Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) (8 page)

“Which one is Noah’s?”

He pushed open a door and showed me a room that looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.

“I’m afraid his office won’t help you much,” Durell said. “He hasn’t used it in months.”

“I’d like to take a look, if it’s okay with you.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

The desk was empty. The file cabinet was full of purchase orders.

We walked on. “So,” I said, “he hasn’t been around in months? Since he started work on the arks?”

Durell did a half-grin. “We’ve had a few meetings. He’s been coming by every couple of weeks to look through his mail.” We stopped in front of a swinging double door. He pushed in and we entered what looked like the guts of the business, a series of big, interconnected rooms stuffed with conveyor belts and machinery.

“This first room, here,” he said, “is where we make our flavored rice nectars. It starts out right over there, with those boilers and kettles. First you boil the rice and then it goes into that big blender over there…” He pointed at something that looked like a large industrial vacuum cleaner. “That breaks down one of the chains of the carbohydrates and liquefies it. Then it goes back into a kettle and the starter’s pumped in. See what we’re doing here is making the first stage of sake. It’s fermented, but it’s nonalcoholic. It’s called amazake. I tell you, those Asians… anyway, that breaks down more of the carbohydrates, makes it sweet— just from what’s in the grain.” He pointed to two huge vats. “It goes and sits in those overnight. It’s agitated and temperature-regulated. Then it’s pasteurized, and the bran gets sieved out over there.” I had begun to drift into a fantasy of Noah’s body being disposed of in these vats, cooked, packaged, run along a conveyor belt… “Then it gets pumped over to that tank, where the flavoring is added— we did some apricot yesterday— and then it gets pumped over to that big fellow over there.”

I snapped myself back to attention to look at his “carousel filler,” a collection of funnels where the glop was dropped into the bottles, plastic ones, which were then machine-capped. A conveyor belt took the little soldiers over to another work area, where the still-hot nectar was dropped into a cold water bath.

“After that,” he said, “we put the labels on and put the whole batch in one of those refrigerators over there.” I followed him along the conveyor-belt trail to another machine. “Here’s where we slap the labels on,” he said. He reached into a carton, pulled out a roll of labels and tore one off, backing and all. “Souvenir?” he smiled. It was the label for Yellow Brick Farms’ Apricot-flavored Rice Nectar. Pretty. A rosy-cheeked, slightly Asian-looking farm girl holding a bushel basket full of apricots. I hate apricots. I thanked him and pocketed the piece of paper.

He pointed through a door to another room. “We do the dried fruits in there. Want to have a look at that?”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, “but I have a few more things I wanted to talk to you about.” He looked disappointed. “You sound like you really miss Noah’s presence around here.”

“Sure I do. We’re a good team. Oh, I can keep things moving. He always relied on me anyway, but in a partnership, each man has his own area of expertise.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But what does any of that matter, with the world ending?”

He laughed an “oh, you rascal” laugh.

We were back in his office again. He glanced at his desk. A new phone message memo sat in the middle of his blotter. He set it aside, settling back in his chair.

“Now, about the world ending,” he began. “Yes, there was the flood to consider. But Tom’s not crazy, you know. You do know that?” I shrugged. “Anyway, he wanted to keep the business going. For the employees, for the cash flow.”

“If he’s dead, what happens to his share of the business?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “Why, it goes to his wife, of course.”

“One more thing. Do you know his other partner, this Pincus guy up in Tahoe?”

“We’ve met.” His tone and expression were noncommittal.

“You don’t like him?”

“He’s a smart businessman, runs a nice little casino.” Not one clue to his feelings.

“You think he could have something to do with this?”

“You know what they say about lying down with dogs.”

“You think Noah’s picked up some fleas?”

He grunted. “I’ll tell you, Jake, I wouldn’t accuse anyone of anything. But I just don’t know.”

On my way out, I considered inviting Doreen for a beer to pump her about the company, but she wasn’t around. The Toyota was no longer in the lot. Maybe some other time.

I stopped for half an hour at a place I knew in Glen Ellen, a reputed haunt of Jack London’s, and had a beer by myself while I went back over the Yellow Brick road. The rest of the day was spoken for. I had gotten roped into an afternoon with the folks, which was okay, and Eva’s niece, which might not be okay. After that, I had my own plans for dinner.

I stopped at the ark on my way home to pick up the information about Marjorie’s grandmother. Beatrice wasn’t around, but she’d left it with Arnold. It was just one o’clock when I walked up to the house.

Pa and Eva were sitting on lawn chairs reading copies of an East Bay weekly they’d picked up on a stroll along College Avenue after brunch that morning. They were wearing new straw hats of wildly different styles. His was a rakish cowboy hat with a small feather, hers a wide-brimmed fantasy with a bunch of grapes nestled along the brim. I thought of Carl Hinks.

“No bananas?” I asked. “No pineapple?”

“Carmen Miranda I’m not,” Eva laughed.

“You’re better looking,” my father said.

“Speaking of good looking,” Eva said, “it’s too bad you got plans for tonight. Lee is such a lovely girl.”

“I’ll meet her,” I said reasonably. “I’m going shopping on Telegraph Avenue with you.”

“That’s okay,” my father said, grinning viciously. “The niece is staying over in Berkeley tonight. We’re going touring tomorrow, then dinner tomorrow night before she goes home again to… what is it called, Eva?”

“Petaluma,” Eva said.

“The whole weekend? That’s nice,” I said. “I can have dinner with you tomorrow, but I’m working during the day.”

“Another one of your articles that never gets printed?” my father asked.

“That’s right, Pa. Tell me, Eva,” I added, just to make conversation, “what did you tell Lee about me?”

“About you?” She laughed. “Why about you? Lee comes to Berkeley; she’s got friends. Two birds— me, her friends. Who said anything about you?”

I sighed. I was afraid it was going to be a long afternoon. Of course, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by adoring women at the moment, anyway. My eight-month romance with Iris Hughes, the gorgeous psychotherapist, had finished evaporating that summer, and neither of us was watching when the last little bit of it disappeared into nowhere. I was still seeing Chloe Giannapoulos occasionally. She was my dinner date that night. But she’d become involved with her work and possibly with one or two coworkers at
Probe
magazine, and didn’t seem to be showing much gratitude any more to the guy who’d introduced her to the guy who helped her get the job.

The funny thing about it was, we liked each other a lot. But Chloe, who was somewhere around forty years old, had a battered emotional history that wasn’t very different from mine. Although she trusted me as much as she could trust anyone, she was pretty damned happy with her life just the way it was. Professionally exciting and emotionally independent.

And since I wasn’t sure that wasn’t the best way to live, after all, I wasn’t about to argue with her. The way I look at it, wait and see is always the best policy when it comes to love. Unless you’ve been hit with one of those swept away, don’t-want-to-think-about-it, let’s-do-it-now bombshells. In that case, you have a choice: be a damned fool or run like hell.

I haven’t been faced with that choice in a long time. Maybe that’s something you can do just so many times before the capacity to do it wears out.

I wasn’t interested in falling in love; I wasn’t interested in spending a lot of time with Eva’s probably boring and unattractive relative. And even if this Lee was Aphrodite herself, she lived in Petaluma. I don’t commute.

I had a few minutes. I repaired to my tiny office, which could best be described as a service porch, and started making lists of people to see and questions to ask.

She showed up about ten minutes later. I heard her arrive, and emerged from the back of the house with every intention of being cordial. Maybe even gallant.

If she wasn’t Aphrodite, she could have passed in some circles. She was in her early thirties, I guessed, not too thin, not too fat. About five seven or eight. She had green eyes and red hair, not quite orange, a little deeper on the red side, very fine and soft-looking, cut short sides and back and longer on top. She had the redhead’s pale skin, with a fine dusting of freckles across her nose. A nice nose with a small bump in it. Her mouth was spectacular: full lips and perfect teeth.

She was wearing pearl gray pants and a turquoise knit shirt that didn’t have any animals on it. I have never liked turquoise. Suddenly I was crazy about turquoise, and redheads, and green eyes.

We acknowledged each other with fragile smiles. For one wild moment, I considered breaking my date with Chloe. But no, that wouldn’t do. If you wear your heart on your sleeve, a woman will not let you take off your clothes.

I offered to drive our little expedition up to Berkeley.

Lee turned out to be perfect.

“I noticed this car when I drove up,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

I couldn’t help myself. I opened the door with a flourish, guiding the older folks into the back seat. Lee stepped up gracefully into the passenger seat. I held the door until she was settled, then I closed it for her. I just couldn’t help myself. I dashed around the gleaming blue hood and climbed in beside her, released the emergency brake and started the car.

“It sounds like it’s in beautiful condition,” Lee said. “And the interior is perfect.”

“Rebuilt engine,” I said. “Nearly original interior.”

“Amazing,” she replied, stroking the dash. That was almost more than I could stand. I shifted into gear and pulled away from the curb, trying not to smile like an idiot.

Eva, especially, was delighted with the street market, several blocks, on both sides of Telegraph, ending at the campus on Bancroft. Booths, tables, displays. I didn’t know when the custom started, but I’d never known Berkeley without it. I also didn’t know how the real stores on the street, the ones that paid rent, felt about the shopless commercial enterprises that flourished on their sidewalks every weekend, but I figured they were probably good for business generally on the street, and as “street artists,” inviolable, essential to Berkeley’s image of itself.

Some of the merchants actually were street artists, actually made the jewelry, cutting boards, little boxes, clothing. But a lot of the displays were run by employees of the business people, many of whom were simply retailers. Right before Christmas, you could barely stumble down the sidewalks for the crowds of purveyors. Not a bad place to buy gifts, some of them handmade.

“Once,” I heard Eva telling Lee, “when I was a little girl, I visited my aunt in New York, and she took me down to the Lower East Side. A marketplace outdoors, like this. Well, not like this, exactly. Same principle.”

“Was a place in Chicago,” my father said, “called Maxwell Street. Same thing. You could find anything. Antiques, even. But no more.”

I reflected that Telegraph Avenue was a pretty sanitized version of either the Lower East Side or, especially, Maxwell Street, which I remembered vaguely from my Chicago childhood as a disintegrating, but still exciting, bazaar.

The expedition took a solid three hours, at which point it became time to go home and prepare for our various evenings. Eva came away with earrings and a scarf. My father bought a maroon tie with a hula dancer allegedly hand-painted on it. I don’t know what stall he found it at; I missed it entirely. I hesitated over a tee shirt with “I Like Ike” printed on it, and decided not to buy. Lee bought a striped tank top that I would have loved to see her in right then and there.

On our way back to the car, I glanced toward the hat shop where Hinks worked, and decided I would stop in there, one day soon, and check out the merchandise.

Lee went back to her friend’s house— who was this friend, anyway?— to change, and our little household took turns with the bathroom. I had to leave for San Francisco before Lee came back to get the folks, but Eva let me know that they, too, were going to The City to eat and see a show. “A musical,” Eva explained, “because Lee knew we would like that. Such a wonderful girl.”

I couldn’t have agreed more, but I didn’t say so.

Rosie was arriving home as I was leaving.

“I may be ready to start helping you on Monday,” she said.

“Good. I need you.”

“Yes, you do. Got a date?”

“Meeting Chloe.”

“Say hi.”

Less than half an hour later I was saying hi to Chloe at her Noe Valley apartment. A hug, a kiss on the cheek. Mutual murmurings of “It’s been too long.”

“Got any ideas about dinner?” I asked.

She had Haydn on the stereo; we were drinking a warm-up glass of wine, sitting on her blue overstuffed couch. Over in the corner was the rocking chair I remembered from her place in Novato, up in Marin County, where I’d first met her.

“I can’t decide. I feel ethnic, but then again, sushi would be nice.”

“What kind of ethnic, I mean besides Japanese?”

“My kind, dolt.”

Greek food sounded terrific to me. It always does. “Know a place with belly dancers?”

The restaurant was out in the Sunset District, where the fog shows up earlier and stays longer than in other parts of San Francisco. I’d left Oakland in warm sunlight, wearing a lightweight shirt and sport jacket, carrying a pullover. The fog got to the restaurant ahead of us; I put on the sweater as I stepped out of the car. Once the sun goes down, it’s chilly everywhere. Occasionally, I still feel a twinge of nostalgia for those hot mid-western summer nights. But not often.