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

front of the house, above the entry hall, with a row of windows filled with plants in big pots— the ones I’d seen from outside— and to doors on either side that I guessed led to second-floor rooms.
    I don’t enter the homes of strangers with any expectations, or at least I try not to. But once invited in, I do tend to halfway expect to be asked to sit down. It didn’t happen.
    “Just on my way to take a look at the pool when the bell rang,” he said. “Come on.”
    He trotted toward the back of the living room and made a sharp left through a swinging door into a smaller room, only twenty by twenty. It was a well-equipped gym, with the same hardwood floor as the living room but no fancy beams. Just white plaster walls and surgical chrome. A rowing machine, a treadmill, an exercise cycle, a slant board, and one of those multi-station weight machines. The back wall, like the one in the living room, was glass. One section was broken, with a large branch poking through and rainwater on the floor. Outside the glass I could see more deck and a big covered swimming pool. The cover, and the deck, were littered with debris from the trees.
    “Take a seat somewhere,” he said, waving at the exercise equipment. Then he slid back a glass door and went outside. The weight equipment offered a couple of seats, so we sat, watching him poke around.
    “He’s rich,” I said to Rosie. “He can be as weird as he wants to be.”
    “And creative. Don’t forget creative.”
    He returned quickly. He seemed to do everything quickly.
    “Pool looks okay. Hot tub’s okay. Lost some roof tiles,” he reported, as though we might actually care. “Be right with you.” He disappeared through a thick doorway with a tiny window in it. Rosie gave me a look, and I grinned back at her. He popped out again. “Sauna’s fine. No leaks.”
    He arranged himself on the rowing machine, taking off his glasses, placing them carefully on the floor, and setting a timer. “Do you mind if I do a few things while we talk?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but began pulling. “I missed my workout this morning, flying up here.” Before either of us could speak, he added, “Tell me what it’s like being a P.I.”
    “A lot of the time,” Rosie said, “it’s pretty tedious.”
    “Bet it’s fun. Admit that it’s fun. What does it take to get a license?”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t have one.”
    He laughed. Pull. Pull. Pull. “I guess you don’t want to talk about it, am I right? Okay, ask away.”
    “You don’t seem very upset about Gracie’s death,” I said.
    He looked as though he considered stopping his rhythmic chore, thought better of it, and kept on going. “Of course I’m upset. I feel shitty. I told you. But I’m not devastated. She was a nice person, and we liked talking to each other. But nothing really close. I feel guilt more than loss.”
    Nicely put, I thought. He was creative, all right.
    “There’s something I don’t quite get, though,” Rosie said. “All she had to do was come out here, walk around the house, take a look, and go home again. But she didn’t do that. She went and stood out on the scarp to watch the waves coming in to get her. Why would she do a thing like that?”
    “Wouldn’t you? It must have been magnificent out here last night.”
    “I don’t know,” Rosie said. “I doubt it. The question is, would
she?”
    He thought about it, rowing that damned machine to nowhere. “Are you saying maybe she didn’t? That something else happened?”
    “I doubt it,” I said. “But on the off chance that the death is related to the break-in at the sperm bank, we’re just checking out possibilities. Eliminating the extraneous if we can.”
    He raised his eyebrows, turning to look at me, just as his timer went off.
    “I don’t know what she’d do. She had to have had a romantic streak— she loved those old movies— but I guess I never thought of her as a person who took chances.