“Yeah, well, it was after seven and I still hadn’t heard anything. So finally I called the cops again. Angie told me they’d found her body. That was when I drove out to see.” She shook her head. “I saw, all right. I couldn’t believe it, you know? They were hauling her dead body up with ropes.” She wiped her eyes.
Rosie and I had been lucky, I thought. We’d gotten there when the body was already gone. I like it better that way.
“Did you identify her?”
“Heck, no. Clement did. You think I wanted to go out there and look at her?”
“Of course not,” Rosie commiserated. “And then Wolf showed up, too, right?” Fredda nodded. “He seems like a real sweet guy. We were in the tavern when he got the news. It knocked him right over.”
“Oh, sure. He’s the best. They seemed to get along pretty good too. They were probably going to get married.” She was cutting out circles of dough again.
“Henry mentioned that Wolf’s had a lot of problems,” I said. “Is that so?”
“Oh, nothing too big. Women. He had a marriage that didn’t work out. There was a kid too. And before that he had a thing for Nora; that was when they were pretty young. And she dumped him and took off for the city. Said she had things to do. Well, she did them and came back, but by then it was too late. Not that she came back for him. I heard she got homesick. Wanted to have a more, you know, natural life. By the way, be sure and put in that write-up that these cookies are all natural. No artificial ingredients.”
I thought it was probably time to go. She was putting two more cookie sheets into the oven. I don’t like to wear out my sources in one sitting, and besides, I was getting dizzy watching her.
We thanked her, assured her we didn’t need to be escorted to the door, and walked back down the hallway. Joanne was sitting on the front porch. “Is that your truck, with the dog in it?” Rosie said it was. “You going to write about my mother?”
“Maybe,” I answered, feeling guilty. “I’ll bet you’re glad your mom is in the cookie business, right? You get to eat all those cookies.”
She laughed, a short bark. “So what? She gave you some, didn’t she?” I said yes, she had. “They’re not very good, are they?” She swung her chair around and rolled to the other end of the porch, dismissing us.
We returned to Georgia’s Cafe for some non-Fredda coffee. I hadn’t noticed them before, but there they were, in a cardboard box on the counter: plastic bags with gummed mailing labels on them that said “Fredda’s All-Natural Cookies.” The label was hand-lettered neatly in ballpoint.
I was thinking I’d like to talk to Nora again, maybe get some background on Wolf and her relationship with him. Rosie mentioned she thought we ought to talk to the Hackman boys. Maybe we’d find out, after all, that the break-in had been an adolescent joke. In which case, she said sadly, Gracie Piedmont’s death was probably just an accident and there was no case of any kind. She was depressing me to the point of agreeing with her. Which turned her around.
“No,” she said. “I don’t really believe any of that.”
I noticed that Fredda’s cookies were also on the menu, under Desserts. Fifty cents apiece. “You don’t want to go home yet.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I want there to be a case, and as long as she’s dead anyway, she may just as well have been murdered.”
Nora didn’t answer her home phone, so we went over to the bank. The receptionist was there and sent us up after consulting with her intercom. But when we got to Nora’s door, which was ajar, we heard two voices. I knocked.
“Just a second,” she called out. “See you later, then, Marty?”
A short, muscular man wearing thick glasses brushed out past us, with just the quickest nod in our direction. I turned to watch him go before entering the office. He looked familiar.
“Marty?” I asked. She nodded. “Spiegel?” Yes, she admitted, it was.
Rosie was impressed, but she tended to business. “I guess he flew up here because he never got a return call from Gracie Piedmont last night? To check on his house?”
“I suppose so,” Nora said.
“And you’re buddies?” I asked. “He just dropped in to say hi?”
“Don’t be silly.” She played with a stack of papers on her desk. “He was here on business.”
“Business? What kind of business? Bank business?”
She didn’t answer me. “What did you need to see me about, anyway?”
“Look, if you want us to investigate, you’re going to have to give us information freely.” Actually, I was curious as hell.
“All right. But this is highly confidential. We always keep this information very strictly to ourselves.”
It turned out that the famous Marty Spiegel was what the guy in the bar had called a “depositor.”
I filed that information under “fascinating but irrelevant” and turned to Nora’s private life.
– 9 –
Nora had, it turned out, been very heavily involved with Wolf Oswald, but that had been a very long time ago. They had dated sporadically in high school, more seriously when she was attending junior college. He had wanted to get married. She had taken a series of jobs in the county, “nothing very exciting,” and had put him off while she tried to decide what she wanted to do.
What she wanted to do, after all, was leave, go to San Francisco, and work in the financial district at whatever she could find. She had worked, and she had learned. She had gone to school at night and taken business courses. There had been occasional weekends in Wheeler for a while, but finally he had married someone else, and he and Nora became, she said, friends. That marriage had fizzled a couple of years before she had come back to Wheeler to stay.
I was beginning to understand what Fredda had meant about Wolf’s problems with women, but his story didn’t seem very different from anyone else’s. Not very different, for example, from mine. A lot of us had limped footloose in one way or another through the seventies. Periods of realignment are hard on everyone, especially when they end up with absolutely nothing having been changed by all that agony.
“When you came back to town,” Rosie asked, “what happened between you then? He was free, wasn’t he?”
“He was free, but nothing happened. We went out once or twice, but it didn’t work.”
Rosie persisted. “And he never resented you for not marrying him?”
“I think he was relieved, when he got to know me again later. Relieved that we hadn’t gotten married. I’m not the easiest person to get along with and I love to work. I don’t think that’s the kind of wife he had in mind.” She sighed. “Poor Gracie. She would have been right for him. Poor Wolf. Anyway”—she drummed her fingers on her desk— “I really don’t think any of this has any significance. It’s all years and years ago.”
“You say Gracie would have been perfect for him,” I said. “How?” All she had ever said about Gracie before was that she was a good employee and was “sweet,” whatever that means.
“Oh, you know. Feminine in a traditional way. She would have let him take the lead, make the decisions. She wasn’t assertive at all as far as I could tell. Don’t misunderstand— I liked her.”
“But you weren’t friends,” Rosie said.
The phone rang. She picked it up, asked the party on the other end to hold on, covered the mouthpiece, and said, “Listen, guys, I’ve got an appointment in five minutes. Could we pick this up again later?”
We said good-bye.
I was thinking about those “years and years” since she and Wolf had been together. It didn’t mean much. A man can carry a heartache around for decades. A relationship that should have worked and didn’t— because you were too young and stupid, maybe— can leave you looking for that person for the rest of your life. I had one like that. It has been years and years, and a lot of women, including one marriage, in between. And if I knew where she was, I’d go and get her. If she was still the person I remembered.
It
was early. I figured we should go look for Marty Spiegel, Gracie’s friend, and that the place to look for him was probably the house he’d been so worried about.
The road out along the spit was still slick with mud now half-dried. A birch tree had fallen onto the road, but it was passable. The big trees sheltering the houses didn’t look much the worse for wear, all in all, but there were branches scattered on the road and in what we could see of the yards.
In daylight, without blinding wind and rain, the spit was a beautiful place. The ocean was as quiet as it ever gets up here, and the air was fresh and salty. The glimpses of wealth between the trees didn’t spoil the effect one bit, although, on the way out to Marty’s, I noticed a couple of houses that didn’t look so great. One was modest. One was even humble, with plywood still covering the windows from the night before.
We stopped at the bottom of the driveway where, the night before, Gracie’s car had been parked. In its place now was an old red Jaguar. We didn’t doubt for a second that we’d found the right driveway. The Jaguar’s license plate said MOVIES. We left Alice sleeping in the car and walked up to the door.
It was quite a door.
One of those big double jobs, about ten feet tall, but not the kind you’d expect a butler to answer. Eric the Red, maybe, but not a butler. It was made of thick rough redwood slabs with monstrous black iron strap hinges. The small round windows on either side of the door were heavy leaded glass pictures of sailing vessels of some ancient and indeterminate origin.
The house went nicely with the doors. Very big. This was no rustic crackerbox covered with plywood siding and batten board. The front exterior was solid, with no windows other than the little leaded jobs by the door, and made of thick redwood planking set on the diagonal. I looked up. There was some transparent glass on what could have been the second or third floor, depending on the downstairs ceilings, but it was screened on the inside with potted plants. At least I supposed they were potted.
All he needed was a moat. I couldn’t wait to see the inside. I grabbed the big iron ring that hung from the door, but Rosie poked my arm and, reaching alongside the doorframe, pressed an electric bell. We heard it resound deep inside the building, a throaty two-note chime. A window slammed up somewhere around the side of the house and a voice yelled, “Who is it?”
“Friends of Nora Canfield,” I yelled back. “We need to talk to you.”
Sometime later, maybe two minutes, a small door set in one half of the big doors swung back. Spiegel was frowning, his chunky shoulders cast aggressively forward. He was dressed in a T-shirt and those little shorts people run in. The T-shirt didn’t say anything. I noticed the heavy glasses were held together on one side with a small safety pin.
“What’s the problem?” he wanted to know.
“No problem,” I said, and was about to launch into my Probe magazine scam when I realized the spiel wouldn’t work with him. He’d dealt with the press too often, and I thought I remembered something about how hard it was for reporters to get to see him. So I played it straight.
“We’re looking into some things for Nora, and we want to talk to you about the accident out here last night.”
“Accident?” He slumped against the doorjamb, the aggressive stance suddenly gone. “You mean Gracie. You some kind of private cops?”
I shrugged and nodded, a half statement he could interpret any way he wanted. “Actually, we were looking into the break-in at the bank, but then this happened. This accident…”
Again, I let him fill in the blanks. “Could we come in and talk to you about it?”
He tightened up again, and danced a couple of steps in place, like he was going to start sparring. “I’m kind of busy. There was some damage to the house. I haven’t even checked every room yet.”
“We won’t take much of your time,” Rosie said.
“Well, okay. But I don’t know much about last night. I was in L.A. I feel so bad that she came out here— can you understand that I’m not feeling too great about that? Shit. Come on in, then, for a few minutes. I’m not trying to be hostile or inhospitable or anything, you know, it’s just that a lot of people are always bothering me… Come on in.” Finally, he stood aside and we entered.
The man was in great shape. Short, maybe five foot seven, but every inch was pared down to the muscle. I’d been doing some bicycling lately, and my spare tire was nearly gone. But he made me feel flabby. I resented it.
The entry hall was big and square and empty except for several black iron coat hooks screwed into the paneled wall. The floor was quarry tile. He led us across the tile into an immense room that would have done service as a Saxon Great Hall. Squares of white plaster wall were framed in chunky redwood. The vaulted ceiling was crossed by beams a foot wide and two feet deep.
The floor was pegged hardwood planking. Along one wall was a stone fireplace with a firebox that must have been five feet across. Along the back of the room were anachronistic sliding glass doors leading to a deck. There wasn’t a lot of furniture, just a seating arrangement, facing the fireplace, consisting of an eight-foot brown leather couch, a couple of leather chairs, and a few obviously hand-hewn tables. The rug on which the furniture sat also looked handmade, Scandinavian, and very thick. A wide staircase led up to a gallery, along the front of the house, above the entry hall, with a row of windows filled with plants in big pots— the ones I’d seen from outside— and to doors on either side that I guessed led to second-floor rooms.
I don’t enter the homes of strangers with any expectations, or at least I try not to. But once invited in, I do tend to halfway expect to be asked to sit down. It didn’t happen.
“Just on my way to take a look at the pool when the bell rang,” he said. “Come on.”
He trotted toward the back of the living room and made a sharp left through a swinging door into a smaller room, only twenty by twenty. It was a well-equipped gym, with the same hardwood floor as the living room but no fancy beams. Just white plaster walls and surgical chrome. A rowing machine, a treadmill, an exercise cycle, a slant board, and one of those multi-station weight machines. The back wall, like the one in the living room, was glass. One section was broken, with a large branch poking through and rainwater on the floor. Outside the glass I could see more deck and a big covered swimming pool. The cover, and the deck, were littered with debris from the trees.
“Take a seat somewhere,” he said, waving at the exercise equipment. Then he slid back a glass door and went outside. The weight equipment offered a couple of seats, so we sat, watching him poke around.
“He’s rich,” I said to Rosie. “He can be as weird as he wants to be.”
“And creative. Don’t forget creative.”
He returned quickly. He seemed to do everything quickly.
“Pool looks okay. Hot tub’s okay. Lost some roof tiles,” he reported, as though we might actually care. “Be right with you.” He disappeared through a thick doorway with a tiny window in it. Rosie gave me a look, and I grinned back at her. He popped out again. “Sauna’s fine. No leaks.”
He arranged himself on the rowing machine, taking off his glasses, placing them carefully on the floor, and setting a timer. “Do you mind if I do a few things while we talk?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but began pulling. “I missed my workout this morning, flying up here.” Before either of us could speak, he added, “Tell me what it’s like being a P.I.”
“A lot of the time,” Rosie said, “it’s pretty tedious.”
“Bet it’s fun. Admit that it’s fun. What does it take to get a license?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t have one.”
He laughed. Pull. Pull. Pull. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it, am I right? Okay, ask away.”
“You don’t seem very upset about Gracie’s death,” I said.
He looked as though he considered stopping his rhythmic chore, thought better of it, and kept on going. “Of course I’m upset. I feel shitty. I told you. But I�
��m not devastated. She was a nice person, and we liked talking to each other. But nothing really close. I feel guilt more than loss.”
Nicely put, I thought. He was creative, all right.
“There’s something I don’t quite get, though,” Rosie said. “All she had to do was come out here, walk around the house, take a look, and go home again. But she didn’t do that. She went and stood out on the scarp to watch the waves coming in to get her. Why would she do a thing like that?”
“Wouldn’t you? It must have been magnificent out here last night.”
“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “I doubt it. The question is, would she?”
He thought about it, rowing that damned machine to nowhere. “Are you saying maybe she didn’t? That something else happened?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “But on the off chance that the death is related to the break-in at the sperm bank, we’re just checking out possibilities. Eliminating the extraneous if we can.”
He raised his eyebrows, turning to look at me, just as his timer went off.
“I don’t know what she’d do. She had to have had a romantic streak— she loved those old movies— but I guess I never thought of her as a person who took chances. I never really thought about it one way or the other. But you never can tell about people. Maybe she was feeling reckless. Maybe she’d had a fight with her boyfriend or something and was playing out some dramatic scenario.” He stood up, shook himself, and trotted over to the treadmill. He set it at a good jog and took off.
“Did they fight much?” I asked. “Gracie and Wolf?”
He shook his head. “We never talked about things like that. Except once she did say, jokingly, that he seemed to be a little jealous of our friendship.”
“And you’re sure there was nothing to be jealous of? Maybe on her side?”
He was sweating and breathing hard, finally. “I never noticed anything emotional.”
“So you called from L.A.,” Rosie said. He nodded, sweat dripping off his chin. “Why did you call her instead of the local police?”
Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) Page 6