The Shape of Dread

by Marcia Muller

  “Just like George,” she said again, and began to cough.

  Alarmed, I asked, “What’s wrong?”

  She waved an arm at the door and choked out, “water.”

  I hurried to the kitchen, found a glass among the welter of objects on the counter, and rinsed it. I was filling it when I heard a crash. Startled, I dropped the glass in the sink, shattering it, and ran toward the bedroom. But partway through the living room I realized the crash had been the front door slamming; Laura was gone.

  I rushed outside and down the stairway. By the time I got to the sidewalk, Laura was climbing into the Mercedes sports coupe that was parked in the drive. I ran around to her side, but she had locked the door. She started the car and it hurtled backward, tires barely missing my toes. By some miracle, there was no oncoming traffic on Upper Market.

  As I watched the Mercedes careen downhill and out of sight, I hoped Laura had enough control not to kill herself or someone else on her way back to Palo Alto.

  17

  George said, “I’ll call a colleague of mine and ask him to look in on her. If she refuses to see him, though, there’s not much I can do.”

  We were seated in the kitchen of his borrowed house, drinking wine. The promised pizza was on its way. He had gone ahead and ordered it, I thought, as a way of maintaining the illusion of normalcy, but my news about Tracy’s purported telephone calls and Laura’s behavior had shaken him badly.

  “Maybe you should be the one to talk to her,” I began tentatively.

  He shook his head. “No, Sharon, I can’t. It’s over with Laura and me. Last night affirmed that.” To my inquiring look, he replied, “No, you’re not the first woman I’ve slept with since the separation. And I confess I wasn’t always faithful to my wife. But you were the first woman since Laura with whom I’ve shared that essential connection that makes it the beginning of a relationship, rather than a casual affair. I can’t encourage Laura to think there’s still something between us, no matter how bad a shape she’s in.

  “Besides,” he added, “Laura’s a very perceptive woman, even when she’s in a poor emotional state. She’d realize I was only coming round out of pity, and that would take away her pride. She’ll need her pride if she’s going to survive whatever’s ahead.”

  I nodded, twirling my wineglass slowly between my fingers. “Just so long as someone looks in on her. But what about those phone calls…I just don’t know. The whole thing’s so clandestine, spooky-so unlike Tracy. And yet I have to remind myself that it was also unlike her to disappear and maintain a silence while her friend was convicted of killing her. I just don’t know, dammit!”

  “Is it possible the calls are a figment of Laura’s imagination?”

  “Yes.” He grimaced, then laughed bitterly. “You know, part of me wants to believe that, because I can’t imagine what Tracy’s become, that she would put us all through such an ordeal. But on the other hand, if Laura’s imagining them, she’s deteriorated drastically in the course of a week.”

  “Do people just suddenly…go like that?”

  “Sometimes. It could have been accelerated by the holidays. She refused to do anything during them, even though some relatives had asked her to visit. I even tried to get her to go to dinner with me on Christmas Eve, but she wouldn’t.”

  I felt a prickle of jealousy, even though I hadn’t so much as known of George Kostakos’s existence then.

  He smiled and covered my hand with his. “I only did that because I felt sorry for her. I should have known better. She saw right through me, of course.” He paused, studying my face, his candid gaze asking me to believe him. After a moment I lowered my own gaze to the tabletop, discomforted because he had seen through me as easily as Laura had seen through him.

  He understood that, too, released my hand and rose briskly. “I’ll call my colleague. You listen for the pizza delivery guy.”

  I remained at the table, sipping wine moodily and staring at a big bunch of dried red peppers that hung from a black iron pot rack. Strangely ambivalent feelings were welling up in me. On the one hand, I wanted George all to myself; on the other, I wanted him to do something to help Laura. The night before, I had not thought of him as a still-married man with a badly disturbed wife; tonight it was the only way I could think of him. Perhaps this relationship would prove to be more than I wanted to handle-

  The doorbell rang. I picked up the money he’d left on the table and went down to meet the man from Domino’s.

  We spent the remainder of the evening in tacit agreement not to discuss either his wife or my investigation. After we ate, we built a fire and-in lieu of comfortable furniture-piled blankets and pillows on the floor in front of the hearth. For a while we stared at the flames and traded past histories and small confidences-the mortar that binds the bricks of physical desire and runaway emotion into a structure far stronger than either of those elements alone.

  I learned that George had always lived in Palo Alto, except for the years he spent in college at Harvard and postgraduate work at the University of Michigan; that he’d turned his back on the family business-oil exploration and drilling-by entering the Ph.D. program, and thus became estranged from his father. He met and married Laura, who was also doing graduate work, in Ann Arbor; unlike many academic couples, they both managed to secure faculty positions at Stanford. After Tracy’s birth, he and his father reconciled, and when his father died some dozen years ago, he found himself in possession of a small fortune.

  “But the money never made a difference,” he said. “It was nice to have it, and we lived well, but it just…didn’t make a difference.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Things went along much as they always had. Life fell into a predictable routine, day to day, month to month, year to year-the way it does when you’re building careers and raising a child. It wasn’t unpleasant, but…” He fell silent, watching the fire for a moment.

  “You know,” he went on, “there’s a whole period in my life that’s gray. I really don’t remember much about it. Little things stand out: a nice Christmas, Tracy’s high school graduation, a good vacation. But it’s as if they happened to someone else and were told to me. What I do remember are things from early on: winter mornings in Cambridge, when it was so cold you dressed inches from the electric heater and literally slid to class on ice-slicked snow; autumn days in Ann Arbor, when the whole Huron river Valley was hazed with leaf smoke that still didn’t mute the fall color; a special evening with Laura shortly after we moved to Palo Alto, when we walked through the eucalyptus groves at Stanford after a rain, with that overpowering smell of the trees all around us and water dripping off them onto our bare heads. For a long time I thought maybe I’d lived all my real moments and that those scattered memories were all I ever would have.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Tracy disappeared. The pain was searing, but it brought me out of it. Surprisingly, what I found wasn’t totally bad. At least I was alive again. At least I could feel.”

  He turned to me, cupped my face in his hands, and conversation became superfluous. Making love seemed to have a catalytic effect on George’s worry and pain, transforming it into a force that swept away whatever residual guilt and separateness I’d been feeling. Afterward I lay suspended in a warm satiated state, perfectly secure, all but the most pleasant of senses dulled.

  Sometime after midnight the phone rang. George took the call in the kitchen; when he came back, his step was lighter. “That was my colleague,” he said. “He’s talked with Laura, and she’s agreed to see her therapist tomorrow.”

  I sat up, pushing my hair back off my face. “What about those phone calls-does she still claim she received them?”

  He crawled under the comforter, pulled me down beside him. “My friend says yes.”

  “Then I’ll proceed on the basis that Tracy is alive and has been trying to meet with her mother.”

  For a moment I felt tension creeping back into his lean body; the
n he turned me toward him. For a time we were able to ignore the fact that a world where death and pain and loneliness are the rule, rather than the exception, lurked just outside the circle of each other’s arms.

  At nine the next morning George had an appointment with someone from Living Victims, the support group for relatives and friends of murder victims, which he was assisting with grant writing. I asked if I might stay at the house for a while to view some of the videos of Tracy’s performances; he pointed out the cabinet where they were stored and went off looking reasonably cheerful.

  Before I sat down to watch, I phoned Stan Gurski. The news from officialdom was what I’d expected: Barbour and Emmons had not yet been picked up; Larkey had released McIntyre’s dental records but declined to assist, due to a prior commitment. When I phoned Larkey at his home, however, he told me that he just hadn’t been able to stomach viewing the remains a second time. I assured him I sympathized with him, and asked for the name and number of the talent agent he had introduced Tracy to. I didn’t address the issue of Jay’s affair with Tracy, merely set an appointment to talk face-to-face that afternoon.

  The agent’s name was Jane Stein. I called her office on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A., and when I mentioned Larkey, was put right through to her. Ms. Stein was confused when I asked if she had heard from Tracy Kostakos since her disappearance, and surprised when I said I was investigating the possibility she might be alive. Coincidentally, she was about to leave for the airport, to fly to San Francisco for a meeting with a client. Since she was going on to New York in the early afternoon, she said, she planned to have lunch with the client at SFO. Could I meet with her beforehand? She’d like to hear more about the situation, and perhaps she could offer some insight that might help me. I agreed to meet her in the main lobby bar at the United Airlines terminal at eleven-thirty.

  That left me with only two hours to spare. I decided to watch only the tape containing the routine about the lesbian waitress, then go home, change, and drive to the airport. The tape was still in the machine. I rewound it and dragged over the least spine-punishing chair in the room.

  The tape had been recorded on extended play; it held six hours of routines-thirty-some individual performances dating over the two-month period before Tracy’s disappearance. I looked briefly at each, fast-forwarding through some, examining others with more interest. After a while I became aware of a pattern that hadn’t been apparent from reading Tracy’s sketchbook.

  In most of the routines-the bewildered feminist, for example-it was obvious Tracy was fond of the character she had created. Her wit was sharp but affectionate; the fun she poked was gentle. But in others-notably the lesbian waitress-her humor became caustic and needling, as if she shared Larkey’s opinion that comedy had to hurt to be funny. Her portrayal of Lisa McIntyre held particularly malicious undertones, and I could certainly understand why the waitress had been enraged. Not only had she been sexually used by Tracy, but then humiliated in front of the public and her coworkers. I suspected Tracy might have handled her material that way in angry reaction to her own guilt over what she’d done to Lisa, or perhaps because she blamed Lisa for allowing herself to be used. Lisa couldn’t have known that, however, and I now wondered if her own rage had been strong enough to provoke a violent confrontation.

  After a while Tracy’s routines stopped being funny to me. Now that I knew how she had gone about creating them, they seemed trivial compared to the suffering they had undoubtedly brought many of the women they were patterned on. I shut off the VCR and stood at the front window for a bit, staring out at the misted lagoon across the street, then wrote a brief note to George-lover’s nonsense that didn’t really fit my mood-and went home to change.

  There were five messages on my answering machine, four of them personal and one from the contractor, reminding me supplies were due to be delivered that afternoon so he could start work on the back porch the next morning. I swore softly, readjusting my mental schedule to make time for that. Watney waited for me in the kitchen, howling indignantly about my protracted absence. When I fed him, he turned up his nose at his favorite chicken-and-liver; I sent him outside, telling him to catch some mice, if he thought they were so much better.

  For my meeting with a genuine Hollywood personage (and with the idea in the back of my mind that it might be novel for George to see me in a grownup person’s outfit for a change), I put on a black knit skirt-and-tunic outfit and tied a colorful silk scarf around my neck. As I spiffed my hair, I examined the gray streak that had been in it since my teens, wondering if I ought to start dying it. Once it had looked exotic among the black, but I was old enough now that it merely seemed as if it was supposed to be there. Then I thought, Why should I dye it? Men consider their gray hair distinguished; I think mine is, too.

  Cheered by the thought, I went off to the airport.

  18

  Jane Stein was a pleasant surprise. With the typical snobbery of northern Californians for Tinseltown, I’d been anticipating someone flashy, a trifle tacky, perhaps loud. The dark-haired, conservatively dressed woman seated at a window table in the airport bar was none of those. Her manner was reserved, her firm handshake and low voice were quietly confident, and she was even sipping coffee rather than the wicked dark drink that I’d imagined. She invited me to sit down and dispatched the waitress for my iced tea with a minimum of fuss, then leaned forward, regarding me with keen brown eyes.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet a real private investigator, rather than those cinematic horrors we’re always creating down south,” she said.

  “I’m glad you feel the way I do. I can’t watch those shows or films. I like most mystery novels, but the way we’ve been portrayed on the screen…”

  Stein leaned back in her chair, seeming satisfied with the rapport we’d established. “Well now,” she said, “tell me what this is about Tracy Kostakos being alive.”

  I outlined my case to date, leaving out the sleazier side of Tracy’s behavior. Stein listened thoughtfully. When I concluded, she said, “It’s quite bizarre, but I’ve seen enough things in this business that nothing truly surprises me. I assume it’s the same for you.”

  I nodded, moving my arm so the waitress could set down my tea.

  “You know, I wonder…” Stein paused, her gaze on the other side of the room. “Let me tell you about my last meeting with Tracy.”

  “When was that?”

  “Monday, two weeks before she died…disappeared, whatever. We were here in this very bar. I frequently meet with my San Francisco clients at the airport when I’m on my way to New York. There’s enough time between connections for a couple of conferences, and it saves me an extra trip north.” She smiled. “Most of my clients up here aren’t at the point in their careers yet that they can easily afford to fly down to see me. Anyway, I’d met Tracy only twice before-once when I caught her act at Café Comedie, and again when she and Jay made a trip to L.A.”

  “You knew they were lovers?”

  “Oh yes. Jay made that clear; he was proud of it, you see. He’s had his rough times in recent years: his career waning, substantial financial losses. He needed a pretty young woman like Tracy in his life as much as she needed him.” She shook her head. “What he didn’t need was to lose her the way he did.”

  “Why did you meet with Tracy that last time?”

  “She’d called me, said she needed to talk. It seemed she wanted to get away from San Francisco and hoped I could book her into a club in L.A. I had the impression things were going badly in her personal life. Perhaps she’d tired of Jay, or there was someone else, and she wanted to break it off. At any rate, she said she needed a change. I pointed out that she’d just signed a very lucrative contract with Jay; I doubted he would let her out of it, and I didn’t feel it would be ethical to try to break it.”

  “How did she react to that?”

  “Petulantly-but I’m used to that in my clients. We also talked about the possibility of film or TV work. I felt she wasn’t
ready for either yet and counseled her to be patient. She showed me a new approach she’d been working on for her routines, and I felt that with some more development and practice she might have a good thing there.”

  “What was it?”

  Stein signaled for more coffee. “Very improvisational. She would take the daily newspaper and open it at random to a feature article-or ask a member of the audience to do so-then create a routine based on the piece. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but you have to think extremely well on your feet to pull it off. I felt she had that ability.”

  “She actually demonstrated it to you?”

  “Yes. When I said I was wondering about something…well, I’ll lay it out for you, and you tell me if you think it’s relevant.” Stein waited until the waitress had poured her refill before continuing.

  “I had that morning’s L.A. Times with me. She turned to the feature section and did a very funny sketch about a woman who had built a twenty-thousand-dollar doghouse for her seven Dalmatians and was trying to persuade her neighbors not to take her to court for zoning violations. It was rough in spots, but I was quite impressed. Then an odd thing happened.”

  I waited as Stein sipped coffee before going on.

  “Let’s see if I can get this as accurately as possible,” she said. “We talked some more, and I made some notes. While I was writing, Tracy paged through the newspaper. I looked up a few minutes later and…something wasn’t right. Her face was very pale and-on later reflection, I decided-a little frightened. I asked her what was wrong, but she shrugged it off, said nothing, that she’d just gotten an idea.”

  “And she wouldn’t elaborate on it?”