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

room. I couldn’t imagine the dead woman, an artist, living with it. The stuff must have belonged to Harley before the marriage. That shed a little more light on his personality and on their marriage. No wonder Harley’s artist-wife had languished.
    At first Harley had worried about his wife’s apparent creative block. She had assured him that it was temporary and that she would soon pass to a new plateau in her work. When it became obvious that the problem was more than temporary, Harley had already drifted away from her. He was too involved in his own life to worry very much about hers, if indeed she had one at all apart from him.
    He had told Rebecca he suspected that she had given herself too much to her married life. When that began to fail, she started looking for ways to find herself and possibly her work again. She had begun to get involved with various groups, starting, for some reason, with an astrology study group. She had moved on to a painting class that she quickly declared “low-level and useless,” had taken some art history classes, which she found irrelevant, and had most recently been involved with her meditation group and her therapy group.
    She had been talking lately about building a studio on the back slope of their yard. John had hoped she would. When they were both home together, her aimlessness was oppressive to him.
    “Wasn’t very helpful to her, was he?” I commented.
    Rebecca tried to reason with me. “He couldn’t very well lead her life for her, could he?”
    “Certainly not. He was much too busy with his own.” I forestalled an angry reply by changing the subject abruptly. “That money of hers. Does he get it now?”
    Rebecca picked up a black mushroom with her chopsticks and sat staring at it, thinking. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “We’ve never discussed it. You’ll have to ask him.”
    I reflected that they’d hardly had time to discuss it, since her death at least. “I will. You don’t have any idea, I suppose, about how much money there was?”
    She dropped the mushroom and picked up a piece of chicken. “There was some from her early sales, but I got the idea that there was even more from her family. I really don’t know.” She looked at the chicken as if she were wondering what it was and put it in her mouth. Then she took a long swallow from her glass of wine. “He didn’t kill her for her money. Or have her killed. He hasn’t got it in him.”
    “You’re probably right. Why don’t we forget I ever said that. How do you think she died?”
    Rebecca brightened a little and looked at me straight on. “I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t know why the police think someone killed her, but it seems obvious to me that she killed herself. After all, she wasn’t very happy.”
    I shrugged. “They must have some reason. Tell me more about her. Was she a good-looking woman? Attractive?”
    She raised her eyes and looked at me again, this time quizzically.
    “She was nice enough looking, handsome, I suppose you could say. Why?”
    “I just need to know all the things about her that went to make up the complete person. An exceptionally attractive victim might have been victimized because of her attractiveness.”
    “A lover?”
    I nodded.
    “Well, she certainly wasn’t repulsive or anything.”
    I helped myself to the last of the almond chicken, waved to the waiter, and ordered another glass of wine for each of us.
    Rebecca continued. “She was medium. Medium coloring, medium height, medium-sized features. Not very exciting.”
Like her husband
, I thought. “But she certainly could have had a lover.”
    “Sometimes,” I said, “when people suspect their spouses of playing around, they run right out and do the same. Makes them feel better. A lot better.”
    Her eyes softened, and she looked at me sympathetically. “Sounds like you know about that, Jake.” I’d never talked about my long-dead marriage to another woman, and I wasn’t going