Muller, Marcia - [10] The Shape of Dread (v1.0) (html) (43 page)

He made me sound like quite a sterling character. I basked in the
flattery as he fetched the coffeepot.

"Of course," he added as he poured, "there's another side to our
group, as exemplified by Hitler's presence. We tend to become rigid in
our ideas. We develop theories and won't turn loose of them. We can
become extremists." He replaced the coffeepot on the warmer and sat
across from me.

"I knew it sounded too good to be true." I sampled the coffee and
found it excellent, even to my unsophisticated taste. "How'd you know
that I don't use milk or sugar?"

"It's a characteristic of people in our group." At my incredulous
look, he added, "Actually, I don't use them, and I just forgot to offer
any."

"Those negative things you mentioned, a lot of them are valid for
me," I said. "That rigidity?…"

He nodded.

"Once, right after I'd gotten my degree and couldn't find a job, I
took a personality test to see if I was suited for—don't laugh—a career
in life insurance sales. Do you know what the results said? They said I
could be 'pushy, severe, and dominant.'"

He raised Nixon to me. "That's our group."

"What else can you tell me about us?"

"Well, do you ever get reclusive? Standoffish? Kind of prickly?"

"I've felt that way for close to a year now—as if I've built a wall
around me so nobody can come too close."

"Bad sign. Unhealthy end of the scale. Look out for creeping
paranoia. You may become obsessed with peculiar ideas, feel prey to any
number of indefinable threats. When that happens, insanity with
schizophrenic tendencies lies just around the bend."

I choked on my coffee. "You sound just like a fortune teller I used
to know."

He smiled and patted my hand. "Cheer up. When you go nuts, I'll
recommend a good psychiatrist."

I drank some more coffee, feeling relaxed and companionable and
oddly unwilling to bring the conversation back to the reason I'd come.
But finally I said, "What group was Tracy?"

He was silent, looking down into his cup.

"From what people have told me, she must have inherited your sense
of humor."

"Actually she was more like her mother. Laura has very little sense
of humor, and Tracy didn't have a funny bone in her body."

I thought of what Jay Larkey had told me—that for a funny lady,
Tracy had taken herself very seriously. "How do you explain her
becoming a comedian, then?"

"That was an outgrowth of her analytical ability. She knew what made
other people laugh, and how to create it. She just didn't laugh much
herself. Sometimes people standing on the outside see what's going on
inside more clearly than those of us who are there." He was silent for
a while, then looked at me. "You did it, didn't you?"

"Did what?"

"Got me talking about her, even though I said I wouldn't."

"It wasn't all that calculated."

"I didn't think it was. But now that you've got me started, I might
as well go on. Let's go back to the living room, though; it's too
cheerful here to talk about somebody I loved who's dead." He listened
to his words, then shook his head. "On the other hand, Tracy's memory
is so warm that it might do a great deal for that icy room up front."

We went back to our unsittable chairs by the fireplace, and George
talked of his daughter. He talked not in terms of his psychological
model, or even with the detachment of one in his field, but as a
still-grieving father.

Tracy's birth had been premature; for a couple of days he and Laura
had feared they might lose her. But her will had proved larger than her
tiny body, and she quickly grew strong.

As soon as she could talk, she'd clamored for a baby sister. Laura
could have no more children, but it wasn't something a small child
could understand.

She'd had five kittens. Each had met with disaster— speeding cars,
leukemia, the neighbor's dog. After the fifth died, she'd announced to
her parents that she never wanted another pet. And she never acquired
one.

George had worried for a while because she always had more imaginary
friends than real ones. But she'd outgrown them, and when he'd first
seen her perform comedy, he'd realized what fertile material those old
pals had become.

She'd gotten pregnant during her senior year in high school; he and
Laura had gone along with her decision to have an abortion. It had left
no apparent emotional scars.

They'd both known she was unhappy at Foothill Junior College, and
had noted her growing preoccupation with comedy with a certain unease.
When she'd announced her desire to move to San Francisco, he'd been
opposed at first. But Laura had convinced him of the damage an
overprotective family can do, and in the end he'd given in.

No, he said, he didn't resent Laura for pressuring him to allow the
move that eventually led to Tracy's death.

No, he and Tracy hadn't talked much in the last three or four years
of her life. He'd just assumed it was part of the natural separation
process.

Had she abused their credit cards? He'd never had that impression,
but Laura was the one who handled the bills, and she did have a
tendency to be overindulgent where Tracy was concerned.

No, he guessed he hadn't really known his daughter. Not at the time
of her death.

Yes, he honestly believed she was dead. He had no illusions, unlike
Laura.

"Why?" I asked.

"I went to the trial. I watched the evidence being presented day
after day. There's no doubt she's dead."

His hands were locked together between his bluejeaned knees; the
knuckles showed white through his tan. His eyes were more greenish now;
when I tried to hold his gaze, it slipped away from mine.

Finally he sighed. "Maybe it's more that I have to believe it."

"Why?"

"Because if she's not dead, she has done a monstrous thing. If she's
not dead, she is someone I don't want to acknowledge as my own."

After a moment he added, "Please don't find Tracy alive, Sharon. And
if you do, don't bring her back to me."

After I left George Kostakos, I stopped at a phone booth and called
Café Comedie. Larkey wasn't in, but the woman who answered gave me the
last address and phone number on file for Lisa Mclntyre, the waitress
who had been Bobby Foster's friend. I called the number but found it
now belonged to someone else, who had never heard of Mclntyre. Next I
tried to call Marc Emmons but got only a machine. Rae had had similar
results the day before when she'd tried to arrange an appointment for
me, so I decided the best place to catch Emmons would be at the club
that evening.

Directory Assistance had no current listing for Mclntyre, but her
old address wasn't far away, on Pacific Avenue just off Polk Street. I
decided to drive over there and see if anyone knew where she'd moved;
possibly one of the neighbors was still in touch with her.

The building on Pacific was a fairly large one, part commercial,
with a furniture reupholstering workshop, bakery, and drugstore
downstairs and apartments on the second floor. As I'd expected, none of
the mailboxes in the vestibule bore Mclntyre's name. I rang the manager
but received no response;
next I buzzed the seven remaining apartments. Two people were home;
neither had heard of Mclntyre. None of the people working in the
downstairs businesses remembered her, either; they didn't pay too much
attention to the tenants, one man told me.

I decided to turn the search for Mclntyre over to Rae. Since
separating from her husband, my assistant had displayed boundless
enthusiasm for all sorts of routine chores. Besides, Mclntyre wasn't
really central to my investigation; I only wanted to talk with her to
see if she could shed some light on the unusually high level of tension
that Larkey had sensed in his younger employees shortly before Tracy
vanished.

I went back to the MG and considered what to do next. Leora Whitsun,
Foster's mother, was visiting relatives in Los Angeles and wouldn't be
back until New Year's Day, when she was scheduled for duty at the
Potrero Medical Clinic. There were other friends of Tracy's I could
interview— members of her improv group, for instance—but they struck me
as even more peripheral than Mclntyre. About all they'd be able to tell
me was what kind of person Tracy had been, and I felt I already had
enough of a handle on that. Besides, the Friday before New Year's Eve
was a bad time to find people at home.

I thought some more about Marc Emmons: his answering machine always
being on, his abrupt departure from the club the night before. It could
be he was monitoring calls, ducking me. Since his address on Potrero
Hill wasn't too much of a detour on my way home, I might as well swing
by there and check for signs of his presence.

Emmons lived on Mariposa, not far from Missouri Street, in the heart
of the upscale, newly trendy part of the hill. The transformation of
this predominantly blue-collar, ethnically diverse area began in the
seventies, when the middle class discovered its sunny weather and as
yet reasonable property values. Now the neighborhood is largely mixed:
renovated houses and
new apartment buildings and condominium complexes are interspersed
among older, shabbier dwellings; hardware stores and corner groceries
and bars that have been there for generations stand side by side with
patisseries and wine shops and restaurants that cater to the new
element.

Emmons's building was one of the new ones: bastardized Victorian,
with skylights and decks and greenhouse windows, painted sky blue. A
developer's sign advertised one, two, and three-bedroom units, hot tub,
sauna, and exercise room, plus a complete security system. I was
surprised that a man who made his living as a stand-up comic could
afford such a place, but then I didn't know how much Larkey was paying
him. He also might—like Tracy—have well-to-do, indulgent parents.

I rang the bell for 7 A but received no response. Then I went to the
security gate and peered through it at the tower-level parking area,
trying to see if there was a car in that unit's space. As near as I
could tell, there wasn't.

I was beginning to feel this wasn't my day. Probably the best thing
to do was go home and start over at Café Comedie that evening. I began
driving south on Missouri, planning to take Army Street across town to
my quiet little neighborhood near the Glen Park district. But before I
got there, I turned east, toward the Potrero Annex housing project,
where Bobby Foster had grown up.

After a few blocks Missouri curved and took a sharp downward slope,
and I found myself looking at a whole other Potrero Hill. Only minutes
from the luxury apartment houses with their saunas and hot tubs was a
housing complex so alien from them—from most of the rest of the
city—that it might have been in an alternate universe.

The two-tiered dun-colored buildings sprawled over an entire
hillside. The view of the bay and the bridge connecting the city with
Oakland would have been spectacular from their windows—except they were
heavily meshed and barred. I stopped at a
corner where a couple of burnt-out, vandalized cars stood. Farther
down,
against other battered and rusted vehicles, leaned small knots of black
men, drinking and most likely doing drugs. A ghetto blaster stood on
the hood of one of the cars, and rap music filled the air. Some kids
were scrounging around among the rubble in the gutter; as I watched,
one of them held up a used hypodermic syringe.

I stayed at the top of the rise viewing the war zone below—an
embattled piece of turf that armed drug dealers and addicts were doing
their best to wrest from the honest citizens. A few months back, San
Francisco's public housing projects had been declared "out of control"
in a federal government report; a HUD official had admitted in print to
being "terrified" on a tour of the large Sunnydale complex. For a time
a great many solutions to the problem had been proposed; what they
mainly amounted to was shifting the responsibility from the Housing
Authority to the police to the Department of Social Services, and back
again. As far as I knew, few plans had been implemented, and after a
while the media had lost interest in the subject. If anything had
improved in the projects, you couldn't tell it by looking at Potrero
Annex.

As I sat there contemplating the despair and hopelessness trapped
within those barrackslike buildings, a silver stretch Mercedes topped
the rise behind me. The driver and his passenger—both young black men
with eyes masked by mirrored sunglasses—looked hardened beyond their
years. They weren't pro ballplayers come to dispense New Year's cheer
to the old neighborhood; they were here to dispense death. This other,
alien San Francisco was no place for me, unarmed and alone—even in the
middle of the afternoon.

When I arrived home, my brown-shingled cottage on the tail end of
Church Street seemed even more inviting than usual. One of the
contractors I'd had in to give an estimate earlier
in the week was just coming down the front steps. He wanted to check a
couple of things, he said, and then he'd be able to quote me a price.
The price was agreeable, and since none of the others had so much as
bothered to call back, I told him to draw up a contract, and he said he
could start next Wednesday. After he left, I puttered around until six,
then called Café Comedie.

Marc Emmons had called in sick, Larkey told me. I dialed his home
number and again spoke with the machine. Not my day, I thought, and not
my night, either.

The videotape of Foster's confession had been stuffed in my mailbox
when I'd returned, but Rae had included no note. I called All Souls and
talked with Ted, who said she was in the attic, mudding and taping the
Sheetrock she'd put up.

"She says she wants the room finished by tomorrow night," he added,
"so she can start the year in a real room."