“Do you have a lot of tapes of her?”
“Dozens, of practically every character she ever performed. They were in her apartment, and I brought them home, thinking I’d watch them. But I never had the heart to, and when I left Laura, she didn’t want them. She said she didn’t need the tapes to remember Tracy because she would be back soon. So I brought them up here with me. I’ve never watched any of them until now.”
I glanced back at the TV. Fran the feminist had metamorphosed into a lesbian waitress named Ginny. “I wonder,” I said.
“Wonder what?”
“Those tapes-there could be something in them.”
“You mean something that would explain what happened to her?”
“Maybe…no, it’s probably a stupid idea. Besides, I can’t see myself watching dozens of them-not when there are more promising leads I could pursue.”
“You might want to look at the ones that were made close to the time she died. Everything I have is dated.”
“Maybe I’ll do that.” I glanced at the clock on the VCR. It was almost six, still dark outside. “Right now,” I added, “why don’t we brew some of that fancy coffee? There are a couple of people I want to catch off guard, before their morning shots of caffeine have time to take effect.”
12
When I arrived at Amy Barbour’s building at a little after seven, a man in a sweat suit was leaving. I caught the iron gate before it swung shut, and he started to say something. Then he shrugged and turned downhill on the sidewalk. I climbed the stairs and pounded on Amy’s door.
For about thirty seconds nothing happened. Then Amy’s voice shouted for me to hang on, she was coming. The lock turned, a chain rattled, and Amy’s face peered through the crack; she was pasty complexioned and bleary eyed, and her dark red hair stood up in little tufts. I wondered if she always looked this bad in the morning or if her appearance was a consequence of too much New Year’s celebrating.
“What the hell are you doing here at this hour?” she said.
From her manner I gathered she hadn’t heard about me finding Tracy’s body yet. I’d told Detective Gurski about the probable connection between the cottage and the victim’s roommate and had given him Amy’s address and phone number, but there were a variety of reasons he might not have spoken to her yet.
I said, “There’s been a new development, and I need to talk with you.”
Her mouth twitched irritably, but she stepped back, removed the chain, and let me inside. The apartment was dark and frigid. Amy shivered inside her long white terrycloth robe, then turned away from me and fiddled with the thermostat of the electric heater. “It’s just as well you came by, I guess,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
It surprised me that she didn’t ask about the new development, but maybe she hadn’t fully comprehended what I’d said. “What is it?”
She moved away, flicking on lights and heading for the kitchen. When she caught sight of herself in the mirrored wall of the dining area, she grimaced. “There, on the table. Shit, I feel terrible. I’ve got to make some coffee.”
I looked at the table. It was covered with all manner of things: dirty dishes, an ashtray, sections of newspaper, books, playing cards, a basket of moldy-looking fruit. “Where on the table?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” She strode over, picked up one of the books, and thrust it at me.
It was a red and black paperback titled You Can Create a New Identity, by an individual described as a “world-famous private eye.” I’d never heard of him. The book looked well thumbed, and a great number of its pages were dog-eared. I turned to one, captioned “How to Establish a Mail Drop,” and saw various phrases had been underlined in blue ink. In the margin was the notation “Los Angeles?” The handwriting looked to be Tracy’s.
I said, “Where did you find this?”
Amy dumped coffee into a paper filter before she spoke. “In Tracy’s room.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“Just looking around.”
“I thought you were afraid Mrs. Kostakos might catch you and throw you out of here.”
She shrugged. “I’m not anymore. I talked my boyfriend into letting me move in with him. I’m sick of Mrs. K and her weirdness.”
“Has she done something since we last talked?”
“You bet your ass she has. She showed up on Friday like usual, so I thought I was rid of her for the week. Then she turned up on New Year’s Eve. My boyfriend and I came back from having dinner, all set for a nice quiet evening, if you know what I mean. Then we smell the old gardenias. Surprise! She’s in there. Stayed there all night, too. We didn’t want to drive across town to his place-we’d been drinking, and the sobriety checks, you know. So we stayed here and we couldn’t…well, do anything because of the walls being so thin. Anyway, I got mad and said fuck it. As of tomorrow I’m out of here. I haven’t paid my share of the rent for this month, and I don’t intend to. If Mrs. K wants, she can. Then she can sit there all day every day for all I care.”
I frowned, disturbed both by Laura Kostakos’s actions on New Year’s Eve and by the book in my hand. This slim but colorful volume was not something I would have overlooked in my search of Tracy’s room; I was certain it hadn’t been there on Thursday night. “Exactly where did you find this?” I asked.
“The bookcase, along with her stuff on comedy.”
Then it definitely hadn’t been there on Thursday; I’d examined those books thoroughly. Someone had planted it-but who? Laura Kostakos? Or was Amy lying? And if so, why? The only reason I could think of was that she was trying to make it look as if Tracy had planned her own disappearance well in advance. If that was the case, the identity of the person who had killed Tracy was obvious.
My silence made Amy uncomfortable. She got coffee cups from one of the cabinets, took out milk and sugar, then glared at the teakettle on the stove, tapping her fingers on the counter. “Look,” she finally said, “just take the book and go, will you? I’ve got to get ready for work. Everybody else has a holiday, but do I? Hell, no.”
She wanted me to leave immediately, but she’d taken out two cups. “Is your boyfriend here, Amy?”
“What? No.” She looked down at the cups. “All right-yes. Just go, okay?”
She seemed excessively evasive for an emancipated young woman who had just declared her intention of moving in with the man. I pulled out a chair at the table and sat down.
“What’re you doing? I told you to-”
“Don’t you want to know about the new development in the case?”
“The new…oh, I thought that was just an excuse to get in here and hassle me some more.”
“It was no excuse. Tracy’s body has turned up. At a cottage on the Napa River, owned by people named Barbour.”
What little color she’d had drained from her face. Her mouth went slack, and she sagged against the counter.
“She’s been dead the whole time, Amy. Hidden in that old fishing boat on the riverbank. She’s nothing but bones.”
“No no no no!”
“All this time she’s been there-and you knew, and you never told.”
“I didn’t! I-” Toward the front of the apartment, a door opened. Amy swung horror-struck eyes in the direction and shouted, “No!”
“Amy, what the hell?” A man came through the living room in a rush: a big, chubby, bathrobe-clad fellow with a clown’s face. The wide mouth turned down in dismay when he saw me.
I stood up. “Marc Emmons,” I said. “I’ve been trying to reach you for days.”
“Who…?” He looked at Amy. “This is her?”
She nodded.
Emmons quickly went to stand beside her, one arm thrown protectively around her shoulders. Both their robes and their early-morning unattractiveness were a perfect match.
“What have you been doing to her?” Emmons demanded.
“Relaying some
news you should hear, too. Tracy Kostakos’s body has been found. She’s probably been dead since the night she disappeared. But perhaps you knew that, Marc. Amy did.”
“I didn’t! I swear I didn’t!” Amy said.
Emmons barely reacted to the news-a tightening of his mouth, but nothing more. He put his other arm around Amy, as if to shield her from my accusation. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
“She was found near a cottage on the Napa River. I believe the property belongs to Amy’s family.”
Emmons looked down at her. “The old summer place?”
She nodded, teeth chattering.
“So that’s what happened,” he said softly.
“You don’t seem particularly upset by the news.”
“I’m not a person who likes to show emotion in front of strangers. Besides, Tracy’s been gone a long time, and I’ve made a new life for myself.”
“Obviously.”
“Look, let’s sit down and have some coffee.” He released his hold on Amy. “Honey, get us some, huh?”
As if it understood his words, the kettle shrieked. Amy started and turned toward the stove. Emmons motioned at the chair I’d been occupying. “Please?”
I sat, and he took a chair on the other side of the table, in front of the window. Dawn had broken over the East Bay hills; a thin line of opalescent light showed between their tops and the clouds that lowered over them. Emmons’s face was in shadow, but I could see that his clown’s mouth pulled down at its corners; though he stared at the table in grim concentration, I sensed he wasn’t really seeing it. Was he thinking of Tracy? Or had he other things on his mind-things he wanted to hide?
When Amy brought the coffee, her hand trembled so badly that the cups rattled in their saucers. She scurried around the table and moved the chair beside Emmons’s several inches closer, so that when she sat, their shoulders touched.
I said, “How did Tracy come to be at your family’s cottage?”
She glanced at Emmons before she spoke. “She took the keys. She used to go there a lot, whenever she wanted a quiet place where she could be alone for a few days and think things over. Nobody else ever went there. My father-the old bastard-is living in Mexico with his fourth wife. My mother’s back in New York with her third husband. And my sister’s too busy with her big-deal career in Silicon Valley to bother. I haven’t even been there in years.”
“What were the things Tracy wanted to think over?”
“How should I know? Trace never told me anything.”
“You said the two of you confided in one another. That you were best of friends.”
“I made things sound better than they were. I confided, she listened. She was that way with everybody-and then she used them. You think I haven’t read what she wrote about me in her character sketchbook? I’m not so stupid that I didn’t recognize myself.” Her lips twisted bitterly.
“You say she went to the cottage often?”
“Yeah. Whenever she wanted to.”
“How did she get there?”
“Get…?” Amy looked puzzled.
“She didn’t have a car. She didn’t like to drive.”
“Trace didn’t like to drive in the city or deal with the parking hassles, but she didn’t mind it so much on the freeway or in the country. She’d rent a car, or borrow one.” Amy glanced at Emmons again. “Sometimes she’d take someone with her.”
“All right-when did she take the keys that time, and from where?”
“I don’t know when. I keep a set on my key ring, and there was always a duplicate set on the pegboard in the kitchen.” She motioned to it, next to the stove.
“Can you approximate when?”
“Not too long before she disappeared, or I’d have noticed they were gone. She might even have come back here that night and taken them. I’d gone to bed early-she was supposed to wake me for champagne for my birthday when she got home-and I’m a pretty sound sleeper.”
“When did you notice they weren’t there?”
Her gaze slid away from mine. “Oh, not until after all the stuff about the kidnapping.”
“When you finally noticed, did you try to call her there?”
“There isn’t any phone.”
“Didn’t it occur to you to tell the police to check the cottage?”
“Why? There’d been a ransom note, for Christ’s sake! The kidnapper wouldn’t have taken her to the cottage.”
“But after that, when no more notes came and the kidnapper never recontacted her parents, why didn’t you tell someone about the missing keys then?”
“I…oh, shit.” She looked at Emmons for help, but he was staring at the table again, a distracted expression on his face. “All right! I went up there, about a week later. I borrowed a car from this girl I work with. Trace wasn’t there. But there was this blue Volvo in the garage, and there was dried stuff all over the upholstery in the front seat that looked like blood.”
That startled me; for some reason I’d assumed the car had been in the ravine in the mountains since shortly after Tracy had been killed. It also angered me that Amy had been sitting on an important piece of information all this time.
I said, “Why in God’s name didn’t you call the sheriff?”
“I was afraid. I mean, Trace wasn’t there, but there was the car and all that blood. And it was my family’s cottage. And Marc-”
Emmons looked at her and frowned.
I said, “Marc told you not to.”
She was silent.
“Why, Marc?”
His expression was still distracted, as if he was listening to the conversation and thinking about something else at the same time, but now it betrayed more than a touch of fear. He said, “I felt the same way Amy did. They’d think she’d done something to Tracy. And if not that…well, Tracy and I had some serious problems, and a lot of people knew about them, I was also afraid they might suspect me.”
“What sort of problems?”
“Well, basically we’d broken up. She still came around when she needed something, but we weren’t a couple anymore. She was seeing others.”
“Who?”
“…That wasn’t something she’d discuss with me.”
“All right, you were both afraid of being accused of something, so you decided to forget about the car with the bloodstains. But why didn’t you come forward later when it turned up in the mountains and Bobby Foster made a confession you knew had to be false?”
Now both of them were silent.
I added, “You’d have let Bobby go to the gas chamber to protect yourselves, wouldn’t you?”
Emmons moved a hand as if to deny the possibility. “By the time we found out the details of the confession, it was too late. If we’d said anything, they’d try to pin it on us.”
“Were the two of you involved before Tracy disappeared?”
Amy looked genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Emmons said, “No. We just sort of came together afterwards. Even though we’d broken up, I missed Tracy. Amy missed her. It just happened.”
“You both missed Tracy, but you said nothing about what Amy had found at the cottage. What if she’d still been alive at that point? You might have saved her.”
“But she wasn’t,” Amy said. “I could feel it, when I saw the blood in that car.”
“Great. Yet for nearly two years you’ve watched Marc going around acting lovelorn and pretending he believed she was still alive. For all that time, you let her body lie there-”
Amy turned her face against Emmons’s upper arm and started to cry. Through her sobs she said, “We didn’t know she was there. And we did miss her. Ask anybody. We did!”
Emmons smoothed the tufts of her ragged hair. “Haven’t you upset her enough?” he said. “Neither of us needs a lecture. We know what we did was wrong.”
“Maybe you do, but both of you have certainly capitalized on her death. Amy has this entire apartment for half the rent, plus use of all Tracy’s things. And you
built your career on her disappearance.”
He stood up so fast that Amy was thrown off balance. She clawed at the edge of the table, looking up at him in teary panic.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “Just get out of here and leave us alone.”
“I’ll do that, but I think you should be prepared to hear from the authorities. If you think I’ve been rough on you, wait until they start talking to you about a charge of obstructing justice.” I stood, picking up the book on creating a new identity. “Did you plant this in Tracy’s room,” I said to Emmons, “or is Amy lying about where she found it?”
His face became mottled with rage. I retreated into the living room. He took a step toward me, but Amy’s sobs became louder, her breath rasping and fast, as if she were having an anxiety attack. Emmons glared at me, then turned and put his arms around her.
I left the apartment, struggling to contain my own anger. It was a relief to be out of there and not have to hear any more self-serving explanations of what was simply cold-blooded behavior.
13
Early that afternoon Jack Stuart and I sat together on a bench in the visiting area at San Quentin. We’d been waiting to see Bobby Foster for over two hours. The delay annoyed me, but Jack took it stoically; attorneys were used to long waits until one of the segregated visiting rooms became available, he told me. At first we’d discussed the case but after a while had run out of things to say and lapsed into silence. Jack seemed remote today; I wondered if it had to do with my avoidance of him at the New Year’s Eve party.
At about one forty-five, a slender black woman wearing jeans and a thick turquoise sweater entered the area. Her head, crowned by a short afro, turned from side to side as if she was looking for someone; plain gold hoop earrings danced with the motion. Jack roused himself and waved to her. “That’s Leora Whitsun, Bobby’s mother,” he said. “I spoke with her earlier, and she mentioned she would be coming up here.”
I watched Leora Whitsun make her way toward us, realizing with some shock that she was no older than I-several years shy of forty. The woman had had seven children and three husbands; I knew from the files I’d read that she’d put herself through two years of college in night sessions while organizing community watch programs and working days at the clinic. I’d expected a much older, wearier-looking person, rather than this attractive, vigorous woman in the prime of her life. And I certainly would not have expected her to be smiling.
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