Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (23 page)

There was something about his tone when he spoke of Kathy… I thought
of Tracy's description of Soriano's wife in the sketchbook, how she
indulged in affairs as petty revenge against her husband. "You and Rob
have had your ups and downs," I said. "Are you close friends?"

"Not friends, but—until recently—we did good business together."

"What about Kathy? Is she a friend?"

He looked surprised, then flashed his foxy little grin. "You're a
nosy one, Ms. McCone. I suppose it goes with the territory. Yes, she's
a friend. He doesn't care. I don't care. And it makes the lady feel
better. Now, I think that's enough of
personal questions."

"About Tracy—"

"I said enough. I don't want to talk about her, and I especially
don't want to hear any more about what you suspect her of doing."

I picked up my untouched toddy. It was still warm. "Okay," I said.
"I really don't have anything else to ask, anyway. But while I'm
drinking this, would you humor me and do my favorite routine of
yours—the one about Jake and Edna's Rottweiler farm?"

As I'd suspected, the request pleased him. When I left Café
Comedie, my sides ached, and my eyes were damp from tears of laughter.

The storm had blown out to sea by the time I reached my house around
four. The truck with the Sheetrock had already arrived, and George sat
on the front steps talking with the driver. As I approached, I had to
smile, remembering how in awe I'd been of my professors when I started
at U.C. Berkeley. What would that young woman have thought of this
learned gentleman in the Stanford sweatshirt, faded jeans, and
well-worn athletic shoes who was earnestly discussing the Giants'
chances in the upcoming season with a truck driver whose use of the
word "fuckin'" was only surpassed by that of the phrase "shit, man"?

I unlocked the side gate so the Sheetrock could be taken in through
the rear, then led George inside the house. He looked around with
interest, complimenting me on the front parlor— by far the nicest room,
but seldom used. After owning the house for a few years, I'd finally
concluded that I like to do my living as close to the kitchen as
possible, and had bought a comfortable sofa and moved the TV to the
dining room— formerly a repository for paint and building supplies.

When we reached the kitchen at the rear of the house, I sat George
down with a beer and sorted through the stacks of files on
the table for the slim volume on creating a new identity that Amy
Barbour claimed she'd found in Tracy's bedroom bookcase. I thumbed
through it to the page about establishing a mail drop and studied the
notation in the margin. Then I handed it to George and said, "Is this
Tracy's handwriting?"

He examined it at length and finally shook his head. "I can't
honestly say. It looks to be, but it's been a long time since I've seen
anything she's written." He turned the book over, looked at its cover.
"What is this, anyway?"

"Amy Barbour says she found it in Tracy's room. But if she did, it
was planted there." I removed Tracy's sketchbook from the bottom of one
of the piles and flipped it open, studying the handwriting. It varied
from entry to entry, as most people's will do, and there was a gradual
change from beginning to end, presumably because the pages had been
penned over a long period of time, but its style was distinctive and
the individual letters remained fairly consistent. I sat down at the
table, drew the sketchbook closer, and took the other book from George.
As I flipped through it, I found a series of notations.

After several minutes of study, I said, "I don't think Tracy made
any of the notes in this book." I went around the table and laid the
two open in front of him. "The capital L in Los Angeles is consistent
with the way Tracy made hers. See this big upward loop, and the way the
tail of the bottom one trails downward?"

"Uh-huh."

"But the capital A—it's not how she made hers, although it is how
she made her lowercase As."

"Meaning?"

"These notations could have been copied from a sample of her
handwriting. Say someone had a letter from her, and it was signed
'Love, Tracy.' They would be able to get the L right. But if there
weren't any capital As in the letter, an
inexperienced forger might just assume that she made them the way she
made her lowercase As, only larger. An experienced forger wouldn't make
that assumption."

"So what you've got is someone on the amateurish side who marked
this up to make it appear Tracy had used it to plan her own
disappearance. Why?"

"I don't know. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. My reopening
the investigation must have been what prompted it, though, because the
book wasn't where Barbour says she found it when I searched last
Thursday evening. Between then and when she gave it to me on Monday
morning, I'd conducted a number of interviews; a lot of people knew
about that."

"But what did the person who planted this book hope to accomplish?"

"That's what I don't understand. Finding this—if I'd accepted it as
genuine—would only have convinced me I was onto something and made me
work harder. So whoever put the book in Tracy's room can't have wanted
me to drop the investigation. On the other hand, since I was already on
the case, a person who wanted Tracy found wouldn't have needed to go to
such lengths."

"Unless whoever it was knows where she is, and there's some clue in
the notes in the margins."

It was a farfetched idea, but at that point I was willing to
consider anything. I took the book back around the table and made a
list of the notations on a legal pad. After looking it over and
arranging them in various sequences, I shrugged and passed the pad over
to George. "If there's a clue here," I said, "it's damned obscure. I
think these are nothing more than what the person who marked the book
thought a reader who had studied it carefully might note."

He looked the pad over, did some rearranging of his own, and finally
nodded in agreement.

"Another thing to consider," I said, "is who had opportunity to
plant it there. Who had access to that apartment? Amy Barbour. Marc
Emmons. Any number of people who may have visited there. And Laura."

"I can't imagine her doing such a thing. My wife is disturbed, but
not irrational."

"Even if she were, this sort of thing doesn't strike me as her
style. My guess is that it was either Amy or Marc. She came forward
with the book. He became quite angry when I suggested he'd planted it.
They're the logical ones to suspect, except… You know, I keep thinking
of how Bobby Foster's notebook—the one with the misspellings that
matched those in the ransom note—turned up conveniently, too."

"The notebook actually belonged to Foster, though."

"That's true." Discouraged, I went to the refrigerator for a glass
of wine, then slumped in my chair, frowning down at the table. When I
looked up, I saw that George was reading the first entry in the
sketchbook. My impulse was to snatch it away from him, but I resisted
and merely waited.

When he finished, he closed his eyes and rubbed his hand across
them. "This is herself she's describing, isn't it?"

"I think so. She only did that once—as her first entry." The lie
came out easily; there was no way I was going to let him read that
final entry. I reached for the book, but he held on to it with both
hands.

" 'The beloved father, for all his academic knowledge, was little
better. Vague, fondly absent. Sometimes she thought him only half
alive.' Jesus, what did I do to my daughter? And to Laura? No wonder
she was cold—she had a husband who wasn't really there."

I didn't speak for a moment, because I wanted to phrase what I was
about to say very carefully. I knew that how I said it, even more than
the actual sense of it, would be crucial to the future of our
relationship.

"You can only offer what you have at a given time," I finally said.
"I know that sounds simplistic, but you can only do and feel whatever
your current capability is. And the situation, the flaws in it, are
never wholly of your own making. Perhaps there was something in Laura
and Tracy— in who and what they were and how they responded to you—that
made you unable to act as a so-called proper husband and father should."

He considered that, then nodded and reached across the table for my
hand. "It's true. People change, depending on the situation and the
others involved in it. I'm not like that any longer—vague or fondly
absent. I won't be that way in the future, either. That much I can
promise you."

I entwined my fingers with his, leaned forward for his kiss. And the
phone rang.

It was Stan Gurski. "I have some information that I thought might
interest you," he said. "By way of a repay for your tip on Mclntyre."

"Oh?" I glanced at George. He was paging through the sketchbook.

"Mclntyre was shot. Bullet was lodged in the ribcage, a .38. Makes
it look premeditated."

"Why?"

"When I called the owner of the cottage in Mexico Monday
morning—easier to get his permission to enter and search the premises
than to get a warrant—I routinely asked if any weapons were kept there.
He said no; he's strictly a fisherman. So we can assume whoever shot
her brought the gun with them. Gun like that means business, too."

I was well aware of that. I own a .38 and consider it a necessary
precaution for a woman whose job requires her to go into dangerous
places and situations. But I don't take the responsibility lightly, and
I never carry it unless I'm fully prepared to use it.

"Another thing," Gurski said. "She was shot in the car."

"What?"

"Uh-huh." There was thinly veiled pride in his voice now. "When the
ME reported the probable cause of death, I called SFPD. They still have
the car impounded—capital case, appeals coming up. I asked them to look
for other bullets. There was one, lodged in the door panel on the side
where the bloodstains were. Our preliminary comparison shows it's from
the same gun as the one lodged in the remains. San Francisco's finest
sure screwed up on this one."

They had, in more than one way, and it unnerved me to think how
close to the gas chamber that combination of mistakes had taken my
client. I said, "Well, this completely invalidates Foster's confession.
I'll pass the information along to his attorney."

The delivery-truck driver came through the door from the back porch,
invoice in hand, looking for a check. I thanked Gurski for calling and
terminated the conversation, then paid for the Sheetrock and went out
to lock the side gate.

When I came back to the kitchen, George had Tracy's sketchbook open
to the last page. He was staring into space, his face rigid with pain.
My breath caught, and I stopped in the doorway.

Slowly he turned his head toward me and said, "Why did you lie?"

Perhaps he'd known his daughter better than he thought. Had I been
in his place, I would not have recognized her—would not have wanted to
recognize her—in that brief paragraph.

I said, "I hoped you'd never have to know."

"But you know. And we can't allow a secret of that magnitude to come
between us."

I nodded and went to sit at the table.

"I think," he added, "that you'd better tell me everything you know
about my daughter."

Wednesday dawned clear and cold—one of those mornings following a
rainstorm when everything looks hard edged, vivid, and clean. My mood
didn't fit the weather, however. By eleven I had swiveled away from my
desk and was scowling out the bay window at the flat sprawl of the
Outer Mission, wondering what right such a dingy neighborhood had to
look so good in the sunlight. The desk behind me was stacked with
papers and folders. Our holiday slowdown had ended, and our clients
were once more suing and being sued, divorcing and getting arrested and
appealing sentences. I no longer would have the luxury of pursuing the
Foster/Kostakos investigation full-time; I'd give it until Monday
morning, then juggle it with my other duties.

I had to acknowledge that a good part of the reason for my low mood
was the way George and I had left things the afternoon before. As he'd
asked, I'd been frank with him about Tracy, and what I'd had to relate
disturbed and depressed him. He left around six, saying he needed some
time alone. That was the last thing I needed, so after microwaving a
couple of burritos (or "nuking" them, as my nephew
Andrew calls it), I left the house and embarked on what I knew would
probably be a fruitless tour around the city: to the public library to
look for the copy of the L.A. Times that Jane Stein had mentioned,
where I found the microfilm room closed; to Amy Barbour and Marc
Emmons's buildings, in case they'd slipped past the police patrols; to
Lisa Mclntyre's building, in the vain hope its manager might be home;
to Café Comedie, to see if Larkey had heard from Emmons.

While I was at the club, I ran into Kathy Soriano and asked if I
might speak with her about Lisa and Tracy. She pleaded lack of time,
vanished through the door marked Yes, and never came back. I asked
Larkey if he would intercede and arrange an appointment for me with
Kathy. He said he didn't know how strong his influence was in those
quarters lately, but he'd try.

Eventually I ended up at the Remedy, kicking around my ideas on the
case with Jack and Rae. All that did was leave me several dollars
poorer (Rae was so broke Jack and I had to take turns paying for her
beers) and as confused as before. When I went home, my bed seemed too
cold, large, and lonely. I was a long time getting to sleep, and when
the contractor arrived to start work at eight the next morning, I was
barely coherent. Not a good start to the day.

And now I'd had no word from George all morning. Larkey hadn't
phoned about the appointment with Kathy Soriano. Rae had received no
response to any of her inquiries. My spirits were sagging so fast that
I calculated they'd be about ankle level by noon.