Paper Phoenix: A Mystery of San Francisco in the '70s (A Classic Cozy--with Romance!) (18 page)

At a piece of furniture which resembled not a desk so much as the encircling paw of a great wooden animal sat a gray-haired woman with glasses hanging on a chain around her neck. Propelling me toward her, my companion said, “Mrs. Longstreet to see Miss Malone.”

The woman beamed at me. “She’s been expecting you, Mrs. Longstreet.” Before I could think of a sufficiently cutting reply, she was murmuring into a telephone and then saying, “Go right in.”

Jane Malone’s private office was everything the anteroom had led me to expect— huge, and filled with expensive furniture and
objets d’art
. She was seated at a desk that contained enough wood to construct a small house. Considering her size and build, I thought something not so immense would have lessened her resemblance to a small frog on a large lily pad. Still, the overall effect was imposing.

Just inside the door the man dropped my elbow and said, “Wait here.” He walked down the room and had a muttered conversation with Jane, which ended with his making a remark he apparently found amusing and she did not. Still snickering, jingling the change in his pocket, he came back to the door, gave me a last, slow look, and went out.

Jane beckoned me forward. “Come in, Mrs. Longstreet. Sit down.”

“Thanks so much,” I said as I marched toward her. “It isn’t as if I had a choice, is it? I’d like to know what you mean by abducting me like this.”

Jane got up and walked around to the front of her desk. She was wearing an off-white suit and an apricot-colored blouse, and she looked mean as hell. “You’re quite right. I didn’t call up and issue an invitation. I had you brought here. There’s a reason for that.”

“I hope you’ll tell me what it is.”

“I want you to understand what you’re up against, Mrs. Longstreet. I was polite the first time. You ignored me.” She took a cigarette from a box on her desk and lit it. Her eyes following the smoke, she said, “I talked with Richard last night. If you got into this for revenge, you’ve succeeded admirably. He’s frightened to death.”

From the edge of contempt in her voice I could tell that no matter how thick things got for Jane Malone, being frightened to death would not be her style. “There’s no reason to bully me. Try your tactics with the police. I’m out of it.”

Jane’s mouth twisted. “That’s your fond hope. But perhaps you’re in the position of the man riding the tiger in the Chinese proverb. It may be impossible to dismount.”

I felt goose bumps on my arms. The woman had talent. She knew how to scare a person.

“I had you brought here to show you I was able to do it,” Jane went on. “You didn’t want to come and yet here you are.”

“Yes. Here I am. So tell me what this show of strength is supposed to accomplish.”

She disregarded the question. Studying the end of her cigarette, she said, “You spent last night with Andrew Baffrey, didn’t you?”

Obviously my abductor had passed along his conjecture about my overnight absence. “That’s none of your business.”

“Insofar as you’ve interested yourself in my business, I’ve become concerned with yours.” She pursed her lips. “Funny. All sorts of peccadilloes are accepted these days that would’ve caused monumental scandals a few years back. Of course, in some sectors of San Francisco your carryings-on with young Baffrey would cause talk even today. Nothing like ostracism, perhaps, but unpleasant enough.”

I laughed angrily. “If you think I’m worried that my relationship with Andrew Baffrey will get me thrown off the board of the Museum Guild, forget it.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that, precisely.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “You and Richard have a daughter, don’t you?”

Candace. All at once I saw what she was driving at. Candace, with her conventional ways, her mania for correctness, her vast respect for what people were saying. How would Candace feel when she heard gossip about her mother sleeping with the young journalist who had exposed her father as a criminal? Some daughters might be able to take it. I had a feeling that Candace couldn’t. “Candace doesn’t deserve to be involved in this.”

“Children often don’t deserve the problems their parents bring on them. Richard tells me Candace is a conventional girl. She might not understand your no-doubt excellent reasons for this little fling you’re having.”

Jane was right. Candace wouldn’t understand. She would be horrified, and she would never forgive me. Yet it was too late now to change anything, undo anything, back down. With the sense of jumping into an abyss, I decided to brazen it out. “If you think I’m worried about shocking Candace, you’re mistaken. I’ll save you the trouble of exposing me. I’m seeing her this afternoon, and I’ll tell her myself.”

Jane looked even meaner, a circumstance I would have thought impossible. “You’re very lucky to have such an open relationship with your daughter.” She hesitated. “Tell me. Has she been concerned about your mental state lately?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your behavior has been rather bizarre, hasn’t it? Some people might believe you’re having some sort of breakdown. You’re depressed by your divorce, acting strangely, running around town with a man twenty years your junior, trying to embarrass your former husband. Why”— her lips stretched in a ludicrous smile— “some people wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you did something drastic. Depressed, unbalanced people sometimes do, you know.”

After all the fencing, we’d gotten to it at last. In a perverse way, I was almost relieved. “You mean I might kill myself. Or at least, that’s how it would look.”

She lifted her shoulders and let them fall.

“Is that how you did it with Larry Hawkins, too?” My voice was rising. “Got rid of him when he stood in your way?”

“Larry Hawkins had the good judgment to do it himself.”

“I don’t believe you! I don’t—”

“I suggest you stop thinking about Larry Hawkins and begin thinking about yourself.” Jane’s focus on me was total. “I started as a clerk with this company. I didn’t get where I am by backing down and giving in. The Golden State Center is the biggest project I’ve ever handled, and it
will
go through. You have to get out of my way.”

I knew she was telling the truth. She had wrapped her life around a shopping mall, a high-rise office complex, and a convention center with underground parking. To threaten the Golden State Center was to threaten her, and she was fighting accordingly.

She went back to her chair and sat down. “I’ve said all I have to say. I hope you understand the situation.”

“I do.” It was quite clear. Either I stayed out of the Golden State Center business, or I would die. I felt giddy, as if I had been drinking a great deal of wine too early in the day.

Obviously, the interview was over. I walked to the door. When I opened it to go out, I glanced back at Jane. She was still staring at me, and she stared until I closed the door on her look.

“Good-bye, Mrs. Longstreet,” Jane’s secretary chirped. I went past her to the glass doors leading to the corridor, assuming I wouldn’t be treated to the private elevator on my way out. Stepping through the doors, I glanced around to get my bearings, and my eye caught a figure withdrawing rapidly around a corner.

Having just sustained a death threat, I was in no mood to regard rapidly withdrawing figures with equanimity. I took off in the opposite direction, searching for the elevators. I rounded a corner and saw blinking banks of them at the other end of the corridor, at the same time I heard running feet behind me. Terrified, I stumbled forward, and then a deep voice cried, “Wait!”

I knew the voice. Turning around, I nearly collided with my pursuer. It was Ken MacDonald— or the wreckage of the man.

If Ken had been on a downward spiral the other times I had seen him, he now looked as if he had hit bottom. His brushed-denim leisure suit was dust-streaked, his blond hair hanging in lank clumps. His face, always flabby, had an off-center look, and he smelled like stale booze. He wouldn’t have been out of place panhandling on the corner of Sixth and Mission streets. It was impossible to believe that only months ago he had been local TV’s top pundit.

“Maggie,” he said.

I was amazed that he had recognized me at all, much less remembered my name. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising, though. I had sought him out for conversation, and that probably didn’t happen to him often these days. “That’s right. How are you, Ken?”

“Good, good, good.” He squinted at me. “Let’s go have a drink.”

I had too many troubles of my own to want to listen to Ken’s irrational maunderings about losing his job at Channel Eight. “I’m sorry, but I really…”

Disappointment swept over his face. “Aw, come on,” he wheedled. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

The promise of information was no doubt a ploy, but that and the twinge of pity I felt was just enough to make me say, “I guess I have time for a quick one.”

Ken’s downtown drinking establishment was less hip than the Golden Raintree. We sat in a dark booth near the back of a dim, businesslike bar. When the drinks arrived, he took a long pull at his and put it down with a sigh. His face seemed to gain definition. “So,” he said, looking at me expectantly.

The possibility that this meeting could be useful was becoming more remote. “You said you had something to tell me,” I said. He regarded me quizzically. “About Basic Development, maybe? What were you doing there?”

“Ha,” he said, with an air that proclaimed it wasn’t so easy to pull information out of Ken MacDonald. “What were
you
doing there?”

“Talking with Jane Malone.”

“That bitch.” Suspicion stole over his face. “You aren’t working for her, are you?”

“Hardly.”

He drank deeply. “Good. Because I got in trouble once, talking to a guy that worked for her.”

“You mean the man who offered you the cabin at Tahoe? Nick— was it Fulton?”

“Nick Fulton. Son of a bitch offered me that cabin. Got me in trouble. Lost my job. Jane Malone’s fault.”

I’d heard this before, and I didn’t need to hear it again. I was bored with him already. “I thought it was all Larry Hawkins’s fault,” I said, with the unlovely motive of needling him.

“Same thing. Took me a while to figure it out, but I finally got it. Larry Hawkins, Jane Malone, same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned— or, more accurately, oozed— across the table. “They were in it together. In cahoots from the beginning. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

It made no sense whatsoever. I said, “Sure.” When he didn’t continue, but just sat nodding wisely, I said, “In cahoots about what?”

He tapped my arm three times with his forefinger. “To get Ken MacDonald.”

Only then did I realize the extent of Ken’s paranoia. He had lost his job because Jane’s employee, Nick Fulton, had offered him a cabin at Tahoe and Larry found out and exposed him. Therefore, Larry and Jane must be plotting against him. “Interesting theory.”

“It finally came clear to me. I wrote and told Jane Malone I knew.”

Jane had probably gotten a laugh out of that, if she were capable of laughing. “You told her you knew she and Larry had schemed against you?”

“I told her to watch out.”

I looked at Ken closely. Was there a certain cunning, a buried cruelty, in his bleary eyes? “To watch out for what?”

He finished his drink. “Just watch out. You know what watch out means, don’t you?”

“Sure, but—”

“I told her bad things happen to people who mess around with Ken MacDonald. I told her look what happened to Larry, when he messed around with Ken MacDonald. And I told her to watch out.”

I sat staring. “You threatened to kill her?”

He waved his hand in front of me as if erasing my words. “Watch out. That’s all I said.”

“You said look what happened to Larry. What
did
happen to Larry? Do you know?”

He slumped against the back of the booth, his head lolling, all animation gone out of him. “What did happen, Ken?” I insisted.

“He went out the window. I thought you had heard about it.” He closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them and looked around vacantly. “Got to get back. Got to keep an eye on Basic.”

Without further niceties he got up and shambled out of the bar. I hurried after him. When we emerged, I saw that it was beginning to rain. Ken stood swaying on the sidewalk, oblivious of the droplets spattering his clothes.

Suddenly, he gripped my arm. “There he is!” he hissed. “There he is, the son of a bitch!”

“Who?”

“Nick Fulton! The son of a bitch is across the street. See? Standing under that awning?”

I looked in the direction Ken’s wavering finger pointed, and saw the man. Narrow face, thin nose, wearing a gray raincoat, smoking a cigarette. The sight of him went through me like a jolt of electricity. It was the man who had threatened me outside my garage, the man I had later seen at the Citizens Against the Golden State Center meeting. ‘That’s Nick Fulton? The one who works for Jane Malone?”

“The son of a bitch.” He shook his fist in the air. “Come here and fight, you son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

If Fulton hadn’t noticed us before, he certainly did now, as did a number of passersby who noticeably speeded their gait. Fulton watched dispassionately as Ken plunged abruptly into the street, still shouting, his cries mixed with horns and squealing brakes as he dodged through the traffic. When Ken was halfway across, Fulton simply walked several yards and disappeared down an alley. Ken made it across the street and lumbered after Fulton, but I was sure there was no hope he would catch him.

I was trembling. It wasn’t coincidence that Fulton had been standing across the street. I knew he had been standing there because he’d been following me. Jane Malone had no intention of letting me out of her reach.

It was raining harder. I had to escape while Fulton was diverted. Desperately, I scanned the street for a cab, never an easy search in San Francisco. One sailed by me, occupied. I could have wept with frustration. I half-ran down the sidewalk, rain dampening my face and hair. After a block, I looked for a cab again. Nothing. A couple of blocks ahead of me was Market Street. Buses and streetcars moved up and down it through the rain like a school of whales in a gray, turbulent sea. I could get on one, get away. I started to run.