Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (7 page)

She had that look. The one that means, “I can’t wait to get this over with and get you out of here and get on with my life.” The look that is so hard to believe, so impossible to take in, when it comes from someone who used to love you. The look that always makes you wonder if they ever really did. It’s the final look. There’s no coming back from it. She was talking to me and she was completely inside herself, protecting herself from my pain but not really caring about it, just wanting it away somewhere. I wondered if her face had always been that large and flat and square. Because she was different, now, I could really see her. The charm was gone; she wasn’t turning it on for me any more. The illusion was gone. There was nothing looking at me but her naked face, and it was not a face I loved.

I hadn’t wanted to kill her then. But months later, when the shock had worn off and the anger had set in, I might have had one or two little moments…

Yellow Brick Farms occupied an old dairy near Boyes Hot Springs, just north of the town of Sonoma, in the eastern part of the county of Sonoma. I drove north along 80 to Vallejo, up through Napa County, and over the line. I was remembering that a decade or more ago, there’d been an ark in this area, too, but an ark of a different kind.

It was a huge old hotel-restaurant that looked like the world’s biggest riverboat, owned and run by an ex-madam. The place always seemed to be surrounded by animals— dogs, cats, chickens, even a goat or two— and was decorated inside like you’d expect an old-style whorehouse to be decorated. The ex-madam, a huge woman who inspired both fear and loyalty in her employees, could sometimes be seen lolling on her bed through the open door of a draperied room just inside the entrance. She could always be seen somewhere in that hotel, yelling at a waiter, watching a bartender, casting a businesslike eye over the clientele. It was a great spot to eat and drink, although I never stayed overnight there. I heard, not long after I moved to the East Bay from Marin, that Maria’s had burned down and been relocated somewhere unlikely— was it Vallejo? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s anywhere anymore, or if she’s even alive.

The Yellow Brick plant was big, without a yellow brick to be seen anywhere. It was built, rather, of red brick, a strange building material for earthquake-land, but one which nevertheless has a way of showing up in out of the way places.

The many-paned windows were clean; the gutters were plastic, and probably new in the last few years. There were pink geraniums planted beside the door that had
OFFICE
printed in neat white block letters over it. Tidy. An air of comfortable success. No flash, no hype. There were only two cars in the parking lot, a Corvette and a new white Toyota.

The woman behind the desk looked like a lot of women I knew in the early seventies, only a little better. Her hair was longish and dark brown, fuzzy around the ends. She was wearing a kind of peasant blouse and a long skirt with flowers all over it. I couldn’t see the shoes, but I guessed maybe clogs, maybe sandals. I was betting she’d been with the company from the beginning and was very dedicated, and, to go along with the dedication, underpaid.

When she raised her eyes to me, I knew she’d been wearing the same clothes for a dozen years. She was somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. She had dark blue eyes. Her face was round and innocent.

“Hi. What’s your name?”

I was suddenly transported back to childhood. “Jake,” I said. “What’s yours?”

“Doreen.” She smiled. A nice smile that almost compensated for the name. Names that end in “een” always sound like cleaning compounds to me. The two exceptions are Arlene and Francine, for some reason. “Is that Jake Samson?”

I nodded.

“Great name.”

“Thank you.” I couldn’t decide whether she was projecting sweet dumbness or sexual subtlety.

She pressed a button on the intercom on her desk. “Mr. Durell? Mr. Jake Samson to see you.”

All that “mister” stuff didn’t quite go with the laid-back, groovy atmosphere of the outer office and its inhabitant. Mr. Durell asked for just a few minutes, and I sat down on the old wicker love seat that occupied the wall across from the desk. The room was large and full of plants. I noticed no ashtrays on the tables. There was a braided rug in blues and greens on the floor, and framed posters on the walls. Posters of flowers, of sixties and early seventies groups— Creedence Clearwater Revival was one— and some drawings in the colorful fantastical style that looked, then and now, like the product of an acid trip.

Mr. Durell really did need only a few minutes. He buzzed and Doreen— had she called herself something like Willow-song Peacelove once upon a time?— gestured me through a door that was painted yellow. “Second on the left,” she told me.

I wondered why I was so conscious of the time warp she represented. I loved the sixties and early seventies. I think I feel a little angry because that time passed so quickly. Or because it didn’t deliver what it promised. Or because it sailed away on a drug dream and left a lot of people stranded in a time so unromantic and unformed that no one could ever hope to grasp its principles, if it had any.

Durell’s office was big and comfortable, and didn’t look anything like the reception area. It was carpeted in something industrial and had white-painted walls hung with a few nondescript framed prints. Landscapes, flowers in vases, that kind of thing. The desk was an elderly wooden one, the chair a new executive swivel, and there were two wooden side chairs, a tweed-covered couch, and a coffee table.

Durell stood up and smiled, extending his hand over the desk, gesturing generously at one of the wooden chairs, which wasn’t any more comfortable than it looked. I noticed the framed diploma. He had a doctorate in chemistry. Another refugee from the toxic wasteland?

Durell didn’t look like he’d ever felt stranded. He looked very much at ease in the eighties. He was in his mid to late forties, hair cut short but not greased. He was wearing a white shirt with no tie, and suit pants. On a coatrack near the door I saw the suit jacket and tie. He looked tired, and glad to sit down again after we shook hands.

“Nice-looking operation,” I said. Businesspeople tend to like that kind of nonstatement.

He nodded. “Business is good. And getting better.”

I cocked my head. “Oh?”

“We’re one of the older companies in the business now, you know. Got a good toehold on the supermarket chains.”

“No wonder you’re busy, then. Lots of work, no partner.”

Durell shrugged. “Would you like some tea or something, Mr. Samson?”

“Jake.”

“Joe.”

“I don’t suppose you have any coffee?”

“Sure we do.” He buzzed Doreen and asked for two cups of coffee. “She’s my Saturday-morning secretary,” he said. I supposed he was explaining why he had a receptionist on weekends, when no one else seemed to be around. Or maybe he was just bragging about the amount of work he had to do. Or, then again, maybe this was man-to-man stuff, and I was supposed to guess she was some kind of office wife.

I nodded and smiled my congratulations, which would cover any of the above.

Doreen came in carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, a pint of half-and-half, and some brown sugar in a mug. She smiled at me sweetly when Joe thanked her.

“About Noah,” I said, when the door had closed behind her.

He fiddled with his coffee, adding cream and sugar and stirring slowly and deliberately. “I suppose you want to know what I think about this disappearance thing.”

“I do. And I wanted to get a feel for this company— how it got started, who’s been around the longest, what people’s relationships with Noah are like. Standard stuff.”

“Checking out the suspects, eh?” He laughed. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what to say. I guess he must be in trouble somewhere. I know his wife thinks so. And she’s probably right. I can’t quite feature him running off, either. He’s a solid kind of guy, in his way.”

I caught the “in his way.”

“Tell me about him.”

He leaned back in his chair, gazed at the wall behind me, clasped his hands behind his neck, and began. “I’ve known the man for years. Knew him back in Houston, matter of fact. . . . When he got this idea, it sounded a little harebrained, to me, at first, but I had a lot of respect for him, for the way he worked. It sounded like he’d looked into it, like he knew what the hell he was talking about. So I did a little nosing around on my own, and things looked even better. I put a little cash in the hopper; Tom came out here and got things started. Did good right from the beginning. I came out to lend him a hand, been here ever since.”

His eyes focused on me again. I waited.

“Tom liked to manage the raw materials end of things— you know, buying from the suppliers, keeping an eye on them to make sure they kept it clean, real organic stuff. That was important to Tom. Is important.”

“And you?”

“Well, hell, it’s important to me, too. Reputation’s everything in a business like this.”

“No pesticides in the carrot juice, right?”

“Not funny, Jake.” He shook his finger at me.

“Sorry. And your role in the company?”

“I’m still a chemist. Always will be, I guess. I handle the supplements, the processing. Vitamins, mostly. The lab’s my baby. Our vitamins are pure. No sugar. No preservatives, just the real thing. Of course, I’m also Tom’s executive vice president. Since he’s gotten involved in the arks, that’s become a much bigger job than it was before. He just hasn’t been around as much.”

“You say you think he’s in trouble, but the evidence points to a runaway. With Marjorie. What’s so impossible about that?”

He smiled slightly. “It’s not impossible. Middle-aged man… but it just doesn’t seem like him, pulling his money out while the arks are being built, taking off with some little girl. Maybe someone saw a chance to get hold of a lot of money and took it. I hate to think that’s what happened. I hate to think his body’s going to turn up somewhere. Maybe I’m wrong. Hell, there’s not a man alive who can’t be tempted. But then temptation can go more than one way.”

“You want to explain a little more about that?”

He took a last swallow from his cup, and looked inside to make sure he hadn’t left any coffee. “Well, hell, Jake, there’s a lot of possibilities. Look. This Marjorie Burns. She’s with him, or took off with him or something. Right? So there are three possible scenarios as I see it. One, they ran off together. Two, she was with him when he got kidnapped or whatever and she got what he got. Or three, maybe she arranged what he got. Ever think of that?”

“It had occurred to me. I can see you’ve given the situation some thought. Do you have any reason to think she might do something like that?”

“Hell, no. Hardly know the woman. You said you wanted to get a feel for the company. How about a tour?” He stood up. I swallowed the last of my coffee and got up too.

“But you do know her?”

“We’ve met, sure.” He shot me a thoughtful look as we walked out his office door and started down the hall. “I suppose you’ll think it’s funny, a practical guy like me, if I tell you I’ve done a little work here and there on the arks, too.”

“I don’t think it’s funny.” Not as funny as pesticides in the carrot juice. “Is that how you met Marjorie?”

He nodded. “This ark stuff, I thought it was a little strange at first. You know, scientist, businessman, moves to California and goes peculiar. But I don’t know. I believe we really have screwed things up pretty bad, just like before the last flood. And I always believed in the Bible. I guess I just decided not to argue with a man who said he was having dreams of prophecy. You look into it a little more, Jake”— he chuckled— “you might be wanting a reserved seat yourself.”

“Could be. What about what he said in the note, that there was something he had to do?”

We stopped outside a solid wooden door with the word
LABORATORY
printed on it.

“I haven’t seen the note. Heard what it said. Look at it this way, Jake, either way it happened, the note’s going to read that way. ‘I’ve got this thing to do. Very important.’ If he was kidnapped, that’s what they’d make him write so no one would try to go after him. If he ran off with this Marjorie, it’s a sure thing he’d want everyone off his tail and he’d want to give his wife a chance to think he was working. I don’t think the note means a damned thing one way or the other.”

I tended to agree with him, but the note was all I had.

He unlocked the laboratory door, swung it open, and switched on a light.

It looked like a lab. The only one I’d ever seen was the one I’d been forced to spend time in back in high school chemistry, but this looked something like the one I remembered. It had cupboards and racks of test tubes and shiny white counter tops. There was a very professional-looking microscope, a gadget he told me was a mixer, a kilnlike object which was, it turned out, a “precision furnace,” a big box he said was a “refrigeration unit.” Burners. Beakers. All very clean and tidy, like no one ever worked there, a room about twenty-by-thirty with one small window and lots of fluorescent light. Over all, a lingering mixture of chemical odors I couldn’t recognize, although I caught a whiff of pine cleaner.

“Nice,” I said. “For vitamins?”

“Oh, we do a lot of things here. Quality control. Shelf-life improvement. Making mixtures, trying out drying times. A lab in a food factory is like a thumb nail on a thumb.”

A very pristine thumb nail. “Do you make the little pills here?”

He shook his head. “We send them out to be pressed and bottled. Of course, powders are the coming thing, bigger than pills.”

“It doesn’t look like you’re working on anything right now.”

He turned out the light and relocked the door as we left. “You’re right. I don’t get much time in there anymore. We’re just keeping the old product line on an even keel these days. I’ve even sent some work out to consulting labs. I’ve become a manager.” He sighed.

We were walking down the hall again, past some unmarked doors. “Offices,” he explained. The idea of offices clearly bored him.