The figures from that national poll— Gallup, it was— had stuck with me for strong personal reasons. That low point for retribution, 1966? That was the year I became a cop, back in Chicago. The summer of love hadn’t happened yet, and the summer of hate was still two years off. I was a pretty idealistic kid. I wanted to be a cop to protect good people. Chicago was a hard town, people barricaded inside their neighborhoods, spitting over the line into the alien territory next door. But I believed everything was going to get better. We were beginning to understand people, see, beginning to understand why criminals were criminals. If we understood, we could maybe make it all better. And I was going to help. Sixty-six was okay.
Sixty-seven was not bad, although, as a cop, I wished the hippies would wave their dope around a little less. Then came 1968, summer, the Democratic Convention. Chicago in the summer is bad enough without the smell of tear gas. Somehow, in the middle of the mess, I stopped a kid who was coming at me, a long-haired kid waving a sign that said “Make Love Not War.” I stopped him with my truncheon, and I saw the blood pour down his face, and I saw his friend carry him off. That was pretty much it for me. That whole, bloody, stinking time, with kids rioting and the “leaders” who didn’t give a shit how many of them got hurt. The leaders who knew the Chicago cops were rotten and would be encouraged to be rotten and bust heads and lob tear gas canisters into the yards of citizens, and generally prove they were the pigs these people said they were. That whole bloody stinking time. I was a scared kid and I just knew that the kid I’d hit had been an innocent, an idealist, a peace-lover pushed to the edge of stupidity. I didn’t report for roll call the next morning. I never went back to the force. I lit out for California, the northern part, and wandered around doing odd jobs, soaking up the culture, helping out a few friends who got in trouble, living on a commune, living with a woman, getting married and getting divorced and moving, eventually, to the metropolitan East Bay, to Berkeley and then across the border to Oakland. I was a Chicago boy, a city kid, returned to his roots. And I could understand how other city kids might want to believe God was going to wash away all the bad guys, the ones who made innocent people bleed.
So even though Arnold was clearly nuts, I had decided to take his money.
Flight 501 from Chicago was coming in for a landing.
I got up and stood near the ramp entrance as the passengers began emerging, swarming with relief from their portable environment to solid, stationary airport. Although I was looking hard, I didn’t see my parents until they were nearly on me. They’re both short, and a little plump. It was my father’s shirt I saw first, a red and blue Hawaiian number. This was not a concession to current fashion, but a decades-old concession to alien places. He’d been to visit me only a couple of times since I’d moved west; his ideas of California remained unshakably L.A., and his idea of L.A. came, I think, from Alan Ladd movies.
Eva was wearing a turquoise polyester pants suit. She grabbed me before my father had a chance to, and damned near squeezed the life out of me, planting a lipsticked kiss on my lips. Then it was his turn. He hugged me close for a few seconds, then, pushing me away with his hands on my biceps, looked me up and down.
“So, bum? How are you?”
“Isaac!” Eva laughed. “Is that something to call your only son? Such a doll, too.”
“A doll in blue jeans.” He shook his head, but he was smiling.
Eva patted my stomach. “A little more weight, maybe, since I saw you last?”
I shrugged. “I’m on a diet,” I lied.
It took a while to get their luggage, not because the service was slow, but because there was so much of it. Two big ones, three medium, and two canvas bags. I took the two big ones and a bag. My father picked up the three medium ones, grunted, and handed one to Eva.
When we got to the Chevy he looked at it the way he’d looked at me. I braced myself, but he surprised me.
“Hah! Now, that’s what a car should look like. Like an automobile.”
That was great, but, it turned out, he also believed a house should look like a house and a yard should look like a yard.
“What is this?” he wanted to know, as we trudged up the gravel driveway. “A farm?”
“That’s the vegetable garden, Pa.”
“In the front yard?”
“In this neighborhood,” I told him, “you show off your vegetables.”
We passed Rosie’s cottage.
“This is where the Italian lives?” They knew Rosie’s name and they knew she was my friend. Like most of the immigrant generation, they approved of Italians, even if they were Catholic.
I nodded. “That’s the cottage.”
“Could use a little paint,” Eva said. The cedar shingles were only five years old. I wondered what they’d say about the house. I’d started painting the exterior stucco three years before, and, tiny as the place is, I’d never quite managed to find the time to finish. It’s half pale pink and half white. The trim is half scabrous white and half dark green. They didn’t say anything, which is, for them, the ultimate comment.
We dumped the bags in the middle of the living room.
“This,” I pointed to the steel trap, “is a sofa bed, where I will sleep. You get the bedroom.”
“We wouldn’t think of it,” Eva said quickly, before my father got his mouth open. “We wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“Eva,” I kissed her on the cheek. “You couldn’t possibly do that.”
– 3 –
They got up at seven the next morning, tiptoeing heavily around the house until I crawled out of the trap.
“I’ll bet you always get up this early, right?” I asked, untwisting my pajama bottoms— I don’t normally wear anything to bed— and accepting a cup of coffee.
“Sure,” my father replied. “If you had a job you’d get up early, too.”
“I have a job,” I grumped. “I just hadn’t planned on starting it before nine or so.”
Eva made oatmeal. I had a piece of toast, showered, dressed, wandered around the yard for a while, and got underway by nine-thirty.
Following the directions Arnold had given me, I took Claremont Avenue into Berkeley and turned up Ashby, passing the Claremont Hotel. Actually, they call it a resort hotel, but I can never quite get myself to accept the idea of a resort in Berkeley. The massive turn-of-the-century structure occupies acres of insanely expensive real estate. It straddles the Berkeley/Oakland line, but for some reason the management says it’s in Oakland. Must have something to do with taxes. Nothing else that is able to say it’s in Berkeley ever says it’s in Oakland.
I took the second left after the hotel and started the uphill climb through some other very expensive real estate. When I found the house, my first thought was that if all this belonged to me I’d drown before I’d trade it in on a crowded ark.
It had a circular driveway, something you don’t see very often outside of old movies. The middle of the bagel was a mass of flowers and shrubs. The grounds looked big enough and complicated enough to require a full-time gardener. The house itself was one of those Georgian neoclassic numbers with the Greek columns across the front.
One car was parked in the driveway. It was a big, new, expensive American car. I don’t know what kind. All big, new, expensive cars look alike to me. I pulled up behind it. The steps leading up to the portico were wide, and so was the portico. The front door had a fanlight. The bell was a three-note chime.
A thirtyish maid with a sullen freckled face and bright orange hair answered the door. At least I guessed she was a maid. She was wearing a droopy shirtwaist dress and white tennis shoes instead of a cute little uniform, but she was carrying an open bottle of furniture polish. She was a flaw in the fantasyland of this house, and I was still resenting that when she told me Mrs. Gerhart would see me in the den. Georgian houses don’t have dens.
Still clutching her bottle, she led me across a large entry hall with— sure enough— a wide stairway curving down from a
gallery, and ushered me through a large door. She didn’t announce me, she just turned and padded away.
The den was a dim hideaway that had been designed as a library. An easy deduction: the walls were lined with shelves. The woman who rose from the brown leather couch to greet me was in her late forties. She was wearing a full skirt that came halfway down her calves, high-heeled pumps, and a short-sleeved blouse with a Peter Pan collar and a ruffle down the front. Her blond hair was styled in a slightly updated bastard version of the Italian Boy cut of the fifties. She had an upturned nose, red lipstick, and a bright smile.
“Mr. Samson,” she said pertly, “I’m so happy to meet you. Arnold has told me so much about you.” Arnold didn’t know so much about me, and it was probably just as well, but I nodded agreeably and took a seat in the matching leather chair she offered me. “Adele is bringing sherry. I hope you like sherry?”
I assumed Adele was the maid who had let me in. I hoped she would put down the furniture polish before she poured the drinks. I said that sherry would be fine.
“You’ll have to ask me questions— may I call you Jake?— because I really don’t know what you need to know. Call me June.”
“Well, June, for a start, why don’t you just tell me a little bit about your husband. Your history together, his interests, his friends, that kind of thing.”
“Should I start way back at the beginning?”
“Sure.” I wanted to get a picture of the man who had married this fifties princess and become first a rich man and then a cult leader. And I wanted to get a feel for his wife.
“Okay. Let’s see, we met in 1957, at college. He was in graduate school. I was a junior, in education. We met at a sorority party. He was going to be a chemist. I thought that was wonderful.” Yeah, I thought. In 1957 everyone wanted to be a chemist or an engineer and have a great job forever. My mother, may she rest in peace, had wanted me to be a nuclear physicist when I grew up.
She continued. “I admired him so much. All my friends envied me.” She sighed.
“By the way,” I interjected, “is his real name Noah?”
“Oh, good heavens no. His real name is Thomas. Anyway, we were married just two weeks after he got his master’s. I decided I really didn’t need a degree, myself. Of course, he got a job immediately. We bought our first little house. That was back in Ohio. Cleveland. We settled down to raise a family.” She sighed again. “But we didn’t have one.” So much for her generation’s American Dream. “They thought it was because he’d had mumps. Well, things just sort of went along like that. We lived in Cleveland, then Texas. He had wonderful jobs and life was very good. We saved lots of money. But in 1968 or thereabouts, Thomas began to be unhappy. He began to have nightmares. He began to talk about… well, he said he was contributing to the poisoning of the planet. One day he just sat me down and he said, June, I want to move to California and open a health food business. Well, you can just about imagine… But he said he’d worked all those years and made all that money, and he thought there was even more he could make in health food. He said health food and vitamins and things were going to get very big. And you know, Jake, he’d always been right. After all, I had to give him credit for that. He always knew about trends; that’s why he became a chemist in the first place. So I said, okay, Thomas, I guess you know what you’re talking about.”
We were interrupted by the arrival of Adele with the sherry. Two glasses and a bottle on a tray, no furniture polish.
“Thank you, Adele,” she said. Adele left without answering. “So to make a long story short, we moved here. First thing, he opened a store, to get the feel of the business. Then, sure enough, he began to expand. Before I knew it, he was wholesaling and then he had farms and brand names and everything. That was all in five or six years, I forget which.”
This guy, I thought, was a real whiz. I began to wonder how he figured to make money out of arks.
“And then what happened?” I prompted.
“We got rich.” She smiled and sipped her sherry. “But that wasn’t enough for Thomas. He is a seeker. He began to study religion. Oh, not just Christianity, you know, but all kinds of things. And then, just a couple of years ago, he started having dreams again. Nightmares. And then he started getting messages about a flood. That was when he took the name Noah and started organizing these arks. Well, I hate to admit it, Jake, but I thought he was crazy. I begged him to go see a therapist. He wouldn’t and he wouldn’t and then he finally did, somebody here in Berkeley, and he came home and said the therapist told him he was okay and if he wanted to organize arks he certainly had the money and the time and why shouldn’t he? I don’t know if the therapist actually said that, but what could I do? He seemed all right otherwise. I certainly didn’t believe there was going to be a flood, but he was happy, and I thought, what if it’s true? I’d certainly want to be on the ark.”
“What happened to the health food business? Did he sell it?”
“Oh, no. Yellow Brick Farms is still going strong. Although it hasn’t been easy with Thomas concentrating on the arks.”
“You’ve been running the business, then?”
“Oh, no. There’s his partner Joe, Joe Durell. He’s running things. I admire him tremendously, but I’m sure it’s difficult, not having Thomas. He’s understaffed right now, too, besides that. And of course he’s been helping with the arks all along… Jake, Thomas would never leave me. He’s been kidnapped, or maybe he’s been murdered.” Her eyes filled with moisture. Her hand shook and she set down her sherry glass and poured it half full again. I accepted another one. She looked up at me and the tears spilled over. “I hope you can help us.”
“I hope I can, too. So, this Durell’s running Noah’s business affairs, and he’s involved in the arks?” She nodded. “And Arnold’s running Noah’s ark affairs? Is he also involved in the business?”
“No.” She placed her sherry glass on a side table without taking a sip.
“Why keep the business going, I mean, if you believe there’s going to be a flood?”
“Oh, Jake, you can’t just put people out of work. Joe was very concerned about that. And then it brings in money, of course. Along with the casino.”
“The casino?”
“We have a casino up at Tahoe. Well, a part interest in one.”
Of course, I thought. I asked her if there were any other major business interests I should know about, and she said there weren’t. That was a relief.
There were a lot of things I needed to know about Noah neé Thomas Gerhart, but the most important item, at the moment, was the one that came last in the scheme of things: the dear June letter he’d left his wife before he’d disappeared. I asked to see it. She nodded, businesslike, and handed me a file folder that had been lying on one of the bookshelves.
I opened it. It contained an original and two photocopies of the letter. I took out the original. It was six days old, dated September 14.
My Dear June:
I have gone to do something I have to do. I can’t tell you how long it will take or even if I will be back at all. I can’t tell you what I’m doing or why because it’s better for you not to know, and the last thing I want is to see you get hurt. But I have to do this. Tell Arnold for me, please, and tell him that Marjorie is with me.
Love, Noah
The note was handwritten.
“What do you think about this?” I asked carefully.
“I think it was written under duress by someone who wanted the money.”
“You don’t think he’s just run away with this Marjorie— what’s her last name?— to have an affair or something?”
“Of course not. Her name is Burns.”
“You know her, then?”
“We’ve met. She’s a loyal worker. That’s really all I know about her, except that she’s black.”
“Can you describe her?”
“Not really.”
“I’d like to have this,” I said, waving the note.
&nbs
p; “You may have one of the copies,” she said softly. I went along with her. She wanted the original, she could have it. I stuck the original back in the folder and kept one of the copies.
She’d found the note, she said, propped up on her dining room table that afternoon when she’d come home from shopping. She’d taken it to Arnold. The two of them had agonized for a couple of days, finally deciding to take the note to the police. The original. The police hadn’t wanted it. They’d asked two questions: “Is this his handwriting?” and “Does the missing money belong to him?” Yes it was and yes it did, so that was that.
Arnold had known how much money was involved, because it was the amount he and Noah had decided was necessary to cover the remaining construction on the arks, and for supplies, seeds, tools, and equipment for the new world they were planning on building. As before, Noah would hand over the money to Arnold, who would deposit it in the ark account and oversee its disbursement. Mrs. Noah also knew how much was to be handed over, and knew that the check her husband had written— with no payee listed in the check register— had nearly depleted the account from which ark money was usually taken. The check had been dated, according to the register, September 14, the day he had disappeared.
“Do you normally keep that kind of money in a checking account?” The question was half investigation, half awe.
“Certainly not,” she said. “It had to be put there on purpose.”
Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) Page 2