Murder In Marin County: Jack Brubaker, sailor and private investigator, is embroiled in a gruesome Marin murder case while searching for his missing sister. During Jack’s investigation he is forced to revisit the sailing death of his father, while coming to terms with his failed relationship with his sister Lucy.

Murder in Marin County: Mystery and Detective

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BLURB: Murder in Marin County

In You Don’t Know Jack: Murder in Marin County, Jack Brubaker, veteran sailor and private investigator, becomes embroiled in a gruesome Marin County murder case while searching for his missing sister. In his hunt for the murderer, the world weary Brubaker teams up with homicide detective Ellen Jacobs and is aided by a collection of local eccentrics in the San Francisco Bay town of Sausalito. Hired by the victim’s wife, Jack himself becomes the focus of the police investigation as he delves into the murky side of Marin County, complete with trailer parks, meth houses, and Cult compounds. During Jack’s investigation he is forced to revisit the sailing death of his father, while coming to terms with his failed relationship with his sister Lucy.

EXCERPT: Murder in Marin County

It’s a five minute walk to the office but I drive it anyway; a habit I picked up living in Los Angeles. You never know if you’re going to need the car. I drive everywhere.

I usually arrive at the office in the beat up Chevy Suburban with its faded roof and rusted out wheel wells, but right now it’s being towed to the impound lot out on the bay-fill in San Rafael. With the suburban gone I’ll have to depend on the backup car, an Audi Q7. When you live on a boat nothing lasts and nothing stays nice. Everything on a sailboat gets a funk and everything gets dinged, scratched and worn out; but not my Q7. It is not a boat car; no sails, solvents or crap of any kind are allowed inside it. I don’t even like to drink an iced tea in it, but I do, sometimes. The Audi was my only luxury purchase and I never would have been able to buy it without the stock Theresa touted me on. I bought low, sold high and bought the car. Theresa bought her stock low, sold lower and bought the farm.

I roll into the 7-11. I have to see about this itching on my face. I noticed it after the shower. It’s hard to see what’s itching in a fogged-up vanity mirror. I’ve walked into a San Francisco restaurant wearing a badly shaven, lopsided goatee on more than one occasion because of that mirror.

I check my rearview mirror. It’s hard to get the big picture. My face feels like its growing. I move my face around but I still can’t see it all at once. I’m fine. It’s as if I don’t owe the money until I slide the letter opener through the envelope and actually look at the bill.

The 7-11 has a small pharmaceutical section frequented mostly by the anchor-outs and the Laundromat crowd, but I find what I need in an anti-itch cream. I take the pink bottle to the counter. The price is shocking, and so is the look on the cashiers face.

“What happened to you?” The clerk is a weathered-faced, anchor-out with the perfect job and all the ninety-nine cent hot dogs he can eat.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I try not to look him in the eye.

“What did you do, stick your head in an anthill?” He points to the trashcan lid-sized shoplifters’ conscience hanging from the ceiling behind me.

“Holy…” My face is swelling with large red sores erupting everywhere.

“We’ve got a bigger size in the back.” He is referring to the puny bottle in my hands. He does have a point; the small bottle looks ridiculous now. “There’s no sense in dabbing.”

I stare at him. “What should I do?”

I feel something weeping from my cheek, a drop of ooze lands on the counter.

“I’ll get the bigger one in the back.”

I nod.

The manager leaves the counter and heads for the back. There is a small rack of bandanas on the counter. I imagine myself wearing one like a Taliban. The salty dog clerk returns with a pint of the pink stuff.

I throw the bottle on the passenger seat and beat the two minutes of traffic upstream to the Marina Bagel shop. Two brothers from New York do a nice bagel and keep their elderly mother busy by making her fill small cream cheese containers. I don’t like it when she licks the spoon, I go with the shmear. There’s no sense in dabbing.

I turn onto Bridgeway toward the central district. This is the real Sausalito, not the tourist version. I pass Dunphey Park which straddles the spit of land between a small marina and the Sausalito Police trailer park. My office is on the third floor of an old, but not so historic converted apartment building on Caledonia Street in downtown. We’re across the street from the Marin Movie Theatre and next door to Smitty’s bar.

Beneath my office, I have three parking spots in a carport posted with “No Parking” signs. This still doesn’t seem to deter the beach bozos from points Midwest and beyond from parking in my spot. This undesirable situation has led to a close and often illicit friendship with Dolly the meter maid. She has cited so many of these people that the towing company sent her to Hawaii last year for vacation. I have the post card on my wall to prove it. Two of the spaces are currently occupied; one with my assistant’s new Mini convertible and the other with an unidentified Lexus.

I take each step to the third floor as if I were climbing the pyramids in the Yucatan. I poke my head around the corner and examine the office door. It’s a standard door with a brass number six and a sliding nameplate. Today it reads Brubaker & Son Investigations. The door is open, a crack. I remove the nameplate and slip it into my back pocket. I turn the six upside down. Ellen Jacobs is going to have to do some detecting if she comes looking.

Enza, my little Italian firecracker of an assistant, waves me in. Enza is the real deal from North Beach via San Rafael. Family roots that go deeper than oak. Her family came in the 1800’s and didn’t leave the city until the white flight of the Seventies when inner cities became urban wastelands.

The waiting area, a.k.a. the living room, is empty except for Enza, who sits behind a vintage teal McDowell-Craig steel desk. The toilet flushes. Someone is in the bathroom. “Lawyer, client or potential client,” I ask Enza.

“Jesus Christ, what is that all over your face?” Enza pushes her rolling desk chair away from me. “Is that contagious?”

“I think it’s a spider bite. I spent the night in the hills above Tiburon. Is that a client in there?”

“It’s got to be poison oak.” She hands me a tissue. “Christine Flynn, know her?”

“No.”

“You’re oozing.”

I dump the bagels on her desk and run into my office, which is really the bedroom of the apartment. It may seem weird, but I like to be seated in my desk chair before the client enters. I found the chair sitting at the curb on special trash pick-up night in the town of Ross.

Sometimes I get lucky; vis-à-vis my desk chair, and sometimes I wake up with dead bodies.

My company should be called Tangent Investigations except that I would never be in the office.The chair – right – I like to keep it formal, in the chair, behind the desk. I like to be in control at the onset because I end up losing the control in the long run, and I have to fight like hell to get it back.

Today is no different as the leather lets out a gasp when I land in my throne. I am not sure of the provenance of my chair before I pulled it out of the trash, but I can tell you it was one of the things that Theresa rolled off her balcony into the creek bed far below her “Great Room” on the night we had “The Talk.”

Never break up with a girlfriend when she is having a low blood sugar attack.

Enza picks up her steno pad and walks in. Her ridiculously high heels creak beneath her. She hides her exposed belly with the steno pad.

“What happened with the Dutton case?” She leans a hip against the side of my desk. She is wearing the skinny jeans that are all the fashion.

“Which case?” I’m finding it difficult to stay focused.

“Dr. Dutton, the plastic surgeon. You were supposed to be documenting his bedside manner.”

“It’s still developing.” I hear the bathroom door open and the prospective client pads across the lobby to the coffee table out of view. I hear her flip through some magazines.

“Why do you wear that blouse if you’re just going to cover up your belly with the steno pad?” I say this staring out the window at the boats moving slowly up the main channel. I can see Enza’s reflection in the glass.

“Why do you act like you have eyes in the back of your head when I can clearly see their reflection in the window?”

She’s tiring of my little game.

“Where are they looking now?” I ask coyly.

Enza looks over her shoulder at the door and turns to leave.

“I ran into some trouble this morning on the Dutton case, but it didn’t involve him. It involves someone else.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Thank God not her kind of trouble. I’ll take dead body trouble over Enza’s kind of trouble any day.

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