Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (19 page)

I stood up, reached over and squeezed his hard shoulder, and told him to try to get some rest. The crewcut kid met us in the living room and escorted us to the door.

I took the parking ticket off my windshield and stuck it in my pocket.

Naturally. It went along with everything else. We’d started out with a nice, cozy little disappearance the cops couldn’t have cared less about. Now some vicious son of a bitch had gone and complicated things. I had to come up with some way of telling what I knew to the cops— withholding evidence in a homicide is not something the law looks upon kindly— without admitting that I’d been investigating the case. The old magazine writer cover would have to do it. Or maybe Arnold… I needed to think it through a little.

But the only thing my brain would focus on was that someone I was supposed to be finding was dead.

Emeryville is a city, a weird little waterfront appendage stuck onto the Bay side of Oakland. A mishmash of houses, restaurants, warehouses, businesses, condos, tall corporate headquarters, and low-ball poker clubs. And the Emeryville Mud flats.

As far as I know, there are only three ways to get down to the mud flats. You can pull up on the shoulder of the freeway and climb the cyclone fence, you can take a boat in until it scrapes bottom and wade the rest of the way on foot, or you can approach from Powell Street. From there, it’s a short hike across the flats to the sculptures, a pleasant enough challenge if you’re wearing waders, which we were not.

I parked in the Holiday Inn lot and we crossed Powell. The highway department’s ice plant at the roadside, which squashes unpleasantly underfoot, gave way almost immediately to wild grasses, which gave way again to a muddy bank dropping down to the flats. We half picked our way and half slid down the bank, sloshing over to the biggest collection of driftwood, the warehouse of raw materials, a deep cut full of tons of wood, huge planks and poles, smaller bits crisscrossed in the mud, all interspersed with odd bits of metal and trash and big chunks of styrofoam from God knows what or where. It was here that Carleton had sat and waited for Marjorie.

Rosie led the way across the bridge of flotsam. A sandpiper screamed, nearly upsetting my balance. Another one took up the call. Standing on a perfectly beautiful two-by-twelve that I knew I could find some use for around the house, I turned to watch the birds. There were three sandpipers running around on the shore yelling at me, and when I slipped off my plank and fell against a charred telephone pole, a flock of doves I hadn’t even seen, those small beige doves you see everywhere in the East Bay, took off. Oddly, there were no gulls. Gulls circle the parking lot of my neighborhood Safeway, miles from the Bay. Gulls hang around downtown Berkeley. But here, on the Bay itself, I didn’t see even one.

I turned back in the direction of the sculptures. Rosie was waiting silently for me, twenty feet ahead, on a hillock of grass.

“Birdwatching,” I said. She nodded and negotiated a tricky leap from the hillock to a cross-hatch of railroad ties three feet away, sliding dangerously on their muddy surface, catching herself, and stretching a leg toward another patch of semidry grass. I, passing lightly, Nijinsky-like, over the last of the dry footing of nearly solid driftwood, reached a stretch of mud and water-logged turf, following Rosie’s trail along the slightly dryer, upper side of the flats nearer the freeway fence.

Rosie had already entered the field of art, so to speak. The sculptures were still some distance away from me, stretching to the south. I stopped again to get my bearings, to look toward the exhibit, when I saw a flashing movement, just to my left. A pale orange cat, small, wiry, was watching me from its perch on yet another chunk of phone pole— is there a country in the South Pacific where a revolution against ITT has been launched? Was the cat lost? More probably abandoned, maybe as a kitten. Probably wild. A survivor, admirable and smart. I called to it.

“Hey, cat, don’t be scared. Want to come home with me? Here kitty…” I was sure Tigris and Euphrates would understand and accept a poor refugee. The cat continued to stare at me. Afraid, interested, maybe even wishing it could believe me, but too frightened to approach. Face to face at twenty feet but no closer. I turned my head away for an instant, to find Rosie. When I turned back it had vanished into the brush.

Rosie was standing under a huge humanoid figure, waiting, again, for me to catch up. I nodded to her, held up my hand, took a deep breath of the unnameable soup of undefinable ingredients, and sloshed on, trying to find solid footholds, failing half the time.

The driftwood art of the Emeryville mudflats tends to the abstract. I hadn’t really looked at it lately. A quick glance from the freeway every so often. Lots of humanlike figures and some animals. Looking around me, straining my eyes in the mist-glare of the afternoon, I thought I remembered that there had once been more representational art out there: more real-looking objects and machines. But maybe some of today’s abstractions were the ruins of those earlier creations. It could have been ten years since I thought I saw them.

The closest one to me was a human, or a tyrannosaur, or something, nine feet tall. A post with assorted scrap propping and climbing it. A mane of aluminum fringe. A big styrofoam head, mouth open, red tongue sticking out. A single protrusion— a unicorn horn?— sticking out of the middle of its head.

There was a gallowslike structure with a piece of wire fencing hanging, executed, from it; a horse-shape, maybe fifteen feet at the head, and another big horse, farther on, to which Rosie had now progressed. To the left, a thing with two wheels that looked vaguely like a dive-bombing airplane.

A windmill.

A cross complete with shreds of martyr.

Rosie had reached the one we were looking for, the first one that offered a shelter for a corpse. Tent-shaped, plywood propped against car tires and two-by-fours. Alongside it, a picket fence, or six pickets of one, that seemed to go with the little tent in a casual way, was stuck upright in the mud.

To get to Rosie, to get to the tent, I was going to have to cross some very wet land, and go a dozen feet closer to the Bay than the track I was following. I didn’t expect to find anything there. My shoes were already soaked. I stepped off the plank from which I’d been surveying the art show, down onto soggy grass. Up to the laces of my white running shoes.

The water was six inches deep in spots; some of those spots had planks laid across them, bridges for sculptors. I used the planks when they were there to use, but mostly I slogged. Through sticky mud that damned near sucked my shoes off; through drowned grass.

I passed a door, propped by two-by-fours, upright, looking closed for some reason. A boat shape perched on a pillar of phone pole. I ran out of bridges and sank shin-deep, negotiated the other foot around to higher ground, did a couple of hops and a jump, and reached Rosie and the tent.

“Anything?”

Rosie shrugged. “Looks like someone’s been here. But then,” she added, “someone has.”

Lots of someones. The mud was churned to the consistency of cheese spread, a distasteful item even on crackers, where it’s supposed to be. Squatting as best I could in the mush, I looked inside the little tomb. The surface was gouged by the pushing and pulling of a body, and by the feet of laboring cops. A few footprints disappearing into the marsh grasses. Nothing interesting stuck in the mud or the sculpture, or at least not any more. No bits of clothing, hanks of hair, bloodstains. No crouching killer.

I got down on my knees and crawled inside. Not much doubt that the structure had been there a long time. Rot was creeping up its deeply mired sides. I pulled out my pocket flash and checked more carefully. Crud. And enough room for two if two should want to have a cold and sloppy alfresco screw. But like Marjorie’s had, someone’s feet would have stuck out. I exited backwards.

“You’re a mess,” Rosie told me.

I stood up.

“Think she was killed here?” Rosie asked.

“I guess. Followed. Killed. Shoved inside. To hide the body? From Carleton?”

“Maybe just to delay discovery. How would they know she was meeting someone?”

I nodded. “He didn’t see anything or anyone. He just sat there and waited, he says.” I glanced to my left, toward the cyclone fence and the freeway, the southbound traffic no more than a hundred feet away. The top of the fence, in a direct line from the wooden tent, was bowed out of shape. But that could have happened in 1973. I pointed it out to Rosie.

“Who knows?” she said. “Marjorie would have come over from Powell, like we did. The killer could have followed her from there…”

“Not without being noticed, coming down the bank.”

“Right. She’d run.”

“And he’d chase her down. Maybe he shot her while she ran, got her in the back of the head.”

“Hard to do, isn’t it?”

I agreed. I thought about it. “What if there were two of them? One of them went down the bank, the other one drove the car along here, hopped the fence, and caught her running from the other one. Neat. Then they tied her up, shot her, and stuffed her in the tent. A shot, out here, with all the noise from the freeway?”

“Sure,” Rosie agreed morosely. “That would work great. One shot. A few screams. No trying to hit a moving target in the dark in the mud.”

“Or Carleton met her, killed her, stuck her away.”

“Or the killer got off a lucky shot and dragged the body out here to hide it.”

I turned to the right. A dancing human figure, twelve feet tall, of rusted scrap. Beyond that, the Bay, the Bay Bridge, The City and its conglomerate skyline of old and new San Francisco. A little farther to the north, the Golden Gate and Marin, the Marin headlands hiding in the afternoon fog.

“I wish she’d been killed somewhere else,” I said.

“Why?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. But if I thought I was going to die, it would break my heart to know I was looking at that”— I waved my arm at the view— “for the last time.”

“You’re a romantic son of a bitch, Samson.”

“I know.”

We stuck around for a few minutes, just thinking about it, then hiked back across the marsh to the Holiday Inn. We took our shoes off and banged them around for a while, trying to get rid of some of the mud. Then I pulled an old blanket out of the trunk and spread it on the front seat to protect the Chevy.

Inside the closed car again, the stink of swamp on our shoes and clothing was nearly overwhelming.

“I wonder how it really happened,” I said.

Rosie sighed. “Academic. She’s dead. She knew something and someone killed her. Or someone killed her because they hated her.”

“Or because they loved her.”

“Horse shit.”

“It happens.”

“Not in this case,” Rosie said. “It’s all got to do with whatever made Noah and Marjorie run off in the first place.”

“There’s something else I don’t get,” I said, maneuvering the car out of the parking lot. “Why would anyone walk a dog in the mud?”

On our way back to the house, I stopped at a liquor store and picked up an afternoon
Examiner
and an
Oakland Tribune.
The
Examiner
had a tiny blurb on the murder, the
Tribune
had a slightly bigger one that solved, at least, one of the small mysteries. It included a paragraph about the woman who’d found the body. She and her dog went down to the mud flats frequently, she said, because “there’s a cat living there. We’re trying to adopt the cat.”

There was no message from Hal on my machine, but that would have been a little quick, anyway. He might not have anything for a day or two.

Eva was in the kitchen cooking. Pa, she said, was taking a walk with his friend Rico. She invited Rosie for dinner, but Rosie said she had a date.

“Such busy people,” Eva clucked, mixing just the right amount of regret with her joy at Rosie’s social success.

Dinner would be ready, I was informed, in an hour and a half. Rosie’s date was not for two hours, so we went to the cottage to take care of a chore that was best, I thought, done quickly.

I had considered going to Ralph Hawkins and laying it all out for him, telling him everything I’d learned about the case so far. He was a very sharp cop, a very good one, and the point of this whole thing, after all, was to return Noah safely to the bosom of his cult. We were no longer playing hide-and-seek.

There was a problem with that approach. I wanted very badly to stay on this case, and once Hawkins told me to butt out, I would be on very soggy ground, even as an “investigative reporter” for
Probe.

Best if the cops didn’t know we were in it at all. Rosie and I talked about it. She agreed. What we would do, we decided, was write out everything we knew, every word we remembered, every lead, every physical clue, take the story to Arnold and tell him to give it to Hawkins. Arnold would say that this was all the information culled by all the ark people who had been trying to find Noah and Marjorie.

We started at the beginning and worked our way through, with me taking notes.

“Here’s how it looks,” Rosie said, handing me a glass of orange juice. She was out of beer. “Noah leaves a note saying he’s got something to do, and he and Marjorie take off for Tahoe. That’s the start, right?”

“I don’t think so. Marjorie went somewhere early Saturday morning. We don’t know whether she came back or not, but sometime during that day she picked up some false ID. Then she and Noah took off. With the ID and with the quarter of a million.”

“He wrote a check for the money, but there was no payee listed in the check register and the check has never been paid in.”

“Right. And just a few days before he disappeared he told Arnold to speed up the construction. Why would he do that and take off with the money?”

“Maybe,” Rosie mused, “he never did take off with it. Maybe he gave the check to Arnold before he went, saying, ‘Here, finish it off fast,’ and Arnold has it stashed somewhere.”

“Interesting point. Maybe Arnold’s been stashing a few dollars here and there all along.”