Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (34 page)

Bobby Foster nodded but didn't move.

"It would be better if you sat down." I gestured at the single chair
on his side of the grille. "We have a lot to go over."

This time he made no response of any kind. I waited.

Finally he said, "Don't know what you think you can do for me." His
voice was deep—a large man's voice trapped in a smallish man's body.

"I'm not sure if there is anything I can do. That's what I'm here to
find out."

My admission of uncertainty seemed to relax him; perhaps he liked
the fact that I didn't pretend to have all the answers. He moved to the
chair and perched on its edge.

"What did Jack Stuart tell you about me, Bobby? It is okay to call
you Bobby?"

He shrugged.

"And please call me Sharon."

He regarded me from under those heavy eyelids for a moment, then
said, "Stuart, all he tell me is you a private eye for that law firm of
his. He say maybe there's something you can do to get me out of this
mess."

"You don't seem to believe that."

Another shrug. "Don't see what nobody can do. They try me, send me
up here. One of these days they gonna kill me."

"But you claim you didn't do the murder."

"Now you the one look like you don't believe me."

"I'm not sure what I think yet. A lot of guilty people claim they're
innocent. But I haven't heard your side of the story. And Jack Stuart
believes you."

He shifted position, leaning back in the chair. "That Stuart, he
okay. Better than the PD I had for my trial, maybe."

Bobby's first attorney had been a public defender; after the
conviction his mother had raised the money to retain All Souls for the
appeals process. "Jack's a good criminal lawyer," I said. "If there's a
procedural basis for overturning your conviction, he'll find it. But
the PD you had wasn't bad, either. What it boiled down to is that there
was a strong case
against you."

His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward, arms on the table. "You
call that a case? They never even find her body. How the hell you gas a
man when you ain't even got a body?"

I knew that both the public defender and Jack had explained to him
the legal basis for conviction in a "no-body" case. I also knew that he
stubbornly refused to accept the explanation and argued vehemently with
them every time the subject came up. What I suspected was that—lacking
anything else—he had seized upon the issue as a last hope and wasn't
about to turn loose of it. Determined not to let him get off on that
overworked tangent, I asked, "What do you think happened to her?"

He shook his head.

"Tracy Kostakos was a friend of yours. You must have some idea about
her disappearance."

"If I did, would I be here?"

"Some people think she's still alive. Her own mother, for instance.
Laura Kostakos thinks her daughter disappeared of her own free will."

His gaze moved away from mine, to a point beyond my left shoulder.
Immediately I felt a prickling at the base of my spine—the kind I often
get when I sense someone is withholding something important from me.

I said, "Bobby? What do you think happened to Tracy?"

"Don't know," he replied, still avoiding my eyes. "But she ain't
alive. If she was, she'd of heard about me and come back and put things
right." He was silent for a moment, then added softly, "Tracy, she dead
all right. But I didn't do it to her."

"Why did you confess, then?"

"I took that back later. That just a story."

"A story, Bobby?"

"Yeah."

"It fit the facts pretty closely."

"Facts? Ain't no facts. Ain't even a body!"

"Why did you confess?"

He clenched his fists, then tipped his head back so he was looking
at the ceiling. The cords in his neck grew taut as he struggled for
control.

Bobby Foster had a history of losing his temper—and a juvenile
record to go with it. But while in the custody of the California Youth
Authority, he'd apparently learned to cope with the impulse to
violence. Life had been looking up for him—until Tracy Kostakos had
disappeared one rainy night nearly two years ago.

After a bit he unclenched his fists and lowered his head. His eyes
were intense but free of anger. "You ever really been scared, lady?
Scared shitless?"

I had, on numerous occasions, but I sensed he was talking about a
different kind of fear. I shook my head.

"Then you don't know. They hammer at me for hours, tell me what I
did. They say I flunked the lie detector test I took before. Later my
lawyer, he found out that wasn't true; it say I lied about some things
but not about killing her. But then I believe them, and it scare me
even more. I get tired, mixed up. After a while I start believing
everything they tell me. The way it work, it's like you remembering
some dream you had. What they tell you, you start seeing it, only you
can't really 'cause it just a dream."

"And then?"

"It start getting real. You see it better. But it still be like the
picture of an old TV that don't work right. You stop being scared
'cause you so tired. They hammer at you some more and you think maybe
if you tell them the dream they go away. Doesn't matter, it just a
dream—right? So you tell them. Then you find out it ain't no dream—it's
a fucking nightmare. "

I leaned back in my chair, trying to imagine what he'd told me. I
could, and yet I couldn't. But it fit with certain
inconsistencies I'd noticed in the trial transcript and the videotape
of his confession. Police interrogation methods these days are more
civilized than the old back-room tactics, but still capable of
producing false admissions of guilt.

After a moment I said, "Tell me about yourself, Bobby."

His face, which had become animated while he was talking about the
confession, went blank. "Why?"

"If I'm to try to help you, I need to know something about you."

"What you want to know?"

"Anything you'd care to tell me."

"Ain't nothing to tell."

"You grew up in San Francisco, right?"

"Potrero Hill. The projects."

"Went to school there?"

"For a while."

"To what grade?"

"Seventh."

"And then you were in and out of the CYA?"

He nodded.

Even though I already knew, I asked, "What did you do to end up
there?"

Silence.

"Bobby?"

"Look, Stuart know all that stuff. Why don't you ask him?"

"I'd rather hear it from you."

He hesitated, regarding me with a mixture of suspicion and hope.
"You really think you can help me?"

"I'm going to try."

"How?"

"By turning up new evidence. By finding out if Tracy Kostakos is
still alive. And if she's not, I'll try to find out what really
happened to her."

"Why you have to know all this stuff about me, then?"

"In my business, I never know what information is going to be
important. I want to hear about your life, right up to the minute you
walked into this room this morning."

That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded, took a deep breath, and said,
"Okay. Where you want me to start?"

"At the point where you quit school and started getting in trouble.
But first let me set up my tape recorder." I took it out of my
briefcase and placed it on the table. Bobby looked dubiously at it but
didn't protest. After I'd tested it, I started the tape and leaned back
in my chair.

"All right," I said, "just talk. Don't hurry or leave anything
out—I'll come back next week if I have to. You and I have a lot of work
to do."

As Bobby began talking, I looked down at my hands. They lay in my
lap, palms turned upward, fingers curled. Cupped, as if I were about to
hold his life in them.

My visit to Bobby Foster was the result of an impromptu picnic I'd
gone on with Jack Stuart, our criminal law specialist at All Souls.
He'd turned up on my doorstep the previous noon—Wednesday of that last,
afterthought week of the year, which serves no earthly purpose except
to frustrate those of us who have had enough of the holidays and are
anxious to get our lives back to normal.

I'd taken the dead time off in order to launch my campaign (I
refused to call it a New Year's resolution) to once and for all have
the construction finished on the back porch of my house. I'd begun
enclosing it to make a second bedroom the previous summer but had run
out of money halfway through. In October I'd refinanced my mortgage and
received funds to complete the job, as well as to make a number of
other necessary and essentially uninteresting repairs. Then I'd gotten
caught up in Christmas shopping and holiday festivities. This week had
been reasonably productive, but now I found myself infected with the
general lassitude that was going around, and none of the contractors
whom I'd had in to give estimates had gotten back to me. When Jack rang
the bell, I was
wandering around the backyard harboring halfhearted notions of
murdering some of the blackberry vines that had taken hold there. If he
hadn't shown up, I'd have been wringing my hands in boredom inside of
fifteen minutes.

So I was happy to climb into his van and go off to nearby Glen Park.
Jack had with him a shopping bag stuffed with French bread and cheese
and salami, plus a bottle of reasonably good wine that I recognized as
filched from the store laid in by All Souls for the annual New Year's
Eve party. I'd brought along some catalogs I'd been meaning to study,
and when we arrived at the far end of Glen Canyon, I found an old
blanket in the back of the van and sat down by a big tree stump to
read, while Jack proceeded to climb the rocks on the canyon wall.

Jack was an avid climber, but unfortunately not a very good one.
He'd taken up the hobby by way of sublimating the pain caused by his
divorce the year before, but in my opinion he could have done with more
psychic pain and fewer physical injuries. In early November he'd
suffered three cracked ribs in a fall while climbing at the Pinnacles;
he was only now getting back into shape. The dangers here in Glen
Canyon, he'd informed me, were only categorized as Zone One—meaning no
permanent damage was likely to result from a mishap. That was just as
well, since this holiday season was the first he'd spent alone since
the divorce, and he was presently sublimating with a vengeance. It made
me nervous to watch him, so I kept my eyes focused on the catalog I was
paging through.

The catalog was from something called the Educational Swap Meet—a
loosely organized coalition of self-styled experts who jointly
advertised courses they hoped to offer. For a few weeks now I'd been
thinking I really ought to get back into the social swing—I'd been
unattached and without much interest in pursuing a relationship for
nine months— and, on
the precept that Dear Abby is usually right, had decided taking a class
would be a good way to Meet People with Similar Interests.
Unfortunately what was offered in this particular catalog seemed odd,
if not downright perplexing, and I wasn't at all sure I wanted to meet
people with interests in those areas.

I called to Jack, "How about this one—'Spiritual Gunhandling for
Gentle People'?"

Jack grunted loudly. I glanced up. He was dangling in a
treacherous-looking fashion near the top of the rock formation, not all
that far above. Quickly I returned my eyes to the catalog.

"What it is, is the art of Zen shooting," I said. "You're supposed
to make friends with your gun and use it in meditation."

Jack gasped. I turned the page.

"Here's another—'Meeting One's Soul Mate through Visualization and
Astrology.' No, wait. This is it—'Getting into Death. Face your own
inevitable demise and actually feel good about it.'"

There was a thump. Afraid that Jack was facing his demise without
benefit of the course, I looked up. He had jumped off the rocks and was
brushing dirt from his jeans as he came toward me.

He said, "Why don't you just take another photography course?"

"Because I've had to face the fact I'm lousy at it."

"You'd be lousy at getting into death, too. And meditating with your
gun sounds dangerous."

"True." I tossed the catalog—and my hope of meeting my soul mate
through exotic means—aside.

Jack went to the van to get the sack with our lunch. I slumped
against the tree stump, savoring the crisp day.

It was clear, but the sun's rays had that watery, filtered quality
that tells northern Californians the rains are not far off.
The canyon was heavily silent. Usually Glen Park—a recreational haven
in the south central neighborhood of the same name—teems with the
offspring of families who inhabit the nearby cottages and small homes,
but today they must have been off enjoying such Christmas-vacation
treats as movies and visits to the Exploratorium. The narrow, densely
wooded canyon extending north from the playgrounds and tennis courts
where we were was especially deserted.

I leaned my head back against the big stump's rough bark and stared
up through the silvered, shifting leaves of the surrounding eucalyptus
trees. A jay sat in a starburst of light on one of the topmost
branches. Beyond him a haze of woodsmoke drifted from the fireplaces of
the homes and condominiums on affluent Diamond Heights. Had it not been
for the angular outlines of their overhanging balconies and the growl
of a bus toiling up O'Shaughnessy Street, I could have imagined I was
deep in the wilderness, rather than in one of the nation's major cities.

Jack came back, dropped down onto the blanket, and began pawing
through the sack.

I said, "Well, at least you're still alive."

"Those rocks are a piece of cake. As I told you, only Danger Zone
One."

"How many zones are there?"

"Three. An error in Two can put you in a wheelchair for good. Before
you tackle Zone Three, you check with your life insurance agent to make
sure your coverage is in force."