Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (4 page)

Eva was browning a hunk of boneless chuck.

“Such a stove,” she said. “I haven’t seen a stove like this since World War II. The burner… fut-fut-fut.” Tigris and Euphrates were entangling themselves in her legs, crazed by the smell of meat. “You should feed the cats.”

I did as I was told. “It works okay,” I said, defending my stove. “The other burners don’t go fut-fut-fut.”

“I always make pot roast on the front left. I’m too old to change.”

“Where’s Pa?”

“Taking a walk. He wants to see what all the noise is about down on the corner. I met your tenant today. She’s coming for dinner.” Eva’s tone was even, unrevealing. I wondered what kind of costume Rosie had been wearing when they met. She has two favorite tee shirts. One is imprinted with the head of Gertrude Stein, the other, Marilyn Monroe.

The meat was brown. Eva added water, sliced onion, celery tops, and a bay leaf.

“She always drives a truck?”

“She’s a carpenter. She needs it for work.”

“Such a beautiful girl. It’s a new world nowadays, that’s for sure.”

“Parts of it, anyway,” I said. “How did you meet Rosie?” I sat on the stepstool to watch her cutting up potatoes and carrots.

“I was watering your tomatoes. She came home. I told her six-thirty. The dog is coming, too. A beautiful dog.” Rosie has a middle-aged black standard poodle named Alice B. Toklas. Eva dropped the pieces of potato in salted cold water and let them sit on top of the stove. The cut-up carrots went in the refrigerator. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll defrost your refrigerator. And now I think I’ll take a nap.” She wiped her hands on her apron. Actually, it was my apron, a canvas one with “Berkeley Lumber Company” printed on the front. A present from Rosie. Eva went into the bedroom. I walked down to the cottage.

Rosie’s worked with me on two other cases, and I was wondering if she might have some time to help out on this one. At the very least, I needed to do some thinking out loud.

Alice, dozing on the small front deck, opened her eyes, wagged her undocked tail, and got up to accompany me inside. Rosie offered me a beer.

The cottage is a big L-shaped room with a Franklin stove in one corner. The small part of the ell is the kitchen. We sat at the table and looked out the French windows at the cottage yard, an enclosed, ivy-hung island of privacy.

“She’s making pot roast,” I said.

“Good. I’ll pick up a bottle of burgundy and a bottle of Mogen David. Think that will do it?”

“Manischewitz is okay, too.”

Rosie was wearing a red tank top, cutoffs, and cowboy boots. No Stein. No Monroe. There was a fine powder of sawdust on her short dark hair.

“Got a case,” I said casually.

“When do you need me? I’m finishing a garage conversion this week.”

“What are you converting it to?”

“A master bedroom.”

“I need you whenever you can come in on it.”

She laughed, and I knew why. On my first two cases I’d been reluctant, to say the least, to involve Rosie. For one thing, they included corpses. For another, they required dealing with some pretty unsavory types. Rosie’s not exactly pink cotton candy, but she is my friend, and I guess I had been feeling protective. I still did, but I was determined not to show it because it really infuriated her. Also, I would never have tied those cases up so neatly if Rosie hadn’t been around. We were a good team.

“Does this one pay anything?”

“Sure does. You can have fifty-fifty on the per diem any day you work.” I gave her the financial picture.

“I’m free most of next week, and if we’re still on it after that I can get out of the next job. Just a deck, and I’m helping a couple of friends. No rush, no problem.” She sipped at her beer.

I told her who the clients were.

“Noah’s ark,” she said. “And vitamins. And a casino.” She got us each another beer. “You know, I saw a piece on them in the
Chronicle
a couple of months ago.”

“About the arks?” I found that hard to believe. The street would have been besieged by reporters and freaks.

“Not exactly. A reporter came around to check them out and they told her they were building a ship. That it was an educational project of some kind, that they hadn’t been able to get space on the Bay, and that they were going to dismantle it when the project was over. Tiny little blurb. I guess the press kind of lost interest after that.”

I showed her the wallet-sized photo June had given me. “It’s a few years old,” I said. “But she says he looks pretty much the same except his beard’s a little longer.” We both gazed at the picture. A pale dark-haired man. Fine-looking frizzy hair. Crisp short beard. Pale eyes— gray, she’d told me— that looked mildly bewildered. This was after the successful establishment of Yellow Brick Farms but long before the arks. I told Rosie I had a description and license number for his car, too.

She thought in silence for a while. “So maybe he’s kidnapped and maybe he’s dead and maybe he’s in a motel room with Marjorie. What do you think?”

I shrugged, remembering the orange-haired Adele. “I think the maid did it.”

Rosie arrived for dinner promptly at six-thirty, Alice leading the way. She was dressed conservatively in white pants with drawstrings at waist and ankles, Birkenstock sandals, and a peach-colored silk blouse. I hoped she wouldn’t spill any gravy; she was pretty dressed up.

Eva beamed, and offered her a glass of Mogen David. Rosie was not willing to go that far, and asked for burgundy.

The evening was cool, so I’d laid a tiny fire in the Franklin stove for coziness. Eva maneuvered things so that Rosie and I wound up on the couch.

“So,” Eva said, “you’re a carpenter. You make kitchen cabinets, that kind of thing I suppose?”

“Sure.”

“She also builds houses,” I added. What was this kitchen cabinet crap? Rosie tossed me a look that said she didn’t need my help, but thanks for the thought.

“Jake could use some new cabinets. He should hire you.” Of course— I knew she was thinking this— if I married Rosie I wouldn’t have to pay. “All this carpentering,” she continued, “it doesn’t make your hands calloused?” I stayed out of it. Rosie smiled.

“A little,” she admitted, “but I use a lot of hand cream.” I glanced down at her hands. I’d never really noticed anything but their shape before. They looked smooth. Amazing.

Eva took a sip of her Mogen David. My father came out of the bedroom, pink from his shower, knotting a striped tie.

“Ah! I thought I heard voices. The carpenter’s here.” He could hardly have avoided hearing voices, since the house is about six hundred square feet. “Can I bring somebody a little wine?”

I asked for burgundy. He brought the bottle in from the kitchen.

“So tell me, Rosie,” he said, settling in the rocker beside the fireplace. “I hear a lot of people in San Francisco don’t eat meat.”

Rosie hesitated. “Well, I have friends in San Francisco, and some of them— I suppose that’s true…”

I turned to her, feeling that an explanation was needed. “He means the Bay Area. The City, Marin County, the East Bay, the Peninsula, maybe even Sonoma, Napa— they’re all San Francisco.”

“Oh, right, in that case, sure. There are a lot of people who don’t eat it, or eat less of it, or don’t eat red meat. But isn’t that true in Chicago?”

“Who knows? Red meat. Huh. Red meat. Like pot roast.” He turned to Eva. “See, I said you should ask. Maybe she don’t eat pot roast.”

“I eat pot roast,” Rosie said quickly. I knew she didn’t eat red meat often, but Rosie is not inflexible. As for me, there is no life without pot roast. Because I’m a man of the eighties, and because middle age threats are closing in, I don’t eat pot roast every night.

Having exhausted that topic of conversation, my father went on to better ones.

“You’re a carpenter,” he said. “You should get a job with those crazy people on the corner. The ones who are building a boat.” He was kidding. Rosie saw that, and laughed.

“I don’t know much about shipbuilding,” she said, “and I don’t think they’re hiring, anyway.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Eva said, “maybe you can tell me why such a beautiful girl is a carpenter. Such heavy work. And a smart Italian girl, too.”

It had never occurred to me to ask Rosie why she had become a carpenter. She thought for a minute. “I’ve always liked building things, making things. I like wood and I like houses and I like creating an environment.”

“Ah,” Eva said. “Creating an environment. A home, you mean?”

“Homes, offices…”

“A home,” my father said, nodding.

“When I was a little girl,” Rosie continued, “I liked playing with hammer and nails and saw. My father had some old tools. He wasn’t very handy, but he had that much. We were kind of poor then, and there were a lot of toys my parents couldn’t afford to buy me. I wanted a playhouse when I was about eight, my father couldn’t build things, and a playhouse would have cost a lot to buy, so I built one. Old scrap lumber, cardboard. I didn’t have any roofing materials, of course, so I kind of shingled the roof with aluminum foil. It leaked.” She laughed. “My mother found me a plastic tarp and I tied it down and nailed it every which way. I had to keep replacing pieces of the house, but I kept it together through the first two months of winter rain.”

“Rosie grew up in Napa,” I explained. She had never told me about the playhouse. Only the scooter that didn’t steer.

“You made a house,” Eva smiled approvingly. It wasn’t cooking or sewing, but it would have to do.

We all had a little more wine. Eva was smiling and glowing, and my father had that silly look he got whenever he had a drink of any kind. That look brought back memories of family weddings, when my father, high on his one whiskey and ginger ale, would dance with my mother, swinging her around and shouting, “Look at her. So beautiful. So cute. Look at those fat little cheeks. Isn’t she cute?” I wondered if he did the same with Eva.

Eva said dinner was ready any time, so we all sat down at the table, across the room from the fireplace. But Rosie sat for just a second, then hopped up again and followed Eva into the kitchen, to help. Then I jumped up and followed Rosie. My father stayed seated.

I carried the plate with the roast on it; Rosie carried the potatoes and carrots, sieved out of the gravy. Eva carried the gravy and the brussels sprouts. I went back for the root beer, diet and regular, and again for the bread. Rosie went back for the bean salad.

“For dessert,” Eva said, “I got a cheesecake.”

We all stuffed ourselves. Between bites, we talked about this and that. Eva was very good. We were half an hour into the meal before she asked Rosie if she was engaged or anything.

Now, I knew that Rosie had been seeing someone for quite a few months, but I also knew that they hadn’t decided how far the relationship was going to go. My biggest concern was that Rosie would want to live with the woman and would decide that the cottage was too small. I’d have to add a room to keep her around.

“Not engaged,” she said. “But going steady.”

Eva shrugged. She wasn’t impressed with “going steady.” She liked Rosie, I could tell, and until she actually married someone, she was a possibility for me. “And what does he do?” Eva asked, hoping his status would be even lower than mine, whatever mine might be.

“Social work,” Rosie said, avoiding pronouns. Rosie’s not the kind of person who hides what she is, and she never lies about it, but neither is she interested in discussing her personal life in detail. When it comes to old people, if she thinks explanations might confuse or upset them, she tends to avoid the explanations.

“A social worker.” Eva swallowed a piece of potato. “They don’t make much money, but it’s nice to do that, I suppose.”

My father, who had worked for the WPA as a young man, was winding up, I knew, for a paragraph or two on poverty, welfare, and hard work. He took a swig of diet root beer.

“They don’t know what it is, today, to be poor. All this welfare. They should be out fixing the streets, like I did. They don’t know. I wouldn’t wish another Depression, but they should know what it’s like.”

“Pa, I think some of them do know.”

“People shouldn’t go hungry,” he said. “Not a dog, not a cat should go hungry.” He looked down at Euphrates, who was waiting patiently beside the table for the plates to be cleared, grunting from time to time with food lust. Tigris was sitting on the chair near the fire, glancing our way frequently. Alice was sleeping on the couch. “But a man should have the desire to work.” Was this an oblique criticism of me, I wondered?

Rosie got him talking about the Depression and the WPA. Once, when we’d known each other for only a short time, she had taken me on a tour of all the government-sponsored, Depression-era WPA murals in the metropolitan Bay Area. I think it was my appreciation of those murals that made her decide I could be her friend.

We cleared the table, just Rosie and I, and did the dishes, and then we all had coffee, caffeinated and decaffeinated, and cheesecake. My father was, by now, wild about Rosie.

When she got up to leave, he insisted on walking her to the cottage, despite the fact that she had a canine escort.

Later, after Eva had gone to bed, my father and I sat out on the front steps looking at the stars.

“A beautiful girl, that Rosie,” he said. “But after all…” he nodded sagely. “We have to understand that we are in San Francisco.” My father, man of the world.

I looked at him. He looked back at me slyly.

“Actually, Pa,” I told him, “we’re in Oakland.”

My father was sitting at the kitchen table drinking his morning coffee and reading the paper. Eva was in the bedroom making their bed. I had already made my couch, drunk one cup of coffee, made a phone call, and toured the yard. The ivy was strangling the acacia again. I would have to call someone to take care of that, since I was a busy man.

Eva finished the bed and joined my father in the kitchen. I hung around the living room, thinking about a second cup of coffee.

“What kind of person would do such a thing?” My father shouted. “They won’t bury the dead people!”