Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) (5 page)

“Okay. I was just walking around, you know? It was kind of a nice morning. It wasn’t raining or anything. So I walked down the path. Thought I’d take a look around the canyon, maybe walk down the road a mile or so. But I noticed this thing flopping around in the ditch, stuck in the brush, so I went over there. It looked like a body, but I figured it couldn’t be, so I poked at it with a branch and it turned over to where I could see his face. I recognized him and got sick and scared and ran away. I guess I yelled, too.”

“Did you see the wound? A weapon of any kind?” He shook his head. “This fight you had with the guy. What was that about? And when was it?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, brushing back the forelock. It fell right back down again. “It was about his crummy company, Jake.” I was Jake again. “You wouldn’t believe the way they run things around there. And he was so self-righteous, like they weren’t running a scam at all. Maybe I should fill you in a little on the company itself?”

That sounded like a good idea. Since I was working on the assumption that Alan hadn’t killed the man, I had to start looking at the victim’s life and involvements. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me about it. Start with the kind of work you’ve been doing.”

Alan explained that he was an underling in what the company called the communications department. The department produced all the printed materials for the salespeople, he said, and also worked on, and sometimes created, course material.

“You create courses?” I asked. He nodded. “And people buy them and study them by mail? And get diplomas?”

“Yes, except for the high school courses. They’re just studying those so they can pass high school equivalency tests where they live.”

“And you just kind of— write these courses?” The word “credentials” came to mind. I said it out loud. Alan laughed bitterly.

“Mr. Bowen, he’s the president of the company, he got a degree in education back in the forties sometime. Smith used to be a teacher, too. Then there’s the rest of the faculty. Some old woman who used to teach fifth grade, a couple of moonlighting high school teachers, a CPA for the accounting course, and a lawyer for the business law. They’re all on some kind of retainer. There’s a faculty office in the building, but I know some of them don’t live around here and I’ve never seen anyone in that office. When the students send in their course work it gets shipped back out again to the faculty, for corrections. That’s mostly all they do, except they’re supposed to write any new course material, or at least act as consultants on it. Sometimes Chloe writes to them with questions.”

“Who’s Chloe?”

“My boss. The manager of the department. She’s a burnt-out ex-wire service reporter. About your age.”

“So that’s what you were investigating? Bad courses?”

“Well, that too. But there’s something wrong with the way they’re selling the stuff. Kickbacks or something. At least Artie thinks so.”

“Yeah, he mentioned something about that. Is that what Smith did? Sales?”

“No. He was academic vice-president.”

“So,” I said, getting back to my original question, “what was the fight about?”

Alan’s first assignment, it turned out, had been to write some kind of study materials to go along with the first two chapters of a history book used in one of the high school courses. He’d churned out the stuff and turned it in to his boss. She had done a little editing and sent it on to Smith, who was her boss. Smith had returned it the next day, while Alan was in her office. Alan asked Smith why his work hadn’t been sent to the history teacher. Smith had snubbed him. Despite the manager’s warning looks, Alan had kept pushing. In a hurry, I guessed, to get his exposé and get out.

“I asked him if the faculty ever saw the courses before they were printed. He got really pissed off and told me I was ‘maligning a fine old company’ and I’d better watch myself or I’d lose my job.”

“When was all this?”

“Right around the end of the week. Thursday, I think.”

“And the only witness was your boss?”

“Not exactly. Her door was open. Anyone in the writers’ room could have heard. And the receptionist. Maybe even the artists.”

I stood up. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything.”

“Okay, relax, Alan. I don’t think you’ve got a real problem.” As we walked out of the room I added, “What do you think Smith might have been doing in the canyon?”

“Well, how would I know? I don’t think he was looking for me. Sometimes people come here just to walk around. It’s a pretty place.”

Artie’s son Mike was home from school and eating an apple. Jennifer was lying on the couch, the baby sleeping beside her. Julia was doing something in the kitchen. I’ve never known her to be a particularly domestic woman, so I guessed she was still avoiding the issue of Alan. Artie and Alan and I went out on the deck, with Mike trailing along. We leaned against various parts of the railing and looked at each other.

“The lawyer,” Artie said, “says he doesn’t see why he should have to repeat things to you he’s already told me. So he said you should talk to me.”

I swallowed a retort. “Okay,” I said. “Does anyone know what Smith was doing here? Where did he live?”

“I don’t know why he was here. But he only lived a couple of miles away, closer to town.” I gathered that he meant downtown Mill Valley, not San Francisco.

“And what about the murder weapon?”

“He was stabbed.”

“With an icepick?” I was getting irritable and I let it show. “With a butcher knife? With a nail file?”

Artie looked helpless and I felt a little sorry for him. But I asked him another question anyway. “When was he killed?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just assumed it was in the morning.” He was getting embarrassed.

“Forget it,” I soothed. “You just don’t know what questions to ask. That’s why I’m here.”

Mike perked up. “You a P.I., Jake?”

“No, I’m just helping out.” I took out the little notebook I’d stuck in my hip pocket that morning. “What’s the lawyer’s name?”

“Marty Chandler.” He gave me his phone number. Alan was standing there pretending none of this had anything to do with him. I went back in the house to call the lawyer. Unfortunately, I was told, he was not in the office. I left a message for him to call me at Artie’s number.

Out on the deck again, Artie was chatting aimlessly with Alan and Mike. Probably trying to take some of the pressure off. Just another ordinary day.

“Yeah,” Mike was saying. “I stuck the note on the bulletin board in the kitchen last week, but I kind of forgot to mention it.”

“That’s okay,” his dad said. “I kind of forgot to notice the bulletin board. Did he say what it was?”

“Just some tool or something of yours he had.”

Artie smiled at me cheerfully. “Neighbors. Always borrowing something.”

I grunted. My throat was getting sore again. I told him about the message I’d left at Chandler’s office. And speaking of neighbors, I said, I wanted to sit down with him or Julia and get some background on some of the people who lived in the canyon. Besides Carlota Bowman.

“Uh huh. You’ll meet Charlie today. He’s the one with the room to rent. He called to let me know he’ll be home around five and I should bring you over then. He wants to meet you.”

“Does he want references?”

Artie didn’t bother to answer that question. “And you’ll have a perfect opportunity to meet the rest of them tomorrow night at the meeting.” I questioned him with one weary eyebrow. “It’s a neighborhood meeting. For the canyon. At Charlie’s.”

“About the murder?”

He was patient with me. “No, Jake, we have these meetings every so often to work on canyon problems. We have an agenda and everything. And Charlie’s got a hot tub.”

I laughed. “You meet in the hot tub?” I thought I was joking, but Artie replied, a little defensively, “Well, yes. In a way.”

“It’s over there, Charlie’s place,” Artie said, pointing across the canyon. I lined my eyes up with his index finger.

“The one with the arch? At the top of the stairs?” It was the house just above Carlota’s.

“Yeah. You just cross that bridge and follow the path. It’s the one with the sagging gutter. His door’s only about twenty steps up from the path.”

Or, I thought, about a hundred steps from the floor of the canyon.

I had an hour before Charlie got home. I used it to track down the poker regulars and tell them that the Tuesday night game was canceled for this week.

A little after five Charlie called and said we were welcome to come over. We crossed the bridge and followed the path, only this time, I checked out the house a little more carefully. The Asian-looking arch across the bottom step was made of two vertical six-by-sixes and a couple of flat pieces nailed across to form the top, one at the front of the verticals and one at the back. The horizontal boards were jigsawed in a pagoda roof shape. A deck was over our heads. Tucked under it, just above the path, was a small room. The under-the-deck room had its own entrance. Twenty-five steps above the path was the entrance to the house itself, swathed in blackberry and ivy, fresh growth from the passing winter sprouting from the stumps of last year’s surgery.

To the left of the entry door was a life-sized statue of a male nude in soft stone.

Artie knocked and Charlie opened the door. He was huge, maybe six foot three and thick in chest, shoulders, and neck. He glared at me and I damned near backed off the deck until I realized the look was one he would probably describe as a shrewd piercing gaze.

“Come on in,” he said softly, and we entered the living room. It sloped enough so that a marble placed at the upper end would shoot right down to the lower end, where a sliding glass door led out onto the deck. Not one of the four corners of the room looked like a true right angle. The ancient brick fireplace directly across from the entry looked tilted, but I decided that was because it was vertical and the floor was not horizontal.

The slightly dizzying effect of stepping into a house out of square was the first thing I noticed. The second thing was the art on the walls. It matched the nude on the deck. Naked males everywhere, sitting around in their frames.

Once I got past all that, I noticed the tiny, neat kitchen at the upper end of the living room, the door from the living room to the bedroom, and a steep and narrow flight of steps that led up alongside the kitchen to what was probably some sort of attic room. I also noticed that the view from every window was green and beautiful. The rain had stopped but a damp smell clung to the interior of the house. Like most of the old houses in these canyons, this one had probably been a summer cottage owned by a family living in San Francisco, back in the days when the only way to get to the wilds of Marin County was by ferry boat.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” I said.

“Thanks,” Charlie rumbled. He brushed a shock of black hair back from his forehead and smiled proudly. He had small violet eyes that crinkled when he smiled, a large crooked nose, and deep lines from nostril to chin. I guessed his age at somewhere around forty-five. He was a natural for the part of the aging town marshal forced to face the young gunslinger, and he dressed for the part in a worn blue work shirt, nearly new Levi’s, and cowboy boots. The pointy kind.

He got right down to it. “How long would you need the room for?” he asked Artie.

“Can’t tell, maybe a couple of days, maybe a month. What’s your monthly rate?”

“Well, I’ve never rented it out before. Let’s say two hundred dollars.”

Artie rolled his eyes. “Let’s take a look at this sultan’s palace,” he said.

Charlie led us back down the steps to the door under the deck, produced a key, and showed us in.

The room was approximately ten by twenty and sparsely furnished, with a cot at the far end and a long work table shoved up against three windows that pierced the front wall. In the corner to the left of the door was a small potbelly stove. Its chimney went through the wall, and, I presumed, up from there. I also presumed it rose to well above deck level. The floor was flowered linoleum, with a lot of little dribbles and mounds of crumbly white stuff all over it. I knelt down to rub some between my fingers.

“Plaster?” I asked, looking up at the ceiling to see if more of it was about to fall.

“Of Paris,” Charlie answered. “The legacy of George. A sculptor.” He gestured toward the ceiling, and I realized he was pointing to the nude figure on the deck above. “He left me. And he didn’t even clean up after himself.”

I nodded sympathetically, and Artie muttered something that sounded like, “Yeah, that’s tough.”

“Two hundred a month?” I said, looking around the room. I could see black smudges of mildew along the back wall. The dampness I’d felt in the house above was more pronounced here.

“I’d clean it up for you,” Charlie offered. “Put in a little chest of drawers. I’ve got an old chemical toilet you can use. We can share the shower upstairs.”

“How much off if he uses the shower at my house?” Artie wanted to know. I wandered out the door and left them to their negotiations. The room was okay for my purposes, even if I had to use it for a couple of weeks. I didn’t plan to spend all my nights there, anyway. For one thing, I had a date later that week over in the East Bay.

The negotiations were concluded and the two men joined me outside. It had been resolved that I would use Artie’s shower. Charlie handed me a key to the room and promised, again, to clean up the residue of George.

“Move in any time,” he said.

“You’re going to move in tonight, aren’t you?” Artie whined.

“Okay. Sure. I’ll just run back home and get some clothes and take care of some odds and ends, then I’ll come back tonight. If anything happens I need to know about, between now and then, just leave a note on the door.”

He nodded gratefully.

I drove back to Oakland and took care of my odds and ends. Like a nice quiet dinner at home, an hour’s soak in the tub, and some conversation with Tigris and Euphrates. I also called a neighbor who said, sure, he’d be glad to take care of the cats if neither Rosie nor I could get back to do it. We arranged a signal. I would hang a towel on the fence when I was at home. And I left a note for Rosie telling her about the hot tub community meeting, something I was sure she wouldn’t want to miss. Then I tossed some essentials in an airline bag and headed back across the bridge.