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

  PRAISE FOR SAMSON’S DEAL

  “Jake and Rosie are worth the book. They are memorable characters who charm us with their affection. If Singer can sustain this detective tandem, she’ll be a writer worth watching. With Samson’s Deal she joins the elite sorority of Bay Area women who’ve made their fictional debut with novels that overtly pay homage and subtly parody the conventions of the mystery story.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  The Bay Area is an incredibly popular home for fictional detectives and affable Jake Samson is a welcome addition to the fraternity. The Berkeley detective makes his debut in Samson’s Deal . Singer has created an appealing, believable detective in the easygoing Jake. The author’s grasp of the Berkeley-Oakland milieu is convincing and fully flavored.

  —Oakland Tribune

  SAMSON’S DEAL

  By

  Shelley Singer

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Samson’s Deal

  Copyright 1983 by Shelley Singer

  Cover by Andy Brown

  ISBN: 9781625170859

  Originally published by St. Martin’s Press

  www.booksbnimble.com

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: April, 2013

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  Contents

  Chapter 1 • Chapter 2

  Chapter 3 • Chapter 4

  Chapter 5 • Chapter 6

  Chapter 7 • Chapter 8

  Chapter 9 • Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 • Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 • Chapter 14

  Chapter 15 • Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 • Chapter 18

  Chapter 19 • Chapter 20

  Chapter 21 • Chapter 22

  Chapter 23 • Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 • Chapter 26

  Chapter 27 • Chapter 28

  Chapter 29 • Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 • Chapter 32

  Chapter 33 • Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Dedication and Acknowledgments

  Guarantee

  If You Enjoyed This Book…

  A Respectful Request

  About the Author

  – 1 –

  The directions I’d taken over the telephone helped me to find Chandler Hall without too much difficulty. The man had described the Berkeley campus building as modern, and so it was. It looked like a low-cost housing project. What he hadn’t mentioned, though, was the most obvious feature: half a dozen pickets standing around outside the door in the bright October sunlight.

  Three of the neatly barbered young people carried neatly lettered signs, two of which seemed to be generalized indictments of the political science department housed within. One said, DOWN WITH LEFT-WING PROPAGANDA, and the other said, TEACH THE TRUTH ABOUT LIBERAL UN-AMERICANISM. The third was more personal. It said, JOHN HARLEY IS A RED.

  Harley was the man who had called me and said he needed my help. He’d refused to tell me on the phone what kind of help he needed. I hoped he didn’t expect me to pad my shoulders and accompany him in and out of Chandler Hall every day, making nasty faces at a bunch of kids.

  I accepted one of the leaflets they were waving at passersby, pushed open the door to the building and started up the stairs to the second floor. .

  The call from Harley had come a couple of hours before. It had caught me doing what I seemed to be doing a lot of lately, which was very little. I’d been lying on my lounge chair in my colorful, lush, messy, impossible-to-maintain backyard, wondering why the squirrels had planted a walnut tree six inches from my foundation, wondering why I hadn’t either euthanized it or moved it when it was weed-sized, and wondering whether I was going to try transplanting the now four-foot-high tree or sell the house in five years. And wondering why the hell I was occupying my formerly keen mind with this trivial problem.

  A year ago, I realized, I wouldn’t have thought twice about having nothing much to think about. At thirty-seven, I had retired from the world of combat. I’d done a lot of things in my life, and I’d had it with just about everything I’d ever done. Adding up a small cushion of savings, a small income from a trust fund my mother had set up for me, and a little bit of rental property, 1 decided that, with a lot of economizing, I could afford to live the life of an urban gentleman farmer.

  Until I closed the savings account or got bored, or both. That had been the plan. That was still the plan.

  There was still some money in the account, but for some reason, when this guy Harley called and said he wanted to talk to me about a job, and that his friend Rebecca Lilly—his accent on the word friend was slightly coy—had told him I sometimes handled “discreet matters,” I got interested. The guy sounded like a jerk, but maybe I was tired of walnut trees. Or maybe it was the mention of Rebecca that did it. She might have had lousy taste in men, but she was a bright and beautiful woman. There was a time when I’d thought we might get something going. We’d had a couple of dinners, talked about ourselves, and—nothing. Like I said, she had lousy taste in men.

  I didn’t know what Harley meant by “discreet matters,” so I asked him. He, in turn, asked me to visit him at his office to discuss it. Right away. I said I’d come, but I took my time. An old policy of mine. I’ve learned that if money’s involved, it’s never a good idea to be too accommodating. People might hire a hungry man, but they won’t think he’s worth much.

  So there I was.

  And there, milling around on the second floor of Chandler Hall, were half a dozen more pickets. To forestall any silly conversation, I smiled cheerfully at them and waved the leaflet I’d gotten from their comrades out in front. They didn’t smile back. I knocked on Harley’s door.

  “Who is it?” The voice was high-pitched, exasperated.

  “Jake Samson,” I told the door.

  The door opened. I slid through the eighteen-inch space with some difficulty and the door closed again.

  “Look,” I began, “I’m not really too interested in bodyguard work. I’m not very tough—”

  He mumbled, “No, no, no,” collapsed in a chair behind the desk and waved vaguely at another, which I took as an invitation to sit down. He didn’t look good. It was hard to tell if he ever did.

  He had what are called regular features: a straight nose, lips neither prissy nor especially sensual, gray eyes neither piglike nor protruding. He was very pale and his light brown hair, streaked sparsely with gray, hung lankly over his forehead. He looked clammy. He looked like he’d been throwing up.

  I wondered briefly how Rebecca could prefer a flimsy specimen like this to me. I have been told that my mouth is wide and sexy, my green eyes piercing, my large broken nose masculine, my blond hair, my freckles, my sturdy five-foot-ten frame—but that was in another country, and alas…

  “What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” he snapped at me.

  I glanced down at the piece of paper the pickets downstairs had handed me. “Flyer. Something about a corps.”

  “Corps,” he snarled. “That’s what they are.” He pointed at the door. I could hear them out there, walking back and forth and talking among themselves. “Campus Organization for the Return of Political Sanity, CORPS. Pompous little bastards.” The sou
nds in the hallway changed. A new and authoritative voice had been added, and all the feet began to move away from Harley’s door. Harley jumped up from his desk, strode to the door, hesitated, and opened it just enough to peek outside. He nodded once, decisively, came back and sat down again.

  “Campus security,” he said. “And about time, too. I called them half an hour ago. Now maybe we can get down to it.”

  “Right,” I said enthusiastically.

  “I called you about my wife, of course.”

  I looked blank. He stared at me.

  “You didn’t hear?” He was incredulous. “It was in the papers, on TV—”

  I interrupted him. “I didn’t.”

  Urban gentlemen farmers often do not read newspapers or watch TV news for weeks at a time. I never seem to miss anything. “Suppose you tell me the whole story right now.” I pulled out a small pocket notebook and, pen poised, waited for him to begin.

  He snapped at me again, like a testy Pomeranian. “If I knew the whole story I wouldn’t be hiring you to investigate for me.” He wasn’t hiring me yet, but I let that pass.

  “Then tell me,” I said, slowly and with astounding patience, “what you do know.”

  A cheer rose from the gang of picketers clustered outside the building. Just about enough time, I guessed, for the advance guard from the second floor to have returned as heroes from the political science fortress.

  Harley glanced at the window, sighed, frowned, and picked up a pen from atop a folder of papers on his desk. He tapped the pen on the folder as though he wished he were working on the papers. “It’s incredible they’d be out there hounding me today. My wife. Margaret. She died yesterday.” There was that little trick of his again, accenting the loaded word. This time, the word was died.

  “Died?” I repeated. The demonstrators had begun a chant: “John Harley is a red.”

  “I’m not, you know,” the man spat at me. “A communist. I’m not even a socialist. I’m closer to anarchist than anything else.”

  Yes, I thought. I could tell by the structure of our conversation.

  I steered him back to the subject of his wife. He had gone home from his office the previous morning to find her dead, lying on the hillside below their deck. He had called the police. The police didn’t seem to think the death was an accident.

  “What did she die of?” I asked.

  “She fell off the deck.”

  “Okay,” I said, maintaining a professional calm. “But I mean what did the fall do to her? How did she die?”

  “Oh.” His voice dropped, but I heard him say, “Her neck. It was broken.”

  “And the police are investigating.”

  “Yes. It’s been quite an ordeal.” I wanted him to go on with his story, so I didn’t mention that the situation probably hadn’t been pleasant for his wife either. The CORPS people were still chanting, and even though they’d switched to insulting the political science department as a whole, Harley was having trouble ignoring them. I took a stab at looking sympathetic, and he was encouraged to go on.

  “There was the first cop, and he sniffed around and asked me a lot of questions. Then he called in his superiors, first one and then two more, and they all asked me questions and wrote down everything I said. And then of course there was someone with a camera photographing everything and looking for fingerprints and I can’t imagine what else.”

  Nothing unusual there. The beat cop had decided things looked fishy and had gotten his district sergeant out to have a look. He in turn has made the decision to call for a homicide team and a technician. The system had not been designed to annoy Harley, but I was sure I would never convince him of that.

  “So they’re checking out the possibility of a killer. What do you want with me?”

  “I want you to find out who did it.”

  I shook my head. “That’s police business.”

  “I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”

  I nodded thoughtfully and gazed around the office, giving myself a little time to catch my breath.

  “Plus expenses,” I said.

  – 2 –

  The question was, did I really want to do it? Maybe, after all, I wasn’t sure I could.

  One thing was sure. I wasn’t going to get a coherent story out of Harley as long as he was being constantly distracted by an anti-Harley political demonstration. I decided to take my preinvestigation investigation a step further and check out the scene of the crime. My prospective client agreed to meet me at his house.

  “Half an hour?” he asked, standing and beginning to pack the folder he’d been tapping and a couple of books into his briefcase.

  I shook my head and told him I couldn’t make it in less than an hour, that I had things to do. For one thing, I wanted to think. For another, I hadn’t had lunch. He sighed and led the way to the door, stepping back to let me go out first. I suspected him of leaving with me because he was nervous about leaving alone. But the group outside didn’t give him any trouble. They gave him, and me, an icy silence. Harley glared at them. I nodded and smiled, but they still didn’t believe me. I guess it’s something about my attitude.

  We parted just out of earshot of the demonstrators. Harley said that since the CORPS picketing had started, he always parked on the other side of the campus and was careful that no one he recognized as belonging to CORPS ever saw him getting into his car.

  “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, s
weating 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.