Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (18 page)

The Berkeley stroller had passed the tent, but her dog had not. The small terrier, in a classic act, had begun to whine, to approach the sculpture and back away again. That was when the woman saw the blue running shoes, still attached to Marjorie Burns.

An execution-style murder, the paper said. Shot in the back of the head.

I had never met Marjorie, but beyond wishing that none of this had happened to her, I could certainly wish it hadn’t happened that way. Execution-style. Hell, every stupid punk who can almost read knows how to do it execution-style. And then to be dumped in a sculpture in the middle of that homemade and eternal art show. And then to be found by a terrier replaying a scene from an English whodunit— well…

I decided to call June Gerhart later, hauled myself to my feet, and headed for the door. Rosie had to see this, then we’d go down to the corner. I had nearly made it out when Eva caught up with me and handed me a bowl of soup. It was green. I looked at her. “From the zucchini in your poor garden. I been watering.”

“Got some work to do now,” I muttered, passing my father as he came in, wiping his hands on his pants. He snorted.

“Okay, just tell us when you’re running out of town again— we’ll go take our trip to Lake Tahoe.”

I nodded.

Rosie’s door was open and I walked in. She glanced at the bowl of soup in my hand but didn’t say anything. I handed her the paper, folded to the photo of the mud flats. She glanced at it, put it down again, and went to the kitchen stove, where coffee was dripping. She waved a cup at me, I said yes, and she poured for both of us. Then she sat down to read.

I decided against calling Marjorie’s grandmother, considered and rejected her cousin Victor, postponed Mrs. Noah again. While Rosie read, I dialed information and got the number of the hat shop on Telegraph Avenue. Carleton wasn’t at work, I was told. A friend of his had called in and said he couldn’t make it that day.

I called his home number.

“Hello?” The voice didn’t sound like Carleton’s.

“Is Carleton Hinks there?”

“Yeah. But he don’t want to talk to nobody right now.”

“Tell him this is Jake Samson. Tell him I want to come over and talk to him this afternoon.”

I heard the message being transmitted. The voice returned.

“He says okay, he wants to talk to you. He’ll be here any time you come.” I wrote down the address, and said goodbye to Carleton’s friend.

Rosie had finished the news story.

“We need to go see Arnold,” she said.

“Yeah. And return a call from Mrs. Noah. We also need to get hold of Hal Winter and see if he can get us anything on what the cops know.” Hal is a poker buddy and a Berkeley attorney with other buddies in the Alameda County D.A.’s office.

“Speaking of cops,” Rosie said, “now that they’re in it, they might be visiting us.”

I had thought of that, but hadn’t wanted to put it in real words.

“Yeah. Anyway, we need to find out was she killed on the mud flats or brought there from somewhere else—”

“How long was she dead, what kind of gun, any other marks on the body—”

“Anything found at the scene that anyone’s willing to talk about— I’ll give Hal a call now.”

Of course, he wasn’t in. He never is. I left a message. He’d get back to me and leave whatever answers he came up with on my tape if I wasn’t around. He thinks my crimebusting efforts are funny. Which reminded me to give a quick call to Artie Perrine, another poker buddy and the editor at
Probe
magazine who had given me the paper that said I was a free-lance reporter. Now that I was going to be crossing police paths again, I wanted him to be prepared for any queries on their part. I called
Probe.
He was out to lunch. I left a message.

Mrs. Noah, as luck would have it, was in. She was delighted to hear from me. As a matter of fact, she sounded delighted all the way around.

“The police are certainly interested in what I have to say now,” she said. “They’re taking my husband’s disappearance a lot more seriously.”

“They’ve been to see you then?”

“I called them the minute I heard. And they took the note he left. They went through his office, too. And they asked me a lot of questions. About his business interests, his friends, that kind of thing. You know.”

I had to ask. “Did you tell them I took some of his stuff?”

“Oh. No. Should I have?”

I had been holding my breath. I let it out. “No. But I’m going to drop off what I still have. Then you can pass it on to them, tell them you just found it. In a dresser drawer or a closet— anywhere they haven’t been. Because they would be upset if they found out you’d neglected to give them something.” Not to mention how they’d feel about my having it. There were a couple of those papers I still wanted to keep; I would make copies. “Did you tell the police anything about me at all?”

She hesitated. “Is there some reason why you’re afraid of them, Jake?”

“I’m not afraid of them,” I lied. “But it’s best if they don’t know I’m helping out. They might try to stop me.”

“Well, I just answered their questions, and told them we had been trying to find my husband.”

“Okay. You sound like you’re in pretty good spirits. Doesn’t it worry you that the woman your husband was with has been murdered?”

Silence. Then, “I think it’s a terrible shame, of course. But they weren’t together, were they? It was just her they found. And now the police will help. It’s so much better with everyone trying to find him, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Better. One more thing. Do you remember the name of the cop you talked to?”

“Yes. Such a nice man. A Sergeant Hawkins.”

“Ralph Hawkins?”

“I think so.”

I thought about dropping the whole thing right then and there, but I’d put in too much time and blood. Hawkins and I were acquainted. I’d run into him, so to speak, when I was trying to find out who killed a local artist and tossed her off her deck. Hawkins, I was sure, had not forgotten me and Rosie.

Rosie had been listening. When I said good-bye to June Gerhart, she volunteered to run up to College Avenue and copy the papers we still had. We agreed to meet at the ark.

Arnold was working down in the hold. It was huge and dim down there, like the belly of a flat-bottomed whale, with all the ribs on the inside.

I asked him what he knew about Marjorie’s murder. He didn’t know much more than the
Chronicle
had printed.

“But I have this terrible fear that Noah’s going to be found the same way. Somewhere. That’s what I told the police, that it would all be their fault for not believing us in the first place.”

“What else did you tell the police?”

“All I know is what I told you. That’s what I told them.”

“You didn’t say anything about the fact that we’ve been looking for Noah and Marjorie?”

“I did mention that some of our people might have been trying to find out what happened to them, but that’s all I said.” He tossed me an accusing look. “It isn’t as though we actually know where he is.”

I blessed Arnold, in my heart, for his bureaucrat’s caution.

“Is Beatrice around?”

“No. She’s not feeling well today.”

“Give her my condolences.” I thought of Marjorie’s grandmother. Condolences would never be enough, there.

“But how are you doing, anyway? Do you know anything at all? I was hoping you’d be able to keep this from happening. I certainly hope—”

“So do I. And yes, we’re making headway.” I told him about our visits to the Russian River and, particularly, Tahoe.

“I’ve always thought,” he said, “that Jerry Pincus is a frightening kind of man. Cynical.”

I would have used stronger words. I heard someone coming down the ladder to the hold. It was Rosie. They greeted each other, Arnold still sulky.

Rosie must have heard the tag-end of my little speech.

“We got a lot of new information, Arnold,” she said. “We’re getting close. We’ll find Noah and bring him home safely.”

Rosie’s confidence shored me up, even if it was just an act. Having done her part, she began strolling around the interior of the ark and left Arnold to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve got a lot of work today. We’ll let you know what we find out. Perk up, Arnold, you have an ark to build.”

“That’s right,” Rosie said, ambling back toward us. “And the people up in Sonoma are ahead of you. The deck’s almost finished and they have some interior plywood up…” Arnold wasn’t listening.

“If something doesn’t happen soon, I don’t know what I’ll do,” he ranted. “We’ll run out of money.” I didn’t think it was the right time to mention that I’d been on the case a week and it was time for the rate to go up to $200 a day.

“We’ll talk to you later, Arnold,” I said, and we got out of there, climbing up out of the belly of the beast, walking back to my car, parked in front of the house.

Our first stop was Noah’s place. I left the file folders with the maid, Adele, at the door to avoid further depressed or depressing conversation. We cut back over to Oakland, Claremont to College, and from there, took Broadway toward downtown.

Carleton Hinks lived in the first-floor flat of a narrow three-story Victorian just west of downtown Oakland. I parked in a faded red zone across the street, alongside an apparently nameless warehouse or factory that showed no signs of life. I figured I could get away with it there.

Carleton’s door was opened by a boy with a long, spiky crewcut and a Guardian Angels tee shirt. A young man, I guess, but I estimated his age at somewhere around eighteen.

“Jake Samson,” I said. He looked at Rosie.

“Rosie Vicente,” she said.

He looked back at me. “When I talked to you on the phone you didn’t say nothing about two people. He don’t feel so good, you know.” His pale blue eyes were resentful. I was getting sick of resentment.

“I know,” I told him. “But she’s my partner. We’re together, that’s how it is.” I figured that sounded enough like a bad cop show to make sense to him. It did; he shrugged and invited us in.

We let him lead us through a sunny living room furnished in wicker, bamboo, and plants. There was art on the walls, mostly posters and fruit crate illustrations, but all framed. A large braided rug seemed to float on the highly polished hardwood floor. The kid walking ahead of us was muscular, with a swagger that might have been for Rosie’s benefit, might have been just self-consciousness. His chinos had a belt on the back, and he was wearing white high-top sneakers.

The bedroom was dark.

“Don’t turn on the light, man,” Carleton said.

I sat down on the bed next to him. “This is my partner, Rosie.” He muttered hello. “I’m really sorry, Carl.” He didn’t answer. “I just wanted to check with you. See if the cops have been around, what they’re asking about. See if you know anything about what happened to Marjorie.”

He sighed deeply, with a ragged edge. “Yeah. It was the cops that told me. They said someone told them I was her boyfriend. I said I was her friend. They wanted to know when was the last time I saw her, all that shit. I told them. And I told them about the phone call, a couple nights ago.”

I stopped him. “What phone call a couple of nights ago?”

“Look, Jake, I know I should have kept you posted, but she didn’t want anyone to know, she said, and I honored that. I shouldn’t have. Maybe we could have— oh, shit, I don’t know.” His voice broke.

“What are you talking about, Carleton?”

“She called me. A couple of nights ago. Said to meet her at the flats in two hours. Would’ve been about eleven o’clock. So I drove on over there. I was a little late, because we were doing some planning here— you know, about that druggie that’s been hitting West Berkeley— but I got there by eleven-thirty, anyway, and I sat down on that big pile of driftwood, right there where you first get down onto the flats, and I waited for her. No Marjorie. I waited until three in the morning.”

“She just said to meet her? That’s all she said?”

“No. She said there was big trouble. That she needed my help. I asked her what about the cops, should we bring them in on it. She said not yet. She wanted to talk to me first, figure out what to do. She sounded real nervous. Worried and scared.” He stopped talking and blew his nose.

“Do you know where she was calling from?”

“No.”

“Go on,” Rosie urged.

“Okay, so I waited. When she didn’t show up, I called Victor, and I called her grandma, and they both said they hadn’t heard from her, didn’t know if she was in town. Yesterday I talked to Arnold. He said he hadn’t heard from her, that as far as he knew no one had, nor from Noah, either. Then last night the cops show up, tell me she’s dead, start asking me a lot of questions. I told them what she said on the phone. Figured I’d better. They said they’d be back. Bet they will, too.”

“Probably,” I agreed. I told him how we’d picked up Marjorie’s trail in Tahoe.

“She was using fake ID up there, calling herself Beatrice Hinks,” Rosie said. “Do you know where she might have picked up some fake identification?”

“Oh, well, there’s half a dozen guys around her neighborhood. Easiest thing in the world. It might not be good, might not get past a cop or a bartender, but it would be okay for most purposes.”

“Tell me this,” Rosie said. “How long would it take to get hold of a fake driver’s license? If you knew who to go to? Hours? Days?”

“Same day.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea who she might go to for that?”

“Nah. Like I said, could be anybody.”

Even so, the information was helpful. It meant she could have found out she needed to cover her movements, gotten fake ID, and taken off for Tahoe all in the same day.

“Have you talked to her grandmother since she was found?”

“Yeah. I called over there. She’s pretty bad. Got a neighbor in to look after her. Victor did, I mean. She wasn’t talking to anybody.”

“Do you have any idea why she might have wanted to meet you at the mud flats?”

“It just kind of worked out that way. See, she seemed like she was afraid to go home, and she said she didn’t want to meet anyplace that, well, she said might be watched. I don’t know what she meant. I guess whoever killed her… Anyway, we used to go there, together, sometimes. It’s real peaceful. So we just agreed to meet there.”