No One You Know (16 page)

I followed her through the living room into the entryway. She pulled the curtain back, and there was James Wheeler, a skeleton of a man with a wild swirl of gray hair. The dog had climbed up onto the pillow beside his head. “I’m here, hon,” Mrs. Wheeler said.

He looked up at me and for a moment, something flashed across his eyes. He raised an arm, as if to wave, but it dropped back to the sheet.

“I know,” Mrs. Wheeler said, holding the glass of water to his lips. “She looks just like her sister, doesn’t she?”

Twenty-three

O
N
S
ATURDAY, AS PROMISED
, I
MET
T
HORPE
at Opera Plaza. When I arrived he was still signing books, a line of customers stretching through the store. He looked up, saw me, and mouthed “Ten minutes.”

A good-looking guy walked into the store, carrying an ugly baby in a Maclaren backpack. He wore an expensive leather jacket, brown Skechers, and rocker jeans cut so low and tight it was a wonder he could walk. The baby wore a pink hat that said
Nader 2008.

The guy’s shaggy haircut and sideburns were too perfect to be real. He was of the class of young, disaffected San Francisco hipsters who had long baffled me with their seemingly unlimited supply of free time and money, none of which they appeared to spend on food. He turned and gave me a lopsided grin. “Who’s the author?” he said.

“Andrew Thorpe.”

“Any good?”

“I haven’t read the book.”

I excused myself and walked to the coffee shop attached to the store, where I bought a tin of chocolate-covered espresso beans. Back at the store, I popped one in my mouth and let the chocolate melt on my tongue. By the time Thorpe was finished, I’d had a dozen and was beginning to feel the buzz.

“Ready to walk?” he asked.

Half an hour later we were sitting at a little table at Mangosteen, crowded in on both sides by noisy lunchgoers. The place smelled of lemongrass.

“I recommend number ten,” Thorpe said. “Cubed steak with potatoes over rice, or number twenty-two, same thing but with noodles.”

I went with the noodles. The service was slow, but the food was good. Thorpe talked about a meeting he’d just had with his life coach before launching into a series of questions about my personal life. Without exactly knowing how it happened, I ended up telling him about Henry, our breakup in Guatemala three years before.

“Was he the one?” Thorpe asked.

I just shrugged, but he asked again. Reluctantly, I said, “I thought he was, at the time.”

“Do you still think about him?”

“On occasion.” The truth was I’d been thinking about him a lot lately, but that was none of Thorpe’s business.

“Then he wasn’t the one,” Thorpe said. “If he was, you’d think of him every morning when you wake up. You’d think of him when you go to bed at night, when you drop off your dry-cleaning, when you’re sitting in a movie.”

“I saw James Wheeler.”

“You went through with it.” He sounded surprised.

“Why didn’t you tell me he’d been cleared by his alibi?”

“Was he? I don’t remember that. Like I said, he just wasn’t that interesting.”

He swirled the last bite of steak around in the sauce and popped it in his mouth. The server came over with the check, and Thorpe handed her his credit card before I could protest. “I’m stuffed,” he said, patting his stomach. “What say we take a walk, work off the lunch?”

The sun was out, scorching the sidewalk, glinting off the parked cars that lined the street. I took off my sweater and twisted my hair up in a bun to get it off my neck. The Tenderloin smelled atrocious in the heat, like dog shit, petrol, and baked piss. Guys urinating on the sidewalk were one of the commonest features of the neighborhood, second only to drug-addled prostitutes working their trade at all hours. This was a part of the city I’d never learned to love.

We walked South on Larkin, block after block in silence.

By the time we got to Market, my shoes were beginning to pinch and I wondered where Thorpe was taking me. Every minute with him made me feel uneasy, but I was determined to ask him for more names.

“Do you like horse races?” Thorpe asked. “I sometimes go to Bay Meadows. It’s more fun than you think. I was planning to go next Saturday. You should come.”

Fortunately, I didn’t have to answer, because just then we were overtaken by a posse of a dozen men linked together by a complex matrix of chains, clad in leather vests, kilts, and combat boots.

“Oh, I forgot, it’s the weekend of the Folsom Street Fair,” Thorpe said.

I had the feeling he hadn’t forgotten, that this had been our destination all along.

We continued walking south. Within a few blocks, we were caught up in the crowd: men in leather chaps with nothing underneath, women in painful corsets, towering trannies in six-inch heels. I felt out of place in my knee-length summer skirt and T-shirt, like Exhibit A in the Suburban Soccer Mom display at the Museum of Mainstream Morality.

“If I’d known this was our destination, I’d have worn something a bit more dramatic,” I said.

“You look great. Maybe people will think you’re being ironic.”

Eventually we came to a barricade in the middle of the street.

“Three bucks to enter,” said an extremely tall man in a bit and harness. He whinnied, stomped his big foot, and shook his hair extensions. He was so convincingly horselike, I wondered if he dressed like this every day.

“Well, since we’re here already,” Thorpe said, fishing a five and a single out of his wallet.

One thing I loved about San Francisco was that, when it came to public exhibition of all varieties, the vibe was decidedly laissez-faire. At any moment, you might wander into what seemed like a scene from a movie. Years ago, I’d been folding my towels at a Laundromat on Diamond when the theme song from
Grease
came on the radio, and all five patrons literally burst into spontaneous song. If you had the time and inclination, you could live your life as a picaresque without ever leaving the city.

Thorpe turned his attention to a whipping demonstration going on at a booth a few feet away. The sun was oppressive, the smell of leather and mysterious lubricants overpowering. Someone swatted me on the backside with a wooden paddle, but when I turned to identify the spanker, I met a sea of guileless faces. I felt like Alice in a freaky San Francisco version of Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter and all his loopy friends were into S& M.

And then I saw a familiar face.

“Jack?”

He wrapped me in a hug. “Ellie. God, it’s been ages.”

His thick black hair hung down to his shoulders. He wore a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and brown leather pants. “You look great,” I said, and he did. Thorpe beamed his most confident smile. “This is Andrew Thorpe,” I said. “And this is my friend Jack, from college.”

“Jackson,” he corrected me. That’s when I remembered how he’d insisted on being called Jackson, even though his actual given name was just Jack.

We’d met at the beginning of my senior year and had been together morning and night for several weeks before he went to Senegal with the Peace Corps. It was good to see him. The city was full of men whom I’d had brief relationships with in the year following Lila’s death. Every now and then, I’d run into one of them. It was always interesting, if somewhat unsettling, to see who they’d become, how they turned out.

A tall blonde in a red leather dress came up and put her arm around Jack’s waist. “This is my wife, Stacy,” he said. To my surprise, he introduced me as “an old girlfriend.”

There was an awkward pause. “The kids are at home with the sitter in Atherton,” Stacy said.

“Kids?”

“We’ve got two. First grade and preschool. They think we’re at a company picnic.”

Stacy was friendly and quick, and I got the feeling that when she wasn’t dressed like a hooker, she wore serious business suits and pulled in a serious income—maybe as an attorney or a realtor. But I remembered Jack/Jackson as a skinny guy with a joint in one hand and a book in the other, lounging naked on his ratty mattress in the aftermath of sex. It was strange to think of him married with kids.

He handed me his business card. “Give me a call. We’ll have you over for dinner. You can meet the little monsters.”

“That would be great,” I said, but I knew I’d never call.

Thorpe and I pushed past booths selling giant dildos and gold-plated cock rings, vendors peddling anatomically vivid funnel cakes, posters advertising special events for various fetishes. A woman in a rubber nursing uniform thrust a flier into my hand. It read,
Meet Your Submissive. First consultation free.

Finally we came to the end of the street and exited the fair. I was trying to figure out how to phrase my request when Thorpe said, “I’ve got another one for you.”

“Pardon?”

“Another name. Something else I didn’t put in the book. There was a car out at Armstrong Woods around the time Lila went missing, a white Chevy. Somebody thought it looked weird and took down a license plate, reported it to the cops.”

He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. On it was printed a name: William Boudreaux.

“He was some sort of musician, went by Billy. I originally planned to follow up on it, but then I just got busy. And anyway, by the time I discovered it, I already liked where the book was going.”

I folded the paper carefully and slid it into my wallet. “Thank you.” We walked for a couple of minutes in silence before I said what was on my mind. “I have to ask—why are you doing this?”

Thorpe smiled. “I guess I’ve got this crazy thought in my head that if I do you a good turn, maybe I can win you over.”

We kept walking. The crowds thinned out, the fog moved in. When we got back to Opera Plaza, where my car was parked, I said, “Hey, before I go, could you clear one thing up for me?”

“Yeah?”

“Your house. The view from your desk.”

“Ah, that.”

“Well?”

“Would you believe it’s a coincidence?”

“No.”

He looked away. For a moment, he actually seemed to be blushing. “When it came up for sale, I’d gone almost two years without writing a word. I’d sit down to type, and I’d just stare at the blank page for hours. This had gone on for so long, I’d finally decided to abandon writing altogether and go back to teaching. I was visiting a friend in the neighborhood one Sunday, when we drove by and saw the open house sign. He wanted to have a look, so I joined him. I wasn’t looking to buy, and it’s not really even my style—too modern, somewhat cold—but when I realized I could see your house from the upstairs window, I knew I had to have it, and I knew that the room with the view would be my office.”

“That’s a little creepy.”

“Maybe, but it worked. Within two months of moving in, I had three chapters of a new book. I did my writing at night, but only on those nights when the light was on in your room.”

“By then, it wasn’t even my room,” I said. “My mother had turned it into an office.”

He rested his hand on the roof of my car. “Oh, I knew you weren’t there anymore. But when the light was on, I could pretend you were. I imagined you sitting at your old desk, reading books, listening to music. I at least had the illusion of your being nearby. And sometimes you were. Until your mother moved away last year, I rarely went out on Thursday nights. That was the one night of the week when I could be almost certain of seeing you. Even though I couldn’t speak to you, I still could conceive of an imaginary line running from my desk to you. I would watch you down there, standing on the sidewalk in front of the house with your mother. I wondered what you were talking about. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that there were times when I wondered if my name came up.”

“You must understand that’s weird,” I said. “Very weird.”

What I didn’t tell him was that even the one man in my life who had truly loved me, Henry, had never been so devoted to me. In comparison with Thorpe, Henry had given up on me relatively easily. Did obsession breed a deeper loyalty than love?

He rubbed at an imaginary spot on my car. “What can I say? You were my Zelda, my George Sand, my Stella. My books, the house, the mild celebrity I’ve enjoyed—it’s all because of you.”

It was easy to see he’d put me on a pedestal. If the circumstances had been different—if his book had been about anything other than Lila—I might have been flattered. I could see how, under the right conditions, it might be really nice to be someone’s muse.

Finally, I unlocked the driver’s-side door, but before I could open it, Thorpe did it for me. “Really,” he said, once I was settled behind the wheel, “it might not be a bad idea to look up Billy Boudreaux.”

Twenty-four

W
HAT ABOUT
T
HORPE
?” H
ENRY ASKED ME
once.

It was December 8, 2004, the fifteenth anniversary of Lila’s death, and we had just visited her grave with my parents.

It was a cool day in Palo Alto, the sun shining after a night of heavy rain. As there were no civilian cemeteries in San Francisco, we had been at a loss as to where to bury Lila. We ended up choosing Alta Mesa Memorial Park because it was the closest cemetery to Stanford. Even though it was a longer drive from the city than the large cemeteries in Colma and Daly City, it seemed like a more fitting place. We liked that trees had grown up around some of the older headstones, and that the grounds were well-kept without appearing overly manicured.

Much of that day is a blur. I remember that we rode to the cemetery in Henry’s Jeep Cherokee, because my car was in the shop. I remember that he had made a mixed CD for the drive, which began with Lila’s favorite song, Elvis Costello’s “Peace, Love & Understanding,” and ended with Gram Parsons’s “She Once Lived Here.” I remember that he held my hand while we drove, and that we had to stop at a 76 station in Burlingame because the gas light came on. I remember that, when we arrived, we had a difficult time finding Lila’s grave, despite the fact that I’d been there many times, and I felt embarrassed that I got lost. Surely, if the situation were reversed, Lila would have had a clear picture in her mind of the layout of the cemetery, would have been able to remember not only the plot number, but exactly which path we needed to take to get there.

After wandering for a few minutes, we finally saw my parents standing in the distance, and made our way to them. My mother was wearing a navy dress and matching knee-high boots. She’d gotten a new haircut, with bangs, that made her look younger than she had in years. My father was dressed in a suit, and it took me a moment to realize he was going to the office later that day. It angered me that he would treat it like a regular day, that he would abandon my mother on such an important anniversary. Even though they had seen each other rarely in the five years since their divorce, this was one day I believed they should be together. When I pulled him aside and whispered, “I think Mom would really like it if you hung around today,” he replied, “Actually, sweetheart, that’s the last thing your mother would want.” He gave me a quick squeeze on the shoulder and walked away. And I couldn’t be angry anymore, because he had used that simple term of endearment left over from my childhood, a word he hadn’t used for me since Lila died.

It was early that afternoon, while Henry and I were eating lunch with my mother at Maven Lane Café, Lila’s favorite restaurant, that he posed the question: “What about Thorpe?”

I sat across the table from the two of them. I shot him a look, but he didn’t seem to understand.

“What about him?” my mother said warily.

“I just wonder about his motives,” Henry said. “I wonder why he went to great lengths to make a case against Peter McConnell.”

“It wasn’t that hard to do, Henry,” my mother said. I recognized the tone of voice—I’d heard it when I watched her trying cases in court. It meant he was on thin ice. I tried to telepathically will him to back off, but he continued.

“I’m just saying, did anyone ever look at him?”

“Look at him?” my mother asked.

“You deal with crime all the time,” Henry said. “Surely the person who appears at first glance to be guilty isn’t always the one.”

“Henry,” I said. “This isn’t the time.”

“Actually,” my mother said, “nine times out of ten, the person who appears to be guilty is.”

Henry’s face flushed.

“Please pass the salt,” I said.

But it was too late. My mother had laid down her fork and had turned to face Henry. “Go ahead.”

Henry took a sip of water and looked at me, as if I might rescue him. But I knew my mother. Now that he’d baited her into this, he wasn’t getting out until he’d made his case, whatever it was.

“I just can’t help but think that Thorpe’s interest in the whole thing was bizarre. In the book, he tried to make it sound as if McConnell had something to gain from Lila’s death, but in truth McConnell could only lose. His career was at stake, his marriage. Everything about him pointed to his being a rational man, the kind of person who would weigh the consequences of his actions. To me, something about it just doesn’t add up. Technically, the only person who came out at an advantage in the end was Thorpe.”

“Where is this coming from, anyway?” I asked. “Why on earth are you bringing this up now?”

“I saw something in
Esquire
last week,” he said. “An article about the three murders last year in Golden Gate Park.”

“The homeless men who were killed in their sleep?” my mother asked. I remembered it, too. It had been a big local news item for a couple of months. People in the Outer Sunset, near where the murders occurred, had begun to get nervous.

“Yes,” Henry said. “The article was by Thorpe.”

“Big deal,” I said. “That’s how he makes a living. Other people’s tragedies.”

“But there was something strange about the tone of the article,” Henry said, “something almost gleeful. I got the feeling Thorpe actually took pleasure in the details. The police have never linked the three murders—one was a stabbing, one was a shooting, and the other was a strangulation—but Thorpe kept referring to the Golden Gate Park serial killer, as if it was a given that they were all related. As if he knew something no one else did.”

It was unlike Henry to have such bad timing, such lack of subtlety. I regretted bringing him along. My mother had enough to contend with on the anniversary of Lila’s death. She didn’t need this. “You’re coming out of left field,” I said. “Leave it alone.”

My mother picked up her fork again and began moving her salad around on her plate. “It’s okay, Ellie,” she said. “It’s not like it’s something I’ve never thought of.”

“It’s not?”

She looked at me, her eyes soft. “Oh, I don’t think there’s any credibility to it. But I’ve thought of pretty much everything. Every possibility, no matter how far-fetched. In my mind, I’ve diagrammed a hundred different scenarios. For what it’s worth, I do believe, in my heart, that it was probably Peter McConnell. But if I were to look at it objectively, as a prosecutor, I’d have to say the case against him is flimsy. There’s only one thing I know for certain.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about your sister. Fifteen years, not one day.”