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

at that.” She pointed to her desk, and I could see that her evenings had been pretty solitary lately. The desk top was piled with paperbacks—science fiction and murder mysteries: Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Fritz Leiber.
    I nodded sympathetically. I suspected she just hadn’t gotten over her last lover. The relationship with Marge had ended only six months before. It hadn’t been a good one, but I knew from my own experience that doesn’t make the final, irrevocable loss any easier.
    “Well, I don’t know if I’ll even take the job.”
    She threw me a suspicious look. “You still haven’t told me what it is.”
    “Oh,” I said casually, “someone got killed.”
    “Killed?” She glanced at the books on her desk. “Do you mean murdered?” Her face was a study. She was having trouble choosing between regret and excitement. Not fear. Oh, no, not Rosie. And how could I tell her I didn’t want to involve her in anything that might be dangerous? She would have been righteous indignation itself. She would have accused me of being protective, Macho. She wouldn’t believe that I would feel the same way about a close male friend. Not to mention a good tenant.
    “Yeah, well, maybe. Or manslaughter. Or suicide, but—”
    She grinned at me. “Look, Jake, it’s okay. If you don’t feel you need someone to help you—you know, protect you—I’ll understand.”
    I just grinned back at her, finished my beer, and stood up to leave. “Got to make a phone call. If I decide I need a bodyguard, I’ll let you know.”
    Tigris and Euphrates came running to meet me as I approached the house, sucking in their cheeks and trying to make their chubby sides concave, mewling the duet from “The Starving Kitty.”
    I fed them. They would never have allowed me to talk on the telephone otherwise. Then I called Rebecca Lilly’s office. She was there.
    We hadn’t talked for more than a year. Her voice was the same, low and raspy with soft edges of humor and sex. I told her I wanted to see her and asked about lunch the next day. She agreed and said I should pick her up at home. She had been planning to take the morning off anyway. I figured she didn’t want anyone connected with Harley coming anywhere near her office.
    It was still early. Plenty of time for a long shower before dinner. I stripped and looked at myself in the full-length mirror, a confrontation I’d been avoiding. With some pain, I had to admit it was getting to be that time again. In the past couple of years, my spare tire had had an alarming tendency to grow, and the usual measures—a week or so of cutting down a little on food—just didn’t seem to work anymore.
    A salad and a chop for dinner. Beer? Tonight, at poker, okay. Tomorrow, no. If anything, wine. Because it doesn’t go with potato chips. Because my mother died of a heart attack after years of being overweight. Because I like to maintain the fiction that what I do or don’t do is going to make a difference in how long and how well I live.
    The shower soothed me a little, and while the chop was broiling, I put in a call to Artie Perrine, one of the poker regulars, and asked him if he could make it a little early because I wanted to talk to him privately. He agreed.
    Artie was an editor of
Probe
magazine, a San Francisco-based investigative monthly. I’d met him in Mendocino in 1973. He was a friend of a friend and had been up there looking for his sister, who’d gotten herself involved with some heavy-duty dealers. I’d helped him to find her and get her ass out of there. She was seventeen at the time. A few months ago Artie had mentioned that she was back up the coast again, but this time she was working as a marine biologist. He often said he owed me. I wondered how much I could collect.
    Artie showed up fifteen minutes early, but so did Hal Winter, a fairly successful Berkeley attorney I’d met at a party when I first moved to Oakland.