“He won’t. He has no idea where you are. As long as you stay right here, you’ll be safe.”
I would call Stan Gurski as soon as I left her, tell him what I’d found out. He would want to question her, probably would have her taken into custody, but Lisa didn’t need to know that yet. I suspected that the policeman father who had beaten her had left her with a deeply ingrained aversion to the authorities.
I wanted to say something reassuring to her, but I could think of nothing to offer. Finally I repeated my statement that she would be all right if she stayed at home, and took my leave of her.
23
After I called Stan Gurski and relayed the information about McIntyre (and ruined his evening by dashing his previous conceptions about the case), I gave some thought to hunting up a copy of the two-year-old L.A. Times that I needed. A call to the nearest branch of the public library proved it to be closed-by budget cuts, I supposed, similar to those that kept San Francisco’s libraries on shortened hours. The best place to try would be the Times itself, but first I decided to make my reservation for a return flight north.
As it turned out, USAir’s departures were less frequent at night; there was only one seat available on the nine o’clock flight, and after that I’d have to take my chances on standby. Since the Times was located downtown, there was a distinct possibility that I’d miss all the flights and end up spending the night in L.A. I hesitated for only a moment, decided it was more important to be at the focus of my investigation, and reserved the last seat at nine.
On the return flight I sipped an unaccustomed bourbon and water and tried to reconstruct what had happened to Tracy on that rainy winter night, based on yet another set of new facts.
She’d arrived at the club and had the confrontation with Lisa. Uncharacteristically upset, she’d broken down and cried. Prior to that she’d worried about no longer being a good person; now she saw her world coming apart as a result of her shabby treatment of others. If Lisa told Jay everything, at the very least he’d break off their affair. He might even attempt to have her contract with the club invalidated. But worse than that, she’d be exposed as an unfeeling opportunist. Her impulse was to flee-to a place where she often went for solitude and contemplation.
But to do that she needed a car. At first she turned to Marc, but he’d refused, saying he needed his the next day. Next she approached Kathy. Kathy had driven to the club separately from her husband, so she agreed to let Tracy borrow the Volvo. Tracy had probably taken the keys from the valet parking box when she left after her performance, but then she’d had her second confrontation of the evening, with Bobby Foster.
Why, if she was so upset and shamed by Lisa’s threat of exposure, had she blurted out to Bobby the truth about her motive for sleeping with him? Possibly she assumed he’d find out soon, anyway. Maybe because she was hurting, she wanted to lash out and hurt someone else. Or because she was in a hurry, she said the first thing she thought of that would make him let her go. At any rate, she retrieved the Volvo from the lot and drove to Napa County. The two “sightings” of Tracy that the police had investigated most thoroughly were probably genuine; she would have had to travel via the B ay Bridge, where the former classmate claimed to have seen her, and could very well have stopped for groceries at the convenience store outside of Berkeley.
But that wasn’t quite right. It left too much time unaccounted for. What had she done between ten o’clock and twelve-thirty A.M., when she’d supposedly driven across the bridge? Gone home for the keys to the cottage. And gone to Emmons’s apartment, as she’d told Bobby she intended to do? No way of knowing.
Then what?
If I followed what Lisa had told me to a logical conclusion, in his rage Larkey had taken the gun from behind the bar, driven to the river, shot Tracy, and concealed her body. The shooting had taken place in the Volvo-perhaps she’d been trying to escape-and after Jay told Kathy what had happened, she’d decided it was less of a risk to leave the car at the cottage temporarily than to reclaim it and attempt to clean the bloodstains. I was sure Kathy had had no difficulty convincing Jim Fox, Rob’s assistant, to report it stolen. But how had she explained that to her husband? Wouldn’t she have had to tell him who was using the Volvo when they’d driven home from the club together the night before?
I thought about the relationship between the Sorianos. The one time I’d seen them together, they’d seemed to be in different worlds. She prattled on, he barely listened. Given that type of interaction, she also would have had no difficulty convincing him he’d misheard, that she’d actually loaned the car to Fox.
All right, I though, at that point it’s safe to assume that Kathy became an accessory. She aided Jay in fabricating the so-called kidnapping. And it would have required two people to move the Volvo from the cottage to the isolated ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Later, when police attention focused seriously on Foster, she made sure the notebook he’d used for his GED studies-and she and Jay had used as a blueprint for the ransom note-was passed on to them. After I discovered Tracy’s remains, Jay switched her dental records with those of a frightened young woman whom Kathy had given money to leave town for good. Their reasoning, undoubtedly, was that lacking a positive identification of those remains, the conviction against Foster would stand.
I even had an idea about the phone calls to Laura from “Tracy.” The first time I’d met Kathy, she mimicked Tracy’s voice, repeating the punch line from the bewildered feminist routine. Later, when I viewed the videotape, the punchline had sounded familiar because Kathy’s imitation had been a good one.
All of it-the switched dental records, the calls, the book on creating a new identity that they’d somehow placed in the apartment on Upper Market-had been designed to keep a true identification of Tracy’s remains from ever being made.
So there it was: a more or less logical scenario. Except I couldn’t quite buy it, not as it currently stood.
The problem was the motive. I simply couldn’t imagine Larkey-no matter how enraged-driving up to the cottage with the intent to kill. I couldn’t imagine him creating an elaborate frame of Bobby Foster, a young man he professed to like, much less standing mutely by while Bobby went to his death. It was not that I didn’t believe Larkey was capable of such actions; I’d long ago learned that most people are capable of anything, given sufficient reason. But if Larkey had done those things, he would have had a much more compelling motive than mere anger. He would have had much more than his masculine pride at stake.
I stared distractedly at my reflection in the black airplane window. The bright cabin lights made me look washed out and sickly; my thoughts made me looked worried and frustrated. Quickly I glanced away.
What exactly was it that Tracy had said to her mother at their last Friday lunch? The things about not being a good person anymore, but something besides that. Something about a sin of omission. That, coupled with whatever she had seen in Jane Stein’s copy of the Times, might give me an inkling of that motive. But where the hell was I going to lay my hands on a copy of an L.A. paper at this hour of the night in San Francisco? Perhaps I’d made a mistake in not staying over-
The flight attendants were passing along the aisles, collecting things. I finished my drink, handed the plastic tumbler over, and raised my tray table, as instructed, to an upright position.
I found the nearest bank of phones on the concourse and called All Souls. Jack wasn’t there; Rae was on another line. I waited impatiently, tapping my fingers on the aluminum shelf. When she finally came on, she said, “Shar, thank God you’re back. There’s a woman on the other line who needs to talk to you. She’s been calling off and on all afternoon.”
“Who?”
“She won’t give her name, but she says it’s important.”
“Get her number, tell her I’ll call her back.”
Rae put me on hold, came back about fifteen seconds later. “Shar, she still won’t tell me anything. Just said she’ll call again.”
“Dammit! It’s probably about this case.”
“If she calls again, I’ll make her give me a number somehow, or I’ll tell her to come here. What happened in L.A.?”
Briefly I explained to her about finding McIntyre, and what that probably meant.
When I finished, Rae said, “You know, it’s funny, but I think Larkey suspected something like that.”
“Larkey? What’s he got to do with it?”
“When I called him to cancel your appointment, he sounded kind of down, so I told him you’d gone to L.A. to locate Tracy. I thought it would cheer him up-you’d said he cared for her-but it didn’t. He asked me to have you let him know how it turned out. Said that if it wasn’t Tracy down there, he wanted to drive up to Napa tomorrow and check out those dental records again. Seems he’d been thinking about them, and something odd had occurred to him.”
“What?”
“He couldn’t go into it; he was in a meeting.”
What had occurred to him, I thought, was that he’d better cover up switching the X rays and falsely claiming the remains weren’t Tracy’s. Perhaps he intended to go to Napa, take another look at them, and identify them correctly, in order to deflect suspicion from himself. I said, “I’ll talk with him later. Any other messages?”
“George Kostakos. He’s at home.”
“What about Jack-where’s he?”
“Had to go to Sacramento on another case.”
“If you see him before I do, fill him in on what’s happened. But right now I need you to do something for me. I’m not even sure it’s within the realm of the possible, but I need a copy of the L.A. Times, metropolitan edition, for February second, the year Kostakos disappeared.”
“I’ll check the library.”
“I doubt it’s still open.”
“This is a tough one.” Rae sounded glum, then rallied. “Maybe Hank will have some idea.”
“Hank. Is he still staying there on the couch?”
“As of this morning.”
That was another thing I wanted to deal with-but not until this case was wrapped up. “Well, ask him.”
“Will do. By the way, I went by your place earlier to feed the cat. The contractor was there; he said not to worry about locking up after him, because you’d given him a key to the side gate.”
“Yes-he’s bonded, and I couldn’t let myself get tied down to his schedule. Thanks for looking out for Wat.”
“Don’t mention it. Where can I reach you?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll check in.”
I broke the connection and called George at his borrowed house. I wanted to break the news to him about finding McIntyre alive-and to break it in person, because it meant that his daughter really was dead. But I only reached the machine.
In a way it was good, I thought, because after breaking that kind of news, it would be very hard to leave him. And where I needed to go as soon as possible was Café Comedie.
24
On Bryant near Fourth Street, roughly two blocks from South Park, I ran into a monumental traffic jam. Odd, I thought, for close to ten-thirty at night.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, staring at the sea of red taillights in front of me. Then I switched the radio on, to see if I could find out what was causing this. Out of old habit, I punched the button for KSUN, an AM station with an exuberant hard-rock format, where my former lover, disc jockey Don Del Boccio, now held court in the prestigious late-evening slot. (If, as Don was fond of saying, having the ear of half a million teenagers whose combined IQ was probably in the low seventies could be considered prestige.)
I was so irritated at the jam-up that I didn’t even feel a rush of nostalgia when I heard Don’s voice extolling the talents of a group called Matt and the Mercenaries, and I turned down their atonal screeching (perhaps they really were in a war zone?) so far that I almost missed it when minutes later Don said, “…traffic advisory.” I turned the radio up again, expecting him to report an overturned big rig or some such thing on the bridge approach several blocks ahead.
“…and also a news bulletin,” he added. “We have a five-alarm fire that’s backing up traffic on Bryant Street and nearby access routes to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Emergency vehicles are blocking Bryant at Second and Third, and while police are attempting to reroute traffic, it’s pretty much at a standstill. So if you’re traveling to the East Bay or South of Market tonight, it’s best to avoid the main arteries. The fire is on South Park, between Second and Third streets, Bryant and Brannan. Fire crews and ambulances are on the scene, and police are asking that people keep away from the area if at all possible. That’s all we’ve got on it now, but we’ll be keeping you posted.”
South Park!
I clutched the wheel, my stomach knotting. Now that I knew about the fire I became aware of sirens, of an orange-red glow in the sky. A sickening feeling filled me. Was it possible this disaster was somehow related to my case? Was it Café Comedie…?
I needed to get there and find out what had happened, but there were no side streets or alleys intersecting this part of the block. There were parking spaces along the curb, and I was in the far right lane, but the one next to me, as well as those in front of and behind it, were taken. Two cars ahead there was a vacant space, but now traffic was at a total standstill; hours could pass before I reached it.
Everywhere people were hanging out their windows, trying to see what had caused the holdup. Some got out and stood in the street; the driver of the pickup that was stopped next to the parking space I coveted climbed up in the truck’s bed and looked around. If this continued, Bryant Street would soon look like a used-car lot on inventory liquidation would soon look like a used-car lot on inventory liquidation day. I fumed and grumbled aloud, experiencing that feeling of impotence in the face of impersonal forces that is easily one of the worst aspects of urban life. If traffic didn’t move soon, tempers would flare, and the street scene could turn ugly.
The guy in the bed of the pickup was the fist to snap: he yelled, “Fuck it!” and jumped down onto the pavement. Then he climbed into the truck and started it. It lurched forward, into the bumper of the car in front of it, then back into the one behind. Its wheels turned sharply to the right; the pickup slewed through the empty parking space beside it and onto the sidewalk.
The car behind it barely hesitated before it followed suit. The two vehicles fishtailed down the sidewalk next to the logjam in the street. A woman two cars over leaned out her window and shouted, “Assholes!”
I agreed with her, but the lunatics had shown me the way out. I was about to execute the same maneuver when a siren whooped somewhere behind me. A motorcycle cop, obviously on his way to attempt to reroute traffic, raced down the sidewalk after the truck and car. A ticket and the ensuing delay was something I didn’t need, so I settled for pulling into the empty parking space. Then I jumped out of the MG and ran toward South Park.
As I got closer, the air reeked of smoke; it clogged my nostrils and windpipe and made my breath come short. There were flashing lights ahead: red, blue, amber. The sky overhead glowed like an inverted red-orange globe. People were shouting. Radios in the emergency vehicles squawked and crackled.
When I turned onto Third Street itself, I saw the entrance to South Park was blocked by a police barricade. A great crowd milled about, resisting the officers’ efforts to clear a path for an arriving ambulance. I could hear the flames now: a roar that sounded as if whole buildings were being sucked into a vacuum. The smoke-filled air was warm as a spring day.
The crowd acted as a solid mass, shifting this way or that, but providing no opening. I wriggled between two men, pushed a third aside, elbowed a woman so she stepped back. To my left a police officer shouted for people to move; he spread his arms wide, and one of his hands caught me hard on the shoulder. The lights of the ambulance washed over the tight press of humanity. As it crept forward, the driver hit the siren. That accomplished what no amount of police commands could: the c
rowd parted and the ambulance drove toward the barricade. I slipped under the officer’s arm and darted in its wake.
As the ambulance sped through the barricade, a hand grabbed my arm. “That’s far enough, lady.”
I didn’t reply, transfixed by the scene in front of me. Fire trucks clogged the parkway itself. Ambulances were pulled onto the grassy oval. People lay on stretchers, white-coated paramedics attending to them. At the picnic tables and on the ground, others-many in evening attire-sat or lay. Their faces and hands were smoke blackened, their clothing torn and disheveled.
Beyond the ring of barren sycamore trees, the façade of Café Comedie was enveloped in what looked to be a solid wall of flame. The wrought-iron fence in front of it had been flattened by the hook-and-ladders. The buildings on either side were afire, too. Great torrents of water arched through the air; smoke billowed. The swiftly moving figures of the firemen were mere sooty silhouettes. And over it all spread the consuming brilliance of the flames.
If they couldn’t control this inferno soon; it would engulf all of South Park. Perhaps several surrounding blocks.
“Lady, move before you get hurt,” the officer said, tugging at my arm.
“Do you know how it started?”
“Somebody said something about an explosion.”
I stared at the wall of fire, remembered the gas leak Larkey had mentioned-the one PG&E couldn’t fix properly. “Was anybody trapped in there?”
“Don’t know. Now-move!”
I moved, but only a few yards away. I couldn’t take my eyes off the flames. In spite of the efforts to quell them, they shot upward, as if to consume the sky itself.
A woman near me was having hysterics. She kept sobbing, “He promised! He promised!” I looked her way, saw she was bent over, a man clutching at her leather-jacketed shoulders. The man was Mike, the bartender from the club. As I drew closer, I realized the woman was Kathy Soriano.
The Shape of Dread Page 21
