Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (3 page)

“That’s it?”

“Well, she used to be an artist, but she hadn’t done anything with it for a while.”

“Was she a dabbler or was she a professional?”

“Oh, professional. Actually quite well known at one time.”

“Why aren’t you willing to leave it to the police?”

“Because the police deal in the obvious, and I want the real killer found before they stir up a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

My obtuseness exasperated him. He answered me with a series of questions. “Isn’t it true that the first suspect is always the spouse? Or maybe someone the spouse is, uh, seeing on the side? If the police really get going on this, wouldn’t there be all sorts of problems and publicity and maybe even arrest for the spouse or the spouse’s—”

“Lover?” I finished, irritated with his indirectness. He nodded, flushing slightly.

“You should have heard the questions they asked me,” he wailed. “I expected to be arrested right then and there. When did I leave the house that morning? Was she in good spirits? Were we having any marital problems? I want someone investigating this from my side. I want you to solve it before the police decide to throw me to the wolves. I don’t trust them. They know my record. In the sixties—well, anyway. I can’t prove I didn’t kill her before I left the house. And there’s someone else they might start harassing.” He looked at me significantly.

“Rebecca Lilly,” I said resignedly and stared out over the eucalyptus trees at the smog-tinted view of San Francisco. I didn’t think the police gave a damn about Harley’s politics, old or new, but they might, indeed, give a damn about his love life. I told him I would think it over.

“I need to know now,” he objected. “We have to work fast.”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow,” I told him. There were some people I wanted to talk to that night.

Harley had assured me that he and Rebecca had been more than careful to keep their affair secret, so I thought I might have a little time to nose around before the cops started hitting too hard on either one of them. That helped. But I was going to need some kind of cover for my investigation. A private citizen wandering around trying to solve a homicide needed to have some kind of explanation for his peculiar behavior. I didn’t think the Oakland police department would take Harley’s ten-thousand-dollar offer as an explanation.

I had some ideas about how to deal with that problem as well as a couple of others, but I couldn’t take the job until I knew for sure. Fortunately, the problem-solving involved a couple of guys I played poker with, so I could keep my one-day promise to Harley without sacrificing my weekly ritual.

Then there was Rebecca. I wanted to talk to her before I made a decision. She’d gotten me into this in the first place.

I came down out of the Oakland hills to the realities of the flatlands. As usual, my liquor store’s parking lot was overfull, and I had to squeeze my car into a diagonal position that practically guaranteed a dented fender. Also as usual, I took my chances, since there is no such thing as a poker game without beer and chips. I bought a newspaper, too.

When I emerged from the store, I saw that I’d been lucky. The same cars were parked on either side of me. No dents. I slid behind the wheel and glanced at the paper. A small story, at the bottom of page one. It didn’t have anything in it that I didn’t already know.

By the time I pulled up at my gate it was nearly four o’clock, and my tenant, Rosie Vicente, was home from work. Her pickup truck with its padlocked toolbox was sitting stolidly out in front. Rosie’s a carpenter, self-employed. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days and decided to stop at her cottage to see if she’d drink a beer with me before I went on back to my house.

The usual setup for a house and cottage is big house in front, small cottage in back. Not my place. The front was fifty feet of occasional and self-reproducing vegetable garden and dirt driveway with patches of paving here and there. Beyond the garden there’s a clump of bamboo coexisting with a stand of acacia trees. Behind that prolific camouflage is the cottage with its tiny yard and, to the left of that, the path going back toward my front yard and my tiny house, surrounded by other people’s back yards and tall fences. Privacy and quiet.

The top of Rosie’s Dutch door was open, but I knocked on the door frame anyway. Her bed was just a few feet away, and respect for each other’s privacy was the best way I knew to ensure continued friendship.

She came to the door dressed in cutoffs, work boots and heavy socks, and a T-shirt decorated with the head of Gertrude Stein. Rosie is a knockout, about five foot five with curly black hair, cut short, and peacock blue eyes. She’s always slightly tan from working outdoors. She’s in her early thirties. We’ve been friends for two years, ever since she first rented the cottage. Just friends. She smiled and invited me in. Her aging standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, also has curly black hair and also smiled and welcomed me.

I pulled two beers out of my sack, and her smile got even brighter. I followed her past her bed around the ell to her kitchen table.

“What’s new, Jake?”

We sat and looked out the big casement windows into her shady, fuchsia-draped yard. I noticed a small pile of lumber under the acacia. She had mentioned that she was going to build a curved seat around its trunk.

I shrugged. “I may be getting involved in a job. If I do, I may need your help from time to time, feeding Tigris and Euphrates, that kind of thing.” Tigris and Euphrates, my sister and brother cats, were very particular about being fed on time. Mutual pet-sitting in a pinch was part of the agreement Rosie and I had.

“Sure. If you’re not around I’ll just deal with it.” She took a swig of beer and looked at me quizzically. “What kind of job? Anything interesting? Anything you might need help with?” She knew I’d been involved in some pretty disreputable chores in the past.

“Could be,” I said carefully. “Sounds like you’re bored.”

“I am. Busy but bored. Decks, decks, and more damned decks. I haven’t built anything complicated since last year. And winter’s coming.” If the season was particularly rainy, there’d be days at a time when she did no work at all. “And my love life? Yech. Look at that.” She pointed to her desk, and I could see that her evenings had been pretty solitary lately. The desk top was piled with paperbacks—science fiction and murder mysteries: Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Fritz Leiber.

I nodded sympathetically. I suspected she just hadn’t gotten over her last lover. The relationship with Marge had ended only six months before. It hadn’t been a good one, but I knew from my own experience that doesn’t make the final, irrevocable loss any easier.

“Well, I don’t know if I’ll even take the job.”

She threw me a suspicious look. “You still haven’t told me what it is.”

“Oh,” I said casually, “someone got killed.”

“Killed?” She glanced at the books on her desk. “Do you mean murdered?” Her face was a study. She was having trouble choosing between regret and excitement. Not fear. Oh, no, not Rosie. And how could I tell her I didn’t want to involve her in anything that might be dangerous? She would have been righteous indignation itself. She would have accused me of being protective, Macho. She wouldn’t believe that I would feel the same way about a close male friend. Not to mention a good tenant.

“Yeah, well, maybe. Or manslaughter. Or suicide, but—”

She grinned at me. “Look, Jake, it’s okay. If you don’t feel you need someone to help you—you know, protect you—I’ll understand.”

I just grinned back at her, finished my beer, and stood up to leave. “Got to make a phone call. If I decide I need a bodyguard, I’ll let you know.”

Tigris and Euphrates came running to meet me as I approached the house, sucking in their cheeks and trying to make their chubby sides concave, mewling the duet from “The Starving Kitty.”

I fed them. They would never have allowed me to talk on the telephone otherwise. Then I called Rebecca Lilly’s office. She was there.

We hadn’t talked for more than a year. Her voice was the same, low and raspy with soft edges of humor and sex. I told her I wanted to see her and asked about lunch the next day. She agreed and said I should pick her up at home. She had been planning to take the morning off anyway. I figured she didn’t want anyone connected with Harley coming anywhere near her office.

It was still early. Plenty of time for a long shower before dinner. I stripped and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, a confrontation I’d been avoiding. With some pain, I had to admit it was getting to be that time again. In the past couple of years, my spare tire had had an alarming tendency to grow, and the usual measures—a week or so of cutting down a little on food—just didn’t seem to work anymore.

A salad and a chop for dinner. Beer? Tonight, at poker, okay. Tomorrow, no. If anything, wine. Because it doesn’t go with potato chips. Because my mother died of a heart attack after years of being overweight. Because I like to maintain the fiction that what I do or don’t do is going to make a difference in how long and how well I live.

The shower soothed me a little, and while the chop was broiling, I put in a call to Artie Perrine, one of the poker regulars, and asked him if he could make it a little early because I wanted to talk to him privately. He agreed.

Artie was an editor of
Probe
magazine, a San Francisco-based investigative monthly. I’d met him in Mendocino in 1973. He was a friend of a friend and had been up there looking for his sister, who’d gotten herself involved with some heavy-duty dealers. I’d helped him to find her and get her ass out of there. She was seventeen at the time. A few months ago Artie had mentioned that she was back up the coast again, but this time she was working as a marine biologist. He often said he owed me. I wondered how much I could collect.

Artie showed up fifteen minutes early, but so did Hal Winter, a fairly successful Berkeley attorney I’d met at a party when I first moved to Oakland. He was the second man I wanted to talk to, a good solid guy with some good solid connections with the DA’s office. He didn’t exactly owe me, like Artie did, but our friendship had involved a lot of give and take, so I thought he wouldn’t mind doing me a favor now and then. I set Hal up in front of the Franklin stove with a beer can in his hand and invited Artie to join me in the kitchen while I dumped the chips into bowls.

I kept my voice low and he followed suit, but like I said, the house is small and there was no way to be sure Hal wouldn’t overhear.

He asked what he could do for me. I told him. He leaned against the wall, looked at me from under serious eyebrows, and said he didn’t see why not. He’s a little guy, and sometimes he overcompensates for his size by deepening his voice and puffing up his chest.

My cover would be that I was working on a story for
Probe,
a piece about the mysterious death of a local artist. Artie would leave a free-lance contract in my mailbox the next morning.

“That ought to open doors for you, Jake,” he said. He laughed, but he meant it. “The cops don’t like us much, but they tend to leave us alone. They hassle you, want to check to make sure you’re doing what you say, just have them call me.”

“Thanks, Artie.” It was funny, but now that I’d touched him on his power base I became suddenly aware of how much he’d changed since I first knew him. Back in the early seventies he was a nice kid with a thin beard and wide eyes. Now he sounded like he should have a big cigar in his mouth.

There was a knock on the door. That would be Jim Nelson, a friend of Hal’s and the fourth member of the group. I started out the kitchen door, but Artie stopped me and Hal got up to let Jim in. I let Artie pull me back into the kitchen again.

“Listen, Jake,” he said, “are you going to be doing this kind of thing often?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Sometimes I hear about people in trouble. Good people.”

“I might consider it, job by job. You willing to keep vouching for me?”

“Sure.” He smiled slyly. “Of course, once in a while we may have to run a little something with your byline. Just to make it look kosher. And you could probably pick up some useful information for us on some of those jobs—”

“It’s possible,” I interjected, grabbing for the bowls of chips. If I wasn’t careful, Artie would have me working for him. He pulled some beers out of the refrigerator and followed me to the living room. The conspiratorial look on his face made me feel I’d just made a pact with the devil.

When we drew for the deal, I came up with a king. It didn’t make me feel any better about Artie when he announced, in unnecessarily significant tones, that it looked like “Samson’s deal.” He even winked at me.

The king was the best card I had all night, except when Hal dealt a game of low ball. I drew a full house, aces over tens, and lost to Artie’s two of diamonds, three and four of clubs, seven of spades, and nine of hearts.

I finished up twenty-three dollars down, a real bundle for our low-stakes games. But when I asked Hal to stay for an extra beer afterward and gave him the story about the magazine piece, he said he didn’t think he’d have a problem passing along a little public information on the case for my “article.” I don’t know whether he’d overheard any of my conversation with Artie, but it was clear that he didn’t believe a word I was saying. On the way out he punched me on the arm, snickered, and warned me to watch my tail.

Rebecca owned a condominium in a big new anthill of a building in North Berkeley. Only five stories tall but it stretched for half a block, and somehow the architects had managed to cram thirty-two apartments into it. I pushed the button for number 15 and waited.

The intercom crackled and Rebecca’s distorted voice descended from the third floor.

“Who is it?”

“Jake.”

“Okay.” The door buzzed and I pushed and walked into the large courtyard, open to the sky so that, presumably, the exotic flora sprouting from the circular graveled beds wouldn’t feel trapped. I bypassed the elevators for the sake of fitness and trotted up the uncarpeted service stairs. As I passed apartment 14, an elderly man came out, looked at me very carefully, smiled tentatively, and closed his door again. Friendly, I thought. And nosy. Rebecca opened her door before I knocked.