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

by Michaela Thompson

  A jolt of pain crossed Andrew’s face, gone almost before I had seen it, leaving his eyes a little redder than before. “You could say that,” he muttered. He stood up, slipping his fingers in the back pockets of his faded jeans, and wandered back to the window. “What was your name again?”

  “Maggie Wilson. ‘

  He rested one foot on the windowsill and leaned his elbow on his knee. He was wearing a battered-looking pair of running shoes, their faded electric blue the brightest color in the room. “Maggie, I want to know why you’re here,” he said casually.

  This was it. My face was getting hot. “I told you.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe you.” He didn’t seem angry, or even particularly interested. “For one thing, I know the guy who runs that program at State. When he sends students over, he always calls me to see if it’s OK. Should I give him a jingle to ask about you?”

  Looking down at Candace’s notebook in my lap, I shook my head. I must look like a whipped puppy. I wished to God I’d never heard of Andrew Baffrey.

  He crossed the room and perched on the corner of his desk in front of me. “Then I want to know what you’re doing,” he said. “Did you come here for some weird kick, or are you snooping around for somebody?”

  Mustering my dignity, I stood up. My nose began to prickle, a bad sign meaning I might cry. “I’ll leave,” I said, making a tentative movement toward the door.

  Without getting up, Andrew caught me by the forearm. “I want to know what you’re doing here,” he repeated, his voice level.

  I was an idiot, a fool, and now I looked like a fool in front of this loathsome, self-righteous apprentice muckraker. I pulled my arm away, searching frantically and vainly for another plausible lie.

  “Surely you must realize how many people would like to know what Larry Hawkins was keeping under his hat,” Andrew said. “Did you think you could walk in and ask and I’d tell you, just like that? How long do you think the Times would last if we went around discussing our stories before they appeared in the paper? I want to know what your interest is, Maggie. That’s all.”

  His eyes seemed dark and huge. Through the dizziness of my embarrassment I grasped that I had taken a risk and I had gotten caught, fair and square. Without realizing I was about to do it, I said, “My name is Maggie Longstreet.”

  I couldn’t tell if it meant anything to him. He nodded and said, “Fine. Let’s go have a cup of coffee while we talk about the rest.”

  ***

  Once we were out on the street, Andrew’s color looked better, and as we walked he began to swing his arms. Watching him, it occurred to me that his usual temperament could be quite different from the anxiety-ridden side of him I had seen so far. Unaccountably, I felt my own spirits rise, and I took a deep breath of factory effluvia.

  “This place I’m taking you to has terrible Danish, and the coffee is even worse,” he said.

  I was grateful for his effort to put me at ease. “What a recommendation.”

  “It’s my favorite place to hang out, because it has flamingos painted on the walls.”

  Not only flamingos, but red and pink hibiscus, assorted palm trees, and an aquamarine lagoon, all somewhat chipped and faded, adorned one wall of the Tropicana Cafeteria. The mural’s vegetation was supplemented by a lush assortment of plastic foliage. Andrew seated me next to a particularly bushy (and dusty) specimen and went to the counter, returning in a few minutes with coffees and Danish. Putting mine in front of me, he said, “Sink your teeth into this, if at all possible.” Sitting across the table, he leaned back to look at the flamingos for a moment. When he turned to me, the lines of tension had returned to his face.

  “It might help if I tell you I know who you are,” he said. “I’ve been poking around picking up gossip in the city departments for several years now. Of course I know who Richard Longstreet is, and I know you’ve just gotten a divorce, or dissolution, or whatever. Do you want to take it from there?”

  Andrew had been right about the Danish. It was hard to chew, and even harder to swallow. I choked down a bite with the aid of some coffee. “I wanted to find out if Larry had been working on any stories relating to Richard.”

  He didn’t seem surprised. “Why? Would that give you some leverage in the settlement, or something?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I sat silent for a moment. My idea that Richard had somehow been involved in Larry’s death now seemed irrational, the unhinged fantasy of a vindictive, disappointed woman. “I thought…” I cleared my throat and started over. “I thought it would help me understand things a little better. The kind of person Richard was, I mean.”

  “Hm.” Andrew’s face was shaded by his bony fingers, but he was watching me closely. “There’s one thing that puzzles me.”

  “What?”

  “How did you get the idea that Larry might have been investigating Richard? When Larry was onto something, he told absolutely nobody, not even me. He might let me in on it to the extent that he needed legwork, or he might drop a hint or two, but nobody got the full picture until it was ready to go in the paper.”

  “So you don’t know whether Larry had anything on Richard or not?” From the strain I could feel around my eyes, I knew I was watching Andrew as intently as he was watching me.

  “I didn’t say that. I asked why you thought he did.”

  “I suppose maybe Richard mentioned it at some point.” I could feel him willing me to go on, feel his knowledge that I wasn’t being frank. I clamped my jaw, determined not to tell everything I knew unless he gave something too. We stared at each other. I felt as if he and I were in a magnetic field— a field enclosing us, our table, two cooling cups of coffee, two inedible Danish pastries.

  Andrew broke the tension first. It evaporated at the first sign of his grin. “I’ll settle for a draw on that round,” he said. “Why don’t we have some fresh coffee?”

  As he set the new, steaming cups beside the cold ones he said, “I’ve got a proposition for you, Maggie.”

  All at once I felt reckless. “Name it.”

  He took a large bite of his Danish and chewed thoughtfully, leaving a few crumbs clinging to his beard. Then, ticking his points off on his fingers, he said, “I know something you want to know. You know something I want to know. Now this is the deal.” He edged his chair closer and leaned conspiratorially across the table. “Why don’t we tell each other what we want to know?”

  I nearly laughed out loud. “They certainly teach you clever ways to elicit information in journalism school.”

  “I never went to journalism school. I was a political science major.” He smiled. “What do you say?”

  It was obviously the only way I’d find out anything more. “All right. But only if you go first.”

  “Do you know,” he said ruminatively, “those are the exact words my first little girlfriend used when I asked her to play doctor. But if I had ever learned anything from experience, would I be where I am today?”

  His face sobered. “Here goes. Larry was working on a story about the Redevelopment Agency, especially Richard Longstreet. Now, you’re going to ask, what was the story about? I don’t know. Like I said, Larry was paranoid about leaks, but at the same time if he was on something very large, he couldn’t resist making tantalizing remarks about it. For the past several months, he’s been telling me, ‘We’re going to get those Redevelopment bastards,’ or ‘I’m going to blow Richard Longstreet right off the map.’ So the answer to your question is, yeah. Larry had a story, and it was big.”

  So I’d gotten my answer, after all the trouble. There was a connection between Larry and Richard. I felt as if I had walked through a doorway and Andrew’s words had slammed the door behind me. Now I was in a place I’d never been before, and there was no way to go back.

  Six

  “You got pale. Are you OK?” Andrew said.

  My face felt immobile, as if encased in plaster. I had trouble moving my lips to ask, “Is there any way
of finding out more about the story?”

  Looking at me closely, Andrew hesitated before he answered. “I’m not sure. I haven’t been through Larry’s office yet, his private papers. It could be there, or it could be that he was carrying the whole thing around in his head. Sometimes he worked that way.” He sat back in his chair. “Your turn.”

  A bargain was a bargain. Besides, as I tried to think how to begin, my suspicions once again seemed to melt into absurdity. I knotted my hands together in my lap. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “After three years at the Times, I consider craziness a purely relative concept.”

  “When I saw Larry’s obituary in the paper, I remembered something I overheard Richard say about Larry on the telephone a couple of months ago.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. I don’t know who he was talking to, but he told the person that he knew Larry Hawkins was a pain in the ass, but they wouldn’t have to worry about him much longer. When I remembered, I got curious and I wanted to find out—” I broke off. Find out what?

  “Holy shit,” said Andrew. He looked stunned. “You mean, like— you think Richard might have had something to do with Larry’s death?”

  I shrank from hearing it put so baldly. “Probably not,” I said hastily. “Really it was just that I was curious. I said it was crazy.”

  “Not especially crazy.” Andrew’s face, so yellow and unhealthy-looking when I had met him earlier, now surged with color. I was surprised, thrown off balance by the intensity of his reaction. Surely he could see how tenuous the whole thing was, I assured myself. He wouldn’t begin a campaign for Richard’s arrest on the basis of a few words.

  “Listen, this is strictly confidential,” I said, wishing I’d said it earlier.

  He nodded vigorously. “Sure, sure. It’s just that this makes—” He dug a spiral-bound notebook from his breast pocket and shoved it across the table to me. “I owe you. In the next couple of days I’ll know if Larry left behind anything on that story. Give me your number, and I’ll call and tell you what I find out.”

  Writing down my name and number I said, “I appreciate this. But you don’t actually owe me anything.”

  He flipped the notebook shut and replaced it in his pocket. “Yes, I do. A hell of a lot more than you realize. You’ll hear from me.”

  We walked the few blocks back to the Times in silence. I was trying to assimilate what Andrew had told me. Now I knew for sure that Richard had been in danger from Larry. An exposé, a scandal, his photograph in the papers— how he would despise it. I wondered what he had done, what Larry had been preparing to divulge. I would give a great deal to know. It might help me to assess, or reassess, the past twenty years. At my side Andrew was equally thoughtful, his head bent, his hands shoved in the pockets of his red nylon windbreaker.

  When we reached Cleveland Street he shook my hand, promising once again to call me soon. I watched him lope into the building, then turned toward my car.

  Driving back home I thought about Andrew, wondering if my daughter Candace, now a sophomore at Stanford, would like him. I doubted it. Candace had inherited too much of Richard’s concern with appearances to be impressed by a threadbare crusading journalist. A budding stockbroker would be more in her line, or a young lawyer in a three-piece suit just starting out at one of the better Montgomery Street firms. Like father, like daughter.

  Which was too bad, because it would be fun having somebody like Andrew Baffrey around. If he started seeing Candace, the two of them might come for dinner sometimes. He’d regale Candace and me with the latest political gossip, or tell stories about the crazy things that had happened at the paper. The three of us would sit around and laugh…

  I dragged my mind from this completely improbable scenario. Candace would never look at him twice, and he was probably taken anyway. A man as attractive as he was would have been snapped up long ago.

  The phone was ringing when I got home. I heard it as I was closing the garage door. For reasons that were never adequately explained to me— something about the foundations? Reinforcement against the next big quake?— the renovation of our house left us with an attached garage but no inside access to it. That circumstance frequently made me wish the place had been leveled in 1906. Wishing it yet again, I sprinted up the front steps and caught the phone, miraculously, on the tenth ring. The female voice at the other end was unfamiliar.

  “Maggie Wilson?”

  “Yes?” Someone at the Times, since she thought my name was Wilson, but it didn’t sound like Betsy.

  “This is Susanna Hawkins.”

  I hoped my gasp of surprise was lost in my general breathlessness, and hoped even more that Susanna hadn’t called to finish the job of berating me she had started yesterday. “Yes, hello,” I said warily.

  Her voice was soft and a little nervous, a tone totally unlike that of our former encounter. “I got your number from Betsy O’Shea. I want to apologize for the way I acted yesterday. It was unforgivable, but I hope you understand—”

  I rushed to reassure her. “Of course I do. Please don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m really ashamed of myself, and I’d like to make it up to you,” she went on. “I thought maybe I could help with your article, so I got together one of Larry’s bios and some reprints of articles about the Times. I’m more or less”— she breathed deeply— “going through things anyway, and—” I heard a crash, a child wailing in the background, a dog barking. “Oh, God. Can you hang on a minute?” she said, and left the phone.

  Listening to her chastise child and dog, I mused that this was a pretty kettle of fish. I was thoroughly ashamed that Susanna Hawkins, newly widowed, had taken the trouble to help me with an article that didn’t exist. In fact, the effort at conciliation seemed a bit excessive on her part. Since I didn’t want to risk causing another scene like the one at the Times office, it would be best to go along with her, take whatever she had for me, and slink away.

  This decision coincided with her return to the telephone. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I was saying you could stop by if you wanted to and pick up that information.”

  I thanked her emphatically. She gave me an address in Bernal Heights and directions on how to get there. As I was replacing the receiver I heard another shriek in the background and mentally gave thanks that Candace was no younger than nineteen.

  Unwilling to keep Susanna waiting and also wanting to get the whole thing over with, I started out immediately. Bernal Heights was exactly in the direction I’d just come from. As I drove south on Van Ness Avenue once again, past the opera house and the lavish automobile dealerships, it occurred to me that I’d spent more time south of Market in the past two days than I had in the previous two years. The traffic wasn’t bad, and in twenty minutes or so I was parking on Barton Street, across the street from the number Susanna had given me.

  Judging by the neighborhood, the Times hadn’t made Larry wealthy. Barton Street, neither fashionable nor rich-hippie funky, was lined with modest, pastel-colored houses fronting on cracked sidewalks, straggling up the side of a steep hill. Now, at noon, the street was empty, except for two large dogs trotting purposefully toward the hilltop, but I could imagine that after school hours it would be alive with children.

  The Hawkins house was yellow with a brown roof and white trim. In a few places, paint from the trim had dribbled in rivulets onto a picture window. I curbed my wheels, crossed the street to the door, and rang the bell. Inside, a dog began to bark.

  Susanna opened the door, looking tired. She was wearing jeans and a blue work shirt with the tail out and the sleeves rolled up, and around her neck was a choker of tiny red and blue beads. Her long brown hair was loose on her shoulders. “Hi, come in. Excuse the confusion,” she said, and led me to a tiny living room which was vastly overpopulated by two small dark-haired boys and a large, furry white sheepdog who appeared overjoyed at my presence and wanted to prove it by lunging at me.

  “Leave her alone
, Curly,” Susanna said without noticeable effect. Then, addressing the older of the two children, “Abner, take Curly out back, would you please?” As Abner, whom I guessed to be around four, corralled the dog, I noticed that the smaller boy, about two, had taken the opportunity to begin writing on the wall with a red crayon. From the look of the wall, it wasn’t the first time he had tried it. It took Susanna several minutes of persuasion mixed with threats before he was dispatched to play with his brother in the backyard. “Zeke is an individualist, but Abner can handle him for a minute,” Susanna said. “Now let’s see. Where was the folder I had for you?”

  A coffee table in front of the couch was spread with papers, and a cardboard box filled with what appeared to be manuscripts was in the middle of the toy-strewn floor. On an end table I noticed a manila folder. Sitting on top of it was an open jar of peanut butter and a sticky knife. “Is that it?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah.” Susanna picked up knife and jar and handed the folder to me. “Hope you don’t mind a little peanut butter.”

  “Not at all.” I opened the folder and glanced at its contents. A reprint from Newsweek with a photo of Larry posed against the San Francisco skyline, a Xerox from the Los Angeles Times. “This will be a big help.”

  “I hope so.” She sat on the arm of a chair. “The only thing is, I hope you don’t want to interview me or anything.”

  I shook my head. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Good,” she said. “See, I know what can happen. People say one thing, but it comes out sounding another way.”

  “You won’t have to worry about that.” I felt sorry for her. She looked so fragile, blue veins visible beneath her skin, ash-colored half-circles under her eyes. “What will you do now?”

  She picked at a string on the chair. “I don’t know. There isn’t much money. Everything Larry got, he funneled into the Times.”

  I was taken aback by the frank bitterness in her tone. “The Times will continue to publish?”