Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (11 page)

Emmons lived on Mariposa, not far from Missouri Street, in the heart
of the upscale, newly trendy part of the hill. The transformation of
this predominantly blue-collar, ethnically diverse area began in the
seventies, when the middle class discovered its sunny weather and as
yet reasonable property values. Now the neighborhood is largely mixed:
renovated houses and
new apartment buildings and condominium complexes are interspersed
among older, shabbier dwellings; hardware stores and corner groceries
and bars that have been there for generations stand side by side with
patisseries and wine shops and restaurants that cater to the new
element.

Emmons's building was one of the new ones: bastardized Victorian,
with skylights and decks and greenhouse windows, painted sky blue. A
developer's sign advertised one, two, and three-bedroom units, hot tub,
sauna, and exercise room, plus a complete security system. I was
surprised that a man who made his living as a stand-up comic could
afford such a place, but then I didn't know how much Larkey was paying
him. He also might—like Tracy—have well-to-do, indulgent parents.

I rang the bell for 7 A but received no response. Then I went to the
security gate and peered through it at the tower-level parking area,
trying to see if there was a car in that unit's space. As near as I
could tell, there wasn't.

I was beginning to feel this wasn't my day. Probably the best thing
to do was go home and start over at Café Comedie that evening. I began
driving south on Missouri, planning to take Army Street across town to
my quiet little neighborhood near the Glen Park district. But before I
got there, I turned east, toward the Potrero Annex housing project,
where Bobby Foster had grown up.

After a few blocks Missouri curved and took a sharp downward slope,
and I found myself looking at a whole other Potrero Hill. Only minutes
from the luxury apartment houses with their saunas and hot tubs was a
housing complex so alien from them—from most of the rest of the
city—that it might have been in an alternate universe.

The two-tiered dun-colored buildings sprawled over an entire
hillside. The view of the bay and the bridge connecting the city with
Oakland would have been spectacular from their windows—except they were
heavily meshed and barred. I stopped at a
corner where a couple of burnt-out, vandalized cars stood. Farther
down,
against other battered and rusted vehicles, leaned small knots of black
men, drinking and most likely doing drugs. A ghetto blaster stood on
the hood of one of the cars, and rap music filled the air. Some kids
were scrounging around among the rubble in the gutter; as I watched,
one of them held up a used hypodermic syringe.

I stayed at the top of the rise viewing the war zone below—an
embattled piece of turf that armed drug dealers and addicts were doing
their best to wrest from the honest citizens. A few months back, San
Francisco's public housing projects had been declared "out of control"
in a federal government report; a HUD official had admitted in print to
being "terrified" on a tour of the large Sunnydale complex. For a time
a great many solutions to the problem had been proposed; what they
mainly amounted to was shifting the responsibility from the Housing
Authority to the police to the Department of Social Services, and back
again. As far as I knew, few plans had been implemented, and after a
while the media had lost interest in the subject. If anything had
improved in the projects, you couldn't tell it by looking at Potrero
Annex.

As I sat there contemplating the despair and hopelessness trapped
within those barrackslike buildings, a silver stretch Mercedes topped
the rise behind me. The driver and his passenger—both young black men
with eyes masked by mirrored sunglasses—looked hardened beyond their
years. They weren't pro ballplayers come to dispense New Year's cheer
to the old neighborhood; they were here to dispense death. This other,
alien San Francisco was no place for me, unarmed and alone—even in the
middle of the afternoon.

When I arrived home, my brown-shingled cottage on the tail end of
Church Street seemed even more inviting than usual. One of the
contractors I'd had in to give an estimate earlier
in the week was just coming down the front steps. He wanted to check a
couple of things, he said, and then he'd be able to quote me a price.
The price was agreeable, and since none of the others had so much as
bothered to call back, I told him to draw up a contract, and he said he
could start next Wednesday. After he left, I puttered around until six,
then called Café Comedie.

Marc Emmons had called in sick, Larkey told me. I dialed his home
number and again spoke with the machine. Not my day, I thought, and not
my night, either.

The videotape of Foster's confession had been stuffed in my mailbox
when I'd returned, but Rae had included no note. I called All Souls and
talked with Ted, who said she was in the attic, mudding and taping the
Sheetrock she'd put up.

"She says she wants the room finished by tomorrow night," he added,
"so she can start the year in a real room."

I could understand that, so I told him not to bother her. Then I
wandered around listlessly, thinking about Bobby Foster's plight.

Capital punishment was an issue on which I felt oddly ambivalent. I
agreed with the usual arguments against it: it hasn't been proven a
deterrent; it is used discriminatively against the poor and minority
group members; more than a few innocent parties have been unjustly
condemned and executed; and contrary to what its proponents would have
you believe, most methods of execution are neither painless nor humane.

On the other hand, the sight of a bloodied, broken victim of
violence called up a primal rage in me—an atavistic bloodlust that made
me want to exact the proverbial eye for an eye. I'd encountered enough
unrepentant killers to know that there were those who couldn't be
redeemed, certainly not in an overloaded penal system such as we have
in California.

I had to admit that there were instances when I'd subscribed to the
just-blow-them-away viewpoint.

As of today there had not been an execution in California since
1967. In the interim, some three hundred people, including my client,
had been sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Within the next couple of
years the legal carnage mandated by the reinstatement of the death
penalty would begin, and at that time I suspected that those of us who
were undecided would quickly have our fill of retribution. In my
rational moments, I abhor killing of any kind, so I knew which side of
the issue I would then champion.

To take my mind off that subject I went to the kitchen and put on
some leftover spaghetti to heat slowly. Then I gave in to the impulse
I'd been trying to resist, and looked at the video of Foster's
confession again. That depressed me thoroughly, so I gathered together
my notes and what files Rae didn't have and went over them, paying
particular attention to various "sightings" of Tracy that the
authorities had investigated before the bloodstained car had turned up.
As usual in missing-persons and kidnapping cases, reports from
individuals both sane and mad had poured in to the authorities. Most
had been easily dismissed as mistakes or outright fabrications, but
there had been two leads promising enough for the various law
enforcement agencies to commit themselves to a significant number of
man-hours.

A Walnut Creek woman had spotted someone strongly resembling Tracy
driving a car across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge at around
twelve-thirty in the morning after she was last seen at Café Comedie.
The informant had taken note of her because they'd gone to school
together at Foothill College prior to the woman's marriage and move to
the Contra Costa County suburb. She could say nothing definite about
the make or model of the car, however, nor had she noticed if there was
anyone with Tracy. East Bay authorities assisted in the search, but no
tangible evidence of
Tracy's presence there ever surfaced.

Another lead backed up the sighting on the bridge. A clerk in a
twenty-four-hour convenience store just off Interstate 80 outside of
Berkeley identified Tracy as having stopped and bought a quantity of
groceries at around one that morning. At first she'd thought she didn't
have enough cash to pay for them, and had asked if the store would
accept a traveler's check left over from a recent vacation in Hawaii
(where Tracy had gone with her parents for the Christmas holidays that
year). While she searched for the checks, the clerk asked her where she
had stayed in Hawaii, and she named the resort on the big island where
the Kostakoses had spent a week. Then she discovered she had enough
cash after all, paid, and left. Together with the first lead, this one
had seemed promising, but eventually the East Bay inquiry was
back-burnered.

I flipped through my legal pad to the notes I'd taken on the two
sightings. They both seemed significant to me, but I also had
questions, such as whose car Tracy had been driving. She hadn't owned
one, didn't like to drive. I supposed I could speak with the Walnut
Creek woman and the clerk—assuming either could be located—and see if
they could supply additional details, but that was an unlikely
possibility, given the passage of time.

Frustrated, I grabbed another legal pad and began making a list of
things for Rae to do on Monday—or more likely Tuesday, since January
second was the legal holiday.

1. Ask our contact at the realty co to pull credit rept on T.
Check for activ in chg accts aftr date of disapp. If we have a contact
at her bank (see my Rolodex) check for activ in accts there.

2. Call my friend at DMV & see about vehicles registrd to T.
Check
driving recrd for viols after disapp.

3. Call Mrs. K & get names of T's drs, dntsts. Ask if any reqs
for
med recs.

I stopped, chewing on the pencil top. Why on earth was I doing this?
Rae knew the elements of skip tracing, had probably gotten started. All
I had to do on Monday was tell her to look for Lisa Mclntyre as well.

Besides, I knew skip tracing wouldn't turn up anything on a woman as
bright as Tracy. If she were alive and unwilling to be found, she
wouldn't be using her own name. She wouldn't be stupid enough to use
her charge or checking accounts. She would long ago have acquired a new
identity. I would let Rae go through the motions, because it's always
wise to do so, but I was certain she would be wasting her time.

Finally I tore the list off the pad, balled it up, and tossed it on
the floor. For a moment I considered reading through the notebook of
character sketches I'd taken from Tracy's room, but decided to save
that for the next day. In case I was still unable to contact Marc
Emmons, it would give me something to do before I had to get dolled up
for New Year's Eve.

I put the files and the video aside, then dished up some spaghetti
and settled down with it and a tape of Airplane!— my all-time favorite
lunatic comedy movie and cheerer-upper. After a while, my fat old
spotted cat, Watney, came to sit on my lap, and together we whiled away
a few more hours of the waning year.

The shabby brown Victorian on the hill above Mission Street was
ablaze with light and awash with New Year's Eve revelers when I arrived
at nine on Saturday night. The living room chandelier and wall sconces
had been turned on, and for once all the bulbs worked; a fire crackled
on the hearth. I noted with amusement that someone had tried to
disguise the fact that most of the needles had fallen off the Christmas
tree in the window bay by draping it in extra tinsel. A bar had been
set up on the big coffee table; the punch bowl would surely contain the
bourbon punch for which I had long ago provided the recipe. I knew if
Hank had tinkered with it, it would be doubly lethal—and that the
coffee in the urn in the kitchen would be doubly strong.

The crowd was an odd mixture of All Souls clients, personal friends
of staff members, pillars of the local liberal establishment, and even
an occasional Republican. Across the room by the fireplace I spotted
Charlie Cornish, an antiques—well, really junk—dealer who had figured
prominently in the first major case I'd investigated for the co-op.

He raised his punch cup to me, and I waved. On the other side of the
room was my old friend Claudia James, who used to own my answering
service until it went bankrupt due to the increasing popularity of
answering machines. Tonight she looked prosperous in a dyed suede
outfit; it seemed to me that I'd heard she was now doing something with
computers.

I hurried upstairs to my office, dumped my coat and bag, then went
to the hall mirror and examined my appearance. The dress had been my
Christmas present to myself: red silk, long sleeved and low necked,
with a slightly flared, indecently short skirt. I'd piled my hair high
on my head, liberated my grandmother's garnet earrings from the
strongbox where I usually hide them, and put on a pair of high-heeled
black suede pumps. All in all, it was a far cry from my usual sweater
and jeans. Spiffy enough to make me feel hopeful. Maybe there would be
an interesting man downstairs—one who wasn't into Zen gun handling or
death. My "soul mate"? Well, at least somebody who could be taken out
in public.

Before I joined the party, I went to the kitchen to see if I could
help out with the food. Jack was there, arranging a platter of cheese
and cold cuts. His eyes brightened when he saw me; they moved from my
face to the dress's neckline to my legs. I gave him what I hoped was a
sisterly smile.

Ted was there, too, getting out more wineglasses and examining them
for those unsightly spots. "Love your dress," he said.

"Thank you. Where's yours?"

"Didn't come back from alterations in time."

I patted the sleeve of his burgundy velvet smoking jacket. "This is
more you, anyway."