Games to Keep the Dark Away

by Marcia Muller

  Games to Keep

  the Dark Away

  By Marcia Muller

  Copyright © 1984 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  Ebook @2011 by AudioGO. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-60998-612-4 (trade)

  ISBN 978-0-7927-8266-7 (library)

  42 Whitecap Drive

  North Kingstown, RI 02852

  Visit us online at www.audiogo.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 1

  The wind whipped my jacket open as I went up to the guardrail. The sheer, rock-strewn face of Potrero Hill dropped away for fifty yards or more, and I could look down on the roofs of the houses below. I turned, pulling the jacket tightly around me, and walked down the street from where I’d parked at the dead end. Broken glass and other debris crunched beneath my feet.

  All the buildings save two in this short block were condemned or half demolished. They stood silent in the early October dusk, gaping holes where windows had once been, jagged timbers silhouetted against the dying light. I shivered, only partly from the biting wind.

  Number twenty-one was surrounded by a six-foot red-wood fence on which the number was spelled out in carved letters. I pushed through the gate into a deep front yard that was choked with vegetation. A gravel walk overhung by scraggly palm trees led to the front door. I went up and rang the bell.

  In a moment the door opened a crack and a pale, nondescript face peered at me over the security chain. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Snelling? I’m Sharon McCone, the investigator from All Souls Legal Cooperative.” I passed one of my cards though the narrow opening. After a few seconds the chain rattled, the door opened, and I was admitted into a dark hallway.

  The man quickly rechained the door, then turned to me, his hand outstretched. “It’s good of you to come so promptly. I’m Abe Snelling.”

  I clasped his slender, long-fingered hand. Its palm was moist. “I’m glad to meet you. I admire your photographs.”

  “Thank you. Come this way.” He led me down the hall toward the back of the house. So far I couldn’t tell much about Snelling, except that he was short, shorter than my own five six, and that his blond hair was thinning at the crown. I followed him into a large, white-carpeted living room and stopped, caught up in the view.

  In the foreground, the lights of Potrero Hill cascaded down into the industrial flatlands below. The warehouses, oil storage tanks, and ships in dry dock were softened by the dusk, and beyond them, the water of the Bay lay flat and quiet. My gaze moved to the East Bay hills and the shining chain of bridge that linked the two shores.

  “Your view of the Bay and the hills is spectacular,” I said.

  “Yes, I enjoy it during the day.” Snelling crossed the dark room and drew the draperies with a decisive snap of the cord. He then went around flicking on table lamps. The walls of the room were also white and covered with his photographs. The furnishings were severely modern.

  I must have had an odd expression on my face because Snelling stopped and gave me a lopsided grin, his head cocked to one side. “I can’t stand to have the drapes open after dark.”

  “It is pretty bleak-looking out there.”

  “No, it’s not that.” He motioned at a chair. “Actually, it’s snipers.”

  “What?”

  “I have a ridiculous fear of snipers.”

  “Oh.” I sat down in one of those chrome-and-leather chairs that are surprisingly comfortable in spite of their looks.

  Snelling sat across the glass coffee table from me and fumbled in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “It’s stupid, but when I was in my teens, one of the neighborhood kids shot his mother. She was standing at the kitchen window and he went out in the backyard and shot her through the glass with his hunting rifle. A thing like that makes an impression on you.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Anyway, since then, I’ve never been able to have the curtains open after dark. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t seem to help it.”

  “We all have those kinds of fears,” I said, thinking of my own phobia about birds.

  Snelling fiddled with a chrome table lighter, and I watched him, disappointed that he didn’t fit my notion of what a celebrity photographer should look like. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had expected, but Snelling wasn’t it. He was slender, with an almost unnatural pallor and washed-out blue eyes. He wore faded jeans with a hole in one knee, a workshirt stained with darkroom chemicals, and scuffed loafers. His abrupt motions reminded me of a bird, the kind you see running along the tide line at the beach. The association did nothing to endear him to me.

  Still, he was a potential client and it was time to get down to the business. “Mr. Snelling, I understand you have a problem you want me to investigate.”

  He finally got the cigarette lit and looked up. “Yes, as I told your boss—Hank Zahn is your boss?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, as I told Hank Zahn, it’s not the sort of thing I can go to the police about. I mean, it could be nothing and then Jane would be furious with me.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning. Who’s Jane?”

  “Jane Anthony, my roommate. She’s missing.”

  I took a pad and pencil out of my bag and noted the name. “For how long?”

  “A week. Exactly a week today.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “There’s not much to tell. I had an early-morning photo session. I do all my work in my studio, upstairs.” He waved a hand at the circular stairway that ascended to a second story. “As far as I knew, Jane was still asleep in her room. The session took a long time; it was with Anna Adams—you know, the actress who’s starring in that terrible musical at the Golden Gate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Miss Adams is a good actress, but she’s got the attention span of a flea. It took hours to get a few decent shots. During that time, I thought I heard Jane in the kitchen below. When Miss Adams left, Jane was also gone.”

  “She didn’t leave a note?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Is she in the habit of going off without telling you?”

  “Never.”

  “So what did you do?” “At first I didn’t think much of it. I went about my daily routine. But, when dinnertime came and went, and Jane still hadn’t shown, I got worried. I called a few of her friends around nine, but they hadn’t heard from her.”

  “What about her place of employment? Does she work?”

  He shook his head. “Jane’s an unemployed social worker. With all the budget cuts, jobs in that field are hard to come by.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “Waited. Checked back with the same friends the next day. Halfway through the week I called Jane’s mother—she lives down south in a coastside village called Salmon Bay, near Port San Marco. I didn’t want to alarm Mrs. Anthony—she’s old and not in very good health—so I just said Jane had mentioned she might stop in there on her way to L.A. But her mother hadn’t heard from her.”

  “Did Jane take any of her things with her?”

  “As far as I can tell, only enough for a night or two. Her stuff’s gone from
the bathroom, and there’s an overnight case missing from her closet, but her big suitcases are still there.”

  “I assume she drove.”

  “Yes. She has a white…I think it’s a Toyota, about five years old.”

  “Do you know the model?”

  “No.” He spread his hands apologetically. “I have a VW beetle and, except for that type, all cars look alike to me.”

  I noted the probable make and year of Jane’s car. “Do you have a picture of your roommate?”

  He turned and gestured to the far wall, which was covered with photographs. “The one on the extreme left.”

  I got up and went over to it. Jane Anthony was a strong-featured woman in her mid-thirties. Her dark hair was pulled back severely, accentuating her prominent nose and the forward thrust of her chin. It was not a pretty face, but a commanding one and, surprisingly, Snelling had made her attractive in the photo. It was not what one expected of the man who termed his work “the portraiture of realism.”

  I turned. “Do you have a copy that I could have?”

  “Yes, upstairs.” He got up and went toward the circular stairway. “I’ll get one.”

  While he was gone, I turned back to the wall and looked at the other photos. They were by no means the pretty tinted variety you saw in the windows of ordinary photographers’ studios. Instead, they were severe and uncompromisingly truthful—Snelling’s trademark. I went to the opposite wall where, over the stone fireplace, I had spotted the picture that had made him famous.

  It had happened only a year ago, when Abe Snelling was merely another down-at-the-heels photographer roaming San Francisco’s streets in search of subjects. One morning while passing the Blue Owl Café, here on Potrero Hill near San Francisco General Hospital, Snelling had seen a man run out, pursued by the restaurant proprietor, a gentle soul who was well liked in the neighborhood. Sensing the unusual and obeying his photographer’s instincts, Snelling readied his camera. The two men struggled, a shot was fired, the proprietor staggered and fell to the ground, and the robber ran off. As the proprietor’s wife knelt over the dying man, futilely willing the life to stay in his body, Snelling snapped picture after picture of her anguished face. The photograph that he sold to the evening paper was picked up by the wire services, and eventually was featured on the cover of Time’s issue on crime in the cities.

  It was a grisly beginning, but Snelling’s career had burgeoned after that, and now he was the “in” photographer of a wealthy and famous clientele. Society people and celebrities were all eager to expose themselves to the harsh eye of Snelling’s camera; maybe they found it refreshing to see themselves with none of the warts removed.

  Now I stepped back and looked at the photo from a distance. An amateur photographer myself, I liked to think I was some judge of the art and, if I knew anything at all, the actual picture seemed strangely diminished compared to the reproductions I’d seen. It was as if the starkness of the surrounding white-on-white décor had leeched away all its rich emotion, leaving only a caricature in place of the anguished woman.

  Snelling clattered down the spiral staircase and extended a five-by-seven copy of Jane Anthony’s picture to me. I slipped it into my bag and said, “I’d like to see Jane’s room if I may.”

  He nodded and took me to a second stairway that led downstairs; as in many of San Francisco’s hillside houses, the bedrooms were on the lower level. Jane’s room was at the end of the hall. Snelling pushed the door open and motioned me in.

  The first thing that struck me was the room’s extreme tidiness. I myself am a finicky housekeeper—I have to be, living in a studio apartment with all my worldly goods—but this room bore the mark of a fanatic. The double bed would have passed a military inspection; perfume bottles, comb, brush, and mirror were perfectly aligned on the dresser; the spines of the books in the bookcase were straight and an exact inch from the edge of the shelf; even the wastebasket had been emptied. I went to the closet and found what I had expected—a row of skirts, blouses, dresses, and pants arranged by color and type. Shoes were lined up in a rack on the floor.

  I turned to Snelling. “Mr. Snelling—“

  “Abe, please.”

  “Abe, let me ask you this—what is the relationship between you and Jane?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Were you just roommates or…”

  “Oh. Just roommates. I met Jane a couple of months after she moved here from Salmon Bay. She has an interest in photography, so we hit it off right away. She’d hoped to get a job as a social worker but, like I said, they’re hard to come by. I felt sorry for her—she was working part-time as a typist and having trouble paying her rent—so I suggested she move in here until a decent job came along. Of course, I never realized she’d be with me for six months.”

  “I see.”

  “Not that I mind having her here,” he added quickly. “She’s quiet and considerate—and a good cook.”

  I went to the bookshelf. There were textbooks—some of which I recognized from my days as a sociology major—and popular self-help manuals and a great deal of paperback science fiction. Taking a book out, I saw that it had been read, but carefully, without cracking the spine. I then went through the dresser and bedside table drawers. They were as precisely arranged as everything else—and devoid of anything personal.

  “What about these friends you checked with?” I asked Snelling. “When did you last contact them?”

  “This morning. They still hadn’t heard from Jane.”

  “Do you know if she kept an address book?”

  “A small one, in her purse. I looked for it, but obviously she took it with her.”

  “Can you think of anywhere else she might have noted things, like appointments or names and addresses?”

  He frowned. “Maybe in the front of the phone book. She scribbled things down in there sometimes.”

  I had noticed a directory on the bottom shelf of the bedside table. Pulling it out, I turned to the front pages. There , in a bold hand that fit with the woman in Snelling’s photograph, were various notations—Gold Mirror, 18th & Taraval…43 Masonic bus (to Geary)...SFG Pharmacy 12-8…Kelly Services, Market near 6th…Cannery Cinema, cheap show Wed… The notations seemed to be the names of restaurants, shops, theaters, and bus routes, merely the details of daily life in the city.

  I closed the phone book and replaced it, unconsciously lining it up with the shelf edge in much the way its owner would have. Then I turned to the window and looked out over the darkening vista of vacant lots and half-demolished houses. As before, I shivered.

  “Pretty desolate, isn’t it?” Snelling said from the doorway. He hadn’t ventured into the room, presumably because of the phantom snipers beyond the open draperies.

  “I noticed the demolition, of course. It strikes me as a lonely place to live.”

  “Maybe but this part of Potrero Hill has the best weather in the city. Since I work only with natural light, good weather is important. Besides, it won’t be lonely for long. Those houses are being torn down to make way for a condominium complex; they’re building them all over the hill. I’m sorry about that, because I like the solitude.”

  I had heard that Snelling was quite a recluse. In spite of his celebrity, the shy photographer was never photographed himself and even refused to attend exhibitions of his own work. It was said that he ventured out of his house less and less these days, insisting his clients come to his studio here rather than go to them.

  I continued gazing at the view, wondering where to start looking for Jane Anthony on the basis of the few facts I had, until I heard Snelling shuffle his feet. He was still nervous about snipers, even if I wasn’t. I took a final look around the room and then followed him back upstairs.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to bring the police in on this, Abe?” I asked.

  “No!” He looked surprised at the violence of his own answer, then repeated more softly, “No. If Jane has just gone off for some private reason, s
he’ll be furious with me.”

  He seemed excessively concerned with Jane’s temper. “She did go off without telling you.”

  “I know, but she’d say she’s an adult and entitled to live her own life. Please, Sharon, can’t you find her without involving the police?”

  “I’ll try.” I asked him for the names of the friends he’d contacted as well as Jane’s mother’s phone number and address in Salmon Bay. He got an address book and read them off to me.

  “Do you plan to talk to Mrs. Anthony?” he asked as he followed me down the hall to the door.”

  “It’s a good place to start. I’ll try not to alarm her. But, frankly, there’s so little of your roommate here—nothing personal at all—that I really don’t have any sense of who she is or what she’s likely to do.”

  “Funny.” He paused, his hand on the doorknob. “I thought I knew her, but I don’t have any sense of that either.”

  “Well, maybe her mother will fill me in.”

  “Maybe.” But he sounded doubtful.

  We said good-night and I went out into the crisp fall evening. As I started down the overgrown path, I heard Snelling chain the door and lock himself securely into his sanctuary.

  Chapter 2

  As I walked back to my car, I noticed a black VW parked nearby. It hadn’t been there before and, since it was even more beat-up than my own MG, I wondered if its owner had abandoned it. My question was answered when I drove off. The VW’s lights flashed on and it pulled out after me.

  I turned off of Snelling’s street onto Missouri, heading for home, but I wasn’t very familiar with Potrero Hill and I quickly found that it had any number of streets that came to dead ends. In the dark, I lost my bearings and, at the same time, I became conscious that the same set of headlights had been shining in my rearview mirror for quite a while. They were small and close-set, and I wondered if it could be the VW I’d seen near Snelling’s house and, if so, why it was following me. Possibly it had something to do with my visit to the photographer but more likely it was someone who had spotted me, a woman alone, and decided to play games. The best course of action was to get off this damned hill; I could lose him on the flatlands.