Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) (2 page)

“No. A creative observation. And the thieves just came in and opened this up…” I felt around the edges. “How does it open?”

She lifted the lid. A cloud of very cold vapor seeped out. Through the mist I could just make out a few long rods with numbered vials, each about the size of my little finger, attached to them. The rods were set in a rack that looked like it would hold a hundred times as many. She closed the lid again before I could get a better look.

“Those vials. Is the sperm in those?” She nodded.

“Frozen?”

She nodded again. “Hard as glass. In liquid nitrogen at minus one hundred ninety-six degrees centigrade. It’s called cryopreservation.”

“Like that cryo-something where they freeze people? So they can thaw them out when there’s a cure for whatever killed them?”

“Yes. Suspended animation.”

“Minus one ninety-six. Centigrade. I guess that’s pretty cold. These tanks must be unique.”

“Not really. They’re just like the ones the cattle industry uses to store bull sperm.”

And that, I thought, was also pretty cold. “How many samples can you store in one of these things?”

“A lot.”

“And the few I saw in there?”

“Donated since the break-in.” I took out my notebook and jotted down some of the information she’d given me. Then, since there wasn’t anything else to see in the dim, chilly little room, we went back out.

“What’s in these files?”

The woman who had been typing labels was painstakingly sticking them onto file folders.

“Donor information. Medical background, legal agreement. Each donor has a number for his file and his sample. Copies of donor profiles. That’s how the recipients make their selections, by numbered donor profiles. No names. Just numbers. Totally anonymous.”

“And the numbers on the cans?”

“They refer to the classifications— private rental storage, for example, or available to the public.”

I nosed around the file room window for a while. One small scratch on the sill. Then I suggested we go back up to her office, sit down, and talk some more. She sighed. Clearly, I was taking too much of her time.

“Tell me this,” I said as we walked up the steps. “Why would a guy do that? Donate?”

“Lots of reasons. Some men are donors for specific women. Some do it for the money. Twenty-five dollars. Some do it because they’re starting cancer therapy or getting vasectomies or going to work at jobs where they may be exposed to chemical or radioactive mutagens.”

We were settled in her office again. “Why is it frozen?”

She looked at me like I was an idiot. “So it will live long enough to be used.”

I was not intimidated. “Could you elaborate?” I snapped.

She looked at me, startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. Of course. I’m afraid I’m distracted. There’s so much work to do to make up for the damage. That break-in cost us a great deal of money.”

I nodded kindly, and waited for her to go on.

“It’s frozen for two reasons, really. Logistics, first of all. It can’t live more than a day unfrozen. We store it for doctors and researchers as well as for private parties. Sometimes we ship it out of town, frozen. We rent the storage space to the doctors, and the researchers, and the men I mentioned before, who need to store their sperm for one reason or another. And to women with private donors. And of course we need to store a great deal of it, from a variety of donors, for the women who come here, the ones who want to have a child by an anonymous donor with no paternal rights.” The words “over-the-counter sales” occurred to me. “Sometimes, two or three years down the line, a woman who’s already had one child through us wants to have another one by the same donor.” She must have noticed that I’d raised my eyebrows, because she added, “We can store, long-term, for up to seven years.”

“Who are most of these women? I mean—”

“Most of them are women with infertile partners.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Well, if you mean insemination, that’s been going on for a couple of centuries. But modern cryopreservation is relatively new— since the early sixties.”

I made a few more general-interest notes and got back to more immediate matters. “And someone broke in and stole thousands and thousands of samples, took them out of the freezers— the tanks— and dumped them. Why?”

“We don’t know. The police chief has the note they left, for all the good that will do, but I remember it word for word.”

I nodded, holding my pen above a clean notebook page.

“It said, ‘Godless destroyers of the family, be warned. We are setting free this seed in the ocean. Leave our town or suffer the consequences of your sins.’ They spelled
consequences
wrong, with a C instead of a QU.”

“Was it typewritten?”

“No. Messy block letters. Like someone had printed it with the hand they didn’t usually use for writing.”

I thought about that. It wasn’t particularly smart to use a typewriter, because anyone who’d ever seen a movie knew that typewriter type was identifiable. But at the same time, anyone who’d ever seen a movie knew that the way to do a really bad note was with cut and paste letters. Maybe this guy, or group, was just too lazy to do it right.

I got up and walked to the window, looking once more at the back of the building across the way. “What’s that shop over there?”

“Louis’s Art Gallery and Bookstore.”

“I have to say it seems a little odd that you’d have a sperm bank way out here instead of in San Francisco or the East Bay— somewhere closer to the center of things.”

“We’re considering opening another branch closer in. But actually, this is a very good location. We got a wonderful deal on the building. Safe neighborhood.” She laughed, for the first time since I’d met her. It was a nice, rueful laugh. “We’re reasonably central. Close enough to San Francisco, convenient to a number of large towns. Besides, I’ve tried living in the city. I want to live here. I was born here.” She had stopped smiling. “And I don’t plan to move.”

Two phone calls and an “urgent” employee visit in the next fifteen minutes convinced me that Nora’s absence on the job was beginning to be felt, so I didn’t keep her more than half a dozen questions longer. I suggested we meet again that night, after I’d gotten to know the town better. She suggested, to my amazement, dinner at her place. I went back out onto the street with her address and directions on how to find it.

Nora had told me she didn’t know of anyone who had openly declared themselves to be enemies of the bank, and had shrugged helplessly when I’d asked her if she’d gotten any bad feelings from anyone. She said she didn’t have a lot of time to notice feelings, at least not at work.

I was beginning to understand the size of the crime. A great deal of money lost, yes. But what I couldn’t get out of my head was the guys with cancer, and the ones with the poisonous jobs. A last chance at fatherhood, gone. I wondered how many attorneys had already started working on suits.

My next stops were the police station and the shop that had the most direct access to the bank’s back windows. The shop first, because it was closer, and then the police.

Usually, when I’m on a case, I try to avoid all contact with the law, but I figured that wouldn’t work very well in a town with a population of somewhere around two thousand. Not much chance I wouldn’t be noticed, so I might as well be noticed right away.

I had my usual cover. A couple of years before, my old friend and poker buddy Artie Perrine, an editor at
Probe
magazine in San Francisco, had agreed to give me a letter of ID as a “freelance writer” on assignment. In exchange, I agreed to give him anything in the way of story material I might come up with while on a case. Chloe, who had gotten me involved in this one, was also an editor at
Probe.
Anyone who didn’t believe the worn, yellowing, undated letter could just call the magazine for verification.

I have considered getting a P.I. license. It’s hard to explain why I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. I guess I just don’t like government very much and don’t want it looking over my shoulder. Maybe it’s genetic memory— a long history of fending off Slavic despots, Turkish soldiers, and Tatar hordes. I’d rather keep a low profile, thanks just the same.

The wind was whipping up a good one, full of horizontal rain, and this time I was walking into it. The art-shop sign was swinging hysterically, like a drenched man trying to flag a taxi. I allowed myself to be blown in the door.

A thin man with half a head of straight dark hair, sitting on a stool behind the register, looked up at me with a morose smile. The radio on the shelf behind him was delivering a weather report. At his feet was a half-unpacked cardboard carton of books, the return address a book distributor in San Francisco.

“Hi,” he said. “I was just thinking about boarding up and going home. Can I help you?”

“Mind if I look around?”

He raised his shoulders and his eyebrows in resignation, still friendly, but clearly not expecting much from my presence except delay. I looked around.

The walls were covered with books, from worn linoleum floor to dingy ceiling, with two room-dividing partitions built out at right angles into the large room to hold paintings and drawings. There was one particularly nice series of charcoal drawings. Beach scenes, mostly, a few sketches of the town, and a portrait of the man who had been behind the counter and was now carrying sheets of plywood out of a back room. Except for a couple of watercolors that looked like they might have come from the same artist, the drawings were the only pieces in the gallery that looked anything like professional. There were some gummy-looking oils— a rowboat on the beach, a dune with wildflowers— that had to be the offspring of someone’s Sunday hobby.

The books were mostly paperbacks, several sections of used books priced to sell, with one small table of California-published books on the ocean and the environs of Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties. I figured those must be for the tourists.

The rain was battering the large front window and, as I passed near, it shuddered in the wind. Reluctantly, the dark-haired man leaned a sheet of plywood against the wall and followed me back to the register.

“I don’t want to keep you long,” I said, paying for a used Parker mystery. “But I wonder if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

“Short ones?” He was trying to stay pleasant. After all, I’d just spent fifty cents.

“Yeah. My name is Samson. Jake Samson. Are you Louis?”

“Yes. Lou Overman. This is my place.”

“Do you live upstairs?”

“Why do you want to know?” His patience, like his hair, was wearing thin. I gave him the patter about being on assignment for
Probe
magazine, checking out the story on the burglary over at the sperm bank.

He nodded thoughtfully, gazing at me with interest, and admitted that he lived upstairs, although he failed to see what that had to do with the burglary. I didn’t answer the implied question, just waited for him to get uncomfortable and say something else. He got uncomfortable fast.

“I guess it is a pretty strange story. Especially the part about dumping it in the ocean. Religious fanatics.” He smiled wryly and looked sophisticated. I didn’t see why the dumping was any stranger than the rest of the crime, but I smiled a world-weary smile to go with his sophisticated one.

I waved at the ceiling. “Your place must look out on the back of the bank, right? Where they broke in?”

The window shuddered again, and he glanced at his waiting plywood. “You could say it does.”

“Let’s. Did you see or hear anything that night?”

He made an effort to relax, leaning against his counter, looking sad. “No. I sleep soundly, I’m happy to say.”

“No sound of glass breaking, no voices, no noise at all?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything or see anything. Sorry.” He glanced at the front window as it shuddered again.

I leaned against the counter and lowered my voice. “I was wondering, a businessman like yourself, you must know a lot of what goes on here in town. Maybe you’ve got some idea of who might have wanted to do a thing like this. Who in particular would disapprove of the kind of business they’re running over there.”

He responded well to his new status as an expert witness. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know who it could be. Most of the people here are live-and-let-live types, pretty much. Oh, we have a few people who take their religion too seriously, and a few rednecks, like everywhere else, but” —he shook his head— “I can’t imagine who would actually do something like that.” He gave me a sharp look from suddenly clear dark eyes. “But I can keep my eyes and ears open if you want me to— and maybe if you let me know some of the things you find out, I can help you put two and two together.”

I got a powerful feeling that his next words were going to have something to do with either his private detecting fee or a mention of his shop in my article, so I thanked him, said I hoped he would keep his ear to the ground, said that his big plate glass window was really taking a beating and it looked like maybe he’d better cover it real quick, and said I would be talking to him again. Then I flipped the slicker hood back over my head, smiled at him in a way that I hoped promised rewards of some kind to come, and struggled out onto the sidewalk again. What there had been of late-afternoon sunlight was fading.

The gutter would have been a good spot for Whitewater rafting, and it was only a matter of time, I thought, before the sidewalks would be washed by waves from the street traffic. If there was any. I was getting worried about the roads. Rosie Vicente, my partner, friend, sometime carpenter, and tenant at my two-cottage Oakland place, was due to arrive that evening. I’d already reserved a room for her at the Oceanview, where they said they didn’t mind renting to a woman with a polite, middle-aged standard poodle.

Rosie’s dog, Alice B. Toklas, is a sophisticated traveler who spends most of her time sleeping in the car. I have never tried traveling with my cats, Tigris and Euphrates, and never will. They were now in the care of a sitter.