Full House: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 3)

by Shelley Singer

  So we strolled casually past the poker tables, around the chaos of the slots and out the front door.

  We walked very quickly to the car, got in, and drove out of the lot.

  “You know,” Rosie said, “now that I think of it, Pincus wouldn’t have people beaten up in his own parking lot. It would be bad for business. Can you imagine what the customers would think if they saw people getting beaten up right outside?”

  “Yes. Which makes me wonder just exactly where he does plan on doing it.” I was watching my rearview mirror. I couldn’t tell if we were being followed. A car had pulled out of the lot a few seconds behind us but that didn’t mean anything. I flipped on my right signal and cut down a side street for one block before I signaled again, turned left, and began running parallel to the main street. The car was still behind us.

  “Why did you use your signals?” Rosie sounded a little scared. I know I was.

  “I wasn’t trying to lose them. I just wanted to know if they were following us. Now I’m trying to lose them.” I turned right at the next corner— no signal— cut my lights, then left, left again for one block, right, left, and right again onto the main road.

  “Lights,” Rosie said.

  I switched them back on. I couldn’t tell whether we’d lost them or not. I’d been busy trying not to hit anything in the dark. I asked Rosie. She’d been watching out the back window.

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t see any lights behind us after the second right turn, but they could have picked us up again on this street. Their headlights look like a dozen other ones I can see behind us from here.”

  “Maybe they’re just trying to scare us.”

  Rosie laughed. I joined her. “Let’s wear them out,” I suggested. “You feel up to spending a few more hours hanging around the casinos?”

  “Yes.”

  I pulled into a huge casino lot. Again, business was brisk. People walking to and from cars. A couple of cars pulled into the lot while we were walking across to the casino’s back entrance, but we couldn’t be sure whether one of them contained our friends.

  We went directly to the bar. Rosie ordered brandy. I was thirsty. I started with mineral water and lime.

  “You know, Jake,” Rosie said carefully, “if you’re going to be doing a lot of this detective stuff, you might consider getting yourself a more anonymous car.”

  “Rosie!” I cried.

  “Or at least a newer one.”

  I stared at her. She knows how I feel about newer cars. At least the newer cars in anything like a reasonable price range. No creativity, and, worst of all, no character.

  The man sitting next to Rosie was staring at her hindquarters. He was about fifty-five, and he was wearing a plaid sports coat, beige doubleknit pants, and brown and white spectators. He had about half his hair. I tried not to notice his preoccupation.

  “Forget it,” I told her, referring to the anonymous new car. “If it was built after 1959 it’s a clone.” The man spilled a little of his whiskey on the bar.

  “This your boyfriend?” he asked Rosie.

  “Yes,” she said, without even looking at him. Now he was staring at her neck. “I understand how you feel, Jake. I don’t mean to be insensitive.”

  “You her boyfriend?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s okay, Rosie, you’re right, in a way. But I never really plan on doing these jobs, you know.”

  “Y’outta Noo Yawk?” I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to me, Rosie, or Rosie’s rear end.

  “No,” Rosie and I said simultaneously.

  Rosie continued. “Do you think they’re out there waiting for us?”

  “Probably not. Why bother? They can figure they’ve already scared us. Maybe that’s enough. On the other hand, Pincus could be the kind of man who always keeps his promises, especially if they’re nasty ones.”

  “Okay. Let’s go with the plan about wearing them out.” She bought some dollars, and dropped a couple of them into the poker machine in the bar. “Want to play some roulette?” I shook my head. “Keno?” She held onto a pair of queens and drew another one. I realized I’d forgotten to tell the Tuesday night group I wouldn’t be playing poker with them. “Keno?” she repeated. I shook my head again. “I’m feeling lucky.” She played another dollar, got four on a diamond flush and drew a spade. “Well, maybe not. Do you ever play poker up here, Jake?”

  “I have once or twice, but it’s too expensive. I dropped a couple hundred once, real fast, and that finished it.”

  “Other people lose a lot more than that, Jake, that’s nothing.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing for a rich carpenter.”

  “So,” the man next to Rosie said, “Y’outta Noo Yawk?”

  “How about some twenty-one?” I said.

  On the way to the tables, I found a telephone and tried Arnold’s number again. Still no answer. I thought of calling Mrs. Noah, but didn’t really want to bother her. Arnold’s call probably hadn’t been that important.

  We played twenty-one. Rosie came out twenty dollars ahead; I lost about the same amount. Over my objections, we tried roulette. Rosie was all over the place, betting on four numbers at a time. I played red. I won fifty, she lost her twenty.

  We moved to the craps table. I played the pass line. She played the don’t pass line. Then we switched. We both lost, and went back to twenty-one for a while.

  I tried Arnold’s number again at around 2 A.M. The line was busy.

  By three, we were so exhausted we kept nodding off at the nickel slots.

  “What do you say?” I turned to Rosie, who had dropped a nickel in her machine and forgotten to pull the handle down.

  “They can’t still be waiting,” she said. “Let’s go to bed.”

  But they were.

  Just as we walked up to the car, two guys jumped out from behind a suitably anonymous vehicle in the next row. One of them was the giant goon. The other one was shorter but nearly as broad. The big one grabbed Rosie and pinned her arms behind her back. That was the last I saw of them before the other one was on me. I could hear Rosie yelling her head off, then a truck hit me in the stomach and I was vomiting mineral water and beer and a late-night taco all over myself. Another truck hit me in the jaw, twice. I kicked out at the truck’s knees, slipped in my own vomit, and fell against a car. He hit me a couple more times until I was on the ground. Rosie was still yelling, and I could hear people running toward us, yelling back, but I couldn’t quite get up. I raised my head and looked out of the eye that wasn’t swelling shut. The goons were gone, and half a dozen half-drunk gamblers were trying to help me up.

  “I called the cops,” one of them said.

  “Thanks,” Rosie’s voice said from somewhere. “We’ll take care of it from here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re okay, now. Thanks.” They were reluctant to leave us, and I hate having people watch me bleed, so Rosie helped me get in the car, took my keys, and drove us away from there.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. She looked rigid with rage.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m fine. Better than I look. How about you?”

  “Nothing wrong with me,” she said through gritted teeth. “That gorilla held my arms through the whole thing. I couldn’t throw him or smash his instep or his shin or anything. I tried. I really tried. Nothing worked. He was huge and he read all my moves before I made them. He just held me there while his friend beat you up. After all, it wouldn’t have been right to beat me up, too. I’m a woman. Goddamn sexist pigs.”

  “Let’s go to Jerry’s Jackpot,” I said. I wanted to tear the place apart.

  “Are you nuts? We’re going back to the motel and check you over and see if any thing’s broken. Then you’re going to get some sleep. And so am I. We’re in no shape to play any more boyish games tonight.”

  I didn’t argue. I felt like all my bones were broken, and I didn’t smell too good, either.

  I asked Rosie to give Arnold another try while
I washed off some of the damage.

  When I limped out of the bathroom, smelling sweeter and feeling mean, Rosie was sitting in the desk chair waiting for me.

  “She’s dead. Marjorie.”

  “Dead?”

  “Murdered. Shot. Dumped on the Emeryville mud flats. Arnold’s been with the cops, and with ark people, and with Mrs. Noah. It’s a mess. He wants us back there right now. He says to stop wasting time out here and get back where the trouble is. I told him you were hurt and that we’d head back first thing in the morning. That we’d be there before noon.”

  – 21 –

  Rosie drove home. I could see okay; the eye was better. But my right knee was giving me some trouble. I’d fallen hard on it when the goon had knocked me down the night before.

  We arrived home before noon, all right, stopping on the way to pick up Alice, but I decided to go to the house first, before dashing down to the corner to soothe Arnold. I wanted to check my tape again, maybe even get my bearings.

  My father was watering the geraniums.

  “If I’m not here does everything die?” he said by way of greeting.

  “Rico was taking care of the cats.”

  “I know, I know, I meant the flowers.”

  “How was Napa? Or Sonoma? Or wherever you were?”

  “She’s fine. She likes you, I think. You should call her. What’s wrong with your face?”

  “A couple of bruises.” I continued on into the house, trying not to limp.

  Eva was making lunch. “You’re limping,” she said. I hadn’t even caught her looking at me.

  “I fell.”

  “I told Lee you went to Lake Tahoe. I didn’t tell her you went with Rosie. Sit down, have some soup. A sandwich. I bought some turkey loaf.”

  “I’m not hungry.” My refusal was part bruised stomach, part turkey loaf.

  She asked a couple of times, but she didn’t push.

  I limped into the bedroom to check my answering machine. No messages.

  “If you’re looking for messages,” Eva called out, “I got a couple for you.” I trekked back out to the kitchen. “Some girl named Beatrice called. Said it was important. This morning, early. Something about you should call Arnold and when are you getting home. And another one, June. You should call her.

  “Thanks.” I went to the bathroom, found an Ace bandage in the linen cupboard, pulled up my right pant leg and wrapped the knee. Better. I looked at my face. Blue jaw, black eye. And my stomach. Two fresh bruises, nestled in the remains of the skinning I got the night Pa got bashed.

  I found the morning paper on the table in the living room and sat down on the couch to look it over. The story was on page three, at the top. East Bay woman found dead on Emeryville mud flats. There was a photo of a part of the flats, and a couple of lines under the photo that said an Oakland woman identified as Marjorie Burns, twenty-three, had been found lying partway inside the driftwood tent near the sculpture-on-a-stick of the World War I airplane.

  According to the story, she had been found by a stroller the day before. A Berkeley woman walking her dog down by the Bay, on the mud flats where at least two generations of artist-citizens had created a permanent exhibit of fanciful, sometimes funny constructions that stretched for hundreds of yards along the bayfront. Permanent but organic, growing, shrinking, slowly changing as one piece falls into decay and another takes its place.

  The Berkeley stroller had passed the tent, but her dog had not. The small terrier, in a classic act, had begun to whine, to approach the sculpture and back away again. That was when the woman saw the blue running shoes, still attached to Marjorie Burns.

  An execution-style murder, the paper said. Shot in the back of the head.

  I had never met Marjorie, but beyond wishing that none of this had happened to her, I could certainly wish it hadn’t happened that way. Execution-style. Hell, every stupid punk who can almost read knows how to do it execution-style. And then to be dumped in a sculpture in the middle of that homemade and eternal art show. And then to be found by a terrier replaying a scene from an English whodunit— well…

  I decided to call June Gerhart later, hauled myself to my feet, and headed for the door. Rosie had to see this, then we’d go down to the corner. I had nearly made it out when Eva caught up with me and handed me a bowl of soup. It was green. I looked at her. “From the zucchini in your poor garden. I been watering.”

  “Got some work to do now,” I muttered, passing my father as he came in, wiping his hands on his pants. He snorted.

  “Okay, just tell us when you’re running out of town again— we’ll go take our trip to Lake Tahoe.”

  I nodded.

  Rosie’s door was open and I walked in. She glanced at the bowl of soup in my hand but didn’t say anything. I handed her the paper, folded to the photo of the mud flats. She glanced at it, put it down again, and went to the kitchen stove, where coffee was dripping. She waved a cup at me, I said yes, and she poured for both of us. Then she sat down to read.

  I decided against calling Marjorie’s grandmother, considered and rejected her cousin Victor, postponed Mrs. Noah again. While Rosie read, I dialed information and got the number of the hat shop on Telegraph Avenue. Carleton wasn’t at work, I was told. A friend of his had called in and said he couldn’t make it that day.

  I called his home number.

  “Hello?” The voice didn’t sound like Carleton’s.

  “Is Carleton Hinks there?”

  “Yeah. But he don’t want to talk to nobody right now.”

  “Tell him this is Jake Samson. Tell him I want to come over and talk to him this afternoon.”

  I heard the message being transmitted. The voice returned.

  “He says okay, he wants to talk to you. He’ll be here any time you come.” I wrote down the address, and said goodbye to Carleton’s friend.

  Rosie had finished the news story.

  “We need to go see Arnold,” she said.

  “Yeah. And return a call from Mrs. Noah. We also need to get hold of Hal Winter and see if he can get us anything on what the cops know.” Hal is a poker buddy and a Berkeley attorney with other buddies in the Alameda County D.A.’s office.

  “Speaking of cops,” Rosie said, “now that they’re in it, they might be visiting us.”

  I had thought of that, but hadn’t wanted to put it in real words.

  “Yeah. Anyway, we need to find out was she killed on the mud flats or brought there from somewhere else—”

  “How long was she dead, what kind of gun, any other marks on the body—”

  “Anything found at the scene that anyone’s willing to talk about— I’ll give Hal a call now.”

  Of course, he wasn’t in. He never is. I left a message. He’d get back to me and leave whatever answers he came up with on my tape if I wasn’t around. He thinks my crimebusting efforts are funny. Which reminded me to give a quick call to Artie Perrine, another poker buddy and the editor at Probe magazine who had given me the paper that said I was a free-lance reporter. Now that I was going to be crossing police paths again, I wanted him to be prepared for any queries on their part. I called Probe. He was out to lunch. I left a message.

  Mrs. Noah, as luck would have it, was in. She was delighted to hear from me. As a matter of fact, she sounded delighted all the way around.

  “The police are certainly interested in what I have to say now,” she said. “They’re taking my husband’s disappearance a lot more seriously.”

  “They’ve been to see you then?”

  “I called them the minute I heard. And they took the note he left. They went through his office, too. And they asked me a lot of questions. About his business interests, his friends, that kind of thing. You know.”

  I had to ask. “Did you tell them I took some of his stuff?”

  “Oh. No. Should I have?”

  I had been holding my breath. I let it out. “No. But I’m going to drop off what I still have. Then you can pass it on to them, tell the
m you just found it. In a dresser drawer or a closet— anywhere they haven’t been. Because they would be upset if they found out you’d neglected to give them something.” Not to mention how they’d feel about my having it. There were a couple of those papers I still wanted to keep; I would make copies. “Did you tell the police anything about me at all?”

  She hesitated. “Is there some reason why you’re afraid of them, Jake?”

  “I’m not afraid of them,” I lied. “But it’s best if they don’t know I’m helping out. They might try to stop me.”

  “Well, I just answered their questions, and told them we had been trying to find my husband.”

  “Okay. You sound like you’re in pretty good spirits. Doesn’t it worry you that the woman your husband was with has been murdered?”

  Silence. Then, “I think it’s a terrible shame, of course. But they weren’t together, were they? It was just her they found. And now the police will help. It’s so much better with everyone trying to find him, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. Better. One more thing. Do you remember the name of the cop you talked to?”

  “Yes. Such a nice man. A Sergeant Hawkins.”

  “Ralph Hawkins?”

  “I think so.”

  I thought about dropping the whole thing right then and there, but I’d put in too much time and blood. Hawkins and I were acquainted. I’d run into him, so to speak, when I was trying to find out who killed a local artist and tossed her off her deck. Hawkins, I was sure, had not forgotten me and Rosie.

  Rosie had been listening. When I said good-bye to June Gerhart, she volunteered to run up to College Avenue and copy the papers we still had. We agreed to meet at the ark.

  Arnold was working down in the hold. It was huge and dim down there, like the belly of a flat-bottomed whale, with all the ribs on the inside.

  I asked him what he knew about Marjorie’s murder. He didn’t know much more than the Chronicle had printed.

  “But I have this terrible fear that Noah’s going to be found the same way. Somewhere. That’s what I told the police, that it would all be their fault for not believing us in the first place.”