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 Page A

her we didn’t need to be escorted to the door, and walked back down the hallway. Joanne was sitting on the front porch. “Is that your truck, with the dog in it?” Rosie said it was. “You going to write about my mother?”
    “Maybe,” I answered, feeling guilty. “I’ll bet you’re glad your mom is in the cookie business, right? You get to eat all those cookies.”
    She laughed, a short bark. “So what? She gave you some, didn’t she?” I said yes, she had. “They’re not very good, are they?” She swung her chair around and rolled to the other end of the porch, dismissing us.
    We returned to Georgia’s Cafe for some non-Fredda coffee. I hadn’t noticed them before, but there they were, in a cardboard box on the counter: plastic bags with gummed mailing labels on them that said “Fredda’s All-Natural Cookies.” The label was hand-lettered neatly in ballpoint.
    I was thinking I’d like to talk to Nora again, maybe get some background on Wolf and her relationship with him. Rosie mentioned she thought we ought to talk to the Hackman boys. Maybe we’d find out, after all, that the break-in had been an adolescent joke. In which case, she said sadly, Gracie Piedmont’s death was probably just an accident and there was no case of any kind. She was depressing me to the point of agreeing with her. Which turned her around.
    “No,” she said. “I don’t really believe any of that.”
    I noticed that Fredda’s cookies were also on the menu, under Desserts. Fifty cents apiece. “You don’t want to go home yet.”
    She laughed. “You’re right. I want there to be a case, and as long as she’s dead anyway, she may just as well have been murdered.”
    Nora didn’t answer her home phone, so we went over to the bank. The receptionist was there and sent us up after consulting with her intercom. But when we got to Nora’s door, which was ajar, we heard two voices. I knocked.
    “Just a second,” she called out. “See you later, then, Marty?”
    A short, muscular man wearing thick glasses brushed out past us, with just the quickest nod in our direction. I turned to watch him go before entering the office. He looked familiar.
    “Marty?” I asked. She nodded. “Spiegel?” Yes, she admitted, it was.
    Rosie was impressed, but she tended to business. “I guess he flew up here because he never got a return call from Gracie Piedmont last night? To check on his house?”
    “I suppose so,” Nora said.
    “And you’re buddies?” I asked. “He just dropped in to say hi?”
    “Don’t be silly.” She played with a stack of papers on her desk. “He was here on business.”
    “Business? What kind of business? Bank business?”
    She didn’t answer me. “What did you need to see me about, anyway?”
    “Look, if you want us to investigate, you’re going to have to give us information freely.” Actually, I was curious as hell.
    “All right. But this is highly confidential. We always keep this information very strictly to ourselves.”
    It turned out that the famous Marty Spiegel was what the guy in the bar had called a “depositor.”
    I filed that information under “fascinating but irrelevant” and turned to Nora’s private life.

– 9 –
    Nora had, it turned out, been very heavily involved with Wolf Oswald, but that had been a very long time ago. They had dated sporadically in high school, more seriously when she was attending junior college. He had wanted to get married. She had taken a series of jobs in the county, “nothing very exciting,” and had put him off while she tried to decide what she wanted to do.
    What she wanted to do, after all, was leave, go to San Francisco, and work in the financial district at whatever she could find. She had worked, and she had learned. She had gone to school at night and taken business courses. There had been occasional weekends in Wheeler for a while, but finally he had married someone else, and he and Nora became, she said, friends. That marriage had