The Gossiping Gourmet: (A Murder in Marin Mystery - Book 1) (Murder in Marin Mysteries) (2 page)

In fact, Warren’s gourmet
lunches were the highlight of the month for those who subsisted on steady diets
of Arby’s and Subway sandwiches. Officers who might have called in sick that
day with plans to go deep sea fishing or out to Peacock Gap to play eighteen
holes of golf, chose some other day of the month to be stricken with a bad case
of blue flu. Chief Petersen was particularly impressed when officers with the
day off showed up around eleven forty-five, just to “get something out of their
locker.”

As a connoisseur of
indiscreet conversation, Warren made sure that he was first at the table when
the staff’s food was plated, and the gossip was about to be dished. Sometimes,
it was nothing more than a small gem, like a 415 call—disturbing the
peace—caused by the mayor’s drunken teenage sons.

And, sometimes, it may well
be a precious stone, case in point, the assault and battery arrest of Grant
Randolph, the newly appointed chair of the Sausalito Fine Arts Commission. On
the morning after Randolph was booked and released from county jail, Warren had
busied himself preparing his latest delight, caramel chicken: eighteen pounds
of chicken legs and thighs marinated for a full day in a sauce of light brown
sugar, peeled ginger, rice vinegar, soy sauce, and vegetable oil—a blend of
amazing tastes that nearly brought Sausalito’s Finest to tears. 

The Saturday night of the
arrest, Patrol Officer Chris Harding was one of the first on the scene. Between
bites and praise, he slyly reported to Warren, “The EMT boys had to take his
wife up to the hospital. She was in pretty bad shape when Officer Hansen and I
arrived.”

It is uncertain what the
tongue of the baby-faced patrol officer was loosened by, but when he began to
talk about Grant Randolph, he never thought to stop.

Warren quickly emerged from a
fog of fear that this month’s feast would bring him no reward. All at once the
tips of his ears tingled as he stopped to contemplate the value of this news.
Randolph seemed to take delight in correcting Bradley at every one of their
encounters.

“Warren’s upper lip, which
balanced an unruly salt and pepper mustache, puckered forward with a guffaw
when he heard the surprising news. “No, I don’t believe that! Really? Grant
Randolph? I didn’t think he could hurt a fly.”

“You wouldn’t think that of
Mr. Randolph,” Chris Harding offered, “if you had seen Mrs. Randolph sprawled
across their living room floor.”

“Wow,” Warren murmured, as he
proffered yet another piece of that sweet and spicy chicken to his new friend.

Warren’s circle also
considered Randolph to be a bit too aggressive. Undoubtedly, he had the right
pedigree in the arts and his financial standing was not in question, but
accepting the chairmanship of the town’s art commission when you had taken up
residence less than a year earlier? Well! That was more than just a bit pushy.

If it had not been for the fact
that no one else was truly interested in investing the time and effort that was
needed to do the job, he probably would not have won the position in the first
place.

Mrs. Alma Samuels, who had
been married to the late great San Francisco attorney Roger Samuels, thought
Randolph was a bit presumptuous as well. But she tolerated the man because, as
she explained, “he has unquestioned credentials in the world of fine art.”
However, she shared with Warren and her close group of friends, known locally
as the Ladies of Liberty—Ethel Landau, Marilyn Williams, Beatrice Snyder, and
Robin Mitchell—that she too felt uncomfortable with the man she often referred
to as “an east coast know-it-all.” 

Armed with this blazingly hot
news, Warren knew it would not be long before word of Randolph’s arrest was
whispered loudly into Alma’s one good ear. The hearing in her right ear had
been gone almost as many years as Mr. Samuels.

Best of all, news of Grant’s
arrest would be a wonderful item for the lead for Warren’s weekly column,
“Heard About Town,” in
The
Sausalito Standard
.

But perhaps that would be a
waste of a delicious piece of gossip that should be savored rather than gulped.

Fortunately for Warren, the
paper’s publisher, Rob Timmons, was not on the best of terms with Chief
Petersen, having written one too many stories about unsolved home burglaries in
Sausalito.

“The guy’s a muckraker,”
Petersen repeatedly told Bradley. “If his family hadn’t lived in town for three
generations, and his father hadn’t been the fire chief, no one would pay any
attention to what he wrote in that rag of his.”

Rob had long known that Chief
Petersen preferred he write about anything but the Sausalito PD. Unfortunately,
their bloated budget and repeated bumbling of various cases made them an easy
target. Among the citizens of Sausalito, complaints about their police
department had long been a cause for debate. Nearly all of those who were home
by nine and in bed by ten thought their police did an outstanding job. But
those who lived a more active life, going into San Francisco for the symphony,
the theater, or social events, thought differently.

Traveling through Sausalito
after eleven o’clock at night could be risky business. Patrol officers, who are
expected to issue a certain number of traffic citations during an eight hour
shift, would often pull over vehicles for such offenses as a “rolling stop,” as
opposed to making a full stop at one of the city’s endless gauntlet of stop
signs, or traveling down a deserted street at thirty-seven miles-per-hour in a
twenty-five zone.

The careful policing of
traffic violations was particularly galling to someone, who minutes after
receiving a citation, arrived home to find that their house had been
burglarized.

That led to a steady flurry
of letters to the weekly
Standard
about “our well-paid police who are
busy working speed traps while thieves are cleaning out our homes of jewelry
and other valuables.”

Rob knew that his
often-critical coverage of the Sausalito PD was well-received by many of the town’s
well-connected, and even more importantly, a majority of his readers.

His less than cordial
relationship with Petersen’s police force was counterbalanced by his close
relationship with the county sheriff’s department, where his fellow high school
basketball teammate, Eddie Austin, served as the department’s chief detective
inspector.

Eddie shared Rob’s view that
the Sausalito PD was “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” He and Rob also
knew the situation was exacerbated by the two departments having jurisdictions
that bordered one another. The Waldo Grade on the Highway 101 corridor serves
as the dividing line between Sausalito to the east, and the Marin Headlands to
the west. Sparks flew when either department stepped outside its boundary. And,
as Eddie, an experienced investigator, knew better than most, when the
Sausalito PD did not have the manpower or expertise to meet the task, he was
called in to work closely with his comrades in blue. 

Finally, it was easy for Rob
to dislike Petersen, since his father, Ron Timmons, the retired Sausalito fire
chief, and the police chief annually battled over their fair share of the
city’s total budget for emergency services.

 “Relationships in small
towns,” Ron once explained to his son, “can get as tangled as hooks and fishing
lines. It’s often not intentional, but the same people keep chasing the same
catch. People have mostly good intentions, but their egos keep getting in the
way.”

It was always a bit of a
tightrope walk for Warren—the
what, where, when
, and
how
of
dishing the dirt. Most importantly, of course:
the who
! Many factors had
to be carefully considered. This meant keeping secrets from one, sharing them
with another, laying out a plan of attack, and all the time staying aware of the
fact that telling too little meant not gaining attention. Whereas, telling too
much meant losing control of whatever intriguing gossip was in your possession.

Warren’s life was the
antithesis of what Mark Twain famously suggested, “If you tell the truth, you
don’t have to remember anything.”

Later that afternoon, in
which his caramel chicken was praised and devoured, Warren was at his word
processor preparing his weekly column. His fingers were curled menacingly over
the keyboard. He ached to tap out the name
Grant Randolph,
but held
back, as he had on a variety of topics so many times in the past.

Instead, he filled the column
with several of his usual ramblings about the differences between cats and
dogs, the need to keep our “small city’s streets tidy, in spite of the daily
abuse they encountered as tourists trampled through carelessly discarding
unfinished ice cream cones, ketchup packets, and hot dog wrappers!”

He favored ending with a
lament about the woeful absence of manners in today’s youth. “We were raised to
respect our neighbors’ right to quiet and privacy. Has kindness and
consideration disappeared altogether?” Warren frequently asked his readers.

Each Wednesday, when the
paper containing his latest admonishments landed in every single mailbox in
town, Warren anticipated several calls from admirers praising his latest
effort. But while praise was the expressed purpose of their call, most of his
callers were leading up to the inevitable question: “Well Warren, what do you
hear in your travels through town?” And since most of these callers were age
seventy-five or older, Warren was in the habit of speaking up.

His usual approach was to
start with a question: For example, Warren said, “Did you know that Penelope
Jones is planning to remarry?”

His listener might respond,
“Why, I didn’t think her divorce was even finalized!”

“That was my first thought,”
Warren might add with an innocent giggle.

From that point, the
conversation would devolve to increasingly less kind speculation.

Warren: “Bill Butler
apparently is going to need a hip replacement. I was wondering, do you think
it’s his wife pushing him down the stairs, or that he just fell down drunk all
on his own?”

Listener: “Oh, Warren, you’re
so right about that! That man’s life would improve immeasurably if he could
keep away from the bottle.”

Warren’s phone circle were
all members of the Sausalito Women’s League; most for forty years or more. “The
League,” as it was most often referred to, started back in the early years of
the Twentieth Century, and was organized as a clandestine effort to support the
suffragette movement. Over the intervening years, the League grew into the
paramount social set for Sausalito’s established gentry. 

Alma Samuels’ service as
president emeritus was all the proof needed of the club’s high standing in
local society.

Thirty years earlier,
Samuels—who was the one person in Sausalito in whom social and political power
reached its pinnacle—formed her own tight-knit circle called the Ladies of
Liberty, of whom Marilyn Williams, age 72, was the youngest member.

Within this group, most of
Bradley’s columns were received with a blend of giggles and false
admonishments. “Oh, Warren, you are just awful!” they’d tease him after he put
into print a particularly juicy bit.

He’d chuckle with a
conspiratorial tone and say, “I suppose I just can’t help myself!”

Early each week, before his
column was due, Warren’s phone would ring. Invariably, Alma Samuels was the
caller. This was Warren’s opportunity to invite himself up to her expansive and
sadly empty mansion on one of the highest hills in Sausalito, where on most
days the views of Richardson Bay are a breathtaking collage of blue water and
white sails, against the backdrop of Tiburon’s rolling green hills and dazzling
estates.

“Alma,” Warren said in a
volume a bit higher and certainly more ominous than usual, “you will simply not
believe the trouble Grant Randolph has gotten himself into. It’s too delicious
to tell you over the phone I have to see your reaction with my own eyes.”

“Well, what are you waiting
for, Warren? Get yourself up here,” Alma croaked, and then added with a
flirtatious giggle, “Prying minds need to know!”

In the business of gossip,
Warren was the dominant, and his listeners were the submissives. He would share
a little, and his recipients would respond that this was bad, this was awful,
and then plead for a little more.

It was a naughty little game
that Warren and Alma had performed many times.

The Samuels Mansion sat on a
leveled lot up near the top of Monte Mar Drive. The street was less traveled
than many of the other roads in Sausalito, all of which eventually lead down to
the bay and the small city center.

Its lack of traffic was one
of the pluses that attracted Roger and Alma Samuels to purchase the home in the
late 1960s, well before Sausalito emerged from what many thought were the dark
days of the counterculture.

In that era, the Samuels
rarely visited the center of town where, on weekends, hippies often stripped
down to their underwear, or less, to frolic in the fountain that graced the
small, green, palm tree-lined city center park, Vina Del Mar. (Interestingly
enough, twenty-five years later, one of those nude bathers served a brief term
as the city’s mayor—a topic rarely mentioned in polite society.)

The old place was desperately
in need of repair. But both Alma and Roger—a securities attorney who had a cold
distant heart and a keen observant mind—could see its great potential. The
house sat on a wonderful piece of land, with broad vistas that stretched from
Mount Tamalpais to over half of San Francisco Bay. The iconic Golden Gate
Bridge was not visible, nor the San Francisco skyline, but the views it did
have were picture-postcard worthy, nonetheless. And so, the up-and-coming
attorney and his adoring wife took a chance on a community that had seen
grander days, and put their money into the aging mansion that had what Roger
Samuels called, “respectable old bones.”

The mansion turned out to be
a wise investment. What sold for $115,000 in 1968 was valued at (depending on
which one of Sausalito’s ever gracious and endlessly aggressive real estate
agents you asked) twenty, twenty-five, or even thirty million dollars.

Warren Bradley got a certain
thrill simply driving up to the grand old home, which in the past half century
had gone through numerous updates and improvements.

While it was indeed grand,
and while Roger Samuels had left a generous estate that assured Alma’s future,
regardless of the number of years she lived, the care she needed, or the maintenance
that the home might require, there was still a feeling of sadness to the place.

Alma’s one child, a daughter
who had followed her father’s footsteps into the world of business law, was
long gone from the house. For many years, Alma had been left on her own to
wander from one empty room to another. And although she tried to keep herself
busy, the burden of her eighty-plus years had clearly begun to weigh her down.

Only one fulltime staff
person remained in Alma’s employ: Louise, who over the past thirty years had
evolved from maid and cook, to caretaker and social secretary.

It was Louise’s tired smile
that greeted Warren when he rang the bell.

“Hello, Louise, how are you
today?”

“Fine, Mr. Bradley.” Louise
rolled her eyes at his gracious condescension. “Is Ms. Alma expecting you?”

“She is indeed.”

“I’ll tell her you’re here.
Why don’t you wait for her here in the sunroom?”

As Louise departed, Warren
paused to breathe in the air of great wealth. He preferred the smell of old
money and real power to the sweet scent of fresh cut roses.

Warren never had actual
wealth. Rather, he had what he thought of as “acquired comfort.” He lived in a
small, lovely cottage that he’d purchased for a very small sum from a lonely
widow who died twenty years earlier. Some said that he’d stolen the house out
from under her. Others decided not to consider whatever circumstances were
involved.

His clothes and material
goods were aged, but carefully maintained. Being a cautious consumer can make
up for many financial shortcomings. Bypassing Sausalito’s outrageously
expensive grocery store and various food boutiques in favor of salmon, steaks,
and chicken acquired at Costco provided the respectable basics for many
lavishly presented gourmet meals. The fifty-mile round trip drive to the
northern part of Marin County was a small sacrifice, given his tight budget.
Warren simply made certain to carry his acquisitions into his house in unmarked
boxes and discretely dispose of any Costco labels in a city trash bin, never in
his own refuse, left out weekly for pickup on the curb.

As all great gossips know,
prying eyes can be found anywhere, and garbage often provides a trove of hidden
truths. 

Alma stepped cautiously but
confidently into the sunroom, where Warren was enjoying the view. One of her
closest friends, Beatrice Snyder, had recently broken her hip after a fall.
Alma was determined to avoid a similar fate.

“Alma, my dear, how are you?”
Warren asked, as he kissed her hand and smiled warmly.

“As well as can be expected,
I suppose,” Alma said, as she gave an anemic smile in response to Warren’s
touch before making herself as comfortable as possible in an old
Chippendale-back chair that had been relegated to the sun room years ago.

Cold bitch, Warren thought,
while making certain a smile remained brightly upon his face.

Alma believed herself to be
gracious by the simple act of inviting Warren into her home. If not for her
love of gossip, he would have no place in her presence.

“Now, Warren,” she began in
the imperious tone Warren had heard so many times before, “what’s this business
about Grant Randolph?”

As he always did, Warren spun
a tale over a period of ten minutes that would have taken anyone else two
minutes to tell. But since his only currency was information, he was a master
at presenting a few spare facts as an epic tale.

“Well, well! I can tell you,
Warren, I’m not at all surprised. That man has a mean streak in him, and I just
knew it.”

“If I didn’t know that
before, my dear, I certainly know it now,” Warren said with a false look of
shared concern.

“I hope you think twice
before putting any of this in the paper. You can never be sure what kind of
people you’re dealing with. For years, we had a better group of people moving
into Sausalito. Now, I just don’t know. These young social climbers are not to
be trusted.”

“Alma, my dear, I couldn’t
put it better myself.”

Mrs. Samuels’ advice was
indeed music to Warren’s ears. He had no intention of sharing his best scoops
with random readers. Plus, he cowered from the thought of being under the same
dark cloud his publisher was frequently under. Reporting hard news made you a
target—not from the threat of physical harm, but of being socially ostracized.
A teller of truths that many don’t want to hear—and others are enraged simply
by seeing in print—carries a heavy burden.

So much good gossip not going
into his column was one of the unhappy realities of the news business: many of
your best ideas never got a chance to appear in print. Still, Warren had
already typed out the headline “Art Commission Chairman Randolph Paints an Ugly
Picture” and saved it to a file marked
Randolph,
in the hope that his
cleverly crafted declaration might appear next to his byline one day.

Alma gathered her strength
and said, “Well, what’s to be done about this? It would be an outrage for
Randolph to be allowed to stay on. A violent man in a distinguished community
position? That’s unacceptable!”

It quickly occurred to Warren
that perhaps he was already in a bit too deep. He was in the gossip business.
If it was Alma’s presumption, however, that he wished to play the white knight,
she was sorely mistaken.

Warren paused and uttered an
extended “Well,” which gave the impression that he was deep in thought. Then he
began, “I have eyes and ears everywhere. First, we’ll have to see if his poor
wife pushes forward in filing charges against him. You know, in many cases
these battered women don’t pursue their tormentors. They let them back into the
house and hope to continue their lives, as if nothing happened.”

Warren was truly flying by
the seat of his pants. To begin with, he was ignorant as to the extent of Mrs.
Randolph’s injuries. His only actual knowledge was that the police had been
called by one of the Randolph’s neighbors, who was reporting a
possible
domestic dispute.