Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (27 page)

As it turned out, USAir's departures were less frequent at night;
there was only one seat available on the nine o'clock flight, and after
that I'd have to take my chances on standby. Since the Times was
located downtown, there was a distinct possibility that I'd miss all
the flights and end up spending the night in L.A. I hesitated for only
a moment, decided it was more important to be at the focus of my
investigation, and reserved the last seat at nine.

On the return flight I sipped an unaccustomed bourbon and water and
tried to reconstruct what had happened to Tracy on that
rainy winter night, based on yet another set of new facts.

She'd arrived at the club and had the confrontation with Lisa.
Uncharacteristically upset, she'd broken down and cried. Prior to that
she'd worried about no longer being a good person; now she saw her
world coming apart as a result of her shabby treatment of others. If
Lisa told Jay everything, at the very least he'd break off their
affair. He might even attempt to have her contract with the club
invalidated. But worse than that, she'd be exposed as an unfeeling
opportunist. Her impulse was to flee—to a place where she often went
for solitude and contemplation.

But to do that she needed a car. At first she turned to Marc, but
he'd refused, saying he needed his the next day. Next she approached
Kathy. Kathy had driven to the club separately from her husband, so she
agreed to let Tracy borrow the Volvo. Tracy had probably taken the keys
from the valet parking box when she left after her performance, but
then she'd had her second confrontation of the evening, with Bobby
Foster.

Why, if she was so upset and shamed by Lisa's threat of exposure,
had she blurted out to Bobby the truth about her motive for sleeping
with him? Possibly she assumed he'd find out soon, anyway. Maybe
because she was hurting, she wanted to lash out and hurt someone else.
Or because she was in a hurry, she said the first thing she thought of
that would make him let her go. At any rate, she retrieved the Volvo
from the lot and drove to Napa County. The two "sightings" of Tracy
that the police had investigated most thoroughly were probably genuine;
she would have had to travel via the Bay Bridge, where the former
classmate claimed to have seen her, and could very well have stopped
for groceries at the convenience store outside of Berkeley.

But that wasn't quite right. It left too much time unaccounted for.
What had she done between ten o'clock and twelve-thirty A.M., when
she'd supposedly driven across the bridge?
Gone home for the keys to the cottage. And gone to Emmons's apartment,
as she'd told Bobby she intended to do? No way of knowing.

Then what?

If I followed what Lisa had told me to a logical conclusion, in his
rage Larkey had taken the gun from behind the bar, driven to the river,
shot Tracy, and concealed her body. The shooting had taken place in the
Volvo—perhaps she'd been trying to escape—and after Jay told Kathy what
had happened, she'd decided it was less of a risk to leave the car at
the cottage temporarily than to reclaim it and attempt to clean the
bloodstains. I was sure Kathy had had no difficulty convincing Jim Fox,
Rob's assistant, to report it stolen. But how had she explained that to
her husband? Wouldn't she have had to tell him who was using the Volvo
when they'd driven home from the club together the night before?

I thought about the relationship between the Sorianos. The one time
I'd seen them together, they'd seemed to be in different worlds. She
prattled on, he barely listened. Given that type of interaction, she
also would have had no difficulty convincing him he'd misheard, that
she'd actually loaned the car to Fox.

All right, I thought, at that point it's safe to assume that Kathy
became an accessory. She aided Jay in fabricating the so-called
kidnapping. And it would have required two people to move the Volvo
from the cottage to the isolated ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Later, when police attention focused seriously on Foster, she made sure
the notebook he'd used for his GED studies—and she and Jay had used as
a blueprint for the ransom note—was passed on to them. After I
discovered Tracy's remains, Jay switched her dental records with those
of a frightened young woman whom Kathy had given money to leave town
for good. Their reasoning, undoubtedly, was that lacking a positive
identification of those
remains, the conviction against Foster would stand.

I even had an idea about the phone calls to Laura from "Tracy." The
first time I'd met Kathy, she mimicked Tracy's voice, repeating the
punch line from the bewildered feminist routine. Later, when I viewed
the videotape, the punchline had sounded familiar because Kathy's
imitation had been a good one.

All of it—the switched dental records, the calls, the book on
creating a new identity that they'd somehow placed in the apartment on
Upper Market—had been designed to keep a true identification of Tracy's
remains from ever being made.

So there it was: a more or less logical scenario. Except I couldn't
quite buy it, not as it currently stood.

The problem was the motive. I simply couldn't imagine Larkey—no
matter how enraged—driving up to the cottage with the intent to kill. I
couldn't imagine him creating an elaborate frame of Bobby Foster, a
young man he professed to like, much less standing mutely by while
Bobby went to his death. It was not that I didn't believe Larkey was
capable of such actions; I'd long ago learned that most people are
capable of anything, given sufficient reason. But if Larkey had done
those things, he would have had a much more compelling motive than mere
anger. He would have had much more than his masculine pride at stake.

I stared distractedly at my reflection in the black airplane window.
The bright cabin lights made me look washed out and sickly; my thoughts
made me looked worried and frustrated. Quickly I glanced away.

What exactly was it that Tracy had said to her mother at their last
Friday lunch? The things about not being a good person anymore, but
something besides that. Something about a sin of omission. That,
coupled with whatever she had seen in Jane Stein's copy of the Times,
might give me an inkling of that motive. But where the hell was I going
to lay my hands on a copy of an L. A. paper at this hour of the night
in
San Francisco? Perhaps I'd made a mistake in not staying over—

The flight attendants were passing along the aisles, collecting
things. I finished my drink, handed the plastic tumbler over, and
raised my tray table, as instructed, to an upright position.

I found the nearest bank of phones on the concourse and called All
Souls. Jack wasn't there; Rae was on another line. I waited
impatiently, tapping my fingers on the aluminum shelf. When she finally
came on, she said, "Shar, thank God you're back. There's a woman on the
other line who needs to talk to you. She's been calling off and on all
afternoon."

"Who?"

"She won't give her name, but she says it's important."

"Get her number, tell her I'll call her back."

Rae put me on hold, came back about fifteen seconds later. "Shar,
she still won't tell me anything. Just said she'll call again."

"Dammit! It's probably about this case."

"If she calls again, I'll make her give me a number somehow, or I'll
tell her to come here. What happened in L.A.?"

Briefly I explained to her about finding Mclntyre, and what that
probably meant.

When I finished, Rae said, "You know, it's funny, but I think Larkey
suspected something like that."

"Larkey? What's he got to do with it?"

"When I called him to cancel your appointment, he sounded kind of
down, so I told him you'd gone to L.A. to locate Tracy. I thought it
would cheer him up—you'd said he cared for her—but it didn't. He asked
me to have you let him know how it turned out. Said that if it wasn't
Tracy down there, he wanted to drive up to Napa tomorrow and check out
those dental records again. Seems he'd been thinking about them, and
something odd had occurred to him."

"What?"

"He couldn't go into it; he was in a meeting."

What had occurred to him, I thought, was that he'd better cover up
switching the X rays and falsely claiming the remains weren't Tracy's.
Perhaps he intended to go to Napa, take another look at them, and
identify them correctly, in order to deflect suspicion from himself. I
said, "I'll talk with him later. Any other messages?"

"George Kostakos. He's at home."

"What about Jack—where's he?"

"Had to go to Sacramento on another case."

"If you see him before I do, fill him in on what's happened. But
right now I need you to do something for me. I'm not even sure it's
within the realm of the possible, but I need a copy of the L.A. Times,
metropolitan edition, for February second, the year Kostakos
disappeared."

"I'll check the library."

"I doubt it's still open."

"This is a tough one." Rae sounded glum, then rallied. "Maybe Hank
will have some idea."

"Hank. Is he still staying there on the couch?"

"As of this morning."

That was another thing I wanted to deal with—but not until this case
was wrapped up. "Well, ask him."

"Will do. By the way, I went by your place earlier to feed the cat.
The contractor was there; he said not to worry about locking up after
him, because you'd given him a key to the side gate."

"Yes—he's bonded, and I couldn't let myself get tied down to his
schedule. Thanks for looking out for Wat."

"Don't mention it. Where can I reach you?"

"I'm not sure. I'll check in."

I broke the connection and called George at his borrowed house. I
wanted to break the news to him about finding Mclntyre
alive—and to break it in person, because it meant that his daughter
really was dead. But I only reached the machine.

In a way it was good, I thought, because after breaking that kind of
news, it would be very hard to leave him. And where I needed to go as
soon as possible was Café Comedie.

On Bryant near Fourth Street, roughly two blocks from South Park, I
ran into a monumental traffic jam. Odd, I thought, for close to
ten-thirty at night.

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, staring at the sea of red
taillights in front of me. Then I switched the radio on, to see if I
could find out what was causing this. Out of old habit, I punched the
button for KSUN, an AM station with an exuberant hard-rock format,
where my former lover, disc jockey Don Del Boccio, now held court in
the prestigious late-evening slot. (If, as Don was fond of saying,
having the ear of half a million teenagers whose combined IQ was
probably in the low seventies could be considered prestige.)

I was so irritated at the jam-up that I didn't even feel a rush of
nostalgia when I heard Don's voice extolling the talents of a group
called Matt and the Mercenaries, and I turned down their atonal
screeching (perhaps they really were in a war zone?) so far that I
almost missed it when minutes later Don said, "… traffic advisory." I
turned the radio up again, expecting him to report an overturned big
rig or some such thing on
the bridge approach several blocks ahead.

"… and also a news bulletin," he added. "We have a five-alarm fire
that's backing up traffic on Bryant Street and nearby access routes to
the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Emergency vehicles are blocking Bryant
at Second and Third, and while police are attempting to reroute
traffic, it's pretty much at a standstill. So if you're traveling to
the East Bay or South of Market tonight, it's best to avoid the main
arteries. The fire is on South Park, between Second and Third streets,
Bryant and Brannan. Fire crews and ambulances are on the scene, and
police are asking that people keep away from the area if at all
possible. That's all we've got on it now, but we'll be keeping you
posted."

South Park!

I clutched the wheel, my stomach knotting. Now that I knew about
the fire I became aware of sirens, of an orange-red glow in the sky.
A sickening feeling filled me. Was it possible this disaster was
somehow related to my case? Was it Café Comedie…?

I needed to get there and find out what had happened, but there
were no side streets or alleys intersecting this part of the block.
There were parking spaces along the curb, and I was in the far right
lane, but the one next to me, as well as those in front of and behind
it, were taken. Two cars ahead there was a vacant space, but now
traffic was at a total standstill; hours could pass before I reached it.

Everywhere people were hanging out their windows, trying to see what
had caused the holdup. Some got out and stood in the street; the driver
of the pickup that was stopped next to the parking space I coveted
climbed up in the truck's bed and looked around. If this continued,
Bryant Street would soon look like a used-car lot on inventory
liquidation day. I fumed and grumbled aloud, experiencing that feeling
of impotence in the face of impersonal forces that is easily one of the
worst aspects of urban life. If traffic didn't move soon, tempers would
flare, and the street scene could turn ugly.

The guy in the bed of the pickup was the first to snap: he yelled,
"Fuck it!" and jumped down onto the pavement. Then he climbed into the
truck and started it. It lurched forward, into the bumper of the car in
front of it, then back into the one behind. Its wheels turned sharply
to the right; the pickup slewed through the empty parking space beside
it and onto the sidewalk.

The car behind it barely hesitated before it followed suit. The two
vehicles fishtailed down the sidewalk next to the logjam in the street.
A woman two cars over leaned out her window and shouted, "Assholes!"

I agreed with her, but the lunatics had shown me the way out. I was
about to execute the same maneuver when a siren whooped somewhere
behind me. A motorcycle cop, obviously on his way to attempt to reroute
traffic, raced down the sidewalk after the truck and car. A ticket and
the ensuing delay was something I didn't need, so I settled for pulling
into the empty parking space. Then I jumped out of the MG and ran
toward South Park.