There are fancier and maybe even better restaurants in Mendocino, but I like the Pelican. Good seafood, good prices, and great service. There’s a big, friendly bar upstairs that sometimes has live entertainment in the evenings. This was still afternoon, but for the moment, brandy would be entertainment enough.
The bar was on the right, the windows on the left, facing the street. The wall behind the bar sloped up to the beamed ceiling, and all the walls, including the sloping one, were covered with paintings. The paintings, which were new since the last time I’d been there, were mostly very big. The biggest ones looked, at first glance, like some kind of series by the same artist. Since several of them were up behind the bar, I figured I could have my brandy while I got a better look at them.
The bartender was a medium-sized, medium-looking man who was a bonier version of the Han Martin physical type. Sandy, a little tough. He was fast with the brandy and slow to take a tip. I held the snifter cupped in my hands like you’re supposed to, to warm the stuff, and looked up at the art work. The first thing I noticed was that the paintings had a few qualities that a lot of the art you see around seems to lack. For one thing, the artist could draw. For another, he or she had worked at the craft, apparently recognizing that art without craft is so much diarrhea. I didn’t just like the paintings because the subject matter looked real— whatever that’s called. I like a lot of art that is just color and form. I liked these because the artist had talent and discipline. It took me a few minutes to catch on to the series, but once I figured out that the woman getting the stays laced tightly around her wasp waist could only be Scarlett O’Hara, I was able to identify some of the other characters. There was Rick, wearing a trenchcoat, watching the plane take off from the Casablanca airfield. Henry VIII was eating. Tugboat Annie was at the wheel of her vessel.
But there was something odd about the paintings. The faces. They weren’t the faces of Bogart or Laughton or Dressler or Dietrich or Lombard or Colbert. Nor were they imagined or idealized. They were real, individual, genuine-person faces.
That was when I noticed the guy three barstools down. He was the Thief of Baghdad.
The bartender caught me looking from the painting to the man and back again.
“That’s right,” he said. “They’re all people who live here in town. The artist’s local. Comes in a lot. He’s Gary Cooper in High Noon.”
“You bought all those paintings from him?”
“Nah. Too expensive. We rent them. He needs the money right now. Child custody problems. Rough situation.”
“I’m here to see a man named Bill Smith,” I said. “Is he up there somewhere?”
“Henry Fonda,” he said. “Grapes of Wrath.” He wandered off down the bar to give the Thief of Baghdad another drink.
I finished my brandy and left the bar. It was still only about six o’clock and I wasn’t particularly hungry, so I thought I’d head back to the inn and see if I could catch Smith.
This time there was someone already behind the counter, a thin young man of about twenty, with his nose in what is usually called a slim volume— somebody’s poetry or something.
“Hello,” I said affably.
He looked up slowly and spoke coldly and politely. I guessed he was probably reading cold and polite poetry.
“Can I help you?”
“Sure can,” I said. “I’m in room 2C—”
“Oh, good,” he said, relaxing. “I was afraid you were looking for a room and we don’t have any. I hate telling people that.”
“Uh huh. Well, I was wondering if the owner was around, because I’ve actually come all the way up here to talk to him.”
The thin young man suddenly became a slender young man, all by raising his eyebrows and tilting his head gracefully. Then he checked the book on the counter. “Samson? Jacob Samson?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’ll see if he’s here, Mr. Samson.” I figured that meant he was. The only question was whether he’d talk to me.
He would. The slender young man reappeared in about a minute.
“He’s in his office, Mr. Samson. Just go outside and around the house to your right. Follow the wooden walkway through the lilacs.”
18
Around the side and at the end of the walkway, there was a door with a sign on it that said “Office.” Beyond that, out in the back yard, was a small new building, half glass and half redwood, about twenty by twenty-five, with big skylights. It looked like everyone’s fantasy of an artist’s studio.
I knocked on the office door and was invited to come in.
I’d never seen James Smith, so I didn’t know what he looked like. Mrs. Smith was a fairly good-looking woman, and Bunny, at sixteen, showed a lot of promise. But the painting in the bar was accurate; this man was beautiful.
I don’t mean beautiful pretty. I mean beautiful the way— oh hell, not exactly like a Greek god, because his face was too contemporary. He didn’t have those Greek god lips that all those statues have, and his nose was longer than theirs and his hair wasn’t curly. But he looked like a perfectly handsome man. Perfectly. I would not want Iris to see him. I certainly didn’t want her to see him standing next to me.
He had straight, healthy-looking black hair cut short but falling softly over his forehead like the hair of a child. Green eyes, about the color of the Algerian ivy that’s pulling down my back fence. His skin had the faded winter tan of the Northern Californian who spends a lot of summer time outside. His eyelashes looked like they belonged on a Walt Disney kitten.
He stood to greet me. About six feet tall, maybe two inches ahead of me. His shoulders, in a soft pale blue sweater, were thicker than mine. His flanks were leaner. Of course he was several years younger.
He gestured toward a straight-backed chair at the end of his scarred oak desk. I sat. He sat.
“Okay,” he said. “I got a message that you wanted to talk to me about my father. But I don’t know who you are. Police?”
“No.” I pulled out my letter of agreement with Probe magazine, the one that says I’m working on a free-lance assignment for them. Smith looked at it and frowned handsomely.
“Probe? What exactly are you after? My father wasn’t well known. Not even to my mother.”
“Well, it’s not exactly your father I’m doing the piece on. I mean,” I said earnestly, “his death was pretty strange, and certainly belongs in any story about…” I hesitated, hoping he’d fill in the blank. He did.
“It’s that disgusting company, right? You’re doing an exposé on them— on their crooked business. Right?” I smiled and shrugged. “That’s terrific. Bunch of hypocrites. Self-righteous crooks. And my father was a real classic. Holy Jim Smith.” I managed to look a little shocked. After all, he was speaking of the dead. And his own father. “As you can see, I’m not mourning.”
“Yeah. I see. So you don’t think much of your father’s company. And you didn’t think much of your father. I’ve talked to your mother and your sister. Your mother gave me the impression he was a great guy. Honest, hardworking, righteous—”
Smith snorted, but there was no laughter in his eyes. Just a lot of anger, and, not very well hidden behind that, a lot of pain.
“Uh huh. A very righteous man. You want to believe that, go ahead.”
“I don’t want to believe anything. I’d like to hear what you think.”
“Okay. You’ve already talked to my sister. You know how he felt about me. Anyone who didn’t live up to his standards— his high moral standards— just didn’t belong in his world, just didn’t deserve to live at all. You want to hear a great story about my father?”
“Sure,” I said.
“It goes back twenty years. I was twelve, so it’s exactly twenty years. Dad wasn’t a teacher anymore. He was already working for Bowen. He’d been a high school teacher, see, and Bright Future was mostly just a high school program then. Anyway, he liked to— how did he put it?— keep his finger on the pulse of education. That’s wh
at I was for, I guess, pulse-taking. Bunny wasn’t born yet. I was the only kid he had. So we used to have these sessions, you know? Maybe every week or two. He’d sit me down and ask me about my subjects and how I was doing. My classes, my teachers. It was a big deal that year, because I was in seventh grade. Middle school. Anyway, he always wanted to know all about my teachers. Were they strict, that kind of thing. You know? Anyway, there was this one teacher, my homeroom teacher, and I took English from him, too. He was a great guy. I was crazy about him.” He shrugged. “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be crazy about him. I mean, kids hear stuff about that kind of thing, but it doesn’t really register as being personal or anything. Not for a while.” He was having trouble explaining himself. “Or maybe I was just more innocent than most boys my age.” He paused. “You probably don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I think I do,” I said. “Kids get crushes.”
“Yeah, well, it was different for this kid, but I didn’t know it yet. And I wasn’t any different from the guys I hung out with. I mean I didn’t play with dolls or anything.” He laughed. “Anyway, I guess I talked a lot about this teacher, or my father didn’t like the way I talked about him or something. So pretty soon, when we’d have our little talks, he’d get all casual and maybe toss in a couple of questions about this guy. Where’d he live, was he married, did he have kids, that kind of shit, you know?” I nodded.
“Was he married?” I asked. “Did he have kids?”
Bill threw me a disgusted look. “Yeah.”
“So what happened?” I asked, hoping to get to the punch line.
“Okay, so we had this little homeroom softball team, played against the other homerooms. And after one of those games, he had us over to his house for lemonade or some damned thing. Now you gotta remember, I was in love. When I went upstairs to use the bathroom I just had to look around, you know? Get closer to him by sniffing around. The bedroom door was closed, but I opened it and checked it out. Walked right in. And I saw some stuff on the dresser. His brushes, some of his wife’s shit, like that. And a little pipe with a piece of screen across the top and a little ash in the bowl. Women didn’t smoke pipes, I thought. This belonged to my teacher. This was his. Something of his. I took it. Stuck it right in my pocket, closed the door behind me and went back downstairs again.
“Anyway, my mother found it in my sock drawer and took it to my dad. He took it to some cop friend of his who told him what it was. My dad freaked out, old solid citizen came back to me, not screaming, you know, very calm and cold, and kept at me until I told him where I got it. I guess I even said something about the bedroom. That was the end of my homeroom teacher.”
“Drug bust?”
“Well, they tried. But they couldn’t find a trace of anything in his house. All they had was the pipe and they weren’t going to get any testimony out of me about that. I already felt shitty enough about letting my father bully it out of me. I shut my mouth and I wouldn’t open it again and they just didn’t have any proof.”
“So how was it the end of him?”
“My father went to his buddies on the school board, raving about dope and seduction. A man like that, he said, had no right to be teaching children. Had no right even to have a child of his own. I actually remember him saying that. Next thing I knew, my favorite teacher wasn’t a teacher any more. I heard later his whole life fell apart. And it was all my fault, with a lot of help from my father.”
He looked as though he were about to cry. Even now, after twenty years. A long-term load of guilt. I looked at my shoes to give him a second to recover.
He recovered fast. When I raised my eyes again, he no longer looked like he might cry. He looked very hard and very cold, just as his father must have looked when he was making the school system safe and clean for the son he later decided wasn’t worth the effort.
Then he laughed. “Sorry. I’m sure you didn’t want to hear all this. That righteous bullshit really set me off. The man was a menace. And a hypocrite. There he was, working for that crooked company, and making moral judgments about—”
“You say the company’s crooked. Do you know that?”
He shrugged. “Sorry, I can’t help you prove it. I wish I could.”
I was wishing he could, too. If there was really something illegal going on…
Smith interrupted my thoughts. “Listen, I’d like to help you out. If there’s anything I can do, all you have to do is let me know. But…” He waved a hand over the ledgers and papers on his desk.
“Yeah. I see you’re busy. If you come up with anything, give me a call.” I scribbled Artie’s phone number on a scrap of paper. He stuck it in his pocket. I stood up. “You’ve got a great place here. Looks like you’re doing a lot of work on it. Or were.”
He smiled. “Thanks. We’re working on it.”
Well, I hadn’t really expected him to explain that yes, he had some money problems because his savings had gone to hire someone to kill his father. You can’t win them all.
“Oh, by the way,” I said casually. “Where were you when your father was killed?”
He laughed. “I work on weekends. Always. Even a chance to kill my father wouldn’t pry me loose.”
I thanked him for his help, said I’d be around for another day or so if he thought of anything, and left him to his business.
Someone was hammering in the backyard. I heard the sound of it before I caught sight of the large man, out in front of the studio, tacking a canvas to a big stretcher frame.
“Hi,” I said. He looked up from his work and nodded at me, decided he didn’t know me, and went back to his canvas. That one quick look, though, told me who he was. Gary Cooper in High Noon. The artist who’d done the old movie series that was hanging in the Pelican bar.
“Hey,” I said. “You’re the guy that did those paintings, the ones with all the people in town.”
He looked up again. Warily. “Well, not all the people in town,” he said.
I trotted over to him, the cheery tourist. “I just wanted to tell you how much I like them.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said, leaning the canvas against the outside wall of the studio and taking his first really good look at me. “Want to buy one?”
“Wish I could.”
“Oh.” He reached for the canvas again, hesitated, and turned back to me. “You the guy wanted to talk to Bill about his father?”
I nodded.
“You sure you don’t really want to talk to me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Who are you?”
He stepped very close to me. He was a big man, and he was threatening me with his size. “Andy Tolberg. If you’ve got some business with me, I’d prefer it if you’d leave Bill alone.”
I was finding this conversation very confusing. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tolberg, but as far as I know I don’t have any business with you.”
He didn’t seem to believe me. “What are you doing up here?” he demanded.
I gave him my Probe magazine line.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You’re checking up on me. For my ex-wife. Me and Bill. Our business.” He jerked his large chin toward the hotel. “And our life together.”
That was when I’d remembered what the bartender had told me about this man being involved in a custody battle. And needing money to fight it through. Now I had the explanation for the half-finished renovations. And since he’d said “our life together,” I also thought I probably had the reason for the custody problem.
I backed away, hands raised, palms upward. Look, no weapons, nothing up my sleeve. “No. Absolutely not,” I told him. “I came up here to find out about Bill’s father. I don’t know anything about your ex-wife, and I don’t care.”
He glared at me. “Yeah? Maybe. But get it straight, I love my daughter. I want her with me. We could give her a good, decent home. A hell of a lot better than that damned pillhead of a mother of hers. And her slimy boyfriend.” He advanced again, closing the space I’d mad
e between us. “She’s my kid, too, for Christ’s sake!” Then he turned away abruptly, picked up his nearly stretched canvas, and stalked into his studio.
I walked back out to Main Street, feeling a little stunned by all the emotion I’d been exposed to in the past hour. Bill’s hatred. Andy’s rage. The town didn’t feel as peaceful to me as it had before. But then peaceful wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. I’d paid for two nights in Mendocino. That gave me plenty of time to wander around being subtle and clever and finding out a little more about the two men.
I checked out art galleries and I listened to gossip in the bars. The people at the art galleries were more interested in selling art than in talking about artists, and if the locals were talking about Bill’s murdered father they weren’t talking about him where strangers could hear. Or didn’t know he was Bill’s father. Or hadn’t noticed what might have been, to them, just another murder down in the Bay Area.
By the time Saturday night came around, I had myself convinced that I’d achieved nothing but my own depression. It didn’t matter that I’d added at least one good suspect to my list, and that I knew more about the victim than I’d known before. What did matter was that I liked Bill a lot better than I liked what I’d been hearing about his father. I was sure that whoever killed the guy had a hell of a good reason for doing it. If Bill was the killer, I sympathized with him. But then, my sense of justice sometimes doesn’t square with the law.
Like James Smith. The big difference between us, I told myself, was that my heart was in the right place.
On my way back to my room to shower and change for dinner, I stopped at the desk to have a chat with the slim young man. Smith had told me he’d been in Mendocino the day his father was killed. I wanted to check his story.
“Yes?” The young man lifted his eyes reluctantly from an L.L. Bean catalog.
“Hi. Thought I’d stop by and pick up my coupon.”
He looked blank. “Coupon.”
“Yeah. When I called in my reservation— let’s see, that was last weekend— Mr. Smith told me I would get a discount coupon for my next visit.” I’d talked to a woman when I’d called. Maybe he wouldn’t know when the reservation had been made.
Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) Page 12