Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2)

by Shelley Singer

  Praise for Shelley Singer

  “…one of the nicer guys in the private eye business, who operates in a relaxed, casual style without need for macho posturing.”

  —Washington Post

  “…surprising twists, and sharp-edged humor…”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Jake remains his loyal, intelligent and quirky self, which is plenty to rejoice about.”

  —Contra Costa Times

  “Ms. Singer is one of only three or four authors that I wouldn’t miss whatever she wrote.”

  —Over My Dead Body

  FREE DRAW

  A Jake Samson Mystery

  By Shelley Singer

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Free Draw

  Copyright © 1984 Shelley Singer

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 9781625172792

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: August 2013

  Cover by Andy Brown

  eBook (ePub and Kindle) editions by booknook.biz

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Free Draw

  Start Reading

  Full Table of Contents

  1

  I had not been in a good mood to start with the day my friend Artie Perrine called and told me, in his roundabout way, that he needed my help.

  I had a cold. My car was in the shop. The sun had poked through for awhile that morning, but the skies were gray with rain again by two. Just another day in a dismal and apparently endless Northern California winter. I couldn’t go anywhere and I couldn’t settle down to not go anywhere. I was as cranky as a slightly sick kid who has to stay in because the weather’s bad. Rainy day coloring books, hot soup for lunch.

  My cats, Tigris and Euphrates, were even crankier. The drizzle had driven them inside where they were threatening to shred the living room curtains if I didn’t make the rain stop.

  The phone rang just as I was deciding to have an afternoon beer.

  “I’m afraid,” Artie said sadly, “that I won’t be able to make it to poker Tuesday night.”

  Obviously, I was supposed to ask why. “Sorry to hear it,” I grunted.

  He waited a full ten seconds, then he said he had to see me right away and asked if I could drive out to his house in Marin County.

  “Can’t do it,” I told him. “No car.” I started telling him all about it. How my beautiful 1953 Chevy had gasped, stalled, and finally passed out in a cold March downpour in the middle of San Francisco rush hour. How I’d scraped my knuckles all to hell messing around under the hood. How I’d had to have it towed all the way across the Bay Bridge to my mechanic in Berkeley.

  He didn’t care. “Borrow one.”

  “Artie, what’s going on?”

  “Borrow a car. Or take a cab. I’ll pay for it.”

  “A cab?” I was shocked. I don’t know anyone who takes cabs from Oakland to Marin. It isn’t done. He had to be desperate if he was willing to spend that kind of money just to see me.

  “Just come. Please.”

  Okay, I said. I’d see what I could do. But I didn’t feel too great and why the hell couldn’t he come to the East Bay to talk to me?

  “Because my house is in an uproar. My wife is half crazy. I’m half crazy.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that. I’d put up as much of a fight as my conscience would allow. Artie and I were old friends. He needed me. He’d get me.

  The first thing I had to do was find some transportation. I called my tenant, Rosie Vicente, who lives in the cottage fifty feet from my house. She’s a self-employed carpenter and sometimes works weekends, but in the winter jobs are scarce. She was home.

  “Rosie? Can I borrow your truck for a few hours?”

  “Sure,” she replied instantly. “Just get it back by morning.”

  “No problem.”

  I dressed in two shirts, a thick sweater, a down vest, and heavy work boots, pulled my genuine Basque beret onto my stuffed-up head, and strolled down the path. Rosie was leaning on the sill of the bottom half of her Dutch door. Her black standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, joined her there, standing on her hind legs, paws on the sill, as I clomped up the steps.

  “Hot date?” Rosie wanted to know. Her short dark hair was tousled, her eyes soft. I wondered if she was in the middle of one herself.

  “Don’t I wish,” I said. I was standing to the side of the door so anyone who might be in Rosie’s bed would remain out of sight. Rosie and I are close friends and I want to keep it that way. She likes her privacy.

  She handed me the truck keys. I thanked her, said I’d see her later, sneezed once, and headed for the street.

  Rosie’s pickup isn’t as old as my car, but unlike the Chevy, it’s got its original engine. The truck is fifteen years old and has the personality of a senile housecat. Reliable and tough if you give it special handling with a gentle touch. Soft words to remind it to do right by the human who drives it. Like not drop its gas tank in the driveway, upchuck its oil, or collapse on the freeway.

  The truck started after the second try, coughed a little, and purred for me.

  In my own car, I can usually make it from Oakland-Berkeley across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and on down to southern Marin in about forty minutes. But Rosie’s truck gets shaky at anything over forty-five miles an hour, so I was forty minutes into the trip before I passed the San Quentin exit just across the bridge on the Marin side.

  I tried not to look at San Quentin. I always try, but it’s hard to miss. I used to try not looking at Alcatraz, but of course that island no longer serves its former interesting purpose, and the San Quentin monolith is now the only depressing sight on San Francisco Bay. In a place so beautiful, any ugliness, any misery, is more obvious and somehow more terrible. In the land of beautiful bridges, who wants to believe in trolls?

  Traffic was light going south on 101, so in fifteen minutes I was taking the Mill Valley cutoff and heading toward Artie’s canyon. The rain was falling softly and steadily. Rosie’s windshield wipers needed new blades. My throat tickled and my sinuses hurt. But what the hell, I thought, I was doing it— whatever it was— for Artie. Poker buddy. Old pal. And, in an offbeat way, a business partner. Artie was an editor of Probe magazine, an investigative monthly out of San Francisco. The autumn before, we’d made a working arrangement that earned me a nice chunk of money as an unlicensed and under-the-table private investigator and got Probe started on a circulation-building series about the radical right. I still carried the credentials that said I was a free-lance writer and gave me the cover I needed to take any other such jobs that might come along.

  The road to the canyon twisted narrowly through a tucked-in-the-trees residential area that included everything from old family mansions to log cabins from a kit. Most of the homes were obscured by trees, shrubbery, and the rise and fall of the land. If there hadn’t been a weathered wooden sign that said “Foothill Canyon” nailed to a tree, you’d have thought the graveled entrance was somebody’s driveway. A badly maintained driveway, at that, with deep chuckholes from the winter and no place for two cars to pass. I pulled up under a dripping redwood tree, two feet from a miniature rapids cutting into the sides of an overflowing drainage ditch, and
swung down from the truck, my boots slipping on the wet clay.

  Artie must have been peering through the trees, because I’d just started up the path to his house when I saw him coming down toward me. He met me halfway, about seventy-five feet along.

  “The body was down there,” he said, pointing toward the frothing ditch. “My nephew found it, and that’s how this started.”

  “Nephew? Body?” I was too busy climbing the muddy trail to react more intelligently. Stumbling over a rock, I grabbed for the base of a shrub, felt something move, and pulled my hand back, wiping the gummy mess off on my pants. Where my hand had been was a creature known in the area as a banana slug. Just picture a green banana covered with slime and crawling along the ground. One of the more prolific residents of the damp and mildewed beauty spots of Northern California. This one was now slightly wounded.

  “It’s my brother’s kid, from Des Moines,” Artie explained. “And his wife. And their baby. They’re all staying with us until they get settled. I don’t know how they’re going to get settled now. Stupid kid.”

  We had reached the slightly more secure footing of the half-dozen wooden steps that led to his front door. I was wondering where Artie was keeping this extraneous family. He and his wife, Julia, had a small house, with just about enough room for them and their twelve-year-old son. Two bedrooms. I was also wondering about the body he’d mentioned.

  The living room was a cluttered mess. A pile of luggage, cardboard cartons, and shopping bags huddled in a corner. The sofa bed was folded up, but there was bedding perched on one of its arms.

  Perched on its other arm was a red-eyed and very young woman.

  “Jennifer,” Artie said to her, “this is my friend Jake Samson.” Her eyes flickered and she tried to smile. A child of about two, with flaming orange hair, was toddle-falling around the room chuckling to itself and trying to get a good grip on the family golden retriever who, motherly creature though she was, looked a bit harassed and seemed to be trying to stay out of the child’s way.

  Julia was sitting in an overstuffed chair oozing emotional exhaustion, her eyes fixed on the baby as if it were about to go up in a puff of smoke. She turned her head and nodded to me, then spoke to her husband without shifting her gaze from my face.

  “Are you going to tell Jake about it, Artie?” The remnants of her New York accent somehow lightened the deeper accent of horror.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. “We’ll go into the bedroom.”

  “Good. I don’t want to go through it again.”

  “I know,” he sighed. “I don’t blame you.”

  I sat down on the bed. Artie paced.

  “So,” I said. “The body.”

  2

  “Well, Alan found it.” Artie’s a small guy with a bald spot that makes him look like Friar Tuck. He scratched his bald spot. “Jesus, Jake, it’s such a long story.” I crossed my legs and picked a pebble out of the sole of my boot.

  The long story, or at least the beginning of it, boiled down to this: Alan had found a dead man in the ditch that morning. He’d panicked, screamed, and run away. A neighbor had heard the scream, seen Alan running, and gone down to investigate. She had then called the police and told them she had seen Alan running from the scene of the crime.

  “She knew Alan, then?”

  “No, not exactly. She described him. The cops started questioning everyone they found in the canyon. No one was here but Alan. Jennifer was shopping. Julia and I like to go out for breakfast on Sunday. My son, Mike…”

  “Go on, Artie.”

  He sat down on a straight-backed chair and continued. “The cops talked to Alan. He said he didn’t know anything about any corpse or anybody running or anything at all. Only he was acting weird, and he fit the description they had, and sure enough, by the time we got home, the neighbor had identified him as the guy she saw.”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me why he lied to the cops.”

  “Well, that was just the first lie.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “They asked him why he hadn’t called them about finding the body and they asked him why he’d lied to them about finding it. And he gave them this long story about how he’d panicked, and how he’d never seen a corpse before, and how he went crazy when he saw the face and the staring eyes…”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know how he could be so stupid. Just got carried away, I guess. Like when he got married. He was only twenty when he got married.”

  “I don’t see why what he said was stupid. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me.”

  “Sure. Except the cops then asked him if he knew the guy and he said no.”

  “And he did?”

  Artie began pacing again. “Have you ever heard of Bright Future Correspondence School? Up in San Rafael?”

  I thought a minute. The name sounded vaguely familiar, and besides being tacky in and of itself, carried a funny smell along with it. I cocked an eyebrow and Artie answered the unasked question.

  “We’ve gotten some hints that there’s more than just a little sleaze behind that operation. No real proof, just the possibility. It’s one of those multilevel operations, and they suck in a lot of people. That’s okay if they keep it legal, but it’s tricky stuff—”

  “Maybe we can talk about that later,” I interrupted. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I still didn’t know why he was talking about it. “How does this involve your nephew?”

  “He was working there for me. Undercover. The dead guy was a Bright Future vice-president.” I nodded, waiting for more. “So, Alan finds the body and panics. If he gets involved, he reasons, there might be publicity, with Alan identified as living here in the canyon. With me. Which connects him with Probe. Which blows his cover. So the first thing he does is lie about finding the body.”

  “And the second thing he lied about was knowing the corpse.”

  “Right. Of course, the cops didn’t know right away that he lied about that. But they found out fast enough. I guess they put someone on the Bright Future angle right away and found out Alan worked there. That was when they came back to get him. Right before I called you.”

  “But they can’t hold him on that.”

  “I guess not. But they took him in for questioning and he’s not back yet.”

  My head was beginning to pound. Why wasn’t I home in bed? I looked at him. “Artie, I really don’t think you’ve got very much to worry about. All he has to do is explain about the undercover job. You can back him up on that. The cops will think he’s an idiot, but—”

  “There’s more. Something the police don’t know yet. Or at least I don’t know that they do. Another reason why Alan panicked. He’d had a big fight with the guy, at the office. This vice-president, this James Smith—”

  “James Smith? Is that an alias?”

  “Shut up and listen, Jake. Smith threatened to fire Alan. They had this big argument. Lots of witnesses. It was about a course Alan was working on. Alan told me it was garbage, and that they didn’t care what kind of shit they sold, and he just had to say something about it. I told him to for Christ’s sake keep his mouth shut and keep a low profile. Dumb kid. This is what I get for giving him work. Fresh out of journalism school. He needed work. What could I do? My brother’s kid, after all. I gave him work.”

  I sighed. Artie didn’t notice.

  “Okay,” I said. “Take it easy. Tell me this. Do you think maybe he could have killed the guy?”

  Artie glared at me. “He’s a journalism graduate, Jake. What kind of question is that, anyway?”

  I shrugged. This was Artie’s movie, not mine.

  “I was just wondering,” I said, “what this Smith was doing hanging around your ditch waiting to get killed.”

  It was Artie’s turn to shrug. “I don’t know where he was killed. The cops have been doing a lot of looking around up here and up top. See, that’s where the water comes from. There’s a ravine up there where
it collects, then it runs down the spillway to the ditch.” I remembered seeing some kind of stream running down the canyon side when I’d been struggling up the path to Artie’s house. “Alan says the body was a mess, like it could have washed all the way down.”

  “And now you want me to check things out.”

  Artie smiled hopefully.

  I thought about it. Once, for a year or so, Marin County had been my home ground. That was right after I came out from Chicago, a young ex-cop who’d had his trial by fire in the summer of 1968, the summer of the Democratic National Convention and the Yippies and the stink of tear gas and the feel of a kid’s blood on my nightstick. Sickened and afraid of myself, I’d fled to California. Flower Land. I’d lived in Marin, and Sonoma, and farther north in Mendocino, wandering around, picking up money where it could be found, falling into and crawling out of a bad marriage, and, eventually, tiring of woods and fields and the role of bitter expatriate and going back to the kind of urban environment I’d grown up in. Not Chicago. Never again Chicago. But the East Bay, with its ethnic neighborhoods and its crime and its vitality.

  I didn’t know Marin anymore. Maybe I knew my way around physically, but it wasn’t home. I didn’t know the cops. I didn’t know the attitudes. I thought of a few more excuses before I cut the bullshit and pushed the sad old memories out of the way. They had nothing to do with Artie’s problem. I could handle Marin if Marin could handle me.

  Artie was waiting for me to do something besides think and make faces. Suddenly it occurred to me that he hadn’t said anything about money.

  “Listen, Art. Investigations cost. Expenses. Things like that.”

  “Sure. Naturally.” He waved his hand at me. “I can manage the expenses. If they’re not too high.” He hesitated. “But, you know, I’m already helping to pay the lawyer—”

  “You’ve got a lawyer already?”

  “Well, certainly. The minute they took him in. And you know we just bought this house and the down payment pretty well drained our capital…” He let his sentence dribble off into nothing. And nothing was what we were talking about. For me. Artie was looking for a better poker hand without laying out any chips. A free draw.