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

right before I dozed off.

– 13 –
    Rosie was moving around in the next room. I looked at the clock. Two hours had passed. I called out, and she came in.
    “I brought back some food,” she said. “Hungry?”
    “Sure.”
    She had been doing more than going for takeout. She had gone to the Hackmans’, where she had found the younger of the two boys, Tommy, at home alone. He was about fourteen, she said. He wouldn’t let her in, but she did her best Nancy Drew act and got him curious enough to agree to talk to her out in the yard. She told me about their conversation over a dinner of gooey hot turkey sandwiches on Styrofoam bread on Styrofoam plates, which we ate sitting on my bed.
    She had started out by telling the boy that we were investigative reporters, and that her partner had been injured in a “suspicious accident.” We felt, she told him, that something very odd was going on in Wheeler, and that someone had tried to get us because we had been looking into the break-in at the bank and the death of Gracie Piedmont.
    Rosie described Tommy as a bright, nervous, sly-eyed kid, tall for his age, physically clumsy, and self-conscious in her presence.
    He had demanded to know exactly what she wanted from him.
    She told him that we’d heard his older brother, Rollie, had been the one who found the bank’s assets out on the beach the morning after the burglary, and that we were wondering if he’d seen anything else.
    “How would I know?” the kid said.
    “What did you think when you found out what had happened?”
    He tried to be cool, but he wasn’t handling it very well, she said. He grinned and blustered and picked at a hangnail and told her he thought the break-in was “pretty dumb” and the bank itself was “weird.”
    “Some of the people in town,” she said, “think you and your brother might have pulled the job.”
    He had laughed— proudly, she thought— and admitted that they had a reputation, all right.
    He wouldn’t say they’d done it— and he wouldn’t say they hadn’t done it. And he didn’t know where his brother was or when he’d be home.
    I was having trouble eating with my left hand, and dropped a gob of mashed potatoes and gravy on the front of my clean shirt. It slithered down to my lap.
    “What’s the house like?”
    “Poor. The yard’s a mess. There’s an old station wagon on blocks in the side yard.”
    “What do you think?” I maneuvered a slice of turkey into my mouth.
    “Hard to tell with a kid like that. Maybe they did do it. But then again, it’s possible he just wants to give the impression of guilt. Their reputation, you know. We need to talk to his brother. And his parents.”
    Rosie had made two more calls while I’d been sleeping.
    She had invited Nora to the poker game, but didn’t think she’d come because she had said something about wanting to work. Rosie had then dropped by Melody Clift’s house and invited her. Melody said she’d be delighted. An interesting group: Clement, Spiegel, Melody Clift, Perry, and us.
    I decided to skip the pain pills for the evening so I could be awake and alert for the poker game. Beer’s a pretty good painkiller, anyway.
    My arm was heavily bandaged, set in a sling. I couldn’t quite manage a shower, so I sponged myself down and put on clean clothes, once again.
    Rosie drove the Chevy. As a teenager I’d had a lot of practice at driving a shift car with my left hand while the right was otherwise occupied, but that had been a long, long time ago, and I didn’t feel like trying it just yet.
    Clement’s house was a small stucco bungalow, a couple of blocks from the center of town. Pale green with white trim. Maybe twelve hundred square feet, maybe a little more. It had a shallow front porch with barely enough room for two redwood chairs with plastic cushions and a small redwood table between them that held a jade plant in a clay burro planter. The concrete stairs and porch were freshly painted in that terra-cotta