Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (21 page)

He walked over to where Wolf sat, his head still against Rosie’s shoulder, and helped him to his feet.

“I don’t know what’s been going on here,” he said, “but I think this boy needs a doctor.”

Wolf shook his head. “No. I’m okay now. I just can’t take any more of this guy’s shit, that’s all. He won’t let me get my mourning done.” The last few words came out in an eerie wail. He shook his head again, and wandered off toward the men’s room. “Just need to wash my face.” Before he went through the door, though, he stopped, turned around, and looked at Rosie, a soft, grateful, almost apologetic look.

She muttered something that sounded like “Sure. Okay.” Henry said he thought it would be best if we’d leave. I agreed with him.

“That was very touching,” I said to Rosie.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she snapped, “what’s the matter with you, anyway, premenstrual syndrome? Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved?” The question was rhetorical. She knew very well that I had. More than once.

I was beginning to worry about Rosie. Was she attracted to the man? I was having enough trouble thinking objectively as it was. I wanted her to be able to.

“While you’re feeling so damned sorry for him, are you forgetting the possibility that he killed her? Just because he’s feeling bad now doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

We walked half a block in silence. “And just because you don’t like him,” she said, “and you don’t like the alternatives, doesn’t mean he did. The things that are starting to add up aren’t adding up to Wolf. And you know it.” I knew it, all right, and neither one of us liked the alternatives.

I was due at Melody’s for dinner, but I left the motel earlier than I needed to, and made a point of pulling up outside Frank Wooster’s place to take another look at it. He didn’t seem to be home. I got out of the car and stood near his front door, facing the ocean, facing the point where Gracie had fallen, right across from Spiegel’s house. If Gracie had been standing out there right that minute, I would have had a clear view of her. I noticed that Wooster had not yet taken the boards off his front windows, although the weather had been fair for days. Maybe he didn’t like the view.

There was a light on at Filomena’s. I made a quick decision to stop by.

She was happy to see me, and offered me a glass of brandy. I said no thanks, I was on my way somewhere else and had just wanted to say hello. And I wanted to ask her again what she might have seen the night of Gracie’s death.

“I know you didn’t see her, didn’t see anything of what happened to her. But maybe you saw something else? Something small, something you might not have considered significant.”

“But what could that be?”

“Did you see any of your neighbors? Talk to them? See anyone arriving before you closed up your house?”

She thought about it. “No. Nothing. Mr. Spiegel’s house was dark, of course, and the people next door were away too.” The cat, Sara, appeared in the doorway, brushed briefly against my leg, and darted off into the yard. “Frank was home a bit earlier than usual. His garage doesn’t usually close until five, and then he tends to eat dinner in town, I think. But he was out there, boarding up his windows. Other than that, I didn’t hear or see anything.”

“Frank? Frank Wooster was home? Here? Next door? What time was that?”

“It must have been sometime around four, or closer to four-thirty, actually. I saw him hammering up some plywood right before I closed my shutters. He was just getting started, too, poor man.”

She didn’t think he’d seen her, she said. I didn’t think he had, either.

I wanted to kiss her on the cheek, but I didn’t. I thanked her and went on to Melody’s. Melody was curious about the private call I wanted to make, but left me alone with her gilded French reproduction phone. Clement was home. He said he’d go have a talk with Frank.

“I should have checked back with Miss Barth,” he said. “Perry’s the one who talked to her. I should have known better.”

“Don’t be too hard on Perry,” I said. “I talked to her once before too.”

Dinner at Melody’s was a great success, from the marinated artichoke hearts to the mousse. I was astonished and nearly overcome with admiration when she carried in the stuffed trout.

“You made this?”

“Of course not,” she admitted. “My cook did.”

“Is she still in the kitchen? I want to tell her—”

“Him. And he’s gone for the night, of course. Why would I want him to stay?”

Anyway, like I said, it was a great success all the way around. For one thing, I had never before made love in a hexagonal tower.

The stairway to the bedroom rose from a corner of the large living room. I guess you could call it winding, but it wasn’t like those dizzy, tight little spirals that take up maybe five or six feet of space in a room. It was big enough to get you through the ceiling in two wide turns. It was heavily carpeted, enclosed with a waist-high rail, and it didn’t quiver.

Melody led the way. At that point, I probably could have followed her up a twenty-foot ladder without hesitating.

I came up through the ceiling and stepped onto a slate floor partly covered by several overlapping Persian rugs, all of them red. To my right, its head against one side of the hexagon, was a round brass bed. I didn’t know there was such a thing, and there probably isn’t— unless you can have one handmade. The head and foot formed arc-shapes that partially enclosed the red-velvet-covered mattress and made me think of a crib in a whorehouse.

Three walls of the hexagon were window. The other three, including the one the bed rested against, were paneled with something exotic— cypress?— and pale and hung with erotic tapestries, heavy and old-looking. Greek stuff. Satyrs and maids and shepherds and nymphs. I’d heard about satyrs before, but I’d had no idea of the extent of their, well, extent.

Feeling momentarily mortal, I walked over to the window walls. The glass was warm, double glass, heated by vents between the two layers. I looked out over the shrubbery, over the road, to the cliff and the ocean beyond it. The sky was clear, the Pacific washed noisily and rhythmically against the rocks. My focus shifted and I saw Melody lying propped against the pillows on the bed, smiling, watching me. I forgot about the satyr and concentrated on the nymphs.

I woke early and alone. Thin fog was drifting against the windows. The smell of coffee drifted up from downstairs. I dressed and went down to the living room. Melody was there, and someone else was working in the kitchen. She kissed me on the cheek and went to tell the cook to put breakfast on.

The man— he looked like a bodybuilder— served us and then left the house. I don’t know where he came from or where he went. He smiled, but he never said a word. I wondered if she carted him around with her wherever she traveled.

I sat down to a beautiful breakfast across from a beautiful, if somewhat tired-looking, woman, and that was when I learned that, unfortunately, my first time in the tower was also my last, and that this breakfast was a good-bye meal.

“You’re going back to San Francisco?” I asked, swallowing a mouthful of shirred eggs. I had not yet gotten the point of what she was saying.

“Not yet, Jake. I’m sorry. I hope you won’t be upset. But Wolf needs me.”

I didn’t remind her that she had called him a “dumb hunk.” He’d gotten to her somehow. He sure had a way with women.

She said she felt torn, but believed she was doing the right thing “for now.” She said she had wanted us to have “one last beautiful night together” before she told me she was going to start seeing Wolf again.

“I understand,” I said, always a good sport. I didn’t, but then no one ever said I had to.

Rosie answered my knock on her motel room door dressed and ready for breakfast. On the way to Georgia’s, I told her about Frank Wooster. We stopped in at the police station, but Clement wasn’t in yet. I asked Angie to tell him where we would be for the next hour. She wrote the message down very carefully.

We had a big day ahead of us, but I still couldn’t bring myself to eat breakfast twice. I ordered coffee, Rosie ordered half the menu.

“Didn’t the doctor give you breakfast?”

“Not everyone works as fast as you do, my friend.”

I laughed, “Fast doesn’t always take.” I told her about Melody and Wolf. She patted my hand and looked carefully at me.

“How do you feel?”

“My ego’s a little bruised, I guess. And my feelings. But I’m okay— I mean, Lee’s the one I really—”

She shook her head at me, grinning. “Lee would love to know that. How’s your neck feel?”

“That’s bruised, too.” I pulled down my sweater’s turtleneck and showed her. “But not bad.”

She sipped her coffee. “Had any more thoughts about sand castles?”

“And maps,” I said, pulling out of my pocket the map Clement had drawn for us, smoothing it out on the table between us.

“And famous men?”

I nodded, and drew a couple more items on the map. Like kids playing Connect the Dots, we sketched some lines from point to point. What we came up with wasn’t the bunny in the tree, but it was just as good.

Clement came in and sat down with us for a cup of coffee. He’d talked to Wooster, he said, and the old man had admitted he’d been home but insisted he had seen nothing.

“Sure,” I said. “That’s why he lied about being there in the first place.”

“I’ll keep on his back,” Clement said, finishing his coffee and taking off again.

Rosie said there was some research she wanted to do in Rosewood. I told her to take the Chevy, I thought I could handle my end of things without a car.

“Isn’t it interesting,” she mused, “what kinds of ideas you can come up with if you take a situation and skew it just a little? Take an action and look at it from another side?”

“You think we’re on it now, don’t you?”

“Yes. It makes sense, in a crazed kind of way.”

We agreed that sometimes it pays to spend a few hours building sand castles. But we had a few more moves to make, a few more right answers to get before we could justify what we were planning for later that night.

Rosie went off to do her research. I went to visit Aunt Hilda one more time, then I stopped in at Wooster’s garage. He told me the truck would be as ready as he could make it in a day or two.

“Terrific,” I said. “How come you lied about being out on the spit when Gracie died?”

He did exactly what I’d expected him to do. He turned around and started walking away.

“I’ll get back to you on that tomorrow,” I said.

Marty Spiegel’s car wasn’t anywhere on Main Street, so I called him and asked him to meet me at the motel. He said he had to stick around and keep an eye on the roofers, but he’d drive in and pick me up if I wanted him to.

I did. I hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep the night before and a walk out to the spit and back was more than I wanted to do.

Spiegel and I spent a pleasant couple of hours together. The roofers were there hammering away, but the day was sunny and warm and we sat out on the patio drinking tequila sunrises and talking about the town and the people in it, talking about death and reproduction. I confessed that I had read his file and knew about the arrangement he’d made for his sperm. I asked him how much Gracie knew about that arrangement.

All she knew, he said, was that he was a donor.

Had she ever asked him about it? No, he said, she hadn’t. Not directly.

“She did start to talk about it once, the last time I was up here, but I got kind of embarrassed and changed the subject. I don’t like to talk about it much. Like it’s bad luck or something.”

“When was that— the time she started to talk about it?”

“Couple of months ago, I think. Can we get off it now?”

I got off it, but not very far. I asked him about other women in town. If he’d been interested in anyone or if anyone had shown an interest in him. Then we talked about his neighbors on the spit, particularly Frank Wooster. And we talked about Overman and Joanne.

I didn’t tell him where I was going with any of this conversation, but he’s a smart man. He got the idea. And the minute he got it, he changed the subject. He told me a bit more about how he’d made his fortune, and I told him more about how much fun it was to be a detective. He asked if I’d be interested in being a consultant for one of his films someday, and mentioned a very tempting figure.

He offered to drive me back to town, but I felt like walking off the tequila and the conversation. After talking to him, I didn’t have much doubt, anymore, about what had happened to Gracie Piedmont and why. I took the path down to the beach and strolled along the water until I came to the spot where the vials had been dumped. Then I cut up and across the road and into town, up Spicer to Mendocino.

I saw Hackman working under the hood of the junk car in his driveway and said hello. I saw Joanne rolling down the street toward her house and waved to her. She waved back, hunched her narrow shoulders, and wheeled up the ramp to her front porch.

One quick stop at the hardware store, and then on to the motel.

Rosie was there already. We exchanged the day’s information. We called Clement to see if there was anything new on Frank or on Rollie. There wasn’t. I told him what Spiegel had said and what Rosie had learned that day.

He said we were getting closer but he couldn’t move on it yet. I didn’t tell him what we were planning for later that night. I couldn’t.

Meanwhile, the best thing Rosie and I could do for the next few hours was sleep. It would be the last chance we’d have for a while.

As I was dozing off, I thought about Melody. I was glad she had, at least, felt torn— whatever the hell that meant.

About one in the morning we crept around the back of the sperm bank. I had a piece of glass I’d bought at the hardware store, a few inches square. Rosie had a cardboard carton she’d filled with cheap plastic toys from the dime store.

I stood up against the building, just below the window that had been entered the night of the burglary, and dropped my piece of glass to the asphalt of the parking lot. It broke. Rosie scraped her carton along the side of the building and set it down on the ground. The contents made small noises of collision. I grabbed the box and we both dashed around the side of the bank, just as we heard a window being raised. I lay down on the ground and peeked out from behind a garbage can. Overman had his head stuck out his bedroom window and was looking all around the back area for the source of the sounds. Then he pulled his head back in and slammed the window.