I went back to my room and sat down on my cot.
At five-thirty, I went to get Chloe. We drove north into Sonoma County, to Santa Rosa, and had a family-style Basque dinner. A lot of food served by a large, motherly woman. Perfect for my mood.
“Tell me what you’re thinking of doing about work,” I said.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said. “What’s worse, I don’t know what I want to do. But I’ve been making good money. I can hang on for a while until I find something.”
“What about your staff? They might need to start looking, too. What are you going to tell them?”
“The truth. They’re young. They’ll do okay. Except for Bert.”
“Betrayed and abandoned,” I said.
“The man’s pathetic, Jake. I would have expected you to feel more pity.”
She was right. The problem was, I figured the best course at the moment was to feel pity for no one but Alan— that was hard— Artie, Julia, Jennifer, and me.
After dinner we drove into Petaluma, about halfway between Santa Rosa and Novato. Petaluma used to be called the chicken capital of the world. I don’t know what it’s the capital of now, but that night we heard some great bluegrass at a cafe there.
“When this case is over,” Chloe said later, “you’ll be going back to the East Bay, won’t you?”
“Sure. But it’s not like I live in Santa Barbara or someplace. We’ll see each other. Often.” I meant it. “Besides, maybe you won’t be staying in Marin.”
“Maybe.”
I did everything I could that night to reassure Chloe that this was a relationship, not a convenient affair. And she did everything she could to reassure me.
33
Bill arrived promptly at noon. He looked like he’d had a good weekend. I could hear Rosie hammering away down below.
“Fund-raiser go okay?”
“Real good. We’re almost out of debt.”
I told him I was glad to hear it and offered him a beer. I’d borrowed two cans from Rosie’s cooler. We talked for a while about the coming custody hearing, but he got impatient with that.
“This isn’t what you wanted to talk to me about, Samson. Why don’t we just get to it?”
“Okay, but first I want to show you something. Come on.” I led him out the door and down the lane. By the time we got to the footbridge he was getting a little fidgety.
“Is this the spillway, where—”
“Yeah.”
We climbed the path all the way up to the crevasse. “This is probably where it happened, Bill,” I told him. “Here’s how it went. The killer met your father here. Maybe they fought, maybe it happened suddenly. The killer stuck the knife in your father’s gut. Maybe he died right away, maybe not. Then the killer took him and dumped him into the spillway somewhere up here.”
Bill was very pale. “What are you telling me this for? I didn’t ask for a tour. I don’t need this—”
“I think maybe you do.” He shot me an angry look. “There was a lot more water in the spillway then. It carried your father all the way down. It was a rough trip. Somewhere along the way, the knife fell out.”
“Look, you son of a bitch…”
“All the way down to the bottom.” I pointed down the course of the spillway to the ditch, barely visible through the brush. “Down to that ditch. Where he got stuck in some branches. That’s where they found the body. In the ditch.”
Bill turned abruptly and started down the path. I caught up with him.
“Come on back to my place for a few minutes, Bill. We’ve got more to talk about.”
“I don’t think we do.”
“You left your jacket there. Come on. We’ll have another beer.”
“I don’t want your fucking beer.” But he came with me. He was looking sick.
We walked back across the bridge and along the lane to my room. I sat him down but he stood up again, reaching for his jacket.
“I’m sorry I had to do that, Bill. I just thought you ought to know, see it for yourself.”
“Very sensitive of you, Samson. I think I’ll just go, now. Unless you’ve got more games in mind. Like showing me a run-over cat.”
“Bill, no one deserves to die that way. And the kid the police are holding doesn’t deserve what’s happened to him. I think you can help.”
He quieted down. He was looking at me suspiciously, but he was interested. “What am I supposed to do about it,” he demanded. “Confess?”
“Just give me a few more minutes of your time.”
“All right,” he snapped, “talk.”
“Sure. But I think I need another beer.” I really did. “How about you?”
He shrugged, watching me coldly, still standing and getting skittish again.
“Here,” I said, tossing him my copy of the Marin Journal of the Arts. “Just let me go get the beer. Relax. Get a little culture. Bunny says you like films. Read a film review. I’ll be right back.”
“You’re stalling. What are you stalling for?”
“I’m not stalling. I just want to get a beer.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. But he opened the magazine and sat.
Rosie was sawing on a piece of railing on the landing near her door. She looked at me. I nodded. She stopped sawing and trotted down to where her truck was parked on the canyon floor. Then I waited a couple of minutes, standing just inside her room.
I would either have to take two more beers back upstairs or— I didn’t have to. Someone was running down the steps. He passed the landing. Bill. He couldn’t see me. I let him get all the way down. I waited until I heard a car start and churn gravel out of the canyon. I ran downstairs. Rosie was standing beside her truck.
“White Toyota!” she yelled. “And I’m not going with you.”
I envied her. I swung my Chevy around and skidded out the entrance. No white Toyota in sight. I drove too fast for the narrow, winding road, and, after a quarter of a mile, spotted the car taking a curve ahead of me. I managed to stay one curve behind him all the way to Miller Avenue. When he pulled out into the sparse traffic, I let three cars fill the gap between us.
He pulled in at a meter in the municipal parking lot near the bus station, not stopping to feed it a quarter.
I gave him a couple of minutes, then I followed him into Mary’s Bookstore.
The two men were facing each other. They didn’t notice me come in.
“You didn’t know your old teacher was living here, did you Bill?” I said. They both swung toward me.
Bill was whiter than he’d been at the spillway. Eric was gaping at me. I was glad to see that Mary wasn’t around. After all, she had told me that Monday was her usual day off.
But Sergeant Ricci was there, a book in his hands, standing near a rack of best-sellers.
“Carlota told you,” Eric croaked.
Bill closed his eyes. “No,” he said softly. “I’m the one who told him. It looks like I told him. Again.”
34
When I’d called Sergeant Ricci that morning to tell him everything Rosie and I had learned, he’d been skeptical. When I’d laid out our plan for tricking Bill into identifying his former teacher, he’d said it was a dumb-ass idea and had given me the required earful about amateurs messing with law enforcement. He’d also said he’d do some checking around himself.
So I’d been very relieved to see him at the bookstore. I couldn’t very well expect Eric to fall into my arms and let me lead him quietly away, but he didn’t give Ricci much of an argument. He didn’t give him anything else, either. Not right then. After his initial indiscreet remark about Carlota, he clamped his mouth shut and didn’t open it again until his lawyer told him to.
Aside from all the other evidence against him, the law found it hard to believe that Eric hadn’t lied to the sheriff’s people, way back at the beginning, when they’d asked all the canyon residents if they knew the victim.
Eric would have found it hard to forget James
Smith, even after twenty years. Like Bill, all he had needed was the face and the right name to go with it.
The face of a student’s father. The face of a man who came to him, and accused him, and told him he was going to lose his job. Because Smith believed in warning people of his intentions. Not the kind of meeting that slips a man’s mind later on. Especially when the threat is real, and the man loses his job, his home, and his family.
First the job went, then the home. Eric had trouble finding work, and his wife had trouble dealing with his emotional problems and with the gossip that was inevitable in the small suburb where they lived. Their teenage daughter had an even harder time. The family moved to Chicago. The kid started getting in trouble at school. Eric tried to talk to her. She accused him of ruining her life. He broke and went off on a two-week bender. By the time he got back home, his daughter had run away. To California, the goodbye note said.
Eric left his wife in Chicago and went off to find the girl. After a month of futile wandering, a letter from his wife caught up with him at the home of a friend in Los Angeles. She was filing for divorce. He never found his daughter, and he never went back to the Midwest. He met Mary, who took him in and supported him, held him up until he could stand on his own a little better, and made him a partner in her bookstore.
They bought a house in the canyon.
One day, while he was checking out the spillway for winter damage, he found a hunting knife on the trail. The knife was engraved with the owner’s initials. He had a neighbor with those initials. Artie. A. P. But no one was home at the Perrine house, and he didn’t want to leave a good knife out in the damp, so he took it home and forgot about it.
A few days later, James Smith walked into the store to buy a birthday present for Bunny.
“And Smith recognized Eric?” Chloe interrupted my storytelling. The three of us— Rosie, Chloe, and I— were sitting around Chloe’s living room waiting for a pizza to be delivered. Alice and Achilles, the German shepherd, were sleeping butt to butt in front of the potbelly stove.
“No,” I said. “Not right away. He brought one of the journals up to the counter and asked Eric if he thought it would be a good present for his sixteen-year-old daughter. Eric said he thought it would be. Then he took a second look at his customer.”
“And knew who he was?” Chloe obviously wanted to get to the good part faster. She knew a lot of it already, of course. Some from me, some from news coverage. But we had the full story now, and she was eager for details.
“He wasn’t sure,” I told her.
He rang up the sale and initiated a friendly “do-you-live-around-here” conversation. Smith said yes, as a matter of fact, his family liked the area so much he was planning on building a new house just outside town.
That was when Eric was sure that the odd coincidence in names he’d run across recently was not a coincidence at all. James Smith was an almost ridiculously ordinary name. He’d had no reason until that moment to think that the man who was buying a lot in the canyon was the James Smith he had known twenty years before and two thousand miles away.
“I’m glad you still have a daughter to buy presents for,” Eric had said. “I haven’t seen mine for a long time. You used to live in Chicago, didn’t you?”
Yes, Smith admitted. He had moved to California with his company. Did he know Eric from somewhere? He looked familiar, but…
Eric couldn’t take it. The man had ruined his life and then had just forgotten him. He told him who he was.
“And you’re James Smith,” he said. “The same damned James Smith.” He accused him of causing trouble everywhere he went. “But that’s all right, this time I’ve got the law on my side. I know what you’re doing and I’m going to stop you.” Then he told him to get out of his store and never come back.
For weeks, Smith had been agonizing over the situation at Bright Future, over his suspicions about Morton’s sales empire. Although he had heard that there might be some question about the availability of the lot, it never occurred to him that what he was “doing” had anything to do with the canyon. When you work for a crooked company, and someone who hates you starts yelling about the law, you’re going to assume that’s what he’s yelling about.
So Smith got scared. He decided right then that he’d better take the headmaster offer and get out fast. He went home and announced to his family that they would be moving. And as Bunny had said, he wasn’t lying when he told his wife that it wasn’t because of anything that had happened that day at work.
“Wait a minute,” Chloe objected. “How do you know that Smith thought Eric was talking about Bright Future?”
I didn’t get a chance to answer right away because the pizza arrived. We moved our conversation to the table.
“Because of something Smith said later on, to Eric,” Rosie explained.
“Yeah,” I said. “Give me a chance to get to it.” I took a big bite of pizza.
“Now that his mouth is full,” Rosie said, “I’m going to tell some of this.”
She picked up where I’d left off. Eric said later that seeing Smith again had caused him to do “some brooding” about his lost daughter. But he insisted that he calmed himself down and concentrated on keeping Smith from getting the canyon property. He talked to both Mary and Hanley and offered them any help he could give them— Hanley testified to this— in preparing their case against the sale.
In the canyon a couple of days after that meeting with Smith, he ran into Mike, whom he recognized vaguely as Artie’s son. He remembered the hunting knife, mentioned that he had something of Artie’s and would drop it by. He’d said “had,” not found, and both Mike and Artie had assumed it was something he had borrowed, maybe from Julia.
He didn’t get around to returning the knife until the following Sunday morning. He’d been crossing the footbridge on his way to Artie’s when he’d seen Smith walking up the trail. He’d followed him.
Not, of course, with anything violent in mind, he said. All he wanted to do was tell Smith he might as well give up any idea of buying the lot because the canyon residents were going to fight him. They hadn’t yet found the documents they needed, but Mary was sure they existed and would be found.
At the top of the trail, near the lip of the spillway, Smith turned to see Eric coming up behind him.
Eric started to say what he’d planned to say. But Smith, he said, started jabbering about his job, for some reason Eric didn’t understand. He told Eric he couldn’t threaten him anymore, that there was nothing he could do to him because he’d resigned. Eric, he said, could do anything he wanted to do about Bright Future.
“Ah hah!” Chloe said. “And then?”
Rosie was starting her third wedge of pizza, so I picked up the narrative.
“And then Smith got nasty.”
According to Eric, Smith called him a bum and a criminal. He asked Eric what had happened to his daughter, the one he hadn’t seen in years. Had he managed to ruin her life, too? Like he’d ruined Bill’s?
Eric was sickened and enraged by the reference to his child. He started to feel dizzy, he said, and confused. And still the tirade went on. Something about how Bill was trying to pass his sickness on to another child, but he, Smith, was going to save her. Something about saving a little girl from the likes of Eric.
Anderson says now he has no idea how it happened. He says he went crazy, found the knife in his hand, and used it. He doesn’t remember anything about throwing the body in the water, but he admits that he must have. He does remember falling in the mud afterward, picking himself up and running away.
There’s no way to know whether his story was true. Rosie thinks it is, but I’m not so sure. In any case, his version of things didn’t get him off with the voluntary manslaughter verdict his lawyer was trying for. The jury did go along, though, with second degree murder, because the prosecution couldn’t prove premeditation.
“And Rosie,” I concluded, turning the floor over to my friend, “was the
one who really got things moving along the right lines.”
Rosie explained that all the time she’d been working on those steps, she’d wondered about Eric’s visits with Carlota. She said they looked like duty calls. He obviously wasn’t having an affair with her. Just as obviously, he didn’t really like her all that much.
Then Carlota referred to him as a “colleague,” and that made her wonder even more. He reviewed films, but he didn’t make them. If he were also a filmmaker, Rosie was sure, the blurb under his review would have said so. Did artists think of critics as colleagues? She didn’t think so. Then she saw the lousy films he’d said were so great. Including the one that showed Carlota had a good view of the lane from her living room mirror.
When she finally hit Carlota with some solid questions, she got some interesting answers. Carlota made her living as a teacher. Eric was an ex-teacher, and therefore a colleague.
And Carlota had been spending a lot of time with her mirrors the morning of the murder. She had, as a matter of fact, seen Eric rushing home along the lane, beyond her own reflection, earlier that morning. She had wanted to talk to him about the review he had said he would do of her films. She dashed out to her kitchen deck, hailing him. He had hesitated, yelling back that he would talk to her later, and continued on to his house.
She had assumed, she told Rosie, that he wanted to go home because he was all muddy. At least she remembered seeing some mud.
Carlota, it seemed, had begun her wine drinking early that day. If the films were any indication, Carlota’s “creative sparks” were often alcohol-fueled. So she missed something that Eric was sure, once he got home and saw it himself, she must have seen. A splash of blood on his shirt. Along with the mud.
He went back to see her that afternoon and told her all about the wonderful review he was going to write. She didn’t mention the blood. He thought if he took good care of her ego, she never would.
Carlota had never felt, she said at the trial, that his appearance on the path had any significance. It was his job, after all, to inspect the spillway in the spring.
Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) Page 21