Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (21 page)

“And that’s happened?”

“It’s happened.”

The phone rang. I was busy with the food, and Hal went to answer it. He didn’t seem to be saying much. Mostly, he was listening.

“You’ve got something there, all right,” he said when he came back into the kitchen. “About Perfect Day cosmetics. Couple of years ago. Atlanta. Not a big deal, not a real big company. But it looked like there was head-hunting going on and when the Georgia law started having a look, the company just kind of faded away. What’s the connection?”

I told him about Morton.

“No shit, Jake? I think some of my friends might be interested in hearing about that. Now, when do we eat?”

The next morning I puttered around the house for a few hours, watering plants, talking to the cats, sweeping the floor, and removing bowls and pots of moldy leftovers from the refrigerator.

Shortly after noon, I refilled the cats’ bowls, pulled the towel off the fence, and pointed the Chevy north toward the San Rafael bridge, timing my arrival at Morton’s office for 1:00 p.m. I made it with five minutes to spare. His office was open and empty; his secretary was not around. I walked in and sat in his visitor’s chair to wait for him.

The secretary spotted me when she came back to her desk nibbling a cookie.

“Mr. Samson?” I nodded. “Mr. Morton said he was expecting you. He is at lunch. He should be back any moment now.” She didn’t say anything about my letting myself into her boss’s office. She just stuck some paper into her shiny new typewriter and began tapping away.

Morton strolled in ten minutes later, looking cheerful and content, as though he’d just had a large, expensive meal and was about to have a friendly chat with a business acquaintance. He shook my hand and dropped smiling into his high-backed executive swivel. He asked what he could do for me. I told him to can the shit. He laughed.

“All right, Samson. Bert told me what happened. He got scared and pulled a dumb stunt. Is there something you expect me to do about it?”

“Yeah. Explain it. Explain what Franklin’s scared of. Explain what it is, exactly, that you’re doing with this company. Explain what happened at Perfect Day. And then you can explain why you killed James Smith.”

He laughed again. “Did you rehearse that? It’s very good. I don’t see that I have to explain anything to you, but obviously you’re going to make a nuisance of yourself unless I do. Franklin’s scared because Franklin is always scared, has led his whole life being scared. When Perfect Day went under, he lost a good job. He’s not the kind of man who bounces back. Good enough at his work, loyal to his employer”— I snorted, but Morton just kept on talking—”but not strong, and not very smart. He has some idea that you can cause trouble for Bright Future, and that he’ll lose another job. Pretty silly idea, but then a man’s entitled to his fears, isn’t he?”

Morton didn’t look any different from the way he’d looked the last time I’d seen him, but he sure didn’t sound the same. He’d dropped the hype, the sales clichés. He wasn’t bothering to do his act for me, and the clothing and hairdo he wore for the sales vice president’s role suddenly looked more like a costume than plain bad taste.

I decided to try out some of my new sophistication.

“I don’t think his fears are all that silly, Morton. Perfect Day ‘went under,’ as you put it, because it was operating outside the law. And Bright Future’s next in line because you’re running the same kind of head-hunting operation here.”

“Head-hunting?” he smiled brightly at me. “Head-hunting? I’m not really sure exactly what you mean by that. But whatever it is, it doesn’t sound like anything that’s going on here. Not that I know of, anyway. And,” he yawned, “if it has to do with sales, I’d certainly know about it.”

“You don’t just know about it. You started it and you’re doing it. And that’s why you killed Smith. Because he was threatening to blow the whistle.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “I think I understand now, Samson. You have some idea that I’m doing something illegal. You think Smith had proof of it and threatened to use that proof against me.”

“Exactly.”

“And you think I killed Smith to protect myself.”

I was watching him carefully. He seemed perfectly relaxed. Was he considering bashing me over the head and dumping me in the bay?

“Tell me,” he said, “have you told the police what you think?”

“They know what I know,” I lied, continuing to watch him. I was disappointed. He just looked back at me and shook his head.

“Samson, my friend, you’re bluffing. I don’t know why. I guess we’re all ambitious, and you’re just looking for a big story to make your career. I don’t blame you for that. Ambitious. Sometimes people go a little too far with that.” He smirked. “I guess you’ve heard that the people at Perfect Day might have gone a little too far with that. But think about it. Even if I were doing something illegal here, James Smith would never have done anything to harm the company itself. He was resigning. Leaving the area. Moving on. An appropriate response for an executive who disagrees with company policy and has no hope of changing it. And that’s all it came down to, you know, a slight disagreement on policy. And there’s something else. If there were any law-breaking going on here, do you think I’d want to call attention to the company, and to myself, by killing one of the executives? Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”

I’d listened to his monologue patiently, and now it was my turn again. “You didn’t have any choice. You’re a crook. You were covering your ass. You were desperate.”

“I’m never desperate,” he snapped at me. “And it’s not true that the police know what you know. They know more. They know that I was leading a sales meeting right about the time Smith died. In Santa Cruz. And I had breakfast with the Santa Cruz people before that.”

I shrugged. “Nice alibi. So Franklin killed him for you.”

Morton laughed loudly. “Sorry, wrong again. Franklin was in Santa Cruz, too. Covering the meeting for the company newsletter.” He leaned back in his chair and slitted his eyes at me. “I think I should warn you not to run around talking this kind of crap. About a crooked operation. About murder. I’ll hit you with one hell of a lawsuit, and I’ll win.”

I thought about that. If he was covered on the murder— if he really was— that didn’t mean he was covered on the scam he was running. “Now you’re the one who’s bluffing,” I said, grinning at him.

He shook his head at me again. Then, he put his elbows on his desk and leaned toward me. He wasn’t smiling, not the slightest bit. “You’ll know soon enough, Samson. Now get out of my office. I have a company to run.”

I was finished with him anyway, at least for the time being, so I got all the way down the hall to Bowen’s office. I told his secretary I had something important to tell him. She looked at me skeptically, as though no one ever had anything important to tell Bowen, but she let him know I was there and he invited me in.

He was wearing the same suit as the first time and was sipping a glass of sherry.

“Would you like some, Mr. Samson? Good for the digestion, after a nice lunch.”

I told him no thanks. Then, I told him there was a possibility that Morton was running a crooked sales force and maybe killed Smith to cover it up. He turned very pale and spilled some sherry.

“So maybe you can tell me, Mr. Bowen. Was Morton in Santa Cruz that weekend?”

Bowen stared at me a while longer and set his sherry down on the desk. “I don’t know. How would I know?” His voice shook. “Howard is always going somewhere on business. He travels all the time. I don’t know where. He does his job very well. He’s very conscientious. He’s done wonders. Saved the company. I’m sure, Mr. Samson, that you are very, very wrong.” His hands were trembling and he looked sick and shocked. He also looked old and not very strong. I was afraid that if I pressed the issue, the man would have a heart attack right before my eyes. He spoke again. “I don’t know why you would want to say a thing like that to me. James resigned because he wanted to work for a school down south. Because he was tired of the pressures of the executive life, and wanted to return to academia.” The old man sounded wistful. I got the feeling he was wishing he’d done the same thing years ago. Then his mood, and his facial expression, changed abruptly. He was angry. “I’ve often felt that the state of modern journalism is deplorable. Sensationalism, lies, all kinds of destructive behavior. If you are fishing for scandal, you are fishing in the wrong pond.”

I reeled in, threw away the bait, and left. I did try to get into Bill Armand’s office, but he wasn’t in.

At seven o’clock, 101 north was still clogged with commuters. I sat comfortably in my Chevy, plugging along mile by mile, looking at Marin County, trying not to care that Morton, my favorite suspect, had an alibi and that the alibi would probably hold. After all, the police hadn’t been sitting on their hands between Smith’s death and Alan’s arrest. They’d talked to people at Bright Future. That was how they’d heard about Alan’s argument with Smith.

Somewhere, though, they’d missed something. The something I had to find.

Meanwhile, I was looking forward to spending an evening with Chloe. I was glad she lived in the northern end of the county. I like it up there. It’s peaceful.

Now that I’d spent some time, again, in Marin, some of the good memories were coming back, some of the fondness I’d always felt for this place. Not just the dank southern end of it, but all of it, in all its variety.

Each part of the Bay Area has its own, unique character. The East Bay is tough and political and has a hard urban maleness that keeps me moving and functioning. San Francisco is androgynous. And Marin, well, Marin always feels female to me. Like you could just pillow your weary head on those round, smooth hills.

Popular wisdom has it that Marin County is uniformly rich. I’d once heard a Berkeley radical use the county’s name as a synonym for the other side in what he called, with great originality, “the class struggle.”

It’s true that Marin has a high per capita income, natural beauty, and, in some places, incredible wealth. Even movie folk live there. But back when I’d been drifting around this side of the bay, I’d come to know a whole different Marin, and some of it had to be there still. Rotting shacks in the woods inhabited by welfare mothers and their children. Leftover flower children growing tomatoes on the dusty backside of someone else’s West Marin property. People who’d lived off those back roads and in those canyons and meadows so long that they remembered when you could buy a little place for under twenty thousand dollars, maybe even trade a hand-painted van for a down payment. A long time ago. Like about fifteen years.

I don’t know. Maybe they’re all gone now, moved to Sonoma or Mendocino or Humboldt County. Or L.A. or Fresno. Forced out by years of pay-anything demand for a chunk of Marin soil. But I doubted it. I wanted to believe those people were still around, the ones who’d been hiding in the wrinkles of Marin for twenty years. And that they would hide out there for another twenty years.

I turned off at the downtown Novato exit and headed toward Indian Valley Road, taking advantage of a stoplight to glance again at the directions. The address was on a road that angled off just before Indian Valley. You could even call it a street, because on one side were middle income tract homes and on the other, small ranches running about five acres. A dividing line between suburbia and country, all within the borders of the same town.

The mail box was enameled in streaky red, like nail polish. A length of chain with a “Keep Out” sign tied to it with wire was strung between posts on either side of the entrance. The driveway was a dirt road that ran a good 200 feet back to a white frame house sheltered by two oaks and a huge old walnut. According to my directions, that was the landlord’s house. I was to drive past it to a smaller one at the back.

I pulled up at the chain, got out of my car, unhooked one end of it, got back in my car, and took the first few feet of mud in first gear. Then, also according to directions, I got out and hooked the chain to its post again. I nearly got stuck about halfway on, where the road dipped and the mud was especially deep and soft, spun my wheels a little, backed up, rocked a couple of times, and lurched ahead.

No wonder Chloe wasn’t worried about unwanted visitors.

At my right was a rail fence lined with irises as-yet-unbloomed. I was supposed to call Iris soon, I remembered.

Beyond the frame house, I passed some kind of outbuilding— my headlights caused an eruption of crackling and crowing from within— and thirty or forty feet beyond that was a tiny house that looked like it, too, had once been an outbuilding. A perfect rectangle, sheltered by more oaks and surrounded by foot-high grass. I pulled in behind an old blue gray Volvo. A German shepherd shoved the curtains aside and glared at me, barking, through a big window. I started up the overgrown walk that appeared to be made of broken chunks of concrete and led to a concrete slab porch on the long side of the rectangle. The door opened, the shepherd lunged at me, and Chloe said, “Hi, come on in.”

The dog sniffed my hands and feet, wagged once or twice, and led me inside, where he trotted off to a corner and curled up for sleep.

“Achilles likes you,” Chloe said.

“He’s too trusting.” I handed her the bottle of Grand Marnier I’d brought. She thanked me, waved me to a chair with a “be right back,” and went through a door into the kitchen. I sat down and surveyed the room, trying to get a fix on its inhabitant.

Real knotty pine paneling, probably done in the thirties or forties, whenever this box of a place had been converted from a bunkhouse, outhouse, stable, or chicken coop.

I was sitting in an oak rocking chair beside a small, hot potbelly stove, in the corner near the big window. Directly in front of the window was an oiled pine table with two straight-backed chairs. In the opposite corner, there squatted a brown space heater so old it had a black stovepipe and rounded corners. It looked like an old radio. There was a big, multicolored braided rug, a navy blue couch with a red pillow squashed up against the arm, and, at right angles to that, an overstuffed chair. Between them stood a brass lamp with a fringed shade. The wall to my left, on the other side of the door, was floor-to-ceiling books.