Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (4 page)

She hadn’t changed much, just enough to show that hers had not been an easy year. Her hair was a little longer, her fingernails a little shorter, and the lines around her eyes a little deeper. The giveaway was in the two new lines at the corners of her mouth. She looked thinner and harder, and I found myself thinking that John Harley, with his wife and his house in the hills, had not been good for her.

Rebecca led me into the living room and offered me a glass of wine. I was glad it was white wine because her pale carpet was just the kind that attracts red wine like a magnet. Sure, I know the trick with the salt; I just never expect it to work. And there’s a certain lack of dignity in crawling around on somebody’s floor sweating and pouring salt on the rug. Especially a woman’s floor. Especially a woman like Rebecca. It was this train of thought, followed while she poured and served the wine, that rubbed the edge off any regrets I still had about our relationship that never was. I don’t want a woman whose carpets make me nervous.

The furniture was white and blue and yellow and red and contemporary, with two exceptions: a standard lamp with a fringed shade that might have been made in the twenties and an oak sideboard that looked Victorian.

Rebecca was wearing a pair of fashionably baggy pants, tight around the ankles; clogs; and a tight little nothing blouse, a mauve print with hardly any sleeves and hardly any buttons. She sat back and surveyed me. I’d dressed carefully in my usual corduroys, a Hawaiian shirt that, for some reason, women seem to like, and a tweed jacket.

“Too bad it’s cool this afternoon,” she said. “It would be nice to sit on the balcony.”

I looked out through the glass doors. Like Harley, she had a view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco but from a slightly different angle. Views like that can be expensive. We sat in the living room.

Rebecca and I had met when we were both selling houses for a living. She was still doing it. That was, in fact, how she had met John Harley. She had sold the Harleys their house in Montclair. She told me about her relationship with him. How he had called her repeatedly until she agreed to meet him for lunch. How she’d fallen in love with him. I looked away from her eyes. I didn’t want her to see what I thought of that. She told me a lot about him, too. He was wise and gentle and too kind to desert a wife who loved and needed him. She told me everything but how he was in bed. I kept my eyes on my wineglass.

“Has it occurred to you,” I said, “that he might have killed her himself?” I glanced up quickly to catch her reaction. She seemed genuinely astonished.

“Of course it hasn’t,” she replied calmly. “For one thing, he wasn’t home that morning. He was at his office.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. We spoke to each other. On the phone. I called him and he was there. And there are even some witnesses. A political group that’s been bothering him. They saw him. They knew he was working. He told me they were picketing outside the building.”

I shrugged. “I still don’t know when the woman was killed.”

She leaned back in her chair, frowning, thoughtful. Then she flashed me a look of understanding. “I get it,” she said. “This is an intellectual exercise. You’re practicing.”

I laughed. “No, Rebecca. Not really.”

She leaned forward again. “Oh, come on, Jake. Why would he hire you?”

“He thinks cops are stupid. Maybe he thinks I’m stupid, too. Maybe he thinks if he hires me that will convince everyone he didn’t do it. Maybe he doesn’t even intend to pay me.”

She was on her feet, defending him. “That’s ridiculous. He’s not like that. He’s totally sincere about this.” She suddenly realized she was standing and sat down again.

“Besides,” I added, “wasn’t it your idea to call me?”

She downed the rest of the wine in her glass. “It was all his idea, hiring someone to investigate. All I did was suggest you.”

I finished my wine and stood up. “Okay. Let’s go get something to eat and talk about this some more.”

We settled on Sen Ying’s, Szechuan and Cantonese, a few minutes north of Rebecca’s, where Berkeley disappears quietly into the town of Albany.

We were halfway there before I broke the silence.

“What time was it when you called him?”

She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I guess it was around ten-thirty or eleven.”

“Where were you?”

“Jesus, Jake.” She tried to laugh, but her voice broke. “You know how it is in my business. I was wandering around all morning. In and out of the office. I think I called him from a phone booth somewhere.” I reached over and patted her hand. She pulled it out from under mine and grasped my arm. “Jake,” she said softly, “you’ve got to help us.”

The restaurant was crowded but they found us a table. We ordered white wine, sizzling rice soup, spicy pork, and almond chicken.

I had abandoned my slap-and-jab method, questioning her gently over lunch, asking her to tell me everything she knew about the dead woman. She knew a lot.

Margaret Harley had not, according to Rebecca, known that her husband was having an affair. But she had apparently felt that something was wrong and, in recent months, had begun to act suspicious in a sad way. She had been given to sporadic outbursts of bitterness about the marriage. Harley had told Rebecca that he had caught her more than once watching him in a searching, questioning way. He had begun to find it less and less possible to be in his wife’s company for any length of time. He had taken to retreating to his study or working at his office. They had developed sexual problems because, or so Harley had told Rebecca, he no longer wanted to make love with his wife.

But he had vacillated about leaving her. In some ways their marriage was a comfortable one for him. For one thing, Rebecca said, Margaret had money of her own that gave John an illusion of freedom. Freedom to consider teaching less and exploring what he called other options.

Rebecca, on the other hand, felt that his fear of divorce—I thought of it as his fear of self-sufficiency—would fade as his love for her grew. She had been confident that would happen soon and, meanwhile, had been content enough to see him often and know that she was the one he really loved.

Once she started talking about John Harley, I had a little trouble getting her back on the subject of his wife. I maneuvered her around again, asking what Harley had told her about his wife’s background.

Mostly he had complained that she wasn’t doing anything with her talent.

Margaret Harley had been a promising young painter, achieving some recognition in her native Massachusetts while she was still in her twenties. By the time she met John Harley, she was well known and able to command high prices for her work. He had a teaching job in Boston. They had married. She had taken his name legally, continuing to sign her work “Margaret Bursky.” Within a year or two of their marriage, he had received an offer for a much better job at Berkeley, and they had moved to the West Coast.

After the move, she began to paint less. In a few months she was no longer painting at all. At the time of her death, at the age of thirty-five, she had not painted for six years. While Rebecca was telling me all this, I had a quick flashback to the fake Early American furniture in Harley’s rumpus room. I couldn’t imagine the dead woman, an artist, living with it. The stuff must have belonged to Harley before the marriage. That shed a little more light on his personality and on their marriage. No wonder Harley’s artist-wife had languished.

At first Harley had worried about his wife’s apparent creative block. She had assured him that it was temporary and that she would soon pass to a new plateau in her work. When it became obvious that the problem was more than temporary, Harley had already drifted away from her. He was too involved in his own life to worry very much about hers, if indeed she had one at all apart from him.

He had told Rebecca he suspected that she had given herself too much to her married life. When that began to fail, she started looking for ways to find herself and possibly her work again. She had begun to get involved with various groups, starting, for some reason, with an astrology study group. She had moved on to a painting class that she quickly declared “low-level and useless,” had taken some art history classes, which she found irrelevant, and had most recently been involved with her meditation group and her therapy group.

She had been talking lately about building a studio on the back slope of their yard. John had hoped she would. When they were both home together, her aimlessness was oppressive to him.

“Wasn’t very helpful to her, was he?” I commented.

Rebecca tried to reason with me. “He couldn’t very well lead her life for her, could he?”

“Certainly not. He was much too busy with his own.” I forestalled an angry reply by changing the subject abruptly. “That money of hers. Does he get it now?”

Rebecca picked up a black mushroom with her chopsticks and sat staring at it, thinking. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “We’ve never discussed it. You’ll have to ask him.”

I reflected that they’d hardly had time to discuss it, since her death at least. “I will. You don’t have any idea, I suppose, about how much money there was?”

She dropped the mushroom and picked up a piece of chicken. “There was some from her early sales, but I got the idea that there was even more from her family. I really don’t know.” She looked at the chicken as if she were wondering what it was and put it in her mouth. Then she took a long swallow from her glass of wine. “He didn’t kill her for her money. Or have her killed. He hasn’t got it in him.”

“You’re probably right. Why don’t we forget I ever said that. How do you think she died?”

Rebecca brightened a little and looked at me straight on. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know why the police think someone killed her, but it seems obvious to me that she killed herself. After all, she wasn’t very happy.”

I shrugged. “They must have some reason. Tell me more about her. Was she a good-looking woman? Attractive?”

She raised her eyes and looked at me again, this time quizzically.

“She was nice enough looking, handsome, I suppose you could say. Why?”

“I just need to know all the things about her that went to make up the complete person. An exceptionally attractive victim might have been victimized because of her attractiveness.”

“A lover?”

I nodded.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t repulsive or anything.”

I helped myself to the last of the almond chicken, waved to the waiter, and ordered another glass of wine for each of us.

Rebecca continued. “She was medium. Medium coloring, medium height, medium-sized features. Not very exciting.”
Like her husband
, I thought. “But she certainly could have had a lover.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “when people suspect their spouses of playing around, they run right out and do the same. Makes them feel better. A lot better.”

Her eyes softened, and she looked at me sympathetically. “Sounds like you know about that, Jake.” I’d never talked about my long-dead marriage to another woman, and I wasn’t going to start now.

I lightened up. “Doesn’t everybody?”

The waiter brought our wine. Rebecca ate a piece of celery.

“Did she ever see you and Harley together? I mean after the sale was closed and there was no reason for you to be together?” She shook her head and concentrated on chewing what seemed to be a gristly hunk of chicken. “Did you ever run into the two of them, out in the evening or shopping or anything?” The East Bay wasn’t all that big, after all. She shook her head again.

“I saw them once in a movie line but I avoided them. They never even saw me.” I wondered. People who suspect their spouses seem to develop telescopic, microscopic, and panoramic vision. Well, it didn’t matter.

“How hard were you pushing for marriage? Yours, I mean.”

She glared at me. “He knew I wanted it.”

“How often did you see each other?”

She put down her chopsticks. One of them fell on the floor. The waiter came over, looked at her full plate, and handed her another set.

“About two or three times a week. Once she went back east to visit her family, and we had several days together. What does all that matter, anyway?”

“Everything matters, Rebecca.” I finished the rest of the food on the serving plates and considered what she had left uneaten in front of her. No, I’d already eaten too much. The first day of cutting down was always the hardest.

I asked her if she’d like to go somewhere for another glass of wine.

“If you don’t have any more questions, I think I’ll just go home, Jake. I’m exhausted and I feel a little sick.”

I dropped her off and went for an Irish coffee, no sugar, at Michael’s Saloon on Shattuck. I had two of them before I decided to take the case.

Harley wasn’t in his office or he wasn’t answering his phone, so I tried the home number. He was there. I closed the door to the saloon’s phone booth and told him to go to his bank and draw out a five-thousand-dollar cash retainer.

“Seems like a lot of money to start off with,” he grumbled. When I didn’t bother to argue with him, he gave up. “Oh, all right. Meet me at my bank. It’s—”

“No. I’ve got work to do.” I also didn’t want to be connected with a large withdrawal from his account. I was working for a magazine, not for Harley. I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. “Do you know the Scholar?”

“Of course. It’s a bar just north of campus.”

“Good. Meet me there with the money at six.” A little more grumbling and we had a date. “Also, I need some information from you. Your wife’s will. There is one, isn’t there?”

“I think so.” He sounded sulky. “I expect I’ll hear from her attorney if there is.”

“Okay. Let me know. The other thing I need is information about some of the groups she belonged to. What were they, where did they meet, any names you can give me?”

“Oh, yes. I thought you’d want to know that.” The sulkiness had passed as quickly as it does in a child. Now he was the cooperative grownup. “The only thing I know about for sure is the meditation group. She was in a therapy group too, but she didn’t talk about it.” I grunted encouragement. “They met at the Earthlight Meditation Center. Do you know it? On Euclid?”