Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (24 page)

The intermission ended and we all trudged back to our seats.

The last film was called
Mirrors.
It was an endless— twenty minutes? An hour? Three days?— study of objects reflected in mirrors. I recognized two of the mirrors that hung in Carlota’s living room. There was the one that hung near the French doors, reflecting one side of the living room, a window looking out onto the kitchen deck, and some of the steps leading up to the path above her house. I could even see a piece of my room across the path and under Charlie’s house.

Then there was the one that hung near the grand piano. That reflected the piano, some of Nona’s artwork, and some of the hillside along the stairway.

I stopped watching after the first ten minutes or so, and let my mind work on the problems of Andy and Bill and Howard Morton. And Bunny. I was going to have to cope with Bunny again.

When the film finally ended, we drifted back out again to the reception table. There was no champagne left. Carlota was surrounded by a small circle of enthusiasts— Nona, two other women, and the bearded man. A few other people looked like they thought they should speak to the filmmaker and hovered around the outside of the circle looking confused, but most of the audience just walked slowly out the door. Rosie and I agreed that was the best course. We congratulated Carlota on the showing and said we had some errands to run that night.

Then we escaped to a soda fountain in San Rafael. Rosie had a hot fudge sundae; I had a banana split.

At nine the next morning, Julia came and knocked on my door to tell me someone named Barbara was on the line.

“She sounds pretty eager, Jake. What’s your secret?”

“Wrinkles.”

Bunny wanted to know why I’d kept her waiting so long. “What did you do,” she demanded, “shave first?”

I explained that I wasn’t living near my telephone, gritted my teeth, and apologized.

“Oh, that’s okay. No pressure. You ready to take me out?”

“For lunch,” I said. “Just lunch. Can I pick you up at school?”

“I’m not in school today.”

I did a quick run-through of my mental calendar. “Is it a holiday?”

“No. Just lunch, huh?” I could almost feel her shrug. “Well, maybe you’ll change your mind after lunch.”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“Meet me at the Casbah at twelve-thirty.”

I thought she must be kidding. “You an old movie fan or something?”

“Huh?” I gathered from that answer that she wasn’t. “It’s no movie, Samson, it’s a restaurant. On Throckmorton. It’s not far from the movie, though.”

“See you there at twelve-thirty.”

“Yeah, you will.”

But I didn’t. I was there at 12:35 and she wasn’t. The Casbah was a pleasant and expensive looking place with dark gold plaster walls hung with Oriental carpets, a few wooden booths alongside the front window, a few tables in the center, and about half a dozen archways hung with beads along the left side. They did a good lunch trade.

A slender dark man approached me. “Name?”

“Samson.”
Terrific
, I thought,
he’s going to tell me there’s an hour wait for lunch.

“This way, Mr. Samson.” He led me to one of the beaded archways, pulled back the beads, and showed me into a cozy little hideaway, a platform with a low table and cushions for sitting.

“Did I have a reservation?” He nodded solemnly.

“And Miss Smith said she would be about fifteen minutes late. May I bring you a drink?” I glanced at the wine list. They had retsina.

“Greek wine?” I asked.

He smiled. “The owner’s wife is Greek. You will see from our menu that we are quite cosmopolitan here. Greek dishes, Arab dishes. We like to think of ourselves as Eastern Mediterranean. You would like a glass of retsina?”

My love for retsina dates from my Chicago days. I’d gone through a belly-dancer period in my early twenties and I used to spend half my evenings hanging around the old Greek Town area. It’s a funny thing about retsina. If you don’t like it, you think it tastes like furniture oil with the furniture still in it. If you love it, as I do, it reminds you of the forest the resin came from. Unique, this resinous wine of Greece, like feta cheese and wrinkled black olives. When I drink it, I imagine myself sitting in a cafe overlooking the Aegean, dreaming out my days in useless philosophy.

After a while, I stuck my head and arm through the beads and ordered another glass of wine. A few minutes later, Bunny arrived. She was playing a new role. Her hair looked a little less like Elvis Presley’s. She was wearing loosely fitted green velvet pants that stopped halfway down the calf, high-heeled boots, a fishnet shirt with something satiny under it, and a green velvet jacket, darker than the pants, with short embroidered sleeves. I wondered where she’d left her coat. The day was chilly for bare arms. She slid into the cubicle beside me, and moved in close.

“Sit around on the other side of the table, Barbara,” I said.

“Come on, Jake, no one can see us here.”

“Just the patron saint of little children.”

“You Catholic or something?” She snarled and moved to the other side of the table, nearly colliding with the waiter, who was bringing our menus. He did not ask her if she wanted something to drink. She asked for a Turkish coffee; I continued working on my second retsina. The menu was extensive for lunch. Since Artie was paying, I tried to keep the overhead down by ordering egg-lemon soup and a falafel sandwich with hummus. Bunny ordered the soup and stuffed grape leaves.

“Two avgolemono, dolmades, falafel with hummus,” the waiter repeated, writing it all down very carefully while he gave Bunny several long looks. After he finished checking out Bunny, he gave me an approving leer, I guess for being tucked away in this little den with an adolescent. I glared back at him and he went away.

“Okay, Barbara,” I said, all business. “Why don’t you tell me what you have to tell me?”

“Before lunch?” she whined. “How do I know you won’t just take off and leave me here?”

I sighed. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“You won’t because I’m not talking until we eat.”

I surrendered. “Fine. How’s school?”

She snorted. “You mean what am I studying and what do I want to be when I grow up? Jesus, Jake.”

“Well, you must be interested in something.”

“Lots of things. Right now, I’m interested in who you think killed my father.”

I decided to shake her up a little. “Maybe your brother did it.”

She laughed, but the laugh wasn’t real. “Billy? Don’t be stupid. He wouldn’t kill anyone. He’s real sweet.”

“He had some good reasons for hating your father. I talked to him. He’s pretty angry about your father’s reaction to his being gay.”

She screwed up her face, thinking hard. “He wouldn’t kill him for that.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But your daddy was also trying to fuck up Andy’s life. Wouldn’t he kill him for that? Or maybe Andy would. What do you think? What do you know about Andy?”

“I only met him once. He seemed real nice.”

“Did you know what your father was planning to do before I asked you about it?”

“Yeah. Billy told me.”

“When?”

“Well, right after he found out. We keep in touch.”

The soup arrived. It was thick and yellow and it smelled wonderful. It tasted wonderful, too. Best I’d had since Chicago. Egg-lemon soup is not easy to make. The base is chicken broth, to which you add a mixture of egg and lemon. A chef once told me you beat the egg whites first, then add the yolks and beat some more, then you add the lemon juice very slowly, beating the hell out of the whole mess while you’re mixing the eggs and lemon. If you don’t do it that way, the lemon will curdle the egg. Anyway, it goes something like that. There’s rice in the soup, too.

Bunny tasted hers. “This is weird.”

“I thought you were a sophisticate, ordering stuffed grape leaves and everything. You mean you’ve never had avgolemono soup?”

“Never had grape leaves, either. I just liked the way it sounded.” She plodded along with her soup-eating. I waited until my sandwich and her dolmades had arrived before I got back to picking her brain.

“Okay, Barbara,” I said, “I seem to be pretty much committed to paying this check, now. You ready to let loose of some information?”

She poked at one of the sauce-covered cylinders on her plate, unrolling a little of the grape leaf, cutting it off with her knife, and tasting it.

“What’s this sauce?” she asked suspiciously. “Tastes like the soup.”

“That’s because it’s egg-lemon sauce.”

“Grody. And this really tastes like a leaf.” She hacked away at her food until the spiced meat stuffing was exposed. She liked that all right. Little savage. She picked up her Turkish coffee and slugged about half of it down. She liked that, too.

The falafel sandwich was good, with the hunk of falafel, lettuce, and pieces of cherry tomato inside a pocket of pita bread along with the hummus, a kind of dip made of ground-up chickpeas and I don’t know what else. The hummus seemed a little thin. Sure enough, three bites into it the stuff soaked through the bottom of the half-circle of pita and the whole mess dropped down into my plate. I went after it with my fork.

“I’m waiting, Barbara. What do you know?”

“Can I order one of those?” she asked, after she’d polished off those parts of her lunch she’d decided to eat.

“Sure. After a little conversation.”

“Oh, all right. What did you ask me?”

“One of the things I’d like to know is how Bill knew what your father was planning to do. I can’t imagine one set of lawyers passing on that information to the other set of lawyers.”

“You don’t understand my father at all. He wrote Billy a letter, telling him what he was going to do. He believed you could do all kinds of shitty things if you told people what you were doing. Kind of like warning them, you know? So he sent this letter saying he was going to help Andy’s ex-wife keep him away from the kid. He was going to do it by telling the judge that Andy was unfit and so was Bill.”

“Let me get this straight. Andy’s ex-wife found out he was gay and started the custody fight. How did your father come into it?”

Bunny sneered. “He saw this piece in the paper about how some gay people were trying to help Andy raise money for court. Bill’s name was in it. And Andy’s ex-wife, too. My father called her.”

“So, what did your father know that she didn’t know?”

“Nothing, as far as Bill could see from the letter. He just said he was going to testify that the guys were unstable or nuts or something and would screw in front of the kid. I mean he didn’t use those words.”

“Is that true?”

“Can I order one of those sandwiches now?” I hailed the waiter and ordered her falafel. “No, it’s not true, for Christ’s sake, Jake. Of course it’s not true.”

“Your father was going to lie?”

She sighed wearily. “He never lied. He thought that’s how it would be. He was pretty ignorant.”

“How did Bill feel about that?”

“He was pissed off. Nobody likes to have their own dad saying things like that, you know. But he wasn’t real worried. He said he didn’t think the judge would listen to that kind of crap, without proof or anything. He said he wasn’t even sure the other lawyer would want to use it.”

“Did Andy agree with him?” I didn’t. Maybe the judge wouldn’t have bought it— maybe— but I was willing to bet there would have been some attempt to use James Smith’s statement.

Her falafel arrived and she took a huge bite. I waited while she chewed.

“Don’t know. Didn’t ask him.”

I was wondering what Andy’s lawyer had told him. I was also wondering whether Andy— or Bill— had been enraged enough by the man’s viciousness to strike out at him no matter what they thought the legal effects of his plan would be.

“There’s another thing,” I said. “Your mother seemed to think your father’s decision to take the new job was pretty sudden. But she says she didn’t question him about it. Is that true? Do you know anything about that?”

“Boy, you sure expect a lot for one lunch. I already answered all the stuff about Andy and Bill. Maybe I should make you take me out again—”

“Barbara,” I said, pulling her plate over to my side of the table. “How much do you want the rest of this sandwich?”

“Okay.” She was laughing, but she was also hungry.

“Tell me when you found out you were going to be moving.”

“Yeah, you know that was really something. It was on my birthday. Some birthday present, huh? He came home with this present for me— you know, that journal— and he handed it to me and wished me happy birthday and then he said to my mother that he’d decided to take the new job, and that we were going to be moving down south.”

“How did your mother react to that?”

“She was upset.”

“How do you know?”

Bunny laughed unpleasantly. “Because for once she didn’t say ‘Yes, dear, whatever you say, dear’ or some kind of shit like that. She said she didn’t want to take me out of school here, and that our whole lives were here, and all that. And she wanted to know why.”

I leaned forward, keeping my fingers locked onto her plate. “What did he say?”

“He said he couldn’t tell her everything because it wouldn’t be good for her to know, whatever that meant, and that she had to trust him. He said it was personal. She asked him if something had happened at work that day, and he said no. But he thought it would be best if he took the other job.”

I asked Bunny if she thought he’d been telling the truth.

“Oh, sometimes he wouldn’t tell you everything you wanted to know. But he didn’t lie.”

A light rain had begun to fall as I got out of my car and started up the steps. Rosie, wearing a yellow slicker, was nailing the last new boards into place on the landing outside her room. Alice was sitting just inside the door, well out of the drizzle.

“How about some coffee, pal?” I said. She nodded, whacked in a few more nails, and followed me up to my room. I filled the kettle at the outdoor faucet and plugged in my hot plate.

Alice came in, shook herself, and flopped, sighing, in a corner.

I told Rosie about my lunch with Bunny, and we talked for a while about odds and ends of the case. She said she’d probably know by Saturday night whether Andy could account for himself on the morning of the murder.