Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (28 page)

As I got closer, the air reeked of smoke; it clogged my nostrils and
windpipe and made my breath come short. There were flashing lights
ahead: red, blue, amber. The sky overhead glowed like an inverted
red-orange globe. People were shouting. Radios in the emergency
vehicles squawked and crackled.

When I turned onto Third Street itself, I saw the entrance to South
Park was blocked by a police barricade. A great crowd milled about,
resisting the officers' efforts to clear a path for an arriving
ambulance. I could hear the flames now: a roar that sounded as if whole
buildings were being sucked into a vacuum. The smoke-filled air was
warm as a spring day.

The crowd acted as a solid mass, shifting this way or that, but
providing no opening. I wriggled between two men, pushed a third aside,
elbowed a woman so she stepped back. To my left a police officer
shouted for people to move; he spread his arms wide, and one of his
hands caught me hard on the shoulder. The lights of the ambulance
washed over the tight press of humanity. As it crept forward, the
driver hit the siren. That accomplished what no amount of police
commands could: the crowd parted and the ambulance drove toward the
barricade. I slipped under the officer's arm and darted in its wake.

As the ambulance sped through the barricade, a hand grabbed my arm.
"That's far enough, lady."

I didn't reply, transfixed by the scene in front of me. Fire trucks
clogged the parkway itself. Ambulances were pulled onto the grassy
oval. People lay on stretchers, white-coated paramedics attending to
them. At the picnic tables and on the ground, others—many in evening
attire—sat or lay. Their faces and hands were smoke blackened, their
clothing torn and disheveled.

Beyond the ring of barren sycamore trees, the facade of Café Comedie
was enveloped in what looked to be a solid wall of flame. The
wrought-iron fence in front of it had been flattened by the
hook-and-ladders. The buildings on either side were afire, too. Great
torrents of water arched through the air; smoke billowed. The swiftly
moving figures of the firemen were mere sooty silhouettes. And over it
all spread the consuming brilliance of the flames.

If they couldn't control this inferno soon, it would engulf all of
South Park. Perhaps several surrounding blocks.

"Lady, move before you get hurt," the officer said, tugging at my
arm.

"Do you know how it started?"

"Somebody said something about an explosion."

I stared at the wall of fire, remembered the gas leak Larkey had
mentioned—the one PG&E couldn't fix properly. "Was anybody trapped
in there?"

"Don't know. Now—move!"

I moved, but only a few yards away. I couldn't take my eyes off the
flames. In spite of the efforts to quell them, they shot upward, as if
to consume the sky itself.

A woman near me was having hysterics. She kept sobbing, "He
promised! He promised!" I looked her way, saw she was bent over, a man
clutching at her leather-jacketed shoulders. The man was Mike, the
bartender from the club. As I drew closer, I realized the woman was
Kathy Soriano.

Mike looked relieved when he saw me. He said, "I can't do anything
for her."

"Let me try." I took hold of Kathy, dragged her down to a sitting
position on the pavement. She hunched over, arms wrapped around her
midsection, hands over her face, sobbing raggedly.

Mike squatted beside us. I asked him, "Is she hurt?"

He shook his head. "She was just handing her keys over to one of the
valets when the explosion happened. I'd stepped out for some air on my
break. I grabbed her, and we ran down here." He looked toward the
flames. "My God," he added in awed tones, as if only now realizing what
might have happened to him had he stayed inside.

Kathy was rocking back and forth now. "Jay," she sobbed. "Jay. He
promised."

I put my arms around her. She buried her head under my chin. Over
her rumpled curls I said to Mike, "Jay? Rob?"

He shook his head slightly—in the negative. "The explosion was back
by the office, from what I could tell."

"Jesus."

Kathy began to sob louder. "The bastard! He promised!"

"Who, Kathy?"

"Jay, oh, Jay…"

"What did he promise?"

She jerked her head, and it connected violently with my chin. I
shoved it back down, and the shriek she'd been about to let fly was
muffled against my jacket. "She needs medical attention," I said to
Mike.

"So do all of them." He motioned at the people in the park. "There
aren't enough medics to go around."

He was right, of course. "Do you know who her doctor is?"

"Most of us go to the Potrero Clinic, but I don't suppose she—"

"No, but her doctor's probably in Marin, anyway. The clinic'll do in
an emergency. Help me get her up."

The two of us hauled Kathy to her feet. She stumbled and swayed
between us, hysteria spent now. I said to Mike, "My car's a couple of
blocks away. Will you walk down there with us?"

He nodded, and we began making our way through the crowd. The same
people who hadn't wanted to let the ambulance through gave Kathy
sympathetic looks and cleared a path for us.

Traffic was moving slowly on Bryant Street now, rerouted down Fourth
toward China Basin. Beyond Townsend Street there was an entrance to the
280 freeway, the quickest way to Potrero Hill. With any luck at all, I
could have Kathy to the clinic within half an hour. Mike and I loaded
her into the passenger seat of the MG, and then he loped off toward
South Park to see if he could help some of the others.

Kathy slumped silently beside me, her head drooping forward. As I
eased the car into the creeping stream of traffic, she gave a tremulous
sigh, as a child that has spent itself crying will do. I glanced at
her, wondering if she had blocked the knowledge of her husband's and
lover's probable deaths. For her sake, I hoped so.

Fortunately I knew where the clinic was—on Arkansas Street near the
Potrero Hill playground. I pulled to the white curb in front, went
around the car, and hoisted Kathy out. She was a
dead weight now; I staggered under the burden. A white-coated young man
came bustling out with a wheelchair. Efficiently he got Kathy into it
and trundled her inside.

The clinic was like many other low-budget, low-cost operations I'd
seen: old, minimally furnished, but spruced up with a cheerful paint
job and colorful posters. The young man wheeled Kathy to a counter,
where a sign read ADMITTING. I was relieved to see Leora Whitsun
sitting behind it. She stood up when she saw us, her face furrowing in
concern.

Briefly I explained what had happened. "I couldn't think of where
else to take her," I added. "She's in no shape to tell me who her
doctor is."

"That's all right; we don't discriminate." Leora allowed herself a
small ironic smile, then picked up the phone receiver, buzzed someone,
and spoke quietly into it. "Room A," she told the young man. To me, she
added, "You just go sit over there, Sharon. There're magazines, coffee
in that urn in the corner. Be a little while." Then she picked up a
clipboard and followed the wheelchair.

I sat on one of the two yellow vinyl couches, opposite a young
Hispanic couple, who huddled together as if for warmth. The woman's
face was crumpled and streaked with tears; the man was all of twenty,
yet his bleak eyes suggested there was nothing he hadn't seen. He kept
smoothing the woman's hair and murmuring the endearment "querida." To
avoid intruding, I grabbed a year-old copy of Field and Stream and kept
my gaze fixed on an ad for rifles. After a while a doctor came through
the door and ushered the young couple back the way Kathy had been
taken. I set down the magazine and looked around for a pay phone,
thinking to call All Souls.

I was about to borrow the phone on the admitting desk when Leora
returned. "The doctor wants to keep her overnight," she said, "till we
can find out about her husband. Are you
sure he died in the fire?"

"There's no way of knowing yet."

"What about Jay? Did he… ?"

"Probably."

She touched her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes. "Poor man.
I'll pray for him." When she took her hand away, she looked old and
tired, as if the added weight of this latest tragedy had finally made
her burdens more than she could bear.

I would have liked to say something encouraging about her son's
case, but at the moment I couldn't think of anything that would make
sense. Besides, my major suspect was probably dead, and I doubted Kathy
would ever admit her own complicity. Instead, I patted Leora's arm,
thanked her, and said I'd call later to check on Kathy. But halfway to
the door I thought of something I needed to ask her.

"Leora," I said, "when Jay took Tracy Kostakos's dental records up
to Napa County the other day, did he spend much time here beforehand?"

She shook her head. "None at all. He called, asked me to pull the
file and envelope it. When he came by, he left his car in the white
zone, just ran in and grabbed it."

Of course that didn't mean anything; he probably had switched the X
rays a long time before that, on the chance that one day the body would
be discovered. And yet…

I said to Leora, "You mentioned that Kathy came looking for him here
on New Year's Day."

"That's right."

"Did she say why she thought he might be here?"

"No, just that she wanted to break the news about the Kostakos girl
to him personally."

"What about Tracy's dental records—did she mention that the Napa
sheriff's department needed them?"

Leora frowned. "You know, she did. She even offered to take them up
there herself, since Jay would be upset by the news and
might not want to deal with them. I told her he'd have to authorize
their release before I could give them to her."

"What did she do then?"

"… I'm not sure. We had a patient with a stab wound— family fight,
what else?—and he was bleeding all over the place. There were other
emergencies, too. I kind of lost track of her."

"Is it possible Kathy could have gone into the records room without
you noticing her?"

"It's possible. And she would have had enough time to, because I saw
her leaving more than fifteen minutes later. But why would she… ?"

Why, indeed? That, like many aspects of this case, made no sense
whatsoever.

On the way to Bernal Heights I tuned to KSUN again, to see if they
had an update on the fire. A news broadcast was in progress. The fire,
the announcer said, was now under control; at least five people had
died, and damage was estimated in the millions. When the broadcast
ended, the deejay who held the midnight-to-six slot came on. I looked
at my watch and was surprised to see it was twelve-ten.

I snapped off the radio and drove in silence, deeply discouraged and
saddened. Tonight's tragedy eclipsed my earlier sense of urgency about
wrapping up the case. I knew that if Larkey was dead, there was a good
chance I would never find out exactly what had happened the night Tracy
died, but somehow I just didn't care.

To tell the truth, I was fed up with the case. What had begun as a
compelling search into the past had turned into an arduous sifting of
sordid and depressing facts. I was sick of digging into the life of a
young woman whose chief occupation had been getting what she wanted at
the expense of everyone else. I was sick of people like Amy Barbour and
Marc Emmons, who did shabby things and then tried to justify them, even
to themselves. The users of the world had always disgusted me, but no
more so than tonight. I'd lost sympathy for almost everyone involved in
my investigation.

As I searched for a parking space near the co-op, I wondered about
that loss of sympathy: what if it was indicative of something worse?
What if I was also losing empathy—a quality, I'd often been told, that
made others willing to open up to me, and thus made me a good
detective? What if—worse yet—I was losing my enthusiasm for the work
itself?

I thought of Rae, of the energy she applied to the most menial of
investigative tasks, of her elation when a lead turned out to be a
solid one. Day after day she maintained that enthusiasm, while toiling
for a salary that wasn't enough so that she could rent a decent
apartment, and receiving little credit for her efforts, save my own
(often infrequent) thanks. How did she do it?

Well, for one thing, Rae hadn't seen all that I had. She hadn't
spent year after year experiencing what amounted to living nightmares.
She hadn't spent over a decade uncovering secrets of people's lives
that literally made one's flesh creep, hadn't repeatedly dealt with the
havoc and destruction caused by human greed, carelessness, and
stupidity.

So what I was really asking was what had happened to me, that I
couldn't sustain the enthusiasm. And there was my answer.

Wait a few years, Rae, I thought. Just wait.

It was a fate I wouldn't wish upon her but couldn't warn her away
from. Because—as Larkey had said of Tracy—she wouldn't listen to me,
any more than I would have at her age.

I'd driven around the triangular park in front of the co-op twice
and still hadn't found a space. Both of the driveway spots were
occupied. For a moment I considered leaving the MG by a fireplug, but
recent experience and a glance at the tinderbox buildings lining the
street made me think better of the
idea. I finally wedged the car into a semilegal space at the corner and
hurried up the hill.

There were no lights in the parlor or any of the offices opening off
the first floor hallway, but a glow came from the kitchen at the rear.
I went back there and found Hank sitting at the table with Amy Barbour.
He appeared to be sober for a change; she was eating a bowl of cereal.

I stopped in the doorway. Amy's presence was so unexpected, the
scene before me so homey and normal in contrast to what I'd witnessed
in the past two hours, that I was at a total loss for words. Hank
glanced at me and said, "There you are. You have a visitor. She arrived
about an hour ago—hungry."