Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (2 page)

“You may think that seems overcautious,” he said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they’re vandals as well as Visigoths.” He smirked at his own turn of phrase. I said sure, I understood that, and we went off in opposite directions.

The home address Harley had given me was in Montclair, a hilly, woodsy, rustically expensive section of Oakland, accessible from Berkeley by a short freeway ride. But I’m not particularly fond of freeways. Unless I absolutely have to be efficient I prefer the streets, where you can actually see nonmechanized humans walking around. I drove south down Telegraph Avenue, east toward College Avenue, and south again, heading toward my own neighborhood in Oakland, not far from the Berkeley border and close enough to Montclair.

By the time I’d crossed over into Oakland I’d almost forgotten about lunch, I was thinking so hard. I was thinking about homicide, one of the few ugly items I’d had very little experience with. I was also thinking about cops and how funny they are about people getting in their way when they’re working. That was something I knew a lot about.

Once, in Chicago, I had been a cop. A twenty-four-year-old cop suddenly swept up in the insanity of 1968. The Democratic Convention. The head-smashing frenzy of the police force and the idealism, damned foolishness, and hysterical violence of the young and not-so-young who gathered there.

I’d lost my head when a young long-hair came running at me, crazed but unarmed. I’d used my nightstick on his face. I’d heard him scream and seen him bleed.

That was when I decided that somehow things had gotten out of hand and I didn’t really want to do that kind of work anymore, at least not in a group. I moved to California, smoked some weed, dropped some acid, picked up odd jobs here and there, and wandered up and down the coast for a few years. I learned a little carpentry, a little plumbing, a little dealing, and, eventually, a little real estate. In between, trading on my short term as a cop, I helped out a few friends who were being hassled by outside-the-law bill collectors, discouraged a few hostile ex-husbands, and collected some debts. I didn’t charge much but I took it in cash.

I got married and I got divorced. Then this city kid began drifting toward his urban roots, down from Humboldt County to Mendocino, on down through Sonoma to Marin, and finally, just three years ago, across the bay to Berkeley. I took a job with a sleazy realty company, grabbed hold of my own little lot in an acceptable section of the Oakland flatlands, and began to build up my credit with what some people like to think is the real world.

That lasted just two years. When I’d had enough of showing cardboard houses to overextended people, sweating out my commissions on nice, new, easy-to-maintain homes I didn’t like and didn’t want to sell, I quit. And I hadn’t done much since then but work around the house—or think about it—argue with my middle-age spread and my midlife crisis, and play poker.

All right, so maybe I was getting a little bored. But maybe I could find safer ways to entertain myself. It’s one thing to work around the law up in the woods where the law is county and scarce and another to walk around on the heels of city police. Not to mention tripping over their toes. Still, I told myself, with ten thousand dollars beating a tattoo in my brain, I didn’t have anything planned for that day but my Tuesday night poker game. There was no reason not to hear the man out and take a look at the house where his wife had died.

Thus resolved, I stopped at a too-groovy College Avenue cafe. The hamburger was passable. Once I removed three-quarters of the alfalfa sprouts I was able to get my medium-to-large mouth around it. The waitress flirted with me, which was nice. She was kind of chunky, with short brown hair, pretty brown eyes, and a beautiful smile. I flirted back. The place was crowded, she was overworked and probably underpaid, and I left a thirty percent tip.

In a few minutes I had driven past the last of the antique shops, maneuvered through the frantic shopping-center intersection at Fifty-first, and was drifting peacefully along the quiet curves of Moraga behind a very old man driving at an exact and steady twenty-five miles an hour. We were both looking at the nice houses and the trees and the humans.

The old man drove straight on toward downtown Montclair, and I turned off, heading into the tall trees and narrow roads. When I got close to Harley’s neighborhood, I noticed a few For Sale signs and allowed myself a moment’s fantasy. Pretty area.

Harley’s house on Virgo Street was a classic type for the Oakland-Berkeley hills, set back and below the level of the road, sheltered by trees and hillside. It didn’t look like a particularly big house, but it’s always hard to tell from the front when the view is at the back. These houses grow downhill, layer upon layer. I knew that it was bound to have at least one deck and maybe as many as three. I parked on the dirt shoulder. There were already two cars in the carport at the foot of the steep driveway, a BMW and an Audi. I found the wooden steps that led down to the house, with a redwood retaining wall holding up the hill to the right. As I made my descent, I checked my watch. Right on time. Half an hour late.

It took Harley a couple of minutes to answer the bell.

“I was just out on the deck,” he said, a slight edge of sorrow to his voice. I followed him through an entry hall and a large living room. The sliding glass doors at the far end were partly open. We went outside onto the deck. The only deck, but a big one, around fifteen by twenty-five or thirty feet, furnished with a redwood table and two small benches, two lounge chairs, and a redwood rocker. On the table was the folder I’d seen him put in his briefcase. He’d been working. Everything was very neat and in its proper place. Harley sat in one lounge chair and I took the other.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked politely. He didn’t look capable of getting out of the chair again, so I said no, maybe later. He sat gazing out over the railing at the wooded hillside. Eucalyptus trees, a rural feeling of privacy, a view of San Francisco that must have been spectacular at night. A warm breeze carried autumn dampness, the hint of rains to come, and the tang of the eucalyptus.

“Tell me how it was when you came home yesterday,” I prodded. “Describe everything you saw.” He shrugged as if to say, “I suppose I have to.”

He had arrived home just before noon, parked his BMW next to his wife’s Audi and walked down to the front door. He inserted his key in the deadbolt, turned the key, and found the door unlocked. Only the spring lock in the doorknob, the one that caught when the door was closed, was locked.

“Was that normal?” I wanted to know.

“Yes,” Harley replied. “She was careless. I used to remind her all the time about keeping the house secure when she was in it. She never listened.”

“And then?” I urged him to continue the story.

He had entered the hall, set his briefcase on the hall table, gone into the living room, and noticed that the door to the deck was open. He had walked out onto the deck and stepped to the railing. I got out of my lounge chair and went to the railing, trying to picture how things had been. I looked out and across the bay to San Francisco, The City.

Then I looked down into the garden below the deck, down to where the hill dropped away from the house.

“She was right down there,” Harley said. “Margaret. Lying on her back. I could see her eyes. I knew she was dead.” I nodded. It was a thirty-foot drop, but my imagination told me he would have been able to see that much. His wife, nestled crookedly on her back among the rockroses and acanthus. Lying perfectly still, her blank and foggy eyes staring up at him.

I turned back to Harley. “Okay, let’s take it from the beginning. Why were you home so early?”

“I don’t have any classes on Monday.”

“But you went to your office anyway? Did you have an appointment?”

“No. I like to work there. On my book. My manuscript.” He waved his hand toward the folder on the table. “But they wouldn’t let me work. Those idiots. The ones you saw today. They were out there chanting. I couldn’t concentrate. That’s probably what they want. To interfere with my work. Bunch of Nazi book burners.”

“But you did have classes today?” I was wondering what the hell he’d been doing at work the day after his wife’s death.

“I would, normally. Someone else will be taking them for a few days.” He caught my quizzical look and bridled. “I went there today because I had to get out of the house. Is that so strange?” No, I guessed it wasn’t.

“What’s your book about?”’ I asked. I didn’t really care, but I’ve heard that writers hate that question. Harley didn’t.

“Well, broadly, it’s about the absurdity of political systems. None of them work, after all. Never been one I’d care to live with. You know,” he said thoughtfully, “back in the sixties there was a lot of feeling that socialism could solve our problems. I never went along with that, but I could live with the kind of people who felt that way, and the things they believed in.” He sighed nostalgically. “I was a teaching assistant then. Pretty involved with the antiwar movement. The students and I—well, we got along. I was one of them. But now!” he snorted. “It’s like the fifties all over again. Do you remember what things were like then?” I nodded. “I certainly never thought we’d go back to that. On the campus. And at Berkeley!”

I remembered the fifties all right. And like anyone else my age with pretensions to individuality, I remembered them with distaste. But then, I had mixed feelings about the sixties, too. Harley’s indignation brought to mind that old curse that says, “May you live in interesting times.” Harley didn’t mind living in interesting times. He just wanted them to be interesting his way.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s all pretty disgusting. Now, let’s take things back to when you first got home. Before you called the police. Did you notice anything unusual? In the house or on the deck?”

He shrugged, scratched his jaw, and tried to think.

“Well, not in the house. Not that I noticed. I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“Just describe everything you saw when you came out here.”

“Uh huh. The sliding glass doors were open. I walked through.” He closed his eyes, trying to visualize. He was getting into the spirit of things now. I waited silently for him to go on. “Her coffee cup was on the table. And a bowl of apples. That was odd.”

“The coffee cup?”

He waved a hand at me. “No, no, the apples. A bowl of them. They weren’t out there when I left in the morning.”

“So?”

He drummed his fingers on his thigh and cocked an eyebrow, Basil Rathbone fashion. “We kept fruit around the house, of course, Mr. Samson. But Margaret rarely ate any. I think that’s significant.”

I caught on. “Oh, like you mean she was offering fruit to a guest?” I was not too impressed. He noticed.

“Exactly.”

I let him have his way. “Could be,” I said, pursing my lips. “What else did you see?”

“Well, I saw her. From up here.”

“That’s all? You didn’t go down to look at her?”

He glared at me. “I couldn’t. Besides, I told you, I could tell she was dead. Her eyes. I was pretty sure.”

“Anything else?” There had to be something else, or the police wouldn’t be investigating a homicide.

“I didn’t see anything else.” He was getting snippy again.

“And the neighbors?” The closest neighboring houses were barely visible through the trees. “Did they see or hear anything?” He shook his head.

I stood up, went to the railing and looked down.

“How do you get down there?” I asked. I knew the police would have checked over that hillside pretty carefully, and even if they’d missed something, there wasn’t much chance I’d find it in the wake of many official feet. But the only way to begin is to look at whatever there is to see.

Harley led me back inside the house, back through the living room, and down a flight of stairs to what used to be called a rumpus room. It didn’t look like there’d ever been a rumpus in it. Very neat, with a plaid couch and fake Early American furniture. Even a spinning wheel lamp.

We hadn’t hit bottom yet. We went out the door of the rumpus room and down some concrete steps past what looked like a pretty good-sized basement. When the steps ended, we were at the top of the slope. To our left was the front wall of the basement. To our left and about thirty feet above our heads was the deck.

“Where was she?” Harley thought for a moment, then sidled over under the deck, looking at the sloping ground. I followed him, walking the way I usually do.

“I guess it was right about there,” he said. It? Funny way to talk about a dead woman you’d been married to. I looked where he pointed and saw a whole constellation of crushed plants, mostly acanthus. The area he’d pointed out looked only a little messier than the rest of the hillside. It wasn’t hard to tell where the law had been. They’d left a trail of broken plants and gouges in the landscape. I kicked a few rocks loose myself on the way down.

I knelt on the hard-packed stony clay, dusty from the rainless California summer, and searched the crushed greenery. No blood that I could see. Without looking up, still dissecting the ground with my eyes, I asked him another question.

“About the broken neck—did you hear anything else about her? Any other injuries?” I didn’t hear his answer, so I looked up at him. He was shaking his head. Terrific. For all I knew the woman had a broken neck and a bazooka wound in her back. “No other marks that you could see?” He shook his head again.

I figured I’d done my token search-the-scene act and that there wouldn’t be much profit in poking around anymore. Even if I found something, I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. I climbed back up and stood next to Harley under the deck.

“Well?” he said.

I ignored the challenge. “Any idea who might have wanted to kill your wife? Did she work? Any trouble with anyone at her job?”

“No. She didn’t work. She didn’t do anything, except of course belong to her groups.”

“Groups?”

“A therapy group. And a meditation group. She said they were attempts at self-definition.” He shook his head sadly, the wise man confronted with foolishness.