Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (19 page)

He sniffed. An idea too ridiculous, obviously, to contemplate.

“I assume you deal with some San Francisco galleries,” I said. “Have you sent any of his work there?”

He shook his head. “I was going to. I’ve been talking to some people. But no one yet. And no one he knows, if you’re thinking that’s where he might have gone. Now I wish you’d go. I have an engagement.” We allowed him to herd us to the door.

“He’s hiding something,” Rosie said when we were down on the street again.

I agreed. Lou Overman was hiding, I thought, a whole lot of somethings. But I didn’t think he was clever enough to hide them much longer.

We were on our way to the Hackmans when Joanne rolled up behind us.

“Excuse me,” she said primly, and we moved out of her way. But before she could go very far, I called out to her.

“Joanne? Did you hear about Rollie Hackman?”

She stopped and spun around halfway to show us her sharp profile. “Yes.”

“Do you have any idea where he might have gone or why? Are you friends with him or Tommy?”

“We are not friends.” Her mouth twisted in an old-woman smile. “Tommy’s stupid and Rollie likes beautiful girls. You know, cheerleaders. That’s the dog I saw in your truck, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is he friendly?”

“Yes, she is. Any cheerleaders in particular?”

“I wouldn’t know. If you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way to my great aunt’s house for dinner.”

“Oh, is your mother busy tonight?”

She turned away and didn’t turn back. “Yes.”

She rolled away.

The Hackmans were a mess. Mrs. Hackman was crying and looked as though she didn’t plan to stop for days. Hackman was so drunk he couldn’t get off the couch. Tommy was holed up in his room and wouldn’t come out, but Mrs. Hackman let us go back to see him.

It was just the way Clement had said it was. He wouldn’t say anything except “Go away.”

Mrs. Hackman, on the other hand, was able and willing, between snuffles, to tell us Rollie’s girlfriend’s name and address. We got out of the Hackman house as quickly as we could after that. Rosie and I split up at the corner, she to follow up on the girlfriend, I to head back downtown and see if I could find out more about Overman’s “engagement” for the evening. We agreed to meet at Georgia’s Cafe in about an hour.

I had nearly reached the gallery when Fredda’s station wagon passed me on the street. A couple of seconds later Lou’s yellow car pulled out of the alley beside his shop, moving slowly. He turned left onto Main, with Fredda making a U-turn right behind him.

I turned around and ran for the motel and my Chevy. I was going to have to drive fast to catch up with them, and that was going to be hard with one arm. But there wasn’t much else I could do. I wanted to see if those two were going to the same place and what they did there.

I started the car and reached over the wheel to shift into first, pulled out of the lot, wrestled the stick into second and then third, drove three blocks, hit a stop sign, ripped off my sling, and used the bad arm to shift. It hurt like hell, but frustration hurts worse.

Catching sight of Fredda’s car about a mile outside of town, I followed it from an around-the-curve distance all the way into Rosewood.

She pulled up outside a tavern, parking right behind Lou’s car. When she went inside, I parked behind her. I pushed open the door. The place was dimly lit, but I could see the two of them sitting at a booth. I had no hope of not being seen eventually, but I did hope I could at least catch the mood. I did. Lou was talking animatedly, and he looked angry. Fredda was sullen. I couldn’t hear what her friend was saying, and tried slithering into a nearby booth. Fredda saw me. Her eyes widened, she muttered something to Lou, then smiled and waved.

I went over to say hello.

“What are you doing here?” Lou snapped.

“Just passing through. Saw your cars, decided to stop in and say hello.”

“Hello,” he said. “Now would you please leave? This is a private conversation.”

“Sure thing. See you two kids around.”

I sat in the car for half an hour, put the sling on again, and drove one-handed back to Wheeler, considering the possibilities. Old flames relighting the fire? Hardly. Ma and Pa discussing some problem with the offspring?

Rosie, when we met at Georgia’s, had nothing much to report. Rollie’s girlfriend said they’d broken up a week before because he wasn’t any fun anymore.

“I don’t think much of his taste in girls,” Rosie said. “She’s a real snip, and I don’t think she cares about him at all. The only thing she could tell me was that he had some friends down in Marin, she thinks in San Rafael.”

“That’s something, I guess.” I told Rosie what I had been doing.

“Why do you think they’d go out of town to meet?”

“Small town. Gossip. Maybe they don’t want Joanne to know they see each other. Maybe they have some other connection, like with Rollie.”

At that moment Clement walked into the cafe. I waved him over and he sat down.

I kept my voice low. “Clement, is Lou Overman Joanne’s father?”

“Lou?” He nodded. “But it’s not something he or Fredda talk about. No one ever said it was so, even though half the people in town figured it out years ago.”

The waitress came. We all ordered chili.

“Why are you asking that, Jake?”

I told him about their meeting in Rosewood. “Did you know they were seeing each other?”

“Seeing each other? How do you mean that?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“If you’re talking about romance, forget it. Those two don’t like each other. Not at all. I didn’t even know they were speaking. They usually aren’t.”

“So it’s strange that they were together?” Rosie asked.

“Oh, hell, Rosie, maybe they meet each other once a month and talk about old times. It’s not the kind of thing I usually look into.” He laughed and took a spoonful of chili. I followed his example. It was good.

“Speaking of romance,” I said, “what about Hilda and Frank? We saw him bringing her flowers. Now that was strange.”

He laughed again. “Oh, Frank has been courting Hilda for years. Wants to get married. Maybe she’ll weaken someday. How about you?” He smirked. “I hear you been talking to Melody Clift.”

I nodded.

“She tell you anything about her past love life?”

“Of course not.”

“Just thought you might be checking into it.”

“Why would I do that?” I couldn’t tell whether the old bastard was laughing at me or not.

“Well, I thought you might be interested to know she had a fling with Wolf a couple of years ago, before things got so serious with Gracie.”

Rosie was enjoying the conversation. “Are you saying she might have been out on the spit the night Gracie died? That she might have killed her in a jealous fit?”

Clement grinned. “Well, she called me early on— you were in the office, Jake— from San Francisco, she said. Lying, maybe, but Henry says he called her later, down there. Still…”

“She was on the beach the day the truck got sabotaged,” Rosie said.

“That’s right, she was on the beach,” I said. “Not up on the road with a wrench.”

Clement laughed and finished his chili. “Got to go. Checking on a couple of leads about Rollie.”

I told him about the friends in San Rafael, but he was ahead of us.

“Yeah. Got some calls in to the police down there, and San Francisco too. Lots of kids run off to San Francisco. Henry’s working on it, too, with his newspaper contacts.”

I snorted. “He likes to keep his hands on things, doesn’t he?”

“Henry’s okay. Maybe he cares a little too much, but that’s no crime. Guess you didn’t much like his piece about you, huh?”

I ignored that. “Before you go, tell me again what exactly it was you found on the beach the day after the break-in?”

“Lot of little plastic vials. Stuck in the sand, caught in the rocks. Had to figure most of them got washed out to sea. We found only a hundred or so. Nora says they lost a lot more than that.”

“And that’s all you found?”

“You mean footprints, something like that? No, except for Rollie’s. Sand was washed smooth of anything that might have been there earlier. Except there was one thing. Big square depression on the dry sand. Could have been made by a box. Could have been what they carried the stuff out there in. But like I said, it was up on the dry sand. Didn’t have to even be from that day.”

“And Rollie,” Rosie said. “He was there.”

“That’s right. Said he’d been there a little while, hadn’t seen anything. See you later.” He left.

“Maybe you ought to go talk to Melody again, Jake,” Rosie said. “Ask her if she’s sure she didn’t kill Gracie because Gracie stole her man.”

“Enough,” I snarled. “Let’s follow through on the lovely couple.”

“Lou and Fredda?”

“Right. I’ll watch his place if you’ll watch hers.”

“What is it you expect to see?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know. But I would like to know how tight they are, what their relationship is, whether they’re sleeping together.”

“And if they come back to the same house tonight, one of us will be able to hear what they’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

The antique store next to Lou’s provided good, safe cover. It was a one-story place with no living quarters, all shut up and dark for the night. I brought a blanket from the motel and made a nest for myself behind a dumpster with a good view of Lou’s back door. I was wearing two sweaters and a warm jacket. I had no idea how long I’d be stuck there.

As it turned out, I had no more than an hour of discomfort before he drove up the alley, parked behind his shop, and let himself in the back door. Alone. I waited another twenty minutes, just to make sure Fredda wasn’t following him, before I set out for Fredda’s house. Rosie was waiting for me. She said Fredda had showed up a while ago, with Joanne, and the mother and daughter had gone into the house together. Fredda was asking Joanne, Rosie said, what she had had for dinner at Aunt Hilda’s.

When I woke up the next morning, my arm hurt less and my head felt clearer than it had in days. I left the tape around my shoulder but tossed the gauze sling in the wastebasket.

Waiting for Rosie to get up next door, I reflected that the main problem with this case was the way it attacked from all sides. A burglary, complete with its own handy note of explanation, an explanation that laid what I was sure was a false trail. A murder that looked like an accident, or, possibly, an accident so mired in interconnections that it looked like a murder. An attempted murder, or at least an attempt to scare us off by sabotaging the truck. And now a runaway kid, suspected from the beginning of being the burglar of the first instance.

Put it all together and what happens? What I came up with in that early morning clarity was an amoeba, constantly changing shape, shooting out its little pseudopodia and drawing them in again, but nevertheless an amoeba. One-celled. One case, after all.

Rosie agreed with me, after an argument. Real life, she insisted, wasn’t neat. You could very well have a burglary here, an accident there, a crazed attack on a truck still farther over there, and a runaway boy. Maybe, she said, two of them were connected, maybe three, maybe all four. How could you know?

“Wishing,” I said, “will make it so.”

She chewed on that, along with her paprika-painted country fries.

“What you’re saying, then, is that to create order out of chaos we need to pretend there is such a thing as order.”

“In all the arts and sciences,” I replied, “including the art of detection.”

“And do you have a theory that holds this mess together? A framework for your house of cards?”

“There’s the unfortunate part,” I said. “Several different frameworks can be built.”

“Then let’s build them. Let’s spend the morning seeing if we can’t tie up a few loose ends, and then let’s stop racing around for a few hours, go sit on the beach, and build them. Maybe when we’ve put up three or four, one or two will begin to look like they’ll stand.”

Rosie was looking over my shoulder. “Look who’s coming our way.”

I turned. It was Henry Linton.

“How are you two doing this morning?” he asked. “How’s the arm?”

“Better, thanks,” I said politely.

“Good, good…”

“Why’d you write that crap in the paper?” I said in the same polite tone of voice.

“Because that’s how I feel. Nothing personal. But look what’s happened now— young Rollie’s disappeared.”

“We didn’t do it,” Rosie said.

“Not saying you did. Like I said, nothing personal. But we don’t need people from out of town getting in the way when there’s trouble.”

“I hear you’re going to use some of your contacts to help find Rollie. Contacts out of town,” I said.

He smiled. “Can’t be helped, now.”

“Why don’t you want us to find out what’s going on?”

He sighed. “I never said that. We need to find out. I just hope you give Clement the credit he deserves when this is all over.”

So that was it. He didn’t want anyone showing up his sheriff. That really pissed me off. “You know something, Henry? You’re a patronizing son of a bitch. Clement’s a good lawman. He doesn’t need any credit from us. He’s doing a great job with no help.”

Henry’s eyebrows went up. “Except from you.”

“We’re doing what we can, yeah. But you don’t have to take care of Clement. He can take care of himself. So can all the other people you seem to think are your children.”

“Well. I guess you told me.” He turned and walked out of the restaurant.

We set to work. I called Melody and said I wanted to talk to her, and she invited me for dinner. We checked in with Clement, who had nothing new from San Francisco or San Rafael. He told us he and Perry had finally managed to track down all the summer residents of the spit and the permanent residents who had not been around the week before, and they’d all checked out.

“What about the ones who were around?” Rosie asked. “Are you sure Henry’s covered?” He nodded. “What about Frank Wooster?”

“He says he stayed late at the garage Friday, but all we’ve got is his word. Which reminds me— about Saturday? Henry’s got both Frank and Wolf covered for the afternoon. He took his car in to Frank’s right after lunch— right after he says he saw you at the restaurant. Then he spent the next three hours working on inventory with Wolf, except for the two or three times he walked over to the garage to check on how Frank was doing. Not much doubt that both Wolf and Frank were working when somebody did in your truck.”