Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) (7 page)

The ponytail moved slowly from side to side. “Tragic.”

“Excuse me,” I said with the proper mournful tone. “I couldn’t help but overhear. I suppose you’re talking about Margaret Harley, or Bursky?”

They turned to me and agreed, cautiously, that they were indeed talking about the deceased.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s very sad. Did you know her well?”

They both shook their heads, regarding me warily.

“I’m doing a little magazine piece on her and I’m looking for people who knew her, people who can tell me something about her. She was an artist, you know, a few years back.”

“Yes, that was mentioned briefly in the papers, I think.” The black curls waggled sadly. “But of course we didn’t know that. She never talked much.”

“Alana. And Billy,” the woman with the ponytail said kindly, but with an air of butting me out of her tête-à-tête. “She seemed to be friends with them. You could talk to Alana now. She’s here.”

I smiled brightly. “Thank you, thank you very much.” At least she had confirmed the information I’d already gotten from Alana. I wandered around a bit more. Quite a few of the folks were talking about their dead fellow-meditator. People were beginning to move out the door. Alana was coming toward me.

“Shall we go?” Her smile was wide and generous. She took my arm. Several people watched us leave. Well, why shouldn’t she be proud to be seen on the arm of such a handsome fellow?

Alana suggested we go the Winery, a place on Telegraph Avenue. Since we both lived in that direction, we agreed to take our own cars and meet there.

The Winery was in one of those arcades created from the insides of a building. You went through the archway and there was a brick courtyard. Red, not yellow like my road. With a fountain. Each of the restaurants and shops had its own door leading into the courtyard. Skylights completed the illusion of— what? An old-fashioned dead-end brick street? But pleasant.

We chose a table in a dark corner. The waiter—she was a woman, but Rosie yelled at me once for saying “waitress” and I can’t get my tongue around “waitperson”—came over instantly and lit our candle. We ordered a carafe of the house white, which she assured us was made by one of the more reliable and consistent California vineyards.

I took a few stabs at small talk, and Alana responded with practiced ease. Then I got to it.

“This Billy. How close was he to Margaret Bursky?”

She sipped at her wine. “I don’t know. They seemed to be friends. Anyone could tell you that.” She hesitated. “Look, I don’t know much about Billy. Why are you asking me about him?”

I held up my hand in a soothing gesture. “Just trying to get a little background before I talk to him.” She still looked put out. My question had verged on gossip, after all. I decided I’d better get off the subject of Billy.

“You said you’d had an idea she dabbled in art.” I tasted my wine and wondered how to approach this woman. “Where’d you get that idea?”

Alana wrinkled her forehead. “I know that intrigued you before. Why?”

“Because there doesn’t seem to be a sign of any recent work. It would be great if there was some. Work no one knew existed by a fine, lost artist.” Alana was a nice woman. She liked my attitude.

“I don’t know. Let me think.”

“Did you ever see her doing any drawing?”

“No, that wasn’t it.” She closed her eyes. “She used to carry this big canvas bag around with her. About this big.” She indicated an object about the size of an airline bag. “It had a shoulder strap.” I nodded encouragingly. “I remember once we were going to meet at the beginning of the week and she wanted my phone number. She pulled a whole lot of pencils out of the bag—maybe they were drawing pencils—and then fished around until she came up with a little notebook to write the number in. It just seems to me I remember seeing a larger notebook or drawing pad or something in the bag, too.” She shrugged. “I can’t be sure. But the pencils, that I’m sure of.” She looked up at me over the rim of her glass. “Does that help?”

“It’s interesting to speculate,” I said vaguely and mysteriously. She looked at me skeptically and I abandoned mystery. “What do you think about the way she died?”

Alana cooled again perceptibly and gazed casually around the room. “What do you mean?” she murmured from an aloof profile.

“I mean do you think she might have killed herself?” I realized I was being pretty straightforward, but she was being so damned oblique and discreet I was ready to scream.

She turned to me, even cooler. “Of course not.” But she wouldn’t meet my eyes. Not that I have much faith in eye contact as an indicator of honesty.

I pressed on. “Did she seem reasonably happy?” I reflected that no one ever said “happy” all by itself anymore.

“Look Jake, she was my friend.”

“That’s very nice. But her death wasn’t very nice, and I’ve told you I’m writing a friendly piece, so why won’t you just talk to me?”

She thought about what I’d said while she finished her glass of wine. I poured her another and refilled my own glass.

“All right,” she said abruptly. “I’m going to trust you not to damage her memory. Actually, I don’t really know very much.”

I settled back in my chair. Was she going to unwrap a little?

“When I first met her, about three months ago, she seemed depressed. She didn’t talk about her personal life, but everything she said about everything was, well, colored by depression. Sometimes she would drink more wine than might have been wise. Sometimes she would pick people out in the bar or restaurant and make up stories about them, sad or peculiar stories. I assumed that those stories had something to do with her life, but it was as though she were telling me secrets somehow, and I tended to push them out of my mind later.”

“Did she ever talk about marriage or art or lovers—”

She flapped her hand impatiently. “I’ll get back to that, Jake. Just let me follow this process, all right?” I agreed, irritated. “For the past month or so, though, she’s seemed happier. I even commented on it, making some remark about her cheerful mood, and she said something about having direction and purpose. She didn’t talk about it any more than that and I didn’t ask. Now, to get back to your question. I got the impression she had pretty strong ideas about marriage. I’d been talking about my own divorce, five years ago, and she said she didn’t really approve of divorce. I told her my husband had been a philandering lout. That made her angry in a righteous way, but she still wasn’t sure I should have left him. She was an odd mixture, you know? Conventional about some things, like divorce, and unconventional about others.” She stopped and looked confused. “But is that so?” she asked wonderingly. “Isn’t it conventional now to get divorced?” She shook her head. “I’ve lost track, I think, of…”

I took a chance on interrupting her again and being chastised. “How did she feel about lovers? Did you ever talk about things like that? I assume that even if she didn’t talk much about her life, you talked a bit about yours.”

She smiled wryly. “About my lovers, you mean? There have been one or two.” She looked at me almost seductively. “I did talk about one man, as a matter of fact
.
She didn’t seem shocked.”

All right, so I’d have to be more direct. “Do you think she might have had one?”

“If she did, she never told me. But the way she felt about marriage, it seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”

I reflected that either Margaret Bursky-Harley had resigned herself to the celibacy of a dead marriage or she’d been the most successfully secretive woman since my ex-wife. The level in our carafe was sinking pretty rapidly toward the one-quarter mark. I gestured at it. Alana smiled. I ordered another carafe and allowed myself some rumination time. Alana didn’t seem about to press me to ask more questions.

The self-portrait I’d seen of the dead artist had shown a passionate face, with warmth, appeal, strength, and intensity. The face, and the art, had shown real sensitivity. But it could have been the sensitivity of an ascetic or even a martyr.

“So,” I said with an air of renewal, “she was in a meditation group. How else did she spend her time? Any other groups or organizations?”

Alana’s face closed up. The wine bearer brought us our second carafe. I was getting a little foggy. I would have to slow down, let her do more of the drinking.

“I know she was doing some therapy or other, some kind of group thing, right?” I asked.

She smiled tightly at me. That was it. She felt strange about the therapy. She was, truly, confused about what was now conventional. “Well, of course, everyone does that at one time or another, isn’t that so?” Her voice was a bit higher than usual. “There wasn’t anything wrong, you know. She was just exploring herself.”

“Of course,” I agreed, looking shocked that anyone could think that therapy served any purpose beyond that of the emotional dilettante. She relaxed. “I don’t know more than one or two people who haven’t done some of that sort of thing during the past ten years,” I lied. “Actually, what I wanted to know was—” I had lost track of my sentence. One should not get fuzzy-brained when questioning people. It’s not professional. “I still need to talk to more people who knew her. You know, find out how people saw her. And I wondered if you knew where I could get in touch with this group or the therapist. Or whatever.”

Alana had finished her first glass from the new carafe. She was speeding up while I was slowing down, and she didn’t seem to be feeling anything at all. She shook her head. “No, but I do know that she picked the name off the bulletin board at the center. The therapist. The card or notice is probably still up there. I just didn’t pay any attention to who it was or what kind of group.” Her tone was light, implying that such a group was not the sort of thing she had any use for. I remembered that I’d seen several therapists’ cards on the board. Oh, well. No one ever said this was going to be easy. I wanted to talk to Billy again, so I’d be going back to the center the next day, anyway.

“Alana?” She looked at me expectantly. “If you’re sure she wouldn’t have killed herself, what do you think happened?”

She laughed shakily. “Well, is there any question? The poor woman fell. That seems clear enough, doesn’t it?” She was asking me the question as though her own faith in the reasonableness of the world were at stake.

I peered down into my wine. I didn’t for a minute believe that a woman of forty or more still thought the world was reasonable, but I didn’t see any purpose in not going along with the fantasy. I looked up at her and smiled into her own anxious smile. “Sure,” I said heartily, “decks are almost as dangerous as hot tubs. Dangerous place, California, hazards everywhere.”

We both laughed, although I hadn’t said anything very funny.

I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her; and I thought I’d probably get another chance if I did think of something. We struggled through the last half of the second bottle of wine, two to one her favor. She challenged me to a California hazard-naming contest. We raced, one after another, through decks, hot tubs, smog, drought, tidal wave, earthquake, dry rot, terminal laid-backness, termites, mud slides, Mediterranean fruit flies, banana slugs, and unemployment, and then it got harder. She came up with slow strangulation by Algerian ivy; I countered with the probability that the two halves of the state, north and south, would always be bound in their unnatural union.

Although her naturally heavy eyelids were drooping very low, she managed a grin. “You win, Jake. That’s the worst.” It was decided that I would follow her home and she would make some coffee.

Alana drove very slowly down Telegraph toward Oakland, turning left on Alcatraz and right again just before College Avenue. Nice neighborhood. She pulled up in front of the basic brown shingle with red trim on lots of casement windows. Big dark tree in the front yard. Two flats, upper and lower. I followed her up the stairs. Converted, I thought, burping slightly with the effort of climbing, from a single-family house.

She led me into the kitchen and sat me down at a table with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Bentwood chairs, four of them. New cabinets. New floor. She was weaving around on it, making coffee. I offered to help. She waved me away with a shoo-fly gesture.

“Nice place,” I said smoothly.

She was concentrating hard on measuring the coffee into the top of the Melitta. “Thank you. Had it converted after the divorce so I could rent out part of it.”
Well, good,
I thought. I hated to think of her without something to fall back on. She seemed softer than most of the women I’d known, as though her emotional life had been too painful and the pain had destroyed her elasticity.

She got the coffee measured and the kettle on to boil and sat down across from me. The kitchen light, stark above us, showed every line in her face. She looked tired. I guessed that I did, too, and that the bags under my eyes were standing out in high relief and my incipient whiskers were making my face look a little dirty. I took her hand.

“Alana, I want to thank you for the help you’ve given me. You’re a good and loyal friend, and I swear to you that you will never read a bad word about Margaret Bursky that was written by me.” Easy enough to promise that. I wasn’t going to write any words at all if I could help it.

She looked into my eyes. “I think you’re a nice man, Jake. I hope I’m right about that.” The water boiled and she poured it through the coffee.

“Smells like French roast,” I said.

“Of course,” she replied.

We took our coffee into the living room, where one lamp was burning next to the couch. She sat down and patted the cushion next to her. Comfortable couch. I set my coffee down on the coffee table. So did she. The light was softer than in the kitchen. Neither one of us had to be disturbed by the sight of the other’s life history engraved on flesh. She put her hand up and touched the back of my neck.

“I think,” I said, “that you’re a nice woman.”

“No,” she whispered, “I’m not. I won’t fall in love with you. I’ll just use you a few times and dump you before you have a chance to dump me. I’m not a fool, and I’m no longer fooled by romance.”