Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (25 page)

I was satisfied with those simple facts, but there were others that
still didn't fit. The stolen car. The premeditated nature of Lisa's
murder. The faked kidnapping. Tracy allowing her friend Bobby to be
convicted of a crime he didn't commit. The phone calls to her mother,
after nearly two years' silence. And the motive for it all…

I would find that out soon, and when I did—

The brake lights on the van in front of me flared. I jammed my foot
down hard on the pedal. The car—a low-budget Japanese import—shuddered
to a stop inches from the van's bumper. I restarted it and crept up the
grade in pace with the rest of the traffic.

At the point in a case when assorted facts start to form a more or
less understandable pattern, I usually feel a thrill of excitement. But
now I felt only a strung-out tension and queasiness in my stomach—a
dread of what I would find out. A dread of what additional horrors I
would have to offer up to George.

He didn't deserve for his daughter to be embroiled in such a mess.
Neither did Laura. True, George had been a "fondly absent" father;
true, Laura had been a cold mother. But they had loved Tracy. Whatever
I was about to find out was guaranteed to be bad, perhaps more than
even George could bear, and certainly enough to topple Laura's
precariously balanced sanity.

And bad for you, too, my all-too-truthful inner voice told me.
Disastrous for this new relationship—the first that's promised to
matter in a long time—for you to be the one who blows it
all wide open. You don't deserve that.

But Bobby Foster didn't deserve to die, either.

My stomach spasmed. I gripped the steering wheel harder, forcing
down the queasiness.

Near Sherman Oaks the interstate dipped down into the San Fernando
Valley and crossed the Ventura Freeway. Traffic slowed close to a
standstill on the westbound access ramp, then speeded up after it
completed the merge. The exit for Reseda Boulevard, according to my
map, was only about four miles beyond the interchange. As I drove, I
squinted into the glare of the setting sun, its red and orange and gold
smeared across the car's windshield, all but obscuring what lay ahead
of me. By the time I coasted off the freeway and turned north, my eyes
had begun to smart.

The boulevard was a wide one, lined at first with stores and
restaurants and gas stations. Farther on, I came upon a vast area of
apartment buildings: two and three-storied stucco with the obligatory
tiny lawns and palm trees, arranged around courtyards containing the
obligatory tiny swimming pool and more palm trees. Many of their
balconies overlooked the boulevard; they were furnished with lounge
chairs from which tenants could view the passing cars, and potted
plants that had somehow adapted to breathing exhaust fumes. Weber
barbecues and hibachis stood as mute testimony to the good life.

Farther on, in Reseda proper, business establishments regained
prominence. I checked the address Rae had given me and began watching
for The Great American Laugh-in. It appeared on the left, between a
Mexican restaurant and a shoe store. Parking was plentiful; I pulled
into a metered space directly across the street.

Like Café Comedie, the club had a colorful facade— yellow, green,
and orange—but it gave off a less sophisticated aura, as if its
relative proximity to Disneyland had caused it to be exposed to too
strong a dose of sunny, cloying fun.
A former storefront, its blacked-out windows were painted with a
barrage of balloonlike happy faces. As I crossed the street, I saw that
twin clowns on either panel of the double entry pointed jovially at the
doorhandles. I made a sour face at the clown on the left as I stepped
into the dimly lit lobby.

Plywood cutouts of more clowns greeted me: one pointed the way to
the checkroom, another to a door marked RESTROOMS; a third had a
mechanical arm that semaphored toward the club proper. I went that way,
feeling the breeze from the arm's whirling. The large room's
arrangement was also similar to that at Café Comedie, except the bar
ran along the right-hand wall.

A woman's husky voice said, "We don't open until six, ma'am."

It was only a little after five now. "Then what's he doing on the
job so early?" I motioned at the clown.

The woman laughed. She was perched on a stool at the end of the bar,
a calculator and stack of order forms in front of her, and wore a
costume that made her resemble Ronald McDonald. "Switch is broken. Son
of a bitch never stops flailing around. Like a lot of men I know."

I smiled companionably and took a seat two stools down from her.
"I've known a few of those, too."

"Seems all some of them can do these days. I've got one at
home—can't keep a job, can't cook, won't dirty his hands housecleaning.
I ask you—why do I keep him?"

"Well…"

"Yeah. That's exactly why I keep him. Look, I don't mean to be rude,
but I really can't serve you until six."

"I'm not a customer." I never knew how to play situations like that
until I saw who I'd be dealing with. This woman appeared hardheaded and
fairly streetwise, so I decided to play it straight—up to a point.

When I placed my identification on the bar beside her, her eyes
became knowing and wary. "Private cop, huh? What's Bart done now?"

"It's not Bart I'm looking for—whoever he is. It's Lisa Mclntyre."

"What's she done?"

"Nothing so bad." The trick was to give her an acceptable
story—certainly not the old ploy about a long-lost relative leaving a
fortune—that would compel her to reveal "Lisa's" whereabouts. I bided
my time until I could get a better handle on what would work with this
woman. "Your name is… ?"

"Annette Dowdall. I'm manager and bartender."

"Does Lisa still work here?"

"Who says she ever did?"

"Her records with the union. And you asked what she's done, so you
must know her."

Ms. Dowdall digested that, nodded slightly.

"You happy with Lisa's work?" I asked.

She shrugged. "She's kind of a ditz. Forgets to return change,
spills drinks, breaks glasses. But the customers like her. I like her."

"You wouldn't want to lose her, then."

"No, of course not. Look—what's with Lisa?"

"As I said before, nothing so bad. She skipped out owing back rent
on her apartment in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Somebody from
the building saw her down here and told the management. They had me run
a check."

"So what do they want—just the rent?"

"That and the storage costs on all the stuff she left behind."

"She left her stuff there? That's something!"

"What do you mean?"

"The poor kid can't get it together to buy anything. Not that it
would fit in that studio—" She got up abruptly and went around the bar.
"Look, you want a drink or something?"

"I thought you couldn't serve me until six."

She grinned. "I can't serve customers until six."

"In that case, white wine, please."

She poured the wine and a Bud for herself, then came back around the
bar. "Look," she said, "Lisa's a nice kid. She doesn't have much money,
certainly not enough for that rent and storage. Can't you just tell
them you couldn't find her?"

I shook my head. "There's no point in that. They'd only hire
somebody else, who might not be as pleasant with her as I would."

Ms. Dowdall still looked doubtful.

"I won't be rough on Lisa," I added. "And frankly, I think my client
will arrange for her to pay the debt in installments. I suspect he's
really more interested in getting her things out of storage than
anything else. If I take him Lisa's check for part of the storage fee
and her written permission to dispose of what she left, I think he'll
probably forgive the rent."

She thought about that while I sipped my wine. Finally she said,
"I'd just hate to see the kid get in trouble."

"You seem fond of her."

She shrugged and poured the rest of the bottle of beer into her
glass. "It's more I feel sorry for her. Lisa's kind of pathetic, if you
know what I mean."

"Not exactly."

"Well, she doesn't have any friends that I know of, and she never
even tries to make some. She just comes to work and then runs home to
her wretched little studio—I know it is, because I drove her home one
time when she wasn't feeling so good, and I guess she thought she had
to ask me in. Sometimes she hangs around here on her nights off and
watches the stand-up acts, kind of wistfullike. I think it's that she
wants to be a comedian, but she knows she hasn't got what it takes, so
she just sort of hovers on the fringes."

What made her wistful, I thought, was that she knew she was good and
could never perform again.

Annette Dowdall frowned, picking at the label on the empty beer
bottle. "There's something not right about Lisa."

"How so?"

"It's not that she's a loner. She's lonely. And every now and then I
get the feeling she's scared."

"Of what, do you think?"

"I'm not sure. Sometimes she seems to be… watching. Like she thinks
somebody's going to show up and… I don't know. Not somebody like you,
looking for back rent. Something more serious than that."

"Something bad in her past, perhaps. What do you know about her?"

"Not much, other than her employment record, and I didn't actually
check it out. Her union card was in order, and waitresses in a place
like this, they come and go, no big deal. But there was one thing…"She
hesitated, still picking at the label.

I took a sip of wine, giving her time to decide whether to trust me.
My restraint paid off. She said, "There was this one day last August.
She came on shift at six. We don't do much business until later, so she
was sitting here at the bar. The TV was on to the national news. I
wasn't watching it, I was doing paperwork. But she was, and all of a
sudden she got very upset—gasped, went pale. I asked her what was
wrong, but she wouldn't tell me. And for the rest of her shift she
acted like this was a funeral parlor, not a comedy club. I finally told
her to go home early."

"You don't recall anything about the newscast?"

"No, when I'm working with figures, I more or less blank everything
else out."

August was when Bobby Foster had been convicted and sentenced to die
for Tracy's so-called murder. The case had received national publicity
because it was a no-body conviction. It sounded to me as if Tracy had
heard about it on the news, been distressed, yet still not come forward.

"Is… Lisa scheduled to work tonight?" I asked.

Annette Dowdall shook her head.

"Will you give me her address and phone number, then?"

She hesitated a bit longer, then said, "She doesn't have a
phone—something about owing back bills and they won't give her one till
she pays up. But I guess it would be okay for you to go over there. You
see how she lives, you'll know it's only right to ask them to go easy
on her." She took a cocktail napkin off a nearby stack and scribbled on
it. "That's right down the street—the Tropic Palms."

"Thanks." I took the napkin. "Let me pay for my drink."

"No," she said, "it's on the house."

I thanked her again, said I was sure something could be worked out
with Lisa, and went out into the gathering darkness.

The Tropic Palms was one of the older and shabbier buildings in the
residential strip I'd noticed earlier: two storied, fake Spanish, on
the same side of the boulevard as the comedy club. Mailboxes
honeycombed one wall of the entryway; a number of them appeared to have
been broken into. A heavy wrought-iron lamp on a massive chain was
suspended from the arched ceiling; its bulbs had burned out. The
building had no buzzer system or security gate.

I went through the archway into the courtyard. The lighted swimming
pool lay in its center—a murky jade pebble. Floodlights illuminated the
various tropical plantings; their brittle leaves shivered in the cold
wind that gusted about the enclosed space. Rusted lounge furniture
stood around the pool, skeletal in its wintertime abandonment.

The apartment number written on the cocktail napkin was 209. There
was a central staircase to the rear of the courtyard. I skirted the
pool and climbed it. A sign at its top indicated that apartments
201-221 were to the left. I turned that way, the dread I'd felt on my
drive to the valley worsening. By the time
I arrived at 209 and pressed the doorbell, my heart was pounding.

After a few seconds a voice called out for me to hang on. It was
flat, dull—not much like the vibrant tones I remembered from Tracy's
videotapes. Of course she would have changed…

The door opened and I came face to face with her.

The woman before me was painfully thin. The bone structure of her
heart-shaped face was more prominent than two years before, her cheeks
hollowed. Her curly light-brown hair seemed to drag under its own
lifeless weight. When she saw me, a stranger, she blinked and jerked
her chin up.

This was not Tracy Kostakos.

It actually was Lisa Mclntyre.

For a moment I just stared at her, my mouth agape. She frowned and
took a step back, partially shielding her body with the door. I found
my voice and said, "Lisa Mclntyre?"

She nodded warily.

I reached into my bag for my identification, trying to fit this
development into my previously conceived notions. And failing. Lisa was
here, alive. But the Napa County coroner had skeletal remains that
matched her dental records. Since those bones couldn't be Lisa's…

I introduced myself and handed her my identification. She studied it
as if it were in a foreign language, then thrust it back at me. "What's
this about?" she asked. Aside from a faint twang left over from her
early years in Oklahoma, her voice was curiously without inflection.

"Ms. Dowdall at the club gave me your address—" I began.