Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

by Shelley Singer

  It took Harley a couple of minutes to answer the bell.

  “I was just out on the deck,” he said, a slight edge of sorrow to his voice. I followed him through an entry hall and a large living room. The sliding glass doors at the far end were partly open. We went outside onto the deck. The only deck, but a big one, around fifteen by twenty-five or thirty feet, furnished with a redwood table and two small benches, two lounge chairs, and a redwood rocker. On the table was the folder I’d seen him put in his briefcase. He’d been working. Everything was very neat and in its proper place. Harley sat in one lounge chair and I took the other.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked politely. He didn’t look capable of getting out of the chair again, so I said no, maybe later. He sat gazing out over the railing at the wooded hillside. Eucalyptus trees, a rural feeling of privacy, a view of San Francisco that must have been spectacular at night. A warm breeze carried autumn dampness, the hint of rains to come, and the tang of the eucalyptus.

  “Tell me how it was when you came home yesterday,” I prodded. “Describe everything you saw.” He shrugged as if to say, “I suppose I have to.”

  He had arrived home just before noon, parked his BMW next to his wife’s Audi and walked down to the front door. He inserted his key in the deadbolt, turned the key, and found the door unlocked. Only the spring lock in the doorknob, the one that caught when the door was closed, was locked.

  “Was that normal?” I wanted to know.

  “Yes,” Harley replied. “She was careless. I used to remind her all the time about keeping the house secure when she was in it. She never listened.”

  “And then?” I urged him to continue the story.

  He had entered the hall, set his briefcase on the hall table, gone into the living room, and noticed that the door to the deck was open. He had walked out onto the deck and stepped to the railing. I got out of my lounge chair and went to the railing, trying to picture how things had been. I looked out and across the bay to San Francisco, The City.

  Then I looked down into the garden below the deck, down to where the hill dropped away from the house.

  “She was right down there,” Harley said. “Margaret. Lying on her back. I could see her eyes. I knew she was dead.” I nodded. It was a thirty-foot drop, but my imagination told me he would have been able to see that much. His wife, nestled crookedly on her back among the rockroses and acanthus. Lying perfectly still, her blank and foggy eyes staring up at him.

  I turned back to Harley. “Okay, let’s take it from the beginning. Why were you home so early?”

  “I don’t have any classes on Monday.”

  “But you went to your office anyway? Did you have an appointment?”

  “No. I like to work there. On my book. My manuscript.” He waved his hand toward the folder on the table. “But they wouldn’t let me work. Those idiots. The ones you saw today. They were out there chanting. I couldn’t concentrate. That’s probably what they want. To interfere with my work. Bunch of Nazi book burners.”

  “But you did have classes today?” I was wondering what the hell he’d been doing at work the day after his wife’s death.

  “I would, normally. Someone else will be taking them for a few days.” He caught my quizzical look and bridled. “I went there today because I had to get out of the house. Is that so strange?” No, I guessed it wasn’t.

  “What’s your book about?”’ I asked. I didn’t really care, but I’ve heard that writers hate that question. Harley didn’t.

  “Well, broadly, it’s about the absurdity of political systems. None of them work, after all. Never been one I’d care to live with. You know,” he said thoughtfully, “back in the sixties there was a lot of feeling that socialism could solve our problems. I never went along with that, but I could live with the kind of people who felt that way, and the things they believed in.” He sighed nostalgically. “I was a teaching assistant then. Pretty involved with the antiwar movement. The students and I—well, we got along. I was one of them. But now!” he snorted. “It’s like the fifties all over again. Do you remember what things were like then?” I nodded. “I certainly never thought we’d go back to that. On the campus. And at Berkeley!”

  I remembered the fifties all right. And like anyone else my age with pretensions to individuality, I remembered them with distaste. But then, I had mixed feelings about the sixties, too. Harley’s indignation brought to mind that old curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Harley didn’t mind living in interesting times. He just wanted them to be interesting his way.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s all pretty disgusting. Now, let’s take things back to when you first got home. Before you called the police. Did you notice anything unusual? In the house or on the deck?”

  He shrugged, scratched his jaw, and tried to think.

  “Well, not in the house. Not that I noticed. I don’t know. What do you mean?”

  “Just describe everything you saw when you came out here.”

  “Uh huh. The sliding glass doors were open. I walked through.” He closed his eyes, trying to visualize. He was getting into the spirit of things now. I waited silently for him to go on. “Her coffee cup was on the table. And a bowl of apples. That was odd.”

  “The coffee cup?”

  He waved a hand at me. “No, no, the apples. A bowl of them. They weren’t out there when I left in the morning.”

  “So?”

  He drummed his fingers on his thigh and cocked an eyebrow, Basil Rathbone fashion. “We kept fruit around the house, of course, Mr. Samson. But Margaret rarely ate any. I think that’s significant.”

  I caught on. “Oh, like you mean she was offering fruit to a guest?” I was not too impressed. He noticed.

  “Exactly.”

  I let him have his way. “Could be,” I said, pursing my lips. “What else did you see?”

  “Well, I saw her. From up here.”

  “That’s all? You didn’t go down to look at her?”

  He glared at me. “I couldn’t. Besides, I told you, I could tell she was dead. Her eyes. I was pretty sure.”

  “Anything else?” There had to be something else, or the police wouldn’t be investigating a homicide.

  “I didn’t see anything else.” He was getting snippy again.

  “And the neighbors?” The closest neighboring houses were barely visible through the trees. “Did they see or hear anything?” He shook his head.

  I stood up, went to the railing and looked down.

  “How do you get down there?” I asked. I knew the police would have checked over that hillside pretty carefully, and even if they’d missed something, there wasn’t much chance I’d find it in the wake of many official feet. But the only way to begin is to look at whatever there is to see.

  Harley led me back inside the house, back through the living room, and down a flight of stairs to what used to be called a rumpus room. It didn’t look like there’d ever been a rumpus in it. Very neat, with a plaid couch and fake Early American furniture. Even a spinning wheel lamp.

  We hadn’t hit bottom yet. We went out the door of the rumpus room and down some concrete steps past what looked like a pretty good-sized basement. When the steps ended, we were at the top of the slope. To our left was the front wall of the basement. To our left and about thirty feet above our heads was the deck.

  “Where was she?” Harley thought for a moment, then sidled over under the deck, looking at the sloping ground. I followed him, walking the way I usually do.

  “I guess it was right about there,” he said. It? Funny way to talk about a dead woman you’d been married to. I looked where he pointed and saw a whole constellation of crushed plants, mostly acanthus. The area he’d pointed out looked only a little messier than the rest of the hillside. It wasn’t hard to tell where the law had been. They’d left a trail of broken plants and gouges in the landscape. I kicked a few rocks loose myself on the way down.

  I knelt on the hard-packed stony clay, du
sty from the rainless California summer, and searched the crushed greenery. No blood that I could see. Without looking up, still dissecting the ground with my eyes, I asked him another question.

  “About the broken neck—did you hear anything else about her? Any other injuries?” I didn’t hear his answer, so I looked up at him. He was shaking his head. Terrific. For all I knew the woman had a broken neck and a bazooka wound in her back. “No other marks that you could see?” He shook his head again.

  I figured I’d done my token search-the-scene act and that there wouldn’t be much profit in poking around anymore. Even if I found something, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. I climbed back up and stood next to Harley under the deck.

  “Well?” he said.

  I ignored the challenge. “Any idea who might have wanted to kill your wife? Did she work? Any trouble with anyone at her job?”

  “No. She didn’t work. She didn’t do anything, except of course belong to her groups.”

  “Groups?”

  “A therapy group. And a meditation group. She said they were attempts at self-definition.” He shook his head sadly, the wise man confronted with foolishness.

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, she used to be an artist, but she hadn’t done anything with it for a while.”

  “Was she a dabbler or was she a professional?”

  “Oh, professional. Actually quite well known at one time.”

  “Why aren’t you willing to leave it to the police?”

  “Because the police deal in the obvious, and I want the real killer found before they stir up a lot of trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  My obtuseness exasperated him. He answered me with a series of questions. “Isn’t it true that the first suspect is always the spouse? Or maybe someone the spouse is, uh, seeing on the side? If the police really get going on this, wouldn’t there be all sorts of problems and publicity and maybe even arrest for the spouse or the spouse’s—”

  “Lover?” I finished, irritated with his indirectness. He nodded, flushing slightly.

  “You should have heard the questions they asked me,” he wailed. “I expected to be arrested right then and there. When did I leave the house that morning? Was she in good spirits? Were we having any marital problems? I want someone investigating this from my side. I want you to solve it before the police decide to throw me to the wolves. I don’t trust them. They know my record. In the sixties—well, anyway. I can’t prove I didn’t kill her before I left the house. And there’s someone else they might start harassing.” He looked at me significantly.

  “Rebecca Lilly,” I said resignedly and stared out over the eucalyptus trees at the smog-tinted view of San Francisco. I didn’t think the police gave a damn about Harley’s politics, old or new, but they might, indeed, give a damn about his love life. I told him I would think it over.

  “I need to know now,” he objected. “We have to work fast.”

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow,” I told him. There were some people I wanted to talk to that night.

  – 3 –

  Harley had assured me that he and Rebecca had been more than careful to keep their affair secret, so I thought I might have a little time to nose around before the cops started hitting too hard on either one of them. That helped. But I was going to need some kind of cover for my investigation. A private citizen wandering around trying to solve a homicide needed to have some kind of explanation for his peculiar behavior. I didn’t think the Oakland police department would take Harley’s ten-thousand-dollar offer as an explanation.

  I had some ideas about how to deal with that problem as well as a couple of others, but I couldn’t take the job until I knew for sure. Fortunately, the problem-solving involved a couple of guys I played poker with, so I could keep my one-day promise to Harley without sacrificing my weekly ritual.

  Then there was Rebecca. I wanted to talk to her before I made a decision. She’d gotten me into this in the first place.

  I came down out of the Oakland hills to the realities of the flatlands. As usual, my liquor store’s parking lot was overfull, and I had to squeeze my car into a diagonal position that practically guaranteed a dented fender. Also as usual, I took my chances, since there is no such thing as a poker game without beer and chips. I bought a newspaper, too.

  When I emerged from the store, I saw that I’d been lucky. The same cars were parked on either side of me. No dents. I slid behind the wheel and glanced at the paper. A small story, at the bottom of page one. It didn’t have anything in it that I didn’t already know.

  By the time I pulled up at my gate it was nearly four o’clock, and my tenant, Rosie Vicente, was home from work. Her pickup truck with its padlocked toolbox was sitting stolidly out in front. Rosie’s a carpenter, self-employed. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days and decided to stop at her cottage to see if she’d drink a beer with me before I went on back to my house.

  The usual setup for a house and cottage is big house in front, small cottage in back. Not my place. The front was fifty feet of occasional and self-reproducing vegetable garden and dirt driveway with patches of paving here and there. Beyond the garden there’s a clump of bamboo coexisting with a stand of acacia trees. Behind that prolific camouflage is the cottage with its tiny yard and, to the left of that, the path going back toward my front yard and my tiny house, surrounded by other people’s back yards and tall fences. Privacy and quiet.

  The top of Rosie’s Dutch door was open, but I knocked on the door frame anyway. Her bed was just a few feet away, and respect for each other’s privacy was the best way I knew to ensure continued friendship.

  She came to the door dressed in cutoffs, work boots and heavy socks, and a T-shirt decorated with the head of Gertrude Stein. Rosie is a knockout, about five foot five with curly black hair, cut short, and peacock blue eyes. She’s always slightly tan from working outdoors. She’s in her early thirties. We’ve been friends for two years, ever since she first rented the cottage. Just friends. She smiled and invited me in. Her aging standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, also has curly black hair and also smiled and welcomed me.

  I pulled two beers out of my sack, and her smile got even brighter. I followed her past her bed around the ell to her kitchen table.

  “What’s new, Jake?”

  We sat and looked out the big casement windows into her shady, fuchsia-draped yard. I noticed a small pile of lumber under the acacia. She had mentioned that she was going to build a curved seat around its trunk.

  I shrugged. “I may be getting involved in a job. If I do, I may need your help from time to time, feeding Tigris and Euphrates, that kind of thing.” Tigris and Euphrates, my sister and brother cats, were very particular about being fed on time. Mutual pet-sitting in a pinch was part of the agreement Rosie and I had.

  “Sure. If you’re not around I’ll just deal with it.” She took a swig of beer and looked at me quizzically. “What kind of job? Anything interesting? Anything you might need help with?” She knew I’d been involved in some pretty disreputable chores in the past.

  “Could be,” I said carefully. “Sounds like you’re bored.”

  “I am. Busy but bored. Decks, decks, and more damned decks. I haven’t built anything complicated since last year. And winter’s coming.” If the season was particularly rainy, there’d be days at a time when she did no work at all. “And my love life? Yech. Look at that.” She pointed to her desk, and I could see that her evenings had been pretty solitary lately. The desk top was piled with paperbacks—science fiction and murder mysteries: Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Fritz Leiber.

  I nodded sympathetically. I suspected she just hadn’t gotten over her last lover. The relationship with Marge had ended only six months before. It hadn’t been a good one, but I knew from my own experience that doesn’t make the final, irrevocable loss any easier.

  “Well, I don’t know if I’ll even take the job.”

&
nbsp; She threw me a suspicious look. “You still haven’t told me what it is.”

  “Oh,” I said casually, “someone got killed.”

  “Killed?” She glanced at the books on her desk. “Do you mean murdered?” Her face was a study. She was having trouble choosing between regret and excitement. Not fear. Oh, no, not Rosie. And how could I tell her I didn’t want to involve her in anything that might be dangerous? She would have been righteous indignation itself. She would have accused me of being protective, Macho. She wouldn’t believe that I would feel the same way about a close male friend. Not to mention a good tenant.

  “Yeah, well, maybe. Or manslaughter. Or suicide, but—”

  She grinned at me. “Look, Jake, it’s okay. If you don’t feel you need someone to help you—you know, protect you—I’ll understand.”

  I just grinned back at her, finished my beer, and stood up to leave. “Got to make a phone call. If I decide I need a bodyguard, I’ll let you know.”

  Tigris and Euphrates came running to meet me as I approached the house, sucking in their cheeks and trying to make their chubby sides concave, mewling the duet from “The Starving Kitty.”

  I fed them. They would never have allowed me to talk on the telephone otherwise. Then I called Rebecca Lilly’s office. She was there.

  We hadn’t talked for more than a year. Her voice was the same, low and raspy with soft edges of humor and sex. I told her I wanted to see her and asked about lunch the next day. She agreed and said I should pick her up at home. She had been planning to take the morning off anyway. I figured she didn’t want anyone connected with Harley coming anywhere near her office.

  It was still early. Plenty of time for a long shower before dinner. I stripped and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, a confrontation I’d been avoiding. With some pain, I had to admit it was getting to be that time again. In the past couple of years, my spare tire had had an alarming tendency to grow, and the usual measures—a week or so of cutting down a little on food—just didn’t seem to work anymore.