The Shape of Dread

by Marcia Muller

  Mike looked relieved when he saw me. He said, “I can’t do anything for her.”

  “Let me try.” I took hold of Kathy, dragged her down to a sitting position on the pavement. She hunched over, arms wrapped around her midsection, hands over her face, sobbing raggedly.

  Mike squatted beside us. I asked him, “Is she hurt?”

  He shook his head. “She was just handing her keys over to one of the valets when the explosion happened. I’d stepped out for some air on my break. I grabbed her, and we ran down here.” He looked toward the flames. “My God,” he added in awed tones, as if only now realizing what might have happened to him had he stayed inside.

  Kathy was rocking back and forth now. “Jay,” she sobbed. “Jay. He promised.”

  I put my arms around her. She buried her head under my chin. Over her rumpled curls I said to Mike, “Jay? Rob?”

  He shook his head slightly-in the negative. “The explosion was back by the office, from what I could tell.”

  “Jesus.”

  Kathy began to sob louder. “The bastard! He promised!”

  “Who, Kathy?”

  “Jay, oh, Jay…”

  “What did he promise?”

  She jerked her head, and it connected violently with my chin. I shoved it back down, and the shriek she’d been about to let fly was muffled against my jacket. “She needs medical attention,” I said to Mike.

  “So do all of them.” He motioned at the people in the park. “There aren’t enough medics to go around.”

  He was right, of course. “Do you know who her doctor is?”

  “Most of us go to the Potrero Clinic, but I don’t suppose she-”

  “No, but her doctor’s probably in Marin, anyway. The clinic’ll do in an emergency. Help me get her up.”

  The two of us hauled Kathy to her feet. She stumbled and swayed between us, hysteria spent now. I said to Mike, “My car’s a couple of blocks away. Will you walk down there with us?”

  He nodded, and we began making our way through the crowd. The same people who hadn’t wanted to let the ambulance through gave Kathy sympathetic looks and cleared a path for us.

  Traffic was moving slowly on Bryant Street now, rerouted down Fourth toward China Basin. Beyond Townsend Street there was an entrance to the 280 freeway, the quickest way to Potrero Hill. With any luck at all, I could have Kathy to the clinic within half an hour. Mike and I loaded her into the passenger seat of the MG, and then he loped off toward South Park to see if he could help some of the others.

  Kathy slumped silently beside me, her head drooping forward. As I eased the car into the creeping stream of traffic, she gave a tremulous sigh, as a child that has spent itself crying will do. I glanced at her, wondering if she had blocked the knowledge of her husband’s and lover’s probable deaths. For her sake, I hoped so.

  Fortunately I knew where the clinic was-on Arkansas Street near the Potrero Hill playground. I pulled to the white curb in front, went around the car, and hoisted Kathy out. She was a dead weight now; I staggered under the burden. A white-coated young man came bustling out with a wheelchair. Efficiently he got Kathy into it and trundled her inside.

  The clinic was like many other low-budget, low-cost operations I’d seen: old, minimally furnished, but spruced up with a cheerful paint job and colorful posters. The young man wheeled Kathy to a counter, where a sign read ADMITTING. I was relieved to see Leora Whitsun sitting behind it. She stood up when she saw us, her face furrowing in concern.

  Briefly I explained what had happened. “I couldn’t think of where else to take her,” I added. “She’s in no shape to tell me who her doctor is.”

  “That’s all right; we don’t discriminate.” Leora allowed herself a small ironic smile, then picked up the phone receiver, buzzed someone, and spoke quietly into it. “Room A,” she told the young man. To me, she added, “You just go sit over there, Sharon. There’re magazines, coffee in that urn in the corner. Be a little while.” Then she picked up a clipboard and followed the wheelchair.

  I sat on one of the two yellow vinyl couches, opposite a young Hispanic couple, who huddled together as if for warmth. The woman’s face was crumpled and streaked with tears; the man was all of twenty, yet his bleak eyes suggested there was nothing he hadn’t seen. He kept smoothing the woman’s hair and murmuring the endearment “querida.” To avoid intruding, I grabbed a year-old copy of Field and Stream and kept my gaze fixed on an ad for rifles. After a while a doctor came through the door and ushered the young couple back the way Kathy had been taken. I set down the magazine and looked around for a pay phone, thinking to call All Souls.

  I was about to borrow the phone on the admitting desk when Leora returned. “The doctor wants to keep her overnight,” she said, “till we can find out about her husband. Are you sure he died in the fire?”

  “There’s no way of knowing yet.”

  “What about Jay? Did he…?”

  “Probably.”

  She touched her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes. “Poor man. I’ll pray for him.” When she took her hand away, she looked old and tired, as if the added weight of this latest tragedy had finally made her burdens more than she could bear.

  I would have liked to say something encouraging about her son’s case, but at the moment I couldn’t think of anything that would make sense. Besides, my major suspect was probably dead, and I doubted Kathy would ever admit her own complicity. Instead, I patted Leora’s arm, thanked her, and said I’d call later to check on Kathy. But halfway to the door I thought of something I needed to ask her.

  “Leora,” I said, “when Jay took Tracy Kostakos’s dental records up to Napa County the other day, did he spend much time here beforehand?”

  She shook her head. “None at all. He called, asked me to pull the file and envelope it. When he came by, he left his car in the white zone, just ran in and grabbed it.”

  Of course that didn’t mean anything; he probably had switched the X rays a long time before that, on the chance that one day the body would be discovered. And yet…

  I said to Leora, “You mentioned that Kathy came looking for him here on New Year’s Day.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she say why she thought he might be here?”

  “No, just that she wanted to break the news about the Kostakos girl to him personally.”

  “What about Tracy’s dental records-did she mention that the Napa sheriff’s department needed them?”

  Leora frowned. “You know, she did. She even offered to take them up there herself, since Jay would be upset by the news and might not want to deal with them. I told her he’d have to authorize their release before I could give them to her.”

  “What did she do then?”

  “…I’m not sure. We had a patient with a stab wound-family fight, what else?-and he was bleeding all over the place. There were other emergencies, too. I kind of lost track of her.”

  “Is it possible Kathy could have gone into the records room without you noticing her?”

  “It’s possible. And she would have had enough time to, because I saw her leaving more than fifteen minutes later. But why would she…?”

  Why, indeed? That, like many aspects of this case, made no sense whatsoever.

  25

  On the way to Bernal Heights I tuned to KSUN again, to see if they had an update on the fire. A news broadcast was in progress. The fire, the announcer said, was now under control; at least five people had died, and damage was estimated in the millions. When the broadcast ended, the deejay who held the midnight-to-six slot came on. I looked at my watch and was surprised to see it was twelve-ten.

  I snapped off the radio and drove in silence, deeply discouraged and saddened. Tonight’s tragedy eclipsed my earlier sense of urgency about wrapping up the case. I knew that if Larkey was dead, there was a good chance I would never find out exactly what had happened the night Tracy died, but somehow I just didn’t care.

  To tell the truth, I was fed u
p with the case. What had begun as a compelling search into the past had turned into an arduous sifting of sordid and depressing facts. I was sick of digging into the life of a young woman whose chief occupation had been getting what she wanted at the expense of everyone else. I was sick of people like Amy Barbour and Marc Emmons, who did shabby things and then tried to justify them, even to themselves. The users of the world had always disgusted me, but no more so than tonight. I’d lost sympathy for almost everyone involved in my investigation.

  As I searched for a parking space near the co-op, I wondered about that loss of sympathy: what if it was indicative of something worse? What if I was also losing empathy-a quality, I’d often been told, that made others willing to open up to me, and thus made me a good detective? What if-worse yet-I was losing my enthusiasm for the work itself?

  I thought of Rae, of the energy she applied to the most menial of investigative tasks, of her elation when a lead turned out to be a solid one. Day after day she maintained that enthusiasm, while toiling for a salary that wasn’t enough so that she could rent a decent apartment, and receiving little credit for her efforts, save my own (often infrequent) thanks. How did she do it?

  Well, for one thing, Rae hadn’t seen all that I had. She hadn’t spent year after year experiencing what amounted to living nightmares. She hadn’t spent over a decade uncovering secrets of people’s lives that literally made one’s flesh creep, hadn’t repeatedly dealt with the havoc and destruction caused by human greed, carelessness, and stupidity.

  So what I was really asking was what had happened to me, that I couldn’t sustain the enthusiasm. And there was my answer.

  Wait a few years, Rae, I thought. Just wait.

  It was a fate I wouldn’t wish upon her but couldn’t warn her away from. Because-as Larkey had said of Tracy-she wouldn’t listen to me, any more than I would have at her age.

  I’d driven around the triangular park in front of the co-op twice and still hadn’t found a space. Both of the driveway spots were occupied. For a moment I considered leaving the MG by a fireplug, but recent experience and a glance at the tinderbox buildings lining the street made me think better of the idea. I finally wedged the car into a semilegal space at the corner and hurried up the hill.

  There were no lights in the parlor or any of the offices opening off the first floor hallway, but a glow came from the kitchen at the rear. I went back there and found Hank sitting at the table with Amy Barbour. He appeared to be sober for a change; she was eating a bowl of cereal.

  I stopped in the doorway. Amy’s presence was so unexpected, the scene before me so homey and normal in contrast to what I’d witnessed in the past two hours, that I was at a total loss for words. Hank glanced at me and said, “There you are. You have a visitor. She arrived about an hour ago-hungry.”

  Tonight Amy looked very much the waif who needed to be taken in and fed. Her artichoke-leaf hair drooped limply; her face was sallow, eyes underscored with dark smudges. She wore a stained Garfield T-shirt, rumpled jeans, and mud-splattered rain boots. I suspected she could use a bath. She’d started getting twitchy as soon as she saw me; now she set down her spoon and nervously licked a drop of milk from the corner of her mouth.

  I nodded to her, then said to Hank, “Have you seen either Jack or Rae?”

  “Not tonight. You had a phone call a few minutes ago. From a man, asking if you were back from L.A. When I said no, he asked if Amy had been in touch with you. I said she was right here, and he hung up.”

  “That’s strange.”

  Hank shrugged and stood up. “I gather you and Amy have a lot to talk about, so I’ll be going.”

  “Are you staying here tonight?”

  “No.” Without elaborating, he left the room.

  I watched him go, wondering briefly if this meant he and Anne-Marie had reconciled, then turned my attention to Amy. “Go on with your cereal,” I said, sitting down.

  She looked around, a trifle furtively. “If you don’t mind, I don’t think I’ll finish it. This whole-grain stuff is pretty disgusting, and there isn’t even any sugar.”

  “There’s usually a bowl of it-”

  “No, there isn’t. Hank said that one of the other lawyers threw out all the impure stuff right after New Year’s.”

  I knew who she meant; we had a health nut on staff who conducted periodic purges of the refrigerator. But this was going too far. I made up my mind to speak to him about literally cramming his New Year’s resolutions down everybody else’s throats.

  Amy said, “I wouldn’t even have eaten what I did, but I hadn’t had anything since a Wendy’s around eleven this morning.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “My…the apartment.”

  “Since when?”

  “About noon. I called you as soon as I got to town. You weren’t here, so I just holed up at the apartment and kept trying. Finally, at about ten tonight, your assistant said you wanted me to come here and wait for you. Nobody was around but Hank. He…he’s nice.”

  “Yes, he is,” I said absently. So Amy was my first mysterious caller. “Where have you been since Monday?”

  “The cottage.”

  “Up at the river?”

  She nodded. “It was the one place we figured nobody would look for us. We watched it for a few hours to make sure the cops were done there, then snuck in and hid.”

  “Marc was with you?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Still there. I drove his car in to talk with you. He figured if it was just me I’d be less recognizable. The police are looking for a couple.”

  What I figured was that Emmons preferred risking Amy’s hide to his own. “How do you know the police are looking for you?”

  “Marc’s building manager stopped us while we were moving some of my stuff in on Monday and said a cop had been asking for him. Later on, one showed up at my place, but we didn’t answer the door. That afternoon we went up to the river.”

  “And stayed there the whole time?”

  “Uh-huh. At first it wasn’t so bad, like camping. Marc even dug out some of my father’s old fishing stuff and tried to catch us dinner. But then he got all depressed and nervous about…our situation. Obviously we can’t stay there forever, so he said I should talk with you and see if you can help us make a deal.”

  “A deal.”

  “Yeah. What you really care about is finding out who killed Trace, right? I mean, you don’t really want to turn us in to the cops for…What was it you called it?”

  “Obstruction of justice.”

  “Yeah, that. So if we tell you what we know, you can go to the cops and get them to agree not to arrest us, in exchange for the information.”

  “You mean you want a guarantee of immunity from prosecution.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Why didn’t you just go directly to the police? Or get a lawyer?”

  “We’re afraid of the police, and we don’t know any lawyers-or have any money for one. Marc’s parents were giving him an allowance, but they cut it off as of the first of the year. That’s the reason he’s letting me move in with him, to help with the rent.”

  “So you thought I’d work for free.”

  She hung her head. “Please.”

  “All right-tell me what you know.”

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “I don’t know what the police will do, but you and I have a deal.”

  She hesitated.

  “Amy, I’m in no mood to play games! I’ve just come from South Park, where there was an explosion at the club. At least five people are dead-”

  “The club exploded?”

  “There was an explosion and fire, at about ten tonight.”

  She leaned forward, elbows on the table, running her fingers through her limp hair. “Oh God oh God! Marc said he was afraid something awful was going to happen. Oh God!”

  I didn’t see the connection between an explosion caused by a gas leak and
whatever it was Emmons knew-or claimed to know. But since she’d obviously linked them in her mind, I used it to my advantage. “You see? You’d better tell me all of it.”

  “I would, but I don’t know much. Marc only told me certain things. He said it was too dangerous for me to know everything.”

  I took a deep breath, tried to keep exasperation out of my voice. “Okay, tell me what he did tell you.”

  She raised her head and looked around. “Do you think I could have a drink? Some wine, maybe?”

  I quelled a desire to take her by the shoulders and shake her, and went to look for some. There was a jug of dangerously cheap red under the sink that the health nut had apparently missed. I looked dubiously at it, shrugged, and poured a glass. When I returned to the table, Amy seized it eagerly.

  “Okay,” she said after taking a gulp, “I’ll tell you what Marc told me. About two weeks before she died, Trace found out something really bad about somebody at the club. It upset her, and she didn’t know what to do about it. A ‘moral dilemma’ she called it. Trust Trace to make it into a big deal like that. Anyway, she never said anything about it to me. She wouldn’t. But she told Marc. And he said she ought to just forget it.”

  “And you have no idea what it was? Or how she found out?”

  “No. Only that it was bad. It really bothered her. She wouldn’t turn loose of it. And Marc…well, this sounds awful, but he saw some advantage in it for him.”

  “How do you mean?”

  She hung her head and said in a low voice. “He went to the person involved and told them. He promised to keep Trace from doing whatever it was she wanted to do about it.”

  “In exchange for what?”

  She looked up quickly. Her eyes were moist. I could tell she wanted to deny the obvious, but that wasn’t possible. “Money, maybe. I don’t know,” she said miserably.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, he had her pretty much convinced. But then, the night she disappeared, Trace came over to Marc’s. She was really upset; something terrible had happened at the club. She said that at first she’d decided to go up to the river and sort things out. But then she’d realized that maybe she could salvage the situation-those were her exact words, ‘salvage the situation’-by using the information she had. Marc tried to talk her out of it for a couple of hours, and she finally promised him she’d think it over up at the river for a day or so before doing anything. But he already knew what she’d decide. And then she left, and he never saw her again.”