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.”
– 3 –
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 tow
n. 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.
I had hoped, on this first ramble through the town, to get a feel for it and for its people. But the people were not outside where they could be seen, and every time I raised my eyes to look around I got leaves and twigs and rain in the face. So I plodded, head down, to the police station.
The cop behind the desk was in his early sixties, I guessed, a gray man with gray hair and watery gray eyes. His small feet were propped up on the desk, and his reading matter of choice was TV Guide.
He looked surprised when I stumbled in, dripping, smiling like a friendly idiot.
His radio, like everyone else’s, was tuned to a weather report. I heard something about fifty-mile-an-hour winds.
I threw back my hood, unzipped the front of the slicker, strode purposefully up to his desk, stuck out my hand, and told him my name. His, he said, was Clement Paisley, a name which I thought suited him not at all. Chief Clement Paisley.
He asked me to take a seat. The only seat, besides the wooden bench under the front window, was a sprung secretarial chair, but I took it. With a soft thunk it dropped a notch on its shaft.
I told him I was interested in learning more about the problem over at the sperm bank for a possible article in Probe magazine.
“Probe,” he said. “I’ve seen it on the stands somewhere. Never read it. San Francisco, right? So, you work in San Francisco.” For some reason, he thought that was amazing.
“I’m a freelancer,” I said. Which was true, as far as it went.
“So I guess you live down there?”
“Oakland.”
“I got a boy lives in Berkeley. Well, not exactly a boy. He’s thirty-six this year. About your age, I guess?”
“About.” Not quite.
He shook his head. “I don’t know how anybody can live down there. What exactly is it you’re interested in finding out, Mr. Samson?”
“Well, for a start, I hear you found the stolen items on the beach.”
“Not on the beach, exactly, and only some of them, floating around, up against the rocks. Most of them must have been washed out to sea. Would have been.”
“So you’re the person who found them?”
“Well, how it worked was Nora saw what had happened and called over here. I went to have a look. Saw the note, went to the beach. There was a kid out there, young boy from town. He was there already. Said he’d seen all that stuff in the water, didn’t know what it was. So I guess you could say he found it. He kind of hung around while we hauled out the evidence, or what was left of it. You ever write anything besides magazine pieces?”
“Sometimes. Why?” I never write anything at all except an occasional letter to my father in Chicago.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about retirement lately— it’s not so far off now. I’ve seen a lot in my day. A whole lot.” He squinted at me appraisingly. “Thought I might try my hand at some detective stories sometime. Maybe use a partner who knows some of the ins and outs of the writing game.”
“Interesting idea,” I said, looking very interested. “Maybe we can talk about that some more when I’ve finished my story here. We might have a pretty good mystery going right now.” A man with delusions of fictional wealth could be useful, particularly since he was thinking I might be useful to him.
For once, maybe, I wouldn’t have to spend my time toe-dancing around the sensibilities of the law, with its peculiar idea that maybe someone should arrest me for withholding information— which I do not do— or interfering with an investigation, which is a pretty fuzzy charge as far as I’m concerned.
Paisley startled me by laughing a Mike Hammer kind of laugh. “Not much of a mystery, if you ask me. Just a prank. Kids, probably. I got a lot of things to do around here that take priority over a prank. We got people growing dope in the hills. We got a wifebeater or two. We got some mean drunks. And it looks like we’re going to be having some flooding problems if this keeps up.” He cast a countryman’s weather eye toward the window— self-consciously, I thought. After all, northern California may be country but it’s not Indiana.
“It’s funny,” I said conversationally. “I guess city people just don’t think of you folks up here having crime problems. But of course you do. I can see you’ve got a tough job.” I had gone just an inch too far. He looked at me suspiciously.
“That’s right. Nothing like Oakland, of course, but it would take an army to handle things there.”
I agreed. “In the meantime, though, I really need to check out this sperm bank thing. That’s what my editors are interested in, and I’m a workingman. The ins and outs of the writing game. I wonder if I could have a look at the note the vandals left.”
“Sure,” he said, one workingman to another. “You can have a look at it.”
“Actually, what I’d like is a copy— maybe for reproduction in the magazine.”
“Only copy machine is over at the drugstore. I’ll see if I can’t get my man to run over and make a copy later, but we’re going to be pretty busy.”
“I could run it over there myself.”
Maybe he thought the break-in was just a prank, but he was enough of a cop not to let evidence go drifting off with a stranger. He gave me a sly smile.
“I think you know I can’t do that, Mr. Samson.” He laughed. “You’re a tricky one.”
I smiled back at him. I was beginning to enjoy his company. He chuckled again, got up, and went into a back room. He returned with a plastic bag. The note was in it. He smoothed the plastic on the desk and let me look.
It was exactly as Nora Canfield had said, complete with “Godless destroyers” and the misspelled “consecenses.”
I looked closely at the printing. Made with a soft pencil. Very laboriously done, very unstable-looking. The lines were wavy, the verticals and horizontals were neither vertical nor horizontal, exactly. The lines slanted downward on the unlined, cheap typing paper. The kind of paper you could buy at the local drugstore when you went to make copies of whatever it was you made copies of.
&
nbsp; I agreed with Nora. The printing looked a lot like it was done by someone using the wrong hand. Or some senile crazy. Or some barely literate and not too well coordinated kid.
I thanked Chief Paisley.
“Tell me this,” I said. “You think the whole thing was just a prank. Why is that? It looks pretty serious to me on the face of it. Even if you just think in terms of the money that’s been lost.”
“Oh, I know the people in this town, Mr. Samson. There may be one or two who might write something like this, but they’re not the kind who could pull off a burglary, or lug cases of what they stole all the way to Spicer Street Beach, if they did decide to do such a peculiar thing.”
“Who might those people be?”
He frowned and shook his head. “I’m not going to send you around to scare innocent people. But I’ll tell you this— two of them are too old and one of them’s too young, and a cripple to boot.”
“Do you know of anyone who might have it in for Nora herself? Does she have any enemies?”
“None that I know of.”
“No one besides a disabled kid and a couple of old people who might be angry that she set up that kind of shop in their town? No one who might want to scare her off?”
“I can’t see anyone caring about any of that. This town gets most of its money from tourists, after all. Whatever reason people have for coming here, they’re just more customers for the restaurants and shops and motels. Sure, maybe some people grumble, but nothing big.”
“Are you sure someone broke in— that the thieves really used the window, and didn’t have a key to the door?”
“You mean did someone fake all that window stuff, breaking it and so forth?”
“Yes.”
“I’m pretty sure. Glass on the inside, on the floor. Scratches on the outside wall and the sill. No reason to believe it was an inside job.” He smirked when he said the last two words, like he enjoyed using them and making fun of them at the same time.
“I was just wondering if there might not be someone working at the bank who—”
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 2