Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (12 page)

We decided to try a pizza place she’d noticed on her way to the lumber yard. We took my car, since there wasn’t room in the cab of the pickup for two people and a large dog, and Alice was not allowed to ride in the back of the truck.

“This is working out perfectly,” Rosie said after she’d eaten her first bite of pizza-with-everything-but-anchovies. “I’ll be right there in the canyon where I can keep an eye on things. I should be able to pick up a lot. We can hash things over every night.”

“Well, maybe not tomorrow night,” I told her. “I’ve got a date with Iris over in the East Bay. After I’ve finished tomorrow’s quota of running around, I may just head home to clean up. Visit the cats. You know.”

She thought a minute. “I’m going to be over there tomorrow night, too. We could check in with each other, just to see if we’ve got anything important to pass on. If we miss each other at home, I’ll be at Polly’s later.” Polly’s was, depending on what term you prefer to use, a lesbian/dyke/women’s bar/club/entertainment center.

“Okay. Got a date with someone interesting?”

“I don’t know yet how interesting she is. I’ve only talked to her once.”

I ate a slice of pizza. “So, tell me, what’s your information-gathering plan?”

“For starters, I get the feeling that Carlota knows everything that goes on around there.”

“What gives you the idea that Nona will give you a chance to hang around talking to Carlota?”

“Carlota gets home from work three hours before Nona does.”

“And what makes you think Carlota knows anything we can use?”

Rosie grinned. “Let’s just say that she seems to be my assignment, so I hope she knows more than anyone you talk to.”

“No question about it, Rosie, you’ve got the most dangerous end of it this time.”

Just because people live in Mill Valley, it’s not safe to assume they like narrow, twisted roads, giant trees, houses on stilts, slugs, and mildew. The town is a bedroom community with equal shares of rustic, quaint, and suburban-civilized.

The Smith house was on an ordinary upper-middle-class street of level lots and mixed architectural styles. There was fake Tudor, brown shingle, redwood siding and glass, Spanish, and California bungalow. The late James Smith’s residence was a tidy, medium-size frame house, white with blue trim. It had a small front lawn with no brown spots, crab grass, or dandelions, and the walk was edged with tough, charmless juniper, clipped like a hedge. I’m always suspicious of people who stick juniper in their yards. I figure their second choice would be cardboard cutouts of bushes.

But then, the juniper could have been there before the Smiths moved in.

The doorknocker was the brass head of a harmless-looking lion. The woman who answered the door was wearing a gray herringbone dress with a white collar and a white belt. The dress covered her trim, fifty-year-old figure closely and neatly, the way her beauty shop set and brown-rinsed hair covered her head. All very crisp and untouchable. She questioned me politely with cool blue eyes.

“Jake Samson,” I said. “I called this morning.”

She nodded. “Come in, Mr. Samson. I’m Mrs. James Smith.” She did not, apparently, have a first name of her own.

She led me through a formal entry hall into a formal, characterless living room and sat me down in a reasonably comfortable chair that should have had a footstool to go with it, set at right angles to a stiff-looking three-cushion couch. I was facing a fireplace with a nice old mantel of dark wood. There wasn’t a speck of dust, let alone ash, beneath the brass andirons.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Samson? You’re a writer of some sort?”

“That’s right,” I said. If I kept this up long enough I might start believing it myself. “I’m doing a magazine piece on Bright Future, and of course I wanted to talk to you about your husband. After all, he was one of the company’s guiding lights.”

“He certainly was,” she said, with a smile as cool as her eyes and an edge of brittle suspicion in her well-modulated voice. “Of course you realize it isn’t easy for me to discuss him so soon after our tragedy.” That was when I remembered whom she reminded me of. Once when I was a young cop in Chicago I’d been briefly assigned to the Conrad Hilton suite of a big-time evangelist who was playing Chicago that week. The evangelist’s wife spoke of her husband with the same kind of practiced reverence. A woman playing the emperor’s wife, managing to convey with every word, every expression, that she was proud to sacrifice herself to the greatness of her man. She was as genuine as the emperor’s new clothes.

“I understand that,” I said softly. “But I just didn’t feel the picture would be complete without talking to you.” I could be reverent, too.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Samson?”

“No, thank you very much. I’ll try not to keep you for long. Just tell me about yourself, how you felt about your husband’s work, his role in the company. Your family. I believe you have two children?”

Her tiny little smile twitched. “Yes, that’s right.”

“A son and a daughter?”

“Only the daughter’s at home. She’s sixteen. She’ll be home from school any time now.”

“Oh, good, I’d like to meet her.” Mrs. James Smith nodded, once. “And your son? Where is he?”

She startled me by laughing indulgently. “Well, my son is thirty-two years old. Naturally, he’s off on his own.”

“Does he live around here? I’d like to talk to him, too, if it’s at all possible.”

“Oh, he lives some distance from here, I’m afraid.”

“Oh? Where?”

She frowned and said shortly, “Mendocino.”

“The town or the county?”

“The town.” Her lips were tight.

“And what is his name?”

“You wanted to talk about my husband’s work and how his family worked along with him, isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right.” I heard the front door open. An adolescent girl strolled into the room. I don’t know what I expected the daughter of Mrs. Smith to look like, but it wasn’t like this. Not that she wasn’t neat, trim, and brittle-looking. She was, but in the eerie interplanetary style of the eighties. Plucked eyebrows, dark red lipstick, hair short at back and sides and tossed around on top, tight pants, high-heeled shoes, and a red leather jacket with immense shoulders. Her gaze was also just another version of her mother’s, cool, with a touch of the robot thrown in for good measure. She was carrying a book.

Mrs. Smith hesitated— I could almost feel the shudder under her skin when she looked at her daughter— and then introduced us.

“Bunny, this is Mr. Samson. My daughter, Bunny. Why don’t you go to your room, dear?”

“Pleased to meet you, Bunny.”

Without even glancing at her mother, Bunny replied, leering slightly, “My friends call me Barbara. What’s your name?”

“Jake,” I said.

“Mr. Samson and I are having a business conversation, Bunny.”

The kid’s eyes went robotic again, she shrugged and left the room.

Mrs. Smith began a monologue about Bright Future and her husband’s theory of education, all that stuff about studying at your own pace in the comfort of your own home. I scribbled in my notebook and let her babble on for a while, then pushed back toward more personal topics by asking about the family’s move to California, how long they’d lived in Chicago, that kind of thing. Then I got back to the son.

“You say your son is thirty-two, Mrs. Smith?” She looked wary, but she nodded. “And Bunny is sixteen. Was your son— uh, what was his name again?— from a previous marriage?”

She smiled patronizingly. “I’ve had only one marriage, Mr. Samson, and I expect to live out my days having had only one marriage.” I guessed she hadn’t liked it all that much the first time. “Bunny was…” she paused.

“A pleasant surprise?” I said brightly.

“Exactly.”

We had managed to skirt the vile edges of sex, though, and that was a mistake. She got restless.

“Perhaps we could continue this conversation another time, Mr. Samson? I have a lot to do today.”

“I understand,” I said. “So do I. Just a couple more questions, Mrs. Smith?” She continued to sit on the edge of her seat.

I asked her how her husband felt about the new sales system at Bright Future.

“My husband,” she said, “was always loyal to his company and to whatever was good for his company.” The woman, I thought, should go into politics.

“I’m sure he was. Mrs. Smith, could you tell me why your husband was in the canyon that day?”

“The police asked me that. It’s very simple. We were considering buying a lot there. He walked over to take another look. He was concerned about the water, the runoff. There had been heavy rain. The lot is at the bottom of the canyon. He wanted to be sure the water was contained.”

That explained why he’d been puttering around up top.

“I think that will be all for today, Mrs. Smith. Except of course I would like to be able to make some mention of your family members, even those I don’t talk to. What did you say your son’s name was?” I’d guessed right. Once she thought I wasn’t going to try to talk to him, she was willing to give me his name. I wondered why that was so.

She stood up and it was time for me to leave. I thanked her and allowed myself to be escorted to the door. She didn’t waste much time saying goodbye.

As I slid behind the wheel of my car, Bunny-Barbara sidled up. She must have left the house by the back door. She was still carrying her book.

“Uh, hey,” she said, “how about a lift down to Throckmorton?”

“Sure,” I told her. “Get in.” She did. She leaned against the door, one foot up on the passenger seat, and stared at me. I started the car and rolled off in the direction of downtown Mill Valley.

“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked, by way of opening a conversation I didn’t really expect to be very productive.

“I’m not reading anything,” she said.

“I mean the book you’re carrying around.”

“Oh. Yeah. It’s my journal. I take it everywhere. You know, so I can keep track of my life.” She gave an odd little laugh. “That’s what journals are for. Stuff that happens to you. Thoughts. What kind of business you talking with my mother?”

I gave her the line about working for a magazine and told her about my conversation with Mrs. Smith.

“Pleasant surprise, huh? I was an accident and a girl at that. And my brother was an even worse disaster.”

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“I’m the only one in the family that talks to him. My father wouldn’t see him at all. My mother let him in the house once a couple of years ago, but it was so weird I don’t think either one of them would let it happen again.”

We were getting very close to Throckmorton Avenue and downtown Mill Valley. “Why is that?” I asked her.

“Shit, man,” she said eloquently. “You met my mother. My father was worse.”

I nodded noncommittally.

“Don’t you get it?”

I shook my head.

“He’s gay, man.” She laughed raucously. “He really did ‘em in.”

“But you’re in touch with him?”

She turned cold. “Yeah. Any reason why I shouldn’t be? I love him. He’s real nice to me, takes me to movies sometimes— weird art ones— and out for dinner. Just let me out in the parking lot.”

I drove slowly into the municipal parking lot that served most of downtown Mill Valley and the tiny bus station as well.

“I’d like to talk to your brother,” I said.

“Why?”

“I want to find out more about your father’s life.”

“You’re a cop.”

“No.”

She narrowed her eyes at me, thought a moment, and shrugged. “My brother lives in Mendocino. He’s got a hotel up there.” She told me the name of the hotel.

“Bill Smith?” I stopped the car.

“Did Mother tell you his name? That’s pretty good.” She nodded her approval of my expertise. “You want to go out sometime, Jake?” I gave her a look. She laughed at my discomfort. “No jail bait, huh? Too bad. You want to read my journal?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Sure you do. It’s hot.”

“It’s also private.”

“You think so?” She snickered. “Don’t you want to know how I felt about my father?”

“Yes, but you’ve told me that, in a way.”

“Come on, have a look. You don’t have to be scared. Come on. It’s hot,” she repeated.

“Okay. Okay. Let me see it.”

She handed me the book. Its paper cover was printed in a marble pattern, the predominant color mauve, that favorite of the Victorians. Or was it the Edwardians? I opened it up. The inside front cover still had the price sticker, with the identification “Mary’s Bookstore.” Which was the name of Artie’s neighbor’s shop. The price had been scribbled out. The inscription on the flyleaf said the book was a gift to his daughter on her birthday, from Daddy. It included the admonition to use the book well and create a structure to her life. The message was dated the week before his death.

I turned the page. And another, and another. The journal was blank. I gave it back to her.

Bunny was looking at me slyly, waiting for me to comment on any one of several meanings the book’s emptiness might have. I didn’t. She laughed, dug around in her pocket, and handed me a purple card printed with her name, address, and telephone number. “That’s my private phone,” she said. “In case you want to know anything more about accidents and disasters.” Then she got out of the car and strolled off in the direction of the bus station.

Over dinner at Sen Ying’s that night, I told Iris Hughes about the goings-on in Foothill Canyon, and, since I was trying to be amusing, I leaned heavily on stories of canyon residents.

“I’d love to meet Carlota and Nona,” she said, grinning. “I can’t believe Rosie is actually staying at their house. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her or envy her the experience. Could be useful in my field.”

Iris’s field is psychotherapy. She and Rosie had met the previous autumn. They like each other, and I could see that Iris was enjoying the imagined spectacle of good old straightforward Rosie evading the slithery advances of Carlota. Not to mention possible retribution by Nona the intense.

I laughed with her. “We’ll get to hear about her first day, if it’s okay with you. I told her we might meet her later. At Polly’s. Polly’s is a—”