Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (15 page)

“Why go through another procedure when it can be stored? Also, reversals sometimes don’t work and sometimes they’re only temporary— scarring can cause obstruction again. Some doctors advise their male patients to store sperm immediately after a reversal, just in case.”

I reflected that there were an awful lot of ways for a sperm bank to make money.

“I want to get back to this home insemination,” Rosie said, and I lost the doctor again. “You just carry it home, thaw it out… ?”

“You take it home packed in dry ice, thaw it, and use it as soon as possible.”

“It lives for only a day once it’s thawed,” I explained to Rosie.

“That’s right. And it thaws in ten minutes at room temperature.”

“What if you take it home, thaw it out, and then something happens and you can’t use it right away?”

“You would have a problem, Rosie,” the doctor said, laughing. “And I wouldn’t advise tucking it in with the TV dinners. You’d kill it.”

“But your kind of quick-freeze doesn’t?”

“Some percentage of sperm die even when the method is very fast and very cold. All our sperm must first pass a freeze-tolerance test.”

This was all very interesting, but we had a lot of people to talk to, and besides, I wanted lunch. I thanked the doctor, Rosie thanked the doctor, she said we were very welcome, indeed, and left. We went to get a sandwich and were back in half an hour.

We talked with several employees who dealt directly with donors or recipients. Despite orders from above to be open with us, they were all very nervous about confidentiality. Did any of them recall anyone who was particularly dissatisfied with services or product? They were all shocked at the question, and most of them said no such thing had ever happened. One woman did remember a couple of prospective clients who had read all the donor profiles and declared themselves to be dissatisfied with the possibilities, but they had been given their money back.

“About those possibilities,” Rosie said. “I guess you have a pretty broad spectrum of donors?”

“Oh, yes.”

“What kind of spectrum? I mean in terms of what?”

“Oh, education, interests, health history, occupation, ethnic background.”

“And every woman gets to see information about every donor?”

“About every donor whose sperm is available. There are no profiles on the private storage people, of course.”

“And mostly women can find what they want?”

“Certainly. Some people are just unbelievably picky.”

I asked her if she by any chance remembered who these dissatisfied prospects were.

There was one from Marin County, she said, and one who had come all the way from Santa Cruz. But neither of them had been really angry. Anyone local? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Gracie Piedmont had stopped in once during her lunch break— there was no rule against employees using the service, she assured us— and looked through the donor profiles.

“She said she was just curious, but who knows? Anyway, she looked, but she didn’t find what she wanted, I guess, because she never followed up on it. I mean, she didn’t complain or anything, if that’s what you’re after. And you have to understand, that was a favor to her, as a fellow employee. You know, I mean, no one can just walk in here off the street, not pay anything, and check out the profiles to see what they can see.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

We talked to a few more people before we got to the one who, with Nora, had access to all the confidential files and to the tank room, the one who had come in just after Nora the morning after the burglary.

“What a mess that was,” she said.

“A mess?” Rosie asked. “I thought they just broke in, took the stuff, and took it to the beach.”

“Well, that, yes. But someone got into the files too. Pried them right open, got them all mixed up. It took days to put them right.”

“Pried?” I groaned. “I didn’t see any pry marks on the cabinets.”

“Of course you didn’t.” She was indignant. “By then we’d put everything in new ones. You can’t keep confidential files in cabinets with broken locks. In fact, we had that done in a few hours, just put all the messed-up files in the new drawers and worked from there.”

“Great work,” I said.

“I guess Clement thought that was just part of the prank,” Rosie said to no one in particular.

“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to Clement. Perry was the one who came out when we first called.”

So, after several hours work, we came up with two interesting bits of information. The dead woman had been thinking of becoming a client at her own company, and the files had been rifled. I wanted to talk to Fredda again about her cousin and I wanted to know more about what had happened to those files. Would kids have broken into them? Maybe, for a laugh, to see what kind of men would want to be donors. The two who were under suspicion were, after all, budding men themselves. Natural curiosity? Part of the joke? I called Nora on the intercom and checked with her. Yes, she said, the files had also been broken into— was that significant?

“Did Clement know about it?”

“I suppose he did. I think he must have. He came out later, after he went with Perry to the beach, and looked around.”

“Had the cabinets been replaced by then?”

“No, that was later in the day.”

Rosie and I went to talk to Clement. He was sitting behind his desk, reading some reports, and waved us in happily, shoving the papers aside.

I got right to it. “Clement, why didn’t you say anything about the bank donor files— the confidential files— being messed with?”

“Oh, hell, Jake, I don’t think that’s important.”

“Why not? Whoever was there would have had to hang around for a while. Wouldn’t kids be too scared to do that? Why would religious fanatics look at the files? Why not destroy them, if anything?”

Clement leaned back in his swivel chair, put his feet up on the desk. “Okay. You got me. Can I trust you not to make a damned fool of me in print?”

“Yes, absolutely.” No lie. There wouldn’t be any print unless
Probe
actually did decide to do a piece, and I thought I might be able to protect Clement even so.

“It was that damned asshole”—he glanced at Rosie— “Perry. Maybe he was hung over. He screwed up bad. He took the call. He saw the files and the freezers. He told them not to touch the freezers or the window but he didn’t say anything about the files. By the time I got over there later there was a woman working away at those cabinets, taking the files out, smearing her hands all over everything. If there ever was anything to see, anything at all, there wasn’t anymore.”

“No prints?”

“Drawers were all smudged up. Folders too. And there must have been a thousand of those. We found a couple of her prints, clean, but that was it. And there wasn’t anything on the freezers. But I don’t see what difference it makes to you. Same story. Break-in, vandalism.”

“It could make a big difference,” I said.

He swung his feet to the floor. “Okay. But a man my age can’t afford to make too many mistakes. Oh, nobody’s going to take away my pension, but I’m not ready to leave this job yet. To tell you the truth, it keeps me company.”

“You didn’t make the mistake,” Rosie objected. “Perry did.”

“Same thing, in the end, Rosie. I’m responsible for this town.”

“Is that the only thing you haven’t told us?”

He nodded. “It’s not like I’m keeping a lot of secrets here, Jake. It didn’t seem to matter, early on. I figured it was just those two kids who did it, anyway, the Hackmans. Can’t you picture a couple of bright boys getting a kick out of reading those files?”

I could, but I wasn’t ready to. “You still think that?”

“A lot of different things have happened. The bank. Gracie. Your truck. There’s not a lot of doubt in my mind that someone tampered with your brakes. That’s no innocent kid’s prank. We’ve got something serious going on here.”

“So you’re willing to concede that now?”

He stared at me, coldly. “Damn it, Jake, let’s not talk about conceding, okay? Perry messed up. I messed up. But I don’t know what’s connected to what and neither do you.”

That was true. And I wondered, for just a second, whether it might not be better to admit we weren’t reporters after all if Clement was worried about his mistakes being made public. But much as I liked the man, he represented the law, so I let the thought die. I told him what we’d learned about Gracie Piedmont looking through the donor profiles. He understood that was the public part of the donor files, the part the customers got to see.

“What’s next for you?” he asked.

“We came here to find out about the break-in, and that’s the angle we’re going to take for the time being. But Gracie’s death keeps coming up. There’s a connection. What about you?”

He ran down a list of all the people he’d talked to. The only one he’d seen so far that we hadn’t was Great Aunt Hilda, a treat I’d been saving. “I haven’t come up with a damned thing worth using.”

“Neither have we,” I admitted. “Yet.”

Frank Wooster was sunning himself, an old wooden kitchen chair tilted against the warped boards of his garage. The truck looked the same as it had the day before.

He nodded at us, but he didn’t move.

“Any news on the truck?” Rosie asked.

“New axle’s on the way. Body man’s coming in tomorrow, like I already told you. But we got a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Can’t seem to track down a new fender. Not much we can do with that one.” He jerked his greasy gray head toward the interior.

“What can you do, then?”

He shrugged. “I’ll make a couple more calls, but I got a feeling it’ll be easier for you to find junk parts down around San Francisco. Lots of junk down there.” He didn’t quite sneer. I wanted to punch him out, but I didn’t think that would be a great idea.

We walked the half mile to Fredda Carey’s house. Besides Wolf, she seemed to be the only person who might know why Gracie Piedmont had been interested in the donor profiles. Fredda answered the door, and there was no sight or sound of the wheelchair. Joanne, I guessed, was at school.

“Well, hello again,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to get any work done with people coming around to ask me things all the time.” She added nervously, “That’s a nice dog. Does he bite?”

“No, she doesn’t,” Rosie said.

“We understand that you’re busy,” I assured her. “But we do have a question about Gracie.…” She shrugged, sighed, and waved us inside.

Rosie told Alice to stay on the porch, since, despite her assurance that the dog was not vicious, Fredda clearly did not trust the animal.

Once again she invited us to join her in the kitchen while she worked. Once again we watched her circular movement from oven to refrigerator to table to freezer to table as she operated her system.

Rosie began the conversation on a social note, mentioning that we had, the day before, visited Nora’s folks in their neat little house.

“Nice people,” she said. “Very nice people. It’s wonderful how they’ve got Nora to see to things for them, so they can have a pretty home and a comfortable old age.” She sighed again, gazing around her kitchen. “Some of us have to put enough by on our own.” She cut circles of dough and lined them up, soldier-like, on a cookie sheet. “That Nora is some kind of go-getter. I’ve got a lot of admiration for that woman. Real brainy. You got to be smart to make it in this world.”

“What we actually came to talk to you about,” I said, “was something we heard at the sperm bank this morning. Something about your cousin.”

She took one cookie sheet out of the oven, put the new one in, put the finished ones on top of the refrigerator, took the cooled ones down from the refrigerator and dumped them in bags, took the bags to the freezer, which didn’t look as full as it had the last time we’d seen it. “What about Gracie?”

“That she was interested in maybe using the bank’s services, that she read through all the profiles of the donors but didn’t take it any further.”

Fredda looked thoughtful. “She could have.” She flattened another ball of dough. “I guess she did, if someone says she did.”

“But why would she? Was there some problem with Wolf?”

She laughed. “Now, how would I know that?”

“We heard he’d had a child with his first wife,” Rosie said. “Unless something has happened to him since then…”

Fredda gave us her shrug. “Not that I’ve heard.”

“But she was planning on marrying him?”

“I guess so. Listen, who knows anything about anybody else? Maybe that was before she decided to marry him. Or maybe she was changing her mind and wasn’t ready to say so. Or maybe she was just bored and felt like reading something. I couldn’t say.”

“So you don’t know any reason why she might have been looking for a donor?” Rosie persisted. “You don’t remember her saying anything? And you don’t know whether Wolf can still father children? She really never talked to you about any of that?”

Fredda got slightly irritated. “Not that I remember. But she could have said something and I just forgot. I’m a busy woman, you know. I can barely keep up with my own problems.” She was cutting out those damned little circles again.

We thanked her and asked her the way to Great Aunt Hilda’s house. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood.

“What do you want with her?” She stared at us.

“Nothing much,” Rosie replied.

On our way down the street Rosie smiled. “She didn’t offer us any cookies this time. Alice would have loved one.”

The directions took us a couple of blocks north and east— away from the ocean and away from downtown. The street looked slightly less poor than Fredda’s, but this house, too, was nearly paint-bare.

Great Aunt Hilda was on the front porch holding a wet string mop when we strolled up the walk. I don’t know what I had expected. A female version of Frank Wooster, maybe. But this woman was no lean, ascetic Bible-belt-style crank. She was a big, fat, sloppy California crank.

She must have topped two-fifty. Her hair was combed straight down all the way around in a short Buster Brown. She looked to be around sixty, but who could tell?

She wore one of those print housedresses that no one wears anymore, with big brown flowers on it. She had little blue eyes in a round, lumpy face. She put a large, puffy hand on the sagging rail and frowned at us.