Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (18 page)

“No, of course not. We didn’t take clients in there. We had a separate file of profiles and we brought the profiles to them in another room. I suppose someone who had visited to see the profiles could, conceivably, have some idea. Somehow.”

“But mostly it would be employees who would know exactly where to go?”

“Anyone familiar with the bank would know, but yes, that would be pretty much limited to employees.”

“And possibly to nosy prospective clients?”

“Possibly.”

“Then how would a couple of kids or a religious fanatic know where to go? Whoever broke in broke into the right room.”

“They would know,” she said, “if they could get an employee to tell them where to look.”

“A good, order-following employee like Gracie?”

“I said she was a good employee. I never said she had a mind of her own.”

Rosie eyed Nora coolly. “Even so,” she said, her voice matching her look, “any employee could have told anyone.”

Nora shrugged. I switched to something else that had been on my mind and asked her about Lou and Joanne.

“There has been some speculation, apparently,” she said. “I wasn’t in town when Joanne was born, but I have heard that Lou is probably the father.”

“She looks like him,” Rosie said.

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess she might, a little.” Nora finished her ravioli. “But what does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But we’re trying to get at this burglary, and I keep thinking it’s odd that he heard and saw nothing that night. The burglars were around for a while. They broke the window. They must have had a flashlight. They messed around in the files and they moved the contents of your tanks through the window. They must have made some noise at some point. It would be handy if he had something to do with it.”

“I still don’t know what his being Joanne’s father would have to do with the burglary.” Nora was clearly impatient with this line of speculation.

“I don’t either. But what I really want to find out is whether the files were rifled for fun or for information. Is Lou a donor?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there some way to find out if he was ever rejected as a donor?”

“Yes. There’s a file.”

I was not looking forward to going back to the bank and spending the rest of the day looking through the donor files when I wasn’t sure they would tell us anything. But that seemed to be a logical, if tedious, next step.

We drove back to Wheeler. Nora, with what looked like relief, returned to her office. On our way to the file room, I glanced at Rosie, who had been quiet in the car. “You’re not exactly wild about Nora, are you?” She laughed.

“Oh, I don’t really dislike her.”

“She confuses me,” I admitted. “One minute she’s knifing a dead woman with her version of straight talk, and the next minute she’s being polite about someone who doesn’t admit he’s got a kid.”

“I don’t think manners or morals come into it at all,” Rosie said. “When she knows something— or thinks she does— she says what she knows. When she’s unsure, she’s uncomfortable, she gets bored. I think that’s all there is.”

“Oh, come on. You’re saying this successful businesswoman is about as complicated as Alice.”

“You’re complicated, Jake. That’s why she confuses you.”

The woman in charge of the files confirmed what Nora had said. They were intact, nothing was missing. How did she know for sure? She knew, she said, because she had cross-index lists, whatever those were.

We made ourselves as comfortable as we could in the file room, and began a long afternoon of reading.

It was mildly interesting. A lot of different kinds of men with different backgrounds, talents, and occupations. We went through the availables first. Students made up the biggest group, as we’d been told, but there were laborers, businessmen, and professionals too. The profiles were an odd combination of personal information and cold description. Whoever wrote them could have been a botanist describing an intelligent tree. There was this one, for example:

Donor No. 340

Summary: Good intellectual and verbal ability, better than average looks, some musical talent.

Ancestry: Central European.

Occupation: Law student.

Born: 1960s. Eye color: Blue.

Skin color: Fair.

Hair: Brown, curly, full.

Height: 1.8m(6'0")

Weight at 22 years: 77 kg. (170 lb.)

General appearance: Normal, average build, full face.

Personality: Strong presence, assertive, humorous, friendly.

Interests: Include reading, softball, bicycling, music.

Achievements: Law school scholarship, published in law review, first trumpet in college orchestra.

I.Q.: 150.

Art, creativity: Music mentioned above.

Athletics: High school baseball, no major achievements.

Manual dexterity: Good.

General health: Excellent.

Defects: Two grandparents developed duodenal ulcers, one in his forties, one in her fifties.

Blood type: O pos. Pressure: 120/75

Comment: Recurrence risk for ulcers estimated at 22 percent after age fifty.

What a guy. I hoped he wouldn’t give up his trumpet when he was a successful, ulcer-ridden, aggressive lawyer.

I read through number 340’s legal agreement with the bank, where he said he wouldn’t come back whining for his paternal rights later on. I glanced at his medical records and various reports on his sperm. His surname sounded German. He had accepted what appeared to be the usual student payment for his donation— twenty-five dollars.

From the availables we moved on to men whose reasons for being donors were part of their files, the guys in categories: the ones who were impregnating surrogates, the ones who had made arrangements with friends, the ones with medical reasons, and a very few who, for odds and ends of reasons, were saving it for posterity. Among the last was Marty Spiegel, donor number 126. If I’d felt like I was looking through keyholes before with the files of strangers, reading the file of an almost-friend, without his knowledge or consent, made me feel like one of those P.I.’s who takes pictures of unfaithful spouses. Sleazy. In his file, I discovered, was an agreement that should he die before his relationship with the bank had ended, his sperm would be turned over to the management of the executor of his estate, an attorney in L.A., who would then, I guessed, be charged with the responsibility of finding a suitable mother for his child. Or would he be directed to sprinkle it over the sea with Spiegel’s ashes?

When we finished with the donors, we searched the lists of recipients. At the end of our reading we had come up with nothing much. None of the men we were thinking of as suspects, with the exception of Spiegel, was a donor. None of the women who were possibles was listed among the recipients.

Lou Overman was not a donor, past, present, or even rejected.

We stepped back out onto Main Street with our eyes and our tempers somewhat the worse for wear. I noticed a newspaper vending machine outside the drugstore full of hot-off-the-press
Wheeler Weeklys
, and bought one. I wondered whether the paper would have anything interesting to say about the excitement around town lately.

There was a sketchy article about the break-in at the bank, which must have been discovered after the deadline of the week before, and a story about Gracie Piedmont’s death that treated it as an unfortunate accident during a bad storm.

Two paragraphs at the bottom of the front page mentioned another unfortunate accident— our crash on the coast road— and included the notation, at the end, to (see page 3).

Stopping long enough to turn to page three, I read on as I walked. The headline was “San Francisco Reporters on the Trail of Trouble.” The story went downhill from there.

“Why are
Probe
magazine reporters Jake Samson and Rosie Vicente nosing around Wheeler?

“They’re doing an article on the North Coast Cryobank, they say. We want to know what kind of story that would be? Why didn’t
Probe
show any interest until the bank was broken into and vandalized by persons unknown? And why are they asking questions about the recent death of one of this town’s citizens, who also happened to be an employee of the bank?

“What are they after? Why are they mercilessly harassing the recently bereaved?

“We’re all friends and neighbors here in Wheeler, and maybe it’s time someone told people from down around San Francisco that our town, our people, don’t exist for their amusement, that our private sorrows have nothing to do with them, and that if anything untoward has actually happened here, we’ll be the ones to set it right.”

It went on like that for another couple of paragraphs, but I stopped reading and handed the paper to Rosie. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, read the piece through, then riffled some pages.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the masthead. I looked. The publisher and editor was our friend Henry Linton, the mayor and patriarch of Wheeler.

Just as I got inside the door of my room someone knocked on it.

“Who’s there?”

“Clement.”

I let him in. “What’s going on, Clement?”

“I just thought you might want to know about this. Rollie Hackman. His mom called me a couple of hours ago. Looks like he’s run off.”

“Run off?”

“Run away.”

Suddenly I felt cold and scared, remembering Gracie, remembering our crash. “Are you sure he left on his own?”

Clement nodded. “That’s what Tommy says. He says his brother told him he was leaving town for a while, that he’d get in touch, and tell the folks not to worry.”

“What else does Tommy say?”

“Nothing. No matter what you ask him, he says he doesn’t know the answer. I know that boy, Jake. If his brother said don’t talk, he won’t talk. Not even to his folks.”

Maybe Tommy wasn’t talking, and maybe the Hackmans didn’t know anything, but there was one other place to go for information about Rollie, and that was Louis’s gallery and bookstore. Clement went off on some mission of his own.

I banged on Rosie’s door. No answer. I banged louder and heard a cry of rage from within. A minute later she came to the door, wrapped in her robe, dripping shower water on the floor.

Her disgust at being dragged out of the shower vanished when I told her about Rollie. In five minutes she was dressed and ready to go. We took Alice, who had been stuck in the motel during our hours at the bank, along with us.

Lou was just locking the door of the gallery from the inside when we arrived.

We made faces and yelled about how urgent our visit was. He shrugged and shook his head. He was closed. We yelled some more. He pointed to a door next to the big front window of the shop and jerked a thumb upward. An entrance to his apartment. The door was unlocked, and we got upstairs fast enough so that we had to wait a few seconds before his apartment door opened.

“What is it you want?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“Rollie’s run away. What do you know about it?”

He sagged, and closed his eyes.

“That’s terrible,” he whispered. Then he regained his composure, stood up straight, and met my eyes. “What makes you think I know anything about it?”

I wanted to say “Your reaction to the news,” but that wouldn’t have been the right approach. Instead, I asked if we could come in and sit down.

“I don’t see why you should. I don’t know anything about this. It’s awful.”

He did look pretty unhappy, all right. Rosie and I walked in and sat down without an invitation.

“You like the kid,” I said. “You sell his work and you’re happy when someone else appreciates it. You’re probably the only person in this town he can talk to about art. I don’t think his parents are too helpful. Maybe he even thinks of you as some kind of mentor.”

“I suppose he does.”

“Anything more than that?”

He looked puzzled for a moment, then glared at me. “I’m not a pedophile, Samson. And in any case, I’m completely heterosexual.” He glanced at Rosie. “No offense meant.”

“None taken.” She smiled.

“It’s just that you seem to have other unacknowledged relationships,” I said, “and I thought this might be one too.”

His eyes went dead. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Skip it for now. All I’m saying is that Rollie might have confided in you, something that would be helpful in finding him. I want you to think hard about anything he might have said lately, anything that might give us a clue. And while you’re thinking, could I use your bathroom?”

“Oh, sure,” he snarled. “And while you’re at it, why don’t you stop off in the kitchen and cook a seven-course meal?” He pointed to a doorway, and I got up and went through the kitchen, which had a stairway leading down to the shop, and into a bedroom with the bathroom next to it. I closed the bedroom door partway behind me, and went to the windows. Sure enough, his bedroom looked right out on the back area, and the back windows of the sperm bank. I went into the bathroom, closed the door, stood around for a second, and flushed the toilet. Then I rejoined Lou and Rosie.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I can’t help. He never said anything about going anywhere. He was happy enough at home, although you’re right about his folks. They’re not much help to him. And if you’re thinking he ran away because he did something wrong, don’t think it. He wasn’t that kind of boy. All he cares about now is his art. Well, mostly all. He cares about his brother. And he likes girls, I guess.”

“Any particular girls?”

“I think he has a girlfriend, I forget her name. But you’re right. He could have run off with a girl. Kids get funny ideas sometimes.”

I hadn’t suggested any such thing, but he seemed to like the idea. He liked it so much I dismissed it as a possibility for the time being, anyway.

“You must have talked about what he’d do when he grew up, where he’d go to school, where he’d go to work as an artist,” Rosie said.

“Well, San Francisco, of course. You can’t do better than that.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Rosie said. “A lot of artists live in Oakland and Berkeley because they can’t afford San Francisco. There’s a tremendous amount going on in the East Bay.”