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

I’m stupid, too. Maybe he thinks if he hires me that will convince everyone he didn’t do it. Maybe he doesn’t even intend to pay me.”
    She was on her feet, defending him. “That’s ridiculous. He’s not like that. He’s totally sincere about this.” She suddenly realized she was standing and sat down again.
    “Besides,” I added, “wasn’t it your idea to call me?”
    She downed the rest of the wine in her glass. “It was all his idea, hiring someone to investigate. All I did was suggest you.”
    I finished my wine and stood up. “Okay. Let’s go get something to eat and talk about this some more.”
    We settled on Sen Ying’s, Szechuan and Cantonese, a few minutes north of Rebecca’s, where Berkeley disappears quietly into the town of Albany.
    We were halfway there before I broke the silence.
    “What time was it when you called him?”
    She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I guess it was around ten-thirty or eleven.”
    “Where were you?”
    “Jesus, Jake.” She tried to laugh, but her voice broke. “You know how it is in my business. I was wandering around all morning. In and out of the office. I think I called him from a phone booth somewhere.” I reached over and patted her hand. She pulled it out from under mine and grasped my arm. “Jake,” she said softly, “you’ve got to help us.”
    The restaurant was crowded but they found us a table. We ordered white wine, sizzling rice soup, spicy pork, and almond chicken.
    I had abandoned my slap-and-jab method, questioning her gently over lunch, asking her to tell me everything she knew about the dead woman. She knew a lot.
    Margaret Harley had not, according to Rebecca, known that her husband was having an affair. But she had apparently felt that something was wrong and, in recent months, had begun to act suspicious in a sad way. She had been given to sporadic outbursts of bitterness about the marriage. Harley had told Rebecca that he had caught her more than once watching him in a searching, questioning way. He had begun to find it less and less possible to be in his wife’s company for any length of time. He had taken to retreating to his study or working at his office. They had developed sexual problems because, or so Harley had told Rebecca, he no longer wanted to make love with his wife.
    But he had vacillated about leaving her. In some ways their marriage was a comfortable one for him. For one thing, Rebecca said, Margaret had money of her own that gave John an illusion of freedom. Freedom to consider teaching less and exploring what he called other options.
    Rebecca, on the other hand, felt that his fear of divorce—I thought of it as his fear of self-sufficiency—would fade as his love for her grew. She had been confident that would happen soon and, meanwhile, had been content enough to see him often and know that she was the one he really loved.
    Once she started talking about John Harley, I had a little trouble getting her back on the subject of his wife. I maneuvered her around again, asking what Harley had told her about his wife’s background.
    Mostly he had complained that she wasn’t doing anything with her talent.
    Margaret Harley had been a promising young painter, achieving some recognition in her native Massachusetts while she was still in her twenties. By the time she met John Harley, she was well known and able to command high prices for her work. He had a teaching job in Boston. They had married. She had taken his name legally, continuing to sign her work “Margaret Bursky.” Within a year or two of their marriage, he had received an offer for a much better job at Berkeley, and they had moved to the West Coast.
    After the move, she began to paint less. In a few months she was no longer painting at all. At the time of her death, at the age of thirty-five, she had not painted for six years. While Rebecca was telling me all this, I had a quick flashback to the fake Early American furniture in Harley’s rumpus