The Gossiping Gourmet: (A Murder in Marin Mystery - Book 1) (Murder in Marin Mysteries)

by Martin Brown

  “Damn it,” Rob mumbled repeatedly to himself, oblivious to the lovely May morning that surrounded him. Among other things, Bradley’s killer was certainly guilty of lousy timing. Rob knew well that this was the curse of the weekly news outlet, particularly in an age of instant communication. Just like any endeavor, luck and timing play a large role.

  Having been the person who discovered Bradley’s body, this simple reality was particularly difficult. The Sausalito Standard’s lead story this week was: “Parks and Recreation Commission Reviews Plans for Proposed Dunphy Park Playground.”

  Not nearly as dramatic as: “Sausalito Standard Columnist Warren Bradley Brutally Murdered.”

  Still, Rob knew he had to focus on getting out the rest of the Standard’s weekly local editions. At the same time, he couldn’t help but wonder when the county’s daily newspaper would send a reporter to cover Bradley’s murder.

  Naturally, there was the paper’s online home page, but Rob used it sparingly, knowing that he did not have the budget to compete with the websites of major Bay Area newspapers, principally, The Marin Independent Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, and The San Jose Mercury. When a big story hit the day your weekly landed in-home, you had to wait seven days to have your full say.

  Rob also knew, however, that there was one very important silver lining; the dailies, and the chatter birds of the local TV and radio news broadcasts, no doubt would be all over the story for the next twenty-four hours. After that, there would be another sensational story to cover—say, a body found floating in the bay, or a politician found with someone else’s spouse, money, or both…a bank robbery and much more. That pack of news hounds have been well trained to always chase the scent of the new, new story of the day.

  For next week’s edition of the Standard, he’d be the one and only reporter covering the Bradley murder investigation—

  And that would hold his readers’ attention.

  In fact, depending on how the investigation and the story unfolded, Bradley’s slaying could be the Standard’s top story for weeks to come.

  Coverage of new streetlights in the downtown tourist district and new water-saving low-flush toilets being installed in all city facilities would just have to take a back seat to the Bradley investigation.

  When Rob dragged his tired body and frazzled mind up the long narrow steps to his offices, Holly was waiting breathlessly for him.

  “I called Karin. She told me you were already on your way down here. I tried your cell, but you didn’t pick up. Karin told me you were there—and that you saw the body! How cool is that? Pretty gruesome, huh?”

  “Who told you about Bradley?”

  “One of my neighbors. I ran into her as I was leaving for work. She’d heard it from two cops on Bridgeway. She passes them every morning on their way down to Café Divino for their morning lattes and bagels.” Holly’s brown eyes were twinkling, and her short black curly hair bounced up and down as she talked. She was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

  Rob knew she was never a fan of Warren’s—and in fact, every time she said his name, she prefaced it by calling him “that mean, sneaky little man.” Nor was she a fan of his column. But to Holly and Rob—and most likely to other Sausalito lifers as well—the circumstances surrounding Warren’s death had turned the gossiping gourmet into a local rock star.

  One of the Standard’s two phone lines began to ring. Two seconds later, the other started. Rob’s cell phone started to vibrate, and then Holly’s went off as well.

  “It really is going to be a long day, huh?” she said.

  In that first hour of phone calls, most of which Rob used as an excuse to end at least one call before taking the next, the one voice he was happy to hear was that of Eddie Austin.

  “So you’ve been assigned to the case?”

  “Duh, yeah.”

  “Can you stop up at the office?”

  “Yep. In fact, I’m two minutes away. I’ve got a few questions for you. Right now, you’re my number one suspect.”

  “Me?”

  “Sure, buddy! You had motive and opportunity. Bradley wrote a lousy column and you wanted to get rid of him. Happens all the time in your business. You dirty rat!”

  “Very funny, asshole.”

  “Chillax! It’s just a working theory. It’s not like we’re ready to issue an arrest warrant or anything,” Eddie chuckled as he clicked off.

  Although Rob and Eddie grew up just blocks apart and saw each other regularly throughout their time at Bayside Elementary School, it wasn’t until they both won spots on Tamalpais High School’s junior varsity basketball team that they became inseparable.

  Their parents always laughed about the fact that they had mirror image families. Rob had a sister, Lisa, who was two years his junior, and Eddie had an older sister— Andrea, who was two years his senior.

  They were born one week apart. And although they went their separate ways at San Francisco State—Rob into journalism and Eddie into criminal justice—the two stayed very close. In fact, Eddie served as Rob’s best man when he married Karin, and Rob as Eddie’s best man when he married Sharon.

  Eddie’s parents, like Rob’s, chose a different place than Sausalito to retire. Rob’s parents headed south to San Diego, whereas Eddie’s parents headed north, retiring in Spokane, Washington, where Eddie’s mom had grown up.

  Eddie’s parents sold their home on the flats near Sausalito’s City Hall, which supplemented their retirement savings, and allowed them to buy their new home in Spokane for cash. The small two-bedroom rental house on Locust was snug, but comfortable for Eddie, Sharon, and their son, Aaron.

  Over beers, usually at the end of a long work week, at the town’s one “neighborhood dive bar,” Smitty’s, Eddie and Rob often complained or simply joked about some of the “small minded nitwits” that too often dominated their hometown’s daily life.

  Local politics alone provided them, and the town as a whole, with their own theater of the absurd. For decades, the town’s city council had been a source of jokes and wonderment throughout the county. Fights broke out regularly among council members, sometimes during public meetings. Actual physical injuries were rare, but feuds were common and could last a decade or longer. Rob in a Standard editorial, after one of these fights, labeled Sausalito “Baghdad by the Bay,” an oft-repeated joke that generated laughs for months afterwards.

  Most assumed that at least three or four of the city’s five council members were taking money or “favors” in exchange for their votes. One development project, for…say a small bed and breakfast establishment, would sail through the planning process and win council approval…only to be followed six months later with an all but identical project being “killed in committee.”

  It even became common knowledge in town that your project, which could be anything from opening a new tourist trinket shop, to a new restaurant, to a hillside mega home, would fare better in the hands of one of the council majority’s favored architects, attorneys, or real estate agents. All of which helped to reinforce Sausalito’s reputation as “the meanest little town in the west.”

  But, for all the in-fighting, mean spirited gossip, adulterous affairs, viciously thrown insults, and occasionally thrown punches, murder was a most rare occurrence. Most of Eddie’s homicides came from the few pockets of poverty and crime in the county. In towns the Standard covered weekly: Sausalito, Belvedere, Tiburon, Mill Valley and Ross, people might have expressed a desire to kill their neighbors, but they rarely acted on that impulse. The last murder investigation in Sausalito was over a decade ago, and it ended quickly when a jealous lover confessed to what she described as “a crime of passion.”

  Eddie was still chuckling as he pushed his way up the narrow steep steps into the Standard’s offices.

  While it was a busy day for both Rob and Holly, what with tomorrow’s edition of the Tiburon/Belvedere paper due at the printers by three that afternoon, they were both eager to hear any
news Eddie might bring.

  “I’ll tell you two, right up front—this case is going to take awhile.”

  Rob shook his head and gave a half chuckle. “If that’s the case, then the Ladies of Liberty—a.k.a. the nearly deaf and the nearly dead—are going to go wild. Warren was their poster boy! They’ll be organizing protests outside of Sausalito police headquarters, demanding answers.”

  “See if I give a shit,” Eddie retorted. “My office is in Marin City, and they won’t be showing up there anytime soon.”

  Marin City is a small enclave at the northern edge of Sausalito. It was developed in the 1940s to house hundreds of the ship builders hired to turn out cargo vessels for the war effort in the Pacific. Today, Marin City is predominately African American.

  Eddie was right. It was a safe bet that Alma Samuels and the majority of her friends had never set foot in Marin City, despite it being just two miles from their picture-perfect homes.

  “Come on, Rob, admit it,” Eddie added, “Any headache for Petersen is usually entertainment for you, not to mention great copy for the paper.”

  Holly’s eyes opened wide. “Don’t those clowns have some clues as to who may have done it?”

  “Hey, watch that, Holly, I’m now included in the “clowns” without clues. Look, in truth, there’s not a helluva lot of evidence up there. This is certainly one strange case! Bradley’s missing hands are going to make it an ongoing story. Rob knows that better than just about anyone else in town.” Eddie shrugged. “Rob finds him on the porch swing, enjoying the fresh air. Only thing wrong is that he’s cold as ice. The guy is seventy-two, perhaps a little on the young side for a stroke or heart attack, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. Petersen and the EMT boys can’t get the county coroner, so they’re happy to take him up to the morgue and get the hell back to their coffee and computer games. Then we hit a big snag—the nicely dressed gentleman’s two arms end at his wrists. No hands. So, where are the hands?”

  Rob and Holly, who were seemingly transfixed by his retelling of the facts, merely shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders.

  “We can’t find any hands, and we’ve got four of Sausalito’s finest looking for them as we speak, including traipsing through that thick underbrush under Bradley’s house.” Eddie wasn’t trying too hard to keep from chuckling over the very thought of that.

  Holly, who could never resist a pun, jumped in and said, “I’d be happy to lend you a hand, but we’ve got another edition to get out.”

  “Somehow, Holly, I just knew you were going to say that,” Eddie muttered.

  Rob frowned. “Why was there no blood? I’ve got to figure that getting your hands whacked off would cause a bloody mess.”

  “The theory we’re working on now is that Bradley was suffocated, most likely with a pillow, shortly after midnight,” Eddie explained. “In all likelihood, the killer spent twenty or thirty minutes rummaging through his place looking for something, then perhaps wiping the place clean of any prints. Then, before he leaves, he decides to take Bradley’s hands as a souvenir. Or maybe he didn’t want us to have his victim’s fingerprints. I already checked and found there are no prints on file, by the way.

  “Now, remember, this all happened approximately nineteen hours before you went to check on him. But, as far as blood, Rob, dead people don’t bleed.”

  “Yeah,” Holly added, nudging Rob’s arm with her elbow. “Don’t you read any murder mysteries, pal?”

  “No, Holly, I’m too busy working.”

  “Holly is right,” Eddie said. “When the heart stops pumping, the blood that flows out of us quits. It turns pretty quickly into a kind of thick goop and stays inside the arties and veins. You can get some minimal leakage, depending on gravity, but that’s about it. In all likelihood, Bradley’s hands were cut off ten minutes or so after his death. And in Bradley’s house, gourmet chef that he was, there were several weapons that could do the job. Most likely it was a…” Eddie paused and flipped open his note pad, “it was a Victornix Forsheiner Rosewood Meat Cleaver, which we found sitting on the kitchen counter. It looked almost spotless, but it was one of many items we bagged for the lab team to take a closer look at.”

  “Eww! Kind of like scalping him, only different!” Holly’s eyes opened wide. She sat down at her computer. In a moment, her screen filled with the cleaver maker’s product description, which Holly enthusiastically read aloud: “A high carbon stainless steel blade made to the highest standards by expertly trained Swiss craftsmen. Eww! This product is ideal for cutting through joints and bones. Double eww!”

  “Aren’t you enjoying this a little too much?” Rob asked, half annoyed and half amused.

  “I’ll tell you both this much,” Eddie continued, “This killer was no amateur. A whack job, for sure—but not a sloppy one. If his only aim was to kill Bradley, suffocation potentially leaves no telltale signs. Unless there was a struggle, there’s a good chance he might have gotten away with it. However, the house shows no sign of a fight and no sign of forced entry. That being said, the hands were taken as souvenirs. Or, perhaps in a brief death struggle, Bradley scratched the arms of his assailant. Skin or fiber evidence can be hard to clean out from under fingernails, so you could argue that the killer wanted to take the evidence with him.”

  “Maybe the hands were taken as some kind of cult thing, or a warning?” Holly murmured. Rob and Eddie exchanged glances. They could tell Holly loved playing junior detective.

  “Let’s not forget that the killer took the time to dress up his victim and prop him up on the porch swing like a department store mannequin,” Eddie said.

  “Wow. This is really going to stir up some shit,” Rob said, imagining increased ad sales for the paper as long as this case dragged on.

  “You’re very right, my friend,” Eddie said, patting Rob on the back. “And I think this shit is going to stay stirred for quite some time to come.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A work week can pass quickly when you’re putting out four different editions of weekly community newspapers. Yet, it was hard for Rob to keep his focus on such major news stories as: “Expansion of the Children’s Section of the Mill Valley Library Begins,” or “Ross Common Landscaping Budget Goes Under a Second Review,” when, as Rob expected, Sausalito was pulsating with the story of Warren Bradley’s demise.

  By Friday afternoon, less than seventy-two hours after the discovery of Warren’s body, Alma had sent a letter to the Standard, co-signed by each member of the Ladies of Liberty, demanding increased police manpower for the murder investigation.

  “One of our community’s most distinguished citizens has been cut down in his prime,” she wrote. “We are bereft at the loss of a charming and gifted friend. Can we honestly believe that any of us are safe in our homes while this deranged killer remains at large? The lovely hills and beautiful vistas of Sausalito by day must not be overtaken by the dark and menacing forces of night!”

  Alma concluded dramatically by borrowing from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “This case of ‘murder most foul,’ must be guided to a swift and satisfactory conclusion by our police and community leaders. Their actions now will assure us or deprive us of the confidence and trust we have placed in them.”

  “Wow,” Holly said to Rob while reading over his shoulder. “I guess we’ve got no shortage of mail for the letters section this week. Half of them already want to know why the cops haven’t arrested Grant Randolph by now.”

  “The Internet has become this era’s version of a lynch mob,” Rob said. “Let me see them. I’ve probably got to run a couple of them, but I don’t want to add to the hysteria by running a page worth of letters calling for Randolph’s head. The thing that worries me even more is, right now, we don’t have much of a story beyond what the dailies covered days ago.”

  Just about everyone in Sausalito—with the noteworthy exception of the police— had a theory about Bradley’s slaying. Eddie had theories too. But because his job was to deal in fact, no
t fantasy, he found himself on a frustrating ride that, to this point, was taking him nowhere.

  As was their usual custom, he and Rob met Friday after work, at Smitty’s, to have a couple of beers and toast the coming weekend.

  They weren’t in much danger of being overheard. It was a quiet time inside the poorly lit watering hole, which catered mostly to old sailors and longtime Sausalito residents who preferred to share a drink only in the company of fellow locals, as opposed to the myriad of tourists who flooded the bars on Bridgeway during the weekends. In every sense, it lived up to its reputation as a dive bar, and its local patrons wanted it that way.

  While it was half empty in the late afternoon, in another four hours it would be packed and pulsing to old-fashioned rock ‘n roll, blaring from the jukebox in the corner. The place had the permanent scent of beer, perspiration, cheap perfume, and aftershave.

  “No progress with Bradley, I assume?” Rob asked.

  “Not much. Some plausible theories about the time and sequence of the murder, but killer and motive…all pretty thin,” Eddie said, shaking his head and looking down in frustration.

  “I’d love to come up with something more than the dailies had over the last couple of days.”

  Just as Rob suspected, as far as the San Francisco media was concerned, the story had already lost most of its allure. If not for the gruesome detail that the victim was missing both his hands, the story would have died in less than twenty-four hours. But now, with nothing new to report, the story was placed on the back burner.

  After a long thoughtful pause, Eddie said, “We’ve got some interesting pieces; we just don’t know how they fit into the puzzle.”

  “Like what?”

  “Bradley had at least two guests that night. One was Ray Sirica.”