The McCone Files

by Marcia Muller

  “…Oh, right.”

  Pete said, “Wait, I’ll open the door to the coffeehouse.”

  On hands and knees I began feeling my way toward the sound of their voices. I banged into one of the desks, overturned a wastebasket, then finally reached the opposite wall. As I stood there, Ann’s cold hand reached out to guide me. Behind her I could hear Pete fumbling at the door.

  I leaned against the wall. Ann was close beside me, her breathing erratic. Pete said, “Goddamned door’s jammed.” From behind it came voices of the people in the coffeehouse.

  Now that the danger was over—at least until the first of the aftershocks—my body sagged against the wall, giving way to tremors of its own manufacture. My thoughts turned to the lover with whom I’d planned to have dinner: where had he been when the quake hit? And what about my cats, my house? My friends and my co-workers at All Souls? Other friends scattered throughout the Bay Area.

  And what about a nameless, faceless man somewhere in the city who had screamed for help before the phone went dead?

  The door to the coffeehouse burst open, spilling weak light into the room. Lloyd Warner and several of his customers peered anxiously through it. I prodded Ann—who seemed to have lapsed into lethargy—toward them.

  The coffeehouse was fairly dark, but late afternoon light showed beyond the plate-glass windows fronting on the street. It revealed a floor that was awash in spilled liquid and littered with broken crockery. Chairs were tipped over—whether by the quake or the patrons’ haste to get to shelter I couldn’t tell. About ten people milled about, talking noisily.

  Ann and Pete joined them but I moved forward to the window. Outside, Twenty-Fourth Street looked much as usual, except for the lack of traffic and pedestrians. The buildings still stood, the sun still shone, the air drifting through the open door of the coffeehouse was still warm and muggy. In this part of the city, at least, life went on.

  Lloyd’s transistor radio had been playing the whole time—tuned to the station that was carrying the coverage of the third game of the Bay Area World Series, due to start at five-thirty. I moved closer, listening.

  The sportscaster was saying, “Nobody here knows what’s going on. The Giants have wandered over to the A’s dugout. It looks like a softball game where somebody forgot to bring the ball.”

  Then the broadcast shifted abruptly to the station’s studios. A newswoman was relaying telephone reports from the neighborhoods. I was relieved to hear that Bernal Heights, where All Souls is located, and my own small district near Glen Park were shaken up but for the most parts undamaged. The broadcaster concluded by warning listeners not to use their phones except in cases of emergency. Ann snorted and said, “Do as I say but not...”

  Again the broadcast made an abrupt switch—to the station’s traffic helicopter. “From where we are,” the reporter said, “it looks as if part of the upper deck on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge has collapsed onto the bottom deck. Cars are pointing every which way, there may be some in the water. And on the approaches—”

  The transmission broke, then resumed after a number of static-filled seconds. “It looks as if the Cypress Structure on the Oakland approach to the bridge has also collapsed. Oh my God, there are cars and people—” This time the transmission broke for good.

  It was very quiet in the coffeehouse. We all exchanged looks—fearful, horrified. This was an extremely bad one, if not the catastrophic one they’d been predicting for so long.

  Lloyd was the first to speak. He said, “I’d better see if I can insulate the urns in some way, keep the coffee hot as long as possible. People’ll need it tonight.” He went behind the counter, and in a few seconds a couple of the customers followed.

  The studio newscast resumed. “…fires burning out of control in the Marina district. We’re receiving reports of collapsed building there, with people trapped inside…”

  The Marina district. People trapped.

  I thought again of the man who had cried out for help over the phone. Of my suspicion, more or less confirmed by today’s conversation, that he lived in the Marina.

  Behind the counter Lloyd and the customers were wrapping the urns in dishtowels. Here—and in other parts of the city, I was sure—people were already overcoming their shock, gearing up to assist in the relief effort. There was nothing I could do in my present surroundings, but…

  I hurried to the back room and groped until I found my purse on the floor beside the desk. As I picked it up, an aftershock hit—nothing like the original trembler, but strong enough to make me grab the chair for support. When it stopped, I went shakily out to my car.

  Twenty-Fourth Street was slowly coming to life. People bunched on the sidewalks, talking and gesturing. A man emerged from one of the shops, walked to the center of the street and surveyed the façade of his building. In the parking lot of nearby Bell Market, employees and customers gathered by the grocery carts. A man in a butcher’s apron looked around, shrugged, and headed for a corner tavern. I got into my MG and took a city map from the side pocket.

  The Marina area consists mainly of early twentieth-century stucco homes and apartment buildings built on fill on the shore of the bay—which meant the quake damage there would naturally be bad. The district extends roughly from the Fisherman’s Wharf area to the Presidio—not large, but large enough, considering I had few clues as to where within its boundary my man lived. I spread out the map against the steering wheel and examined it.

  The man had said he’d taken a walk that afternoon, to a place two blocks from his home where people were flying kites. That would be the Marina Green, near the Yacht Harbor, famous for the elaborate and often fantastical kites flown there in fine weather. Two blocks placed the man’s home somewhere on the far side of Northpoint Street.

  I had one more clue: in his anger at me he’d let it slip that the Legal Switchboard was “down the street.” The switchboard, a federally-funded assistance group, was headquartered in one of the piers at Fort Mason, at the east end of the Marina. While several streets in that vicinity ended at Fort Mason, I saw that only two—Beach and Northpoint—were within two blocks of the Green as well.

  Of course, I reminded myself, “down the street” and “two blocks” could have been generalizations or exaggerations. But it was somewhere to start. I set the map aside and turned the key in the ignition.

  The trip across the city was hampered by near-gridlock traffic on some streets. All the stoplights were out; there were no police to direct the panicked motorist. Citizens helped out: I saw men in three-piece suits, women in heels and business attire, even a ragged man who looked to be straight out of one of the homeless shelters, all playing traffic cop. Sirens keened, emergency vehicles snaked from lane to lane. The car radio kept reporting further destruction; there was another aftershock, and then another, but I scarcely felt them because I was in motion.

  As I inched along a major crosstown arterial, I asked myself why I was doing this foolhardy thing. The man was nothing to me, really—merely a voice on the phone, always self-pitying, and often antagonistic and potentially violent. I ought to be checking on my house and the folks at All Souls; if I wanted to help people, my efforts would have been better spent in my own neighborhood or Bernal Heights. But instead I was traveling to the most congested and dangerous part of the city in search of a man I’d never laid eyes on.

  As I asked the question, I knew the answer. Over the past two weeks the man had told me about his deepest problems. I’d come to know him in spite of his self-protective secretiveness. And he’d become more to me than just the subject of an investigation; I’d begun to care whether he lived or died. Now we had shared a peculiarly intimate moment—that of being together, if only in voice, when the catastrophe that San Francisco feared the most had struck. He had called for help; I had heard his terror and pain. A connection had been established that could not be broken.

  After twenty minutes and little progress, I cut west and took a less traveled residential
street through Japantown and over the crest of Pacific Heights. From the top of the hill I could see and smell the smoke over the Marina; as I crossed the traffic-snarled intersection with Lombard, I could see the flames. I drove another block, then decided to leave the MG and continue on foot.

  All around I could see signs of destruction now; a house was twisted at a tortuous angle, its front porch collapsed and crushing a car parked at the curb; on Beach Street an apartment building’s upper story had slid into the street, clogging it with rubble; three bottom floors of another building were flattened, leaving only the top intact.

  I stopped at a corner, breathing hard, nearly choking on the thickening smoke. The smell of gas from broken lines was vaguely nauseating—frightening, too, because of the potential for explosions. To my left the street was cordoned off; fire-department hoses played on the blazes—weakly, because of damaged water mains. People congregated everywhere, staring about with horror-stuck eyes; they huddled together, clinging to one another; many were crying. Firefighters and police were telling people to go home before dark fell. “You should be looking after your property,” I heard one say. “You can count on going seventy-two hours without water or power.”

  “Longer than that,” someone said.

  “It’s not safe here,” the policeman added. “Please go home.”

  Between sobs, a woman said, “What if you’ve got no home to go to any more?”

  The cop had no answer for her.

  Emotions were flying out of control among the onlookers. It would have been easy to feed into it—to weep, even panic. Instead, I turned my back to the flaming buildings, began walking the other way, toward Fort Mason. If the man’s home was beyond the barricades, there was nothing I could do for him. But if it lay in the other direction, where there was a lighter concentration of rescue workers, then my assistance might save his life.

  I forced myself to walk slower, to study the buildings on either side of the street. I had one last clue that could lead me to the man: he’d said he lived in a little cottage between two apartment buildings. The homes in this district were mostly of substantial size, there couldn’t be too many cottages situated in just that way.

  Across the street a house slumped over to one side, its roof canted at a forty-five-degree angle, windows from an apartment house had popped out of their frames, and its iron fire escapes were tangled and twisted like a cat’s cradle of yarn. Another home was unrecognizable, merely a heap of rubble. And over there, two four-story apartment buildings leaned together, forming an arch over a much smaller structure….

  I rushed across the street, pushed through a knot of bystanders. The smaller building was a tumble-down mass of white stucco with a smashed red tile roof and a partially flattened iron fence. It had been a Mediterranean-style cottage with grillwork over high windows; now the grills were bent and pushed outward; the collapsed windows resembled swollen-shut eyes.

  The woman standing next to me was cradling a terrified cat under her loose cardigan sweater. I asked, “Did the man who lives in the cottage get out okay?”

  She frowned, tightened her grip on the cat as it burrowed deeper. “I don’t know who lives there. It’s always kind of deserted-looking.”

  A man in front of her said, “I’ve seen lights, but never anybody coming or going.”

  I moved closer. The cottage was deep in the shadows of the leaning buildings, eerily silent. From above came a groaning sound, and then a piece of wood sheared off the apartment house to the right, crashing onto what remained of the cottage’s roof. I looked up, wondering how long before one or the other of the buildings toppled. Wondering if the man was still alive inside the compacted mass of stucco….

  A man in jeans and a sweatshirt came up and stood beside me. His face was smudged and abraded; his clothing was smeared with dirt and what looked to be blood; he held his left elbow gingerly in the palm of his hand. “You were asking about Dan?” he said.

  So that was the anonymous caller’s name. “Yes. Did he get out okay?”

  “I don’t think he was at home. At least, I saw him over at the Green around quarter to five.”

  “He was at home. I was talking with him on the phone when the quake hit.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” The man’s face paled under the smudges. “My name’s Mel: I live…lived next door. Are you a friend of Dan’s?”

  “Yes,” I said, realizing it was true.

  “That’s a surprise.” He stared worriedly at the place where the two buildings leaned together.

  “Why?”

  “I thought Dan didn’t have any friends left. He’s pushed us away ever since the accident.”

  “Accident?”

  “You must be a new friend, or else you’d know. Dan’s woman was killed on the freeway last spring. A truck crushed her car.”

  The word “crushed” seemed to hang in the air between us. I said, “I’ve got to try to get him out of there,” and stepped over the flattened portion of the fence.

  Mel said, “I’ll go with you.”

  I looked skeptically at his injured arm.

  “It’s nothing, really,” he told me. “I was helping an old lady out of my building, and a beam grazed me.”

  “Well—” I broke off as a hail of debris came from the building to the left.

  Without further conversation, Mel and I crossed the small front yard, skirting fallen bricks, broken glass, and jagged chunks of wallboard. Dusk was coming on fast now; here in the shadows of the leaning buildings it was darker than on the street. I moved toward where the cottage’s front door should have been, but couldn’t locate it. The windows, with their protruding grillwork, were impassable.

  I said, “Is there another entrance?”

  “In the back, off the little service porch.”

  I glanced to either side. The narrow passages between the cottage and the adjacent buildings were jammed with debris. I could possibly scale the mound at the right, but I was leery of setting up vibrations that might cause more debris to come tumbling down.

  Mel said, “You’d better give it up. The way the cottage looks, I doubt he survived.”

  But I wasn’t willing to give it up—not yet. There must be a way to at least locate Dan, see if he was alive. But how?

  And then I remembered something else from our phone conversations…

  I said, “I’m going back there.”

  “Let me.”

  “No, stay here. That mound will support my weight, but not yours.” I moved toward the side of the cottage before Mel could remind me of the risk I was taking.

  The mound was over five feet high. I began to climb cautiously, testing every hand- and foothold. Twice jagged chunks of stucco cut my fingers; a piece of wood left a line of splinters on the back of my hand. When I neared the top, I heard the roar of a helicopter, its rotors flapping overhead. I froze, afraid that the air currents would precipitate more debris, then scrambled down the other side of the mound into a weed-choked back yard.

  As I straightened, automatically brushing dirt form my jeans, my foot slipped on the soft, spongy ground, then sank into a puddle, probably a water main was broken nearby. The helicopter still hovered overhead; I couldn’t hear a thing above its racket. Nor could I see much: it was even darker back here. I stood still until my eyes adjusted.

  The cottage was not so badly damaged at its rear. The steps to the porch had collapsed and the rear wall leaned inward, but I could make out a door frame opening into blackness inside. I glanced up in irritation at the helicopter, saw it was going away. Waited, and then listened…

  And heard what I’d been hoping to. The music was now Beethoven—his third symphony, the Erotica. Its strains were muted, tinny. Music played by an out-of-area FM station, coming from a transistor radio. A transistor whose batteries were functioning long after the electricity had cut out. Whose batteries might have outlived its owner.

  I moved quickly to the porch, grasped the iron rail beside the collapsed steps, and pulled myself
up. I still could see nothing inside the cottage. The strains of the Erotica continued to pour forth, close by now.

  Reflexively I reached into my purse for the small flashlight I usually kept there, then remembered it was at home on the kitchen counter—a reminder for me to replace its weak batteries. I swore softly, then started through the doorway, calling out to Dan.

  No answer. “Dan!”

  This time I heard a groan.

  I rushed forward into the blackness, following the sound of the music. After a few feet I came up against something solid, banging my shins. I lowered a hand, felt around. It was a wooden beam, wedged crosswise.

  “Dan?”

  Another groan. From the floor—perhaps under the beam. I squatted and made a wide sweep with my hands. They encountered a wool-clad arm; I slid my fingers down it until I touched the wrist, felt for the pulse. It was strong, although slightly irregular.

  “Dan,” I said, leaning closer, “It’s Sharon, from the hotline. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  “Unh, Sharon?” His voice was groggy, confused. He probably been drifting in and out of consciousness since the beam fell on him.

  “Can you move?” I asked.

  “…Something on my legs.”

  “Do they feel broken?”

  “No, just pinned.”

  “I can’t see much, but I’m going to try to move this beam off you. When I do, roll out from under.”

  “…Okay.”

  From the position at which the beam was wedged, I could tell it would have to be raised. Balancing on the balls of my feet, I got a good grip on it and shove upward with all my strength. It moved about six inches and then slipped from my grasp. Dan grunted.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Try it again.”

  I stood, grasped it, and pulled this time. It yielded a little more, and I heard Dan slide across the floor. “I’m clear,” he said—and just in time, because I once more lost my grip. The beam crashed down, setting up a vibration that made plaster fall from the ceiling.

  “We’ve got to get out of here fast,” I said. “Give me your hand.”