The Gossiping Gourmet: (A Murder in Marin Mystery - Book 1) (Murder in Marin Mysteries) by Martin Brown Page A

“favorite
contacts,” she angrily pressed, “GRANT.”
    But Grant, who was listening
to an old Miles Davis in Paris jazz album coming through the ear buds of his
iPod mini, never heard his phone as he turned onto Bulkley, just a short
distance from their front door.
    A few minutes later, when he
walked through the door in a relaxed, inebriated state, a ripened grapefruit
flew past his head, hitting the front door with a dull thud. Barbara shouted,
“Where have you been, you bastard?”
    His brain immediately sensed
trouble. He knew he was under attack, but he was bewildered as to the cause.
    “Out late with your little
whore girlfriend?”
    “What?”
    “You heard me, you son of a
bitch.”
    “What the hell are you
talking about?”
    Enraged, Barbara came rushing
toward him. She was carrying an oversized hardcover coffee table book—it was a
three-hundred-page retrospective on the work of Salvador Dali.
    Grant’s adrenaline surged.
His mind was still in a fog. Wildly, he swung his right arm forward to block
the book from striking the side of his head. Instead, however, his powerful forearm
cracked across Barbara’s lower left cheek and jaw, and sent her reeling
backward, crashing to the floor.
    It was Barbara’s
bloodcurdling scream at that moment that compelled their next door neighbors,
the Andersons, to call the Sausalito police department. Although it was after
midnight and the town was as peaceful as an undiscovered tomb, two patrol cars,
blue lights flashing, raced up Bulkley Drive. The patrol officers, Steve Hansen
and Chris Harding, knocked on the Randolphs’ front door less than three minutes
after they were summoned.
    Grant, who had run to
Barbara’s side to make a tearful apology, opened the door when he heard a deep
booming voice say, “Sausalito police, open the door.”
    Standing there, reeking of
beer, sweat, and tequila, Grant pulled open the door. He immediately told
Hansen and Harding that everything was okay.
    “Sir, is that your wife on
the floor?” Harding asked, “We’ll have to check on her condition.” Harding bent
over Barbara, who was still laying flat on the floor looking up in a daze at
the eager young faces of the two police officers. “Ma’am, are you alright? Do
you need medical assistance?”
    On top of suffering from a
surprisingly powerful hit, she had struck the back of her head when she hit the
bare tiled floor. Barbara, whose head was ringing, responded groggily to the
officers’ questions. Hansen called into the fire department to send up the EMT
crew.
    Meanwhile, Harding took out
his handcuffs. Before Grant fully understood what was happening, he had been
restrained, and was being escorted out the front door by Harding, who then
drove him up to the county jail for processing on charges of assault and
battery.
    A stretcher was brought in,
although, in a less than clear voice, Barbara said she thought it was
unnecessary to take her to the county hospital, Marin General. But the EMT
officers told her that it was a wise precaution whenever someone had suffered a
blow to the back of the head.
    Oscar and Clarice Anderson,
both in their eighties, stayed at their upstairs bedroom window and watched in
horror as first Grant Randolph was taken out in handcuffs, followed by the
shadowy figure of his wife, who was being wheeled on a gurney into the back of
a Sausalito Rescue medical transport vehicle.
    “Oh, my God,” Clarice said,
while Oscar held his arm around her. “They seemed like such a nice quiet
couple.”
    “Looks can be deceiving, my
dear,” Oscar said softly, as they both returned to bed.

CHAPTER
TEN
     
    After Chris Harding’s
retelling of early Sunday morning’s domestic violence call to the Randolph home
while he and his fellow officers were eating their way through Warren’s caramel
chicken, and after Alma and the Ladies of Liberty had turned Warren’s busy bee
gossip into a call for immediate action, Bradley had few, if any, options:
    Either he would