Free Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) by Shelley Singer Page B

breakfast the next day, and the local political connection said Wednesday was fine.
    I went out for a Japanese dinner and a couple of bottles of sake, then I went back to my room, mellow, full of raw fish, tempura and rice, and called Rosie for a consultation. Her carpentry job, she said, would be finished by Wednesday morning.
    “I’m really sorry I’m not with you, Jake. Sounds like the Richmond women are a lot of fun.”
    “Who knows? You may get your chance. Have you managed to get anything done on your end?”
    She had, with Pam’s help, paid some calls on Pam’s immediate neighbors. No one had seen anything the day of Richmond’s death. She’d made a couple of phone calls earlier that evening— it was seven o’clock in Oakland— and was getting some idea of what directions we ought to take out there, and who we should be talking to for starters. That was good news. As usual at the beginning of a case, the possibilities are multidirectional and somewhat overwhelming. And narrowing things down is tough. If you’re not careful, you can eliminate someone early on who might have had the key to the whole damned thing. In real life, there’s no nice, straight literary line that leads right to the killer. I was hoping to do a great deal of narrowing down in Minneapolis.
    After I had talked to Rosie, I called Pam. She wasn’t there, so I left her a message to get back to me. I had just settled down with one of my favorite sitcoms when she called.
    I ran over some of the same ground with her, although I was a bit kinder to Richmond’s wife with Pam than I had been with Rosie. I’m not sure why. And a little less amusing about Richmond’s mother.
    Pam told me what flight she would be coming in on the next day, for the funeral. We had agreed that she would travel to Minneapolis, first of all because she wanted to be there, and second, because I thought I could probably use some help in identifying the people who showed up and getting a fix on them.
    “I can’t believe how hard it is to get away,” she said. “Everything’s in total chaos. People don’t know what to do. I’ll have to leave again right after the funeral.”
    I didn’t guess that would be a problem, I reassured her. She sounded pretty wired, and maybe glad, in a way, that she was needed at home. I couldn’t imagine that she felt all that comfortable about spending time in Richmond’s other life.
    I went to bed early and got an early start on the next day, but I might as well not have bothered. Neither the cousin nor the brother was at the mill, and, once again, the brother was not answering his home phone. I was meeting the campaign manager at ten, which gave me a little over an hour with him before I had to head out to the airport to get Pam.

– 13 –
    RON Lewis seemed like a nice guy, but somehow he didn’t fit my image of a campaign manager.
    For one thing, he looked unbelievably innocent. He was a youngish— about thirty-five— man of medium height, with plump cheeks, slender figure, and thin hair. His eyes were pale blue and childishly wide. He had picked me up at the motel and taken me to a place he’d heard of where we could get a “real jack and avocado omelet.”
    I’m not that crazy about omelets, but he was so proud of himself for tracking down the restaurant that I ordered one.
    He started talking about how anxious he was to get back to L.A.
    “I feel all torn up, you know? And before this, with the campaign, I had to be all over the state. That was great, in a lot of ways, but now… I just need to level out.”
    “Sure. I can understand that.” I needed to get him on the track, even if he was homesick. “We don’t have a lot of time, Lewis. I’d like to get some of your ideas on what might have been going on in Richmond’s life and in the party that could have led to this.”
    He poured cream into his coffee, slowly, watching the color change. Then he added a teaspoon of sugar, exactly level.
    “I wish I knew,