Read Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) for Free Online Page A

months. Rosie put in an apple tree and some boysenberries way back at the ambitious beginning, and those produce. So that’s the garden. One of these years one of us is going to put in a bench and a little pond full of goldfish. As soon as I figure out a way to keep Tigris and Euphrates from going fishing. Maybe ten years from now, when they’ve died of old age and I’m married and not so busy chasing women.
    The thing I like about the garden is, it’s calming. When my head is spinning and I can’t figure out why I’m doing what I’m doing and where the hell I’m going next, I go up and look at the food growing. Maybe pull some weeds or water-spray some aphids or pick some snails. I don’t think about anything when I’m doing that, and sometimes not thinking about anything is the best thing you can do. So I picked some snails off the two-week-old bean plants, put them in a bag, and took them down to the landscaped austerity of the condominiums on the corner. I wished the little bastards a happy and fulfilled life and took my empty bag back home again.
    Rosie’s truck was parked in the driveway. She and her standard poodle, Alice B. Toklas, were home from work and sitting on her little front deck.
    “I’ve been thinking about the Richmond case,” I said.
    “Come on in.”
    I sat on her new futon, she took the rocking chair.
    “We need to start writing out a plan of attack, Rosie. The funeral’s in two days in Minneapolis— his hometown. Can you go?”
    She shook her head. “No. I won’t be finished with this job by then.”
    “Okay. I’ll plan on going. It should be a pretty useful trip. With any luck, the other candidates will be there and I’ll be able to take a look at them. And family. Pam says there is a wife. Maybe while I’m gone, you can get to some of the local people, if you have the time.”
    She nodded. “I’ve already started that.” We laid plans for about an hour, then I wandered back to the house.
    There was a message on my machine from Hal. He had some information and why didn’t I call him back?
    He was still in his office. He picked up the phone himself.
    “Hi, Hal. What did you get?”
    “Oh, hi. Yeah. Well, on the Richmond thing, the guy hanged himself. He definitely died by hanging, by asphyxiation. I got some notes here… ‘Postmortem lividity in the head, the arms and the lower legs.’ The head because of the rope, the legs and arms because of gravity. Petechial hemorrhages in the lining of the eyes and eyelids’— that’s these little spotty hemorrhages from asphyxiation. Then there was a deep groove from the rope on the guy’s neck, and inside that groove there were black-and-blue marks— that means the blood vessels were ruptured by the hanging, which means that he was alive when he was hanged. Nobody killed him first. He’d been dead no more than a couple of hours. Pretty classic, the man told me.”
    “Maybe. Was there a note? I haven’t seen anything about a suicide note in the papers.”
    “He said there wasn’t.”
    “So what else do they have that makes them call it a suicide? There was nothing wrong with the man’s state of mind, no indication he was going to kill himself.”
    “Well, Jake, I’ll tell you, they don’t seem to think a whole lot of his state of mind, generally speaking. I mean the guy was running for governor as an independent, for Christ’s sake. Spending all that money and time and energy. And I guess they did a quick check on his private life. Doesn’t sound like he had the best marriage in the world. Maybe there was more, maybe the man had some trouble in his past or something. If there was more, I didn’t hear about it. That’s all I got. Hope it helps.”
    “It does. Thanks.”
    We said goodbye.
    It didn’t help. Not really. I still didn’t know why someone had killed Joe Richmond, and I especially didn’t know how they had done it.

– 7 –
    LEE and I were sitting in one of our favorite restaurants in Petaluma,