Read Online Spit In The Ocean: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 4) by Shelley Singer - Free Book Online

think he was really close to anyone in town. Kind of full of himself, if you ask me. Maybe a little snobbish, if you know what I mean. No, see, Gracie was a movie freak. You know, she knew all about Cary Grant and Veronica Lake and people like that. All the old ones. And I guess they got started talking once. Had something in common. Friends, that way. If he ever talked to anyone else, it would have been different, but he didn’t, so she was the one he called.”
    She made it sound like the woman had died because she liked old movies.
    I ate the rest of my cookie so she wouldn’t be insulted. “Where was he calling from?”
    “L.A.”
    “And you and your daughter were there when he called?”
    “Not Joanne. I took Joanne over to her great-aunt’s place. She likes it there.” A grimace.
    “You don’t?” I asked.
    “Oh, she’s okay. My mother’s sister. It’s just that she’s all the time talking about Jesus this, Jesus that. Joanne’s kind of gotten into it too.” She shrugged, a by-now familiar gesture that she seemed to use as a good-natured expression of “what the hell.” She looked at her watch, said “Whoops,” and went to the oven. Another batch of cookies, a bit on the brown side. She repeated her procedure up to the point of putting another batch in the oven. She didn’t have any ready.
    “I’m getting behind in the system, here.” She frowned. “I forgot to roll out some more to go in when those came out.” She floured the board again, dropped another ball of dough on it, and began to smash away.
    “We won’t keep you much longer,” I told her. “So she got this phone call and took off?”
    “That’s right.” The dough didn’t have a chance. In a couple of minutes it looked like a steamroller had gotten it. “She said she’d just run over for a minute. It got longer and longer and I was sitting there getting worried, so I finally called Clement.”
    Rosie, who is usually very polite, had not finished her cookie. She asked, “What were you afraid might have happened?”
    “Oh, listen, in that storm? Anything. A tree could have fallen on her car. Somebody’s roof could come off and land on her head. Anything.”
    “And you called back…” I prodded.
    “Yeah, well, it was after seven and I still hadn’t heard anything. So finally I called the cops again. Angie told me they’d found her body. That was when I drove out to see.” She shook her head. “I saw, all right. I couldn’t believe it, you know? They were hauling her dead body up with ropes.” She wiped her eyes.
    Rosie and I had been lucky, I thought. We’d gotten there when the body was already gone. I like it better that way.
    “Did you identify her?”
    “Heck, no. Clement did. You think I wanted to go out there and look at her?”
    “Of course not,” Rosie commiserated. “And then Wolf showed up, too, right?” Fredda nodded. “He seems like a real sweet guy. We were in the tavern when he got the news. It knocked him right over.”
    “Oh, sure. He’s the best. They seemed to get along pretty good too. They were probably going to get married.” She was cutting out circles of dough again.
    “Henry mentioned that Wolf’s had a lot of problems,” I said. “Is that so?”
    “Oh, nothing too big. Women. He had a marriage that didn’t work out. There was a kid too. And before that he had a thing for Nora; that was when they were pretty young. And she dumped him and took off for the city. Said she had things to do. Well, she did them and came back, but by then it was too late. Not that she came back for him. I heard she got homesick. Wanted to have a more, you know, natural life. By the way, be sure and put in that write-up that these cookies are all natural. No artificial ingredients.”
    I thought it was probably time to go. She was putting two more cookie sheets into the oven. I don’t like to wear out my sources in one sitting, and besides, I was getting dizzy watching her.
    We thanked her, assured