the bench and moving, submerged to my chin, over to the other side of the tub.

No one paid any attention. Not Arlene. Not Carlota. I sat there for a moment, listening to a discussion of the price of redwood, and then got the hell out of that tub and into my clothes. I was almost completely dressed before I realized that I had forgotten to dry myself first.

The meeting didn’t last much longer. Although there were occasional surreptitious glances at Artie and Julia, everyone, even Carlota, exercised enough restraint to leave untouched the subject of Alan. A few minutes after I returned, safely dressed, to the backyard, the second shift got out of the hot tub and we all moved back into the house. Everyone milled around for a few minutes, saying goodnight. Rosie was saying something about an estimate to Carlota, while Nona hovered alertly by.

Eric said it was nice meeting me, and wasn’t I staying at Charlie’s now? I said I was.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “Charlie’s been pretty lonely since George left.” He smiled paternally. I didn’t bother to explain that I was not George’s replacement, even though Eric seemed to expect me to say something in reply. I just nodded and smiled back.

Rosie followed me down to my room and asked if she and Alice could spend the night with me.

“See, I’ve finished my estimates in the East Bay,” she said, “and I promised Carlota I’d have a look at the steps tomorrow and let her know what I’d charge to fix them.”

I offered her the cot but she insisted on laying her sleeping bag on the floor. I stuck some paper and kindling in the pot belly, got that going, and added a chunk of oak. Then we turned our backs on each other to undress and got into our respective beds. After the hot tub party, it seemed a little silly to return to our former modesty with each other, but it felt right to do it that way somehow.

“So what did you think?” I asked her.

“Weird group.” I agreed. “I got the feeling that almost any one of them could stick a knife in someone if they had the right excuse. Especially that Hanley character. And that Jim.” She yawned. “He’s the kind that neighbors always say seemed like such a nice quiet fellow— until he murdered forty people.”

“What about the women?”

“Well, Jesus, that Arlene. Eerie. And of course Nona. Although I would think she’d be more into poisons or curses or something. And Carlota found the body.”

“Right. But somehow I can’t imagine Carlota taking such direct action. She kind of slides around, you know?”

“You mean she’s not violent, she’s just sleazy?”

“Something like that.”

“She asked me over for a drink tomorrow.”

“Carlota? Where was Nona when she did that?”

“In the toilet. I have a feeling only Carlota will be home.”

I laughed. “Watch out, babe. She was looking at you like you were her very own birthday cake.”

Rosie snorted. “I never mess with married women. Especially if they’re total twitches.”

“She may also be a mite confused,” I said, and told her about the anonymous groper in the hot tub.

“Interesting,” she said, once she stopped laughing. “Things like that never happen to me.”

“Probably because you refuse to take off your cowboy boots.”

“Good night, Jake.”

“Good night, Rosie.”

The Bright Future Home Study Plan Incorporated occupied a two-story office building in an industrial park north of San Rafael. The redwood siding must have looked good a decade before; now it was fading and starting to break loose from the vertical slats that covered the seams. I didn’t bother to drive around back to the parking lot. There were plenty of spaces on the industrial park’s pseudo-streets.

I pushed through the door into the reception area. My attention was immediately split between the smiling receptionist and a real eye-catcher near the right-hand wall: a spiral staircase about three feet in diameter, bolted through the royal blue carpeting to the floor and dead-ending at the solid acoustical ceiling. A sign hanging from it at eye level said, simply, “Bright Future.”

I must have stared at this symbol a bit longer than most casual visitors because the receptionist interrupted my musings.

“May I help you, sir?”

I looked at her. Teased hair, molded and sprayed. Dimples displayed by an over-wide smile. Long fingernails painted to match her reddish-brown lipstick. She looked like she’d just finished eating raw liver.

“Yes,” I replied politely. “I’m Jake Samson. I have an appointment with Mr. Bowen.”

If she could have smiled wider, she would have. I was big stuff. I had an appointment with the president of the company. But the smile was brief. I guessed that my status was only partly resolved. I had an appointment with the president, sure, but what kind of welcome would I get? She buzzed his office. If I was really somebody, Bowen himself would come out to fetch me. If I was nobody in particular, his secretary would appear. The third alternative? Have the receptionist send me back on my own, which could mean I was an old friend— very high status— or they hoped I’d get lost on the way. I was pretty sure I’d get the secretary, since I doubted that someone who’d identified himself as a writer from
Probe
magazine would be left to wander around on his own.

I was there, supposedly, to look over the possibilities for a story on education— the economics and feasibility of what these people called home study, as opposed to other kinds of schooling. As far as I knew, however, no one had ever been interested in said feasibility until one of the company’s vice-presidents got himself tossed down a spillway.

Like I figured, I got the secretary. An intelligent-looking middle-aged woman who didn’t overdo my welcome. She escorted me back to the presidential suite. The outer office, which she inhabited, was small but carefully decorated with blue carpeting, a wood-grain desk, and white file cabinets. The inner office, where Bowen sat, was big enough for a typing pool. White carpeting, blue walls, lots of big windows with blue drapes, a real wood desk with two visitors’ chairs upholstered in blue and white tweed, a conversational group of more blue and white chairs and a white table with a blue ashtray. A blown-up photograph dominated one of the walls, a photograph of an old building on a city street. Screwed to the frame in brass was the legend, “First Corporate Headquarters, 1953, Chicago.”

Bowen stood up and walked around his desk to greet me solemnly. He was a short man, thin, with white hair worn medium long. The glasses he wore, and his suit, a slightly wrinkled, brown off-the-rack business suit, looked as though he could have been wearing them since 1953. His face, like his suit, was wrinkled. He had watery, gentle blue eyes. He didn’t seem to belong in his office. A formal little man, at home in Chicago in a dead era, transplanted to 1980s California casual. Just a different kind of elegance, maybe, but awfully bright colors for a man in a brown suit.

“Mr. Samson, please sit down. Edna?” The secretary had waited just inside the door. “Would you bring us some coffee, please?” He spoke very precisely, the way teachers used to talk back when they were trying to set a good example.

After he’d finished shaking my hand, he invited me to sit in one of the chairs facing his desk. No conversational grouping for me. Or maybe the decorator’s idea of conversation was different from his. He reached for the book of matches lying next to a desk lighter set in a glittering gold ball and lit a cigarette, dropping the dead match in a large blue ashtray that matched the one on the table across the room. There were just a few butts in the ashtray. He offered me a cigarette. An unfiltered Chesterfield. He needed only a brown fedora to complete the time warp. I, being a modern person, declined the cigarette.

“I’m afraid,” he said quietly, “that I’m not very clear on why you wanted to see me. Something about a magazine article?”

I leaned forward earnestly. “I’m very interested in the home study phenomenon. Historically and currently.” I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Mr. Bowen?” He looked up. I took out my notebook and a pen, and gestured toward the photograph on the wall. “Is that the year of your founding? 1953?” He swung his chair around to face the photograph and spoke to it.

“Yes. And that was our building.”

I counted rapidly. “All five floors?”

He kept his eyes on the photograph. “Well, no. We started with the second floor. But by 1963 we occupied all of it.”

“Very impressive. Do you still have an office there?”

He turned around to face me again. “We moved out here in 1975 and consolidated.” He smiled sweetly. “Things aren’t the way they used to be, you know. A business can only grow these days by paring away the fat. And of course you needed more people back then, just to operate. No computers, that sort of thing.”

“So your business has grown?”

“Recently, yes. But we have always kept even with the economy.” I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that keeping even with the economy didn’t sound too good, overall.

“And the key to that,” I nodded, “is the management team, right? A solid corps of executive talent. Mature experience and fresh new blood.” The corners of his mouth turned down slightly in a half-born frown. “And I know— I’m terribly sorry— that you recently lost one of your team members.”