Mr. Durell really did need only a few minutes. He buzzed and Doreen— had she called herself something like Willow-song Peacelove once upon a time?— gestured me through a door that was painted yellow. “Second on the left,” she told me.
I wondered why I was so conscious of the time warp she represented. I loved the sixties and early seventies. I think I feel a little angry because that time passed so quickly. Or because it didn’t deliver what it promised. Or because it sailed away on a drug dream and left a lot of people stranded in a time so unromantic and unformed that no one could ever hope to grasp its principles, if it had any.
Durell’s office was big and comfortable, and didn’t look anything like the reception area. It was carpeted in something industrial and had white-painted walls hung with a few nondescript framed prints. Landscapes, flowers in vases, that kind of thing. The desk was an elderly wooden one, the chair a new executive swivel, and there were two wooden side chairs, a tweed-covered couch, and a coffee table.
Durell stood up and smiled, extending his hand over the desk, gesturing generously at one of the wooden chairs, which wasn’t any more comfortable than it looked. I noticed the framed diploma. He had a doctorate in chemistry. Another refugee from the toxic wasteland?
Durell didn’t look like he’d ever felt stranded. He looked very much at ease in the eighties. He was in his mid to late forties, hair cut short but not greased. He was wearing a white shirt with no tie, and suit pants. On a coatrack near the door I saw the suit jacket and tie. He looked tired, and glad to sit down again after we shook hands.
“Nice-looking operation,” I said. Businesspeople tend to like that kind of nonstatement.
He nodded. “Business is good. And getting better.”
I cocked my head. “Oh?”
“We’re one of the older companies in the business now, you know. Got a good toehold on the supermarket chains.”
“No wonder you’re busy, then. Lots of work, no partner.”
Durell shrugged. “Would you like some tea or something, Mr. Samson?”
“Jake.”
“Joe.”
“I don’t suppose you have any coffee?”
“Sure we do.” He buzzed Doreen and asked for two cups of coffee. “She’s my Saturday-morning secretary,” he said. I supposed he was explaining why he had a receptionist on weekends, when no one else seemed to be around. Or maybe he was just bragging about the amount of work he had to do. Or, then again, maybe this was man-to-man stuff, and I was supposed to guess she was some kind of office wife.
I nodded and smiled my congratulations, which would cover any of the above.
Doreen came in carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, a pint of half-and-half, and some brown sugar in a mug. She smiled at me sweetly when Joe thanked her.
“About Noah,” I said, when the door had closed behind her.
He fiddled with his coffee, adding cream and sugar and stirring slowly and deliberately. “I suppose you want to know what I think about this disappearance thing.”
“I do. And I wanted to get a feel for this company— how it got started, who’s been around the longest, what people’s relationships with Noah are like. Standard stuff.”
“Checking out the suspects, eh?” He laughed. “Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what to say. I guess he must be in trouble somewhere. I know his wife thinks so. And she’s probably right. I can’t quite feature him running off, either. He’s a solid kind of guy, in his way.”
I caught the “in his way.”
“Tell me about him.”
He leaned back in his chair, gazed at the wall behind me, clasped his hands behind his neck, and began. “I’ve known the man for years. Knew him back in Houston, matter of fact. . . . When he got this idea, it sounded a little harebrained, to me, at first, but I had a lot of respect for him, for the way he worked. It sounded like he’d looked into it, like he knew what the hell he was talking about. So I did a little nosing around on my own, and things looked even better. I put a little cash in the hopper; Tom came out here and got things started. Did good right from the beginning. I came out to lend him a hand, been here ever since.”
His eyes focused on me again. I waited.
“Tom liked to manage the raw materials end of things— you know, buying from the suppliers, keeping an eye on them to make sure they kept it clean, real organic stuff. That was important to Tom. Is important.”
“And you?”
“Well, hell, it’s important to me, too. Reputation’s everything in a business like this.”
“No pesticides in the carrot juice, right?”
“Not funny, Jake.” He shook his finger at me.
“Sorry. And your role in the company?”
“I’m still a chemist. Always will be, I guess. I handle the supplements, the processing. Vitamins, mostly. The lab’s my baby. Our vitamins are pure. No sugar. No preservatives, just the real thing. Of course, I’m also Tom’s executive vice president. Since he’s gotten involved in the arks, that’s become a much bigger job than it was before. He just hasn’t been around as much.”
“You say you think he’s in trouble, but the evidence points to a runaway. With Marjorie. What’s so impossible about that?”
He smiled slightly. “It’s not impossible. Middle-aged man… but it just doesn’t seem like him, pulling his money out while the arks are being built, taking off with some little girl. Maybe someone saw a chance to get hold of a lot of money and took it. I hate to think that’s what happened. I hate to think his body’s going to turn up somewhere. Maybe I’m wrong. Hell, there’s not a man alive who can’t be tempted. But then temptation can go more than one way.”
“You want to explain a little more about that?”
He took a last swallow from his cup, and looked inside to make sure he hadn’t left any coffee. “Well, hell, Jake, there’s a lot of possibilities. Look. This Marjorie Burns. She’s with him, or took off with him or something. Right? So there are three possible scenarios as I see it. One, they ran off together. Two, she was with him when he got kidnapped or whatever and she got what he got. Or three, maybe she arranged what he got. Ever think of that?”
“It had occurred to me. I can see you’ve given the situation some thought. Do you have any reason to think she might do something like that?”
“Hell, no. Hardly know the woman. You said you wanted to get a feel for the company. How about a tour?” He stood up. I swallowed the last of my coffee and got up too.
“But you do know her?”
“We’ve met, sure.” He shot me a thoughtful look as we walked out his office door and started down the hall. “I suppose you’ll think it’s funny, a practical guy like me, if I tell you I’ve done a little work here and there on the arks, too.”
“I don’t think it’s funny.” Not as funny as pesticides in the carrot juice. “Is that how you met Marjorie?”
He nodded. “This ark stuff, I thought it was a little strange at first. You know, scientist, businessman, moves to California and goes peculiar. But I don’t know. I believe we really have screwed things up pretty bad, just like before the last flood. And I always believed in the Bible. I guess I just decided not to argue with a man who said he was having dreams of prophecy. You look into it a little more, Jake”— he chuckled— “you might be wanting a reserved seat yourself.”
“Could be. What about what he said in the note, that there was something he had to do?”
We stopped outside a solid wooden door with the word LABORATORY printed on it.
“I haven’t seen the note. Heard what it said. Look at it this way, Jake, either way it happened, the note’s going to read that way. ‘I’ve got this thing to do. Very important.’ If he was kidnapped, that’s what they’d make him write so no one would try to go after him. If he ran off with this Marjorie, it’s a sure thing he’d want everyone off his tail and he’d want to give his wife a chance to think he was working. I don’t think the note means a damned thing one way or t
he other.”
I tended to agree with him, but the note was all I had.
He unlocked the laboratory door, swung it open, and switched on a light.
It looked like a lab. The only one I’d ever seen was the one I’d been forced to spend time in back in high school chemistry, but this looked something like the one I remembered. It had cupboards and racks of test tubes and shiny white counter tops. There was a very professional-looking microscope, a gadget he told me was a mixer, a kilnlike object which was, it turned out, a “precision furnace,” a big box he said was a “refrigeration unit.” Burners. Beakers. All very clean and tidy, like no one ever worked there, a room about twenty-by-thirty with one small window and lots of fluorescent light. Over all, a lingering mixture of chemical odors I couldn’t recognize, although I caught a whiff of pine cleaner.
“Nice,” I said. “For vitamins?”
“Oh, we do a lot of things here. Quality control. Shelf-life improvement. Making mixtures, trying out drying times. A lab in a food factory is like a thumb nail on a thumb.”
A very pristine thumb nail. “Do you make the little pills here?”
He shook his head. “We send them out to be pressed and bottled. Of course, powders are the coming thing, bigger than pills.”
“It doesn’t look like you’re working on anything right now.”
He turned out the light and relocked the door as we left. “You’re right. I don’t get much time in there anymore. We’re just keeping the old product line on an even keel these days. I’ve even sent some work out to consulting labs. I’ve become a manager.” He sighed.
We were walking down the hall again, past some unmarked doors. “Offices,” he explained. The idea of offices clearly bored him.
“Which one is Noah’s?”
He pushed open a door and showed me a room that looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time.
“I’m afraid his office won’t help you much,” Durell said. “He hasn’t used it in months.”
“I’d like to take a look, if it’s okay with you.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
The desk was empty. The file cabinet was full of purchase orders.
We walked on. “So,” I said, “he hasn’t been around in months? Since he started work on the arks?”
Durell did a half-grin. “We’ve had a few meetings. He’s been coming by every couple of weeks to look through his mail.” We stopped in front of a swinging double door. He pushed in and we entered what looked like the guts of the business, a series of big, interconnected rooms stuffed with conveyor belts and machinery.
“This first room, here,” he said, “is where we make our flavored rice nectars. It starts out right over there, with those boilers and kettles. First you boil the rice and then it goes into that big blender over there…” He pointed at something that looked like a large industrial vacuum cleaner. “That breaks down one of the chains of the carbohydrates and liquefies it. Then it goes back into a kettle and the starter’s pumped in. See what we’re doing here is making the first stage of sake. It’s fermented, but it’s nonalcoholic. It’s called amazake. I tell you, those Asians… anyway, that breaks down more of the carbohydrates, makes it sweet— just from what’s in the grain.” He pointed to two huge vats. “It goes and sits in those overnight. It’s agitated and temperature-regulated. Then it’s pasteurized, and the bran gets sieved out over there.” I had begun to drift into a fantasy of Noah’s body being disposed of in these vats, cooked, packaged, run along a conveyor belt… “Then it gets pumped over to that tank, where the flavoring is added— we did some apricot yesterday— and then it gets pumped over to that big fellow over there.”
I snapped myself back to attention to look at his “carousel filler,” a collection of funnels where the glop was dropped into the bottles, plastic ones, which were then machine-capped. A conveyor belt took the little soldiers over to another work area, where the still-hot nectar was dropped into a cold water bath.
“After that,” he said, “we put the labels on and put the whole batch in one of those refrigerators over there.” I followed him along the conveyor-belt trail to another machine. “Here’s where we slap the labels on,” he said. He reached into a carton, pulled out a roll of labels and tore one off, backing and all. “Souvenir?” he smiled. It was the label for Yellow Brick Farms’ Apricot-flavored Rice Nectar. Pretty. A rosy-cheeked, slightly Asian-looking farm girl holding a bushel basket full of apricots. I hate apricots. I thanked him and pocketed the piece of paper.
He pointed through a door to another room. “We do the dried fruits in there. Want to have a look at that?”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, “but I have a few more things I wanted to talk to you about.” He looked disappointed. “You sound like you really miss Noah’s presence around here.”
“Sure I do. We’re a good team. Oh, I can keep things moving. He always relied on me anyway, but in a partnership, each man has his own area of expertise.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But what does any of that matter, with the world ending?”
He laughed an “oh, you rascal” laugh.
We were back in his office again. He glanced at his desk. A new phone message memo sat in the middle of his blotter. He set it aside, settling back in his chair.
“Now, about the world ending,” he began. “Yes, there was the flood to consider. But Tom’s not crazy, you know. You do know that?” I shrugged. “Anyway, he wanted to keep the business going. For the employees, for the cash flow.”
“If he’s dead, what happens to his share of the business?”
He seemed surprised by the question. “Why, it goes to his wife, of course.”
“One more thing. Do you know his other partner, this Pincus guy up in Tahoe?”
“We’ve met.” His tone and expression were noncommittal.
“You don’t like him?”
“He’s a smart businessman, runs a nice little casino.” Not one clue to his feelings.
“You think he could have something to do with this?”
“You know what they say about lying down with dogs.”
“You think Noah’s picked up some fleas?”
He grunted. “I’ll tell you, Jake, I wouldn’t accuse anyone of anything. But I just don’t know.”
On my way out, I considered inviting Doreen for a beer to pump her about the company, but she wasn’t around. The Toyota was no longer in the lot. Maybe some other time.
I stopped for half an hour at a place I knew in Glen Ellen, a reputed haunt of Jack London’s, and had a beer by myself while I went back over the Yellow Brick road. The rest of the day was spoken for. I had gotten roped into an afternoon with the folks, which was okay, and Eva’s niece, which might not be okay. After that, I had my own plans for dinner.
– 9 –
I stopped at the ark on my way home to pick up the information about Marjorie’s grandmother. Beatrice wasn’t around, but she’d left it with Arnold. It was just one o’clock when I walked up to the house.
Pa and Eva were sitting on lawn chairs reading copies of an East Bay weekly they’d picked up on a stroll along College Avenue after brunch that morning. They were wearing new straw hats of wildly different styles. His was a rakish cowboy hat with a small feather, hers a wide-brimmed fantasy with a bunch of grapes nestled along the brim. I thought of Carl Hinks.
“No bananas?” I asked. “No pineapple?”
“Carmen Miranda I’m not,” Eva laughed.
“You’re better looking,” my father said.
“Speaking of good looking,” Eva said, “it’s too bad you got plans for tonight. Lee is such a lovely girl.”
“I’ll meet her,” I said reasonably. “I’m going shopping on Telegraph Avenue with you.”
“That’s okay,” my father said, grinning viciously. “The niece is staying over in Berkeley tonight. We’re going touring tomorrow, then dinner tomorrow night before she goes home again to… what is it called, Eva?”
“Petaluma,
” Eva said.
“The whole weekend? That’s nice,” I said. “I can have dinner with you tomorrow, but I’m working during the day.”
“Another one of your articles that never gets printed?” my father asked.
“That’s right, Pa. Tell me, Eva,” I added, just to make conversation, “what did you tell Lee about me?”
“About you?” She laughed. “Why about you? Lee comes to Berkeley; she’s got friends. Two birds— me, her friends. Who said anything about you?”
I sighed. I was afraid it was going to be a long afternoon. Of course, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by adoring women at the moment, anyway. My eight-month romance with Iris Hughes, the gorgeous psychotherapist, had finished evaporating that summer, and neither of us was watching when the last little bit of it disappeared into nowhere. I was still seeing Chloe Giannapoulos occasionally. She was my dinner date that night. But she’d become involved with her work and possibly with one or two coworkers at Probe magazine, and didn’t seem to be showing much gratitude any more to the guy who’d introduced her to the guy who helped her get the job.
The funny thing about it was, we liked each other a lot. But Chloe, who was somewhere around forty years old, had a battered emotional history that wasn’t very different from mine. Although she trusted me as much as she could trust anyone, she was pretty damned happy with her life just the way it was. Professionally exciting and emotionally independent.
And since I wasn’t sure that wasn’t the best way to live, after all, I wasn’t about to argue with her. The way I look at it, wait and see is always the best policy when it comes to love. Unless you’ve been hit with one of those swept away, don’t-want-to-think-about-it, let’s-do-it-now bombshells. In that case, you have a choice: be a damned fool or run like hell.
Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3) Page 6